The “Health Ranger” attacks vaccines

Imagine the horror of giving a baby a vaccination to protect his health, only to have him become violently ill. Sadly, such things may happen if the vaccines are defective. But when a product is defective, the logical response is to stop using the product for a short time, do an investigation to determine what went wrong with the product, and then replace it with an improved version of the product, NOT ban the product completely and tell people to never use it! But that is exactly what anti-vaxxer loons in Australia are doing!

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The Spice Girls were frauds from the beginning

One of the greatest failures of the public in the world was reflected in how the Spice Girls, with their slogan “Girl Power” became such an overwhelming success. If enough people had applied skepticism to the matter, they would have rejected the pop group en masse and they would have had only minor hits, if any at all.

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Stop America’s political see-saw!

There was a time when the American people were not so blindly loyal to their political parties as they are now. During the American Revolution itself, the two opposing factions were the Loyalists who favored the American colonies remaining part of the British Empire, and the Patriots who wanted American independence. The Patriots won and most of those who remained Loyalists fled to Britain or Canada. Then there was another conflict between Federalists, who favored the new U S Constitution, and the anti-Federalists who opposed it. The anti-Federalists lost. The next conflict was between the Federalists and the Democratic-Republicans. Eventually, the Federalists lost and faded away. Then the Whigs rose to challenge the Democratic-Republicans (later, the Democratic Party), but they too failed before the Civil War, to be replaced by the Republicans.

So we had three political factions which died out due to being rejected by the American people: the Loyalists, the Federalists and the Whigs. But ever since the Civil War, the people have been stuck on a see-saw. Whenever they become dissatisfied with Democratic policies, they turn to vote Republican. Then when they are unhappy with Republican policies, they turn back towards the Democrats. Then when they are disappointed with Democratic policies, they go right back to the Republicans. Does this make ANY sense? I think not.

The Republicans led us into war in Iraq in 2003, based on claims regarding that country that turned out to be false. Any party that does that should have been thrown out of power the very next year, but it didn’t happen until 2006 and 2008 and the Democrats took over. Now there is a sizable movement to vote the Democrats out of power in 2010 and 2012……so the Republicans may take over again? No, there are other options for conservative voters to consider! Such as:

The Libertarian Party:  http://www.lp.org/

The Constitution Party: http://www.constitutionparty.com/

The Reform Party: http://www.rpusa.info/

The America First Party: http://www.americafirstparty.org/

Any one of these should rise to take the place of the Republican Party, which I feel has long outlived its usefulness, and likewise if the Democratic Party fails liberals in the future, they should look at:

The Green Party: http://www.gp.org/

The Libertarian Party: http://www.lp.org/ (It strongly appeals to both conservatives and liberals for various reasons)

The Socialist Party: http://socialistparty-usa.org/

And it should be an unwritten rule in American politics from now on that whenever a party is voted out of power, it should NEVER be voted back in! If we took such a stand, maybe we would truly have a government of the people, by the people, and for the people. Because right now that seems to not be the case!

A disturbing video about Islam

Watch this:

My response to it is as follows.

First, the Quran was not revealed in one piece, but in bits and pieces over several decades and was not even assembled in its final form until some years after the passing of the Prophet Muhammad. Thus we need not assume it is totally accurate in its statements. See these earlier blog entries:

https://dalehusband.wordpress.com/2008/10/14/the-chain-of-abrahamic-religions-is-too-rusty-and-weak/

https://dalehusband.wordpress.com/2010/05/04/muslims-get-a-life/

Second, who is to say that Muslims have to assume that the “later” verses of the Quran that teach intolerance for non-Muslims have abrogated the “earlier” ones that preach tolerance? Only those who either want to promote Islamic extremism or those who want to destroy Islam itself. Ironic, that these two factions would have that in common, even while opposing each other as well as moderates among both Muslims and non-Muslims. This alone shows the absurdity of their positions. Also, who says we have to follow every detail of the barbaric Sharia law when adopting Islam? Shouldn’t it be enough to simply follow the Five Pillars of Islam?

