Officially, it’s Columbus Day tomorrow, everywhere except the two big cities I most strongly identify with: Seattle, near where I grew up, and Minneapolis. Both are politically progressive, probably because of my influence (it couldn’t possibly be that my background influenced me), and both have renamed Columbus Day to Indigenous People’s Day.
Pam Mazanec addressed the Colorado state board of education with an argument for “improving” the teaching of history.
As an example, I note our slavery history. Yes, we practiced slavery. But we also ended it voluntarily, at great sacrifice, while the practice continues in many countries still today! Shouldn’t our students be provided that viewpoint? This is part of the argument that America is exceptional.
A creationist sent me this charming image to show that Nazis were evolutionary biologists.
Hitler using evolution theory to justify racial supremacy
If Nature does not wish that weaker individuals should mate with the stronger, she wishes even less that a superior race should intermingle with an inferior one; because in such a case all her efforts, throughout hundreds of thousands of years, to establish an evolutionary higher stage of being, may thus be rendered futile.
Zing! That put me in my place.
A literary site, Dear Author, recently published an analysis of a digital publisher, Ellora’s Cave, which markets erotic/romantic fiction. That genre is undergoing booming growth right now, but Ellora’s Cave has declining revenues and is apparently failing to pay authors.
The NRA wouldn’t allow stupid people to handle a deadly weapon, would they?
I’m back from Zeteticon 2014 — you’ll all have to go to Zeteticon 2015. It was a well-organized and entertaining conference. Although everyone’s talks were interesting, I just want to comment on David Silverman’s.
Here’s a horrifying statistic for you (Warning! Autoplay video at that link!).
Before they can reach the American Dream, many migrant women have to survive a Mexican nightmare. A staggering 80 percent of Central American girls and women crossing Mexico en route to the United States are raped along the way, according to directors of migrant shelters interviewed by Fusion.
That’s up from previous reports by non-profit organizations like Amnesty International that estimate the number at 60 percent.
So the conservative estimate is 60%? Yet the Republican perspective on these people is that they are lazy moochers who parasitize American society — when they’re actually strong, ambitious people who have survived a harrowing struggle to get here.
Now you know.
An Idaho State University assistant professor with a concealed-carry gun permit shot himself in the foot with a semiautomatic handgun that accidentally discharged from inside his pocket in a chemistry classroom full of students, police said on Wednesday.
