I Think It's An Improvement? Maybe?

Usedtabee, when a decent, God-fearing white American committed suicide, you'd get chain letters or emails with the structure of a parent searching the dead child's room and finding a book that wasn't expected:

Jesse Kilgore committed suicide in October by walking into the woods near his New York home and shooting himself. Keith Kilgore said he was shocked because he believed his son was grounded in Christianity, had blogged against abortion and for family values, and boasted he'd been debating for years.

After Jesse's death, Keith Kilgore ... searched Jesse's room and found the book under the mattress ....

Now what do you think Mr. Kilgore had found under his son's mattress?

If this were the 80's, or the 90's, or even sometimes the Aughts, you might expect the parent to have found one of the following:





or even



But what did Mr. Kilgore find under his son's mattress?



I think this might be an improvement? Maybe? Unfortunately, Jesse's still dead, but now the moral Chicken Littles are screaming about a book of substance instead of a harmless, lightweight pastime.

Personally I don't for one second think that The God Delusion alone drove this man to kill himself. He was a veteran, after all; who knows what psychological damage he was dealing with? And we must also consider the source: I found this on Fundies, but they source it to World Net Daily, a known screech rag. It does not present a neutral account of the man's death, instead getting all of its information from the man's father and relatives. They blame all of the man's troubles on his college education and the people he interacted with in school, thereby allowing WND a second target: Atheists and intellectuals. It's like a wingnut's wet dream, two screech targets with one stone.

Nutshell Rand Paul

Your intolerance of private individuals' intolerance is intolerable to me.

That was him, in a letter to the Bowling Green Daily News, which was published in their May 30, 2002 edition.

Young Master Paul was seriously arguing that a society that legislates against discrimination in the private sector is not a free society, while at the same time arguing that the government should not discriminate using taxpayer dollars.

Mr. Paul's house of cards is divided against itself and cannot stand.

Nod to Crooks & Liars and Right Now.

How High Is the Water, Momma?

Watch at YouTube.

Nashville Floods Claim Grand Ole Opry House.

So Nashville is Flooded ... How Can I Help?

Fuckers.

Fox News: Mr. Rogers an "Evil" Man



Their argument goes, Mr. Rogers was always telling children how special they were; these children grew up with humongous egos and a vast sense of entitlement; and now they feel entitled to health care.

Like getting routine wellness care is something you get for outstanding achievement.

Wait: Do the Fox News folks seriously see as one of their lives' achievements the fact that they can afford not to die of something preventable?

Someone Robbed This Woman Of The Fruits Of Her Labor

This poor young woman has spent several years earning one of the highest GPAs in her class, and at this moment captured on film she believes that she has spent that time committing the grave sin of "worshiping the intellectual mind:"



She then asserts that there are people in the audience who have not lived as Jesus has called them to live, prays that they will come to see the error of their ways, breaks into tears, starts shaking uncontrollably, and finally collapses. The video ends with one of the officers of the school asking someone to call an ambulance, and announcing the processional.

The note on the YouTube page says this occurred at Midwestern State University, Texas, and the video was posted to YouTube on January 26, 2010; but there is no other indication of when it occurred.

It is unclear from the video whether the girl in question was the salutatorian or the valedictorian. She's giving a "benediction."

Who messed with her mind so much? It seems a cruel and heartless thing to do, to rob this girl of her achievement and wind her up so much she collapses in public.

Then There Was The Time...

... when Superboy decided, "Oh, to hell with it."


Image: The cover of Superboy #32, in which the Boy of the Future walks along a red carpet towards a throne, an elaborate crown atop his black-with-blue-highlight hair, and is adored by a crowd, prominent among them Ma and Pa Kent who apparently did not foresee this moment and are not, contrary to expectation, utterly appalled.

I Doubt It

There was a little-known, ill-fated, and short-lived attempt in the early 1970s to revive Star Trek as an intergalactic racing show.

Heavily influenced by popular movies such as Cannonball Run and Smokey and the Bandit, and the latest fad from Japan, Speed Racer, the new show would feature Kirk, Spock and McCoy solving mysteries and getting girls along the illegal Federation muscle car street racing circuit.

But then they decided to make the franchise into a Saturday morning cartoon, and it was largely acclaimed as the better choice.

Picture credit: Retrospace Zeta. Sometimes NSFW.

Shorter John Tierney, New York Times

For Earth Day, 7 New Rules to Live By
John Tierney, the New York Times

Foolish Greenies, don't you know that your efforts to forestall Armageddon has ironically made the world a worse place?

Ha Ha Commie Lois Made Corner Bookstore Employees' Children Starve

This might be one iota more amusing if you couldn't imagine Glenn Beck* making this exact same argument in the future.

*To pull an example out of my hat at random.

Stolen from the Comics Curmudgeon.

Late to the (Digital) Party

Okay, so there's this site, Gamecrush.com.

Its business model, at first glance, is hardly new; it provides digital entertainment over the internet for a small fee ($6.60 for the first 10 minutes, $8.25 thereafter).

The digital entertainment it provides, however, is head-to-head games with women gamers. Apparently your fee gets you 500 credits; each 10-minute session costs you 400 of those credits. GameCrush skims 160 credits off the top, the woman gets the remaining 240 credits, and you can "tip" her your remaining 100 credits ... if she has earned them by being hot, playing well, and flirting like mad.

Jesus Christ, people, I thought we were trying to squash the lonely-loser image of people who play video games. Sheesh!

You can read more about this pathetic service, which is currently down and claims to have been overwhelmed by 10,000 page requests in 5 minutes, at Wikipedia -- but hurry, I'm afraid the article has been scheduled for termination.