Thanks, everyone!

In the first 24 hours of our fundraising campaign, we’re almost 3/4 of the way to our conservative goal of $20,000. When we hit that, though, don’t stop! We set a goal to cover our current expenses, but we know more will be coming along, depending on how far Carrier wants to take his foolish suit.

It’s sad, too, because he has to be spending at least as much money on his lawyer, all for an unattainable award (he won’t be able to squeeze $2 million out of us; we’re operating on a shoestring as it is), on a journey that, win or lose, is doing a heck of a lot of damage to his reputation.

Help!

Y’all know we’re getting sued by Richard Carrier because we thought a woman who accused him of harassment ought to be listened to, and because we had the temerity to question his use of professional meetings as open meat markets, right? We need your help now. He’s demanding over $2 million dollars for damages to his professional reputation (trust us, we know: you can be accused of all kinds of dubious ethical problems and still have a thriving career on the atheist lecture circuit*, unfortunately, so this is kind of a weird complaint), and we’ve had to throw tens of thousands of dollars at a lawyer to defend ourselves.

None of us are exactly wealthy, so this is unsupportable, and we are reaching out to our readers for assistance, with a GoFundMe site for donations.

This lawsuit has all the hallmarks of a SLAPP suit — a lawsuit filed to stifle legitimate criticism and commentary. The named defendants are Skepticon, The Orbit, and Freethought Blogs – as well as individuals Lauren Lane, the lead organizer of Skepticon; Stephanie Zvan, a blogger for The Orbit; PZ Myers, a blogger for Freethought Blogs; and Amy Frank-Skiba, who publicly posted her first-hand allegations against Carrier.

We need your help to keep our voices alive. All the defendants are represented by the same attorney, First Amendment lawyer Marc Randazza. Randazza is providing his services at a significant discount, but we are not asking him to work for free. Plus, there are thousands of dollars in “costs” for the case that don’t include legal bills, and there is no way to discount those. In order to continue fighting this lawsuit, we, the defendants of this case, have put together this campaign to raise money to defray our costs, some of which is outstanding. Donations will be used only for this case. In the event that the funds raised exceed our legal bills, they will be donated to Planned Parenthood .

I’ve been fortunate in the past that the loons who’ve threatened to sue me have tended to collapse at the prospect of defending their absurdities, and their already compromised reputations, in court. This one is sufficiently self-righteous that he’s continued on, to the point where we really need to bring in a professional to fight for us, and a good lawyer is not cheap. Every penny will be deeply appreciated.

*Sadly, the one thing that can cut short your career in atheism is criticizing harassers. Deep down, it’s all very tribal and the one thing you must never do is challenge authority.

What do we know about the Jedi religion, anyway?

Bactatankbreathmask

Sarah Jeong highlights a gigantic plot hole in Star Wars, and now that she’s brought it up I can’t stop figuratively kicking myself for not noticing it myself — my excuse is that I avoided thinking about the prequels as much as possible, so it’s unsurprising that a lot would slide by, but this problem is so huge even that isn’t a good reason. The short summary:

At the end of Episode III, Anakin gets three limbs chopped off and then falls into hot lava. He lives.

His wife has babies, under medical supervision. She dies.

Whoa, that’s right. In this incredibly advanced science fiction civilization, they have “bacta tanks” that can heal massive damage, they have amazing knowledge of the nervous system to the point that they can build neurally controlled prosthetics that are indistinguishable from the biological version, but somehow a Space Princess with access to the resources of an entire planet doesn’t even get an ultrasound to determine that she’s carrying twins. This makes no sense. They clearly must have the technology; they have life form scanners and the ability to clone people, which implies a deep knowledge about reproductive biology.

Which means they must choose to reject the use of common, trivial technology to benefit women’s reproductive health.

What could cause people to reject the use of simple medical procedures to save lives? One thing that I can think of: religion. That says a lot about the “hokey religion” of the Jedi; apparently there’s something profoundly evil imbedded within it that suppresses the use of technology and information to benefit the health of women, as if everything in a woman’s reproductive system is forbidden (to be fair, maybe they’re just as prudish about men’s crotches, and perhaps millions of men are dying of untreated testicular cancer in the galactic federation). Now I have to wonder, though — if there is such a strong prohibition against technology approaching women’s nethers, does the Star Wars universe have vibrators?

These are proscriptions even more sweeping than those of the real Catholic church, and suggests that maybe there’s a reason the Empire is so successful in recruiting immense numbers of minions. There’s the cloning thing, which suggests that maybe the secular empire was at least a little bit less squeamish and definitely better informed about baby-making than the Rebellion. Maybe they were also fighting against a repressive religion, the Jedi, that was spreading its toxic, repressive ways throughout the galaxy. I could see how that would inspire military action against the peaceful, meditative religion that still manages to somehow field fleets that make nearly miraculous victories. Perhaps the Jedi are the Islamists of that age…and maybe “Jedi” is a corruption of “Jihadi”.

