Category: Beating Back the St00pid

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Quote of the Day

"We see a connection to the world around us… Ham sees only sin. Turns out you can learn a lot when your library consists of more than just a single book." ~ Hemant Mehta, The Friendly Atheist, in response to Ken Ham of the Creationist Museum blowing a gasket over Carnival Cruise Lines embracing evolution in their Super Bowl ad.

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A Banner Year for the Prince of Darkness

My snark meter is off the charts. This is great!

From RAWSTORY:

2014 was a banner year for the Prince of Darkness. When he wasn't personally bedeviling Christians, his minions were erecting statues in his honor or forcing themselves upon innocent city council meetings. Lord of Lies — this was your year!

January witnessed the unveiling of a 7-foot tall likeness of his lieutenant Baphomet that will be placed in front of the Oklahoma Statehouse. Decent Christians responded by drafting an "unlettered little bill" that would have allowed cities to erect similar monuments to Mein Kampf.

In February, Satan's plans to destroy the economy went awry, but that didn't stop the Dark Lord from having some big gay fun, both here and abroad. He was, however, disappointed that his scenes in The Bible ended up on the cutting room floor.

But his disappointment was short-lived, as March saw Lucifer reach new heights in the entertainment world as his film, Frozen, successfully created the next generation of lesbians. He was also able to stymie the Kickstarter campaign for Bible Chronicles: The Call of Abraham, not because he "perceived it to be a threat to his kingdom," as the Christian extremists claimed, but just because it looked God-awful.

April was another big month for Satan — not only did he gay up some graham cracker commercials, his minions started a campaign to ban corporal punishment in schools.

May wasn't looking so good after the Supreme Court ruled that Christians could open town hall and city council meetings with prayers — but Satanists exploited the equal-is-as-equal-does loophole in Court's logic and flipped it to the Father of Lies' favor. He did, however, suffer one minor legal setback, but it involved ice cream and that fellow wasn't a true unbeliever anyway.

All things considered, though, May slots in the win column, what with getting those wily Benham boys fired from HGTV and helping his buddy Chuck Darwin grab a "toehold" on young minds.

Satan mostly took June off, only stopping by to welcome some shunned homosexuals into his flock after their Christian parents abandoned them.

But July was business as usual, as the Great Deceiver was officially recognized by everybody's favorite Pope. He and ol' Chuck stormed some more classrooms, then he and some secularists crashed a few weddings. More importantly, the whole ice cream fiasco was forgotten after those in his thrall twisted the Hobby Lobby decision against its original intent — after which Satan reportedly said, "Suck on that, Scalia!"

After that, August was bound to be a little bit of a letdown — and it outside of a some minor chicanery about a "black mass," it was.

Everything was gangbusters again in September, though, starting with an old-fashioned witch hunt at the Naughty Girls Donut Shop. "Naughty girls burn in Hell!" the townsfolk shouted to no avail, for the power of Satan sustained the future Culinary Institute of America graduate against the doughnut-hating hordes.

After cornering the small-town doughnut market, the Dark Lord scored perhaps his greatest victory — a legal avenue to despoil the minds of Florida's children with his Satanic activity book. Next to that, yet another city council invocation barely merits mention.

October opened with battle plans being drawn for this year's War on Christmas, but Satan spent most of the month toying with tiny Christian brains. He convinced Kirk Cameron that Halloween was really a Christian holiday, then convinced another one of those Benham boys that it'd be a good idea to bust in and break up some lawful wedding ceremonies.

Contrary to popular reports, however, he had nothing at all to do with knocking down the monument to the Other Guy's laws.

In November, the Son of Perdition hawked his new energy drink, and he would need it — what with all those activity books to deliver and the War on Christmas around the corner.

Because what a war it would be! Hobby Lobby continued blowing up in Christianist faces, Satanic holiday displays were being erected both hither and thither — even Santa defected!

Which is not to say there were no casualties — one self-styled "Catholic Warrior" got a lick in, but who would even notice after the year Satan had?

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Oh Sah-NAP!"

Stolen from the ever-fabulous Towleroad:

The change.org petition asking The Learning Channel to cancel 19 Kids and Counting over the Duggars' "LGBT fear mongering" that caught fire on the internet earlier this week also managed to catch the attention of right-wing Christian activists who are concerned with (but don't actually understand) first amendment protections. 

