More link n’ load tonight. (Lock and link? Nah. )

First, one I have had hanging about and mixing with the wrong crowd in my browser for almost a week now, the charming story of a family of four that went for a little bit of a walk down the road.

Completely bare-ass naked.

This is a highly quotable article. For example :

Another witness, Charlotte resident Jill Mead, told the paper that the sight “blew [her] mind.”

Really, dear? That’s all it takes to blow your mind? The sight of an old lady, her daughter, a toddler, and an infant walking down the road in the State of Grace, clad in glory, popped your noodle?

I find that adorable. But then again, I have lived with nudists and I am a sexually deviant pervert. So my frame of reference might be a little different.

Here’s one from the officer in charge of the case, Captain Rod Farley, regarding the conclusions drawn from the medical and psychological examination of the two adults :

“It didn’t appear that they had any problems short of that they didn’t have any clothes on,” Farley said.

Don’t you just love that gift for understatement many people from the South have?

But the true beauty comes from the simplicity of the explanation :

As for the inspiration for their public nudity, the women gave as good a reason as any: Farley said they told police, “the Lord told them to get naked and walk down the street.”

Kinda hard to argue with that.

Now the kids, they will be fine. Infants barely even know clothes exist and toddlers are not sold on the concepts yet either. This odd excursion will do them no harm.

But as for the adults, apparently, both women agreed that God had told them to walk naked down the streets, and that’s what really blows my mind.

What was that conversation like?

Grandmother : Well, God just told me we should walked down the street naked with the kids.
Daughter : Yup. Me too.
Grandmother : Well, best get to it, then.

And then they just shucked down and went for a stroll.

The alternative is that one of them talked the other into it, which I find equally hard to believe.

And what about the officer? What kind of day did he have? There he was, on his third Krispy Kreme, and he gets a call from dispatch.

Officer : There’s a what on Providence Road? You’re kidding. And all of them buckass naked? Not a stitch on? Alright, this I gotta see. I’m taking the call. But send backup. With blankets.

It must have seemed like a gently amusing dream. Just one of those odd little things that happen in life. I can’t imagine a single person being truly upset by it.

Frankly, the whole thing strikes me as adorable.

Of course, the police often have to deal with nudity.

Nude Police Lineup by Bob Newhart

Bob Newhart is a hero of mine. His gentle style of comedy is, to me, absolutely beautiful.

The other news item I wish to address is this latest teapot trapped tempest.

Here is the headline as it is making the rounds on Facebook : Bill Nye Booed (not Boo’d, you knobs) In Texas For Saying The Moon Reflects The Sun

And as such, it is perfect Internet bait for all of the Asshole Atheist crowd to crow about and point out how stupid and superstitious all those inbred yokels down in Texas must be.

So that set is falling all over themselves to post things like “And to think, these people vote!” and “No wonder these people have Rick Perry as their leader” or the always elegant and original “*facepalm”.

Yeah, good thing us cool people aren’t smallminded bigots intolerant of those different from ourselves while patting ourselves on the back for being The Right Kind Of People, right?

And that’s how the Asshole Atheists and Sadistic Skeptics would like you to interpret the article that foes with that headline, but that is not the truth at all, and I can show you the smoking gun.

Here it is. Emphasis mine.

But nothing got people as riled as when he brought up Genesis 1:16, which reads: “God made two great lights — the greater light to govern the day and the lesser light to govern the night. He also made the stars.”

The lesser light, he pointed out, is not a light at all, but only a reflector.

Note the important words there. He brought up. Nobody asked him a question. Nobody was suggesting teaching Genesis 1:16 as science in schools or making it part of Texas law.

He was the one who brought up the Bible in the first place.

In other words, Bill Nye The Asshole Guy started the fight. He is the aggressor here. He deliberately attacked these people’s faith and now is acting all disingenuously butthurt because they got mad at him for it.

What the hell did he expect to happen? They would look at him and say “Gosh, you are right, Science Guy. My faith is a sham and the Bible is a pack of lies. All hail Bill the Science God!”

He knew exactly what was going to happen. He poked these people in the eye, and not even to make a point, just to generate this kind of bogus news story so he and all his bigoted atheist skeptic friends could masturbate their egos over it.

