Savage Popcorn

Pray to Jesus, and make a wish

(via The Flophouse)

Google are proposing some guidelines to try and help curb the proliferation of self-installing software - such as adware and spyware.

This is a growing problem and any action to try and do something about it is a good thing - even if it only achieves an increased awareness amongst internet users of what they are downloading and installing on their PCs. Hopefully other companies will start to follow Google’s lead and hopefully people will start to become more cautious about what they click on.

(via Googleblog, surprisingly enough)

[Religious faith is] bad for one’s capacity to think clearly, to judge, to reason, to argue, to follow arguments, to discriminate. Those are all useful capacities. In fact one could argue that in a democracy, they’re essential capacities.
- Butterflies and Wheels

What purpose can raising ‘awareness’ of an unlikely or impossible scenario possibly serve, other than encouraging people to be more afraid than is rational?
- Sandy Starr on the ‘issues’ surrounding The Day After Tomorrow.

A French blogger arrested by the Police because of his blogging

Christophe blogs on monputeaux.com. He is a citizen of the city Puteaux that is close to Paris.

Christophe does not like the way the city mayor manages the city, spends the public money and says it on his blog, every day. He has been very successful doing that, with hundreds of inhabitants of Puteaux reading and commenting his blog everyday and many national newspapers that talked about his blog.

Christophe criticizes the city management so much that they have tried to stop him for months, the city mayor has even sent him threats over the phone that he recorded and blogged, of course.

Today, he has been stopped in the street by the Police Municipale (the local French Police) who tried to arrest him for his blogging.

Once the National Police turned up, Christophe was released and he has now filed an “abuse of power” complaint.

(via one.point.zero)

Childless couple told to try sex

A German couple who went to a fertility clinic after eight years of marriage have found out why they are still childless - they weren’t having sex.

…

“We are not talking retarded people here, but a couple who were brought up in a religious environment who were simply unaware, after eight years of marriage, of the physical requirements necessary to procreate.”

Now that’s one restrictive religious environment. I find it incredible that a 36 year old man and a 30 year old woman appear to have not even heard of sex.

(via SEB)

Astrology is bullshit

[T]hankfully we have the doctrine of uncertainty to protect psychics everywhere from malpractice lawsuits. Otherwise an entire industry of aging hippies and their clientele comprised of middle-class 16 year old girls and bored house wives trudging aimlessly from one rebellious new-age religion to the next would have to find a new hobby. Who knows? They might even get jobs.

It is odd that coalition forces have not kept consistent records about estimates of people in Iraq who have been killed
- Jack Straw

Butterflies and Wheels has a few candid thoughts on the subject of the faked Daily Mirror photos, the subsequent outrage and Morgan’s attempt to justify them as “an accurate depiction”.

We don’t want a situated truth or a perspectival truth. We don’t want a community’s truth. We don’t want US truth and UK truth and Iraqi truth. We don’t want my truth and your truth and their truth. We want the truth, period. We don’t want the truth the army is happy with, and the one the government is happy with, and the one the newspapers are happy with, and the one the prisoners of war are happy with, and the one the voters are happy with. Do we? I don’t think so. I think we want just the one. The single, general, universal, global, true-for-everyone truth about what did happen and what did not. That truth may or may not be available; that’s a separate issue. But we don’t look placidly at faked pictures and say ‘Well that was true for the people who made the pictures, no doubt, so that’s good enough.’ We don’t conclude that the pictures made something to talk about for a few days and that’s good enough. Sometimes playful irony about the truth just doesn’t butter any parsnips.