Paul LePage loves welfare

Posted on October 13, 2010 by Michael

He just hates poor people.

Creationist Republican/Tea Party candidate for Maine governor Paul LePage rages against government and the assistance it gives to poor people. He’s intensely angry that anyone would have the audacity to take his money from him in order to help others. But this isn’t some pure libertarian stance he’s taking. No, as is well-known, the LePages stole a lot of money from Florida by illegally claim double-residency, thus getting their children in-state tuition at massive savings. This, as is the case with virtually all Tea Party supporters, is about greed. LePage is willing to take government assistance – welfare – from the state of Florida when it suits his wallet, but when it comes to helping anyone else he wants to put caps on benefits and slash every service under the sun.

Paul LePage is just another greedy Republican/Teabagger who is out to get his own. It has only ever been about his own wallet.

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Immediate don’t ask, don’t tell injunction

Posted on October 12, 2010 by Michael

The courts have traditionally been the place where the immorality of bigoted Americans has gone to die. Today is no different.

A federal judge issued a worldwide injunction Tuesday immediately stopping enforcement of the military’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy, suspending the 17-year-old ban on openly gay U.S. troops.

U.S. District Judge Virginia Phillips’ landmark ruling also ordered the government to suspend and discontinue all pending discharge proceedings and investigations under the policy.

The Obama Administration is under no obligation to challenge this. It’s unclear what this administration will do, especially this close to midterm elections, but I feel decent about the right decision being made. A challenge to this ruling would be a slap in the face to all the gay people who serve the United States in uniform, not to mention a weakening of our military. There’s no rational justification in DADT and it needs to stop.

Filed under: News, Rights | Tagged: , , , , | 4 Comments »

Capturing the world

Posted on October 12, 2010 by Michael

As usual, the wonderful writing over at Shambling After deserves recognition.

I lived in a little bubble of ignorant bliss and although I convinced myself that I was concerned with the rest of the world, I couldn’t even begin to comprehend how much of the world there is to be concerned with.

This is about Cairo, but the same feeling found its way into me while I was in Africa. The constant dirt and abject poverty was something I expected, but it wasn’t something for which I was necessarily ready. I found myself often thinking, when people say they’re suffering, when they say they have it bad, it’s all relative. The tiny villages of Tanzania have suffering, they have it bad. That isn’t to say there is nothing but misery there – the number of smiling children I saw astounded me – but it isn’t ice cream and video games. When black Americans say they can relate to their ‘home land’, I now have nothing but contempt for such statements. Just as when a white person says he can at all relate to being black in America, the claim would be risible if it wasn’t such a lie. And I’m not saying I can relate merely because of what I saw while I sat in a Range Rover with my hundreds of dollars worth of hiking equipment and Slim Jims. But I do at least know I can’t relate.

To steal the Samuel Johnson quote used at Shambling After,

The use of traveling is to regulate imagination by reality, and instead of thinking how things may be, to see them as they are.

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Thought of the day

Posted on October 12, 2010 by Michael

The notion that theists can take comfort in living for some purpose shows at least two things: (1) that they’re oblivious to the fact that they’re wrong that there is an ultimate purpose. It’s all a big if, then situation – if everything they say is true, then they can take comfort. Too bad they’ve never bothered to offer any evidence for any of their claims. (2) The whole game is really just about comfort. People fear death, they fear losing all they have, they fear not existing. That probably has played a role in the invention – and certainly the persistence – of religion. And it is this need for comfort manifested through religion that has lead to hostility towards science. We can’t stop the need for comfort, nor do we want to stop it, but we can stop religion, if even only theoretically.

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Sick school district admits wrongdoing

Posted on October 11, 2010 by Michael

When a government organization settles a lawsuit, can we just start saying they’re admitting wrongdoing? If they thought they were going to win, they would try. For example, Lower Merion School District knew it was going to lose a case since it was in the wrong, so the district effectively admitted as much when they settled a case of spying on underage students.

A Philadelphia-area school district agreed Monday to pay $610,000 to settle two lawsuits over secret photos taken on school-issued laptops.

The Lower Merion School District admitted it captured thousands of webcam photographs and screen shots from student laptops in a misguided effort to locate missing computers.

Harriton High School student Blake Robbins, then 15, charged in an explosive civil-rights lawsuit filed in February that the district used its remote tracking technology to spy on him inside his home. Later evidence unearthed in the case showed that he was photographed 400 times in a two-week period, sometimes as he slept in his bedroom, according to his lawyer, Mark Haltzman.

The settlement calls for $175,000 to be placed in a trust for Robbins and $10,000 for a second student who filed suit, Jalil Hassan. Their lawyer, Mark Haltzman, will get $425,000 for his work on the case.

The district often did this in an effort to figure out where lost laptops were located. That would be fine if they did it with simple GPS units – after informing students and parents – but that isn’t the method they chose. Instead they decided to go with turning on webcams. What’s worse, they went about falsely accusing students of things they illegally saw them doing.

According to his suit, Robbins learned of the practice when a Harriton vice principal cited a laptop photo in telling him that the school thought he was engaging in improper behavior. Robbins told reporters the school had mistaken candy he was seen eating for drugs.

I’m entirely against a school punishing a student for any illegal activity that takes place outside school which does not directly affect anyone else at school while at school, but this is above and beyond that. The school thought it would be okay to illegally obtain images which they would illegally view and then illegally punish students for what they saw. Have these people no common sense?

I’m glad this district is out $600K. Maybe they can add this incident to their civic and government courses.

Oh, and there’s this unsurprising tidbit:

The district is no longer using the tracking program.

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Hey, look at that

Posted on October 11, 2010 by Michael

I’ve said in the past that one of the most powerful tools in philosophy is the thought experiment. As it so happens, even the U.S. military seems to agree with me, specifically teaching the classic trolley problem to West Point students.

These cadets are being taught to make moral decisions for themselves, not to follow rules blindly. There are risks in creating a generation of philosopher-­soldiers. One instructor I spoke to, Major Danny Cazier, acknowledged this but told me that “the pay-off is too high to pass on.” He says it is vital that when soldiers are in a terrifying battlefield situation, they don’t lose sight of “the fundamental principles that a person believes in, and which guide his actions. And those principles need to have been conditioned by considerations like the trolley problem.” The cadets agree. They’ll soon head off to perform their duty—the trolley problem is heading to Kandahar.

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PZ is full of good quotes

Posted on October 11, 2010 by Michael

Really, just go read his post:

I’ve been told to hush, there are good Christians who support science, and a vocal atheism will scare them away…and I have to ask, you question my support for science education, when you pander to people who you admit will put their superstitions above science if someone says a harsh word about Jesus?

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The sanity of secularism

Posted on October 11, 2010 by Michael

From PZ:

There is an answer, and it’s on display right here in this room. The solution, the only longterm solution, is the sanity of secularism. The lesser struggles to keep silly stickers off our textbooks or to keep pseudoscientific BS like intelligent design out of our classrooms are important, but they are endless chores — at some point we just have to stop pandering to the ideological noise that spawns these unending tasks and cut right to the source: religion.

Filed under: Atheism/Humanism | Tagged: , | 1 Comment »

I’m back

Posted on October 11, 2010 by Michael

And comments are back to normal.

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Thought of the day

Posted on October 11, 2010 by Michael

I love movies. As such I’d like to hear about a few really good ones people have seen recently. Go.

(Comment moderation is now off.)

Filed under: Misc | Tagged: , | 2 Comments »

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