Inciting Violence

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There may be a serious problem with understanding the legal definition of “incitement”:

Fox News contributor Father Jonathan Morris on Sunday called for officials in Oklahoma City to shut down a Satanic black mass because he said worshippers were “inciting violence” by mocking Christians.

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[I]n a segment titled “The Fight For Faith” on Sunday, Morris explained to the hosts of Fox & Friends that he felt “bad” for anyone who participated in the event.

“You get yourself into something that is, first of all, satanic, that is supernatural,” he said. “They believe that as soon as you connect yourself with evil, evil stuff happens. I feel very bad for them.”

Morris acknowledged that Satanists had a “political right” to worship, but he said that the city also had a “responsibility to defend the good governance of its people.” Continue reading →

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This Week in WTF, September 19, 2014 (UPDATED)

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– That was supposed to be a figure of speech: A Chinese candy company accidentally supplied candy stores all over New Zealand’s South Island with bags of dicks—technically, bags of phallus-shaped candy, but I like my way of saying it.

– For the mourner on the go: A funeral home in Michigan is offering drive-thru viewings (h/t Amy).

I’ll just leave it at that.

– Math just got interesting: A Thai textbook publisher recalled a math textbook once someone (presumably anonymously) notified them that what they probably thought was a stock photo of a teacher on the book’s cover was actually a Japanese porn star. I’m not entirely sure what the big deal is, as the picture is of a fully-clothed woman holding a folder while standing in front of a chalkboard with math-related stuff written on it. I guess the association with adult entertainment renders people unable to avoid the thought that she is naked underneath her teacher costume.

Continue reading →

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What I’m Reading, September 18, 2014

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There’s nothing “shocking” about growing up, Mary Elizabeth Williams, Salon, September 11, 2014

Along with the gotcha! wardrobe malfunction, the “Can you even believe it that a human being is subject to the laws of time and physical progression?” story is a reliable page views grabber. Throw in wrinkles, weight or any possible cosmetic surgery and you’re particularly golden. Three years ago, the Internet blew a gasket when Sinead O’Connor, who was once 20 years old, appeared in public, in the words of an Inquisitr headline, “No Longer Bald or Skinny.” Fortunately, she had the decency to lose weight before the release of her new album earlier this year, prompting inevitable headlines about her “dramatic makeover.” And when the 81-year-old Kim Novak appeared at the Oscars this winter with an unusually taut, immobilized countenance, critics were swift to mock her “wax museum” appearance. These are your options, people. You can get older in whatever natural form that may take and be made fun of for it, or attempt to remain youthful and be made fun of for it. Basically, unless you master some vampire-like secret of remaining a fixed age and size for eternity, you’re screwed.

Colorblindness is the New Racism, Lauren Rankin, Policy Mic, July 22, 2013 Continue reading →

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What I’m Reading, September 17, 2014

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The “death of adulthood” is really just capitalism at work, Andrew O’Hehir, Salon, September 12, 2014 (h/t Kjerstin Johnson)

It’s all very well to discuss feminism as a force of cultural liberation expressed by Beyoncé, Lady Gaga and Lena Dunham, but for millions of women in the Western world it has also been an economic imperative, one that set them free from some (but not all) traditional expectations and thrust them into a job marketplace where they are often underpaid relative to their male counterparts. This is too complicated an argument to develop here, but I suspect that the “death of adulthood” is so much more evident among men than women because women are still called upon to perform productive labor – the bearing and nurturing of children – that cannot be or generally is not performed by men. In that sense the death of adulthood is just another name for the fabled “crisis of masculinity” we’ve been hearing about for 30 years or longer, in which men often feel that their power has been undermined by ball-busting feminists when what’s really happening is that their economic role has changed and they don’t know what the hell to do about it.

Fox News Correspondent Tries to Slam Obama, Instead Proves Trickle-Down Economics is a Scam, Allen Clifton, Forward Progressives, August 16, 2014 Continue reading →

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There Is No More Boot

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Printed maps of the state of Louisiana typically show a “L”- or boot-shaped state, but the state hasn’t actually had that shape for quite some time (h/t PZ):

According to the U.S.G.S., the state lost just under 1,900 square miles of land between 1932 and 2000. This is the rough equivalent of the entire state of Delaware dropping into the Gulf of Mexico, and the disappearing act has no closing date. If nothing is done to stop the hemorrhaging, the state predicts as much as another 1,750 square miles of land — an area larger than Rhode Island — will convert to water by 2064. An area approximately the size of a football field continues to slip away every hour. “We’re sinking faster than any coast on the planet,” explains Bob Marshall, a Pulitzer-winning journalist in New Orleans. Marshall authored the series “Losing Ground,” a recent collaboration between The Lens, a non-profit newsroom, and ProPublica, about the Louisiana coast’s epic demise. Continue reading →

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No Otisburg…….Yet……..

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The “Six Californias” initiative will not be on the ballot in 2016, after the California Secretary of State disqualified the petition for having too few legitimate signatures. I see two lessons here:

1. As karoli at Crooks and Liars says, “professional petition gatherers [are] terrible at what they do,” charging “Six Californias” mastermind Tim Draper around $1.5 million for signatures rejected by the state.

2. Trying to carve your own personal fiefdom out of the nation’s most-populous state never seems to work: Continue reading →

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An Open Letter to the Chinese Government

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Look, we get it. You’re powerful. You have a great deal of power over most facets of Chinese society.

But even you cannot compel the Dalai Lama to reincarnate if he doesn’t want to.

Maybe a better (or at least more scientific) way of putting it is that you cannot force Buddhists to accept your own Dalai Lama appointee if the current Dalai Lama doesn’t want to reincarnate, because come on, everybody would see right through that.

Get over it.

"Bos grunniens at Yundrok Yumtso Lake" by Dennis Jarvis [CC-BY-SA-3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

Here is a Tibetan yak, for no reason.

Photo credit: “Bos grunniens at Yundrok Yumtso Lake” by Dennis Jarvis [CC-BY-SA-3.0], via Wikimedia Commons.

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