Xmas gifts for the crazy Christian you love

Ship of Fools presents great gifts for the religious nutcase in your life this holiday season. My favorite is their favorite (#1):

My parents would so put this in their yard.

Survey of the damage

And here's The Onion with a hilarious hurricane-like report on the damage done to the nation by the Bush presidency:

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Golden line

From Gail Collins' column in today's NYT (links added by me):

Palin has been pressing the line that people don’t really know “the real Barack Obama,” and who could make the argument better than a woman who we’ve already known for almost six weeks? Really, she’s like one of the family.

We’ve gotten so close we’ve already learned that she didn’t actually sell the plane on eBay, didn’t actually visit the troops in Iraq and didn’t really have a talk with the British ambassador. As soon as we get the Trooper thing and Alaska Independence Party thing and the tax thing figured out, she’ll be an open book.

*drum sting*

PS: Economists who once backed McCain's economic plans are now balking at his proposal to buy mortgages directly from banks.

PSS: Someone should lose a hand (or at least a finger) over this.

Great atheist images

I've given you wise words before, so here are some hilarious images, courtesy fruitloop and her cool Believers Anonymous site:

Same image, different perspective:


I like it, and her 12-step program idea. We used a similar image at GF until Ryan made the cool logos we have now. Another good one from her profile:

See more of her work at cafepress...

The Good and the Bad-Fugly

This new video of McCain is good. Damn good.

Digg It!

Ben Smith explains why the GOP's attempt to smear Barack with a mock facebook app is lame. Check out the reviews written on it there, especially the one I just wrote entitled, "McDumb as Bush"...

Blog Readability Level: Genius

Trust me, I know that things like this mean nothing to you nor my ego:

TV Reviews

Of course, all it's doing is looking for a few key vocabulary words they've arbitrarily decided indicate reading level. But still, I got a screencap:


Just remember that if your blog is private, you'll have to go in and make it public for a few minutes before allowing the website to scan it.

Nice diagram

Via PZ:

Dan Rather refers to Obama as "an Osama bin Laden"

Dan Rather makes a bumbling idiot of himself while breaking an irony meter. He is talking about how today's 24h news cycle means anything you say, even when you aren't supposed to be live, is fair game for the sensationalistic news to use. Then, he defends Jesse Jackson by saying that, "...he was important in paving the way for an Osama bin Laden to appear..."

Stop and think about this for a moment: what in the hell does Jesse Jackson have to do with terrorism? Nothing. What else could Rather have meant? Obviously, that Jackson's run for the presidency in 1988 paved the way for Obama's candidacy today. So, Dan Rather confused not only the name, "Obama" with "Osama", which is bad enough, he confused, "Obama" with "Osama bin Laden". JFC...

H/T: I saw this at FiveThirtyEight.com, my favorite polling site. Also, check out their current projections and electoral map:

Religulous, randomness

I am quite anxious to see Bill Maher's "Religulous", coming out 10/3/08, according to Wikipedia. Here's the trailer via YouTube:

Lionsgate has registered a domain, disbliefnet.com, and God is it a funny spoof of beliefnet.com.

Speaking of funny spoofs of religion, and in the vein of "Every sperm is sacred", my second favorite Monty Python clip, The Onion has a hilarious article on Hothouse Effects:

On a complete tangent, the John McCain official flip-flop list that I mentioned before now has a new URL and a new graphic. It's great!

On another complete tangent, our health care system's failure is documented. Again.

Borat's sequel

Sort of.  Of course, Borat is supposedly dead, but Cohen is doing another similar theme:  use a movie to expose the ignorance and prejudices of Americans, while putting them in uncomfortable settings.  It's based on his Brüno character.  In one scene, the joke's on a bunch of rednecks. It's precious! A bunch of Arkansas hillbillies buy tickets to see a cage match, but the guys strip down to the underwear and make out!  Bwahahahaha

I can't wait to see it.

It reminded one person of the prank by Top Gear, when they painted "Man Love Rocks" and "Country & Western is Rubbish" on their cars and drove through Jesusville, Alabama.

The pranks that people play on religious biases can be funny or naughty.  When it comes to naughty, no one ups the Church Whipper (NSFW:  1, 2, 3).  When it comes to funny, at the last GC meeting I learned that they actually manufacture little feet to replace on your Darwin Fish if some asshole acted on Jesus' love and tore the feet off it.  While I don't have one, I was thinking I should buy some Darwin Fish replacement feet and put them on the innocent Jesus fish of a bunch of cars at a church during a service.  It would be harmless and humorous.

Gimme that ol' time religion

I know this is old, but it's hilarious:

Two funny irreverent things

Okay, so when the huge spawn of twisters killed lots of people throughout the SE, and when a huge spawn of twisters killed lots of people in KS and AL, I asked for some logical consistency: the fat self-righteous religious right kooks needed to step up to the plate and claim that God hates TN, or KS, or AL...just as they did when Katrina hit LA. Finally, someone has stepped up to the plate, blaming Iowa for God's wrath -- Jason Werner. PS: See this take-down at the Secular Philosophy blog of arguments based on the idea that God sends wrath down on specific locales when God gets pissed.

See this hilarious spoof of Expelled, just substitute Intelligent Design Creationism for Astrology and Biology for Astronomy and you get the joke:

Note on Appalachia & Obama

When I said a few days ago that I know the Appalachian region all too well, as I lived my first 20 years there, I spoke about the racism that I know played into Obama's significant electoral losses in the region. Boy, I wish I'd known that the Daily Show video had come out the night before on this exact issue.

