http://www.thenewcivilrightsmovement.com/uncucumbered/rowan_county_kentucky_clerk_kim_davis_makes_a_last_stand

Sorta transcript:

In Kentucky, one county clerk is standing up bravely for what she believes in: hating gay people. Kim Davis has quickly been turned into an artificial folk hero thanks to anti-gay organizations bussing in supporters and handing her awards for refusing to do her job, which is to give marriage licenses to people who want them, even if she doesn’t like those people.

Fundamentalist Christians in the United States have made a trend out of not doing your job, like pharmacists refusing to give women medicine because it may also prevent them from getting pregnant, or bakers not selling cakes because they may be eaten by gay people. On the scale of how fucked up this is, I’d say Davis falls somewhere in the middle of those two other incidents: probably no one will die from not getting a marriage license (though I guess it could happen if they were marrying to get their spouse’s medical insurance), but without a marriage license they definitely wouldn’t even be able to order a wedding cake from a homophobe, let alone be denied one.

Amazingly, Federal District Court Judge David Bunning has yet to fire Davis for failing to do her job, though he has ordered her to do that job. An order that she is continuing to defy, only heightening her folk hero status amongst the other homophobes.

The bigots are pretending this is a case of religious freedom: it’s against her religion to do her job, so she shouldn’t be fired. I would personally love to see them argue that when it comes to people with other religions doing other jobs. For instance, what if you get in a car accident, lose a lot of blood, and find that your nurse at the ER is a Jehovah’s Witness? Blood transfusions are against her religion, and you can’t fire someone for not doing their job due to their religion, right?

Or what if your clerk at the DMV is a fundamentalist Muslim, and you happen to be a woman? Issuing driving licenses to women is against his religion, and you can’t fire someone for not doing their job due to their religion, right?

I certainly sympathize with Ms. Davis, of course. If I were a county clerk in bumfuck Kentucky and two homophobic bigots came in looking to get married, I’d be very tempted to exercise the tiny amount of power I have in my otherwise pathetic life to make their lives just a little bit worse. But I wouldn’t, because I know that if I did that, I’d get fired, even if I pointed out that my religion is secular humanism, which I interpret to mean that I should not bring joy to the lives of assholes or else I risk going to humanist hell, which, ironically, would be a fundamentalist church service at 8am on a nice Sunday morning.

So I wouldn’t. And neither should Kim Davis, bigot folk hero.

http://www.openculture.com/2014/12/chrissie-hyndes-10-pieces-of-advice-for-chick-rockers-1994.html

http://time.com/4016811/chrissie-hynde-pretenders-rape/

Sorta transcript:

Chrissie Hynde, lead singer of the Pretenders, has a new autobiography out in which she talks about how she was once raped by a guy in a biker gang. Which is horrible, and to make matters worse, she is coping with that memory by telling herself and others that it was her fault. And to make matter even worse still, she expands upon that broken thinking by telling other women that if they get raped, it’s their fault, too.

We’ve been over this territory many times before: telling women, as Hynde does, that if they wear high heels then it’s their fault they get raped because they should have planned to be able to run away from their attacker, leads to more and more ridiculous situations until we’re all in burkas being told that we deserve to get raped because we blinked the wrong way or showed a bit too much ankle.

It’s a pretty stupid thought process, but it IS what we should unfortunately expect from a woman coming out of rock and roll in the 70s and 80s. Unfortunately, to get by in a severely misogynistic culture, sometimes it can seem easier if you have to become one with the misogynistic culture. Become the “cool girl” who doesn’t care if she gets groped or raped, who doesn’t go out of her way to help other women, and who in fact helps enforce the existing hierarchy.

And if you’ve been paying attention, you’ll know that Hynde was already playing that role. In 1994, she had some truly shit advice for other women interested in getting into rock and roll, including insisting that they shave their legs. Because nothing says “rock” like spending a lot of time and money conforming to society’s expectations of you, am I right? She also suggests that women don’t sound “hysterical” by “belting” or “screeching,” which is in fact hysterical considering that “hysterical” is derived from a sexist idea that a woman’s over-the-top emotions come from her uterus, and considering that there were a number of amazing female singers who were about to hit it big by belting and screeching in 1994, like Courtney Love and Corin Tucker of Sleater-Kinney.

