The above image came to me via email. It’s from Truth Saves, but I was unable to find it on that site. The site has a lot of other good stuff, though.

As you’ve noticed, I’m still having a lot of trouble finding time to post new articles. Since I very much would like the site to continue, I’ve been pondering how to do so given the changes in my life’s priorities.

I have an idea on how to proceed. Long-time readers (if they all haven’t wandered off due to no new posts) might not be completely happy with the changes, but the site probably can’t continue in its current form. I hope to have some news about that shortly.

Here again, I present my semi-annual feature, “Comment of the Day”. Today’s comment comes from Sue Blue, who gives us a capsule summary of Rick Perry:

Perry is a twat who makes even Bush look reasonable and middle-of-the-road. This is the guy who supported Texan secession and who thinks holding huge public prayer rallies at taxpayer expense is the way to fix Texan weather and economic woes. The irony of this guy running for president just fucking blows the top right off my irony meter. Here’s someone who claims to hate “big government” so much that he wants his state to secede… yet he wants to be POTUS? Who in their right mind—even a Republican—would want this guy running the country? Then there’s the do-nothing-but-pray-loudly approach to natural and man-made disaster. He’s as dumb and crazy as Bachmann when it comes to his statements about evolution and science. He’s only slightly more articulate than that other Texan village idiot.

I was down in Texas visiting unfortunate relatives when this moron held his prayer-fest, held in a huge, air-conditioned stadium while thousands of Texans sweltered in 110-degree heat with their power turned off because the emergency funds collected by the utility to help the poor were being held in a special account used to make the state budget look good and keep the Repub promise not to raise taxes. These guys would rape their own Grandmas if there was a buck in it for them.

I’m on vacation for the next two weeks. You guys can worry about the fundies for me. I’ll try to look in on the blog every few days to delete the spam comments and fish anybody out of comment moderation.

Well this is embarrassing. It appears that I have just been raptured.

If you’re seeing this post, it means that God has taken me! (Or possibly I’ve just been run over by a drunk driver while trying to cross the street. Please check outside for a mangled body on the road. That’s probably me.)

I had this post scheduled to run automatically at 6:01 PM on May 21st. I figured that the rapture would run on time (God is like Mussolini, you know). If I hadn’t been raptured by 6:01, I was planning to intervene and prevent this post from publishing. The fact that you’re seeing it now means that I have been raptured!

Hallelujah!

This just shows what those fundies know. They claimed that I’d spend eternity in hell for being an atheist. I’m not going to hell! I’m going to heaven!

…Surrounded by fundies for eternity. Oh, shit!

This is an extremely occasional feature that I only run when I remember I have it, and when somebody posts an exceptionally insightful comment. I like to elevate that comment to the top, so everyone can see it.

Today I’m bringing two comments to your attention. Both are by anti_supernaturalist.

His first comment was in response to “Obama Aborts Osama”:

• Pro-birth ideology poses an international public health threat

Religious anti-abortion ranters are not pro-life. They are pro-birth. There’s a big difference.

By dismissing women’s rights over their own bodies, fundies expect to regain control over reproduction and birth in accord with pro-natalist dictates. Pro-natalism, a term from the 19th century, sells a poisonous nostrum of sexual customs which do not belong in a contemporary planet-wide ethos which must treat women equally.

Fundie pretensions to secular power over abortion are not pro-life. They demand enforcement of ancient (and modern) near-eastern cult practices which amount to total reproductive repression: that no impediment whatsoever on births be permitted by law.

No sexual practices which preclude conception, homosexuality foremost. No chemical contraception. No physical barriers to conception. No abortions, not even in cases of rape, incest.

What happens to mother and child after birth is irrelevant to the men who run right-wing political and religious institutions.

Pro-natalism is the sexual theory of “tea party” ignorati, myriad fundie sects, mormons, and the rc-church.

Pro-birth, a public health disaster, is pro-mass-death. It creates disease, poverty, and ignorance worldwide by fostering overpopulation, damning safe (and joyous) non-reproductive sex, forbidding responsible sex education, and blocking medical research.

