Random Crap in my Tabs

RCimT: Saturday mostly-science! (plus politics)

Jason Thibeault, , , 1 Comment

Some more Random Crap! You love these, admit it.

A skeptical take on neti pots came in handy battling some ridiculous forwards about them being good prophylactics against H1N1.

There was a bolide explosion over the Netherlands, and Phil Plait points us to where to find photos. Amazing pictures!

This picture absolutely floored me today — some of the moons hardly look bigger than motes of dust on this very long, mostly black image, but the Mars Observatory got Earth and Jupiter in the same frame.

The LHC is fully cooled once more, and prepares to re-enter Science! mode. Put your goggles on!

Back Street Boys? In an office environment? Sung by nerds? Possibly powerful. Probably funny.

Proof that Falcon Heene’s dad is a duplicitous fucker, and a bit of a nutbar to boot. Now can we stop feeding his attention whore nature?

Allegations have emerged that General McChrystal, handpicked by Obama to end the Afghanistan war, was involved in the cover-up of the real reasons behind Pat Tillman’s super-suspicious death.

Simon Singh won an appeal in the fight against the British Chiropractic Association after he decried their practice of pimping out “bogus” neck-cracking-based remedies for colic, ear infections, asthma and other issues in children. Apparently he ran afoul of British libel laws, despite everything he said being science-based — e.g. the BCA made claims they couldn’t back up, he called them on it, they went crying to the courts. Keep fighting, Mr. Singh, we’re all pulling for you.

Scientific testing on mice suggests we may soon be able to induce a quasi-suspended-animation merely by administering certain combinations of gases to patients prior to surgery, providing surgeons much, MUCH longer to perform delicate operations. We know what gases are to be used on some smaller animals, and more research needs to be done before we can use this to help perform surgeries on larger animals like cats, dogs, monkeys and humans.

CNN scuttled an anti-Lou Dobbs ad, paid for by progressives enraged that his primary focus is constantly on those damn dirty brown people coming up from Mexico despite all the millions of issues America faces, and despite there not only being very few Mexicans actually entering the country illegally, the ones that do don’t seem to be much of a burden on your society.

Obama proclaims that he is “just getting started”, and that he won’t brook any more obstructionism from certain elements. ‘Bout time someone on the side of reason grew a bit of a backbone. Now, if you could “get started” on some of your more long-standing and pressing promises, that’d be great. You have a supermajority in the senate, why not just steamroll the obstructionists a few times? Why do you keep allowing bills to be gutted (and by gutted I mean reduced to nothing more than platitudes and pats on the head)?

Let’s see if I can squeeze one more post out of this tab collection. I’m almost through it all! If only I could stop clicking on Twitter links…

RCimT: Saturday mostly-science! (plus politics)
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RCimT: Catch-up

Jason Thibeault, , ,

I told you last time I still had a ton of crap in my tabs. It’s exploding again, so here we go, one more time. (I really gotta stop ctrl-clicking on everything interesting!)

First up and above the fold, Stephanie Zvan got good-but-complicated news with regard to her biopsy, suggesting the lesions she has on her cervix are not invasive cancer and can be treated. The blogosphere heaves a collective sigh of relief.

Much more below the fold.
Continue reading “RCimT: Catch-up” →

RCimT: Catch-up

RCimT: The usual Sunday godlessness

Jason Thibeault, , , , , ,

Hi everyone, and welcome to the end of yet another weekend! I’m not feeling all that great — I think I’m starting to finally succumb to that cold I’ve been staving off for almost two weeks now. So, I’m going to phone this one in and throw a few funny links and a Cool Atheist of the Week, then go snuggle into bed and drink some tea, and read Carl Sagan’s The Demon Haunted World. Or maybe I’ll just bring the laptop in and watch some Mythbusters instead, in honour of my pick for this week.

Jamie Hyneman, from The Discovery Channel’s popular show Mythbusters was interviewed by David Federlein, in the #42 episode of Skepticality. Both were attending The Amazing Meeting 4 last year in Vegas:

David: “What brought you to the skeptical movement here?”

Jamie: “I actually before this didn’t really know that much about the skeptics society, and I guess Adam and our producer were a lot more up on it and were more enthusiastic about it, but once I got into it, I became aware that unknowingly, I mean, I’m actually pretty adamant about the whole God thing. And it seems that skeptics are by and large atheists or something approaching that, which I strongly identify with, and so it turned out to be a good thing and I’ve become enthusiastically a part of it.”

