The BBC reports that some UN boffins have expressed worries about this pattern we seem to be developing in the US of failing to indict cops who kill unarmed people.

“I am concerned by the grand juries’ decisions and the apparent conflicting evidence that exists relating to both incidents,” UN Special Rapporteur on minority issues, Rita Izsak, said in a statement.

A trial process would ensure the evidence is considered in detail, she said.

“The decisions leave many with legitimate concerns relating to a pattern of impunity when the victims of excessive use of force come from African-American or other minority communities.”

They do, yes. The Eric Garner case, especially, is horrifying. He wasn’t rushing at anyone, he was … Read the rest

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From A Mighty Girl:

At age 23, British secret agent Phyllis Latour Doyle parachuted into occupied Normandy in May 1944 to gather intelligence on Nazi positions in preparation for D-Day. As an agent for the British Special Operations Executive (SOE), Doyle secretly relayed 135 coded messages to the British military before France’s liberation in August. For seventy years, her contributions to the war effort have been largely unheralded but, last week, the 93-year-old was finally given her due when she was awarded France’s highest honor, the Chevalier of the Legion of Honour.

Doyle first joined the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force at age 20 in 1941 to work as a flight mechanic but SOE recruiters spotted her potential and

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My November column for The Freethinker is out.

It asks a question.

What do we do with the thought that some things are more important than others? Specifically, how do we deal with the awareness that some human problems are more urgent and pressing than others? How do we sort them, how do we rank them, how do we decide which ones we should pay most attention to?

I talk about the variety of things I discuss on my blog (hey that’s right here) and say that I don’t really know how to rank them, and don’t particularly want to.

I understand the thinking behind good-faith efforts to rank degrees of misery. There is such a thing as being spoiled,

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A long long list of Fellows of the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry are urging the news media to stop referring to climate deniers as “skeptics.” Pass it on.

Public discussion of scientific topics such as global warming is confused by misuse of the term “skeptic.” The Nov 10, 2014, New York Times article “Republicans Vow to Fight EPA and Approve Keystone Pipeline” referred to Sen. James Inhofe as “a prominent skeptic of climate change.” Two days later Scott Horsley of NPR’s Morning Edition called him “one of the leading climate change deniers in Congress.” These are not equivalent statements.

As Fellows of the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry, we are concerned that the words “skeptic” and “denier”

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So a kid age 7 reads a book about insects with much enjoyment, then when she gets to the back cover she sees that it says the book is for boys.

Publishers? Don’t do that.

You don’t say “books for white people” do you? Don’t say “books for boys” either.

Parker Dains, seven, from Milpitas in California, wrote to Abdo Publishing after she discovered that the Biggest, Baddest Book of Bugs that she was reading was part of a series called the Biggest, Baddest Books for Boys. She told her local paperthe Milpitas Post: “It made me very unhappy. I was like, ‘What the?’ I said, ‘Dad we have to do something quickly.’”

So she wrote to

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So so so so so so funny.

[Description: two photos: one, a bunch of US-football players captioned “how America sees the 49ers”; two, the same bunch of US-football players wearing pink skirts over their uniforms captioned “How Seattle sees the 49ers”]

Contempt for the female just never gets old, does it.… Read the rest

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Oh puhleeeeeeeeeeeeeze.

I know the New York Post is a Murdoch paper but come on. NY Post columnist Bob McManus says it was Eric Garner’s fault that the cops choked him to death.

Eric Garner and Michael Brown had much in common, not the least of which was this: On the last day of their lives, they made bad decisions. Epically bad decisions.

Each broke the law — petty offenses, to be sure, but sufficient to attract the attention of the police.

And then — tragically, stupidly, fatally, inexplicably — each fought the law.

The law won, of course, as it almost always does.

What was the law that Garner was supposed to have broken? The law against selling … Read the rest

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Oh look, what a coincidence. Last April, a cop choked a guy while a bystander took pictures…and the cop was immediately fired.

Guess what the choked person isn’t. Besides dead.

Frank Phillips, a Knox County Sheriff’s officer, was fired Sunday night after a series of pictures taken by photographer John Messner were published in the Daily Mail in Britain. They showed an officer identified by the Sheriff’s Office as Phillips grabbing 21-year-old college student Jarod Dotson around the neck and squeezing him until he fell to his knees.

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A Missouri man drove his van through a crowd of protesters in St Louis last night, and then waved a gun at them.

According to the St. Louis Dispatch, activists were preparing for a “die-in” demonstration, which includes lying in the street, in Maryland Plaza at around 8 p.m. to protest the decision not to charge the officer whose illegal use of a chokehold resulted in the death of Eric Garner.

“As they did, a man driving a Town and Country minivan drove through the intersection and accelerated through the crowd,” the paper reported.

Well maybe he was late for dinner and the pesky protesters were in his way. Look at it from his point of view.

After a

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Surprisingly (to me at least), a high-up in the Southern Baptist Convention has gone off on racism, Sarah Posner reports.

After the failure yesterday of a grand jury to indict the New York police officer who was videotaped choking Eric Garner to death, Russell Moore, president of the Southern Baptist Convention’s Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, launched into a denunciation of racism in the church on the ERLC’s program “Questions and Ethics.”

Saying he was “shocked and grieved” by the news, Moore added:

Romans 13 says that the sword of justice is to be wielded against evildoers.

Now, what we too often see still is a situation where our African-American brothers and sisters, especially brothers, are more likely to

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The earliest sunset of the year (in the northern hemisphere) is almost on us. I didn’t know, until Leonard Tramiel told me last summer around the time of the solstice, that the earliest and latest sunrise and sunset don’t occur on the solstice. Bruce McClure at EarthSky explains.

