Surely Jesus is hypoallergenic?
Seen on a Facebook status update:
I’m wondering if any of my pastor colleagues have some suggestions for serving the Eucharist to the gluten intolerant members of the church?
Am I the only one who finds this funny?
atheism Education: doubt evangelicals
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Very Powerful…
I never had to go through much of this stuff. I was raised a freethinker by scientific parents, and I had almost no content with mainstream Xtianity when I was growing up. Nobody in our family or community circles ever asked about religion; open religious advocacy would have been considered bizarre.
I was bullied in school and hated every bit of it — but this is bullying of a whole different order. This kind of bullying starts at birth.
How appalling.
atheism Education environment Politics: assholes denialists evolution idiots Republicans theocracy
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Year 3, Month 4, Day 20: He That Troubleth His Own House…
This is entirely expected — but it still sucks:
NASHVILLE — Tennessee Gov. Bill Haslam today allowed a controversial bill allowing teachers to discuss the “weaknesses” of evolution and other scientific theories to become law without his signature.
It is the first time Haslam, a Republican, has refused to sign a bill passed by the GOP-led General Assembly.
The legislation has been derided by critics nationwide as a modern-day “monkey bill,” a reference to a 1920s Tennessee law that outlawed the teaching of evolution and spurred the arrest and trial of Dayton, Tenn., teacher John Scopes in the infamous 1925 “Monkey Trial.”
“I have reviewed the final language of HB 368/SB 893 and assessed the legislation’s impact,” Haslam said in a statement. “I have also evaluated the concerns that have been raised by the bill. I do not believe that this legislation changes the scientific standards that are taught in our schools or the curriculum that is used by our teachers.
“However,” Haslam added, “I also don’t believe that it accomplishes anything that isn’t already acceptable in our schools.”
I wish they’d never been allowed to rejoin the Union. Sent April 11:
Although he’s allowing HB 368/SB 893 to become law without his signature, Governor Haslam cannot avoid soiling his fingers on a dirty piece of legislation. The bill’s language is entirely disingenuous. It is absolutely obvious that this is an attempt to undermine a genuine and robust scientific consensus under the guise of “discussing the weaknesses” in scientific opinion on evolution and climate change.
Will Tennessee’s teachers really explore the relationship between feedback and forcing in climate models — or will they promulgate attractive and convenient pseudo-facts (“carbon dioxide is our friend!”) offered by well-funded denialist groups? Will they explore the relationship between punctuated equilibrium and phyletic gradualism in our understanding of evolution — or will they offer attractive and convenient pseudo-facts from well-funded creationist groups?
When the world’s climate is perilously close to spinning entirely out of equilibrium, we can no longer afford the luxury of substituting ignorance for knowledge under the guise of “teaching the controversy.” This will not end well — for Tennessee, for America, or for the world.
Warren Senders
atheism environment Politics: assholes denialists idiots Republicans
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Year 3, Month 3, Day 28: Inhofe Is INHERENTLY Unconstitutional
The Bradenton Herald (FL) runs the same piece on Inhofe to which I responded yesterday.
The real hoax is the claim that a scientific debate exists about the reality of climate change. It is promoted by organizations that benefit from our current energy choices and groups that are opposed to any regulation whatsoever, even the most sensible safeguards that help protect our children’s health.
The hoaxers claim climate scientists are “in it for the money,” a ludicrous proposition as pointed out by Jon Koomey. Dr. Koomey used his expertise in mathematical modeling to study the economic impacts of climate change for two decades at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. If Koomey and his colleagues were in it for the money they would have taken their analytic expertise to Wall Street long ago, where their salaries would have been five to 10 times what they can make working for the government.
The hyped rhetoric around this issue is an attempt to convince Americans that accepting the scientific evidence will require taking actions inimical to our shared values of liberty, freedom, community and entrepreneurship.
But one need look no further than the studies of America’s military and intelligence officials who understand how disruptive human-caused climate change could be to our nation’s interests both at home and abroad (in 2009 the CIA established a Center on Climate Change and National Security). Putting our head in the sand about climate change is a sure way to undermine American liberty, economic prosperity and national security. Of all the alterative paths before us to address this problem, doing nothing to reduce the threat of serious climate change is a dangerous and expensive option.
