You know how we keep being told that Indonesia is an example of a country where Islam is the majority religion but is not oppressive?

Oh really?

The Jakarta Post has defended the publication of a cartoon criticising Islamic State (IS) militants, after its editor was named in a defamation case.

The cartoon shows a flag similar to ones used by IS with the words “there is no God but Allah”, and a skull and crossbones.

That is, the IS flag has the words “there is no God but Allah” and a plain oval; the cartoon made the plain oval a skull and crossbones.

Published on 3 July, the cartoon replaces the oval shape on the original flag with a skull and crossbones but leaves the Arabic religious phrase “Laa ilaaha illallaah”, meaning “there is no God but Allah”.

It also shows the words Allah and Muhammad, which are sacred to Muslims and found on IS flags, inside the skull shape.

The Post, a leading English-language daily, said the cartoon was meant as a critique of the use of religious symbols in acts of violence.

Well we can’t have that, now can we. People might start to think that happens a lot, or something equally alarming and improper.

But some Muslim groups said the cartoon was offensive towards Islam. The Post apologised and retracted the cartoon on 8 July, saying it regretted the “error in judgement”.

On Thursday, police named the Jakarta Post’s editor-in-chief, Meidyatama Suryodiningrat, a suspect for religious defamation.

“We are amazed because the fact is we did not commit a criminal act as accused,” the newspaper responded in a statement on Thursday.

“Religious defamation” – i.e. the nonsense idea that it’s possible to “defame” religion. In Indonesia the police are enforcing this nonsense idea.

A police spokesman told the BBC Mr Suryodiningrat could be summoned next week. He could be facing five years in prison for religious blasphemy.

So how is Indonesia an example of a country where Islam is the majority religion but is not oppressive? I don’t see it, myself.

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

The view from up there – Lake Michigan, Chicago, St Louis, Memphis…

Image Credit: NASA/Barry Wilmore

From the International Space Station, Expedition 42 Commander Barry Wilmore took this photograph of the Great Lakes and central U.S. on Dec. 7, 2014, and posted it to social media.

Toronto, Buffalo…Columbus…Atlanta…

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

Another woman has a Bill Cosby story. (No, it’s not a story of how he spotted some guy spiking her drink and gave the guy a damn good talking to. Nope.) Beverly Johnson tells hers in Vanity Fair.

She grew up admiring Cosby. She was delighted when he asked her to audition for a bit part on his show. She met with him in his office and thought he was fabulous. She and her young daughter had lunch at his house and she thought he was even more fabulous.

Looking back, that first invite from Cosby to his home seems like part of a perfectly laid out plan, a way to make me feel secure with him at all times. It worked like a charm. Cosby suggested I come back to his house a few days later to read for the part. I agreed, and one late afternoon the following week I returned. His staff served a light dinner and Bill and I talked more about my plans for the future.

Then he made her a cappuccino, and she said she didn’t drink coffee that late in the day, and he insisted and she felt mystifyingly (to herself) unable to argue with him.

It’s nuts, I know, but it felt oddly inappropriate arguing with Bill Cosby so I took a few sips of the coffee just to appease him.

Now let me explain this: I was a top model during the 70s, a period when drugs flowed at parties and photo shoots like bottled water at a health spa. I’d had my fun and experimented with my fair share of mood enhancers. I knew by the second sip of the drink Cosby had given me that I’d been drugged—and drugged good.

[Editor’s Note: Cosby’s attorneys did not respond to Vanity Fair’s requests for comment.]

My head became woozy, my speech became slurred, and the room began to spin nonstop. Cosby motioned for me to come over to him as though we were really about to act out the scene. He put his hands around my waist, and I managed to put my hand on his shoulder in order to steady myself.

She was rapidly losing it, so she started shouting at him.

“You are a motherfucker aren’t you?”

That’s the exact question I yelled at him as he stood there holding me, expecting me to bend to his will. I rapidly called him several more “motherfuckers.” By the fifth, I could tell that I was really pissing him off. At one point he dropped his hands from my waist and just stood there looking at me like I’d lost my mind.

Then he grabbed her by the arm and yanked her down the stairs and out the front door, hailed a cab, and shoved her into it. She got home – she doesn’t know how – and slept well into the next day. It took days for the drug to wear off completely.

For a long time I thought it was something that only happened to me, and that I was somehow responsible. So I kept my secret to myself, believing this truth needed to remain in the darkness. But the last four weeks have changed everything, as so many women have shared similar stories, of which the press have belatedly taken heed.

