Just doing work around the house and hopefully going on a bike ride this afternoon.

Unpacking in my new apartment. This’ll take a month at least, I think.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sWS-FoXbjVI

Gonna cook some risotto (surprise!) tonight!

I’ll be laying around the house, which is no different than most days (unemployed/disabled, whee!) and devouring more of Blackwater, Jeremy Scahill’s book on the super powerful, super scary, right wing Christian mercenary army. Rah rah America!

Those damn majority of scientists, they are in on it too!

Last day of a two week vacation: I took my parents to the Grand Tetons and Yellowstone to celebrate my father’s 80th and my mother’s 75th birthdays.

http://www.sagarmatha.com/images/2011-US-WY-sow0002.medium.jpg

3 Grizzlies, 1 Black Bear, hundreds of bison, elk, dozens of pronghorn antelopes…

This geyser gave me a shower:

http://www.sagarmatha.com/images/2011-US-WY-beehive0003.medium.jpg

Took the kids swimming and came home with a pretty spectacular sunburn, despite having covered myself with sunscreen more than once and staying mainly in the shade.  But the kids had a good time, so I guess that makes it okay.  Probably grilling something later this evening.

Why do implementations of monogamy always seem to include dishonesty?  I don’t understand that at all.

Truthers and birthers aren’t backed by the global energy industry. Those that aspire to run things or actually do run things have an enormous stake in climate change denialism and have modeled their efforts after the lung cancer denialism employed by the tobacco industry in the 50s and 60s. But we’re talking about a much bigger stake now than last time (for instance, we never fought wars over tobacco).

Speaking of SkepChick, did you know there was a Epic Shitstorm going on re her comments about unwanted advances at atheism conferences? I saw it on Metafilter:

http://www.metafilter.com/105214/the-existence-of-greater-crimes-does-not-excuse-lesser-crimes#3795707

That link includes PZ Meyers great response and not-so-awesome response from Dawkins. And the Mefi comments really got out of hand, it’s usually a better space than that.

Global warming denialists… the strange bit is that many of them are otherwise intelligent people, but they still can’t see the implications of what they believe. Then again… Eric S. Raymond.

Raymond was always off the deep end. His one claim to fame, The Cathedral And The Bazaar,  combined software engineering pseudoscience with a libertarian apologia for what was in essence a highly anti-capitalist movement. (This made it very popular in Silicon Valley.) If he was able to start out with that level of cognitive dissonance, I don’t think he very far to go to deny what is, after all, a fairly simple theory derived from the the basic physics of gases.

Yes, I’ve been following the SkepChick Epic Shitstorm too, on Pharyngula.  I should have been less naive about how any statement about sexism in the atheist community would be taken (I was hoping for more enlightenment and questioning of the status quo.)  But of course it’s wrong for a woman to criticize a man for following her into the elevator at 4 in the morning and then, while just the two of them are in there, cold propositioning her for sex without any previous interaction with her.  After he listened to her talk in her speech about how she didn’t appreciate how women were being sexualized at these male-heavy conferences.  SHE was being a terrible person for saying that was creepy.  Two or three thousand comments followed, pretty heavy on the “she was horrible for not giving him the benefit of the doubt,” and “she should have just kept her mouth shut because there’s no problem.”  And sadly, Richard Dawkins was one of them.

I was a bit surprised that Amanda brought up global warming as the most significant issue (even though I agree with her).  There is a lot of other pseudoscience popular in the atheist community; more relevant to feminism are various beliefs based on bogus “evolutionary psychology” hypotheses. These popped up a lot in various blog comments following the Rebecca Watson kerfuffle. There is only one thing worse than a guy who thinks God gave him the right to swing his disk any way he wants to, and that’s a guy who believes that the theory of evolution somehow does.

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weirdnoise—I think global warming *is* the most significant issue, because it is such a gross Truth vs. Lie problem, and its ramifications will impact every being on this planet, no matter how progressive and egalitarian they are. But you’re also playing to what the woman was describing as the problem of lists: that because Amanda is a woman and a feminist, that she can only be counted on to opine expertly about lady-bits-issues.

As for the SkepChick thing, to me it indicates that the men in those threads really miss the comfort and tradition of the old call-and-response of the great liturgical churches—they obviously take great satisfaction in doing their part to add their voices to an age-old response. When I see that sort of dogpile (where nothing new is said under the sun) when a woman DARES question male priv, it reminds me of hearing people recite the litany.

No, I am not playing to the problem of lists, Ponygirl, though I absolutely agree that it exists and is a major problem. In this case, Amanda has worked hard to make herself a focal point on the intersection of feminism and skepticism, and can be counted as a top expert in the subject. And that’s where the program was going, until the host put on that phone call at the start of the second half. Amanda handled the issue very well, but it pretty much sucked the energy out of the rest of the program when the host let the call go on much too long. It seemed such a waste of Amada’s time.

Since Amanda has said very little about AGW on Pandagon, I was surprised that she mentioned it as the top issue since I’ve never seen her claim that here. It was a pleasant surprise, and I thought she made it a very good example of an area where “skeptics” often go off the rails. I’m glad she brought it up, and I’d like to hear more on that perspective in her writing. But on the science of AGW? She’s a well-informed layperson, not an expert, and never claimed to be.

There are women in the earth sciences, and it’s galling that none of them are on the “list” to talk about AGW. The media seems to hew hard to the stereotype that only men can be scientific authorities with the sole exceptions being medical opinions on babies and ladybits. This shortchanges everyone: women in science, women who might become scientists or interested in science, the public, and science itself, which when all is said and done is all too often a patriarchal institution.

All that said, I was just disappointed that Amanda wasn’t allowed to play more to her strengths, which are formidable indeed. I wish the host had just got out of the way and let the interviewer do her job.

My 4th was spent nursing a nasty cold I got at CONvergence. When you get a lot of people coming from across the nation, they tend to bring their viruses with them, so the CON crud is a common occurrence.

It was great to see you at the skepchick con. I only saw you at the the 12:30 panel. I was surprised and elated to see that it was standing room only! As much as I like my believer friends and acquaintances, being the only Atheist in a room full of believers can feel a bit isolating. I had no idea that there were so many of us.

weirdnoise:

Raymond really went off the deep end after 9/11 though, and is well into tinfoil hat territory these days. Among other things, he’s got this curious compulsion to gloat any time someone doesn’t buy an iPhone (he’s the sort of raving maniac Android fanboy who gave Linux a bad name back in the 90s), and he’s also on the record as a) describing Roissy, the misogynist asshole, as “fiercely intelligent”, b) blaming a teenage girl who committed suicide for not being able to accept the crap she’d inevitably get for being different, c) blamed Alan Turing for his own persecution, d) being an HIV denialist as well as a global warming denialist and a crazy-as-fuck teabagger, e) believing ACORN threw the election despite evidence to the contrary, and f) thinking that just because he was part of the first Ron Paulish wave of the Tea Party that he was somehow still relevant to them. Not to mention the way he pissed off fetchmail users—note that the current maintainers have a somewhat different roadmap from Raymond’s.

In other words, the man’s a howling, delusional nutter who deserves to have the Jargon File taken away from him.

(Disclaimer: I wrote a big whack of the RationalWiki article about the guy.)