Turkey is now going to have halal blood.

Wut?

I don’t know. That’s what they say.

A recent Turkish Red Crescent initiate is set to be turned into a factory-supported production process, making medicine out of Turkish people’s blood in order to rule out any risk of non-Islamic dietary impact, according to the organization’s head, Ahmet Lütfi Akar.

Akar told daily Hurriyet that the move could both eliminate dependence on drugs imports, as well as providing Muslim Turks with assurances that their medicine complies with their religious codes.

Uh huh. Because if it’s Turkish blood, it’s clean, and if it’s kaffir blood, it’s dirty. That’s always a great way to think about people.

“For instance, if we are buying

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Via Taslima – a study shows that chimps and orangs can have episodic memories after three years.

It has been well established in humans that sensory cues like songs and smells can help transport our minds back to the past.

The team, led by Gema Martin-Ordas of Aarhus University, Denmark, used the same principle. They found that cues – keeping the experimental set up the same – triggered the apes’ memories.

They observed that 90% of the apes who experienced the event three years earlier found the tool in the correct location almost instantly.

“Our data, and other emerging evidence, keep challenging the idea of non-human animals being stuck in time,” said Dr Martin-Ordas.

“We show not only that chimpanzees

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For dessert at the end of the day – another painting that’s not in a stove. Flowering Orchard, from the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam.

I’ve been there once, years ago. That’s one museum that really impresses on you the difference between the real thing and pictures in books. The real paintings practically vibrate on the walls. It’s a wonderful, overwhelming experience.

… Read the rest

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Atheist Ireland has made a submission to the Irish Constitutional Convention, looking to get blasphemy out of the Irish Constitution.

3. Why the Irish blasphemy law in particular is harmful

…

(ii) The preamble to our Constitution states that all authority of the State comes from, and all actions of the State must be referred to the Most Holy Trinity. It also humbly acknowledges all of the obligations of the people of the State to Our Lord Jesus Christ.

That’s just a bonkers thing to have in a constitution. Just nuts. That’s not the kind of thing it’s reasonable to expect an entire population to agree to or submit to! You can’t demand agreement on something that’s not decided by … Read the rest

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Mohammed Hanif warmly thanks Adnan Shaheed for his generous letter to Malala Yousafzai.

Thanks for owning up that your comrades tried to kill her by shooting her in the head. Many of your well-wishers in Pakistan had been claiming the Taliban wouldn’t attack a minor girl. They were of the opinion that Malala had shot herself in order to become a celebrity and get a UK visa. Women, as we know, will go to any lengths to get what they want. So thanks for saying that a 14-year-old girl was the Taliban’s foe.

Then he moves on to theology.

Like you, there are others who are still not sure whether it was “Islamically correct or wrong”, or whether she deserved

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A new Dan Cardamon.

How can you tell what a woman wants at any particular moment, I mean, come on.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Efcqo1r4NCw

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One article from the Asian Human Rights Commission leads to another, like this one from July 3 about the murder of one woman who was a women’s rights activist, followed by the murder of her sister who was trying to pursue the murder case.

Dear friends,

The Asian Human Rights Commission (AHRC) has received updated information regarding the murder of Ms. Shamim Akhter (50), who worked for the Social Welfare organization in Tando Jam, Sindh province. She was brutally chopped to death by her husband Mr. Sajid Mahmood and Police Constable Usman Lodhi on 4 June 2013 (For further information, please see our recent urgent appeal: AHRC-UAC-092-2013).

Now, we have learned that Shamim’s younger sister, Ms. Tasleem Akhter, who

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Via Małgorzata – in Pakistan, a young woman stoned to death for having a mobile phone.

Arifa, a mother of two, has been stoned to death on the orders of Panchayat (a tribal court) for possessing a cell phone. She was executed on 11 July in the district of Dera Ghazi Khan in Punjab province. The victim was stoned to death by her uncle and relatives on the orders of Panchayat after she was found to have a mobile phone.

There’s something wrong here.

I know that’s an understatement, but it’s also the problem. There’s something wrong. There’s something wrong when on the one hand there’s a trivial matter like possession of a mobile phone (on which it would in … Read the rest

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The one that was in the Kunsthal, Rotterdam.

Bloomberg has images of all the destroyed paintings.… Read the rest

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This one was in Rotterdam, so this one has been burned up in a stove.

 … Read the rest

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This one is at McMaster Museum of Art in Hamilton, Ontario, so it too is not burned up in a stove.

 … Read the rest

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This one is at the Hermitage, so it hasn’t been burned up in a stove.

… Read the rest

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Nooooooooooooooooooooo.

