Live or Die: The negative side of positive thinking

What’s wrong with positive thinking? Nothing per se – until you believe that the only way to survive in the world is to Think Happy Thoughts, no matter what happens or how shitty your situation may really be. It’s delusional, it’s dangerous, and it’s the subject of this magnificent video.

As a small sidenote, I kinda wish we could’ve seen the full whiteboard by the end of it. But, no matter.

Remember, folks: Realism is always the right answer.

(via Pharyngula)

Tags: positive thinking • The Secret • reality • delusion

We really went there

So here’s another bit of photographic evidence you can use to slap down those bothersome cranks who insist that humans never went to the Moon: the actual landing site of Apollo 16 with all the equipment and astronauts’ bootprints clearly visible from orbit. Sweet.

Of course, you can also check this one out. And this. And this, too.

(via Bad Astronomy)

Tags: Moon • lunar landings • Apollo 16

Who’s afraid of the big bad corporations?

As usual, a tad bit simplistic, but the message can’t be argued with:

“Who’s afraid of the big bad corporations?” | Non Sequitur

It’s continually astonishing how some just never seem to get it. You’d think their thick-headedness was deliberate.

(via @todayspolitics)

Tags: cartoon • David Horsey • Non Sequitur • Tea Party • teabaggers • government

Focusing the media’s priorities

Rather self-explanatory, I think.

(via @todayspolitics)

Tags: Fox News • Lindsay Lohan • BP Oil Spill • news

Daily Blend: Wednesday, July 14, 2010

Beneath the placidly smiling face, the heart of a monster

• Remember that innocuous, imperfect Declaration on Religion in Public Life put together during the last Copenhagen atheist convention? It just sent Ken Ham into a delusional little paranoid fit. Laughter and exasperation ensue.

• Freedom of the Press wins out: Coast Guard finally removes ban prohibiting reporters and photographers from documenting the oil spill.
  (via @todayspolitics)

• Yemeni cleric Anwar al-Awlaki ^[pictured] calls for the death of Molly Norris, the cartoonist who originally launched “Draw Muhammad Day” before withdrawing from the event for (ironically enough) safety reasons. Or, in which my anger at the Obama’s administration efforts to find and eliminate Awlaki just lost some (though not all) of its edge.

• Prominent Moscow art curators who set up an art exhibit satirizing the legal censorship of blasphemous art face 3-year jail sentences for setting up art exhibit featuring blasphemous art. Update: Both have been found guilty but received hefty fines without any accompanying jail time.

• So, if you’re an skeptic/atheist, are you a warrior or a diplomat? Personally, I’m really quite casual about it all and my attitude (ie. level of respect) towards others is determined by their own attitudes and actions, not what they believe in. As far as I’m concerned, believe in whatever the hell you want, just as long as you aren’t demonstrably harming anyone else in the process. In which case, the invective machine revs up with a wrathful roar.

• Fox “News” again trots out the 2008-era smear that Obama wants to teach sex to kindergarteners. What, run out of new fabricated smears?

• Just fucking don’t and shut up about it.
  (via @todayspolitics)

• Yet another alleged terrorist at Gitmo is found innocent of all charges and released.
  (via @washingtonpost)

• The US’s current political choice: Nerds who can’t communicate vs. sociopaths who refuse to let anyone else have the country.
  (via @todayspolitics)

As always, if you have any story suggestions, feel free to send them in.

Tags: atheists • secularism • Ken Ham • Christian Persecution Complex • Freedom of the Press • BP Oil Spill • Coast Guard • First Amendment • Anwar al-Awlaki • Molly Norris • terrorism • Draw Muhammad Day • blasphemy laws • Yuri Samodurov • Andrei Yerofeyev • Barack Obama • lies • gay marriage • abortion • drugs • sex • hypocrisy • Gitmo • Democrats • Republicans • USA

Mr. Bean is the Devil

Here’s a wonderful skit by Rowan Atkinson, from the days before he lost his vocal chords for his role as Mr. Bean:

Why, looks like Christians aren’t faring much better than those atheists, are they?

(via Friendly Atheist)

Tags: Rowan Atkinson • Hell • Devil • comedy

Ten effortless anti-atheist debunkings

There’s something amusingly appropriate about a cat with cheese slapped onto its face

From Human Events, a conservative rag on par with the WorldNutDaily in terms of credibility, comes this silly little piece by Benjamin Wiker where we’re presented with ten tactics that the writer is sure will leave any atheist stumbling for words before his intellectual superior. As you can imagine, the only reaction triggered in atheists will be eye-rolls and quick dismissal of their interlocutor as being a clueless twerp.

