Atheist display adorns Daley Plaza near Christmas tree, menorah
WGNtv.com
Wedged between a nativity scene and a towering menorah at Daley Plaza sits an 8 1/2-foot-tall letter “A.” The display was put there by the Wisconsin-based Freedom From Religion Foundation to counterbalance the religious displays. 25 years ago, a ...

Winnipeg Free Press
Brian Pallister, Manitoba Tory Leader, Explains 'Infidel Atheists' Comment
Huffington Post Canada
WINNIPEG - Manitoba's Opposition leader has offered his holiday wishes to groups of people including "infidel atheists," leaving online commentators divided as to whether the phrase was insulting or an awkward attempt at humour. Brian Pallister gave an ...
Manitoba Opposition leader has a holiday message for 'all you infidel atheists'The Globe and Mail
Manitoba Tory leader defends 'infidel atheists' remarkCBC.ca
'Infidel atheists' comment was misrepresented: PallisterWinnipeg Free Press

all 67 news articles »

BizPac Review
Atheist group: Take back Christmas from Christians!
Raw Story
“This season is a great time of year for a hundred reasons—none of them having to do with religion,” said American Atheists President David Silverman via press release. “This year, start a new tradition: Don't go to church. You hate it, it's boring ...
Atheist Billboard in Times Square Specifically Designed to Make Sarah Palin's ...New York Magazine
Atheist group targets Christmas with 'anti-god' billboard campaignBizPac Review
Atheist Billboards Make Holiday Push For People to Worship NothingThe Hollywood Gossip
Salon -God Discussion
all 15 news articles »

ABC7Chicago.com
Chicago's Daley Plaza Holiday Display Includes Nod To Atheism, Bill Of Rights
Chicagoist
There is room at the annual Daley Plaza holiday display for Christianity, Judaism and even atheism. If you've visited you'll notice a giant “A” nestled between the Hanukkah menorah and the Nativity scene. That “A” stands for “atheism” (or “agnostic” if ...
Atheist display adorns Daley Plaza near Christmas tree, menorahWGNtv.com
Daley Plaza display honors atheists, agnosticsChicago Tribune
Atheists erect 8-foot 'A' in Chicago to mark holidaysABC7Chicago.com

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Atheist Group Asks Bellflower School Officials To Halt Prayer At Meetings
CBS Local
Atheist Group Asks Bellflower School Officials To Halt Prayer At Meetings. December 4, 2013 8:14 AM. View Comments. Filed under. Local, News, Syndicated Local, Watch + Listen. Related tags. Atheist, Bellflower, District, Freedom From Religion ...

Atheist group targets Christmas with 'anti-god' billboard campaign
BizPac Review
Not content with having the freedom to be non-believers, an atheist group has plans to erect 55 billboards this week in the Sacramento, Calif., area to force their point of view on others. The effort is part of an ongoing national campaign by the ...
Atheist group: Take back Christmas from Christians!Raw Story
Atheist Billboard in Times Square Specifically Designed to Make Sarah Palin's ...New York Magazine
Atheist Billboards Make Holiday Push For People to Worship NothingThe Hollywood Gossip
God Discussion
all 14 news articles »

Christian Post
$3K 'Gift From Atheists Everywhere' Rejected by Illinois Park District to ...
Christian Post
December 4, 2013|10:51 am. The park department of Morton Grove, Illinois has rejected a donation from an atheist teacher and blogger, saying that it would prefer to avoid becoming involved in any First Amendment dispute or controversy. The donation had ...

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I know, the Republicans have declared that racism is over, but we all read that wrong. What they really want to do is declare that talking about racism is over. We all know that the Republican Party is the most racist party in the country — they actually depend on fomenting racist attitudes to get elected nowadays — so they have a vested interest in getting us to shut up about racism in the US.

That way we wouldn’t notice events like this: three high school kids waiting for a bus their coach arranged to take them to basketball practice get arrested. For loitering and obstructing the sidewalk. Wait, waiting is what you’re expected to do at a bus stop, right? Yes, but waiting while black is apparently a crime in Rochester, New York.

