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Hits of the Day
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Blog Posts
- Trying to bribe a police officer would be the same as trying to talk him/her out of a ticket.
- Taxation would be taking away our speech.
- A bonus from your employer would be the same as them giving you a good talking to.
- Prostitution would be the same as talking someone into sleeping with you.
- Convincing someone to vote for a particular candidate would be the same as buying their vote.
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If money were speech
by Verified Atheist 2/6/2012 - 12:05 pm
I was thinking some about the equivalence that has been made in the Supreme Court between money and speech. What if money actually were speech? What would that mean?
Please, contribute your own!
Tom Udall for Vice President?
by Verified Atheist 12/28/2011 - 10:18 am
OK, to start with, this is meant partly tongue-in-cheek. But… only partly.
As you may recall, in 2008 there was some name calling within the Democratic party as to whether you were a racist (if you were a Clinton supporter) or you were a sexist (if you were an Obama supporter). Obviously, I'm hand-waving quite egregiously, but I trust that everyone remembers what I'm referring to, even if I am being a bit glib about it. [Read more]
Desperation Recipes
by Verified Atheist 12/16/2011 - 2:59 pm
Sometimes, good, novel recipes are borne out of desperation. I had that happen to me recently when I found myself with only one egg and needed to make a two egg omelet. In lieu of the other egg, I substituted Greek yogurt (which I had on hand).
The recipe is as follows: [Read more]
2011 Elections, part deux
by Verified Atheist 11/7/2011 - 10:08 am
I don't really have much to add to my previous post on the 2011 elections TOMORROW, but since it is TOMORROW, I wanted to throw this back up on the front burner to help remind people that they need to vote TOMORROW.
My question for today is, will you vote tomorrow, and if not, why not?
I'm attempting to add this as a poll:
2011 Elections
by Verified Atheist 11/3/2011 - 8:54 am
Next Tuesday is the second Tuesday in November, and so for many of us (most of us?) this means that there are local and/or state elections to think about. These are the types of elections that those supporting the various Occupy movements should approve of: typically little money is invested in campaigning and politicians who are frequently known by their supporters or at least only one or two degrees separated. Furthermore, those people who get elected to national offices (which is what the media usually focuses on, and unfortunately what many of us, including me, focus on) usually occupied state offices previously, and those people who get elected to state offices usually occupied local offices previously. [Read more]
Outrage and Inner Peace
by Verified Atheist 10/16/2011 - 4:17 pm
A friend of mine once said to me:
There's a fine line between contentment and complacency.
Now, my friend's point was meant as an argument against being complacent, but I happen to think it cuts both ways. It's been decades since I was a teenager, and over that time I've worked more and more on establishing inner peace, and as a result I am a more peaceful man.
Am I too peaceful? Maybe so.
Don't take this small piece as a lecture to be more peaceful, but rather as a question (or set of questions) from someone who understands the value of well-placed outrage.
Can inner peace and outrage co-exist? [Read more]
Space hotels
by Verified Atheist 10/1/2011 - 12:31 pm
As some of you know, I love science, and I care about the environment. Sometimes, these two interests are in conflict, as in the case of space hotels. Alas, my romantic side wants the space hotels to win, and any time my environmental, logical side speaks up about how much fuel will be required for such ventures, my romantic side punches him in the face and steals his lunch money. [Read more]
Parties and salamanders
by Verified Atheist 9/21/2011 - 2:02 pm
I've recently stumbled onto the YouTube site of an unsung genius. He also has a web-site with much of the same content, only with text added.
There's a lot of great content there, but to get you started, I want to highlight these three bits:
"Nearly half of Americans don't pay taxes?" - Why that should make us mad!
by Verified Atheist 7/30/2011 - 3:48 pm
No doubt many of us have heard by now that nearly half of all Americans pay no taxes. Now, of course, an easy response to that is to correct that statement by pointing out that all Americans pay taxes, but that still leaves the statement that nearly half of all Americans pay no federal income taxes as being true.
