Hey look – live streaming from the International Space Station.

Pale blue dot close up; your house from very far away.… Read the rest

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One of those “please share” items so I’m sharing it because wo.

MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow said it best: “Turn that frown upside down oil-soaked neighbourhood, you can get a job cleaning it up if you just have the right attitude. We’ll make it worth your while. That is seriously what Kinder Morgan is arguing to the freaking Canadian government about why they should be allowed to triple the capacity of their pipeline.”

More in the Vancouver Sun.

 … Read the rest

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An excellent piece at The Stone on “open carry” and the exciting time it is when a bunch of gun-toting fanatics can force law enforcement to back down because law enforcement doesn’t want yet another Waco or Ruby Ridge. Patrick Blanchfield

Earlier this month, in Bunkerville, Nev., representatives of the Bureau of Land Management withdrew from a tense standoff with supporters of Cliven Bundy, a rancher who owes the federal government over $1 million in unpaid fees for allowing his cattle to graze on public land. The hundreds of self-appointed militia and “states’ rights” activists who flocked to support Bundy, many in full tactical gear and openly carrying assault rifles, blockaded a federal interstate and trained their weapons on B.L.M.

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BBC 2 had a show about misogyny a couple of days ago, and the New Statesman has a review by Rachel Cooke.

She starts by saying misogyny is nothing new and she’s not sure it’s worse now than in the past.

I see, though, that in one sense all of this is irrelevant. What matters is that women feel misogyny is on the rise, there being so many exciting new outlets for the expression of woman hatred.

Well no, that’s not right, because it’s two different things. If women feel misogyny is on the rise when it isn’t, then it’s worth explaining that it isn’t. But the fact that there are so many exciting new outlets for the expression of … Read the rest

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Some comments left on one of the three or four irritable Facebook posts I fired off about Ricky Gervais yesterday:

All hail the great Atheist Community!… Read the rest

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Maki Naro @sciencecomic on Twitter:

Whenever anybody points out that “cunt” is a misogynistic slur pic.twitter.com/5zqxXwYSJp

 … Read the rest

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The menace of Boko Haram is not just a military issue – it is an ideological one. The west should help Nigeria defeat Boko Haram and win the battle of ideas.

The kidnapping of more than 200 school girls by Nigeria’s terrorist group, Boko Haram, has attracted outrage and condemnation from different parts of the globe.(1)

People across the world have joined the online campaign to ‘Bring Back Our Girls’ and pressure the government of Nigeria to do more in combating the menace of this Islamist group.(2,3).

The US, the UK and France have offered to help Nigeria rescue the girls and bring their abductors to justice.

But some people are speculating that an intervention by western countries could turn … Read the rest

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Another thing about Ricky Gervais’s bit of Facebook wisdom is how childishly wrong it is as a claim (much less an argument).

If you grabbed Hitler and shouted “stop killing innocent people you cunt”, someone on Facebook would call you out on your sexist language.

Well first we have to accept that “you” can “grab” Hitler in the same world where people will comment on Facebook about what you shouted at him. It’s too much to ask us to accept that. If Ricky Gervais were in a position to “grab” Hitler and shout something at him, he wouldn’t be in a position to report his shouting on Facebook.

Then, an even more demanding task: we have to accept that grabbing … Read the rest

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According to the Nigerian Tribune, the US and UK have brought in the high tech equipment to locate the Boko Haram hiding place and the schoolgirls they’ve enslaved.

BOTH the United States and British anti-terror specialists who arrived Nigeria on Friday have started deploying high-grade surveillance technologies to track down the voice, location and the fire power of Boko Haram terrorists who kidnapped over 200 girls of a secondary school in Chibok, Borno State.

According to reports on Friday by Daily Mail of the United Kingdom and other news channels monitored by the Saturday Tribune, the deployment and further operation of the exercise is being overseen by the Special Forces, even as there are indications that the Special Forces may

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Ricky Gervais is so proud of his clever joke about how people will object to your use of sexist epithets EVEN WHEN IT’S HITLER YOU’RE CALLING THEM that he put in some time defending it on Twitter as well – entirely and obliviously missing the point while doing so. God he’s thick. I think I’ve mentioned this before (but then, he keeps illustrating it), but I thought David Brent was satire, when it turns out he was just Ricky Gervais.

