Lynna is your curator. How are you all holding up, America?
Pharyngula
Evolution, development, and random biological ejaculations from a godless liberal
A good article by one of the founders of the FFRF: it seems there have been many concerns simmering for some time. I was a little surprised by this bit of news.
That Silverman is accused of saying to a woman fighting him off, “You don’t get to say no to me,” however, unfortunately rings true to me. I felt “bullied” while attempting to work with Silverman on the speakers committee for the second Reason Rally. I say “attempting” because I was summarily booted from the committee he was chairing and denied a voice in the planning (but at least not before I was able to secure Julia Sweeney as a speaker, I’m pleased to say).
Also, the FFRF has been leading by example for a long time.
At FFRF, all staff and volunteers must sign an anti-harassment policy, which also instructs on how to report any such harassment. This has been in place for decades.
In 40 years, there have been only two reported or known occasions of sexual harassment. One involved a friend, then in her early 20s, who was accosted by one of our Board members, a middle-aged man, in an elevator as she left an FFRF convention in the late 1970s. He restrained her in a bear hug and forcibly kissed her as the elevator went down several flights. She was a rape survivor, and this repugnant encounter unfortunately summoned back that trauma for her. She told me what happened, I immediately informed my mother, the president of FFRF, who immediately confronted the Board member and demanded (and got) his resignation.
About 12 years ago, I learned that a young staffer, another woman in her 20s, was accosted at our office by a new volunteer, an elderly man. As she walked past him, he slapped her behind with a post-it note containing a weird message. As soon as I learned of this, I immediately contacted and confronted him, and he too was “fired.”
A commitment to women and equality means nothing unless the freethought movement makes clear it will not tolerate sexual misconduct or sleazy behavior by leading nonbelievers.
One disappointment, though: don’t read the comments. Like many of the atheist sites on Patheos, the FFRF page is infested with known slymepitters and miscellaneous sexists/misogynists. One of the only suggestions I’d offer to them is that you ought to curate your comments sections, because they’re pretty much unreadable.
Also, the first comment is from a guy threatening to withdraw from the FFRF because he’s annoyed about the grammar in the post, and talks about how he “could go on for hours”, nitpicking. Yeah, let him withdraw.
The New Yorker has a wonderful story about Rachel Carson which points out that we ignore most of her writing. She’s most famous for Silent Spring, which of course I’ve read, but much of her prior work was about the sea and the shore, which I have not. I guess I’m going to have correct that deficiency.
It also fills in many biographical details about her life, which was full of family responsibilities and struggles. My respect for her keeps going up and up.
I have to highlight one detail, though. After Silent Spring, this quiet, private woman who was dying of cancer (and refused to mention it in public), was savagely targeted for harassment by the American chemical industry. Remember this if anyone tries to tell you that science is not political.
“What she wrote started a national quarrel,” “CBS Reports” announced in a one-hour special, “The Silent Spring of Rachel Carson,” in which footage of Carson was intercut with footage of government and industry spokesmen, to create a de-facto debate. (Carson refused to make any other television appearance.) In the program, Carson sits on the porch of her white-railed house in Maine, wearing a skirt and cardigan; the chief spokesman for the insecticide industry, Robert White-Stevens, of American Cyanamid, wears thick black-framed glasses and a white coat, standing in a chemistry lab, surrounded by beakers and Bunsen burners.
Whoa. Caricature much? White coats & beakers, the trappings of scientism. I am amused, and appalled.
White-Stevens questions Carson’s expertise: “The major claims of Miss Rachel Carson’s book, ‘Silent Spring,’ are gross distortions of the actual fact, completely unsupported by scientific experimental evidence and general practical experience in the field.”
Carson feigns perplexity: “Can anyone believe it is possible to lay down such a barrage of poisons on the surface of the earth without making it unfit for all life?”
White-Stevens fumes: “Miss Carson maintains that the balance of nature is a major force in the survival of man, whereas the modern chemist, the modern biologist and scientist believes that man is steadily controlling nature.”
Stop right there. White-Stevens is simply wrong — that is a horrifying attitude to take, that rather than existing as a part of nature, humans are responsible for controlling nature. I can’t imagine any modern biologist taking White-Stevens position, in part thanks to Rachel Carson.
You can now watch the whole 1963 program, thanks to the intertubes. It’s not a pleasant experience: there’s a train of expressionless, somber white men all positively asserting that all of the chemicals they’re spraying across the landscape are harmless, that they have been thoroughly tested and do no harm to people at all, which is not particularly reassuring coming from people who think all of nature is to be brought under their control.
Watch for the scene where White-Stevens is lecturing at a lectern, and the camera pans to the audience…which consists entirely of men in crewcuts, white shirts, and/or ties. There are also scenes where the defenders have to reluctantly admit that widespread pesticide use sometimes damages the environment — they talk of streams full of dead fish, and one says that he’s seen the elimination of 80% of the wildlife in some areas. Watch the whole thing and it gets more and more clear that the overuse of pesticides has led to serious effects on animals at concentrations far lower than the industry endorses. White-Stevens does not come out of this looking good.
