Stop Making Babies, You Fools!

An associate of mine has made a very excellent blog post about overpopulation.
I give you...
Chestocrates

A Great Black Pit

My favorite part of Sweeney Todd is that everybody dies at the end.

(Well, that and everything prior.)

Make sure to see it on the big screen. The soundtrack and blood effects deserve a massive canvas; it's a splendid bit of musical theatre with egregious gore and copious cleavage. Thrilling throughout! Thanks to DarkNES and :EYG: for providing free premiere passes to myself and my succulent stable of goth chix0rz. Rumors of a sophomore Gothsicles album fill me with much dread and foreboding... I mean, glee and anticipation...


There's a hole in the world like a great black pit,
And it's filled with people that are filled with shit.

Euthanized Critters

What have you done to make the world a better place?
This guy killed things.

Genius

most awesome idea ever.

$$$ Cha-Ching! $$$

The undead have invaded Southridge Mall!

Mall zombies!

On Black Friday, actual zombies swarmed a bastion of capitalist consumption in Southern Milwaukee. They were difficult to differentiate from the regular shoppers, mindlessly milling about, feasting on bargains.

killing: ok. sexing: not so much.

Remember when I posted on the Loved Dead a while back? Well now it seems that Wisconsin's Attorney General J.B. Van Hollen is spending his time waging an excruciatingly slow battle to outlaw such necrocentric amorousness (instead of, oh I don't know, fighting the rash of violent crime in Milwaukee that his campaign promises focused on). So, to recap, you can probably get away with shooting the living, but you can't fuck them if they die from it.

Wacky Indian Wisdom

Stop the plague of babies before it starts, people.
And stop the spread of STDs.
Here is a shield that will protect you.

It's Quite Absorbent...

the Death Napkin!

(yoinked from world-o-crap)

Whole Human

Word.
(stolen from Ectoplasmosis.)

Anna Rexia

I'm totally going as her for Halloween...

Check out that ribcage! SchaaaaaWing!

Cheating Death?!?

Tremendous stuff from tha C-dawg; he even talks about weight control - the straw-man thinspiration for this blog!



Also, don't miss his interview with Charlie Savage.

And, here's Suscitatio Enterprises LLC, a cool research company I discovered; be sure to do their survey if you identify with them: Vampirism & Energy Work Research Study.

Season's greetings! Halloween's just around the corner...

Pointing the Pink Pistol

Thank the gods! Well, at least Ares and Apohrodite, who can now agree on the latest fashion accessory for girls available at Gander Mountain in Waukesha, according to this Journal-Sentinel article. Guns! Now girls can kill too!

From the article: "Females want to shoot guns, but they want them to look pretty, too... guys could give a rat's butt what their gun looks like." Wha? Guys totally care about the sexiness of their piece. The article is way off. Nobody wants something like the Grasshopper from Men In Black.

From Where I Sit chimes in, saying nothing.

I thought killing was a distinctively masculine trait, but it turns out the lesser sex can do something beside just nurture life... blast holes in it!

W000, America.

And unrelatedly, here's a good bit of zombie sci-fi I discovered. Well, not totally unrelatedly... the Somalian girls with the assault rifles are pretty bad-ass, and I couldn't help but imagine them with phallic pink blunderbusses.

Vladimir Putin? More like, Stupidimir Putzface!

Seriously, Russia thinks it's a good idea to give out prizes for having babies? Cars and refrigerators are your solution to population optimization? Go back to Baba Mat for more advice, you morons.

There's a nice bit on voluntary population control over at Pandagon.

A Swiftian v.p.c. strategy is discovered by the intrepid folks at Ectoplasmosis. A child-burger and chips for around 3 bucks! Can't beat that.

Mmm... Crepusculicious

nipped from the gorgeous Stone Parliament of Art.

CREPUSCULE (2*)
Uploaded by AMDS

also, recently I became aware that some old friends of mine decided they would throw together a design firm, and it looks like they've come up with some pretty nifty stuff, such as this graphic for a gun-control campaign... of course, the campaign is ludicrous; we need way more guns, accessible to everyone, if we're ever going to blast ourselves into extinction.

Flow Skull

nipped from BoingBoing.

Zach the Lego (Ax) Maniac

Are you ready for the best use of Legos since the Brick Testament? Check out Block Death: A Museum of Horrors. My favorites are the Stake, Playing Superman, and It's Probably Just the Wind.

