Michelle Wolf gives Megyn Kelly her comeuppance

After wallowing in the mud at Fox News for a decade and reaping the huge rewards of being just another of their attack dogs, faithfully repeating the party line and viciously attacking people who disagreed with it when she was not being utterly ridiculous (she once made the claim that Santa Claus was white), Megyn Kelly has now moved to NBC and is trying to pass herself off as serious journalist. On her new show she landed an interview with Russian president Vladimir Putin.
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Who would want to steal the body parts of Catholic saints?

One of the truly weird aspects of Roman Catholicism is their preservation and veneration of body parts of those declared by the church to be saints, seemingly in the belief that viewing and praying to those bits increases your chances of having your prayers answered. This article lists some of the body parts that have been preserved, including (if you can imagine it) Jesus’s foreskin, It is a macabre practice, to put it mildly. This news item about a brain fragment of a saint being stolen raises the weirdness all the way to 11.
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New hosting service up and running (almost) smoothly

PZ Myers informs us that the switch to the new host server occurred last night and went pretty smoothly and that the only glitch seems to be that the list of approved commenters (i.e., those whose very first comments were approved by the editor of each site) has disappeared and so your first comment after the switch might have to be approved by me again. I’ll monitor the site more frequently than usual to do so.

Film review: War Machine (2017)

The war in Afghanistan is a tragic version of the film Groundhog Day, where the same cycle of events gets played out over and over again with no discernible progress. We now have president Trump faced with the prospect of deciding whether to send in more troops and a new commander to break the stalemate, which is the same situation president Barack Obama faced in 2009 when he was newly elected.
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Good and bad news from Ireland

Leo Varadkar has been elected leader of the Fine Gael party in the Republic of Ireland which means that he will become the country’s next taoiseach, the equivalent of prime minister. On the positive side is the fact that the 38-year old Varadkar is the son of an Indian immigrant father and Irish mother. He is also gay. Neither of these is insignificant given the overwhelming Roman Catholic culture of the country and the rise of anti-immigrant sentiment that saw the passage in 2004 of legislation that removed citizenship rights from the Irish-born children of non-national parents.
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We are moving to a more stable hosting service

As visitors to any of the FreethoughtsBlogs site will have noticed, there have been server problems that have periodically made the sites unavailable during the past few days. But PZ Myers says that we are shifting to a new webhosting service this week that one hopes will be more reliable. The move should be invisible to visitors to FtB and also (I hope!) to those of us who write the blogs.

Britain – still not reeling or cowering

In the US, any terror attack sends the media into a frenzy of fear mongering and as a result people here tend to be in a state of permanent fear. But as I have said many times before, Americans don’t seem to realize that people in other countries seem to be made of sterner stuff than those who live in the ‘home of the brave’ and take these awful acts in stride. It is not that they minimize the tragedies but that they don’t let themselves be paralyzed by them.
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Is there a pattern here? If so, what is the motive?

London suffers yet another terrorist attack with seven dead so far and dozens more injured, many critically, in two separate but connected events. We are told that three assailants were shot dead by police. Although no group has yet claimed responsibility for the attacks, given that this occurred less than a week before British elections on June 8 and that there was a similar attack in Manchester last week Paris a few days before the French presidential election, one has to ask if there is a deliberate pattern to launch such attacks just before elections.
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