Hell's Handmaiden Politics, philosophy, religion... and their collisions with the real world. Statistics Unique Visitors: Total Unique Visitors: Outgoing: Total Outgoing: 9 2914 8 2138

Articles from Hell's Handmaiden

Terrorist Acts, Suspicious Activity, and General Terrorism News 2007-05-26 08:58:21 Very cool resource– Global Incident Map Displaying Terrorist Acts, Suspicious Activity, and General Terrorism News. Caveat Emptor– The map seems to be run by The Transit Security Report and it feels like it leans sharply right. Why? Mostly it is the hyper-patriotism and juvenile web design. ...

The War on the Global Ummah 2007-05-25 12:13:28 I’ve recently been told by the blogger Pommygranate that strictly speaking the war on terror is: … a war on the revival of the idea of the global Ummah started by Hasan al-Banna in the 1940s following the fall of the Turkish Caliphate. Interesting… so… This is a religious war then? This is a war over ideology, not over criminal behavior? Funny, I thought we were not fighting over religion. Silly me. Second, Islam is not the only religion with branches dreaming of global dominance. Christianity comes to mind. In fact, Christianity already has a self-proclaimed global head– the Pope. This Pope once had very long military arms and still has tremendous political clout worldwide. Numerous Protestant groups are also equally fervent fantasists about a Christian world. Since it is about ideology, lets go after them too. Third, fighting an organization like al-Banna’s Muslim Brotherhood with military power is foolish– like fighting the Mafia with tanks& ...

Living in the Non-Real World 2007-05-24 13:02:00 John Edwards went on record as “repudiated the notion there is a ‘global war on terror’, calling it an ideological doctrine advanced by the Bush Administration that has strained American military resources and emboldened terrorists.” Damn straight. There is no war on terror. There are terrorists, yes. There is a war, yes. Several wars actually. There are people in Army suits shooting at people not in army suits. But the war on terror is a farce, and it is a farce that is actually making things worse. Edwards also “called the war on terror a “bumper sticker” slogan Bush had used to justify everything from abuses at the Abu Ghraib prison to the invasion of Iraq.” Over at OpinionNation, I found this rebuttal; “I’ve never heard President Bush ?justify the abuses at Abu Ghraib? by using the phrase ?war on terror?. What is this guy talking about?” You can’t be serious? Is this really a rebuttal based upon nit-picking a ...

From ?Can?t Keep Quiet? 2007-05-24 11:56:40 Iraq on the verge of collapse ...

From Seed 2007-05-24 11:54:08 a Dirty Little Secret ...

The Naked People Made Me Do BAD Things! 2007-05-24 10:45:05 Sorry, but I’m not buying it. Reactions like this– originally encountered at NoPornNorthhampton– do not come from watching naked people have sex. I’m sure the account is true in that it is an accurate reflection of the author’s experience, of her emotional reations and her subjective state. Damage like this does not come from watching nudie flicks. This kind of pathology is well on its way when you get to the porn. I was claiming power, the all-elusive power that women strive for their entire lives, from degrading and enjoying the degradation of other women. I had absorbed a lesson from the patriarchy: women are easy to degrade, weaker, and more vulnerable, so much so that even another woman can take their power. …The idea of humiliating a man was so foreign to me that my mind discounted the possibility of it immediately, before it even blinked on the radar. I had spent my life with men controlling me it was clear, at least to me, that I would never ...

Morning dose of Irony 2007-05-23 09:09:08 The President has two constitutional powers to stop wreck-less Democrats from their insistence on committing Unconstitutional Acts, and one is the power of the Veto.. If this does not stop them from ignoring Constitutional Limits on the Legislature, then the President will have no choice but to Exercise his OTHER Constitutional Power, and that is to Adjourn Congress till 2008 and send the Democrat crybabies home..(Article II, Section 3). President Bush Vetos Dem’s UNCONSTITUTIONAL spending bill Wait… the President is preventing unconstitutional acts? That is almost like protecting the constitution! Wow, that’s rich. The author of the post cited swallowed a White House press release whole, and, well, the White House says that the Dems are trying something illegal. Must be so, right? Finally, this legislation is unconstitutional because it purports to direct the conduct of the operations of the war in a way that infringes upon the powers vested in the Presidency by the ...

The Carnival of the Liberals 2007-05-22 23:27:13 Is a tough carnival to get into, but I am happy to say that I made it into Carnival of the Liberals #39. Take a look. ...

