Supreme Court recognizes that people change

Posted on May 17, 2010 by Michael

In a no-brainer, the Supreme Court has picked up on the fact that 17 year olds are likely to be different individuals when they get older.

By a 5-4 vote, the court said young people serving life prison terms must have “a meaningful opportunity to obtain release” if they haven’t killed their victims. The majority opinion by Justice Anthony Kennedy extended the “children are different” rationale that drove his decision five years ago that outlawed the death penalty for killers under 18.

To no one’s surprise, Scalia and his puppet, Thomas, both dissented. Of course, they’re legal minds haven’t matured past the age of 11 year olds, so maybe they just aren’t aware of the obvious facts of life.

But even the average Joe can be an idiot. This is from the comment section on the Yahoo! article; I suspect it will turn out to be rather representative of the conservative criticism that will be dealt out to this piece of reason.

This is great. Once again the US Supreme Court is telling juveniles it is OK to disobey the laws of this country as long as you do it before 18.

Yes, that’s exactly it. Despite all the news reports, the quotes from the justices, and the actual written opinions, what has actually just happened is that the Supreme Court has ruled that there are no punishments for crimes committed as children. Rob a store at 17? You’re free. Snort cocaine and get busted at 16? No sweat. I mean, how else could someone possibly interpret such a heavy and complex ruling?!

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An American tragedy

Posted on May 16, 2010 by Michael

If I ever had a religion, it no longer matters. It is in its final death throes.

“Law & Order” was supposed to live forever, so the fact that it almost did — 20 years is an eternity in network years — doesn’t mitigate the shock of NBC’s announcement last week that it had pulled the plug.

It was bad enough when Lennie died. And then Jack’s role was diminished. But this? I don’t know if I can handle it.

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Catholic bigots harm child’s education

Posted on May 14, 2010 by Michael

A child in Massachusetts was set to attend school at St. Paul Elementary School, but the sexually immature chief bigots, Rev. James Rafferty and Principal Cynthia Duggan, rescinded their acceptance of this new student because his mother is a lesbian. But in a surprising move, another sexually immature Catholic leader has stepped up to the plate in an attempt to quell the flaming bigotry.

The head of education for the Boston Archdiocese offered Thursday to help find a different Catholic school for a boy denied acceptance at a Hingham Catholic school because his parents are gay.

In a statement, superintendent Mary Grassa O’Neill said she spoke with a parent of the 8-year-old boy and “offered to help enroll her child in another Catholic school in the archdiocese.”

“We believe that every parent who wishes to send their child to a Catholic school should have the opportunity to pursue that dream,” O’Neill said.

Insofar as someone has a “dream” involving Freddy Krueger, sure that’s a dream.

This is surprising on a couple levels. First, I attended a Catholic school – which, incidentally, offered an excellent education bar the religion – and I vividly recall being told on multiple occasions that any and all students were welcome. The specific examples given were students of different religions, but it was a blanket statement we were being given, so I presume someone having a gay parent would have been just as irrelevant. Of course, this is New England, the place where bigotry tends to be less prevalent. Second, the Catholic church is against all sorts of random junk. No meat on Good Friday, no divorce, no birth control – plenty of parents go against all these haphazard (sometime irresponsible) teachings of the church. It is only the overwhelming sexual immaturity of these Christians which can explain the pointed bigotry towards gays. It’s disgusting.

While it looks like a new, clear policy is going to come from the Boston archdiocese which does not arbitrarily discriminate, that isn’t the case in another recent act of shame.

The Massachusetts case is similar to a decision by a Catholic school in Boulder, Colo., the Sacred Heart of Jesus, which said two children of lesbian parents could not re-enroll because of their parents’ sexual orientation. The Denver Archdiocese backed the school’s decision.

Maybe this is a blessing in disguise. Allow fewer and fewer children to be polluted with the mind virus of religion while growing animosity towards an already battered institution? Sure.

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Religiously-motivated violence gets worse in Nigeria

Posted on May 12, 2010 by Michael

It’s only getting worse.

Witnesses say people are fleeing their homes in central Nigeria over fears of renewed religious violence between Christians and Muslims.

