Politics
pharyngula | November 23, 2009Representative Patrick Kennedy has been barred from taking communion by the Catholic church. This is a politically motivated action to intimidate a politician into supporting a position on a political issue opposed by the church, abortion rights. Hmmm…using religion to commit extortion. How unusual.
I feel for him. I have a few consecrated wafers somewhere around the house; I'd love to send him some so he could cannibalize Jesus, but unfortunately, I also got threats to send me poisoned wafers from a few good Catholics, and I haven't tested them. I'd rather not be responsible for murdering a…
j7uy5 | November 23, 2009Is there some kind of especially violent undercurrent right now, in the
right-wing river of hate?
Ed Brayton just
href="http://scienceblogs.com/dispatches/2009/11/missouri_republicans_call_for.php">posted
about a billboard put up by the GOP, specifically the
href="http://lafayettecountyrepublicans.blogspot.com/2009/11/new-i-70-billboard-replaces-famed.html">Lafayette
County
(Missouri) Republicans:
style="display: inline;">
src="http://scienceblogs.com/dispatches/I-70%20Billboard%2011_19_09.jpg"
class="mt-image-none" style="" height="300" width="400">
The
sign
href="http://…
emjohnson | November 20, 2009Now that the Darwin Reclamation Project collage has been posted, I can confess that I have a few problems with the recent atheist action that sought to counter the dunderhead Ray Comfort and his Creationist propaganda ministry. I'm not sure who originally suggested this action, but I don't think it was well thought out. Having athiests systematically round up as many copies as they can of a work they disagree with (however ridiculous such a work may be) stinks of censorship and creates an impression in the broader public that Comfort's arguments are somehow threatening to evolutionary…
oracknows | November 20, 2009As I discussed in detail when I analyzed them, the new USPSTF recommendations for screening mammography for breast cancer have sparked a debate that has degenerated from a scientific and public policy debate into pure emotional rhetoric. When last I visited this topic, yesterday, I had intended it to be my last post for a while, perhaps ever. However, the amount of idiocy that I was dealing with became so overwhelming and the post grew to even huger than Orac-ian proportions. So I decided to split the post into two parts, because the particular argument I'm about to discuss deserves its very…
catdynamics | November 19, 2009There is a radical proposal in Iceland to restore the economy and rescue the nation from bankruptcy: expand the tax base to recover revenue from the extensive underground economy.
Tax the fucking elves!
Translation by Alda at the Iceland Weather Report
Yeah! The Free Ride Is Over.
Party is over, Elves!
Income and capital gains taxes on the elves - especially the High Light Elves, that should cover the repayments to the UK all by themselves. This applies to all the Hidden Folk.
Ghosts, zombies and others in the afterlife will be charged a Death Tax.
Dwarves will, finally, pay VAT!
That…
jrosenhouse | November 18, 2009Sarah Palin's new book does not contain an index. So Christopher Beam, writing at Slate made one for her! Not that you were planning to read the book anyway, but this will save you the trouble.
If for some reason you want to know more about the book, have a look at the review in The New York Times. For example:
Elsewhere in this volume she talks about creationism, saying she “didn't believe in the theory that human beings -- thinking, loving beings -- originated from fish that sprouted legs and crawled out of the sea” or from “monkeys who eventually swung down from the trees.” In…
drorzel | November 18, 2009It's always kind of distressing to find something you agree with being said by people who also espouse views you find nutty, repulsive, or reprehensible. It doesn't make them any less right, but it makes it a little more difficult to be associated with those views.
So, for instance, there's this broadside against ineffective math education, via Arts & Letters Daily. It's got some decent points about the failings of modern math education, which lead to many of our entering students being unable to do algebra. But along the way, you get frothiness like the following:
The educational trends…
pharyngula | November 16, 2009She has so much of it to spread around, too. Sarah Palin's memoir reveals her unsurprising opinion about evolution.
Elsewhere in this volume, she talks about creationism, saying she "didn't believe in the theory that human beings — thinking, loving beings — originated from fish that sprouted legs and crawled out of the sea" or from "monkeys who eventually swung down from the trees." In everything that happens to her, from meeting Todd to her selection by Mr. McCain for the Republican ticket, she sees the hand of God: "My life is in His hands. I encourage readers to do what I did many years…
pharyngula | November 16, 2009That seems to be the idea behind forming a council of key policy advisors, whose qualifications seem to be the fervency of their obeisance to an invisible man in the sky.
The move has been criticised by secularists who warned that it represented a worrying development.
However, Mr Denham argued that Christians and Muslims can contribute significant insights on key issues, such as the economy, parenting and tackling climate change.
Oh, really? How? I suppose tithing and refusing to allow money to be lent at interest are a kind of economic strategy…just not a very productive one. And I don't…
oracknows | November 15, 2009Since I seem to have attracted several truly idiotic Holocaust deniers in the comments after this post, including, believe it or not, Eric Hunt, the anti-Semite who attacked Elie Wiesel at a San Francisco hotel in 2007 and who now runs a blog full of Holocaust denial and anti-Semitism where he recently bragged about attending an appearance by arch-Holocaust denier David Irving and bleating about a vacuous legal suit he's bringing against Steven Spielberg and Irene Weisberg Zisblatt over what he considers to be a "defamatory" documentary.