  1. Proclaim publicly, “There is no god but Allah and Muhammad is His Prophet.”
  2. Pray five times daily.
  3. Give alms to the poor.
  4. Fast during the daytime at the month of Ramadan.
  5. Make a pilgrimage to Mecca at least once in your lifetime.

Anything beyond that seems irrelevant. Sharia Law seems to be a man-made addition to the original Islam. If it is indeed from Allah, why do Muslims leaders specify only Five Pillars and not more? These Five Pillars certainly do NOT imply attempts to subvert and destroy other religions and secular societies.

Third, if Muslims are allowed to lie in order to spread Islam, isn’t that a logical reason to conclude that Islam itself is full of lies and thus not worth following by anyone? One must wonder if Christians and followers of other faiths pull the same sort of stunts. See this:

https://dalehusband.wordpress.com/2009/10/12/lying-about-history-for-the-bible/

The references to the Quran that are supposed to be so shocking are not specified in the video above. So where are they and what do they really say? Until those are revealed, that video should be held as skeptically as Islam itself may be.

One Step At A Time

This song, by singer Jordin Sparks, is worth hearing and is something I think we should all live by.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PIE5QtkxzvM

Hurry up and wait
So close, but so far away
Everything that you’ve always dreamed of
Close enough for you to taste
But you just can’t touch

You wanna show the world, but no one knows your name yet
Wonder when and where and how you’re gonna make it
You know you can if you get the chance
In your face as the door keeps slamming
Now you’re feeling more and more frustrated
And you’re getting all kind of impatient waiting

[Chorus:]
We live and we learn to take
One step at a time
There’s no need to rush
It’s like learning to fly
Or falling in love
It’s gonna happen when it’s
Supposed to happen and we
Find the reasons why
One step at a time

You believe and you doubt
You’re confused, you got it all figured out
Everything that you always wished for
Could be yours, should be yours, would be yours
If they only knew

You wanna show the world, but no one knows your name yet
Wonder when and where and how you’re gonna make it
You know you can if you get the chance
In your face as the door keeps slamming
Now you’re feeling more and more frustrated
And you’re getting all kind of impatient waiting

[Chorus]

When you can’t wait any longer
But there’s no end in sight
when you need to find the strength
It’s your faith that makes you stronger
The only way you get there
Is one step at a time

The prophet Isaiah did NOT predict the coming of Jesus!

One of the biggest absurdities ever claimed by Christians is that many of the prophecies made in the Old Testament refer not to events that were expected to occur within a few years, but to events that might occur hundreds or even thousands of years from the time of the prophecy, including references to Jesus that were only realized as such after the fact. One example of this is the claim that the prophet Isaiah predicted that Jesus would be born of a virgin and would be God incarnate. But in fact, he did no such thing.

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A denialist makes seductive, but hollow, claims

Check out this comment at the Intersection blog at the Discover Magazine website:

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/intersection/2010/08/18/will-you-shut-up-just-a-second-will-you-stop-shouting-hard-lessons-in-science-communication/#comment-67676

39.   Steve Says:
August 19th, 2010 at 4:52 pm

AGW proponents argue from a faith in models, implying that we can only postulate what will happen because a real experiment cannot be run. Sadly for AGW proponents, Earth has run the massive atmospheric CO2 experiment. Proxy data shows that atmospheric CO2 has been 10 – 20 times what it is today. The result? The planet survived. It even thrived. Was it warmer than today? For certain periods, yes, it was. But, for other periods, it was colder. These facts alone should be enough to educate an open mind that CO2 is NOT strongly correlated to temperature and catastrophic global warming is impossible.

