Transmillennial

Most people are familiar with Boko Haram , the Islamist terrorist organization that began in Nigeria. What they probably don't know is what the name means. Contrary to some media reports, Boko is the Hausa word for the Western system of secular education brought to Nigeria by the British, and means more generally sham, fraud, or deceit. When the British colonial government imposed secular schools in northern Nigeria at the beginning of the 20th century, Boko was applied in a pejorative sense to this new system. Haram of course just means forbidden . We shouldn't be smug. Our own local fundamentalists also think Western secular education is haram . Take for example, the locally-founded coven of screaming wingnut harpies quaintly named Moms for Liberty . These, ahem, ladies, who are mostly free of the education they so deplore, have gone after all mannner of social studies textbooks. And now they've also decided to clean up biology, which as we all know is...

I ran into Steven A Christie, MD, JD online. He wrote a pro-forced-birth book called Speaking for the Unborn, which purports to provide 30 second pro-life rebuttals to pro-choice arguments . I think 30 seconds actually refers to the amount of tiime he spent thinking about them. It's a truly bad book. But he sent me a copy. And to give it credit, I don't think any other book has made my job drop to the floor from the very first sentence. Whether or not something’s alive is a purely scientific question that science has fully settled As I wrote to him, there aren't enough LOLs in the entire universe to cover that one. Just google the phrase Are viruses alive? . Not a bad idea anyway... you can come up with some interesting, informative discussions. I like this one . Funny, the Microbiology Society hosting a discussion about a fully-settled question! Science in general is not a safe space for binary minds, and biology is t...