How do I deserve such "honors"?
In any case, while I'm…
grrlscientist | November 14, 2009tags: religion, fundamentalism, christianity, Why Do Atheists Care About Religion?, imrational, streaming video
How does religion impinge upon each American's rights? This video should open your eyes to the ridiculous, backwards and utterly nonsensical laws that control our lives because of someone's religious beliefs.
razib | November 13, 2009John Emerson points me to some interesting data crunching over at Open Left. The diarist, "dreaminonempty," is analyzing the past few years' election results against demographic variables. What's there not to like? Though I do think the perspective is a bit too The Emerging Democratic Majority. Yes, it does look like the Republicans, as a white Christian party, are in a world of demographic hurt. But, be cautious about projecting current trends too far. By that, I mean that the trends working against the Republicans are clear, but we aren't quite where the Republicans were during the 1970s-…
pharyngula | November 13, 2009A sensible federal judge has struck down South Carolina's plan to proselytize with license plates, pointing out that it violates the separation of church and state for the state to not only endorse religion, but a specific religious sect. Good work, except that it would have been such a useful marker for vehicles to avoid on the road — after all, their drivers could be raptured up into heaven at any moment.
I suppose there will be a compensatory over-reaction to help out, though. All the Christian drivers of the state are still welcome to slap on lots of bumper stickers and cover their…
pharyngula | November 12, 2009The man who slaughtered 13 unarmed people in Fort Hood, Major Nidal Malik Hasan, was clearly mentally ill, and should have been treated and cared for before he snapped and went on a rampage. Unfortunately, there's another factor that seems to be getting minimized in the press accounts: he was also a member of an Abrahamic death cult. Ibn Warraq has come out with a strong statement on the Islamic terrorism that motivated the attacks.
It is time to abandon apologetics, and political correctness. Not all Muslims are terrorists. Not all Muslims are implicated in the horrendous events of…
pharyngula | November 12, 2009Wow. I thought our local vets were petty when they threatened to yank scholarships if they weren't allowed to lead prayers in public schools, but now someone has topped them. Who, you may wonder? As if you couldn't guess, the Catholic Church leads the way in small-minded extortion.
The Catholic Archdiocese of Washington said Wednesday that it will be unable to continue the social service programs it runs for the District if the city doesn't change a proposed same-sex marriage law, a threat that could affect tens of thousands of people the church helps with adoption, homelessness and health…
pharyngula | November 12, 2009Sometimes I find it hard to believe how callous these conservative politicians can be. The governor of Rhode Island has just vetoed a bill that would have allowed a same-sex partner to make funeral arrangements for a dead partner. So imagine this: someone wracked with grief at the loss of someone to whom they had committed a substantial part of their life now gets to also be told that they are locked out of the responsibility of taking care of anything to do with the funeral ceremony. How degrading and insensitive; how vile and intrusive.
Shame on Governor Carcieri. It takes a real man to…
ddobbs | November 12, 2009
Ben Cardin, a Maryland Democrat, has asked the Pentagon for info on how many troops in war zones have been prescribed antidepressants while they were deployed. Cardin sent a letter Tuesday to US Department of Defense Secretary Robert Gates expressing concern about how antidepressants are being administered troops in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Cardin wants to determine if the Defense Department is prescribing antidepressants appropriately and is concerned about any connection between the meds and suicide rates among troops. In October, for instance, 16 active-duty US soldiers killed themselves,…
terrasig | November 11, 2009
A bit off-topic of the blog but a science building on campus is hosting a discussion with Guadeloupe-born footballer, Lilian Thuram. He was considered to be one of the best players in Europe; his best-known accomplishment of his 15-year career playing defender with Monaco, Parma FC, Juventus, FC Barcelona and the French national team, is contributing to France winning the 1998 World Cup.
However, Thuram was forced into retirement in 2008 following a diagnosis of cardiac hypertrophy (ventricular, I assume, and pathological, not typical "athlete's heart"). The same condition claimed Thuram's…
pharyngula | November 11, 2009This is a charming local story for Veteran's day. The American Legion post in Bloomington has been doing a little ceremony at the public schools for 40 years, and has also been giving scholarships to students. Last year, they surprised the school by adding a public prayer to their ritual; this year, the school asked them not to do that. Guess what their reply was?
To announce in a snit that they wouldn't do the ceremony at all if they couldn't make it religious, and that they'd also take their scholarships away.
Nice.
They have every right to do that, of course. I would have thought that…
pharyngula | November 10, 2009The sentencing of a convicted murder, Khristian Oliver, should be an embarrassment to the state of Texas; the jurors consulted the Old Testament to see what should be done with him, found a bible verse they liked — "And if he smite him with an instrument of iron, so that he die, he is a murderer: the murderer shall surely be put to death" — and sentenced him to be executed.
Well, that was just fine with Governor Rick Perry. Oliver has been killed. Isn't it nice to have the importance of biblical morality affirmed for us once again?