Rachel Carson, on the other hand, is magnificent. She doesn’t get enough air time.
Note that this was all before the EPA was established, which the current administration is trying to destroy.
Most mornings, I get up a few hours before my wife does, and shortly afterwards I carry out the morning ritual of Making the Coffee, and I dutifully deliver a cup to her bedside, where the sweet strong smell gently awakens her. I’ve been noticing an odd thing, though: we have lots of cups, and a place in the kitchen cupboard where we put them, but on many mornings, the cups are not there. Thus begins another part of the morning ritual, the Quest for Coffee Cups. I tend to find them in the dining room, in the living room, and in our bedroom, strangely always on the table near her side of the bed, and also, they have often collected tea bags in their interiors.
From my observations, I have determined that these ceramic cups undergo a daily migration, and that they wander the house to prey upon teabags. I am pretty sure there’s a complex hidden ecosystem at work here. For instance, I’ve noticed that if I take off my socks in my office and leave them by my slippers, sometime during the day they will mysteriously disappear. My first hypothesis was that the hungry coffee cups were snatching them up, but I’ve never found a cup with a sock in it, suggesting that there may be some other medium-sized predator prowling about the house. I’m eyeing the casserole dish. Or maybe the toaster.
The existence of a hitherto unnoticed food web operating inside my house has me vaguely worried. If I vanish some day, somebody check the guts of the dishwasher, or possibly the cabinet in my office. They’ve been trying too hard to look nonchalant lately, and could be plotting something.
It’s unbelievable what we men can get away with. Here’s an account of an ongoing trial in which a naval officer is accused of raping a junior officer.
The junior officer testified that Neuhart forced his way into her home and attacked her, only stopping when her screams alerted a neighbor. Neuhart ran out a back door and was caught by police after he fell and broke a leg.
Forces his way into a home, attacks a woman who screams so loudly a neighbor shows up, and then runs away. This is an open and shut case so far, right?
During the trial both sides acknowledged that the woman was intoxicated after drinking heavily with Neuhart earlier at a hotel bar. Hotel surveillance video showed her hugging and kissing him. They drove back to her home in a limousine.
Jurors heard video from Neuhart’s cellphone in which she screams at him to leave and tells him some 90 times to stop trying to have sex with her.
They’ve got an audio recording of the woman clearly saying “NO!” 90 times? That she was drunk and affectionate earlier shouldn’t matter at all.
In case you’re wondering how they came to have a recording sufficiently detailed that they could count how often she told him to stop, this is the unbelievable part — the rapist gave it to them. He thought it was exonerating evidence.
Neuhart testified that the woman consented to going home and having sex with him. He said he recorded part of their encounter in case the woman later alleged rape.
Our foreign enemies will quail before the brilliance of our naval commanders. He’s like Horatio Hornblower made flesh.
If your jaw is hanging open in disbelief at this guy, just leave it there, maybe grab it with one hand to keep it from falling off: the jury was deadlocked. This was declared a mistrial.
People still insist there is no such thing as rape culture.
Alexandre Bissonnette, the Canadian mass murderer who walked into a mosque and opened fire, is not at all remorseful.
“I regret not having shot more people,” the shooter told the social worker, who described him as calm and coherent. “The victims are in heaven and I’m living in hell.”
Earlier in the day, prosecutors revealed searches from Bissonnette’s computer that “indicated the Quebec mosque shooter was obsessed with U.S. President Donald Trump, Muslims, Dylann Roof, mass shootings and feminists,” the Gazzette noted. The Canadian National Observer reported that the shooter searched for Trump more than 800 times before the massacre he committed just over a week after the American president’s inauguration
What an excuse! He imagines his victims are in heaven. They’re not, they’re dead, their families are grieving. Religion sure fucks up your head, doesn’t it?
You know what else he was consuming, besides his bible? Alt-right neo-Nazi garbage.
Evidence presented at Alexandre Bissonnette's sentencing hearing this morning includes a list of some of the Twitter accounts he was checking in the month before he killed six men at a Quebec City mosque. pic.twitter.com/Xdew4HbjkQ
— Andy Riga, Montreal (@andyriga) April 16, 2018
Just to be fair, Ben Shapiro was very popular with this guy, and he has tried to distance himself from the association.
The shooter is a deranged POS who should burn in hell. If you think I'm responsible for his evil, GFY. https://t.co/VHmCMoK6TU
— Ben Shapiro (@benshapiro) April 16, 2018
OK. Bissonnette is a “a deranged POS”, agreed. But then Ben Shapiro is also “a deranged POS”, so I guess it was a case of shared affinities. Looking at all the names on that list, it’s one big garbage pile of deplorables.
By the way, Andy Riga is the journalist reporting on this case for the Montreal Gazette, and is worth following if you care about what happens to “a deranged POS”.
