The Thing about Dark Humor

...is that for it to work, it has to be, you know, humorous. When it isn't, it's merely dark.

Like this (**Warning: graphic violence...don't watch this if kids are around**):



The 10:10 campaign has since pulled the video from its website

But what sort of groupthink went into the making of it in the first place such that no one realized the whole idea was absolutely barking mad?

The Internet: Providing Credulous People Ever More Opportunities to Waste Their Time

In the first scientific experiment to be conducted via the social messaging service, experts will investigate "remote viewing" - the psychic ability to identify distant locations.

Members of the public will be asked to "tweet" their impressions of a randomly chosen spot in the UK visited by one of the researchers.

Then they will vote for which of five photographs on a website shows where the visitor was standing.

The trial will be repeated with visually different locations four times.

HT: Mark Shea

Whither Goeth England?

Words associated with Christianity and British history taken out of children's dictionary

Oxford University Press has removed words like "aisle", "bishop", "chapel", "empire" and "monarch" from its Junior Dictionary and replaced them with words like "blog", "broadband" and "celebrity". Dozens of words related to the countryside have also been culled.

The publisher claims the changes have been made to reflect the fact that Britain is a modern, multicultural, multifaith society.

This Student-Government Should Take Off, Eh?

There are, of course, so many worthwhile charities to support that it's simply impossible to support them all.

But sometimes, the reasons for choosing not to support a given charity are rather doltish:

The student-government association at Carleton University, in Ottawa, is drawing widespread criticism for withdrawing from a nationwide fund raiser for cystic fibrosis after deciding the disease was not “inclusive” enough, The Charlatan, Carleton’s student newspaper, reported.

Freshmen at 65 universities and colleges in Canada have raised millions for the disease over the past 50 years in a traditional event held during student-orientation week. But Carleton will no longer participate, after the association adopted a motion on Monday erroneously stating that the disease “has been recently revealed to only affect white people, and primarily men.” The motion directs student leaders to select a more “broad reaching” charity to support. [source]

I'm Voting for Obama

Because, you know, the Illinois junior senator himself said:

So I am going to try to be so persuasive in the 20 minutes or so that I speak that by the time this is over, a light will shine down from somewhere.

It will light upon you. You will experience an epiphany. And you will say to yourself, I have to vote for Barack. I have to do it.

So I guess I have no choice.

Related

• Na Na Na Na Na Na Na Na Leader



• Other previous related posts here

Guns Don't Kill People; Cartoon Guns on T-Shirts Kill People

Or so some security guard at Heathrow apparently thinks.

[HT: Mark Shea]

The Reinvention of Paul Ehrlich

This email found appeared in my inbox yesterday with the subject line:

40 Years Later – is Paul Ehrlich’s ‘Population Bomb’ Finally Exploding?

Um, no.

But I digress. Here's the email itself:

From: Severn Williams [mailto:sev@sevwilliams.com]
Sent: Wednesday, May 14, 2008 11:35 AM
To: editor@prolifeaction.org
Subject: 40 Years Later – is Paul Ehrlich’s ‘Population Bomb’ Finally Exploding?




May 14, 2008 - Contact: Severn Williams - 510-336-9566


Dear Eric,

He wrote the book that helped launch the modern environmental movement. He is one of the most accomplished - and controversial - scientists of his generation. He has counseled governments, appeared in television shows ranging from documentaries to The Tonight Show, and won a Macarthur Genius Award.

Now, exactly 40 years since the publication of The Population Bomb ignited debate and action around the globe, author and scientist Paul R. Ehrlich is back with a new book, The Dominant Animal: Human Evolution and the Environment.

A quick glance at today's headlines tells the story: world food prices at record levels, increasing conflict over scarce resources, the immediate threat of global climate change, the spread of toxic chemicals into drinking water and food, and more. In short, it looks an awful lot as though the "Population Bomb" Paul Ehrlich warned us of in 1968 is now exploding.

In The Dominant Animal, Paul joins with his wife, Anne H. Ehrlich, a prize-winning scientist herself, to examine this growing crisis - from its roots in human evolution to the failure of modern government to respond. It is a powerful examination of how the humans today are creating the world of humans of tomorrow-and what it will take for our civilization to survive.

The Ehrlichs bring us to the startling realization that our domination of Earth has, in part, prompted a period of rapid change the scope of which the planet has not seen since an asteroid hit the earth 65 million years ago.



Paul Ehrlich is known for his provocative and interesting interviews and his cogent explanations of scientific knowledge. The 40-year anniversary of The Population Bomb and the publication of The Dominant Animal in June provides a great opportunity for an in-depth look at Paul Ehrlich's original warning to the planet in 1968, his legacy, and his continuing work to understand and explain the crisis facing our civilization.

Paul and Anne are available for extensive interviews, profiles, or brief commentary in relation to reporting on broader stories.

Copies of the book can be requested by contacting Severn Williams at 510-336-9566 or sev@sevwilliams.com.



Sincerely,


Severn Williams, Island Press

Paul (Worst. Prognosticator. Ever.) Ehrlich is to demography what the Jehovah's Witnesses are to eschatology.

(To their credit, though, at least the JW's have taken the hint and now no longer attempt to set dates for their apocalyptic predictions.)

Dumbest. Headline. Ever.

From HuffPo:

Pope Should Start "Spiritual Renewal" with Bisexual God

HT: Mark Shea

Thou Shalt, Like, Not Kill, Dude

I defy you to read this story without laughing:

Moses was high on drugs: Israeli researcher

JERUSALEM (AFP) - High on Mount Sinai, Moses was on psychedelic drugs when he heard God deliver the Ten Commandments, an Israeli researcher claimed in a study published this week.

