"Darwin was the first to use data from nature to convince people that evolution is true, and his idea of natural selection was truly novel. It testifies to his genius that the concept of natural theology, accepted by most educated Westerners before 1859, was vanquished within only a few years by a single five-hundred-page book. On the Origin of Species turned the mysteries of life's diversity from mythology into genuine science." -- Jerry Coyne
An interesting fact: Ayaan Hirsi Ali is an atheist, aka normal person. I recommend her book "Infidel".
Are you suggesting that religious people are not normal?
In the 21st century that's true. It's not normal to believe in supernatural nonsense. We know things these days.
Why is it that some atheists (among whom I count "some of my best friends") often feel they must become as loudly and insistently intolerant as some religious fanatics?
Why should I tolerate ridiculous fantasies which I know are wrong? Also look at what religion has given the world, women treated like farm animals, out of control violence, brainwashing, and in America a religious war against teaching science especially evolution. I'm suppose to tolerate this Dark Ages nonsense?
Orthodox Judaism is ridiculous and disgusting. They are equal to Muslim morons. They are a minority of Jews and I usually ignore them.
The other cults are equally ridiculous and disgusting.
Islam (also known as the world's largest terrorist organization) treats women like farm animals. I already wrote about these stupid assholes elsewhere. The only solution is nuking Mecca but that would be wrong.
Catholicism (also known as the world's largest sexual child abuse organization): Women can't be priests, bishops, cardinals, and popes. Only guys who like to molest children get those jobs.
I could spend all day looking things up and writing about these religious cowards but I'm not going to do that. I would rather waste my time playing chess even though I'm on a terrible losing streak these days.
Today's Wall Street Journal has an interesting article about Muslim scum and their fear of women which I will copy & paste here. It was written by an ex-Muslim, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, who is now a normal person, aka atheist. How she went from Muslim moron to normal person is described in her excellent book "Infidel".
Another interesting fact: Ayaan Hirsi Ali requires body guards the rest of her life for obvious reasons.
The article is about Saudi Arabia where women are required to wear black tents.
Mohammed bin Salman, Saudi Arabia’s crown prince, is in the United Kingdom this week to meet two female leaders: Queen Elizabeth II and Prime Minister Theresa May. He will see for himself that women have as much to contribute to public life as men.
In Saudi Arabia, governed by Shariah (Islamic law), a woman must live under the authority of a male guardian, her wali al-amr. The Quran (4:34) says, “Men are the protectors and maintainers of women, because Allah has given the one more [strength] than the other, and because they support them from their means.” The General Presidency for Scholarly Research, an official body in charge of Islamic legal opinion, has issued a fatwa construing the verse strictly: “A woman should not leave her house, except with her husband’s permission.”
Saudi women do not have freedom of movement and never become fully independent legal persons. Regardless of age, they need permission from a male guardian to travel overseas, apply for a passport, marry, or be released from prison. The guardian is usually a woman’s father or husband, but can also be a brother, cousin or even son. Imagine the humiliation of a middle-aged woman having to ask a young son’s approval for important and mundane life decisions.
Guardians’ reach doesn’t stop at the border. Last April, 24-year-old Dina Ali Lasloom was held up by Filipino authorities as she changed planes at Manila International Airport. Ms. Lasloom had left Saudi Arabia against her family’s wishes. Her Saudi uncles appeared and whisked her back to Riyadh. An airline official told Human Rights Watch he heard Ms. Lasloom begging for help before being carried out in a wheelchair with duct tape on her mouth, feet and hands. The Saudi government said this was “a family matter,” and she has not been heard from since.
Could things finally be changing? Around the time Ms. Lasloom was returned to Saudi Arabia, King Salman loosened the guardianship law, permitting women to access services such as health care without the approval of a male relative. Since then, he and the crown prince have promised women the right to vote, work, drive and even join the military. But those rights don’t amount to much with the male guardianship regime in place.
As part of his tour of the U.K. and U.S., the crown prince is hoping to persuade investors to back his Saudi modernization plan, Vision 2030. He stood up to Wahhabi clerics to allow concerts and sporting events in the kingdom, and he confronted the country’s wealthy elite last November, detaining those suspected of corruption at the Riyadh Ritz-Carlton.
There could be no clearer demonstration of the crown prince’s commitment to bringing Saudi Arabia into the modern era than dismantling the guardianship system. It would earn him credibility with investors and unlock the productive capacity of Saudi women, fewer than 18% of whom participate in the labor force.
In 1962, a Saudi royal decree was issued forbidding the sale and purchase of slaves in Saudi Arabia. That, too, was better late than never. Crown Prince Mohammed should belatedly end the subjugation of Saudi women and cement his place as one of the Middle East’s great reformers.
Ms. Hirsi Ali is a research fellow at the Hoover Institution and founder of the AHA Foundation.
The resignation of Gary Cohn is a significant blow to Donald Trump’s Presidency, and recovering from it will be a significant challenge.
Departures are normal after a President’s second year, but the circumstances of Mr. Cohn’s leave-taking as top economic advisor are anything but normal after only 14 months.
Mr. Cohn was in the middle of a major policy dispute inside the Trump administration over trade policy. On one side were Mr. Cohn and free-trade advocates, and on the other was the Administration’s protectionist wing led by Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross, trade negotiator Robert Lighthizer and Mr. Trump’s personal trade swami, Peter Navarro.
Losing policy disputes comes with the job, but the particulars of this loss revealed more about Mr. Trump’s increasingly self-damaging style of managing his senior officials.
Last week, the President announced his intention to impose tariffs on imported steel and aluminum, though “announcement” overstates what happened. Mr. Trump essentially blurted out the news at a White House meeting, blind-siding Mr. Cohn and the rest of the Administration team, in what amounted to a coup d’état by Mr. Ross and the protectionists.
