'Revolutionary' drug that prevents breast cancer created

A drug that could prevent thousands of young women developing breast cancer has been created by scientists.

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Iran Says "Women are better off in Iran than anywhere."

Irony anyone?

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One more reason to think religion sucks!

http://linda-l.blogspot.com/2008/02/in-name-of-god.html

No further comment or embellishment necessary. Just click on the link.

Woman freed from sentence for being 'Christian'

The woman was unaware that when she was two years old her father briefly left Christianity to pursue Islam before returning to Christianity. Under Egyptian law that made her a Muslim for life, so she was charged with, and convicted of, fraud for putting "Christian" as her religion on her marriage certificate in 1982.

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Saudi Arabian 'Witch' to be Put to Death

In Saudi Arabia, an illiterate woman accused of being a witch is scheduled to be executed. Beheaded, to be specific. One of the claims against her? She caused a man to be impotent.

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Iran to Punish Apostasy with Death

Leaving Islam is already punishable by death in Iran. Now Iran wants to write the apostasy death penalty into its penal code. Much like Roosevelt's pre-WWII letter to Hitler asking the fuhrer to tone things down, the EU is concerned and has asked Iran to reconsider. Hitler mockingly read Roosevelt's letter in the Reichstag to roars of laughter.

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Racism Alive and Well at Planned Parenthood

The true nature and purpose of planned 'parenthood'. It's ironic though how many people have been blinded to this due to politics.

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A "Reset Button" for the Brain Could Cure Alzheimers

With a little help, our brains can be trained to heal themselves. After a traumatic brain injury, some of your brain cells go into reset mode, reverting to a stem cell-like state. Using these "reset cells," a group of German researchers were able to coax the brains of injured mice to regrow neurons to replace damaged tissue .

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Fast Food Blues

1. Working third shift and just trying to get through a typical week, I find myself going to a fast food restaurants about 6 times a week. 30 years ago twice a month would been a lot. (yes I am old enough to remember a time before Mcdonalds). And over the last 30 years I have noticed the following changes:

1. It now takes twice as long to get your order
2. Your are twice as likely to get your order wrong
3. Fast food workers are far more likely to be rude
4. Fast food workers are harder to understand
5. Errors in making change are far more likely

Going to a Mcdonalds used to be 10 minute breeze, now it's a 20 minute ordeal. Recently I went through a Mcdonalds and I noticed that both employees at both windows had their phones out texting. I know that working at a Mcdonalds is not the most demanding job, but couldn't you wait until you were done with your customer before you whip out your Blackberry(How do Fast Food employees afford Blackberry's anyway? )

Here's my list of the top 5 fast restaurants(or bottom 5 if you prefer) in terms of poor service and general incompetence.

1. Kentucky Fried Chicken
2. Arbys
3. Taco bell
4. Mcdonalds
5. Wendys
   

Now I am having a hard time coming up with a 5 best, but here are the best in my experience:

1. Tim Hortons
2. Subway
3. Quiznos
4. White Castles

Four is the best I can do, Burger King is highly location dependent as is Hardees. I suppose that the answer is to be a better time manager and fix my own food.

Until that day:

Emoose out

The Dark Side of Ethanol?

The search for the best alternative energy source has become something of a green-car arms race.

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L Ron Hubbard Plagiarized Scientology

"Evidence that L. Rob Hubbard plagiarized Scientology from a 1934 German book called "Scientologie." The text seems to map to various hoo-haw from the cult's official doctrine, too."

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Anti-Police Riot in Iran

The Iranian regime does its best to keep a tight rein on news outlets, but new media – cell phone video, YouTube, and the countless number of blogs and news forums in Farsi means that when large-scale protests against the regime occur in public they are impossible to completely conceal...

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Survey: Americans freely change

A new map of faith in the USA shows a nation constantly shifting amid religious choices, unaware or unconcerned with doctrinal distinctions. Unbelief is on the rise. And immigration is introducing new faces in the pews, new cultural concerns, new forces in the public square.

