FIREBLIND.COM

According to this link, Muslim astronauts have received guidance on how to best be Muslim in space. One of the problems they face is how to pray while facing Mecca, something they’re supposed to do here on earth.

It seems to me that praying while facing Mecca would be incredibly easy in orbit: you simply pray “down”. It’s not like the earth is behind you and you don’t know it.

Me, floating in space: Hmmm…I wonder where the earth went. Last time I checked I was orbiting it.

Earth, sneaking up on me: BOO!!!!!

Me: Zoiks!

I’ve always thought the proscription to pray towards Mecca was rather silly. In what possible way could Allah care which direction you’re facing? After all, it’s not like he’s hanging out in the Ka’bah, sucking some kind of power out of all the prayers flowing in his direction. Or, maybe he is and I’m a jackass making fun of Allah and his house box. Either way, I win, since my place has more square footage and I’m not even a son of god, let alone a god.

I wonder if this means Islam won’t be around for future space exploration. If we’re 40 bajillion miles away, do you just float in the direction of earth and hope that your prayer beam shoots all over Allah’s face and not the face of some other planet’s deity? Or, do you realize how silly it is and forget it altogether?

Or, how about the habit of fasting between sunrise and sunset during Ramadan? Once you hit orbit, sunrise and sunset don’t exist. If you move into another solar system, do you switch suns, or do you keep your Swatch Watch set to earth time? (editor’s note: Oh man, do I wish I still had my green Swatch Watch.)

Once we move away from our little planet, all the stupid minor struggles and inane requirements that make up religion become completely irrelevant.

I had a funny ending, but I got tired and forgot it. Oh well. Such is the life of a sexy pirate. Sometimes the grog and women get to you. That, and reading Goofus and Gallant in my back issues of Highlights magazine.

Tomorrow there’s supposed to be another funtastic illegal immigrant protest. Both sides are spewing major rhetoric in the buildup. I heard one soundbite in which a young female decries being treated as “second-class”, while I’ve heard others containing white men more or less declaring that the illegals “took our jobs”.

On the one hand, not being a citizen is the very definition of being second class. The majority of rights, benefits, and privileges to to those who are citizens. The second level of the same goes to those who immigrate legally, with the least amount of privilege going to those who immigrate illegally. That’s just the way it works; I don’t make the rules, I just report them in a funky, radical kind of way.

Anyways, I’d like to make two points that I’ve probably already made elsewhere. But, since Jessica Simpson likes to hear me talk, I’ll say them again.

Point the first: the above cited female is somewhat justified in her criticism of the treament of illegals, especially in SoCal where I’m from. Sure, a LOT of illegals engage in crime and depend heavily on government programs (i.e. “taxes”) to get by. But, a significantly larger number work their bloody brown asses off to make the Californian economy go ’round. And by and large, most of our illegals are decent people. As much as we depend on many of them, it sucks that they get crapped on by so many people. If we really do need their labor and their buying habits to keep the economy churning, be fair and let more get in here legally.

Point the second: the above notwithstanding, illegal immigrants have caused a significant amount of harm to many parts of the country. Their population centers tend to be high density, high crime, high poverty, high tax infusion areas (public services). All that combines to make life worse for everyone that is here legally and who pay their fair share of taxes, including other Mexican and Central American immigrants. Heck, even the “decent’ illegals need to be able to work, and they often do that by stealing social security numbers, which screws the innocent person on the other end.

(Before DP [whom I admire more than almost anyone] can say it’s the victim’s fault for not checking their credit report often enough, let me say this: stating that identity theft is the victim’s fault is like saying a diner’s at fault for not jumping fast enough when Oldie McRetard drives through the window of a Burger King.)

In short, it pisses me off that everyone stacks up on one side of the issue and is dishonest about the totality of it all. Grow up, jerkwads.

