Stop listening to him! Pay attention to me!

OK, let's see if I can use one of these "internet memes" that all the cool kids are into.

Shorter Pam ("I probably am a vampire") Geller (Big Government)
AIPAC Applause-O-Meter

I don't care if you did hear cheering for Obama in the videos from the American Israel Public Affairs Committee meeting. That wasn't cheering, it was just polite applause. And you know those crazy Jews - they'll applaud anything. Who are you going to believe? Me, or your lying ears?

Cameron and Obama, Addicts and BFF

Recent op-ed piece in the Guardian by Simon Jenkins is worth a read. Here's an except:

"Obama and Cameron have let themselves become trapped in a lethal military embrace, one that has failed to deliver peace in Iraq or security in Afghanistan. It has destabilised Pakistan and spread al-Qaida's influence. It has killed hundreds of thousands of people to no one's obvious benefit, and cost billions of dollars that would have been better deployed on peace and reconstruction. Today, London and Washington are fortress cities through which their statesmen must travel like frightened rabbits, like Obama during his London visit.

"This was the legacy of Bush and Blair and it is the most barren in recent history. Yet it holds those successors in thrall. Neither has shown a capacity to disengage from the drums and trumpets of warin favour of a more subtle and more productive diplomacy. Until they do, any hope that the west's leadership might gain traction in the Muslim world is futile."

For full story go to Addicted to War.

School Superintendent Asks Gov. Snyder to Make His School a Prison

Nathan Bootz, the Superintendent of Ithaca Public Schools in Michigan, wrote a letter to the editor asking Gov. Snyder to make his school a prison:

Dear Governor Snyder,

In these tough economic times, schools are hurting. And yes, everyone in Michigan is hurting right now financially, but why aren’t we protecting schools? Schools are the one place on Earth that people look to to “fix” what is wrong with society by educating our youth and preparing them to take on the issues that society has created.

One solution I believe we must do is take a look at our corrections system in Michigan. We rank nationally at the top in the number of people we incarcerate. We also spend the most money per prisoner annually than any other state in the union. Now, I like to be at the top of lists, but this is one ranking that I don’t believe Michigan wants to be on top of.

Consider the life of a Michigan prisoner. They get three square meals a day. Access to free health care. Internet. Cable television. Access to a library. A weight room. Computer lab. They can earn a degree. A roof over their heads. Clothing. Everything we just listed we DO NOT provide to our school children.

This is why I’m proposing to make my school a prison. The State of Michigan spends annually somewhere between $30,000 and $40,000 per prisoner, yet we are struggling to provide schools with $7,000 per student. I guess we need to treat our students like they are prisoners, with equal funding. Please give my students three meals a day. Please give my children access to free health care. Please provide my school district Internet access and computers. Please put books in my library. Please give my students a weight room so we can be big and strong. We provide all of these things to prisoners because they have constitutional rights. What about the rights of youth, our future?!

Please provide for my students in my school district the same way we provide for a prisoner. It’s the least we can do to prepare our students for the future...by giving our schools the resources necessary to keep our students OUT of prison.

Respectfully submitted,

Nathan Bootz
Superintendent
Ithaca Public Schools

I did not fact-check this as to whether Supt. Bootz's assertions on prisoner treatment are correct; I know that here in California we cut most of these services from our prisons years ago. I also know that anytime you make this kind of comparison, there is a risk of public backlash that will have the result it did here, removing program after program leaving our correction system little more than an overcrowded warehouse that makes serious criminals out of even the least violent offender.

Still, it breaks my heart to see this kind of desperation in a school administrator.

H/T to Big Think

Happy 70th

Before the day is out, all the best to Bob, my northern neighbour to the south...

MEET STORM, A CHILD WITHOUT GENDER

An interesting tidbit flittered across my screen that made me smile on a day when not much is going right. I found this story so profoundly wonderful and wacky I just had to share.