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Teens losing touch with historical references

Big Brother. McCarthyism. The patience of Job.Don't count on your typical teenager to nod knowingly the next time you drop a reference to any of these. A study out today finds that about half of 17-year-olds can't identify the books or historical events associated with them.

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Over Half of Britons Claim No Religion

The report also calls for the disestablishment of the Church of England. The role and privileges of the established Church are challenged because they do not reflect “the religious demography of the country and the rising proportion of other Christian denominations.”

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Baby Strapped in Car Seat for 8 Days and Left to Die

Sargent died with his eyes open, fists clenched and strapped into a car seat after eight days without food or water, the county's top prosecutor said Wednesday. Parents of 5-month-old appear in court to face first-degree murder charges, may be facing death penalty

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Muslims upset by Doritos

Furious Muslims have heavily criticised Walkers crisps after it emerged that certain varieties of the manufacturer's products contain trace elements of alcohol

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Evolution Wins as Creationists (Accidentally) Switch Sides

The Florida Board of Education officially upheld evolution yesterday.

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Westboro Church Told To Share Financial Data

The Westboro Baptist Church is being told to hand over its financial data as it fights paying a $5 million court judgment.Perhaps there is a god after all.

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Israeli MP blames quakes on gays

An Israeli MP has blamed parliament's tolerance of gays for earthquakes that have rocked the Holy Land recently.BBC.It's nice to know that Christians don't have a monopoly on bigots.

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20 Tacky Religious Products Guaranteed to Anger God

For as long as there has been religion, there's been someone hawking religious crap to scam a buck off the devout.

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Albino Moose Near Whitefish Lake, Montana

All right, so I'm a sucker for moose stories. (but they're so cute)

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Christian Right Gets Its Way

"In God We Trust" Will Have Prominence on New Coin

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Bible story comics featuring giant killer robots

Mecha Manga Bible Heroes is a series of graphic novels featuring "action-packed mecha-manga art and adventure-filled tales from the Old Testament." The characters, stories and themes remain the same. Only the setting has changed – to a futuristic world of robots, aliens and advanced technology!

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Huge Frog Was Eating Machine

With an armored head and a mammoth 16-inch body, it wasn't quite the frog prince. Scientists have discovered the remains of what might have been the largest and fattest frog ever to have lived on Earth. Dating from about 65 million to 70 million years ago during the Cretaceous Period, the frog is 3.5 inches longer than the largest living frog.

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Women Murdered her Scientologist father and teenage sister.

The 25-year-old, who cannot be named, is facing two counts of murder and a third of maliciously inflicting grievous bodily harm with intent to murder over a frenzied stabbing at her southwestern Sydney home in July last year.

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The Dumbing Of America

There is no quick cure for the epidemic of arrogant anti-rationalism and anti-intellectualism that has infected America. Her people are in serious intellectual trouble--in danger of losing our hard-won cultural capital to the virulent mixture of these two social laggards along with low expectations which are a result of our idolatry infotainment

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Wikipedia defies 180,000 demands to Remove Muhammad's Image

Wikipedia, the free online encyclopaedia, is refusing to remove medieval artistic depictions of the Prophet Muhammad, despite being flooded with complaints from Muslims demanding the images be deleted.

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US military accused of harboring fundamentalism

WASHINGTON (AFP) - Since his last combat deployment in Iraq, Jeremy Hall has had a rough time, getting shoved and threatened by his fellow soldiers. The trouble started there when he would not pray in the mess hall.

"A senior ranking staff sergeant told me to leave and sit somewhere else because I refused to pray," Hall, a 23-year-old US army specialist, told AFP.

Later, Hall was confronted by a major for holding an authorized meeting of "atheists and freethinkers" on his base. The officer threatened to discipline him and block his re-enlistment.

"He said: 'You guys are being a problem and problems can be removed,'" Hall said. "He was yelling at us and stuff and at the very end he says, 'I really love you guys, I want you to see the light.'"

Now Hall is suing the major and Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, accusing them of breaching his constitutional rights. A campaign group, the Military Religious Freedom Foundation, is waiting for the Pentagon to respond to a lawsuit filed in a Kansas federal court on Hall's behalf.

