I took Cooper to the beach this afternoon, his first time since he had his paw stitched. It had been a foggy morning but was pretty sunny in the afternoon, though not as hot as it had been the last few days. The park where the beach is (Golden Gardens) was sunny, and I chucked the ball (with the chuckit) on the grass before we got to the beach and Cooper chased it, and then we got to the little trail through the Scotch Broom (aka gorse) to the beach…and we were in a different universe – some of the thickest fog I’ve ever seen, which got thicker while we were there. It was weird and beautiful. There was just … Read the rest

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Maryam reports that there’s growing evidence that very young girls are being “married” to much older men in Sharia courts in the UK. Girls as young as five.

A recent undercover investigation by the Sunday Times found imams in Britain willing to “marry” young girls, provided this was carried out in secret. The imams had been approached by an undercover reporter posing as a father who said he wanted his 12 year old daughter married, to prevent her from being tempted in to a “western lifestyle”.

Imam Mohammed Kassamali, of the Husaini Islamic Centre in Peterborough, sanctioned the marriage, but stressed the need for total secrecy. He stated: “I would love the girl to go to her husband’s houses

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I often find Sam Harris irritating, but he can be very good at hitting the right nail on the head. He is in his new piece on the freedom to offend.

I’ll just give a few examples of nail-hitting.

Whether over a film, a cartoon, a novel, a beauty pageant, or an inauspiciously named teddy bear, the coming eruption of pious rage is now as predictable as the dawn. This is already an old and boring story about old, boring, and deadly ideas.

…

The contagion of moral cowardice followed its usual course, wherein liberal journalists and pundits began to reconsider our most basic freedoms in light of the sadomasochistic fury known as “religious sensitivity” among Muslims. Contributors to

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Faith healing doesn’t work; would interfaith healing do better?

No. So why is interfaith such a good thing again? Why is faith a good thing?

It’s not.

Consider Randi and Russel Bellew for instance. (No, I don’t know why Russel spells his own name wrong.)

A Creswell,  Ore., husband and wife have pleaded guilty to negligent homicide charges in the faith healing death of their 16-year-old son.

KVAL-TV reports that the teen, Austin Sprout, died at home last December after his appendix  burst. Lane County sheriff’s Capt. Byron  Trapp says medical professionals believe the boy’s condition was treatable had he been provided medical care.

Ya think?

That’s one hell of a painful death those two damn fools inflicted on their … Read the rest

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Another piece on women in tech fields. The takeaway:

It was always the ones that said they didn’t see gender or color who did the most damage. “They’re just words,” they would say, “Why do you let them hurt you?” And with that, my pain was made as invisible as me. “They’re just words.” Indeed, just the verbal incantations of power, like law and code and everything else that made the world. I decided to leave tech for words.

❧

But now I’m all shouty. Now people are angry at me because I have a stage, and they can’t make me invisible and ignore me, because the truth is you can’t ignore words, and I have the words. So

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There’s a dreadfully wrong-headed article by Eboo Patel in the Chronicle of Higher Ed. You can probably guess the gist if you remember that he’s one of Chris Stedman’s favorite interfaithy types. The gist is that faith is great, it doesn’t matter what kind as long as it’s faith, and it’s a kind of identity like race so let’s start making sure there’s lots of diversity of it, because faith.

Part of the rationale for 1990s-era campus multiculturalism was to remedy the racial bias in the broader society: to lift up underrepresented narratives, to remind people that many communities have contributed to the American project, to ensure that our perceptions of race were not driven by the crime reports on

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I know it’s obvious, I know it’s too easy, I know everybody and its dog is all over it, but can I just point and laugh at Romney a little all the same? Because it’s too perfect.

That is how they think. I know some, and that’s how they think. They think everybody who isn’t rich is contemptible, and out to steal their stuff.

At the fundraiser, Romney was asked how he could win in November, and he replied:

There are 47 percent of the people who will vote for the president no matter what. All right, there are 47 percent who are with him, who are dependent upon government, who believe that they are victims, who believe the government

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This is funny. I got a tweet from Linky ‏@LinkyGray saying

putting on an event celebrating & supporting women in science and media, called LogicGrrrl in Edinburgh, cld you spread word?

So I said sure and asked if she had any useful links and in the meantime I tried Google, which turned up nothing relevant but did turn up something from a Christian apologetics site explaining “Girl Logic.” It’s chapter 4 of something (a book? a manifesto?) called What does a Woman Want? A Real Man.

“Girl logic” is the label given to describe that series of semi-consecutive feminine thoughts that favored “cute things,” “soft things,” and cuddly little kittens and puppies. It causes girls to act in

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Hey hurry up today is the last day for Early Bird pricing for the American Atheists 50th Anniversary National Convention. You want to go to that! It’s in Austin. You can see the bats from it.

I’ll be there. Anthony Grayling is the keynote speaker. Who else is there? Jessica Ahlquist – Jamila Bey – Greta – Elisabeth Cornwell – Jerry De Witt – Matt Dillahunty – Margaret Downey – J.T. Eberhard – Janet Heimlich – Linda LaScola – Teresa McBain – Dale McGowan – and Dave Silverman of course. Along with many others. It should be fuuuuuuun.… Read the rest

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Roy Brown told the UN Human Rights Council what’s what last week.

States which fail to punish faith-based violence against religious and non-religious minorities, or which legitimize faith-based violence through laws against ‘blasphemy’ or ‘apostasy’, should have no seat on the UN Human Rights Council. This was the view presented by the International Humanist and Ethical Union (IHEU) delegation to the UN Human Rights Council on Monday.

And quite right too.

The 21^st session of the UN Human Rights Council (Geneva, 10 September 2012) opened with a report from the High Commissioner for Human Rights, Navi Pillay. Speaking in response to her report, IHEU Main Representative Roy Brown thanked her for her recognition of the problem of violence

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