It’s not the thing you fling – it’s the fling itself.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rJgt-HO0_kY

Donate to the SSA!… Read the rest

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

Uh oh, it’s 11:50. That’s cutting it too fine.

The UK education secretary has decided to fuck up science education.

All children are to be taught a foreign language – which could include Mandarin, Latin or Greek – from the age of seven under reforms to the national curriculum being unveiled by the education secretary, Michael Gove.

In other reforms, children will be encouraged to learn science by studying nature, and schools will be expected to place less emphasis on teaching scientific method.

Less emphasis on teaching scientific method? What the hell? Why would they do that? They might as well say they’re going to place less emphasis on teaching children critical thinking and just stuff them with a … Read the rest

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

This just in – today’s installment of Boko Haram attacks on churches in Nigeria. Body count for this week: 4 so far.

The violence Sunday in Jos and Biu, a city in hard-hit northeastern Borno state, comes as almost every weekend this year has seen churches targeted by a radical Islamist sect known as Boko Haram and other shadowy assailants exacerbating the country’s unease. While no group immediately claimed responsibility for Sunday’s dual attacks, they bore the hallmarks of the sect’s previous assaults, which continue unstopped despite a heavy military presence in the region.

You know this idea we were talking about, making the world a better place? This isn’t it.

Killing people isn’t it.

No group immediately claimed

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The final question from Brianne:

Any updates on Hamza Kashgari?

Not of the type “He is free!” alas…but there is what appears to be an update on how he’s doing, from a relative, translated on the Free Hamza Kashgari Facebook page:

We visited Hamza, thank God, he’s in a good mental condition, and he says “hello” to everyone asking about him, he was extremely moved ‘weeping’ when he heard about the Balloon’s launching on his Birthday, may God unite us with him again.

Well “God” kind of got him into this mess, but never mind. However, that’s something, but it’s still Hamza-in-prison as opposed to Hamza in New Zealand living a free life.

Donate to the SSA!… Read the rest

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Brianne’s topics part 2.

What work/speech/writing of Christopher Hitchens do you find most inspiring? What do you most disagree with?

Most inspiring: the literary/historical/foreign correspondent writing, because of its sheer abundance, erudition, wit, and style. Pretty much all the speech I’ve ever seen, even when he was both hungover and jetlagged, as he was the first time I saw him on a book tour, when he was promoting No One Left to Lie To. It was the morning after the White House correspondents’ dinner, and he’d taken the red eye to Seattle – so he must have been as hungover and jetlagged as it’s possible to be without expiring. It did show, but it didn’t make him slow or … Read the rest

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It’s 9:47. I took some time to read things, and have a little coffee, so it’s 9:47. Yikes.

Brianne – awake much too soon after her 24 hour stint – provides topics.

How can we get Americans more interested in world politics? Do we need to get Americans more interested?  Does that kind of interest and knowledge set have to start being rolled out in the younger school years?

We certainly need to get Americans more interested – because the US does a lot of [helping/meddling] in the world, and citizens should have more knowledge in order to judge what is helping and what is meddling. Because there are international charities and NGOs, which Americans – like anyone else – … Read the rest

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EcksLibris (amusing nym!) replies to my request for topics to post about:

I would love to hear more about you, how you came to your beliefs/lack thereof, and how you became an activist (in the best possible sense of the word)!

I don’t generally like to talk directly about Me Me Me, but talking about how we come to our beliefs/lack thereof is another matter. It’s always interesting, at least to me.

I came to my lack of theist beliefs mostly by never really having theist beliefs in the first place, as well as I can remember. I was told things, as a child, but I think they must have always been hedged. I know they were sometimes, because I … Read the rest

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Ewan answered my request for suggestions by asking for reasons to support the SSA. Greta has a good selection of quotations on that.

JT Eberhard, a campus organizer and high school specialist with the Secular Student Alliance, gives us his personal account of what he does. He starts with Jessica Ahlquist on what the SSA did for her:

When JT Eberhard contacted me and gave me the support of the Secular Student Alliance I felt like I had friends again.  Over the course of two years the SSA provided me with support and JT closely monitored the actions of the school committee, always ready to come to my defense at any minute.  He expressed that he cared not only

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It’s 8:05 – no, 8:06. Get going.

An item on Twitter just now caused me to read the Wikipedia entry on the atheist’s wager, an alternative to Pascal’s of the same ilk.

You should live your life and try to make the world a better place for your being in it, whether or not you believe in god. If there is no god, you have lost nothing and will be remembered fondly by those you left behind. If there is a benevolent god, he will judge you on your merits and not just on whether or not you believed in him.

Not alternative enough, if you ask me. It’s still too focused on postmortem, as if we were going … Read the rest

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Here we go. The miniature blogathon begins.

Brianne did hers yesterday, except hers wasn’t miniature: she did the whole 24 hour thing. I encouraged her by reminding her that the second half was going to be much longer than the first. I’m kind that way.

You were supposed to suggest things for me to post about. Seriously: any suggestions? But then it’s Sunday, when nobody reads this. People read this exclusively during working hours, so that they’ll know for sure they’re not wasting their time.

Not to worry. It’s not as if the world is empty of things to talk about.

Donate to the SSA!… Read the rest

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Via Tarek Fatah, a Calgary conference has invited Bilal Philips as the top speaker; Philips has repeatedly said homosexuals should be executed. Get the name of the conference – The Power of Unity: Islam in a MultiCultural Canada. Some unity!

And there’s a slew of other craps, too.

Munir El-Kassem, a dentist from London, Ont., wrote a column back in 2001 that condemned the West as hypocritical and defended the Taliban regime for destroying the sixth-century Buddha statues in Bamiyan…

Shaykh Hatem Alhaj recently lost his job at the Mayo Clinic because he wrote papers in support of female circumcision. He later tried to clarify his position by saying he only supports nicking the clitoris, not cutting it right

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

Athena Andreadis is disgusted but not surprised at the spectacle of Golden Dawn spokesman Elías Kasidhiáris hitting Liána Kanélli in the face on a tv talk show the other day.

For those sequestered in silently running nuclear submarines, Golden Dawn got 7% of the vote in the May elections, gaining seats in the parliament – the first time such a thing has happened since World War II (not counting the junta). Its platform is the standard troglodytic garbage: ethnic purity, “natural” order – which includes the de jure disenfranchisement of women and Others – and bodily violence against those who disagree. Its members regularly assault immigrants, minorities and journalists as well as other “undesirables”, with tolerance (if not cooperation) from

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“Thank You Hater” went viral yesterday; I saw it everywhere. It was all over my Twitter feed, including via Roger Ebert and Stephen Fry. Isabel Fay tweeted about the phone ringing off the hook and interviews lining up to be done. The Guardian reports on the instant virality.

It also reports a different cyber-bully story.

A woman has won court backing to force Facebook to reveal the identities of cyberbullies who targeted her with a string of abusive messages on the website.

Nicola Brookes was granted a high court order after receiving “vicious and depraved” abuse on Facebook after she posted a comment in support of the former The X Factor contestant Frankie Cocozza.

The woman, from Brighton,

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Sarah El Deeb is a journalist with the AP in Cairo; she tweeted about the protest against violence against women, and then about the attack on the protest. Before the attack she posted a nice hopeful photo -

That was before a mob of men attacked them.… Read the rest

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