And so, just because I do love to poke fun at idiots whilst tearing their nonsense apart, I give you: Ten Ways to Debunk Ten Stupid Anti-Atheist Tactics.

1. Discuss the Fermi Paradox. Atheists love aliens because they always assume that, a) brainy creatures gushing out of every galactic cranny shows that Earth is low-rent cosmic real estate, and b) the smartest aliens will be atheists. Against this giddy optimism, the famous physicist Enrico Fermi asked a quite innocent question: If Earth is a typical planet, and there are lots of planets in the universe, then why haven’t any extraterrestrial critters dropped by, or even sent us a text message (“ur nt solo, n btw ur nt vry smrt”)?

The Fermi Paradox is facile and foolish and constitutes no credible argument against the existence of extraterrestrial life. This sort of thinking is the equivalent to peering underwater in the ocean and, if you don’t immediately see any fish swimming nearby, claiming that there’s no life in the seas. The Universe is a very, very, VERY big-ass place, large enough for it to take millions, or even billions, of years for even light (which travels at around 300,000 miles per second) to make any comparatively significant distance from one area to another. This understandably means that there could very well be plenty of planets that harbor extraterrestrial life dispersed throughout the cosmos, lifeforms ranging from the sophisticated to mere fungi or bacteria. The thing is, with the size of the Universe taken into account, there could be billions of them, and we’d still be too far away to ever get to see them, much less contact them. And as for alien messages: Again, there could be millions of them whizzing around, but that we can’t detect because A) they haven’t reached us yet (and perhaps won’t within the next few thousand generations), or B) they’ve traveled for so long that the signals have decayed into white noise, indistinguishable from background interference.

The Vaccine Song

Back in the day, they didn’t care about their children, they just had more and more and let them die from preventable diseases for the heck of it. … Oh, wait, they did care about their kids, every bit as much as parents do today, and their kids were only dying from preventable diseases because, well, a lack of advanced medicine hadn’t made them preventable yet.

And yet, we now have vaccines that allow us to shield our beloved offspring from potentially deadly illnesses and save countless lives … so why are there still some groups peddling false claims and misinformation against life-saving medicine? Such a question is explored in this brilliant little song.

It’s really quite clever and effective to compare the pain of families past as they dealt with diseases that are now entirely and easily preventable, and to wonder how they would react if they knew that we now had the ability to eradicate such illnesses – but that some groups strove to keep real medicine away from the children who desperately need it.

Maybe champions of the antivax movement just don’t have enough of their beloved children dying from vaccine-preventable diseases to see how much damage they’re causing.

(via Respectful Insolence)

Tags: antivaxxers • vaccines • The Vaccine Song

Fail Quote of the Day: Orly Taitz stars in The Last Defender (from despotism!)

Orly Taitz

As if she couldn’t get any loonier, Birther Queen and stellar-grade nutjob Orly Taitz seems to be hell-bent on reaching ever-greater levels of craziness. Faced with the $20,000 fine she earned by constantly harassing the Supreme Court with bullshit lawsuits and then personally attacking Judge Clay Land when he threatened to fine her, Taitz is now pleading with the Supreme Court to void the hefty sanctions in the only way she knows how – by going completely batshit crazy [original emphasis]:

"Allowing sanctions by Judge Land to stand, will signify beginning of tyranny in the United States of America and end to the Constitutional Republic which is the foundation of this nation," she writes in the lengthy brief posted on her website.

"If the judiciary can sanction an attorney for bringing an action to uphold a Constitutional right, what is next? Will FEMA camps be turned into the next GULAG? Will we see a wave of political assassinations of dissidents, as were seen in numerous totalitarian regimes around the World, such as regime of Saddam Hussein in Iraq or regime of Mahmud Ahmadinejad in Iran?"

Can we make it official, now? Can she officially be labeled as clinically insane and carted off to a faraway nuthouse where she can’t bother sane people ever again?

(via Dispatches from the Culture Wars)

Tags: Orly Taitz • crazy • Supreme Court

Daily Blend: Tuesday, July 13, 2010

Ashlea Monigatti (16) Obviously, the very personification of “fat chick”, no?

God, I’m lonely. … Oh, right, I’m supposed to be tough. Um … yarr!

• Thug cop Jeff Overcash from Fort Lauderdale PD harangues a man for rolling his eyes at Overcash following an idiotic display of bravado, then later arrests the man when he tries to file a complaint.

