Anxious Mo-Fo

A parody of a Jack Chick tract, in which I replaced the captions and the last page. The original is called “The Little Ghost”.

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An elderly couple lost their life savings because of a small amount of marijuana:

Last summer, two violent intruders broke into [Luther and Meredith Hicks'] house. Luther and his son fought with the burglars. After his son was stabbed, Luther broke free, got his gun and saved the family by shooting one of the intruders and scaring the other off…

The police entered the house and discovered the family safe. Because a small amount of marijuana was inside the home - used by Luther to ease his painful arthritis, hip replacement and shingles - the officers decided to confiscate Meredith and Luther’s entire life savings, more than $400,000.

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He said he would like to cut Obama’s nuts off. Now that’s hardcore.

The Washington Post and the New York Times have said that Jackson made a crude comment, while leaving the comment itself unspecified. Well, here’s The Economist’s Democracy in America blog setting things straight:

At issue was a series of Cosybesque speeches before black audiences, in which he had decried the prevalence of absent fathers in African American communities “I’d like to cut his nuts out [sic]“, Mr Jackson concluded.

And Daily Kos:

Apparently after an interview with a fox news correspondant, Jesse Jackson (who thought his mic was off) said “See, Barack’s been talking down to black people … I want to cut his nuts off.”

Follow the Daily Kos link above for video, if you are so inclined.

That’s a thumbnail of a panel from his tract, The Last Generation. And it gets even better.

But I can raise the specter of this as leverage to convince her to let me get a six foot wide print of dogs playing poker:

Choosing a fresco from the façade of a Pompeian shop which depicts an ass mounting a lion and a figure of Victory crowning the triumphant ass, [John R. Clarke] reviews the various academic interpretations which, in their different ways, have managed to turn a blind eye to the ludicrous sexual topsy-turvy of the scene. One particularly opaque analysis relates it to a modern Sicilian folk tale about an ass and a lion trying to cross a river together. Another reads it as a visual metaphor for the victory at the Battle of Actium in 31 BC of Octavian, the ass, over Mark Antony, who had used the image of a lion on some of his coins—so transforming “an embarrassingly dirty sexual image into an almost clean allegory of a historical event.”

From Mary Beard’s Isn’t it Funny, in the New York Review of Books.

I don’t think she’ll let me hang this, either.

Link, stolen from Pharyngula.

Andrew Sullivan received a missive from a reader which reads, in part:

I hesitate to use the “atheist” label not because I’m ashamed of my lack of belief. Instead, I do so because the label has acquired a life of its own out of my control.

For example, many critics of the godless have successfully attached intolerance, amorality, immorality, fundamentalism, dogmatism, as well as evangelism to the simple lack of theistic belief. In fact, many people I otherwise respect quite a bit (ahem) have even served up the canard that those united only by a lack of positive belief in God can be aggregated just as reasonably as those united by an enormous suite of shared positive beliefs. This results in lumping godless people like me together with Stalin or Hitler as surely as it would lump Spanish Inquisitors with modern Catholics. Is it any wonder then that people like me would try to avoid a category that would be used against us in this way?

Sullivan’s anonymous reader does not specify how he she identifies herself, or provide a solution for the problem he or she describes. This is remarkably like the kind of person who refrains from calling herself a liberal because of the (successful) attempts of conservatives to define the word. Regardless of what some might think the word atheist means, I call myself an atheist because the word is unambiguous and accurate. I lack belief in God; I’m not theist; therefore, I’m atheist. An advantage of the word “atheist” is that “a-” prefix: Atheism is not a something; it’s a lack of a something. It is not a creed or dogmatism of its own, but a rejection of a set of creeds and dogmatisms*.

Your neighborhood Christian apologist might think, or at least claim, that because I’m an atheist, I am joyless and arrogant, I’m dogmatic and evangelical, I look down my nose with disdain at benighted, ignorant believers**, and I agree with everything Richard Dawkins says. But that doesn’t mean any of that is true, and, moreover, I like the English language too much to abandon a word as unambiguous and accurate as “atheist” in favor of refraining from self-identification, or an ugly and ambiguous term.

Maybe, if we didn’t call ourselves atheists, religious apologists would somehow not notice that there exist people who don’t believe in God, and refrain from lumping them all together with a convenient label for the purpose of arguing against them. We should imagine them shaking their fists in impotent fury, unable to argue against atheism because those slippery devils used a different word, or no word at all. Or not.

* There are, obviously, atheist dogmatisms, Communism being the worst example.

** Honesty compels me to admit that I do look down my nose with disdain at young earth creationists.

One morning last month, [9-year-old] Arwa Abdu Muhammad Ali walked out of her husband’s house here and ran to a local hospital, where she complained that he had been beating and sexually abusing her for eight months… She was the second child bride [in Yemen] to come forward in less than a month; in April, a 10-year-old named Nujood Ali had gone by herself to a courthouse to demand a divorce, generating a landmark legal case.

Link.

And encountered a Lego madeleine which, as it happens, functions quite nicely as a madeleine for me, too: the Lego Space Galaxy Explorer.

I turned around and I saw what she had in her hands: the Lego Space Galaxy Explorer… And then it hit me… A wave of emotions took control, hitting my head like a Lego Airbus 380. Dozens of images started to appear in my head, Polaroids of Xmas and birthdays that I thought were faded, completely fresh, color-corrected, and restored by the damn Lucasfilm for a Blu-ray re-release… There was my mother and father—who built a huge Lego ferris wheel and the Blue Train for us when we were too young to build it, then never stop giving us new sets every year—and then my two brothers and my sister, playing on the rug, building all kind of new and wonderful constructions populated by the strangest creatures. And that smell. The perfect smell of Lego bricks.

I had that set when I was a kid. Please, stop me before I find it and purchase it on eBay.

Link.

But how can you not want to see a movie which includes a scene like this?

That’s Angelina Jolie, laying on the hood of a moving car, firing a gun. Completely, utterly ridiculous - and awesome! The image is a thumbnail of an image from IMDB’s photo gallery from the movie.