Empire of the Odd

On April 30, 2012, the Center for Inquiry (CFI) filed suit against a Michigan country club for religious discrimination and breach of contract after the club cancelled an event because of the attendees’ lack of religious beliefs.

CFI is charging the Wyndgate Country Club in Rochester Hills, Michigan, and its owner with violation of the Civil Rights Act and with breaking its contract with CFI’s Michigan branch. The Wyndgate cancelled a scheduled CFI–Michigan event to be held October 12, 2011, that would have included an address by Richard Dawkins.

The Wyndgate justified breaking its contract by stating that “the owner does not wish to associate with certain individuals and philosophies,” referring to the “philosophies” of Professor Dawkins and other nonbelievers. The expressed reasoning for the cancellation specifically referenced Dawkins’ October 5, 2011, appearance on The O’Reilly Factor, during which Dawkins’ atheism was central to the conversation. Wyndgate thus denied use of its public accommodations entirely on the basis of religion.

“This was to be an opportunity for friends to gather, enjoy each other’s company, and hear from one of their favorite authors, an internationally renowned professor; but the Wyndgate opted to breach its contract simply because atheists would be taking part,” said Steven Fox, Legal Director for CFI. “If this kind of discrimination was directed at any religious group there would rightfully be no end to the outrage. The fact that the victims are nonbelievers makes it just as wrong, just as unacceptable, and just as unconstitutional—and we will not let it stand.”

Since filing suit, the case has been featured in media coverage by such outlets as The Detroit News, The Oakland Press, MLive, and WJR’s Frank Beckman Show.

Read the full complaint here.

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The Center for Inquiry (CFI) is a nonprofit educational, advocacy, and research organization based in Amherst, New York; it is also home to both the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry and the Council for Secular Humanism. The mission of CFI is to foster a secular society based on science, reason, freedom of inquiry, and humanist values. CFI‘s web address is www.centerforinquiry.net.

I know this is going to be disappointing a lot of people out there.  I never figured out the overwhelming desire of some wo-woos to see the end times. I think it would be a lousy experience all around. I mean, even the most pleasant end of the world scenarios seem to end with some “chosen people” living in a bland paradise. Heck paradise is for chumps. You can write that down somewhere.  Any prison no matter haw you gild the bars is still a prison.

http://www.myfoxal.com/story/18311865/apocalypse-never-newly-discovered-mayan-calendar-disproves-2012-doomsday-myth

By Andrew Couts
Provided by 

from here 

Seth Shostak

Senior Astronomer, SETI Institute

You may not see massive UFO exhibits at your local science museum, but there’s no dearth of saucer stories infesting my email. Every day I receive several reports of alien sightings, extraterrestrial plans for Earth, and agitated screeds about the reluctance of scientists to take the whole subject seriously. Plenty of people think they have convincing evidence for other-worldly visitors, and they want me to know.

Allow me to first note that this is a phenomenon worthy of attention. If aliens are really hanging out in our ‘hood, it’s hard to imagine any other fact more worthy of study. If not, then why does such a large fraction of the populace insist on believing they’re here?

Note that few, if any, of these emails are penned by hoaxers. The correspondents are sincere, and many simply wish to help us in our search for evidence of extraterrestrial intelligence. Others are ticked off, usually at me.

It’s a fire hose of correspondence, but stepping back a bit from the massive electronic corpus, it strikes me that virtually all of it falls into one of four categories. For the curious and interested, I list these subject areas below, together with a modestly elaborated description of each.

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I love stuff like this, a couple of high school kids see a 9 foot being with a bag and florescent eyes, and it’s assumed it’s an alien! Why and alien and not a hyper-dimensional being or a shaved Bigfoot with florescent eyes?  Why is it always an alien.? It’s probably from “another galaxy too!”

Read more: http://www.digitaljournal.com/article/323874#ixzz1tX5ycr1Z

When I talked to David Edgar Love by Skype at his Montreal apartment Wednesday evening, he sounded exhausted — he’d had only an hour of sleep in the past two days.

“I’m pretty tired. I was up until about 5 this morning, then I had mnql1 wake me up at 6 and had that radio interview,” he says, crediting his good friend and translator, mnql1, just one of many members of Anonymous who have supported Love over the last two and a half years as he’s waged a one-man war against Scientology’s Narconon drug treatment center in Trois-Rivières, Quebec.

Sunday evening, news began to leak that one of Love’s numerous complaints about the treatment center to Canadian authorities was paying off: Quebec health officials ordered the facility closed immediately, even as Narconon appeals the government’s finding that it failed miserably in an attempt to get certification for its unscientific methods of treating drug addiction.

Since the news broke, Love has been talking to Canadian journalists as they scrambled to get details on the sudden closing, which came with no advance public word from health officials.

After more than two years of telling his own story of witnessing fraud and abuse at the center, and relentlessly pursuing Canadian authorities with more than 3,700 pages of documents he had amassed about the facility, Love was still in some shock that his work had suddenly, and so spectacularly, paid off.

“We weren’t expecting this,” he admitted.

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Amateur stargazers have discovered an intriguing object jutting out from the surface of Mars. The seemingly perfectly rectangular, upright structure, found in NASAimages of the Red Planet, bears a striking resemblance to the monoliths planted on Earth and the moon by aliens in the classic sci-fi film “2001: A Space Odyssey.”

The object in question was first spotted several years ago after being photographed by the HiRISE camera onboard the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, a NASA space probe; every so often, it garners renewed interest on the Internet. But is it unnatural — a beacon erected by aliens for mysterious reasons, and even more mysteriously paralleled in the imaginations of Stanley Kubrick and Arthur C. Clarke, creators of “2001”? Or is this rock the work of nature?

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EL PASO – Rapidly moving and unusually powerful storms do hit the southwest of United States from time to time and one of them struck near Roswell, NM, in the late hours of July 4, 1947.

An aerial craft of unknown design was attempting to cross a rather desolate area some 75 miles northwest of Roswell when it was hit by a powerful bolt of lightning, according to witnesses, and crashed. So began a series of events that have had repercussions to this day.

It should be noted that neither the craft nor the crash went unnoticed. Rancher Mac Brazel heard a loud noise different from the normal sounds of thunder. Two nuns at St. Mary’s Hospital in Roswell saw what they believed was an airplane crash in the distance. The tower at Roswell Army Airfield tracked the flight of the object and reported a “descending flash.” However, at the time no one knew just what had taken place.

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