Activate the Mechanism!

Why does caffeine keep you awake?

girlishfeministi:

There is a neurotransmitter called adenosine, this neurotransmitter produces sleepiness. It accumulates throughout the day and declines during sleep. So your adenosine levels are at its highest before you go to sleep.

Caffeine looks a lot like adenosine. So when caffeine enters the body, it binds to the receptor sites designed for adenosine. Therefore, even though your adenosine levels are rising, they are not binding to its receptor sites, because caffeine is already chilling there. So you will be more awake. :)

If caffeine does not affect you very much, it could mean that you do not have as many adenosine receptor sites as other people.

Tennessee private school bans homosexuality

atheismfuckyeah:

A Christian school in America has updated its policies to ban gays and any mention of homosexuality.

News Channel 3 of Memphis, Tennessee, reports that a letter was sent home to parents of the 300 children at Rossville Christian Academy outlining the ban.

The policy reads: “Homosexuality is forbidden in scripture (Romans 1:27, Leviticus 18:22).  A staff member or student who promotes, engages in, or identifies himself/herself with such activity through any word or action shall be in violation of this policy. 

“Should the administration determine a violation of this policy, the person involved will be subject to disciplinary action with the possibility of permanent dismissal.  Any applicant who is not in compliance with this policy will not be admitted.”

A lawyer has told the news channel he sees no legal issues within the new policy because the school is a private institution and there are no state laws protecting gays.

The school is yet to comment on its new policy.

From Pink Paper

Seriously, people. Seriously. 

~Mooglets

And unfortunately, that lawyer is right.

Shit like this pisses me off so much, it drives me crazy that the radical religious will try to shelter themselves completely from the outside world.

I’m guessing the clients of this “school” have parents that are woefully homophobic, then they go to school where it’s not even discussed, and end up living in this “alternate reality” that will influence them for the rest of their life.

It’s pretty sad.

[TW - Police Brutality] A seventh-grader says a county police officer yanked him out of the school cafeteria, handcuffed him in front of his friends, dragged him to the band room, where no one could hear, and beat him while he was handcuffed - all because the student dressed like Ice Cube’s character in the movie “Boyz n the Hood” for school spirit week.

Latoya Mason sued the Prince George’s County School Board and county police Officer Wantalex Tilus on behalf of her son, Lennox Seaforth Jr.

During spirit week at Drew Freeman Middle School, students are encouraged to participate in themes that change daily.

On “70s and 80s” day, Mason says, students and teachers dressed in “throwback designer wear, etc., from the respective decades.”

 ”One particular teacher was dressed as a Hippie from the ’70s, which represented a sub-cultural youth movement known for its counter-values and embracement of the sexual revolution, psychotropic drugs, and rock-n-roll,” according to the complaint in Prince George’s County Court.

Seaforth wore a baseball cap, flannel shirt with a white T-shirt underneath, and blue jeans intended to look like Ice Cube’s character Doughboy in the 1991 movie “Boyz n the Hood.” His mom says Tilus was on cafeteria duty that day, and he “asked plaintiff whether he was ‘Gangbanging?’ Plaintiff replied ‘No’ and ran to his seat where he resumed eating lunch with his friends/classmates. Defendant Tilus walked off,” according to the complaint.

But “moments later, defendant Tilus walked across the cafeteria to where defendant was eating and told him to ‘get up!’ Defendant asked, ‘What did I do?’ …

“Within seconds, defendant Tilus grabbed plaintiff by the back of his collar snatched him up from his seat, lifting him completely off the ground, then forcefully pushed him toward an adjacent wall where he slammed him face first, Tilus then placed his hands behind his back and cuffed him,” the mom says.

Tilus then “paraded plaintiff through the aisle were his friends were seated and exited the cafeteria with plaintiff in custody in a manner so that the violent disturbance could be observed by everyone in the crowded cafeteria. This even was caught on tape,” the complaint states.