He got away with it for a long long long time. Decades.

Still I struggled with how to reveal my big secret, and more importantly, what would people think when and if I did? Would they dismiss me as an angry black woman intent on ruining the image of one of the most revered men in the African American community over the last 40 years? Or would they see my open and honest account of being betrayed by one of the country’s most powerful, influential, and beloved entertainers?

As I wrestled with the idea of telling my story of the day Bill Cosby drugged me with the intention of doing God knows what, the faces of Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, Eric Garner, and countless other brown and black men took residence in my mind.

As if I needed to be reminded. The current plight of the black male was behind my silence when Barbara Bowman came out to tell the horrific details of being drugged and raped by Cosby to theWashington Post in November. And I watched in horror as my longtime friend and fellow model Janice Dickinson was raked over the coals for telling her account of rape at Cosby’s hands. Over the years I’ve met other women who also claim to have been violated by Cosby. Many are still afraid to speak up. I couldn’t sit back and watch the other women be vilified and shamed for something I knew was true.

So she spoke up.

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

Wow. What not to do: make a point about climate change by trampling on a fragile, restricted, ancient artwork.

http://www.ancient-origins.net/

The BBC reports:

Peru says it will sue activists from the environmental pressure group Greenpeace after they placed a banner next to the Nazca Lines heritage site.

The activists entered a restricted area next to the ancient ground markings depicting a hummingbird and laid down letters advocating renewable energy.

Peru is currently hosting the UN climate summit in its capital, Lima.

So Greenpeace rewards Peru by stomping on the Nazca lines, where people are not allowed to walk. What will they do next, have a rave in the Lascaux caves? Build a campfire at Stonehenge? Skateboard all over Machu Picchu?

Luis Jaime Castillo, a Peruvian deputy culture minister, said Peru would file charges of “attacking archaeological monuments” against the activists from Argentina, Austria, Brazil, Chile, Germany, Italy and Spain.

He said the Nazca Lines, which are an estimated 1,500 to 2,000 years old, were “absolutely fragile”.

“You walk there and the footprint is going to last hundreds or thousands of years,” he said.

The lines, depicting animals, stylised plants and imaginary figures were declared a Unesco World Heritage Site in 1994.

“They haven’t touched the hummingbird figure but now we have an additional figure created by the footsteps of these people,” Mr Castillo told local radio.

The Guardian has more:

The activists entered a “strictly prohibited” area beside the figure of a hummingbird, the culture ministry said. They laid big yellow cloth letters reading: “Time for Change! The Future is Renewable.” The message was intended for delegates from 190 countries at the UN climate talks being held in Lima.

Castillo said no one, not even presidents and cabinet ministers, was allowed where the activists had gone without authorisation and anyone who received permission must wear special shoes.

They didn’t wear special shoes. You can see that in the photos – they’re wearing ordinary trainers, with all the ridges and bumps that trainers have.

For more on the Nazca lines, there are pictures and links at latinamericanstudies.org.

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

Atul Gawande is horrified at the way medical doctors helped the torturers.

In a series of furious tweets on Wednesday, the New Yorker writer castigated clinicians for their role in helping the CIA carry out torture — and in some cases, effectively doing it themselves.

Reviewing the Senate Intelligence Committee’s newly released report, Gawande points to nearly a dozen individual examples of physicians playing a role in the CIA’s interrogation and treatment of detainees.

For instance, at least five detainees were subjected to forced rectal feeding or rectal rehydration — where CIA torturers infused large amounts of liquids into their rectums — one of the most gruesome parts of the Senate’s report, the Daily Beast‘s Shane Harris concludes.

But those procedures weren’t medically necessary. “It was doctors who devised the rectal infusions ‘as a means of behavior control,’” Gawande says.

And doctors also played a key role in helping detainees get back on their feet – so they could be tortured some more.

I just read Gawande’s series of tweets, and there’s one about doctors okaying forcing someone with broken bones in his foot to stand up for 52 hours.

…the Department of Defense issued a June 2005 memo that spelled out the “medical program principles and procedures for the protection and treatment” of detainees — presumably, a move that should [have] reinforced the need for proper medical care.

Yet on closer scrutiny, the guidelines were ethically “troubling,” Leonard Rubenstein and others wrote in JAMA. They created loopholes that allowed military physicians and other personnel to participate in torture activities, which were authorized by the United States but “absolutely prohibited” by international human rights law.

I hate it when the US flouts international human rights law. It’s shameful. Shameful.

