Tennessee’s embarrassing tea party

Tennessee’s governor, Bill Haslam, recently appointed a well-qualified resident of the state to be the new international director of the Tennessee Department of Economic and Community Development. Her name is Samar Ali. And you can guess where this is going.

The state tea-partiers and Republicans are hysterical. SHE’S A MOOOSLIIIIM!

They bought ads in the newspaper decrying the hiring of Ali because she’s Muslim. Various county leaders are outraged and are passing resolutions condemning Haslam because he hired a Muslim. Oh, and as long as the bigots are emboldened, they’re also tossing in complaints about the fact that Haslam hasn’t fired enough homosexuals.

You know, this is why government is supposed to be secular. As long as the people doing the work of administration keep their religion out of their work, as long as they are responsible to everyone in their state, as long as they are competent, I don’t care whether they’re Christian or Muslim or atheist. Unfortunately, our privileged, selfish Christian conservatives have this mistaken notion that the purpose of government is to act as an arm of the Christian church, and that evangelical fervor is an adequate substitute for competence, and that is doing us great harm.

I don’t want to deal with this any more

It’s too stupid. It turns out TAM had an anti-harassment policy after all (good for them), except that it was secret and implemented by hidden cameras and disguised security goons who would turn their entire focus on victims of harassment, rather than harassers.

I don’t understand at all.

All I can guess at is that this policy was kept secret so it wouldn’t discourage any creepy guys from attending. Their money is just as good as any woman’s, after all! TAM wants to be open to everyone, including gropers and PUAs and drunk fumblers, and doesn’t want to send any messages that might inhibit them. And I think it’s perfectly fair that there be a skeptics’ convention that caters specifically to frustrated, privileged men — I just didn’t think that TAM, with its history of inclusivity, was going to elect to be that conference.

The tragedy of Aquaman

It’s true: Aquaman has huge physiological problems. The temperature, the osmotic gradient, the pressure would all kill him, he’d never be able to maintain the caloric intake needed for his super-swimming ability, and the psychic screams from all those fish would drive him mad. But Southern Fried Scientist missed one, and this is the one that always ruined my childhood fantasies of growing up to be Aquaman: oxygen. The dissolved oxygen in seawater is much lower in concentration than in the atmosphere, so all that activity has to be carried out by an oxygen-starved brain and musculature. If Aquaman had gills, they were tiny and discrete, hardly adequate for the job; if he was using the respiratory surface of his lungs to extract oxygen, well, tidal breathing is incredibly inefficient, and using the delicate membranes of the alveoli to generate negative pressure in a dense medium like water, they were going to be shredded. Aquaman dies, twisted by osmotic shock, brain numbed by oxygen starvation, with a cloud of blood gushing out of his mouth.

I really did used to like Aquaman, and he was one of my favorite superheroes, just because I loved the idea of being able to dive off a dock and swim forever. But when I started thinking about it, on every page my brain would be shrieking, “HOW ARE YOU RESPIRING, AQUAMAN?” and I’d be distracted.

Lesson learned: less thinking.

Why I am an atheist – PeteJohn

Being someone who is deeply interested in history and who is trying very hard to find a job as a history teacher, my tale o’ atheism is essentially historical, with the subject being myself.  When I was little my mother tried very, very hard to convince my younger sister and myself that her liberal Methodist faith was an integral part of being a good and wholesome person.  We all went to church, we went to Sunday School, mom ran the Children’s Church program, we sang the songs, we missed NFL games on Sundays so we could help clean up the kitchen on communion days, and so on and so forth.  I can’t say any of it was ever super-intense, in your face, be-saved-or-be-damned like many churches seem to be, and all in all it wasn’t too bad.  I heard over and over again that it was a good thing to do good things, and I figured that wasn’t a bad idea at all.  It wasn’t until I got older and started to think seriously about making the religion plunge that I began to see that “doing good things” included doing a lot of things that didn’t seem particularly good at all.  I learned it was a good thing to go vote for the anti-gay, anti-abortion, pro-gun, pro-death penalty, borderline racist candidates with R’s next to their name.  I learned it was a good thing to help buy the church a new jumbo-screen and a fancy new building (with a gift shop!) with a giant sign, even though there wasn’t a thing wrong with our building.

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LOOTERS!

This request sent chills down my spine…

We’re looking for a few volunteers to join us and help hand out t-shirts and posters. You may even run into one or two of the Producers and/or Stars of…

Wait for it…

…the upcoming Atlas Shrugged Part 2 movie.

Zombie Ayn Rand is clawing her way out of the grave right now.

