"Celebrities, I wanna be celebrity"

Not really.

I find it odd that when I go onto a news website, there's several links trying to direct me towards some celebrity news or another that is even more emotionally devastating to the common housewife than the fact that there are hundreds of people dying from treatable diseases, there are thousands of people who are living without things we in America can't live without, and there are probably millions who have to survive in a country that denies them their basic rights.

What is with our fixation on celebrities? When they are perfect little plastic dolls, we feel safe. When we find out that they have faults, cracks, chips in the paint, LOOK OUT! And when one dies, thousands must roam the streets in mourning. Yes, it is sad that a 20 something guy who has been on a few block buster hits has passed away. But what of the many children who are stolen in Africa and the Middle East to be made into soldiers? What of the women living in hostile countries who are raped and killed daily?

What about the fact that a lot of this goes on in our own country? Child soldiers have been used in gangs, women are captured and killed, gays are killed just because of their love, Jane and John Does are found and are never named, their families forced to live without the knowledge of what happened to them... the list goes on and on.

People can ask, "what can I do? that's happening miles away, things like that can't happen to me!" or "I don't want to think about that, I just want to sit in front of the tv and pay attention to my celebrities". But there is a lot one person can do, from volunteering, to giving money, to just being there for their neighbor. And if all a person can do is give money instead of giving time, they might object and say that they don't have enough money to give, they could think of all those movies they have in their dvd case, the amount of money they spend on tv and internet, and how much junk food they stuff down their face, adding to their gut. Most places that ask for money don't ask for a lot. Sure, I don't do anything but make this information known to those who ask, but I'm hoping to do more in the future.

Keeping those who need help in mind are better than forgetting them altogether.

I Only Wish

And I don't think I'm the only one.

This is a gorgeous shirt I came across while idly looking for a graphic or two. It beats the hell out of the flag crap kids have to go through in the US right now (although this little hero is showing it doesn't have to happen).

A lad can dream. One day, it'll happen.

Hey, I don't hate Chuck Norris. I pity the fool.

Just an additional to Chuck Norris' plans for Texas, as mentioned in an earlier post. Image is from Superpoop.com, whose fantastic name I never heard before today, and was revealed to me by my bro Kai.

Who is this Graham cracker?

This just in: Islam and Judaism are genetic traits that can be canceled out by accepting Jesus!

Franklin Graham, I salute you. But I thumb my nose at the end of it, then bend over and fart tremendously in your general direction. You have reached a new limit for monstrously barbaric worldviews in the face of GENETICS NOT WORKING LIKE THAT.

This may possibly be the most subtle bit of racism I've seen this year. You say that Islam is genetic, and make the same claim about Judaism in the same sentence. But then going on to say you can 'heal' yourself of Islamic genes by becoming Christian? So, like, making obesiance to your sky-daddy means that Muslims can cure the nasty brown person religion given to them by their fathers?

I've got to wonder if the loony twunt is thinking at all. I used to think you had to be very smart to appear this stupid. Nowadays, I'm starting to wonder if that was just a way of hiding from the fact that people really, honestly believe this shit.

As Monty Python said, you're a Catholic the moment Dad came...but then Franklin is the son of an evangelical preacher. He knows how to think out an argument like a mussel knows how to climb a tree.

Discipline This

Mother slaps her baby on plane

Now, this is tough to comment about since there's many sides to this argument, and I'm the lucky person who gets to talk about it.

When is it right for a mother to discipline children, and when should people butt in? When a 13 month old kicked her mother, who retaliated by slapping the child, a flight attendant stepped in.

Now, here's when it gets tricky. The flight attendant says that she saw the mother slap the child on the face, and upon retrieving the child and taking her to the back of the plane, the flight attendant finds that the child has a black eye.

The mother on the other hand says that she just "popped" the child on the legs to get her to listen, and that the black eye was from a dog bite.

... A dog bite. What the fuck?! Do you really expect us to believe that a dog bit your child and you didn't do anything to prevent it? Even if you didn't give the child the black eye yourself, letting her get near a dog that is angry enough to attack her is just bad parenting in and of itself!

Let's not forget that this is a 13 month old girl. She probably doesn't know she's doing anything bad in the first place. While some toddlers can express wide ranges of tantrums at this age, they would never need to be slapped or hit. Actually, you can still discipline a child of any age without resorting to violence.

Of course, the mother in question just brushes it off, saying that "It's ma child, I can discipline her however way I want". NO. This leads to child abuse, you sick fuck.

The father had the right idea, yelling at the mother to stop hitting the child. He should probably divorce the dumb bitch and take his daughter far away from her.

