Oh, my…I think every postman ought to be equipped with a video camera to record their interactions with customers, even though sometimes it may be horrific.
Pharyngula
Evolution, development, and random biological ejaculations from a godless liberal
Oh, my…I think every postman ought to be equipped with a video camera to record their interactions with customers, even though sometimes it may be horrific.
I have arrived after a long, long series of flights, and have already experienced wonderful Mexican hospitality and Negro Modelo, many thanks to the gang from Masa Critica, so all is right in the world. It’s not too late to show up, you can register at the door, just come on out to the Hotel Fiesta Inn Centro Histórico and join us at 8 tomorrow morning for Primer Coloquio Mexicano de Ateísmo. There will be live internet streaming of some of the talks, so let’s hope more of the Spanish-speaking world takes advantage of this event, too.
La fe NO mueve montañas, la ciencia sí!
A young woman, Asia Bibi, had a few words to say about Islam.
She said that “the Quran is fake and your prophet remained in bed for one month before his death because he had worms in his ears and mouth. He married Khadija just for money and after looting her kicked her out of the house,” local police official Muhammad Ilyas told CNN.
Yes, the police got involved! More than involved: Asia Bibi has been sentenced to death for blasphemy.
She was also fined $1100.
Meanwhile, Walid Husayin has been writing an atheist blog, anonymously, in Palestine. He also mocked gods on Facebook. Now he’s been caught — he was spotted posting heretical words on his computer in an internet cafe — and people are very unhappy with him.
Now, he faces a potential life prison sentence on heresy charges for “insulting the divine essence.” Many in this conservative Muslim town say he should be killed for renouncing Islam, and even family members say he should remain behind bars for life.
“He should be burned to death,” said Abdul-Latif Dahoud, a 35-year-old Qalqiliya resident. The execution should take place in public “to be an example to others,” he added.
The state probably won’t kill him — they’re only talking about a life sentence in prison.
You know, the gods are only harmless phantasms. It’s their believers who are parasites and killers and dangerous lunatics.
I remember my physical education class in high school — the instructor (I will not dignify him with the title “teacher”) was a psychopath, as far as I was concerned. He ran the class like a petty tyrant; members of the football team were treated royally and given exemptions and privileges, while the rest of us were subject to his whims and rather vicious rules. We had jock strap inspections every day, and if we were unequipped, we’d be punished; we had to, for instance, run a certain number of laps around the track, and the students who came in last would be punished. And punishment was always the same: we’d be paddled. Not gently, but great walloping strikes with a perforated chunk of wood shaped like a cricket bat. We would be hit so hard that Old Man Earl would actually frequently break the bat on our butts, so he had a stockpile of them in his office. Once he decided to wack every student in the class for some annoying infraction, and he went through three or four of them, covering the gym floor with splinters and broken chunks of wood.
I’m surprised, looking back, on the horrors the PE teacher could get away with because he was the coach of a winning public school football team; I’m most surprised, though, that we actually let it happen, and it was unthinkable at the time to stand up to the blustering, crew-cutted, 6½ foot tall lunatic and tell him that he was a disgrace and ought to be fired.
But I had it good. I was living in Washington state, not Alabama. I also got out of PE classes as quickly as possible and focused on the science courses, which were far more reasonably run. Trust me, you never, ever want to take an academic course from the local coach of brutal team sports.
Now I’ve read this account of one public school teacher in contemporary Alabama.
Payton attends Plainview Elementary and is in the seventh grade. Recently, Lewis claims her son came home from school with severe bruises and welts on his behind. Melissa Lewis said her son was upset, “Mom look at my butt and see if there is something wrong with it? He dropped his pants and I said wow what happened? He said I got paddled because I did not pass my science test.”
Whoa. What possible pedagogical purpose does physical punishment have in a science course? I suppose I could stand up in front of my class and tell them that if they don’t master simple Mendelian genetics right now, I’ma gonna cut a beeyatch, but I don’t think it would have a positive effect on learning.
Anyway, the teacher has apparently been doing this for years. The response so far? Teachers have been sent a letter “discouraging” the use of corporal punishment in the classroom, but it’s still allowed. Why? Don’t ask me. Maybe it’s because the locals are all ignorant thugs, an idea supported by the online poll on the article.
Should Congress ban the use of corporal punishment in the classroom?
Yes, it has no place in the classroom
24%
No, things are fine the way they are
38%
Leave it up to the schools to decide15%
More guidelines need to be established
23%
Hmmm. How about if teacher and administrator performance reviews were motivated by the presence of a big grinning maniac of a football coach, equipped with a big stick or switch, and anyone who didn’t come up to snuff would get a vigorous thrashing? Views on the allowability of corporal punishment might change a little faster.
A few days ago, sent you off to vote on a debate on genetically-modified crops, a debate that has continued onwards.
We didn’t quite pharyngulate this poll; it has gone back and forth, and now the anti-GMO forces have a pretty good lead. One reason that we didn’t pound it into the ground is that there was some dissension here, even — I think a fair number of the people who read about it here went off to vote for the antis. And then, also, I’ve learned that the anti-GMO gang organized their own opposition (which is perfectly fair!), which I suspect voted with much more unity than the gang from here.
Anyway, I have obtained some top secret email from the organic gang’s mailing list, shown here for your amusement:
The Economist has a GM debate sponsored by BASF: “This house believes that biotechnology and sustainable agriculture are complementary, not contradictory.”
We’re currently losing and the debate rounds up in the next 48 hours.