Navy, you’ve got a nasty little worm in the works

I rarely do this, but we’ve got a troll who deserves an outing. wordplague has been plaguing this thread — 62 comments in 10 hours! — claiming to be a graduate student somewhere. He’s being over-the-top misogynistic, making rape jokes, bragging about making rape threats, making death and mutilation threats, and man, he really, really hates his advisor, who is a woman, working in a lab that uses lasers and liquid nitrogen. If I knew who he was, I’d be calling his advisor right now to warn her she’s got a time-bomb in her lab.

But I don’t know who he is. So I’m just going to release his IP address. All of his comments come from a couple of gateways at bremerton.nmci.navy.mil. I don’t know what research facilities they have in Bremerton — I know of the Bremerton Naval Hospital — but he may just be lying to us all. If any authorities at the naval institutions in Bremerton or NMCI want my assistance tracking down the creep, I’ll gladly forward the stuff I’ve got to them. He needs help.

Not-so-pointless poll on Australian chaplains

The Atheist Foundation of Australia would like their prime minister to answer one simple question:

Dear Prime Minister. Against the strongly expressed concerns of mental health professionals, teacher unions and secular organisations, why do you allow the outrageous situation to continue where largely unqualified, religious evangelists have access to young children in public schools, in the form of the National School Chaplaincy Program?

She’s been dodging it, of course, and I suspect that if she were backed into a corner she’d be entertainingly frantic in her efforts to escape. So let’s corner her! And she has made the mistake of making that possible.

Dear members and supporters,

OurSay is giving us the opportunity to directly ask Prime Minister
Julia Gillard a question, and we have chosen to focus on the
outrageous taxpayer funded National School Chaplaincy Program.

This Saturday, Gillard will answer three of the most popular questions
as chosen through OurSay. One of these questions could be ours.

Please follow these simple steps to make sure that we have a seat at
the table:

1) Sign up for OurSay

2) Vote seven times for our question:

3) Recruit a friend to do exactly the same

Click here to get started: http://oursay.org/s/2ea

We only have until Thursday but, if we all came together – we could
make sure that this important issue is being heard by Prime Minister
Gillard and all of Australia that very Saturday.

Regards, David Nicholls

President – Atheist Foundation of Australia

PS. Make sure that you sign up and vote seven times to get an answer
from Gillard on Chaplaincy.

It’s a poll with some teeth. Let’s make Gillard dance!

Camille Marino is probably going to jail

Marino is a demented fanatical animal rights activist who runs a website called “Negotiation is Over”. NIO is notorious as the site of some of the most frothingly furious denouncers of all animal research. Marino is from Florida; she was arrested and extradited to Michigan in March to be tried for words she wrote on the internet.

Whoa. That ought to give one pause — arrested for free speech, you’re thinking? That does cause one’s knee to jerk.

But then she was also arrested in May when she chained herself to a library door to protest being banned from the Wayne State campus in Detroit. She’s been ordered to stay away from the researchers she threatens, but then she travels to their university to harass them — that sounds like stalking to me.

The situation here is that Marino’s got nation-wide bands of dedicated followers, those followers have in the past shown a willingness to undertake violent, destructive action on behalf of their cause, and Marino has been actively inciting others to kill researchers. You want an example? Here’s an example, and it’s also a great example of her incoherent state of mind.

The image on this page [a chalk outline labeled “animal abuser was here”] is not a cute logo. It is my personal belief that if you are a sadistic animal torturer, that is all you deserve – a chalk outline. That’s my opinion, not a threat. It’s not even inciting anyone because, unless you read my words and run out and murder David Jenstch (sic) (an idea that amuses me immensely), I’m not responsible. If you have time to think about it and form your own conclusions, my words cease being the impetus. Eh, that used to be the law at least. Who knows? Who cares? We have a job to do and that’s all that matters…. NIO is no longer mincing words. This is war!… Nothing is off limits at NIO!

…

if there are no consequences, there is no threat. If you spill blood, your blood should be spilled as well…. Some of the more high profile pacifists have said that I am “violent” and “unbalanced”. I think they finally may be right about something!

If I have my way, you’ll be praying to us for mercy!

It’s just her “opinion”, she’s not inciting anyone — she would just be amused by David Jentsch being murdered by someone who read her suggestion to go murder him. She’s not responsible, she’s just telling everyone that researchers’ blood should be spilled, and that nothing is off limits.

She’s a danger to others. It’s good news that she’s being constrained to protect the citizenry.

Why I am an atheist – Paul

I was talking with a couple of Christians after a band practice one evening. It dawned on me how primitive but totally defended their ideas were. Of course if they were rational they would not be religious. I noticed the religious invoke God or the supernatural (capable of  something illogical or inexplicable) whenever I have cornered them or their arguments and was able to show their views were wrong, self contradicting or baseless. They use invoking the supernatural as a ploy in any argument they are losing. They also use a supernatural claim when they do not know, understand or accept evidence.

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