Now, here comes the tricky part: At what point should a stranger get in the way, such as flight attendants?

The answer? Before it's too late.

Build A Holy Army With Your Hole

Have a fucking bucket ready.



I think I'm going to be sick.

That's a group who - notice in the vid - won't confirm that Catholics are actually Christians too. The bitch wouldn't give a straight answer talking about Latino people either. It backs up what's hinted at in the group's literature - they're building a Christian army. They're breeding a Christian army. To take back the world as their rightful Christian place.

Either they're boned or we are. Thankfully, it's them.

*Video gratefully if cheekily sourced from Ed Brayton's blog Dispatches From The Culture Wars. Thank you, Ed.

Don't X Me Y, Just Do What I Say

It's settled. The homophobes have no idea what they're doing.

For those who know better than to read anything ever posted on WorldNutDaily, that's a link to a minor rant by a truly microcephalic lady named Nancy Pearcey. This is a woman who thinks Earth is six thousand years old (a figure apparently based on adding up the ages of all the sequential generations of people mentioned in the Bible, hint hint) and that people coexisted with dinosaurs.

That's only the start. The whole thing's so intellectually crap that it's only appeared on the site that gives a weekly column to Chuck Norris, possibly the subject of the greatest amount of misguided respect on the Internet...and this dumb bitch has decided that gay people and transgender people don't respect the human body.

...What? Why wouldn't they respect it? Like anyone, they put a lot of work into getting it to look just the way they want - the way they think their body should look. Like a lot of people on both sides of the gender divide, sometimes they resort to surgery. Why do they show any less respect for the human body than any of the people Pearcey isn't talking about?

The article's full of this sort of thing. Very vague definitions that don't really make sense when you look into them with real inquiry in mind, but which make just enough sense to resonate with anyone who's already decided gays are morally in the wrong for being who they are. Like a lot of opinion writers who come down on the repressive side of the moral viewpoint scale, she quotes old writings and implies they're factual, taking their accuracy and even their relevance as read without a second thought. She even uses Descartes' logic, by quote-mining a philosopher called Daniel Dennett on the topic of body-and-soul duality as Descartes laid it out - a view Dennett doesn't actually agree with, which means he'd probably be quite pissed if he knew what she did.

She kind of thinks in cartoons, too. Like, real kids' stuff. She keeps making this assumption that people are born with a sexual identity and should stick with it, and anyone gender-confused is apparently just being rebellious or sinful. What she thinks is in it for these sinners to do such a thing, she doesn't say. But she either doesn't know about or is deliberately ignoring the fact that XX and XY, the so-called 'officially' male and female chromosomal configurations, are not the only ones. There's a hell of a lot more than just those two, and without getting into complicated genetics info that I can barely make sense of it's hard to go into what the differences are. (It's easy to find the necessary stuff on Google if anyone does want to read up on it.)

There's also this little gem:

this represents a devastatingly disrespectful view of the physical body. It alienates people from their own bodies, treating anatomy as having no intrinsic dignity. No dignity is accorded to the unique capabilities inherent in being male or female.

What?

Which dictionary's she working from? The inner workings of a human being are not very dignified processes. Mine certainly aren't. While she's clearly talking about reproduction, the 'unique capabilities' inherent in the genitals of a human male are basically the kind of pressure systems that'd never make you want to pump up a Super-Soaker water gun again. A surge and a splat are not exactly noble goings-on. She's trying to appeal to some higher purpose inherent in all this, but consider it all in context it just comes out as 'ADAM AND EVE NOT ADAM AND STEVE BLAAGH DERP' and other such time-honoured wastes of space. If she's going to only use her body parts for what her god supposedly intended, does that mean she's not going to whistle? Will she follow her god's intent for her feet and make sure they never do anything that humanity came up with for itself, like driving a car or using a trampoline? Does she eat her meat raw and live in a tree? She typed that shit with her fingers, and I bet no one in the Bible imagined that one...and if she doesn't like the idea of going back that far to different body parts, then tough. You pick on people for how they use their penises, and they'll all rise to stand up against you.

Or something.

Fact #892: There is no brain in Chuck Norris' head. Only a fist with a cross tattooed on it.

There was a time when I, like many other teenagers with Internet access, loved Chuck Norris jokes. I'm not proud of every moment in my life. But it's only recently I've started realising how deeply fucked-up this bearded Bible-thumper is.

Get a load of this shit.

This is a guy who has been quoted as saying Texas should secede from the US and form its own republic governed by the Ten Commandments. There is no chin under Chuck Norris' beard; there's no fist, but there's no fucking chin. Got to wonder how many of the racist, inbred dickheads who think he's a natural leader for Texas would react if they did enough reading to find out his real name's Carlos - just like one a' them there dirty Mex'kins!