It is true, and it should make us madder than it makes the conservatives. [Read more]
In the News
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Conversations with suicide bombers
By Elizabeth Weingarten, ForeignPolicy.com, May 23, 2012
It was 2009 in Peshawar, Pakistan, and Mossarat Qadeem was sitting on the floor of a house with about a dozen young Pakistani men -- some of whom had nearly become suicide bombers. Qadeem's goal: to undo the destructive brainwashing of the al-Qaeda and Taliban teachers who trained them in extremism, in part by asking the students to narrate their life stories.
"We were handling one of the boys, and he just came, put his head here in my lap, and he started crying and weeping," Qadeem recalls. "I was taken aback. It is very unnatural in my country that a man that tall can just sit at your feet and put his head here. [The other men] were all crying with him, and I was looking at him, and thinking, ‘my God.'"
All in a day's work for Qadeem. She's the national coordinator of Aman-o-Nisa, a coalition of Pakistani women that convened in October 2011 to combat violent extremism in Pakistan at the grassroots level. [....]
Read the article at http://afpak.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2012/05/23/conversations_with_suicide_bombers- Add new comment
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For Native American Women, Scourge of Rape, Rare Justice
The issue of sexual assaults on American Indian women has become one of the major sources of discord in the current debate between the White House and the House of Representatives over the latest reauthorization of the landmark Violence Against Women Act of 1994.
.......
“We should never have a woman come into the office saying, ‘I need to learn more about Plan B for when my daughter gets raped,’ ” said Charon Asetoyer, a women’s health advocate on the Yankton Sioux Reservation in South Dakota, referring to the morning-after pill. “That’s what’s so frightening — that it’s more expected than unexpected. It has become a norm for young women.”
The difficulties facing American Indian women who have been raped are myriad, and include a shortage of sexual assault kits at Indian Health Service hospitals, where there is also a lack of access to birth control and sexually transmitted disease testing. There are also too few nurses trained to perform rape examinations, which are generally necessary to bring cases to trial.
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Doctor Who Helped Find Bin Laden Given Jail Term (for...
By Ismail Kahn, New York Times, May 23/24, 2012
PESHAWAR, Pakistan — A Pakistani doctor who helped the Central Intelligence Agency pin down Osama bin Laden's location under cover of a vaccination drive was convicted on Wednesday of treason and sentenced to 33 years in prison, a senior official in Pakistan said.
A tribal court here in northwestern Pakistan found the doctor, Shakil Afridi, guilty of acting against the state, said Mutahir Zeb Khan, the administrator for the Khyber tribal region [....]
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Russia lawmakers advance bill on penalties for protesters
By Sergei L. Loiko, Los Angeles Times, May 23, 2012
MOSCOW — Stiff new penalties aimed at opposition protesters were given preliminary approval Tuesday by Russian lawmakers loyal to President Vladimir Putin, the target of mass rallies and demonstrations before his March election victory.
The bill, which opposition parliament members termed draconian and protested by threatening to file out of a legislative session, calls for fines of up to $50,000 and up to 200 hours of community service for organizers of rallies and demonstrations that grow violent or exceed the approved number of participants.
The sanctions were approved on first reading by parliament's lower house, which is controlled by Putin's United Russia party. They mark a return by the Kremlin to a tough stance against critics after concessions during the recent election campaign [...]
Also see:
Russians back Putin, strong leadership
Washington Post, May 22, 2012A Pew survey of 1,000 Russians found that President Vladimir Putin is well-liked by more than 70 percent of citizens, especially older adults.
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In Cuba, Mystery Shrouds the Fate of an Undersea Internet...
Associated Press, May 21, 2012
HAVANA — It was all sunshine, smiles and celebratory speeches as officials marked the arrival of an undersea fiber-optic cable they promised would end Cuba's Internet isolation and boost web capacity 3,000-fold. Even a retired Fidel Castro had hailed the dawn of a new cyber-age on the island.
More than a year after the February 2011 ceremony on Siboney Beach in eastern Cuba, and 10 months after the system was supposed to have gone online, the government never mentions the cable anymore, and Internet here remains the slowest in the hemisphere. People talk quietly about embezzlement torpedoing the project and the arrest of more than a half-dozen senior telecom officials.
Perhaps most maddening, nobody has explained what happened to the much-ballyhooed $70 million project....
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