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

Via a Catholic group on Facebook –

Did Jesus feed the hungry as a general thing? I know about the loaves and fishes but that was a one-off, and it was “the hungry” in the sense that a bunch of people were together for awhile and time passed so they got hungry – it wasn’t about feeding the chronically hungry poor.

Did Jesus clothe the naked? Did he care for the ill?

He is reported to have done some good things, like talking to despised people and commending forgiveness, but he wasn’t a social justice warrior. And as for the Catholic church…

Also, notice “the unwanted child”…Subtle, huh?

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

The BBC reports that jihadist (I would call them Islamist) attacks killed more than 5000 people

in one month.

It has useful graphics. Iraq and IS are much the worst, but Nigeria and Boko Haram get second prize.

The data gathered by the BBC found that 5,042 people were killed in 664 jihadist attacks across 14 countries – a daily average of 168 deaths, or seven every hour.

About 80% of the deaths came in just four countries – Iraq, Nigeria, Syria and Afghanistan, according to the study of media and civil society reports.

Iraq was the most dangerous place to be, with 1,770 deaths in 233 attacks, ranging from shootings to suicide bombings.

In Nigeria, 786 people, almost all of them civilians, were killed in 27 Boko Haram incidents. These tended to be large and indiscriminate bombings and shootings such as the attack on the central mosque in the northern city of Kano, which left 120 dead.

27 Boko Haram attacks in just one month – it’s an absolute nightmare.

Civilians bore the brunt of the attacks with a total of 2,079 killed, followed by 1,723 military personnel.

But the proportions varied significantly between countries. In Nigeria, almost 700 civilians were killed, at least 57 of them children, whereas just 28 deaths were from the military.

In contrast, in Syria and Afghanistan, more than twice as many military personnel died as civilians.

Of the 146 police officers who died, 95 were in Afghanistan. Politicians and other officials were also targets in Afghanistan, and in Somalia, where 22 were killed.

Compassion in action.

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

Good PR for the American Enterprise Institute – an NPR story on Dick Cheney defending the use of torture on prisoners, illustrated with Cheney in his native habitat.

Pro-unregulated market, anti-feminist, pro-torture, anti-climate science, pro-bosses, anti-unions – the friend of all humanity.

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

17 women are in prison in El Salvador for having miscarriages or abortions. The Center for Reproductive Justice is campaigning to get them freed.

With one of the world’s most extreme abortion bans, El Salvador prohibits women from receiving an abortion under any circumstance—not in cases of rape or incest, not even to save their lives. Since 1998, dozens of women have been wrongfully criminalized and imprisoned under this law—even when the pregnancy ended due to natural causes. Take action today to pressure the Salvadoran government to release Las 17 in time to go home to their families for the holidays.

It shares some of their stories.

Twenty-nine-year-old Teresa worked in a sweatshop in San Salvador and lived in a working-class neighborhood with her 8-year-old child.

In November 2011, without ever realizing she was pregnant, she went into early labor, giving birth in a toilet. The baby did not survive. Following this trauma, Teresa experienced heavy bleeding and eventually fainted. Her family summoned emergency services. At the hospital, she was reported to the police on suspicion of having induced an abortion.

Despite inconsistencies and lack of proof that Teresa performed an intentional act leading to the miscarriage, she was convicted of murder and condemned to 40 years in prison.

She’s been in prison for over two years. Teresa’s elderly grandmother is currently caring for her young child.

…

After 11 years in jail, Verónica is not yet halfway through her 30-year sentence.

At age 19, while employed as a domestic worker, Verónica became pregnant. Shortly before reaching full term in her pregnancy, she experienced an obstetric emergency that resulted in a miscarriage.

Her employers took her to the Chalchuapa Hospital, where she was reported to the police. Without witnesses or any direct proof, Verónica was swiftly convicted of murder. Even the judgment acknowledges the lack of evidence and states, “the motives the subject had for committing [murder] are unknown although it can be deduced that her motivation was to avoid social reproach.”

They’re horror stories, one after the other.

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

So James Watson’s little trick worked. The rich guy who bought his Nobel medal did indeed buy it to give it back to him.

Russia’s richest man has revealed that he bought US scientist James Watson’s Nobel Prize gold medal, and intends to return it to him.

Steel and telecoms tycoon Alisher Usmanov said Mr Watson “deserved” the medal, and that he was “distressed” the scientist had felt forced to sell it.