There’s a climate change hoax all right, but it is Sen. Inhofe and his science-denying associates who are trying to do the fooling. We are all going to pay a price if we don’t call-out their campaign of misinformation and get down to the real work before us. The question now is what will be the cost of inaction to our health and our pocketbooks? The longer the hoaxers can prevent serious action, the higher the price we will all pay.
The guy is a disgrace to idiots everywhere. Sent March 22 (80 degrees outside):
Oklahoma senator James Inhofe is egregiously ignorant about basic science. His approach to climate change is equal parts stout denial and hippie-punching; apparently mocking environmentalists and rejecting the existence of the burgeoning crisis is enough to make the problem go away. Inhofe recently stated (on MSNBC) that he used to accept the conclusions of climatologists until he figured out how much it would cost to address the problem, demonstrating that the power of wishful thinking trumps reality every time — in the U.S. Senate, anyway.
Anywhere else? Ignoring your cardiologist’s warning doesn’t mean an automatic heart attack, and driving drunk doesn’t always mean a crash — but your insurance company and the arresting officer know: reality wins.
Mr. Inhofe’s thinking is so steeped in the apocalyptic wishful thinking of Biblical end-times theology that his involvement in climate policy should probably be forbidden under the Establishment clause of the Constitution.
Warren Senders
atheism Education environment Politics: timescale wisdom
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Year 3, Month 3, Day 26: Go Slowly, Beloved
The Toronto Globe & Mail runs a piece by Rose Murphy that addresses long-term thinking:
Recently, David Finch, Paul Varella and David Deephouse – analyzing polling data around oil-sands development – explained that while climate change is seen as an important issue by most Canadians, it isn’t personally relevant because the most dramatic effects will not be felt until the end of this century.
I gave birth to my first child last year. According to the latest data from Statistics Canada, his life expectancy is 79; if he reaches that age, he will live until the year 2090. The normal anxiety I feel as a parent about my child’s future is heightened by what I know from a career spent considering the implications of climate change and analyzing the economic impacts of climate change policy. And for me, it couldn’t be more personal. The best information available today tells me this issue touches anyone who has a child in their life who they love. Action we take, or fail to take, right now to address climate change will profoundly affect their lives.
Well-said. I took advantage of my father’s address in Toronto to pretend a local affiliation for this letter, sent March 20:
As children, we are taught to value old things. Ancient monuments fill us with reverence, and we would never knowingly grind petrified bones into garden gravel — yet we have no qualms about using fossil fuels to power our lifestyles of convenience. The light bulbs illuminating both our productivity and our profligacy burn sunshine that once shone upon dinosaurs. If wisdom is the ability to conceive timespans longer than a single human life, it is obvious that our rapid-fire media environment needs to change if our species is to survive and prosper in the coming centuries. While the 24-hour news cycle may be keeping us “infotained,” it has failed to foster long-term thinking, which is another way of saying “sustainability.”
Nowhere is this failure more evident than in the case of climate change, a slowly-unfolding catastrophe triggered by the wasteful and thoughtless consumption patterns of our industrialized civilization.
Warren Senders
atheism Education environment Politics: denialists media irresponsibility philosophy
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Year 3, Month 3, Day 25: Voices In The (Vanishing) Wilderness
The Seattle Times runs a dynamite column by William Geer on whether environmental policy should be dictated by polls and media bullshit:
SHOULD elected officials and policymakers let public-opinion polls decide our nation’s future response to climate change? Indisputably, no.
The roller-coaster path of public acceptance on climate change charted by political polls is frustrating to the pragmatists among us. With nearly 98 percent of the world’s climate scientists saying climate change already is affecting the natural world, effective action requires the knowledge we gain from focused investigations and sound science — not political polls.
We should solicit the views of those not subject to political debates — fish and wildlife.
Biologists do that through field investigations on the distribution and abundance of species in habitats that meet their life-cycle requirements. If one habitat no longer will support a species, the species must move to another habitat that does. It cannot debate habitability in the public square and it votes by adapting, migrating or dying.
Read the comments on the article if you wanna get seriously depressed. Sent March 19:
Before we can begin to tackle the interdependent crises presented by global climate change, there’s a question that needs a response.
“What’s in it for me?”
