Squash teh Gay like a Cockroach:
He’s bad. The people laughing along with him are just as bad. Advocating breaking your son’s arm? If your daughter does not smell like a girl…
Nice. And by “Nice” I mean this guy needs to die. Figuratively, of course, it would be terrible if he actually did die.
Andrew Wagner has been missing since Thursday. He was last seen near Virginia, MN and he drives a very distinctive car, a 1964 Red Volvo 122s. See the poster below.
People are very concerned about Andrew’s state of mind and well being based on communications with others during the week last week. If you have any info at all please call 218-749-6010, St. Louis County dispatch.
Tom Levenson will be on Skeptically Speaking later today, talking about his book Newton and the Counterfeiter.
This just in:
Diageo announces it is to end funding of Heartland Institute
Diageo, one the world’s largest drinks companies, has announced it will no longer fund the Heartland Institute, a rightwing US thinktank which briefly ran a billboard campaign this week comparing people concerned about climate change to mass murderers and terrorists, such as Osama bin Laden, Charles Manson and Ted Kaczynski.On Thursday, a billboard appeared over the Eisenhower Expressway in Illinois showing a picture of Ted Kaczynski, the Unabomber who in 1996 was convicted of a 17-year mail bombing campaign that killed three people and injured dozens. The caption read: “I still believe in global warming. Do you?” A day later it was withdrawn.
We had a hella storm come through the Twin Cities last night. Some hail, some wind, but piles of lightning. And then this happened in Dinkytown: Lightning struck a high power line, which fell across a couple of parked cars and stayed “live.” The live line heated up the pavement on the street enough that it caused a buried gas line to explode.
I’m pretty sure there are details we don’t know yet. Perhaps there was already a leak and the gas that caught on fire was already out of the pipe. Perhaps the lightning grounded through the gas line and that is what sparked the fire. Either way it totally freaked the fire department guys. They’ll be talking about this for a while!
Ever see anything like this before?
Apparently, Joe Biden has come out in favor of Same Sex Marriage.
He did say that, right?
Thanks you Joe. I think.
“Excuse me, waiter…”
“Yes?”
“I’ve got a lot of French fries here. I wonder if you could bring me a little extra ketchup?”
“No.” Continue reading Did you hear about the Ketchup Shortage?
Atheist Voices of Minnesota: an Anthology of Personal Stories
Check it out. Atheist Voices of Minnesota: an Anthology of Personal Stories
Farmington man helps atheists find a voice
It’s not always easy being a nonbeliever. In a society where personal faith is still important to many, people who identify themselves as atheists often worry how they’ll be perceived if friends, family or employers find out they don’t believe in God……Bill ….[has] been active in the Minnesota atheist community for the past three years, but there are still members of his family he wouldn’t want to know about his lack of faith.
…um … Bill …
Last year he founded a publishing company, Freethought House, specifically to publish a collection of essays by Minnesota atheists. Money from sales of the book, called Atheist Voices of Minnesota, will benefit the group Minnesota Atheists.
“I’ve gotten a lot out of this community,” said Lehto, who got involved with local atheists through a group on networking website meetup.com. “This is kind of a way for me to do something for the community that uses my skills and knowledge. I don’t think there’s been anything done like this.”
And so on and so forth. Check it out.
Did you ever have something you thought was pretty interesting happen to you, but then when you try to explain it to someone else, they kind of half listen and don’t come close to getting what you are saying, and you realize part way through that it really isn’t that interesting unless you are the person it happened to? Do you know what bloggers do when they experience this?
They blog it! Somebody out there’s gonna relate! Continue reading Stoned and Confused
Here in Minnesota, and in surrounding states, there is some real tension between Native and Immigrant communities. The poorest, most drug-ridden, down trodden and repressed communities here are often Native, and conveniently these communities tend to be (but not always are) located far away from urban areas or other places with a lot of white eyes. Health in Native communities is of major concern to the usual institutions and people that are concerned with such things.
