The essence of the conservative ideology is for the government to do as little as possible for the least of us, to allow intolerance and bigotry to run their natural course, and that individual economic self-interest is the be-all and end-all of human existence.
As a member of the professoriate, I like to think that we are egalitarian and do our very best to correct the social inequities that are so prevalent outside of our relatively benevolent, enlightened institutions. Only…not. It looks like women get screwed over in academia, too.
The gender gap in faculty pay cannot be explained completely by the long careers of male faculty members, the relative productivity of faculty members, or where male and female faculty members tend to work -- even if those and other factors are part of the picture, according to research being released this week at the annual meeting of the American Education Research Association.
When all such factors are accounted for, women earn on average 6.9 percent less than do men in similar situations in higher education, says the paper, by Laura Meyers, a doctoral candidate at the University of Washington. The finding could be significant because many colleges have explained gender gaps by pointing out that the senior ranks of the professoriate are still dominated by people who were rising through the ranks in periods of overt sexism and so are lopsidedly male, or that men are more likely than women to teach in certain fields that pay especially well.
Maybe the disparity is because equality is only just now beginning to percolate upwards from the new faculty? Nope, they corrected for that. Is it because we have more women in the low-paying sociology departments than we do in the higher paying computer science departments? No, they corrected for that. Is it because women are less able to do the work and are too busy gossiping about babies and needlepoint to do the work? No, they corrected for that.
Darn. I guess the simple fact of the matter is that we're paying women less than they deserve. From which the important, obvious lesson to be learned is that we ought to hire more women, because we're getting equal work for cheap.
Perhaps I should mention that to our hiring committees.
I must be very old. I remember a friend getting recordings of the Goons sent by mail, and we'd sit around listening to an old reel-to-reel tape machine and we'd laugh and laugh. I suspect that Eccles and Bluebottle will not resonate with the whippersnappers here, but I shall inflict them on you anyway.
(Last edition of TET; Current totals: 12,173 entries with 1,334,165 comments.)
How could I forget? Easy, actually, it's a rather forgettable event in which nothing happens. Seven years ago, Paul Nelson invented a creationist metric, ontogenetic depth, which purportedly measures the complexity of developmental processes and somehow implies that evolution is impossible. At that time, he wasn't able to tell us exactly what it was or how to measure it, but he promised to explain it…tomorrow. A tomorrow which has so far stretched out to seven long years, and we now annually note the anniversary.
I really don't care anymore if Nelson ever comes up with a nonsensical rationalization. It's symbolic. It's representative of all the promised 'science' the Intelligent Design creationists have been claiming to be doing, yet never deliver. Last year I predicted that there would be no revelations from Nelson in 2011, and now I predict that in 2012, I'll be making the same reminder.
Unless I forget. I might. It's hard to remember a specific day on which creationists fail — that's like every day, you know.
First of all you should know that the impure can't touch me without
gloves, only the chaste or the the ones that lost their chastity after their
marriages and haven't been adulterous may touch me with no gloves,
i.e., no fornicator or adulterer may have direct contact with me, nor anything
impure touch my blood, no impure may have direct contact with a virgin
without permission, those that take care of my burial should take off all
my clothes, bathe me, dry me and wrap me while totally naked in a white cloth
which is in this building, in a bag I left in the first room of the first floor, after
wrapping me in this cloth you may put me in my coffin. If possible, I'd like
to be buried next to the grave where my mother sleeps, my mother is
called Dicéa Menezes de Oliveira and is buried in the Murundu cemetery.
I need the visit of a faithfull follower of God in my tomb at least once,
I need him to pray in front of it asking for God's forgiveness for
what I did asking that when Jesus comes he will wake me up from the
sleep of death to life.
At least this savagery won't be pinned on atheists, not this time. I don't think we can blame religion, either, although his insanity clearly found expression in religious idiom — this guy was just malignantly deranged.
I hope no one is respecting the killer's final wishes, and that his corpse is treated like dead rotting meat, nothing more, and buried with exactly the same treatment anyone else's body would receive. And then may his name be forgotten.
Not in the same place at the same time, unfortunately — that could be an interesting conversation. But they're both out and about talking.
Tonight at 7pm Eastern, Sam Harris will be wasting his time debating William Lane Craig. Rumors are that you will be able to watch the debate live at that link; I'm neck-deep in work, so I don't think I'll be able to watch, but I'm sure I'll here about it.
The other fun event is next week: Rebecca Watson will be speaking on "Women's Intuition and Other Fairytales" at 7 pm Friday, April 15, at CFI-Transnational, 1310 Sweet Home Road, Amherst, NY.
Show up, tell her I sent you, and that she owes me a beer for getting you to go.
I don't know if I should encourage these things — they are of the devil. At least the intent in this contest to create anti-creationist LOLcats is good. Your goal is to make a funny picture with peculiar grammar that mocks creationist ideas, and win fabulous prizes. Go for it!
…and this is a 