At four months old, Storm is the most recent addition to the Witterick/ Stocker household of Toronto, Canada which includes brothers Jazz and Kio. But for now, Storm’s parents aren’t revealing his/her’s gender.

"We've decided not to share Storm's sex for now--a tribute to freedom and choice in place of limitation, a stand up to what the world could become in Storm's lifetime (a more progressive place? ...)"

Stocker and Witterick say the decision gives Storm the freedom to choose who he or she wants to be. "What we noticed is that parents make so many choices for their children. It's obnoxious," adds Stocker, a teacher at an alternative school.

HERE is the story.

I found myself being able to identify with some of their ideas and concepts. I remember at the age of 8 wanting desperately to be a boy, mostly because my brother got so much attention from my Dad and a favorite uncle. I thought if I wished really hard and acted like a boy, I’d become one. This quickly passed and I became content to be a girl but many times I was told I couldn’t do something or follow a career path because it was reserved for males only.

One of my sons at the age of four wanted my mother in law to paint his nails with nail polish like hers. He liked the bright, shiny color. My father in law went wild,” You’ll turn him into a sissy!” I had to defend my mother in law’s action and my son’s desire for the innocent interaction it was. Today he is a man who seems quite well adjusted to his gender.

The notion of letting children develop their own personality and perspectives is appealing to me. Think of how much mental illness and or sociopathic behavior might be averted if kids grew up just being whatever they wanted to be.

Forget color, gender, religion and social status…

I’ll let Storm’s, Jazz’s and Kio’s Mom have the last word:

"Everyone keeps asking us, 'When will this end?'" she said. "And we always turn the question back. Yeah, when will this end? When will we live in a world where people can make choices to be whoever they are?"

Lemmings

Well, it's a new week. Apparently the world ended on Saturday not with a bang, but with a whimper. If you're reading this, you're apparently a hopeless sinner, doomed to five months or so of torment before being sent to the fiery pits of hell, or perhaps (just maybe) Harold Camping was wrong.

Christianity tends to get a pass in our society. The most outrageous ideas popping out of the mouths of the sincerely religious are allowed to stand unchallenged (although other religions don't get the same respect).

But not this time, really. Most of us heard about Camping and his idiotic ideas, and most of us thought he was an idiot. But there were some poor gullible bastards who were taken in. Many of them were taken in completely.

A man in Nairobi killed himself because of Camping's prediction. A man in California tried to euthanize his pets. People have spent their life savings, families were torn apart.

And a woman in Antelope Valley tried to kill herself and her two daughters, by slitting their throats and wrists.

Fortunately, "murder/suicide" now joins "spotting fraud" as just another thing she sucked at.

Some people suggested that Camping had emailed a suicide note to the Family Radio employees and killed himself. Sadly, that didn't prove to be the case. He showed up the next day, confused that he'd proven to be a lying sack of fuck. As I write this, the Family Radio website hasn't changed their "Judgement Day - May 21, 2011" screen:

But I clicked on that microphone in the upper right, and that vicious, unwavering bastard is holding a press conference claiming that God has now judged the world, and it will still end on October 21st.

This evil fucknozzle has earned over a hundred million dollars with this scam, and he is still trying to keep it going.

The saddest part to all this is, Camping's followers will most likely just become more devout because of this. What needs to happen is that his victims need to sue him for his immoral con game. But it won't happen.

Because the one thing that lasts forever is stupidity.

Damon Fowler vs. Bastrop, LA

Graduating from high school is supposed to be a joyous time in a young person's life. For Damon Fowler, however, the celebration involved being lied to and ostracized by his community, and being booed as he walked across the stage in Bastrop, LA. His parents honored the occasion by throwing Damon's possessions out on the lawn in the rain, locking the house, and going "on vacation." Prior to this, they had cut off Damon's internet access and his contact with his brother in Texas who supported him.

