In Space, No One Can Hear You Scream

Now that America's shuttle program has been deep-sixed, What's next for NASA's illustrious star-sailors? Why, astronaut suicide, of course!

I hope I'm the last boss

This game looks awesome: The End

It is a game... which integrates strategy, puzzles and philosophical questions into a world which explores a range of commonly (or less commonly) held views about death, belief and science.

The game takes the player on a metaphysical journey, recording their interactions in the world to reveal their attitudes towards mortality. These views are presented alongside their friends and some of the most important thinkers of our time, such as Gandhi, Descartes and Einstein.

...The ultimate prizes are the Death Objects, ranging from a memorial diamond to a human heart, which deepen a player’s contextual knowledge of death and help them progress through the game.

Here's a trailer:

The Laugh Zone

From Total Drek comes the preview for this gem, The Life Zone, which a commenter describes as "like being fired out of a cannon into a sea of mindfuckery."

So the girls are imprisoned in a hospital until they give birth, and are indoctrinated by "The Jailer" and a woman called Dr. Wise with pro-life propaganda for 7 months. One tries to induce a miscarriage but fails. Then we find out this is some kind of Dante-esque, medieval purgatory, and the girls are all dead, having died on the operating table of an abortionist. They are here to receive a second chance to repent and join the side of goodness/life. Two do but the third, who once again tries to abort her pregnancy, must spend eternity in Hell with Dr. Wise (who, while she didn't have an abortion per se, did "abort" her god-given duty to have children, by working so hard that she didn't take care of her body and became barren, resulting in her marriage falling apart and her eventual suicide. Get it? Because women who work outside the home might as well be dead, and are damned for eternity!).



So, ya know, go have some babies.

R.I.P. Harold Garfinkel

The innovative sociologist who turned the study of common sense into a dense and arcane discipline, has died.

O noes! Not our next possible leader!

From Feministing, we see that the far-right life apologists are co-opting the visage of our vaguely pro-choice president in their latest billboard advertising atrocity.

Every 21 minutes??? What about the trillions upon trillions of hapless Spermatazoan-Americans that are cruelly suffocated in socks or latex all the damn time? Aren't they all also our next possible leaders?

What's more, the billboard is targeted in Obama's political home of Chicago, and is part of the ridiculous campaign that is clearly meant to stir up the phantasm of a black holocaust, such as this one which the poor, black neighborhoods in Milwaukee are subjected to as well:

Here's a great article on that issue. Basically, yes , of course black women are more likely to get abortions than white women. That's because they're far more likely to get pregnant, even though they're not more likely to have sex. This is because they also tend to live in communities that are poorer, they have less access to accurate information about sex, less access to contraceptives, and less access to health care in general. They're also less likely to be able to financially support a child. So yes, of course you're going to see higher abortion rates there, too, as a result of the constrained choices faced by these women. But look at that billboard, and the others cited above in that link - the implication of the marketing campaign is that this situation is not simply an emergent phenomenon that arises out of a highly stratified industrial-capitalist economic system rife with structural racism, but rather that it is an intentional conspiracy of a government controlled by left-wing crypto-racists bent on the annihilation of the black population! Never mind that the Dems are the only party to ever do anything that benefits poor and minority communities, that's just an insidious way to cover up their real agenda of genocide. It's the radical fundamentalist Religious Right that truly have the best interests of black America at heart, reeeaaaaaally it is!

The Uterus: Serial Killer

Lots of absurd pro-life policy gambits in the news lately, ever since the reactionary crypto-values-voters (code-name: Tea Party) swept the country last November.

Exhibit A: Representative Bobby Franklin of Georgia has proposed a bill that would allow for the police to investigate all cases of miscarriage, to make sure they were natural (and not felony murder). Daily Kos says, "Just because SCOTUS can't define when life begins, doesn't mean that GA can't, since we all know it begins at conception. Because some idiot like him, who graduated from a damned Bible college and who isn't a lawyer, obviously knows more about constitutional law than the Supreme Court." The folks over at Feministe are suggesting that ladies mail documentary evidence of their menstrual cycle to Mr. Franklin, to aid in his investigations.

Exhibit B: South Dakota, and now Nebraska, have bills proposed to categorize the murder of abortion providers, or the murder of anyone in the course of trying to save a fetus, as "justifiable homicide." This would essentially authorize and protect vigilante executions, which is unprecedented.

Exhibit C: the ridiculous group, Live Action, is waging a PR war on Planned Parenthood, alleging they're secretly operating a child prostitution ring. It seems to me that the logical implication of their assault on Planned Parenthood's funding, which they market as being intended to "protect women and girls," would in fact justify and encourage the patriarchal notion that women are the property of men, and that women ought to be pregnant at all times - that it is the duty of men to make sure any non-pregnant woman becomes so ASAP, using any means necessary. Since human life is the primary "good" in these lunatics' moral schema, then any situation is morally bad to the extent that new human life is not being maximized. In other words, rape away, gentlemen, you are doing the Lord's work.

Pie anyone?

Sing a song of sixpence! Four to five thousand free dead blackbirds, with no apparent signs of injury, fell out of the sky in Arkansas this past Sunday.

How many miracles is enough?

This is the year we hit 7,000,000,000 people. So tell me, do ya feel special, punk? Well, do ya?

Driven To Drink, They Meet Their Maker

From the unapologetically mortal Pharyngula comes this delightful story, "Dispute over God leaves two dead." They drank an insane amount of pure alcohol, argued about the existence of God, and set to murdering each other. How very... Russian. Somebody call Dostoevsky.

PZ Myers asks, "So did the atheist win, or the believer?"

"Does it even matter in a grim cold universe, where we're all doomed to eke out a futile existence until we die, where we're either meaningless sputterings of a few pounds of electrified meat, or the serfs of immense beings who will snuff us out painfully, slowly, eternally and with casual disregard if we fail to properly praise them incessantly? Does anything matter? The snow falls. It will cover us all."