As long as we remain selfishly focused exclusively on our momentary desires, we will fail in our responsibilities to our descendants, and all the life that shares our common DNA. Some are selfish through love of Mammon; their lust for continued profits blinds them to the destruction their exploitation leaves behind. Some are selfish through religion; craving immortality, they rank their own souls above the well-being of the web of Earthly life. For some, it’s political power; for others, the chance at transient fame. Perhaps saddest of all are those whose selfishness is born of apathy; having abandoned any hope of influencing the process, they drift along, watching unhappily as their world is gutted by malefactors of great wealth.
We’re not going to make progress against the epiphenomena of a runaway greenhouse effect until we can start asking, “What’s in it for us?”
Warren Senders
atheism Education environment Politics: armageddon cowering before the apocalypse denialists idiots theology
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Year 3, Month 3, Day 21: Only When The Last Tree Has Been Cut Down…
The Tuscon Sentinel notes the frothy mixture of god-bothering and just plain dumb that makes up Senator Santorum’s public statements:
Rick Santorum calls global warming a “hoax.” If he were a scientist, he would be in a small minority.
“The dangers of carbon dioxide? Tell that to a plant, how dangerous carbon dioxide is,” Santorum said at the Gulf Coast Energy Summit in Biloxi, Miss., on March 12. He made similar comments in early February in Colorado Springs, Colo., saying that global warming was a “hoax” and that “man-made global warming” and proposed remedies were “bogus.”
Santorum isn’t the only climate change skeptic, but skeptics are rare among scientists who actually study the climate. A paper published in 2010 by the National Academy of Sciences found that 97 percent to 98 percent of climate researchers “most actively publishing in the field” agreed that climate change was occurring.
To my knowledge, no journalist has yet asked Santorum about his views on apocalypse. It would be a very interesting question…although we already know the answer. Sent March 15:
Just when we thought the 2012 election couldn’t get any more idiotic, we’re treated to Rick Santorum’s recent remarks on climate change. Judging from the former Pennsylvania senator’s eager rejection of scientific research, his backers must be terribly nostalgic for the good old days…when the sun revolved around the earth.
Mr. Santorum’s constituents are ready to ignore the science of global warming for two reasons. First, because they’ve been lied to and manipulated by a group of cynical, profit-driven corporate entities; second, because their collective eagerness for a Biblical Armageddon renders irrelevant any notion of planetary long-term thinking. Ronald Reagan’s Interior Secretary, James Watt, famously remarked, “We don’t have to protect the environment — the Second Coming is at hand.” Mr. Santorum’s theologically-driven ignorance of basic science shows that he’s cut from the same cloth.
Any politician this anxious for apocalypse should never be entrusted with the levers of power.
Warren Senders
atheism Education environment Politics: belief systems media irresponsibility scientific consensus
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Year 3, Month 3, Day 6: Still I Look To Find A Reason…
According to a number of news reports, more Americans have stopped whacking the snooze button, as witness this, from the San Diego Union-Tribune:
The percentage of Americans who believe in global warming has rebounded to the highest level since the fall of 2009, according to a University of Michigan survey released Tuesday.
When the initial poll was done in the 2008, 72 percent of Americans said they believed there was solid evidence that average temperatures on Earth have been getting warmer over the past four decades.
The number fell to 65 percent in the fall of 2009 and tumbled to 58 percent a year later. But the most recent survey shows that in the fall of 2011, the number of climate-change believers rebounded to 62 percent.
A day earlier, the San Diego Regional Climate Education Partnership issued its own countywide survey on the same topic. It showed that the majority of San Diegans believe that:
• Gasoline engines and electricity generation emit carbon dioxide into the atmosphere (68 percent).
• Rising carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is a major cause of increased temperatures (54 percent).
• Worldwide annual temperatures between 1990 and 2010 have been the warmest in recorded history (55 percent).
The highest degree of specific concern (71 percent) was expressed for “future generations,” followed by “children” (69 percent) and “humanity” in general (65 percent) — what survey sponsors said indicated a strong connection between climate change impacts and people.
Good. I was getting bored with bashing Heartland Institute. Sent February 29:
Scientifically literate citizens are delighted to hear that more Americans are beginning to accept the ominous reality of global climate change. After all, you can’t fix a problem until you recognize that it exists. So a survey showing that almost two-thirds of Americans “believe in global warming” is good news — of a sort.