It started about a week ago, when Damon objected to a prayer that was scheduled during his graduation ceremony. In 1992, the Supreme Court ruled against coerced prayer in a strongly worded decision which read, in part:

"As we have observed before, there are heightened concerns with protecting freedom of conscience from subtle coercive pressure in the elementary and secondary public schools. Our decisions in [Engel] and [Abington] recognize, among other things, that prayer exercises in public schools carry a particular risk of indirect coercion. The concern may not be limited to the context of schools, but it is most pronounced there. What to most believers may seem nothing more than a reasonable request that the nonbeliever respect their religious practices, in a school context may appear to the nonbeliever or dissenter to be an attempt to employ the machinery of the State to enforce a religious orthodoxy."

Ironically, the original suit was brought by Christian parents who objected to a rabbi giving the benediction at their child's graduation. In the 18 years since this ruling, Christians have repeatedly and vociferously complained and fought against this ruling, illustrating the 'be careful what you wish for' aspect of any such effort.

When Damon went to the ACLU, the school backed down, and agreed to a moment of silence in place of the prayer. He then posted this on reddit.com, a social media site with a strong atheist community. The top-rated out of the 1,771 comments is a response from Damon's brother, who kept the community in the loop after Damon was cut off from communication by his parents. He conveyed the amazing support to his brother in conference calls through Damon's sister. Meanwhile, Damon's teacher Mitzi Quinn told the local newspaper, "[In the past, non-religious students] respected the majority of their classmates and didn’t say anything. We've never had this come up before. Never…And what’s even more sad is this is a student who really hasn't contributed anything to graduation or to their classmates." The paper reported that Quinn was given an award for her "great service." Damon received death threats, and his brother and sister feared for his safety attending the graduation.

I would dare any apologist to defend the behavior of the so-called Christians in this story. One of my dearest Facebook friends posted the graduation video with a comment that she missed the days we could openly make religious references in school, but what I saw was a student defiantly flouting the Constitution and going back on the school's promise, and the crowd cheering wildly:

But while Damon was cut off from almost every avenue of support, wonderful things were happening across the internet. A Facebook fan page now has 10,115 people who "like" it (though some apparently clicked the like button so they could say hateful things and boast about how the prayer was said anyway, that's to be expected). The FFRF had already awarded Damon a $1,000 scholarship, but an additional scholarship fund was set up on ChipIn with a goal to raise $10,000. The total donations now stand at $14,482.75, thanks to support by prominent atheist bloggers like The Friendly Atheist.

The most striking element of this story, to me, is the terrible behavior exhibited by the Christians in contrast with the outpouring of support from the atheists. I'm sure my own cognitive biases are hard at work here, but I just spent the last few hours reading through a huge amount of commentary on this subject and I have yet to find one redeeming comment from a religious individual, even among my own friends. I had intended for my first post to be more of an uplifting story, but the more I read about this, the more I despair for the prospect of coexistence. Yes, this one had a happy ending, but my mind keeps going back to the thought of one kid, alone and scared, publicly shamed and cut off from support. How an entire community, including that child's parents, could come together to do that is beyond me.

The First Cephalopod in Space

The space shuttle Endeavor is carrying the first cephalopod in space. Called Euprymna scolope or bobtail squid, the onboard passenger will be the subject of experiments to test the Transpermia Hypothesis, also known as exogenesis or panspermia.

We are talking about space aliens in the form of microorganisms imbedded in meteorites that came to Earth billions of years ago and seeded our planet. If life came to Earth aboard primitive rock ships, then linguists are likely to build big words from Latin building blocks: Hence the term lithopanspermia.

Yes, our ancestors may have come from Mars or Venus or other corner in space, found a hospitable home on Earth, and evolved into the flora and fauna we know today. Sound far-fetched? Not according recent analyses of space borne particles.

In 1996, a meteorite originating from Mars was shown to contain microscopic structures resembling earthly nanobacteria. Although debunked and ignored for years, David McKay of the Johnson Space Center reexamined the sample in 2009, using an electron microphotography technique not available in 1996, and found “strong evidence that life may have existed on ancient Mars" (source).