American Family Association, Alliance Defending Freedom, and other anti-LGBT organizations and websites helped spearhead a #DefendtheDuggars tweetfest today. But like NOM's Twitter warning last month that marriage equality would lead to people marrying themselves, the campaign quickly started backfiring in spectacular fashion.

Here are just a few highlights of what's rolling in over on Twitter:

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Wingers Go Ghandi

Josh Marshall, at Talking Points Memo:

Yesterday, Sen. Tom Coburn suggested that President Obama's immigration executive order might lead to "civil disobedience", "anarchy," or even political "violence." I asked just what that civil disobedience might look like and TPM Reader FS has an idea of what anti-immigrant forces might have in mind …

My suggestion for what civil disobedience should look like is to move to Phoenix, trade their imitation Army rifles for shovels, and do a protest march through the residential subdivisions, pulling weeds as they go.

They should march into restaurant kitchens, offering to wash dishes for free. Or volunteer to man the drive through at any of a hundred fast food joints. Maybe ask a California cabbage farmer if they have anything needs harvesting. Those are the jobs illegal immigrants might be taking away.

A little background. I lived in Phoenix for 13 years, the last eight as a homeowner. Ours was the fourth house completed in our neighborhood and I'd often sit on the porch drinking beer and watching Hispanic workers build our neighbors' houses. For a few bottles of Pacifico, I learned most of the workers were from Mexico or Guatemala, and none were employed directly by the builder.

For all the anti immigrant bluster for which Sheriff Joe Arpaio is famous today, he could've effortlessly rounded up 100 immigrants a day in any new subdivision being built anywhere in Maricopa county, from about 2000 to 2007. But that would've really inconvenienced the real estate developers, so Sheriff Joe found other stunts like making prisoners wear pink underwear. He didn't come to hypocritically discover anti immigration fever until the bubble burst and people turned on each other.

My time in Arizona made it really hard for me to get mad at a man who wants to work in 110 degree heat, for cash. But those are the jobs in question. Anyone who wants to protest should start there.

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Say Hello to the Face of Hate Stupidity

From Towleroad:

Boise, Idaho-area couple Justin and Melanie Sease are driving around in a car painted with phrases like "HOMOSEXUALITY is a sin & a abomination", "Just Say NO to Gay Marriage", and "GOD'S NOT DEAD". They say they're speaking out for others who are afraid to do the same in light of the recent arrival of marriage equality in the state, and whine to KBOI that they're being ridiculed for it:

2truck"We've had a few homosexual extremists who cuss us out and get very angry with us and threaten us."

Why are they on a crusade?

Says Justin, who claims he's "taking a stand for the Heavenly Father":

"We can never accept public homosexuality. It's wrong, and it's wrong in God's eyes first. He's very clear in the Bible. The Bible says that when homosexuality is publicly accepted, basically it spreads like a cancer….This is kind our little way of protesting the homosexual extremist movement…"

Said Melanie:

"If nobody else is going to do it, why not start doing it. Hopefully, other people will join us and follow us and do what we're doing.Most everyone who has seen our vehicles gives us a thumbs up, waves, smiles, or honks."

Watch, here…

I have a question for these "Christians:" why is it that their supposedly omniscient, all-powerful daddy-in-the-sky is so utterly and completely incapable of enforcing his supposed edicts by himself? Why does he always have to call upon the assistance of these yahoos who have barely three brain cells between them to do his bidding? In the old days this sky-fairy would supposedly have to do little more than sneeze and fire and brimstone would be raining down upon the unwashed, unworthy heathen before you could say, "Gesundheit!"

The only possible explanations I see are…

◆ Sky Daddy is—despite their pronouncements to the contrary—in fact, dead.

◆ Sky Daddy doesn't exist—and never has.

◆ Sky Daddy is alive and well and is either perfectly okay with gay marriage—or has in fact moved on to watching over much more interesting creatures than Homo sapiens.

…none of which fit too well into this couple's narrow, self-centered, bigoted view of the universe.

Seriously…can you imagine spending eternity with these people?