The medal, awarded in 1962 for the discovery of the structure of DNA, sold for $4.8m (£3m) at auction.

The medal was the first Nobel Prize to be put on sale by a living recipient.

Cool way to make 5 million bucks. Dignified, too.

In an interview with the Financial Times recently, Mr Watson said he had been made to feel like an “unperson” since a Sunday Times interview seven years ago in which he linked race to intelligence.

So he sold his medal in a fit of pique and in hopes that someone would pay a lot of money for it and then give it back to him. How touching. Racism gets its reward.

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

Shaheen Hashmat did an interview for the Scottish Sunday Mail ten days ago, and she has the article on her blog.

This is the transcript of an article by journalist Jenny Morrison featuring the most in-depth interview about my experiences that I’ve done to date. It took me a while to agree to do this, as it would a mean a lot more detailed exposure closer to home and my fear of a backlash was greater. But the imbalance of efforts to raise awareness and provide support throughout the UK is too significant to dismiss an opportunity to at least try and address this. Please note the minor clarifications I’ve included below the transcript.

She’s brave.

She was just 12 years old when she escaped from her family home.

But Shaheen Hashmat says the emotional scars of her childhood have been harder to leave behind. Growing up in a large Pakistani family Shaheen, now 31, says relatives controlled everything from how she should dress, to who she should speak to. She was expected to work in her family’s businesses from an early age – and if she refused, she’d be beaten. As she grew up, Shaheen saw several female family members being put on a plane, sent to Pakistan and forced into marriage. When it became clear that the same fate awaited 12-year-old Shaheen, a concerned relative tipped off social services and the police. With the legal protection of the authorities, she was able to leave her family but it has taken years for her to come to terms with the honour abuse she suffered.

She’s talking about it now because she wants to help people in the same situation. When she was a child she thought she was all alone.

I would see people getting beaten and there was a strong history of forced marriage in my family. Every single aspect of my life was under strictest control. When you are raised to believe you have no choice in anything you do, when every aspect of your life is so closely monitored, you feel worthless. At times, I have felt suicidal. But I am determined that I am not going to hide away – what happened to me is not my shame, I didn’t do anything wrong. I’m not going to change my name or adopt a new identity because I shouldn’t have to hide. Sadly I’m not the only person this has happened to but if I can help others by speaking out, then I must.

When she was 12 she escaped, with the help of a relative and the police.

Shaheen says a turning point in her life came three years ago when she read Jasvinder Sanghera’s book Daughters of Shame. The book, which tells the stories of women who have survived honour abuse or been forced into marriage, let Shaheen see she was not alone. She said, “I could really relate to these women’s stories. I hadn’t been forced on to a plane and forced into a marriage but I was still a victim of honour abuse.”

If only they could all escape, but it’s only a tiny fraction who can. Yet.

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

Not to flog the deceased equine too much or anything but there’s an interesting little point in here. Slate has a pre-apology piece about the law and consumers and redress, and it reminds me of a larger issue.

Summary: Edelman was wrong about the law, too: “treble damages” isn’t mandatory but at the discretion of the judge, and anyway there’s a $25 minimum.

MGL 93a(9)(3) requires that before bringing suit the plaintiff send a demand letter to the business asking for rectification of the unfair or deceptive act or practice. That gives the business a chance to settle things for something like actual damages. The whole purpose of the demand provision is to encourage settlement and to act as a control on damages.  (Refusal to parlay is one of the hooks that can result in treble damages.)

If the defendant’s offer of settlement is rejected by the plaintiff, the defendant can introduce its offer (and its reasonableness) at trial.  Here, the restaurant offered the professor a full refund of the overcharge in response to his email (which is fairly understood as a demand letter). Thus, in a lawsuit, if the defendant made a reasonable settlement offer, the court must limit damages not to the $25 minimum, but to the restraurant’s reasonable offer. See Kohl v. Silver Lake Motors, Inc., 369 Mass. 795 (Mass. 1976). I don’t see how the professor gets to treble damages here.

It’s fun to play gotcha with an unnaturally pissed off Harvard prof, but there’s actually a bigger point here. Yesterday, a few #Slatepitchy souls argued that, despite his dislikable approach, we should applaud Edelman for standing up against a restaurant that was, in some small way, cheating consumers. But whatever good he did was outweighed by his personal comportment. Lawyers have a lot of power in that they understand how to work the legal system and don’t need to pay anybody to write up a lawsuit on their behalf. And that power can very easily be abused, because it can still be expensive and time-consuming to defend against a crap case.

