Sunday morning, 9am Central time: Atheists Talk radio asks whether atheists can now relax, since Obama will soon be in office. I think you know the answer to that one: no. We’ll have to tune in to see what Lori Lipman Brown has to say!
We’re learning more about what Obama is actually going to do in office, and while there are some negatives, right now the positives outweigh them.
Let’s get the bad decisions out of the way first.
Rick Warren, professional homophobe, bigot, and smirking airhead, will be prominently promoted in the invocation at the inauguration. This is a symbolic slap to the face of rationalists and GLBT citizens of our country, and is not a good sign.
The man who will be the Interior Secretary, a position which should be concerned about conservation of the country’s natural resources and which has been typically filled with vultures and exploiters from industry by Republican presidents, is going to be more of the same: Ken Salazar, who will almost certainly promote mining and ranching interests.
Both of those are real disgraces, and it’s not as if Obama was boxed in or lacking alternatives. They’re also incomprehensible. Warren is a sneaky little creep who already got more respect than he deserves by hosting one of the presidential debates, and he’s also a guy who is anti-Democratic policies — you know he did not vote for Obama. So why throw him another bone? Salazar just sounds like a lazy choice, somebody who was picked to appease industry…but he’s not a steward of the environment.
The bads are awful, but I’ve got to say that his good decisions are very, very good.
The director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy will be John Holdren of Harvard University, a professor of environmental policy who takes a hard line on global climate change — he was an advisor to Al Gore on the movie, An Inconvenient Truth.
Jane Lubchenko is a professor of marine biology at Oregon State University. She’ll be in charge of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, another key appointment in climate change policy.
Co-chairs of the Council of Advisers on Science and Technology will be Harold Varmus, who won a Nobel for his work on viral oncogenes, and Eric Lander, a very big name in genomics research.
Another Nobel laureate, Steven Chu, will be the Secretary of Energy. Chu has also been outspoken about climate change and is a strong promoter of alternative energy sources.
If these good people are actually listened to by the president, expect to see major improvements in energy policy and biology research, and some serious attention paid to carbon. This is, overall, a net plus for science and a real strike against anti-science in the White House, a huge change from the last 8 years. Salazar is troubling, some people are concerned that NASA will suffer, and sucking up to the odious Rick Warren still makes me wonder what atavistic social policies might be nestled in Obama’s mind, but there is some hope on the horizon, at least. Now if only he could do even better.
It was not an auspicious start to the day. Before we could even leave for my son’s commencement at UW Madison, we had to clear the 6″-8″ of snow that had fallen overnight from our driveway. Then we had to flounder through unplowed roads to the highway. Then we discovered near-blizzard conditions of blowing snow on the road, but we persevered. We told ourselves that it would get better the farther east we went — Minneapolis always has wimpier weather than we do.
Then we got to the freeway…and it got worse. The roads were icy and slick, everyone was limping along at half the speed limit (except the idiot drivers of 18-wheelers, who were howling along at over 70mph in the left lane, stirring up billowing clouds of snow as they passed that would blind us all with a temporary white-out), and scattered all along the road were cars that had spun out and ended up in a ditch. We were held up by multiple car crashes. The final straw was when we pulled over to ask at a gas station about conditions further east, and were told a tale of apocalyptic catastrophe further on, with the freeway in both directions snarled with flipped and smashed cars.
We gave up, and came home. It was just too dangerous.
Now we are Disappointed Monkeys — we have to miss our son’s graduation. It also means he is stuck in dreary, uninteresting, barren Madison for Christmas, since we planned on bringing him back with us.
At least the university will be streaming the 2008 Winter Commencement at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, so we can watch it, but it’s not the same. If any of you happen to be going to the commencement for your own kids (or perhaps because you’re graduating, too), could you listen for the name Connlann Myers and give a little whoop and holler for us? We’d like to have been there, but we thought that orphanhood would be a really lousy graduation gift.
The pharynguloid hordes continue their reign of terror, marching through foreign lands and laying waste to their polls. Today, we crush Norway. An article about a faith healer wants to know whether you think this guy is a:
Placebo (23%)
Helbreder (healer) (61%)
Overtro (superstition) (9%)
Lureri (scamming) (8%)
I think he’s a superstitious scammer who’s taking advantage of the placebo effect, so basically anything but a healer. So go stem!
