Shorter Bryan Fischer: Because the Nazis really hated homosexuals, they are nothing like the Religious Right. Or maybe it’s that because the Nazis were gay, they didn’t hate homosexuality enough, as the Bible clearly says you should.
I don’t know. It’s a confused mess of butchered history, so who knows what this guy is trying to say. He sure seems fascinated with butch Nazis abusing effeminate beautiful boys, though.
You may recall that a while back I mentioned how Jerry Coyne praised some work on bat evo-devo. I also said that I was going to have to write that paper up sometime. The bad news: I haven’t written it up for the blog. The good news: I did write it up for a future Seed column. The better news: Stephen Matheson has a summary right now, so you don’t have to wait for my column to come out.
You should still subscribe anyway. It’s pretty on shiny paper.
It was commencement weekend here in lovely Morris, Minnesota, and I spent yesterday in a funny outfit posing for parents and going to commencement parties, and this morning was spent ferrying #2 Son to the Twin Cities for his long bus ride back to Madison. It’s time to buckle down and finish my grading now.
But on a happy note, I think we can safely close the nominations for this month’s Molly already: it’s a landslide, and I don’t think Kenny has a chance of catching up, and also we should celebrate the winner’s birthday somehow. The Molly for May 2008 goes to Etha Williams.
Tune in at 9am for Atheists Talk radio — this week, there will be discussions of genetics and ethics, and just in time for your summer planning, you’ll learn more about Camp Quest.
…but God has a blog in which he lists the stuff he hates. He’s definitely a bit petty and vindictive, so be careful commenting over there — he might just pick on you.
One century, you’ve got Bach, another century, you’ve got Li’l Markie. Christianity has really gone downhill from its prior status as the font of funding for culture and art and intellectual endeavor to being the being the bottom of the barrel source for kitsch and crap. Case in point: Denyse O’Leary’s hideous, horrible, talentless hackery has been nominated for a Canadian Christian Writing Award. Even setting aside the fact that I disagreed vehemently with the content of the book, if you judge it on the quality of the writing, it doesn’t deserve recognition, it warrants condemnation — it’s probably the worst-written bit of tripe to cross my desk all year long, and that’s saying a lot. I’ve got a few people trying to persuade me to review their Christian apocalyptic fantasy novels, and O’Leary’s book is more incoherent than those.
It’s the end of our semester, and there’s another transition here: one of our colleagues, Dave Hoppe, is retiring, to our regret but to his happy progress. We all got together for a retirement dinner yesterday, so here’s the happy crew, the entire UMM biology discipline.
We hope Dave can still drag himself away from his lakefront home to say hello to us all now and then!
You people all need to get on over to Sciencewomen — she’s been blogging the Intel International Science and Engineering Fair. This is the stuff of the next generation of scientists!
Is your lunch hour safely over? If not, wait a while before watching another interview with Ben Stein. I can’t believe what an idiot this man is; it’s not just that he’s ignorant, but that he has these bizarrely inappropriate notions about biology. He complains about “Darwinism” because it doesn’t explain why are there laws of gravity and thermodynamics, or where physics and gravity come from (Bonus lunacy! He claims Darwin said gravity was intelligently designed!). He keeps making these insane assertions in interview after interview, too; does he ever think, or notice that gravity is not a product of biological processes? Did someone tell him gravity was produced by sucking or something?
We all know, after all, that gravity is actually produced by the 4th dimension, which is not what you think it is. Just ask a smart rabbit, who even shares some other sentiments with Stein.
(Whatever you do, don’t send that comic to Ben Stein — he might think it’s a serious hypothesis.)
We’re all caught up on the new Molly inductees: for March, it’s Glen Davidson, and for April, brokenSoldier. Give them your attention when they comment!
Of course, now we have to gather nominations for May. Who are the commenters who make you perk up and think? Name them in the comments to this post.
