Tampa

I forgot how much I like trying new beers and annoying new people in new cities.
Cheers


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Location:Heathrow Dr,Tampa,United States

If we follow Rick Santorum's logic to its inevitable conclusion.

Philosoraptor on angelic rapists

Miss you Barney.

To Protect and Service

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Undercover UK cops infiltrated environmental groups, seduced women in the groups, fathered children with them, abandoned them

Undercover police agents in the UK infiltrated environmental groups, had sex with their members, struck up long-term relationships with women in these groups, fathered children with these women, and then abandoned the children.

Two undercover police officers secretly fathered children with political campaigners they had been sent to spy on and later disappeared completely from the lives of their offspring, the Guardian can reveal.

In both cases, the children have grown up not knowing that their biological fathers – whom they have not seen in decades – were police officers who had adopted fake identities to infiltrate activist groups. Both men have concealed their true identities from the children's mothers for many years.

Good thing the police were there, though. Who knows what kind of unethical behaviour an environmentalist might be getting up to.

Undercover police had children with activists

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Dr Grumpy has another heartwarming story

Doctor Grumpy in the House: The ink is black, the page is white: Race relations are more complex than passing laws and saying "look, we elected/hired a black person." A lot of the time real change is seen...

I don't trust that face in the mirror.

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[Update-related article] In Atheists We Distrust - Daisy Grewal - Scientific American

[Update 8pm GMT-7 Jan-17] Link to an article that was posted on Dec 1 on RD.net - both reference research by Will Gervais from the University of British Colombia

UBC study finds believers distrust atheists as much as rapists

---

Thanks to Neil5150 for the link

Subjects believe that people behave better when they think that God is watching over them.

Atheists are one of the most disliked groups in America. Only 45 percent of Americans say they would vote for a qualified atheist presidential candidate, and atheists are rated as the least desirable group for a potential son-in-law or daughter-in-law to belong to. Will Gervais at the University of British Columbia recently published a set of studies looking at why atheists are so disliked. His conclusion: It comes down to trust.

Gervais and his colleagues presented participants with a story about a person who accidentally hits a parked car and then fails to leave behind valid insurance information for the other driver. Participants were asked to choose the probability that the person in question was a Christian, a Muslim, a rapist, or an atheist. They thought it equally probable the culprit was an atheist or a rapist, and unlikely the person was a Muslim or Christian. In a different study, Gervais looked at how atheism influences people's hiring decisions. People were asked to choose between an atheist or a religious candidate for a job requiring either a high or low degree of trust. For the high-trust job of daycare worker, people were more likely to prefer the religious candidate. For the job of waitress, which requires less trust, the atheists fared much better.

Read more

B Herr

An inevitable response to the previous post.

 

 

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Educate Women About Their Bodies? Never!

via Friendly Atheist by M J Shepherd on 1/17/12

 

 

(In response to this post)

 

 

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This is awesomely funny.

 

 

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Karen Santorum: She's a Superfreak

via Blogtown, PDX, Portland Mercury by Dan Savage on 1/17/12

Um... fucking the forty-years-your-senior doctor who delivered you? I wouldn't even do that:

Mrs. Santorum, 51, apparently wasn't always committed to the [pro-life] cause. In fact, her live-in partner through most of her 20s was Tom Allen, a Pittsburgh obstetrician and abortion provider 40 years older than she, who remains an outspoken crusader for reproductive rights and liberal ideals. Dr. Allen has known Mrs. Santorum, born Karen Garver, her entire life: he delivered her in 1960.

"Karen was a lovely girl, very intelligent and sweet," says Allen, who at 92 uses a walker but retains a sly smile. A wine aficionado who frequented the Pittsburgh Symphony and was active in the local chapter of the ACLU, he lives with his wife of 16 years, Judi—they started dating in 1989, soon after he and Garver split—in the same large detached row house where he lived with the woman who would become Santorum's wife. He and Garver also lived for several years in another house a few blocks away. "Karen had no problems with what I did for a living," says Allen, who helped start one of the first hospital-sanctioned abortion clinics in Pennsylvania. "We never really discussed it." (The Santorum campaign did not return repeated requests for comment on the relationship.)

The six-year-long May-December affair, which was always out in the open, began in 1982, when Garver was a 22-year-old nursing student at Duquesne University. Allen was then 63.

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Don’t Fear the Clitoris

 

 

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Don’t Fear the Clitoris

via Friendly Atheist by Hemant Mehta on 1/17/12

A couple of days ago, Laci Green posted a video explaining the clitoris:

It was quickly flagged as inappropriate for anyone under the age of 18.

To which Laci responded:

Keeping information a secret never helped ANYONE. You are only hurting those you are trying to "protect". The idea that discussing female anatomy & pleasure is something "18+" is nothing short of oppressive…ESPECIALLY since none of my videos addressing male anatomy & pleasure ever get flagged. Pleasure is for everybody. Yes, even teens. Get over it.

*Applause* Yes to that. There's nothing to be ashamed or scared or freaked out about.

Thankfully, the video has since been reinstated so anyone of any age can see it. Watch it yourself. You might learn something.

 

 

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No one expects the Spanish Inquisition!

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Place the medieval techniques alongside those laid out in modern handbooks, such as Human Intelligence Collector Operations, the U.S. Army interrogation manual, and the inquisitors' practices seem very up-to-date

The inquisitors were shrewd students of human nature. Like Gui, Eymerich was well aware that those being questioned would employ a range of stratagems to deflect the interrogator. In his manual, he lays out 10 ways in which heretics seek to "hide their errors." They include "equivocation," "redirecting the question," "feigning astonishment," "twisting the meaning of words," "changing the subject," "feigning illness," and "feigning stupidity." For its part, the Army interrogation manual provides a "Source and Information Reliability Matrix" to assess the same kinds of behavior. It warns interrogators to be wary of subjects who show signs of "reporting information that is self-serving," who give "repeated answers with exact wording and details," and who demonstrate a "failure to answer the question asked."