Witnesses say there has been at least one death in the city of Jos and people began fleeing on Saturday.

A military spokesman confirmed there was unrest in the city, but gave no details.

It isn’t going to be easy for Nigeria, Africa’s most populous nation, to deal with all the violence it currently faces. Some of it comes from corruption that pervades its entire government. Some of it comes from poverty. But much of it comes from religion; religion is the cause of all the killings between Christians and Muslims going on right now. To cause a significant change in the dynamics of the region, the fact of religion would need to be removed. It cannot simply be replaced with anything – only a simpleton would think that – but without religion, the basis of any violence would change. (It would also change if one religion was all that dominated, but then the entire country might come in conflict with entire other nations.) In places like Northern Ireland, an elimination of the Catholic/Protestant divide throughout the later half of the 20th century probably wouldn’t have completely eliminated all violence there, but it would have subtracted from the equation one significant piece of unnecessary (and untrue) ideology.

For Nigeria, the Christian/Muslim divide is acting as a reason to kill over a lack of fertile lands. Eliminate that divide and the lack of good growing land still exists, but one significant reason for all the murders will be gone. I suspect that for this country corrupt officials might step in to fill the void of controversy and unrest, but they would actually be a step forward in an effort of social and political reform for the better.

They certainly couldn’t be any worse than the two violent religions that have such a strong hold in Nigeria right now.

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Want to be a religion of peace?

Posted on May 12, 2010 by Michael

…then all Muslims ought to be condemning what happened in this video:

This is all in response to a cartoon by Lars Vilks which depicted Mohammed with the body of a dog. The ridiculous overreaction just doesn’t make sense. It’s a drawing. Besides that, calling Mohammed anything remotely related to a dog should be taken as a compliment.

And as if all that isn’t enough:

An al-Qaeda front organisation then offered $US100,000 ($A110,730) to anyone who murdered Vilks – with an extra $US50,000 ($A55,365) if his throat was slit – and $US50,000 ($A55,365) for the death of Nerikes Allehanda editor-in-chief Ulf Johansson.

Yep, that’s the way to get to heaven: murder and mayhem. If you do it over a poorly drawn cartoon, all the better!

Via PZ.

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Dan Barker destroys FOX Noise

Posted on May 11, 2010 by Michael

Dan Barker absolutely takes down the biased questions he’s given on FOX Noise. His use of facts was a nice change of pace for that network.

Filed under: Atheism/Humanism, News, Politics and Social | Tagged: , , , | 1 Comment »

They’ve got Maine all wrong

Posted on May 11, 2010 by Michael

PZ has a post about the new platform of Maine’s GOP.

We shouldn’t pick on the South all the time, so here is a tale out of the eminently Yankee state of Maine. The Maine Republican party recently met to establis their official platform, and ended up getting hijacked by the tea-baggers. Their new platform contains all kinds of nutty demands.

It’s true, the platform is pretty nutty. For instance, it calls global warming a myth (because conservatives are generally hostile towards science), it bizarrely calls for the adoption of “Austrian economics”, and it wants to see the elimination of the Department of Education, but let’s slow down. This has led to a number of comments on that post which get Maine all wrong.

While I lived in Connecticut and Massachusetts, we referred to Maine as New England’s West Virginia.

How dare someone refer to Maine like that. Everyone knows we prefer to be called the far south of the far north. Also, a number of other posts get a few important things wrong. For instance, it’s “lobstah”, not this stranger “lobster”. (I recommend getting it from a restaurant that sits in the harbor; it does a wicked job of soaking up that full ocean aroma so much bettah.)

It’s seriously obvious the Maine GOP is insane. But despite that fact, I would like to still take credit for this gem:

In pursuit of these principles we endorse and shall promote the following initiatives.

II. To Establish Justice:

b. Reassert the principle that “Freedom of Religion” does not mean “freedom from religion”.

I can only hope that my recent letter to the editor (also found here) played at least a small role in spurring the GOP to reassert their inanity. I’m sure the recent, correct ruling about the unconstitutional standing of the National Day of Prayer was the main catalyst, but either way, silliness lays at the base here. Freedom of religion is impossible without freedom from religion. To say “You’re free to practice any religion you want!…so long as you actually do practice a religion” runs counter to any notion of freedom I’ve yet to ascertain in my young life. Maybe these crazies just want to live in More’s Utopia? I don’t know.