Lest one think that the proxy data cannot be trusted, we have evidence within recent history of the same result. First, however, a primer. It is well known that temperature follows a logarithmic function in the presence of rising CO2 levels. That is, temperature rises more at a lower CO2 range increase (say, from 100ppm to 150ppm) than at a higher CO2 range increase (say, from 300ppm to 350ppm) . From roughly 1940 to present, CO2 has been increasing. If AGW theory is correct (i.e. CO2 is THE major variable controlling global temperature), then there should be a strong, logarithmic correlation between temperatures and rising CO2 levels after 1940. That is, a larger temperature increase between, say, 1940 – 1950 as opposed to 1990 – 2000. What we see, though, is that global temperature actually decreased slightly between roughly 1940 – 1970 (culminating in the ice age scare) before beginning a roughly 3 decade increase (culminating in the AGW scare). In addition, over half of the global temperature increase of the 20th century occurred BEFORE 1940, when CO2 levels were fairly constant. An open mind that follows data to arrive at a conclusion would rightly conclude that CO2 is NOT a major variable in global temperature.

Frankly, I don’t care if any kind of cap-and-trade system passes. Energy use will not dissipate. And since fossil fuel holds the most energy density, it will be used. Cap-and-trade will simply increase the cost of everything. People will either: 1) demand more money for their labor in order to maintain their standard of living or 2) get poorer. In the period of economic instability, several individuals and companies will get VERY rich.

By 2100, CO2 will have increased even more. If the trend of the past 200 years continues, global temperatures will increase steadily with 20 -40 year modulations that follow the warm and cold phases of the oceans. Our understanding of bioshpere mechanics will have increased immensely and enough data will have been gathered to know that CO2 is not the boogeyman that grant-seeking “scientists” thought it was. If fossil fuel usage is not declining, it will be much more costly (even in inflation-adjusted terms). If we are smart, nuclear energy will be much more abundant. If we are even smarter, we will have found a way to reprocess the waste for re-use. Energy storage technology will have increased to the point that wind and solar energy can provide a steady stream of power around the clock. They will, however, still be a niche technologies.

Our great-grandchildren will look back on this time and wonder what the f*#k we were thinking and curse us for putting politics ahead of common sense and sound science.

First, the models Steve refers to are based on the physical and chemical laws that govern all of matter. If you wish to debunk those models, you must show either that the models are incomplete or that the laws are incorrect. He has not.

Second, Steve does not specify when the CO2 levels were 10 or 20 times higher than today. Indeed, we can be certain that the Earth’s atmosphere was full of CO2 about four billion years ago, just as Venus’ atmosphere is today. The critical difference between the two planets is that Venus is closer to the Sun, and it has no oceans like Earth does to absorb some of the CO2 and lock it away. It also does not have life, including plants to absorb even more CO2. The reason the Sun did not burn us up hundreds of millions of years ago when the CO2 levels were much higher than today was because the Sun was also much less luminous, as you would expect with a star that had less helium and more hydrogen in its core (Helium is at least four times denser than hydrogen and helium is also what hydrogen fuses into to produce its sunlight. Denser concentrations of gas in the cores of stars will indeed be hotter. Strange that Steve overlooked that). And at most geologic periods,  Earth WAS warmer than today and the sea levels were much higher. But that was not a problem because our civilization did not exist. The concern today is that our civilization is so highly adapted to the specific global climate of the late 20th Century that ANY significant deviation from that will do great damage to that civilization.

Third, Steve ignores that fossil fuels are nonrenewable and when they begin to grow scarce, the price of them will skyrocket anyway. Indeed, the best way to lower the price of fossil fuels at present is to REDUCE DEMAND FOR THEM!  Which is a compelling reason to switch to renewable sources; the only reason we haven’t yet is because the fossil fuel companies have rigged our so-called “free market” economy to support their perpetual dominance. That has to be stopped, or we will end up with fossil fuel companies only getting richer and richer at the expense (literally) of the rest of us, global warming or no global warming. That’s why we need governments to step in and use some kind of force to stop them.