Preach On, Thomas Studdelmeyer!

Everyone Should Own A Gun For Protection And Possibly For Suicide

For as long as I can remember, our Second Amendment right to own firearms has been under relentless attack. Opponents say having guns creates...

Dead Sexy, Yeah Baby Yeah!

Who is this irresistable creature who has an insatiable love for the dead?
~Rob Zombie

Why, it's Grunke, Grunke, and Radke! Silly boys. From the post: "sex with a dead body whose demise you didn't cause isn't against the law in Wisconsin." Whoddathunkit! Thanks Invisible Tenant! And you've reminded me of one of my favorite authors...

And here are a couple of bonus goodies for you necrophiles in the audience:
Hot Zombies / Girls and Corpses

In other news, a Mexican death cult has totally emasculated me. So if you find yourself in a situation where you should be dead, but your soul is lingering in your rotting corpse because I didn't come to collect you, its probably because I couldn't get myself to come in to work, what with having these new lady parts to play with...

- Thanatos

Precocious Youth

Ah, the precociousness of today's youth! My heart swells with pride at the human condition when I hear stories like this. Back in the olden days, people had to grow up, develop muscle mass, harbor seeds of hatred, and learn to strategize before they could really try murdering each other. But with today's modern labor-saving technologies, now even a weakling 3-year old female has a "shot" at the glorious blessings of Khorne. I say she is the chosen one, and with her first perforated abdomen as a good omen, she should be crowned as the new empress-for-life of the NRA, and her wisdom should be spread by the institution of a "Young-Guns" program to teach more toddlers how to blow each other away... for God, Guns, and Glory!

Execute the Abortionists!

In an outstanding post over at Feministe, Jill asks: how much prison-time should a woman receive for an abortion? And for that matter, how much should the doctor receive for his serial mercernary assassinations? The discussion references a Newsweek article by Anna Quindlen which describes a mini-documentary on YouTube wherein anti-choice protesters are asked what penalties they would suggest when their goal (the outlawing of abortion) comes to fruition.

What is so great is how Jill draws out the logical implications of the anti-choicers, illuminating their hypocrisy in a magnificent reductio ad absurdum. The result is a hilarious damning of the "pro-life" position as inconsistent, condescendingly patriarchal, and downright foolish from a public policy perspective. I would put forth a pro-thana counter-claim: anyone who does not get an abortion should be executed on the grounds that they are the root cause of all the suffering and evil that person will endure during its life! >:)

From the discussion:

...if a fetus is a person, and abortion indisputably kills a fetus, then abortion is murder... But we punish people for murder. We sentence them to long prison terms, often for life. Sometimes we execute them.... What if they have multiple abortions? What if they had access to all the literature and information that anti-choicers believe women considering abortion should be required to receive? What if they acknowledge that they know exactly what they are doing and they feel no guilt or shame for terminating their pregnancies?

...If women are so infantile that our bad acts toward fetuses must be punished with counseling or left to God, does that apply when our bad acts are directed at born people? If I kill my next-door neighbor, can I simply say that because of my tiny lady-brain and tinier lady-morals, I just didn’t know any better? Can I get counseling or some smiting instead of jail time?

...If a fetus is a person with all the same rights as you or I, then killing that fetus — or paying someone to kill that fetus — is murder. Deliberate, pre-meditated murder. How can it possibly be legally (or even morally) consistent to attach full rights to a fetus and then treat its death as somehow less important, or different, than the death of a born person?

...To complicate things a little more: If life starts at conception, and from the moment of fertilization an egg is a full-fledged human being with the same rights as you or I, what do we do about calculating the death rate? The miscarriage rate?

...If a fertilized egg is a full-fledged person under the law, what other legal activities — other than abortion — would have to go? ...Any medical treatment that could potentially harm a fetus, even if foregoing it meant that the woman would experience severe health complications or death?

...What about pregnant women engaging in behaviors that are risky for the fetus? Can she be prosecuted for child abuse or negligence if she, say, drinks coffee while she’s pregnant? ...goes binge drinking every night and survives off of Cheetos?

...These are a lot of questions, but they absolutely must be asked. And those who want to see abortion criminalized need to think long and hard about the consequences of their ideal policies.

