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Sunday, March 19, 2006
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This remarkable video from al Jazeera shows an Arab woman arguing against the "backwardness" of the fundamentalist Muslims. (Arabic with subtitles.)
When is the last time you saw someone on American TV arguing against the backwardness of fundamentalist Christians? American TV wouldn't allow that -- not in today's environment of threats and intimidation.
(Via Seeing the Forest.)
9:04:08 PM 
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Poverty-Stricken Africans Receive Desperately Needed Bibles
(Via The Onion.)
9:03:59 PM
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Eric Umansky is scared Eric Umansky: The Ice Caps: This is scary, scary stuff: Following two recent studies on changes to Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets, NASA is touting a survey that it says confirms “climate warming is changing how much water remains locked in Earth’s largest storehouses of ice and snow.”
In a press release for the survey, NASA directly tied the changes to warming and described the survey as “the most comprehensive” ever in both regions.That stand can in part be explained by lead author Jay Zwally’s warning....
“We’re seeing the early signs of changes in the ice sheets,” he added. “The climate warming from greenhouse gases has really just started.”
As much as I talk about Iraq and national security, those things are small beans compared with the administration's failure to acknowledge let alone confront global warming. (Not that the White House is alone in fiddle-faddling.) GW, after all, is going to affect the world far more than Iraq--and I suspect it will affect the world far quicker than most of us think. Why? Feedback loops, such as, say, the icesheets melting.
(Via Brad DeLong's Semi-Daily Journal.)
5:36:58 PM
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Goosing the Antithesis shows how the fundies are right: science does present a threat to their fairy tales religions beliefs.
he issue, however, goes much deeper than that. The very act of observation itself is based on naturalism. If I was to believe in a god, I would be plunged in immediate and deep epistemic anxiety. Even what I know about this god, could have been planted, by this very god, in my mind. In this way, I could be deluded, through supernatural intervention, to believe that my god is all-good when it is in fact all-evil. But most importantly, the god could also make me see things fall to the ground when in fact they float, or make them appear to fall faster or slower than they really fall. This god could very easily fool me into believing in a law of gravity which is in fact a complete divine fabrication. Better yet, it could simply implant an unassailable belief that all my acts of observations confirm this law, when in fact they do not.
11:40:46 AM
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MELISSA FLETCHER STOELTJE, SAN ANTONIO EXPRESS-NEWS - A study done by the Graduate Center of the City University of New York found that the percentage of the population that describes itself as "nonreligious" more than doubled from 1990 to 2001, from 14.3 million to 29.4 million people. The only other group to show growth was Muslims. "Right now, the fastest-growing religious identity in America is the nonreligious," says Dan Barker, co-president of the Freedom From Religion Foundation, a Madison, Wis.-based group that champions church-state separation and works to educate the public on non-theism. A study by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life found that 16 percent of Americans (about 35 million) consider themselves "unaffiliated" -- a category that includes "unaffiliated believers," "secularists" and atheists/agnostics.
(Via UNDERNEWS.)
11:30:35 AM
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This is what Scientologists believe:
In Scientology doctrine, Xenu (also Xemu) is a galactic ruler (of the "Galactic Confederacy") who, 75 million years ago, brought billions of people to Earth, stacked them around volcanoes and blew them up with hydrogen bombs. Their souls then clustered together and stuck to the bodies of the living, and continue to cause problems today. These events are known to Scientologists as "Incident II", and the traumatic memories associated with them as The Wall of Fire or the R6 implant. The story of Xenu is part of a much wider range of Scientology beliefs in extraterrestrial civilizations and alien interventions in Earthly events, collectively described as space opera by L. Ron Hubbard, the founder of Scientology.
[link][more]
(Via reddit: what's new online.)
10:44:48 AM
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Billy West (the voice of Fry, Dr. Zoidberg and others) releases more inside info. According to a post he made on his message board, Futurama is going to be renewed for television with 26 episodes. No word as to what network it will be on or which cast members will rejoin the show.
(Via digg / dig.)
10:38:32 AM
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© Copyright 2006 Steve Michel.
Last update: 4/1/2006; 5:26:21 PM.
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