So there’s a new trend in France? A fashionable new style of mini-jihad – drive a van or truck or car into a crowd of shoppers because Allahu akbar?

A van has been driven at shoppers at a French Christmas market in the city of Nantes and the driver is reported to have stabbed himself, officials say.

Ten people are reported to have been injured, five seriously.

The exact circumstances remain unclear, but the incident comes only a day after pedestrians were run down in Dijon.

The driver of that vehicle screamed “God is great” in Arabic.

Meanwhile, to confuse the issue further, in Glasgow a garbage truck (aka rubbish lorry or bin lorry) went out of control in a … Read the rest

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There’s a letter, or memo, that purports to be from the PBA but the PBA is denying it. If it’s real it’s terrifying – it’s unabashed fascism is what it is.

But the PBA is denying it.

A spokesman for the Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association has denied that the group issued a now-widely circulated memo reacting to today’s killing of two police officers that says, among other things, “The mayors hands are literally dripping with our blood because of his words actions and policies …”

Well the “literally” is excessive for sure.

The memo was first posted on Twitter by Ryan Gorman, whose Twitter bio gives his title as managing editor of breaking news and original content at AOL. Gorman

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Apparently the PBA of New York is blaming the mayor in the wake of the murder of two cops in Brooklyn yesterday.

The two police officers were sitting in their car when they were shot.

The killings have widened the divide between the NYPD—under fire following a grand jury’s decision not to indict the officer who killed unarmed Staten Island man Eric Garner in July—and Mayor Bill De Blasio.

Officers turned their backs on De Blasio when he arrived at police headquarters for a press conference, and police union head Patrick Lynch told reporters “there’s blood on many hands”— apparently singling out the mayor for blame alongside anti-brutality protesters.

Because we shouldn’t object to police brutality? We should smile … Read the rest

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That Missouri legislator who introduced a law that would require women to get the man’s permission before she can have an abortion – that guy is even worse than he seemed at first. He talked to a news program on Thursday to clear that up.

“It took two to come together and create a child, and right now the way it is the woman gets the full say and the father gets no say, and I think that that needs to change,” Brattin said. “With the women’s movement for equal rights, well it’s swung so far we have now taken away the man’s right and the say in their child’s life.”

That’s because the pregnancy happens to the woman… Read the rest

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Originally a comment by Dave Ricks on Provocative or offensive?

A side note about accommodationism:

In 2008, Austin Dacey wrote accommodationism to mean [1]

The view that there exist no important conflicts between science and religion I call accommodationism. Those who either recognize no conflicts between religion and science, or who recognize such conflicts but are disinclined to discuss them publicly, I call accommodationists.

In 2009, Jerry Coyne wrote accommodationism to mean [2]

Professional societies like the National Academy of Sciences — the most elite organization of American scientists — have concluded that to make evolution palatable to Americans, you must show that it is not only consistent with religion, but also no threat to it.

Dacey and … Read the rest

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Here’s an uncomfortable subject to think about – police unions, and the part they play in keeping abusive cops from being fired.

There are, of course, police officers who are fired for egregious misbehavior by commanding officers who decide that a given abuse makes them unfit for a badge and gun. Yet all over the U.S., police unions help many of those cops to get their jobs back, often via secretive appeals geared to protect labor rights rather than public safety. Cops deemed unqualified by their own bosses are put back on the streets. Their colleagues get the message that police [are] all but impervious to termination.

I think labor rights are important, and unions are mostly a good … Read the rest

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Ahmar Mustikhan reports in the Examiner on the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan’s explanation for why the slaughter in Peshawar was right-on according to the prophet. It’s enough to make you vomit.

The Islamic terrorist outfit that carried out the bloodiest school massacre in world history Wednesday defended its action as being in line with what Prophet Mohammed, who Muslims believe was the last messenger of God, did with his enemies 1400 years ago.

“At the time of the Bannu Qurayza massacre, Prophet Mohammed ordered only those children be killed whose pubic hairs have appeared,” said Umar Khurasani, spokesperson for the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan. Bannu Qurayza was a Jewish tribe that lived in present day Medina. Islamic history texts confirm 800 men and boys

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Apparently that article about the unreliability of Doctor Oz et al. has prompted lots of people to say “well obviously you shouldn’t trust a doctor on some tv talk show!”

But it’s not obvious. It’s not obvious unless you already know it.

It’s not at all easy to know which authorities to trust, and it’s not obviously stupid to assume that people on tv are constrained by some sort of rules or standards about truth and competence. We may think it’s obvious, but I think if we do we’re forgetting that we have some background knowledge about Oprah’s attraction to woo and the like. Not everybody has the same background knowledge, to put it mildly. It’s not self-evident that Oprah … Read the rest

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From Rahila Gupta in the New Statesman, here’s a shocking fact I didn’t know:

…the conviction rate for rape cases brought by Dalit women stands at an appallingly low 2 per cent as compared to 24 per cent for women in general.

I shudder to think how that plays out in court. I also wonder why the higher number is so much higher than the US rate, which is from 2 to 9 percent according to the Harvard Journal of Law & Gender. (If people wonder why rape victims don’t rush to tell the cops, that conviction rate has to be one reason. Go through that just to see an acquittal? Doesn’t sound like much fun.)

One organisation,

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No really, they’re told that. The Guardian says so.

