Please Support and Sign My “We The People” Petition!

weThePeopleDemocracy only works if we make it work. Please sign my petition and help create enhanced freedom and safety for all Americans. With their narrow focus on firearms, the NRA is failing to protect our FULL arms-bearing Second Amendment rights.

This is a real petition, and it needs 25,000 signatures by January 21, 2013. Let’s get to work, Americans! A blade-carrying population is a respectful population!

Click here:  Hank Fox’s We the People Petition Continue reading “Please Support and Sign My “We The People” Petition!”

When Coyotes Danced (Repost)

[ This weekend I’m transcribing masses of audiofile notes for future posts on Beta Culture, as well as working on some book-y stuff — I have a book in the works, working title “BraynDrops, the Freethought Bathroom Companion” — but unfortunately neglecting things here. I swear I’ll be back soon with some new stuff. Meanwhile, here’s a repost of a piece from Sept. 15, 2011. ]

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It was hot, the day the coyotes danced.

It was about 1990, and I was ranch-sitting for a friend in Bishop, California. The owner was up in the mountains all summer, but there were cattle at the ranch, and somebody needed to be there to look after them.

In this particular case, ranch-sitting was a minimalist job. The cattle were out in a pasture with plenty of water and grass, and cattle don’t need much more than that. Really, all I had to do was walk the pastures once a day and make sure nobody was sick or injured or dead.

The east side of the Sierra Nevada range is mostly “high desert” — not the rolling dunes of sand most people think of when they hear “desert,” but just really dry sagebrush country. The well-watered ranch, by contrast, was an oasis of shade trees and green grass, especially beautiful to someone like me who’d grown up in wet, green country. Continue reading “When Coyotes Danced (Repost)”

Seeing the World Through Sane-Colored Glasses

lastWarningLest we forget, “The Crazy” is totally still out there.

I’m probably reminding ME more than you. I’ve made an effort to be saner, to get all the religious craziness out of my head, and I’ve succeeded (with the religion part anyway) so well that I never think in any religious or superstitious way at all. I tend to tune out the nuttier stuff.

As a result — is it the Dunning-Kruger Effect? — I always think the world around me is fairly sane. I’m prone to see humans as rational and compassionate, with the individual exceptions as rarities.

But … read this: Continue reading “Seeing the World Through Sane-Colored Glasses”

Connecticut Shooting: Warm Lies, Cold Truth, Free Minds

This is a reaction to some of the goddy rhetoric surrounding the shooting in Connecticut:

Even as an atheist good with words, I can barely express how repulsive I find the claim that those children are in Heaven, skipping along beside Jesus as he gives them a tour of Heaven. Yet we’ve heard exactly that, and more than once.

When I posted on Facebook a day or so ago about a mental image related to the tragedy, one of my readers told me she almost threw up when that same image came to her: the picture of 20 lonely Christmas trees standing in 20 silent homes, decorated and flashing with lights and warmth, already surrounded by presents bright with colorful wrapping paper, gilt cards and shining ribbons.

And no children to unwrap them. Continue reading “Connecticut Shooting: Warm Lies, Cold Truth, Free Minds”

Dispatches from Dullardia: The War on Christmas (deep sigh)

Sorry, I couldn’t resist responding to a couple of yesterday’s stories.

One is about a sign in Times Square, put up by American Atheists, that shows a picture of Santa above a picture of a statue of a crucified Jesus. The inscription says “Keep the MERRY!” and “Dump the MYTH!” (photo credit: American Atheists)

Holiday message: Atheists dub Jesus a ‘myth’ on Times Square billboard

Good on you, American Atheists! And fie upon the critics:

“This year it’s different,” said Catholic League spokesman Bill Donohue. “This is vile. When you depict Jesus on the cross with a crown of thorns, this is exploitative. We as Christians never harass, intimidate or insult atheists. But they can’t seem to say, ‘We simply disagree with you.’ They have to insult us.”