Predictably the news caused a firestorm in financial markets and among countries who are not merely U.S. trading partners but its needed allies on international security issues, such as enforcing sanctions against North Korea.
Mr. Cohn leaves behind a strong legacy. He pushed hard for deregulatory initiatives that have produced strong growth. With Council of Economic Advisers Chair Kevin Hassett, he ran point for the White House on the big tax-cut bill. As important, Mr. Cohn assembled a first-rate team of policy advisors, not just on taxes but also on health care and infrastructure.
So an obvious question: Who will replace him? Put differently, who in the community of free-market economic specialists would take the job now? Mr. Cohn, a strong personality in his own right, provided ballast against some of Mr. Trump’s worst economic-policy instincts. It is difficult to imagine that anyone outside the President’s current protectionist cheer-leading squad would volunteer to put up with more of what happened during the past week.
Mr. Trump’s early appointments to key Cabinet positions and to the White House policy-making apparatus were often stellar. Now, surely, the mill of rumors will begin grinding about more departures of top people, such as National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster.
A successful President needs allies, and Mr. Trump has had them so far. By contrast, the tariff decision is a leadership fiasco that has cost Mr. Trump a key ally in Gary Cohn. It is a loss, and this Presidency cannot afford more like it.
Appeared in the March 7, 2018, print edition as 'The Cohn Departure.'
Tis' the last rose of summer left blooming alone
All her lovely companions are faded and gone
No flower of her kindred, no rosebud is nigh
To reflect back her blushes, or give sigh for sigh
So soon may I follow, when friendships decay
And from love's shining circle the gems drop away
When true hearts lie wither'd and fond ones are gone
Oh, who would inhabit this bleak world alone?
In a small village of Kojo in northern Iraq, Farida was living a "simple" life, harbouring dreams about the one thing many Western teens see as interfering with their daily life — school.
"We didn't have that big of dreams. My big dream was to continue school to become a maths teacher," she told the ABC.
Later, that very school would forever be stamped in the villagers' memories as a place where their families were murdered.
Born into a family of four brothers and a father who worked for the Iraqi Army, Farida developed a quality she later associated with saving her life.
"The reason that I tried to keep strong was, my father inspired me and said, 'you are strong and I'm sure you will be strong, doesn't matter when and how'," she said.
She now thinks he might have foreseen what was looming — after all, the Yazidis had been persecuted many times before.
And sure enough, on August 3, 2014, Islamic State (IS) militants surrounded the villages near Mount Sinjar.
While hundreds of thousands of Yazidis fled into the mountains where many of them later perished, for the residents in Kojo it was desperately late — IS had already started blockading the nearby villages.
What began as a negotiating campaign to turn the Kurdish religious minority into Muslims ended in genocide.
Men, women and children were taken to the school where they were robbed of their valuables and executed.
She lost her father and all but one brother — she didn't know it then, but he had survived by pretending to be dead among the corpses.
Farida's mother was captured by the militants and the 17-year-old was taken to a slave market in Mosul.
Sold as a sex slave
IS militants grouped slaves into three categories: virgins who were sold as sex slaves and generated income for the caliphate; young women with small kids; and women with older kids and elderly women, who did manual labour.
Teenage Farida's body was sometimes sold, sometimes "gifted" to IS soldiers.
"I have been in many different places when I was in captivity, but most of them, they were the same," she said.
They were markets for Yazidi girls. They [IS soldiers] were selling Yazidi girls and giving them as gifts and raping them again and again.
"I have seen all these things.
"They sold me without money also."
An indication of how far the IS stronghold's tentacles spread — among her buyers were militants from Libya in northern Africa.
Failed escapes lead to torture
During four months of captivity, Farida tried to escape twice from the "military prison-like" buildings. Each failed attempt resulted in torture, leading to seven suicide attempts.
"They were always beating me, and in Syria one day they beat me much more than on other days. Even now some of my friends — the ones who were in captivity with me — say, 'we will never forget how they were beating you'," she said.
All the while, Farida pretended not to speak Arabic.
"One of the reasons was, I didn't want to communicate with them to reveal information when they asked me questions — because of my family," she said.
"Also, I didn't want to read the Koran.
And when they were talking to each other, I pretended I didn't understand Arabic because I wanted to see what they were going to do and what they were going to plan.
And then one day, a Muslim man from Farida's region told the soldiers Yazidis in her village did speak Arabic and she was "lying and cheating".
With her disguise fading and two other imprisoned girls recently killed, she panicked.
"When I was watching how they beat younger girls, aged eight and nine, and they were raping many other girls, beating them, that was giving me more strength to escape and be their voice," she said. Finding a path to freedom
One day, Farida found a phone where a SIM card hadn't been removed and called her uncle.
"When I called my uncle and told him I'm Farida, he told me, 'no, Farida is not alive'. He just cancelled [the call]," she said.
"Then I called him again and told him, 'no, it's me, I'm alive,' until I led him to believe that I'm alive."
Emotively, she started plotting one more escape.
It was something utterly trivial, a negligent act, through which she regained her freedom.
They thought they had locked the door, but it was actually open," she said.
That night, at 1:00am she and five other girls ran out of the compound in Syria.
Anxious the militants were going to track them down, the girls walked all night and hid in the valley — until they saw a house.
"I told my friends, 'I'll go and see at the house if they can help us," she said.
"If the family in the house is also with IS, I will not come back. Don't come to the same house and follow me."
But one of the girls interjected: "You have helped me all the while, and I will not let you go alone."
The family in the house helped them flee, but her escape highlights the more sinister, financial motives of some who assisted the IS captives.
