…primarily because I don’t define myself in terms of it. The job is what I do the pay for my life, not the thing that defines my life. However, sometimes the frustrations boil over and I am reduced to a bit of flat out ranting. Things That Only Corporate North America Could Do: 1) Assign a major component of development… Read more →
Category: Head-Explodes
Arrrrrrrghh!
This is something you never want to see. I anticipate a lot of wasted time tomorrow. Read more →
A few follow-ups
So, still sick, but capable of posting some follow-up links on some things I’ve talked about before. One of the topics I’ve discussed a lot is the whole “forcing creationism into schools” thing, one classic example of which was the whole evolution sticker thing. Well, you may recall that back in January the courts (correctly!) ordered the stickers removed. Apparently… Read more →
He is always the severest censor of the merit of others…
Another type of post I can do without fear of straining my sick self is the Hump Of Hate post. Today’s target is Congressman Spencer Bachus from–surprise!–Alabama who has decided to continue the government program of censoring Bill Maher. A congressman says comedian Bill Maher’s comment that the U.S. military has already recruited all the “low-lying fruit” is possibly treasonous… Read more →
Hump Of Hate: Church & State
What could possibly be worse than the alignment of highly conservative political factions with fundamentalist Christianity? Xemu knows the answer to that question. As an aside, also from my Hump of Hate, even ignoring who this award was given to, doesn’t this sentence from the article encapsulate so much that is hate-worthy about North American society? Members of the group… Read more →
Hump Of Hate: Texas Textbooks
So, I’ve talked a lot about textbooks, primarily about the religously-motivated alterations of their content; most recently it was the homophobic alterations of Texas texts. Now I read in a post at Ambiguous.org that because a number of Southern states buy their texts as a bloc, lead by Texas, that the national publishers are self-censoring their content so that it… Read more →
Hump of Hate: Fascism Anyone?
A while back, Laurence Britt published an article in Free Inquiry magazine entitled “Fascism Anyone?”. In the article Britt looked at a number of fascist regimes (Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, Franco’s Spain, Salazar’s Portugal, Papadopoulos’s Greece, Pinochet’s Chile, and Suharto’s Indonesia) and finds fourteen common characteristics of all of them. The “14 characteristics of fascism” from the article have spread… Read more →
What’s even more retro-focussed than Conservative?
I know I said I wasn’t going to say anything about this, but damn… Canada’s Conservatives Show Deep Cracks On Gay Marriage … Going into the weekend convention in Montreal Harper tried to show a unified party for a national TV audience. It was not to be. Former Alliance members forced public debate on issues that Harper wanted to gloss… Read more →
Deus vult?
Well, time for me to blow off some steam that has been building up at the increasing tide of ridiculous religiously-motivated tomfoolery. I’m not going to write anything about Terri Schiavo and Bush’s religio-pandering, except to note the potentially pleasing fact that apparently the Administration has actually pissed the people off. (Well, maybe one thing–if you really believe in an… Read more →
Happy / Sad
More on the continuing evolution-in-schools front, sent in by Mr. ReallyTryingToMakeMyHeadExplode. School Board Approves Biology Text Book Without Creationism UPDATED: 7:29 am EST February 15, 2005 ELKTON, Md. — The Cecil County Board of Education unanimously approved Monday night “Biology: The Dynamics of Life” as a textbook for next year’s 10th-grade science classrooms. The decision came after a board member… Read more →
Still more sadness
Just so Kansas, Georgia, and all the rest don’t feel lonely at the HillBilly Legislation Barbecue, Virginia has jumped right in with literal fashion police. Fines for ‘droopy drawers’ backed The Virginia state house has voted to outlaw the trend of wearing trousers so low that underwear hangs over the top. Delegates said the habit, popular across the US and… Read more →
Sometimes the world is not so wonderful.
So, you may recall I had a moment of hope a little while back, when the federal court kicked Cobb County in the ass over their proposed evolution stickers. And then that little bit of hope was immediately crushed. Well, now humanity, or at least the Kansas branch, is grinding salt into my wounds while I am down. Evolution disclaimer… Read more →
Hope crushed
So, I was feeling a little hopeful after the recent decision regarding the evolution stickers. (And if you follow links in that earlier post, you can walk back through all my rants about this.) Well, that tiny bit of hope is crushed by the NY Times today: Evolution Takes a Back Seat in U.S. Classes In districts around the country,… Read more →
The Importance of Education Can Not Be Overemphasized
During many political arguments, my proposed solutions to The Big Problems are often extremely long-term solutions, predicated on the notion that education can be the cornerstone of a civilization–if it takes as its goal the production of citizens trained in critical thinking, rather than the production of employable units. I am frequently mocked for my view of education as a… Read more →
I am full of bile
Several readers of this blog have asked me why I haven’t said anything about the tsunami. For the record, the answer is that I simply have nothing to say that isn’t obvious to everyone, and that wouldn’t sound incredibly trite. The other answer is that I am full of bile–it is killing me to see Americans so apparently full of… Read more →
