Solstice Blessings

I see those around me gearing up for Christmas, doing their best to meet the cultural and commercial expectations our mamas all raised us with. I’m not unaware of the change of the soundtrack as I shop for my daily dose of chocolate milk at the local King Soopers or stroll the aisles at Wally World restocking hobo essentials. Santa-branded candy is as overpriced as a class at the late Trump University which is slightly abated by the recent heavy discounts on Bronco-branded merch. You can also pick up some heavily discounted pumpkin-spiced croutons for your salad right now if you know the right aisles to shop.

The sounds of the season and the Xmas themed end-caps at the stores were in place long before Thanksgiving eve. This is the Christian holiday snatched from the pagans and assigned as the birthday of Baby Jeebus fully re-dedicated to the American God of Retail. O’Holy Night and all that and “get your grimey ass back to Mexico” says Tucker Carlson on God’s Chosen Channel. I’m eternally and daily thankful I’m free of the cognitive dissonance required to carry water for this imaginary monster. Hippie Jeebus I could stomach.

Now what to celebrate? Are we totally screwed? Maybe for those whose imaginations need to be filled by self-righteous holy pricks imaginatively interpreting The Goat Herders Guide to the Galaxy. Somebody give these people a science book ferchrissakes.

This Rambo Jeebus, this malignant Christian Nationalist Jeebus, this “FU dirty hippes!” version of Jeebus has soured the entirety of the American religious landscape and made many realize that the true history of Baby Jeebus is as nebulous as the the position and speed of an atomic particle. At least an atomic particle leaves a reliable footprint. Though we may sometimes tire in our attempt to hang onto that which is most precious to us it’s best to maintain a firm grip on the reliable atoms in the rope than to let go and pray for a miracle against gravity, and everybody dam well knows it.

As for me? The most blessed all of the hobo heretics the high mountain meadows can muster? I’ll continue to spread honesty, cheer and happiness around me in as eager and prolific a manner as the spirits of an aging hobo and his old hobo hound can muster, fully leveraging the utility of the companionship my cute publicity-loving-pup adds to the mix. There may be some weed involved, all legally obtained and distributed under the laws of my totally utopian state. I’ll always strive to maintain as much of a positive public image as can be had from such a minimalist perch as this poverty-tainted platform will allow.. Build new friendships and try to maintain the many acquired along the happy trails.

At this most blessed of holiday seasons, I’d be remiss not to note the most serendipitous of the many hobo blessings (that coincidentally happens to make a fundamentalist Pentecostal wince hardest) is that I am living as close to the purported lifestyle of the beloved Baby Jeebus as is humanly possible in the 21st Century. That noted, I’m not nearly as incommunicado, nor has my army of a dozen female apostles completely gelled, just yet. I’m less inclined to push against those wishing to form a religion around me the older I get. It’s a feature, not a bug. Hoocoodanode?

Chalk it up to the curiosity of my nature. It’s what my mama raised me with. That, and a round Earth.

Enjoy.

Tea Party Truth Serum

The Color of Tea is Brown(shirts) 

MIssissippi’s Miscreants

The lunatic fringe known as the Mississippi Tea Party is going bonkers over their loss to Senator Thad Cochran in the recent primary runoff.  There is literally no tactic they haven’t considered (legal or illegal), in their attempts to seize power.  It is their complete disregard for American jurisprudence and common standards of human decency that led a handful of them to conclude that sneaking into a nursing home and photographing Thad Cochran’s Alzheimer-afflicted wife would be some kind of political coup d’etat.

The Dean of Debauchery

With the dust not yet settled from either their illegal behaviors or the loss of the Republican primary, one of the masterminds behind the ill-advised break-in recently committed suicide (so we are told).  His name was Mark Mayfield (seen above) and by offing himself in such a dramatic fashion, he has ensured that his legacy will always be “the McDaniels lieutenant who killed himself rather than face justice for his crimes”.  He’s not the first Tea Party idiot that I’ve known named Mark who has bought the farm.  It’s safe to say that given the choice of continued living in Mississippi, or killing yourself and burning in Hell, Mr. Mayfield is indeed “in a better place” now.  Take from that what you will, but for the sake of your future male children, please have the decency not to name them Mark.  Everybody knows the only good Christian name worth having is Timothy!!  Why else would God name two books of the Bible after me?

The Fallout

Like a wounded tiger, the uncontrolled and artificially-created beast that is the Tea Party incarnation of Fox News is lashing out in Mississippi.  The overt racism which always seethed just under the collar of a ‘reconstructed’ Mississippi is on full display.  What Bush did with the twisting of the definition of torture is now being applied to the definition of voter fraud!  How do you know if it’s voter fraud?  According to Mississippi Tea Party activists, If the voter is Black, then it’s voter fraud!!.  This is how the simple-minded Tea Party people operate in an attempt to keep things simple, but the tone-deafness of their racism is simply unbelievable!!