Three boys (l-r) Daequon Carelock, Wan’Tauhjs Weathers and Raliek Redd were arrested in Rochester while waiting for bus to basketball scrimmage

I’m sure the cops were confirmed in their righteous efforts to keep riff-raff off the streets as soon as they heard those names: Daequon, Wan’Tauhjs, and Raliek. I wonder if the kid on the right was actually wearing a hoody while waiting for the bus? So many racial signifiers, so many justifications for arrest. You want evidence for structural racism in America? There it is.

And here’s another example: white people resisting attempts to even teach them about racism. At Minneapolis Community and Technical College, Shannon Gibney was teaching about structural racism in a communications class — it’s a rather important topic and appropriate to the subject — when students complained.

[One of the white students asked,] ‘Why do we have to talk about this in every class? Why do we have to talk about this?’ I was shocked… It was not in a calm way. His whole demeanor was very defensive. He was taking it personally. I tried to explain, of course, in a reasonable manner — as reasonable as I could given the fact that I was being interrupted and put on the spot in the middle of class — that this is unfortunately the context of 21st century America.

Another white male student said, ‘Yeah, I don’t get this either. It’s like people are trying to say that white men are always the villains, the bad guys. Why do we have to say this?’

I tried to say, ‘You guys are trying to take it personally. This is not a personal attack. We’re not all white people, you white people in general. We’re talking about whiteness as a system of oppression.’

And so I’m quite familiar, unfortunately, with how that works — and how the institutional structures and powers reinforce this white male supremacy, basically, and that sort of narrative, and way of seeing the world.

And so I said, ‘You know, if you’re really upset, feel free to go down to legal affairs and file a racial harassment discrimination complaint.’

“Why do we have to talk about this.” That’s like the common whine of every entitled, selfish, child of privilege: do not question my right to have all the things, do not challenge my status, do not ask me to look down and notice all the people I’m trampling, do not ask me to recognize the oppressed as human beings. It was entirely right of her to inform them that they could go complain to the administration, and it is entirely right that they did so.

Two white guys complaining that their teacher was teaching them about racism? You might think that it’s a foregone conclusion that Minneapolis Community and Technical College would dismiss that concern pretty quickly. You’d be wrong. Structural racism, remember?

The vice president of student affairs at MCTC filed a formal reprimand of Shannon Gibney. Against a black teacher teaching a class about racism!

“I definitely feel like I’m a target in the class. I don’t feel like students respect me,” she continued. “Those students were trying to undermine my authority from the get-go. And I told the lawyer at the investigatory meeting, ‘You have helped those three white male students succeed in undermining my authority as one of the few remaining black female professors here.’”

MCTC doesn’t have to worry. Word will get around that the school is only for white folks, and their student body and faculty will get whiter and whiter, and conflict will be minimized, and the white men will be affirmed in their smug privilege, and all will be well as long as we don’t look down.

We’ve got a few of the same smug people at UMM, but at least our administration doesn’t support them. But even here, the magic word “diversity” can be used to mask inaction and even direct discussion of the problem. Talking about racism is over. Continuing to demand discussion about it is grounds for a reprimand.

But I think a movie about it could be interesting. If you’ve never heard of it, Sedona is kind of the epicenter of a whole webwork of New Age nuttiness — it’s what you get when liberals go full-on faith-head.

Carrie Poppy, Brian Thompson, and Adam Isaak are running a kickstarter to make an expose of the whole silly mess. If you’re feeling nice, it’s an opportunity to help them get a nice camera and some travel expenses; if you’re one of those mean skeptics, look at it as donating to send them off to get a colonic irrigation on camera. Win-win!

Sometimes, it’s the little things that just add up and fill me with rage. Like this report on bank employees.

Almost a third of the country’s half-million bank tellers rely on some form of public assistance to get by, according to a report due out Wednesday.

Researchers say taxpayers are doling out nearly $900 million a year to supplement the wages of bank tellers, which amounts to a public subsidy for multibillion-dollar banks. The workers collect $105 million in food stamps, $250 million through the earned income tax credit and $534 million by way of Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Program, according to the University of California at Berkeley’s Labor Center.

We are all supplementing banks so that they can screw over their employees at the bottom, and throw more of their cash to the owners at the top. The plutocrats want it both ways: they want a complete absence of regulation so they can continue to plunder profits, and they want poor, desperate people to do their labor for a pittance, with government aid. You might argue that banks have faced all kinds of problems lately, so maybe they’re lean from top to bottom, but we know that’s not true.

