Danish Cartoonist Threatened in Home

Super Best Friends Club, you guys

Remember when some Danish newspaper published a bunch of cartoons depicting Muhammad in September 2005? Well, some people are still pretty pissed off about it.

One of the cartoonists involved, Kurt Westergaard, was threatened in his home on Saturday.

And by threatened, I mean a man broke into his home and tried to confront Westergaard and his granddaughter with an axe and a knife. (CBC)

Did I mention that Westergaard is 75 years old? Or that his visiting granddaughter is only 5?

The cartoonist and his granddaughter fled to his panic room (a must for his line of work, apparently). Police then showed up and shot the attacker in the knee.

Police say that the incident was 'terror-related', which either means that the attacker is a terrorist, or that Westergaard and his granddaughter were terrified because they were almost killed with a knife and an axe.

Disdain for those who hide behind religious beliefs as a means of justifying hatred and violence is a recurring theme in prairie dog, and it's not hard to see why. It's pretty sad if the greatest threat to your beliefs is an old man who makes funny little drawings.

That said, as someone who holds a great deal of affection for cartoons and the cartoonists who cartoon them, I can't help but feel a little satisfied that in an age of spectacular CG special effects and Sham-Wow-miracle products, a few inked lines can still hold so much power to provoke.

Onion News Tops Prairie Dog

Decade in review, schmecade in review. The Onion News Network recently looked back on the entire history of Earth. Ranking high on its list of notable occurrences, as you might expect, is God's miraculous creation of the planet and the rest of the firmament approximately 6000 years ago. (Onion News Network)

Anti-Abortion Religious Fascists Piss Me Off

So my sadistic, Whitworth-poking publisher handed me a press release from LifeCanada. The release was about a survey LifeCanada commissioned on Canadians' attitudes toward abortion.

According to LifeCanada, Canadians don't much like abortion. Surprise!

The headline reads "Poll: Canadians Favour Abortion Limits", and the press release opens thusly: "For the ninth year in a row a majority of Canadians have rejected the status quo on abortion. Over half say there should be legal protection for human life before birth and over two-thirds say abortions should only be paid for by taxpayers in medical emergencies or in cases of rape or incest."

Now, I'd be curious to hear what percentage of Canadians agree with LifeCanada's mission statement: "To promote the sanctity of all human life from fertilization to natural death through public education. To advocate for the preborn, the disabled, the infirm and the elderly who are all uniquely created by God."

The Toronto Star has a column on LifeCanada here.

You might think LifeCanada is a kooky extreme Christian group with little to no real power, but I say the thinking they represent is dangerous and becoming more popular. More and more Canadians--especially in Saskatchewan--are electing politicians to the governing Conservative party who share LifeCanada's desire to impose their pushy, old-fashioned religious garbage on the rest of us through laws and/or the sneaky and underhanded de-funding of services. For example, just within the last month, Conservative Saskatoon-Dumbolt MP Brad Trost helped organize a petition to defund Planned Parenthood International and Conservative MP Maurice Vellacott (Ass-katoon-Wanuskewin) praised the inadequate abortion services in his city.

This holy-rollers can't separate their extreme religious beliefs from their public jobs serving ALL Canadians, and have no business being in politics--but Canadians keep electing them.

This American-style right-wing garbage is moving from the fringes to the mainstream. It has to stop.

We're living in degenerating times. From tax-cut anarchists getting away with saying whatever stupid crap they want in public without being laughed off their podiums, to wanton enviroment destruction, to health care privatization to freedom of (AND FROM) religion, Canada is descending into ignorant and mean-spirited politics.

Yeah, we're all going to have to get a little more political to fight these shenanigans.

Things we can all do: donate to our favourite, non-Conservative political party and/or publicly active, non-profit advocacy group (Council Of Canadians, David Suzuki Foundation, Planned Parenthood, habitat for Humanity, etc.).

E-mail letters to newspapers magazines and other media. (Make your letters relevent to something they've published/broadcast recently, stick to the word limits and don't ramble: keep to one topic.)

