I have some good news and I have some bad news...

Disclaimer: When people mess with the well-being of children, it makes my blood boil. As such, even the "good news" section of this note results in a pretty strong rant. If you're faint of heart, keep reading - it'll be good for you.

Let's start with the bad: one last time, science is going to suffer at the hands of the current President before he is finally (and mercifully) sent packing back to that shithole we call "Texas."

Before he leaves, Dubya is filling federal positions dealing with science policies with the same type of people he has always appointed: those who are grossly unqualified. Needless to say, AAAS President James McCarthy is pissed:

"It's ludicrous to have people who do not have a scientific background, who are not trained and skilled in the ways of science, make decisions that involve resources, that involve facilities in the scientific infrastructure," said James McCarthy, a Harvard University oceanographer who is president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. "You'd just like to think people have more respect for the institution of government than to leave wreckage behind with these appointments."

Ouch. This is coming from one of our most austere science organizations, and one that was slower than most to criticize ID for fear of offending people. Glad to see McCarthy pulling no punches over this.

So how bad could it be?

"In one recent example, Todd Harding -- a 30-year-old political appointee at the Energy Department -- applied for and won a post this month at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. There, he told colleagues in a Nov. 12 e-mail, he will work on "space-based science using satellites for geostationary and meteorological data." Harding earned a bachelor's degree in government from Kentucky's Centre College, where he also chaired the Kentucky Federation of College Republicans.

Also this month, Erik Akers, the congressional relations chief for the Drug Enforcement Administration, gained a permanent post at the agency after being denied a lower-level career appointment late last year.

And in mid-July, Jeffrey T. Salmon, who has a doctorate in world politics and was a speechwriter for Vice President Cheney when he served as defense secretary, had been selected as deputy director for resource management in the Energy Department's Office of Science. In that position, he oversees decisions on its grants and budget."

Can we please get this dangerous, simpering git out of Washington as soon as possible?

Ok, good news to balance that out. A Florida court has overturned the ban on gay adoption, and has included us a wonderful paragraph of sanity:

"It is clear that sexual orientation is not a predictor of a person's ability to parent. A child in need of love, safety and stability does not first consider the sexual orientation of his parent. The exclusion causes some children to be deprived of a permanent placement with a family that is best suited to their needs."

Of course, we're already hearing "Judicial activism! Waaaaaaah!" from the religious other side. We're also hearing the same shit that came out of Arkansas a month ago:

"Everywhere in the law where children are affected, the standard must always be what is in the best interest of the child," said Stemberger, an attorney in Orlando. "What is stunning to me is that when it comes to dealing with gays, that standard goes out the window. Children do better with a mother and a father."

To quote my dad:

"They shovel that manure out as if leaving 2/3 of the foster care kids with NO HOME AT ALL somehow achieves that "best environment" and somehow doesn't "harm children in ways that show up later in life". How stupid and gullible can people be? Talk about shit for brains.

You have to hate and fear homosexuals a lot to pass a law that hurts both children and heterosexuals in order to "get the gays". I think it is both disgusting and pathetic that people would use children as expendable pawns in their culture wars."

You know what? Statistically, kids to better with rich parents than they do with poor parents. They also do better with educated parents than with non-educated parents and better with white parents than they do with black parents (statistically speaking), but any laws prohibiting those demographics from rescuing a child from a fucking orphanage would rightly look cruel and retarded (as long as we're talking about throwing standards out the window, jackass)

And as usual, what's the culprit? Faith. Not stupid people who happen to be religious, but faith. The culprit is the very notion that believing in things (and hence formulating your world view) without evidence and clinging to that belief no matter how ridiculous, discriminatory, or malicious is not only a good thing, but the best thing. It's the only way that people could divorce themselves from basic human empathy to such an extent as to harm children to get a group of people that want to help the children. And it's the only way people could so eagerly spit on the products of our 21st century understanding in order to do so.

