I wonder sometimes how dogs remember their puppies once they’ve been taken away.
“Written in the Bones,” a comic by Carey Pietsch and Christopher M. Jones, offers one idea of how they might. Continue reading
The state of Missouri forgets to send a guy to prison for 13 years, and he spends that time leading a productive life and staying out of trouble while never trying to hide (h/t Jason). Then the state notices the mistake and sends a SWAT team to his house.
After he was convicted of armed robbery in 2000, Cornealious Anderson was sentenced to 13 years behind bars and told to await instructions on when and where to report to prison. But those instructions never came.
So Anderson didn’t report. He spent the next 13 years turning his life around getting married, raising three kids, learning a trade. He made no effort to conceal his identity or whereabouts. Anderson paid taxes and traffic tickets, renewed his driver’s license and registered his businesses.
Not until last year did the Missouri Department of Corrections discover the clerical error that kept him free. Now he’s fighting for release, saying authorities missed their chance to incarcerate him.
In a single day last July, Anderson’s life was turned upside-down.
“They sent a SWAT team to his house,” Anderson’s attorney, Patrick Megaro, said Wednesday. “He was getting his 3-year-old daughter breakfast, and these men with automatic weapons bang on his door.”
Meanwhile, the federal government decides not to bother a Nevada rancher who has been breaking the law for twenty years because someone might get hurt.
It’s not like the Missouri SWAT team could’ve been sent to round up cattle instead, and I really do think it would be dumb if people get killed over that moocher rancher—but it is an interesting statement on the allocation of police resources.
Now that we are seeing outbreaks of diseases that were once relegated to the history books and vaccine labels, and now that even Jenny McCarthy seems unable to control the beast she helped to create, perhaps it’s time for some stronger rhetoric than mere science and mockery.
The following photo was taken during World War II at the 363rd Station Hospital in Port Moresby, Papua New Guinea (which was part of Australia at the time):
![By Otis Historical Archives of National Museum of Health & Medicine (OTIS Archive 1) [CC-BY-2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons](http://crypticphilosopher.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/Atabrine_advertisement_in_Guinea_during_WW2.jpg "By Otis Historical Archives of National Museum of Health & Medicine (OTIS Archive 1) [CC-BY-2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons")
About 27,000 Allied soldiers contracted malaria in New Guinea during the campaign against Japan, which lasted more than three years, from early 1942 until the war ended in August 1945. Antimalarial drugs were among the most effective tools in controlling the disease.
You didn’t forget your antimalarial meds. If you did, you had a pretty good chance of dying, even without anyone shooting at you.
So go get your dang vaccines. Any questions?
Photo credit: By Otis Historical Archives of the National Museum of Health & Medicine (OTIS Archive 1) ref: D44-145-1 (MAMAS) [CC-BY-2.0], via Wikimedia Commons.
![By Novis-M (Own work) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons](http://crypticphilosopher.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/320px-ACU_Universal_Camouflage_Pattern-300x225.jpg "By Novis-M (Own work) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons")
The irresponsibly stupid and dangerous camouflage patterns of the U.S. military, David W. Brown, The Week, January 22, 2013
When the Marine Corps selected a digital pattern for its combat uniform in 2002, the U.S. military as a whole seemed to fracture, with each branch wandering aimlessly in a bizarre search for sartorial identity. It’s been a long, strange trip since. So let’s take a brief look at the camouflage patterns of the U.S. military, and the sorry stories of their adoptions.
If You Don’t Like “Rape Culture” Then Focus For A Minute On Sex and Status, Soraya Chemaly, Huffington Post, April 7, 2014
The idea that we live with a culture that promotes rape is anathema to people who a) don’t want to believe it because, when you start to really think about it, it’s awful and scary and defies reason; b) live in communities filled with words used to deny, promote or camouflage sexual assault or c) are people who have power and benefit, in multiple, intersecting ways, from the status quo.
“Status” is the operative word. If you don’t like the words “rape culture” or you are uncomfortable with the idea that men rape women (and that is the vast preponderance of cases) in huge numbers, here is a different way to think about this: People with higher status are entitled to rape and abuse people with lower status in society.
Fear of becoming a racial minority makes white Americans more conservative: study, Scott Kaufman, The Raw Story, April 10, 2014 (h/t LGM)
Two researchers from the Department of Psychology and Institute for Policy Research at Northwestern University demonstrated that the more white Americans know about the changing demographics of the United States, the more likely they are to endorse conservative policy positions.
