Friggatriskaidekaphobia time

I have an excuse to visit Philadelphia this May: I’ll be attending the Friggatriskaidekaphobia party that Margaret Downey will be putting on on Friday, the 13th of May, along with Tom Flynn.

Meet Tom Flynn, along with PZ Myers, at the Freethought Society (FS)’s 2011 Anti-Superstition Bashon Friday, May 13, 2011 from 7:00 PM to 11:00 PM in the beautiful Corinthian Yacht Club on 300 West 2nd Street, Essington, PA (just minutes from the Philadelphia Airport). FS will host a “Friggatriskaidekaphobia Treatment Center,” which will be equipped to assist party attendees in getting over all their superstitions and starting the process of ending magical thinking. Enjoy food, dancing, drinking and camaraderie.

Get rid of your secret superstitions! Anti-superstition “nurses” and “doctors” will be on hand to cure you. Enjoy a DJ Dance Party featuring Ladder Limbo, Horoscope Trashing, Open-Your-Umbrellas, fast and slow dances, Mirror Breaking Ceremony, and more! Cash bar and free hors d’oeuvres, door prizes and free educational literature will be available!

The general admission (includes light fare) is $10 with $5 discounts available for students and seniors. Cash bar only. No BYOB. There is no charge for children under the age of 13. The Club is located at 300 West 2nd Street, Essington, PA 19029.

If you will be attending, please email tickets@FtSociety.org.

I’m a little worried about the dance party business, though. I think seeing me dance would be bad luck.

i-ed6e339572ca54f355bce846265f1e3a-frigga.jpeg

I hope there will be many Philadelphians in attendance!

A little cheery news

The world doesn’t always suck! Two tidbits to brighten your day:

  • Glenn Beck is leaving Fox News, in a move that is claimed to be amicable but is probably more due to the fact that his show loses money for the network.

  • In one of those very important elections, the race between liberal challenger JoAnne Kloppenburg and conservative ass David Prosser for the Wisconsin supreme court is currently too close to call, but Kloppenburg leads. This would have been no contest a month or so ago, but it’s now widely viewed as a referendum on the union-bustin’ Governor Walker.

Weirdest comment on the Templeton Prize so far

I have to acknowledge the very silly Mark Vernon, who considers the award a triumph. Apparently, Martin Rees accepted the award to hit back vengefully at Richard Dawkins — oh, how I wish I were in a position to wreak havoc on mine enemies by getting £1,000,000 handed to me.

He really does see this as a Victory for Science, though.

When the cultural history of our times comes to be written, Templeton 2011 could be mentioned, at least in a footnote, as marking a turning point in the “God wars”. The power of voices like that of Dawkins and Sam Harris — who will be on the British stage next week — may actually have peaked, and now be on the wane. Science could be said, in effect, to have rejected their advocacy. Rees brings a preferable attitude to the debate.

Huh? The Templeton Foundation is a lushly endowed, private religious organization. It does not represent Science. Science did not have a voice in granting this award, only the trustees of the Templeton Foundation. I don’t see any sign of the diminution of the popularity of Dawkins and Harris, and I doubt that either of them were ever very high on the short list of potential awardees, anyway.

Besides, I’m planning to pay for a pizza for the good students of the Morris Freethought group tomorrow, which I think will be an awesome turning point in the history of atheism, and will mark the moment when religion began to ebb away and disappear. So there.

Blame UberFoo. He mentioned this song, and now I can’t get it out of my head, either…so I inflict it on you as well.

In the event of my dissolution into degeneracy

I have a request to all of you. Some of you hate me, so you’d enjoy this, but it’s more important that those of you who have a mild and distant affection for me take a stand, too. If, sometime in the future, when the billions of dollars role in, if you learn that I’m flying in children for sex, I don’t want you to defend me. Don’t use friendship as an excuse, just come out loud and clear and denounce my behavior, with no qualifiers. Please. There aren’t any justifications or rationalizations possible.

I am not planning to turn into a leering old degenerate, but you never know…I could suffer traumatic brain damage that radically alters my behavior, turning me into either a lecher or a Christian. If such a horrific event occurs, consider me dead and start abusing the bankrupt personality residing in my corpus, OK?

Ditto if I start robbing banks, beating up little old ladies for their social security checks, praising the Templeton Foundation, or become a Mormon. That stuff is just wrong.

Death by chocolate

If you’ve been following the wars in Africa, you already know that there’s at least one other powderkeg besides Libya — Côte d’Ivoire, which is struggling with a disputed succession and roving gangs of angry young men with guns. The Nation has an excellent summary of the problems in Côte d’Ivoire, and unfortunately it’s all about chocolate. Also unfortunately, although American bombs have been involved in the Libyan conflict, Côte d’Ivoire has also been afflicted with American intervention — in this case, by the corporate power of agribusiness, Cargill and Archer Daniels Midland (ADM).

At the moment, the world cocoa price in London is high, roughly 1,600 West African francs per kilo. But the small farmers here laugh bitterly at that figure; they are lucky if they get half of it for their sacks of beans. Cargill, ADM and a big Swiss concern, Barry Callebaut, are some of the biggest buyers; during the harvest season that ended last fall their Ivorian agents fanned out across the southern part of the country, offering much less than the world price. Then Gbagbo’s corrupt government took a big bite in “official” taxes. Finally, the small farmers paid bribes at the police roadblocks that regularly cut the highway down to the port at Abidjan.

So if you want to know what’s really causing the civil war, it’s poverty and uncertainty driven by gigantic business interests that willingly gouge every franc they can out of a country that doesn’t have the economic clout to fight back. And we contribute by supporting exploiters.

Côte d’Ivoire may seem away, and exotic. But every time those in the more prosperous parts of the world buy chocolate, we are exploiting the people who produce it. As long as we continue to tolerate this injustice, there will be no peace in Côte d’Ivoire.

Is there anything like the Fair Trade option for coffee that has also been applied to chocolate? What we need is a mechanism to bypass the corporate leviathans and invest directly in the farmers who do the work.

Faitheist wins Templeton prize

Another year goes by, and yet again the Templetonians have failed to throw a million pounds at me. I feel the same way I do when they announce the Powerball lottery winners and my ticket isn’t among the winners — of course, I never buy lottery tickets anyway, but that just makes the analogy even more perfect. The word for the seething emotional and intellectual turmoil I’m feeling right now is…”meh.”

So this year the Templeton Foundation has made the cunning decision to suborn somebody already sympathetic to their cause and with a respectable scientific reputation: an astronomer who doesn’t believe in any gods but does suck up to the church and who detests vocal atheists. I do love how he sneers at Stephen Hawking for knowing “little philosophy and less theology,” and then when discussing his own philosophy of supporting the church, he says he likes the architecture of cathedrals and the hymns. Yeah, there’s a deep thinker. I read the interview; it’s like a conversation with a soggy piece of toast.

Now he’s a rich slice of soggy toast. Mediocrity pays!

Jerry Coyne has a nice piece in the Guardian on the award.