Make it known to loudmouths and idiots around you that you have zero patience for the idea that their goofy personal religious views should be enshrined in law. When some jackass starts talking about saving babies or how immigration is ruining the country, don't just sit there and take it. Tell them they're a jerk and demand they shape up. We've got to get peer pressure working for us.

There's your Wednesday pep talk, fellow heroes. Now get to work. You and me, we've got to save this country from the hobgoblins who want to take hard-won rights away and drag us back to the 17th century.

And by the power of Greyskull, we're going to have fun doing it.

Grrrr!

Sunday Sermon

Values, values, values, values. In the United States those invoking the term often (if not usually) use it to justify their own gruesomely immoral attempts to deny others freedoms and resources. Welfare for the poor, health care for everyone, the right to marry whoever one wants, the freedom to choose to end a pregnancy. Can't do it folks, goes against American values.

Whatever. It's cartoonishly predictable. When I hear an American say "values" I think theirs are probably deformed.

There are probably exceptions, but if the word hasn't been ruined it's damn close to it.

Getting to my point: last night, Nobel prizewinner-designate Barack Obama addressed gay and lesbian activists at a Human Rights campaign dinner in Washington, DC--and he talked a good game (New York Times). He said it was time to end Don't Ask, Don't Tell (DADT), the Clinton-era (or should I say Newt Gingrich-era?) policy that says homosexuals must be discharged from the military if they're honest about their sexual orientation. He also "called on Congress to repeal the Defence Of Marriage Act [DOMA]," which lets states ban gay marriage and says the federal government position is that marriage is between a man and a woman.

Well, those are values I think most prairie dog readerswould agree with.

The problem, according to activists, is that the president could effectively end DADT by using executive powers to suspend its enforcement. And he hasn't.

As for DOMA, Obama shat the bed last spring when his administration defended the act by comparing homosexuality to incest (New York Times again).

Unlike Canadians, who can marry who they like regardless what their crotches look like (no thanks to Stephen Harper's conservatives, who fought against gay rights tooth and nail--please don't ever, ever vote for them), American gays and lesbians have to put up with unbelievable amounts of bullshit, mostly coming out the mouths of "value voter" bible-thumpers.

In fact in the United States, support for gay marriage is well below 50 per cent. Although I note that non-churchgoing catholics, Hispanics and people under 30 buck the trend. Who's the worst? Southerners (not by as much as you might think though), protestants who go to church every week and Conservative Republicans. (There's a difference between the last two?)

The link is to the Pew Research Centre, and it's recommended reading--very interesting stuff in a pleasing, easy to understand chart.

Given all this, it's probably not a big surprise there's a rally in Washington today to remind the president and Democrats it's time to stop talking and start doing. (Washington Post)

Will they? Who knows. Obama's actually said he's against gay marriage, so either he's a bigot or he's lying for political insurance.

I guess gay and lesbian Americans should hope he's a liar?

Superheroes Grouped by Religion

What if superheroes teamed up according to religious affiliation? What if there was a website that figured this all out and had collages of these newly formed superteams? (By the way, did you know that Captain Canuck was a Mormon?)

Link

(Un-) Holy Crap

So, there's an online "Christian" encyclopedia-thing called Christopedia. You can find it here.

This is their entry on Barack Obama as of 8:14 local time tonight. And oh, you better believe this is going to get changed fast now that it's out. Here's an excerpt. Warning: it is pure, evil hate:

On November 4, 2008, the nigger defeated John McCain in the general election and became the first niggerid-American to be elected President of the United States.^[1][1][1][1] In his victory speech, delivered before a crowd of many thousands of his supporters in Chicago's Grant Park, the nigger proclaimed that "change has come to America."^[1]

The nigger's assigned Secret Service codename is "Renegade."^[1][1] "Renegade" was first used to describe someone who had turned from their religion, coming from the Spanish word renegado meaning "Christian turned Muslim."^[1]

And it goes on and on and on and on and on.

Who is the constituency for this website? Who's reading this stuff? Who's sharing these ideas? Is it a small group of fringe militia types? thirteen-year-old boys thinking they're funny? Or something more widespread?

