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From the 1906 book The Outbursts of Everett True by A. D. Condo and J. W. Raper. With thanks to Barnacle Press.

Israel News: ‘Saint with Pure Semen’ Imprisoned

Former Defense Ministry employee says his semen is holy liquid, physical contact with him heals body and soul. Number of women fall under his influence after he tells them he is one of 36 righteous people in Judaism.

Los Angeles Times: Sex Allegations Against Rabbi Roil Israel’s Orthodox Community

Sexual harassment by religious leaders and homosexuality among rabbis.

Chicago News: Dad Could Be Jailed for Taking Girl to Church

Last month, Joseph Reyes violated a court order when he took his young daughter to services at Holy Name Cathedral. The court order– which states Reyes cannot expose the toddler to any religion other than Judaism– came down after Reyes, 35, baptized his daughter without his wife’s permission. His wife is Jewish and he converted, but the couple is in the middle of a bitter divorce. Reyes says he was a practicing Catholic when he married his wife, Rebecca. He converted to Catholicism after his daughter’s birth. Now, he says his estranged wife and the court is interfering with his right to expose his daughter to both religions.

New York Times: British High Court Says Jewish School’s Ethnic-Based Admissions Policy Is Illegal

Britain’s Supreme Court declared Wednesday that it was illegal for a Jewish school that favors Jewish applicants to base its admissions policy on a classic test of Jewishness — whether one’s mother is Jewish.

The Freethinker: Cycle Lanes Removed to Appease Jewish Neighborhood Group

A CYCLE lane “war” has broken out in the New York Hasidic enclave of Williamsburg. The lanes, covering 14 blocks of the neighbourhood were sandblasted away last week after Jewish zealots complained that scantily-clad hipster cyclists were distracting them from holy thoughts. According to this report, cyclists attracted to the area made it difficult for the Hasids to obey religious laws forbidding them from staring at members of the opposite sex in various states of undress.

BBC News: Rabbi ‘Offered Cocaine for Sex’

Rabbi Baruch Chalomish, of Upper Park Road, Salford, rented an apartment where he could “relax and have a party”, Manchester Crown Court heard. Police raided the Salford flat and discovered a total of 101 grams (3.6oz) of cocaine and more than £17,000.

Haaretz Israel News: Brazil to Extradite to Israel ‘Rabbi’ Suspected of Child Abuse

A self-appointed rabbi accused by Israeli officials of burning and cutting toddlers as part of a purification ritual will be extradited from Brazil, an official said Thursday. Elior Noam Chen will be picked up Oct. 27 in Brasilia by two Israeli agents, a Brazilian Foreign Ministry spokesman said.

Toronto Sun: Dad Convicted After Trying Home Circumcision on Son

A Vancouver-area man has been convicted of criminal negligence causing bodily harm for a botched amateur circumcision he attempted on his four-year-old son. However, Justice Marion Allan acquitted the man, who along with his family can’t be identified under a publication ban, of aggravated assault and assault with a weapon.

First of a series that never ends (etc.).  As is so often the case, a rabbi becomes a ‘rabbi’ when they are caught doing something wrong.  There are no black swans: that bird you see over there is not really black, or not really a swan.  There are no bad rabbi: that man you see over there sucking blood from a baby’s mutilated penis is not really bad, or not really a rabbi.  Much of the animal remains in the man.  It takes religion to bring out the monster.

Estimated launch window for the Lemurian Flying Rocket Association: first week of July 2010.

Barry A. Hazle Jr. served a year in prison on a drug charge. After he got out, his parole agent sent him back for being an atheist. Now, the 41-year-old Redding computer technician has won a ruling from a Sacramento federal judge against the state and stands to collect damages for having his constitutional rights violated. Even before U.S. District Judge Garland E. Burrell Jr. decided in his favor last week, California corrections officials had issued a new policy protecting the rights of atheist parolees. “This has been a long and painful process for me,” Hazle said in a statement through his attorney this week. “The judge’s ruling can’t give me back my lost freedom, but it begins to restore my faith in our judicial system.”