Fourth, CO2 is not THE only factor in climate change. The drop in global temperatures between 1940 and 1970 could have been a temporary halt in global warming, not a sign of cooling, due to factors such as the advent of nuclear energy which largely replaced fossil fuels for a time before accidents like Three Mile Island and Chernobyl lessened public support for the use of nuclear fuels, making fossil fuels more popular once again. And since we have had reliable CO2 measurements only since the 1950s, we cannot say for certain what global CO2 levels were prior to that decade. So his claim that “over half of the global temperature increase of the 20th century occurred BEFORE 1940, when CO2 levels were fairly constant,” is unfounded.

Steve is not open-minded at all. He is an idiot who beleives the denialist claims without testing them, as I have.

The Imminent Demise of Evolution: The Longest Running Falsehood in Creationism (via The Word of Me…)

Whenever you wish to appeal to popular prejudices, lie. And the bigger the lie, the better. The biggest lie of all being that evolution is a theory about to fail. It never has, actually.

The Imminent Demise of Evolution: The Longest Running Falsehood in Creationism Copyright 2002  G.R. Morton. This can be freely distributed so long as no changes are made and no charges are made.  http://home.entouch.net/dmd/moreandmore.htm In recent reading of Dembski and other ID proponents I saw them make a claim which has been made for over 40 years.  This claim is one that the young-earthers have been making.  The claim is that the theory of evolution (or major supporting concepts for it) is increasingly being abandoned … Read More

via The Word of Me…

P Z Myers screws up a critique of a religious writer

Myers said the following here:

http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2010/08/julian_would_not_appreciate_th.php

I think I’m beginning to figure David B. Hart out. I’ve been totally mystified about why anyone would consider him a credible or interesting thinker since reading his essay belittling the New Atheists, which was dreary and wearying — I compared his prose style to that of Eeyore. But note: one of his central points in that essay was that these New Atheists aren’t as smart and brave as the Old Atheists, an idea that comes up again in a new essay.

Hart has now written a column praising Julian the Apostate, of all people. Julian was a very interesting person in history, a 4th century Roman emperor who resisted the Christianization of the empire begun by Constantine by openly rejecting Christianity and endorsing a revitalization of paganism. He’s something of a mixed bag for atheists: he’s a hero for opposing the dour old monotheism that was spreading through the culture, but also a bit of a flake for encouraging the old classical religions — he was not an atheist by any means. The novel by Gore Vidal, Julian, is an excellent introduction to the doomed rebellion against Christianity.

One thing Julian also was not is a friend to Catholicism, so it’s odd to see a Catholic writer heaping praise on him. But then you discover that Hart doesn’t admire him for his views or his intelligence or his cause (although he acknowledges them), it’s because Hart has the conservative disease of believing everything was better in the past, that there was a Golden Age, and that we’re living in an era of decline and defeat right now. To these cranky old farts of stodginess, we’re always living in perpetual decline. Julian is to be admired because he also thought the generations before him were better than the one he was living in.

As a scientist, one would think he would value accuracy over merely bashing religion for the fun of it. But he made a mistake and got busted for it!

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Is this really a science journal, or a Creationist front?

http://www.virologyj.com/

One has to wonder that after seeing this nonsense published within it:

http://www.virologyj.com/content/7/1/169

Influenza or not influenza: Analysis of a case of high fever that happened 2000 years ago in Biblical time

Kam LE Hon email, Pak C Ng email and Ting F Leung email

Department of Paediatrics, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Prince of Wales Hospital, Shatin, Hong Kong SAR, China

Virology Journal 2010, 7:169doi:10.1186/1743-422X-7-169

The electronic version of this article is the complete one and can be found online at: http://www.virologyj.com/content/7/1/169

Received: 16 June 2010
Accepted: 21 July 2010
Published: 21 July 2010

© 2010 Hon et al; licensee BioMed Central Ltd.
This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Abstract

The Bible describes the case of a woman with high fever cured by our Lord Jesus Christ. Based on the information provided by the gospels of Mark, Matthew and Luke, the diagnosis and the possible etiology of the febrile illness is discussed. Infectious diseases continue to be a threat to humanity, and influenza has been with us since the dawn of human history. If the postulation is indeed correct, the woman with fever in the Bible is among one of the very early description of human influenza disease.