His second comment was in response to “Planned Abortionhood”:

• The real issue — social control

Fundie xian males, like their fundie muslim and jewish brothers, shudder at a technological world in which mental agility has replaced physical strength as the core measure of economic utility.

This reordering of values strips away a ancient core faith-based lie: god-ordained male supremacy.

Unresolved to this day is a decades long struggle over gender equality — equal productive and reproductive rights.

Whom does The House and Senate back? The relevant group, women themselves, tens of millions of them?

Or white male second-hand-god salesmen? Spewing pro-birth at any price. One hundred year old social darwinism tarted up as “family values”.

Fundies are obvious offenders, but RCs run a close second.

Women’s aspirations, self realization, reproductive self-determination must be crushed by direct force.

Xian domestic terrorism, like muslim domestic terrorism, humiliates, intimidates, and batters women back to submission.

Protected by complicit federal and state officials, cells of xian thugs have been targeting women and their humane values for decades.

Fundie irrationality drives scientific knowledge about sex from America’s schools just as it drives medical research abroad.

Xian political ideologues must eventually embrace state totalitarianism. Their “truths” can never win popular support. An open society will repudiate their nihilism composed of literalist lies, morally repugnant beliefs, and puritanical rules.

When you come to a fork in the road, take it.
—Yogi Berra

So can you take a fork and not take it? (Maybe only if it’s a spork!)

You may have noticed that I haven’t written much in this blog in the last couple of months.

I’ve had a sleep disorder for quite a while. It has actually benefitted this blog, because if I’m awake anyway, I might as well do something constructive.

Some time back in January, things got busy at work for a bit. That aggravated the sleep disorder. Things got difficult. I’m now following a treatment plan, so hopefully things will get better.

Then there’s photography. I’ve dabbled in it over the years, with much unsuccess. Lately, it has become my main interest. One of these days, I’ll actually take a couple of good photographs.

So given my messed up life, I need to reconsider my priorities. In the near term, that would be work, brainy girlfriend, and photography.

So what happens to this blog?

The last thing I want to do is shut it down. It’s too important to me. It allows me to vent my frustrations when I see the country being destroyed by the blind, the delusional, and even the merely misguided.

I’ve also attracted an exceptional readership. This is probably a 4th-tier atheist blog. I don’t have nearly as many readers or anywhere near the mindshare of most other established blogs. That’s OK with me. A large readership just causes problems, because it attracts too many wackos of all stripes.

What we have here that I value a lot is a small community of active commenters. Scroll back through the last bunch of articles and see how many comments each article has. I consistently get more high-quality comments on my articles than some of the bigger blogs.

Shutting it down is too unpleasant to contemplate, but I can’t maintain the pace of the past. I have to scale things back, at least for the time being. For the most part, I will be ignoring the day-to-day fundie screeds that fill my email box (If I can. Those things really get me riled sometimes.).

Instead, I’m going to try to focus on bigger-scale projects. I have a bunch of fundie books I want to humiliate. One is a Bible comic book that Jeff alerted me to. Another is a book from the ’60s telling women how to be good wives. I have a pile of others stashed in a pile somewhere that I want to make fun of.

So look for several articles a month for the foreseeable future. Hopefully I’ll even be able to do one per week. I hope you’ll continue to come by and check things out. Maybe eventually things will return to how they were. But for now, my life needs this reordering of priorities.

I haven’t posted anything in three weeks. Things are a chaotic blur right now. I have a second sleep study coming up in a week. I’ll post again when I get this under control.

Methought I heard a voice cry ‘Sleep no more!
Macbeth does murder sleep’, the innocent sleep,
Sleep that knits up the ravell’d sleeve of care,
The death of each day’s life, sore labour’s bath,
Balm of hurt minds, great nature’s second course,
Chief nourisher in life’s feast,—
…
Still it cried ‘Sleep no more!’ to all the house:
‘Glamis hath murder’d sleep, and therefore Cawdor
Shall sleep no more; Macbeth shall sleep no more.’

—MacBeth, Act 2, Scene 2

Things have been a bit of a blur this last week. The crunch at work was supposed to ease up a little bit yesterday, but it didn’t. It’s going to be a few more weeks. I’m halfway through writing another short Cabzon Dinosaur article, but snark requires a refreshed brain. Maybe tonight…

I’ve been cruising a lot of random blogs in my odd hour here and there. I came across a strident libertarian blog that had a quote that rather disturbed me. Now that I have an easy answer (that completely blows it out of the water), I can’t find that quote or that blog again.

