Gasp! You mean it’s a changing document?

Unlike the purely political Antonin Scalia, Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer has some common sense:

Breyer told hundreds of people during an event in downtown Little Rock that a judge’s job is to figure out how the Founding Fathers’ values apply to modern issues.

“George Washington didn’t really have a view about the Internet,” he said, drawing laughter from the crowd of about 650 people at the Statehouse Convention Center.

It’s sad to think that more people, including the purely political conservative “justices” on the Court, don’t realize this utterly basic fact.

Thought of the day

Kiss was an awful band. Just awful.

I get mail, too

I have to admit I was pretty disappointed when PZ got a cease and desist notice from Christopher Maloney and I didn’t. I mean, what am I, not good enough? Haven’t I been offensive enough? I know I don’t have PZ’s following, but I thought I had made a perfectly valiant effort to be as disrespectful as possible in my fight against the anti-science nature of naturopathy. Yet still, Maloney struck me a blow, an insult, a real dig to my ego. No notice. No letter. Woe was me.

But all that has changed. You see, Maloney has decided that the trickle of posts I make only in response to him nowadays needs challenging. (Click to enlarge.)

(The bottom two lines read: “…cherry-pick evidence, often lie and misrepresent facts. Recently a local naturopathic “doctor” Christopher Maloney…” You wrote this response in reply to Dr. Maloney’s editorial on October 29, 2009 which…”)

There is also a cover page (which would not scan for the life of me). Titled “NOTICE TO CEASE HARASSMENT & NO TRESPASS NOTICE”, it continues:

Pursuant to 17-A M.R.S.A. 506-A(1), you are hereby being served with notice to immediately cease and desist from engaging in any course of conduct with the intent to harass, torment or threaten Dr. Christopher Maloney, N.D., 4 Drew St., Augusta, Maine, whether on or off of premises, in person, or via electronic means. Violation of this Notice is a Class E crime under the laws of the State of Maine, pursuant to 17-A M.R.S.A. 506-A(1).

In conjunction with the foregoing Notice to Cease Harassment, you are also hereby prohibited from coming within 100 feet of the above-described premises for any reason. Violation of this No Trespass Notice may result in your arrest and/or civil and criminal trespass charges being filed against you pursuant to 17-A M.R.S.A. 402(1)(D)-(E).

Where to start, where to start.

How about my publication, Without Apology? Never billed as a newspaper (I would never produce such a vile thing), it is a publication I put out from 2009-2010 over the course of roughly 6 months. Contrary to the lies implied by Maloney, the idea for the publication was hatched long before I had even heard of naturopathy. And even when I had heard of that quackery, the first 3 editions were about politics, social concerns, local issues, and science. It wasn’t until the forth edition that I even mentioned Maloney, and even then it was only in two articles. There was also an article about objective morality and another about poker. (A fifth edition came out that said nothing of the quack; a sixth edition featuring Ashley F. Miller will be out soon.) The paper was not made for him.

Next take a look at the fourth paragraph in the first image. Maloney says I add the keywords “Christopher Maloney” to all of my blog posts daily. To prove the point, March 25, 2011 is cited as an instance where I did this three times. Goodness. How wrong can one sentence be? First, it isn’t even possible to add the same keywords more than once to a single post. Get with the times, you old fogies. Second, I don’t even post about Maloney on a daily basis. Go ahead, do a quick search. The last time I posted about him was February 20th (and gee, wouldya look at that, it was a response to something he said; crazy that). Third, I didn’t make any post about him on March 25. Not March 25, 2011, not March 25, 2010, not March 25, 2009. So why mention that date in particular? Look near the top of the page. It was the date that Maeghan Maloney (once she was done creating the ugliest header in history) wrote the letter. Totally professional, huh?

Oh, and how about those “impeccable credentials”? It looks like some more bullshit to me:

Not that I doubt that a naturopath could come out of Harvard—the university has produced its share of creationists—but as a Harvard University alum, I had to see if Christopher Maloney was also one. I found one, but the one listed, who lives in Hawaii, earned an MBA and a MPA (public administration, probably from the Kennedy School) in 2006. None with a Diploma in Continuing Health Studies, whatever that is, is listed. I suspect Maloney took a couple of extension course in the Harvard Extension School (a night school opened to any and all who have the money) and possibly one which awards some kind of diploma. But it’s a stretch to claim as his lawyer/wife does that he has a “…pre-medical degree from Harvard.” Harvard issues no such animal.

And I thought the alt-med crowd was above reproach.

The most laughable part of the whole letter (aside from the @live.com email address) is the accusation that I make these posts in order to boost my search engine results. Trust me, Maloney is not the big draw on FTSOS. In fact, a ctrl+f look at all the search terms that have landed people here over the past year yields 16 results for the word “Maloney”. In contrast, searches that use the word “Hubble” number around 27,000.

Wondering about the CC at the bottom of the page? That would be my father, the good man. Apparently Maloney thought it would be okay to investigate my family, the sneaky little creeper pants. I think his point was to tattle on me, as if I haven’t kept my mother, my brother, my cousins, my aunt, my uncle, my grandmother, and, yes, my father, all in the loop about his shenanigans this whole time. Given Maloney’s endlessly immature actions, I guess it isn’t surprising that he would think an adult might be afraid of basic communication with his parents.