The moment an Evangelical Christian compromises, they’re on the road to hell. Ken Ham of Answers in Genesis had that moment when he could have said he’s going to stand by his principles and insist that every employee of his organization must abide by his rigid religious articles of faith, and he wavered and wobbled and decided that in the absence of a large enough population of fanatics in the region, he’d allow some positions to be filled by lukewarm Christians.
We are a Christian organization, and as a Christian organization, we employ people who are Christians. We actually, for the seasonals, we actually have a more abridged Statement of Faith, the fundamentals of Christianity, not our detailed one for all of our full-time managers and others. So for seasonals, I know there’s a lot of young people who still aren’t necessarily mature in all their thinking in lots of areas, but if they can sign the tenets of the fundamentals of the Christian faith, they can… work here.
An abridged Statement of Faith? The Devil loves it when you abridge your faith. Satan just danced along on your principles, kicking out a word here, chopping out a phrase there, cackling as he tricked Jesus into making concessions.
The bad news is that the rest of us are going to have to put up with Ken Ham joining us in Hell now.
Speaking of time machines, here’s a video recording of a stroll through New York city in 1911.
A couple of things struck me: the hats! Everyone is wearing them, with the exception being the kids. I wonder if there was some sort of ritual associated with coming of age amongst the New Yorkians — “Now you are a man, and may and must wear this headdress at all times, lest ye scandalize the populace with the distressing dome of your skull.”
Also notice how the pedestrians just wander across the street on a whim, as if they haven’t yet realized that the steely horseless carriages are going to claim total ownership of the thoroughfares.
Hey, wait, maybe the hats are the secret passkey to allow one to ignore traffic. I’m going to have to try it next time I’m in NYC — put on a nice Panama and stride confidently into Times Square.
On 16 April 1834, the HMS Beagle was beached to inspect the hull for damage (click on that for more detail). The event was noted by this well-known engraving.
Charles Darwin noted the specific latitude and longitude in his notes, so we can actually go to Google maps and find the site, as I did.
I’m just wondering if anyone else would go to the link and zoom in the satellite photo and be vaguely disappointed that the Beagle isn’t there? Jeez, I need more coffee. Or maybe Google Time Machine.
Even a small cult can be incredibly profitable. There’s this freaky alternative medicine quack in Australia who runs a scam called Universal Medicine — his specialties are “esoteric breast massage”, “esoteric ovary massage”, and “connective tissue therapy”. My first objection has to be that he doesn’t understand what “esoteric” means.
The esoteric principle is that we are love – innately and, unchangeably. The principles of the esoteric way of life date back to the oldest forms of knowledge and wisdom. Whilst ancient in their heritage, the principles of the esoteric life in human form have not out-dated themselves in relation to what is required of mankind to live in harmony and thus arrest any wayward conduct that does not build brotherhood within and amongst our communities everywhere.
The esoteric means that which comes from our inner-most. It is the livingness of love that we all carry equally deep within and it is this livingness that restores each and every individual back into the rhythms of their inner-harmony and thus from there, the love is lived with all others.
You want to know more? Here’s a short documentary on Serge Benhayon, the guy who founded it. He’s a bankrupted ex-tennis coach with no medical degree, not even the slightest training, and he came up with the idea for his ‘therapy’ while sitting on the toilet. But he’s also the reincarnated spirit of Leonardo da Vinci, so you can trust him. Right.
He’s raking in $2 million a year, and he has 700 followers. I’ve got more followers than that! You slackers have not been sending me a sufficient fraction of your income. All you have to do is go to my donation page and type in the amount of $3000 and click send, and if 700 of you do that, I’ll have made somewhat more than Serge Benhayon. Even better, unlike Serge, I promise not to fondle your breasts and groin or stick you with acupuncture needles.
Ick. That sounds like a threat. Even if you don’t send me any money, I promise not to do that. I think I just realized why I’m not getting rich. I’m not extortionate enough.
Anyway, one of his many laughable comments in that video is this one:
I can’t be brainwashing intelligent people and educated people.
Ha. Intelligent and educated people are just as easy to fool as anyone else. You just need the right hook, and you can sucker ’em right in. (Damn, again — just realized another reason I’m not making a fortune is that I’m not tapping enough suckers with the right bait.)
Case in point: it turns out that Benhayon has followers in the University of Queensland medical school who have been pissing pro-UM stories into the scientific literature.
Mr Benhayon’s acolytes include Christoph Schnelle, a UQ faculty of medicine researcher who was the lead author of three articles on UM health practices.
He and eight co-authors are now under scrutiny for an alleged failure to declare their roles in what has been described as “a dangerous cult” by Professor Dwyer, who is now based at the University of New South Wales.
The ABC has obtained video of four of the researchers publicly advocating UM practices, including two doctors.
Two more researchers are presenters at the Benhayon-founded College of Universal Medicine.
The others are a naturopath and a psychologist who practice at UM’s Brisbane clinic, and a director of its UK-based charity.
See? You can fool educated people.
By the way, Benhayon calls the ‘esoteric’ practices of Universal Medicine the “Way of the Livingness”. More like the Way of the Banality.
