Quickies
Skepchick Quickies 4.20
- Fornication the "cause of unwanted pregnancies" – Fighting for women's rights in Ireland. From Ashley.
- Elderly perv falsely diagnosed cancer in women so he could sexually assault and use weird gadgets on them – He used pseudoscience as a thinly veiled way to take advantage of and molest these women that he lied to. From Ben.
- How to apologize – The Oatmeal posted this comic about gamer girls the other day but the author redeemed himself fully with his apology. Hint: It's not an "I'm sorry you feel that way" apology.
- Evolution seen in "synthetic DNA" – From cerberus40.
- Cute Animal Friday! Animals with stuffed versions of themselves. A grey seal from Ullrich. Some uh, hugging, prairie dogs from Kirsten. And since "moar felines" were specifically requested by someone in the survey, I offer you cheetah and labrador BFFs.
I don't even know where to begin with that first headline. I tried reading the article, but my brain rebelled.
Guess what, sperm, is also a contributing factor in more than 99.99% of all unwanted pregnancies.
Oh wow, that apology by the author of The Oatmeal is quite the way to apologize. Wish more people in the "gaming" community acted like that.
I believe the 'moar kittens' was me, and I regret nothing!
Apologizing is only hard when you REALLY REALLY REALLY don't mean it, and actively hate the people you are apologizing to. If you can't even fake sincerity in text form, you must have a whole ton of hostility and contempt for your target. I'm already a big fan of The Oatmeal… *sings* "He is the motherfucking pterodactyl!"
Fuck the Catholics, of course.
If you follow the link labeled "these bogus healing machines" in the elderly perv story, it brings you to the American Cancer Society's page on Electromagnetic Therapy. The first bit of info is:
"Other common name(s): BioResonance Tumor Therapy, Cell Comm System, Rife machine, Zapper, Super Zapper Deluxe, zapping machine, electromagnetism, bioelectricity, magnetic field therapy, bioelectromagnetics, bioenergy therapy, and other names
Scientific/medical name(s): none"
Awesome.
<i>Gill, who is not a doctor, gave the women phony homeopathic treatment…</i>
Alas, if only he'd given them the *real* homeopathic treatment, their cancer might have been cured….
To a person with a law background the "fornication is the leading cause of unwanted pregnancies" is a very questionable claim, but not a particularly funny one. "Fornication" actually has a formal meaning, and it's not just sex, it's sex between unmarried people. I'm fairly sure that all this person was saying was that most unwanted pregnancies arise from sex outside of marrige. (This, of course, has little bearing on her argument against abortion.)
Of course she is they type who thinks that a marriage certificate is magical and will make any pregnancy wanted by automatically bringing in enough resources to care for the child. Plenty of married couples face unwanted pregnancies though.