• Poster campaign will attempt to stop antisocial practice
• Doctors say crossing legs will not affect reproductive powers

Are they sure? Not in any way? Not even shrinking things just a little? Or enfeebling them ever so slightly? Or delaying appropriate responses? Or making them look like lace or flowers or scented soap?

As 2014 comes to an end, one thing New York commuters can expect in 2015 is an official city campaign against a growing problem: “manspreading”.

I wonder why the problem is growing. Maybe it’s a reaction to feminism? “I’ll show you – I’ll take up extra room so that you’ll know who’s boss.” Or maybe it’s that subway … Read the rest

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So long, Geoffrey Peterson.

Adios, Secretariat.

//www.youtube.com/watch?v=gof5Y72HTx4… Read the rest

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A team of researchers led by Christina Korownyk of the University of Alberta’s Department of Family Medicine took a look at the medical information on two tv doctor shows, “The Dr. Oz Show” and “The Doctors,” which have average daily audiences of 2.9 million and 2.3 million respectively. The paper was published in the BMJ.

When looking at the shows individually, there was evidence to support 46% of the claims made on the “Dr. Oz Show.” Approximately 15% of the claims made on the show were contrary to what has been reported in scientific literature. There was no evidence to support or reject 49% of the claims made on the show. “The Doctors” had slightly better results, with

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So the Vatican has issued its final report on the rebellious nuns in the US. It dresses it up in cuddly language but Mary Hunt at Religion Dispatches is wholly unpersuaded of its cuddliness.

Despite herculean efforts to make nice, the 12-page report and its presentation reinforce the Roman Catholic Church’s patriarchal power paradigm. And although many have hailed the report as a sign of the Vatican’s warming toward women, I am not convinced.

Many will hail anything as a sign of something cuddly, because that’s what they do. The rest of us turn a very yellow eye on Vatican reports.

The first shoe dropped in 2008 when Cardinal Franc Rodé announced an Apostolic Visitation of active women’s religious

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Massimo Pigliucci has a post about the American Atheists billboard campaign and the utility of what Dave Silverman calls the “firebrand” approach to fighting religion.

In this essay I will first explain why I object to “firebrand” atheism and on what principled (i.e., before evidence) grounds. I will then look at David’s data and argue that it doesn’t show what he thinks it does, and why even if it did this would still not settle the matter. I will then end with some constructive suggestions for atheist activism more generally.

Why firebrand atheism is a bad idea

American Atheists’ billboards have carried messages the likes of “You know it’s a myth… and you have a choice,” “What myths do you

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This is a sickening story.

British girls as young as 14 are being helped to marry Islamic State fighters in Syria in increasing numbers by London-based “facilitators”.

Teenagers wanting to become ‘Jihadi brides’ are being assisted with applying for passports, given funding and sometimes even accompanied to the region after being groomed online.

Ew. What a golden opportunity – marry a murderer and give up all your rights for the sake of the bright lights of IS-held Syria.

Pockets of east London in particular are becoming hotbeds for organised groups of men and women helping young IS supporters to get to the Syrian conflict zone, the Evening Standard reported.

Haras Rafiq, an expert at British counter-terrorism think-tank, the Quilliam Foundation,

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Ireland and the US are so alike in so many ways, most of them bad.

In Ireland, a woman who is clinically dead but 17 weeks pregnant is being kept alive against her family’s will. At this painful time, her relatives must go to court to stop the Irish state treating their loved one’s body as a cadaveric incubator.

Yeah we do that too. Marlise Munoz was kept alive after brain-death despite her family’s wishes for two months last year because she was pregnant.

Munoz was 14 weeks pregnant with the couple’s second child when her husband found her unconscious on their kitchen floor November 26. Though doctors had pronounced her brain dead and her family had said she

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Obama’s gone all radical extremist ideological gender feminist on their asses. TIME – avid fan of Christina Hoff Sommers – reports on his gender-feminist press conference today:

President Barack Obama’s traditional end-of-year press conference Friday was historic for reasons that had nothing to do with the substance of the president’s comments. All eight of the reporters who questioned Obama were women—and nearly all were print reporters—an apparent first for a formal White House news conference, a venue traditionally dominated by male television correspondents.

It makes news, yet all-male gatherings hardly ever make news.

“The fact is, there are many women from a variety of news organizations who day-in and day-out do the hard work of covering the President of

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This is basically an ad for a 3D printer but I don’t care, the technology is just so astounding I have to share it anyway.

Tara Anderson, a director at 3D-printing company 3D Systems, adopted Derby from non-profit dog rescue Peace and Paws. “I kept looking at his photo and reading his story, and I cried literally every time,” says Tara in the video. So she decided to do something about it and created a pair of specially fitted prosthetic legs for Derby, built in a loop configuration similar to kids’ “jumping shoes” to stop him digging them into the ground. The result is one happy dog.

//www.youtube.com/watch?v=uRmoowIN8aY

H/t karmacat… Read the rest

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Originally a comment by MrFancyPants on Yes that’s right, exactly like this.

I wonder if the people (mainly men?) complaining about “why is gender even an issue” are even professionals in a computer science field. If they are, they’re stunningly unobservant.

I am a computer science professional (formerly academic, now in the private sector) and I can confidently state that gender is a huge deal in this field. As an academic, I repeatedly saw promising female grad students drop out of the computer science program or switch to a different field, and it was apparent that this was happening due to the boys’ club nature of the research labs at that time (and at that university).

Now, as a … Read the rest

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