And a commenter says:

And these *would* be legitimate questions if abortion was outlawed and criminal cases against doctors/women went forward. The idea of forensic vagina inspectors poking the former contents of my uterus under a microscope to determine how many, if any, murders occurred is simultaneously hilarious and terrifying.

Brilliant stuff people! Forensic vagina inspectors. Gosh I love the blogosphere.

lolDoomcatz!

Cats have always been associated with the the night, black magic, and even death. According to Wikipedia, "several ancient religions believed that cats are exalted souls, companions or guides for humans, that they are all-knowing but are mute so they cannot influence decisions made by humans." Indeed, Oscar here goes farther than most as an all-knowing soul guide; not unlike my good friend Hermes, he's basically a full fledged psychopomp! He is a shining exemplar of feline-kind's affinity for my cold embrace. I name him an honorary Harbinger of Yours Truly.

- Thanatos

Vanquished by munchkins!

Wow, I couldn't make up stuff this good if I tried. And I do!

Thanks to Patrick McIdiot, I heard about this Mark Steyn guy who wrote in the NY Sun this article about how tenuous humanity's grip on existence is. Honest to golly, he actually says the following:

In Europe as a whole, the fertility rate is a little over 1.3, which is what demographers call "lowest-low" fertility, from which no society in human history has ever recovered. The Spanish, the Italians, the Germans, the Greeks, the Bulgars and Ukrainians will be extinct long before the polar bears or the Antarctic krill or the Latin-American three-toed tree sloth or any of the other species these professors wants to protect... I'm as agog at the marvels of technology as the next chap, but you could hardly ask for a more poignant example of the west's boundless scientific innovation [such as a new kind of condom] on the brink of ruinous demographic decline.

Yep, Mark Steyn actually thinks that mankind is on the brink of ruinous demographic decline. Six and a half billion is an awful lot like zero, after all. Too close for comfort at any rate. Poor humans! Vanquished by the nano-munchkins of their own creation, who stop condoms from tearing and thereby kill off the whole species.

Too rich, too thin

The skinny on summer fashion: these chicks are guaranteed to give you a bone!

Grave Matters

From a book on eco-friendly burials, via Marginal Revolution:

Over time, the typical ten-acre swatch of cemetery ground, for example, contains enough coffin wood to construct more than forty houses, nine hundred-plus tons of casket steel, and another twenty thousand tons of vault concrete. To that add a volume of formallin sufficient to fill a small backyard swimming pool and untold gallons of pesticide and weed killer to keep the gravehard preternaturally green.

Resistance is Futile

Those Japanese are at it again, bringing the world wonderful technology.

but News Alert! Robots' rights activist arrested. Good! Stop defending those job-thieving chrome-backs, you meat-traitor. They shouldn't even be in this country (Silly robot, inalienable rights are for humans!). Of course, if human-ness is a quantifiable concept, then perhaps we could draw up a point system to measure their value to us, and have that be commensurate with the levels of rights we give them. I mean, seriously, most of 'em can't even speak English. They're all "beep blip bloop beep" and shit. Go back to Mechs-ico, and lay off the tech-quila, 53ñ0r. We only want to take the best parts of you. You keep the scrap.

Really I'm of course just sad that robots don't die like people do. They don't have to wrestle with the meaning of death. BUT AT LEAST THEY BRING IT! (with their laser eyes, chest-missiles, and crushing power-claws!)

War: what is it good for?

Absolutely everything!

War is really the only mechanism the world has left for controlling the human population. Your mortality and your inability to get along with each other combine to limit the acceleration of your otherwise infinite growth.

Predators won't do it because you exterminate them. Disease won't do it because your medical technology is too clever. Starvation won't do it because you engineer efficient food systems. Resource depletion may not even do it because you're working on alternative energy sources. But one thing can always be counted on for sure - you'll find things to fight about.

War does not determine who is right - only who is left. ~Bertrand Russell

It is forbidden to kill; therefore all murderers are punished unless they kill in large numbers and to the sound of trumpets. ~Voltaire

Links:

• God is pro-war
• L to the O to the L
• pros and cons

Suicide Commando

Emile Durkheim's groundbreaking monograph, Suicide, established that phenomena once thought to be exclusively psychological and quintessentially individualistic could in fact be sociological in origin. What does this mean? Well, with a little well-planned social engineering, governments can get their suicide rates shooting through the roof! (of the mouth! (budum-bum!))