Hazle’s fight with the state over religion began Feb. 27, 2007, when he was paroled from the California Rehabilitation Center, Norco, where he did a year for drug possession. As a condition of his release, Hazle was ordered to attend a 90-day, inpatient drug treatment program. He agreed to the program but even before his release told prison officials he wanted to be sent to a “treatment facility that did not contain religious components,” federal court papers state. Instead, he was assigned to the Empire Recovery Center in Redding, a 12-step program pioneered by Alcoholics Anonymous and featuring a strong religious overtone, utilizing references to God and “a higher power.”

When Hazle asked to be moved to a program that was not faith-based, he was told – wrongly, as it turned out – there was none in Northern California. His parole agent, Mitch Crofoot, instructed him that “he should continue to participate in the Empire program or he would be returned to prison,” court papers state. Hazle kept attending but also persisted in objecting to the arrangement, presenting Crofoot with a written appeal on April 3, 2007. Three days later, according to court papers, Empire workers told the parole agent that Hazle had “been disruptive, though in a congenial way.” That same day Crofoot called Hazle out of an Empire treatment class, arrested him on a parole violation for not participating in the very program he was attending, and booked him into the Shasta County jail. Soon thereafter Hazle was returned to prison, where he spent more than three months.

Article continues. It is good that Mr. Hazle has a restored faith in our judicial system.  Articles like this only serve to lessen my faith.  Prohibition has cost the USA more in money and lives than it could have ever saved.  Alcoholics Anonymous is a fine program for those who volunteer for it in the same way that a religious group or a sports team or a community college class or getting out for a walk now and then can be helpful for someone seeking change in their life.  But the State has no business compelling anyone to join AA.  AA does not have consistent evidence that they are any more helpful than other treatments or no treatment at all, and so the State should seek groups that have a better record of positive outcomes.  AA is a religious group, and so the State should not refer people to it.  Mr. Hazle might consider moving to San Francisco, where an appeals court found State-mandated attendance at AA unconstitutional.  Why does the State send people to AA? Because as a volunteer organization, it is free.  So is getting out for a walk now and then, and you don’t have to offer prayers to a serene invisible monster that lives in the sky to get some good out of it.  State-mandated AA is a form of theater that has the appearance of helping people but is actually a fake solution to a fake problem – the fake problem of prohibition.

From the 1906 book The Outbursts of Everett True by A. D. Condo and J. W. Raper. With thanks to Barnacle Press.

Trevor Blake: Invisible. Portland, Oregon USA. 21 April 2010.

The Bell Curve is a book published in 1994 worried about an increasingly isolated cognitive elite, a merging of the cognitive elite with the affluent, and a deteriorating quality of life for people at the bottom end of the cognitive ability distribution.  The authors documented these claims as something they were against.  Much is claimed in the book, but this blog post concerns exactly one claim and no other.  I think it is true that cognitive partitioning along IQ lines is occurring in the USA, and with it comes some profound threats to liberty.  Replace the word “book” with “blog” in the excerpt below and see if it rings true…

The college population has grown a lot while its mean IQ has risen a bit. Most bright people were not going to college in 1930 (or earlier) – waiting on the bench, so to speak, until the game opened up to them. By 1990, the noncollege population, drained of many bright youngsters, had shifted downward in IQ. While the college population grew, the gap between college and noncollege populations therefore also grew. The largest change, however, has been the huge increase in the intelligence of the average student in the top dozen universities, up a standard deviation and a half from where the Ivies and the Seven Sisters were in 1930. One may see other features in the figure evidently less supportive of cognitive partitioning. Our picture suggests that for every person within the ranks of college graduates, there is another among those without a college degree who has just as high an IQ – or at least almost. And as for the graduates of the dozen top schools, while it is true that their mean IQ is extremely high (designated by the +2.7 [standard deviation]s to which the line points), they are such a small proportion of the nation’s population that they do not even register visually on this graph, and they too are apparently out-numbered by people with similar IQs who do not graduate from those colleges, or do not graduate from college at all. Is there anything to be concerned about? How much partitioning has really occurred?