Two on Plantinga 2007-05-22 14:45:08 Fides Quaerens Intellectum has a couple of good posts concerning Alvin Plantinga– BonJour on Plantinga?s Warrant and Plantinga and McGrew on the Historical Argument. From the latter: Let me take a moment to iterate one of the difficulties I find with Plantinga?s epistemology, and I will continue to talk about the article. The idea that it is rational to accept a belief as true, while being aware that one has no reasons or arguments to think that the belief is true (or false) seems to miss the very standard of what it means to be rational. Fides Quaerens Intellectum » Plantinga and McGrew on the Historical Argument This is very much the way I see Plantinga. He does great damage to the idea of ‘reasonable’ in order to make his case. ...

Human Rights and Matthew Shepard 2007-05-22 10:42:33 The Human Rights Campaign has asked me, via email, to “Take Action: Tell your Senators: Pass the Matthew Shepard Act”. Well, I can’t do that. The Matthew Shepard Act is a law against thought, not behavior. Sen. Gordon Smith apparently disagrees– “This act is about the prosecution of crime, not prohibition of speech”– and I am sure that many are with him on that, but the position just makes no sense. From the summary of the act: Authorizes the Attorney General to provide technical, forensic, prosecutorial, or other assistance in the criminal investigation or prosecution of any crime that… is motivated by prejudice based on the actual or perceived race, color, religion, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, gender identity, or disability of the victim or is a violation of the state, local, or tribal hate crime laws. H.R.1592 What this means in no uncertain terms is that prosecution of a crime is at least partially dependent upon the ...

Oral Sex: An Addendum to ?Sex or Cancer?? 2007-05-21 20:06:37 Recently I wrote about HPV, its relationship to cancer and the controversy over making a vaccine for the virus mandatory. Now I’ve discovered that a new study “the human papillomavirus (HPV) to an increased risk of a kind of oral cancer more often seen in men”. Additionally… Of the 300 study participants, those infected with HPV were also 32 times more likely to develop this type of oral cancer than those who did not have the virus. Oral Sex Can Add to HPV Cancer Risk The vaccine– the subject of controversy in my earlier post– “protects against four: HPV-6 and HPV-11, which cause warts; and HPV-16 and HPV-18, which cause about 70% of cervical cancers. Similarly, according to the study, HPV-16 was present in 72 of the 100 cancer patients enrolled in the study. Between 12,000 and 15,000 new cases of oropharyngeal cancer are diagnosed each year, and about 3,000 people die from it.” While my last post focused only on HPV’s risk to fem ... Cancer

everydaytrash 2007-05-21 08:15:41 has the Carnival of the Green # 78 ...

The Humanist Symposium #2 2007-05-21 08:12:59 is up at Confessions of an Anonymous Coward, so get your godless heathen devil worshipping selves over there and read your immortal souls into doom. ...

Climate chaos? Don?t believe it 2007-05-20 14:30:55 Why? The 3rd Viscount Monckton of Brenchley– known, rumor among his fellow ’skeptics’ has it, “to his wider family as ‘Mr Knowledge’”– says so, of course, and he’s made up the science to prove it. Isn’t that enough? Not really. Monckton’s article is junk. He relies heavily upon the “medieval warm period”, which didn’t happen, he blames the sun, and he more or less attributes all of the science in favor of man made global warming to a kind of vast conspiracy. I especially love this last tactic. Monckton does, rather ironically, report that “Dick Lindzen emailed me last week to say that constant repetition of wrong numbers doesn’t make them right.” Indeed. There is nothing really new or surprising to Monckton’s article. He’s printed a string of pretty common, and well debunked, claims. My posts on the subject at tagged Global Warming, but don’t just take my word for it ...

The target audience 2007-05-20 12:07:22 I am a voracious consumer of audio books. I’ve ‘read’ hundreds of hours, if not at least a thousand, of books whilst driving here and there. I had an account at Audible for years before I became so desperately behind that I fear I may never catch up. But it isn’t just Audible that overtook me. Several Teaching Company courses assisted and places like Librivox offer free downloads of public domain material. I am hopelessly and eternally behind. But that is not the point. As noted, I’ve listened to productions from a number of sources. Most of them are very good, especially when, like me, you care more about content than presentation. I’ve been posting more and more frequently on economics and so I’ve been brushing up on the subject. I guess I’ve been through three or four books/lecture series on the subject in the last six weeks. The one I just finished struck me as peculiar. It was different in character from the others. It had none of th ...