Rather than take her son to the principal’s office for his presumed offense, Tilus “marched him through the halls until he found the empty band room in which to secret plaintiff out of the sight of potential witnesses.” Mason says the cop closed the door behind them and kept away from the window in the door “so there would not be any witnesses to what he would do next. …

“(T)he band room was the perfect place to assault plaintiff because of the way the acoustics were constructed, any sound or noise could easily absorbed, included screams for help. …

“(W)hile inside this room defendant Tilus chided plaintiff about the way he was dressed then smacked him twice in the face with his full force so hard that he left whelp marks on plaintiff’s skin; throughout the entire time plaintiff remained in handcuffs.”

Mason says Tilus refused to let her crying son out of the room until he composed himself, then “marched him back to the entryway of the cafeteria, still in handcuffs and custody, so that all the other children leaving the lunch period could see him.”

Seaforth was treated by the school nurse, who documented the marks on his face as consistent with the size and shape of an adult man’s hand, according to the complaint.

[SOURCE]

Evangelical Christian attends high school football game, has to sit through an evocation by a Buddhist priest, realizes what the First Amendment is all about.

On my travels across the internet, I came across this post on World Net Daily from 2005 written by an Evangelical Christian, entitled, “why I’m against pre-game prayers”.

The long and the short of the post is this; while serving in the military, he was living at Wheeler Air Force Base, located on the island of Oahu in Hawaii, just outside of the small pineapple farming town of Wahiawa.

Here, followers of his faith were in the minority, and the population was mostly of Japanese and Chinese ancestry, instead of there being several christian churches as there would in small towns on the mainland, there were several Shinto or Buddhist shrines.

Upon attending his first game at Wahiawa High School with the youths he was working with, an announcement came over the PA to stand for a pre-game invocation, then became very uncomfortable when the evocation was by a Buddhist priest. 

In his own words his reaction was:

We were frozen in shock and incredulity! What to do? To continue to stand and observe this prayer would represent a betrayal of our own faith and imply the honoring of a pagan deity that was anathema to our beliefs. To sit would be an act of extreme rudeness and disrespect in the eyes of our Japanese hosts and neighbors, who value above all other things deference and respect in their social interactions. I am sorry to say that in the confusion of the moment we chose the easier path and elected to continue to stand in silence so as not to create a scene or ill will among those who were seated nearby.

This is how students that are not of the christian faith feel when publically lead prayer of a christian nature is held at school events.
 
I’ve often tried to emphasize that the section of the First Amendment to Constitution of the United States of America is not only there to protect the government from religion, but also to protect religion from the government.
 
All the yelling and screaming about publicly lead prayer not being allowed in public schools never seems to address this. The people advocating this never think about this, again, in the author’s own words:

I would say in love to my Christian brothers and sisters, before you yearn for the imposition of prayer and similar rituals in your public schools, you might consider attending a football game at Wahiawa High School. Because unless you’re ready to endure the unwilling exposure of yourself and your children to those beliefs and practices that your own faith forswears, you have no right to insist that others sit in silence and complicity while you do the same to them. I, for one, slept better at night knowing that because Judeo-Christian prayers were not being offered at my children’s schools, I didn’t have to worry about them being confronted with Buddhist, Shinto, Wiccan, Satanic or any other prayer ritual I might find offensive.

Despite being raped twice by the same person, a 7th grade girl was blamed, demonized and punished by school officials

Heartbreaking: 7th Grade Girl Raped Twice, Blamed and Punished By School Officials Both Times

The first time she was raped, school officials told her she was lying. They even demanded she write and hand-deliver an apology letter to her attacker.  Twisting the knife a little deeper,  the school expelled her for the rest of the year. The devastating sequence of events that followed suggests that school officials may actually have wanted the girl to have been attacked, or punished for speaking-out, once more  She was raped by the same boy in the library the following year. 