Some thieves stole seven paintings from a Rotterdam museum. The paintings have probably been burned up in a stove.

Noooooooooooooooooooooooooo.

Ash from an oven owned by a woman whose son is charged with stealing seven multimillion-pound paintings, including works by Matisse, Picasso and Monet, contained paint, canvas and nails, a Romanian museum official said on Wednesday.

The discovery could be evidence that Olga Dogaru was telling the truth when she claimed to have burned the paintings, which were taken from Rotterdam’s Kunsthal gallery last year in a daylight heist.

Ernest Oberlander-Tarnoveanu, director of Romania‘s National History Museum, told the Associated Press that museum forensic specialists had found small fragments of painting primer, the remains of canvas and

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Some imbecile who is a “senior member” of the Taliban has written a criminally stupid “open letter” to Malala Yousafzai explaining why the Taliban shot her and how wrong she was to do the things that forced the Taliban to shoot her. It turns out they had a perfectly valid reason, which is that they thought she was maligning them. Sure; that’s fair. It’s fair the way it’s fair if some impudent girl of 12 refuses to marry some guy she doesn’t know and her family murders her to repair their broken “honor.” Totally fair. Some people matter and get to have things all their way, and other people don’t, and the people in the first group get to kill … Read the rest

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Bwahaha Andrew Brown is such a riot.

Is it really ludicrous that the Vatican should be claiming you can get time off purgatory by following the pope on Twitter?

Yes, Andrew, of course it fucking is!

Yes, it is ludicrous to think there’s a magic supernatural guy in the sky who transcends everything and is too vast and magical and everythings for mere humans to comprehend, who hunches over an iPad keeping track of human beings retweeting the pope. Yes, that is very very ludicrous.

There are obvious problems. If as a materialist you don’t believe in purgatory, or hell, or any kind of moral balancing in an afterlife, then the whole thing is absurd, though no more

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The Taoiseach has told the religious orders to have a serious think about their refusal to pay any compensation to the women who did slave labor in the Magdalen laundries for decades. This was a for-profit business the orders were running, and the women got literally no payment at all. That’s slavery, and a pretty damn harsh version of it at that.

The four orders have told the Government they will not contribute to the redress scheme set up to compensate the former residents of the laundries. The scheme is expected to cost between €34 million and €58 million.

The Mercy Sisters, the Sisters of Our Lady of Charity, the Sisters of Charity and the Good Shepherd Sisters have

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Speaking of Ken White Popehat – he has an interesting post on Nancy Grace. (Who? She has a US cable “news” show about The Judgin [to use Peter Cook's label], which I’ve never seen but have a vague sense of by reputation – which can be summed up with the odious word “feisty.”)

He starts with the enigma of her politics, which combines tropes from all (banal) directions, so what actually is she? None of those, but something they don’t cover.

Nancy Grace’s political bent is quite recognizable to me.  She’s not liberal or conservative, and no principled view of gun ownership or race or women’s rights drives her coverage.  No, she’s a vigorous statist, at least with

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On Monday July 1 I was walking around in Dublin so I didn’t see Ken’s Popehat post Why Does Talking About Creepers And Harassment Make People So Angry? I didn’t see it until now, when a correspondent pointed it out to me.

I confess:  I still don’t get it.

We write about things that make people angry:  sometimes on purpose (u mad bro?), sometimes because the topic interests us.  But few topics are as consistent in their ability to draw anger and trolling and bizarre visitors as the issue of sexual harassment and responses to it.

If I talk about my experiences training clients’ employees in how to avoid sexual harassment, I draw nutters.  If I talk about sites that

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Hahahahahahahahahahahahaha

Vatican offers ‘time off purgatory’ to followers of Pope Francis tweets

[gasp] On the one hand purgatory, on the other hand tweets.

HahahahahahahahahahahahahaHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA

In its latest attempt to keep up with the times the Vatican has married one of its oldest traditions to the world of social media by offering “indulgences” to followers of Pope Francis’ tweets.

The church’s granted indulgences reduce the time Catholics believe they will have to spend in purgatory after they have confessed and been absolved of their sins.

Reduce the time Catholics believe they will have to spend in purgatory? What good is that?? Surely the believers want the indulgences to reduce the actual time Catholics have to spend in purgatory. I wonder if … Read the rest

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And speaking of the Magdalenes – here is a petition you can sign, to force the orders who ran the Magdalen laundries to pay compensation to the victims.

They have refused to make payment of compensation, leaving this to the Irish Government but it was they who exploited the women, they who ran the laundries and they who should pay for the abuse they committed.  Letting them get away with not paying would be a true travesty of justice.

As is so common with the church.

 … Read the rest

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