DON’T LET THE TERRORISTS WIN
Via The Friendly Atheist.
Fort Bragg, here in town, has decided that it’s a church and needs to “save” people in town.
And in other news, Newt Gingrich is still an idiot. Newt, buy a map. The World Trade Center was not in the South Bronx.
First Amendment? What First Amendment?
A soft-spoken 14-year-old’s nose piercing has landed her a suspension from school and forced her into the middle of a fight over her First Amendment right to exercise her religion.
Ariana Iacono says she just wants to be a normal teenager at Clayton High School, about 15 miles southeast of Raleigh. She has been suspended since last week because her nose ring violates the Johnston County school system’s dress code.
Iacono and her mother, Nikki, belong to the Church of Body Modification, a small group unfamiliar to rural North Carolina, but one with a clergy, a statement of beliefs and a formal process for accepting new members.
The morons in the district office are threatening to send her to juvi school. The nose stud is so tiny it’s almost invisible. There is no way in hell that her having it interferes with the school’s mission. This is a power play, pure and simple. The authoritarians in the district office think they ought to be able to decide which religions are and which are not “legitimate.” They’re wrong and they’ll lose in court. And, in the process, waste tens of thousands of tax dollars.
Make sure to click over to the story for a photo of the offending stud. And I’m not sure that some of the comments aren’t good examples of Poe’s Law.
Here’s a local one:
A teacher at J.W. Coon Elementary School has been suspended with pay after being accused of breaking the arm of a 5-year-old student, Cumberland County Schools officials said this morning.
Jackie Bennett, 57, of the 6500 block Pacific Avenue in Fayetteville, is charged with assault inflicting serious bodily injury and child abuse inflicting serious injury, said Debbie Tanna, a Cumberland County Sheriff’s Office’s spokeswoman.
Bennett is an exceptional children’s teacher, said Theresa Perry, schools spokeswoman.
Bennett told investigators he was trying to use a “therapeutic hold” on the girl Tuesday when she was injured, Tanna said.
“A therapeutic hold refers to the technique used by school employees to restrain a child for a limited time in an attempt to calm the child and to prevent them from harming themselves or others,” Perry said in an e-mail.
But just remember, schools are the safest place for students to be.
It’s simple math. Start with John 1:1
In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.
Add in this crap from my favorite wingnut site:
“That’s one of the things that I think characterizes the left,” states Crouse. “They don’t want there to be any authorities [or] boundaries or any demands on their own opinions.
“They want to be able to go in any direction they want to go, and for their word and their stances [and] their opinions to be the final thing — and they’ve set up their own intellect as the ultimate authority rather than the Word of God, rather than the principles of conservatism.”
I guess liberalism = everything but Christianity. Cool. We have lots more folks on our side.
The next time I’m taking all of my remote controls on a canoe trip, I’ll make sure to stick them all in this “Heat Seal Poly Bag for Remote Controls.”
It is baggy and semicircular on one end. Put in what you need to pack, and blow with hot wind, it will shrink along the item and dovetail well. Simple to operate, waterproof, dustproof, antifouling, good appearance, dampproof, it is a super easy to use packing product.
We finally tried the much-hyped candy. I love chocolate covered pretzels. These new M&M’s are almost but not quite entirely unlike chocolate-covered pretzels (with apologies to Douglas Adams). Very little chocolate flavor and even less pretzel.
Much ado advertising about nothing.
I need some help. The girls (and I) want to learn ASL. None of us has any kind of experience with the language, so we’re going to at least try to learn it via some kind of program. Does anyone have any experience in this area? Suggestions? Warnings? Wild guffaws?
We’re leaning towards Naturally Signing.
Thanks.
Target recently donated $150k to reactionary GOPer Tom Emmer, who is running for MN governor. I am personally going to boycott Target until they repent by donating a like sum to the DFL.
I haven’t posted anything homeschooling-related in about forever, but I couldn’t pass up this re-tread from the 1990s. A couple of quotes:
If you have time to commit, then homeschooling may be an alternative to traditional education venues. The time you spend homeschooling does not have to follow traditional models (8-5, five weekdays), but it does require at least the same amount of time.
The best homeschooling parents are former teachers
More secessionist talk from an (WARNING! REDUNDANCY ALERT!) ignorant Republican.
And everyone else ought to just get the hell out!
Shop at Home Depot and make a bunch of bigots cry.
I’m pretty sure that public school teachers ought not be anointing their students with “holy oil.”
Under the category of increasing revenues to the federal gov’t, our “betters” are getting set to implement a fee that I bet will generate zero dollars in the next year:
There’s even a new fee if you’d like formally to renounce your U.S. citizenship — it costs nothing now, but the price tag will be $450 starting Tuesday.