• New study shows that voters are influenced less by analysis of candidates’ policies and (much) more by how charismatic they are. Truly a ground-breaking revelation, that.

• You really gotta wonder how Christians claim to know so much about Heaven and Hell if they’ve never been there (and never will).

• Schadenfreudelicious: Australian (Anti)Vaccination Network gets its ass chewed out by a governmental investigation, formally labeled as an antivaccination group and ordered to openly declare their antivax leanings whenever trying to spread (mis)information. Goddamn, that’s gotta hurt.

• The United States is divided by God – literally.

• There are two types of TMIs (Too Much Information): Either it’s private and improper to share, or it’s just pointless beyond human comprehension.

• A sizeable collection of the BP oil spill photos you the government doesn’t want you to see.
  (via @BPGlobalPR)

• Fox “News” legal analyst Andrew Napolitano went on with Ralph Nader and openly said that there’s “overwhelming” evidence that what Bush, Cheney & co. “participated in criminal conspiracies” that were “blatantly unconstitutional” and that they “absolutely should have been indicted”. Man with dead contract walking.
  (via @todayspolitics)

• 16-year-old Ashlea Monigatti ^[pictured] disqualified from Australia’s Next Top Model for being “too big” at 32-24-34 and goddamn she’s fucking gorgeous. Or, why I support finding anyone who supports these stupid shows and slapping them.
  (via Fark)

• Pahrump, Nevada sheriff’s attempt to charge a district attorney accused of diverting public funds goes slightly awry when the DA refuses to charge himself with any crimes. No, not making that up.
  (via Fark)

• 6 Things From History Everyone Pictures Incorrectly. Features blinding pyramids, feathery lizards and Chinesus.
  (via Fark)

• Why, I’ll bet Barry even has the gall to actually fall asleep at night. How dare he rest on his laurels so!
  (via Fark)

• When they retire, most people play cards or watch boring TV shows. This man built his own freaking personal subway. PWNed.
  (via Fark)

• In the midst of California’s new pertussis/whooping cough epidemic, the logical way to protect your 5½-month-old daughter is with proper vaccination herbs, homeopathy and chiropractic.
  (via Fark)

As always, if you have any story suggestions, feel free to send them in.

Tags: police • Jeff Overcash • law enforcement • sociology • psychology • voting • politics • Christians • Christianity • Heaven • Hell • Australian Vaccination Network • schadenfreude • USA • God • Wikipedia • toilet paper • BP Oil Spill • disasters • tragedies • Andrew Napolitano • Bush administration • Ashlea Monigatti • Australia's Next Top Model • modeling • Pahrump, Nevada • Tony De Meo • Robert Beckett • Cracked.com • subways • metros

Fail Quote of the Late Night: Biden on the evils of “media piracy”, redux

Vice-President Joe Biden

In which Vice-President Joe Biden continues his assault on common sense and reality by comparing filesharing to defrauding customers with cheap knock-offs:

"Whether we're talking about fake drugs that hurt...or knock off car tires that fall apart at 65 miles per hour causing injury and death, counterfeits kill," Biden said at the White House.

That’s twice now that the VP has said something mind-numbingly idiotic regarding the supposed evils of filesharing. Last Monday, I commented on how he’d compared downloading copyrighted content off the Web to vandalizing storefronts and physically robbing the joint. Now, he’s actually claiming that “media piracy” will kill people?

Just what the hell is this guy smoking? Unless he can rationally and credibly explain how clicking a button and downloading movies, songs, games, software and so on onto your hard drive is comparable to low-quality drugs or crashing a fucking car, or any other situation that leads to people actually losing their lives, then I don’t really see any other reason for him gaffing this badly. It’s past moronic and entering the outright dumbass.

(via @todayspolitics)

Tags: Joe Biden • piracy • filesharing • counterfeit

Soldier realizes the troops are pawns in a political game

Okay, facetious title aside, this is a great video featuring a young US soldier’s speech on how the real enemy to the US (and free people in general) isn’t the faceless, foreign Them – it’s the war-mongering billionaires and politicians at home who fuel people’s zeal for a foreign occupation that results in nothing but pain, death and destruction for everyone involved.

Little of this is really anything new, but it’s quite reassuring to know that at least some troops are starting to grasp the size of the destructive farce that they are unwittingly perpetrating. Maybe when more honorable patriots start dissenting and refusing to participate in an ongoing bullshit campaign, we could see some real progress.

(via @todayspolitics)

Tags: US Military • Afghan War • War on Terror