Suicide is a fundamental human right. This does not mean that it is morally desirable. It only means that society does not have the moral right to interfere. ~Thomas Szasz

Now, physician assisted suicide is another kettle of fish. If a shriveled old soul sans social utility is just sitting around suffering and sucking up air, then surely a society should interfere. More specifically, a Hemlock Society.

[The prosecutor] calls it a crime, a murder, a killing... this could never be a crime in any society which deems itself enlightened... I call it a medical service. You came to me and said, 'Please help me.' The aim was a final solution to incurable agony. ~ Dr. Jack Kevorkian

Plague of Babies

There are too many people in the world. For realz. If we're not going to eat them, having more babies will just add to the problem. Seriously. Death is the best option for most embryos. Besides, there may not even be a limbo anymore (thanks, Ratzinger!) so they'll basically get a straight shot to Heaven - a heck of a lot better deal than the tribulations the rest of you mortals have to go through in your vale of tears. Oh yeah, and women should have, like, rights and stuff, to control their own bodies, I guess. It's like William Harrison says. And hey, if you're a woman, you'll do better in your career without a kid anyway! According to Cornell sociologist Shelly Correll, childless women are twice as likely to receive call-backs for job interviews. But mainly, MORE DEATH!!!

Here's some info on the abortion controversy.

Childless-by-choice info here, here, here and here.

These fools feel that "the [over-population concerned] extremists are only drawing out the underlying philosophy of environmentalism to make it more explicit... If you hold that human life is worth less than the natural order, then you will have less respect for its sanctity. The ecological outlook is an expression of middle-class rage at the masses... Environmentalism, like all political discourses that take shortage as their starting point, will tend towards misanthropic solutions. Any movement that begins with the view that mankind must be curtailed to reduce the pressure on the environment will have to start thinking how it will select those who must make sacrifices," and then they self-righteously admit to being anthropocentric speciesists.

And in all seriousness, ecologist Garret Hardin (the "Tragedy of the Commons" dude) concisely makes my point thusly:

Society does not need more children; but it does need more loved children. Quite literally, we cannot afford unloved children - but we pay heavily for them every day. There should not be the slightest communal concern when a woman elects to destroy the life of her thousandth-of-an-ounce embryo. But all society should rise up in alarm when it hears that a baby that is not wanted is about to be born.

Feministe points out that pro-choicers are like, "here, have some contraceptives to prevent having to have abortions in the first place," while idiotic pro-lifers are like, "f*ck that!"

And, less seriously, some posthumous humor (take that, Crypt Keeper!). Stop reading now if you are offended by tasteless jokes...

Why did the baby fall out of the tree?
Because he was dead!

Why did the dead baby cross the road?
It was stapled to the chicken.

What's the difference between a bucket of gravel and a bucket of baby guts?
You can't gargle gravel.

How do you make a dead baby float?
Take your foot off of it's head.

and of course...

What's the difference between a Cadillac and a pile of dead babies?
I don't have a Cadillac in my garage.

*Buh-dum-CHING!*
Thank you, thank you, I'm here all night.
-Thanatos

A Capital Idea

Capital punishment. So many romantic images: the chair, the gallows, the gas chamber, burning at the stake, crucifixion, stoning, the firing squad, lethal injection, the guillotine.

It can be a tricky issue. On the surface, it seems like a freebie: state-sanctioned homicide, clean and orderly, score-one-for-the-good-guys. However, supporting the death penalty is often at best a zero-sum proposition because it is generally reserved for murderers, who would obviously be more productive in terms of the death rate were they to live. These cases should be dismissed. Other types of criminals and dissidents are certainly fair game for society to glut its taste for vengeance on. While the process may be expensive in the legal environment of developed democracies, at least there is no opportunity cost of future death prevention, for they are of no consequence to the death rate except in their own demise.

Capital punishment is a good way of making miscarriages of justice irrevocable while reducing murder rates not at all. ~C.D. Hare. Awesome!

Links:

• Pro-death penalty resources
• Cliched arguments against capital punishment
• Death penalty info
• Texas law

Welcome!

Hi, and welcome to Pro-Thana, a blog and web-portal dedicated to the promotion death. I take inspiration from a combination of Pro-Ana, the anorexia support group movement, and Thanatos, the Greek god of death.