Yet another email from the Family Research Council pronouncing the end of America has arrived in my inbox. This one begins I thought I’d seen it all. that is a link to a page begging for a $50 donation (or more if you are so inclined). The page does not contain any useful information about the reason you should send them money. For that matter the original email contains statements like

Yesterday I did something new: I canvassed on behalf of Mike Honda‘s US Congressional race. Walking into campaign headquarters and seeing a lot of young people (most of them were in college) working to re-elect a strong progressive congressman gave me hope for the future. I’ve been voting for 36 years. And despite being opinionated and holding strongly progressive (i.e., liberal) views I’ve never done anything other than vote, participate in an occasional political poll, and donate money.

I went to watch a The Young Turks video and it had an embedded ad for a poll about President Obama on the NewsMax “news” web site. I clicked it. What a surprise they require that you sign up to receive email alerts from them to participate in the poll. So I used the Do Not Track Me email masking feature to subscribe in order to participate in the poll.

The trend is slow but clear. In the USA those who identify as atheist or spiritual but not religious is growing. In fact those groups now represent a plurality of Americans. This is [bad news] for the Republican party. Couple that trend with defection by women who don’t like being treated like second class citizens or, worse, children and things look grim for the GOP. I think I’m going to celebrate tonight.

Arizona is a dangerous place to live or visit. They allow open-carry of guns in “non-secure” portions of an airport. So a gun nut decided to brandish his AR-15 in the Phoenix airport. This wasn’t someone who lives in a shack and uses his gun to hunt for food. It was Dr. Peter Steinmetz, Director, Neuroengineering Program at the Barrow Neurological Institute. Someone in the comment thread to the Salon article pointed out that you never point a gun at a person.

This article and this article allege that Hobby Lobby fired a pregnant employee when she took time off to give birth. What a surprise. Not! As with most well off Xians the Green family puts corporate profits ahead of the family. Despite their protestations that “family values” are the most important thing in the world. Everyone, including atheists, hold inconsistent views. What makes people like the Greens so despicable is their insistence that Christianity provides them with moral absolutes which makes them superior to non-Xians.

I saw Lucy yesterday. One thing I haven’t seen discussed in other reviews is the trigger for Lucy’s transformation. Specifically, how ridiculous it is. Supposedly this is a new drug that the dealers understand well enough to know it will be in high demand. So much so that they can afford to use incredibly expensive high risk means of getting the drug to the target markets. And yet they don’t know that it can enhance cognitive powers.

Ray “Banana Man” Comfort stated that there is no gravity in space. He has subsequently apologized for such a bone-headed statement: As Professor Myers points out in that tweet Ray is still wrong. From Ray’s Facebook post: While there is invisible gravity in space (so much for “seeing is believing”), this massive earth hangs on nothing. It has no visible means of support — similar to the no means of support backing Darwinian evolution.

I set this web server and WordPress blog up three weeks ago. Since then there have been eleven attempts to hack it via password guessing. Below is a table of the passwords the hackers tried for your amusement. The login names tried were admin, my user name (from my email address), and variations of the blogs host name. If any of your passwords look like these you should consider changing your password to something stronger.

This segment by John Oliver on his new show “Last Week with John Oliver” pretty well sums up the problems with the US criminal justice system: [https://www.youtube.com/embed/_Pz3syET3DY?feature=oembed] Then read “The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness” and “The Divide: American Injustice in the Age of the Wealth Gap“. Then consider yourself lucky if you’re a relatively well off white person in the United States. And if you are a member of that group hang your head in shame if you aren’t doing anything to correct this huge injustice.