Breitbart for sale

forsale

While Fox News is frantically struggling to scuttle the Trump’s presidential campaign, there is one media outlet that has been proudly and loudly in his corner: Breitbart.

They’re actually running articles titled THE 10 MOST IMPORTANT REASONS TRUMP WOULD MAKE A GREAT PRESIDENT and DONALD TRUMP RISES TO POSITION OF TOTAL DOMINANCE. Wow. They must truly believe.

Or maybe not.

According to four sources with knowledge of the situation, editors and writers at the outlet have privately complained since at least last year that the company’s top management was allowing Trump to turn Breitbart into his own fan website — using it to hype his political prospects, and attack his enemies. One current editor called the water-carrying “despicable” and “embarrassing,” and said he was told by an executive last year that the company had a financial arrangement with Trump. A second Breitbart staffer said he had heard a similar description of the site’s relationship with the billionaire but didn’t know the details; and a third source at the company said he knew of several instances when managers had overruled editors at Trump’s behest. Additionally, a conservative communications operative who works closely with Breitbart described conversations in which “multiple writers and editors” said Trump was paying for the ability to shape coverage, and added that one staffer claimed to have seen documentation of the “pay for play.”

Breitbart also went all-in on the idea that gamergate was about ethics in journalism. I don’t think they’d recognize ethics unless it ran up and paid them with a big check.

The Reverend Dan Erickson explains why I shouldn’t be an atheist

Quotation-Bob-Dylan-god

The Rev. Dan Erickson, Senior Pastor at Chisholm Baptist Church, has managed to publish an op-ed in the Hibbing, Minnesota Daily Tribune titled “It’s not easy to be an atheist.” Apparently, the Daily Tribune is so desperate for content that they’ll publish tired religious cliches, and Rev. Erickson has never actually talked to an atheist.

In his book, “When God Goes to Starbucks,” Paul Coppan notes that there is plenty of evidence we, as human beings, have a disposition to believe in some type of deity or spiritual reality. Thus, he says, if someone wants to overcome this predisposition to believe in God and be an atheist, it may be necessary to make some intentional choices in order to avoid being a “default theist.”

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Most pathetic troll ever

mclovin

Creationists (and poes), it doesn’t help the conversation at all when you pretend to believe something you do not — your complete lack of understanding of the others’ positions makes your sham obvious from the very onset.

For example, I got this request from an “atheist” to help spread a rational understanding of the universe…like this.

We as atheists are sick and tired of having religious people laugh at us. We’re sick and tired of defending the most ridiculous theory in the world . . .

The truly delusional Big-Bang theory.

The universe did not originate out of “nothingness” via some stupidly insane Big-Bang theory ! For pity sake, even a moron knows that “nothingness” cannot experience a bang. And so what’s reality ? What’s the alternative ? Well look closely and please think deeply. Pure Logic is the alternative, it’s very very simple;

The universe has “always existed” . . . Period.

The evolution of TIME is what deceives us

into thinking the universe must need a beginning.

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Those sneaky gingers pop up everywhere

gingers

I have a brother with red hair. I also have a son with red hair. Once upon a time, my beard and mustache contained many red hairs among the dominant browns. If you’ve ever wondered how these gingers appear all over the place, Petra Haak-Bloem offers a good explanation (although it needs some editing: how many different ways can they spell pheomelanin?).

The shade of hair color is determined by the amount of melanin, or pigment, in the hair. Your DNA not only encodes what kind of pigment you have, but also how much of it. “For white people the shades are dependent on two sorts of melanin: eumelanine (black pigment) and pheomelanine (red pigment). Hair cells of dark haired people only contain eumelanine. Blondes have less eumelanine. And redheads’ hair contains mostly pheomelanine,” Haak-Bloem says.

“More than a decade ago, researchers discovered that one gene (MC1R) on chromosome 16 plays an important part in giving people red hair. MC1R’s task is making a protein called melanocortin 1. That proteine plays an important part in converting pheolmelanine into eumelanine,” Haak-Bloem tells me. “When someone inherits two mutated versions of the MC1R-gene (one from each parent), less pheomelanine is converted into eumelanine. The feomelanine accumulates in the pigment cells and the person ends up with red hair and fair skin.”

The unexpectedly red beard is the effect of the same mutation in the MC1R gene. When you only have one mutated MC1R, red hair can appear in (unwanted) places. But even Haak-Bloem wasn’t completely sure of the mechanism. Having a deviant red beard has never been linked to any deadly diseases, so it’s pretty low on the research priorities list.

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The GOP is rotten to the core

trumpuke

Let’s spell it out: in their desperate effort to achieve relevance through stridency, the Republicans have turned their backs on half the electorate. Brilliant move, guys.

It’s nice to already know the Republicans’ strategy as they lurch toward the long and bumpy road to someone else’s presidency. Removes the mystery.

Their new mantra, in GOP-speak: So long, ladies.

I’ll give them this: They’re no longer pretending to care about us. Yay for them for ending that charade. They don’t want us, and apparently they’ve decided they don’t need us. Or, as Jeb Bush put it on Tuesday: “I’m not sure we need half a billion dollars for women’s health issues.”

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We aten’t dead

atentdead

I’ve been reading the obituaries. So many people, friends and foes alike, have expressed their confidence that Freethoughtblogs is dooooooomed, because Ed Brayton has left. It’s all going to fall apart without his iron hand ruling this motley crew! Without him, no one could possibly be interested in reading anything on this network! They only ever read the old white men here anyway, so losing one is an irreparable loss!

Let me explain a few things about how FtB works. These people don’t have a clue.

  • Ed never actually “ran” this place — no one did, or does. This is one of those pinko commie anarchies. He managed the books, arranged for the ad services, that sort of thing, but all of the blogs here are autonomous. No boss. Get it? If you’re an authoritarian, maybe not.

  • The kind of minimal, managerial oversight needed to keep the lights on has fallen into the hands of the executive committee, a small subset of the people here who handle mundane issues that affect the whole network. Just to let you know how busy the executive committee is, we initially proposed to meet once a month. I don’t think we’ve met in over a year.

  • The network is not a vanity project for the white men who set it up. It’s an anti-vanity project. The whole purpose of the network was to leverage our traffic into creating a space for a diverse group of bloggers. They’re still here! Ed and I could drop dead on the spot, and it’ll still keep ticking along.

  • Building a diverse network also produces a robust network. There is no single point of failure. By design and by diffusing the leadership all along, there’s no way to take it out with loss of a single blogger (we’ve lost and gained bloggers all along, you know).

  • We do have to worry about maintaining a volume of traffic to maintain ad rates. But this is a group that does not prioritize making money off their writing (although it sure would be nice…) but on maintaining independence. I’d be writing for free — I was writing for free years ago — and what money we do make is distributed among the bloggers by traffic. There is no central authority skimming off the profits.

  • I do have one serious worry about an ongoing failure. That’s all you people who say you only came here for the PZ and Ed show. You’re doing it wrong — I’m not going to object to you reading my stuff, but the whole point of the network is to give all those other voices a platform. You should go read them.

So here’s some suggestions.

Go look at the main page. See all those bloggers?

Go look to the left, at the sidebar. See all those bloggers?

Scroll down on the sidebar, and look for the “Latest Posts Around FtB”. See all those bloggers who have recently posted stuff?

Broaden your horizons a bit. Go read one or more of those links.

Don’t trust me. Go read Miri, who is saying exactly the same thing.

You can also stop annoying us all with the ill-informed doom-talk.