Jesus and Mo dance around the Confirmation Circle.

Jesus and Mo //

Can become a patron at Patreon.… Read the rest

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Now a piece of horrible news from Mauritania:

A Muslim man has become the first person to be sentenced to death for apostasy in Mauritania since independence in 1960 after a court ruled he had written something blasphemous.

Mohamed Cheikh Ould Mohamed, who is around 30 years old, fainted when the ruling was read out late Wednesday in a court in Nouadhibou in the northwest of the country, a judicial source told AFP.

As well he might. Imagine being sentenced to death by a court of law for writing “something blasphemous.”

During the hearing the judge told Mohamed that he was accused of apostasy “for speaking lightly of the Prophet Mohammed” in an article which was published briefly on

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Department of Stories that we suspect didn’t happen quite the way they were described.

The New York Post reports – or, rather, melodramatizes – a tale of an evil Grumpy Passenger being thrown off a plane during boarding because he was a demonic Enemy of Christmas.

The byline is Michael Liss, Daniel Prendergast and Philip Messing, which seems like a lot for such a tiny story (in both length and import). Maybe they’re all sock puppets of Bill O’Reilly, or Murdoch himself.

The man was waiting to board American Airlines Flight 1140 to Dallas when a cheerful gate agent began welcoming everyone with the Yuletide greeting while checking boarding passes.

The grumpy passenger, who appeared to be traveling alone, barked

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So there was this charity event. It was held at an Elks Lodge. The lodge is in Glendale, California. The host of the event was a retired cop. About half of the 50 to 60 guests were cops.

You can probably already tell this story isn’t going to go well.

Somebody took some video. Salon reports on what the video shows.

In the video, Gary Fishell, a former federal investigator, sings a parody of the song “Bad, bad Leroy Brown“:

“Michael Brown learned a lesson about a messin’
With a badass policeman
And he’s bad, bad Michael Brown

Then it gets worse; go there if you want to read the whole thing.

It’s the fascism again. It’s … Read the rest

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Here is another reason to dislike Bill Maher.

Bill Maher‏@billmaher
#TheInterview Is that all it takes – an anonymous threat and the numbers 911 – to throw free expression under the bus? #PussyNation

He wouldn’t use #NiggerNation that way. He didn’t, and he wouldn’t. Yet he thinks it’s ok to use #PussyNation that way. (Yes, Jon Stewart also does that [unless he’s stopped], and that sucks too.)… Read the rest

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The New York Public Library has a Christmas / solstice / holiday / rainy day present for us: questions asked of reference librarians in the days before The Google.

Recently some folks at the New York Public Library discovered a box containing old reference questions from the 1940s to 1980s. They’ll be posting the questions to their Instagram account on Mondays (starting today), but have shared a bunch with us today, noting, “we were Google before Google existed.”

I love it when people discover a box containing treasure.

• What did women use for shopping backs before paper bags?
• Are black widow spiders more harmful dead or alive?
• Is it proper to go to Reno alone to get a divorce? (1945)

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The junior Senator from my home state of New Jersey sends us a shout-out.

Today is HumanLight — a Humanist holiday celebrates a Humanist’s vision of a good future on December 23. I wish you all a good future and a happy holiday!

Same to you Senator!… Read the rest

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The New Yorker on Facebook.

… Read the rest

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The first paragraph of a somewhat rambling think piece about Joan Didion snagged my attention.

EVEN NOW, even in this century, decades past the pictures with Corvettes and cigarettes and sunglasses, even after her manner, with its uneasy admixture of condescension toward the world and delicacy toward the self, became case study for how to be slightly dangerous and stylish and aloof as a writer without the compensatory aid of masculine bravado, there is always murmuring about Joan Didion.

Um, ah. That’s quite a tidy summing-up of why I don’t like Joan Didion. I think that admixture is exactly the wrong one to have, because it gets everything reversed. The condescension (or doubt, or critical view, or skepticism, or caution) … Read the rest

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Is police work the most dangerous job you can do?

No. You know what is? Construction.

Construction is one of the most dangerous occupations in the world, incurring more occupational fatalities than any other sector in both the United States and in the European Union.^[27][28] In 2009, the fatal occupational injury rate among construction workers in the United States was nearly three times that for all workers.^[27]

Have a table from 2006.

Construction workers are far more at risk than cops are. Maek you think.… Read the rest

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The BBC’s Paul Wood also reports on the terrible fate of Yezidi women.

Yezidis say there are still 3,500 Yezidi women and girls enslaved by IS. Three thousand five hundred. A few have escaped, and some of those told their stories to Paul Wood.

Hannan is 18 and wants to be a nurse, a future almost snatched away by IS.

Hannan says the jihadists blocked Sinjar’s roads with their pick-up trucks. She was turned back to town, where women and girls were separated from everyone else.

“There were 20 of them, with long beards and weapons. They said: ‘You’re coming to Mosul.’ We refused. They hit us and dragged us to their cars.”

She was taken with other women

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MediaMatters tells us that Rush Limbaugh has been ranting about the idea of Idris Elba playing James Bond.

