Lynda Barry has carefully dissected the stages of reading and illustrated all 20.
I’m at a loss, though. I’m either arrested somewhere around stage 12, or I got to stage 20 while skipping 13-19.
(First series I finished: does Dr Seuss count? Otherwise, it was Wrinkle in Time. First genre: Science Fiction, of course.)
This was entirely predictable. Axe, the deodorant company with the really horrible sexist ads, is doing something admirable, sponsoring a contest to send people to a space camp in Florida. They’re doing it with a poll, unfortunately (please, people, just stop! Popularity contests are not measures of merit!), and the one woman in the Malaysian contest got a flood of sexist remarks — tampon jokes and that sort of thing. Apparently, having human physiology disqualifies you from being an astronaut. Clearly these arguments are being made by anti-human robots! Someone needs to point out that all of the contestants poop and pee and sweat and drool and sneeze, and some of them even ejaculate.
You know what to do. Vote (on Facebook, which means a lot of you won’t be able to). The backlash is already favoring Roshini Muniam (Rose), so I think you’ll be just adding the final fillip, but that’s OK.
Adam 15198
Han 10950
Firdaus 28620
Rose 41217
Ishyhara Rio 26479
Tune in Sunday at 9am Central to Atheist Talk radio. This is a call-in show, and you can phone or email in questions and comments…so I need to warn Watson’s frothing, obsessive haters that input is carefully screened, so don’t waste your time.
Kristen Ostendorf was a teacher at a Catholic school in Minnesota for 18 years. Then one day, in a workshop with 120 other teachers, she openly confessed how she lived her life.
It wasn’t planned. It was a very surreal moment when I heard myself saying the things I tried not to say. And I was at once terrified and really glad and proud. I didn’t just say, “I’m gay, I’m in a relationship with a woman, and I’m happy,” and sit down. That really wasn’t the point of what I was saying. It was, “This is my prayer for all of us: That we mean what we do.” Then I sat down and I thought, “I wonder what’s going to happen next?” I hadn’t considered [the repercussions], but I didn’t know I was going to say what I said.
Take a guess what happened next. Go on, I bet you can do it, no problem.
The next day, not even after any significant deliberation, but the very next day, she was called into the office and asked to resign. She refused, so they fired her.
This is the same school that recently compelled their president to resign when it was discovered that he was in a long-term relationship with another man.
Ms Ostendorf seems like a good person with a great deal of personal integrity, yet, unfortunately, much of her discussion in that article is about how Catholicism is such a positive, affirming force in her life, and how she loves the scripture and has been inspired by it.
The evidence says otherwise. I think too many people look into religion and see a mirror, reflecting their good values and their personal aspirations, and they fail to see that they’re holding up a burden and a distraction and a poisonous delusion, and that, as good people, they’d be even greater when free of that ugliness. They need to realize that they are not the church, and the church is not them — and that separating oneself from an edifice of lies is actually a virtue.
Now this looks interesting: God Bless America: Strange and Unusual Religious Beliefs and Practices in the United States.
God Bless America lifts the veil on strange and unusual religious beliefs and practices in the modern-day United States. Do Satanists really sacrifice babies? Do exorcisms involve swearing and spinning heads? Are the Amish allowed to drive cars and use computers? Offering a close look at snake handling, new age spirituality, Santeria spells, and satanic rituals, this book offers more than mere armchair research. It takes you to an exorcism, a Charismatic church and a Fundamentalist Mormon polygamist compound. You will sit among the beards and bonnets in a Mennonite church, hear the sounds of silence at a Quaker meeting, and listen to L. Ron Hubbard’s sci-fi stories told as sermons during a Scientology service. From the Amish to Voodoo, the beliefs and practices explored in this book may be unorthodox, and often dangerous, but they are always fascinating. Some of them are dying out, while others are gaining popularity with a modern audience, but all offer insight into the past, present and future of religion in the United States.
My only question would be…are there religious beliefs that aren’t strange and unusual?
The survey on vaccination that’s being held up by DJ Grothe is not out yet, but there’s a preliminary summary that was made available. I learned something from even that one page summary: most anti-vaxxers actually do recognize that vaccination is protective, and their opposition is based on widespread misconceptions about side-effects and the evilness of pharmaceutical corporations. There is even a hint about effective strategies to convince reluctant people to vaccinate.
The full results were supposed to be released a year ago. I wonder when we’ll finally get to see them?
(via Science Friday)
Ahh, that’s what I need. In a long day full of classes and meetings, it’s a breath of fresh air to see libertarians called on their baloney.
Libertarians have a problem. Their political philosophy all but died out in the mid- to late-20th century, but was revived by billionaires and corporations that found them politically useful. And yet libertarianism retains the qualities that led to its disappearance from the public stage, before its reanimation by people like the Koch brothers: It doesn’t make any sense.
They call themselves “realists” but rely on fanciful theories that have never predicted real-world behavior. They claim that selfishness makes things better for everybody, when history shows exactly the opposite is true. They claim that a mythical “free market” is better at everything than the government is, yet when they really need government protection, they’re the first to clamor for it.
It’s quite clear that libertarians are just “useful idiots,” pawns of the far right wing deployed whenever they want some stooge to claim that inequities are rational.
Coming this Spring, a three-episode series on PBS:
I’ll be watching it.