Hynde’s first point of advice is the worst by far, though: she says that women shouldn’t “complain about sexist discrimination.” Because again, quietly accepting abuse is SO fucking rock, right? I guess we should just be glad her number one tip for making it as a woman in the music industry was “suck a producer’s cock.”

It actually reminds me of Hilary Clinton, in a way. Bear with me: Clinton has the chance to become the first female President of the United States of America. Her toughest liberal competition right now is Bernie Sanders, who is way more radically progressive, and he’s spent decades maintaining a remarkably unwavering democratic socialist platform. If Sanders were anything but a white male, I don’t think he’d have a chance in hell. Those privileges balance out his radical ideals in the same way that Hilary’s conservative centrist ideals balance out the fact that she is a woman.

In other words, it’s really, really, really hard to be both a member of a marginalized group AND a radically progressive thinker who is accepted by the majority. People like that can kick off movements and inspire generations to come, but they also tend to get murdered.

So Chrissie Hynde worked hard and fought through a lot of sexist bullshit to be a woman in rock for that long, but she wasn’t good enough to do it without throwing other women under the bus. She wasn’t strong enough to do it without telling herself that the horrific things that happened to her were her fault. Because if we believe that something horrible is our own fault, we also get to have the optimistic hope that we can prevent it from happening again. It’s a comforting idea, but I much prefer to understand that shit happens and we should all fight back as best we can, even if we end up pissing some people off along the way. Because that’s truly rock and roll.

http://www.rawstory.com/2015/08/carbon-dating-suggests-worlds-oldest-koran-is-even-older-than-the-prophet-muhammad/

http://www.birmingham.ac.uk/news/latest/2015/07/quran-manuscript-22-07-15.aspx

https://c14.arch.ox.ac.uk/embed.php?File=dating.html#what

Sorta transcript:

Carbon dating suggests ‘world’s oldest’ Koran could be older than the Prophet Muhammad, states misleading headline crafted specifically to make atheists jizz their pants.

Let me start by saying that Muhammad definitely didn’t get any divine instructions to pass down any message ever, because there is no god. But some people believe that, anyway. Even though they’re wrong, this isn’t the evidence you’re looking for if you want to prove Muslims that their religion is baseless.

The University of Birmingham has a really old Koran, and some researchers there had it radiocarbon dated at a University of Oxford lab. Radiocarbon dating can be really fantastic for archaeologists and anthropologists to place certain organic materials within certain time periods within the past 50,000 years. It’s pretty accurate, but there are still error bars. In this case, the researchers found that the parchment probably dated between 568 and 645 A.D.

Muhammad supposedly got his revelation between 570 and 632 A.D. So right there, you have a lot of overlap that supports the current understanding that the various parts of the Koran were written down after Muhammad’s death. He died in 632, and this parchment could date to around 645. Done.

Even if that overlap wasn’t there, if the carbon dating showed the parchment must have been created, say, before 570 AD, it still wouldn’t prove the Koran was created before Muhammad. A parchment could have been created long before someone decided to write something on it.

And parchment basically means an animal skin. Radiocarbon dating works by measuring the amount of carbon left in something, which allows researchers to count backwards and see when that animal stopped consuming carbon, i.e., when they died, because the carbon isotope leaves the body at a reliable rate. So we know that the animal died between 568 and 645, but we don’t know when that animal was skinned, and when that skin was turned into parchment, which is a pretty interesting and painstaking process.

And then we don’t know how long that parchment was around before it was written on. Testing the ink may get us a little closer to pinpointing the date, but that’s really difficult, since ink only tends to have tiny amounts of carbon and it’s usually going to be co-mingled with carbon from the parchment.

It’s really fascinating how researchers use various techniques to pinpoint dates like this. That’s the story, here, and also the fact that this manuscript may be the oldest portion of the Koran we have. That’s really cool and it helps us form a better picture of how Islam began and grew.