On the topic of appeal to authority (as though having lots of famous people “on your side” is such a big deal outside of proving how mainstream an outgroup actually is), check out this bullshit Yahoo Groups question/answer, Can someone name ANY atheist famous for something other than being an atheist? The question was obviously asked by a theist, considering the ridiculous dig at evolution (what’s that got to do with atheism again??), and considering the “best answer” picked wasn’t one of the dozens of comments containing multitudes of atheists and what they’re famous for outside atheism but is instead one with lolspeak, no punctuation, and “no” as the answer.

Speaking of lolspeak, here’s something that’ll make you go WTF (there’s a tenuous segue at best): Klingons for Christ, a rather twisted attempt to make the case that Christianity is the right religion for every good Klingon warrior to embrace. I say twisted because the author pretty much has to perform acrobatics to reconcile the two — the scariest part is that it’s a rather successful amalgamation of the two fiction-based philosophies. As long as you can get past the “thou shalt not kill” thing, which you can do if you use the “murder” translation instead, and define “murder” as any killing that’s done in an honourless manner.

The Wikipedia page for Catholic sexual abuse scandals in Canada is sorely lacking in our latest example. Could someone with a Wikipedia account kindly rectify this?

And finally, ever wanted to prove you can fuck up less than Yahweh supposedly did in the Christian Bible? Here’s your chance. Pro tip: as an omnipotent deity, you can make everything perfect any time you want. Try not to fuck up too badly!

RCimT: The usual Sunday godlessness

Other blasphemers celebrating yesterday

Jason Thibeault

In case you weren’t aware, yesterday was Blasphemy Day, a day of civil disobedience to laws protecting ideas over people. I wasn’t the only one celebrating the day. Here’s a short list of others that took it upon themselves to tell everyone that $CHOSEN_DEITY sucks ass.

DanJ at RelativelyUnrelated
Julie at Attempts at Rational Behavior
Mike Haubrich at Tangled Up in Blue Guy
Stephanie Zvan at Almost Diamonds
Greg Laden at Greg Laden’s Blog
PZ Myers at Pharyngula
Jen McCreig at Blag Hag (who also represented at Purdue University!)
leguru at Stupid Evil Bastard
American Atheists at atheists.org
even Jesus and Mo themselves get into the spirit
Penn Jillette on Youtube (though those of us outside the USA will now have to circumvent Youtube’s country filters, as Crackle Media has decided the world consists of the USA.)

I’m sure I could never chronicle all of the blasphemy that went on yesterday, but these were some very notable entries. So much fun is to be had making fun of fictional characters! And it doesn’t even hurt anyone, unless you happen to take personal offense at your personal imaginary friend being insulted, at which point you might want to reassess your life priorities.

Other blasphemers celebrating yesterday

RCimT: Godless LOLs

Jason Thibeault

Some more godless LOLs to carry you through this day of piety toward imaginary creatures.

The Rapture was supposed to happen this past Monday, according to a crack Christian mathematician. Surprisingly, it didn’t.

Eddie Izzard did a great routine on the absurdity of the Great Flood story that’ll leave you in stitches. Especially when he tries to do his evil dog impression and ends up doing the same thing as his evil giraffe.

A comic about the intelligent design movement involving what doors are opened by the claim of “just a theory”.

Do you suffer from long short term memory loss? Jesus doesn’t remember.

In case you’ve never been there, check out The Brick Testament — a faithful retelling of the Bible using LEGO minifigs. And lots of blood tiles. LOTS of blood tiles.

Happy Sunday!

RCimT: Godless LOLs

RCimT: Sex Lists

Jason Thibeault

I’m not sure why there’s such synchronicity over the past few days with regard to sex lists suddenly popping up in my tabs via Twitter links and such, but I’ll take it as a sign from some divine power that I should make a blog post about sex lists!

First up: the 50 Greatest Cinematic Sex Scenes. I can’t agree or disagree with much of this list, as I haven’t watched nearly enough of them, but it’s put a few movies on my “to watch” list at least.

Here’s a brilliant little list of ten simple ways to prevent sexual assault. I can’t argue with the reasoning, either. If people would follow these ten rules, rape just wouldn’t happen, period.