Infectious diseases continue to be a threat to humanity, and influenza has been with us since the dawn of human history. We analysed a case of high fever that happened 2000 years ago in Biblical time and discussed possible etiologies.

Case

The Bible descrbies the case of a woman with high fever cured by our Lord Jesus Christ. According to Mark 1:29 to 33 and Matthew 8:14-15, the mother-in-law of Simon Peter “lay sick” with a febrile illness [1]. When Jesus took her by the hand and lifted her up, the fever immediately left. The lady began to serve the household and probably prepared a meal. The case is also described in the gospel by Luke (Luke 4:38-39), who was a physician in his days and he specifically mentioned that the fever was high [1].

The title alone is stupid, and reminds me of that classic line in Shakespeare’s Hamlet: “To be or not to be…”

How the hell can you investigate scientifically something that happened 2000 years ago, when the ONLY evidence that it ever really happened was a written account that could have been made up?

It’s like those astronomers who waste their time arguing over what the star was that led the Magi to Bethlehem to see Jesus as an infant. Aside from the account in the Gospel of Matthew, there is no independent affirmation of such a star in secular literature.

And the authors give away their blatant lack of objectivity when they refer to “our Lord Jesus Christ”. They repeat one sentence in the Abstract and Case sections for no reason, and even misspell the word describes. Such sloppy editing is bad enough, but then they do not give ANY experimental or direct observational data whatsoever.

Others have already taken note of this absurd event:

http://scienceblogs.com/aetiology/2010/08/biblical_fever_influenza_youre.php

http://scientopia.org/blogs/thisscientificlife/2010/08/10/the-virology-of-christ/

I made this comment at the first one:

People need to stop looking at accounts of miracles in the Bible and trying to find rational, naturalistic explanations for them. That in itself reveals a lack of faith. That goes not only for the writers of that totally rediculous paper, but for all those “scientific” Creationists out there. I too would blacklist that journal for accepting that nonsense.

UPDATE: The paper was retracted as promised by the editor of the journal, Robert Garry.

http://www.virologyj.com/content/1743-422X-7-190

Misdefining terms for purposes of propaganda

This is the direct sequel to https://dalehusband.wordpress.com/2010/06/24/atheism-is-a-dogma-get-over-it/

Prior to the 1990s, it was clear to me what atheism, atheists,  agnosticism,  agnostics, dogma, and fanaticism were. That’s because we had clear and logically consistent definitions of those words. They were found in reliable dictionaries like Webster’s New World Dictionary. Here are the definitions I found in the 1975 edition, which I still own and use.

atheism: “the belief that there is no God”. (That’s the ONLY definition in the book.)

agnostic: “a person who beleives that one cannot know whether or not there is a God or an ultimate cause, or anything beyond material phenomena.” (The ONLY definition in the book.)

dogma: “a positive, arrogant assertion of opinion.” (One of several definitions, and it is not implied that dogmas must always be religious in nature.)

fanaticism: “excessive and unreasonable zeal” (Again, it is not specified that only religion can produce fanatics.)

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Why I despise Alex Jones

Because the man is a fuked up lunatic, even worse than most of those right-wingers who spew their hate on FOX News!

