Tuesday, January 24, 2012
Saturday, January 21, 2012
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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Wednesday, January 18, 2012
Dr Grumpy has another heartwarming story
Tuesday, January 17, 2012
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.
B Herr
An inevitable response to the previous post.
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This is awesomely funny.
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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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