Yet it's "disrespectful" for people like me to point out how indescribably stupid those beliefs are. Tough shit, your religion is false. Your religion, the only motivation there can possibly be to discriminate against these normal people given the findings of science is false, so you can stop believing it. There are no talking snakes, witches, or pernicious gods that get pissy when people work on the wrong day (and there never were), and dredging the moral imperatives of times before Christ into the 21st century based on believing such nonsense is the very definition of pious idiocy. At the very least you deserve to be mocked for being so gullible, even for the minority of voting Christian voices who don't let their credulity turn them into bigots.

Sarah Palin Turkey Interview

Sarah Palin is a retard. Proof: she conducts an interview with local media right in front of a farmer slaughtering turkeys. *Warning*-Graphic turkey slaughter action.

Surfing teh Interwebs is Good for You!

A new study has proven that surging the internet is good for teenagers.

Not a teenager? Not to worry! It turns out that surfing the web is just as good for everyone else, too.

Each volunteer underwent a brain scan while performing web searches and book-reading tasks.

Both types of task produced evidence of significant activity in regions of the brain controlling language, reading, memory and visual abilities.

However, the web search task produced significant additional activity in separate areas of the brain which control decision-making and complex reasoning - but only in those who were experienced web users.

Yay for not ending up like this guy!

If 'God' had a Facebook page:

Well, what do you know, College Humor actually comes up with something not involved half naked chicks or booze. Kind of.

Behold, the 'God' Facebook page!

Here's a little taste of what it's like (but I highly recommend going to the page and reading it all):

Sweet Map Action

So, I was listening to NPR the other day I learned about World Mapper. This guy, Mark Neuman, and his team of super nerds have come up with an alternative mapping method which re-sizes areas on a map according to a certain subject of interest.

For example, here is the normal election map that is sectioned out by state:



This map can seem somewhat skewed because it seems like, due to visibility alone, that Montana would have more influence over New York because it appears larger on the map. However, New York has more electoral votes because of the larger population, which this map doesn't show.

Check out Mark's alternate version:



Freakin' cool! The areas are skewed to properly show how much influence each red or blue state has.

More maps can be found on World Mapper and they are all pretty awesome.

They are Coming to Your Town...

I hate to pull down the level of the posts lately. JT has been doing a great job keeping the posts up to a high intellectual standard.

But this is just so funny...



You can buy the FIVE PACK TODAY!!!

Note: I just read a beautiful little piece over on the Friendly Atheist's blog on this video. Very well done. =)

Chuck Norris should shampoo my crotch

I've seen this letter from Chuck Norris circulating around the intertewbz, including the blogs of two good friends of mine.  So I figure I need to say something about it.

The first seven paragraphs are the Association Fallacy, trying to insinuate that a few isolated incidences are indicative or approved of by the whole of those supporting equal rights. 

No, almost all of us condemn violence.  If this logic works, then all Christians pray their children to death, hate science, and are members of the Ku Klux Klan.  If that sounds absurd to you, then Chuck is not off to a very good start.  Chuck's whole letter depends on asserting that something is the case when it's not the case.  The instances of violence are rare and are an exception to the rule - yet Chuck, for his spiel to work, has to invert reality and convince us that most protesters are shoving old ladies.  This is dishonest and wrong.  Rather, throughout the protesting we are seeing stuff like this:

"Throughout the entire event demonstrators were thanking the police," said Long Beach Police Sgt. David Marander. "It wasn't an adversarial event, except for the few who were there to cause trouble."

"Other than a smashed police car window, there were no reports of property damage nor injuries."

Or this:

"A similar protest took place in San Diego, where around 11,000 people demonstrated peacefully despite an attempt by anti-gay marriage activists to disrupt the march, police said. One man was arrested for attempting to incite violence before being released."

Afterward, he admonishes us to accept the will of the majority.  This is a means of circumventing the discussion about whether or not what the majority wants is moral.  Consider the following paragraph:

"The truth is that the great majority of those opposed to blacks marrying whites are not bigots or hatemongers. They are American citizens who are following 5,000 years of human history and the belief of every major people and religion: Marriage is a sacred union between a man and a woman of the same ethnicity. Their opposition to Loving vs. Virginia wasn't intended to deprive any group of its rights; they were safeguarding their honest convictions regarding the boundaries of marriage."

