Due to various academic commitments, this blog has been very Blogspot Nights lately. I'm not happy about it but it may not change soon—once my comics class is over I have a few weeks off before work at [Undisclosed Location] starts up again.

Let's struggle onward together.

* Daily Kos has a compilation of the obsessive hate directed from Bill O'Reilly towards Dr. George Tiller for the crime of practicing medicine. O'Reilly's response tonight on the air was essentially that Tiller had it coming.

* Birthers overrun government transparency program.

* Petraeus says the U.S. violated the Geneva Conventions, while General Ricardo Sanchez calls for a Truth Commission. More from Attackerman.

* Barack Obama has declared June LGBT Pride Month. Hey, how great! It's like he's almost actually taking action! Call me when you're repealed DADT.

* Oprah and pseudoscience. Via Kevin Drum.

* The accusation that Sonia Sotomayor has—as The New York Times uncritically put it—a "race-based approach to the law" is turning out to be one of the most reality-detached arguments to make it into the mainstream since Saddam’s mushroom clouds. All the relevant evidence—all of it—proves how false that accusation is.

* Franken and Coleman went to the Minnesota Supreme Court today, and Coleman got smacked.

* And atheist children will kill you for candy.

Just a few more.

* An end to post-Fordist consumption madness?

* Not Gaia, but Medea: how nature kills her young.

While Lovelock uses "Gaia" to refer to Earth's biosphere as a kindly mother goddess, Ward uses "Medea" as a reference to the mother in Greek myth who killed her own children. Ward says life, like Medea, eventually sows the seeds of its own near-destruction - over and over again. "Life boils up and bubbles up, and through its own waste products and activities makes the planet no longer inhabitable," he said.

Via MeFi.

* Inside credit-card agency snooping.

* Racism and science fiction, by the great Samuel Delany.

* And some bad news for atheists.

In addition to terrorists, "Twitter has also become a social activist tool for socialists, human rights groups, communists, vegetarians, anarchists, religious communities, atheists, political enthusiasts, hacktivists and others to communicate with each other and to send messages to broader audiences," a new paper from the U.S. Army darkly reports.