But wait! Before you blow your budget…

…at the Pharyngula store, something desperately urgent has come up: Sarah Morehead is in trouble. Those of you who know Sarah for her gentle activism in the atheist movement should also know that she’s an exceptionally nice person with a family, so these problems are not to be tolerated. I’ll keep it simple: it’s an ugly spousal abuse situation, which has left her and her kids with no support…and really, when you read her story, you’ll see she had no choice but to get out.

She needs help. She needs donations. If you can, get over there and chip in.

Support Pharyngula! Shop at the store!

Are you scrambling for last minute Xmas gifts? I have a solution for you. Go to the Pharyngula online store, coming to a sidebar near you soon, and buy books and stuff from Skeptical Robot and Amazon. It doesn’t cost you anything more, but I get an itty-bitty cut, which is nice. Think of it as taking a small slice of the Evil Amazonian Empire’s profits and giving them to me, an Evil Blogger.

I just set this thing up, so there isn’t a lot there yet (I haven’t even started on the fiction section yet), but I’ll keep stuffing new entries in, as the whim strikes. Recommendations are welcome, but I’m only including books I’ve actually read myself.

Who’s the idiot now?

Steve Harvey has long been notorious for saying stupid things.

Emmy Award-winning TV host and best-selling author Steve Harvey advises women not to date atheists because you don’t know where the man’s “moral barometer” is, and says that as far as someone not believing in God, “well, then, to me you’re an idiot.”

Harvey, who also hosts a radio show and started his career in stand-up comedy, went on to say that Darwinism is essentially nonsense because he doesn’t think the universe “spun out of a gastrous ball and then all of a sudden we were evolved from monkeys.” If that were true, he says, then “why we still got monkeys?”

Yep, that’s his argument, the dumbest argument against evolution ever…although at least he spiced it up with that “gastrous ball” comment. So now I am full of schadenfreude at his latest gaffe.

[Read more…]

My status as the local Grinch is affirmed

I even made the Minneapolis Star Tribune! They have a story about my griping about the damned annoying cemetery bells that plagued us for years.

Some neighbors were less enthusiastic than the visitors. Local blogger and biology professor PZ Myers railed for years against the bells that tolled near his home, rousing him from sleep with the sound of “hymns. Cheesy hymns, played mechanically on an electronic carillon.”

Myers, who lives two blocks from the cemetery, said the clangor of bells started at 5 a.m. and continued until 10 at night, despite his protests.

I wasn’t the only one complaining, as the story makes clear, but now the guy who thrust the chimes upon us is busily nailing himself up on a cross.

[Read more…]

Liven up that Christmas get-together!

I’m more than a little tired of Christmas carols now — to be honest, I was exasperated around Halloween — so I don’t know if changing the lyrics is quite enough. But maybe it will work for you: here’s a gallery of scientific songs of praise, mostly familiar Christmas carols with fresh words.

I think I’ll stick with my usual medley of Nine Inch Nails songs of angst and frustration.

Guess who is all done grading?

ME, that’s who. I still have to upload these last few grades to the official site, but my computer is acting up, as always, so I’m going to have to walk in to my office and do it there. But to celebrate, anyway, I took off to fly my gadget. This is a quick buzz around the Morris Wetlands management district offices. Just because it’s empty and open land, and it’s very quiet (the whole town is quiet right now — students have gone home for the break).

This thing is fun, and the mechanics of flying it are easy, but just a word of warning to anyone who gets one: it takes practice. Lots of practice. Right now I can do all the basics of getting it to go up and forward and backwards and left and right, but I tell you, when it’s a kilometer off in the distance and you’ve lost track of its orientation and your depth perception is off so you think everything is fine but the camera is telling you you’re flying straight towards a tree, it’s a little nerve wracking.

Also, it’s really cold out there, around -15 to -20° C, and you’re actually kind of relieved that the battery is only good for about a 20 minute flight, because you’re fingers are freezing off. Note also it’s not the best day for photography: hazy and gray, flying over a world that’s mostly white. But that’s Minnesota.