Limbaugh on Idris Elba: “James Bond was white and Scottish, period.”

Huh. Jesus was Mediterranean and Palestinian, too; I wonder if Rush Limbaugh ranted when Mel Gibson played the part.

Anyway…if I had any interest in James Bond I think I’d rather watch the guy on the left playing him than the shouty fella.

… Read the rest

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

It’s not just IS. Lejla Kurić reminds me that Karadžić said much the same thing at his trial. I’d forgotten that if I ever knew it.

The BBC reported it in 2010.

Former leader Radovan Karadzic has said the Serb cause in the Bosnian war was “just and holy” as he began his defence at his genocide trial at The Hague.

Marcus Tanner at the Guardian expanded on the point.

Listening to Radovan Karadzic describe his war against the Bosnian Muslims as “holy”, it’s tempting to think he is making a bad joke, or fooling the judges. This would be to mistake both the man and his supporters. Most of the Bosnian Serb fighters serving under him

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Don’t let’s forget about the Yezidi women. Islamic State has enslaved hundreds or perhaps thousands of them for the purpose of rape, Amnesty International reports.

What AI doesn’t report, at least in the press release, is the fact that IS treats this as officially okie dokie according to Islam. IS gives itself permission and indeed approval to treat women and girls this way because they consider it endorsed by their religion.

From the full report:

In August 2014, IS fighters abducted hundreds, possibly thousands, of Yezidi men, women and children who were fleeing the IS takeover from the Sinjar region, in the north-west of the country. Hundreds of the men were killed and others were forced to convert

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Originally part of a comment by kagekiri on “A predictable outcome of divisive anti-cop rhetoric.”

Stop and frisk just harasses the vast, vast majority of people stopped (according to the NYPD, 9 out of 10 are innocent), as they aren’t committing crimes, and the vast majority of people stopped are black people. In areas that are 24% black or latino, they make up 75% of stops, and given only 11% of stops are ones where police actually have a suspect they’re looking for, that means 89% are just “random” (read: racist as fuck), so it’s not even mostly explained by having more black and latino suspects they’re looking for. It’s just plainly racist and authoritarian, and not even particularly effective … Read the rest

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Should promoters of homeopathy be able to claim that homeopathic “vaccinations” are effective? Nope, not in my view. It’s the equivalent of advertising Cyanide Candy on cartoons shows aimed at children.

A court in Australia has accepted a version of that view.

The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission has convinced a court that a company that offers homeopathic remedies was “misleading and deceptive” when it tried to argue that said remedies provide a viable alternative to the pertussis vaccine.

The case dates back to early 2013. The company, Homeopathy Plus, posted a series of three articles that claimed (among other things) that the vaccine for pertussis (whooping cough) is unreliable and ineffective. Literature currently at the site criticizes

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Life for Canadian dentistry students who are careless enough to be women can be quite unpleasant, it appears.

“It was hell,” said the resident, CBC News is calling “Sarah”. We have agreed to protect her identity because she fears retaliation​ and damage to her professional career.​

Over the course of her final year in residency she says she and other female peers were targets of misogynistic jokes, comments and text messages made by a fellow male resident.

“When I started I was one of two females and the jokes [and] the acceptance for certain kinds of jokes were shocking to me.”

“He would make comments about other [female] residents weight or about her height. When we were studying cranial-facial abnormalities

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Anthony Zurcher reports on the opportunistic “blame the protests” rhetoric over the murders of the two New York cops.

At the centre of the storm is New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio, who has been heralded as a populist torch-bearer since his election in November 2013.

The mayor had previously expressed solidarity with protesters who had taken to the streets after a police officer was not indicted for the death of Eric Garner.

And he had publicly wondered if his biracial son was safe from police – rhetoric some are now arguing helped to create an environment that encourages violence against police.

Yes, and? Is protesting the killing of Eric Garner and the non-indictment of his killers so obviously … Read the rest

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

Originally a comment by Bruce Gorton on “A predictable outcome of divisive anti-cop rhetoric.”

On the same day on which this story broke, I read another in which a cop attacked someone who was asleep in a hospital.

The cop arrested his victim for assault, it was probably only that hospital waiting rooms have cameras that resulted in the cop being found out.

Last week meanwhile I subbed a story about a cop who was suspended, for not tear-gassing a suicidal university student he had just talked down when his fellow officers felt the need to forcibly restrain the said student for no apparent reason.

America’s police force blames the media, but who was it that killed a 12-year-old for … Read the rest

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Oh and by the way – it’s completely unimportant, but then again it perhaps led to things that were important, so it might be worth mentioning – the first person Ismaaiyl Brinsley shot was his ex-girlfriend, Shaneka Thompson. He shot her in the stomach.

Nancy Leong at Slate says this is a pattern.

We live in a country where shooting your ex-girlfriend is at most local news.

According to media reports, the management of Thompson’s apartment complex distributed a letter to other residents stating that her shooting was the result of a “domestic dispute” in order to reassure them that “this was a private, isolated incident.” When three women are murdered by their husbands or boyfriends every single day

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