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A one-year-old baby is 30% fat.

The Latin for New Netherland was Novum Belgium; its seal depicted a giant beaver.

Lionesses will sometimes have sex 50 times a day, although each session only lasts 10 seconds. About 8% of all lion sex is gay.

When temperatures drop below 55 degrees centigrade, exhaled breath freezes immediately. Siberians call this phenomenon the ‘whisper of the stars’.

Peter Viggers, Conservative MP for Gosport, claimed over £30,000 of taxpayer’s money as gardening expenses. He built a £1,645 ‘Duck Palace’.

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In English, a jill is a female ferret; to jill means female masturbation.

When Navajo babies laugh for the first time, they get a party. The food is paid for by whoever made the baby laugh.

The Republican Party is the only political party in U.S. history to win a Presidential Election without achieving a majority of the popular vote. As a result, three Republicans were elected President even though their main opponent received more votes.

More than half the world’s population has seen a James Bond film.

During the Second World War, the Führer oath that every party member, officer and soldier had to take contained the words “I swear in the name of almighty God, my loyalty to the Führer.” Also, the belt buckles of German soldiers were inscribed with ‘Gott mit uns’ (God on our side).

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Problems with Stem-cell Research

‘Your qualms about embryonic stem-cell research are similarly obscene. Here are the facts: stem-cell research is one of the most promising developments in the last century of medicine. It could offer therapeutic break-throughs for every disease or injury process that human beings suffer—for the simple reason that embryonic stem cells can become any tissue in the human body. This research may also be essential for our understanding of cancer, along with a wide variety of developmental disorders. Given these facts, it is almost impossible to exaggerate the promise of stem-cell research. It is true, of course, that research on embryonic stem cells entails the destruction of three-day-old human embryos. This is what worries you.

Let us look at the details. A three-day-old human embryo is a collection of 150 cells called a blastocyst. There are, for the sake of comparison, more than 100,000 cells in the brain of a fly. The human embryos that are destroyed in stem-cell research do not have brains, or even neurons. Consequently, there is no reason to believe they can suffer their destruction in any way at all. It is worth remembering, in this context, that when a person’s brain has died, we currently deem it acceptable to harvest his organs (provided he has donated them for this purpose) and bury him in the ground. If it is acceptable to treat a person whose brain has died as something less than a human being, it should be acceptable to treat a blastocyst as such. If you are concerned about suffering in this universe, killing a fly should present you with greater moral difficulties than killing a human blastocyst.

Perhaps you think that the crucial difference between a fly and a human blastocyst is to be found in the latter’s potential to become a fully developed human being. But almost every cell in your body is a potential human being, given our recent advances in genetic engineering. Every time you scratch your nose, you have committed a Holocaust of potential human beings. This is a fact. The argument from a cell’s potential gets you absolutely nowhere.

But let us assume, for the moment, that every three-day-old human embryo has a soul worthy of our moral concern. Embryos at this stage occasionally split, becoming separate people (identical twins). Is this a case of one soul splitting into two? Two embryos sometimes fuse into a single individual, called a chimera. You or someone you know may have developed in this way. No doubt theologians are struggling even now to determine what becomes of the extra human soul in such a case.

Isn’t it time we admitted that this arithmetic of souls does not make any sense? The naive idea of souls in a Petri dish is intellectually indefensible. It is also morally indefensible, given that it now stands in the way of some of the most promising research in the history of medicine. Your beliefs about the human soul are, at this very moment, prolonging the scarcely endurable misery of tens of millions of human beings.

