Tag Archives: wtf

World news: NASA Sensors Detect Barking Moonbats

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Yesterday, NASA’s LCROSS mission impacted the moon at high speed.

The purpose of the mission was to create a large plume of dust from impacting the bottom of a deep cater near the moon’s south pole so that the plume could be analyzed for signs of water ice. In that particular respect, it went swimmingly, no pun intended.

However, the mission also revealed something totally unexpected–a treasure trove of barking moonbats here on planet earth. The moonbats have set up a Web site in which they claim the LCROSS mission is a part of a conspiracy by a “powerful syndicate of military-industrial criminals” that was “inspired by fanatical terrorist airline hijackers” to bomb the moon. From the Web site:

Of course, there is much more behind this attack than casual scientific curiosity on whether or not there is water on the Moon. First of all, since the long-range accuracy of intercontinental ballistic missiles has never been proven to work, the LCROSS suicide mission serves as a live-fire test exercise for US war strategists with an interest in the precision of orbiting satellite weapons—in other words, the southern hemisphere of the Moon will be turned into a firing range, making this mission one giant leap for the global reach of space warfare. Secondly, LCROSS has been promoted as “the vanguard” for the US military-industrial-entertainment complex’s return to the Moon—according to NASA, finding water is a necessary first step for “building a long-term and sustainable human presence” there. Historically, the purpose of exploration has always been the exploitation of resources and the colonization of territory without regard for ecosystems or indigenous peoples, and clearly the Moon is the next territory coveted by imperialists.

This so-called “NASA experiment” is a hostile act of aggression and a violent intrusion upon our closest and dearest celestial neighbor. Does any love song or poem or fairy tale worth its salt not mention the Moon? Who can take a walk in the Moonlight with a lover and not feel the romance to your very soul? At night, when the Moon rules, we sleep, and we can visit the Moon in our sleep with ease. The Moon is our night light, our blanket, our grandmother, our mother—it is woman, child, domestic life, tides, bodies of water, liquids, circulation, comfort, nurturing, paintings by Remedios Varo, stories by Jules Verne, and so much more.

It’s not entirely clear to me that the authors of this Web site understand what the word “ecosystem” means or why the moon doesn’t have one, but I’m particularly curious about who, exactly, the indigenous peoples in question are.

On the bright side, at least they’re not trying to deny that we ever landed on the moon at all…

List o’ Linky-Links, Christian Fundamentalist Edition

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My browser has 32 open windows, so you all know what that means: time for another list of Linky-Links, where we see who fed it and who ate it all across the Whacky Wide Web!

This episode seems to have a special theme: those whacky Christian fundamentalists, up to their silly hijinks in their classic laugh-a-minute way that we all know and love.

So without further ado, on to the links!

First up, we have this breaking news from Muckflash: Christian Group to Produce Clean Pornography.

The group, recently incorporated as the Southern Coalition for Progressive and Pure Change (an obscure sub-branch of the International Congress of Church and Ministries), will pay for the production of 5 films which they say will act as a “stepping stone away from iniquity” as viewers use the films as an intermediate step as they “switch paths from the sexually impure world of the devil to the white shining path of the Lord.”

“We’re envisioning a kind of ‘nicotine patch’ for the tortured souls that struggle in this world to find a Christian voice in the midst of a popular culture that has lost the Word of God in a heathen cacophony of selfish desire,” said Reverend Dr. Stanley Lovett, Founder and Executive Director of SCPPC.

Let’s not forget the subtext of racism and good old-fashioned slave-era stereotypes about blacks, which tend to follow conservative Christianity like flies following a charnel wagon:

Dr. Lovett was willing to give a general description of the the first film, however. According to Lovett, Jodie and the Great Black Whale will feature an 18 year old missionary in Jamaica who is swayed by native temptors into working as an exotic dancer.

And just in time, too, because over at the God and Science site, we learn that pornography leads to sex with robots, and sex with robots leads to the extinction of the human race.