Check this out:

http://www.prisonplanet.com/elite-moves-to-lobotomize-zombify-global-population.html

{{{Elite Moves To Lobotomize, Zombify Global Population

The Alex Jones Channel

Aug. 4, 2010

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cm3PYZ0N7Dg

THIS IS REALLY HAPPENING!!! LINKS ARE BELOW
The establishment media and the scientific dictatorship are promoting brain-eating vaccines that virtually lobotomize people and rewire their brains into a state of subservient compliance so that their natural instinct to get angry and rebel against the tyranny being imposed upon them is neutered and sterilized.
“Academics say they are close to developing the first vaccine for stress — a single jab that would help us relax without slowing down,” reports the Daily Mail.
FOR MORE INFO
FOOD THE ULTIMATE SECRET EXPOSED PT1
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MSpkLk…
FOOD THE ULTIMATE SECRET EXPOSED PT2
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-B9MeO…
http://www.infowars.com/food-the-ulti…
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/art…
http://www.infowars.com/new-york-time…
http://www.prisonplanet.com/establish…
http://www.infowars.com/oxford-bioeth…
http://www.infowars.com/category/feat…
}}}

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Holding CNN accountable for phony “balance”

CNN published an article on its website about climate change. Two bloggers with a strong interest in the subject looked at it and quickly debunked its credibility.

http://thingsbreak.wordpress.com/2010/07/29/new-study-lays-out-11-indicators-of-a-warming-world-media-focuses-on-contrarian-views/

From time to time, journalists like Andy Revkin and Keith Kloor protest that the mainstream media doesn’t do an awful job covering the issue of climate change. They believe that the well-documented, systematic bias of undermining scientific conclusions by “balancing” them with contrarianism is behind us. Unfortunately, this is demonstrably false.

The above image is from the self-proclaimed “Most Trusted Name in News” CNN’s coverage of NOAA’s just-released 2009 State of the Climate Report, copy from The Financial Times. The State of the Climate report details how the planet is warming as captured by 11 different indices, from land surface temperature to glacial mass balance.

http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2010/07/misleading_reporting_from_fion.php

Thingsbreak has produced a graphic illustration of how lazy journalists mislead in the name of “balance”. On right is his colour coding of her story on the NOAA report on the State of the Climate in 2009, with red marking coverage of “Climategate” and contrarians and green marking coverage of the report that the story is ostensibly about. This, from the red coverage, quite takes your breath away:

David Herro, the financier, who follows climate science as a hobby, said NOAA also “lacks credibility”.

Tim Lambert, the blogger, who follows climate journalism as a hobby, says Harvey lacks credibility.

Harvey’s story was so bad that even Keith Kloor said that it was “glaringly flawed”.

CNN must have noticed the criticism and acted on it. The article has now been REMOVED from its website! Another victory for honest reporting, as opposed to fake “balance” in reporting.

http://edition.cnn.com/2010/WORLD/europe/07/29/climate.change.noaa.ft/

Page not found

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A damning statement about public schools

Occationally I find a statement by someone so stunning in its brilliance, yet so obvious, that I feel the need to spread it around. Such as this:

http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2010/08/i_am_the_wrong_person_to_answe.php#comment-2702235

Posted by: skeptifem Author Profile Page | August 3, 2010 10:28 PM   #9

Public school isn’t meant to genuinely educate. It never will. They dole out skills that increase the value of the lowest rung of workers. That is the purpose of it. Having customers and workers who can read and do basic math is something that power structures need, so we have it.

The current cirriculum in schools does not prepare students for huge portions of living, perpetuating privilege and disadvantage. People come out of school knowing nothing about how to go further than HS, medicine, the law, economics, and history. Children are taught obedience and discouraged from thinking critically. The liklihood of a state institution portraying the state honestly (which is to say, in a negative light) is unlikely. So it isn’t as though everyone who grew up in public school isn’t pumped full of ridiculous lies in the same way the homeschoolers are, it is just a different set of lies.
Real knowledge and the ability to think critically is kept to classes of people who are conditioned for obedience. The number and variety of meaningless hoops a person typically has to jump through in order to make it far in education weeds out radical people. Even on the K-12 level, people are branded “behavior problems” (of course there are genuine ones as well), or put into “slow” or “advanced” groups based on what people should know by a certain age, as if minds don’t vary wildly in that respect. It divides em, often along race/class/sex lines. It teaches learning is a chore (that takes place between 7 and 3), and you learn what other people say, and that you unwind by doing a bunch of non thinking by buying products or staring at screens all day. It kills the motivation to learn. Children don’t see the past or future of the world they are in, shut in with only people their own age except for authority figures.