I’m a pilgrim today, traveling far to the east to the mysterious land of Wis-con-sin, where I shall spend some time in adoration of the son.
My middle child, the cute and monkey-like Connlann, is graduating from the University of Wisconsin Madison tomorrow, with a degree in English. Hooray for the hard work and success of our boy! Hooray for rituals of completion! Hooray for the end of chunky great tuition payments!
So, anyway, I shall be spending most of my time today driving, and most of tomorrow driving, and a good spell of tomorrow sitting in uncomfortable seats watching a ceremonial parade of strangers, but it is all worth it.
(Thanks to Lisa M for sending me the charming Happy Monkey illustration.)
So a wingnut gets a cartoonish version of religious history:
Ritualistic Baal worship, in sum, looked a little like this: Adults would gather around the altar of Baal. Infants would then be burned alive as a sacrificial offering to the deity. Amid horrific screams and the stench of charred human flesh, congregants – men and women alike – would engage in bisexual orgies. The ritual of convenience was intended to produce economic prosperity by prompting Baal to bring rain for the fertility of “mother earth.”
And what do you think that reminds him of? I think I’m wrong: he’s not making a metaphor, he’s saying that modern-day liberals are the direct descendant of Baal worshippers.
Modern liberalism deviates little from its ancient predecessor. While its macabre rituals have been sanitized with flowery and euphemistic terms of art, its core tenets and practices remain eerily similar. The worship of “fertility” has been replaced with worship of “reproductive freedom” or “choice.” Child sacrifice via burnt offering has been updated, ever so slightly, to become child sacrifice by way of abortion. The ritualistic promotion, practice and celebration of both heterosexual and homosexual immorality and promiscuity have been carefully whitewashed – yet wholeheartedly embraced – by the cults of radical feminism, militant “gay rights” and “comprehensive sex education.” And, the pantheistic worship of “mother earth” has been substituted – in name only – for radical environmentalism.
Well, I think modern conservatism is descended from ritual cannibalism, so there.
A reader sent me this caricature. I do make a rather grim looking cleric, don’t I?
Still, it’s an interesting proposal. I think we need a pope who would blow raspberries at the rituals and laugh at the beliefs, and I can see myself thwapping Bill Donohue with that stick a few times. Is there an application form for me to fill out? How many members of the college of cardinals are among my readership?
Lack of self-awareness is a tragic disease running rampant in the fundagelical community. Here’s an amusing instance: what happens if you tell children about Santa, and then they find out the truth? Why, they go on a terrorist rampage of murder and mayhem, of course.
Right. I’m sure you all remember that day when you discovered Santa Claus was just-pretend, maybe when you were 4 or 5, and you right away ran out and burned down the pre-school and strangled the cat. Funny, isn’t it, how everyone reading this figured out that Santa isn’t real and managed to survive the trauma without committing any felonies.
Not this poor kid, though. Look how he ends up.
Guess what? I bet Osama bin Ladin doesn’t believe in Santa Claus either.
Alas, this Chick comic has a very muddled message. It seems to be that you shouldn’t teach kids to believe in fairy tales, because they’ll be disappointed when they find out the truth…but somehow, he thinks the fairy tale of Jesus is different.
Since everyone is sending me this link, I’ll go ahead and mention the amusing comparisons between various religions and programming languages…however, I am deeply offended. They left out the greatest programming languages of all, Pascal (especially Object Pascal) and Modula-2. What’s with all this praise for obscurantist C and its dialects? Wirth’s languages win on clarity and structure.
Perhaps it is because they can’t be compared to religion in any way.
Now someone else is giving away a free book to commenters — it’s like Christmas or something. Leave a comment at Domestic Father and maybe you’ll win a copy of Ben Goldacre’s Bad Science(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll), which is a really good deal, since that book isn’t yet available in the US, and I’ve been itching to get my hands on it for a while.
I was tempted not to tell you all, just to improve my chances of winning, but altruism won out.
