Posts Tagged ‘ FTB ’

Those parts of the brain were completely switched off

Nov 30th, 2013 10:58 am | By

Imagine being a neuroscientist, and studying brain scans of murderers to look for psychopathic traits. Imagine doing that and looking at scans of family members for comparison purposes, and then finding one that is way at the extreme edge of what you’re finding in the murderers’ scans. Whoops, the scans got mixed up. The techs check and re-check; nope, no mix. So you peel off the code – and the scan is yours.

That’s what the neuroscientist James Fallon found.

He told his wife and she said, “I’m not surprised.”

He laughed at that. Which is kind of psychopathic itself.

The BBC discussion is slightly odd, because they simply talk about murderer or not murderer. He’s not a murderer, … Read the rest

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



Thankful Dinesh

Nov 30th, 2013 10:26 am | By

And then there’s Dinesh D’Souza, with a festive Thanksgiving tweet.

I am thankful this week when I remember that American is big enough and great enough to survive Grown-Up Trayvon in the White House!

Great god almighty. What is wrong with people?… Read the rest

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Reading Dickens

Nov 30th, 2013 10:03 am | By

I’ve started reading Little Dorrit for the third or fourth time…skim-reading it in places, because I long ago decided that the only way to read Dickens is to jump when you start to get bored, because there’s no denying he gave a wealth of detail and sometimes it’s about something you just don’t need a wealth of detail about. That prison in Marseilles at the beginning for instance – I never will know what that’s there for, because I invariably get bored before I find out so I skip it.

But don’t go thinking it’s inherently boring, or that all of it’s boring, or that it’s boring in proportion to its quantity, or anything like that. The truth is that … Read the rest

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Bullying at 35 thousand feet

Nov 30th, 2013 9:04 am | By

One of the hot social media items this morning is a woman who made a big fuss about a delayed flight because Thanksgiving and a guy who retaliated. The point of the item seems to be that the guy did a great job of schooling the woman. I beg to differ.

Elan Gale Live-Tweets his Feud with Asshole Woman on Flight

This note war on a plane is hilarious. I have no idea who he is but I want to be his friend.

Hmm, yeah, I don’t.

He tweeted about her. Fine. The tweets are funny, and she’s anonymous. But then he sent her a note, and she replied to say his note was not cool, and he sent another.… Read the rest

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I get comments

Nov 30th, 2013 8:24 am | By

Author

franc

0 approved

your@cuntsmellslikegrave.com

In Response To

Dayna Morales may have made it up

Comment

Submitted on 2013/11/29 at 11:53 pm

“Why do people do this?”

Same reason people accuse Shermer of rape. Human degradation masked as social justice. Duh.

The comment doesn’t amount to much. It’s clearly just a pretext for the real point, which is to tell me that my cunt smells like grave.… Read the rest

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He usually let the football coach take care of that sort of thing

Nov 29th, 2013 5:18 pm | By

Meanwhile, back in Steubenville, Ohio

A year ago this week, Michael McVey, the superintendent of schools in Steubenville, Ohio, sat in a conference room down the hall from his office and said he knew none of the details of Aug. 11, 2012, the night a 16-year-old girl was raped by two Steubenville High football players at a series of parties on a hot summer night.

Nope, he said, he didn’t know much, aside from the rumors that had been swirling around the football-crazy town for months. He told me and a colleague that he had not spoken with any of the students thought to be involved in the event because it hadn’t taken place on school grounds or during

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85% versus zero

Nov 29th, 2013 4:09 pm | By

Orac, as he indicated in a comment, has been following the Sarah Hershberger case. He has a very informative post from October 28; very informative and very sad.

A couple of weeks ago, I commented on the story of 10 year old Amish girl in northeast Ohio with cancer whose parents, alarmed by the side effects of chemotherapy, had decided to stop the chemotherapy and treat their daughter with folk medicine instead. As a result, alarmed at the likelihood that Sarah Hershberger would suffer and die unnecessarily at a young age, the hospital treating her, Akron Children’s Hospital, went to court. It lost the first round, but earlier this month the original ruling was overturned, and it was

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Well are you?