The Tea Party Constitution

Tea Partiers are quite content to use the second amendment as their favorite masturbatory aid, but don’t be fooled into thinking they give two wanks on a dead wallabies weenie about your right to free speech.  How can I be so sure?  Well, I’ve put them to the test.  One thing that rightwing Christian movements have in common, whether they be mid-twentieth century Germans or early twenty first century Tea Party creationists is a proclivity towards banning that which they find offensive.  Not at all dissimilar to what we see their fundamentalist Muslim counterparts doing to ‘ungodly’ art in their own neighborhoods.

Banning Critical Artworks

Not content in their efforts to dominate that media in which they can buy and control, the ‘liberty loving’ Tea Party folks are hard at work trying to keep my artistic Facebook creations out of the display of their sensitive and easily swayed flock of rubes. Shown above is a McDaniels parody campaign advertisement that the Tea Party fascists tried to get banned though their dishonest attempts at silencing me.  This is in line with their true character of acting in the manner we have com tp expect from the Brownshirt Faction of US politics.  Their latest attempt at silencing my creative #timremix works involves a report to Facebook that the following picture contains “graphic violence”!  It’s definitely as tasteless as their politics, but violent?  I only created it out of ‘self defense” when I read where some of the high ranking operatives in the Mississippi Tea Party were talking about building a memorial to the late Mark Mayfield!!  Just thought you should all be aware.  There’s entirely too little documentary evidence of their hooliganism and thuggery for people to point and click to.  Here’s the ‘graphically violent” picture in question that they just flagged on Facebook:

Profits on the sale of the Mark Mayfield memorial t-shirt are going to improve nursing home security in Mississippi.

Isn’t there a Bible verse of some significance to this bunch of religious knuckle draggers that specifically forbids bearing false witness?  

Enjoy.

 

The Miracle of Medical Malpractice

Just when you thought you’d seen the worst of the religion inspired creationist freak shows, along comes a real life example of the extent to which religious idiocy has infected the minds of America.  The glow is fading off this old religious miracle, but fear not my fickle-brained faithful friends!!  There’s a new miracle ready to rock your world!!

It’s a Miracle?

(CNN) — Even in the Bible Belt, coroners don’t use the word “miracle” lightly.

But Holmes County, Mississippi, Coroner Dexter Howard has no qualms using the word for the resurrection, as it were, of Walter Williams, who he was declared dead Wednesday night.

As if to mock the recent rebroadcast of my heavily documented on-line secular miracle, my old neighbors in Mississippi have seen fit to induce another miracle of their own in an obvious attempt to glam onto the press I’ve generated with mine.  Of course it’s rather self serving for this incompetent medical examiner to lay his own incompetence off as a miracle, but it’s a helluva good way to distract the bumble brained Baptists who apparently voted him into his position as coroner in the first place.

A Different Kind of Miracle

I suspect the ecclesiastical certificate of this miracle is already on it’s way back from the Kinko’s where Brother Ted gets a 10% bulk-rate discount.  I hope my religious friends won’t take too much offense to me using such a desultory eight letter word, but perhaps if we examine the actual evidence, there is a more rational explanation for what happened than “godditit”.  Let’s hit the breaks on the Baptist Pope-mobile for just a second here and look at the “observational” science as Ken Ham suggests is the only proper way to decide on these serious issues of life and death.

By Creationist Standards

Because I was taking really good notes the night Ken Ham gave that science lesson to Bill Nye, I decided to look at the ‘observational” evidence of this latest claim of a Mississippi miracle and here’s what I found:

“Among the public health consequences was a medico-legal spoils system that valued pseudoscience and expedient criminal convictions over scientific validity”

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/06/17/steven-hayne_n_3454666.html

The state is one of several that elect county coroners to oversee death investigations. The office requires no medical training, only a high-school diploma, and it commonly goes to the owner of the local funeral home.

http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/jurisprudence/2008/02/the_bitemarks_men.html

Mississippi Needs a Miracle

It would be more of a miracle if Mississippi decided to implement standards for medical examiners that included, I don’t know, maybe having some medical license or training?   Until then, Uncle Teds Bible College and Taxidermy graduates are free to fill the role. Heaven forbid they’d think to pass a law requiring doctors to check on the aging batteries of poor old Black folks with failing pacemakers.  You gotta give them credit.  This kind of thing isn’t out of the norm for religious folks. The reason they’re so quick to pronounce the living as dead is because they are gullible enough to believe that the dead go on living.

Enjoy.

Another Victim of Bible Science

Another day, another dead religious-idiot snake handler.  This time, the fellow had a high enough profile to have scored some National Geographic facetime (Why, National Geographic, Why?).  I’ll assume the best and figure that National Geographic was running a high brow bit on the lunatic fringe of religious society and not trying to go head-to-head with a bunch of waterlogged homophobic Duck Hunters on another network.  If I’m wrong, don’t correct me on the assumption.  I’m old and cranky enough already, living in the world of George Jetson with neighbors apparently beamed in from The Flintstones.  For what it’s worth, I’m feeling quite well today, but then I’m a firm believer that laughter is the best medicine, and given the ongoing freak show of the fundamentalists, I’m assured plenty of healthful smiles to keep me fit.