But there is no sense in taking this interesting little finding and forming an atheist circlejerk around it. It misrepresents the scientific research and just makes atheists look like ignorant assholes, and we don’t need another reason for theists to think that about us.

Good morning!

At long last ... it's finally finished ... and here it is!!

In celebration of my one year anniversary here on Patreon, I'm ridiculously excited to have this video to share with you all, Captain and Tenille's 'Love Will Keep Us Together'.

I brought 5 ukuleles and every t-shirt I own into the studio and was filmed in front of a green screen (that's how we got all those pretty colors) as I recorded the song. The end result looks so slick that it almost looks like I lip-synced after the fact, but everything you see in the video is from the actual recording session. 

I would record a track, change into a different t-shirt, record another track, and so on. If I recall correctly, I wound up putting down 8 different uke tracks and and 14 vocal tracks. And yes, even the solo was recorded in costume. I'll just leave it at that until you see the video.

I've loved this record since I was a kid, the arrangement is insanely great and it was so much fun figuring out how to play all those parts on the uke. When mixing the recording, I wanted to try to have a similar sound to the record, so we did things with effects to try to make some of the ukes sound like tack pianos and even tried to cop the synthesizer sound in the solo (I think we got pretty close).

This thing was a HUGE undertaking, a little over two months in the making, and I leaned heavily on Kris Magyarits, Bob Schachner and all the amazing folks at Alkemy X in Philadelphia. I'm a tough taskmaster, but they really worked and worked on it with me until it delivered the goods.

So, Happy One Year Anniversary to all of my patrons here on Patreon. A year ago, even attempting a video like this would have been a pipe dream, just another idea I'd get and think "damn, it would be really cool if I could do that". All of your support has allowed me to make some of those ideas reality. Thank you. I'm so grateful. 

Let's start year two! In fact, I'll have a big announcement about that tomorrow.

- Jim

http://www.ksat.com/news/texas/muslim-boy-14-arrested-for-making-clock-mistaken-for-bomb_

Sorta transcript:

A 14-year old Muslim boy was arrested in Texas this week for making his own clock and bringing it to school. As we all know, clocks are a necessary feature of all the bombs we see on television. If it weren’t for the clock part, we would have no idea how much time we have left to run away, or cut the green wire, or hacksaw our arm off.

The good news is that the boy, Ahmed Mohamed, is getting a huge outpouring of support from the Internet, including from President Obama who invited him to bring his clock to the White House. That’s probably not going to ease the minds of the Texas high school administrators, of course, since they probably think Obama is a Muslim, too, and so he probably just wants to examine the death clock to find out how to put them into large-scale production and use them to take away Texans’ guns. Somehow.

This is all reminiscent of Kiera Wilmot, the 16-year old black Florida girl who was arrested and expelled from school two years ago for creating an unapproved small chemical reaction in a science lab. The reaction caused a “pop” and a bit of smoke, for which the girl faced felony charges.

I know it’s a bit of a done trope to say “in my day,” but seriously. When I was in high school, a chemistry teacher let my friends write their names in a flammable liquid on their tables and then set it on fire. And as I mentioned in a previous video, just prior to my day, when kids could drink at 18, my biology teacher would let seniors brew beer for their final project.

Of course, we also had jarts, aka lawn darts, aka deadly projectiles that you were encouraged to hurl at your siblings for a fun summertime activity. And when I say “deadly” I’m not kidding. Children were murdered by them. Even our “girliest” toys were lethal: Easy Bake Ovens may as well have come with a recipe for baked children fingers, and they were especially deadly when combined with flammable Rainbow Brite sleeping bags. Oh, and of course there were those Snack Time Cabbage Patch Kids that looked like they were eating little plastic snacks, which was super cute until they turned on our very children and began trying to consume their tiny fingers and strands of hair.

Chuckie was a documentary, you guys.

I guess what I’m saying is that things weren’t necessarily better before we had safety regulations, and we shouldn’t be fooled into false nostalgia. But we do have to strive to maintain a really difficult balance, between keeping kids alive and giving them room to make mistakes. Or for Christ’s sake, at least room to make something that looks like a pipe bomb but absolutely obviously is not.