You believe that “life starts at the moment of conception.” You believe that there are souls in each of these blastocysts and that the interests of one soul—the soul of a little girl with burns over 75 percent of her body, say—cannot trump the interests of another soul, even if that soul happens to live inside a Petri dish. Given the accommodations we have made to faith-based irrationality in our public discourse, it is often suggested, even by advocates of stem-cell research, that your position on this matter has some degree of moral legitimacy. It does not. Your resistance to embryonic stem-cell research is, at best, uninformed. There is, in fact, no moral reason for our federal government’s unwillingness to fund this work. We should throw immense resources into stem-cell research, and we should do so immediately. Because of what Christians like yourself believe about souls, we are not doing this. In fact, several states have made such work illegal. If one experiments on a blastocyst in South Dakota, for instance, one risks spending years in prison.

The moral truth here is obvious: anyone who feels that the interests of a blastocyst just might supersede the interests of a child with a spinal cord injury has had his moral sense blinded by religious metaphysics. The link between religion and “morality”—so regularly proclaimed and so seldom demonstrated—is fully belied here, as it is wherever religious dogma supersedes moral reasoning and genuine compassion.’

– Harris. S. 2006. Letter To A Christian Nation p. 11-12

The Way We Look At Women

Over the course of a century, many strides have been made to further the cause of women, and the new millennium has witnessed a significant change and attitudinal shift in both women’s and society’s thoughts about women’s equality and emancipation.

The unfortunate fact is that women are still not paid equally to that of their male counterparts, women still are not present in equal numbers in business or politics, and globally women’s education, health and the violence against them is worse than that of men.

These are all well known problems, but there is a specific kind of sexism that is more covert and far less obvious in its misogyny: advertisement. Here is a rather passionate criticism of contemporary advertisement with regards to the portrayal of women:

The average person in the western world sees more than 500 ads every day. Very few of the women in those ads look like people we see in our everyday lives; so, maybe it is time to change the way women are generally portrayed in advertisements.

“Feminism is the radical notion that women are human beings.”
― Cheris Kramarae

Why does it feel so different to see pictures of realistic women? Why aren’t we seeing women we recognise in real life and why weren’t we paying more attention to this before?

Where are the women who swept through the thrust-upon feminine superficialities of the patriarchal society? – Girls who help those who can hardly help themselves. Mothers who want to learn from their children and raise a generation of individuals. Happy, free and egalitarian.

When we condone airbrushed faces and photoshopped bodies, what are we saying about women? – That their strengths aren’t strong enough? Their feelings not deep enough? Their cheers not loud enough? If all the women we see in ads look the same, what illusion are we promoting for our daughters? And our sons?

Maybe we should start by seeing women we can relate to. Ladies with style and personality who are not afraid of their ideas. Experts who revolutionise their fields. Independent and fulfilled girls who thrive on their own merit. Women who are individuals.

Let’s see women doing the things that women really do. Let’s appreciate the beauty of overcoming real struggles. Let’s see more women like those we already know, real women living in the real world.

“A woman without a man is like a fish without a bicycle.”
― Gloria Steinem

Maybe all we need to do is look around to remember that the women in our lives carry real beauty of all kinds – and that real beauty is all that is worth seeing.

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John Cleese’s father’s surname was Cheese. Cleese grew up 10 miles from Cheddar and his best friend at school was called Barney Butter.

In 2013, Monaco and North Korea had an unemployment rate of 0,0%.

The record for the most babies born to one woman is 69. She gave birth to 16 sets of twins, 7 sets of triplets, and 4 sets of quadruplets. While the woman’s name is not known, she was the first wife of Feodor Vassilyev, a peasant from Shuya, Russia who lived from 1707-1782.

There is a town in Finland called Leppäkummuntie.

Coco Chanel, Hugh Hefner, Elizabeth Taylor, John Lennon, George Harrison, Aristotle Onassis, Jack Nicholson, Ronnie Wood, Elvis Presley, Rowan Atkinson, Jeremy Clarkson, Park Chung-hee, Josip Broz Tito, Nicolae Ceauşescu, Pol Pot, Enver Hoxha, Ferdinand Marcos, Kim Il-sung, Kim Jong-Il and Sadaam Hussein have owned a Mercedes-Benz 600.

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