Yes he drinks and smokes a lot, but he works even more.
Category: Latest News
Welcome to our archive of news stories relevant to the project of fighting fashionable nonsense. The stories are drawn from the electronic pages of the world’s media. On this page, you’ll find links to those stories that have been featured on Butterflies and Wheels during the current year. At the bottom of the page, you’ll find links to separate archives of stories from previous years.
We’re always pleased to hear about news stories that you think should be featured on Butterflies and Wheels. Just send an email here, if you want to point one out to us.
A note about links
Inevitably links go out of date. We suggest, therefore, that you make hard-copies of the stories that particularly interest you.
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Education should be a priority
In Kabul, the nicest buildings constructed during the post-Taliban years are not schools but mosques.
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Professor’s hand chopped off for “offending faith”
He was arrested in April for preparing an exam question “defaming” Mohammed.
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Ground rules for theist-atheist debate
Let’s not waste each other’s time, shall we?
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“Psychic” gets jail time
For lifting $108,000 and a car from a credulous customer.
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Karen Armstrong finds a kindred spirit
Marilynne Robinson also says positivism is reductionist and sciencey and bad.
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Doctor’s Data sues Quackwatch
Thus making Doctor’s Data more widely known as a fraud.
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Belgium v Vatican: threats against witnesses
Threats have been made against people who gave the authorities information or made a complaint, and against some magistrates.
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Stop the stoning of Sakine Mohammadi Ashtiani
Do not allow our nightmare become a reality. Today we stretch out our hands to the people of the whole world.
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Rust Belt Philosopher on Ron Rosenbaum
For a fan of agnosticism, Rosenbaum is remarkably confident about what he can know.
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John Gray parades his pessimism again
“The humanist assumptions that underpinned science fiction are no longer credible even as fictions.”
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Christopher Hitchens on “Mother Teresa”
Who could fail to be touched by the work of the orphanage? But.
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US State department on stoning
Thinks it’s not “appropriate punishment” for adultery.
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Iranian woman faces death by stoning
Under Iranian sharia, the sentenced individual is buried up to the neck (or to the waist in the case of men) and stoned.
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Another LRB review of What Darwin Got Wrong
Fodor and Piattelli-Palmarini believe that they can replicate Chomsky’s demolition job on Skinner.
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Johann Hari on speculation and starvation
The world’s wealthiest speculators gambled on increasing starvation, and won.
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Cristina Odone announces she is praying for Hitchens
“He is determined to persecute Pope Benedict XVI.” No. The word is “prosecute.”
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Neuroskeptic graphs the flatline of Freud
Proportionally speaking, psychoanalysis has gone out with a whimper, though not a bang.
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BMA: gay ‘conversion therapy’ is harmful
Calls for mental health standards bodies to reject such treatments and ban their use in their codes of practice.
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Bishop Mixa could be allowed to return to work
He appears to have received much more lenient treatment from the Pope than has been proposed by church authorities elsewhere.