I did find this lovely page of quotes about liberals. Some are pro, some are con. Here are a few that jumped out at me. Some of these are obviously true (They must be true. I agree with them!). Others are clearly wrong. Feel free to discuss them in the comments.

“Liberalism is an attitude rather than a set of dogmas—an attitude that insists upon questioning all plausible and self-evident propositions, seeking not to reject them but to find out what evidence there is to support them rather than their possible alternatives.”
—Morris Raphael Cohen

“Liberalism is Rationalism in politics.”
—Francis P. Yockey

“Liberalism is trust of the people tempered by prudence. Conservatism is distrust of the people tempered by fear.”
—William E. Gladstone

“Liberals feel unworthy of their possessions. Conservatives feel they deserve everything they’ve stolen.”
—Mort Sahl

“A liberal is a man too broadminded to take his own side in a quarrel.”
—Robert Frost

“Any man who is under 30, and is not a liberal, has no heart; and any man who is over 30, and is not a conservative, has no brains.”
—Winston Churchill

“A radical thinks two and two makes five. A liberal is more conservative. he knows two and two make four, but he’s unhappy about it.”
—Herbert Prochnow

“Liberalism is totalitarianism with a human face.”
—Thomas Sowell

“Conservative: a statesman who is enamored of existing evils, as distinguished from the Liberal, who wishes to replace them with others.”
—Ambrose Bierce

“If a conservative is a liberal who’s been mugged, a liberal is a conservative who’s been arrested.”
—Thomas Wolfe

“The liberals have not softened their view of actuality to make themselves live closer to the dream, but instead sharpen their perceptions and fight to make the dream actuality or give up the battle in despair.”
—Margaret Mead

“As Mankind becomes more liberal, they will be more apt to allow that all those who conduct themselves as worthy members of the community are equally entitled to the protections of civil government. I hope ever to see America among the foremost nations of justice and liberality.”
—George Washington

3/9/11 Bonus!

I found two more in my quote file on my computer:

“Liberals believe in a future that never will be; conservatives believe in a past that never was.”
—Unknown

“A liberal is someone who worries about whether people are going cold, sick or hungry, while a conservative worries about whether people are suffering as much as they deserve.”
—Unknown

[I’m still working way too many hours these days and have no time to blog. It’s frustrating, because so many great topics have flown by that I wanted to cover. I’ve just come across a topic that demands an in-depth look, so I’m going to see if I can write several small blog posts about it over the next few days. In the meantime, here’s a picture of a shaved pussy.]

One of the things that makes America the Greatest Nation on Earth™ is roadside attractions. I love that stuff!

They began a slow decline with the creation of the Interstate Highway System (Here is a documentary about that.). However, some plucky tourist traps managed to hang on, some even thrived, in the new world of the superhighway.

Alas, now that most people fly everywhere, they’re flying right over some of the best cultural exhibits of the United States. As a result, many of these great sites are shutting their doors forever!

Maybe now that the TSA is sexually molesting everybody, folks will get back in their cars and rediscover America. Come on, people! Do you want a cheap grope, or would you rather hop in your ’53 DeSoto and go to the biggest ball of twine in Minnesota?

One of these great American destinations is the Cabazon Dinosaurs, just outside Palm Springs. Wikipedia tells us:

The creation of the Cabazon dinosaurs began in the 1960s by Knott’s Berry Farm sculptor and portrait artist Claude K. Bell (1897–1988) to attract customers to his Wheel Inn Cafe, which opened in 1958. Dinny, the first of the Cabazon dinosaurs, was started in 1964 and created over a span of eleven years.

Everything was hunky dory until Bell died. Seeing the perfect opportunity to indoctrinate the unwary, the site was bought by creationists in the 1990s!

I suppose it’s fitting and maybe inevitable. Something as uniquely American as the roadside attraction ultimately had to pair up with something as uniquely American as a complete and total disregard for facts and reality.