Profits at the nation’s banks topped $141.3 billion last year, with the median chief executive pay hovering around $552,000, according to SNL Financial. In contrast, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics pegs the median annual income of a bank teller at $24,100, or $11.59 an hour.

This cannot continue, and I’m getting too old to want to live through a revolution.

Atheist Billboards Make Holiday Push For People to Worship Nothing
The Hollywood Gossip
Just in time for the holidays, a non-profit group is planning on erecting dozens of atheist billboards to let fellow non-believers know they're "not alone." Atheist Billboards. The Greater Sacramento Chapter of the Freedom From Religion Foundation ...
Atheist group targets Christmas with 'anti-god' billboard campaignBizPac Review
Are atheist billboards attacking Muslims?God Discussion

all 3 news articles »

Here’s some reading material for you: A new article by Chris Mooney, posted at Mother Jones, argues that we have certain psychological dispositions that make it easier for us to accept religion than evolution. Larry Moran was not impressed with the article. Neither was Jerry Coyne. But I think the article was a bit better than they suggest, and I make my case in this post over at EvolutionBlog. Comments may be left there. Enjoy!... Jason Rosenhouse http://www.math.jmu.edu/~rosenhjd

Atheist display to counter Nativity scene at Florida Capitol
Fox News
A private group placed a Nativity scene in the Florida state Capitol on Tuesday in an event that included prayers, children singing Christmas carols and a celebration of Jesus' birth. Up next, the atheists get their say. The Capitol rotunda is open to ...

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Counting Coup, Atheist Style
Patheos (blog)
For reasons I don't fully get, the atheist bloggers on Patheos have zeroed Public Catholic in general and little ole me in particular, for their disdain. According to them, we're all crazy over here on the Catholic portal and need a good dressing down ...

Modesto Bee
Sacramento Atheist Group Posting 55 Billboards To Encourage Nonbelievers To ...
CBS Local
SACRAMENTO (CBS13) – Billboards with messages from a local atheist group are going up all around Sacramento to reach those of a similar mindset during the Christmas season. It's Christmas time, yet one group thinks this is a great opportunity to get ...
Sacramento-area atheists launch 'Out of the Closet' billboard campaignSacramento Bee
Atheist Group Erects 'Good Without God' Billboards in CaliforniaCharisma News
Atheist Billboards To Flood California City As Non-Believers Make Holiday Push ...Huffington Post
Visalia Times-Delta
all 24 news articles »

Athiest's donation to Ilinois town's park department returned
UPI.com
3 (UPI) -- An openly atheist blogger's donation to the park and recreation department in Morton Grove, Ill., was refused and returned to him, a park official said. When a local veterans group, American Legion Post 134, canceled its $2,600 donation to ...

I was amused to see this review of the history of zebrafish publications. It describes some of the trends in the research (read: lots of developmental biology), and plots the number of papers published. I started working with zebrafish in 1979, so I’ve marked where I began.

You know, when I started out as a grad student in this field, the literature search was pretty easy. Almost all the people who had published on this model system were right there in this one collection of labs at the University of Oregon, with a few other former students scattered elsewhere, so I could just turn to all of the primary authors and ask them directly about anything. There were a few older papers, but as I recall, almost all of them had to do with zebrafish as guinea pigs in environmental toxicology studies.

It’s a little bit different now.

(Of course, that didn’t mean I didn’t have lots to read — the questions were all focused on neurobiological and developmental topics in other organisms. Even now you shouldn’t center your reading on just one experimental animal!)

Emily Graslie asks where the women promoting science on youtube are, and then answers her own question: they’re out there, but youtube is not exactly an inviting environment, especially for women, because of (and she does not phrase it this rudely, but I will) all of the assholes infesting the place.

I’m not a woman (no, really, I grew the beard specifically to prevent confusion), but I’ve felt the same way — I tried to do a few things on youtube, clumsily and awkwardly, but the hostility and idiocy of the youtube commentariat were discouraging further efforts. Open comments meant that most of what I was seeing were knee-jerk twits who didn’t pay any attention to what I said, who flooded the thread with sexist and irrelevant stupidity; use the filtering tools to ban the more egregious offenders, and new idiots join in to scream about how you’re violating free speech, and besides, the same morons just come crawling back under new pseudonyms; shut off all comments as an intolerable waste of time and effort, and then the email comes pouring in accusing me of censorship.