A history of torture and interrogation in the Middle Ages, and how it compares to the standards applied in "The Global War on Terror".

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It contradicts my usual advice to touch and talk to your loved one but the Onion is my most reliable source of medical information.

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Study Finds Hearing Loved One's Voice Induces Excruciating Pain In Coma Patients

BALTIMORE—According to a study published Monday in The New England Journal Of Medicine, people in comas experience excruciating, indescribable levels of pain whenever they hear the sound of a loved one's voice. The Johns Hopkins University st...

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We are not quite there but happily taking the exit off the freeway.

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RAW quote: restriction of freedom (1975)

"More stringent security measures. Universal electronic surveillance. No-knock laws. Stop and frisk laws. Government inspection of first-class mail. Automatic fingerprinting, photographing, blood tests, and urinalysis of any person arrested before he is charged with a crime. A law making it unlawful to resist even unlawful arrest. Laws establishing detention camps for potential subversives. Gun control laws. Restrictions on travel. The assassinations, you see, establish the need for such laws in the public mind. Instead of realizing that there is a conspiracy, conducted by a handful of men, the people reason -- or are manipulated into reasoning -- that the entire population must have its freedom restricted in order to protect the leaders. The people agree that they themselves can't be trusted."

― Robert Anton Wilson and Robert Shea, The Eye in the Pyramid, 1975

Fnord

B Herr

The Google-Kenya ripoff

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The Google-Kenya ripoff

Mocality is an African startup that has a Kenya-wide business directory. There is no Kenyan yellow pages, so the directory was crowdsourced, paying thousands of Kenyans to help create and validate its database.

When the businesses in Mocality's database started asking them about the premium service they were offering with Google, Mocality was puzzled. They had no joint venture with Google, and they had never charged any business for inclusion in their database. When they examined their server logs, they saw a large number of hits to the records for the businesses that had been cold-called from the same IP range.

So Mocality laid a trap: when that IP range next visited the Mocality site, they fed it fake phone numbers that went to Mocality's own call center, where a Mocality operator pretended to be a business-owner and recorded the conversation. In that conversation, the caller identified himself as a Google employee, calling about a joint Google-Mocality venture, and asking the business to pay Google for a Kenya Business Online website with its own domain on that basis. This was, of course, absolutely fraudulent. There was and is no Google-Mocality joint venture.

Shortly after, that IP range stopped visiting Mocality's servers, but another range, this one registered to Google's Mountain View headquarters [edit: this address has previously been used to conduct official Google business in India], began to query its database. Again, Mocality served a fake result with its own call-center number, and an hour later, they received a call from someone identifying herself as working on Google's behalf, asking for money for a joint Google-Mocality product.

The conclusion is hard to escape: Google -- or people working on its behalf, with its knowledge and cooperation -- took the numbers of tens of thousands of Kenyan businesses from Mocality's database, then fraudulently solicited money from them by claiming to be in a joint venture with Mocality. This seems to me to be outright criminal activity, and Google has a lot of explaining to do.

Update: I have contacted Google Africa's press address and asked for an on-the-record response from a named spokesperson.

Update 2: Julie Taylor from Google has replied saying that Google will have a statement soon.

Here's Mocality CEO Stef Magdalinski on the subject:

Since October, Google's GKBO appears to have been systematically accessing Mocality's database and attempting to sell their competing product to our business owners. They have been telling untruths about their relationship with us, and about our business practices, in order to do so. As of January 11th, nearly 30% of our database has apparently been contacted.

Furthermore, they now seem to have outsourced this operation from Kenya to India.

When we started this investigation, I thought that we'd catch a rogue call-centre employee, point out to Goog...

B Herr

Interesting and very Zen-like.

 

 

File-sharing becomes a recognized religion in Sweden

via Boing Boing by Cory Doctorow on 1/5/12

Sweden has given official religious status to Church of Kopimism, a faith and philosophy based on file-sharing. The faith's foundational document, ""POwr, broccoli and Kopimi," is available as a .torrent file indexed on The Pirate Bay (natch). It exhorts followers to undertake 100 tasks to attain #g_d (a hashtagged, all-lower-case version of the observant Jewish tradition of writing God as "G_d").

001. Obtain the Internet.
002. Start using IRC.
003. Group and birth a site.
004. Experiment with research chemicals.
005. Design a three-step program.
006. Take a powerful stance for something positive and essential.
007. Regulate nothing.
008. Say that you have to move in two weeks, but stay for seven months. Come back a year later and do it all over again.
009. ROTFLOL.
010. Relax, you're already halfway there.
011. Just kidding.
012. Don't think outside the box. Build a box.
013. Support support.
014. Organize and go to parties and fairs.
015. Start 30–40 blogs about the same things.
016. Drain the private sector of coders, graphic artists and literati.
017. Create a prize that is awarded.
018. Express yourself often in the media, vaguely.
019. Spread all rumors.
020. Seek out and try carding, and travel by expensive trains. Don't order sushi.
021. Start a radio station.
022. Everything you use, you can copy and give an arbitrary name, whether it's a news portal, search engine or public service.
023. Buy a bus.
024. Install a MegaHAL.
025. Make sure that you are really good friends with people who can use Photoshop, HTML, databases, and the like.

As faith strictures go, these ones are actually pretty good. On the other hand, I'm not much of a believer in Gods, G_d or #g_d, so perhaps this isn't for me.

File-sharing religion goes legit in Sweden

 

 

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Great site for sorting the scientific evidence from the bullcrap.

http://www.senseaboutscience.org/