So I went to the march. It was pretty great.

I didn’t go to the whole thing – I went to the end. Down the hill to the Center, then through the Center and toward downtown a couple of blocks until I found the front of the march. I watched some and joined it some.

There were a couple of Jesus-head guys bellowing through a bullhorn, and the march would do a wave of screams and howls to drown them out every minute or two. I did my share of yelling.

I tried to position myself so that nobody behind me would whack me in the ankle with a stroller, but all the same somebody behind me whacked me in … Read the rest

Science magazine on the government shutdown:

The shutdown is “just deeply disappointing because Congress has had months to fund the government,” said Ken Kimmell, president of the Union of Concerned Scientists in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in a statement. “Without a resolution the federal scientific enterprise will come to a screeching halt, potentially adding millions of dollars in costs and months of delay to taxpayer funded projects.”

It’s the spawn of “starve the beast” – of that whole right-wing trend to frame all government as the enemy, from Ayn Rand to Grover Norquist to these pieces of crap who are trashing everything now. They want to make the US a failed state; that’s the goal.

The shutdown’s impacts could

The National Secular Society on Arif Qawi and St Stephen’s school last Monday, before the theocrats bullied them into submission.

The chair of governors at a highly-performing primary school has called on the Government to issue guidance to help enforce standards on the Islamic headscarf and fasting.

Arif Qawi, chair of governors at St Stephen’s in Upton Park, east London, said the Department for Education should “step up and take it out of our hands”.

Mr Qawi said the school had faced a “backlash” from some parents after banning girls under the age of eight from wearing the hijab in school and encouraging children not to fast on school premises. He said he found it “unfair” that the Government had

Oops, no freedom from hijab for you, little girl.

St Stephen’s primary school in Newham, east London, hit the headlines at the weekend after the Sunday Times reported it had banned Muslim girls under the age of eight from wearing headscarves, to the delight of campaigners who argued it enforces religious conformity on children.

That decision, along with curbs on children fasting on school days during Ramadan, upset many parents, who said they had not been consulted.

Consulted about starving and dehydrating their children? Consulted about treating little girls as sexual vampires who have to be muffled up in cloth to keep them from Tempting males? Parental rights stop where child abuse begins.

On Friday, the school’s chair of

As you may have seen, Trump and Co want to force people to work to qualify for Medicaid.

Under the planned new Health and Human Services regulations announced last week, waivers will be granted to states willing to restructure their programs to force individuals who would otherwise be eligible for Medicaid to work—generally for about 20 hours a week—to qualify for coverage.

What if they’re not well enough to work? What if they can’t find work? What if they have small children at home and no one else to take care of them?

They should have thought of that before they became poor.

The plan purports to help the poor economically and health-wise, but its almost certain to make

Originally a comment by Maureen Brian on Great respect but it’s time to step aside.

I’m afraid my first reaction to some of these spoutings is to ask, “Which man told you to say that?”

That isn’t always justified. In fact I don’t often say it but the thought recurs and sometimes it is needed. There are too many people about who can be catapulted straight into apoplexy by my saying, “Yes, I remember that. In the early ‘80s I was spearheading the campaign at work to get an evidence-based job evaluation scheme introduced which looked only at what work you did, what knowledge you had had to gain and left out entirely matters of sex, race, class.” The … Read the rest

Oh this again,  or rather, still. Always. Never not. Woman interviews an idol of the right, woman is target of a torrent of abuse. The woman is Cathy Newman of Channel 4 (the UK one), the idol of the right is Jordan Peterson.

Ben de Pear, the editor of Channel 4 News, said Newman had been subjected to “vicious misogynistic abuse”. Having to calling in security specialists was a “terrible indictment of the times we live in”, he said.

Newman interviewed the psychologist, Jordan Peterson, about gender on Tuesday. A video of the full 30-minute interview has been watched more than 1.6m times on the Channel 4 News YouTube page and has attracted more than 36,000 comments.

I’ve watched … Read the rest

Guest post by James Garnett.

I see a lot of people cheering on a government shutdown. You need to consider what this means. It’s not just parks closing. During a shutdown, the National Science Foundation stops payments, which can rapidly result in research coming to a halt. For time-sensitive studies, this can mean the loss of data collection that can destroy a study completely. Research projects that have been funded to the tune of millions or even billions of dollars, which have been ongoing for years, can come to an abrupt end without results. That can cripple careers.

Also, remember that we are in the middle of one of the worst and most dangerous flu outbreaks in recent years. … Read the rest

Thought for the day:

https://twitter.com/laura_hudson/status/953707342951981056

Nope.

Not stepping aside.

Shocking and astonishing fact: young people are not always automatically right, and old people are not always automatically wrong. It’s a little more complicated than that.… Read the rest

Originally a comment by iknklast on The right to refuse to do your job.

I nearly lost my mother when I was 9 because a Catholic doctor had refused her any contraceptive care – then bawled her out when she got pregnant again. I suppose he felt my mother, a married woman in her mid-30s, had no right to have sexual relations anymore because getting pregnant was dangerous.

For the record, my mother was not, and never had been, Catholic. She was a member of a religion that didn’t go around poking its nose into married people’s bedrooms, though they could be fierce if someone got pregnant outside of marriage.

My mother had five children at the time, ranging … Read the rest

Barbara Kingsolver pulls no punches:

Patriarchy persists because power does not willingly cede its clout; and also, frankly, because women are widely complicit in the assumption that we’re separate and not quite equal. If we’re woke, we inspect ourselves and others for implicit racial bias, while mostly failing to recognise explicit gender bias, which still runs rampant. Religious faiths that subordinate women flourish on every continent. Nearly every American educational institution pours the lion’s share of its athletics budget into the one sport that still excludes women – American football.

Most progressives wouldn’t hesitate to attend a football game, or to praise the enlightened new pope – the one who says he’s sorry, but women still can’t lead

Guest post by Raymond Dickey.

There was a certain rich man who had a doctor, and an accusation was brought to him that this doctor was making him look bad. So he called him and said to him, ‘What is this I hear about you? Give an account of my physical, for you can no longer be my doctor.’

Then the doctor said within himself, ‘What shall I do? For my master is taking the position away from me. I cannot diagnose; I am ashamed to plug pharmaceuticals. I have resolved what to do, that when I am put out of medicine, they may receive me into their party.’

So he reviewed every one of his master’s medical measurements, … Read the rest

In other “pesky brown foreigners wanting to come here” news, it turns out you have to pass a test to be a humanist.

A Pakistani man who renounced his Muslim faith and became a humanist has had his application for asylum in the UK rejected after failing to correctly answer questions about ancient Greek philosophers.

The Home Office said Hamza bin Walayat’s failure to identify Plato and Aristotle as humanist philosophers indicated his knowledge of humanism was “rudimentary at best”.

Uh…what? Who says Plato and Aristotle even are humanist philosophers? Especially in any modern sense that an ex-Muslim would have in mind? Aristotle is a largely secular philosopher perhaps; Plato isn’t even that. They’re considered part of a broad … Read the rest

It looks as if Trump’s Fake News Awards aren’t today after all.

Trump will name “the most corrupt & biased of the Mainstream Media” on Wednesday, according to a Jan. 7 tweet, but he appears to have done little preparation for the event — if there even is an event.

“We’ll keep you posted on any details around that potential event and what that would look like,” White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders told reporters Tuesday when asked about the awards.

Posted? Potential? Would look like? But the awards are supposed to be today. Has he not prepared? No shopping for medals or tiny statues? No combing through the entries? No secret ballots?

What happened to the