OVO

“The Oregon Curriculum Network is privately sponsored and promotes excellence in education. One excellent way to learn about a topic is to teach it, i.e. to communicate about it to others. My hope is that students in the 21st century will take advantage of the new technologies to teach their peers, and to develop portfolios which showcase their many interests and skills. These portfolios (e.g. web sites) will serve as platforms for further collaboration and communication with others around the world.”

What impresses me most about the OCN is (a) their use of open source software to (b) distribute free educational tools that (c) teach mathematics through real-world examples. Learning mathematics in the abstract is inexcusable when there are so many real-world-applicable ways to approach it. If I had a young one or two in school, I’d give a click to the Oregon Curiculum Network.

Dialogue from the 1960s television series Star Trek plus original music equals TrekTunes.

According to the Salt Lake City Tribune, ‘The nation’s highest court struck down laws banning consensual sodomy in June, but a judge has tossed out one man’s bid to get Utah’s anti-sodomy law — and another one banning premarital sex — off the books. Utah’s consensual sodomy law forbids “any sexual act with a[n] [unmarried] person who is 14 years of age or older involving the genitals of one person and the mouth or anus of another person, regardless of the sex of either participant.” The anti-fornication statute bans premarital sex, saying “any unmarried person who shall voluntarily engage in sexual intercourse with another is guilty of fornication.” Both crimes are class B misdemeanors punishable by up to 6 months in jail and a $1,000 fine.’

Other Utah class B misdemeanors include cruelty to animals, medical fraud of the elderly, carrying concealed firearms in schools, stalking and sexually-oriented spam.

Last night I read a fine update on the “James Ossuary” forgery in Archaeology Magazine. In the magazine they made the claim that you can buy pieces of the “true cross” on e-bay. I was skeptical… but you can confirm for yourself whether it’s true or not.

If the Marquis de Sade were alive today, would he have a web site? Would Edgar Allan Poe be the webmaster of his own domain? Would Arthur Rimbaud use computer technology to disorganize the senses? Would Charles Baudelaire employ venture capital for a sinister new internet startup, Fleurs du Mal Inc? SUPERVERT 32C INC is a consortium of literary, technological, and entrepreneurial interests. Its mission is to utilize the techniques of vanguard aesthetics to research the pathology of novel perversions. A veritable Bauhaus of psychoses, SUPERVERT seeks to invent new kinds of art and literature through the synthesis of abnormal psychology, operant conditioning, sadistic pornography, rationalist philosophy, and modernist aesthetics.

Seems like there was going to be a movie based on A Princess of Mars by Edgar Rice Burroughs in the 1970s but it never happened. Found some sketches by Bruce Grimes of Design Concepts made for this unmade movie. The book is now in the public domain. Yep.

Habitat for Humanity‘s first-ever Shack-a-Thon in Oklahoma was a charity event to raise money for the poor. Student groups built shacks out of cardboard and trash and camped out overnight. One of the shacks was knocked over by vandals described as white males about six feet tall. According to the call log, one wore a white Polo shirt, and another wore a pink shirt and had blond hair. They knocked the shack over after verbally harassing the students building it. What kinds of things did they say? “Why would Christians want to associate with atheists?” Who were the students building the shack? The Oklahoma University Atheists and Agnostics student organization. Praise the Lord!

“This year I was told any artist of color must complete a performance based on 500 years of oppression in order to get funding.” Nao Bustamante said that as part of a great piece of performance art. Her sister Cruz Bustamante is running for office in the California recall election. I’d rather have Nao.

When Vicki Boer was a teenager, her father sexually assaulted her. She went to her clergy (elders of the Watch Tower Bible and Tract Society, aka the Jehovah’s Witnesses) for aid. They did not refer her to the police, or to social workers, or to the Children’s Aid Society. Instead, they instructed her to not seek outside help or to report the abuse. On top of that, they instructed her to councel her father, to give him a chance to ‘repent his sins.’ This series of events caused her to be ostracized by her family, friends, and fellow Jehovah’s Witnesses. When her mother was dying of cancer, she was forbidden from visiting her in the hospital. After all this, Vicki took the Canadian Watch Tower Bible and Tract Society to court for negligence in their handling of her initial abuse. She was awarded $5,000 in damages. She was also given a bill for $142,000 – to pay for the Watch Tower Bible and Tract Society legal fees. That means she owes $137,000 to the Watch Tower Bible and Tract Society for the privilage of being neglected by them, with the added bonus of losing her family and friends along the way.

Christians seem pretty good at getting someone else to pay for their crimes. Last year the government of Ireland cut a deal with the Catholic church – the government would pay some of the fees awarded to the victims of cases of sexual abuse and neglect. The Christians kicked in all of 128 million euros. The tab so far? $1.2 billion euros.

Please forgive me if my math is off in the following – I don’t usually work with such large numbers. But as best I can figure, the Christians are paying around one one-thousandth of the fees and the tax payers are paying the rest. And wonder of wonders: religious groups get tax relief in Ireland. So let’s see… if there are around 4,000,000 people in Ireland, and they are going to pay 1,200,000,000 euros minus 128,000,000 euros, that’s 268 euros for each man, woman and child in Ireland. That 269 euros subsidizes an institution found guilty of the sexual abuse of children from the 1930s up to the 1970s.

Who pays for religion? You do, sucker. Feel like you’re getting your money’s worth?