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

Fair’s fair. I pointed at him for being a poopyhead so it’s only right to point out that he’s agreed he was a poopyhead and apologized for being it.

Here is Edelman’s newest statement, via his personal website:

Many people have seen my emails with Ran Duan of Sichuan Garden restaurant in Brookline.

Having reflected on my interaction with Ran, including what I said and how I said it, it’s clear that I was very much out of line. I aspire to act with great respect and humility in dealing with others, no matter what the situation. Clearly I failed to do so. I am sorry, and I intend to do better in the future.

I have reached out to Ran and will apologize to him personally as well.

Now that’s an apology.

Good outcome.

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

Via Center for Reproductive Rights on Facebook:

Today is International Human Rights Day! There’s no better day to tell Secretary of State John Kerry to stand up for the fundamental rights of El Salvador’s #Las17. SIGN the petition now to bring them home: http://bit.ly/Las17-Petition

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

Originally a comment by quixote on The gulf is rising.

I was a grad student at Tulane in the late 1980s and took many field trips out to the Gulf swamps. Some of them were to help a researcher studying sedimentation rates. Biologists knew then that what is happening now was going to happen. Even then, it would have been expensive to do anything about it, but about one hundredth or one thousandth what it costs now. And one millionth of what it will cost in a few years.

There are two main causes of the problem. Levees along the Mississippi push all the sediment out at one spot near Venice ( and make Gulf dead zones) instead of winding up at different spots all over southern Louisiana as the river makes itself new channels every year.

The second issue is the oil and gas industry which cut channels all through the wetlands to move equipment and build pipes. Salt water intrudes along those channels and kills the vegetation. The dead vegetation doesn’t hold onto the “jello” soil anymore, and the whole thing washes out to sea on the tides. There are early satellite photos of the area, which look like green wetland, and recent ones where the whole thing looks like lacy spider webbing on water.

And, yes, diversion of the river in its current state of pollution and fertilizer load could well create more problems than it solves. Telling the oil and gas industry to restore all the wetlands they ruined is probably also “too expensive.”

By the way, the only part of New Orleans above sea level is the very old part of town and the sliver along the river. Not a lot of sanctuary, especially when sea level rises. There is no land bridge to the mainland. And the causeways would have to be raised.

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

It turns out that the pink princess model for girl children in the US is just as parochial in time as it is in place, according to Elizabeth Sweet in the Atlantic.

When it comes to buying gifts for children, everything is color-coded: Rigid boundaries segregate brawny blue action figures from pretty pink princesses, and most assume that this is how it’s always been. But in fact, the princess role that’s ubiquitous in girls’ toys today was exceedingly rare prior to the 1990s—and the marketing of toys is more gendered now than even 50 years ago, when gender discrimination and sexism were the norm.

The princess thing makes me pull my hair with disgust. It’s so infantilizing, so diminishing, so ridiculous. I even know one or two grown women who seem to model themselves on the pink princess paradigm, and what could be creepier than that?

In my research on toy advertisements, I found that even when gendered marketing was most pronounced in the 20th century, roughly half of toys were still being advertised in a gender-neutral manner. This is a stark difference from what we see today, as businesses categorize toys in a way that more narrowly forces kids into boxes. For example, a recent study by sociologists Carol Auster and Claire Mansbach found that all toys sold on the Disney Store’s website were explicitly categorized as being “for boys” or “for girls”—there was no “for boys and girls” option, even though a handful of toys could be found on both lists.

Really that just sums up the whole thing right there – this idea that there is “for boys” and “for girls” at all. That’s what sexism is: restricting people to “for girls” or “for boys” as if they weren’t allowed to decide for themselves. The world is for boys, the inside of the house is for girls. Jobs are for boys, domestic chores are for girls. Boys are real, girls are dolls. Men matter, women are vacant.

For a time in the 70s toys actually were marketed in a cross-gender way, showing boys playing with toy appliances and girls playing with carpentry sets. But it didn’t last.

Although gender inequality in the adult world continued to diminish between the 1970s and 1990s, the de-gendering trend in toys was short-lived. In 1984, the deregulation of children’s television programming suddenly freed toy companies to create program-length advertisements for their products, and gender became an increasingly important differentiator of these shows and the toys advertised alongside them. During the 1980s, gender-neutral advertising receded, and by 1995, gendered toys made up roughly half of the Sears catalog’s offerings—the same proportion as during the interwar years.