Please vote now and vote NO – and tell everyone you know to do the same.
Message from Phil Chandler
Please – show the GM industry what you think of them with just one click – no signup, name or email needed – just go here – http://tinyurl.com/3yk4xj6 and vote AGAINST the motion.
I suspect this has been worded in an attempt to ask a ‘soft’ question, which sounds harmless, so that people will be fooled into agreeing with it. But the fact is that GM and sustainable agriculture are NOT compatible, or complementary, as the very presence of GM in an open space means that organic and other non-GM crops will inevitably be contaminated. This is happening wherever GM crops are grown, and is well-documented. American farmers who were sold on GM ten years ago are now turning against it – listen to my podcast at http://biobees.libsyn.com for evidence of this.
Don’t be fooled by industry propaganda: GM crops are TOTALLY INCOMPATIBLE with sustainable agriculture.
This is not a definitive survey, but it is run by The Economist and will be used by the media as ‘evidence’ one way or the other.
So please, if you care about keeping our food and our bees GM-free – VOTE AGAINST THIS MOTION – http://tinyurl.com/3yk4xj6 – they don’t need your name or email address, and it only takes a second.
Thanks,
Phil Chandler
www.biobees.com
I’ve found the comments even more entertaining. There’s lots of nonsense like this:
Science and nature are two parallel things. There is no comparison between sustainable Agriculture (SA) and GMOs. In SA production of food is almost natural. There is no destruction of nature and the environment remains clean. GMO is a science which tampers with biodiversity and eventually breaking the environmental cycles. The world doesn’t need food produced using science rather it requires food produced using natures own ingredients.
You might want to revisit the debate and notice who is backing up all their arguments with citations of the peer-reviewed literature, and that most of the opposition to GMOs is coming from people who have this bizarre view that science is unnatural…that is, science up to the level that they are currently using is natural, but anything beyond that, anything newer, is somehow destroying nature.
And I’ll be meeting some of them tomorrow. I’m sure I’ll see a few people from Ateísmo desde México at Coloquio Mexicano de Ateísmo, and more…I actually get to spend a few days in Mexico City. I hope they’ll forgive the fact that I don’t have a lick of Spanish, which is a bit embarrassing nowadays…I should probably sign up for a few classes here at UMM sometime.
It’s not too late to get yourself to the big city for a great meeting.
Oh, and look: there’s a poll! I can guess what it’s saying.
Vas a asistir al Coloquio: ¿Cómo te identificas?
Librepensador(a)
17%
Creyente
4%
Deista
2%
Panteista
1%
Raeliano(a), Cientólogo(a), New Age…
6%
Agnóstico(a)
13%
Ateo(a)
58%
So, denizens of the deep dark thread, how well would you do on a Hitler quiz?
(Current totals: 11,342 entries with 1,181,677 comments.)
A team of neuroscientists has made the coolest nerd porn film ever. They gave 16 women vibrators and asked them to bring themselves to orgasm while they made a movie…of their brains, using an MRI scanner. It’s going to premiere at the Society for Neuroscience meetings.
While it sounds like they have some interesting results — there is a consistent, wide-spread pattern of brain activity during orgasm, and specific areas are known to fire up — the article is not going to do a lot for Professor Barry Komisaruk’s reputation. The interviewer asked a few too many trivial questions.
“In women, orgasm produces a very extensive response across the brain and body,” said Barry Komisaruk, professor of psychology at Rutgers University in New Jersey, who oversaw the research.
“In one experiment we asked women to self-stimulate and then raise their hands each time they orgasmed. Some women raised their hands several times each session, often just a few seconds apart,” Professor Komisaruk said. “So the evidence is that woman tend to have longer orgasms and can experience several of them.”
So…the women in Professor Komisaruk’s life have never had a satisfactory sexual experience with him, so he needed a multi-million dollar machine to figure this out? I’m glad he finally learned this!
(I joke—I’m sure there are interesting neurological results, this article just highlighted the obvious, as if it were news.)
This is a message from Simon Singh:
This week is the first anniversary of the report Free Speech is Not for Sale, which highlighted the oppressive nature of English libel law. In short, the law is extremely hostile to writers, while being unreasonably friendly towards powerful corporations and individuals who want to silence critics.
The English libel law is particular dangerous for bloggers, who are generally not backed by publishers, and who can end up being sued in London regardless of where the blog was posted. The internet allows bloggers to reach a global audience, but it also allows the High Court in London to have a global reach.
You can read more about the peculiar and grossly unfair nature of English libel law at the website of the Libel Reform Campaign. You will see that the campaign is not calling for the removal of libel law, but for a libel law that is fair and which would allow writers a reasonable opportunity to express their opinion and then defend it.
The good news is that the British Government has made a commitment to draft a bill that will reform libel, but it is essential that bloggers and their readers send a strong signal to politicians so that they follow through on this promise. You can do this by joining me and over 50,000 others who have signed the libel reform petition at
http://www.libelreform.org/signRemember, you can sign the petition whatever your nationality and wherever you live. Indeed, signatories from overseas remind British politicians that the English libel law is out of step with the rest of the free world.
If you have already signed the petition, then please encourage friends, family and colleagues to sign up. Moreover, if you have your own blog, you can join hundreds of other bloggers by posting this blog on your own site. There is a real chance that bloggers could help change the most censorious libel law in the democratic world.
We must speak out to defend free speech. Please sign the petition for libel reform at
http://www.libelreform.org/sign