It alleges a "pernicious pattern and practice" of infringement of religious liberties in the military.

The group's founder, former Air Force lawyer Mikey Weinstein, said he has documented 6,800 testimonies by military personnel -- nearly all of them Christians -- of sometimes punitive or humiliating attempts to make them accept a fundamentalist evangelical interpretation of Christianity.

"I am at war with those people who would create a fundamentalist Christian theocracy in the technologically most lethal organization ever created by our species, which is the United States armed forces," he said.

He plans to add extra charges and possibly other lawsuits this month.

"It violates title seven of the US code for an employer to push their Biblical world view on an employee," he said. "But it's a trillion times worse when that is not just your shift manager at Starbucks but that is your military superior."

He singles out one of the major Christian groups in the military, the Officers Christian Fellowship (OCF).

The group represents 15,000 US military personnel around the world, according to its director, retired Air Force general Bruce Fister.

"It is not the position of OCF to try and coerce people to believe what we believe," Fister told AFP.

OCF's aim, as stated on its website, is to achieve "a spiritually transformed military, with ambassadors for Christ in uniform, empowered by the Holy Spirit."

It professes belief in "the eternal blessedness of the saved; and the everlasting, conscious punishment of the lost."

Fister emphasized the group's work to support families of soldiers deployed in the "global war on terror."

"People make mistakes. There's probably been some instances where people have wrongly spoken," he added. "We'd like them not to, but that's life."

"Our checks within our equal opportunity channels identified fewer than 100 formal complaints over a two-year period," said Pentagon spokeswoman Eileen Lainez.

Army spokesman Paul Boyce told AFP: "The Army places a high value on the rights of its soldiers to observe tenets of their respective religious faiths."

The MRFF's constitutional complaint "is a matter of the courts system to address and resolve," he added.

"The joint standards of conduct for the Armed Forces and military equal opportunity policies address the freedom of religion, avoiding discrimination because of religion."

But Weinstein argued that most personnel are "too terrified" to speak out.

"When you actually fight against them, they make your life hell," said Hall, adding he has been passed over for promotion since launching his lawsuit. "I can't get a leg up no matter what I do."

A former military chaplain of a prestigious US military college reported being prevented from leading worship after disagreeing with the fundamentalist stance of other officials.

"I am not ready to say that if someone does not profess Christ as their savior that they are going to hell ... That got a lot of people angered," the minister told AFP, speaking on condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation against a spouse who is a senior officer.

"The leader of the youth group that ministered to the teens (at the academy) said that Catholics were not Christians and that Muslims hated Christians, and that created a lot of tension," the ex-chaplain added.

"As a soldier, many times you want to believe you're fighting on the right side. It's easy to kill someone if you believe that they're going to hell and that they are religiously opposed to you."

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Doctors Group Endorses Weed for Medical Uses

A leading U.S. doctors group has endorsed using marijuana for medical purposes, urging the government to roll back a prohibition on using it to treat patients and supporting studies into its medical applications.

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Dumb and Dumber: Are Americans Hostile to Knowledge?

Something is happening in the U.S: Anti-intellectualism (the attitude that “too much learning can be a dangerous thing”) and anti-rationalism (“the idea that there is no such things as evidence or fact, just opinion”) have fused in a particularly insidious way. Citizens are ignorant about essential knowledge and they don't care.

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Jehovah's Witnesses the Fastest Growing Faith in the US

Time to disconnect the doorbell.

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Atheist Sees Image of Big Bang in Piece of Toast

Excitement is growing in the Northern England town of Huddlesfield following the news that a local man saw an image of the Big-Bang in a piece of toast. Atheist Donald Chapman, 36, told local newspaper, "The Huddlesfield Express" that he was sitting down to eat breakfast when an unusual toast pattern caught his eye.

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Holy shit, I can't believe this still happens in America

If you thought race was an uncomfortable issue in the Democratic presidential primary, wait 'til you get a load of what's going on in the Democratic primary in the Memphis area's 9th District of Tennessee, where a shockingly worded flier paints Jewish Rep. Steve Cohen (D-Tenn.) as a Jesus hater.

