Month: May 2009

Gee, I WONDER why the press is making a big fuss over this!

Jason Thibeault1 Comment

A Romanian nun dies after being crucified and gagged for three days in an ‘exorcism’ to cure her of schizophrenia.

“I don’t understand why journalists are making such a fuss about this. Exorcism is a common practice in the heart of the Romanian Orthodox church and my methods are not at all unknown to other priests,” Father Daniel added.

Yet some say religion is harmless. When your religiosity overrides medicine and brutal torture in the guise of ‘exorcisms’ are performed instead of life-saving treatment for well-understood mental conditions, people die.

And you wonder why I took up the fight against superstitious nonsense.

Update: it’s from 2005. Not “news” per se, but still a relevant and shocking example of stupidity brought on by religion.

Gee, I WONDER why the press is making a big fuss over this!
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Trippy but catchy

Jason Thibeault

Link sent me by Pickles:

This song was built almost entirely out of sounds recorded from the Disney version of Alice In Wonderland. Here’s some more info and a downloadable mp3.

This video does nothing to refute my hypothesis that the visuals in the original were designed to make the heads of people on acid trips explode. My problem with this particular hypothesis is that I’m not likely to test it any time soon.

It also occurs to me that I don’t have an appropriate category for this. I should make a Virals / Memes category soon. Putting in Computers until I do.

Trippy but catchy

Another busy weekend

Jason Thibeault3 Comments

Two in a row. I know. It’s an oddity around here. Just catching you up on what’s new in my life.

Thursday night (starting the weekend early!) Abby visited for a bit, as she’s in town for a very short span after having completed grading her most recent class. Last night Jodi and I had a few Vodka Mudslides and stayed in editing SWIG photos, and watching MST3k whilst blogging, respectively. Today we went to Windsor and visited a furniture place, walking out a straight grand poorer but with a receipt for a $2000 bedroom set which is to be delivered in about a month. The remaining grand is done through Wells Fargo (shudder), and we intend to pay it off before the 12-month no-interest period is over. After that, we went for ice cream with Mark and Sara, then attended their SWIG performance at the Spitfire Arms. Pub food is tasty. And tomorrow is Mother’s Day, so we’re planning on having Jodi’s mom over for supper.

We’ve started work on a liquor cabinet (sans cabinet), and have obtained two items for it already. Plans are to pick up a something-or-other per paycheck, and possibly to build a cabinet for the corner in the kitchen. The plans for the wall unit are on hold after the huge expenditure today, but they’ll not be on hold forever — my creative focus will go toward the corner unit instead, if I can just draw up plans for it. I thought it was a feat managing to draw up plans (twice, no less) for the wall unit; this will stretch my skills with Dia considerably.

I haven’t been called about the replacement microwave yet; should head on over to Home Depot sometime and see how that’s coming along. The little microwave is annoyingly small and takes twice as long to cook anything.

Finally, I can play G, C and D chords on my acoustic guitar. Now I just need to know how to switch between them, and I might be able to start playing things. Those are, after all, the basis of pretty well every song on Earth.

I’m still working on a draft for a proper post full of Oprah-bashing, hoping to find time tomorrow to finish it. I’ve made a resolution to myself that I will go this entire month without missing a day on this blog. I noticed previous months look pretty sparse, and I figure, I’m paying for this bloody thing, I should damn well be using it. So if I get into the habit of posting at least some silly little thing every day, then that’s a start, right?

Another busy weekend

So fucking rock!

Jason Thibeault, 2 Comments

As an antidote to the VenomFangX Saga continuation, here’s some Tim Minchin. This man is brilliant.

Storm

If You Open Your Mind Too Much… Your Brain Will Fall Out (Take My Wife!)

Canvas Bags

So Fucking Rock!

the non-live version

And finally a quote that makes me want to have his man-children:

i don’t think one needs to know anything about religion to be an atheist. it is a natural, simple, instinctive thing to be an atheist. i know what you mean – it is nice to know a bit about religion if one wants to bang on about it like i do… but in general, the burden is not on atheists to be knowledgeable or justify their position. their position is the natural zero point. the burden of intellectual justification falls on the people with bizarre beliefs in magic deities and magic books and the ability for mammals to survive their own deaths.

– Tim Minchin, Angry (Feet) Forum

So fucking rock!

It was all a big scam after all. Quel surprise.

Jason Thibeault5 Comments

I’ve blogged previously about VenomFangX (what an insipid name… I cringe every time I type it) and his creationist Youtube masturbations; linking the archives as his channel has since been deleted. I haven’t caught everyone up on the story thus far. There have been further developments, brought to my attention by PZ Myers at Pharyngula.

First up, it appears as though one of his biggest fans, Anthony Powell, was obviously slightly crazy, and decided to kill his girlfriend (or possibly an ex, or possibly an unrequited love, the news was pretty unspecific about it) then commit suicide this past Good Friday, but not before posting several unhinged videos praising VFX’s wankery. This doesn’t reflect directly on VFX, naturally, but it’s interesting that there are demonstrably far more instances of mental imbalance leading directly into magical thinking, and thus creationism.

