Via Center for Reproductive Rights on Facebook:

Today is International Human Rights Day! There’s no better day to tell Secretary of State John Kerry to stand up for the fundamental rights of El Salvador’s #Las17. SIGN the petition now to bring them home: http://bit.ly/Las17-Petition

 … Read the rest

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Originally a comment by quixote on The gulf is rising.

I was a grad student at Tulane in the late 1980s and took many field trips out to the Gulf swamps. Some of them were to help a researcher studying sedimentation rates. Biologists knew then that what is happening now was going to happen. Even then, it would have been expensive to do anything about it, but about one hundredth or one thousandth what it costs now. And one millionth of what it will cost in a few years.

There are two main causes of the problem. Levees along the Mississippi push all the sediment out at one spot near Venice ( and make Gulf dead zones) instead of … Read the rest

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It turns out that the pink princess model for girl children in the US is just as parochial in time as it is in place, according to Elizabeth Sweet in the Atlantic.

When it comes to buying gifts for children, everything is color-coded: Rigid boundaries segregate brawny blue action figures from pretty pink princesses, and most assume that this is how it’s always been. But in fact, the princess role that’s ubiquitous in girls’ toys today was exceedingly rare prior to the 1990s—and the marketing of toys is more gendered now than even 50 years ago, when gender discrimination and sexism were the norm.

The princess thing makes me pull my hair with disgust. It’s so infantilizing, so diminishing, … Read the rest

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Leo Igwe tells us that humanists and atheists in Africa are starting to speak up.

An increasing number of Africans do not have any religion. Many people across the continent are going open and public with their humanist, atheistic and skeptical views and identity. Non religious Africans are leaving the closet in their numbers. African unbelievers are beginning to organise like their religious counterparts in many countries. One of such countries is Ghana. Ghana is a religious country. But the country’s religiosity does not preclude irreligion. Non religious people in the country are a minority but they are not keeping quiet. They are no hiding. Godless people in Ghana are becoming visible. Non religious people are speaking out. The

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And now for something completely frightening.

The Louisiana coast is rapidly sinking into the sea. There are efforts and plans to move sediment around to save New Orleans and some pipelines and fishing grounds, but much of the Delta is doomed (and the planned fixes are hugely expensive, and Louisiana is a  poor state).

Southeastern Louisiana might best be described as a layer cake made of Jell-O, floating in a swirling Jacuzzi of steadily warming, rising water. Scientists and engineers must prevent the Jell-O from melting — while having no access to the Jacuzzi controls.

The problem is human-made. Over the last 80 years, Louisiana’s coast has been starved of sediment by river levees and eviscerated by canals dredged

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Not everything Time magazine does is awful. It has an excellent long piece on The Ebola Fighters as part of its Person of the Year feature. (The only trouble is it’s a huge pain in the ass to read because it gives you only a tiny window of written material at a time, and there seems to be no way to convert to the printable version. Apparently that’s fabulous for people reading on phones, but I’m not reading on a phone. grump)

A sample:

Why, in short, was the battle against Ebola left for month after crucial month to a ragged army of volunteers and near volunteers: doctors who wouldn’t quit even as their colleagues fell ill and died; nurses

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An elegant young Harvard Business School associate professor ordered some Chinese food the other day. Boston.com has the story.

Ben Edelman is an associate professor at Harvard Business School, where he teaches in the Negotiation, Organizations & Markets unit.

Ran Duan manages The Baldwin Bar, located inside the Woburn location of Sichuan Garden, a Chinese restaurant founded by his parents.

Last week, Edelman ordered what he thought was $53.35 worth of Chinese food from Sichuan Garden’s Brookline Village location.

Edelman soon came to the horrifying realization that he had been overcharged. By a total of $4.

If you’ve ever wondered what happens when a Harvard Business School professor thinks a family-run Chinese restaurant screwed him

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Jenny Kutner at Salon also reports on Dawkins’s unfamiliarity with the Men’s Rights movement.

Noted evolutionary biologist and atheist thinker Richard Dawkins addressed questions of gender discrimination in science head-on at a recent event at Kennesaw State University, responding to a question about the value of feminism in science and the necessity of the men’s rights movement. Dawkins, who has been criticized for contributing to the atheist community’s endemic sexism, said he believes feminism to be “enormously important” — but he wasn’t so sure about men’s rights.

“Feminism, as I understand it, is the political drive towards the equality of women, so that women should not be discriminated against — nobody should be discriminated against — on grounds that

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Aw. Paul Elam is shocked and saddened that Richard Dawkins hasn’t heard of his important movement. Futrelle has the story, starting with who Dawkins is and how often he tweets regrettable nonsense.

He puts his foot in his mouth so often on Twitter that it’s sometimes difficult to tell the difference between his real account and this absurdist parody.

In a recent interview, he doubled down on some of his most appalling earlier remarks, reaffirming that he believes there is such a thing as “mild pedophilia” and that pregnant women who discover that they are carrying a Down syndrome fetus should probably “abort and try again.” And in that interview he reminded us all again just why

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The Justice department released the conclusions of its civil rights investigation of the Cleveland Police Department yesterday. Techdirt reports on some of what it says.

The DOJ’s report opens with the de rigueur statements about how dangerous policing is and how grateful the nation is that there are men and women willing to do this difficult job. But this is mercifully brief. The token belly rub doesn’t even last a full paragraph. The generic praise that makes up the two first sentences is swiftly tempered by these curt sentences.