For those of you who can't/won't watch the video, Jon Stewart basically cuts through the "white working voters" bullshit to get to the heart of it -- race and ignorance. Voters were interviewed who repeated the nonsense about Obama being a Muslim and simultaneously (with no hint of irony or detection of illogic) an atheist.

As much as the Bible Belt section of Appalachia sucks, and as I've pointed to every conceivable fact to support that statement, I wanted to point out something of a little more substance: the NPR interview that exposed a lot of this racist nonsense and its closing statement in particular.

Exit polls from Tuesday show that 22% of voters admitted that race was a factor in their decision. For 8% of voters, race was the most important factor. And almost all those voters went for Clinton. Sometimes, voters say that they aren’t racist – but their friends and neighbors are. Here’s Anna Sale again talking to Brian Blankenship, a Logan County barber.

Blankenship: Well they’re saying Hillary, and if Hillary don’t, they’re saying McCain.
Sale : So they don’t like Obama
Blankenship: No
Sale : And what are the reasons
Blankenship: I’d say because he’s black, most of them.

Finn: And sometimes, voters have no problem saying it themselves.

Cooper: You know I didn’t vote for no colored.
Sale: Who did you vote for?
Cooper: What’s her name?
Sale : Clinton.
Cooper: Clinton, yeah.

Finn: That’s Morris Cooper, an 80-year-old man from Lincoln County. In all these cases, the voters weren’t asked about race – they brought it up themselves.

None of this surprises William Turner. He grew up in Harlan County, Kentucky, and is now chair of Appalachian Studies at Berea College. He says there’s no one single factor that explains Obama’s trouble with voters in Appalachia. It’s his race, it’s his name, it’s his upbringing in far-off Indonesia and Hawaii. And Obama’s message of change, which is so popular elsewhere, doesn’t resonate in a region that resists change.

Turner: How often I heard it said, Nobody likes change but a baby with a dirty diaper. So this kind of change is maybe just a little too much for people to absorb.

Finn: Some people think Obama can turn these attitudes around if he spends more time in West Virginia. In 1960, John F. Kennedy crisscrossed the state for three weeks, and even went down into a coal mine. It paid off – the mostly Protestant state helped select the nation’s first Catholic president. But Turner says Obama has a much tougher job than Kennedy.

Turner: I don’t think Barack could have in the short time he had change these long-standing stereotypes of black people or Appalachia. So what we need is just more education, more interaction, people getting to know each other better. And if he did nothing else but held up a mirror so we see ourselves better than we did last week, that’s good that he did that.

Finn: West Virginians, and other people in Appalachia, complain a lot about unfair stereotypes. But in this case, Turner says we have no one but ourselves to blame.

Indeed. Every hick they interviewed said the same ignorant things. It's enough to make me angry as hell and physically repulsed at the same time. All I can hope for is that more sunlight will work as a disinfectant; that the more people look at these sorts of attitudes, the more those holding them will be recognized for what they are and shunned. Education and liberal values are not going to work on the uneducated and staunch racists in Appalachia.

The same exact thing applies to eastern KY (where all of my dad's family is from and all still live) and there's a great video at Kos on it...also OH, PA, and to a lesser extent TN.

It will be so easy to beat McBush on issues of foreign policy, domestic policy and political ethics that I really think the only thing that can defeat Obama is the demographic he's struggled with for a a long time -- Southern or Appalachian whites & uneducated whites.

Monty Python: "O Lord Please Don't Burn Us..."

There are many very funny Monthy Python clips available online. Everyone has their favorites. My own all-time favorite is from The Meaning of Life: Part II -- Growth and Learning, at about 2:12, with the song, "O Lord, Please Don't Burn Us..." (lyrics)

Paternity: some randomness & humor

Now that we're having a baby, I always tease Amber by saying around other people, "I think it's mine," and so forth.

My dad always loved saying, "Mommy's baby is daddy's 'maybe'!"


He also says (a bit less tastefully), "Well, you were caught in my trap, so that makes you mine." If you could see side-by-side portraits of my father and I when we were kids, you'd understand why he was confident enough to joke crassly about it.

I'm pretty confident too, but...

One study estimates that 1 in 25 children is raised by a cuckolded husband (so-named because the cuckoo leaves its eggs in the nest of another to raise). There is no longer any excuse for those who are suspicious...just dole out the dough and get this home kit for testing.


I'm not really too worried, but for those of you who are, there's no excuse to end up like this poor bastard (more).

JibJab VDay Striptease

I made another JibJab movie, this one a funny striptease for Valentine's Day, rather than about politics like the last one:

Don't send a lame Valentine's Day eCard. Try JibJab Sendables!

Bill and Hillary: Experienced!

A great Billary video from Lee Stranahan; it is hilarious:

"everything is dark-sided" Jesus freak special

I'm as sick as a dog, so it really hurt to watch this:

UPDATE: Now I feel really bad.

Neato Bandito

Alright, so this guy compiled the correlation between facebook network book rankings & college SAT scores to try to show what some of the "dumber" and "smarter" colleges are reading. I was happy to see that neither UF nor VT had the Bible at #1 or #2. See how your school stacks up, and play around with the data at his site, it's neat.

Contrast: "Biblical Science" v. Science

This is fantastic:

(H/T: PZ)