The data underlying the “radical” predictions laid out in this page come from scientific studies that have examined the pervasiveness and effects of pornography upon men and women. In particular, recent data show widespread acceptance of pornography among today’s young adults as “an acceptable way to express one’s sexuality.”1 For males the acceptance rate is 67% compared to 37% for their fathers. Among young adult women the acceptance rate is 49% compared to 20% among their mothers. So, the rate of acceptance of pornography has doubled in just one generation. When those young adults raise their own children, the acceptance rate will probably be greater than 80% for both males and females. The step between watching pornography through technology and engaging in sex acts through an attractive technological object is not that far, especially when the object acts as if it were a real human being.

I don’t know what’s more silly about this article–the notion that human beings don’t actually sex out to have babies and certainly won’t go out of their way to have one if there’s a convenient, non-baby-making alternative, or the even more insulting notion that human relationships are a dismal, unhappy affair, filled with complication and weighed down by erratic, moody women, and that anyone who could skip the whole sordid mess by having sex with robots would never want human companionship.

The Religious Right truly is the village idiot of American culture. These guys never cease to blow my mind with their bizarre misunderstanding of basic human emotion. They really, truly do not get it, on a level that borders on autistic.

Oh, and anti-intellectualism. Mustn’t forget anti-intellectualism. Over on the NY Times Stanley Fish blog comes this astonishing condemnation of intellectual enquiry, Does Curiosity Kill More than the Cat?

Most conservative Christians seem content to keep anti-intellectualism as the subtext of their basic world view. Not so for Stanley, who puts it right out there:

In short, curiosity — sometimes called research, sometimes called unfettered inquiry, sometimes called progress, sometimes called academic freedom — is their God. The question, posed by thinkers from Aquinas to Augustine to Newman to Griffiths, is whether this is the God — the God, ultimately, of self — we want to worship.

And finally, PZ Myers posted this little gem, which neatly sums it all up:

Marketing Claims FTW

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Last night, zaiah and I went shopping at Target for curtains for our new house.

There are, as it turns out, a bewildering array of different kinds of curtains, in different patterns and textures, almost all of which are stunningly ugly.

One brand of curtain carried by Target is Eclipse brand curtains, which are entirely opaque and block out…well, let me show you. Apologies for the poor quality of the image; it came from my iPhone. The bit I’ve circled in red is the interesting bit.

High Weirdness of the Week: Lawson’s Vaginal Washer

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From the depths of Victorian sexual prudery comes this device, the Lawson’s Vaginal Washer, designed to clean the inside of one’s vagina by means of a perforated water-spraying tube surrounded by–and I shudder to say this–rotating squeegee scrapers.

I can think of about a dozen uses for this in a BDSM context right off the top of my head. Just over half of them involve joreth. That brings two questions to mind:

1. Anyone know some person in the Portland/Seattle area with the necessary craft skills to build one of these?

and

2. Hey joreth, when are you coming to visit?

Strange things this morning

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So David and I walked down to the car this morning to head in to the office, and David noticed a folded scrap of paper tucked in the window.

Now, my first thought when there’s a note stuck to my car is always “Oh, no, someone ran into my car in the parking lot.” I don’t know why that’s my first thought, since to date I’ve found a grand total of three notes on my car in my entire life and not one of them was about an accident, but there it is.

Anyway, this note was not, in fact, about someone ramming me in the parking lot. Or maybe it was; it’s hard to tell:

Though honestly, I think it’s more likely that it was aimed at David than at me.

I can’t give you any rational reason for it, but I have a feeling that this note was more likely written by a man than a woman. I could be wrong, but it feels that way…

This, apparently, has been an ongoing issue with David, as well–he tends to get hit on by a lot of guys. I might be being unreasonably modest in assuming that the note’s intended for him but not me, though in all honesty I have to say he’s most likely the “hot” one:

So the stress and poor sleep continues…

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…and with it, the unreasonably vivid dreams.

Which, in this case, apparently offer me the history of cinematography for the next century. Apparently, in 2101, I am to be assigned the task of writing a book on the top 100 movies of the past century (2000-2100). You will no doubt be relieved to know, Gentle Readers, that Watchmen made the cut.

Among the more interesting:

The top movie of 2039, surprisingly, was the surrealistically violent, surrealistically explicit Strength, a highly stylized movie billing itself as “inspired” by the life of the Viking king Canute the Great. It was originally released in 2037 under the name Strength Over Ice as a sprawling 3 hour and 20 minute epic, and was critically panned; Strength Over Ice was a box-office flop. In 2039, an edited, streamlined 2-hour version of the movie was re-released under the new title and became an unexpected hit.