I have to repeat part of that: Continue reading “Dispatches from Dullardia: The War on Christmas (deep sigh)”

Book Of Good Living: Crowd-Sourcing How to Walk

I’m trying an experiment here. Long-time readers may remember a couple of posts a while back about something I call The Book of Good Living.

I see this thing as a part of Beta Culture — a basic resource about living day-to-day. Something like Wikipedia, written and evolved by reader/contributors, and containing a great deal of advice and direction — which everybody is wholly welcome to ignore.

But … you know, a body of objective wisdom about life. Jeez, we get so much hyped and over-hyped shit thrown at us every day, about how we should live, how we should act, what we should wear … it’s like that mass of stuff we might once have learned from our parents and grandparents, or even savvy peers, is drowned in the noise of the crap projected at us through Internet-radio-TV-magazines-billboards-etc. So that EVERYBODY knows how cool it is to get your belly-button pierced, or why you should never give oral sex on the first date (unless it’s true love!), but nobody knows how to safely clean your ear with a Q-Tip. Continue reading “Book Of Good Living: Crowd-Sourcing How to Walk”

A Study in Conflict Between Island Cultures (Repost)

It doesn’t get much play in the publicly-available cultural anthropology literature, but there’s an island in the Pacific where an interesting conflict has played out over generations.

The island, which has an untranslatable name – generally rendered in English as  “Ryeezahn” –  is occupied by two tribes, the Kritsi and the Syenz, which have been at war for generations, a war temporarily restrained in an uneasy peace.

The root of the conflict, as visiting anthropologists have documented, is unequal resource distribution brought on by a drastic inequality in living space. The size of the Syenz territory is more than 20 times that of the Kritsi.   Continue reading “A Study in Conflict Between Island Cultures (Repost)”

New Site Layout (Plus Brain-Stealing Radiation)

No doubt you’ve noticed the different appearance here, and on Freethought Blogs generally. The Hidden Masters of FTB are upgrading the design, as well as making changes such as a hypnotic opinion generator that will steal your mind and turn you into a willing minion of the World Atheist Conspiracy.

I’m not totally convinced I like the new typeface. Certain other bloggers are tweaking their CSS to render posts in other fonts, and I might do the same after things shake out. Some bugs are being worked out behind the scenes, and I don’t want to fiddle until that all settles down.

Meanwhile, you are getting very sleepy. After today, you will think and do only what I tell you. Continue reading “New Site Layout (Plus Brain-Stealing Radiation)”

Offensive on Soooo Many Levels

Read this representative paragraph from an Elevate GF ad:

SPECIAL REPORT: How To Grow 3+ Inches Taller in Just a Matter of Weeks Using This 1 Simple Trick That Celebrities Use.

You may have heard of the enormously popular Elevate GF in the news. It’s a completely organic supplement that celebrities & body builders use around the world that they don’t want you knowing about. But today we are leaking the secret. Elevate GF offers many benefits primarily due to its high anti-oxidant content. It’a all natural HGH hormones make is a “Stud “Building” machine. If you’re skeptical, you’re not alone. When we first learned about this ‘grow taller’ miracle, our fad radar went off right away.

My Inner Editor is disturbed. All the typos — for instance “It’a” and “make is” and the extra quotes in “Stud Building” — are original. This guy is in such a hurry to screw money out of his victims he can’t be bothered to get somebody to proofread his ad copy. Continue reading “Offensive on Soooo Many Levels”

Pics from Eschaton 2012

I had my big mongo camera with me at Eschaton 2012, but I kept reminding myself I was there to learn, to speak, to mingle and meet. Which means there were plenty of people I didn’t get pictures of.

To my immense embarrassment, that means I have pics of almost none of the volunteers. Such as Seanna and Evan, who were the public face of the event for me. Seanna extended the invitation, Evan did the travel arrangements. Throughout the event, every time Seanna mentioned Evan and Far Horizons Travel, she repeatedly, comically, reminded us it was “the only atheist-run travel agency in Ottawa.”

But here are a FEW of the speakers and attendees: Continue reading “Pics from Eschaton 2012”