But don’t forget, online harassment is no big deal.

Casey Parks at OregonLive reports:

A prank call sent a large number of Portland police officers to a Southwest Portland home late Friday night.

Central Precinct officers responded to a home in the 11200 block of Southwest Capitol Highway around midnight after receiving reports that an armed man was holding residents hostage inside.

As officers were developing a plan to contact residents, they learned that the call was probably a hoax.

They later confirmed that everyone inside the home was safe.

A Twitter user who goes by Grace Lynn says the hoax, called a “swatting,” was intended for her. A forum on the website 8chan described the plan to “swat”

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

Now that Dave has drawn my attention to that Salon article saying please stop spelling “God” as “god” I feel like telling the author, Richard Eskow, my reason for disliking the automatic “God” as opposed to “god.”

Please, please, stop writing “god” in lowercase form.

I get it. You don’t believe in a supreme being. That’s fine with me. What anybody believes or doesn’t believe is their call. You may believe that the world would be a better place without organized religion. Having seen organized religion in action, I’m inclined to say you may be right. You may believe that even private, reflective, personal religion is harmful, although I don’t see that myself.

Notice he didn’t say “You don’t believe … Read the rest

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

This pendantic hypocrite is correct about grammar rules, but totally wrong about capitalizing the word god when we are talking about his god in particular, and about how we should all just acknowledge that Christians are always right. And completely wrong about why I write “god” in lower case. I will tell you why:

His god already has a name. It’s YHWH, or Yahweh or Jehovah. That is a proper name, and I generally capitalize proper names. I don’t usually capitalize my own name, but that is a page out of e.e. cummings, and another story. So, if smartass wants his deity capitalized, I have no objection if he uses that particular god’s proper name.

However, I do object that … Read the rest

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

Boko Haram has taken over a whole town and a military base in Borno. That’s bad.

The BBC reports:

Boko Haram has seized a town and key multinational military base in north-eastern Nigeria, officials and eyewitnesses say.

A senator in Borno state said troops had abandoned the base in the town of Baga after it was attacked on Saturday.

Residents of Baga, who fled by boat to neighbouring Chad, said many people had been killed and the town set ablaze.

Baga, scene of a Nigerian army massacre in 2013, was the last town in the Borno North area under government control.

So a part of Nigeria is now in the hands of Boko Haram. That’s bad.

Maina Maaji Lawan,

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

Great – the New York cops are still flirting with fascism by making a great show of their opposition to civilian control of the police department. Apparently they want cops to answer only to other cops, and for everyone else to simply obey the armed police force.

Hundreds of police officers have turned their backs on the mayor of New York at the funeral of the second of two officers shot dead last month.

Wenjian Liu, a son of Chinese migrants, was killed with his partner Rafael Ramos on 20 December by a gunman with a grievance against the police.

Speakers lined up to pay tribute at the service in a Brooklyn funeral home.

In the street outside, hundreds

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

More on that ship full of refugees abandoned in the Mediterranean the other day – specifically, the cheerful news that the traffickers made 3 million bucks on the deal.

Police in Italy believe traffickers made some $3m (£1.9m; €2.5m) from 359 illegal migrants found abandoned on a cargo ship in the Mediterranean.

The Ezadeen was towed into the Italian port of Corigliano Calabro after being found by coast guards on Friday.

Most of those aboard appear to be Syrians, in the second such case involving a freighter this week.

You know – people fleeing for their lives from a deadly war and a murderous government.

The police chief of Cosenza province, Luigi Liguori, said each migrant had paid between $4,000

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

As you may have seen, it has emerged that Avicenna has been plagiarizing extensively on his blog, so we had to cut him loose from FTB.

He posted what he calls an apology after the plagiarism emerged and before we cut him loose. I wouldn’t call it an apology myself. It’s not actually apologetic, and it is quite self-aggrandizing and self-absorbed and self-serving. That’s…not how to apologize.

He doesn’t mention anything about the harm done to the rest of us, or gratitude for taking him on to begin with. That’s not how to apologize either.

So, altogether, not a very shining moment.

On a happier note, we have new people coming aboard soon.… Read the rest

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

And just in case you feel like watching the whole damn thing – here’s the 45 minute version.

//www.youtube.com/watch?v=rVWn89vGJys… Read the rest

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

I went to A Play! last night, and Tuesday night. It’s a two-part play about the presidency of LBJ, All the Way With LBJ and The Great Society. It was pretty damn good. He was an interesting guy but his interestingness was overshadowed by at one end the (much exaggerated) “charisma” of the Kennedys and at the other end the misbegotten war in Vietnam.

Accidental president. Brilliant politician. Flawed man. It’s 1963 and an assassin’s bullet catapults Lyndon Baines Johnson into the presidency. A Shakespearean figure of towering ambition and appetite, the charismatic, conflicted Texan hurls himself into Civil Rights legislation, throwing the country into turmoil. But in faraway Vietnam, a troublesome conflict looms. The Huffington Post calls Pulitzer Prize-winning

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

Speaking of Lego and girls…

Last May, some Girl Scouts met with Obama to talk about a bridge.

Five girl scouts from Jenks met President Barack Obama to present their plan for a flood-proof bridge at the White House Science Fair.

The girls, 6-year-old Avery Dodson and 8-year-olds Natalie Hurley, Miriam Schaffer, Claire Winton and Lucy Claire Sharp of Girl Scout Troop 2612 built a model for the bridge based on the recent damaging floods in Estes Park, Colo. The girls are the only Girl Scouts in the nation at the fair.

The flood-proof bridge model the girls designed mechanizes the bridge with motors and gears in the correct ratios.