Nov 29th, 2013 3:54 pm | By

Want a Friday after Thanksgiving (in the US) quiz? Here, via Dave Silverman on Facebook, is one called Are you smarter than an atheist? (That’s silly. They don’t mean smarter, they mean better-informed-about-religion. Not the same thing at all.)

I scored 100%. Dave got one wrong; Dave Muscato got 100%.

It’s a bit irritating to take because it uses a separate click to tell you whether you got it right each time so that’s twice as many clicks. But I can’t resist easy quizzes.

 

 … Read the rest

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Everyday sadism

Nov 29th, 2013 1:10 pm | By

Another chapter in the annals of harassment, especially harassment of women. A guy called Hunter Moore posted a photo of a young woman that had been hacked from her computer on his Revenge Porn website. Her mother had worked as a private detective, and she got on his case.

I emailed the site owner, Hunter Moore, and asked him to take down the photo in accordance with the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. He refused.

I was not surprised. By this time, I’d perused Moore’s online TV and newspaper interviews. He called himself a “professional life ruiner” and described his website as “pure evil.” He threw legal letters in the trash, addressed his followers as “my children,”

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To seek alternatives to chemotherapy

Nov 29th, 2013 12:27 pm | By

This seems unlikely to end well.

10-year-old Amish girl with leukemia and her parents have left the country to seek alternatives to chemotherapy, according to the family’s attorney.

Sarah Hershberger and her parents oppose chemotherapy, and have been fighting the Akron Children’s Hospital in court after the family stopped Sarah’s treatment. Her parents said the treatments have caused their daughter a great deal of pain, and they’d rather focus on herbal and natural remedies.

It’s odd to make the girl the chief agent by mentioning her first in the first two sentences, as if she left the country and her parents went with her. They took her out of the country. She’s ten.

The Hershbergers left their home in

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UUK has made an idiot of itself

Nov 29th, 2013 11:55 am | By

Now 99 comments on the Universities UK blog. One of the news ones is a very valuable one from the always-valuable David Colquhoun.

I notice that Nicola Dandridge starts by describing Universities UK as being “the representative organisation for the UK’s universities”.  It is nothing of the sort,  It is the representative organisation for (mostly male) vice-chancellors.  That was obvious from its much more honest previous name “The committee of vice-chancellors and principals”,   That’s the same group that supported high tuition fees.

It isn’t fair to blame Nicola Dandridge,  She’s paid to say whatever words are put in her mouth by her bosses.

The outcry against this iniquitous policy document appears to be just about universal. UUK has made

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When a woman goes swimming

Nov 29th, 2013 8:53 am | By

The subhead of an article in India Today:

“When a woman goes swimming, as the word for sea is masculine, when “the water touches the woman’s private parts, she becomes an ‘adulteress’ and should be punished.”
- Summary of a report titled “The misguided Fatwas of the Muslim Brotherhood and Salafis”, as published in the Al Masry Al Youm.

That item is reported in other places, all apparently from the same source. Even Counterpunch reports it.

One currently ascendant Salafist group in Syria, among more than 1000 others competing for weapons and fighters, is “Daash”. The word is an acronym with its letters standing for “the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant.”  Daash appeared on the scene here

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Remember this?

Nov 28th, 2013 4:59 pm | By

Maryam has a perfect graphic.

Read the rest

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Secular liberals and Islamists swap views

Nov 28th, 2013 4:48 pm | By

There’s a very good conversation going on the Facebook page for the event Protest Against Universities UK! No to gender apartheid! It’s a conversation between secular liberals and Islamists.

In any case you should know about the event if you’re going to be in or near London on December 10.