The next solstice in 2014 comes on December 21 and marks an unofficial beginning for winter in the Northern Hemisphere. For this hemisphere, this upcoming solstice brings the shortest day and longest night of the year. And yet the earliest sunsets for middle latitudes in the Northern Hemisphere happen around December 7.

It seems paradoxical. At middle latitudes in the U.S. – and throughout the Northern Hemisphere – the earliest sunsets

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Nice.

America’s favorite Irish-terrorism-supporter-elected-to-Congress took to Twitter on Wednesday afternoon to thank the Staten Island grand jury for its decision not to indict NYPD Officer Daniel Pantaleo for the July death of Eric Garner after being placed in a chokehold while under arrest.

“Thanks to SI grand jury for doing justice & not yielding to outside pressure,” King (or a social media intern) pecked out Wednesday afternoon. “Decision must be respected.”

The congressman — who once reaffirmed his support for Irish terrorists after their attack on Royal forces in Ireland, and who thinks journalists should be arrested for practicing free speech — added: “Compassion for the Garner family.”

Ah yes “outside pressure” – otherwise known as citizens objecting to … Read the rest

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So, we’re just going to keep doing this now?

A grand jury in Staten Island has decided not indict New York City Police Officer Daniel Pantaleo in relation to the death of Eric Garner.

That’s even though Pantaleo was seen on video putting Eric Garner in an apparent choke hold in July, according to city officials and lawyers for Garner’s family. An apparent choke hold that actually choked him to death. His last words were, “I can’t breathe.”

Fuck.

There is a federal investigation.

An official with the U.S. Department of Justice confirms there is a federal investigation into the circumstances surrounding the death of Eric Garner.

…

Garner family attorney Jonathan Moored told the Associated Press that

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Reading Katherine Stewart’s The Good News Club. In chapter 7 she goes to Austin to sit in on Texas Board of Education hearings in March 2010. Many astonishing things were said there.

The conservatives on the board want to make clear that the free enterprise system that makes America great has nothing to do with a universal concern for public policy and the common good – a concern they believe carries the dreaded taint of socialism. On a list of characteristics of good citizenship for grades 1 through 3, the board majority decided to expunge references to “justice” and “responsibility for the common good.”

That one makes me feel something very like nausea of the brain.

Another part of

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Originally a comment by Hj Hornbeck on Guest post: Sexism squanders human resources.

Historically, families have always had at least two “incomes.” Even people who buy into a strict division of labour between the sexes concede that all sexes brought food to the table, from picking berries to doing farm chores. This is quite stable against adversity; if one person cannot provide for the family, they can try to subsist on another person’s contribution. Arbitrary restrictions on what each sex can do artificially limit that capacity, and endanger survival.

On rare occasions, though, a single provider has been enough to feed an entire family. Artificial restrictions aren’t a factor anymore, and don’t face the opposition they would in a … Read the rest

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Because it’s winter in the northern hemisphere.

Sociedad Argentina de Horticultura posts amazing photos on Facebook, and Bernard Hurley frequently shares them and makes my eyes bug out.

Like this one:

And this one:

… Read the rest

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Human Rights Watch had things to say about Iran’s proposed penal code in August 2012.

The new provisions also expand upon broad or vaguely defined national security crimes that punish people for exercising their right to freedom of expression, association, or assembly. One troubling amendment concerns article 287, which defines the crime of efsad-e fel arz, or “sowing corruption on earth.”

Legislators have expanded the definition of efsad-e fel arz, a previously ill-defined hadd crime closely related to moharebeh (enmity against God) that had been used to sentence to death political dissidents who allegedly engaged in armed activities or affiliated with “terrorist organizations.” The new definition also includes clearly nonviolent activities such as “publish[ing] lies,” “operat[ing] or

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A small but I think telling item. Dave Silverman said in a public Facebook post an hour ago that Bill O’Reilly “talked shit about us, but did not invite us on.” Dave is sarcastically pleased that BillO is afraid of him.

He has a real point though. I think it’s pretty reasonable to think that O’Reilly is indeed reluctant to have Dave on his show again, for reasons that have to do with what a bully O’Reilly is.

O’Reilly is a big man, a burly man. He has a loud voice. He uses his size and his loud voice (and his control of the show) to intimidate people he invites on his show to talk.

Dave says he’s been on … Read the rest

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More news from Iran:

On November 24, 2014, Iran’s Supreme Court upheld a criminal court ruling sentencing Soheil Arabi to hang. The court transferred his file to the judiciary’s implementation unit, opening the way for his execution.

For what? Did he murder someone?

A Tehran criminal court had convicted him in August of sabb al-nabbi, or “insulting the prophet,” referring to the Prophet Muhammad, which carries the death penalty. Arabi’s legal team has asked the judiciary to suspend the death sentence and review the case.

Insulted “the prophet” how? Facebook posts.

Nastaran Naimi, Arabi’s wife, told Human Rights Watch that intelligence agents linked with Iran’s Revolutionary Guards arrested her and her husband at their home in Tehran in

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The outrage of the moment in Sommers-land is the journalistic failings of a Rolling Stone article reporting on an alleged gang rape at the University of Virginia. Rebecca Traister at The New Republic discusses this meta-story (so note we’re at level 4 here).

Over the past few days, several publications have reported journalistic lapses in Rolling Stone‘s blockbuster story about an alleged gang rape at the University of Virginia. The reporter, Sabrina Rubin Erdely, never contacted the men that her subject, a student she calls “Jackie,” alleges raped her. Erdely also did not acknowledge in the body of the piece that she did not contact them.

These are serious charges: Journalists are supposed to seek multiple perspectives on the

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