Update: I got this partly wrong, because the Guardian article is at least misleading.

Oh.my.god. I didn’t know about this.

Marta Orellana says she was playing with friends at the orphanage when the summons sounded: “Orellana to the infirmary. Orellana to the infirmary.”

Waiting for her were several doctors she had never seen before. Tall men with fair complexions who spoke what she guessed was English, plus a Guatemalan doctor. They had syringes and little bottles.

They ordered her to lie down and open her legs. Embarrassed, she locked her knees together and shook her head. The Guatemalan medic slapped her cheek and she began to cry. “I did what I was told,” she recalls.

And they infected her with … Read the rest

Oh honestly. Not good enough.

Ten years ago, the BBC was always telling us how bloody marvellous the euro was. Now – for reasons I can’t quite fathom – it’s assisted suicide.

Really? Can’t fathom? Well try harder.

It’s really not that difficult. Something is going to kill us – you, me, all of us. We don’t know what it will be. We do know it could be slow and horrible. We’re afraid of that. Some of us would like to know we (and others who want it) have the option of cutting it short; knowing that would relieve one of the fears.

Now can you fathom it? I’ll tell you what I can’t fathom: I can’t fathom why … Read the rest

Oh I love it when people with an agenda accuse other people of bias.

A BBC film on assisted suicide was “biased”, critics have said.

Care Not Killing campaigners said Choosing to Die, which shows a British man with motor neurone disease dying, was “pro-assisted suicide propaganda loosely dressed up as a documentary”.

And the ex-Bishop of Rochester, Michael Nazir Ali, said it “glorified
suicide”.

…

The Bishop of Exeter, the Right Reverend Michael Langrish, said he wanted to see “much more emphasis put on supporting people in living, than assisting them in dying”.

Oh well then – ! If Care Not Killing campaigners and a bishop say it’s propaganda, well, they certainly are unimpeachable authorities on how to … Read the rest

Remember: religion makes people nicer.

On treacherous building sites little boys were flogged if they slowed down,  carrying loads of bricks up the scaffolding, lime burns lacerating their legs,  hands blistered and cut. This was not Dickensian England; this was Australia and  it was happening until 1970.

…

In 1946, at the age of 10, Hennessey was sent from an orphanage in England to  the brutal Bindoon Boys Town in Western Australia….

”The brothers and sisters were all together,” he says. ”And then they  started grabbing the girls away from their brothers. I can still hear the  screams of these kids being separated. Some of them never saw their sisters  again. I still have nightmares.”

Life at Bindoon, run

They’re still doing it…

The Independent’s first paragraph:

Britain’s largest mainstream Muslim organisation will today call for “robust action” to combat Islamophobic attacks amid fears of growing violence and under-reporting of hate crimes.

You already know what that organization is, right? And it is: it’s the MCB. But what is “mainstream” about the MCB? It is, notoriously, reactionary and male-dominated. More genuinely “mainstream” Muslims don’t consider it mainstream at all, and fume at the media habit of calling it mainstream and treating it as mainstream.

Taji Mustafa, spokesman for Hizb ut-Tahrir in Britain, said: “Xenophobic attacks on Muslims have increased under successive governments. In a manipulative alliance with some sections of the media, they have demonised Islam as part

It takes more than one person to argue with Michael Ruse. Jerry has, Russell has, but I still found new stuff that irritates me, so here it is.

…science tells us that Adam and Eve are fictions. That Saint Paul or Uncle Tom Cobley and all thought otherwise is irrelevant. They were wrong. This is not to say that they were stupid or careless. Two thousand years ago, for a Jew to believe in Adam and Eve was perfectly sensible. But time moves on and with it our understanding of the world around us, and old beliefs have to give way to new ones. Aristotle thought that some people were born to be slaves. He was wrong.