"They helped us, but we paid them later," she said.
Nowhere to call home
Farida, like many former IS sex slaves, found herself alone in a refugee camp in Iraq — freed but nothing to return to.
There, she met Professor Jan Kizilhan, the head of a German refugee program — the Special Quota Project — which has seen psychological treatment and visas granted to 1,100 former IS slaves.
He has personally interviewed and conducted psychological tests on 1,400 sex slaves like Farida. The stories are gut-wrenching.
"When a nine-year-old girl sat in front of me and told the story of how they [IS terrorists] observed when they executed her father and grandfather, and took her alone to the city of Mosul and later to Raqqa, and during 10 months was raped around 100 times by eight different men, you ask yourself, 'how can this happen?'," he said.
"This girl asked me many times, 'why are humans so cruel?'."
Sometimes it took him weeks to decide who could be given a new chance in Germany.
With one 16-year-old rape survivor in a refugee camp, it was a matter of days.
"At [one] night, she had a nightmare and she believed that IS was coming back to take her again. She panicked and thought, 'what can I do, because I know if they take me they will rape me again'," he said.
So, in her shock situation she took gasoline and burnt herself — 80 per cent of her skin was totally burnt.
"I talked urgently with our government and in two or three days we were able to take a special flight and bring her to Germany, and she has had 28 operations." Adjusting to a safer world
Farida and other former sex slaves were given a chance to new life in the "free world".
They were accommodated in safe houses in south-west Germany.
The organisers were initially fearful IS would continue to target the women — once raped, the women are "married" to the militants and "belong to them". Professor Kizilhan said some women were still threatened by the soldiers via social media.
When the girls and women first arrived, they huddled in the same room and locked the door every night. Now, they sometimes lock it, sometimes it stays open.
Slowly, they have started regaining control of their lives, the program's social worker Marion said.
"The mothers had to grow into the role of the head of the family. They don't know this role. And little by little, they learn it," she said.
They live a normal life here, but I think they don't recover completely. I think their whole life was shaped by the experience.
Professor Kizilhan agreed, but said psychotherapy had enabled the girls and women to control the symptoms — and evidence is in statistics.
In refugee camps, he documented about 60 suicides of former IS sex slaves. None of the 1,100 children and women assisted by the Special Quota Project have attempted suicide since arriving in Germany. 'I can be alive again'
Three years on, Farida has taken back her independence.
"When I came to Germany and they helped me and supported me, that was a way that I can be alive again," she said.
Through the Special Quota Project, she was joined by her brother and mother. Her life is now mostly spent in meetings, trains and airports, giving up to 20 speeches a week to raise awareness about the roughly 3,000 girls and women still in sexual enslavement.
"Your community, families, friends are waiting for you. Never think that they won't accept you. Be hopeful and one day you will be free."
"God is the creator of life. He has the right to take it away".
Obviously this stupid fucking asshole for Jeebus is an evolution denier, aka uneducated moron. Also he has the moral values of a terrorist. Typical Christian fucktard.
Even in the most remote areas of the open ocean, plastic flotsam can be found, with far-reaching consequences for marine life. Many animals appear to be choosing a plastic diet. Every year, around 8 million metric tons of plastic waste enters the ocean.
Plastic doesn’t just look like food, it smells, feels and even sounds like food.
In a recent interview about Blue Planet II, David Attenborough describes a sequence in which an albatross arrives at its nest to feed its young.
“And what comes out of the mouth?” he says. “Not fish, and not squid – which is what they mostly eat. Plastic.”
It is, as Attenborough says, heartbreaking. It’s also strange. Albatrosses forage over thousands of kilometres in search of their preferred prey, which they pluck from the water with ease. How can such capable birds be so easily fooled, and come back from their long voyages with nothing but a mouthful of plastic?
It’s small comfort to discover that albatrosses are not alone. At least 180 species of marine animals have been documented consuming plastic, from tiny plankton to gigantic whales. Plastic has been found inside the guts of a third of UK-caught fish, including species that we regularly consume as food. It has also been found in other mealtime favourites like mussels and lobsters. In short, animals of all shapes and sizes are eating plastic, and with 12.7 million tons of the stuff entering the oceans every year, there’s plenty to go around.
The prevalence of plastic consumption is partly a consequence of this sheer quantity. In zooplankton, for example, it corresponds with the concentration of tiny plastic particles in the water because their feeding appendages are designed to handle particles of a certain size. “If the particle falls into this size range it must be food,” says Moira Galbraith, a plankton ecologist at the Institute of Ocean Sciences, Canada.
Like zooplankton, the tentacled, cylindrical creatures known as sea cucumbers don’t seem too fussy about what they eat as they crawl around the ocean beds, scooping sediment into their mouths to extract edible matter. However, one analysissuggested that these bottom-dwellers can consume up to 138 times as much plastic as would be expected, given its distribution in the sediment.
For sea cucumbers, plastic particles may simply be larger and easier to grab with their feeding tentacles than more conventional food items, but in other species there are indications that plastic consumption is more than just a passive process. Many animals appear to be choosing this diet. To understand why animals find plastic so appealing, we need to appreciate how they perceive the world.
“Animals have very different sensory, perceptive abilities to us. In some cases they’re better and in some cases they’re worse, but in all cases they’re different,” says Matthew Savoca at the NOAA Southwest Fisheries Science Center in Monterey, California.
One explanation is that animals simply mistake plastic for familiar food items – plastic pellets, for example, are thought to resemble tasty fish eggs. But as humans we are biased by our own senses. To appreciate animals’ love of plastic, scientists must try to view the world as they do.
