May 3, 2010
In an interview with Mediaite, the much-discussed S.E. Cupp dribbles:
Chris Matthews purports to be a Catholic.
What the fuck does that mean? She had some similarly dismissive line about Matthews' religion in chapter 4 of her book, which was too small an issue to bother with at the time, but this…
May 2, 2010
Carl Levin for Emperor.
April 30, 2010
There were lots of reasons why I wanted to see Affordable Care (née healthcare reform) pass. Ending the tyranny of "pre-existing conditions," of cruel recissions, and insuring more than 30 million uninsured Americans were big reasons. But it wasn't a perfect bill, and there was a vocal group of…
April 29, 2010
Lord love her, S.E. Cupp has posted the first chapter of her book Losing Our Religion: The Liberal Media's Attack on Christianity. That means I've now inflicted two chapters of the damnable thing on myself, and I feel no better for it. You'll recall that the first chapter I saw was her look at…
April 29, 2010
I've been playing around in the Oxford English Dictionary's definition and usage history for "atheism" and "atheist," and found this rather relevant to ongoing discussions.
1876 GLADSTONE in Contemp. Rev. June 22 By the Atheist I understand the man who not only holds off, like the sceptic, from the…
April 29, 2010
Yesterday I made the offhand comment, "Say what you will about creationists, some of them have genuine critical thinking skills." I followed that up by adding "garbage in, garbage out." My meaning there may have been obscure, and commenter PhysioProf objected:
Dude, I get that you are now fully…
April 28, 2010
So Fox News breathlessly reported that Chinese researchers had found Noah's ark. "Has Noah's Ark been found on Turkish mountaintop?," they asked, dumbly. "No," answered slacktivist.
Gawker replied at greater length:
A group of evangelicals found some 4,800-year-old wood on top of Mount Ararat.…
April 26, 2010
Last Saturday, we put on the first ever SkeptiCal: Northern California Science and Skepticism Conference. It was pretty awesome.
The organizers included Bay Area Skeptics and Sacramento Area Skeptics, and we managed to fill a 200 seat auditorium by advertising to our members, other northern…
April 26, 2010
Jerry Coyne, in the throatclearing before an otherwise reasonable dissection of wankery on the Huffington Post, brings the ahistorical and gratuitous FAIL:
I’m coyneing the term “New Creationism” to describe the body of thought that accepts Darwinian evolution but with the additional caveats that 1…
April 25, 2010
Via A Continuous Lean, an HD version of origina 16 mm film from the Apollo 11 launch:
So awesome.
April 21, 2010
I'm in the Washington Post's book review blog today, offering my take on a chapter from conservative pundit S.E. Cupp's forthcoming book. I haven't seen anything but the 4th chapter ("Thou Shalt Evolve"), but the book as a whole seems like an odd project. Not least that a book titled Losing Our…
April 20, 2010
James Grimmelmann considers the Supreme Court's inability to understand the difference between the pager and the e-mail:
Reading about the Supreme Court oral arguments in City of Ontario v. Quon makes me sad and angry in equal measure.
Why so emotional? Here are the Court's questions, in a case…
April 19, 2010
Long-time readers know I've been trying to reduce my the number of RSS feeds I monitor, so it takes a lot to make me add a new blog to my reading, but You're Not Helping is filled with win. The authors' take on the importance of tone is filled with win, for instance.
