Monthly Archives: May 2011

Louisiana Repeal Effort SB 70 Fails in Committee

Louisiana Senate Bill SB 70 would have repealed Louisiana Revised Statutes 17:285.1, which in turn imposed the inappropriately named Louisiana Science Education Act which, as Barbara Forrest recently noted “was promoted only by creationists. Neither parents, nor science teachers, nor scientists requested it. No one wanted it except the Louisiana Family Forum (LFF), a religious organization that lobbies aggressively for its regressive agenda, and the Discovery Institute (DI), a creationist think tank in Seattle, Washington, that couldn’t care less about Louisiana children.”

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DrugMonkey + ActualMonkeys + Google =

This is funny. Have you noticed that lately there has been some interesting synchronization between ads on Scienceblogs.com and our blog posts? Just now, DrugMonkey wrote a blog post concerning discussions in the professional community of scientists who use animals in research. Here is a screen shot of the blog post showing the banner ad that appeared above it:

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Wild angry baboons on the high cliff

We three had somehow wound our way down into the canyon without experiencing any really steep slopes, but having walked for several miles in the sandy dry riverbed, Trusted Companion, Young One, and I were now looking rather hopelessly at unsafe-to-climb cliffs on both sides, covered with imposing vegetation of the kind that sports a thorn every few inches. The sun was low enough that the canyon floor was in a dark shadow, and the air was beginning to chill down. We were far enough from the vehicle, lost enough, and sufficiently plan-free that it would be perfectly reasonable to worry that we might not make it across the remote African Savanna before the leopards and hyenas came out to hunt. It was even possible that we’d have to spend the night huddled in some spot we could convince ourselves was protected from the elements and the wild animals. All this dark and scary truth had dawned on me over the last hour as we continued heading up a seemingly endless side canyon in search of a place to climb out of this river valley known among international extreme outdoors people as one of the most treacherous in the world, and known among the more traditional local folk for its dragon-like 50-meter long human-eating snake that was supposedly mythical.
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Anti-Vax Paranoic Police State Shenanigans: Skeptics visit AutismOne Conference

You must go read the chilling and amusing account of Jamie Bernstein and Ken Reibel’s visit to the AutismOne Conference in the Chicago area. The story has all the elements. Horror:
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(that’s what they were forced to eat); Police Absurdity (though not brutality); Screeching Breathless Paranoia; Jenny McCarthy; and Chemical Castration.

The story is told by Jamie across two blogs: Autism One, Part One on Skepchick and How I Got Kicked Out of the AutismOne Con: Part 2 on Friendly Atheist. Ken Reibel gives his version of the events here.

Crazy Church Lady will Likely Run for President

Her statement:

Well, every decision that I make I pray about as does my husband and I can tell you, yes, I’ve had that calling and that tugging on my heart that this is the right thing to do and because it’s such a momentous decision, not only for myself, my husband and our 28 children, it is a momentous decision what ideas will I bring to bear? What are the resources that I have to marshal in terms of people, assets, the message and also the finances, the amount of time this will take, what this will mean for the nation. Am I the right person for the job? Every decision and every endeavor my husband and I have made we think it through, we’re not rash people. We make a plan because we want to succeed, we don’t want to fail and so we’ve been very deliberative in this process and that’s why we’re now coming to the culmination and next month, as I announced last night, I’ll make that decision right here in Waterloo and the world will know.

And, in a previous episode of Church Lady goes to Washington:
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How to be a good suburbanite

I see the brown streaks and spots and blotches all across your lawn, every brown area exactly like every other in its tone and hue, because all were caused by a single event, that being your misapplication of high-nitrogen fertilizer, as part of your misguided effort to make your lawn look like a golf course, which I assure you is an entirely futile expenditure of energy. Everyone in the neighborhood does this: They put fertilizer, weed killer, fungicide, grub-killer, and who knows what else all over their lawns. On this sandy plain, most of the chemicals are washed instantly into the ground-water. That ground water is then collected by the city and cleaned up, and pumped into water towers like the one that casts a shadow on your so-called lawn. That is the water we drink, provide to our children, and bathe in. I assume the city has done a good job cleaning your chemical wastes out of the water. But, I also know that they had to work harder and spend more of our money to do so because you put so much fertilizer (souped up with weed killer and grubicide, no doubt) on your lawn that it killed half your grass. So not only are you an idiot because you are shitting, essentially, in your own water bowl, but we all KNOW you are an idiot because you have left incontrovertible evidence of your inability to read and follow directions in the form of giant brown hieroglyphs splayed across what was once a greenish lawn in front of your ugly house, but is now a billboard announcing your selfish suburban sense of privilege.

I am grateful that in observing how foolish you look, neighbor, my own staunch commitment to not add one drop of fertilizer, weed killer, fungicide or grub killer to my lawn is reaffirmed. Which means, since someone else mows my lawn, that I’m done with yard work for the day, and can now refocus my efforts on replacing that leaking water heater.

“Monkeys on our backs” by Richard Tokumei will not even make good toilet paper

Richard Tokumei has written a book that is so bad he is ashamed to put his own name on it. “Richard Tokumei” is the pen name of a ‘writer/editor in Southern California [with] degrees in Humanities and Phychology from the University of California Berkeley” and he has produced a book designed to anger everyone who hears of it in order to create needless sensation and thus, sell copies. Which, once people get their hands on, will make rather low quality toilet paper.
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