Humans are visual creatures, but when foraging many marine animals, including albatrosses, rely primarily on their sense of smell. Savoca and his colleagues have conducted experiments suggesting that some species of seabirds and fishare attracted to plastic by its odour. Specifically, they implicated dimethyl sulfide (DMS), a compound known to attract foraging birds, as the chemical cue emanating from plastic. Essentially, algae grows on floating plastic, and when that algae is eaten by krill – a major marine food source – it releases DMS, attracting birds and fish that then munch on the plastic instead of the krill they came for.
Even for vision, we can’t jump to conclusions when considering the appeal of plastic. Like humans, marine turtles rely primarily on their vision to search for food. However, they are also thought to possess the capacity to see UV light, making their vision quite different from our own.
Qamar Schuyler at The University of Queensland, Australia, has got into turtles’ heads by modelling their visual capabilities and then measuring the visual characteristics of plastics as turtles see them. She has also examined the stomach contents of deceased turtles to get a sense of their preferred plastics. Her conclusion is that while young turtles are relatively indiscriminate, older turtles preferentially target soft, translucent plastic. Schuyler thinks her results confirm a long-held idea that turtles mistake plastic bags for delicious jellyfish.
Colour is also thought to factor into plastic consumption, although preference varies between species. Young turtles prefer white plastic, while Schuyler and her colleagues found that seabirds called shearwaters opt for red plastic.
Besides sight and smell, there are other senses animals use to find food. Many marine animals hunt by echolocation, notably toothed whales and dolphins. Echolocation is known to be incredibly sensitive, and yet dozens of sperm whales and other toothed whales have been found dead with stomachs full of plastic bags, car parts and other human detritus. Savoca says it’s likely their echolocation misidentifies these objects as food.
“There’s this misconception that these animals are dumb and just eat plastic because it is around them, but that is not true,” says Savoca. The tragedy is that all these animals are highly accomplished hunters and foragers, possessing senses honed by millennia of evolution to target what is often a very narrow range of prey items. “Plastics have really only been around for a tiny fraction of that time,” says Schuyler. In that time, they have somehow found themselves into the category marked ‘food’.
Because plastic has something for everyone. It doesn’t just look like food, it smells, feels and even sounds like food. Our rubbish comes in such a range of shapes, sizes and colours that it appeals to a similarly diverse array of animals, and this is the problem. Schuyler recalls someone asking, “why don't we make all the plastics blue?”, seeing as experiments suggest this colour is less popular among turtles. But other studies have shown that for other species the opposite is true.
So if there is no ‘one size fits all’ solution, no aspect of plastic that we can easily change to prevent animals from eating it, then what can we take from our foray into the minds of plastic-eaters? Savoca hopes that tragic stories like Attenborough’s albatross will help to turn the consumer tide against disposable plastics and encourage people to empathise with these animals. Ultimately this will help to cut off the supply of junk food pouring into the oceans.
In the case of John Paul II, Vatican experts examined the medical evidence for an allegedly miraculous cure from Parkinson's Disease of a 49-year-old French nun, Sister Marie Simon-Pierre Normand. Sister Marie said that she and her fellow nuns prayed for the intercession of Pope John Paul II after his death. Her sudden cure had no logical medical explanation, the Vatican says.
Women will be able to drive in Saudi Arabia from June 2018
This is progress but I would more impressed if these women were not forced to wear a black tent. The way it is now is just plain fucking stupid. Islam is the most disgusting religious cult ever invented.
Free cash flow (FCF) is a measure of a company's financial performance, calculated as operating cash flow minus capital expenditures. FCF represents the cash that a company is able to generate after spending the money required to maintain or expand its asset base.
According to the myth the Magic Jeebus Man was the son of the all-knowing Magic Man. Therefore most likely the Magic Jeebus Man had all the evidence he wanted to prove the Magic Man was real. Faith is only required for bullshit that has zero evidence. So Jeebus did not require faith.
These days we know the only all-knowing thing in the universe is Google Search.
Without a respite in the bombing, humanitarian aid convoys have struggled to get in. In only the second delivery this year, buses on Monday made their way into the district, according to the U.N.’s humanitarian affairs office, but the organization said it wasn’t clear if the convoy had even been unloaded or its contents distributed.
Unable to get out, Eastern Ghouta residents are now hunkered down underground.
Two days after the regime launched its offensive, Sidra and her husband took their 13-year-old daughter, their cell phones and the little food—mostly dried greens—left in their apartment and ran to the only underground shelter in their neighborhood in Saqba. Days after they fled, a barrage of rockets struck near their building and damaged their home.
The dusty basement they now shared with 14 other families was once used as a warehouse by a furniture merchant. After removing useless furniture, they laid out mattresses and hung up curtains for a bathroom. The men tried to fortify the basement with sandbags meant to help absorb the blasts or shrapnel from barrel bombs.
Across Eastern Ghouta, which contains three cities and 14 towns including Saqba, residents worry whether their underground shelters will be sturdy enough to protect them and whether they will have enough to eat. Sidra says her daughter fainted twice in the past week from hunger and panic.
The continuing assault has sharpened international criticism of Syria and its allies, Russia and Iran—as well as of the U.N. for failing to secure the cease-fire.
But for those sheltering underground in Eastern Ghouta, whose number local doctors and activists estimate in the tens of thousands, none of the international condemnation has brought any relief.
Mohammad Abu Alaa helped prepare his neighborhood’s bunker, a dirt-floored basement that now houses more than 100 people, mostly women and children. They hung curtains in the 650-square-foot room to divide it into women’s and men’s sections and a third area for a wooden stove, even though there isn’t much food to cook.
There is no bathroom and no heat. The only time people venture above ground is to look for food, cow’s milk for the babies or to use the bathroom.