But wait, there’s more!

VI. To Secure the Blessings of Liberty:

a. Restore a vigorous grounding in the history and precepts of liberty, freedom, and the constitution to the educational process. As Thomas Jefferson said, “If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be.”

Really? They want to use Thomas Jefferson? Aside from not ever having stood for anything these haphazard teabaggers want today, I think he would have recognized the irony in their next line:

i. Eliminate the Department of Education and restore schools to local control as specified in the constitution.

Teabagger motto: No ignorance – unless it’s blissful.

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What lying conservatives won’t say

Posted on May 5, 2010 by Michael

The NYC car bomber was captured because of his connection to a cell phone number he provided authorities after the Obama administration beefed up security in light of the Christmas underwear bomber.

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Fat cop can’t run, uses taser

Posted on May 5, 2010 by Michael

An overweight cop that couldn’t run down a teenager who was lightly jogging used his taser to subdue the kid at a Phillies game. See the video here.

The police commissioner is supporting the action.

“It was inappropriate for him to be out there on the field,” the commissioner told KYW Radio. “Unless I read something to the contrary, that officer acted appropriately. I support him 100 percent.”

Who said it was appropriate for the kid to be out there? Hundreds of fans do this every year at baseball games, they eventually either stop running or get tackled, and then get charged with minor ‘crimes’. I’m not sure who is arguing against that consequence. The point, instead, is that tasers haven’t been necessary in all those instances, so why now? My best guess is that this cop is lazy, doesn’t exercise, and was bitter at the fact that a younger, healthier person was easily destroying his fastest running pace with a mere light jog. If he isn’t mature enough to let people who are in shape do the job he is incapable of properly handling, then he needs to be given a paper pushing gig in an office somewhere. It’s silly to take out his anger over being fat on a 17 year old doing what 17 year olds will do. (And come on, the kid was wearing Phillies gear at that. Have some hometown pride.)

But my favorite part is the bad justification being thrown around (sorry for the multiple links; different stories have different points I want to address/make).

“From the preliminary look at it, it appears that the officer was within the policy,” said Vanore, adding that he did not know what may have transpired before the video started. “He was attempting to make an arrest and the male was attempting to flee.”

To where, exactly, was he attempting to flee? Third base? Where was he going to go?

Fortunately, the Phillies aren’t so sure about what this fat cop did.

Phillies spokeswomen Bonnie Clark said the police department is investigating the matter and discussing with the team whether using the stun gun was appropriate.

Police spokesman Lt. Frank Vanore told The Philadelphia Inquirer police internal affairs will open an investigation to determine if the firing “was proper use of the equipment.”

Given the apparent internal investigation, it’s worth noting how unprofessional it was of Police Commissioner Charles H. Ramsey to comment on the story with his “100 percent” support.

Here is a YouTube video that probably won’t stay up very long.

Also, despite Philly fans being almost as bad as New York fans, it was nice that they booed the obese officer.

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The record of Ken Cuccinelli

Posted on May 2, 2010 by Michael

Ken Cuccinelli is a sexually immature, anti-scientific, bigoted conservative who unfortunately holds the high position of Attorney General for Virginia. He has been in the news recently for a few things.

Among the documents Cuccinelli demands are any and all emailed or written correspondence between or relating to Mann and more than 40 climate scientists, documents supporting any of five applications for the $484,875 in grants, and evidence of any documents that no longer exist along with proof of why, when, and how they were destroyed or disappeared.

Pure witch hunt.

I find politicians being involved in science like this especially frustrating given my most recent college semester. I spent a lot of time reading and summarizing a number of scientific papers, so my familiarity with their complexity has only increased. There are a number of things I wouldn’t have understood just a year ago; there are even more things I would have thought I understood, but I wouldn’t have appreciated their importance to the paper. This stuff is not easy. So when people like Cuccinelli pretend like they have the knowledge, qualifications, or honesty to make the accusations they do, it’s frustrating. They have no idea.

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