I get email

A guy named David Shakespeare has a complaint.

I wonder sometimes! I wonder why this website has ads that fill up the lower window of your webpage

To pay for the server, and give a few bucks to the writers, obviously. You might also notice that there’s a link up on the top left of the page that says GET FTB AD-FREE. You don’t get to complain about the ads when we have an option to support the network while ditching all the ads.

Also, I don’t particularly like the ads either.

that show huge breasts, busty celebs, and loaded sexual innuendo

Oh, really? I get ads that say Easiest Way to “Remove” Wrinkles, 1 Fruit That “Destroys” Diabetes, New 20/20 Vision Breakthrough Leaves Optometrists Speechless, and Watch: Alzheimer’s Reversal “Cocktail” Changing Lives. I think the ad company has noticed that I’m ancient and wizened. What is it inferring about you?

But here’s a hot tip: at the bottom right of that block of ads, there’s a little note that says “Paid content” with a question mark. If you click on that, you’ll get an option to show only “family-friendly” ads! Don’t say I never did nothin’ for you. You have the power to make those huge breasts transform into ads for wrinkle cream.

Actually, I blame you for the ads. Because David Shakespeare is not pulling his weight to support a site he clearly reads, we’ve got to run ads to keep the lights on. (It’s OK if you can’t afford or would rather not pay for a subscription…but then, you don’t get to complain that we have ads.)

—all this—all the while demonizing Richard Carrier

What “demonizing”? I rather regret that we couldn’t get to the bottom of those accusations — but he quit when all we’d done is start an inquiry.

for lude behavior via accusation!

We were not inquiring into lude behavior. There were accusations of harassment. That’s serious, and we weren’t going to just pretend that nothing happened.

What’s the world coming too?! My goodness,

OK, Ward Cleaver, the disingenuousness is already getting old. Grow up.

and the double standard,

What double standard? No one here is opposed to sexual behavior. We’re concerned about sexual behavior without consent.

along with the ‘so-called’ contempt of Carrier over the accusers…

You’re not making any sense now. I also don’t have contempt for Carrier, but quite like him personally, and respect his work…but if we’re getting concerns about problematic behavior, we’re not going to sweep it under the rug.

What happened to innocent until proven guilty? Double standards on both ends of this argument.

First, this was not a legal proceeding; nobody had dragged him into court. Secondly, we hadn’t assumed guilt at all — we were in the process of investigating some troubling accusations. If this were a court case (and it wasn’t), you’re arguing that you can’t even try someone with due process because that’s a violation of the principle of innocent until proven guilty.

Golly gee willikers, David Shakespeare! You’re a foolish little troll. Now fuck off.

I get a lot of snide, ignorant notes like this, all making the same complaints. I’m beginning to suspect there’s a troll factory somewhere that stamps stupid ideas into the heads of dull, unimaginative people.

Taylor Swift’s vulva and the worst Christian ever?

Holy crap. You think you’ve plumbed the depths of the Internet, and then you find a Christian making sandwich sculptures of her daughters’ crotches and sneering at Taylor Swift’s labia.

Taylor Swift hasn’t had any nude photos published, has she, so how does she know? And what’s wrong with the sandwich on the left? This is weird, ignorant body shaming and using anatomy as a proxy for piety.

She sucked me in. I had to look at this woman’s web site: An Elegant Life by Jennifer: Spreading Positivity through Jesus Christ. You may be thinking that her sandwich art is neither elegant nor positive, and this is pretty repellent stuff. But that’s because you haven’t read the other stuff she writes.

It’s worse.

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I don’t give a damn about your gun specs

Here’s a sure-fire way to annoy me: write and explain to me how I got the details of some stupid gun wrong. Har, har, it’s semi-automatic, not fully automatic. Don’t you know nothin’? It’s 7.62mm, not 7.63mm. The muzzle velocity is…

Just stop right there, go find a nice quiet place, and masturbate happily to your copy of Guns & Ammo. I’m not interested.

