You are currently browsing the monthly archive for May 2010.
The authors of this particular video have taken pains to make particle physics and the LHC as interesting and accessible as possible. Not a lot of meat here, but still the fly though of the LHC site and some of the pictures of the first higher energy collisions are really quite fantastic.
I’m not sure whether to be happy or sad for the nice lady who finally got her drivers license after her 960th try. :)
Not quite the right idea behind parallel parking...
SEOUL, South Korea – A South Korean woman who earned a driver’s license after 960 tries is ready to buy a car and get behind the wheel.
Yonhap news agency reported Thursday that 69-year-old Cha Sa-soon passed the driving part of the test last month on her 10th try. South Korea requires a written test first, and Cha took it nearly daily since April 2005 before passing last year.
It is a video week here at DWR for better or worse. Sometimes you just want to share cool stuff with people, the Rationalist Anthem fits nicely into that category.
I don't do "women's rights".
Steven Harper does not believe in female autonomy. If his mendacious crew of ethically challenged social conservatives ever took power women across the country would have to mobilize and shut this country down to protect our reproductive freedoms. Evidence of the Conservative disregard for women is writ large as the Conservative government has decided, as a part of its’ G8 platform on women’s issues, not to fund abortions as a part of maternal reproductive care in the third world.
You would think that outright crazy crank-batshittery would take a holiday at least once in awhile. Unfortunately for us Canadians we are still given the pleasure of living under the yoke of religious-inspired delusional conservative ‘morals’ . Rule one in their insipid handbook of perfidious ass-hattery is this: If ye be woman, ye shall not have rights – especially when the holy fetus is involved. Let us examine what the Canadian government stance is, from the CBC report on our G8 position:
“International Co-operation Minister Bev Oda said the government would consider funding family planning measures such as contraception, but not abortion under any circumstances.
“We’re saying that we’re using the definition in our discussions of family planning, which does not include abortion,” Oda told reporters on Monday in Halifax, where she was meeting with her G8 counterparts.
“We’re not debating abortion; we’re clarifying family planning.”
Which is akin to making a garden salad without any allowing the use of any lettuce. Thank you Bev Oda for your wonderfully refreshing anti-woman stance. It is always hearting to see government policy based on fatuous religious beliefs, because the the frak needs evidence?
The Lancet has called the Canadian Conservative Government on its mendacity:
Canada’s position against funding abortions abroad is ‘hypocritical and unjust,’ a medical journal editorial says (via the CBC).
“The Canadian Government does not deprive women living in Canada from access to safe abortions; it is therefore hypocritical and unjust that it tries to do so abroad,” the Lancet says in an editorial Saturday.
The conservatives hypocritical? Not this bunch, the very same that want to abolish the gun registry despite the fact that police forces across the nation are strongly in favour of the gun registry. This is the same group of politicians who gleefully brought down the Martin minority government on charges of corruption that are now currently wallowing in the Jafer/Afghan Detainee accountability scandals of their own (not to mention the unwarranted prorogation of parliament). I digress. The Lancet editorial brings us back on track though:
“Although the country’s decision only affects a small number of developing countries where abortion is legal, bans on the procedure, which are detrimental to public health, should be challenged by the G8, not tacitly supported. Canada and the other G8 nations could show real leadership with a final maternal health plan that is based on sound scientific evidence and not prejudice.”
Decisions based on evidence? What is this crazy talk about ‘evidence’ you leftard crypto-fascist Lancet editors?!
“The Lancet said the plan’s omission of improved access to safe abortion services “is no accident, but a conscious decision by Canada’s Conservative Government not to support groups that undertake abortions in developing countries.”
“This stance must change,” the editorial said, noting 70,000 women die from unsafe abortions worldwide each year.”
Ah, but it is only 70,000 women who die per year. Come on they are just people women after all.
Rona Ambrose, who I would not trust to successfully rub two dimes together, spouts the following tom foolery as a ‘reply’:
Rona Ambrose, the status of women minister, defended Canada’s G8 initiative, citing a statement by World Vision Canada that the abortion debate was clouding the issue while 8.8 million children die every year from causes that would cost pennies to prevent. World Vision, one of the world’s largest humanitarian organizations, opposes abortion as a family planning method.