Speaking of coddled white guys…

The usual suspects are currently howling and thrashing and having temper tantrums over Steve Shives, another white guy who thinks we ought to welcome diversity, but they’re also taking the opportunity to fling accusations of hypocrisy my way. It’s simply amazing how triumphantly they are spamming my email and twitter account with this irrefutable proof that I lied.

harassment

Gosh. They got me now…oh, wait. Read that last comment. It might help.

No, I have never been accused of sexual harassment. If you were to have access to my employment record, you’d find it was completely clean — I simply do not harass women (or men, for that matter), and never have. It’s also not that I have been exonerated of charges — I’ve never been charged with harassment, because I’ve never done it (note that this does not imply that being accused means you are guilty), and I’ve scrupulously avoided circumstances where there is even an opportunity for such an accusation.

They love to make much of that incident in the 1990s — in which a young woman thought she could get a better grade by extortion. I responded by immediately removing myself from the situation and making the situation open to investigation by authorities. She did not accuse me because she couldn’t.

So I have been threatened with extortion, but no extortion took place. Similarly, I get weekly murder threats, but I have not been murdered. I am conscious of the distinction, but these wackaloons apparently are not.

By the way, these loons have also sent wild accusations of harassment to my university employers…who have treated their baseless bullshit with the respect they deserve. Those also are not credible accusations.

Solnit sings

Rebecca Solnit has written a wonderful essay that resonates beautifully, especially after wading through the rage of white men in my mailbox (which, as a white man myself, is really weird.)

There has been a lot said this year about college students—meaning female college students, black students, trans students—and how they’re hypersensitive and demanding that others be censored. That’s why The Atlantic, a strange publication that veers from progressive to regressive and back again like a weighty pendulum recently did a piece on “The Coddling of the American Mind.” It tells us that, “Jerry Seinfeld and Bill Maher have publicly condemned the oversensitivity of college students, saying too many of them can’t take a joke,” with the invocation of these two white guys as definitive authorities.

But seriously, you know who can’t take a joke? White guys. Not if it implicates them and their universe, and when you see the rage, the pettiness, the meltdowns and fountains of male tears of fury, you’re seeing people who really expected to get their own way and be told they’re wonderful all through the days. And here, just for the record, let me clarify that I’m not saying that all of them can’t take it. Many white men—among whom I count many friends (and, naturally, family members nearly as pale as I)—have a sense of humor, that talent for seeing the gap between what things are supposed to be and what they are and for seeing beyond the limits of their own position. Some have deep empathy and insight and write as well as the rest of us. Some are champions of human rights.

But there are also those other ones, and they do pop up and demand coddling. A group of black college students doesn’t like something and they ask for something different in a fairly civil way and they’re accused of needing coddling as though it’s needing nuclear arms. A group of white male gamers doesn’t like what a woman cultural critic says about misogyny in gaming and they spend a year or so persecuting her with an unending torrent of rape threats, death threats, bomb threats, doxxing, and eventually a threat of a massacre that cites Marc LePine, the Montreal misogynist who murdered 14 women in 1989, as a role model. I’m speaking, of course, about the case of Anita Sarkeesian and Gamergate. You could call those guys coddled. We should. And seriously, did they feel they were owed a world in which everyone thought everything they did and liked and made was awesome or just remained silent? Maybe, because they had it for a long time.

Exactly.

A small request to the Russian people

This is the Transsiberian Railway.

Transsiberianmap

It stretches across the whole of Russia, cutting through places with incredibly cold, barren reputations. It’s the middle of winter.

Our crazy brave daughter Skatje is off to that place today. She’s going to spend three weeks visiting St Petersburg and Moscow, and then boarding that train and crossing Siberia, in winter, from Moscow to Vladivostok. Why? She loves Russian culture and the Russian language, and she wants to learn more and see more, and this is her opportunity. So she just decided to go.

Now, while I’m quite proud as a father to have a child who has grown to be so fearless and confident, her parents are going to be a bit anxious for the next few weeks. So, to any Russian readers out there: if by some slender chance, you’ve both read this mention and also encounter an enthusiastic and adventurous American woman on a journey across your country, say hello and remember that she’s there as a friend. And we need more friends around the world.