Perhaps a few examples will illustrate. Think of your twelve closest friends or colleagues. For most readers of this book, a large majority will be college graduates. Does it surprise you to learn that the odds of having even half of them be college graduates are only six in a thousand, if people were randomly paired off? Many of you will not think it odd that half or more of the dozen have advanced degrees. But the odds against finding such a result among a randomly chosen group of twelve Americans are actually more than a million to one. Are any of the dozen a graduate of Harvard, Stanford, Yale, Princeton, Cal Tech, MIT, Duke, Dartmouth, Cornell, Columbia, University of Chicago, or Brown? The chance that even one is a graduate of those twelve schools is one in a thousand. The chance of finding two among that group is one in fifty thousand. The chance of finding four or more is less than one in a billion.

Most readers of this book – this may be said because we know a great deal about the statistical tendencies of people who read a book like this – are in preposterously unlikely groups, and this reflects the degree of partitioning that has already occurred. [...]

The point of the exercise in thinking about your dozen closest friends and colleagues is to encourage you to detach yourself momentarily from the way the world looks to you from day to day and contemplate how extraordinarily different your circle of friends and acquaintances is from what would be the norm in a perfectly fluid society. This profound isolation from other parts of the IQ distribution probably dulls our awareness of how unrepresentative our circle actually is. [...]  When people live in encapsulated worlds, it becomes difficult for them, even with the best of intentions, to grasp the realities of worlds with which they have little experience but over which they also have great influence, both public and private.

Five years ago I published a condemnation of the Roman Catholic Church for their systematic sheltering of clergy who rape children.  This fact is now being discussed by the mainstream media and by courts around the world.  I hope that attention brings about positive changes in the Roman Catholic Church and some measure of peace to those whose lives it has spoiled.

While the mainstream media does discuss the policy of the Roman Catholic Church for systematic sheltering of clergy who rape children, and while the mainstream media correctly states this policy is a written document, they refrain from stating the name of that document.  The name of the document used as policy by the Roman Catholic Church for systematic sheltering of clergy who rape children is the Crimine Solicitaciones.  A google news search for “vatican scandal” yields 5000+ results.  A google news search for “vatican document” yields 500+ results.  A google news search for “Crimine Solicitaciones” yields no results.  I take this as evidence that the name of the document is not to be found in contemporary mainstream media.  The Vatican may benefit from keeping the name of the offending document out of the public eye.  It is less clear how the mainstream media benefits from the same.  A google search (non-news) returns over 2000 hits. In this case it appears the Internet has made a specific piece of information more readily available than mainstream media.  The document has been named in the mainstream media of the past.  A number of links to the Criminie Solicitaciones as well as Cardinal Ratzinger / Pope Benedict’s direct approval and continuation of the Crimine Solicitaciones can be found here.

The Crimine Solicitaciones, Cardinal Ratzinger’s direct approval of it and Pope Benedict’s refusal to denounce it are the smoking gun that they seem they are.  What is more, should Pope Benedict denounce the Crimine Solicitaciones then he risks invalidating the Roman Catholic Church’s claim to papal infallibility.  There is a fine history of papal fallibility, of course.  But the more the Church suffers for its misdeeds, the more possible it is they will learn from their mistakes and not commit them again.

From the 1906 book The Outbursts of Everett True by A. D. Condo and J. W. Raper. With thanks to Barnacle Press.

I have raised my happiness set point (among other things) [...]. Some of the details are lost to memory, but below, I reconstruct for your analysis what I can of the process. It contains lots of gooey self-disclosure; skip if that’s not your thing. In summary: I decided that I had to and wanted to become happier; I re-labeled my moods and approached their management accordingly; and I consistently treated my mood maintenance and its support behaviors (including discovering new techniques) as immensely important. The steps in more detail:

1. I came to understand the necessity of becoming happier. Being unhappy was not just unpleasant. It was dangerous. [...]
2. I re-labeled my moods, so that identifying them in the moment prompted the right actions. When a given point on the unhappy-happy spectrum – let’s call it “2″ on a scale of 1 to 10 – was labeled “normal” or “set point”, then when I was feeling “2″, I didn’t assume that meant anything; that was the default state. That left me feeling “2″ a lot of the time, and when things went wrong, I dipped lower, and I waited for things outside of myself to go right before I went higher. The problem was that “2″ was not a good place to be spending most of my time. [...]
3. I treated my own mood as manageable. Thinking of it as a thing that attacked me with no rhyme or reason – treating a bout of depression like a cold – didn’t just cost me the opportunity to fight it, but also made the entire situation seem more out-of-control and hopeless. [...]