Tuesday, December 10, 2013
Time 5:00pm in UTC
Description
On the occasion of the International Human Rights Day we oppose the legitimisation of forced gender segregation by Universities UK, the body representing the leadership of UK universities.

Universities UK has issued a guidance on external speakers saying that the segregation of the sexes at universities is not discriminatory as long as “both men and women are being treated equally, as

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A fruitless attempt at dialogue

Nov 28th, 2013 3:34 pm | By

Peter Boghossian said something interesting on Facebook (via Twitter, I take it).

I was just called a radical feminist for opposing gender segregation at universities.

I’d just been talking about someone going by the name Abdullah Ali who commented on the Universities UK blog and blamed “EDL white surpemacists and radical feminists” for their knee-jerk responses to gender segregation, so I was interested, so I commented. But I should have known better, because I got called “cupcake” for my pains. It’s radical feminist of me to take exception to that.

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A revival in adherence to normative Islamic practices

Nov 28th, 2013 12:10 pm | By

The iERA, the Islamic Education and Research Academy, has issued a press release agreeing (surprise surprise!) with UUK’s guidelines on girl cooties gender segregation. Tl; dr: it’s religious freedom, it’s great.

The debate about separation came to the fore earlier this year at an iERA event entitled: “Islam or Atheism: Which Makes More Sense?” between Hamza Tzortzis and Professor Lawrence Krauss at the University College of London (UCL) on 9th March 2013. UCL subsequently refused to take any further bookings from iERA, accusing them of “forced segregation”.

iERA later released its own findings of an externally supervised investigation into the accusation of forced gender segregation at the debate. The investigation concluded that there was no such policy or evidence that

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Distracted by the shapely bottom

Nov 28th, 2013 11:52 am | By

There are now 81 comments on the Universities UK blog post “explaining” UUK’s policy on gender segregation. There is at last one that agrees with and praises the policy.

Abdullah Ali

says:

27 November 2013 at 8:41 pm

I see theres been a quite severe knee-jerk response form the white, Islam-ignorant reactionaries here. Men and women sitting in two equal groups isn’t in any way, shape or form comparable to apartheid in Soth-africa, and as a Muslim I find the comparison insulting and, quite frankly, racist. This may make some of you’re liberal feminist heads explode, but the separation is actually mosstly for the benefit and protection of women! Bet you didnt see THAT coming!   It allows women to

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The perp sit

Nov 28th, 2013 11:28 am | By

Just for the hell of it, because I happened to see it…some pet-shaming signs.

Source: blippitt.com

Source: dailydawdle.com

Source: dumpaday.com

Source: sillylittlegiggles.com

Source: dumpaday.com

There are a lot more.Read the rest

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A profane creation

Nov 28th, 2013 10:56 am | By

Another thing to have GMO-panic about – an apple that doesn’t turn brown when it’s cut.

In test fields in New York and Washington state stand about 100 trees bearing the Canadian-designed Holy Grail of fruit science: an apple that cannot brown.

But as the Arctic Apple wends its way toward final approval in both the United States and Canada, genetic-engineering alarmists and entrenched apple interests alike are increasingly framing the new fruit as a profane creation of perverted science.

Because if god had meant apples to stay pale when sliced then god would have made them that way. On the other hand it’s the opposite with penises – god doesn’t like the way god made them, so humans … Read the rest

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“A standard surgical procedure”

Nov 28th, 2013 10:33 am | By

The National Post gives more detail on the Israeli woman fined by a rabbinical court for refusing to allow her infant son to be circumcised.

The mother, whose name was given only as Elinor, said her son had been born with a medical problem that prevented him undergoing ritual circumcision on the eighth day after birth, as is customary in Jewish law.

“As time went on, I started reading about what actually happens in circumcision, and I realised that I couldn’t do that to my son.

“He’s perfect just as he is,” Haaretz newspaper quoted her as saying. In their ruling, the three rabbis wrote: “Circumcision is a standard surgical procedure that is performed on every Jewish baby boy, so

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