The Daily Bluster

From the New York Times:  Student Faces Town’s Wrath in Protest Against a Prayer CRANSTON, R.I. — She is 16, the daughter of a firefighter and a nurse, a self-proclaimed nerd who loves Harry Potter and Facebook. But Jessica Ahlquist is also an outspoken atheist who has incensed this heavily Roman Catholic city with a successful lawsuit to get a prayer removed from the wall of her high school auditorium, where it has hung for 49 years. Read more here . And here . It says in the nytimes article that at ten years old, she became an atheist. Clearly, the girl is made of sterner stuff, and not just of sugar and spice. Yep, that's Jessica As local florists refused to deliver flowers to her, I asked a friend to deliver one to her: You rock, Jessica.

It is difficult to imagine the world today without money, or the concept of money. But surely, the first civilizations did not start out using money, right?             Long ago, people did not use money to buy things. They also did not use money to pay the person who repaired their roof, or built their tables, chairs and other furniture. What they did was to exchange the things they had for the things that they needed. If they had a lot of rice, they might want to exchange some of it for fish, so they would find somebody who has a lot of fish, and see if that person wants to trade some of it for rice. Or maybe a person who was very good at repairing roofs or making chairs and tables would get paid with bananas, or whatever fruit was in season. This type of doing business is called barter .              As you can imagine, barter trade has some serious flaws. For ...

So, 2012. The year the world is supposed to end. As the world (much of it, anyway) celebrated the coming of the new year, I couldn’t help but notice the different ways cultures of the world welcome the new year.  For us here in the Philippines, we like to usher in the year with a bang—literally. With firecrackers that can set off car alarms, and can reduce your precious doggies to whimpering, whining, shitting, piteous creatures; with firecrackers that shatter eardrums, and mangle hands and, in some cases, cause fires and kill people.  The firecracker on the left is aptly called "Goodbye Philippines" Also by firing loaded guns indiscriminately into the sky. This one’s fun—gravity tells us that what comes up must come down, right? So when the bullet does return to earth, it sometimes hit people, including children.  And kills them. Loud noises are supposed to drive away “evil spirits,” according to Chinese traditions. That people use this superstition...

I have never liked celebrating my birthday. Birthdays only remind me that I am one year closer to dying. Last December 28 was my birthday, and were it not for two old friends who actually made the trouble of going to my house to greet me personally, I would probably spend my birthday just like I did the year before (and the year before that): playing a video game. As it was, the three of us drank and talked about old times.   I’m glad they came; I actually enjoyed my birthday this year, which surprised me.  I suspect I am turning into a grouchy old fart, though. And I find I am content to be a grouchy old fart. What the hell, I am disappointed and disillusioned with the world—and the world is disappointed and disillusioned with me. Might as well live with that , and accept my grouchy old fart persona, even if I am not as old as this old fart: This is probably my last post for 2011. Frankly, I didn’t think this blog would go past this year, given...

So, in this season of hope, peace and good will, Catholic League president Bill Donahue has launched a campaign—“Adopt An Atheist,” is what it’s called. Behold : Here’s what our campaign entails. We are asking everyone to contact the American Atheist affiliate in his area, letting them know of your interest in “adopting” one of them. All it takes is an e-mail. Let them know of your sincere interest in working with them to uncover their inner self. They may be resistant at first, but eventually they may come to understand that they were Christian all along. If we hurry, these closeted Christians can celebrate Christmas like the rest of us. As an added bonus, they will no longer be looked upon as people who “believe in nothing, stand for nothing and are good for nothing.”   What he is doing is just perpetrating the bigotry that religious nuts like him have towards people who happen to not share his set of beliefs.  Religion could be dangerous, as it is; combine i...

I know I am blogging about an incident that happened several months ago (June in fact), about a topic that is well past its shelf life, but see, I just read about it. And this one really irked me, and affected me enough it made me want to go visit my Shrieking Tree , i. e., this blog, to   rant and bluster, albeit in a somewhat wussy manner. Here’s what happened (as Inspector Monk used to say): A woman was invited to speak at a skeptics ’ conference held in a hotel in Dublin. Later, as she was in the elevator going up to her hotel room after the conference, a male attendee followed her to the elevator and invited her to his room for coffee. She rejected the offer, and that was that.  They both went their separate ways. Should have invited my right hand instead The woman then posted a video that mentioned her apparently creepy and harrowing experience. After the video got posted, things in the skeptics’ and atheists’ blogosphere got interesting, which, as you m...

Extra! Extra! Iranian protesters storm British Embassy in Tehran!   Thankfully Iranian authorities acted just in time to put a stop to it, thus avoiding a repeat of the 1979 US embassy takeover in the same city . Iranians don’t like westerners much, do they.  One reason may be is that Westerners throughout history have this habit of exploiting countries around the world for their own gain. Not because their very survival hinges on the raping and pillaging of other countries ( especially in Asia ); they do this because of old-fashioned greed; or enterprise, as some westerners call it . Oil in Iran (or Persia, as the country was then known) was discovered in 1908 by a British geologist named George Reynolds who was working for William D’Arcy.  The enterprising D’Arcy had previously arranged an oil concession with Shah Mozzafar al-Din Shah Qajar in 1901. A few months after the discovery of oil, the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (AI...