Month: October 2009

Dumber and dumber: The Texas Board of Education voted on Friday to remove the universe’s age from the state’s educational standards, used as source material for the state’s school textbooks. via Texas Officially Makes The Universe Ageless – Texas – io9.

The Christian Broadcasting Network published, then retracted this ignorant essay by guest contributor Kimberly Daniels: [cached here] Witchcraft works through dirty hearts and wrong spirits. For example, most of the candy sold during this season has been dedicated and prayed over by witches. Do people really believe that 1) there are witches and 2) they’d […]

Is it eugenics if it is voluntary? Or coerced? Or bought? “That there is a group within our society who give their children no hope nor opportunity from the moment that they are born,” the regional mayor wrote on the New Zealand radio website where he broadcasts as a talkback DJ. “That these ‘parents’ are […]

He got paid for funneling kids into juvie centers:P The Pennsylvania Supreme Court yesterday dismissed thousands of juvenile convictions issued by a judge charged in a corruption scandal, saying that none of the young offenders got a fair hearing. The high court yesterday threw out more than five years’ worth of juvenile cases heard by […]

From McSweeney’s: I don’t know about you, but I can’t wait to get my hands on some fucking gourds and arrange them in a horn-shaped basket on my dining room table. That shit is going to look so seasonal.When my guests come over it’s gonna be like, BLAMMO! Check out my shellacked decorative vegetables, assholes. […]

Der Spiegel: Yes, newspapers are dying, but that’s not “journalism” in any more than a historically affected way. Newspapers are dying because of their ridiculous and last-century overhead involving trucks, trees and gallons of ink. Information is not dying, nor is the public’s desire for more of it. Just because we don’t buy buggies anymore […]

Yeah but at Costco I can get a 16 pack of Charmin Ultra-soft: The world’s largest retailer wants to keep its customers even after they die. Wal-Mart has started selling caskets on its Web site at prices that undercut many funeral homes, long the major seller of caskets. The move follows a similar one by […]

I’m glad the CIA learned their lesson: Ahmed Wali Karzai, the brother of the Afghan president and a suspected player in the country’s booming illegal opium trade, gets regular payments from the Central Intelligence Agency, and has for much of the past eight years, according to current and former American officials. The agency pays Mr. […]

From Nature: The public reception of scientific ideas depends largely on two factors: people’s ability to grasp factual information and the cultural lens through which that information is filtered. The former is what scientists tend to focus on when they give popular accounts of issues such as climate change. The assumption is that if they […]