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stcynic | November 3, 2006The violence is escalating, with more than 2000 nuts protesting in Jerusalem.
Police were pelted with stones and bottles Thursday night as members of the Haredi ultra Orthodox Jewish sect engaged in a third night of rioting over next week's planned gay pride march in Jerusalem.
More than two thousand members of the sect jammed into streets in an Orthodox neighborhood in a show of force aimed at pressuring authorities into canceling the parade.
As in the past two nights the protestors rolled garbage cans into intersections to block mounted police from getting to the demonstrators. The…
stcynic | November 3, 2006Woman gets gang raped, gets sentenced by the court to 90 lashes for being alone with a man in a car. There must be quite a time change between here and Saudi Arabia. It's 11:41 here and it's 1100 AD there. Must be on Medieval Savings Time.
stcynic | November 3, 2006Updated: Haggard has apparently confessed.
Ted Haggard, president of the National Association of Evangelicals and pastor of a huge megachurch, has stepped down as NAE leader after a male prostitute went public and said that Haggard had been paying him for sex regularly for 3 years.
Mike Jones, 49, told The Associated Press that Haggard paid him to have sex nearly every month for three years. His allegations were first aired on KHOW-AM in Denver.
Jones said that he had advertised himself as an escort on the Internet and that a man who called himself Art contacted him. Jones said he later saw…
stcynic | November 3, 2006Kehrsam sent me a link to this article about a preacher named KA Paul who goes around the country preaching that Bush is preventing the second coming of Christ.
The Houston-based preacher said he believes that the Bush administration has delayed the second coming because U.S. foreign policy has blocked Christian missionaries from working in Iraq, Iran and Syria.
That's a new twist in wingnuttery, don't you think?
stcynic | November 3, 2006There's a controversy going on in Canada after a union of postal workers in Vancouver refused to deliver a piece of mail they considered bigoted.
Unionized postal workers at an east Vancouver sub-station walked off the job Thursday morning, refusing to handle a publication called The Prophetic Word, published by the Ontario-based Fundamental Baptist mission. The protest was sparked by a headline on an article by Rev. Sterling Clark which stated that AIDS was "the consequences of the sin of homosexuality." Union spokesman Ken Mooney characterized the booklet as an anti-gay diatribe.
Yep,…
stcynic | November 3, 2006One of the mantras for conservatives for decades when it comes to education is the importance of local control. So adamant were they about this that conservative politicians have long run on platforms advocating the elimination of the Department of Education completely. Indeed, the 1996 Republican Party Platform contained this item:
"The Federal Government has no constitutional authority to be involved in school curricula or to control jobs in the marketplace. That is why we will abolish the Department of Education."
The year before that, in fact, conservatives in Congress attempted to do…
tqa | November 2, 2006If you're looking for an update to this blog, you'll have to wait until Monday. I'm off to the Big Island for a few days of fieldwork. I'll be observing flies in their natural habitat over in Volcanoes National Park.
stcynic | November 2, 2006It seems I have a new troll. His name appears to be Brian Louks, judging by his email address of brianlouks@yahoo.com. His first comment was objecting to me calling Pensacola Christian College and Kent Hovind a bunch of loonies. After that, he just took to writing multiple comments saying "try weight watchers" and "go on a diet". Brilliant stuff, really. Anyway, I thought you'd all like to meet him. Here's his yahoo profile.
Update: The troll can email too. He just sent the following bit of nonsense:
You can spout off false statements on your blog and delete one that you dont agree with...…
grrlscientist | November 2, 2006Okay, this is the last word from Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway.
Immaterial (im-uh-TEER-EE-uhl) [Latin im- without, not mÄteriÄlis; of, belonging to matter.]
adj.
of no essential consequence; unimportant.
not pertinent; irrelevant.
not material; incorporeal; spiritual; having no material body or form.
Usage: Mr. Fletcher, retired, of the Treasury, Mrs. Gorham, widow of the famous K. C., approaached Him simply, and having done their praying, leant back, enjoyed the music (the organ pealed sweetly), and saw Miss Kilman at the end of the row, praying, praying, and, being still on the…
grrlscientist | November 2, 2006I have some terribly sad news. William Styron, one of my favorite writers, died yesterday from pneumonia in Martha's Vineyard, Massachusetts. Styron is best known for his lyrical and tragic novel about a holocaust survivor, Sophie's Choice, a bestseller that was made into a movie with the same name, and for The Confessions of Nat Turner, the story of a black slave revolt that won the Pulitzer Prize in 1968. The last book that Styron completed, Darkness Visible (1990), was a short memoir of his descent into a deep depression that caused him to drink heavily and nearly ended with his suicide.…
stcynic | November 2, 2006And the Worldnutdaily is hot on the story.
