How To Have A Biblical Abortion

Yes ladies, it's true, you too can have a Biblically prescribed abortion, depending on the version of the Bible you have (as with all things). The Lord told Moses exactly how this is supposed to work. Here's how:

Basically, first you have to get married or this won't work. Then, sleep with another man. Then have your husband take you to the priest, along with some barley and oil and other random offerings. Now, have the priest give you "bitter water" that brings a "curse" into your body, causing your abdomen to swell and your womb to miscarry! Bam, done. Now you will barren forever, but whatevs.

I Ain't Afraid Of No Rollercoaster

Wow, a London art student designed a workable death rollercoaster.
You go up a third of a mile, then zoom down and through a series of shrinking loops. The G force is enough to kill you.
It's almost as soul-shattering as The Devastator...

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."

Desolate yet all undaunted...

The estimable John De Lancie does a superb rendition of Poe's The Raven.
Happy Halloween!

Liberal Culture of Death

Machine of Death , a book of death-related stories edited by the Wondermark guy, infuriates Glenn Beck by beating him for the #1 book slot on Amazon.com. He whines: "These are the — this is the left, I think, speaking. This is the left. You want to talk about where we’re headed? We’re headed towards a culture of death. A culture that, um, celebrates the things that have destroyed us."

Boo yah.

h/t boingboing

LOL Sign Fail!

see more funny videos

Mean Magnus

Awww, Magnus is upset. It seems that I am now a "vile" reaping agent of doom, just because my siege of the one they call Hitchens will inevitably end in my victory. Who knew? Well, Thorson, guess you'll have to find a new man-crush. Might I recommend Justin Bieber? MWA HA HA HA!

Violence, Agression, Willingness To Kill

Primatologist Richard Wrangham on "Why We Kill"






Question: What are the two most fascinating things about human evolution yet to be explored?

Richard Wrangham: How it is that a pre-human ape became a human. And it's a question that Darwin had no idea about really, and that we've had only some rather simple ideas about until recently, and I think we still have a long way to go. And until we have a sense of the continuity in an evolutionary sense and the biological factor responsible for something like a Chimpanzee standing upright, becoming what we are today, then we will always have this sense of anthropocentrism. We will always feel just a little bit divorced from the rest of the universe. And that's one big question.

I think another huge question is about the evolution of human nature with respect to the biggest use of cooperation, processiality, altruism, and on the other hand, violence, aggression, a willingness to kill. We are an unusual species because we have such an extraordinary mix of these two aspects. We show them both to extremes. We're amazingly more cooperative than almost any other species and we're extraordinarily destructive compared to most species. And grappling with the extent to which that is a product of culture and biology and to the extent of why we should have biological position to go in both of those directions remains one of the huge questions. Which again, is something, of course, that is hard to reconcile with the rest of nature in many ways and for that reason, people resort to religion and they resort to all sorts of naturalistic point of views, strange belief systems to grapple with the question of good and evil.

Question: Are humans predisposed to behave violently?

Richard Wrangham: Well, to talk about inherent aggression in us sets off alarm bells for some people because it sounds biologically determinist, it sounds pessimistic. So, I wouldn't want to quite put it in that term. But, I do think that there's all sorts of evidence that humans have got a predisposition to behave with violence in certain contexts, that yes. And it's a great thing to be aware of it and the more we're aware of it, then the more we can do about it.

You know, it has nothing to do with whether or not one is optimistic, or pessimistic about the future. And I'm a firm believer in the fact that war is not a necessary feature of human life and that there has been a rather impressive decline in the amount of killing that humans as a species do over the last centuries and millennia, and that the future can be expected to be increasingly rosy. But none of that is to deny that within the human heart there is a dangerous side.

Question: How can we overcome this?

Richard Wrangham: We can carry on doing the kinds of things we are doing, which is to think deeply and carefully about anticipating violence. About setting up institutional systems that enable us to anticipate when there is a threat of genocide in the country, when there are threats of war between states and for other states to be prepared to intervene. I mean the great thing nowadays is that, whereas in recent decades and centuries, when two countries declared war on each other, the others just stood by and watched. Nowadays, everyone is very scared and alarmed about it. And doesn't want this to happen and there is intervention just flowing all over the place. You know, we try to get involved in Darfur, we try to get involved in the Congo, we try to get involved in Bosnia. And as a result, things change.

Question: Where are we headed now in terms of aggression and war?

Richard Wrangham: The size of the groups that are political units has just been growing, not exactly steadily with leaps and drops, but have been growing over the millennia. And surely the way in which the human species is ultimately heading is towards a single group. And to me one of the great questions of the future is whether or not that group will be achieved by unanimous pooling of the decision to unite into conquering some of the great problems of the world, such as climate change, or food shortage, or the threat of aggression, or whether or not the gloomy view would be that the single united human group will be achieved by domination. And I think that's, on the whole, unlikely.

I think that the great value of the technological advances that have been happening in the last decades is that people communicate enormously better than they used to so that when there is a problem in Fiji, then the whole of the rest of the world knows about it. When there is an earthquake in Haiti, then within a few hours, everybody in the world knows about it and is rushing to help. And one of the consequences of that sort of communication, or ability, is that the dispossessed get a little bit more power.

So, in the general sense, I feel that the world is becoming increasingly democratic. There are more voices to those that traditionally had very little power, indeed. And that's the kind of dynamic that will help avert a hegemonic move towards a single world government, and instead something more like what's happened in Europe, with countries just saying, it makes sense for us to work together.
Recorded on March 5, 2010

There's A Zombie On Your Lawn

Call of Cthulu's out, Zygote's in

Thanatos is amused by Pastor Joseph Grant Swank, Jr. on Senator Ted "Baby Killer" Kennedy's death, via World-O-Crap:

"Kennedy was one of the countless persons championing slaying boys and girls inside female bodies." (swank)

"Granted, it’s not the Most Dangerous Game, but it’s still nice to get out of the house and into the womb, camping with your buddies, putting out your fetal decoys, sitting in your baby blind with your dog and your gun, sippin’ a beer and occasionally blowing on your Zygote Call." (scott)

Dead Sexy, pt. 2

OMG!!! Men of Mortuaries? Brilliant! Hat tip to SI.


(also see the first installment of Dead Sexy.)

we need Death Panels

According to Right Reborn, "At a recent townhall meeting on healthcare, Obama gave his word... that he wouldn’t be 'pulling the plug on grandma.' Simply stating I promise not to kill anybody certainly isn’t the best approach to winning friends and influencing people."

Correct. He should be promising to kill people. A death panel is the fairest, most efficient way of determining who dies first. Why is it getting all this bad press? It's a brilliant idea, at least in its misconstrued right-wing version. We should be eliminating those who are past the prime of their usefulness to society, they are a drain just like those on welfare, who we should also terminate. All of this won't do much good, however, unless we also significantly ratchet up our program of aborting fetuses, which is the only way to keep the population under control. Eventually, we can create of list of serial birthers for the death panel's consideration - Octomom (tm), you're first up against the wall!