I mean, I’m a person who travels with the Quizotron machine, which looks as close to a bomb as you can get without having a clock attached. If I were a Muslim man, I’d never get through security.

And that brings me to the other bit of bad news in Ahmed’s story: the school followed up with a letter to all the district’s parents in which they didn’t apologize, but instead advised them to make sure their kids say something if they see something. Way to make the racial profiling worse, assholes! How about this: if you see something, ask what it is. Maybe you’ll learn something, like how to make a clock and how to not overreact and end up nearly ruining a kid’s life.

Links:

http://trowelblazers.com/rising-star-trowelblazers/

http://www.forbes.com/sites/kristinakillgrove/2015/09/10/a-new-human-ancestor-arises-from-the-depth-of-a-south-african-cave/

Sorta transcript:

If you’re anything like me, last week you woke up to the astonishing news that scientists discovered a new species of human in a cave in South Africa, and you thought Holy Christ, how did those people survive so long in that cave, how did no one realize they were in there, and most importantly, even though they’re a different species would it still be considered bestiality if we have sex with them?

And then, again, if you’re anything like me, you woke up a bit and read the article and realized that all the members of this new species have been dead for quite some time, so having sex with them would I guess be necrophilia. Or maybe osteophilia because they’re just bones.

Realizing they were dead was a bit of a downer, but then as I read more, the story got amazing again thanks to how these bones were discovered. The lead researcher, Lee Berger, was heavily criticized by others for staffing his Rising Star Expedition team with young and inexperienced researchers, and for finding the perfect team members by advertising on social media.

It made sense that he would cast a wide net, though, considering that the bones he needed to get were located deep inside a cave that required you to squeeze through a 7-inch diameter passageway and then another longer and more terrifying vertical and horizontal passageway that was about a foot in diameter, all 100 feet underground. So Berger needed a crew of archaeologists and paleontologists who were trained spelunkers and excavators who were tiny enough to fit through those passageways even while dragging their enormous metaphorical testicles. And as chance should have it, that entire team was made up of six truly badass women: Lindsay Eaves, Marina Elliott, Elen Feuerriegel, Alia Gurtov, Hannah Morris, and Becca Peixotto.

The huge number of bones brought back by these researchers are incredibly fascinating, because they show a species that complicates our evolutionary history, which is the most fun sort of scientific discovery you can make. The species is a mix of modern and ancient traits: it probably walked upright but also spent a lot of time in trees. It has front teeth like ours and back molars like our ancestors. It has a globular skull but a tiny little brain, which I will leave for you to make your own jokes, probably relating to presidential candidates or something.

And all this tells researchers that they need to be more careful at extrapolating from incomplete bones, because when you have the full set you may see that your specimen is very different from what you expected.

In other words, this expedition is some next level science, and so it’s particularly awesome that so many women will go down in history as having played an integral role in it. I know that if I had seen a story like this when I was a little girl, I would have been thrilled to know that my dream of being a mountain climbing ballerina scientist wasn’t as crazy as I was told. It’s too late for me, of course, but not for all the future mountain climbing ballerina scientists out there today.

Link:

http://www.rawstory.com/2015/09/court-forces-non-religious-mom-to-get-therapy-from-bible-thumping-counselor-or-lose-custody-of-sons/

Sorta transcript:

A woman in Albuquerque was ordered by a court to get therapy from a religious nutcase, and when she refused to go the court took her children away.

First of all, kudos to New Mexico. Usually we see shit like this from Florida, maybe Texas...New Mexico tends to keep its head down and remain safely hidden in the middle of the pack when it comes to states doing shitty things.

Second of all, the good news is that the woman in question got her kids back, but only after gritting her teeth and returning to the religious nutcase therapist. Luckily for all of us, she didn’t give up so easily, and when she went back she took a tape recorder and got solid evidence that the therapist was saying things like “If you want to explore how God was in your past, how God was in your life and not in your life… I know you don’t believe in God which is fine but I know at some points he was in your life in some way.”

