NASA engineer humours the 2012 doomsayer crowd

No Nibiru/Planet X, no planetary alignments, no predicted magnetic pole reversals (and even if they happened they wouldn’t harm us), no solar flares, and the Mayans only predicted a calendar roll-over, so big whoop.

“Folks have to be very careful when they get information on the web.” Yeah, if you have not a scrap of scientific knowledge to lean on, and have no functional bullshit detector, what you find on the web is going to be… well, hearsay at best.

So on December 21, party like it’s the day before the 14th B’ak’tun and the start of Long Count 2..

NASA engineer humours the 2012 doomsayer crowd
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Justin Griffith covered by Fox News and BBC: an exercise in compare/contrast

I could not ask for a more perfect bit of compare/contrast. The mainstream American media is stone-silent about Sergeant Justin Griffith of Rock Beyond Belief fame, with the obvious exception of Fox News. The only news you’ll get about this atheist-in-a-foxhole Stateside is the fact that one of the acts for Rock Beyond Belief once did a music video that included images of a church burning, in a song denouncing sectarian religious violence, and Fox News spun it all to hell and back as though it was military-sanctioned encouragement of violence against religions.

Meanwhile, across the Pond, the BBC has covered Justin and our shared fight asking if the US army can embrace atheists. Their answer is significantly more reality-based than Fox’s, of course.
Continue reading “Justin Griffith covered by Fox News and BBC: an exercise in compare/contrast”

Justin Griffith covered by Fox News and BBC: an exercise in compare/contrast

The Birth of the Moon

An intriguing documentary has caught my eye with its slick teaser trailer.

We like the moon. Because it is close to us.

I can’t wait to see this doc when it’s out. I’ve had a long-standing love affair with the moon and its effects on our planet. I’ve posted quite a bit about it in the past, a number of times in fact.

Apparently, Cosmic Journeys has a number of such documentaries online, each about half an hour minus commercial time, making it ripe for syndication to a real network. Why nobody’s picked this up to fill a time slot somewhere is completely beyond me. They’re slickly produced, engaging, have an excellent narrator, and are completely free. And they’re about one of the most engaging and important topics we as humans could ever study: the universe itself, on a macroscopic scale far beyond our transient and provincial lives.

The Birth of the Moon

Catholics’ protest against HHS contraceptive rules completely misfires

So Catholic officials are up in arms about the US Department of Health and Human Services’ new regulation requiring all employers to provide contraceptives to insured employees with no co-pay. The very idea that people who use contraceptives to prevent pregnancy might actually not have to pay for those contraceptives is evidently so anathema to the very foundational dogmas of the Catholic church, that the leaders of said church must absolutely take a stand for their parishioners. To wit:

In a letter read to congregants in the Atlanta Archdiocese, Archbishop Wilton Gregory called the policy “a matter of grave moral concern.”

“In so ruling, the Administration has cast aside the First Amendment to the Constitution of the United States, denying to Catholics our Nation’s first and most fundamental freedom, that of religious liberty,” the letter continued and was read at all English and Spanish language Masses, the diocese said in a statement.
[…]
“In effect, the president is saying we have a year to figure out how to violate our consciences,” said New York Archbishop Timothy Dolan in a statement.

“To force American citizens to choose between violating their consciences and forgoing their health care is literally unconscionable. It is as much an attack on access to health care as on religious freedom. Historically this represents a challenge and a compromise of our religious liberty,” said Dolan who is also the president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, the public policy arm of the church in the United States.

And yet…

And yet I wonder.
Continue reading “Catholics’ protest against HHS contraceptive rules completely misfires”

Catholics’ protest against HHS contraceptive rules completely misfires

Things that cannot screen for breast cancer, and things that can

"Things that cannot screen for breast cancer: pink water bottles, pink phone cases, pink t-shirts, pink spatulas. Things that can: DOCTORS AT PLANNED PARENTHOOD"

Via Lian Amaris who is also on Twitter and is evidently my kinda person.

For more context, visit Greg’s. The TL;DR: Susan G. Komen For The Cure caved recently to anti-choice activists and has stopped giving money to Planned Parenthood who, you know, actually does screening for breast cancer. As well as pap smear screenings for cervical cancer. And abortions for patients who need to undergo chemotherapy for their cancer.

I’m putting this one in religion, because there are no pro-life arguments that do not originate in some religious person somewhere.

Things that cannot screen for breast cancer, and things that can

America’s 2012 election: vote for Canada

Meet the Canada Party. They offer an alternative to the ridiculous offerings the Republican Party has on display, and the “guy who gave a drunk Congress the keys to the country”.

Seriously, it’s the best choice for all of us, even if our present Prime Minister is a Muppet version of George W. Bush. I mean, just look at your other options.

America’s 2012 election: vote for Canada