Troll sues, gets 6-figure legal bill

Apparently blog comments and online forums aren’t the only place you can troll these days. If you want to make the leap to the big leagues, you can self-publish a book on Amazon, and then sue people for posting critical reviews. Only sometimes it backfires.

An author who tried to sue … is facing a six figure legal bill after a judge struck out his case.

Chris McGrath, an online entrepreneur from Milton Keynes, tried to sue Vaughan Jones, 28, from Nuneaton, over a series of reviews and postings he made on the Amazon website about his self-published and little-known book “The Attempted Murder of God”.

Amazon, the prominent evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins and his eponymous foundation were also named as defendants because they either carried the review or discussion threads linked to it that Mr McGrath claimed were libellous.

via The Independent.

[Read more…]

A good Friday: miracle in Texas

Now here’s a miracle I can believe in.

Zachary Moore, DFWCoR’s spokesman, tells Unfair Park that the group reached out to the Angelika chain after being it’s-not-you-it’s-me’d by Movie Tavern. “Initially they said no, and then they said maybe if we changed the ad, and then they said yes to the original,” he writes. “It’s an Easter miracle!”

The ad will begin playing at the theater on Friday.

This would be the ads for the Dallas-Fort Worth Coalition of Reason, on the theme of happy atheist families and what makes them tick. After initially being refused by local theaters, it now looks like the ads are going to run after all.

via “It’s an Easter Miracle”: Dallas Atheists’ New Pre-Movie Ad Will Run at the Plano Angelika – Dallas News – Unfair Park.

ID creationists and their grasp of “reality”

The Coppedge v. JPL and CalTech lawsuit is living up to its early promise and perhaps even surpassing it. David Coppedge himself has submitted a deposition which includes—I am not making this up—a screenplay in which he fantasizes about his co-workers reduced to tears and desperately searching for a way to escape from the invincible correctness of ID propaganda. Here’s a tiny sample.

WEISENFELDER

…and there was a sticky note on the DVD package. It had names on it and – I think he’s trying to keep track of who he loans his DVDs out to. I don’t want him to offer me DVDs ever again. I can’t take it. I just can’t! …

You know, I’m an ordained minister in the Metaphysical Interfaith Church and I –

[NARRATOR (or something)]

According to Weisenfelder, she “feared” Coppedge would try to loan her another DVD when she did not want him to contact her again. (Weisenfelder Dep. Tr. 159:25-161-4). This is a difficult thriller to appreciate without more information, but that’s where Weisenfelder’s dramatic confrontation with Coppedge ends.

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Conservative trust in science in sharp decline

From the color-me-surprised department comes news of this study showing a very clear trend towards anti-science hostility among conservatives and/or people who regularly attend church.

Relying on data from the 1974-2010 waves of the nationally representative General Social Survey, the study found that people who self-identified as conservatives began the period with the highest trust in science, relative to self-identified moderates and liberals, and ended the period with the lowest.

A whole major subculture adopting hostility towards science as one of their major tribal identifiers. This won’t end well.

Laws are for other people

Courtesy of the aptly-titled “Danger Room” at wired.com, we learn that at least some FBI agents have been instructed that ordinary laws don’t necessarily apply to them.

One FBI PowerPoint … stated: “Under certain circumstances, the FBI has the ability to bend or suspend the law to impinge on the freedom of others.” … Like other excerpts from FBI documents Danger Room reviewed for this story, it was not dated and did not include additional context explaining what those “circumstances” might be.

FBI spokesman Christopher Allen did not dispute the documents’ authenticity. He said he would not share the full documents with Danger Room, and was “unable to provide” additional information about their context, including any indication of how many FBI agents were exposed to them.

Swell.

No God? No charity.

The good folks at Rock Beyond Belief have been given the final word: no, absolutely positively no atheists will be allowed to feed homeless vets in connection with their secular, godless concert.

This means that the evangelicals surely had to follow this law too, right? Of course not.

They were permitted to raise funds (in the form of cash!) for months on post. They raised $54,000 in tithing at every chapel on post – there are several. That is a colossal fundraising effort, repeatedly violating the regulation – at multiple locations on post.

But atheists won’t be allowed to collect a few canned goods to help out their fellow soldiers. Because really, what’s the well-being of a bunch of starving, homeless heroes (who have sacrificed so much for the rest of us) compared to the awful and terrifying prospect of having the public realize that atheists are—gasp!—nice people?

Good to see the leadership at Ft. Bragg making such a plain and forthright statement of their priorities.

The equal rights bill you never heard of.

There is a major human rights bill under debate in Canada. You’ve probably never heard of it, which is a bad sign, because it’s important.

It is about what happens to actual human beings. Human beings whose rights are being denied, identities being invalidated, ability to participate in our society being hopelessly compromised, ability to live without fear of assault or harassment being taken away, and pursuit of simplest forms of happiness, fulfillment and life’s rewards being rendered untenable, impossible. Real living, breathing Canadians being denied their chance at anything resembling a full, rewarding and safe life by the complacency of an uninformed public.

Read the full story at Sincerely, Natalie Reed.

School prayer draws opposition from—wait, who?

For more than 30 years, Dr. Harold Brockus was the Presbyterian pastor at the Good Samaritan Church in Pinellas Park. Sermons, missions, prayers. Everything you would expect from a place of worship and a man of God.

So when a school prayer bill landed on Gov. Rick Scott’s desk this month, Rev. Brockus understandably had reason to care. Enough reason to put his name on a letter imploring the governor to do the right thing with this proposed law.

Don’t sign it.

via Tampa Bay Times.

The only people who really profit from laws mandating state-sponsored prayer are the lawyers who will take home fat fees from all the lawsuits it will take to bring the state back in line with the Constitution again.

God’s definition of marriage

God’s definition of marriage, according to a lot of people today, is given in Genesis 2:24: “For this cause a man shall leave his father and mother and cleave to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh.” But there are a few problems with that. For one thing, the word “wife” does not appear in the original text. The word used there is “ishshah,” or woman–the same word Adam uses in the previous verse when he says, “She shall be called woman (ishshah), for she was taken out of man (ish).” There was no license, no priest or rabbi, no vows, or in short, no wedding. Eve was a woman, and Adam just took her and started sleeping with her, without marriage. If you want to find the earliest Biblical reference to actual marriage, you have to go to Sodom.

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I had no choice, he was packing a whole bag of Skittles

This is old news by now, but the passing of time has only made it even more outrageous. A white vigilante named George Zimmerman has shot and killed an unarmed black teenager, and hasn’t even been arrested.

Zimmerman, 28, claims he shot 17-year-old Trayvon Martin last month in self-defence during a confrontation in a gated community in Sanford, Florida.

Zimmerman spotted Martin as he was patrolling his neighbourhood on a rainy evening last month and called the police emergency dispatcher to report a suspicious person. Against the advice of the emergency dispatcher, Zimmerman then followed Martin, who was walking home from a convenience store with a bag of Skittles sweets in his pocket.

via guardian.co.uk.

As the Guardian reports, this has now led to an investigation by the US Justice Department, joined by the FBI and the US attorney’s office. But he still has not been arrested. If you happen to be passing by the Action Request form for the Sanford police department, you might want to ask why not.