Pandagon

Cats: masters of their own destinies

I'm traveling to Las Vegas to go to The Amazing Meeting, and so blogging may be patchy, but I will try to report back on what's going on in the world of skepticism and science promotion. In the meantime, I have to restart the feminist pet wars, by taking issue with Jill's assertion that cats are useless. Oh sure, in our puritanical culture, where pleasure is considered suspect, at best a waste of time, then cats are not only "useless" but aggressively so. Even as I'm a fan of laying around feeling pleased with yourself, I sometimes walk by my cats and tell them that they need to get up and wash something. Or at least quit puking on shit. Be useful!

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'Complexion' of black camp kids not a problem at this pool

After the treatment the kids attending Creative Steps Day Camp received from The Valley Swim Club, a private school has welcomed the children to swim in its pool. (NBC):

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We're not all out to get you

Tracy Clark-Flory put a twinkly post up about the possibility of creating sperm in a lab and the both baffling and yet predictable media response to the possibility that women could reproduce without men at all:

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Black kids booted from Philly club's 'whites-only' pool

Welcome to post-racial America, where people have their heads in the sand about the state of race relations in this country because a black man was elected POTUS.

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Camille Paglia May Be A Horrible Person, By Which I Mean She Is

Today's Camille Paglia column has been roundly vilified for its idiotic take on Palin's decision to drop out; I think it deserves vilification for an entirely different reason.

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Video homobigot of the day - Pastor Leroy Swailes

UPDATE: The transcript is below the fold.

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If the research doesn't say what you want, just lie about it

As you all well know, I try to keep a steady beat of media criticism of a specific kind of bad reporting---bad science reporting in the name of supporting sexism. Sexists in your secular democracies face a problem---arguing that women are inferior to men has always been the job of religion, where you can just make shit up without any evidence, declare it the truth, and start oppressing people. In steps bad science reporters to fill in the gap, elevating hack scientists over good ones because the hacks say what sexists want to hear, anthropomorphizing animal research to reach strained conclusions, claiming that misogynist conclusions were reached in research that weren't, and allowing armchair evolutionary psychology* to masquerade as genuine science. But this story takes the cake. Is it possible that bad science reporters, when faced with research that cannot be construed in any way to mean that bitches ain't shit, will just lie about it?

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Is nothing sacred?!

This post at Jezebel excited my interest, because I had a pre-existing interest in the difference between what people eat with others around, and what they eat when they eat alone. So I listened to this short interview at NPR with Deborah Madison and Patrick McFarlin, the authors of What We Eat When We Eat Alone. I was looking forward to a few minutes of chuckling good times talking about people who just pour soy sauce on rice and eat that directly, some weirder sandwich attempts, or foods consumed straight out of a can.

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MJ circus day

The wall-to-wall ghoulish coverage has begun and it's not an understatement -- "After the private ceremony, Jackson’s body will be taken to the singer’s public memorial." What, is the body going to be on stage?!.

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If it's a tribe, how come you can't be born into it?

I was slobberingly grateful yesterday that Jesse wrote about Ross Douthat's latest ode to the oh-so-sexy (because you think they're too scatterbrained to use contraception) red state ladies and their leader Sarah Palin, but alas, after reading Matt's rejoinder, I'm forced to jump into the game. Matt singles out this quote from Ross's attempt to play the Palin-the-victim card.

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Time article mulls connection between slain sailor's murder to queasiness over repealing DADT

Mark Thompson, in an article in Time mag, "Gays in the Military: Does a Sailor's Murder Signal Deeper Problems?," muses that the murder of Seaman August Provost is a some sort of sign that the rank-and-file heterosexuals in the military are not ready to serve with openly gay and lesbian colleagues.

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Not because you're a "person of faith", but because you're a "person of stupid"

Thanks to reader abo gato for alerting me to this Express-News story that forced me to hurt myself rolling my eyes. It's a story about how Rick Perry is considering appointing a fundamentalist wingnut to head the State School Board, so soon after the forces of good ousted State Board of Education Chairman Don McLeroy because he disagreed with the existence of evolutionary biology, though I'm not sure if he was pro- or anti-the theory of gravity or the round earth theory. McLeroy and now the new candidate Cynthia Dunbar are objectionable because they reject the idea of basic education, not that you'd know that from the first third of the article.

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