I don't know. But after reading this, just knowing this is out there, I will say, yeah. Sure all this shit-talk coming out of sewer-mouthed, conservative American bigots about the black president and his health care plan isn't motivated by racism. Surrrrrrre.

Fake-Christian psychos. Well at least I have a topic for this week's editorial. Let the angry typing begin.

(Found on Slog.)

Michael Moore: Jesus Was A Socialist

In a column posted this a.m., Michael Moore points out the contradictions between Christian values and American social and political reality:

I have come to believe that there is no getting around the fact that capitalism is opposite everything that Jesus (and Moses and Mohammed and Buddha) taught. All the great religions are clear about one thing: It is evil to take the majority of the pie and leave what's left for everyone to fight over. Jesus said that the rich man would have a very hard time getting into heaven. He told us that we had to be our brother's and sister's keepers and that the riches that did exist were to be divided fairly. He said that if you failed to house the homeless and feed the hungry, you'd have a hard time finding the pin code to the pearly gates.

I guess that's bad news for us Americans. Here's how we define "Blessed Are the Poor": We now have the highest unemployment rate since 1983. There's a foreclosure filing once every 7.5 seconds. 14,000 people every day lose their health insurance.

Full thing here. (Huffington Post)

And Americans are concerned that there are so many atheists nowadays. Well guys, don't be surprised that the hypocrisy, stupidity, insanity and general viciousness of your nasty little fairy tales are offputting to those of us who value decency. But hey, give us a call when you finally get this "though shalt not kill" thing figured out.

Science > Religion: Quantum Physics Edition

If a tree un-fell in the forest, would we remember it?

Nope, says a physicist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. And he's supposedly got the math to prove it.

In what I assume is a deliberate attempt to make my head hurt, MIT physicist Lorenzo Maccone has attempted to solve the problem of the arrow of time.

The arrow of time, if I understand it right (fingers crossed here), describes a contradiction between events at the microscopic level, which (theoretically?) occur in the same way whether time is moving forwards or backwards, and events at the macroscopic level which occur in a different way depending on the flow of time.

For example, the tree falls when we're moving to the future. It doesn't fall if we're moving to the past--it lifts itself back up. Imagine a film of a tree falling, running in reverse. Like that.

Most importantly, the tree doesn't un-fall in the future.

Or does it? Maccone's math apparently suggests it often does. We just don't remember it because of our quantum entanglement with the system of time moving forward.

Maccone says events like a coffee cup heating up instead of cooling or a pane of glass un-shattering do happen, but our memory is erased by necessity. So says his math.

Hence my throbbing temples.

There's a Guardian story on this here. And the Wikipedia entry on Time's Arrow is here. Read 'em and you'll know as much as I do. Probably more--I don't need quantum disentanglement to not-remember insanely weird and complicated physics theories.

But actually, the only reason I'm posting this is for purposes of atheist propaganda.

My understanding, probably similar to yours, is that physicists conceive of the word in bizarro, science-fictionesque ways. I'm not the slightest bit able to understanding their ideas. But I do have respect for them. From what I understand of history, science, and technology, physics seems to have a good track record at bringing us dependable knowledge of the universe we live in. Physicists study time, gravity and the elegant dance of microscopic particles. And while physicists argue about their theories and conclusions, they have an established framework for hashing out their disagreements.

Most importantly, if they can't prove something they call it a theory and they welcome challenges to it. 'Coz that's how stuff gets figured out.

Compare this to religion. Multiple Millennia have passed and there's still no agreement on the nature of god, his motives, how his power works or what he wants. Just lots of argument and fear and hatred and killing in his name. And when something isn't understood? Apparently we're not even supposed to try to figure it out. "God works in mysterious ways."

Physics maps the universe and tries to understand/explain our place in it. It brings forward tentative answers and adjusts its ideas as new facts emerge. I find it meaningful and beautiful. Religion says personal belief is more important than knowledge and tunes out argument. It uses politics, wealth and bullying to get its way. It celebrates that which is crass and ignorant.

Physics is the smart, weird kid who enriches a classroom. I like that kid.

Religion is the out-of-control child throwing books at teachers and biting other students.