Indians make White people nervous. White people are either worried that the Indian has kooties, or are criminals or something, or they are worried that the Indians will think poorly of them or feel bad about, you know, all that bad shit that happened between our people. And some of that bad shit, here in the Upper Plains and the far western edge of the Eastern Woodlands, is very recent. From here, I could drive to Wounded Knee II in a day. I’ve been told that there are still people…white people…in the southern part of Minnesota with curios made of human body parts taken out of the mass grave filled with those executed at the end of the Dakota War of 1862. Many of our historical monuments, homes, and other sites relate to those troubled times. Fort Snelling, the home of one of the Minnesota Historic Society’s facilities (a State institution) was one of those forts where the guys in blue uniforms parodied on F Troop garrisoned. That is where Chief Shakopee was killed when the blue uniformed soldiers arranged a “running of the gauntlet,” a gauntlet manned by Shakopee’s enemies, as a means of executing him. There were starvation camps set up to cause the population of Native people to go down. There are lakes, towns and counties named after the engineers of those concentration camps. I’m thinking that many Native people know a lot more about these things than the White people do. For instance, my in laws, and many of their friends, and several cousins and relatives have cabins on on lakes in Cass County. I think very few of the White people know who Cass was. Lewis Cass, after whom the county and a major lake in the area were named, was one of those architects. I do end up on a Native reservation for several days a year in that area. The reservation is entirely located within Cass County. That would be like having a Jewish homeland in a province or region named after Himmler.
So, why am I talking about this? Because one of Minnesota’s own, a professor at Bimidji University, just upstream from Cass Lake, has written a book called Everything You Wanted to Know about Indians But Were Afraid to Ask
I’m looking forward to learning stuff I didn’t know. I’ll have to look Anton up and see if he’s around during the summer. Maybe we can grab a cup of coffee and swap tales about academia!
Treuer and his book are also written up here, in the Strib.
Thank you to all the bloggers and others who jumped immediately on the Heartland Institute for putting up horribly offensive billboards equating scientists with the scientist/mathematician killing terrorist Unibomber. I have heard unofficially that Heartland will be taking down those billboards.
We’ll see.
more details:
Continue reading Heatland to Take Down Unibomber Billboard UPDATED
…. comparing holocaust survivors to Hitler? Hmong refugees to Pol Pot? Well, maybe not exactly but there is a structural similarity.
People at the Heartland Institute have very little to do with science and very little experience in that area of academics. Otherwise they would remember the Unibomber days, when everyone was worried about the packages they were receiving in the mail, but especially those in mathematics. Now, the Heartland Institute has a billboard campaign with a picture of the Unibomber on it, making the claim that only very fringe people, such as the Unibomber, still “believe in global warming.” This couldn’t be farther from the truth. Anthropogenic Global Warming is real, it is recognized as real by science, and those who deny its reality are, in fact, the ones on the fringe.
Continue reading Comparing mainstream scientists to the Unibomber is like …
The Secular Coalition of America is a lobbying group and umbrella organization for several different secular, humanist, atheist, and skeptics organizations. The SCA is responsible for lobbying at state and federal levels, supporting legislation that is science based rather than “faith” or religion based.
Yesterday, the SCA surprised a lot of people by appointing a long time Republican operative, Edina Rogers, as the Executive Director. Rogers has been involved in the Republican Party as advisor or staffer to several senators and both Presidents Bush. She was the General Council for the Republican National Senatorial Committee in 1994, and has appeared on Fox News representing the White House on several issues including the war in Iraq and energy policy. Despite some efforts to distance Rogers from the Republican policies of the mid 1990s through recent years, there is no doubt that Edwina Rogers has been part of that process and on board with those policies.
Having said that, Rogers has worked in recent years, as a lobbyist, on projects that would not be expected to be part of the primary Republican agenda. She is a secularist and has shown evidence of having favored some policies that would be in alignment with some of the groups represented by the SCA. Here is the video produced by the SCA in which Rogers introduces herself to her new constituents: Continue reading Introducing Edwina Rogers (updated slightly)
As is the case with most things that are important, we as a society have done a very bad job of developing an effective conversation about Global Warming. The vast majority of electronic and real ink that I see spent on the discussion of Global Warming (outside of the peer reviewed literature) is not even about climate or climate change. Rather, it is about talking about climate change, the politics of climate change, critique of the rhetoric about climate change, clarification, obfuscation, complaining, accusing, yelling or belly-aching, and the occasional threat of violence. And today, dear reader, I’d like to give you some more of that! (Well, some of it. There will be no threats!)
Continue reading Global Warming is the Real Thing, but "Global Warming" is not the real problem