Henceforth, the official name of all guns and rifles and whatever fine distinction in the title you want to give them is irrelevant: they are all called Shooty McShootface. You can announce that their purpose is to shoot clay targets, or Bambi, or to look fine on your mantlepiece — I don’t care about that. Their purpose is to kill people. Got that? They are devices to hurl small pieces of metal at lethal velocities that are intentionally aimed at human beings to do them harm.

Your obsession with them is sick.

At least Samantha Bee knows how I feel.

Except…a plague of boils? That’s letting the NRA off easy.

My new answer to every question

When a student comes to complain about their grades, I will answer…

I’m building a wall.

When the local bank asks why I’m waving that gun in the clerk’s face, I will answer…

I’m building a wall.

When the police come to arrest me and tell me to come out with my hands up, I will say…

I’m building a wall. I’m building a wall.

It seems to be the answer to everything.

Great gog, but that man is infuriatingly obtuse. At least the press are beginning to look a bit exasperated with him, too.

My favorite threat ever

Do you know what Obama is going to do as he leaves office?

The Viacom, CIA-run weapons system is activating the Beyoncés and all the rest of the folks to say, ‘Go out and kill the pigs.’

That sounds awesome. It’s so awesome, I confess that my brain locked up solid for a moment as I imagined it. So Obama has an army of Beyoncés? Please let them loose.

Unfortunately, this wonderful prediction comes from Alex Jones, so you know exactly how credible it is.

Creeps among us

I don’t think I knew him — but then, I’ve met so many people in the atheist movement I might have — but suddenly, many of my other friends in godlessness are openly distancing themselves from Dan Linford. Worse, I’m hearing that there has been a lot of whispering about him for years, with women quietly telling each other to watch out for him…and, as I’m usually totally clueless about these things, I didn’t know about it at all (just as I knew nothing about the warnings about Shermer for so long).

And now Linford has confessed to coercing and assaulting students from his position of authority as a professor of philosophy. Here’s a public comment from Heina Dadabhoy:

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Rather, a sign of American culture in decline

angry-bird-icon

I usually say bad things about most movies — you have to admit, it’s not exactly a testimony to creativity or intellectual accomplishment when most of the movies coming out of Hollywood seem to be a) remakes, b) movies based on comic books, or c) remakes of comic book movies. Or worse, the movie version of a video game. I won’t say we’ve reached the nadir, though, because they can always sink lower, but now there’s a movie of a cell phone game, The Angry Birds Movie. I’m skipping it. I’m waiting for Pong: The Movie, or perhaps I’ll even hold out for Pong III: The Paddling.

But you’ll never guess who loves this movie: white supremacists. Finally, someone is catering to the simple-mindedly violent and bigoted Americans, because no other movie has managed to tap so deeply into simple-mindedness. The VDARE review is amusing, in a horrifyingly stupid sort of way.

“Angry Birds” is funny, entertaining, and best of all, right wing and hated by SJWs. It’s PG, so it might be a bit too edgy for very small children, but if you are ok with that, take your kids to see it today!

Dude. It’s a cartoon based on a simplistic, repetitive phone game, and you’re projecting your racism onto it. Most SJWs don’t even care enough to hate it, so that’s even more projection. You couldn’t be projecting more even if you were a little red cartoon bird loaded onto a catapult.

But I’m happy for you that finally the intelligence of movies have descended to your level. Now just wait for the Tetris movie to be made, which you’ll interpret as a horror story about weird sexual combinations.

What does it take to get rid of delusional public servants?

Let me qualify that: what does it take to give far right lunatics the boot in Texas? That’s a different ball game, I know.

Currently running for the Texas Board of Education is the infamous Mary Lou Bruner, who is way out there.