Here’s how you can renounce your citizenship:
formally renouncing U.S. citizenship before a U.S. diplomatic or consular officer outside the United States (sec. 349 (a) (5) INA);
formally renouncing U.S. citizenship within the U.S. (but only under strict, narrow statutory conditions) (Sec. 349 (a) (6) INA);
So, let’s say I’m overseas and decide that I want to be the new “Man Without a Country.” I go to the nearest consulate, make an appointment to see an officer, and announce that “I, Daryl Cobranchi, a natural born citizen of the United States formally renounce my US citizenship.” How is the officer going to respond? Will he say, “Thank you very much, Mr. Cobranchi. Will you be paying by Visa or Amex?” And if I refused to pay, would he force me to stay a citizen? Bizarre.
At first glance I read this as “Crotch.”
Rand Paul doesn’t know how old the Earth is. Or, rather, he was afraid to tell a group of fundy homeschoolers the truth.
Check out the comments on this CNN article about a proposed AZ law. The bill would clearly violate the explicit wording of the 14th Amendment, ratified in 1868. And yet the commenters at CNN are going on about how the Framers of the Constitution never intended for the children of illegal immigrants to have citizenship.
We amended the Constitution. It says that if you are born in the US you are a citizen, by birthright.
Anthony officially graduated yesterday. It was a very nice event. Just our small co-op. All of the kids who participated in co-op classes were recognized, and then we had the actual graduation ceremony. I got to deliver the keynote address. Pretty fun.
It was neat seeing three boys (er, young men) who we have known for years make the transition out of homeschool and into college. All three will be attending one of the local community colleges next year.
I calls ‘em as I sees ‘em. And this is what I see this morning:
No mosques in New York City!
There was a church that perished on 9/11. The little St. Nicholas Greek Orthodox Church. Rebuild that!
It is not a matter of freedom of religion, but, freedom of worship. In America, worship the one true God of our forefathers … of Abraham, of Isaac, of Jacob, of Joseph, and of Nicholas. Any ol’ way you like.
We have a jealous God, who founded America. He hasn’t abandoned us. I promise.
Russ Olenick, Raeford
But, heh, it’s Fayetteville. Lots of idiots running around here. But how, then, to explain the comments on this CNN piece on the same topic? Looks like I picked the wrong week to quit sniffing glue.
It’s not about the “babies.” It’s about keeping women barefoot and pregnant. They don’t like the fact that women can have sex without the risk of getting pregnant.
Thursday was my birthday. No big deal and I wouldn’t mention it at all except it’s a necessary detail for the story. Jonathan had a 9-10 baseball game scheduled for that night. As we were heading out the door for the game, my dad called with birthday wishes. He told Jonathan to hit a home run for me.
Now 9-10 baseball is the first year that the kids pitch. It’s not exactly MLB quality. And Jonathan’s team is not exactly tearing up the league. At the top of the 4th, they were down 10-0. That’s mercy-rule territory. They needed to score at least one run to keep the game alive. The leadoff hitter walked. Then, on the next pitch, one of the stranger plays in baseball happened. A grounder to first allegedly hit the runner going from 1st to 2nd. But nobody on the field saw it and the field umpire didn’t signify dead ball (which is the correct way to handle it). Instead, he let play go on. The batter-runner was thrown out at first and left the field. That’s when the field umpire called the runner on 1st out for interference (Rule 7.09 (m) and 7.10 (a)). Then the home plate umpire called the batter-runner out for abandoning the baseline by going back to the dugout (7.08 (a)(2)). This, IMO, was a very legalistic ruling, since the field umpire blew the call and that error led to the kid leaving the field. Regardless, after all of the discussions and arguments and hullabaloo, it was now 2 outs with nobody on and Jonathan got up. One more out and the game is over. Two pitches later he hit a sharp liner between third and short. It skipped through the left fielder’s legs and rolled to the fence. Jonathan hustled all the way around the bases for a “home run” (at least in 9-10 baseball). As he crossed the plate he yelled out “Happy Birthday, Dad!”
That really was the best birthday present I’ve ever received.
Taser Int’l is headquartered there.
D (a school bus) UI is not very cool.
That is, “insane.” It’s a really good question.
You’ve got to love the folks who write the (totally scientific) polls at OneNewsNow. They really do seem to know their readers. Today’s is #1.
That’s “Wingnut of the Day.”
And another thoughtful conservative calls for the repeal of the 19th Amendment.
Only real Americans (that means white, conservative, and male) deserve the vote.
They really do hate democracy, don’t they?