Such mind-altering substances formed an integral part of the religious rites of Israelites in biblical times, Benny Shanon, a professor of cognitive psychology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem wrote in the Time and Mind journal of philosophy.

"As far Moses on Mount Sinai is concerned, it was either a supernatural cosmic event, which I don't believe, or a legend, which I don't believe either, or finally, and this is very probable, an event that joined Moses and the people of Israel under the effect of narcotics," Shanon told Israeli public radio on Tuesday.

Moses was probably also on drugs when he saw the "burning bush," suggested Shanon, who said he himself has dabbled with such substances.

"The Bible says people see sounds, and that is a clasic [sic] phenomenon," he said citing the example of religious ceremonies in the Amazon in which drugs are used that induce people to "see music."

He mentioned his own experience when he used ayahuasca, a powerful psychotropic plant, during a religious ceremony in Brazil's Amazon forest in 1991. "I experienced visions that had spiritual-religious connotations," Shanon said.

He said the psychedelic effects of ayahuasca were comparable to those produced by concoctions based on bark of the acacia tree, that is frequently mentioned in the Bible.

HT: Sean Dailey at Blue Boar

Na Na Na Na Na Na Na Na Leader

When I hear the junior senator from our fair corrupt state say things like this:

So I am going to try to be so persuasive in the 20 minutes or so that I speak that by the time this is over, a light will shine down from somewhere.

It will light upon you. You will experience an epiphany. And you will say to yourself, I have to vote for Barack. I have to do it.

...I can't help but call to mind the time the Simpsons join the Movementarians:

In the episode, a cult called the "Movementarians" takes over Springfield, and Homer and the rest of the Simpson family become members. Homer and Bart are initially introduced to a pair of young Movementarian recruiters in an airport. Homer becomes brainwashed, and moves his family into the cult compound...

Homer takes Bart to the airport to greet the local football team after their championship loss. At the airport, Homer meets Glen and Jane, a pair of recruiters for a new religion called Movementarianism. They invite Homer to an introductory session at their resort, where a number of Springfield residents watch a video about the religion. The video explains that the Movementarians plan to take a spaceship to the planet Blisstonia. They are guided by a mysterious male figure known only as "The Leader." Most of the attendees are brainwashed into worshipping The Leader, but Homer does not pay enough attention to the video to be affected. After trying other methods, Glen and Jane finally convert him by singing the theme to Batman, replacing the word Batman with the word Leader.

BTW, be sure to check out the brilliant (relatively new) blog Is Barack Obama the Messiah?

Hanukkah Candles Are the New SUVs

I'm still not entirely convinced this is for real, but apparently it is.

From the Jerusalem Post:

'Green Hanukkia' campaign sparks ire

In a campaign that has spread like wildfire across the Internet, a group of Israeli environmentalists is encouraging Jews around the world to light at least one less candle this Hanukka to help the environment.

The founders of the Green Hanukkia campaign found that every candle that burns completely produces 15 grams of carbon dioxide. If an estimated one million Israeli households light for eight days, they said, it would do significant damage to the atmosphere.

"The campaign calls for Jews around the world to save the last candle and save the planet, so we won't need another miracle," said Liad Ortar, the campaign's cofounder, who runs the Arkada environmental consulting firm and the Ynet Web site's environmental forum. "Global warming is a milestone in human evolution that requires us to rethink how we live our lives, and one of the main paradigms of that is religion and how it fits into the current situation."

Read the whole thing.

HT: Sean Dailey at Blue Boar

Well, That's One Way to Run a Town

If you didn't know any better, you might guess that this article was actually from The Onion.

But it's not:

Russian Mayor Bans Phrase 'I Don't Know'

MOSCOW — The mayor of a Siberian oil town has ordered his bureaucrats to stop using expressions such as "I don't know" and "I can't." Or look for another job.

Alexander Kuzmin, the 33-year-old mayor of Megion, has banned these and 25 other phrases as a way to make his administration more efficient, his spokeswoman said Tuesday.

"It's a suggestion to the staff that they should think before saying something," Oksana Shestakova said by telephone. "To say `I don't know' is the same as admitting your helplessness."

To reinforce the ban, a framed list of the banned expressions has been hanging on the wall next to Kuzmin's office for the past two weeks, Shestakova said.

Some of the other prohibited phrases are "What can we do?" "It's not my job," "It's impossible," "I'm having lunch," "There is no money," and "I was away/sick/on vacation."

Kuzmin, a businessman who was elected mayor 1 1/2 years ago, wants to "shake things up" in Megion, a town of 54,000 in the Khanty-Mansiisk region, the spokeswoman said.

The region, located some 1,500 miles northeast of Moscow, produces more oil than the rest of Russia combined. As world oil prices have risen sharply in recent years, the region has flourished, and in stark contrast to the rest of the country its population has grown at the rapid rate of more than 7 percent annually.

But construction has not kept pace, and the lack of adequate housing is one of the town's most serious problems, Shestakova said.

"Town authorities are there to make town residents' life comfortable and prosperous," Kuzmin, a trained oil engineer who studied business administration in Canada, said in a statement posted on the town Web site. "Town officials must work out mechanisms to solve and remove problems, not to avoid them."

Officials who disobey the ban while in the mayor's office "will near the moment of their departure," the statement said.

Providing the mayor with wrong or incomplete information, or being late in reporting important information will be considered an attempt to undermine his work, it said.

Anna Borovikova, the mayor's chief of staff, said the novel approach has improved discipline.

"Before, it was so easy to say `I don't know.' Now before reporting to the mayor we prepare several proposals on how one or another problem can be solved," Borovikova said.

At first it was hard to remember not to use the banned expressions, she said, and they "slipped in sometimes."

All I can say is this: Dilbert's co-worker -- the bald guy with glasses (what is his name, anyway?) -- is lucky he doesn't work in this town.