And their take on TFK? Dead on…
April 15, 2010
From TfK's "Duh!" department, we learn via PZ that a federal judge did the only sensible thing possible about the National Day of Prayer. In a suit filed by the Freedom From Religion Foundation:
A federal judge in Wisconsin ruled the National Day of Prayer unconstitutional Thursday, saying the day…
April 14, 2010
James Kidder is doing yeoman work. You see, Casey Luskin of the Disco. 'Tute took a look at the new Smithsonian Institute exhibit on human origins, and wrote:
Did you get that? Ignoring the fact that transitional fossils are often missing even among taxa whose records are very complete, now…
April 14, 2010
So there's no confusion, I'm entirely down with the skeptical movement. I'm on the board of Bay Area Skeptics (the oldest local skeptic group in the US), I'm helping organize SkeptiCal: The Northern California Science and Skepticism Conference (register now). I've hosted the Skeptics' Circle blog…
April 14, 2010
During confirmation hearings for Justice Alito, conservatives pooh-poohed his sketchy record on race by arguing that race wasn't an issue the Supreme Court would have to face any more. When the Voting Rights Act was challenged in the Supreme Court a little later, conservatives argued that its…
April 13, 2010
According to this meaningless thing, the handful of people following me on Twitter (@JoshRosenau) is smarter than the horde of people following PZ Mahers on Twitter (@pzmyers). Clearly more stupid people need to start following me, or more of the smart people following me need to start saying…
April 13, 2010
Remember a few months back when Kevin Padian was all "The two kinds people who believe that religion and evolution can not coexist are extreme atheists and extreme religious fundamentalists"? Then a buncha people said that Padian (an atheist) was making cracks about atheists, "othering" atheists…
April 13, 2010
Michael at "The Bible is the Other Side" is upset. He's been reading about the suppression of research on evolution acceptance among the American public, and doesn't like what he sees. In particular, he doesn't like yours truly, and the way people like me talk about science literacy:
There is a…
April 12, 2010
Shorter Ned Ryun, former Bush speechwriter and twin son of disgraced former middle-distance runner and Congressman Jim Ryun: An American Armada:
Conservatives must defeat the socialists who are propping up our banking system and forcing all Americans to pay money to private health insurers. To do…
April 12, 2010
Shorter Sam Harris: FAQ :: How can you derive an âoughtâ from an âisâ?:
No.
This is not quite how he'd probably shorter himself, but that's not the immediately important issue. The immediately important issue is that he thinks we could get from "is" to "ought" by saying that actions which produce…
April 12, 2010
PZ asks "Am I to be the next enemy of the NCSE?":
No.
This has been your April 13, 2010 edition of simple answers to stupid questions.
Most of the rest of the piece is not really worth addressing, but I'll note a rather serious error in PZ's opening paragraph:
I'm a little worried. Jason Rosenhouse…
April 10, 2010
Not a joke: How are the heads of the Catholic Church and Massey Energy similar?
Joseph Ratzinger, aka Pope Benedict XVI, is in trouble. Increasing evidence is emerging that he quashed internal investigations and discipline of priests accused, and even convicted, of pedophilia. This is very bad.…
April 10, 2010
Shorter Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal:
Wah!
I mean, can you imagine how the Republicans would react if a Democrat said this:
Speaker Pelosi likes to call the Republicans the âParty of No.â Some of us, we donât like the way that sounds. It hurts our feelings. ⦠Speaker Newt Gingrich said…
April 9, 2010
At Bill Dembski's blog, Clive Hayden reads my law review article and finds it to be "inaccurate," "prideful," and "a kind of disconnected cluster of arguments that reads like a brainstorm (concerned with quantity of arguments over quality), that could only persuade the uninformed."
Meanwhile, an…
April 9, 2010
Atrios is confused:
One thing I've never quite figured out about the wingnut brain is whether their readiness to kill tens or hundreds of thousands of innocent people with nukes is because they see the nukes as a giant external penis or if they just have psychotic death cult psychology and like the…
April 9, 2010
Science magazine reports:
In an unusual last-minute edit that has drawn flak from the White House and science educators, a federal advisory committee omitted data on Americans' knowledge of evolution and the big bang from a key report. The data shows that Americans are far less likely than the rest…
April 2, 2010
I've never written a law review article, and my first stab at the genre turned into a bit of a beast to wrangle. While most of the papers in the journal ran to perhaps a dozen pages, mine weighs in at 68, in which I offer a brief exploration of evolution for the lawerly set, a review of…
April 2, 2010
The Discovery Institute Media Complaints Department issues a missive about a University of Arizona panel on creationism. Amidst the usual whinging about the failure to include the mainstream scientists and historians who totally support ID, we get Disco. hanger-on David Klinghoffer's insistence…