On her Facebook page, Ms. Bruner called Mr. Obama “Ahab the Arab,” and wrote that he “hates all white people and all wealthy people because to him wealthy means white.” Although she condemned the Ku Klux Klan in one posting, she wrote positively of its roots, writing that it started “as citizens trying to fight back against a corrupt government when there were corrupt officials or no officials at all to keep law and order in the rural areas.” Of Mr. Obama’s youth, she wrote: “I heard from a reliable source that Obama was also a male prostitute for a while when he lived in New York with his male ‘partner.’ How do you think he paid for his drugs?”

She’s got all kinds of wacky ideas.

On climate change, she wrote last June: “Climate change has nothing to do with weather or climate; it is all about system change from capitalism (free enterprise) to Socialism-Communism. The Climate Change HOAX was Karl Marx’s idea.”

On the Civil War, she wrote in 2014: “Slavery is not the Reason for the Civil War. by [sic] Mary Lou Bruner…. Historians waited until all of the people who were alive during the Civil War and the Restoration were dead of old age. THEN HISTORIANS WROTE THE HISTORY BOOKS TO TELL THE STORY THE WAY THEY WANTED IT TOLD.”

On the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, she wrote last November: “Many people believe the Democrat Party had JFK killed because the socialists and Communists in the party did not want a conservative president.”

Of course she’s a creationist.

When the flood waters subsided and rushed to the oceans there was no vegetation on the earth because the earth had been covered with water. It took a while for grass and trees to grow back and the big plant-eating dinosaurs needed lots of vegetation to live. The dinosaurs on the ark may have been babies and not able to reproduce. It might make sense to take the small dinosaurs onto the ark instead of the ones bigger than a bus. After the flood, the few remaining Behemoths and Leviathans may have become extinct because there was not enough vegetation on earth for them to survive to reproductive age. Most of the dinosaur fossils which scientists have found are permanently preserved in positions of great distress as if they were trying to keep their heads above water or above the mud.

She won 48% of the vote in her district in the Republican primary.

Any of those bizarre claims ought to have been sufficient to get her rejected by sensible voters; the long history and vast collection of infuriating stupidity ought to have been more than adequate to disqualify her.

But now, finally, a Texas Tea Party group has reconsidered their endorsement of Bruner. Was it the dinosaur story? Accusing Obama of being a drug addicted gay prostitute? The open hatred of “Middle Easterners”? No. It was this video of a speech she gave before a group of teachers, in which she misrepresented the number of teachers employed in a school district.

I guess I’ll take it, whatever it takes to discredit her in the eyes of Texas voters. But it’s just odd that it was this bit of casual ignorance, instead of her record of idiocy, that finally broke some of her support.

Same-sex marriage kills babies

At least that’s what the Heritage Foundation says. It’s going to kill 900,000 babies.

On the surface, abortion and same-sex marriage may seem unrelated. However, as explained in an amicus brief of 100 scholars of marriage, filed in the pending Supreme Court marriage cases and summarized here, the two are closely linked in a short and simple causal chain that the Supreme Court would be wise not to set in motion.

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There is more evidence that ex-wrestling coaches will molest your children, than that transgender people will

Ah, Republican hypocrisy. Ripe and pungent, flowing everywhere. While they’re flailing across the land to gin up a new moral panic over transgender people needing to pee, they’re also rushing to defend a convicted child molester who was one of their own. Dennis Hastert, form speaker, is guilty of sexually abusing children when he was a wrestling coach, and is about to be sentenced. His pals have written letters begging for leniency, and those letters have been made public, because the judge refused to accept them unless they were made openly.

So here’s the verminous Tom DeLay:

So I know his heart and have seen it up close and personal. We all have our flaws, but Dennis Hastert has very few. He is a good man that loves the lord. He gets his integrity and values from Him. He doesn’t deserve what he is going through. I ask that you consider the man that is before you and give him leniency where you can.

So we get a heavy dose of Christian hypocrisy, too. If Hastert gets his integrity and values from Him, that really puts an insidious twist on Matthew 19:14 (Suffer the little children to come unto me).

I also have to ask: do transgender men and women deserve what they go through?