If a Christian was forced by a court to attend a therapy session where the therapist said “I know you don’t believe in Ganesh but I know at some points he was in your life in some way,” all of Albuquerque would be on fire right now. If the therapist was Muslim, Bill O’Reilly would have ejaculated live on Fox News.

It’s sad but true how easy it is to point out violations of separation of church and state using “the Muslim test.” I hate to play upon the fears many Christians have of Muslims, but it’s really the fastest and easiest way to convince them that they don’t want the government meddling in religious affairs.

This Albuquerque case reminds me of the huge problem we have in the US with Alcoholics Anonymous. I know a lot of alcoholics and drug addicts, and some of them have been helped by AA. But the fact of the matter is that AA is fundamentally religious in nature, requiring a belief in some higher power. Many people, atheist AA members included, apologize for this by claiming the higher power can be anything, not necessarily the Christian god. This bullshit is on the same level as those who try to justify government-sponsored public prayers by saying that all the nonbelievers can just sit quietly and have a moment of silence. AA is a fundamentally spiritual movement, which is totally fine for them.

The problem is that AA is often court-ordered punishment for people who commit crimes under the influence, and it’s often the only option available regardless of the alcoholic’s religious beliefs.

People shouldn’t have to dig into the history and tactics of the therapists they’re forced by a court of law to see. That should go without saying, but obviously the US needs to institute some serious quality control in the way we certify counselors who treat people. Rule #1: your religion has nothing to do with my recovery.

http://www.techinsider.io/global-warming-denier-studies-not-replicable-2015-9

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Remember how 97% of all climate scientists agree that climate change is real and is caused primarily by human activity? Have you ever wondered what’s up with the other 3%? What alternative hypothesis do they agree on?

It turns out, they don’t agree on much of anything, except for that they should do terrible experiments that can’t be replicated.

Seven scientists set out to replicate the most popular studies cited by people who don’t believe anthropogenic climate change is happening, and in a paper published recently in Theoretical and Applied Climatology, they revealed that the contrarian studies were rife with cherry picking and statistical flaws, and in some cases outright physical impossibilities, like the paper that sought to blame global warming on the orbits of Jupiter and Saturn. That hypothesis is basically one step away from claiming that global warming is caused by Virgos.

Then there was the paper blaming global warming on the sun and moon, which used a statistical analysis that worked for the 4,000 years they chose to focus on, but not for the 6,000 years they chose to throw in the trash bin because it didn’t work at all.

So not only do those contrarian studies not hold up to scrutiny, but they don’t even have any internal consistency. It’s not as if 97% of climate scientists agree that climate change is caused by humans and the other 3% agree that climate change is caused by solar cycles. It’s that 97% agree that climate change is caused by humans, 1% believe it’s caused by Jupiter, .5% believe it’s not happening at all, 1.25% believe it’s caused by dogs and cats living together, and .25% blamed the Jews and then took a nap.

Personally, I wish more researchers were rewarded for trying to replicate published studies, even if they’re studies that support the consensus. Scientific publishing is rife with problems, and 99% of those problems could be cleared up if more research was replicated. The issue is that there is little incentive for anyone to replicate. Scientists are rewarded with jobs and grants and titles for publishing original research with positive results, which leads to a glut of research that never gets looked at a second time.

If we turn a critical eye toward the other 97% of climate research, I suspect we’d weed out some inaccuracies and end up with a better picture of the problem. Unfortunately, I’m sure the American GOP will continue to plug their ears and kowtow to corporate interests until half of Florida is underwater, but at least as future generations look back at why they’re about to go extinct, they’ll appreciate the minority’s scientific rigor.

http://www.rawstory.com/2015/09/ex-hedge-funder-buys-rights-aids-drug-and-raises-price-from-13-50-to-750-per-pill/

https://np.reddit.com/r/news/comments/2g43kw/a_generic_drug_company_retrophin_buys_up_the/ckg473h?context=5

Sorta transcript:

Martin Shkrelli is a hedge fund manager who has recently come under fire for being the world’s biggest piece of shit after it was revealed he raised the price of the drug Daraprim from $13.50 to $750 per pill. Daraprim is used by both pregnant women and AIDS patients to literally save their lives.