A computer program developed by the girls would cause

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

Originally part of a comment by Golgafrinchan Captain on They were essentially without any relevant experience.

When I was growing up, my parents had a friend who had been a Nazi is WW2. It wasn’t something he really talked about but, through the years, I gathered some details from him and some more from his children. They thought they were the good guys, doing what needed to be done to protect themselves and the world from an imminent threat. It scares the crap out of me that our brains can make that kind of rationalization, but they can.

He was captured quite early and kept in a Canadian POW camp. The moment he realized how horribly wrong he had … Read the rest

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

Originally a comment by Ilyris on Just children.

30 years ago Lego had a space range. I always played with my brother’s Lego, and eventually my parents started buying me Lego too. One of the changes seems to be the faces. The Lego faces of my spacemen were very neutral, just 2 dots and a gently smiling mouth. I hear that they are getting angrier, and the characters are more geared toward conflict. I don’t understand why they can’t leave them neutral and if the child wants to play cops and robbers or whatever they can use their imagination. That seems to have really disappeared, the toys that you build your own dreams with.

From the article: “Research … Read the rest

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

The NY Times reports that Cosby and his team have been attacking his accusers for decades – so he not only assaulted women, he also did what he could to damage them afterwards.

That too is a familiar pattern. Bill Clinton did it, Woody Allen did it, Michael Shermer did it. It’s interesting how conscienceless you have to be to do that – to harm someone and then when she tries to report the harm, try to damage her so badly that she will stop trying to report the harm.

In 2005, when Tamara Green told the “Today” show and The Philadelphia Inquirer that Bill Cosby drugged and sexually assaulted her in the early 1970s, one of Mr. Cosby’s lawyers

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

A story posted publicly by A Mighty Girl on Facebook:

The incredible story of 22-year-old Liberian nursing student Fatu Kekula, who used trash bags to protect herself from Ebola while saving the lives of her family members, inspired people around the world last fall. Fatu’s innovative “trash bag method” was widely praised and is even being taught by aid workers to other West Africans caring for sick loved ones without standard protective gear. But with most schools closed in the country due to the epidemic, Fatu was unsure how she would finish her nursing training. Now, with the help of international supporters, Fatu has the opportunity to finish her education at one of the premier nursing schools in the … Read the rest

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

At Gregory in Seattle’s suggestion I did a Google images search on “LEGO ad 1970s” and sure enough…compared to the present they look like a lost utopia.

Note the caution – when it’s a girl and boy together, the girl is smaller and younger than the boy. It wouldn’t do to have a dominant little girl, even though there are in fact some families in which there is a girl (or even more than one) who is older than her brother.

But all the same. Utopia, I tells ya.

… Read the rest

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

I guess I should adjust my opinion of Judd Apatow. I had thought of him as one of the pillars of Bro-world, whose citizens generally seem oblivious to the existence of women as anything other than platforms for genitalia. But that doesn’t seem to cohere well with his attitude to Bill Cosby.

If you’ve followed director Judd Apatow’s Twitter musings for the last several weeks, his views on the rape allegations against Bill Cosby won’t come as a huge surprise.

But over the weekend, Apatow went on a lengthy anti-Cosby rampage. He slammed Cosby’s “cold” defenders for siding with the comedian. He compared Cosby’s lack of conviction in a court of law to Hitler dying without being convicted of

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

Here’s an exciting new way to treat people badly – offer them passage on a ship and then once the ship is well out into the sea…leave. What the hell, you have better things to do, right?

Italian authorities have taken control of a ship with 450 migrants, thought to be Syrian, that was abandoned by its crew off Italy’s coast.

The Italian coastguard said it was now being towed to an Italian port after a rescue team managed to board.

The Ezadeen, sailing under the flag of Sierra Leone, lost power in rough seas overnight off the south-east of Italy.

A total of 796 migrants were rescued from another ship found abandoned without any crew earlier in the

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

A great comic on the whole “let’s make a special pink fluffy version of this toy for girls” approach to toy-making and -marketing. Maritsa Patrinos is the artist.

“Why do girls need their own Legos?”

“We wanted Legos to appeal to girls more.”

Why not just make them appeal to children? Just children?

There’s no need to sell tricycle for girls and tricycles for boys. There’s no need to sell baseball bats or wagons or toy cars or stuffed animals or train sets or dolls or in fact anything for girls or for boys. There’s no need for all this shepherding and herding and nudging. Leave us alone. Let us play with whatever we want to play with, … Read the rest

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

Sweden has a tv journalist who confronts internet trolls, Robert Aschberg.

The goal of Troll Hunter is not to rid the Internet of every troll. “The agenda is to raise hell about all the hate on the Net,” he says. “To start a discussion.” Back at the Troll Hunter office, a whiteboard organized Aschberg’s agenda. Dossiers on other trolls were tacked up in two rows: a pair of teens who anonymously slander their high school classmates on Instagram, a politician who runs a racist website, a male law student who stole the identity of a young woman to entice another man into an online relationship. In a sign of the issue’s resonance in Sweden, a pithy neologism has been

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

A woman member of parliament in Afghanistan, Shukria Barakzai, escaped death in a suicide bombing last November.

Barakzai, who rose to prominence when she ran underground schools for girls when the Taliban ruled the country, says both the previous Afghan government and its Western benefactors have failed to defend the hard-won rights of women.

“For me, what they do to support women’s rights is just lip service, nothing more than that,” says Barakzai, interviewed in hospital where she was recovering from burns to the left side of her face and her left hand from the attack.

And Afghanistan needs support for women’s rights more than most countries.

World Bank data show Afghanistan still lags far behind even its impoverished

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