Terry Firma, though born and Journalism-school-educated in Europe, has lived in the U.S. for the past 20-odd years. Stateside, his feature articles have been published in the New York Times, Reason, Rolling Stone, Playboy, and Wired. Terry was the founder and Main Mischief Maker of Moral Compass, a now-dormant site that pokes fun at the delusional claim by people of faith that a belief in God equips them with superior moral standards. He was the Editor-in-Chief of two Manhattan-based magazines until he decided to give up commercial publishing for professional photography... with a lot of blogging on the side. These days, he lives in an old seaside farmhouse in Maine with his wife, three kids, and two big dogs.
Yesterday, Vice News posted a completely engrossing documentary by a team in Raqqah, Iraq, the provisional capital of the new Caliphate that the fundamentalists of the Islamic State, formerly known as ISIS, are trying to establish. Warning: The video is full of the kind of overbearing, power-drunk antics we may expect when True Believers are emboldened by the temporary successes brought about by their own violent revolution. Woven into the Vice material is brief other footage of newscasts and images of slaughter, including ISIS enemies’ heads displayed on spikes (so this is definitely NSFW and probably NSFL): Read more
I’m not exactly Mr. Sunshine, so you might think the curmudgeonly grousing of atheist blogger P.Z. Myers would resonate with me. It rarely does, and yesterday I was reminded why. In writing about the suicide of comedian Robin Williams, Myers went from prickly to prickish in three seconds flat. Under the telling headline Robin Williams Brings Joy to the Hearts of Journalists and Politicians Once Again, Myers sneered that [Williams’] sacrifice has been a great boon to the the news cycle and the electoral machinery — thank God that we have a tragedy involving a wealthy white man to drag us away from the depressing news about brown people. Myers was referring to the killing of African-American teenager Michael Brown by police in Ferguson, Missouri, this past weekend. Read more
Lawlessness and ritual circumcision are frequent bedfellows. We’ve seen that some New York City mohels who put their mouths on a baby’s freshly-cut penis to suck away the blood don’t always bother to get the parents’ written permission, no matter what the city’s rules are. Just as amazingly, when the infant contracts herpes, as has happened more than a dozen times, the parents have been known to shield the mohel by refusing to identify him to the authorities, leaving the diseased holy man free to infect the next baby, and so on. Read more