On a different note, I didn’t realize until recently that I felt this way, but I might agree that it’s time to stop granting citizenship to any kid squeezed out of a vagina onto American soil. I’m not sure where that law came from, but it doesn’t make much sense in our modern state of 300 million people. If nothing else, it really screws up our ability to have a proper debate on immigration; after all, when was the last time you tried to sort out the legality of an illegal married couple and their eleventy legal kids?

In conclusion, build a wall, stop creating anchor babies, and stop crapping on good, hardworking immigrants simply because they’re here illegally. Have a real debate on the real issues for once. Oh, and in double conclusion: buy me a bag of pretzels. But not the peanut butter kind. Those suck.

Back in my younger days, I used to read a Christian publication put out by a guy named Chuck Missler. I don’t recall the name now, but it was kind of a small Christian version of Reader’s Digest with a Cloak and Dagger twist. For example, on one page you might read an inspirational story about a woman honoring god through the gift of bake sales, and on another, you might read about how the UN is building up its military presence in the US in an effort to let the antichrist take over American discos, or something like that.

Basically, he claimed to have “sources”, and these “sources” (if you make your fingers into quote marks when you say “sources”, it sounds cooler) were always leaking things that no one could possibly believe, but which sounded kinda plausible because they involved missiles and weird looking guys from foreign countries. Like this guy:

In looking around youtube after the famous Kirk Cameron Banana Incident of Ought-Seven (which actually happened yesterday, and wasn’t really an incident), I found this chestnut. Please, enjoy yourself. We’ll resume our pleasantries afterwards.

Before I get to the heart of my argument, let me say one thing: the fact that the blond woman is standing in what looks like a court room has totally sold me on Jesus. That, and for being a crazy middle-aged woman, she’s not bad. I wonder if she’s single….

I digress. My point is this: even after I stopped being a believer, I still held Chuck Missler in relatively high esteem. The guy is highly intelligent and tends to make good points. But this video demonstrates that to be false. Chuck Missler has broken my heart. He is a complete fraud of an intellectual.

Because I’m already bored, I’ll quickly list the problems with the video:

• Just because the crazy old man in the bad suit at the beginning says that theories of life are fairytales doesn’t make them so.
• Science holds that life can arise spontaneously, but that there are probably limited conditions in which it can do so.
• Peanut butter is not an ideal climate for the spontaneous creation of life. But jelly is! That’s a little known scientific fact.
• Science doesn’t state that the first signs of life that appear are multi-cellular organisms that should be readily visible to the naked eye. Rather, the foundations of life arise out of atomic and sub-atomic patterns that over time might barely be able to replicate themselves. For all we know, the creation of peanut butter might actually be creating the atomic building blocks of life and that by eating a PB&J, we’re essentially performing an abortion. A creamy, crunchy, good-for-you abortion.

Technically speaking, it’s entirely possible that the building blocks of life could be popping up all over the place but are being eradicated too quickly to take hold.

It is complete and utter bloody nonsense to suggest that evolutionary theory contends that we should find well-defined, highly evolved life when we pop open a can of peanut butter. That Chuck Missler would even suggest that this is the case makes him look like the worst kind of idiot. He should know better. Any 9th-grade drop-out with even basic reading comprehension could tell you that this is not what evolution is about.

Seriously. Nuts to Chuck Missler. He should be ashamed of himself. He’s smart enough to know what a bloody straw man argument is.

(For a funny spin on this, watch Pasta Sauce: The Creationist’s Nightmare

As usual, that headline is a bit misleading, but since Kirk Cameron is in the video, and since he’s the bigger name, I’ll call him a retard. Ray Comfort is too. Oh, and nice ’stache.

While you watch this video, I’m going to go put on a pot of my famous downhome coffee and savor its deep, aromatic flavor that whispers of the subdued beauty of the Columbian cocaine forests.

Oh…hello. I didn’t see you there. Done with the movie already? Are you having nightmares about the banana?