SO yeah, I unschool. I don’t see the supremacy of public school at all. Crappy homeschools literally move school into homes- that is what creationist homeschoolers do in spades. School would have to be radically rethought for me to approve, and they have been before. Voluntary skill swaps, anarchist free schools from the early 1900s, that I would approve of in a school. As is public school is a crock of shit.

I must note that I was brought up in public schools, even in college. I guess I was lucky I learned to think as critically as I do. But I am not against public schools. But P Z Myers, who wrote the blog entry skeptifem was commenting on, said at the beginning:

I am not a fan of homeschooling; in fact, if I had my way, I’d make it illegal.

I am glad that P Z is not a dictator over us, then. Not all homeschoolers are religious fundamentalists. That’s an urban myth we need to stamp out.

There are indeed secular homeschoolers. Here are some of their websites:

http://www.secularhomeschool.com/

http://www.secular-homeschooling.com/

http://www.secularhomeschoolers.net/

http://www.atheistview.com/secular_homeschool.htm

There are also Unitarian Universalists who homeschool:

http://www.uuhomeschool.org/

Public schools may provide a valuble service, but no one should rely on them exclusively to educate their children. Parents and other adults also have a responsibility to be teachers, now and forever. Let it be so.

White Americans need to grow up!

Note: the writer of this blog is a white guy.

From the very beginning of the United States of America’s existence as an independent nation, it was totally white dominated. Not just the union as a whole, but every single state within that union, was white dominated. Not a single state was ever allowed to be ruled by non-whites, not Native American tribes, not blacks, nor Asian-Americans. Even states that you would expect to be ruled by non-whites were taken over by whites before they could become states.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oklahoma#History

During the 19th century, thousands of Native Americans were expelled from their ancestral homelands from across North America and transported to the area including and surrounding present-day Oklahoma. The “Five Civilized Tribes” in the South were the most prominent nations displaced by American expulsion policy, an atrocity that came to be known as the Trail of Tears during the Cherokee Nation’s removals starting in 1831. The area, already occupied by Osage and Quapaw tribes, was called for the Cherokee Nation until revised American policy redefined the boundaries to include other Native Americans. By 1890, more than 30 Native American nations and tribes had been concentrated on land within Indian Territory or “Indian Country.”[45] In the period between 1866 and 1899,[43] cattle ranches in Texas strove to meet the demands for food in eastern cities and railroads in Kansas promised to deliver in a timely manner. Cattle trails and cattle ranches developed as cowboys either drove their product north or settled illegally in Indian Territory.[43] In 1881, four of five major cattle trails on the western frontier traveled through Indian Territory.[46] Increased presence of white settlers in Indian Territory prompted the United States Government to establish the Dawes Act in 1887, which divided the lands of individual tribes into allotments for individual families, encouraging farming and private land ownership among native Americans but expropriating land to the federal government. In the process, nearly half of Indian-held land within the territory was taken for outside settlers and for purchase by railroad companies.[47]

Major land runs, including the Land Run of 1889, were held for settlers on the hour that certain territories were opened to settlement. Usually, land was open to settlers on a first come first served basis.[48] Those who broke the rules by crossing the border into the territory before it was allowed were said to have been crossing the border sooner, leading to the term sooners, which eventually became the state’s official nickname.[49]

Delegations to make the territory into a state began near the turn of the 20th century, when the Curtis Act furthered the theft of Indian tribal lands in Indian Territory. Attempts to create an all-Indian state named Oklahoma and a later attempt to create an all-Indian state named Sequoyah failed but the Sequoyah Statehood Convention of 1905 eventually laid the groundwork for the Oklahoma Statehood Convention, which took place two years later.[50] On November 16, 1907, Oklahoma was established as the 46th state in the Union.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawaii#History