The only documentary to make the list was 2057’s Like Neighbors, an account of the brutal murder in 2032 of Kenneth Lanton at the hands of a group of eight members of the theocratic American Dominion Party for alleged “offenses against sexual decency”, and the backlash that it triggered which eventually led to the loss of all six Senate seats held by the party and to the dissolution of the party itself in 2049. When Like Neighbors was released, a handful of theaters refused to show it because the movie contains footage of the murder itself, taken by one of the attackers.

I need to go to bed earlier.

I know folks who’d fuck this light

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Saturday, my roommate and I went to see the new X-Men movie.

This isn’t a post about that movie, except to say horrible movie was horrible, it’s boringly, tediously predictable, and Rorschach would have dropped him down an elevator shaft.

We got our tickets early, expecting a sell-out crowd (which never materialized; the theater was only about a quarter full), and then spent a little bit of time wandering around the tiny strip mall where the theater is located.

There’s a kitchen and bath shop right next to the theater, and in the showroom they have the most amazing chandelier. And I mean that in the worst possible way.

It’s a crappy picture, taken as it was through the window into a darkened store with my iPhone. Still, I think it gets the general idea across.

The chandelier is huge, and is made of an enormous lump of glass with long tentacles coming out of it. And, I want to add, each of those tentacles has a knob on the end of it. An oblong, rounded knob.

This is a lamp for people who really, really, really love their Japanese tentacle porn. This is a lamp that would, were it not chained down, be able to fuck half a dozen schoolgirls in every available orifice simultaneously, without breaking a sweat.

This is the lamp you’d see in the main foyer of a Japanese tentacle demon’s house, assuming they had houses (which they don’t) and used chandeliers (which they also don’t). This lamp is not so much a source of illumination as it is a tribute to Legend of the Overfiend and La Blue Girl wrought in extruded glass and electricity. This lamp is the stuff of nightmares, or perhaps of erotic dreams if Hentai tentacoo wape is your thing. Merely sleeping under this lamp opens a doorway to Realms Beyond, filled with unspeakable horrors desiring to do unspeakable things to nubile flesh.

I think I want it.

Dreaming of Kinky Sex and Computer Security

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These days I’ve been working rather a lot more than I’d really prefer to, and been dealing with rather a lot more stress than I might be wanting, so I haven’t been sleeping well.

When I do sleep well, I rarely remember my dreams, and those I do remember are fairly prosaic, like trying to catch the bus and then realizing as I’m running down the street that I’m in my underwear, that sort of thing.

When I’m stressed and sleeping poorly, on the other hand…

Jenna Jameson, leet computer hacker and hardware wizard extraordinaireWhen I’m stressed and sleeping poorly, my dreams are vivid, complex, and bizarre. Like the one last night, which involved Jenna Jameson, my sweetie joreth, lolitasir, an unsecured fiber optic junction box, a BDSM convention, two other unnamed porn stars, a set of railroad tracks, a disposable Bic pen, a laser pointer, a fishing tackle box full of needles, Walgreen’s drug store, and group sex.

And to be quite honest, I don’t even really know who Jenna Jameson is, other than she either does or did at one time do porn. I didn’t even know what she looks like ’til I Googled her just now. Apparently, that’s her there on the left.

As far as my subconscious mind is concerned, she’s a computer hacker with mad leet skillz.

But maybe I should back up a little.

The dream started simply enough–joreth and I driving together to a BDSM convention. The thing about dreams is that the laws of physical reality don’t apply; within the dream world, I can become other characters, ignore laws of physics, change my shape, become invisible, fly through a tie-dyed sky, all manner of things.

Some things are universal constants, inviolate even in the realm of dreams. One of those is that I have a lousy sense of direction.

So naturally we got lost on the way to the convention–so lost that at one point I decided the only way to find the hotel was to drive along the train tracks to get there. There was, you see, a train station right in front of the place–and happily, we arrived at the same time the train did. I parked behind the train, it disgorged a carload of porn stars and the computer hacker Ms. Jameson, and we went inside…

…to discover the hotel was sold out.

But no matter! The porn stars and Ms. Jameson invited us to stay in their room.

We followed them up to the room, and Cut for kinky imaginary sex and computer trespass