Article continues, at the always remarkable Less Wrong.

Food, animals and opinions about food and animals in the news, compiled by a team of experts for your convenience…

Baylen Linnekin: Jamie Oliver’s Ministry of Food Control

Oliver launched the Feed Me Better campaign, which he designed with the admirable goal of getting British school kids to eat healthier food. But while he could have argued in favor of parents or kids packing the cheap, easy, and tried-and-true alternative to school food—brown bag lunches—Oliver opted instead to urge more government control and increased spending on big-ticket items.. [...] Negative reaction to the British government’s nationwide implementation of Oliver’s school-lunch recommendations was swift and widespread. Parents, some of whom labeled Oliver’s food “low-fat rubbish,” pulled 400,000 kids from the school-lunch rolls, choosing to brown bag it rather than have their kids eat Oliver’s “healthier” options. Parents opposed to Oliver’s scheme handed food to their kids through the gates of schoolyards. Some vendors and parents set up shop outside schools and sold food to students. Enterprising students, in turn, sold food to peers in schools, which led to suspensions for pupil transgressions as absurd as “crisp dealing.” [...] The current issue of his magazine Jamie (Feb./Mar. 2010) recommends several school lunch recipes the magazine bills as “wholesome meals to take to school.” The magazine’s suggested meal for Thursday is a tuna Waldorf pita with hot vanilla milk, an oaty biscuit, and a banana. According to the nutrition information provided in Jamie, this youngster’s lunch contains an astonishing 1,183 calories, 55 grams of fat (20 of them saturated), and 65 grams of sugar. That’s 73 calories, 12 grams of fat (11.5 saturated), and 3 grams of sugar more than the same student would get from eating both a McDonald’s hamburger Happy Meal (hamburger, fries, Sprite) and a Chicken McNuggets Happy Meal (McNuggets, fries, Sprite).

Kate Connoly: How going green may make you mean

When Al Gore was caught running up huge energy bills at home at the same time as lecturing on the need to save electricity, it turns out that he was only reverting to “green” type. According to a study, when people feel they have been morally virtuous by saving the planet through their purchases of organic baby food, for example, it leads to the “licensing [of] selfish and morally questionable behaviour”, otherwise known as “moral balancing” or “compensatory ethics”. [...] The pair found that those in their study who bought green products appeared less willing to share with others a set amount of money than those who bought conventional products. When the green consumers were given the chance to boost their money by cheating on a computer game and then given the opportunity to lie about it – in other words, steal – they did, while the conventional consumers did not. Later, in an honour system in which participants were asked to take money from an envelope to pay themselves their spoils, the greens were six times more likely to steal than the conventionals.

Bobbie Johnson: I’m not the messiah, says food activist – but his many worshippers do not believe him

The trouble started when Raj Patel appeared on American TV to plug his latest book, an analysis of the financial crisis called The Value of Nothing. The London-born author, 37, thought his slot on comedy talkshow The Colbert Report went well enough: the host made a few jokes, Patel talked a little about his work and then, job done, he went back to his home in San Francisco. Shortly afterwards, however, things took a strange turn. Over the course of a couple of days, cryptic messages started filling his inbox. “I started getting emails saying ‘have you heard of Benjamin Creme?’ and ‘are you the world teacher?’” he said. “Then all of a sudden it wasn’t just random internet folk, but also friends saying, ‘Have you seen this?’” What he had written off as gobbledygook suddenly turned into something altogether more bizarre: he was being lauded by members of an obscure religious group who had decided that Patel – a food activist who grew up in a corner shop in Golders Green in north-west London – was, in fact, the messiah. Their reasoning? Patel’s background and work coincidentally matched a series of prophecies made by an 87-year-old Scottish mystic called Benjamin Creme, the leader of a little-known religious group known as Share International. Because he matched the profile, hundreds of people around the world believed that Patel was the living embodiment of a figure they called Maitreya, the Christ or “the world teacher”.

