Jesus and Mo dance around the Confirmation Circle. [Read more…]
Butterflies and Wheels
Gnu atheism, women's rights, internationalism, universalism, and gossip
Jesus and Mo dance around the Confirmation Circle. [Read more…]
Now a piece of horrible news from Mauritania:
A Muslim man has become the first person to be sentenced to death for apostasy in Mauritania since independence in 1960 after a court ruled he had written something blasphemous.
Mohamed Cheikh Ould Mohamed, who is around 30 years old, fainted when the ruling was read out late Wednesday in a court in Nouadhibou in the northwest of the country, a judicial source told AFP.
Department of Stories that we suspect didn’t happen quite the way they were described.
The New York Post reports – or, rather, melodramatizes – a tale of an evil Grumpy Passenger being thrown off a plane during boarding because he was a demonic Enemy of Christmas.
The byline is Michael Liss, Daniel Prendergast and Philip Messing, which seems like a lot for such a tiny story (in both length and import). Maybe they’re all sock puppets of Bill O’Reilly, or Murdoch himself. [Read more…]
So there was this charity event. It was held at an Elks Lodge. The lodge is in Glendale, California. The host of the event was a retired cop. About half of the 50 to 60 guests were cops.
You can probably already tell this story isn’t going to go well.
Somebody took some video. Salon reports on what the video shows. [Read more…]
Here is another reason to dislike Bill Maher.
Bill Maher@billmaher
#TheInterview Is that all it takes – an anonymous threat and the numbers 911 – to throw free expression under the bus? #PussyNation
He wouldn’t use #NiggerNation that way. He didn’t, and he wouldn’t. Yet he thinks it’s ok to use #PussyNation that way. (Yes, Jon Stewart also does that [unless he’s stopped], and that sucks too.)
The New York Public Library has a Christmas / solstice / holiday / rainy day present for us: questions asked of reference librarians in the days before The Google.
Recently some folks at the New York Public Library discovered a box containing old reference questions from the 1940s to 1980s. They’ll be posting the questions to their Instagram account on Mondays (starting today), but have shared a bunch with us today, noting, “we were Google before Google existed.”
I love it when people discover a box containing treasure. [Read more…]
The junior Senator from my home state of New Jersey sends us a shout-out.
Today is HumanLight — a Humanist holiday celebrates a Humanist’s vision of a good future on December 23. I wish you all a good future and a happy holiday!
Same to you Senator!
The first paragraph of a somewhat rambling think piece about Joan Didion snagged my attention.
EVEN NOW, even in this century, decades past the pictures with Corvettes and cigarettes and sunglasses, even after her manner, with its uneasy admixture of condescension toward the world and delicacy toward the self, became case study for how to be slightly dangerous and stylish and aloof as a writer without the compensatory aid of masculine bravado, there is always murmuring about Joan Didion.
Is police work the most dangerous job you can do?
No. You know what is? Construction.
Construction is one of the most dangerous occupations in the world, incurring more occupational fatalities than any other sector in both the United States and in the European Union.[27][28] In 2009, the fatal occupational injury rate among construction workers in the United States was nearly three times that for all workers.[27]
Have a table from 2006.
Construction workers are far more at risk than cops are. Maek you think.
