There have been some interesting nuances following the Donald Sterling uproar. Commenter jaytheostrich wondered in a comment on my post yesterday as to whether Sterling’s free speech rights were being violated because he was being punished merely for something he said, and whether it was legal to do so. Another commenter Suido responded by providing a link to an excellent cartoon by xkcd that seems to settle the freedom of speech issue in a pretty convincing way.
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Some of you may have heard the story of how a customer of US Airways complained about something on Twitter and the response from an employee in the customer relations division came with an attached photograph of a women in a sexual pose.
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The right to abortion has been severely restricted in the US by making it harder to get one and Ohio is one of the worst states in this regard. To counter this, the Cleveland Skeptics and Northeast Ohio Secular Woman are challenging Center for Inquiry Northeast Ohio in a local Bowl-a-thon for abortion access.
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Via Taylor Berman I came across these two videos of Pancho the Chihuahua who seems to have mastered yoga. I am going to show the videos to Baxter the Wonder Dog and see if he might want to try it.
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Once again we have a situation in which the city of Portland, Oregon dumped all the water in its reservoir, all 38 million gallons of it, because cameras seemed to show that someone has urinated into it. After observing the group of five young men near the reservoir, police went out there and arrested three of the men and charged one of them.
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I have recently been praising the city Cleveland for taking a progressive attitude towards LGBT rights. They are even hosting the 2014 Gay Games to be held August 9-16. But some Muslim can drivers have given the city a black eye by walking off their jobs because they refuse to drive taxis that carry ads for the games.
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I don’t use swear words in my normal conversation or in my writing. But I have no objections to other people using them and those words do not shock or offend me. It is just not my style. But custom dictates that in certain situations, certain words should not be used, the most famous example in the US being the seven words you cannot use on radio or broadcast TV and which comedian George Carlin exploited heavily in one of his most famous standup routines, and for which he was arrested many times, like Lenny Bruce before him.
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The organization Foundation Beyond Belief is organizing its first annual conference Humanism at Work to be held in Chicago, IL on July 18-20, 2014.
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Here is a very cute video of little children at judo. I love the way they bow to each other before going at it, doing it so vigorously on one occasion that she fell over.
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Ed Brayton not only writes the widely read blog Dispatches from the Culture Wars but is also the person who manages the business end of the Freethought Blogs site and keeps the whole thing running smoothly.
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