In Which I Check my Spam Folder

2011-07-07T16:38:00.000-07:00

You are embarking on a new career as a spammer to hawk some kind of bogus "male enhancement" product. Do you:

Pick a suitable name that associates your particular product offering with large slabs of granite, leviathan sea creatures, and/or industrial equipment?

OR
Do you pick this instead?

No, really. You thought that was the best option there. Squishable.

On a side note, I think MaxEnlargement is how you'd like to refer to the product you are selling and (in all likelihood) swallowing in handful after desperate handful in the vain attempt to swell your personal micronaut. I mean, who else but a shrunken, shriveled, miserable sliver of a man-child would sink so low as to spam for a living?

MSNBC Pinches a Loaf

2011-07-07T15:04:00.000-07:00

Dog poop as power source?

"Don't pooh-pooh the idea ..."

Really, MSNBC? REALLY? You have a hard news story about innovative science and alternative energy sources, and your best bit of writing comes out of infantile scatology? That's just ~~crappy~~ pathetic. I give your article one pile out of five.

Got Gingrich?

2011-06-22T12:37:00.000-07:00

Time for a poll. What is your analysis (other than blurgh! gak!) of the following photo? Comment away!

Psychotic serial killer about to start another killing spree?
Religious fanatic about to launch into discourse on the horrors of masturbation and the impending apocalypse?
Trophy wife about to start another shopping spree at Tiffany's?
Malfunctioning android about to become self-aware and integrate with SkyNet, triggering global thermonuclear war?
Other?

(Extraneous turdbucket artifact included strictly for context; otherwise, not worthy of comment).

Inaugural Rant, Part the First

2011-06-15T22:19:00.000-07:00

You might wonder what this blog is about and why I am in such high dudgeon here in Arizona.

I can answer those questions by simply linking to this recent news story featuring “Pious Jan”: Arizona's Brewer Prays Before Taking on Her Own Party Over Taxes.

Prayer, you know, as opposed to, oh, I don't know, reviewing spreadsheets? Running projections and simulations? Preparing charts and other visual aids to explain to our reprehensible flock of ideologically retarded rectal rodents that at some point, cutting spending is analogous to slitting one's throat to get rid of a cough?

Nope, not prayin' Jan. She's got to talk to the God and the Jeebus, you see, because THEY'RE going to fix this. There are, after all, some problems we can't solve all on our own.

This, ladies and gentlemen, is our esteemed governor, our civic leader, our elected champion and visionary, and her entire strategy is, "Well, I can't figure it out because math is hard, so I'm just going to let my invisible friend take over from here."

And that's not the worst of it. The worst of it is, the media foolishly licks this moronic spittle up off the floor as though it were (dare I say?) manna from heaven, painting her as a sympathetic grandma-ish figure going off to do battle with a determined foe, outnumbered and outgunned.

Pious politics play well to a crowd, and the papers and pundits are all too happy to pander to the people's predeliction for platitudes and perfidy. Excuse the consonance. It's a low rhetorical trick, one that I reserve for moments of supreme disgust and contempt. It beats using crude anatomical references and body functions. Well, mostly.

“Oh, great,” you say. “Another angry atheist, arrogantly antagonizing Arizonans all aflame with the agape.”

I’ll cop to all of it: atheism, anger, arrogance, and antagonism. Sure. I am an atheist. I don’t believe in gods, any gods, and if they did exist, I would spit in their face and spend every last ounce of strength and breath at war with them, however futile such a gesture would be. (Because gods don’t exist, of course, I must reserve my bile for the pious pestilence who pray to their imaginary tyrants.)

There are those who call the universal dismissal of the existence of abiding deities as arrogant, but that’s a bad argument. Show me an experiment proving supernatural agency by means of concrete, objective, measurable, and statistically significant results that hold up under critical peer review from qualified non-religious experts, and I’ll grant you the existence of that agent. Whether I worship it is another matter, but largely beside the point.

I think the label of arrogance, as applied to atheists, refers more to their refusal to submit to the laws imposed on them by religious authority, by their defiant questioning of doctrinal and dogmatic belief systems, and by not affording bad arguments any slack. And to that, I am only too happy to raise my hand and say, “I am.”

I am certainly antagonistic to the bullies of the world. I don’t believe in placating them, I believe in provoking them, irritating them, enraging them, forcing them out in the open where they can no longer hide their venom under hue of holiness. But I’m getting ahead of myself here.

My dudgeon does not arise from the fact that Jan Brewer, or any one else in public service or not, prays. I care as much about that as I do about Jesse Ventura’s theories on chem-trails or Sarah Palin’s Necronomicon of American History.

My dudgeon, my ire, burns from the fact that she makes it clear that praying is her preferred method of governance (or copping out, depending on how you look at it). It’s that she, and that a great many of our legislature, incorporate Jesus into their politics, and that the vast majority of the fourth estate blithely reports these Jesusical burblings with nary a follow-up question, much less critical reporting.

It’s that faith, in Arizona—and in a great many other places around this nation—is taken not only as a valid alternative to governance by evidence and reason, but as superior to evidence and reason itself. It’s that we have people with a medieval mentality having access to 21st-century communications techniques and technology (to say nothing of military assets, which should scare the hell out of anyone who doesn’t attend the Fundagelical Church o’ Loony).

It’s that we have a law on the books saying that, among other things, students can’t be penalized for wearing a t-shirt quoting Leviticus 20:13, in which God demands homosexuals be put to death, or for stating in a science class that the planet Earth is no more that 6,000 years old.

It’s that I receive updates from Planned Parenthood of Arizona almost weekly outlining yet another bill in the State House or Senate to enslave women as baby factories to the point of death.

It’s that our dunderheaded and thankfully departing U.S. Senator Jon Kyl can not only utter outrageous falsehoods about Planned Parenthood (whether intended as factual statements or not) but continue about his business as a Senator without censure or rebuke from his peers.

It’s all this, a thousand things and more, that prompt me to say something in protest, to howl, jape, defy, mock, insult, and otherwise express utter contempt and outrage for the cruel and insane barbarism that is Christianity in (Arizona) Politics.

High Dudgeon in Arizona

In Which I Check my Spam Folder

MSNBC Pinches a Loaf

Got Gingrich?

Inaugural Rant, Part the First