Some terrible people in Pakistan accused the Bollywood star Veena Malik of “blasphemy” and hurting feelings and inflaming sentiments and the rest of the menu of bullshit. The other day a judge totes agreed and sentenced her to 26 years in prison.
What was the blasphemy? She acted in a scene loosely based on the marriage of Mo’s daughter. [Read more…]
Football. Germany. Frankfurt v Dortmund. Frankfurt’s Hans Seferovic scored the winning goal. He dedicated the goal to Tuğçe Albayrak.
Seferovic lifted his jersey after the goal to reveal a written tribute to Tugce on his undershirt, with the hashtags “civil courage,” “angel,” “courage,” and “respect.”
Curious as always, I naturally looked around this Young America’s Foundation place to see what it’s like. I found a link titled UCSB Students Believe Global Warming is One of the Biggest Threats to the World. I could feel the scorn rising off the words. Silly silly UCSB students – what does it matter if sea levels rise and glaciers melt and rivers dry up and crops fail? [Read more…]
anthrosciguy pointed out that something called Young America’s Foundation has a speaker’s page for Sommers.
Topics:Education, Feminism, Law / Constitution, Political Correctness, Race & Culture
Fee: 3,000 – 5,000
Oh dear god here we go again.
Sinn Fein is refusing to say if it will hand over to gardai the minutes of a star chamber-style inquiry into 100 cases of suspected sex abuse involving members of the Provisional movement, held in Dublin eight years ago.
The secret investigation flies in the face of repeated denials by Sinn Fein leadership of their knowledge of a culture of sexual abuse within the Republican movement.
Again Josh, Official SpokesGay writes a Facebook post that I have to put here.
Had a long conversation with one of my best friends last week. We talked a lot about how different life, sex, love, politics look as we enter middle-age as compared to how it looked to us in the late 80s when we were just coming out.
About the double-edged sword of cultural ghettoization. How the closure of a famed gay bar provokes sadness and outcries about how those young baby fags don’t understand what they’ve lost. And they don’t, but not necessarily for the Very Important Reasons we middle-aged are thinking of. [Read more…]
The New Republic ran a piece by Ken Silverstein about salary inflation at DC think tanks in February 2013.
Jim DeMint had recently left the Senate to become president of the Heritage Foundation, going from $174,000 a year to $1.2 million or more.
Once upon a time, the only way for a pol to cash in like that was to leave elected office in order to become a lobbyist—a nice living, but one that carries with it a stigma that would likely kill any future ambitions for high office. By contrast, a gig at Heritage, the main voice of the conservative movement, could be a good launching pad for a potential 2016 presidential bid. Candidate DeMint could run as a man of ideas, not another pol out shilling for his donors.
You know how I keep expressing astonishment at the way C H Sommers has gone from being an academic to being a shameless hack. It occurred to me to wonder if it’s just a simple matter of being better paid as a hack. Having wondered that, I decided to see if I could compare her salary as an academic to her salary as a hack for the American Enterprise Institute.
The bulk of her teaching career was at Clark University; she was an Associate Professor when she left to be a scholar at AEI. Clark reports the salary for associate profs to be $107,580. [Read more…]
Here’s a good thing. I saw it via Leo Igwe on Facebook: he posted a picture of himself with a young girl who was fundraising for it at the Foundation Beyond Belief conference last July. The good thing is the Kasese Humanist Primary School in Uganda.
The more humanist schools the better, I say.
Sandy Garossino, a former prosecutor, explains at the Huffington Post Canada how Jian Ghomeshi threw a wrench into his own defense by writing and publishing that Facebook post.
Normally in sexual assault trials, the accused doesn’t have to do anything and all the hassle falls on the complainant. The defense strategy is usually to batter the complainant’s credibility to death while the accused just looks on.
The Jian Ghomeshi trial will be very different. [Read more…]