Guest post: An observation from St Carl of Ithaca

Originally a comment by Blake Stacey on The most shameful ontological status.

I felt a little of that when the Mars Rover landed safely. I was disappointed there weren’t more women in the room. I hoped there would be more in the future. I was glad to see the few who were there.

This reminded me of something, so I went and looked it up. Everyone open your hymnals to St. Carl of Ithaca, Pale Blue Dot (1994), p. 243, describing the collision of Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 with Jupiter:

The impact of the millennium was beginning to look very much like a fizzle. [Read more…]

Life in prison for selling $10 worth of marijuana

The ACLU has a report on life sentences in prison without parole. Many such sentences are for non-violent crimes.

The number of people sentenced to life without parole
has quadrupled nationwide in the past 20 years, even
while violent crime has been declining during that
period. Not only has the use of life-without-parole sentences
exploded, but the punishment is available for a broader
range of offenses, and those sentenced to LWOP include
people convicted of nonviolent crimes, including low-level
nonviolent offenses. [Read more…]

Pressing

Naturally Christina Hoff Sommers is contemptuous of TIME’s cowardly failure to tell feminists that they are pompous idiots for doing something Christina Hoff Sommers doesn’t approve. Naturally the only True Feminism™ is that approved first by Richard Dawkins and then by Christina Hoff Sommers.

Christina H. Sommers @CHSommers · Nov 16
TIME caved to pressure. Has stopped poll on most cringe-inducing word because “feminist” was winning by a landslide. http://time.com/3576870/worst-words-poll-2014/

[Read more…]

The Ebola count ticks up

Damn. Martin Salia, a surgeon who caught Ebola while working in Sierra Leone and was flown to the US on Saturday for treatment, died this morning. His case was too advanced.

He was given the experimental drug ZMapp on Saturday. He also received a plasma transfusion from an Ebola survivor. That treatment is thought to offer antibodies to fight the virus, said doctors at the hospital. He was flown from Freetown in a heavily equipped air ambulance for treatment in the United States at the Nebraska Medical Center.

But within the first 12 hours he was in complete respiratory failure and had very low blood pressure, doctors said during a news conference. [Read more…]

Guest post: Would he smile approvingly?

Originally a comment by themadtapper on A complaint to HR would be valid.

The thing that completely blows my mind about the whole ordeal is that in ANY professional context that shirt would be considered unprofessional at best and outright inappropriate in almost every case. And people like Richard Dawkins know damn well it would be. If Dawkins went to a speaking engagement at Oxford and a fellow speaker showed up wearing a shirt like that, would he smile approvingly? I very seriously doubt it. At the very least he’d give it a sigh and a shake of his head, but most likely he’d ask the speaker to please not go out on stage like that. [Read more…]