Greta Christina could use your help

UPDATE: Greta says people have responded so generously that she doesn’t need more donations. But go wish her well if you haven’t already.

Our friend and colleague Greta Christina, on the heels of losing her father, just got handed some scary bad news:

The bad news is that I was just diagnosed with endometrial cancer. I got the initial biopsy results Saturday, and met with the oncologist Tuesday.

The good news about the bad news: To the degree that there is a “good” kind of cancer, this is the good kind: well-differentiated cells, Class 1, in a body part that I have no great need of and am fine with having removed. But it’s still, you know, cancer.

Greta is one of those people who’s always looking out for other folks; since I’ve started reading her I’ve seen her lend her voice to help a number of people who are having tough times. (I was one of those people this year, dealing with misfortune not even in the same league as what’s Greta’s been handed, but she helped me anyway.)

It’s her turn now. At her blog, she spells out a few ways people can help her get through the next couple of months. But if you’re in a hurry, here’s the shortcut: you can toss her some cash you’re not using here,  or sign up for a year’s worth of monthly $5.00 donations here. PayPal links aren’t working due to session data, it would seem, but you can get there via Greta’s post.

And as long as I have the microphone in my hand, knowing that with this readership chances are high that someone else reading this is facing something similar, here’s something to read on surviving cancer that’s helped quite a few people I know when they needed some calm reason and math.

It has come to this?

I worry a little bit about the direction research funding is going. It’s shrinking, and people are looking for creative methods to fund basic research — like this crowd-sourced project to study the neuropharmacology of amphetamines. It looks like a worthy effort and I wish the investigator well, but whoa, where are we going? Are researchers going to have to sing and dance on street corners with their hats out to eke out funds to support their obscure and esoteric efforts?

It’s also going to skew funding in new ways (not that our existing methods don’t bias the directions research takes). Which would you throw a few dollars at: biomedical research into human mental health, or a pure science project to study bone morphology in some species of herps?

But don’t let my general reservations hinder you: if you think the work looks cool, help them out.

Around FtB

I need the html version of a gel ink pen. Anyone got one?

  • Brianne Bilyeu reminds me that I completely missed Ada Lovelace Day! Not surprising, I’m forgetting everything every day.

  • Frederick Sparks discusses the case of a murderous paranoid schizophrenic who has been sentenced to death rather than mental health care. Amusingly, the reason his plea of insanity was dismissed was because the killer claims to be “the ‘Prince of God’ and will be resurrected with Jesus in the afterlife”, which the judge found to be a normal Christian belief.

  • Ophelia Benson reveals that Reddit favors “free speech” over taste and legality and respect for individuals. It’s the Libertoonian version of free speech, of course, which translates as “I get to do whatever I want, no matter who it hurts.”

  • Ian Cromwell leaps on the ‘binder’ meme. So does the Republican party. Why? I don’t know.

  • Digital Cuttlefish is deep in grading — I feel his pain — but takes a moment to notice the curious adoration of the undecided voter.

  • Dana Hunter flaunts an image of a slumping, collapsing mess. I’ve been there, literally.

  • Maryam Namazie highlights Muslims shaming the Taliban.

  • Natalie Reed dissects yet another transphobic article. Sadly, that’s a niche that will always be there.

  • Chris Rodda notes that Mikey Weinstein has been threatened with imprecatory prayer. I’m sure he’s trembling in his army boots at the prospect of magic curses.

  • Taslima Nasreen looks at some women leaders. Guess what? They can endorse misogynistic policies, too!

  • Steven Andrew reports the discovery of an earth-sized planet orbiting Alpha Centauri. My retirement plans might be firming up.

  • Zinnia Jones is working on her signature. I definitely need to get some glittery gel pens.

A terrible, terrible confession

I’m flying off to the Texas Freethought Convention in Austin tomorrow night. I see on the schedule that I’m delivering the Saturday night keynote, and that I’m in the company of Richard Dawkins and Aron Ra and Matt Dillahunty and Jessica Ahlquist.

My personal schedule lately has been raging chaos with obligations piled on top of responsibilities teetering on a foundation of work, and…

and…

Jeez, I haven’t even had a moment to think about what I’m going to say! In two days I have to give an hour talk that will make it worthwhile to hang about in an auditorium rather than going drinking. I am a bad, bad person.

But I’m really good at throwing a talk together on short notice. So I thought that what I would do is put it out to the Pharyngula commentariat: if you were in Austin on a Saturday night, and you had to listen to me talk, what would you want me to talk about? What subjects in freethought and/or science get you wound up, and would have you either pumping your fist or throwing beer bottles at the speaker (either extreme works)?