Ricky Gervais @rickygervais 4h

Sorry I called Hitler a cunt. I wasn’t thinking. His behaviour just got to me. Soz.

I will continue to use offensive words like cunt, atheism & Derek and post pictures of myself in the bath.

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

Another blow struck for the right to call people cunts.

Ricky Gervais
If you grabbed Hitler and shouted “stop killing innocent people you cunt”, someone on Facebook would call you out on your sexist language.

And?

Has Ricky Gervais ever done a Facebook post saying “If you grabbed Hitler and shouted ‘stop killing innocent people you kike’, someone on Facebook would call you out on your anti-semitic language”?

I don’t know for sure, but I seriously doubt it. People like him don’t defend calling people niggers or kikes, but they do defend calling people cunts. Why is that? Because the first is not ok while the second is ok. Why? I can only conclude it’s because hatred of women just … Read the rest

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From Banda Aceh, Indonesia – sexual morality-policing via gang rape.

An Indonesian woman who was gang-raped by men accusing her of having extramarital sex may be caned publicly for violating Islamic law, an official said Wednesday.

The 25-year-old widow said she was raped by eight men who allegedly found her with a married man in her house. The men reportedly beat the man, doused the two with sewage, and then turned them over to Islamic police in conservative Aceh province.

No, the men reportedly beat the man, doused the two with sewage, gang-raped the woman, and then turned them over to Islamic police in conservative Aceh province.

What business was it of theirs what she was doing in … Read the rest

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Michelle Goldberg reported last month on the trial of Cecily McMillan.

Two years ago, a young activist named Cecily McMillan attended a protest at Zuccotti Park marking the six-month anniversary of Occupy Wall Street. When police moved in to clear the demonstrators, a cop roughly grabbed her breast—photos show an ugly bruise—and she ended up being injured so badly that she had a seizure and ended up in the hospital. In a just world, she would be getting restitution from the City. Instead, in a grotesque act of prosecutorial overreach, she’s currently on trial for assault and facing up to seven years in prison.

According to prosecutors, McMillan, now 25, intentionally attacked her arresting officer, Grantley Bovel, by elbowing

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This seems useful and healthy – this Facebook group called Women Who Eat on Tubes*, which features sneak photos of just that.

Some women had a picnic on the tube last month to mock the whole disgusting thing.

Sarah Hardcastle, in a T-shirt reading “women who eat wherever the fuck they want”, produced a bottle of juice neatly relabelled “bloody feminist cocktail”.

“It’s very bitter,” she explained.

The gathering in a London underground train carriage was a response to a controversial Facebook group entitled Women Who Eat on Tubes, featuring surreptitious mobile phone photographs of just that.

Hardcastle, an advertising copywriter, was already wearing the T-shirt when she heard Lucy Brisbane McKay confront film-maker Tony Burke on the Radio

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Jen Phillips’s 11-year-old daughter wrote a research paper for school which is so good it needs to be published here, which Jen gave me permission to do.

It was first published on J. Robert Deans’s blog in UPDATE #2: Hey, Ladies! (You Are) Comics!

Women in Comics–an Independent Research Report, by Erica

Women In Comics: By Erica

The topic I chose is female superheroes in comics. I’ve always been interested in comics, especially when there is a female main character. I noticed some differences in the way female characters are represented compared to male characters. I think it is important that women and men are represented as equals, so I decided to dig deeper into the creation of the characters. … Read the rest

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Major English language media are now reporting the horrendous news about the new and even more barbaric sentence imposed on Raif Badawi.

The BBC reports.

A Saudi court has imprisoned blogger Raif Badawi for 10 years for “insulting Islam” and setting up a liberal web forum, local media report.

He was also sentenced to 1,000 lashes and ordered to pay a fine of 1 million riyals ($266,000; £133,000).

I would put the 1000 lashes first.

Mr Badawi, the co-founder of a website called the Liberal Saudi Network, was arrested in 2012.

A Saudi newspaper close to the government reported that he had lost his appeal against an earlier, more lenient sentence of seven years and three months in jail and

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