How to Save Money

Our representatives[sic] in government just voted to spend another THIRTY BILLION DOLLARS on their wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, because their best minds have not been able to devise a workable exit strategy.

We have the solution to their problem, a simple exit plan guaranteed to remove all our forces from the Middle East. In a spirit of patriotism this 4th of July, we freely offer it below.

You're welcome. 

Buddhist Fatwa

(original pic from TANJ)

The last one doesn't sound quite right, but I'm getting my Buddhism from certifiable lunatic Chime Tenzing, raving in the Berkeley Daily Planet.

Half his rant is threatening violence, hidden under a burqa of course. He sidesteps the Buddhism is “grounded in” nonviolence, by following it up with the inevitable “BUT”. But what?---It will provoke him, and stir his sentiments, that's what.  Like these cases he devotes half his rant to admiring in loving detail.

(1) He “forewarns” Keds that it “will face similar consequences” as the Danish cartoonists who paid “a heavy price”. Not because of any murderers though, because they overlooked that murderers might murder them.

(2) Hindus forced an artist to flee the country “for fear of his life”, a consequence of the artist's “myopic vision”, not the Hindus who attacked him.

(3) Scraping the bottom to get Christains on board, he gives us a lawsuit, and upskirts his fatwa envy: they wouldn't do Mohammed that way, they wouldn't dare!

Those freaks who killed people over cartoons just made the cartoons famous and fools of themselves, but some people are just too dumb to see this. They think they're role models.

It's all cuz these shoes are “a gross denigration of” Buddhism. It's terrrrrible when advertisers denigrate something by splashing it all over everywhere, and making it a household word. Like how they've denigrated Coca-Cola for decades now, and made the company go broke, and you can hardly even find anyone who drinks Coke. 

Buddhism's Tenzing's ideals are important, y'see, and Keds has overlooked that importance, and that's “nauseating”. They've “committed an unpardonable sin” and “invited the wrath of the irate deities” with their “unholy feet”.  Wtf? it's bad enough religion freaks tell us our sex organs are unholy, now we're supposed to be ashamed of our feet?  And "irate deities", lol! 

If you can stop laughing long enough you can see his real beef: his feelings are hurt. Keds’ attitude “has hurt the sentiments of millions of Buddhists” he frothes, and he beseeches Keds “not to hurt the sentiments”, whose bones are easily broken.  By “millions of Buddhists”, he means him, and his suffering. That noise in the background is Buddha, laughing his ass off.

In the spirit of scientific inquiry, we rounded up some sentiments to test this. Filled a whole corral with them. We tried everything: shot them, blew them up, beheaded them, hung them, we even insulted them, and y'know what? You can't hurt them. They're emotions, they don't give a shit. Outrage is an emotion too, and you can't sentiment an outrage either. We tested.

The sentiments weren't outraged, and the outrages weren't sentimented. The people who held the sentiments, they just let go, sat back and watched.  Like Buddha would do.

Nobody else making threats AFAIK, but he's not the only one who didn't like the shoes. A lot of Buddhists complained, and Keds cancelled the products.  Didn't have to kill anybody. 

Matt16: Beware of Yeast.

“The Pharisees and Sadducees came”, and already my dirty mind is off the rails; is that spelled wrong? shouldn't it be “seducees?” Seduce, seducer, seducee, yeah, but then what's Pharise? Some weird kink they used to do back in the day? Maybe I don't wanna know.

Anyhow, these perverts came to (up to?) (on to?) to Jesus, and asked for a sign, and the author here loses his readers in a major WTF? Dude's been campaigning all over the country, kissing babies, curing cancer (well, demons), even raising people from the dead fer chrissakes, and here they are still asking for a sign? What the hell do they need, anyway? I don't blame Jesus for getting all snitty with them and stomping off(16:1-4).

Next Jesus says “Look out for yeast!” His cult are all “wait, what?” and J bitches them out, calls them stoopid for not knowing he meant the teachings of the Pharisees (16:5-12). Seems clear to me: first thing I think of when I hear the word “yeast” is “gobbledy religious doctrine”. No matter how much of that stuff I put in, I can never get my bread to rise though. (no, that pic is not me)

This is a weird story, Jesus stretching another metaphor till it confesses everything it knows and starts making things up. But In Context^TM it makes sense. He disses his followers for his own shortcomings, typical behavior for an abuser who wants to foster a sick relationship. So it's not weird at all, really.

Jesus is a man in search of himself. He wants to know who he is. Apparently, word on the street is that he might be Elijah or Jeremiah or somebody. It's a pretty good bet he ain't John the Baptist, look: head, body, no platter in between: he ain't Johnny. The only other choice the book gives is “one of the prophets”, which got me wondering who made the top 40 back in Jesus-Year 0.

