Tuesday morning links.

* If movie posters were honest. See also: if covers of marginal SF/fantasy series were honest.

* Who knew full moons had names? Via G-Lens.

* Is California the new Michigan?

* Tough times in the USA: people are eating racoon. This has nothing to do with the recession, apparently—some people are just choosing to eat it because they are gross.

* Potsdam University is offering a graduate how-to course on flirting for computer geeks.

* Arm-Chair Logic has your elementary logic test for the day.

* Solar apocalypse: NASA warns of 'Space Katrina.' My production company has already optioned the rights to this headline, don't even think about it.

* Harper's Index: Bush retrospective mega-edition.

* A task force created by 49 state attorneys general to look into the problem of sexual solicitation of children online has concluded that there really is not a significant problem. That's right: online sexual predators have infiltrated top-level attorneys general offices in 49 states. We must redouble our efforts.

* And Whedonesque asks, appropriately forlorn: Has it really been five years since Angel ended? That is a little hard to believe. The Armchair Critic ranks the twenty-five best episodes, and the five worst, of one of the best (and surely the most underappreciated) SF series of all time.

moreintelligentlife.com has a mildly slavish interview with fantasist-of-the-moment (and notorious atheist!) Philip Pullman that's worth reading if you're interested in either children's literature or religious controversy. Here's a bit where he rags on Lewis and Tolkien:

Several times Pullman reminds me that a work of fiction is not an argument. Perhaps it's safest to say that in "His Dark Materials" he has constructed his own imaginative world so as not to submit to anyone else's. He likes to quote William Blake's line: "I must create a system, or be enslav'd by another man's." His story is a rival to the narratives put forward by two earlier Oxford writers, J.R.R. Tolkien's "The Lord of the Rings" and C.S. Lewis's "The Chronicles of Narnia". Pullman loathes the way the children in Narnia are killed in a car-crash. "I dislike his Narnia books because of the solution he offers to the great questions of human life: is there a God, what is the purpose, all that stuff, which he really does engage with pretty deeply, unlike Tolkien who doesn't touch it at all. ‘The Lord of the Rings' is essentially trivial. Narnia is essentially serious, though I don't like the answer Lewis comes up with. If I was doing it at all, I was arguing with Narnia. Tolkien is not worth arguing with."

1) It's a train wreck, not a car crash, though this was probably the interviewer's error and not Pullman's. (The Problem of Susan is worth footnoting here as well.)

2) This is a strange thing that seems to happen to a lot of atheists and agnostics, and I say that certainly having recognized the impulse in myself at times as well. Rather than exiling religious and metaphysical questions to the margins, as you might expect, the recognition of the non-existence of God has the exact opposite effect: the question of God becomes the only one worth asking and the only thing worth talking about. Hence the ludicrous claim that Tolkien is "essentially trivial" because Lord of the Rings is neither a theistic nor atheistic polemic.

I don't quite know what to make of this, but it's very interesting. Clearly, Pullmanistic atheism has mastered the negation, but just as clearly it needs to find some way to move forward into the negation of the negation. I think that's what actually existing atheism would have to be, rather than the cancerous anti-theism that so thoroughly dominates the category today.

Sleeping in today and doing nothing so far has been pretty great. Can these trends continue? Let's find out.

* Delicious vegetarian Thanksgiving recipes, at AskMe.

* Parents suddenly begin to realize that Philip Pullman is a big fat atheist, and panic accordingly. A little more commentary and a different link over at blucarbnpinwheel.

* A legislative compromise has finally been reached on Iraq: Proposed Bill Would Bring 4,000 Troops Back To Life.

* The stem cell controversy is over, too: scientists have finally had some success in getting adult stem cells to do what embyronic stem cells can do. So medical science has been set back only six years; a drop in the bucket, really. (Please note that bucket also contains some chronically and terminally ill people who have suffered and will continue to suffer needlessly as a direct result of the absurd superstition and ignorance at the highest levels of our government.) More at MeFi and Washington Monthly, where they address the ludicrous claim that Bush deserves any credit whatsoever for these breakthroughs.

Philip Pullman, whose Dark Materials trilogy I started once a few years ago but never got around to finishing, is working on a sequel that will elaborate on his conception of atheism:

“This is a big subject and I’m writing a big, big book in order to deal precisely with that question,” he tells the magazine. “I don’t want to anticipate it too much by switching a light on the answer now. The interesting – the curious – question is, if people can be helped by something that is palpably not true, is this better than denying the thing that is not true and not being helped?”

As you can see, Pullman has developed more than a little bit of Dawkinsesque condescension when he speaks now about religion, and the question he thinks is interesting and curious is actually neither interesting nor curious—but whatever else you've got to say about Pullman you've got to give the guy credit for writing a children's series that ends with God being unmasked as a monstrous, immoral fraud. That's guts.