There are buttloads of retorts to this moronic film. Here are two:

A quick, short video

and

A longer, though much funnier and more insightful video

Hopefully, you’re intelligent enough to be able to see the sheer stupidity of this video. If not, and if you’re too lazy to watch one of the above clips, pretend you’re not lazy and read this: the banana in the video is one of the worst possible examples they could have picked.

For starters, the banana most of us know and love/hate was not created by Jimbo (the nickname I think god would give himself), but rather is the product of thousands of years of cultivation by man.

Second, the famous modern banana (the “dessert” banana) cannot exist without the hand of man, as it produces no viable offspring on its own but instead requires careful shoot cultivation. Without man, the dessert banana dies, as it might do soon.

Third, wild bananas look nothing like the human-evolved dessert bananas (the ones Jimbo created), and instead are often strangely shaped and bad tasting.

So to repeat: Kirk Cameron is a damned idiot. Why pick the one plant known more than any other to be an evolved species shaped entirely by man? Oh, and Ray Comfort, you’re dumb too. Also, nice ’stache (again). I bet the boys at the club go crazy for the accent.

Wait, one more time: you both are the stupidest idiots in the world. The dessert banana, hand crafted by man and unable to reproduce is the perfect work of god? That’s like saying the Ford Focus is the BOB-DAMNED PINNACLE of BOB-DAMNED TWENTIETH-CENTURY ENGINEERING!!!!!!!!!!!! YOU MEAN IT HAS A STEERING WHEEL AND IT’LL BREAK DOWN EVERY 10,000 MILES???!??!?!? WHAT A MIRACLE!!!!! THAT IS THE BEST BOB-DAMNED THING I HAVE EVER HEARD! THAT IS EVEN BETTER THAN THE SPACE SHUTTLE, WHICH HAS NEVER BEEN OFFERED IN MULTIPLE COLORS INCLUDING FLAMING YELLOW!!!!!!!!!!!! RAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA! (Calming down…deep breaths….)

………………………

The quote at the end of the video about the perfection of creation testifying to the talent of Jimbo is a lark. A real hoot. A reeeeeeaaaal slap on the ol’ back, eh pal? Like the longer clip above explains, how about poisonous plants like the potato or the onion, or even the acorn? That pineapple is also a real convenient treat. You only have to climb a 20-foot tall tree and hack at it until you get to the innards, which will give you diarrhea if you eat too much of it. “Thanks god for the squirts!”

How about the fact that every bloody animal in creation is trying to rip the innards out of something else living? I can only imagine how much the zebra heralds the beauty of the lion as it slowly has the life squeezed out of it. Nevermind that it’s leaving little Timmy zebra behind to fend for himself in the seedy world of the big city with its “TV” and its “voting rights for women” (take care of your sister Timmy!), those sharp claws are a damned fine invention!

Christianity and god seem awesome when you only pick out the good things, and seem downright perfect when you pick an engineered specimen. Why doesn’t Kirk Cameron make a video called “Down Syndrome: Every Parent’s Dream”? If he can pull that off and still tell me that it makes atheists look stupid, by golly, I’ll give up my wicked ways and go to mosque again.

Actually, it’s not. I’m being a bit trite. Atheism is pretty harsh, but in the end, it is a far more magnanimous and benevolent way of living than religion creates.

Either rent it, or buy it. Now. It’s easily one of the best films released in the last few years. If nothing else, see it only for the moment where Will Ferrell’s character brings Maggie Gyllenhaal a present. Probably the most clever scene in any film of the last 2 decades.

We all know the story of the Garden of Eden: God creates stuff, god forbids stuff, the snake tricks Eve into eating from the Tree of Knowledge, Adam and Eve go to college to learn how to sew and make clothing from fig trees, God punishes them and the snake.

There are a number of things I find cute about the first few chapters of Genesis, but I want to point out two here. First, the Bible says that the serpent was the most cunning of all the animals. Second, after the whole big to-do, God tells the serpent that his offspring will be forced to crawl on the ground.

That’s it!

