I’m not a fan, though was once a donor, of PETA. While the idea is wonderful, they’re crackpots who want to liberate the honey bees from their horrific servitude to man. Way to maintain credibility. I was just shooting for better oversight on humane slaughter practices and maybe an end to the seemingly unending, and certainly unscientific, product testing on animals.

Bees, man. Bees. They live like 100 days if they totally luck out and they only live to make honey… Do these people even know that yogurt is full of live creatures? That mowing a big lawn kills thousands of animals? That owning a house cat you let outdoors makes you a sort of suburban Dr Mengele to your local songbirds?

Still, they deserve a link back for the photo.

Over at Capitol Hill Blue Paul C Campos makes a case—The contradiction of atheism—for why the enormous political prejudice against atheists is justified. He didn’t go it alone either. His Mormon friend, also an expert on religion, helped him.

…when one presses a purported atheist, one almost always finds that the person believes in various propositions that simply don’t make sense without a belief in some source of an ultimate moral order, i.e., what most people would call “God.” For instance, almost everyone who claims to be an atheist still makes lots of “ought” statements, as in “we ought to preserve biological diversity,” or what have you.

…atheists… and religious believers ought to agree that preserving biological diversity, and therefore in the long run humanity, is a profound moral imperative.

…this kind of thing has always seemed to me nonsensical on its face. After all, the human race has existed for an eye-blink of cosmological time and will certainly cease to exist in another eye-blink or two.

The only response a genuine atheist would have to that fact is, so what? Which helps explain why there are almost no genuine atheists.

Why would an atheist answer otherwise? How about because he wants to be–

1. Happy and healthy.
2. Rich.
3. Safe from violence and persecution.

And he probably wants the same for all his descendants because we’re sexually dimorphic biological creatures and our DNA informs our purpose as much as our personal choices.

To be assured of achieving all three there must be freedom—pursuit of happiness as one defines it for oneself, an open economy—the chance to earn as much as one can, and personal rights guarded by a government which adheres to points one and two, freedom of body and of cash. To achieve all three for one’s descendants requires a long view but not at the sacrifice of one’s other interests. One needs, at minimum, to be healthy and safe to be able provide health and safety for one’s children.

So, essentially what the atheist wants is an uncorrupted America where the Bill of Rights is still in full force. And the environment is held in proper stewardship. God doesn’t provide one the ability to appreciate nature, nor art.

So Mr Campos’s vague rationale for prejudice against “genuine” atheists is destroyed.

On the other hand, he implies that the morally superior religious would want to defend nature. No reason given. Just that God informs their morality and presumably God loves all the animals that will fit in a boat.

Campos is actually right that the Christian will be on the opposite side of the atheist but, as he was wrong about where the atheist would fall, he gets this side wrong too.

Why must a Christian answer “so what?” So what if nature ends or the world burns to a cinder in the death throes of our sun? Apparently Paul has read the Bible about as many times as he’s spoken with atheists about morality.

“Genesis” is pretty clear on the matter. The Christian God gave man the animals and plants to rule over; not to conserve but to burn through however we feel. He gave us the world to subdue; not to steward but to beat down.

The Bible says, over and over, that the world we live in now is not real, not permanent. That we live—or maybe sinners don’t, the Bible has several contradictory messages on this point—eternally elsewhere.

The reason why an atheist might understand that human existence is just a blink in time and still care is because the atheist knows this life is all he’s got. He wants it to be good; to matter. The reason why the religious might see their own Earthly lives as meaningless is because every major religion says it is.

The doom of the world can only elicit a “so what?” from Christians, otherwise they are not Christians, just guilt ridden agnostics who have memorized a few New Testament names and seen “The Ten Commandments.”

No, I don’t know that atheists should be considered as citizens, nor should they be considered patriots. This is one nation under God. George HW Bush

This morning in Afghanistan at around 10am local time Vice President Cheney was making a secret visit to an air base. A suicide bomber hit the base. Killed quite a few people but nowhere near hurting Cheney. Thank God.

Many of you at this sad point in my rapid march to the grave are probably not old enough to remember how reviled Reagan was. Fewer still will remember that Kennedy was one of the least popular presidents we’ve had while he was in office.

I remember being in class at a very liberally minded private school when Reagan was shot. I remember the critiques and harsh words against the man evaporating instantly, replaced with deep respect and even reverence for the situation. Men who despised him had glassy eyes when they told us kids about it.

Kennedy became some vague kind of hero for getting his case opened on film. Aside from some debatable contributions to civil rights and getting us in gear to go to the moon his major contribution was becoming the president who came the closest to starting a nuclear World War III and he was completely high on speed at the time.

If Cheney had got himself killed via suicide bomber in Afghanistan today the new, naked Right would have retaken all the lost chairs in DC and our next president, no matter the stripe, would dig America a bigger, ever more impotent moat of blood.

kill all americans

Start with me if you please. It’s 5am and I got three and a half hours of sleep in 15 minute parcels.

How to destroy America.