It also puts the destruction of Alderaan by the Death Star comprehensible. That might be the Star Wars equivalent of nuking Mecca — which does not justify it, of course. But then that makes the Empire analogous to the United States of America, where the people who abhor the weird foreign mystery religion can blithely talk about torture and nuclear weapons and continuous bombardment of populations.

I think I’m going to have to detest both sides now.

I get email…from the presidential inauguration committee?

WTF? This junk mail was actually sent to me from a committee which appears to be the real deal.

Thank you for signing up for your 2017 Make America Great Again Welcome Celebration tickets! Together, we’re going to kick-off the inauguration of President-elect Donald J. Trump and Vice President-elect Michael R. Pence. We’re excited that you’re going to be a part of this historic event.

What: Make America Great Again Welcome Celebration
When: Thursday, January 19, 2017
Time: Concert from 4PM – 6PM. Gates open at 12:30PM and close at 3:30PM.
Where: Lincoln Memorial

What: Inaugural Swearing-In Ceremony
When: Friday, January 20, 2017
Time: Ceremony begins at 11:30 AM. Gates open at 6 AM.
Where: United States Capitol

Your commemorative ticket(s) will be emailed to you.

For more information, follow us on social media and be sure to visit the website: www.58pic2017.org

I did not sign up for tickets to Trump’s pathetic “triumph”. One possibility is that some pest signed me up for this, something that happens surprisingly often (I have been signed up for “free trial subscriptions” to all kinds of bizarre magazines, for instance). The other is that they are so desperate for attendees that they are mass-mailing this crap to everyone. Has anyone else been invited?

First class done!

David_by_Michelangelo

It’s going to be a l o n g semester. 8am is rough; I provided hot water and tea, and we had a mid-class break so anybody could run out for coffee or just slap themselves awake. Then, to ease them in, we talked about an easy topic. We talked about Italy! I would love to visit Italy someday — it’s number one on my list of desirable travel destinations that haven’t visited yet. I also saw an opportunity to get all liberal artsy and talk history and philosophy and art, as well as science, because these are all related.

Here’s my cryptic whiteboard at the first half of the class. Can you guess what we talked about, and how it was at all relevant to developmental biology?

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The students weren’t particularly responsive — I think they were regarding this as something like a dental appointment. But it is the first day, and I’m going to be hammering on them that they need to be alert and interactive and contribute, so they’ll warm to it eventually. Or they won’t, and it’ll be a really long semester.

I am ready.

I just finalized the schedule for my third course this term (Biological Communications, an independent study/writing course) and contacted the four students taking it from me. I’m prepared for my first lecture at 8am tomorrow, mostly ready for my second, and I have the student assignments all laid out and ready to go. I think I know what I’m doing.

Deep breaths. Deep breaths.

Blockbuster movies I have seen in the past year and cannot remember anything about the plot

I must be getting old and senile. There is something wrong with my brain. I have seen all of these movies in the past year, and for the life of me I couldn’t tell you what happened in them.

  • Doctor Strange
  • Star Trek Beyond
  • X-Men Apocalypse
  • Suicide Squad
  • Batman vs. Superman

I know I attended them. I recall blurs of cgi, loud explosions, and chaotic stories in which the fate of the world hung in the balance, but I can’t remember, or care, about a danged thing that happened in them. It’s weird, but there are also little snippets of things associated with them that are surely false memories.

  • Tilda Swinton was an old Asian dude? That can’t be.
  • Sabotage defeats the bad guys. Not the act of sabotage, but the song by the Beasty Boys. With lots of cgi.
    Strangely, I can vividly remember the Beasty Boys’ music video of the song, but not what happened in the movie.
  • A confusing ensemble cast re-enacting the plot of The Mummy?
  • A bomb blows the head off a super-character we all cared so little about they didn’t even bother to introduce him.
  • There’s something about Martha? And it disgusted me?

This is also an oddly spotty problem. I can recall everything about Mad Max: Fury Road, for instance.

Either I have to go in for a neurological check-up, or all of Hollywood does. The latter is highly unlikely, right?

Love, fear, mortality

I am haunted by a dream, a dream that is far too likely to be true, and wakes me up in the middle of the night. In this dream, my wife wakes up in the morning to find my body cold and still in the bed next to her. I feel no pain for myself — I’m dead — but I burn with the agony of loss that she feels, and the pain that wracks her when she calls our kids, and the reverberations of sadness that I will be responsible for causing. If you live life in the embrace of friends and family, you know what I’m talking about. Love and happiness exact a cost, every moment filling a pool of tears that grows deeper with our closeness, and as we grow older they well close to the surface, until…they inevitably break and fall in sorrow and grief.

I’ve been married for thirty-six years. Thirty six years of inseparable mutual devotion in which a lachrymal ocean has grown, that we work together to shore up and contain, because there will be a flood of grief when that dark shore is crossed. I can imagine some grim shadow of it. I can dread it.

And I can sympathize when the partner of long-time commenter Nerd of Redhead dies after 43 years of marriage. That is a rending I don’t want to contemplate…and yet it’s what haunts me, too.