It took it’s own sweet time about getting here, but it’s finally winter in Morris.
Daytime high of -10°F, and it’s supposed to drop down to -25°F tonight. This is definitely stay-inside-and-snuggle-under-a-quilt weather.
Go, Al! Franken will definitely be running for Coleman’s senate position in 2008. This is promising: the Republicans are already upset.
After seeing an account of Franken’s calls [to DFL leaders] on the Star Tribune website, Minnesota Republican Party Chairman Ron Carey issued a statement criticizing Franken’s “anger and slash-and-burn partisanship.”
That’s an excellent endorsement right there.
It’s embarrassing enough that all the Minnesota blogs are snorting in disgust at Michele Bachmann’s kiss, but now those foreign, non-Minnesotan sites are making a big foofaraw, too.
Yes, we confess: Minnesota’s sixth district elected a dumb-as-rocks, simpering, fundagelical Bush sycophant to congress, one who would enthusiastically slobber all over the president on national television.
However, in our favor, we did not re-elect Mark Kennedy to the senate. He was such an outrageous bootlicking Bush toady, we might have witnessed some hot and explicit flunky-on-prez action instead…consider yourself lucky.
Grrr. This story pisses me off beyond all reason. It’s a trumped up contretemps generated by one of our local Minnesota Republican hacks, griping about a UM faculty member using her campus email.
Captain Fishsticks is one of our local conservative nutjobs who haunts the pages of the St Paul Pioneer Press—he’s a free market freak who wants to privatize everything, especially the schools, and yet everything he writes reveals a painful ignorance of anything academic. This week he’s written a response to an article that left him distraught: Peter Pitman advocated more and better science education for Minnesotans, especially on the subject of climate change. Fishsticks, to whom all education is a zero-sum game because every time he has to learn another phone number a whole ‘nother column of the times table drops out of his brain, objects to this threat. He starts off by agreeing with Pitman’s argument, but does so by tying it to some of his lunatic obsessions—he’s a pro-smoking anti-vaccination guy.
I’ve made much the same argument relative to policymakers who unscientifically exaggerate the dangers of secondhand smoke and bureaucrats who ignore scientific evidence about the dangers of universal vaccination.
This approval will not last. The rest of his column is a weird paean to excusing ignorance of science. You see, if people learn more math and physics, they’ll get the idea that we live in a “clockwork universe”, and then they won’t like music or poetry anymore. Seriously.
I am such a trendsetter. First I pick up on the Paszkiewicz story weeks before the NY Times, and now another creationist I took a shot at, Julie Haberle, is written up in the Minneapolis Star Tribune. Ms Haberle is responsible for a set of anti-evolution billboards going up in the region, and she does not come off very well. Here are a few quotes from her that expose her shortcomings.
Julie Haberle, 55, said she once believed creationism “was absolutely nuts” and has over the past nine years come to the contradictory conclusion that “evolution is just silly.”
“I’m just a hack.”
“I’m not a biblical scholar and don’t pretend to have one original thought on the site.”
Contradictory hack without a single original thought? Couldn’t have said it better myself. Oh, and speaking of me, I’m quoted, too—and look, Ma, I’m famous!
“It’s kind of standard creationism stuff,” said Paul Z. Myers, a biology professor at the University of Minnesota, Morris and one of the nation’s most ardent critics of intelligent design. “It’s not a serious site — it’s just chunks of arguments strung together.”
Before I get too cocky, though, the article also notes that the billboards are cheap: somewhere shy of $10,000 each. That’s cheap? I think each one greatly exceeds the entire yearly budget of MnCSE.
Greg Laden, another ardent critic of ID and UM professor who was quoted, has also commented on this article.
Time to go get a beer at Drinking Liberally, ’cause the Fall semester of 2006 is all over but for the final exams and the grading and the tears. The last of the written work was turned in today, and now it’s just grading until my eyeballs evulse.
Here is a prime bit of end of term suckage, too: it is mid-December in Minnesota, and it is raining. Raining! If I wanted to live in a place with cool wet winters, I’d move back to Seattle.
Weird. How many of you parents ever thought you’d be glad to hear your kid was getting called into the principal’s office?
Oh, man, this homophobic student, Andrew Jallo, has discovered Skatje’s blog and is truly making a fool of himself—he has discovered sock puppetry, but doesn’t have the slightest idea how to cover his tracks. The Drama!
Ah, the pleasures of living in a small town in Red America: the high schools are fertile fields for fostering hate, and now it’s facilitated by technology, like Facebook, that allows them to sow it far and wide. My daughter is on a rampage right now, upset because her erstwhile peers at the high school have been putting their bigotry proudly on display. There is currently some ferocious babble going on in a Morris Area High School facebook site, and here’s one of the more outrageous comments:
Okay this is really random but it has to deal with the comment about homosexuality issue that Sibley brought up. Honestly why must our country keep discussing this issue. We all know it’s wrong and that it just shouldn’t be that way. If you want to go with the same sex move somewhere else. Please before we ship yah off. Honestly just get rid of them and then we won’t have this issue. Just ship them to Canada. But yah homosexuality is just wrong so just say no and get over it. It’s never gonna be right so yah!!
There’s more there—way too much more—and there are lots of kids who are blindly supporting that kind of statement. They say “it’s wrong” and that’s enough: their brains shut down, they’ve got nothing to back it up, and they just repeat the “just wrong” mantra over and over again, spicing it up with eliminationist calls to get rid of them. “So yah!!” sums up their reasoning perfectly.
Where do these kids pick up this kind of bigotry? From their parents and churches, of course, but also, the schools out here have been collaborators in a conspiracy of silence. A year ago last Spring, we had a perfect example: the university put on a play about tolerance and diversity, and regional schools boycotted the event, and the reaction to the Vagina Monologues has been similarly backwards. There are no processes in place to teach kids something more than their tradition-based dogmatic ignorance: the schools have given up, some of the churches encourage it, and whole families wallow in this level of stupidity.
And the kid who says we should ship all the gays to Canada? He’s student body president at the high school. He’s a member of the popular clique.
Hmmm…there are a couple of regional links that have popped up recently.
Tyler Cowen writes a “my best friends are Minnesotans” post. Does everyone who praises the state have to mention Prince and Fargo and Bob Dylan?
Hey, there’s a Drinking Liberally Holiday Party next week at the 331 Club in Minneapolis. I don’t think I can make it, but that is also my last day of classes, so maybe I’ll have to attend my local DL chapter and celebrate.
That local Drinking Liberally chapter is run by Lambo, who has just started his own blog, Forum Focus. He’s planning to focus on Forum Communications Corporation (so that’s where the name comes from), the media group that owns a chain of newspapers in our region, and bears watching.