***
Maureen Craig and Jennifer Richeson conducted three studies in which white Americans were presented with information about the racial demographic shifts that have led the U.S. Census Bureau to project that “racial minority groups will make up a majority of the U.S. national population in 2042, effectively creating a so-called ‘majority-minority’ nation.”
The result was that, “[d]espite being self-identified political independents, respondents who were asked about the [majority-minority] racial shift reported being somewhat more conservative than did respondents” who were asked the less salient question about Hispanics being roughly equally to African-Americans.
AA and Rehab Culture Have Shockingly Low Success Rates, Dr. Lance Dodes, Zachary Dodes, AlterNet, April 2, 2014
Twelve-step programs hold a privileged place in our culture as well. The legions of “anonymous” members who comprise these groups are helped in their proselytizing mission by hit TV shows such as “Intervention,” which preaches the gospel of recovery. “Going to rehab” is likewise a common refrain in music and fi lm, where it is almost always uncritically presented as the one true hope for beating addiction. AA and rehab have even been codified into our legal system: court-mandated attendance, which began in the late 1980s, is today a staple of drug-crime policy. Every year, our state and federal governments spend over $15 billion on substance-abuse treatment for addicts, the vast majority of which are based on 12-step programs. There is only one problem: these programs almost always fail.
Peer-reviewed studies peg the success rate of AA somewhere between 5 and 10 percent. That is, about one of every fifteen people who enter these programs is able to become and stay sober. In 2006, one of the most prestigious scientific research organizations in the world, the Cochrane Collaboration, conducted a review of the many studies conducted between 1966 and 2005 and reached a stunning conclusion: “No experimental studies unequivocally demonstrated the effectiveness of AA” in treating alcoholism. This group reached the same conclusion about professional AA-oriented treatment (12-step facilitation therapy, or TSF), which is the core of virtually every alcoholism-rehabilitation program in the country.
Photo credit: By Novis-M (Own work) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.
It’s not a good idea to keep an alligator (or any other species of crocodilian) in your pool. It’s not healthy for the alligator, and depending on the gator’s age and size, it is even less healthy for you and your pool party guests.
It is, however, on occasion, hilarious.
The power of bloggers to change the world appears to be the theme of the almost comically-pretentious documentary American Blogger (h/t Julie).
The trailer tells us this ‘beautiful’ and ‘cinematic’ movie follows some documentarian you never heard of as he travels America in an Airstream interviewing bloggers… who with only one (briefly shown) exception are gorgeous white women who appear to be fairly wealthy.
This is the face of blogging: blond MILFs lounging about in hammocks on their porches. As a blogger this pretty well reflects my life.
Everything about this trailer – from the premise to the awful fucking music – is hilarious. Please hate-watch this.
I can’t add much to that, except to note that if blogging does change the world, the blogs probably won’t originate in suburban middle America. (If someone wants to make Egyptian Blogger, there might be more to it.)
Also, has anyone actually touted the ability of blogs to “change the world” since Twitter and Facebook first caught on? There’s always a new killer app that’s going to change the world until the next world-changing killer app comes along…..
Anyway, you can hate-watch the trailer here:
!["Dragons famili" by mapazhe [CC BY 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/)], via deviantART](http://crypticphilosopher.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/dragons_famili_by_mapazhe-d3b5d8t-300x211.jpg)
How We Won the War on Dungeons & Dragons, Annalee Newitz, io9, March 26, 2014
[U]nlike my fantasy of being a hot half-elf, the Christians actually had some control over our lives. My best friend got kicked out of Catholic school for playing D&D, which we counted as a win because it meant she could come to our shitty public school and play D&D with us. Outside our southern California town, however, D&D players weren’t getting off so easily. They were ostracized by their peers, kicked out of public schools, and sent to glorified reeducation camps by parents who feared their children were about to start sacrificing babies to Lolth the spider demon.
It sounds crazy in our world today, where there are Dungeons & Dragons movies and a rich game industry full of titles inspired by those old paper-and-dice games we played back in the twentieth century. One of the most popular shows on television, Game of Thrones, features plots that my friends and I might have cooked up back on that playground at lunch. Somehow, the popularity of epic fantasy and role playing overcame America’s fear of young people making up stories about monsters and gods.