According to the Springfield News-Leader, the 7th grade special education student at Republic Middle School in Springfield, MO reported her rape in the spring of 2009. School officials refused to believe her, and after suffering through “multiple intimidating interrogations,” she recanted the claim.  What’s more, a school psychologist’s report said the girl “would forego her own needs and wishes to satisfy the request of others around so that she can be accepted.” In other words, the already victimized twelve-year-old might have taken back her statement after school officials demonized her for being raped.

When she returned to school the following year, the school refused her mother’s request for extra monitoring and did not separate her from her rapist who, thanks to the apology letter, knew she had told. If the school wanted the girl to be victimized a third time, they got their wish. In February 2010, the lawsuit says her attacker “was able to hunt [her] down, drag her to the back of the school library, and again forcibly rape her.” This time, she and her mother reported the rape to the police, and a rape kit tested positive for her attacker’s semen. He plead guilty to charges in juvenile court. 

The school’s next move made it clear that it was not lack of evidence fueling officials’ accusation that she was lying, but a deep-seeded hatred for women: Incredibly, the twelve-year-old rape victim was suspended for for “Disrespectful Conduct” and “Public Display of Affection” - two absolutely disgusting ways to categorize rape. The school had victimized the girl a fourth time, slut-shaming a rape victim for an attack that happened on school property, and one her mother sought to prevent by requesting their separation.

Her lawsuit requests damages for medical expenses, emotional distress, and attorneys’ fees, in addition to “punitive damages to deter School Officials and others from similar conduct in the future.”

But the school district denied every one of the girl’s allegations, as well as responsibility for the attack,  the same way they denied her rape.

[SOURCE]

Advice To Giles County: Thou Shalt Not Gamble With Scarce Public School Funds

http://blog.au.org/2011/06/23/advice-to-giles-county-thou-shalt-not-gamble-with-scarce-public-school-funds/

Across the country, cash-strapped public schools are scrambling to keep it together. In many districts, teacher salaries are stagnant, and class sizes are growing.

This would not seem to be a good time for any public school to risk losing scarce funds by going on a Ten Commandments crusade.

Yet that’s exactly what’s going on in Giles County, Va. The school board there voted 3-2 earlier this week to bring a display of the Commandments and nine other “historic documents” to the district’s schools.

The school board has been on this kick for quite a while. The Ten Commandments had been displayed in the schools but were removed after complaints. Rather than accept that a public school is no place for the promotion of religion, school officials decided to spend time and resources coming up with a new display they think will pass muster.

This is a dimension of this issues I hadn’t considered, these pious assholes are going to be wasting tax payer money because they have a bug up their ass for displaying religions bullshit in publicly funded schools, which has been decided time and time again violates the first amendment.

IN 1999, in McCreary and Pulaski counties in Kentucky they decided to display the 10 commandments in the local courthouses, it went to court, they lost the case, had to remove the 10 commandments, and were stuck with a $456,881 bill.

So, not only is this a brash refusal to adhere to constitutional law, it’s a massive fucking waste of tax-payer’s money, and frankly should be an insult to anyone.

Thanks to the Religious Right, atheist clubs thrive in schools.

How Jay Sekulow lost the culture wars

http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/our-humanity-naturally/201105/how-jay-sekulow-lost-the-culture-wars

Twenty years ago, it was rare to find a student atheist group even on a college campus, let alone in a high school. But, thanks to Jay Sekulow, organized atheist groups are now rapidly sprouting in high schools all over the country, protected by First Amendment rights and recognized by the school administration. Atheism, unfortunately, has often been seen by the public as mysterious and foreign, as something strange and perhaps dangerous, but thanks to the Mergens decision organized atheist groups can demonstrate to young people that the secular worldview is valid, nothing to be afraid of, and certainly nothing to vilify.

Read the rest of the article.

Jessica Ahlquist, Damon Fowler, and Harrison Hopkins: Three students fighting prayers in school, doing an “ask me anything” on reddit!

http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/hjd7p/we_are_jessica_ahlquist_damon_fowler_and_harrison/

Check it out if you have been following these stories.