Leave suggestions. I’ll make up my mind so I can get the talk assembled on the plane.

C0nc0rdance and the principle of intelligent, responsible discussion

C0nc0rdance has put up a video berating me for shutting down my youtube comments. It might be more interesting if it weren’t so full of speculation about my motives…motives that I understand very well, while he doesn’t have a clue.

It’s simpler than he thinks. I set up my youtube account to have all comments sent directly to my email account; I read them all. And I was appalled.

[Read more…]

Romney lied, again

I tuned out last night’s debate — my wife watched it, but I put on my headphones and listened to some industrial rock to drown out the drone. I knew I’d be able to get the highlights the next day.

And I did! Apparently Romney was asked about his role in hiring women, and he claimed to have worked hard to bring more women into leadership positions.

ROMNEY: Thank you. An important topic, and one which I learned a great deal about, particularly as I was serving as governor of my state, because I had the chance to pull together a cabinet and all the applicants seemed to be men.

And I — and I went to my staff, and I said, "How come all the people for these jobs are — are all men." They said, "Well, these are the people that have the qualifications." And I said, "Well, gosh, can’t we — can’t we find some — some women that are also qualified?"

And — and so we — we took a concerted effort to go out and find women who had backgrounds that could be qualified to become members of our cabinet.

I went to a number of women’s groups and said, "Can you help us find folks," and they brought us whole binders full of women.

Nice story. Good for him. Except that it isn’t true.

What actually happened was that in 2002 — prior to the election, not even knowing yet whether it would be a Republican or Democratic administration — a bipartisan group of women in Massachusetts formed MassGAP to address the problem of few women in senior leadership positions in state government. There were more than 40 organizations involved with the Massachusetts Women’s Political Caucus (also bipartisan) as the lead sponsor.

They did the research and put together the binder full of women qualified for all the different cabinet positions, agency heads, and authorities and commissions. They presented this binder to Governor Romney when he was elected.

…

I will write more about this later, but for tonight let me just make a few quick additional points. First of all, according to MassGAP and MWPC, Romney did appoint 14 women out of his first 33 senior-level appointments, which is a reasonably impressive 42 percent. However, as I have reported before, those were almost all to head departments and agencies that he didn’t care about — and in some cases, that he quite specifically wanted to not really do anything. None of the senior positions Romney cared about — budget, business development, etc. — went to women.

Secondly, a UMass-Boston study found that the percentage of senior-level appointed positions held by women actually declined throughout the Romney administration, from 30.0% prior to his taking office, to 29.7% in July 2004, to 27.6% near the end of his term in November 2006. (It then began rapidly rising when Deval Patrick took office.)

Third, note that in Romney’s story as he tells it, this man who had led and consulted for businesses for 25 years didn’t know any qualified women, or know where to find any qualified women. So what does that say?

The man is great big smilin’ bag of lies, isn’t he?

The Big Stunt

I refrained from joining in the enthusiasm for Felix Baumgartner’s 128,000 foot parachute jump. It was a spectacular act of bravery, but it was also little more than a colossal stunt and a $10 million advertising gimmick for Red Bull. I just didn’t see the point — there was nothing learned from this event — and it seemed spectacularly crass, with a lot of truly stupid hype surrounding the story.

Now a historian puts the Stratos stunt in context. That makes it a little better, but it’s still a big commercial that put a man’s life at risk.

We’ve got a live one here, maybe

Someone calling themselves “averagetruth” has popped in a few times over the last few weeks to dump some garbage in the comments — so far, he or she has just been doing fly-bys, never responding to any arguments, but watch for ’em — the three-comment threshold has been passed and you can tear into these idiot remarks without hesitation. Here’s the latest:

Do you really want the US to sign “treaties” with the UN so that people cannot paint their houses whatever the fuck color they want? Are you aware that globally, temperatures have been *declining* for the past 16 years?

You are aware that entropy will eventually cause all temperatures to drop to a few degrees Kelvin in any case?

One serious faux pas here is that it was posted in the Lounge, which is not a place for argument. Just so averagetruth knows, future attempts to crash the social area will get the comment moved to Thunderdome, a more appropriate area, and if averagetruth can’t learn, we’ll just have to ban the dope.

But I just want to point out that I’ve run across a beautiful visual argument against that claim that temperatures have been declining on Skeptical Science. Just go look at it, it’s devastating to that point (and really, the source is the Daily Mail?)

At least the entropy argument is novel. Hey, averagetruth, you’re going to be inevitably dead in less than a century — does that mean you might as well just curl up and die right now? The heat death of the universe really isn’t a good argument against taking action in the span of the life of a species.