The Cost Of Permission Culture: Or Why Netflix Streaming Library Sucks Compared To Its DVD Library, Parker Higgins, TechDirt, April 9, 2014
The problem is that, unlike earlier movie-rental options, streaming rights fall fundamentally within a permission culture. Netflix is a great illustration of what’s gone wrong here. It’s gone from having a nearly unrivaled catalog of films available to rent to being the butt of Onion jokes. What happened: It shifted from a system where nobody had a veto power over its operations, to one where it had to get permission and make deals with Hollywood. Sometimes it’s difficult to find the concrete costs of living in a permission culture, but the decline of Netflix’s selection is an important cautionary tale.
Physicist surprised to see himself in ‘documentary’ claiming the sun revolves around the earth, Robyn Pennacchia, Death and Taxes, April 8, 2014
Like any other Christian pseudoscience theory, geocentrism is built upon the premise that humans are special and earth is special and God made them special, so any science conflicting with that must be wrong. Like, probably Satan somehow made it look like the earth is really old and revolves around the sun just to destroy our self-esteem. The film makes this premise clear, with its suggested hashtag, #areyousignificant.
How Hatred of Islam Creates Strange Bedfellows of Christians and Atheists, CJ Werleman, AlterNet, April 11, 2014
Despite claims by David Silverman, president of the 501(c4) political lobby group American Atheists, atheism does not earn an atheist the title of freethinker. With very few exceptions, movement atheists are not. They’re parrots. Don’t believe me? Ask an atheist to opine on the Israeli-Palestinian crisis, and he or she will invariably wax lyrical about religious motivated violence, Islamic extremism and suicide bombers. In other words, expect a recital from atheist luminaries Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins and the late Christopher Hitchens.
***
Atheists, myself included, enjoy mocking religious fundamentalists for their inability to question authority or dogma. But very few atheists sound dissimilar to the aforementioned atheist heavyweights when it comes to assessing the roots of Islamic terrorism. In the aftermath of the attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, American Atheists president Silverman tweeted, “Dear Peaceful Muslims: Sorry, but yet, that IS your Islam and your Prophet’s followers.” Silverman included the hashtag #IslamIsBarbaric. If you were told neo-con firebrand Ann Coulter had posted this careless tweet, you would have believed it.
No doubt, Harris (neuroscience) and Dawkins (evolutionary biology) are leaders in their respective fields. What they’re not is experts on terrorism and the Middle East. So movement atheism needs to stop pretending like they are, because the words of Harris, Dawkins and Hitchens serve only to make movement atheists sound like neo-conservatives, Zionists and the Christian Right, which ultimately makes seeking peace even harder to attain.
[Ed. note: The URL slug for the above article is “how-atheists-are-complicit-atrocities-and-oppression-palestinian-people.” Just thought that was worth noting.]
Photo credit: “Dragons famili” by mapazhe [CC BY 3.0], via deviantART.
By this, I mean that conservatives are not funny when they are trying to be conservative. There are probably enough reasons for this to fill a book, but the fact is that comedy, i.e. the art of making people laugh, strongly tends towards ideas labeled as “liberal” in today’s society. I have argued here before that comedy works best when it is pointed upward, as when someone with less power uses humor on someone with more power. As someone else put it, there is a very good reason why employees of a company might roast their CEO, but the CEO does not roast the janitor.
Some conservatives seem to think that CBS is conspiring against them by giving the Late Show gig to Stephen Colbert. I’ll be said to see The Colbert Report go, but it’s hard to argue, from purely talent- and career-based standpoints, that Colbert hasn’t earned this. And that’s really the key: The Late Show is a comedy show, and Colbert is funny. Limbaugh, et al, are trying to pull more appropriation of progressive language regarding power and oppression, but no one who isn’t already steeped in Limbaugh’s worldview is buying it.
Rush Limbaugh can call his hate speech comedy, but Stephen Colbert’s parody character of conservative hosts is an act of war. One suspects that Colbert’s parody cuts a little too close to the bone for Limbaugh. Conservatives are always looking for a reason to go to war.
In this case, Limbaugh is expertly playing into the Republican victimization complex by claiming that CBS is somehow attacking them by hiring Stephen Colbert. The character that Colbert has played is a funhouse mirror look at how hosts like Limbaugh and Bill O’Reilly really behave.