About the current sorry state of affairs, Wikipedia tells us:

Currently located inside Dinny is a gift store and museum promoting creationism with some of the toy dinosaurs in the shop sold under the label “Don’t swallow it! The fossil record does not support evolution.”

The current ownership has expressed a Young Earth creationist belief that most dinosaurs were created on Earth about 6,000 years ago—the same day as Adam and Eve. In stark contrast to that belief are Bell’s painted frescoes and sculptures inside Dinny, depicting a naturalist and evolutionist viewpoint. Bell’s paintings include representations of Cro-Magnon man (labeled “Cro-Magnon Man 30,000 [years ago]”) and Java Man (labeled “Java Man 400,000”). Bell’s historic displays now exist alongside information detailing the creationist viewpoint of the earth and man’s origins.

The real pisser is that I went to Palm Springs just over a year ago. If I had known they had a creationist museum, I would have visited! Oh, fundies! Why do you place your monuments to stupidity just outside my grasp? Just like reality is just outside your grasp!

I’ll leave things for today with this last quote from Wikipedia:

Pastor Robert Chiles, assisting Kanter in turning the exhibit into a non-denominational church, has been quoted as to his belief of why children are drawn to the dinosaur attraction, “There’s something in their DNA that knows man walked with these creatures on Earth.”

And if so, why?

I’m still here. The blog hasn’t left the state to try to deprive the Republicans of a quorum. I’m just too busy to post anything right now. Hopefully I’ll find some time soon. Lately, I’ve been so tired when I get home from work that I just stare at the computer and look at photography sites. It’s much less painful than reading what the fundies are up to.

(BTW, I’m 90% sure the above photograph is either staged or Photoshopped.)

[The blog has been quiet lately, because we’re in a crunch time at work, which will continue for the next month or so. I have a lot of articles I want to write, but no time to write them. Alas, most of those topics will grow stale before I can get to them.]

George Carlin had a routine where he questioned why we have the phrase “near miss”. After all, it didn’t nearly miss. It really did miss! It should be called a “near hit”!

I’ve been thinking of a couple of the near misses of history. In these cases, though, they should be called “near successes”.

The first involved that regressive Southern blight, Senator Jesse Helms and Korean Airlines flight 007, one of the worst catastrophes of the 1980s. The plane crash was a disaster too.

I remember that incident clearly. I was furious. How could this happen? There clearly is no God. No God that is all-loving could allow such a tragedy to occur.

Jesse Helms was supposed to be on KAL 007, but he missed his flight!

The ’80s wouldn’t have sucked quite so hard, if he’d only known how to get to places on time.

I discovered the second near-success just recently when I was reading up on the Jonestown Massacre.

Congressman Leo Ryan had traveled to Guyana in 1978 to investigate rumors of human rights abuses at Jonestown. Crazy cult leader Jim Jones assassinated most of the congressional delegation as they were trying to depart.

Wikipedia tells us this:

Ryan had also asked his friend Indiana Congressman Dan Quayle to accompany him… but Quayle was unable to go on the trip.

George H.W. Bush’s election campaign (and subsequent presidency? Who knows?) would have been different if his Vice Presidential candidate had been different.

I certainly would have been less nervous in those days. We all lived in fear that something bad would happen to GHW Bush, allowing his thoroughly unqualified Vice President to take over.

I certainly hope our country never gets into that situation again.

Hey, Sarah! There’s another “Congress on Your Corner” happening in Tucson soon! I think you need to investigate!

Things have gotten busy at work again, which has impaired my output here. Don’t they understand I have a blog to write? How dare they pay me for my time! I give it away for free here all the time.

I have a large article I’ve been trying to write for the last few weeks. Maybe I’ll have it done this weekend. In the meantime, I thought I’d keep you entertained with yet another church sign I found on the web.

Jeff is right. They do seem to enjoy the thought that they’re going to be floating on their cloud, eating Cheesy Poofs and swilling beer, while watching the rest of us writhe in eternal agony.

Of course, I enjoy the thought that they’re making themselves miserable in the only life they have. We’re all probably going to the same place anyway. We’re all ultimately going to end up just not existing. Kind of makes you not want to squander what little time you have. Somebody please pass the Cheesy Poofs.