What a frothy douche

Posted on January 2, 2012 by Michael

Rick Santorum, perhaps the easiest Republican to loathe since Satan, has said he would invalidate all gay marriages to this point, given the chance:

In an interview with NBC’s Chuck Todd at his campaign headquarters in Iowa, Santorum said there needs to be one marriage law for all 50 states. When asked if he would make same-sex couples get divorced, he responded, “Well their marriage would be invalid. If the constitution says ‘marriage is this,’ then people whose marriages are not consistent with the constitution … (shrug.) I’d love to think that there was another way of doing it.”

Yep, there is another way. Allow gays to get married since, aside from marriage not even being about procreation anyway, it is illegal to give one group a set of rights whilst simultaneously discriminating against another group for no good reason. That is, after all, the very definition of bigotry.

But hang on, I haven’t even gotten to the best part of Frothy’s hatred:

Santorum said he has hesitations about the Supreme Court taking the decision about marriage away from the people. “32 times marriage has been voted on, in 32 different states from Maine to California, and 32 times marriage has won,” he said. But later in the interview Santorum acknowledged that “just because public opinion says something, doesn’t mean something’s right if it’s not right.”

For someone who hates homosexuals so much, he sure does like to have it both ways.

I’m really excited for the years to come. I can’t wait to see how religious bigots change their arguments from “It’s the will of the people! Listen to the will of the people!” to “Well, what’s right is right.” Santorum seems to have gotten a head start, but I don’t think there can be any doubt that this is the way conservatives will be stating their case in the future. After all, gay marriage will become the law of the land. It may happen in the next few years, or it may happen in 30 years. Either way, it is going to happen (and we will look at today’s laws as we now see anti-miscegenation laws). That means the religious will necessarily need to change their arguments to fit the changing landscape – a landscape on which they will enjoy ever-shrinking relevancy.

Filed under: Same-sex marriage | Tagged: , , , , | 3 Comments »

And if it was all true…

Posted on January 2, 2012 by Michael

Cee-Lo Green, an artist who I think has a pretty good voice, took a big poop all over John Lennon’s “Imagine” during one of those awful New Year’s Eve shows. Instead of saying, “Nothing to kill or die for, and no religion too”, he opted to say, “Nothing to kill or die for, and all religion’s true”. So let’s imagine what that means:

You’ve got Muhammad and Quetzalcoatl fighting the Titans in Valhalla while Vishnu commands the Taurus bull. The Galatic Overlord Xenu is dodging djinns and Anubis to tempt Jesus in the desert before he breeds with giant Aryan women to bring them down to size. Who’s in charge here, Ra, Jehovah, Zeus or Taiyang Shen? Can the light side of the force prevent Cthulhu from bringing Ragnarök to the world, which is made from the dead dragon Tiamat, or will the ancestral spirits and great mother turtle have to create a new one. Do faeries have chakras?

It’s going to take an eternity to sort all of this out.

Filed under: Humor, News, Religions | Tagged: , , , , | Leave a comment »

2011 stats

Posted on January 1, 2012 by Michael

Once again WordPress is wrong about the stats it has for my blog. It says I had about 120,000 hits. Try 138,000. It also says my post about average breast size was my most viewed post of the year. Coming in at number two is an old post about a Hubble contest. This is backwards. And not just by a little – the Hubble post got about 3,000 more hits than the other one. Finally, it says my busiest day was back in May, but this is false. My busiest day was just this month thanks to the Maloney post. I had 2,820 hits that day. (In fact, I had more hits the day after that post than I had on the day in May.)

Anyway. Here is WordPress’s amateurishly done stats summary for FTSOS.

The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2011 annual report for this blog.

Here’s an excerpt:

The Louvre Museum has 8.5 million visitors per year. This blog was viewed about 120,000 times in 2011. If it were an exhibit at the Louvre Museum, it would take about 5 days for that many people to see it.

Click here to see the complete report.

Filed under: Administrative | Tagged: , , , , , | Leave a comment »

Thought of the year

Posted on January 1, 2012 by Michael

Nope. Still no evidence for any gods.

Filed under: Misc | Tagged: | Leave a comment »

FTSOS 2011 in review

Posted on December 31, 2011 by Michael

I blogged. A lot.

That is all.

Filed under: Misc | Tagged: , | 3 Comments »

Catholics, adoption, intolerance, and non-acceptance

Posted on December 31, 2011 by Michael

A friend recently made a post on Facebook where I felt she did not distinguish between intolerance and non-acceptance. I’ve written about the issue before, so I naturally responded. I think it’s more than a mere semantics issue: If we conflate intolerance with non-acceptance, we bring everything into a false equivalence, often causing us to overlook actual issues of intolerance. Let’s take the issue of Catholic adoption agencies in Illinois:

Roman Catholic bishops in Illinois have shuttered most of the Catholic Charities affiliates in the state rather than comply with a new requirement that says they must consider same-sex couples as potential foster-care and adoptive parents if they want to receive state money.

This is blatant intolerance. Rather than continue placing orphaned children into loving homes, these Catholics are actively seeking to impede the rights of others by way of shutting everything down. If they weren’t legally bound, there is no doubt they simply wouldn’t allow gay adoptions at all – ya know, since that’s the sort of intolerance they had been practicing for decades.

