My favorite Hitchslap: “That which can asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence.”
Here’s your morning dose, video-style!
I mourn the passing of the gentleman. He was abrasive, and I didn’t always agree with him, but his arguments were difficult to refute and compelling to watch and read.
(Thanks to Atheism, Philosophy, and Science for the tip.)
…and I almost missed it!
“A towel, it says, is about the most massively useful thing an interstellar hitchhiker can have. Partly it has great practical value. You can wrap it around you for warmth as you bound across the cold moons of Jaglan Beta; you can lie on it on the brilliant marble-sanded beaches of Santraginus V, inhaling the heady sea vapors; you can sleep under it beneath the stars which shine so redly on the desert world of Kakrafoon; use it to sail a miniraft down the slow heavy River Moth; wet it for use in hand-to-hand-combat; wrap it round your head to ward off noxious fumes or avoid the gaze of the Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal (such a mind-bogglingly stupid animal, it assumes that if you can’t see it, it can’t see you); you can wave your towel in emergencies as a distress signal, and of course dry yourself off with it if it still seems to be clean enough.
“More importantly, a towel has immense psychological value. For some reason, if a strag (strag: non-hitch hiker) discovers that a hitch hiker has his towel with him, he will automatically assume that he is also in possession of a toothbrush, face flannel, soap, tin of biscuits, flask, compass, map, ball of string, gnat spray, wet weather gear, space suit etc., etc. Furthermore, the strag will then happily lend the hitch hiker any of these or a dozen other items that the hitch hiker might accidentally have “lost”. What the strag will think is that any man who can hitch the length and breadth of the galaxy, rough it, slum it, struggle against terrible odds, win through, and still knows where his towel is, is clearly a man to be reckoned with.”
I always wondered why having a small (kitchen) towel thrown over my shoulder was so comforting.
With a world that contains scenes like these:
who needs the Invisible Creator of All Who Lives in the Sky?
Daily Kos has a report about yet another maneuver from the rich conservative fuckknobs that have been financing destruction of American liberal organizations such as labor unions. This time the target is public education:
A new wave of school voucher bills is sweeping the nation, which would allow public education funds to be used in private or parochial schools. As with past waves of voucher initiatives, these new bills are largely promoted and funded by the billionaire DeVos family and a core group of wealthy pro-privatization supporters. They include Pennsylvania SB-1, soon coming to a vote in the PA Senate, and the “Vouchers-for-All” bill approved by the Florida Senate Education Committee on April 14. Betsy DeVos is at the helm of organizations that have set the stage for both bills, but you would never know it based on the propaganda being marketed to Pennsylvanians. Even if you are from another state, keep reading. Chances are a Betsy DeVos-led campaign is already at work in your state or will be there soon…
The leaders of many of these DeVos/Koch/Scaife-funded institutes openly voice their ideological objections to all forms of public education. Some even proudly display their support for a proclamation posted at the Alliance for Separation of School and State, which reads,
“I proclaim publicly that I favor ending government involvement in education.”
Regardless of the individual merits of any particular charter school, the promotion of charter schools collectively is key to the hard religious right strategy for destroying public education, because voucher-funded charter schools will siphon money and the best students from public schools.
That, in turn, will degrade public schools, at which point advocates for charter schools and privatization will point to public schools and say, “look! Public schools are a failed experiment. We need more vouchers, more charter schools!”
My attitude about public education pretty much parallels those of John Taylor Gatto:
The philosophy behind modern public education was conceived by 19th-century industrialists who sought to create a working class that was educated just enough to do the work and finish the paperwork, but not educated enough to exercise critical thinking:
My $0.03?
Let public education die. Let it burn.
School is not teaching your child anything really useful anyway, and it’s a tremendous waste of childhoods and educational opportunities.
If you really want your kids to be properly educated, to really learn something, homeschool them. The religious right has known for decades that homeschooling works stupifyingly better than public education; now it’s time for the secular world to learn the same thing (minus the religious indoctrination of which the right is so fond).
It’s been proven repeatedly that children pick up the essentials of literacy and thinking in about 100 hours of education (that’s twelve 8-hour school days, folks); the rest of a child’s education should reading, discussion, and regular exposure to educational opportunities, all of which can be easily handled by most parents.
I posted this in comments in Jen McCreight’s blog Blag Hag, and it came out so well that I’ve reposted it here.
~~~
I accept the natural world as all the world there is. I don’t need a supernatural reason for anything.
I accept that the natural world is ultimately and completely knowable by logic and rational thought.
Religion is immoral. It prevents rationally moral behavior, discourages critical thinking and skepticism, invokes violence among its fundamentalist faithful, discriminates against women, minorities, and gays, treats children as chattel and victims, and encourages unhealthy sexual expression through legislation, violence, and guilt.
Pharyngula mentions in his latest post that Pat Robertson, wingnut and Christian wackadoodle extraordinaire, has made a public statement that the horrific earthquake in Haiti was the result of a “deal made with the Devil” made by Haitians to shake off French rule.
Riiiiight.
Except that there isn’t anything in the media directly attributed to Pope Pat about it. Nothing. The only thing I’ve found is a post in twitoaster claiming that he made the statement.
If anyone’s seen something concretely attributed to that witless godbag, please let us all know in the comments.
Oh, and contact the Red Cross (a good organization that doesn’t waste a lot of money on “overhead costs”) and make a donation to the Haitian earthquake relief fund they’ve set up. Now.
UPDATE: the Robertson comment has been confirmed (see Jeremy’s link in the comments). How can that man possibly get any lower? And why is he blaming the victims on the one hand, and calling for aid to them with the other?
eBay has the most interesting auction running right now:
There are more than 10 of them (all alike, I would suspect), and the seller dinosaurology has a feedback rate at a whopping 66% (repeated computer crashes, shippers’ mistakes, and other whinings). There is local pick-up only (no shipping–sorry, creepy wackadoodles outside California), and every one of them is guaranteed to be authentic.
Really.
(The same seller apparently has tried to buy Left Behind books, claims he never got them, and then claims that eBay wipes out the transactions. We’re all out to get him, aren’t we?)