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"Imagine No Religion" Billboards Spark National Controversy

The national campaign is an effort to let Americans know that there is room for reason and clarity of thought, free from the dogma that organized religion uses to keep its flock in line; as well as donating.

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Cloverfield review

I'm going to have to make this brief, my beloved ibook died last night and I have to sneak this in before heading to work. I finally got around to seeing Cloverfield. I loved it! I don't know what people are talking about. I give it three and a half antlers up.

More later.

Emoose out

The Bible as Graphic Manga Novel, With a Samurai Stranger Called Christ

Ajinbayo Akinsiku wants the world to know Jesus Christ, just not the gentle, blue-eyed Christ of old Hollywood movies and illustrated Bibles. Mr. Akinsiku says his Son of God is “a samurai stranger who’s come to town, in silhouette,” here to shake things up in a new version of the Bible rooted in manga, the Japanese form of graphic novels.

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Ridiculous Christian Comic on Homosexuality

Crazy ass Christian comic explaining how gay people are evil and want to take over the world. The best part has to be the claim that gay people want to put Christians in prison. The demons are pretty cute though.

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GOP sources: Romney to suspend campaign

Former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney will suspend his bid for the Republican presidential nomination, GOP sources tell CNN.

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Mississippi Law: "No fat people allowed in restaurants"

A politician was busy drafting legislation that would ban obese people from restaurants. It wasn't taken well by the public and he's been under fire for (in his words) "trying to shed light on the issue." If publicity for the issue is what he wanted, then publicity is what he'll get.

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American businesswoman jailed in Saudi - going to STARBUCKS!

The joys of the Muslim Sharia Law. An American businesswoman jailed in Saudi - for going to STARBUCKS!!!!

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More movie reviews

Let me use this opportunity to catch up on my reviews: 

30 Days of Night

I had high hopes for this one. It's an adaption of a graphic novel of the same name. I thought they did a great job of translating the claustrophobic and panic inducing  fear that the comic had. the movie had a few flaws, but they were minor. Josh Hartnett as the stoic sheriff was a bit wooden at times. The nasty vampires were...well nasty. There are some genuine scary moments and they kept the stomach churning gore so popular these days to a minimum.  

I give this movie: 3 antlers (out of 4)

Meet the Spartans

This is another case of all the funny bits being in the trailer. Don't waste your time. I wished I had waited for it to be available on Netflix.

I give this movie: 1 1/2 antlers (out of 4)

See you at the Multiplex

Emoose out

Galaxy without dark matter puzzles astronomers

What do you call an absence of darkness? Dark matter is supposed to be spread throughout the universe, but a new study reports a spiral galaxy that seems to be empty of the stuff, and astrophysicists cannot easily explain why.

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DNA Found to Have "Impossible" Telepathic Properties

DNA has been found to have a bizarre ability to put itself together, even at a distance, when according to known science it shouldn't be able to. Explanation: None, at least not yet.

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Online petition ask Wikipedia to remove pictures of Muhammad

An article about the Prophet Muhammad in the English-language Wikipedia has become the subject of an online protest in the last few weeks because of its representations of Muhammad, taken from medieval manuscripts.

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Mini cigarettes give tobacco goodness in half the time

People on break get nicotine fix and still get back to work on time!

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Poll: Quarter of Brits think Churchill, Gandhi were myth

Britons are losing their grip on reality, according to a poll out Monday which showed that nearly a quarter think Winston Churchill was a myth while the majority reckon Sherlock Holmes was real.

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Anonymous Victory - Katie Holmes leaving Tom Cruise?

The actress is said to be inconsolable after a string of leaked Scientology videos, featuring her husband saluting a portrait of Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard, declaring war on psychiatry and claiming that members of his religion are “the only ones who can really help” accident victims, have flooded the Internet and divided Hollywood.

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Heard the one about the muslim medical student

... who refused to scrub up? Well, its true.Muslim medical students are refusing to obey hygiene rules brought in to stop the spread of deadly superbugs, because they say it is against their religion.

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