Racists To Boycott Thor Movie

The Council of Conservative Citizens is this white supremacist group which still exists, and they’re very angry about this movie:

… because there’s a BLACK GUY in it. From Digital Spy:

5 Psychological Effects That Can Cause People to Believe in Nonsense

All of us humans are the result of an unconscious biological process called evolution. Based on the conditions at the time, lots of different pressures selected for certain traits. And after those conditions changed – for example most of us don’t need to prioritize escaping from predators on the savannah anymore – all of the selected-for traits remained. We can’t just say, “Hey! Now that we have houses and locked doors and stuff, I don’t need to wake up in the middle of the night whenever there’s a loud noise because chances are very good that it isn’t a fucking tiger here to eat me and dismember my children!”

Nowadays, lots of these psychological traits have become a target for charlatans and frauds out to scheme you out of your time and money. Here are a few of them to bear in mind the next time one of them approaches you.

Killing for God in Pakistan

Naushad Valiyani, a doctor in Pakistan, is being held on blasphemy charges. Usually these kinds of charges are used for some nonreligious reason, similar to how sex and drug charges can be used to target political dissidennts in the West, and this case is not an exception to that rule. From The Independent:

Jeremy Marks

Jeremy Marks is a Los Angeles high school special education student who’s been caught up in the criminal justice system. Originally he was offered to plead guilty on charges which would land him 7 years in a prison, and more recently he’s been offered a plea deal which included “attempted lynching” and would cost him just under 3 years in prison. He has been in jail for the past 7 months awaiting his day in court as his family is too poor to afford the bail set.

Weird Standards

All three of these stories are about private institutions doing things which are completely within their rights to do. Lots of us think they’re very weird and despicable for doing these things, but there’s nothing illegal about any of it. At the same time though it’s very revealing to examine how selectively certain standards can be applied and ignored.

I’m Going To Steal The President’s Lunch Money

Shoot the hostage.

OK I’m going to kind of sort of agree with someone on Fox “News” here. So, you know, be warned.

The backstory here is that Obama pretty much caved completely to Republicans’ demands of extending Bush’s tax cuts for the rich, instead of just extending them to those making under something like $250,000 per year as Obama claimed he wanted. In a press conference, Obama framed this as if it were a deal made where Republicans conceded things, even though the “concessions” – extending unemployment benefits, for example – were things Republicans always eventually concede on without any real dealmaking necessary.

Killing For God in Haiti

There’s been a cholera outbreak in the aftermath of the Haitian earthquake (which I predicted using my psychic powers).

According to the source of all knowledge:

“[Cholera t]ransmission is primarily through consuming contaminated drinking water or food… Primary treatment is with oral rehydration solution and if these are not tolerated, intravenous fluids. Antibiotics are beneficial in those with severe disease.”

Killing For God in India

From the Washington Post:

NEW DELHI – A bomb blast in the Hindu holy city of Varanasi, during the height of the daily sunset prayer ceremony Tuesday, injured at least 32 people and killed a 2-year-old child, officials said. Authorities said the blast was a terrorist attack.

One of the survivors later took to the Twitter in order to blast the Supreme God in the Vaishnavite tradition of Hinduism Vishnu for its negligence:

Maridjan vs. the Volcano

For some reason I’m only finding out about this now. PBS had anupdated segment on it last night.

There’s this tradition in Indonesia among the Javanese people of Indonesia where a “spiritual guardian” will “talk” to the “spirit” of a volcano in order to find out how the volcano is doing, its music preferences, what kind of celebrities it follows, whether or not it’s going to erupt and kill off a large chunk of the surrounding human population, that sort of thing. It’s a lot like volcanology except that it’s a ridiculous superstition which does not work.

WikiLeaks v. State Department

There’s been another major WikiLeaks data dump. The previous ones which made the news here in America focused on the wars inAfghanistan and Iraq. But this one shifts focus from the Pentagon to the State Department, releasing around 250,000 lightly classified documents which reveal the inner workings of US diplomatic relations.