Katherine Faulkner: KFC diner told ‘you can’t have bacon in your burger here – we’re now halal’

A diner was left fuming after a KFC restaurant took his favourite meal off the menu because it breached their new halal regulations. Alan Phillips was told he would have to travel five miles to another branch if he wanted the Big Daddy, a chicken burger, topped with bacon, cheese and salad. The branch, in Burton-on-Trent, Staffordshire, is one of 86 KFC restaurants which is running trials of a scheme where they sell nothing other than halal meat.

Jessica Vander Velde and Shelley Rossetter: Polk woman who died alone while fasting was following God’s call, husband says

Evelyn Boyd was on a mission to pray — for her husband, her church, her city, the nation and the president. So on Feb. 7, she locked herself in a bedroom to pray and fast. She brought water and prayer requests and told her husband not to bother her. “This is what I have to do,” she told him. For more than three weeks, Boyd, 55, didn’t emerge. Her family could have come to her aid if she needed help, but her husband wanted to respect her wish to be alone. He figured she’d be okay, just like the last four times she fasted. But on the 26th day, family members forced the door open. They found her dead.

Tom Harper: Muslim police chef defeated in ‘bacon roll’ tribunal faces £75,000 legal bill

A Muslim chef who lost a claim of religious discrimination against Scotland Yard after complaining he was forced to cook sausages and bacon faces a legal bill of more than £75,000. Hasanali Khoja accused the Metropolitan Police of failing to consider his Islamic beliefs when he was asked to handle pork products as a catering manager at a police station. The £23,000-a-year chef claimed suggestions by his bosses that he should wear gloves and use tongs left him ‘stressed and humiliated’. Muslims are banned from eating pork under Islamic law. But Mr Khoja, 62, lost his claim in May after a police employee told an employment tribunal how she saw Mr Khoja eat bacon rolls and sausages.

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Demian Bulwa: Pies-in-face attack roils anarchist-vegan world

An ex-vegan who was hit with chili pepper-laced pies at an anarchist event in San Francisco said Tuesday that her assailants were cowards who should direct their herbivorous rage at the powerful – not at a fellow radical for writing a book denouncing animal-free diets. Lierre Keith, a 45-year-old Arcata resident, was attacked at 2:15 p.m. Saturday at the 15th annual Bay Area Anarchist Book Fair while discussing her 2009 book, “The Vegetarian Myth.” A 20-year vegan, Keith now argues that the diet is unhealthy and that agriculture is destroying the world. As Keith stood at a lectern at the Hall of Flowers in Golden Gate Park, three people in masks and black hooded sweatshirts ran from backstage, shouted, “Go vegan!” and threw pies in her face. While they fled, some in the audience cheered or handed out leaflets. [...] “The whole thing was designed for social humiliation,” said Keith, speaking Tuesday from her sister’s home in Kansas. “We’re supposed to be against sadism and cruelty and domination, and these people were willing to do this to me.” Keith said her values are similar in most ways to those of her attackers. She believes in militant action, even property destruction, if it can lead to change. In her book, she said, she railed against factory farming and promoted the restoration of prairies and forests.

Dana Chivvis: PETA’s Euthanasia Rates Have Critics Fuming

When Dawn Brancheau, a SeaWorld trainer, was killed last month by one of the park’s orcas, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals was quick to condemn SeaWorld for keeping its animals constrained in small tanks. Indeed, PETA is often on hand whenever there is an incident involving animals and humans. The group is well-known for its edgy, graphic advertisements, its support for radical animal rights groups, and its throngs of celebrity supporters, from Charlize Theron to Tim Gunn. But PETA has a lesser-known claim to fame that has critics fuming: The organization euthanizes over 90 percent of the dogs and cats relinquished to its headquarters in Norfolk, Va. In 2009, PETA euthanized 2,301 dogs and cats — 97 percent of those brought in — and adopted only eight, according to Virginia state figures. And the rate of these killings has been increasing. From 2004 to 2008, euthanasia at PETA increased by 10 percent. [...] PETA reported an annual revenue of more than $34 million in 2009.

Allez Cuisine!

From the 1906 book The Outbursts of Everett True by A. D. Condo and J. W. Raper. With thanks to Barnacle Press.

Happy Easter, everybody!

Trevor Blake: Quit While You Are A Head. Digital image. 1 April 2010.

From the 1906 book The Outbursts of Everett True by A. D. Condo and J. W. Raper. With thanks to Barnacle Press.