Most of the people who would vote for Chuck are the type who tend to wear at least one item of camouflaged clothing almost all the time, as if to proclaim 'I am wearing this item of military-looking clothing, therefore I am quite dangerous in a rhetorical, Deep Southern, don't-tread-on-my-Bible's-laws-or-I'll-murder-a-doctor sort of way'. The problem is that it actually comes across to most people as 'I'm wearing this piece of camo, because soldiers wear camo, and therefore I think I look like a soldier and THAT MAKES ME AWESOME.' If Caps Lock is cruise control for cool, wearing camo outside of the damn military is cruise control for looking like you dressed with the lights on.

I realise that this might sound hypocritical of me, however: I have been a fan of Mr. T since I was a child and it seems to me that he is the perfect example of down-to-earth manly philosophy: "When you see me now, I'm nothing but a big overgrown tough mama's boy. And I speak that with glee because the problem with society is we don't have enough mama's boys." Compare that to Norris' hypocrisy - wants the Bible running the US, but I bet you the fucker's eaten lobster before - and there's really no contest.

Fuck Chuck. T helps you see.

You Say Islamic Terrorist, I Say Christian Soldier...Let's Call The Whole Thing Off

Another reason churches should never control lives...as if we needed more proof.

So, the US military is having evangelical chaplains do the job of trained psychiatrists. Soldiers serving in Iraq and Afghanistan, and suffering from battle-related problems like post-traumatic stress disorder or PTSD, are being referred to BLOODY PREACHERS instead of people who can help them.

So what are these preachers saying? Have a guess.

According to the reports of these veterans, the chaplains they were sent to for evaluation and treatment had the unmitigated temerity to urge, as a medicinal cure, a conversion to evangelical Christianity, and sometimes even went as far as disgustingly lacing their "counseling" with the soldiers' need to stay on the battlefield to "kill Muslims for Christ."

These fucks need to be told they're doing what the Templars did in Jerusalem. It's a crusade. It's killing in the name of a god, and its proponents should be castigated - along with every single goddamn Christian who doesn't condemn this and spread the news far and wide so all their friends can condemn it too. The bigger the public outcry, the faster this will be fixed up. I hope.

At the moment, I am at the absolute limit of what I can handle. It appears that what I can handle is my boyfriend being an atheist, angrily talking about right winged religious nuts in front of my mother in a very public environment. Announcing that you disagree with my family's core beliefs in Wal-Mart? That's okay.

What I can't seem to handle is this unsettling feeling I got the moment he left to fly back to England. Didn't I mention that he lives there while I live in this flat land called Minnesota?

See, when people talk about missing each other, saying cheesy lines like "You complete me" or "Never gonna let you go", I usually turn my ears off. But see, at the moment, while I sit alone with my cats on my bed, wasting time until I drift off into sleep, it feels as though some crucial part of me is missing. It's like when someone is hungry, but the person doesn't have a stomach, or when an artist sits down to draw, but he doesn't have any hands. It's like trying to walk and finding that you have no feet, or feeling that your feet are itchy, but they aren't there.

What I'm missing in my life is someone who will hold me when I cry, and tease me until I laugh, someone who I can lean upon, or get angry with, or argue about whether or not it's right to hate a racist person, no matter who that person may be. It's like their lips should never leave mine, their body never escape my hold, their eyes never leave my gaze.

I miss my angry atheist, after two and a half weeks of living with him. I found that not only do I still enjoy his company, but each time I got to tell him "Good morning", or be able to kiss him, and each second I spent with him, I fell further in love with him.

Now that he's gone, I'm sad, and the only thing I can smile about is knowing that I won't stop until he's in my arms once again.

As always,

The Christian.

US BP distributors consider reverting to Amoco brand

In the latest of a series of what can only be described as dick moves by people on the fringes of the Gulf fuckup, a group of British Petroleum's American distributors are considering shifting their displayed brand name from BP to the old Amoco brand with the clear intention of making it look like they have no link to BP's hideous PR mistakes and general profiteering-driven dickery. The worst part is that the people who don't know who Amoco are/were will take this as a good move by the distributors instead of sleight of hand intended to fool the public eye. Enough of those people will be buying products under the 'new' Amoco label that there'll still be roughly the same profits going to BP - and they'll feel justified in having engaged in blatant misdirection in order to ignore public opinion and still rake in the cash.

Looks like there'll be a number of people hearing about this from me soon enough. Those around me, expect angry diatribes about liars and dickwads.

- The Atheist