Ah, yes those damn womenz and their bodies. They just need to shut the f*ck up and die quietly.
Ambrose said the government wants to save the lives of women and children, Ambrose said.
“We ask the opposition to stop playing politics with this issue.”
Ah, yes I am guessing ‘Playing politics’ actually means: Stop debating our irrational faith based position with real world evidence and fact. You are just not playing fair; being all evidence based and supported by fact and what not. Let us leave reason firmly outside the political playpen.
Playing politics indeed. The buffoonery that passes for reasonable arguments from conservatives is shocking. How many clown cars need to be called in before Canada squares its position on abortion with reality?
I’m guessing not until the Conservatives are out of power and once again bidden to the background, where they belong.
If you have not been keeping up with the ytube drama that is going on with Thunderfoot and his tangle with Islam I suggest you check out his channel as the smack is being laid down with great alacrity.
Wow a double video post. Crazy, I know, but you really cannot have one without the other. The following is the more scary and less funny of the two.
This is the basis for a good deal of the argumentation in Sam Harris’s The End of Faith. The facet that I wish to point out that is that so called “moderates” of any religion are still responsible for what the crazy whack-a-loons do as they are part of a bullshite system of delusional belief that propagates an irrational view of the world.
FGM: Never accetpable
Female Genital Mutilation just made the news again because the American Association of Pediatrics proclaimed in their article the following:
“There is reason to believe that offering such a compromise may build trust between hospitals and immigrant communities, save some girls from undergoing disfiguring and life-threatening procedures in their native countries, and play a role in the eventual eradication of FGC. It might be more effective if federal and state laws enabled pediatricians to reach out to families by offering a ritual nick as a possible compromise to avoid greater harm.”
Okay, so by tolerating ‘just a little’ female disfigurement we can make the problem of major disfigurement go away?
Unbelievable.
The level of dissonance from this article is staggering. It appears that the APP is speaking out of both sides of its mouth on the issue.
“FGC becomes a physical sign of a woman’s marriageability, with social control over her sexual pleasure by clitorectomy and over reproduction by infibulation (sewing together the labia so that the vaginal opening is about the
width of a pencil).”
We certainly cannot weigh in on the cultural norms being expressed here, that would be colonial and ethnocentric of us to do so… Horsepucky. Disfiguring women in order to control them transcends the bounds of the cultural-relativist argument. From a purely physiological standpoint here is what FGM does to women:
“Infibulation (type 3 FGC) is often associated with longterm gynecologic or urinary tract difficulties. Common gynecologic problems involve the development of painful subcutaneous dermoid cysts and keloid formation along excised tissue edges. More serious complications include pelvic infection, dysmenorrhea, hematocolpos, painful intercourse, infertility, recurrent urinary tract infection, and urinary calculus formation. Pelvic examination is difficult or impossible for women who have been infibulated, and vaginal childbirth can present significant challenges. Scarring may prevent accurate monitoring of labor and fetal descent. Although deinfibulation may facilitate delivery, women who have undergone deinfibulation are at increased risk of complications, including perineal tears, wound infections, separation of repaired episiotomies, postpartum hemorrhage, and sepsis.”
In other words, a fully loaded shit-bucket of ugly side effects that detract and can even take a woman’s life.
“Many anti-FGC activists in the West, including women from African countries, strongly oppose any compromise that would legitimize even the most minimal procedure.4 There is also some evidence (eg, in Scandinavia) that a criminalization of the practice, with the attendant risk of losing custody of one’s children, is one of the factors that led to abandonment of this tradition among Somali immigrants”
This is precisely the view that should win out. We do not accept barbaric acts of disfigurement in our secular society. It is something to be educated about, rallied and fought against. I commend the AAP for including a dissenting view in the corpus of their article.
What remains is the suggestion brought forth by the APP that FGM in some forms is an acceptable practice in our society. FGM in any form is, according the article, still illegal in the US. I think it is irresponsible to suggest that certain forms of mutilating women’s bodies becomes an acceptable standard practice in any context.
Concordance on how anecdata is no substitute for real data.
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