I wish I knew how to help.

Blasphemy Blues

After making tremendous strides over the last few decades to escape its divisive religious past, is Ireland poised for a return to the Dark Ages with a silly new law (Guardian) that would impose a 25,000 euro fine on anyone who "publishes or utters matter that is grossly abusive or insulting in relation to matters held sacred by any religion, thereby causing outrage among a substantial number of adherents of that religion"? If so, the keepers of the Blarney Stone better be on guard that it doesn't get put to another use. (YouTube)

Gog, Magog, Bush, Iraq, Chirac...And The Guardian

Ahhh... a heavyweight newspaper is working on confirming the story. We'll link to it when they get something. (Guardian, Alternet)

Christian Wrong

I awoke this morning to an interview on CBC Radio's The Current with U.S. journalist Jeff Sharlet about his 2003 book called The Family. Families are good, right? They're wholesome. They're the cornerstone of our society. Well, not this one. Unless you're ideal society is a capitalist theocracy whose adherents believe that in killing, oppressing and exploiting their inferiors they're carrying out God's will. (Harper's)

Harper pisses off the Catholic vote

Being an occasional participant in United Church of Canada activities (hauling my five-year-old to Sunday School), I'm not totally up on my Catholic Church dogma. But as a BCer in Toronto points out, Stephen Harper committed sacrilege during the recent funeral for former Governor General Romeo Leblanc. When handed the communion wafer by the priest, he put it in his pocket. (A BCer in Toronto) Which, in Catholic liturgy, is somewhere between a severe no-no and a desecration of the body of Christ. (Harper's people said he consumed it later: videos posted on the net [A BCer in Toronto] are supposed to be 'inconclusive,' but to me it looks as though he didn't consume the wafer).

As I understand it (and Catholics or those who know and mock the Catholic religion, please help me on this), when the presiding priest blesses the communion wafer, it becomes 'the body of Christ.' So, doing anything else but consuming it is sacrilege -- it's as if you're insulting the works, efforts, and words of Jesus Christ, who said at the Last Supper, 'This is my body, it is given for you, do this in remembrance of me." (1 Corinthians, Chapter 11, verses 23-26 via Wikipedia).

Being a member of an evangelical Protestant denomination, Harper could have -- or at least had his protocol people advise him to -- decline the communion wafer. Or he should have consumed it right away, and if anybody questioned him on it, said something to the effect of, 'When in Rome, do as the Romans do.'

The fact that he screwed up -- he looks like he's trying to shake the priest's hand when he goes up for communion -- and that he won't admit it (TorStar) -- going as so far (in my mind) as to 'bear false witness' (Thanks again A BCer in Toronto) says a lot about his character. I said I didn't do it, therefore I didn't do it. All evidence to the contrary doesn't apply.

See, that's the problem. Like most social conservatives, Harper doesn't believe in God: he believes he IS God. Big difference.

Speaking Of Religion And Public Policy

Though there weren't as many people out as there were for Saturday's rally for the Phoenix Coyotes, U.S. President Barack Obama faced protesters yesterday over his support of a woman's right to choose. (Guardian)

Obama was giving the commencement address at Indiana's Notre Dame university--a Catholic college, and therefore (in theory at least) anti-choice on the issue of abortion. Several graduates reportedly decorated their morterboards with crosses and baby feet in protest of Obama's presence. (I'm going to have to find a photo of that because that sounds damn creepy. Maybe the Guardian's writer meant "crosses and baby footprints"?)

With his characteristic eloquence, Obama called for understanding on both sides of the debate.

Sounds good to me. So here, in the spirit of understanding and reaching out to people who don't agree with my pro-choice views (and actually want to change laws to take freedoms away from everyone who doesn't agree with them, but I digress), here are 10 ways anti-abortion activists can actually help fetuses without being a bunch of facists who just want everyone to do what they say all the time.

1) If you're opposed to abortion, don't have one.

2) Fight for strong sex education programs in schools. Sex education = less pregnancification.

3) Provide information about sexual alternatives for youth: activities like heavy petting, oral sex and mutal masturbation can have carry zero risk of pregnancy if properly done.

