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People can be so flagrantly silly sometimes. Here is a little tip, do not give the Police the finger while you have stolen property on your person. :) From the cbc news 680.
KENORA, Ont. – An Edmonton man who used his middle finger to flag down a cruiser in northern Ontario has been charged with stolen property offences.
The cruiser with the Kenora detachment stopped after officers noticed the not-so-polite gesture, and the man asked if he could get a ride to the nearest town.
Officers found the man had two-stolen credit cards, a stolen GPS, an iPod charger and a BlackBerry.
I think it is about as useful sometimes as attempting to urinate up a rope into the wind when its cold outside. Trying to explain concepts like evolution and abiogenesis to people who are religiously addled is an exercise in frustration.
It is like this, you offer your arguments and conclusions, fact based of course, and all they have in rely is goddidit or He works in mysterious ways and *poof* for them it is the “I WIN” button. If you call them on their feckless handwaving then they attempt to disengage with such disingenuous statements as this:
“it’s written to go from the presence of a foolish man when thou perceivest not in him the lips of knowledge”
Seriously?
Bullcoookery does not get any swarmy than this little gem. It is no wonder the dark ages was dominated by the religious because it is obvious they could not and still cannot reason their way out of frakking wet paper bag.
From the CBC Science and Technology Section:
“The European Organization for Nuclear Research, or CERN, said beams of protons circulated at 3.5 trillion electron volts in both directions around the 27-kilometre tunnel housing the Large Hadron Collider under the Swiss-French border at Geneva.”
We are fired up and good to go! I am anxiously waiting for the experiments to start now the the LHC seems to be working at full capacity and is not producing singularities that will officially be ‘very bad news’ for the dwellers on the earth.
:The extra energy in Geneva is expected to reveal even more about the unanswered questions of particle physics, such as the existence of dark energy and matter. Scientists hope also to approach on a tiny scale what happened in the first split seconds after the Big Bang, which they theorize was the creation of the universe some 14 billion years ago.”
I have recently been ‘debating’ with creationists and more hard evidence is always a good thing. To be honest, it is not much of a contest, but can be fun; like fishing with hand grenades.
“Getting the beams to 3.5 TeV is testimony to the soundness of the LHC’s overall design, and the improvements we’ve made since the breakdown in September 2008,” said Steve Myers, CERN’s director for accelerators and technology.”
*waves pom-poms* Go Science Go!
Whoops, not Canadian, no reproductive rights for you!
The Conservative government of Canada once again proves that it is anti-choice, anti-rational and anti-woman. The CBC said:
“A Liberal motion to include a broader range of family planning programs, including contraception, in a maternal health initiative for developing countries, was defeated 144-138 in the House of Commons Tuesday.”
A Liberal motion in the house of commons that was based on fact and evidence in the field was voted down.
“The motion tabled by Liberal foreign affairs critic Bob Rae said Canada’s maternal health proposal to G8 nations must be based on “scientific evidence, which proves that education and family planning can prevent as many as one in every three maternal deaths” and refrain from the “failed right-wing ideologies” of former U.S. president George W. Bush.”
Shocking as it may seem to the CPC, access to reproductive services saves lives.
“Earlier in the day, Rae said the government has refused to acknowledge scientific evidence that shows reducing deaths of women during childbirth in developing countries is inextricably linked to the availability of family planning”
So rather than own up to their anti-woman, anti-science platform the Conservatives decide this is an attempt to reopen the abortion debate? How the frack does this make sense? The question of Abortion in Canada has been settled legally (Access to facilities though is another story). Women have the legal right to access abortions and other health services when they deem fit. Nothing to debate. What minister Oda says is just a sad attempt to cover the Canadian government’s twisted socially conservative roots.
Denying Women Rights World Wide - A compassionate conservative.
“Oda described the Liberal motion as a “transparent attempt to reopen the abortion debate that we have clearly said we have no intention to getting into.”
She insisted the government understands the urgency of ensuring that women can have a safe, healthy pregnancy, and she cited statistics suggesting that as many as 80 per cent of deaths during childbirth are easily preventable by providing basic needs such as clean water and access to trained health-care workers.”