In 2001, researchers from the University of Naples claim to have found live extraterrestrial bacteria inside a meteorite estimated to be over 4.5 billion years old. The scientists resurrected the organisms when they immersed their rock samples in growth medium. Similar to modern day Bacillus subtilis, they say, the DNA is unlike any found on Earth (source – bilingual English/Italian).

Earlier this year (March 2011), Richard Hoover of the NASA/Marshall Space Flight Center published this paper, Fossils of Cyanobacteria in CI1 Carbonaceous Meteorites.

Our stalwart cephalo-astronaut is not the only non-human inhabitant aboard the space shuttle Endeavor. Five strains of bacteria will be used to test the exogenesis theory, specifically whether or not Earth borne microbes can withstand extremes of temperature, zero gravity, and high levels of radiation in deep space.

For our high-flying squid, this experiment is about the beneficial bacteria that live inside the sea creature's body. Called Vibrio fischeri, these bioluminescent organisms generate light which give our squid the ability to outshine its own shadow and mask itself in water.

Previous experiments with microbes in space have shown that some bacteria turn nastier when subjected to extremes of temperatures and radiation. In 2007, for example, a Salmonella sample was three times more likely to kill their hosts after returning from a shuttle mission. Nasa wants to observe what happens to mutually beneficial microbes when altered in space. Will these bioluminescent bugs transform themselves from dim to high intensity?

Watch Octopus ink the aquarium and then turn supernova.

Fizzle ...

Water sports and frozen treats

So, what we have here is a semi-major blogger, Debbie Schlussel, leaping to a blatantly ignorant conclusion... No, wait, I'm sorry. Please replace the end of that sentence with "openly lying."

And then put a period after it. That should pretty much cover everything.

See, Debbie's not as famous as, say, Pammycakes over at Atlas Snores, but she's just as Islamophobic. Debbie, after all, is the one who thought it was great that reporter Lara Logan was beaten and sexually assaulted in Cairo during the riots (it "warmed (her) heart" that people could see what savages these heathen be), or who calls for full-on genocide against all Muslims everywhere ("Rot In Hell, Osama Bin Laden. One down, 1.8 billion to go... many of ‘em inside U.S. borders") despite proudly proclaiming herself "granddaughter of immigrant Holocaust survivors" (Cognitive dissonance is her stock in trade, after all).

But she's willing to go to the mat for her fantasy causes. Case in point:

Philly Muslim Ice Cream Truck Driver Had Urine Popsicles to Sell

Was Muslim ice cream truck driver Yasser Hassan planning to serve “urine popsicles” to non-Muslim Philadelphia area kids? It’s not clear, but Hussein was drunk driving his ice cream truck in the area and police found at least one bottle of frozen urine in the refrigerator that was used to store ice cream sold to children. They also determined that the condition of the entire truck and the ice cream was unsanitary. But, no worries, as the Koran and the Hadiths would say it’s okay to sell this to infidel kids. Oh, and like all the good Muslims who preach to us not to do this and not to do that, he had quite a bit of alcohol in his system and in his truck, despite the fact that this is haram (forbidden) in Islam.

At the moment, there are 54 responses, ranging from "Damn those Islamic types!" to "OMG!! we should Sind all theese terrerist ragheads back to irak where They cum from!!1!"

There could be 55 responses, but there aren't. See, I've done long-haul driving, most often in nuclear convoys. Here's the one response that Debbie decided didn't make the cut editorially.

OK, y’all can feel free to be stupid about this if you want, but people who spend all day in their truck often pee in bottles. And I’m thinking that with an ice-cream van, that’s even more true: it’s harder to lock up. (From experience: if he was smart he was using a gatorade bottle – wider mouth.)

The problem is especially bad with long-distance truckers. The problem is so widespread that some lawmakers have had to take action.

You can google “urine bomb” or “pee bomb” on your own, if you try.

It's not pretty, but it's the truth. But they don't care about "facts" over there in Spittle-Flecked City.