Month: March 2005

BitTorrent Dr. Demento Download Site

Update: The originally linked site no longer exists.

This page hosts BitTorrent downloads of the Dr. Demento Show, including a Torrent for the latest show that tends to show up on the Wednesday or Thursday after the show is broadcast. I live in an area where the Dr. Demento Show hasn’t been broadcast in decades, and it is nice to be able to download the entire two-hour show.

BTW, this is the sort of show that begs to be offered as a podcast. The number of stations airing it has declined steadily as radio has been increasingly consolidated.

Conservative Atheists on the Net

Ron Battista posted reply to my Hannity/Silverman post.

Battista runs an interesting blog, Suspension of Disbelief which has a tagline of “An Atheist Who Is Tired of Atheist Activists.” Can I get an amen to that? 😉

Anyway, Battista links to a number of atheist conservatives such as The Secular Republican, and there’s even a Yahoo! Groups list, Conservative Atheism.

My wife, who is a pagan, and I often discuss this sort of problem, as she gets a little tired of seeing complete nutcases being represented as spokesmen/women for her religious views. But at least in that case, there’s not nutty American Pagans group that the media always turns to. We poor atheists have for too long had to live in the shadow of Madalyn Murray O’Hair and the American Atheists doing their best to convince the country that every atheist was a stark raving loony nut who stayed awake at night worrying about the horrors of “In God We Trust” on our money.

Plus AA tended to promote crackpot ideas from their obnoxious view that religious people were idiots or worse to lending credence to Holocaust revisionist nonsense. In many ways, the AA paralleled another partially-right but equally nutty group led by a charismatic women, the Objectivists. Did anyone ever see Madalyn Murray O’Hair and Ayn Rand together?

I Wish Everyone Would Die

I read Technology Review’s February profile of aging research advocate Aubrey de Grey, but missed what Paul Boutlin calls their “bitchy” editorial slam of de Grey,

But what struck me is that he [de Grey] is a troll. For all de Greys vaulting ambitions, what Sherwin Nuland saw from the outside was pathetically circumscribed. In his waking life, de Grey is the ­com­puter support to a research team; he dresses like a shabby graduate student and affects Rip Van Winkles beard; he has no children; he has few interests outside the science of biogeron­tology; he drinks too much beer. Although he is only 41, the signs of decay are strongly marked on his face. His ideas are trollish, too. For even if it were possible to perturb human biology in the way de Grey wishes, we shouldnt do it. Immortality might be okay for de Grey, but an entire world of the same superagenarians thinking the same kinds of thoughts forever would be terrible.

You have to really appreciate a magazine willing to say, “I hope everyone dies.”

And what’s the deal with “he has not children”? Does not having children still relegate one to pathetic status in this enlightened age?

David Silverman Is No Michael Newdow — Atheist Smacks Down Sean Hannity

For the most part, I’ve never been impressed by the American Atheists (and I am an atheist), but AA’s David Silverman really made Sean Hannity look like the idiot he is on Hannity & Colmes. The topic was the Easter Bunny — apparently some shopping malls in Florida are doing away with the “Easter” part of the Easter Bunny, and going to either Peter Rabbit or “Garden Bunny” (which makes no sense). Hannity, of course, sees this is as yet another attack from those evil leftists.

Before going to the transcript, if Hannity would use his brain for a second he might stop to wonder why a rabbit is symbolized with Easter. What the hell does a rabbit have to do with the resurrection of Jesus? Nothing, of course — its a pagan fertility symbol people. If anything, Hannity should be glad that people are starting to dissociate this pagan fertility symbol from Easter.

Anyway, Silverman is brilliant, noting that what is driving the bunny changes is pure capitalism which, the last time I checked, Hannity supported,

DAVID SILVERMAN, AMERICAN ATHEISTS: Hey, thanks for having me back on the show.

You know, first of all, I want to say that this is about private property and this is about private enterprise. And they can name their bunnies anything they want. They can name them Peter Rabbit or they can name them the Jesus Bunny for all we care. They are private enterprises, and they can do what we wish — or what they wish, I should say.

BOB BECKEL, GUEST HOST: But why do they wish to do that?

SILVERMAN: Because it’s capitalism. They’re living in a place that is growing more and more diverse. And they’re recognizing the fact that Easter is only Christian. And even though it doesn’t have Christian roots, they’re recognizing that is more than Christian, and they want to play on the safe side. They want to sell more stuff. When it comes right down to it, these malls want to sell more stuff. They don’t want to…

Hannity simply ignores this, claiming its leftist intolerance,

SEAN HANNITY, CO-HOST: You know something, David? Look, where is the tolerance on the left anymore? I mean, this is the Easter Bunny. This is about Bob’s kids and my kids going to the mall. Are you really going to be hurt, are you really going to be offended by a mall identifying a bunny as the Easter Bunny? Is your faith shaken that deeply?

But as Silverman notes — and Hannity continues to ignore — atheists aren’t agitating for this change; its something the malls did on their own.

Silverman apparently flustered Hannity by not coming out and being a typical atheist freak (Hannity probably wishes he’d booked Michael Newdow), leading Hannity to this bizarre exchange,

HANNITY: Because of guys like you, because you’re demanding it, because of the frivolous lawsuits…

SILVERMAN: How can you blame me when we’re not doing anything? This is something — no, no, no, Sean. We’re not doing anything. You’re going a little too far here because…

HANNITY: No, I’m not. Why is it happening then?

SILVERMAN: Because of capitalism. They’re going to sell more stuff.

HANNITY: All right. It’s all happening because of capitalism.

(CROSSTALK)

SILVERMAN: They’re not doing it because of the atheists. We don’t have anything to do with it.

HANNITY: Why are the Boy Scouts under attack by atheist groups, by girls that want to be in the Boy Scouts, by gay and lesbian groups that don’t like their values?

SILVERMAN: You want to talk about the Boy Scouts?

HANNITY: No, what it is an assault on the very people in the society that lecture us about tolerance. You guys on the left, you are the most intolerant people on the face of the Earth to the point now that the Easter Bunny cannot be named the Easter Bunny without offending somebody in your side.

Hannity’s just an embarassment with his one-size-fits-all ranting — confronted by Silverman’s reasonable position, Hannity blathers on about Boy Scouts and lesbians and then says he doesn’t actually want to talk about the Boy Scouts after all.

Fox would do well to ditch both Hannity and Bill O’Reilly. Unfortunately since so many people inexpliably watch these goofballs, that isn’t likely to happen.

Source:

Transcript: The Easter Bunny Under Attack. Hannity & Colmes, March 16, 2005.

Fiona Freed, Mostly

Back in November, I mentioned the Fiona Apple fans who were starting a Free Fiona campaign asking Sony to finally release an album that Apple finishes a few years. Sony had decided to simply not release the CD apparently because it doesn’t quite fit in any of the pop cliches of the moment.

This week, the album was leaked on the Internet. For example, this site has a number of high-quality MP3 files which claim to be all 11 songs from the unreleased album. Could be, thought remember downloading music files is illegal and you probably shouldn’t even follow that link at all.