Life in Tea Party Central Casting:
Corruption apparent with health vote
Well, the battle is on. I have a hard time understanding, after all these years, why anyone would proudly associate his name with the title “Democrat.” I have never seen a more ungodly, corrupt group in Washington, and even in our own town, that has raised its head to deprive the citizens of this country of their constitutional rights.
What is even sadder is not that the health care bill has passed because of our present group of communist sympathizers, but we have so many willing to sell this country down the tubes for the color of the resident’s skin or the greed of their character.
Bob Smith
Fayetteville
Do these sub-morons really believe that supporting health insurance reform somehow equates to being a communist sympathizer? I could pick apart his letter word by word, but why bother? I am really curious, though, about what constitutional rights we on the left have deprived him of? Was it the right to be denied coverage by an insurance company? Or perhaps it was the right to be driven into a medical bankruptcy because he gets sick. Oh, I know. He’s being deprived of the right to pay for insurance for years and years, only to have the insurance company rescind his policy when he needs it. Yeah! We proud Democrats are a bunch of sick bastards for that one.
OneNewsNow is touting a bunch of homeschoolers who are “challenging” the constitutionality of the Affordable Care Act.
One News Now is full of shit. The write downs that Deere and Caterpillar are taking are due to a closure of a ridiculous tax loophole that allowed them to write off as an expense money they weren’t spending. FASB rules require that they account for the change in their 10-Q. So they did. But it’s not real money, and it’s certainly not money that they should have been able to count as income. But ONN (full of shit!) wants to play games.
And small businesses were NOT eligible to take advantage of that particular loophole. If anything, reform helps level the playing field for them.
Do y’all remember the Sesame Street song that started out “One of these things is not like the others”? That song popped into mind when I read this HuffPo piece:
Such products as Left Behind wall paper, screen savers, children’s books, and video games have become part of the ubiquitous American background noise. Less innocuous symptoms include people stocking up on assault rifles and ammunition, adopting “Christ-centered” home school curricula, fearing higher education, embracing rumor as fact, and learning to love hatred for the “other,” as exemplified by a revived anti-immigrant racism, the murder of doctors who do abortions, and even a killing in the Holocaust Museum. And now we have a cult/militia dedicated to the same idea.
Funny, but I don’t equate stockpiling weapons and ammo with homeschooling, Christ-centered or not. Just because Christianists homeschool doesn’t mean they’re all one step removed from declaring war on the federal government.
*Oh. My. Allah!
Fundamentalist Muslims can be just as stupid and evil as their Christianist counterparts.
(CNN) — A Lebanese man charged with sorcery and sentenced to death in Saudi Arabia is scheduled to be beheaded on Friday, the man’s lawyer said Wednesday… Sibat is the former host of a popular call-in show that aired on Beirut-based satellite TV channel “Sheherazade.” According to his lawyer, Sibat would predict the future on his show and give out advice to his audience.
It seems pretty clear that the future pope covered up for two (or more?) child-molesting priests. But never you mind. After all, we know that schools churches are the safest place for students children to be.
the stupid cardinal is still smashing into the windows. At least I’m pretty sure that he won’t pass the stupid genes on to his progeny, since he doesn’t have time to seek out a female.
The Hurt Locker continues in a long tradition of boring Best Pictures. I found myself rooting for the Iraqis.
Calling an 11-year-old girl a “loser” is not the way for a teacher to relate to students.
We have mirrored film on our windows to reflect IR radiation. It works quite well, but there is one somewhat negative side effect. For the last 24 hours, we’ve had a male cardinal bashing itself into the windows as it attacks the other male in the mirror. It drives the dog and the cats crazy, and it’s probably not so good for the bird. I even opened the windows enough for the cats to sit on the ledge outside the window. The bird just moved his attacks up about a foot to stay out of harm’s way.
Suggestions?
Lynn at Bore Me to Tears documents the sad end of the public school system in the United States. It was murdered this week in Texas. It is survived by a bastard son, Fundamental Christianism.
I’m sure y’all will be shocked(!) to learn that vaccines are still not causally related to autism.
The “special vaccine court” ruled Friday that parents who alleged their children’s autism was caused by a mercury-containing preservative in childhood vaccines did not prove their cases and are not entitled to compensation.
The reviews of the three test cases by special masters of the U.S. Court of Federal Claims exceeded 600 pages and found all of the claims wanting.
“Petitioners’ theory of vaccine-related causation is scientifically unsupportable,” wrote Special Master Patricia Campbell-Smith in her conclusion about William P. Mead, whose parents, George and Victoria Mead, had brought one of the suits.
“In the absence of a sound medical theory causally connecting William’s received vaccines to his autistic condition, the undersigned cannot find the proposed sequence of cause and effect to be logical or temporally appropriate. Having failed to satisfy their burden of proof under the articulated legal standard, petitioners cannot prevail on their claim of vaccine-related causation.”