We already discussed it. Need more, eh? How about insisting that technology has made stealing a basic human right? That’s a good bit of erosion.

kill all americans [2]

A project of this scale really requires a cost analysis up front.

Let’s just scribble some notes on the napkin here. The best price you can expect for a 50 ct box of quality 9mm rounds is about $12. Assume absolute best case: 1 bullet <—> 1 head. New census puts USA pop at about 296 million today. 2.96x10⁸ ÷ 50 = 5.92x10⁶ boxes of ammo. Do that by the $12 and we get: 7.1x10⁷ or $71,000,000.

Wow… I was going to try to talk you out of it on the basis of cost, but, uh, that’s actually quite economical. Hmmm.

Destroy America

Do it yourself, lazy ass. You don’t see us Americans asking anyone else to do it for us, do you?

kill all americans [3]

It’s time we got serious about this discussion. We have a saying. Put your money where your mouth is. What kind of American would I be if I were willing to kill my countrymen for some silly ideology to which I don’t subscribe?

The resistance in Iraq was offering $1,000 a head for soldiers. I think that’s pretty fair though I question their ability to pay up. I also concede for the purposes of negotiation that the average US citizen is far less dangerous and far easier to dispose of than the average Marine. Far easier. So I think a huge discount is available. We already discussed the cost of doing business in kill all americans [2]. So you know there are some price floors already set in terms of materials. Also, I’m going to have to hire on some new staff but I’ll hire internationally for the obvious reason, cost, and because I would hate to be contractually obligated to shoot each of them as they pick up their final checks.

“i will kill all americans”

All right. If you could stop at the Mississippi, that would probably suit us fine.

Oh– Which side? Well, whichever, really.

Even they’re dead because the fuckwad neighbors are pumping toxins into the watershed so they can have a pretty lawn which I’ve never seen them use once in six years.

There is a particular quote from the Icelandic sagas that I’ve wanted to drop many times but been unable to recover verbatim. The quote is like a proto-Hollywood over the top, snarky, bad-ass action film line. There are a handful of them in the sagas.

I’ve read the sagas all at least once and a few of them several times. I could not recall which saga the line was from nor find the line from skimming my copies. I was seriously dreading rereading Njal’s Saga just to look for it.

Since Google launched their book searching I forgot to care. Stupid me. The apparent magnitude of my scholarship just jumped 10-fold because I am good at remembering pieces of information, especially spatial, but nowhere near eidetic.

Searching on “fashionable nowadays saga” and eyeballing the first page of results was all it took to discover the words appeared on page 95 of Grettir’s Saga.

No page shown however. The University of Toronto Press holds the copyright of the translation of the 750 year-or-so-old original. Instead of hating those rat bastard Canadians for pretending there is such a thing as copyright on the works of man dead for 40 generations—as coached relentlessly by certain Internet prime donne—I thanked them for saving me hours of reading just to extract a bit of trivia to show how wonderfully terrible some of my ancestors were. I walked to the bookshelf and took down the book and found the passage as advertised, on page 95.

The guy, Atli, hears a knock at his door in a rainstorm. Gets up. Grumbles about business. Opens the door to find no one so peers out in the weather. Suddenly–

Thorbjorn came rushing up to the door, and with both hands he drove the spear into Atli’s waist, forcing it right through his body. Grettir’s Saga

What does Atli do? Does he scream, cry, pray, call out for help to his family? Nope. The motherfucker looks down at what’s happened and with his last breath says–

“Broad spears are becoming fashionable nowadays.” Atli the Run-Through

The kind of people these men and women were, I can almost believe such ludicrous machismo isn’t fictionalized at all.

I don’t like hardcore porn.† Seriously. I believe that proves that I am entirely heterosexual, the most straight male on the West Coast; and that Snoop Dog is pretty gay but that wanders from our point.

Why does this distaste prove me straight to an immeasurably small tolerance? I don’t like hardcore porn because I don’t like seeing another guy score on any girl—planting his flag in territory that should be mine. They should all be mine. I have a biological drive the size of Alaska which says I should breed with every woman I see, in persion, in media. Porn is documentation that I didn’t score where another man did. I dislike that.

So, with my credentials in order I hereby take a stand I’ve danced around too much: I am pro-gay. I am so pro-gay that I wish every other man in the world were gay. Well, almost seriously. I’d settle for anything over the current-whatever 4–12%, but I’d love to see 98% saturation. Why do I need the competition? If the fate of mankind rested on me getting six new young ladies from every part of the world pregnant every day, I think… well, actually it’s hard to think at all with that picture in mind.

So, I must assume that anyone who is anti-gay, is gay. Because for any man who is heterosexual in fact, the more gay men he’s surrounded by, the better.

†I loves me some naked women though. The softcore Perfect 10, Domai, Playboy, Suicide Girls idiom is fine. My third wish of three might be for a naked candid shot of every woman who ever lived; at the peak of her beauty. Not for bragging rights, neither. I’d never even tell.

Apparently a great deal of my books are not supposed to cohabitate. Either the service is flawed or I’m exceptional. I refuse to entertain the possibility of both being true.