However, late-century marketing relied less on explicit sexism and more on implicit gender cues, such as color, and new fantasy-based gender roles like the beautiful princess or the muscle-bound action hero. These roles were still built upon regressive gender stereotypes—they portrayed a powerful, skill-oriented masculinity and a passive, relational femininity—that were obscured with bright new packaging. In essence, the “little homemaker” of the 1950s had become the “little princess” we see today.

Gotta enforce those gender differences, people. Without it you get ANARCHY and cats marrying dogs.

It doesn’t have to be this way. While gender is what’s traditionally used to sort target markets, the toy industry (which is largely run by men) could categorize its customers in a number of other ways—in terms of age and interest, for example. (This could arguably broaden the consumer base.) However, the reliance on gender categorization comes from the top: I found no evidence that the trends of the past 40 years are the result of consumer demand. That said, the late-20th-century increase in the percentage of Americans who believe in gender differences suggests that the public wasn’t exactly rejecting gendered toys, either.

While the second-wave feminist movement challenged the tenets of gender difference, the social policies to create a level playing field were never realized and a cultural backlash towards feminism began to gain momentum in the 1980s. In this context, the model outlined in Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus—which implied that women gravitated toward certain roles not because of oppression but because of some innate preference—took hold. This new tale of gender difference, which emphasizes freedom and choice, has been woven deeply into the fabric of contemporary childhood. The reformulated story does not fundamentally challenge gender stereotypes; it merely repackages them to make them more palatable in a “post-feminist” era. Girls can be anything—as long as it’s passive and beauty-focused.

Police that boundary.

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

Leo Igwe tells us that humanists and atheists in Africa are starting to speak up.

An increasing number of Africans do not have any religion. Many people across the continent are going open and public with their humanist, atheistic and skeptical views and identity. Non religious Africans are leaving the closet in their numbers. African unbelievers are beginning to organise like their religious counterparts in many countries. One of such countries is Ghana. Ghana is a religious country. But the country’s religiosity does not preclude irreligion. Non religious people in the country are a minority but they are not keeping quiet. They are no hiding. Godless people in Ghana are becoming visible. Non religious people are speaking out. The profile of humanism in Ghana is growing rapidly.

Humanists in Ghana have staged many social gatherings in the past years. This gathering has served a very important need. It has provided religious non believers in Ghana a sense of community. There is a growing humanist fellowship in this west African country.

Humanist fellowship is important because many atheists across Africa feel lonely and lone. Atheists think they are the only ones who entertain doubts and disbelief in God, when there are several non theistic people out there. The social gathering of humanists in Ghana is supplying that missing link. It is connecting non theists in way that has never been the case. Ghana’s religious landscape is changing. Africa’s ‘beliefscape’ is undergoing transformation. Humanists are beginning to discover that there are other people of like minds. The humanist movement in Africa is growing in strength and number. A wave of secularism and freethought is sweeping across the region.

That’s a great thing. Even if you think religion is wonderful, it’s good that people have alternatives to religion. If you think that religion is far from reliably wonderful, it’s even better that people have alternatives.

The humanist group in Ghana is not only making waves locally but also internationally. The group is gradually becoming the hub organised humanism in West Africa. Humanists in Ghana organised its first international humanist conference in 2012. That conference attracted participants from other West African countries and beyond. The event has demonstrated the vibrancy of organised humanism in one of the world’s most religious country.

Ghana Humanism is set to mark another milestone in the coming weeks. Humanist Association of Ghana is organising another international conference on December 20-21, 2014. The conference will be held at W.E.B Dubois Centre, Accra. The theme of the event is “African Youth for Science and Reason”. Topics to be discussed include Communicable diseases (Ebola, etc), Health and Medicine in West Africa, Science, Technology and Reason, Sex and Relationships as African Atheists, Feminism in Africa, Witchcraft Accusations in West Africa etc . There are plans to organise trainings and workshops for participants.

The theme of this conference is a welcome development for the region. Africa needs events that can expose its youths to reason and science. It is imperative that African youths begin to think rationally and scientifically because reason and science are the mainstay of modern development. One of the greatest obstacles to African development is superstition and religious extremism. These superstitious beliefs are common among young people. Religious fanaticism is draining Africa’s youth capital. African youths needs programs that encourage them to think critically as opposed to activities that reward dogma and blind faith. The members of the Humanist Association of Ghana are predominantly young people. This is a positive and promising development for the region. I hope other African youths will emulate their Ghanaian counterparts by embracing the values of reason science and critical thinking.

