Petition

Yesterday was a busy day for a number of reasons. I thought of skipping it, but I couldn't resist taking notice of one particularly hilarious bit that I found on what is perhaps the wretchedest of all the wretched hives of scum and quackery on the Internet, NaturalNews.com. There, yesterday, on a very special day for me, I saw this headline by Mike Adams: Facebook blocks all Natural News article posts to 2.2M fans after site posts White House petition citing immunization dangers: In the latest outrageous example of total censorship against the independent media, Facebook has blocked nearly…
I've been writing about antivaccine loons for a long time, and during that time I've seen them propose some crazy ideas. The other day, I came across one proposing what might well be the craziest, most irresponsible idea I've ever seen from an antivaccine activist. It comes from our old friend Kent Heckenlively. Heckenlively, as you might recall, started out over at the antivaccine crank blog Age of Autism but, for whatever reason, left the blog to write somewhere else. Amazingly, that "somewhere else" turned out to be the website of one Patrick "Tim" Bolen, whom I just mentioned yesterday…
I've never been a huge fan of the We The People (WTP) website, which was set up during the Obama administration to allow people to petition the White House and, if they receive a sufficient number of signatures on their petition, receive an official response from the White House. While I applauded the sentiment of wanting to provide people an online means of petitioning the administration and like that a petition receiving 100,000 signatures in 30 days would receive a response, I was disappointed by the results. For one thing, although 321 of the 323 petitions that reached the threshold have…
Some time ago, a group of Internet Yahoos who shall not be named (the usual misogynist freaks who spend all their time harassing women who won't shut up) started a petition to get Rebecca Watson tossed off her podcast "The Skeptics' Guide to the Universe." As I understand it, no one took that petition seriously, but as a show of support for Rebecca, on behalf of all of us, Haley Stevens started up a petition to keep Rebecca on the show. And now it is time for you to go and sign the petition. If there are not 1000 signatures on this petition soon the Internet Yahoos will win. Go now and…
Sign the petition to yell at them for it. Start a Petition »
tags: smuggling parrots, poaching parrots, ProFauna Indonesia, endangered species, conservation, politics Indonesians protest the illegal wildlife trade. Image: ProFauna Indonesia. You know that I am passionate about the parrots of the south Pacific Ocean -- I devoted my life to researching them, in fact. So it is my responsibility to bring a very important and tragic issue to your attention. Indonesia, home to many of the birds that I love so much, is killing its endemic parrots through poaching and smuggling. There are 85 parrot species in Indonesia, 14 of which are globally threatened…