“When the strikes simmer down we go to the nearest house in order to use the bathrooms,” Mr. Abu Alaa said. “But because of the never-ending shelling some kids are too afraid to go out to the bathroom. Sometimes they just pee on themselves because they panic from shelling.”
Bayan Rehan, a councilwoman in Douma, eastern Ghouta’s largest city, tried sticking it out in her home at first but was forced to leave after missiles struck her building on the fifth day of the regime’s assault. Amid intense shelling, she and her extended family fled to a nearby basement.
“We had two minutes to run 150 meters towards the nearest shelter for women and children,” she wrote in a Facebook post. “And we couldn’t take anything; we simply wanted to survive the hellfire raining on us.”
Once inside, she wrote, she looked around at the frightened faces around her and was reminded of her time spent in one of the regime’s notorious prisons.
To calm the screaming children that night, she gathered them around her and told them stories about Moses—considered a prophet in Islam—and snippets of “Gone With the Wind,” which she said she chose because it is about the importance of home.
In Sidra’s shelter adults tell stories about heaven, in part to lessen children’s fear about dying as they hear the pounding overhead.
“We tell them there are biscuits, fruits and bread [in heaven],” she said. “Some children then ask us, ‘When are we going to heaven?’”
Wikipedia: In a 2008 Gallup poll, Sri Lanka was ranked the third most religious country in the world, with 99% of Sri Lankans saying religion was an important part of their daily life.
99% of the population are religious fucktards so of course there would be religious violence there.
Wikipedia - Buddhism: The belief that there is an afterlife and not everything ends with death, that Buddha taught and followed a successful path to nirvana;[170] according to Peter Harvey, the right view is held in Buddhism as a belief in the Buddhist principles of karma and rebirth, and the importance of the Four Noble Truths and the True Realities.
Sri Lankan soldiers removed debris from a vandalized building in Digana, a suburb of Kandy, on March 6. Buddhist groups swept through the town Monday, burning Muslim-owned shops and homes.
COLOMBO, Sri Lanka—A state of emergency was declared Tuesday after clashes between Muslims and Buddhists killed at least one person and scores of houses and shops were burned down.
The fighting, which erupted Monday, saw some 27 Muslim-owned shops and businesses as well as several houses set on fire in the central hill town of Digana. The clashes spread to the nearby towns of Theldeniya and Pallakelle, where Buddhist houses were also attacked. At least one mosque was damaged overnight.
Buddhist-Muslim tensions have flared in recent years with the growth of extremist Buddhist organizations, which accuse Muslims of forcing people to convert to Islam and destroying sacred Buddhist sites. Hate groups in Sri Lanka have spread their message on social media platforms.
To prevent further fighting, the Sri Lankan government declared a state of emergency following a special cabinet meeting Tuesday.
Police fired tear gas at the crowds and arrested 24 people Monday. Several petrol bombs were found and confiscated by police Tuesday morning. A 24-year-old was found dead after his home was set ablaze by mobs on Monday night, police said.
More than 1,000 police, army and special forces were deployed to the area. Police countrywide have been placed on alert as Muslim communities in the eastern part of the country and capital city of Colombo protested the violence, demanding action from the government.
“We completely condemn this violence and have already initiated investigations into the incidents,” Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe said in a statement to the parliament. He called for calm and pledged to provide compensation to affected parties.
Muslim parliamentarians protested in parliament, insisting repeated clashes had made them lose faith in law enforcement authorities. Opposition Tamil politicians also condemned what they saw as government inaction on escalating violence between majority Sinhalese Buddhists and minority Muslims.
Buddhists make up about 74% of Sri Lanka’s population, with Tamils at 12% and Muslims at 10% being the two largest minorities in the country’s 20 million population.
The First Amendment to the Constitution opens with a dual pledge of religious liberty: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.” The first part of this provision has come to be known as the Establishment Clause. While the “free exercise” of religion promised in the rest of the sentence has been taken by many to trump the Establishment Clause, those first 10 words have been heavily litigated and generally interpreted by courts as supporting Thomas Jefferson’s intent to erect a “wall of separation between Church and State.”
To be clear, the prohibition regarding an establishment of religion only limits the actions of the government (federal and state, by virtue of the 14th Amendment) in supporting a specific religion. While government buildings may be restricted from displaying Nativity scenes or the oft-neglected Ten Commandments, individuals are free to display signs and symbols of their faith, and to proselytize within established norms of time, place and methodology.
They are also free within religious institutions of learning to teach religion and to infuse every course in the curriculum with religious content, if they choose to do so. But in schools supported by the government, teaching should not favor or endorse the views of one religion over another. This tension between the constitutional dictates of the Establishment Clause and the usually well-intentioned efforts of proponents of religious education in public schools is most vividly displayed in disputes over the teaching of creationism.
Teaching “creation science” in public schools has been outlawed since the 1987 U.S. Supreme Court case of Edwards vs. Aguillard. The biblically-based creation science was easy to refute: Creation was attributed to the God of Genesis, the universe was pulled together in seven days and any evidence to the contrary (e.g., fossils and millions of years of sediments) was also God’s doing. The clearest indication of the religious roots of creationism was its reference to God as the creator. In the following years, creationists regrouped, evolved and challenged the teaching of evolution with the concept of “intelligent design,” prudently stripped of references to God and religion. The dogma of intelligent design holds that the existence of this universe, and life as we know it, are too complex to be attributed to evolution and must be the purposeful work of an intelligent designer.