The snake is pretty much responsible for every single act of pain and suffering in the world since then, and all he has to do is slither around on his belly. Humans? In addition to horrible diseases, warfare, tsunamis, etc, they also get to go to Hell. Sounds like God and the serpent had a little side thing going on….

But I digress. What I wanted to say was that it’s funny that all of snakedom was punished because one snake decides to get all uppity and overthrow everything that God slaved away on. You think that A) God could have created dumber snakes, or B) more intelligent humans. Or, for that matter, he could have avoided the whole debacle by you know…NOT putting a Tree of Knowledge in the garden. Nevermind that he imagined light and magically made stuff appear out of nowhere: throw in a snake with an IQ of 85 and everything falls to pieces. I can see God now: “Oh noes!!1! How could I forget about the cunning snake? All my plans, ruined! If only I could see the future, nothing like this would have happened! Oh…what a world!”

Note that the Bible does not say that the devil tempted Eve. It’s clearly a smart (talking!) animal acting of its own volition. By the way, who taught the snake about good and evil?

One final thing: why punish every serpent for this one serpent’s crimes? Probably because the big G-O-D seems to like punishing everyone and everything when a couple of people make mistakes. Adam and Eve eat from a forbidden tree? Why not give some little African kid AIDS and then let the vultures eat his carcass when his mom starves to death? We should probably hack off his father’s arms when a roving militia comes into town too! A bunch of adults turn away from God? Why not drown everyone on earth, including newborn babies and animals in the Great Flood? A pharaoh starts acting like a jerk to Moses? Hmmmm…let’s see…what’s a good punishment? I know! How about killing all the innocent firstborn children? After that, we can give everyone else boils. Nevermind that it’s one guy being a dick; we’ll let everyone starve and suffer horrible pain. Hooray!

Or, how about this chestnut: a king hears that a messiah was born. Why not let him slaughter all the innocent male children in Bethlehem? That should make everyone happy!

I guess what I’m trying to say is, Go Team God! You’re super awesome!

I listen to talk radio a lot. Not as much as the old guy with the big mustache down the street who swears NASA talks to him on his ham radio, but a fair amount of my drive-time is spent listening to tinny AM stations. One of the constant themes is global warming, and on the more conservative stations, how stupid the idea of global warming is.

Granted, the incredibly good-looking jury in my head is still out on whether climate change is caused as much by us (humankind) as we think it is, but I’m very open to the idea. After all, the research for GW is being conducted by some of the most brilliant minds to ever walk the earth using the best technology ever seen. At the very least, I can say that there is incredibly strong intellectual evidence to find a correlation between the stuff we do and climate change.

You would never know this, however, by listening to conservative talk radio. The way these guys talk, you would think GW research is being conducted by blind, semi-retarded anarchist high school students who would like nothing better than to bring down the “Amerikan” economy. (See what I did there? I spelled “America” with a “k”. Take that, Big Business!)

It’s as if Global Warming has driven over to your parent’s house in it’s 1969 Corvette with its sexy hairy chest, climbed in through the second-story window using the ivy on the front porch, and is now having its way with your smokin’ hot and fully-developed, though ignorant and gullible 16-year-old sister. Hey, at least he’s assistant manager at the KFC.

In any event, all i really wanted to say is this: if the scientists are wrong, so what? We’ll have reduced pollution, decreased the pressure on natural resources, and developed much more efficient and long-term energy sources. We’ll make more jobs in the industries that develop the new technologies to replace the jobs lost in the old industries. Maybe I’ll even eventually get my stupid flying car.

On the other hand, if they’re right, and we don’t do this stuff, your sister’s not the only one who’s gonna get screwed. (Editor’s note: Zing!)

Not that anyone reads my little piece of tripe, but I had to change things around so that people have to register in order to comment now. I got like 40 pieces of junk posts today, including offers for free Xanax, Viagra, rape videos, kites, etc. Always with the kites. Don’t they know that children might see these posts?