I won’t claim that I was any good at the video medium — I didn’t even have an opportunity to try to get better, because it was all shrieking fanboys of certain popular misogynist babblers doing their best to drive me out. I can see how new talent, real talent, might want to run away from the climate there.

But some women have persevered! Graslie lists a number of good science youtubers, so I’ll steal her list here.

Science (biology):
Claire, Brilliant Botany: https://www.youtube.com/user/Brillian…
Sally Le Page, Shed Science: https://www.youtube.com/user/shedscience
Julia Wilde, That's So Science: https://www.youtube.com/user/wildesci…
Dr. Bondar: http://www.youtube.com/user/DrBondar
Lindsay Doe, Sexplanations http://www.youtube.com/sexplanations
Laci Green, Sex+: http://www.youtube.com/lacigreen
Annie Gaus, Pick your Poison: https://www.youtube.com/user/pickyour…
Vanessa Hill, BrainCraft: https://www.youtube.com/braincraftvideo
The Penguin Prof: http://www.youtube.com/user/ThePengui…
Amoeba Sisters: https://www.youtube.com/user/AmoebaSi…

Science (misc.):
Maddie Moate, Earth Unplugged: http://www.youtube.com/earthunplugged
Elise Andrew, I F*cking Love Science : https://www.youtube.com/user/IFLScience
Rebecca Watson: http://www.youtube.com/user/rkwatson/…
Alex Dainis, Bite Sci-zed: https://www.youtube.com/user/Lexie527/
Amy Shira Teitel: http://bit.ly/1dAXh9T
Joanne Manaster: https://www.youtube.com/user/joannelo…
Jessica King, FieldNotes: http://www.youtube.com/jessicasfieldn…
Meg Rosenburg, Tales from the History of Science: http://bit.ly/18rbhRF
Ella, Sci-Files: https://www.youtube.com/user/EllaC522/
Dr. Kiki, This Week in Science: https://www.youtube.com/user/ThisWeek…
Boonsri, Elemental: http://www.youtube.com/user/Elemental…
Eff Yeah Fluid Dynamics: http://www.youtube.com/user/fyfluiddy…
Allison Jack, Agricultural Science: http://www.youtube.com/user/AllisonLH…
Katie McGill, The Physics Factor: https://www.youtube.com/thephysicsfactor

Technology:
Amanda Aizuss, iTalkApple: https://www.youtube.com/user/iTalkApple/
Emily Eifler, BlinkPopShift: https://www.youtube.com/user/BlinkPop…

Engineering:
Jerri Ellsworth: https://www.youtube.com/user/jeriells…
Limor "Ladyada" Fried: https://www.youtube.com/user/adafruit/

Math:
ViHart: http://www.youtube.com/vihart
Saramoira Shields, Mathematigal: https://www.youtube.com/user/SqueakyM…
LookingGlassUniverse: https://www.youtube.com/user/LookingG…
Rebecca Thomas, Dead Bunny Guides: https://www.youtube.com/deadbunnyguides/

The Field Museum Women in Science group: http://fieldmuseum.org/explore/field-…

Now I have more to watch. Maybe I’ll get inspired and try again someday.

Park district returns donation to atheist blogger
Chicago Tribune
After a local veterans group pulled its donations to the Morton Grove Park District in response to a park board member's refusal to stand for the Pledge of Allegiance, a Naperville teacher and atheist blogger asked his readers for donations to replace ...

Raw Story
Illinois park district rejects donation from 'Friendly Atheist' to avoid ...
Raw Story
An Illinois park district has refused a $3,000 donation by an atheist blogger to avoid controversy. The Morton Grove Park District had lost about $2,600 in funding after a local veterans group pulled its donations because an atheist park board member ...
Morton Grove Park District returns donation to atheist bloggerMorton Grove Champion
Morton Grove Park District Returns Atheist's CheckPatch.com
Pledge of Allegiance fight costs Chicago parks money, embroils American ...The Huntsville Times - al.com (blog)

all 9 news articles »