Re: Just Shoot Me Now — If You Have A Rifle…

The US government could outfit every soldier with half a million dollars worth of bleeding-edge gear if we only wanted to raise taxes to 60% of everyone’s income. Soldiers go with the gear they’re issued. You forget, war means men are just another resource and sometimes it’s a soldier’s job to die.

Not pretty? Trying to make war pretty in any way, even from a position of opposition, is part of what lets us get into them at all. If everyone accepted it’s nothing more than a meat-grinder which mostly destroys the souls of those it doesn’t turn into monsters, maybe we wouldn't be so hot for the next one.

Gulf states plan weapons buying binge

It just keeps getting better, George. When you ran in 2004 I really didn’t want you to win but there is a dark trickster corner of me that was deadly curious to see what you could manage in another four years. I swear to God that part of me is lamenting the 22nd Amendment right now. I just could not imagine how bad you could fuck us all if you got another turn at the piñata.

…you know, it might be the only thing that will work. America at large is not going to wake up until we’re all but irretrievably wrecked upon the rocks of someone like you. I’m not sure if I’m thankful or not you were too small a man to do it.

Breastfeeding may boost future social mobility

Or jail time, depending on whether it’s public or private and how old the diner is.

Clinton Woos Black Voters

This headline from the New York Times. The mental image from all the scare tactics the KKK ever put out about a white women wooing a few million black men.

Britney shaves herself bald

Old news.

Why Women Have Fewer Babies

Talk about irresponsible journalism. I don’t know of any men having babies at all!

Genocide death tolls met with increasing indifference: study

“The studies just described suggest a disturbing psychological tendency,” Slovic said. “Our capacity to feel is limited.”

It’s no coincidence. All of our senses are logarithmic. They have to be or they would not work in the real world. We can hear a whisper across a quiet room and we can go to a Ted Nugent concert. We can feel an eyelash and we—well, some of us—can stand up and be pummeled by a 250lb muscle bound man for 15 rounds. If senses weren’t logarithmic, they would not be able to encompass one one-thousandth of that range.

Our senses being logarithmic almost guarantees that our emotions and psychological responses will be too. They are products of our nervous system and its various supports. Hence, the murder of a loved one might drive us to a breakdown but the murder of 1,000,000 strangers can only be “news.” To personally grieve for 1,000,000 individuals would immolate the griever instantly.

“We have to create institutions and laws that will force us to do what we know through moral argument is the right thing to do.” Paul Slovic, a psychologist at the University of Oregon

That makes you the Devil. We know almost nothing to be true through moral argument and the few things we sometimes suppose to be true are almost always corrupted by the state. Is murder immoral? Is theft? Is getting high by yourself? We have laws and institutions that murder and steal and imprison casual drug users for their entire lives. Why? Because fuckheads like you keep saying we need to be forced to do the right thing for our own good.

Tire reef off Florida proves a disaster

Reported by Brian Skoloff, Associated Press Writer.

…tires… have broken loose and are scouring the ocean floor across a swath the size of 31 football fields. Tires are washing up on beaches. Thousands have wedged up against a nearby natural reef, blocking coral growth and devastating marine life.

“The really good idea was to provide habitat for marine critters so we could double or triple marine life in the area. It just didn't work that way,” said Ray McAllister, a professor of ocean engineering at Florida Atlantic University who was instrumental in organizing the project. “I look back now and see it was a bad idea.”

…similar problems have been reported at tire reefs worldwide.

“They’re a constantly killing coral-destruction machine,” said William Nuckols, coordinator for Coastal America…

Now. Before any of you legion intoxicated on the bong smoke that emanates from Al Gore’s exhaust port decide to go out and become climate engineers so you can paint the ice caps with aluminum or condense CO₂ and sink it in the oceans with powdered iron, consider the above. Consider that more often than not when human beings have attempted to engineer an environment for conservation, or to undo damage, it has backfired and made things worse. And behind every such disaster there has been a group of idiots who shrug, “Well, you can’t blame us. It seemed like a good idea at the time.”

US reserves judgment on Palestinian govt –Rice

Yeah! You go, Dr Rice! Fuck your democratically elected government, Palestine! The US doesn’t deal with democracies, you sick fucking bastards!!! Get yourselves another semi-reformed terrorist autocrat like Arafat and we’ll talk.

That would be more amusing if it didn’t approximate the response I got in an email exchange I had this week.

More to the point, fuck you guys in the US government who were surprised to learn that Palestine and Hamas have become inseparable. What else could have happened given the way Israel has managed the situation?

Teen Rescues 3 From Icy NY Creek

From the AP.

18-year-old Thomas Rosati, a high school senior, heard … screams and ran outside to a dock on the creek [to pull] the three boys to safety before police arrived.

“They were like yelling, saying like they’re going to die,” he recalled. “And I was like, ‘You’re not going to die. Just grab my hand.’”

In that young man’s quote you have the current American story summed up neatly. The stupid little kids who ventured where they shouldn’t, screaming they’re dying. One level-headed bystander setting them straight and pulling them out if they’ll just calm the fuck down long enough to listen.