As if this wasn’t bad enough, look at the gall of these people:

“In the name of tolerance, we’re not being tolerated,” said Bishop Thomas J. Paprocki of the Diocese of Springfield, Ill., a civil and canon lawyer who helped drive the church’s losing battle to retain its state contracts for foster care and adoption services.

I suppose the Bishop is technically right. No one is willing to tolerate his bigotry, so that is itself a form of intolerance. Of course, this is nothing more than a caveat: Intolerance is unacceptable except where it has a compelling reason. I think that much is implied, assumed, and understood. The Bishop is trying to exploit an unspoken yet implicit issue in order to gain pity for discriminating Catholics. It’s pathetic.

It should be obvious to any thinking person that this really isn’t a matter of mere semantics. If we’re going to allow people to run around, without challenge, claiming they are facing intolerance, as if connotations and implied meaning have no place in language, then real issues of intolerance – such as gays not being allowed to adopt – will have far less impact in the public mind when they are identified and pointed out: the dilution of language is always the dilution of meaning.

via Friendly Atheist.

Filed under: Politics and Social, Religions | Tagged: , , , , , , | 6 Comments »

Awesome

Posted on December 31, 2011 by Michael

Filed under: Hiking | Tagged: | Leave a comment »

Thought of the day

Posted on December 30, 2011 by Michael

I normally stay away from dumb entertainment news, but this is one of those things that actually gives me pleasure: Katy Perry and Russell Brand are divorcing. I don’t like to find pleasure in the misery of others, but I feel that Brand’s shitty, annoying comedy and awful, unbearable accent justify my glee, at least just a little.

Now Carlos Mencia needs to never be hired for any job ever again and I’ll be happy as can be.

Filed under: Misc | Tagged: , | 14 Comments »

Horrible ‘human’ Lawrence Stowe indicted

Posted on December 29, 2011 by Michael

EDIT: See the comments for an update on the near-exoneration of Vincent Dammai.

I’ve been thinking about it. When I first wrote about scam-artist Lawrence Stowe, I called him “a horrible human being”. I now regret that. Allowing him the title of “human” is far too generous. Far, far too generous. Just look at what he did:

Stowe told [CBS’s “60 Minutes”] MS patient that he can reverse her disease with his program of herbs and vitamins to boost the immune system, custom vaccines and stem cell injections. Medical experts say it’s nonsense but it’s the same pitch that we secretly recorded again and again as Stowe claimed to reverse cancer, ALS, MS, Parkinson’s disease and more.

He did this sort of thing to desperate person after desperate person. He scammed people out of their life savings, sometimes putting them into debt and convincing them to sell their homes. He promised cures where there are no cures. He ruined the lives of real humans nearly as much as nature herself was in the process of already doing.

As awful as that all is, there is at least some good news on the horizon:

Three men have been arrested for their participation in a scheme to manufacture, distribute and sell to the public stem cells and stem cell procedures that were not approved by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), United States Attorney Kenneth Magidson announced today along with Assistant Attorney General Tony West of the Department of Justice’s Civil Division, Special Agent in Charge Patrick J. Holland of the FDA—Office of Criminal Investigations (OCI) and Special Agent in Charge Cory B. Nelson of the FBI.

Francisco Morales, 52, of Brownsville, Texas, was arrested by Customs and Border Protection agents pursuant to a arrest warrant late Dec. 22, 2011. He made his initial appearance the following morning at which time he was ordered held without bond. Alberto Ramon, 48, of Del Rio, Texas, and Vincent Dammai, 40, of Mount Pleasant, S.C., were arrested yesterday. Ramon was arrested as he was about to enter his clinic and has already made his initial appearance in Del Rio, while Dammai was arrested in Florence, S.C., and is expected to make his initial appearance in Charleston, S.C., this morning. Lawrence Stowe, 58, of Dallas, Texas, also charged in relation to this case, is considered a fugitive and a warrant remains outstanding for his arrest. The two indictments in this matter, returned Nov. 9 and 10, 2011, have been unsealed by order of the court.

Given the terrible nature of Stowe, it wouldn’t surprise me to learn that he has already packed up his stuff and moved his operation to another part of the world. Fortunately, the thing with criminals is that they almost always slip up. If he is out of the country, he will return at some point. He can’t hide from his lies and crimes forever.

via SCmom.

Filed under: News, Pure bullshit | Tagged: , , , , , | 6 Comments »

Awesome videos

Posted on December 28, 2011 by Michael

I don’t really have any good context for posting these three videos other than that I find them neat and it’s my blog. So there.

First up is a 1000fps video of a slinky being dropped:

I love this next one. A Montana man was caught with about enough weed on him to roll a joint. For whatever reason he was going to be put on trial instead of given a pat on the butt and a reminder to buckle up. However, it was not possible to proceed with any due process because the judge was unable to find a jury willing to convict. And I don’t mean there was a hung jury or something like that. No, no, no, it’s even greater. When asked if they would be willing to convict someone of such a crime, potential jurors simply said “no”.

This last one is great, even if I did find it by clicking a link with that odious word “patriarchy” in it. I suspect this little girl will go far:

Filed under: Misc | Tagged: , , , , | 6 Comments »

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