While so many modern christians are despicable bigots whose main aim in life seems to be to make life miserable for people who are not like them, perhaps one of the worst was a bloke called James Dobson who founded the ultraconservative Christian organisation Focus on the Family in 1977. He died a day or so ago at the age of 89. Born in 1936 in Shreveport, Louisiana, Dobson was initially a child psychologist who launched a radio show to counsel Christians on parenting1.
I was forced to work with a workplace psychopath for a decade or so. Most of the time, it had little effect, because my day-to-day work was something he knew little about and I was largely left to my own devices. However, there were a few times when we interacted. We edited a book some years ago, and as I was an experienced editor, I did most of the work compiling the volume. He wrote the two page foreword.
In 2009, NASA launched the Orbiting Carbon Observatory (OCO), a satellite designed to take precise measurements of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere to help guide the response to climate change. Unfortunately, the satellite did not make it into its planned orbit. So, in 2014, NASA launched the replacement OCO-2, which has been collecting a huge number of high-resolution measurements, which provides greater spatial distribution of carbon dioxide over the entire planet.
I have been posting stuff on the Blotreport for over eight years now, and I receive an enormous amount of spam, sometimes up to 60 a day, which my wonderful spam filter invariably catches. When I started back in early 2017, a fair proportion of the spam was porn, both gay and straight. That eventually faded away and was replaced, strangely, by several other themes, including a spate of “buy a house in Bali” spam.
Just over a year ago, I wrote a piece about the 2012 discovery of a group of early hominins, the Denisovans, from a cave in Siberia. All that was initially found was a finger bone, from which was extracted some DNA, which showed the owner as not belonging to the Neanderthals. This finger bone belonged to the first group of archaic humans to be revealed solely by their DNA and associated proteins, rather than the morphology of their fossilised bones.
There has been a spate of vandalism and arson of synagogues, cars, a child-care centre, and sundry other sites in the last year or so. Politicians have labelled these attacks as antisemitic and at least some of them may be politically motivated, while the motivation of others is not so clear.
As anyone who reads my stuff knows, I have been kicked off Facebook permanently, and while initially confused as to why it happened, I came to the conclusion that it was because of my posts about the genocide under way in Gaza and the running of the community standards system by zionists1. At the time, I said I’d look around for alternatives.