As a matter of curiosity, and with a nod to the photo of the white guy in the masthead above (and the white guy killed today), are there any/many instances of Black preachers dying this way?  I can’t think of any off the top of my head.  Most of the Black people I know, religiously affixed as they are, seem happy enough just bashing homosexuals and have enough common sense, having escaped slavery and all, not to be messing with deadly snakes.  I’ll leave that question to the racial sociology department at JSU or Howard to work out.  I’m always happy to toss out a free doctoral dissertation topic for a young Black college student having trouble finding a topic.

Jeebus’ Law and Order

And these signs shall follow them that believe: In my name shall they cast out devils; they shall speak with new tongues. They shall take up serpents; and if they drink any deadly thing, it shall not hurt them; they shall lay hands on the sick, and they shall recover. (Mark 16:17-18)

In spite of many previous snake bites, one of which led to the loss of the finger of the aforementioned God slobberer, as well as previous troubles with law enforcement over the transport and ownership of his deadly vermin, today’s Darwin Award nominee was undeterred.  The courts in the US, particularly those in the former slave states, are apparently reluctant to enforce long standing laws against public displays of deadly snakes in church services, so this is what we get to read about every other year or so.

Ken Ham’s Killing Spree to Continue

The southern court system, in declining to prosecute a previous case of snake bite induced religious death, stated that there would be no deterrent effect for prosecuting this type of crime, so hardened were the biblical felons in their proclivities and so devoted were the practitioners and followers of this particular religious aberration.  There are literally places in the US where you can get charged with child endangerment for leaving your minor child at home alone for ten minutes to run to the grocery store but it’s perfectly ok to drag them into a sermon where a preacher is slinging deadly rattle snakes around.  Holy shit! 

Prosecution being useless as a deterrent has never stopped any of the former slave states from dragging every other poor black man into the court system and prosecuting them for smoking marijuana, though it’s a pretty easy observation that the incarceration of those young Black males is as ineffective a deterrent to marijuana use in Black youth as the prosecution of White Pentecostal snake handlers is presumed to be in deterring other young preachers from committing suicide by snake.  Wonder why the difference?

Bonus Thunderfoot Video

Enjoy.

PZ and his Pusillanimous Pixies

As the most prominent atheist comedian on the planet,I give thanks to the many godless blessings that PZ Myers and his not-so-merry band of Girlyban Skepdinks have provided me. A virtual cornucopia of idiocracy to choose from. The only other comedic assignment with more low hanging fruit than I’ve been provided would have been writing jokes for Bill Mahr during the Bush administration. I could have never have imagined (We all knew!) it would still be going strong at this late stage of the game.

But I don’t make the news, I just report it. PZenu and the pusillanimous pixies of Feminology are holed up over at Pharyngula, which to those unfamiliar with Feminology, is the Internet equivalent of the safe haven carved out by Scientologists in Clearwater FL. Like their cohorts in nonsense, the Feminologists were quick to invent their own rules and jargon. Being blocked and banned as a suppressive person was their initial mimicry. Here we are a couple years on, and now they’ve got an automated process for blocking content off their computers that’s even slicker than the blocking software the Scientologists make their people use to protect them from vicious (truthful) Internet content!)

I swear on the imaginary soul of my long departed mother that I am only adding the tiniest bit of hyperbole as I recount these cult-like similarities, and we haven’t even touched on the Feminologist-specific jargon issue yet! Suffice to,say that those idiots over at Pharyngula HQ are so Out Tech on proper skepticism that rehabilitation seems out of the question. The girls over at the PeezOrg have spent way too much time hooked up to their she-meters. There is always a little hope for their recovery but that’s assuming you could wrestle them away from their firm grasp of PZenu’s balls in the first place (Please no photoshops! (I see it already!)) I run a clean ship over here.

This will probably break the heart and soul of those like Michael Nugent (pity the poor dumb bastard) who favor a policy of NOM (non overlapping menseshysteria) between skepticism and the outright bat shit insanity that appears in faithless femininity, but I see no place for allowing evidence free claims to invade and dilute organizational attention away from the mission of figuratively (trigger warning) bitch slapping creationists and Jeebus slobberers who employ the same techniques (tactics).

One final little dingle dongle to make note of. A sad reminder that the virulent nature of memes (both good and bad-thank you Richard Dawkins) goes on unabated, and can laterally transfer from one group of pusillanimous pixies to another. In the latest example it caused a death (of Adria Richard’s career) and she wasn’t even a part of the skeptic movement! It’s not “something in the water” at conferences or a germ picked up off an unsanitary toilet seat at the buffet restaurant loo (unless that’s where Adria happened to be sitting when she got infected reading the Rebecca Watson Slate article e.g.). There is protection available for those who need it. Simply following this blog or my Twitter feed is a good first step.

Hat Tip to the many positive women of skepticism. Their inspiration and support instills a tingling sense of wonder in the nether regions near my dangling tender jiggly bits. I would name them but I’d sound like Brigham Young reading off a list of his many wives and besides, I’d never kiss and tell.

Enjoy.