I really don’t see the point in all this. I have been crystal clear: If Christopher Maloney stops effectively begging me to post about him by virtue of his continued chirps, then I will stop. Threatening me, especially after whining about everyone on the Internet (rightly) calling him censorious, isn’t going to help anything. I’m not one to be intimidated, especially on such flimsy, pathetic, and unprofessional grounds.

P.s., Christopher Maloney is a quack.

17 years

Good news for the wrong reasons

A man in Texas and a man in Arizona narrowly avoided being murdered this week. In each instance (despite the poorly written article on the man from Texas) the reasoning had to do with inadequate anti-murder protection. That in itself isn’t absolutely awful, but a far, far, far, far, far superior reason would be that murder is wrong. And two wrongs don’t make a right – even if the second wrong helps emotionally.

I can’t wait for the U.S. to catch up with the modern world.

Religulous

I have yet to watch Religulous, but people keep on recommending it to me. It’s like they think I’m an anti-theist or something. Weird, I know. However, there are a few reasons I haven’t watched it: 1) It got terrible reviews. 2) I don’t especially like Bill Maher. 3) It isn’t on Netflix streaming and I don’t get the DVD’s delivered to my place since it isn’t my Netflix account. Fortunately, there is YouTube.

I’ll give my horribly out of date assessment later this week, I hope.

The gym

I would make this a “Thought of the day” post, but I don’t like having those posts appear back-to-back. So a few things:

  • Dear guy who sits on the locker room benches naked, Please stop. Thanks.
  • I admire the visibly out of shape people who go regularly.
  • I saw a guy with two heavy duty crutches and a big plastic boot on his surely broken foot today. What’s your excuse for not going?

Thought of the day

I find the deaths of 20 people to be more offensive than the burning of any book.

The power of tumblr

This post of mine has been “liked” or reblogged 305 times on tumblr.

I’m tired of hearing America is the best at this or the best at that all the frickin’ time. It’s a fat country with bad health care, bad politics, bad education, bad infrastructure, bad religion, a horrific income gap, a load of violent crime, moronic drug laws, rampant racism, people who deny the rampant racism, sexism, people who deny the rampant sexism, an active and overt hostility to higher education, and a population that consists of large blocs devoted to ideology over real-world pragmatic answers.

And to top things off, it’s filled with the sort of people who give idiotic responses to all these facts by saying, “Well, if you don’t like, why don’t you leave?” Morons.

Garnering me a grand total of…5 hits. When I get randomly reposted on Reddit, on the other hand, I tend to get 500-1000 hits. I thought tumblr, especially with its simplicity, had more power than that. I wonder if the blogging market is just too saturated, if people treat tumblr a lot like Facebook (i.e., very casually), or if it’s just too early in the site’s life.

Or maybe people just don’t follow sources.

Leaving the atheist closet behind

One of the things I make a concerted effort to do is be sure the people I know (and those I don’t know) are aware that it is okay to be an atheist. Whether it’s through my blog, Facebook, personal publications, in person, or otherwise, I’m not ashamed of being an atheist. My big inspiration has been the atheist writings of the past decade. Specifically, Richard Dawkins has said that he had a couple of big hopes with The God Delusion. First, he wanted to move agnostics to the more reasonable position of atheism; he never intended his book for die-hard theists. Second, he wanted people to realize that it’s okay to be an atheist. It need no longer be dirty to say “I do not believe in any god.” The values, ethics, and morals atheists hold all derive fundamentally from the same places as theists (at least when religion isn’t poisoning the picture); Being an atheist is a good thing.

I think I’ve lived up to that last sentiment; I’m proud of all the rational positions I hold, including my lack of belief in magic skydaddies. And that sense of pride is spreading:

In fact, atheists, agnostics, humanists and other assorted skeptics from the Army’s Fort Bragg have formed an organization in a pioneering effort to win recognition and ensure fair treatment for nonbelievers in the overwhelmingly Christian U.S. military.

“We exist, we’re here, we’re normal,” said Sgt. Justin Griffith, chief organizer of Military Atheists and Secular Humanists, or MASH. “We’re also in foxholes. That’s a big one, right there.”…

If the Fort Bragg group succeeds, it will be overseen by the Chaplain Corps. That might seem contradictory for a group defined by its lack of belief, but it means MASH’s literature would be available along with Bibles and Qurans. It could raise funds on base and, its members say, they could feel more comfortable approaching chaplains for help with personal problems. Recognition would also be an official sign that not believing in God is acceptable, something members say is lacking now.

This is almost certainly because of the efforts of atheist writers and scientists of the past decade. The ability to argue eloquently, to prove our moral fortitude, to show that, “Hey, we do exist”, is why we’re seeing more and more atheist groups. It’s why more and more people are becoming comfortable to declare they have no religion. They may still believe in a god, but the fact that people can say they shun religion is one of the accomplishments of the atheist movement.

I hope this trend continues – so long as it doesn’t morph into the ever-feared Islamic atheists.