At least 6 other gods died and were resurrected prior to Jesus:

Horus c. 3000 BCE
Osiris c. 3000 BCE
Attis of Phrygia c.1400 BCE
Krishna c. 1400 BCE (possibly as early as 5771 BCE)
Mithra of Persia c. 600 BCE
Dionysus c. 186 BCE

------From Forever in Hell

Jesus is looking for a brand, he asks Peter “What's my image?” Petey-boy says he's the Christ, and Jesus washes out his mouth for swearing. Ha ha, just kidding. 'Christ' wasn't a mouthwash word in those days, it was the slangy way to say “You da man, boss”. Remember (11:11), up till now nobody was greater than John the Baptist, but Jesus swallows Peter's line. And hook. And sinker. “Yeah, you said it dude, that's me all right.”

This sounds like a big change in our boy. He's mentioned stuff like this before, like in 12:40, he was saying he was gonna die and get resurrected after three days. How crazy is that? I was all baffled and just ignored it, picture an embarrassed silence, groupies shuffling their feet, looking down, out the window, hey look over there! But it makes sense if he was referring to those legends floating around about Mithra and Co. coming to save the world. He's finally jumped the shark and decided he really is one of them.

16:21 From that time on Jesus began to explain to his disciples that he must go …

See, see what'd I tell ya? Must go do all those things Messaihs have to do, like get killed, rise from the dead, all that stuff (16:21-22). Peter takes him off in the corner and tries to warn him, “Whoa, buddy, yer talking crazy here” but Jesus ain't having none of it, he pulls rank: “GTFO dude, I'm fucken GOD, and you're the mutherfucken devil if you don't buy in. So piss off. (16:23).”

Remember he said he was gonna come while they were out going door to door? Now he says it again, this time he'll be coming in his kingdom when he comes, he'll be coming in his kingdom when he comes, he'll be coming in his kingdom, he'll be coming in his kingdom, he'll be coming in his kingdom when he comes. La, la la.

The guy's nuts.

Best Ad Ever

If you were watching the World Cup in Scotland you would have  jumped up and shouted YEAH, GO TEAM!  Not for the players, but because you saw the ad below at half-time. It's out by Rape Crisis Scotland, and it is spot fucking on.  Cara at the Curvature says what needs saying but let me add my two bits.

We've all seen those list of "ways to prevent rape" that without fail address how women need to restrict their lives since rape is just something that falls out of the sky, nothing to do with men.
We started a different list addressed to the perpetrators instead of the victims, and  high on that list was "Don't laugh at rape jokes".  Along those lines, this ad puts the problem squarely where it belongs, on the perpetrators and their enablers.  Watch for the second guy, the one who looks over his shoulder.

Doesn't that just KICK ASS? There's lots more you could say, by Cara already did (she even has a transcript)  Extract:

Here is what I love about this ad: it treats rape apologist attitudes as a problem, regardless of whether or not they refer to a specific rape. There is no indication in the commercial that the woman has actually been raped. There is no indication that she will be raped. There is no indication that the man who makes the “she’s asking for it” comment is actually planning on raping her, or anyone else, for that matter. And still, in spite of all of this, his comments are dangerous, they have a real impact, and they are worthy of our attention. They’re worthy, in fact, of a PSA about how incredibly fucked up they are. All on their own.
And that, I think, is absolutely fabulous.

Here’s what else I love about this ad: while there’s no indication whatsoever that the man is a rapist, there’s no way to tell for sure that he’s not, either. As Thomas has pointed out many times at Yes Means Yes, while not all men who make rape apologist jokes are rapists, rapists do tend to make rape jokes and apologist comments. Leaving the man’s motives up to interpretation thus manages to do two important things: tell guys who aren’t rapists but think that rape is something fun to joke about that it’s not, as well as tells guys that if their friend is making these types of comments, you should probably point out that it’s not cool. As bystander behavior is incredibly important, I have to say that I love this potential dual effect.

Yeah, what she said.  Read the whole thing, and the comments, too, and click the info button under the Youtube video. RCS had good reasons to launch this, check it out at their homepage. They even have a website for the ad campaign, http://notever.co.uk/  Check it out.  It just tickles me silly.

Ps. If you clicked the YES box in the top picture, you're a worthless piece of shit. Just letting you know.

Caption Contest

A real one, with prizes and everything,  from Freethinker.
---snip---
 ... we thought the picture below cries out for an amusing caption.

Best entry wins a year’s subscription to the print edition of the Freethinker plus a hard-back copy of The Atheist’s Bible, “an illustrious collection of irreverent thoughts”. There is a runner-up prize of a year’s subscription to the magazine.

Closing date for entries is July 8, 2010.

---snip---

That's my own caption up there. It's funny I think, that blue thing looks like a deep sea creature with two long tusks, you can see one little eye up there at the top. For chrissakes, they're taking a photo for I.D., how demented is that? These idiots make it really easy to point and laugh.

When the lights go out though, I'm haunted.  Locked up inside that ridiculous sack is a human being, a person just like me, who I can't believe actually WANTS to be in that situation. What's more, the picture was taken at a voter registration centre in Herat, Afghanistan. 

That person, the one we're making fun of, has come to assert her choices as an individual, in one of the few ways open to her, braving dangers we have no idea of as we sit laughing behind our keyboards. My own caption robs her of even humanity, and suddenly I feel dirty, like I've just spit in her face.

Sometimes we laugh just to keep from screaming.

Inspired by Ratzi