Last Straw

Via Survival International:
‘We did the overflight to show their houses, to show they are there, to show they exist,’ said uncontacted tribes expert José Carlos dos Reis Meirelles Júnior. Meirelles works for FUNAI, the Brazilian government’s Indian affairs department. ‘This is very important because there are some who doubt their existence.’
Survival’s director Stephen Corry said [...]

Here’s just another example of why the term “anti-Semitism” has increasingly come to mean “mild criticism of Israeli government policies,” rather than “hostility to or prejudice against Jews.”
Something I’ve experienced myself.

A teenager in the UK faced prosecution recently for holding a sign up in the street with words on it.
The words? “Scientology is not a religion, it is a dangerous cult.”
He’s wrong of course. It’s both. Other cults like Christianity and Islam have just been around for longer, so they get to be called [...]

Rebels Against Tyranny, an interview with Howard Zinn on Anarchism, by Ziga Vodovnik.

This is hugely disappointing. The proportional voting system in NZ is one of the things that makes me look forward to living in NZ again, and National wants to roll it back.
The fat-cat backers of National clearly see democracy as an impediment to enriching themselves at the expense of others.

It’s a truism like no other that the large majority of us value life, and as an extension of this—being a measure of life—biodiversity.
That human beings, therefore, are to blame for a massive and ongoing decrease in biodiversity is the most incriminating piece of evidence to reveal just how badly out of sync human institutions [...]

Protesting The Protesters
17-05-2008 Update: And they do exist. Here’s the latest: Matthis Chiroux

Sam Harris is undertaking what is apparently a first: the study of religious faith at the level of the brain.
If you’re interested he’s put out a request for volunteers—particularly Christians—to take part in a survey to help refine their experimental stimuli:
We are preparing to run another fMRI study of belief and disbelief, and we need [...]