The Zingularity
Just another Freethought Blogs site
Corporate America is stuck between a rock and a hard place. More accurately, between customer and service. Ultimately, any company that has a customer is in the customer service business. But few CEOs and other big wigs like to think of themselves that way. They like to think they’re developers or accountants or what have you. Besides, delivering service and supporting a complex product costs money, and cost is a four letter word. Solution? Hire temps! [Read more…]
A 64 year-old British woman has been told she has to be part of a religion to be a conscientious objector to taking up arms while applying for US citizenship. The USCIS has reportedly told Margaret Doughty she has until June 21 of this year to “submit a letter on official church stationery, attesting to the fact that you are a member in good standing and the church’s official position on the bearing of arms.” [Read more…]
This has puzzled me all of my life and I have yet to hear a cogent answer from a psychologist or anyone else: why do some people keep dating others who treat them terribly? Perhaps, since I’m a straight male, I see it most often in straight women. Does it play out the same way in gay relationships or with straight men as well? [Read more…]
Exterior: summer sun beats down on gorgeous million dollar McMansions high in the Texas hill country on tree-lined land-scaped streets; 36 hole golf course snakes behind the homes like rivers of emeralds; illegal immigrant yard crews sweating profusely in several manicured yards; boat ramp stuffed with lake yachts and new wakeboard boats to side, glass towers of capital city off in hazy distance. Symbolic rain clouds threatening vista.
Camera pans into small group of suburban elementary school children and one overweight adult in wakeboard boat … Boy 1, Girl 1, Boy 2, and Santa in summery cargo shorts holding Pina Colada with cute Rudolph:
Santa in slightly slurred voice: “Well kids, what with me being outlawed by Godless liberals and no one believing anymore, I guess I’ll have to cancel Christmas this year …”
Horrified looks on children, Rudolph lets out dejected sigh as his glowing red nose fades to black.
Suddenly Boy 2 with iPad screams out joyously: “Wait a minute, Rick Perry is on it! Christmas might be saved after all!” [Read more…]
Rep. Paul Ryan, seen here telling the crowd why good Jesus-based values demand we cut Food Stamps and meal assistance for seniors yet again because those kids and old people will probably just trade that food for abortions or something. Probably.
Via my colleague Hunter at Daily Kos — The most interesting thing about Ralph Reed’s Faith & Freedom Forum being held this week is that it exists at all. Ralph Reed, for those precious few of you who do not remember recent political history, is a crook. He is a political scammer who worked with Jack Abramoff in a swindle of Native American tribes and conservative Christians alike, a scam that went to the heart of the conservative movement but in which every last person save Abramoff himself has undergone a magical conversion back into respectability based essentially on the same scam as they started out with, which is duping Good Christian People out of their money.
So to have Paul Ryan, Marco Rubio, Allen West, Ron Johnson, Rick Santorum, Gohmert-Perry-Bachman-Palin-Cain-and-everyone-else-who-is-anyone in far-right conservatism eagerly climb aboard the good ship Ralph Reed for his latest little shindig should tell you all you need to know about the sincerity of the whole movement. He’s a lobbyist who got caught in a money laundering scandal, and he was back lobbying and collecting checks in no time flat because, bluntly, all the conservatives currently surrounding him were just fine with that. Just don’t get caught again, Ralph, and everyone will go along with the political scammer running a supposed morality-based movement. Everyone involved is exactly that shallow. … Read the whole list of religious scam bullet points here.
There are more than one-hundred sizable objects in our solar system, many of them with ice or liquid water, including planets, moons, asteroids, and KBOs, each reachable and explorable with present day technology
Small probes the size of a human hand or smaller could be a big help to planetary exploration. Moore’s Law and tightening budgets could team up to make that technological leap sooner rather than later. In particular, small probes packed with microelectronics and advanced software capable of learning on the alien spot might bring the deep subcyrosphere of moons like Europa or Saturn’s Dionne under scrutiny: [Read more…]
The Great Psychic Shootout, from SouthPark episode 124 “Cartman’s Incredible Gift”
And by love I mean the purely platonic, non sexual and definitely non same-sex love. Love as in love his position on issues, not necessarily his position on the Gay Lobby, cue dramatic chipmunk. It’s hard to know if stuff like this is the Vatican planting a narrative to see how it grows — it does reek a bit of that — or the real deal. But I can understand, given past Papal apathy or outright corruption and complicity, on class warfare and income inequality, why anyone who stays focused on those growing issues might be a welcome breath of fresh air: [Read more…]
Permian-Triassic extinction event in context with other such events
Carbon dioxide gets most of the climate change press. But methane is a far more potent greenhouse gas. Climate scientists have long studied it as an indicator of CO2 levels and a possible co-conspirator in a number of dramatic extinction events correlated to a sharp increase in global temperatures, most notably the Permian-Triassic event. Recent data suggests there is reason to be concerned: [Read more…]