That’s great news. Tell everyone you know! Leo wants us to spread the word.

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

And now for something completely frightening.

The Louisiana coast is rapidly sinking into the sea. There are efforts and plans to move sediment around to save New Orleans and some pipelines and fishing grounds, but much of the Delta is doomed (and the planned fixes are hugely expensive, and Louisiana is a  poor state).

Southeastern Louisiana might best be described as a layer cake made of Jell-O, floating in a swirling Jacuzzi of steadily warming, rising water. Scientists and engineers must prevent the Jell-O from melting — while having no access to the Jacuzzi controls.

The problem is human-made. Over the last 80 years, Louisiana’s coast has been starved of sediment by river levees and eviscerated by canals dredged for oil and gas extraction. Now, southeastern Louisiana is sinking at one of the fastest rates on the planet as the Gulf is rising.

Already, 2,000 square miles have sloughed into the Gulf. Without action, the state could lose another 1,750 squares miles over the next 50 years.

If that happens, in 70 years New Orleans could be left on a razor-thin sliver of land extending into the open Gulf, battered by storms rolling over the watery graves of unprotected communities.

The economic effects will reverberate across the nation as the seas swamp half of the nation’s refineries and pipelines that transport 30 percent of the country’s oil and gas. The country’s largest port, an economic door to 31 states, would be vulnerable to run-of-the-mill tropical storms, causing shutdowns that cost the nation’s economy an estimated $300 million a day.

Not a trivial problem.

Most of us have known at least some of that ever since Katrina, but it’s easy to lose sight of just how drastic the situation is.

And the proposed fixes are no guarantee of anything themselves, because any fix they can do will have consequences elsewhere and it’s a mammoth engineering task to figure all that out. Sending a box to Mars looks easy in comparison.

“My concern is that a lot of people think if we just turn the river loose, it will just fill in all those holes we’ve created in the delta,” said Roberts. “Well, certainly it’s not as simple as punching holes in the levees.”

Every diversion project is a move in an ongoing chess match with nature. Each one faces different sets of variables and constraints, and engineers are struggling to anticipate the consequences of each step they take.

“Everything you do at one point on the river — anything you take out or put in — will have an effect on the rest of the river,” said Alex McCorquodale, a University of New Orleans researcher working on a study to determine how much sediment is in the lower Mississippi.

It’s a matter not so much of finding a fix as of juggling bad consequences in different places, or even the same places.

Considering how much remains unknown, a few scientists ask why Louisiana has staked so much on diversions. They worry the state could waste its last chance for the coast on a technique they believe poses its own habitat threats and exists only on computer models.

Gene Turner, a distinguished LSU coastal researcher, points to studies that show high levels of nutrients from fertilizer upstream can cause wetlands loss by damaging plants in areas with high organic soils. He is concerned that the state doesn’t have a backup plan if its computer models are wrong.

“Every building code requires a fire exit, and right now this plan doesn’t have one,” he said. “Saying, ‘This is going to work’ isn’t a backup plan, not when you’re doing something that has never been done before, except on computers.”

Turner has the minority view in the coastal scientific community. Nonetheless, the state coastal agency has asked the Water Institute of the Gulf to gather a panel of outside coastal experts to look into those questions.

And then, all this depends on climate predictions, and there’s reason to think current predictions could turn out to underestimate the rate of climate change.

So read the whole thing; it’s an education in itself.

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

Not everything Time magazine does is awful. It has an excellent long piece on The Ebola Fighters as part of its Person of the Year feature. (The only trouble is it’s a huge pain in the ass to read because it gives you only a tiny window of written material at a time, and there seems to be no way to convert to the printable version. Apparently that’s fabulous for people reading on phones, but I’m not reading on a phone. grump)

A sample:

Why, in short, was the battle against Ebola left for month after crucial month to a ragged army of volunteers and near volunteers: doctors who wouldn’t quit even as their colleagues fell ill and died; nurses comforting patients while standing in slurries of mud, vomit and feces; ambulance drivers facing down hostile crowds to transport passengers teeming with the virus; investigators tracing chains of infection through slums hot with disease; workers stoically zipping contagious corpses into body bags in the sun; patients meeting death in lonely isolation to protect others from infection?