Relabeling God as the intelligent designer gained some proponents, including schoolboards that were emboldened to attempt another assault on the Establishment Clause. The Dover, Pennsylvania, school district required ninth-grade biology students to be told that the theory of evolution was flawed and that intelligent design was an alternative. The strategy was not to remove evolution from the science curriculum (indeed, it was needed for standardized competency testing for high school students), but rather to proffer intelligent design as an alternative “scientific” approach to encourage critical thinking. While this may seem reasonable on its face, this approach ignores the nature of science as a rigorous, fact-based, data-driven discipline, and elevated the untestable body of work supporting intelligent design as being co-equal to science.
The school board’s approach was challenged in court, and in 2005 the federal district court reviewing the matter held that intelligent design was not science, but a matter of religion. The presiding judge stated that the doctrine had “utterly no place in science curriculum.” In addition to losing the case, the school board in Dover was voted out as the trial wound down, but efforts to revive intelligent design sprang up in other states, such as Kansas. There, the state board of education supported teaching intelligent design by endorsing language suggesting that key concepts such as a common origin for all life on Earth and for species change were seen as controversial by the scientific community (they’re not), and rewriting the definition of science as merely a search for rational explanations of what occurs in the universe. To its credit, Kansas reversed this effort just two years later, reviving Jefferson’s intent.
More support for evolution comes from a surprising source — a crayfish born of a virgin. Dealers introduced a marbled crayfish into the German aquarium trade in the mid-1990s. Apparently it evolved from a species known as the slough crayfish, Procambarus fallax, which originated in Florida and Georgia. Unlike other members of the fallax species — or for that matter, any other crayfish — the new crayfish, which did not exist 25 years ago, has three sets of chromosomes and is capable of unisexual reproduction (parthenogenesis). Apparently a drastic mutation in one crayfish (perhaps caused by the extreme change in environments) produced the new marbled crayfish, Procambarus virginalis.
The virginalis crayfish are clones of a single parent, each of which is capable of reproducing without a mate. Environmentalists are concerned that the new species will breed rapidly and displace other less-fit species. Ironically, these recently-evolved virgin clones likely carry the seeds of their own ultimate demise. They are identical copies of each other, and accordingly are susceptible to species-wide disease or parasites that might otherwise cause but a ripple in a more genetically-diverse population. Whether in 10 years or 10,000, they probably will cede their place to other more robust species. For crayfish and creationists alike, the inexorable and astonishing grind of evolution will continue apace, whether one chooses to believe it or not.
Ray Ramirez is an attorney practicing, yet never perfecting, law in Texas while waiting patiently for a MacArthur Genius Grant. You may contact him at patrayram@sbcglobal.net
The views expressed in this column are those of the author and not necessarily those of The Observer.
Peregrine Falcons are considered the fastest animal on the planet, with average cruising speed of 37 – 53 kilometers per hour (24 – 33 miles per hour), up to 107 KPH (67 MPH) when hunting down their prey. When “stooping” (dropping on their prey with wings closed), the Peregrine Falcon can achieve speeds over 321 KPH (200 MPH).
Male Peregrine Falcons visit Tower Girl in the late winter and early spring to start courtship and mating.
Austin’s abundant pigeon, dove and grackle population make up much of the diet for Tower Girl. However, Peregrines do have predators of their own they have to watch out for. These include other birds like Great Horned owls, Gyrfalcons, and other Peregrine Falcons.
Austin is considered the edge of the peregrine breeding range, so any hatching eggs atop the UT Tower would expand the known breeding range of the species.
UT Austin students in classes such as Biology of Birds observe Tower Girl and use her to practice their field-work and observational skills.
Peregrines are considered an endangered species success story. A ban on the chemical DDT led them to be removed from the federal endangered species list in 1999. However, Texas Parks & Wildlife notes that Peregrine Falcons continue to have "threatened" status in Texas.
The Peregrine Falcon is the national animal of the United Arab Emirates, and the official city bird of Chicago. It also makes an appearance on the 2007 Idaho state quarter. Most Peregrine Falcons migrate but Tower Girl has lived in Austin year-round, spending time at both the UT Tower and the Frost Bank Tower downtown.
“The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully.” -- Richard Dawkins
"Supernatural explanations always mean the end of inquiry: that's the way God wants it, end of story. Science, on the other hand, is never satisfied: our studies of the universe will continue until humans go extinct."
Everyone should read "Why Evolution Is True". The information in this book is important and well explained. Every paragraph is interesting. There is nothing tedious in this book.
"Is there a reason that a God would need to exist?"
The magic god fairy was invented by uneducated morons to explain the universe they did not understand. The idea is simple and it goes like this: "God Did It."
We know things these days. The god of the gaps has run out of hiding places. The magic god fairy's magic wand was never necessary for anything therefore it's not real.
Here in Idiot America where I live there is a very popular religious cult called "Christianity". It's about an ancient preacher man who was also the son of the Magical Master of the Entire Universe. The dead preacher was called "Jeebus". Jeebus got himself executed and then according to the myth the decomposing Jeebus magically became a zombie. The zombie Jeebus then bragged about not being dead anymore. His moron friends were impressed and so they sucked up to him. A few days later the zombie Jeebus magically flew to the clouds, taking advantage of the cloudy day.
Of course this whole thing is bullshit but the vast majority of America's fucktards believe the entire ridiculous story is real.
Jeebus told his idiot customers if they sucked up to him they would have a magical 2nd life in a magical paradise after they drop dead. The idiots liked that idea because reality made them cry.
They called the magical thing "heaven" and it's so popular there are millions of Americans who are 100% certain it's real.
How does this bullshit work? Every human ape (but not chimpanzee apes for some reason) has something called a "soul" which is inside them. The soul is invisible and weightless. After a coward drops dead the magical soul magically flies to the magical heaven (location unknown) where it magically becomes a duplicate body of the decomposing corpse left on Earth.
I'm not making any of this bullshit up.
