If you’re in New York state, and you don’t want to see the measles outbreaks get worse there, maybe check out our action alert and tell your legislature to end the religious exemptions for vaccinations.
Daniel Dennett has a big feature in Wired on the possibility of consciousness for artificial intelligences. That’s going in the Instapaper queue.
Okay so I know it’s cliche to ask, but seriously, what the bloody hell is the matter with Kansas? Its legislature has a bill that declares homosexuality to be a religion, part of secular humanism (which isn’t a religion either), making it a “mythology, dogma, doctrine or orthodoxy,” and all this equates to the illegality of same-sex marriage. Oh, we’re not done. Another bill would block all pornography on all electronic devices unless the user pays a fee.
We already know that the answer to “what’s the matter with Oklahoma” is “how long do you have?” One new bill would revoke the licenses of doctors who perform abortions except under absurdly restrictive situations, and another would ban abortions after a woman learns the sex of the fetus.
In Free Inquiry, Douglas Whaley attempts to answer the question of what carnivores ate on Noah’s Ark:
On the third day, finding meat for the carnivores achieved a temporary fix when the tigers somehow got into the unicorn pen, slaughtering all the inhabitants but leaving a pile of meat that lasted for a short period.
Hannah Gould says Mari Kondo and her decluttering method are being lazily tied to Shintoism and animism in Western attempts to make a religious connection to the KonMari method. (Not for nothin’, but I am finding discarding things to be akin to a religious experience, complete with all the anxieties that I am doing it wrong and spiritually failing.)
The USDA says you really shouldn’t be buying the blood of young people, because it won’t cure you of anything, which I can’t believe someone from a government agency actually has to say.
A comic book with Jesus Christ as a superhero is cancelled by DC Comics after some Christians whined, but the creator says the book will return under a new publisher.
Quote of the Day
If you have $5000 you’d like to throw away, and you have a lot of time you’d really like to waste, you can join Jose Canseco on a Bigfoot hunt. The promo text reads, in part:
Travel in his custom RV to authentic alien sightings and proven Bigfoot habitats. Camp out in the wild. Tell stories and maybe meet a real Bigfoot. You never know what’s gonna happen with Mr. Canseco.
That almost sounds like a threat.
Food included.
Oh, well, never mind.
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Linking to a story or webpage does not imply endorsement by Paul or CFI. Not every use of quotation marks is ironic or sarcastic, but it often is.