Sounds pretty stupid, doesn't it?  "We weren't trying to be bigoted, we just think you should have to abide by our tradition when choosing who you should marry."  That would be downright hilarious if people weren't serious when they used that argument leading up to 1967, when people of different races were finally allowed to marry.

First, it doesn't matter if it's your tradition - if your tradition is exclusionary, if it insists that others abide by your tradition while forsaking their own, it's bigoted and hate-mongering. 

Second, Chuck doesn't seem to know much about the history of marriage, even within his own faith.  It has not always been between one man and one woman.  Hell, if the tradition had never changed, marriage in the Christian faith would not even be about love. 

Third, Christian marriage is not the only marriage.  Many religions recognized by our government will, and always have, married people of the same gender.  To insist that people abide only by your ideal of marriage is, wait for it, ignoring and suppressing the traditions of other religions.  All the same, why does years of tradition matter?  I just fasted for 20 minutes and had a revelation that Zothar the Lizard King is the one true god (tm), and I am now forming a religion and starting my own traditions which include marrying people of the same gender and forbidding marriage to somebody of the opposite gender.  If my faith gets the nod governmentally, I'm not being a hatemonger - I'm just adhering to my own tradition.

Wait, my tradition is needlessly discriminatory?  Shit...

Or, try this paragraph:

"Nevertheless, bitter African-American activists simply cannot accept the outcome as being truly reflective of the general public. So they have placed the brainwashing blame upon the crusading and misleading zealotry of those white-skinned and religious villains: the Catholics, evangelical Protestants, and especially Mormons, who allegedly are robbing the rights of American citizens by merely executing their right to vote and standing upon their moral convictions and traditional views on slavery."

The fact that slavery was once the overwhelming will of the American public, endorsed by their moral and traditional views, never made it moral.  The majority was wrong then, and you can bet they used arguments like this to circumvent the argument of whether or not what they wanted was right or fair, even as they asserted that they were being moral, just like Chuck is doing.

Other people who have been unable to accept the majority's traditional views on morality have been Susan B. Anthony and Dr. Martin Luther King.  Yes, the majority had spoken, but as Dr. King once said (from a jail cell, no less), "It is the duty of every decent man to disobey unjust laws."

On protesting black churches, it's hard to protest a race.  A race is not a belief-set.  Even if 70% of voters with brown eyes had supported prop 8, protesting people with brown eyes would just be silly.  However, those people who attend churches (and voted for it by a clip of 86%) which donated tens of millions of dollars to the campaign to get prop 8 passed, they are clearly culpable and should be protested.  That being said, gay rights people should be protesting "black" churches - but because they are churches that contributed, not because they are "black."

The rest is more conflating those upset about losing their rights with "violent thugs," including Chuck's quote of Colson.  Yes, we are begging Americans, particularly those on the religious right, for tolerance.  You can't really be surprised when we don't buy your insistence that those of us being intolerant of the discrimination you voted for are themselves the intolerant ones.  Tolerance of intolerance is not tolerance.

The rest of it is Chuck pissing and moaning about violent protesters that make up a few isolated incidences and have been condemned by virtually every gay rights organization both in CA and nation-wide.  If you buy this, you are neither reading nor watching the news.

So, here's a brief recap of Chuck's arguments:

1.  Majority rules.

Yes, it does, and now we are bound by the law.  That doesn't make it right, and to invoke this is to avoid the argument about whether or not it was right.

2.  All/most of the protesters are violent.

Anybody who glances at the news in the morning will know this is bullshit.  Yet, people believe it when Chuck says it without doing any fact-checking.  These people vote.  Ug.

3.  We're not bigots, our faith is just different than yours and so you have to abide by ours.

...really?

The most overt Chuck Norris joke seems to be Chuck Norris himself.

On the notion of tolerating intolerance, as Chuck is asking us to do, Mark Morford once said it better than I ever could.