The Ohio woman, after hearing the shocking confirmation directly from the mega-corporation's international headquarters that the company is, in fact, contributing to the financial and moral agenda of the nation's "gay" chamber of commerce, she quit. And she's not a bit worried.
"I got God backing me. That's where I stand on it," she told WND in an interview.
I don't think God is gonna help you get unemployment benefits. And you're gonna love the rest of the article:
Baird had worked for the corporation, in various branches including Sam's Club and…
stcynic | November 2, 2006Wanna get scared about the upcoming election? Read this Wired article. I dismissed all this talk of election fraud for the last two years as just being an outlandish conspiracy theory, but the more I see reports like this the more real it becomes. And nothing less than our entire system of government is at stake.
The reports, totaling more than 500 pages, paint a disturbing picture of how million-dollar equipment and security safeguards can quickly be undone by poor product design, improper election procedures and inadequate training. From destroyed ballots and vote totals that didn't add up…
stcynic | November 2, 2006I'm enjoying this fight quite a bit. Dick Armey has written an open letter where he slams James Dobson as a man who cares more about keeping the money flowing to his organizations than in actually accomplishing anything (gee, that would be a shock) and Dobson replies with a column on Fox News' website. Dobson misrepresents Armey's position rather badly, claiming that Armey is accusing him of being for things he's against:
Nevertheless, he has implied that I am among those who favor a government monopoly of schools, government-funded "art," taxpayer supported "family planning" organizations,…
grrlscientist | November 1, 2006Thanks everyone for visiting my humble blog -- more than 300,000 people have visited this blog since 12 January! This is the best gift I could have, especially since my hospital discharge date, which was supposed to be tomorrow, was pushed back to the 15th of November. I appreciate your patience with me, especially since I have been unable to regularly access the internet these past months. But I will be back and writing soon.
If I add in the numbers of visitors from my original blog, as of this moment, I have enjoyed nearly 450,000 total readers' visits since 4 August 2004, when I first…
grrlscientist | November 1, 2006I found this wonderful word (below) in a book by the amazing and incomparable Virginia Woolf, entitled Mrs. Dalloway.
Taciturnity (tas-i-TUR-ni-tee) [Latin taciturnitÄs; from tacitus, silent.]
n.
the state or quality of being reserved or reticent in conversation.
Scots Law. the relinquishing of a legal right through an unduly long delay, as by the silence of the creditor.
Usage: Odd it was, as Miss Kilman stood there (and stand she did, with the power and taciturnity of some prehistoric monster amoured for primeval warfare) how, second by second, the idea of her diminished, how…
stcynic | November 1, 2006Fellow ScienceBlogger Shelley Batts is a finalist for a $5000 scholarship for blogging college students and she needs our help to win. So everyone who reads this click here and vote for her. She currently has 273 votes and there are about 7000 people who read this blog every day, so let's push that vote total up over 5000 by the end of the day. And if Diebold isn't in charge of the voting, she might just win.
stcynic | November 1, 2006And why? Because one of the companies that makes them has been bought by a company with ties to Hugo Chavez:
The federal government is investigating the takeover last year of a leading American manufacturer of electronic voting systems by a small software company that has been linked to the leftist Venezuelan government of President Hugo Chávez.
Now I agree with them, there should be no foreign ownership at all of a company that provides voting machines, particularly ones with any ties to a nut like Chavez. But isn't it ridiculous that this gets the attention of the Federal government when 3…
tqa | October 31, 2006Staffers for Virginia Senator George Allen attacked a blogger today at a campaign event, and are now trying to lie their way out of it. Here's their version of the events:
As the Senator was trying to exit the room with a campaign staffer, the Democrat activist, identified as Mike Stark, pushed the Allen staffer. Later, volunteers restrained him and asked to leave the building when he approached the Senator a second time, asking inappropriate questions.
Reality, as seen in the CNN footage available on the Think Progress website, paints a slightly different picture of events:
If you watch the…
stcynic | October 31, 2006From Charlie Crist, Republican candidate for governor of Florida, during a debate with opponent Jim Davis:
Crist, (pictured) who currently is Attorney General and who has dogged suggestions throughout the campaign that he is gay, had one of the more unusual reasons for opposing same-sex marriage, saying marriage is a "sacred" relationship - "like I had, before I got divorced."
You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.
stcynic | October 31, 2006When Minuteman founder Jim Gilchrist had his speech disrupted and overrun by protestors a month ago, I wrote the following:
And mark my words, Columbia won't do a thing about it. Not a single student will be disciplined for their actions.
When Columbia President Lee Bollinger, himself a noted first amendment scholar, issued a strongly worded letter eloquently defending free speech, calling the incident "one of the most serious breaches of academic faith that can occur" at a university and promsing "full accountability by those found to be responsible", I hoped i would be proven wrong in that…