Just be open with us Bev, the freedoms Canadian women have should not apply to women of other countries, after-all it is God given right for a woman to die in childbirth.
Another day, another religious scandal. The unctuous Catholic Church continues to devolve and show it true colours as the amoral cesspool they call a clergy is now very sorry for raping and abusing thousands of children in Ireland since 2005.
Did someone just say 'alter boy'?
“Pope Benedict XVI has released a letter apologizing for years of physical and sexual abuse suffered by Irish children at the hands of priests.
“Your trust has been betrayed and your dignity has been violated,” the Pope told victims. “I am truly sorry. I know that nothing can undo the wrong you have endured.”
The Pope said he felt “shame and remorse” over what the victims have endured and praised their courage in speaking out about their abuse. He also acknowledged that in many cases, no one listened to their complaints.
“You have suffered grievously and I am truly sorry,” he said.
It seems like institutionalized rape and abuse is a-okay -of course until the shamed victims shed their fear and call you on your atrocious record.
Religion needs to go away. Christopher Hitchens, writing at Slate, does his usual excellent job at dismantling particular story, more so than I could at the moment, so enjoy his smack down of the this particularly evil religious moment.
Going down to haggle at the local Farmer’s market is a weekly ritual for many urban dwellers. A recent study also indicates that the markets could be a contributing factor do our sense of fairness and altruism.
“They found that even sharing of money with a stranger in a psychological experiment was more common in societies were people got most of their food from markets, rather than growing it themselves, and in societies that embrace world religions.
In all there were 2,100 participants in the experiments, from communities ranging in size from 20 to 10,000 people, including hunter-gatherers, farmers and people who work for a wage.”
It is nice to see finally, that religions might actually be of some good in the overall picture. Here at DWR the opinion is the sooner they go away the better. However, the findings of the study seem to indicate that subscribing to a “world religion” could be a positive factor when deciding how fair to be to strangers. I guess, the buring the heretics and apostates comes later. :)
“Natural selection would never favour it in these large contexts, but it might work anyway,” Henrick said. “If that’s true, then hunter-gatherers and people in the smaller-scale societies should behave like people in large-scale societies” in the anonymous interactions modeled in the economic games.
Their study showed the opposite, Henrick said.
“In our view, it’s actually pretty tough to get people to co-operate in large-scale societies, and it took a lot of cultural evolution over millennia, probably, to get the right set of norms and institutions to internalize the notions of fairness and mutually beneficial exchange,” Henrick said.”
Sharing is never an easy thing as this study points out. I’m glad I live now and there is a modicum of altruism in people these days, as I suspect my career as a hunter-gatherer would be nasty, brutish and short.
I look southward and see the swirling Health Care debate in the United Stated and (still) marvel at the public system 
we have set up here in Canada. Yet, the Alberta Tories seem to think that Health Care is a bad thing. I quote from David Eggen’s Op-Ed from the Edmonton Journal:
“ […] As it happens, health expenditures in relation to gross domestic product in Alberta have stayed at between five and seven per cent for the last 15 years. We continue to compare favourably to other jurisdictions. The Canadian average is about 10 per cent, France and Switzerland are at about 11 per cent and the United States is at 15 per cent. To me, this sounds pretty sustainable.
This helps to reveal the real agenda behind Liepert’s and Duckett’s draconian actions. It is not about “saving medicare” or responding to the recession. People don’t stop getting sick when the economy is weak.
The Alberta government’s real plan is to destabilize our health-care system so it can implement private, for-profit experiments to “fix” medicare. They are purposefully breaking the health-care system so they can hire private contractors to repair it at inflated prices. […]”
Eggen is right on the money when it comes to the model of first breaking the public system, and then rebuilding it 
with private contractors reaping the profits. They tried that in Bolivia; it did not work out so well.
The problem here is the Zombie Electorate which would happily vote a frakking can of beans into office as long as it represented the Progressive Conservatives.
If you would like a non governmental view of what is going on with the Health Care system in Alberta check out the Friends of Medicare Web page.
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