4) Push for inexpensive or better, free, birth control.

5) Demand politicians increase financial support for low-income housholds. No one should be pressured toward abortion because they can't afford a baby.

6) Free universal day care. See above.

7) Support a fair, progressive tax system that puts the cost of society on those who can afford it, rather than on middle or low-income housholds. Reducing financial stresses on ordinary households mitigates a risk factor associated with unplanned pregnancy. Agitate against the flat tax movement, which is a thinly-veiled attempt to reduce the taxes of society's wealthiest members at the expense of the rest of us.

8) Vote for politicians who support strong public services like education, health care and other social programs--all factors in reducing unplanned pregnancy (compare: Europe vs. the U.S.).

9) Develop a reality-based understanding of human sexuality. Many experts agree that reality is a healthy place to live in.

10) Support gay marriage and gay rights. No one should ever get pregnant because they're trying to prove they're not gay when they in fact are.

FOOTNOTE: The Guardian's story mentions a recent U.S. poll that found most Americans are opposed to abortion. Well, maybe they are and maybe they aren't. Here's a different interpretation of that poll, from syndicated sex columnist/gay rights advocate Dan Savage, who's the "Editorial Director" of The Stranger, a free weekly in Seattle.

Sick, Sick, Sick

GQ magazine is posting several cover pages from intelligence briefings delivered by former Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld to George W. Bush. The briefings all feature bible quotes on their covers. Want to see them? It's GQ's story so you'll have to go to GQ. Click here.

I guess Iraq really was a Christian crusade by a psychotic theocrat. Yet more evidence that religion needs to stay the hell out of government. It gets people killed.

Bigoted Beauty Recieved Message From God

Ouch. It's been a rough month for Carrie Prejean, the Miss California winner who lost the 2009 Miss USA pageant after saying she thought marriage should be exclusively between a man and a woman.

Here's a recap of what happened, in the likely event no one reading this watched or cares about Miss USA.

Close to the end of the competition, Prejean was asked by a judge whether all American states should legalize gay marriage. After saying (incorrectly) that Americans could choose same sex or opposite sex marriage (they actually can't in most states but I digress), she said:

"And you know what, I think in my country, in my family, I think that I believe that a marriage should be between a man and a woman. No offense to anybody out there, but that's how I was raised."

Here's a YooToob clip:




Prejean didn't become Miss America that night (she was first runner-up). She later said her anti- gay marriage remark cost her the crown. Well, ya think?

More entertaining however was the in-retrospect-not-surprising photos that "emerged" of Prejean modelling topless. Those pics, the release of which a reasonable person would assume were payback for Prejean's, one might say, bigoted and idiotic views, launched a controversy around whether she would hang onto the Miss California crown.

(Of course it's stupid that to a lot of people tasteful and tame semi-nude pics of a model are controversial while a model's bigotry and ignorance toward gays and lesbians aren't, but this is happening in America. We can't expect things to make sense.)

Here's the LA Times story on Prejean's pageant loss and the subsequent scandals over the photos.

Annnnnnnyway, after dangling in the wind for a few weeks, Prejean has learned she'll be keeping her crown as Miss Kali. And I guess she's just so excited she had to spread the word. So Prejean, and her now-unbared boobies, scampered over to James Dobson, head honcho of the conservative Christian organization Focus On The Family (FOTF) to talk about her experience.

Naturally, the right-wing radio host is championing Prejean as some kind of she-bin-dun-wrong victim of free speech suppression (it's always Christians who are being oppressed; the oppression where gay people are told they can't marry doesn't count) .

But what's interesting about the Dobson interview, which you can listen to here, is the creepy bit about how Prejean thought Satan was speaking to her through the pageant judge who asked her the gay marriage question.

A quote, transcribed by Dan Gilgoff on his US News And World Report blog, God And Country: "I felt as though Satan was trying to tempt me in asking me this question. And then God was in my head and in my heart saying, "Do not compromise this."

Full article here.