I’m really not sure that I want to live in the same country as these “Christians.”
JACKSON, MS – A northern Mississippi school district decided Wednesday not to host a high school prom after a lesbian student demanded she be able to attend with her girlfriend and wear a tuxedo. (See earlier story)
Instead, the school board met and issued a statement announcing it wouldn’t host the event at Itawamba County Agricultural High School in Fulton, “due to the distractions to the educational process caused by recent events.”
Of course, the super-”Christians” at OneNewsNow are cheering on the homophobes. They even have a rigged poll on the subject. Check out the Q&A.
OneNewsNow.com Poll
What’s your reaction to a school district’s cancellation of its prom following a lesbian’s request to attend and bring her girlfriend? (related article)
1. The district should be commended for sticking to its morality-based policy
2. The community should rally behind the district and host a private event
3. The ACLU should know better than to flex its muscle in the Bible Belt
How ’bout a choice for people who are not still living in the 16th century?
Time to storm the Bastille D.C.
If you think health care reform is ugly, just wait until Congress tries immigration reform again.
The Senate has begun work on an immigration bill and at the center of this new plan is a controversial requirement for all American workers to get identification cards… Under the plan – all legal workers, including citizens and immigrants, would have to get an ID card that includes biometric information like fingerprints.
There is no way in hell that I am giving the gov’t my fingerprints or any other biometric data. The new passports have an RFID chip in them with a digitized passport photo. The day I got mine it somehow got dropped into a microwave oven which accidentally was programmed for 30 seconds on “high.” Who knew that RFID chips and microwaves didn’t play well together?
I absolutely will not voluntarily participate. The only way the gov’t gets my fingerprints is if they arrest me.
I shot this one of Katelyn the other day. Ballerinas can only maintain First Arabesque for a second or two, but in this photo Katelyn looks like she could stay there forever.
The AP(!) dissects Christian/creationist biology textbooks written for the homeschool market. Jay Wile has a pretty ugly quote:
Coyne and Virginia Tech biology professor Duncan Porter reviewed excerpts from the Apologia and Bob Jones biology textbooks, which are equivalent to ninth- and 10th-grade biology lessons. Porter said he would give the books an F.
“If this is the way kids are home-schooled then they’re being shortchanged, both rationally and in terms of biology,” Coyne said. He argued that the books may steer students away from careers in biology or the study of the history of the earth.
Wile countered that Coyne “feels compelled to lie in order to prop up a failing hypothesis (evolution). We definitely do not lie to the students. We tell them the facts that people like Dr. Coyne would prefer to cover up.”
I taught a homeschool co-op chemistry class at our church in DE (Yes, I used to go. A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away). They wanted me to use the Wile text. I reviewed it. Total piece of shit. Really very, very poor. Not surprising given how little respect he has for the way science works.
Another in the never ending series of “Life in Fayetteville, NC.”
Military service a privilege, not a right
Betsy Lowe, thanks for your recent service to our country. By serving, you’ve done what most civilians are only armchair quarterbacks to, deferring to “supporting the troops” instead.Thank you for your comments (“Is controversy a case of guilty consciences?,” Feb 20). With them, you have proven that the best policy is the existing “Don’t ask, don’t tell.” As long as everyone stays in their lane and doesn’t infringe on the rights of others, and focuses on the war-making mission, the mission will be enhanced instead of degraded.
Close-knit units, as in the special operations world, are most efficient at war-making types of missions, which is why most of them have certain specialties that still are not and won’t ever be open to females because of the “no fail” mission statements. The ability to fight, survive and fight again far outweighs any single person’s personal desires to pursue their dreams in the military.
Serving in the military is not a right, it is a privilege. Hence, the military’s policy of weeding out undesirables who would detract from that mission instead of enhancing it.
This is going to offend some I am sure, but why is it that, as a society, we have accepted that homosexuality isn’t a conscious decision but an attraction to the same sex, but we don’t apply that same reasoning towards pedophiles? Aren’t they born that way as well? C’mon, time to step up and accept responsibility for your own adult decision-making.
Rick K. Hopfauf
Sanford
Homosexuality = pedophilia? WTF? I really shouldn’t have to explain this. Presumably Rick Hopfauf is over the age of 5 and has learned to read something beyond Dick and Jane books. But, apparently, the thinking part of Rick Hopfauf’s brain atrophied a long, long time ago. So, here you go Rick Hopfauf…
The reason we accept homosexuality and we don’t pedophilia is that homosexual acts between consenting adults are BETWEEN CONSENTING ADULTS! Children cannot consent and acting on an attraction to pre-pubescent children is wrong, both morally and legally.
*sigh* My neighbors really are a constant source of agita.