But before we break out the champagne, we should recognize that the greenhouse effect isn’t a philosophy, a theology, a credo, or a moral code; it’s as real as gravity — confirmed by experiment, observation and measurement — not something we can choose to “believe in” or not, but a fact. Extra CO2 in our atmosphere causes the greenhouse effect, which causes global warming, which in turn causes climate change. When politicians, pundits, and pollsters claim that science, like religion, is a matter of “belief,” it’s no surprise that public discussion of climate change has been so muddled and confused.
Warren Senders
atheism Education environment Politics: denialists scientific literacy scientific method
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Year 3, Month 2, Day 8: What He Was Doing In My Pajamas, I’ll Never Know
The Tuscaloosa News runs an editorial stating that “Climate Change Should Influence Politics”:
Azaleas are budding and daffodils can be found in full bloom along rural roads around West Alabama. Is that proof of global warming?
Hardly, but that doesn’t mean evidence of sustained, rapid climate change isn’t mounting.
Consider this: Nine of the 10 warmest years in the past century have occurred since the year 2000, according to the NASA Earth Observatory. More of the Arctic Sea is melting.
And now the U.S. Department of Agriculture has changed the map that helps gardeners decide when to plant flowers and which will grow well here. Tuscaloosa, which used to be grouped with much of northern Alabama, now falls in the zone with Mobile.
Even all that isn’t conclusive proof of global warming. No, but the case for climate change has convinced more than 97 percent of scientists actively publishing studies in the field of climatology.
They agree that not only is climate change real, but the rapid rise in temperatures around the world over the past few decades is due to human activity.
Yep. Sent Feb 2:
At the moment, it seems as though science is just about the only element in American public discourse that doesn’t influence politics. Presidential candidates vie with one another for the approval of conservative religious groups, not to mention the various deficit-fixated, abortion-fixated, gay-marriage-fixated ideological factions which have dominated the national conversation for years. Meanwhile, Republican legislators are working overtime to reduce the amount of actual science taught in our country’s science classes, and to reduce the government’s funding of actual scientists who are carrying out research projects crucial to our country’s future.
But has there never been a Presidential “science debate” or anything more than the most anodyne public statements from the candidates about the value of science in our lives — and that’s a tragedy, for scientific method is by far the most accurate and comprehensive way to find out what’s actually happening in the real world — and policies that aren’t reality-based are guaranteed to fail.
And nowhere is this more crucial than in the issue of climate change. The scientific ignorance of our political culture is a disaster in the making.
Warren Senders
atheism Education environment: assholes denialists idiots
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Year 3, Month 1, Day 20: Cry Me A River, Assholes
The Berthold Recorder (CO) runs a story from Grist detailing the WATB behavior of conservatives who find their shibboleths crumbling into irrelevance under the assault of facts:
Prominent MIT researcher Kerry Emanuel has been receiving an unprecedented “frenzy of hate” after a video featuring an interview with him was published recently by Climate Desk.
Emails contained “veiled threats against my wife,” and other “tangible threats,” Emanuel, a highly-regarded atmospheric scientist and director of MIT’s Atmospheres, Oceans, and Climate program, said in an interview. “They were vile, these emails. They were the kind of emails nobody would like to receive.”
“What was a little bit new about it was dragging family members into it and feeling that my family might be under threat, so naturally I didn’t feel very good about that at all,” Emanuel said. “I thought it was low to drag somebody’s spouse into arguments like this.”
Swine. It reminds me of the bullshit Jessica Ahlquist is currently going through. Sent January 15:
That climatologists are now the target of ideologically driven abuse from climate denialists whose carefully packaged preconceptions are endangered by inconvenient facts is hardly surprising.
These attacks are of a piece with similar responses from conservatives in other spheres who feel their world-views are under attack, as in the case of a teenaged girl in Rhode Island who successfully sued to remove a prayer banner from her public school’s wall, and who’s been receiving threats of violence.
Her offense? An accurate understanding of the ideals of her nation’s founding document, and the temerity to hold an institution accountable to them. Dr. Kerry Emmanuel’s offense? Noting some of the plain facts about global climate change: it’s real, it’s our fault, it’s dangerous, and it needs to be addressed sooner rather than later. Apparently, conservatives go into grotesque spasms of victimhood the moment they have to deal with logic, reason, and factuality.
Warren Senders