The bottom line: Prejean might not be a bigot, after all. She thinks she recieved spiritual transmissions during a beauty pageant? I'm going to go out on a limb and say maybe she's just psychotic.

Christianity. Sometimes it's tough to be a fan.

UPDATE: Miss USA judge Perez Hilton, who asked Prejean the question, says God told him to (LA Times).

UPDATE 2: The Miss California organization apparently bought Carrie Prejean breast implants before the Miss USA contest. Why do I get the feeling that absolutely everybody associated with these pageants is going to go to hell when they die? (LA Times)

Three In The Afternoon

The following items are chewing on my ankles, demanding attention.

1. WE SHOULD BE TOLERANT OF OTHER CULTURES An eight-year-old Saudi Arabian child successfully divorces her 50-year old husband after courts originally said she'd have to wait until puberty to request permission to leave the union. Ha ha! Take that, you smarmy, preachy human rights advocates! I dare you to call Saudi Arabia a medieval backwater now! (Yahoo!)

2. ALBERTA: IGNORANT AND PROUD Live in Alberta? Have kids? Want to indoctrinate them in your extreme fundamentalist Christian beliefs, like evolution is pretend and gay people are made of satan, without some "public school" butting in and teaching them "facts"? Things are looking up. (CBC)

3. TORTURE 'TOON the new This Modern World is pretty good. If you haven't read TMW before, it's a long-running weekly political comic and maybe the best of its kind. Check it out here. (Salon)

On Losing Faith (Fighter)

Molleindustria pulled their year-old Flash game, Faith Fighter, off their website. Coverage in the media and on blogs suggests this was done in response to a brief statement by the Organization of the Islamic Conference condemning the game as incendiary and offensive. Turns out things might not be as clear cut as we're being led to believe.

The game, which is still available elsewhere on the internet, pitted all your favourite deities against one another, Mortal Kombat style. According to its makers -- who are also famous for creations such as Oligarchy and Operation: Pedopriest -- it was intended as a satire of the one-way islamophobic satire of those infamous Danish cartoons.

'Natch, this is playing out in the online media as a case of free speech being suppressed as a result of outrage from an islamic group. This Huffington Post article, despite its headline, suggests the reasons for the game being removed are more complicated. Yes, the OIC asked internet service providers to remove the game but it seems it was the game makers themselves who took the game down. According to a statement by Molleindustria:

In few hours this statement generated a way more heated reactions than the release of the game. We are not "bowing to the foundamentalists", we have no sympathy for any religion but we are aware that muslims are victim of widespread racism in the western world. This islamofobia is functional to the imperial interests in Middle East and all over the world. We just want to make clear that the game was not intended to contribute to the media-assisted narrative "islamic world vs freedom of speech".

(Forgive the bad grammar. They're Italian.)

Also of interest are comments by Molleindustria about how a Metro UK journalist may have had a hand in engineering the controversy and then went on to misrepresent the gamemaker's response to it (ie, made their responses up).

Molleindustria's final response seems to be to publish a sequel to the game.

UPDATE (May 1): Faith Fighter is back up on the Molleindustria site. It was apparently only taken down for 24 hours. Paolo, the game's designer, explains his reasoning this way: "In order to reassert control over the DISCOURSE AROUND the game I had to do something that would force the press to refocus on the intention of the game and defuse a potential turmoil based of false assumptions."

That's a clipping from his response to this article on the Play This Thing website. Paolo's comment is the second one after the article and is entitled You're Right It's the Streisand Effect. It's a very good read. He has some interesting things to say about the role of misinformation in creating a false conflict between islam and the west, and he sheds more light on the role of Metro UK in creating this Faith Fighter controversy.

Ironic? Yes. Shocking? Sadly, No

Intrepid Dog Blogger Paul Dechene already made note of this story, but clearly, it needs a rant. As the Globe And Mail reported early this morning, federal Minister of State for Science and Technology Gary Goodyear is refusing to state whether or not he believes in evolution--saying only "I'm not going to answer that question. I am a Christian, and I don't believe anybody asking a question about my religion is appropriate."