According to official counts, more than 17,800 people have been infected with Ebola virus in this epidemic and more than 6,300 have died since this outbreak’s first known case in rural Guinea in December 2013. Many on the front lines believe the actual numbers are much higher—and in any event, they continue to rise steeply. The virus has traveled to Europe and North America, where the resulting fear exceeded any actual threat to public health. In West Africa, however, the impact has been catastrophic. The number of Liberians with jobs fell by nearly half as businesses and markets closed in fear of Ebola. Sierra Leone’s meager health care network simply collapsed: Ebola patients were told by the government to stay home rather than look for a hospital bed. In Guinea, the epidemic stoked distrust of government and aid workers. Medical missionaries were driven from villages by violence and threats.

Mistakes were made.

…the MSF team determined that something new and dangerous was going on in the borderlands. Previous Ebola outbreaks had been isolated in a single area, but now the virus was widespread. As MSF’s Liu puts it, “Already there were multiple locations of clusters” up to 100 miles (160 km) apart. In raw numbers, the Ebola outbreak might have seemed small compared with the chronic contagions of cholera and malaria in West Africa. But an epidemic of Ebola, with its ghastly effects, could corrode civil society by spreading panic. The disease leaped to the top of MSF’s priorities.

But few officials wanted to hear it. Liu recalls fruitless conversations in March with ministries of health in the region, “pushing them and telling them that this was going to be different.” Again and again, health officials complained that the doctors—not the disease—would panic the populace. “We were quickly told by a variety of agencies that we were crying wolf,” Liu says.

One skeptic—perhaps the most influential and thus the most disastrous—was WHO, the health arm of the U.N. Underfunded and overly bureaucratic, WHO is, in the eyes of its many critics, woefully inadequate in dealing with rapidly emerging threats like Ebola. Worse perhaps, the agency’s local representatives are notoriously jealous of their turf and prerogatives. At this same critical moment, WHO offices in West Africa turned away a team of experts from the CDC working in Guinea, insisting that their help was not needed, says CDC director Dr. Thomas Frieden. The CDC, a large and very well-regarded public-health agency, is unsurpassed in its capacity for action, maintaining some 2,000 field workers in 60 countries around the world. Those workers in turn can often summon resources from the U.S. to smother epidemics in their infancy abroad.

Teamwork at this early moment might have saved thousands of lives and ultimately billions of dollars in direct and indirect costs stemming from the Ebola epidemic. Instead, WHO closed the door, says Frieden.

I didn’t know that. I don’t know if it’s true or just something rivals say about rivals – maybe the WHO would say the same about the CDC and MSF. If it is true, it’s a massive tragedy.

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

An elegant young Harvard Business School associate professor ordered some Chinese food the other day. Boston.com has the story.

Ben Edelman is an associate professor at Harvard Business School, where he teaches in the Negotiation, Organizations & Markets unit.

Ran Duan manages The Baldwin Bar, located inside the Woburn location of Sichuan Garden, a Chinese restaurant founded by his parents.

Last week, Edelman ordered what he thought was $53.35 worth of Chinese food from Sichuan Garden’s Brookline Village location.

Edelman soon came to the horrifying realization that he had been overcharged. By a total of $4.

If you’ve ever wondered what happens when a Harvard Business School professor thinks a family-run Chinese restaurant screwed him out of $4, you’re about to find out.

(Hint: It involves invocation of the Massachusetts Consumer Protection Statute and multiple threats of legal action.)

The correspondence follows. Edelman ordered from a menu on the website of Sichuan Garden, and each item (of four) was charged $1 over the price on the menu. Edelman pointed this out, Duan apologized for the fact that the website hadn’t been updated recently. Edelman demanded a triple refund.

And then it got worse, and then worse, and then worse again. Check it out, because it’s quite a display of patrician bullying and cruelty.

Updating to add: the Guardian also reports.

Duan responded an hour or so later, telling Edelman that his is a “mom and pop restaurant” and plaintively offers to honour the website price. But it was too late for hearts and minds with Edelman.

“It strikes me that merely providing a refund to a single customer would be an extremely light sanction for the violation that has occurred,” he replied. “To wit, your restaurant overcharged all customers who viewed the website and placed a telephone order – the standard and typical way to order takeout. You did so knowingly, knowing that your website was out of date.”

“You don’t seem to recognise that this is a legal matter and calls for a more thoughtful and far-reaching resolution. Nor do you recognise the principle, well established in applicable laws, that when a business intentionally overcharges a customer, the business should suffer a penalty larger than the amount of the overcharge.”

The exchange went on in the same vein. Duan offered to refund the difference, and the $12 which Edelman demanded, to no avail.

A rich guy has been overcharged $4! This must not stand!

Another useful lesson in what not to be.

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