The funny thing is that this isn’t the first time Shkrelli has done this. Also I’m going to try to stop saying “Shkrelli” because it makes my mouth do disgusting things. “Shkrelli.” Ugh. I’ll just call him “Shithead.”

Shithead did this last year, too, raising the cost of the drug Retrophin, used for treating a kidney disorder, by about 20 times.

Amusingly, he went on Reddit to defend himself for that, and he promised Redditors that he’d personally come up with solutions to make sure that people who needed the drug would still be able to access it. Instead, he just moved on and did it again to another group of sick people. Shithead.

After all the recent bad publicity, he agreed to lower the price of Daraprim again. But obviously, he’s a giant piece of shit and as soon as no one is looking, he’ll just do it again to a different life-saving medication.

That’s why this entire thing isn’t about Shithead at all. I fully endorse the public bollocking he’s received for his actions, but in the end, shaming one shithead isn’t enough. The US allows the pharmaceutical industry far too much power over the cost of their products, and it’s ridiculous that companies are allowed to charge inflated prices here while claiming it’s to fund research while spending all their money on marketing and leaving it to the National Institutes of Health to do the bulk of new drug research.

I say this as someone who is constantly accused of being in the pocket of Big Pharma, because I point out that homeopathy is bullshit and most chiropractors are dangerous loons. Unfortunately, Big Pharma is all we’ve got when it comes to science-based medicine, and so it’s incredibly important that we recognize that they do have a powerful lobby and sometimes the people who make up Big Pharma are in fact going to be some sociopathic douchebags who are more concerned with their bottom line than with saving lives.

So before you assume that the issue is solved because Shkrelli lowered the cost of Daraprim, remember that he’s done nothing about the other life-saving drugs he’s made into unobtainable luxury items and you probably didn’t hear anything about it. The only way to stop this from happening is governmental oversight, and the only way to do that is to elect politicians who aren’t in the pocket of major corporations.

Shit, this just turned into a Bernie Sanders video, didn’t it?

Study link:

https://peerj.com/articles/1258/

Sorta transcript:

Sometimes I go to psychic fairs, because I enjoy laughing at inept frauds while simultaneously getting depressed at the depravity of human nature. At a lot of these fairs, there’s usually a guy with a camera who you can pay $20 to take your photo and reveal your aura, which is a colorful cloud that reveals your deepest secrets and personality traits. It’s a scam, obviously, because auras don’t exist. OR DO THEY?

They don’t. But a new study has shown evidence of a different sort of aura: instead of colorful clouds, it’s actually composed of skin flakes and poop particles. Yes, you live in a perpetual bubble composed of your own personal disgusting colony of microbes.

The first thing you should know about this study is that the study involved only 11 people in a strictly controlled environment. That doesn’t invalidate the results, but they do tell you to take them with a grain of salt and not automatically assume that these results apply to 7.5 billion people in the outside world.

That said, the results are worth talking about because they’re both interesting and hilarious, my two favorite traits in a thing! The study involved two trials, both of which took place in a room that was well-regulated in terms of air intake. Subjects wearing identical uniforms would come in one at a time and hang out in the room for awhile, and then the air was examined for microbes.

The researchers found that it was pretty obvious to tell when a person had been in the room compared to an unoccupied room, which shouldn’t be that surprising if you already know how much microbes love us, to the point that they outnumber the cells in our own body 10 to 1. So of course we’re going to leave some behind wherever we go.

More interesting is that the researchers found they could distinguish between subjects depending upon the content of the microbes they left behind. So your poop particles may be different from the people around you, and doesn’t that make you feel like a special snowflake?

People will be quick to say that this bodes well for a future where detectives can identify suspects based on the microbes they leave behind, but there’s nowhere near enough evidence to say that each person’s microbial signature is unique, or that it would be detectable in the messy world outside the confines of the laboratory.

All we can say is that this paper leaves us with a lot more disgusting research to be done, and it also leaves us with one of the best acknowledgements I’ve ever read, which I will end with now: “Finally, we thank 11 anonymous volunteer human occupants for shedding their bioaerosols into our sampling apparatuses.” Ah, the things we do for science.