Leaving tomorrow

Oh hey, I just remembered, the Women in Secularism conference starts on Friday.

No I’m kidding, I didn’t just remember, but it kind of feels like it. Despite all the anticipation and discussion, a moment did arrive last week some time when I thought, “Oh, it’s almost now,” as if it had crept up on me.

There’s a story on it in the Houston Chronicle, or in the Houston Chronicle’s blog (or both). Look at Amy there!

Women peruse a table with female freethought paraphernalia at the first Women in Secularism conference in Washington D.C. (Photo: Center for Inquiry)

photo by Brian S Engler

And Debbie Goddard over by the back wall, under the light. [Read more…]

When hashtags collide

A guest post by Athyco in a comment on A new way to stir up trouble.

It has been a knotted mass of stupid from the beginning, and each one contributes their little bit to the mess.

I looked over the comments to Karla’s It’s Personal blog post dismissing this WBC contact, then clicked on her banner to look at some other post titles. I wasn’t looking for anything that would relate to a tweet/con problem, but one surprised me.

Did you know that Karla, as one of four organizers, was not at all happy to have a tweet to #NEPABlogCon (single day September 2012 con for Northeast Pennsylvania bloggers) from someone who wasn’t interested in promoting/attending the con? [Read more…]

A bad trend

Goodluck Jonathan has declared a state of emergency in three states in northern Nigeria because of the way Boko Haram keeps killing people.

It is not the first time that the president has declared a state of emergency, but this is a clear admission that far from being weakened by the army offensive, the threat of the Islamist militants is growing, says the BBC’s Will Ross in Lagos.

And it is the first time that Mr Jonathan has admitted that parts of the country are no longer under central government control, says our correspondent.

The Beeb says 2000 people have been killed in “the violence” since 2010. It doesn’t say how many were people blown up or shot down by Boko Haram, but it was probably most or almost all, since that’s what Boko Haram does.

 

Focus on the Dobson

James Dobson. I don’t talk about James Dobson enough, do I.

James Dobson has a question for his Friends.

Are you tired of hearing about same sex marriage coming from President Obama, liberal Congressmen, media spokesmen, leftist commentators, activist judges, entertainment moguls and homosexual advocates? These and other powerful influencers have set about redefining marriage as it has been known for 5,000 years.

Yeah, 5000 years. Or wait – wasn’t it more like 50? The Donna Reed Show – that wasn’t 5000 years ago was it? [Read more…]

Bill has spoken

Wahay – Bill Donohue (who likes to call himself “The Catholic League”) says there’s no sexual abuse crisis in the Catholic church! Whew, we can all pack up and go home.

Bill Donohue comments on the 2012 Annual Report by the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops on the subject of sexual abuse:

The survey, done by an institute at Georgetown University, shows how utterly absurd it is to maintain that the Catholic Church continues to have a problem with priestly sexual abuse. [Read more…]

Sir, permission to report a rape, sir

I saw The Invisible War on Independent Lens last night, and was duly and thoroughly horrified.

It’s about sexual assault in the US military. There’s a lot of it, and it goes almost completely unpunished. 20% of women are raped during their service, and 1% of men are. Because there are a lot more men than women in the military, the 1% is a big absolute number.

The military is exactly like the Catholic church in this respect – sexual abuse including rape is dealt with in house – with the major difference that in the case of the military that’s legal.

But guess fucking what – that doesn’t work. It’s in house, so the people who should be policing are instead protecting. Rape victims have to go to their superiors to report a rape, and their superiors don’t want to do anything about it. [Read more…]

Pas du tout

Melvyn Bragg doesn’t like the way A C Grayling and Richard Dawkins talk about religion.

He said: ‘The intellectual slackness and terrorism of these atheists, people who I otherwise respected – Richard Dawkins as an explainer of zoology is peerless, and AC Grayling is a great explainer of philosophy. ‘But when they start discussing religion, it’s disgraceful. Religion is basically a great body of knowledge, and we don’t have many bodies of knowledge.’

No it isn’t. That’s just what it isn’t. It’s anti-knowledge. It’s un-knowledge. It’s a huge body of claims to know things that no one knows. It’s an insult to the very idea of knowledge.

Granted it is certainly possible to know a lot about religion…but it’s possible to know a lot about bears, too; that doesn’t make bears a great body of knowledge.

But he said “basically.” Maybe by “basically” he actually meant “not at all.”

 

 

That was my seal carcass

I watched quite a good show on the Discovery Channel last night, about grizzly bears. A crew got (we were told) closer than anyone ever before had gotten for an extended period to a bunch of grizzlies at a bay in Alaska where more grizzlies gather than anywhere else. They gather for the salmon.

I confide this bit of gossip to you for a reason. I noticed an interesting thing – not at all surprising, but interesting. It’s a hard life being a bear. You have to pack in the food in order to survive the winter. You can’t decide oh well it’s ok I’ll just keep hunting all winter, because you’ll be hibernating instead.

It’s a hard life, so naturally it’s a competitive life. The males grab food away from the females. [Read more…]