I am pleased to pass along news from the Foundation Beyond Belief (FBB) and the Stiefel Freethought Foundation that their “Light The Night Walk Team raised $430,000 for The Leukemia and Lymphoma Society last year, the largest amount ever raised by a first year non-corporate team and the 4th largest amount raised by any team in the nation in 2012, including corporate teams.” [Read more…]
As a follow up to yesterday’s post on the inhumane nature of the US prison system, it might be helpful to look at two factors that have contributed to why the US has by far the largest prison population in the world, both in terms of absolute numbers and per capita, along with being extremely harsh in its treatment of them. [Read more…]
In one episode of the BBC TV faux documentary comedy series Life’s Too Short, actor Warwick Davis decides he needs some spirituality in his life and decides to explore a couple of religions to see if one of them might suit him. [Read more…]
As I have mentioned before, I am not a very sociable person. It is not that I am anti-social, shunning all human contact. It is that I am better described as asocial, someone who can interact with others on occasion and when necessary, but am perfectly comfortable being alone with my books, my thoughts, and of course the internet, where you can interact with the world without interacting with actual people. [Read more…]
Thanks to reader Tim, I learned of this article in the Chronicle of Higher Education that highlights research done in Finland that used skin conductance measurements that tell you how much you sweat and thus is believed to be a measure of emotional arousal, to compare the reactions of atheists and religious people to having to utter pairs of statements of the form “I wish my parents were paralyzed” and “I dare God to paralyze my parents.” [Read more…]
The way we treat prisoners in the US has never made any sense to me. This country is easily the world’s leader in the total number of prisoners and in the per capita number. The US prison system is an exceedingly cruel and inhumane (and expensive) system, with some prisoners (especially those in so-called supermax facilities) spending almost their entire time in solitary confinement in their cells. [Read more…]
Netball is a game played the world over (including Sri Lanka) but as far as I am aware, only by women. It is superficially similar to basketball in that the goal is to throw the ball though an elevated hoop. The main difference is that you cannot move while you have possession of the ball and must pass it to another player within three seconds. This means no dribbling but actually results in a fast-moving game with plenty of passing since the non-ball carriers have to move rapidly around the court to try to get free to accept a pass from a team mate or block an opponent from passing or receiving. [Read more…]
I have been railing about the menace of blasphemy laws and once again Pakistan’s infamous laws have revealed that, in addition to being an outrageous infringement of people’s rights of free speech and discriminatory against religious minorities, they also serve as a way for people to settle private grudges and advance their own agendas at the expense of others. The charges can carry the death penalty. [Read more…]
I was both intrigued and disturbed by the recent report of a plan called Inspiration Mars to send a human couple on a flyby of Mars in the year 2018, approaching the planet within 100 miles. The venture will be an entirely private one backed by a group known as the Inspiration Mars Foundation whose chair is Dennis Tito, who in 2001 became the first private person to go into space. They will of course draw on the vast expertise of NASA. Interestingly the only permission one needs to get is from the Federal Aviation Administration, which regulates all spacecraft launches and returns. [Read more…]
Once in while, a news item comes along that inadvertently gives us a telling insight into our media mindset. NPR featured this obituary by the Associated Press’s business reporters Pamela Sampson and Pablo Gorondi on the legacy of Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez that had this quite extraordinary passage that tells you all that you need to know about what the oligarchy and its media lackeys consider development and progress. Sampson says: [Read more…]