I’m not much for Ayn Rand (no duh, you say collectively), but this list of 25 inappropriate things for an Objectivist to say during sex made me laugh heartily. For instance: “You selfish bitch! You greedy, selfish bitch! What? You don’t like my pillow talk?”

Then, there’s a list comprised of a whole ton of ways to have sex. What’s that? Not interested in gnawing off your own penis like a banana slug? Well, don’t worry, that list is just ways to have sex if you’re a member of a different animal species. Instead, you might like this other list of ways to have sex if you’re a human.

Happy Friday Fuck-day everyone! (Or Saturday Sex-day, or Wednesday Hump-Day, or whenever you read this.)

RCimT: Sex Lists

RCimT: Teabagging the health care debate

Jason Thibeault,

Some goings-on in the US health care debate and political beanbag tournament surrounding it.

A Fox News producer was caught directing 9-12 crowds, but it’s a grassroots effort, honest. Never mind that it was conceived by Glenn Beck, paid for by Rupert Murdoch and directed by Fox News producers, it’s TOTALLY legit.

Speaking of Beck, while advertisers are leaving him in droves, he has at least one friend in the media, who makes the straight-faced claim that the 60 advertisers he’s lost pales in comparison with the millions of companies that exist. Never mind that 60 is the vast majority of his advertisers to begin with. Said author also finds himself in a hole, and as the link above shows, doesn’t know to stop digging. Hilarity!

The e-mail forward A Day in the Life of Joe Sixpack has gotten around the intertubes quite a few times already. Sure, it’s no “Obamma is a secrit mooslem”, but you could always improve it by adding “Commie Medicine” to the list. Ten years from now perhaps teabaggers will scream “keep government’s hands off my Medicare Public Option!”

Anderson Cooper invites on a racist teabagger for the second time, and is quite civil with him despite him being demonstrably racist on both occasions.

Life expectancy vs health care costs per capita – not surprisingly, USA comes up both lowest life expectancy, and highest health care cost.

Joe “I Lie!!” Wilson voted yes on a bill that included a provision for illegal immigrants to gain access to health care. Never mind that his current whipping post explicitly denies illegal immigrants in plain English, this makes him not only a douchebag but also a hypocrite.

Dennis Kucinich managed to make the big insurance execs admit that withholding care for cancer patients could result in irreparable harm or death. Video:

And finally, check out documentary evidence (hey, if Creationists think The Flintstones is a documentary, so’s this) that Obama is Hitler reincarnated ZOMG!!

You already know this is all ridiculous. Get out there and do something about it! If the retards can get airtime, surely you reasonable folks can get some airtime as well!

RCimT: Teabagging the health care debate

RCimT Sunday: Godless LOLs

Jason Thibeault,

Happy Otherwise-Meaningless-Second-Half-Of-The-Weekend Day, everyone! As it’s traditionally associated with Christian worship, and most of you think Christian worship is kind of silly, it’s only fitting that this become a tradition on this blog: linking to stuff that’s funny at religion’s expense.

So God apparently once said “let there be light” or something. God is also sometimes Jesus, who can apparently also turn on lights. Only to do so, you evidently have to first turn HIM on. Well, that explains all the pedophile priests anyway.

Here’s a list of 281 ways to annoy the piss outta an atheist. #1:
Ask them why they are bitter against God. Yep, and it all goes downhill from there.

Nom nom body of Christ. I notice none of these guys are going after his brains though… how odd.

Hey God, if you exist and are capable of seeing this and interpreting an anchor tag: you are here.

And this isn’t really about God or even religion, but religious folks seem to think Darwin is some kind of science/atheist prophet or something, so I guess this belongs here too or something.

—

220px-BruceLeecard

Another feature I’d like to start (if I can remember to do so on a weekly basis), is your Cool Atheist of the Week. And I can think of no better first inductee than Bruce Lee.

Lee felt that anything which substituted the ways or beliefs of others in the place of teaching you how to cultivate your own was a step in the wrong direction. For this reason, Lee was opposed to the doctrines–or rather the dogmas–of organized religion.

When asked by journalist Alex Ben Block in the summer of 1972 what his religious affiliation was, Lee answered: ‘None whatsoever.’

Block then pressed him further, asking him if he then believed in God: ‘To be perfectly frank, I really do not.’

source

RCimT Sunday: Godless LOLs