Maybe Rush thinks that he should have been given the gig? The problem with conservatives doing comedy is that they aren’t funny. Glenn Beck thinks he is funny. Rush Limbaugh thinks he is funny, but they aren’t funny. Their humor is usually mean-spirited. Conservative humor tends to enjoy laughing at the misfortune of others.
If conservatives want a spot on a show like The Late Show, they need to put humor over ideology. If conservative ideology just plain isn’t funny, that’s a problem with conservative ideology, not comedy.
![By Kirt L. Onthank.Taollan82 at en.wikipedia [CC-BY-SA-3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], from Wikimedia Commons](http://crypticphilosopher.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/E_dofleini_closeup.jpg "By Kirt L. Onthank.Taollan82 at en.wikipedia [CC-BY-SA-3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], from Wikimedia Commons")
Octopi are smart. They know pro wrestling is fake.
A report from the November 24, 1957 edition of the Toledo Blade details a gathering of 200 people to watch an octopus wrestling event in the Puget Sound near Tacoma, Washington.
Teams of three unarmed skin divers competed to garner points based on the use of snorkels versus breathing tanks and the final weight of octopi wrestled to the surface. A team from Portland, Oregon, won the contest, hauling in an eighty-pound octopus in the process. Let it be noted that Giant Pacific Octopi (Octopus dofleini) are rather timid and not at all aggressive unless provoked, with most cases of provocation ending with the octopus fleeing.
I’m not sure what stones we’ve left unturned in our quest to dominate nature whilst being entertained. I can’t find any instances of people making whales race one another, but then again, I don’t want to give anyone any ideas.
Photo credit: By Kirt L. Onthank.Taollan82 at en.wikipedia [CC-BY-SA-3.0], from Wikimedia Commons.
![Not credited. May be work of U.S. Public Health Service (1918 ad) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons](http://crypticphilosopher.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/CoughsAndSneezesSpreadDiseases.jpg "Not credited. May be work of U.S. Public Health Service (1918 ad) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons")
Dear Parents, You are Being Lied to By Living Whole, Avicenna, A Million Gods, April 11, 2014
Those who do not learn from history are doomed to make the same mistakes. I predicted that an anti-vax backlash would occur when the anti-vax got so successful that they destroyed the herd immunity of a western nation to the point that common diseases could return. If you won’t learn by the carrot then unfortunately it is the stick. The price of Andrew Wakefield and the likes of Sherri Tenpenny, Mercola, Adams was increased disease. We are seeing record increases in common diseases that we were on the verge of eliminating.
How to Talk to Vaccine-Hesitant Parents, Keith Kloor, Discover, April 8, 2014
The smart folks at ThinkProgress seem to have missed all the media coverage of this recent study, which found that, for those already suspicious or concerned about vaccines, images of sick children and dramatic, cautionary narratives “actually increased beliefs in serious vaccine side effects.” This is a known as the “backfire effect,” a phenomena defined concisely here:
When your deepest convictions are challenged by contradictory evidence, your beliefs get stronger.
Jenny McCarthy, Who Still Promotes Misinformation About Vaccines, Now Says “I Am Not ‘Anti-Vaccine,'” Hemant Mehta, Friendly Atheist, April 13, 2014
McCarthy rejects the science — and thinks she deserves credit for just asking questions. Even though those questions were answered a long time ago and she just wasn’t happy with the responses. If Jenny McCarthy is not “anti-vaccine,” then Ken Ham must be the greatest advocate of evolution we’ve ever seen. In the meantime, the Jenny McCarthy Body Count will continue to rise until she comes to her senses and rejects the harmful beliefs that she still holds.
GOP Lawmaker Compares Abortion To Buying A Car, Laura Bassett, Huffington Post, April 9, 2014
A Republican state lawmaker in Missouri defended his controversial bill forcing women to have ultrasounds before abortions by comparing abortion to purchasing a new vehicle. “In making a decision to buy a car, I put research in there to find out what to do,” state Rep. Chuck Gatschenberger (R) told colleagues at a hearing on the bill Tuesday. *** The major problem with Gatschenberger’s analogy, of course, is that people are not required by state law to do research before buying a car. State Rep. Stacey Newman (D) told Gatschenberger that his car analogy was “extremely offensive to every single woman sitting in here.”
Photo credit: Not credited. May be work of U.S. Public Health Service (1918 ad via [1]) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.