In 1887, Kalākaua was forced to sign the 1887 Constitution of the Kingdom of Hawaii, which stripped the king of much of his authority. There was a property qualification for voting, which disenfranchised many poorer Hawaiians and favored the wealthier white community. Resident whites were allowed to vote, but resident Asians were excluded. Because the 1887 Constitution was signed under threat of violence, it is known as the “Bayonet Constitution”. King Kalākaua, reduced to a figurehead, reigned until his death in 1891. His sister, Liliʻuokalani, succeeded him on the throne.

In 1893, Queen Liliʻuokalani announced plans for a new constitution. On January 14, 1893, a group of mostly Euro-American business leaders and residents formed a Committee of Safety to overthrow the Kingdom and seek annexation by the United States. United States Government Minister John L. Stevens, responding to a request from the Committee of Safety, summoned a company of U.S. Marines. As one historian noted, the presence of these troops effectively made it impossible for the monarchy to protect itself.[36]

In January 1893, Queen Liliʻuokalani was overthrown and replaced by a Provisional Government composed of members of the Committee of Safety. Controversy filled the following years as the queen tried to re-establish her throne. The administration of President Grover Cleveland commissioned the Blount Report, which concluded that the removal of Liliʻuokalani was illegal. The U.S. government first demanded that Queen Liliʻuokalani be reinstated, but the Provisional Government refused. Congress followed with another investigation, and submitted the Morgan Report on February 26, 1894, which found all parties (including Minister Stevens) with the exception of the queen “not guilty” from any responsibility for the overthrow.[37] The accuracy and impartiality of both the Blount and Morgan reports has been questioned by partisans on both sides of the debate over the events of 1893.[36][38][39][40]

Then, of course, there is the Mexican War of 1846-1848, in which nearly half of Mexico’s territory was taken over by the United States, along with Texas that had been annexed prior to the war’s beginning. All those territories and later states were later, you guessed it, WHITE dominated, not Hispanic dominated. Of course, it is understandable that allowing  Hispanics to rule those territories or states might eventually result in the secession of some of those states from the USA either to seek independence or to rejoin Mexico.

Also, Puerto Rico has never been allowed to become a state, even though it has been a protectorate of the USA for over a century!

Could that be what fuels anti-illegal immigrant agitation in the United States today? Fear of states that were once part of Mexico being returned to Mexico by the mostly Hispanic people wouldn’t be such a problem if the territories that made up those states had not been TAKEN BY FORCE FROM MEXICO IN THE FIRST PLACE! And liberalizing immigration laws would be a positive step to someday allow non-whites to rule at least one state in the USA, finally! Ironically, illegal immigrants are profitable for American businesses that employ them, since the businesses don’t have to pay the illegals according to minimum wage laws. But they would lose those profits if the illegals were able to gain American citizenship. And the 14th Amendment grants American citizenship to the children of illegal immigrants born in the United States, so the proportion of Hispanic American citizens will rise dramatically a generation from now. OH, NO!

So to white politicians like Tom Tancredo who have made a career out of bashing illegal immigrants from Mexico and elsewhere, I have but one thing to say:

FUCK YOU!

Covering up a discredited Baha’i prophecy

When I was a Baha’i, I spent a summer at the home of an elderly Baha’i couple, and I looked at their Baha’i books. One thing I noticed was a copy of the classic introduction to the Baha’i Faith, Baha’u’llah and the New Era by J. E Esslemont. It contained a reference to 1957, the year Shoghi Effendi, the Guardian of the Baha’i Faith, died, yet it had been published before that year. After searching online this year, I finally found a reference to this older edition.

http://lifeanddoctrine.blogspot.com/2009/03/bahai-faith-bahai-faith-missing.html (original link)

http://www.truefreethinker.com/articles/bahai-faith-bahai-faith-missing-prophecy

(new and improved version)

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