Bruin Alliance of Skeptics and Secularists

Great news! BASS was awarded the 2009 Best Website Award from the Center for Inquiry today during the annual CFI On Campus Leadership Conference.

Here I am accepting the award and giving a short thank you speech.

I’m very happy!

Hello CFI!

There have been several noticeable and several hidden updates to the BASS site these past few weeks. The biggest visible change you can see is that the color scheme and the graphics have changed. In the back end, I’ve updgraded Wordpress to the most recent version, removed and added plug-ins, tweaked the PHP, and incorporated several speed tweaks. I spent quite a bit of time (mostly while on the bus) writing notes (a page or two) on what I should do with the site.

BASS won last year’s SSA Best Website award. Hopefully we shall win again this year.The following are excerpts from my application for the Secular Student Alliance Best Website Award: Read more…

This photo appeared in the UCLA yearbook.  (And underneath, they misspelled my name.)  Some of these people are not coming back next year!  Aww.

On Friday June 5th, we had the last meeting of the year.  There was pizza!  Pie!  Chips and soda!  You may get the impression from my minutes that we’re all debate, discussion, and gossip, all the time.  Not so.  A lot of the time we just spend hanging out.  And if someone wants to talk about something which is inordinately nerdy or philosophical, we’ll do that too. Read more…

From Friday, May 29th,

Meeting discussion

We had another excellent presentation by Deja today about moral panics.  Moral panics are when people think there’s something out there that’s corrupting our precious children.  Please, won’t someone think of the children?  Some examples of moral panics are comic books, music, videogames, satanic cults, and the pedobear.  In the music category, people panicked about KISS (they thought it stood for “Knights in Satan’s Service”), Elvis’ gyrating hips, and about Judas Priest (they thought they were trying to get their listeners to commit suicide).  Ironically, sometimes you’d have to have a dirty mind to see these things, like Tipper Gore saw sadomasochism in Twisted Sister’s “Under the Blade”. Read more…