Poetic justice

A Kentucky teen who sued his school because they required all students to be vaccinated has now been diagnosed as having chicken pox.

A US teenager who took legal action against his school after he was banned for refusing the chickenpox vaccination now has the virus, his lawyer says.

Jerome Kunkel, 18, made headlines last month after he unsuccessfully sued his Kentucky school for barring unimmunised students amid an outbreak.

His lawyer, Christopher Weist, told US media that the teen’s symptoms developed last week.
The student had opposed the vaccine on religious grounds.

His lawsuit argued the vaccine is “immoral, illegal and sinful” and that his rights had been violated.
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“These are deeply held religious beliefs, they’re sincerely held beliefs,” Mr Wiest said.

Just because a belief is ‘deeply’ and ‘sincerely’ held does not make it reasonable. People can deeply and sincerely believe all manner of absurd and even harmful things.

These are the new American heroes

Donald Trump has used his pardon power on a US soldier who was convicted of murdering an Iraqi man in 2009 while he was in US custody.

First Lt Michael Behenna was sentenced to 25 years in prison for the murder of Ali Mansur, a suspected Al Qaeda terrorist shot during questioning.

Mr Trump signed a full pardon of Mr Behenna, who has served five years for unpremeditated murder in a combat zone.

Mr Behenna, released on parole in 2014, has said he acted in self-defence.

[Read more…]

How train wheels work around corners

Some time ago, I discussed how a car’s differential works to allow the outer and inner wheels to rotate at different speeds when going around curves. Along with that I discussed how trains manage to go around curves even though they do not have differentials and the two wheels rotate at the same rate. Via Mark Frauenfelder, I came across this video demonstrating it even more clearly.

Aasia Bibi has left Pakistan

Many readers will remember the case of Aasia Bibi, the Pakistani woman who went through hell as a result of that country’s infamous blasphemy laws and was given the death sentence. That sentence was overturned but the vindictive religious mobs demanded her public execution and opposed any attempt to get her out of the country. Today comes welcome news that she has finally left that country and gone to join her family in Canada where they will live under assumed names with security.
[Read more…]

How to make an adult film with help from family and friends

Alfred Sole has loved films all his life and has made a career in it. At the age of 75, he is still working as a production designer at major studios. In a highly entertaining article, Ashley and April Spicer describe how he got his start in films.

As I approach him, Alfred smiles broadly and extends his hand. He has a boyish face and a soft-spoken, warm manner. He’s of average height with salt-and-pepper hair. He’s like your friendly uncle, or your favorite person to sit next to at the neighborhood bar.

But looks can be deceiving, so I have to ask myself: Is this really the man who in the early 1970s was at the center of a national scandal about a pornographic film titled Deep Sleep? A film he was rumored to have shot in his parents’ home in Paterson, New Jersey using a cast and crew made up of family and friends? And it wasn’t just those close to him who participated in the movie—it was alleged that many in his suburban town had taken part, including a local lawyer, banker, police officer and funeral home director. Hell, even the mayor’s wife, high-school teachers, and Alfred’s mother were said to have been part of the erotic production.

What followed was one of the most notorious national prosecutions of adult film in American history.

Is this the man once described by the government as ‘Public Enemy Number One’?

[Read more…]

TurboTax and H&R Block under investigation

Thanks to a series of reports by ProPublica about how the tax preparation companies are thwarting efforts to provide free tax filings, the IRS has launched an investigation into TurboTax and H&R Block.

Amid calls for investigations from members of Congress, the IRS announced late Friday that it has convened a team of senior leaders to review concerns raised about its Free File public-private partnership with the tax software industry, following a series of ProPublica stories.
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[A]s we have reported, use of the free option, which was never high, has dropped sharply in the past decade. Insiders say that Intuit and H&R Block deliberately steered users away from the Free File option and to paid products. At least five of the companies in the Free File program added code to their free websites effectively hiding them from Google and other search engines.

The move is a sharp break for the [IRS], which as recently as April 26 defended Free File as a “successful program and partnership that’s benefited millions of taxpayers.”

It remains to be seen if this review is just a means for the IRS to mollify critics until this fuss goes away or if they will take meaningful action.

Beating the drums for war with Venezuela

The Trump administration is currently beating the drums of war on two fronts: Venezuela and Iran. The US media love war and war talk since that drives up ratings. One of the surest signs of preparation for war is when the US media falls in line whenever the US government starts issuing threats to other nations about possible invasions. The media then uncritically parrots the government’s talking points and even goes further and makes stuff up. Take this report from CNN from Sunday that has this sentence.

It comes as pressure is mounting on Maduro to step down, following elections in January in which voters chose opposition leader Juan Guaido over him for president.

There are two falsehoods in just that single sentence. There were no elections in Venezuela in January and in the last election in 2018, Guaido didn’t even run. Furthermore, Maduro was elected as president in the last election while Guaido has never been elected president. As Jason Ditz writes:
[Read more…]

New UN warnings on harm to the planet

Pretty much everyone who follows the news would be aware of the new report released by the United Nations yesterday about the impact of climate change, this one focusing on what is happening to the biodiversity of the planet. You can read the summary of the report here with the full 1,500 page report to be released in September. This news report outlines the major findings.

Humans are transforming Earth’s natural landscapes so dramatically that as many as one million plant and animal species are now at risk of extinction, posing a dire threat to ecosystems that people all over the world depend on for their survival, a sweeping new United Nations assessment has concluded.
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Its conclusions are stark. In most major land habitats, from the savannas of Africa to the rain forests of South America, the average abundance of native plant and animal life has fallen by 20 percent or more, mainly over the past century. With the human population passing 7 billion, activities like farming, logging, poaching, fishing and mining are altering the natural world at a rate “unprecedented in human history.”

At the same time, a new threat has emerged: Global warming has become a major driver of wildlife decline, the assessment found, by shifting or shrinking the local climates that many mammals, birds, insects, fish and plants evolved to survive in. When combined with the other ways humans are damaging the environment, climate change is now pushing a growing number of species, such as the Bengal tiger, closer to extinction.
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Scientists have cataloged only a fraction of living creatures, some 1.3 million; the report estimates there may be as many as 8 million plant and animal species on the planet, most of them insects. Since 1500, at least 680 species have blinked out of existence, including the Pinta giant tortoise of the Galápagos Islands and the Guam flying fox.

Though outside experts cautioned it could be difficult to make precise forecasts, the report warns of a looming extinction crisis, with extinction rates currently tens to hundreds of times higher than they have been in the past 10 million years.

[Read more…]

Great moments in Christianity

The Atlanta Journal Constitution reported that “The mayor of Hoschton, a nearly all-white community 50 miles northeast of Atlanta, allegedly withheld a job candidate from consideration for city administrator because he was black.”

City councilman Jim Cleveland defended the mayor, saying:

“I’m a Christian and my Christian beliefs are you don’t do interracial marriage. That’s the way I was brought up and that’s the way I believe,” he said. “I have black friends, I hired black people. But when it comes to all this stuff you see on TV, when you see blacks and whites together, it makes my blood boil because that’s just not the way a Christian is supposed to live.”