Sigh. The Cons recent cuts to funding scientific research across the country--and just as insidiously, their absolutely insane tactic of directing the funding that's left by demanding that it go to science projects that will "benefit business"--doesn't seem all that shocking now, if it ever did.

The simple fact is evangelicals--which, like his leash-master Stephen Harper, Gary Goodyear is--are pretty much universally opposed to unfettered freedom in terms of scientific research. And really, who can blame them? For centuries, science has been coming up with nasty little facts that bump up hard against religion--the earth is round, maybe you shouldn't have burned all those "witches" after all, and hey--it looks like those dinosaurs were really old!

Which, of course, brings us back to evolution, the scariest fact of all for evangelicals (and fundamentalists of all religious leanings, it should be noted).

Simply put, evolution is a fact--and it's a fact that's wiped out, among thousands of others, evangelical beliefs like the 6,000-year-old earth (hello, Stockwell Day), the Adam and Eve origin story, and, in recent years, the idea the HIV/AIDS is a plague from god to rid the world of homosexual sinners--or, for that matter, that homosexuals simply "choose to be gay."

But back to Gary.

Again under the "hardly shocking" category, Goodyear has been endorsed by "Vote Marriage Canada"--who are against same sex marriage, of course--along with numerous other evangelical groups, including Charles McVety's Focus on the Family Canada. I wonder if they're happy that the big G is in charge of the country's science portfolio?

I'm sure they are--but the rest of us should be absolutely outraged.

In the midst of the biggest recession we've seen in my lifetime, at least, our Conservative government is abandoning any hope of maintaining Canada's position as a leader in scientific research--at the very time a U.S. president is (finally) placing an emphasis on it in that country. If you didn't think that was enough to drive the best and the brightest from this country--ladies and gentlemen, we present to you our creationist minister of Science and Technology. How long before the Big Valley Creation Science Museum in Alberta becomes the centre of government-funded research in this country?

Clearly, Gary Goodyear has absolutely no business in this portfolio, and should be removed from his position post-haste--and if Ignatieff's Liberals have a shred of backbone, they won't stop screeching about that until it happens. I'm not holding my breath on that--but I am maintaining a tiny shred of hope that Canadians across the country will vent enough outrage to make it happen.

Ah, well--it's not all bad. At least we can finally stop feeling bad for the Americans and their eight-year slide into ignorance and fundamentalism--because now, they feel bad for us! Who saw that coming back in the Dubya days?

He's Probably Right

A couple days ago I posted a link to this story in the Guardian about a British advertising campaign promoting atheism. The catch phrase: "There's Probably No God."

There's been more discussion around the campaign in the Guardian around this (not really a surprise, people are very attached to their make-believe sky-spirit). I like this article by A.C. Grayling, who brings the smackdown on the the word "probably". Turns out the it's in there because the sales twits who sell ads on buses think it would be legally inaccurate to simply say "there is no God".

Grayling has this to say:

"There is something delicious about the thought of a functionary in an advertising agency doing ontology by arbitrating on the question of which fictional characters need a grey area of uncertainty around discussion of their existence – Little Red Riding Hood? Rumpelstiltskin? Santa? Betty Boop? Saint Veronica (who allegedly started out as sweat on a cloth and became a person)? Aphrodite? Wotan? Batman?"

Fun stuff. Read the whole thing here.

Interview Revue '08: Kevin Miller, Writer For "Expelled"

Back in June I signed up to write an article about the anti-evolution doc Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed starring Ben Stein. You may have seen it mentioned on several critics’ Worst-Of lists.

Turns out the writer and director are from Saskatchewan. (As I mentioned in the article, I accidentally wound up chatting with the family of director Nathan Frankowski after the Regina premier.)

As part of my research, I interviewed the movie’s writer, Kevin Miller, via the email but opted to write a more straight-up review of the film for the prairie dog and didn’t end up using any of it.

In hindsight, I wish I would have challenged him more on the misinformation in the film. Thing is, there was just so much crap in there masquerading as truth I found myself a little overwhelmed.

Anyway, here's the interview in its entirety. As a Google doc. (My first time making one of those so let me know if it doesn't work on your machine.)

Interview with Kevin Miller