Now the dead cowards have a magical 2nd life in their duplicate bodies which have a wonderful magical time forever and forever. The coward's 2nd life never ends. Trillions of years from now, long after the entire universe goes extinct the magical heaven continues to have fantastic parties and other stuff.
I repeat: I'm not making any of this bullshit up.
Most Americans think the entire ridiculous fantasy is real.
Does this mean most Americans are batshit crazy? Yes, that's exactly what their problem is.
Extreme stupidity is part of the problem but mostly it's an incurable mental illness.
In this photo taken Wednesday, May 3, 2017, Sudan, the world's last male northern white rhino, is photographed at the Ol Pejeta Conservancy in Laikipia county in Kenya. The health of 45-year-old Sudan is reported to be deteriorating and his minders said Thursday, March 1, 2018, that his "future is not looking bright."
By CHRISTOPHER TORCHIA, ASSOCIATED PRESS JOHANNESBURG March 3, 2018
Old and sick, the world's last male northern white rhino has surprised his keepers by getting up and walking around at a wildlife area in Kenya.
The 45-year-old rhino named Sudan moved during the night and took a "delicious mud bath" after long-awaited rains fell, the Ol Pejeta Conservancy said Saturday on Twitter. It noted that March 3 is U.N. World Wildlife Day and that it had received many messages of concern for the ailing Sudan, who could be euthanized if he continues to suffer from a deep infection on his back right leg.
"He is now resting again and will be attended by the vet team and his keepers throughout the day," said the conservancy, which is also home to the last two female northern white rhinos - Sudan's daughter and granddaughter.
While the rhino subspecies is on the verge of extinction because of poaching, scientists hope to use southern white rhinos as surrogates to carry northern white rhino embryos and give birth. The in vitro process would be conducted using sperm from dead rhinos that is stored in Berlin and eggs extracted by surgery from the females at Ol Pejeta, according to the conservancy.
Some conservationists believe the scientific project stands little chance of rebuilding a viable population of northern white rhinos and say funding and resources should be directed to saving imperiled species with a much better chance of recovery. They refer to Asia's Sumatran and Javan rhinos, with fewer than 100 of each species remaining.
There are roughly 20,000 southern white rhinos in Africa. Their numbers dipped below 100 around a century ago, but an intense effort initiated by South African conservationist Ian Player in the mid-20th century turned things around. Even so, the southern white rhino and another species, the black rhino, are under heavy pressure from poachers who kill them for their horns to supply illegal markets in parts of Asia.
Northern white rhinos once roamed parts of Chad, Sudan, Uganda, Congo and Central African Republic, and were particularly vulnerable because of the armed conflicts that have swept the region over decades.
"They had the bad luck to be living in war zones," said Jo Shaw, African rhino expert for the WWF conservation group. ——— Follow Christopher Torchia on Twitter at www.twitter.com/torchiachris
"The original creation account of the old testament was originally written much earlier by the Sumerians."
The know-nothing morons who wrote the idiotic bible copied and pasted stuff from previous civilizations. I'm not surprised.
These days know-nothing morons still exist. They would rather believe in ancient bullshit which has zero evidence than accept the overwhelming evidence for evolution. In the 21st century that's quite a feat. These retards for Jeebus have to go out of their way to know nothing.
On the Danger Islands of Antarctica, researchers have discovered one of the world’s largest colonies of Adélie penguins, harboring more than a million birds of a species long thought to be succumbing to changing weather patterns and dwindling food supplies.
The Adélies are dressed by nature in formal black and white. Their eyes are rimmed by distinctive white rings that resemble spectacles. And in recent decades, their fortunes have shifted with long-term changes in the annual ice conditions on which they depend, with eight or more colonies along the Antarctic Peninsula vanishing.
For that reason, the discovery of such a large new colony surprised some scientists.
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Somebody else wrote this excellent comment for the brain-dead Republicans who think human caused global warming is wrong:
"Those skeptical of the motivations of the scientific community should note that this new information was reported by scientists in a scientific journal. The scientific method is agnostic, and the scientific community is generally honest. If the data contradict accepted theories, then publish the findings and try to explain them. The same applies to anthropogenic climate change. When results which seem to contradict accepted theories become available, scientists acknowledge them and try to explain them. Scientists love to prove each other wrong! Currently, the vast majority of scientists believe the data in support of anthropogenic climate change is overwhelming. If credible new data become available that contradict the accepted theories, scientists will acknowledge them and try to explain them, modifying core theories if necessary. The idea that there is a vast conspiracy among scientists is absurd. I'm no fan of Al Gore, but he chose his title well. It's true and damned inconvenient."
Syria's military appears to be advancing on several fronts as it tries to retake the enclave just to the east of the capital, Damascus.
Government forces have now taken 25% of the area, UK-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights monitors say.
A UN aid convoy planned for Sunday has not been able to enter the enclave.
The fighting since 18 February has left more than 600 people dead, many of them children.
How bad is the humanitarian situation?
Neither a daily five-hour truce ordered by the Russians - Syria's main backers - nor the ordering of a nationwide ceasefire by the UN Security Council have led to any humanitarian relief for the enclave.
The UN says that the "collective punishment of civilians is simply unacceptable".
The organisation said it had failed to obtain permission from Syrian officials to allow 40 trucks carrying humanitarian supplies to enter the key town of Douma.
Image copyrightAFPImage captionMore than 600 people have been killed in the past week in the Eastern Ghouta
"Instead of a much-needed reprieve, we continue to see more fighting, more death, and more disturbing reports of hunger and hospitals being bombed," UN regional humanitarian co-ordinator Panos Moumtzis said.
Some 393,000 people are trapped in the besieged enclave.