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Microsoft's New Mac vs. PC Hyperbole

From Rene Ritchie at iMore:

Microsoft has three new Surface Pro 3 ads out today that, as promised, switch from trying to attack the iPad to trying to attack the MacBook Air. Given how heart-breakingly, bank-breakingly unsuccessful Surface has been to date, it's hard not to sympathize. It's also hard not to think repeating past strategic failures will only result in more failures. Instead of shifting from iPad to MacBook, maybe Microsoft should shift from attacking Apple to attacking the PC market?

Mac sales were up 18 percent year-over-year last quarter. The Mac has grown 32 out of the last 33 quarters. That's against Windows PC sales that continue to be on the decline.

It's incredibly tough to imagine anyone would leave a MacBook Air for a Surface Pro 3. More specifically, that they'd leave the ability to run OS X on hardware of that caliber for Windows 8 on anything. Especially because the MacBook Air can run OS X and Windows 8. Putting Windows on a tablet turned out to be a liability not a feature and it looks like the same is going to hold true for hybrids.

People who use Macs use them intentionally. We love not only the quality of the hardware but the experience and workflow enabled by the software, by OS X and iLife and iWork and all the OS X-exclusive apps by Panic and Flexibits and Tapbots and Aged & Distilled and SuperMegaUltraGroovy and The Iconfactory and, many more. That's simply not attainable by PC hardware, and certainly not by the widely-maligned Windows 8.

It's telling that "run Windows instead of OS X" wasn't even suggested as a benefit in any of these three new ads. When Apple ran their famous "Mac vs. PC" series, OS X being better and preferable to Windows was almost always front-and-center.

Microsoft does mention running Office and Photoshop, but both of those apps are available on the Mac. Office is available for iPad now as well, as are really great detachable keyboards. They also suggest you need a paper note book to use a pen with Apple products, which, given the stylus market for iPad, is either ignorant or deliberately false.

I'm almost tempted to suggest Microsoft would be better off running an ad encouraging OS X customers to buy a Windows license for their Macs, to get the "best of both worlds", but again, given how poorly Windows 8 has been received, that probably wouldn't help very much. Maybe focus on Bootcamp and gaming?

I'm even more tempted to suggest Microsoft shouldn't focus on Apple at all, and go gunning for Dell, HP, Lenovo, and other PC vendors instead. People who buy PC laptops and hybrids are already Windows-only customers. All the things Microsoft is actually showing off in their ads — great specs, capacitive touch, pen input, etc. are probably something Windows-only customers would be really interested in. Hell, for anyone used to the creaky plastic and gaudy stickers of many Windows laptops, Surface could be a welcome upgrade. Even for people with higher end PC ultrabooks, getting something not painfully, slavishly derived from Apple design could be a breath of fresh air.

Given the politics involved in Microsoft's OEM partnerships, however, I don't think we'll ever see that happen.

More…

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The Absurdity Runs Deep

"The absurdity runs deep: America is using American military equipment to bomb other pieces of American military equipment halfway around the world. The reason the American military equipment got there in the first place was because, in 2003, the US had to use its military to rebuild the Iraqi army, which it just finished destroying with the American military. The American weapons the US gave the Iraqi army totally failed at making Iraq secure and have become tools of terror used by an offshoot of al-Qaeda to terrorize the Iraqis that the US supposedly liberated a decade ago. And so now the US has to use American weaponry to destroy the American weaponry it gave Iraqis to make Iraqis safer, in order to make Iraqis safer.
 
It's not just ironic; it's a symbol of how disastrous the last 15 years of US Iraq policy have been, how circuitous and self-perpetuating the violence, that we are now bombing our own guns. Welcome to American grand strategy in the Middle East."

– Vox: The US bombing its own guns perfectly sums up America's total failure in Iraq

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Really, CNN? Really?

The other day I was in a McDonalds and imagine my surprise when I looked up and saw on the television that CNN was still running almost exclusive coverage on missing flight 370. My immediate reaction was:

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Quote of the Day

Poking creationists with a sharp stick:

"The Crab Nebula is about 6,500 light years from Earth. According to some beliefs, that's the age of the whole universe, but if the universe were only 6,500 years old, how could we see light from anything more distant than the Crab Nebula? We couldn't. To believe in a universe as young as 6,000 or 7,000 years old is to extinguish the light from most of the galaxy, not to mention the light from all the other hundred billion galaxies in the observable universe." ~ Astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson, in last Sunday's episode of Cosmos, which focused on the speed of light.

Via.