The use of force by police should be guided by a respect for human life and human dignity, the need to protect public safety, and the duty to protect individuals

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A doctor I know said this on a Facebook thread about the way the police treated Eric Garner, especially after they slammed him to the sidewalk:

Diabetic or not, the man was in respiratory arrest, an immediately life-threatening situation and one which any emergency responder with first aid training should recognize. Prone positioning with hands behind the back is a significant risk factor in inducing sudden respiratory arrest, which is why the hog tie position has been outlawed in many jurisdictions. Garner showed visibly obvious signs of severe respiratory distress. His diabetes was about the 987th issue on his list of Problems. If police officers are unable to recognize that a man they had just arrested is in respiratory

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Well merry Xmas to you too, Fort Lauderdale. (Look, I said it! I’m an atheist and I said merry Xmas. Booya.)

Fort Lauderdale was, until a judge suspended operations, happily arresting people for feeding the homeless in city parks. Nöfuckingel.

A Florida city that made it illegal to feed homeless people on the street and arrested a 90-year-old charity volunteer for defying the ordinance must sit down for mediated talks with opponents of the law after a judge issued a 30-day stay of the law on Monday.

Meanie judge. The cops were having so much fun busting do-gooders for giving food to poor people.

Fort Lauderdale’s city council passed the homeless feeding ban last month after an all-night session

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

Last September, as schools started up after the summer break, some teachers at P.S. 220 in Queens, New York wore matching Tshirts to school, even though the teachers’ union urged them not to. You can probably see why the union said don’t do it.

Photo Credit: NYPD Facebook

Eric Garner was killed by the police in July. The Tshirts were a message. They were an ugly message.

Tensions between unions for city teachers and police officers are heating up over a United Federation of Teachers directive telling school employees not to wear T-shirts to work backing the NYPD.

At issue is an online message circulated earlier this week to UFT members cautioning them against a grassroots members’ plan by

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Steve Novella did this piece about Dunning-Kruger last month. Is it wrong that I find some of it extremely funny?

Like this, quoting Dunning…

What’s curious is that, in many cases, incompetence does not leave people disoriented, perplexed, or cautious. Instead, the incompetent are often blessed with an inappropriate confidence, buoyed by something that feels to them like knowledge.

I see someone bouncing along like one of the creatures in the Macy’s Thanksgiving parade, puffed out by the hot air of something that feels to them like knowledge. And so I laugh.

Also Dunning:

An ignorant mind is precisely not a spotless, empty vessel, but one that’s filled with the clutter of irrelevant or misleading life experiences, theories, facts, intuitions,

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Originally a comment by Marcus Ranum on Oops I forgot to do a title.

TRIGGER WARNING: serial killer, murder

1. The audience is different. Porn is for adults, whereas video games are generally at least in part intended for younger audiences.

Apparently you haven’t heard of the internet. Which is amazing, since you’re using it to post your comments.

2. Porn isn’t intended to be normative. That doesn’t mean it doesn’t function that way, of course, but it generally isn’t intended as such by either producer or consumer.

Intent is totally magical. Because if I don’t intend to hurt anyone when I drive drunk, it doesn’t count if I actually run over a dozen nuns, right? Of course porn … Read the rest

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Another bit to add to the pile of awful.

As Tamir Rice’s 14-year-old sister rushed to her brother’s side upon learning he’d been shot, police officers “tackled” her, handcuffed her and placed her in a squad car with the Cleveland officer who shot Tamir, her mother and a Rice family attorney told reporters Monday.

The mother, Samaria Rice, was threatened with arrest herself as she “went charging and yelling at police” because they wouldn’t let her run to her son’s aid, she said.

Two little boys had come to her door and told her the police had just shot her son. At first she thought they were messing around, but then she realized they weren’t.

She ran to the

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Originally a comment by John Horstman on Knowing v accepting.

All knowledge is functionally Bayesian – it’s a matter of probability of being true, which we can sometimes even formally quantify, but it’s never 100%, with the exception of constructed abstractions (like mathematics or other formalized abstract systems, where things can have definite truth values because we construct them that way) and the existence of at least one ‘mind’ – some system capable of cognition such that I can even be here considering the questions.

This is due, as Ibis3 points out, to the solipsism problem, which can never be resolved – not even if there was a god (or some other outside observer of the universe) and you … Read the rest

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Well this is a surprise. A US court declined to dismiss a lawsuit against Pastor Scott Lively. Pink News reports:

An appeals court has refused to dismiss a case against homophobic pastor Scott Lively, who is set to stand trial for crimes against humanity.

Lively is an American pastor who cheered on anti-gay legislation in Russia, branding Putin an ‘unlikely hero’ for passing it.

It previously emerged that he addressed an anti-gay conference in Uganda just before the country’s homophobic law was first drafted, and he is facing a charge of crimes against humanity for his role in encouraging the country’s law, and similar ones around the world.

I’m amazed. I don’t think “free speech” should be … Read the rest

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Raw Story reports on a conversation event Dawkins did last month, in which he expressed surprise that there’s such a thing as the Men’s Rights Movement.

During the event on November 21, Kennesaw’s Michael L. Sanseviro asked the outspoken atheist about the contributions of feminism to science. He also asked Dawkin’s opinion of the men’s rights movement.

“Of course feminism has an enormously important role,” he replied. “Feminism, as I understand it, is the political drive towards the equality of women — so that women should not be discriminated against, nobody should be discriminated against on grounds that don’t merit discrimination. So, yes, feminism is enormously important and is a political movement which deserves to be thoroughly well-supported.”

Much

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)