Shortly thereafter, VFX started a charity donation PayPal account, asking for donors to cover the $500 of his monthly upkeep (car, rent, etc.), so he could keep preaching on the interwebs, and everything above the $500 would go to a sick kids hospital. After changing what the goalposts were mid-stream (instead of $500, he would start giving to the charity only after getting 500 *donors*, somehow counting each donor as $1 no matter how much was donated), folks like dprjones investigated the claims and his faux-charity scheme, forcing him to stop disclosing his plans for donating at all, since the law could come down on you for such graft.

And then the plot thickens. Suddenly, VenomFangX’s YouTube channel and personal website were taken down. His last posted video prior to the takedown suggested that “Muslims” sent his parents death threats, addressing them directly by name. The timing of this, coming very shortly after his charity scambaiting, is surely just a coincidence. The message on his website is beyond hilarious, regardless of whether the death threats existed or not — it conjures images of this pasty mental midget getting dragged out of the room by his ear, then getting spanked when out of sight. The most likely scenario is, of course, that he needed to make a hasty exit, stage left even, after drawing the ire of a number of government agents regarding his charity scheme. Having already insulted Muslims in the streets, he had a convenient scapegoat, given most hyper-Christians’ irrational fear of Muslims in general.

To complicate matters, VenomFangX has apparently resurfaced on Youtube under a new account, creatively named VenomFangX1, posting (for all I know) new videos. If the video is indeed new, then the shutdown is a dodge. If it’s not new, then someone’s faking him, and that new account should be watched because there will be at least SOME hilarity.

It was all a big scam after all. Quel surprise.

Fuck you Oprah.

Jason Thibeault, , 1 Comment

Oprah Winfrey just spent the last bit of goodwill capital she had with me — not that I think she’d care one way or another — when she performed her most recent travesty against humanity: signing Jenny McCarthy on for her own talk show. Yeah, THAT Jenny McCarthy, the one that’s famous for having displayed her girly bits a long time ago. The one in my sidebar widget, the one that counts how many people have gotten sick or died from preventable diseases while she campaigned against vaccines, that thinks vaccines with thimerosal caused her son’s not-autism (which went away because it wasn’t autism, and thimerosal wasn’t in her son’s vaccine to fucking well begin with!), and that her bullshit therapies (which do effectively zero for real autistic patients except give their parents false hopes) can do that which modern medicine, for some nefarious reason, refuses to do. Oprah is now officially and unequivocally beyond redemption. She is a purveyor of antiscience, credulously giving voice to bullshit artists, the ignorant, and those that are out to make a quick buck. That she has a vast audience gives her undue power to shape the minds of those that apparently cannot think for themselves, and this makes me sad.

I will expand on this theme shortly, with evidence.

Fuck you Oprah.

Then they legislated that black was white…

Jason Thibeault,

… and got killed at the nearest zebra crossing.

Texas just hit the trifecta: their board of education just held votes on whether or not the universe is roughly 13.6 billion years old, whether the origin of life is explainable at all via scientific methods, and whether random web sites or scientists know more about climate change. And apparently all of these points, the refuting of well-grounded science on the basis of some contrarian belief systems (guess which!), are a matter of “humility”.

facepalmmotivator

Then they legislated that black was white…

Ding dong, SCO is dead!

Jason Thibeault, 2 Comments

Despite years of protestation from the likes of Rob Enderle and Maureen O’Gara, SCO never had a case. What they had was a windmill (Linux), a dusty set of armor (being their legal theories), a papier-mache lance (their attempt at extorting money from all Linux users for “licensing their proprietary code”), and a mule (being their Unix System V licensed from Novell) to ride on.

Finally, after six years of tying up the courts with their baseless claims that Linux contained proprietary UNIX code inserted into it by IBM, and the countersuit by Novell claiming they did not even have the right to sue for such a thing as they were effectively revoking all SCO’s rights over the code for breach of contract, SCO is being forced to file Chapter 7 after their attempt at Chapter 11 bankruptcy turned out to be such a dismal failure. That’s right, now they’re being forced to sell the computers, laptops, patents, chairs, desks and toilet paper rolls in one big fire sale, then divvy up the money and hand it out to their creditors. Meaning, of course, Novell is not terribly likely to get all the back license fees owed to them when SCO misreported how many licenses they had sold.

Either way, the court case isn’t necessarily dead, so PJ can’t put on her red dress just yet. I want a real resolution to the case so there’s a judgement on the facts that Linux users can point to the next time a Microsoft proxy tries to sue F/LOSS out of existence.

Ding dong, SCO is dead!

The OUT Campaign

Jason Thibeault

I’d been mulling over whether or not to show solidarity with Richard Dawkins’ OUT Campaign by posting a red A, knowing that the last thing atheists are is organized — giving atheists a symbol (and a figurehead “leader” in Dawkins) implies a level of organization that most assuredly isn’t there. It might also make me a target for fundamentalist idiots who consider the mere fact that a person doesn’t believe in God, makes them inferior and worthy of death. (Or at the very least, worthy of being trolled or spammed.)

However, the public at large responds to symbols better than they do the shunning of symbols, plus there’s something deliciously and intentionally ironic about the choice of the Scarlet A as that symbol; and ultimately my posting it is little more than a way to show those of you who are afraid to admit you don’t believe in God that you’re not alone.

Besides, it’s a bit of free advertising. And that can’t hurt. Well, unless my hosting company starts complaining about bandwidth.

The OUT Campaign