Daily Archives: October 11, 2011

How to not cure cancer

Skeptics and atheists and freethinking folk are supposed to be smart, and they are supposed to be inquiring and, well, skeptical and freethinking and stuff. But they very very often are not. Between skeptics being politically conservative (mainly with respect to social issues) and often not as inquiring and smart as they are fond of telling the rest of us they are, I am sufficiently annoyed by the movement(s) as a whole to reserve calling myself, for instance, a skeptic. If anything, I’m a skeptical skeptic. A godless freethinking skeptical meta-skeptic. That’s me.
Continue reading How to not cure cancer

Support EPA’s Water Infrastructure Project

By signing this petition:

A new report from Green For All found that we could create nearly 1.9 million jobs and inject over a quarter of a trillion dollars into the economy by fully upgrading America’s aging water and stormwater infrastructure.

Every year, 860 billion gallons of raw sewage spill into our waterways – enough to cover the entire state of Pennsylvania one inch deep. Fixing that problem creates jobs.

Green For All’s report, available here (http://bit.ly/WaterWorksReport), shows that making the EPA’s recommended $188 billion investment – enough to manage stormwater and preserve water quality for millions of Americans – could have a huge short- and long-term impact. And the timing for the investment couldn’t be better.

Americans need clean water. We need clean jobs. This investment gives us both.

Sign here

Why Guns Need To Be Controlled

Delbert Huber shot and killed Timothy LarsonDelbert Huber, an 81-year old Kandiyohi County Minnesota man, got into a verbal argument with 43 year old Timoth Larson. Huber settled the dispute by blasting Larson with his gun. Larson is dead. Larson was a special ed teacher at St. Michael-Albertville Middle School West.

Twenty Two year old Mattisha Houston killed Joseph Wells in Houston. She was shooting at a tree in her back yard, missed the tree, and Wells was killed while watching his TV.

Timothy Huber, the son of Delbert was also arrested. [source]

This is not the usual sort of thing I like to point out, but since it was close to home I thought I’d mention it .

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Johnnie Flow armed herself with a handgun last February, because she felt her family was being threatened. The gun was not legal, and apparently there was no attempt at safety training.

Then, her 3 year old son go thold of the gun and shot her other kid, 2-year old Payton, in the stomach.

Johnie says:

“I’m not a bad mother,” Flow said. “Anybody who knows me knows my babies mean the world to me. That was just a freak accident.”

Ah, Johnnie, sorry, no. You are a bad mother. That was not a freak accident. That was you having a loaded gun that was not locked away. You turned one of your kids into a victim of gun violence, and the other into a perp. That does not mean that you can’t be a good mother, but just saying that you are a good mother because you want it to be true is a stupid as leaving a loaded gun in reach of your toddlers.

Also, you are reproducing too fast. Slow down.

The victim was release from the hospital on Saturday.

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Confront Sudan

A petition:

Change US policy to confront the government of Sudan for ongoing mass atrocities and act to protect innocent civilians

Recent events in Southern Kordofan, Blue Nile, Abyei and Darfur prove that the government of Sudan is continuing to use the same deadly methods that it has employed for years against its own people: attacking civilians on a broad scale with its army, militia and air force; limiting and blocking humanitarian assistance to millions displaced by attacks; and focusing US attention on negotiations that are not honored. It is time for significantly escalated action by the United States consistent with the Responsibility to Protect doctrine. Condemnations of new war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide are necessary, but not sufficient.

8 years after the start of the Darfur genocide, it is time for escalated action by the US to stop the genocides and mass atrocities in Sudan.

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German Semi-Wild Child = Fake? And other matters

L’enfant sauvage, the 1970 movie by Truffaut, depicted a plausible case of a “wild child” … a person left at very young age in the wild, who then grew up in the absence of human culture. Such wild children are rare, and most of them are not real, or at least, not as wild as originally claimed.

A team of psychologists who were interested in the phenomenon and related questions (like, how is language learned?) attended the opening of that movie during the same week that they were informed of the existence of another wild child of sorts, Genie. Genie, later depicted (very indirectly) in the 1994 movie Nell, was not left in the woods. She was left in the closet, but still grew up without much human interaction.

Continue reading German Semi-Wild Child = Fake? And other matters