Opposition sources and journalists on the ground say that hundreds of people have been fleeing the bombardment of Beit Sawa, south of Douma and on the eastern edge of the densely populated centre of the Eastern Ghouta. The enclave is an agricultural region about the size of Manchester in the UK.
Residents, many of them women and children, are reported to have fled into the centre of the enclave to seek shelter. Fighting has intensified in Beit Sawa between government forces and the Islamist faction Jaysh al-Islam.
The Eastern Ghouta is dominated by Jaysh al-Islam. But Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, a jihadist alliance led by al-Qaeda's former affiliate in Syria, also has a presence there.
A resident speaking to the BBC described the situation in the Eastern Ghouta as "beyond critical".
What is the Syrian government's aim?
Several reports suggest government forces are attempting to cut the region in two.
Syrian state media say the army has advanced on several fronts, and has taken control of villages and farms while attacking from the eastern side of the enclave.
The Syrian observatory said regime forces were 3km (two miles) from Douma.
The military has been accused of targeting civilians, but it says it is trying to liberate the region, one of the last rebel strongholds, from those it terms terrorists.
US President Donald Trump and UK Prime Minister Theresa May agreed in a phone call on Sunday that Syria and its Russian backers bore responsibility for the "heart-breaking human suffering", Downing Street said.
The leaders agreed that Russia must act now to persuade the Syrian government to stop the bombing.
"Is the Atheists/Christian idea of God contestable since no one on earth knows if God does or does not exist?"
What we have here is a failure to understand what is reality and what is fantasy.
Reality: everything is a natural process.
Fantasy: God did it.
God is just another word for magic. Magic is not real therefore magic god fairies are impossible.
This is why I'm 100% certain your Magic Man is not real. Same thing for the Easter Bunny, a fantasy no less childish and no less ridiculous than the magic god fairy fantasy.
Theism is brain damage.
Agnosticism is brain damage.
Atheism (100% certain god fairies are not real) is normal.
"If there is overwhelming evidence for evolution, then why do Christian fundamentalists continue to resist the theory?"
There is no "if" about it. Evolution is the strongest fact of science. These days the evidence from genetics is more powerful than Charles Darwin could have imagined possible.
Why do American bible thumpers and Muslim terrorists deny the established truth of evolution?
There can be only one possible explanation. The science deniers are uneducated morons.
Many years ago I walked by the Catholic church where I was brainwashed when I was a student there. I went into the lobby. Nobody was there. I saw a wad of cash which was a donation to the church. I grabbed that cash and walked out of there. Was that wrong? I don't think so.
Several years ago the corporation I worked for transferred me from Chicago to California where I lived for 4 years. It was an interesting experience. On the weekends we would go snow skiing at Heavenly Valley where we could ski on the California side with a fantastic view of Lake Tahoe or on the other side which had a view of the desert in Nevada. On the way to becoming a more experienced skier it's amazing I didn't get killed. We also cross country skied at Mt. Shasta.
Skiing on the Nevada side with a view of the desert.
Skiing on the California side with a view of Lake Tahoe
"I'm so confused about my faith. I do believe in God and am spiritual just do not know what religion I am. If you could tell me your belif? It will greatly impact me and hopefully lead me to the truth."
"tell me your belif?"
If an idea is a belief and/or requires faith then that idea is bullshit and it must be thrown out.
I prefer reality, aka atheism. Reality is not a belief. Reality does not require faith. Reality has the advantage of being real.
Religion is a denial of reality. Religions are for feeble-minded know-nothing cowards.
The Wall Street Journal does not have a problem with Trump's plan to destroy the environment. Virtually everyone in the Trump Administration is an evolution denier including the Vice President FFS. The Wall Street Journal does not have a problem with these anti-science morons.
The Wall Street Journal does have a problem with Fucktard Trump's plan to have a trade war. It's obvious the WSJ has a burning hatred for Trump as do I.
Donald Trump doubled down Friday on his plan for steel and aluminum tariffs, telling his advisers he won’t exempt any countries from the new blunderbuss border taxes, and issuing on twitter one of the greatest displays of economic nonsense in presidential history. “When a country (USA) is losing many billions of dollars on trade with virtually every country it does business with, trade wars are good, and easy to win. Example, when we are down $100 billion with a certain country and they get cute, don’t trade anymore-we win big. It’s easy!,” Mr. Trump tweeted Friday morning.
Let’s parse that one, to the extent it is humanly possible. Mr. Trump believes that trade is a zero-sum game, with winning defined as having a national trade surplus. But trade consists of millions of acts of buying and selling by individuals and companies that are presumably for mutual benefit. Otherwise why would they do it? No one forces anyone to buy or sell across borders. The entire point of trading goods or services is that someone wants to buy the car or pay for the engineering design.
Then there’s Mr. Trump’s remedy, which is “don’t trade anymore-we win big.” So if the U.S. has a $100 billion deficit with Country X, simply stop trading with that country. Voila, problem solved.
But that $100 billion deficit represents an enormous amount of commercial activity, which creates jobs for millions of Americans. Someone in the U.S. has to sell that car made in Japan, or create an ad campaign to sell it. Mr. Trump’s trade-deficit remedy is to stop that trade cold and assume that somehow the production will magically arise in the U.S. Even if that were true, and it isn’t, he’s advocating what economists call autarky, or economic self-sufficiency that would result in a depression as commerce and investment crashed.
Some of our more sanguine friends see the tariffs and tweets as Mr. Trump’s familiar negotiating bluster, but we wouldn’t be too sure. Protectionism may be his only real policy conviction, and his tweet confirms he doesn’t know what he’s talking about. This is what the equity markets are saying as they discount trade-dependent companies.
AFP