Tell me, Nye, would you have done that in a synagogue? Or a temple? Or a black Baptist church?

In doing shit like this, all you do is confirm to these people that scientists are out to get them and there is no possibility of middle ground between you and them.

You, sir, are no humanist, secular or otherwise. You are an abusive bigot religion-bashing just to score points with your bigoted friend, and that makes you no better than the people who you oppose.

In fact, you are worse than them, because you are smart and educated enough to know better.

I had a hard time forgiving you after that detergent ad where you sold out your credibility and your responsibility to teach the truth to children just to make a quick buck.

You chose money over science, Nye, and that is something I will never entirely forgive you for. What were kids supposed to think when they saw you shilling for some megacorp?

Still, over the years I got over that, mostly. After all, I loved your show, I loved you on Almost Live, and I have enjoyed your recent work.

But this erases all that and puts you further into the red than ever.

You are a bad person who did a bad thing Bill. You have fallen in with the Richard Dawkins, Ayn Rand, Neil DeGrasse Tyson bunch of tiny minded “skeptics” whose idea of science is to shit on all beliefs other than your own and close your minds and your hearts to the vast majority of humanity.

And that is just plain unacceptable.

You are dead to me until you renounce your wicked ways and come back into the true light of promoting understanding, cooperation, tolerance, and acceptance in humanity.

That’s what a real humanist does. It’s what a real liberal does.

It’s what real human beings do.

Come back to being human, Bill, before it’s too late.

Well, it’s Thursday, I don’t feel like talking about what went down during therapy (although it was pretty productive, actually) and there’s some stuff hanging around the browser looking impatient and bored, so I guess it’s time for spring cleaning.

First off, hey, let’s argue about guns! I’ll start us off.

First, hey wow, Jim Carrey. Still around. When is the last time he did a movie? I think the last thing he did of note was Mister Hopper’s Penguins, which tells ya something about career trajectory.

I am not a fan. I was, back in the heady days of Ace Ventura, which I thought was hilarious when I saw it in the theater but I am pretty sure I would hate now.

After that, did not have much use for him. The last straw was when I followed him on Twitter, and found his twitter ramblings weird and offputting and kind of dickish.

Much like the man.

But to give him his due, I really liked Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind and I Love You Philip Morris, so I can’t poo-poo his career too much.

So that’s Jim Carrey. Let’s talk about the sketch itself, as comedy.

Well, like pretty much everything JC does on his own, it is brilliant in many ways, but marred by that psychotic intensity of his and his tendency to amp everything up way beyond 11. Because of this, even his legitimate satire comes across as more abusive farce than anything else, like he is a Spitting Image puppet brought to life by a well meaning but terminally clueless fairy godmother.

Also, and relatedly, it means that it lacks the most important ingredient in satire, which is accuracy. Satire needs to be accurate to be funny and not just mean. As with libel and slander, its main defense is the truth. Satire works because it exposes hypocrisy and thus resolves the tension in our minds between, for instance, what someone says and what they do, or what they said then as opposed to what they say now.

This resolution feels great, and that, to put it simply, is why satire is funny. But in order to get at that tension, your aim must be true. You have to hit the target dead on so that people recognize the hypocrisy you are satirizing, and then, boom, comedy.

So while I agree with the general sentiment Carrey is putting forth, he does it in a really sloppy and disturbingly tweaked way. So as comedy, the skit is deeply flawed.

OK, so let’s talk guns.

I agree that gun culture in the USA is destructive macho bullshit, grown up men acting like little boys who can conjure up any number of imaginary aliens to justify their building a pillow fort and running around the house goes pew pew pew.

That is why gun culture and paranoia are so intimately linked. They pretend they need the guns to protect themselves, but in reality, they want the gun because guns are cool and make them feel powerful and dangerous and such, and they will invent whatever phantoms they need to invent to justify getting them.

It is also why gun culture and right wing politics are so intimately linked. In general, conservatism is based on anger and fear, whereas liberalism is based on guilt and compassion.

And so the conservative emotional primitivism, where only primal emotions like rage and fear are trusted and anything more complex or nuanced are mistrusted to the point of loathing, works perfectly with gun culture, which is founded on anger and fear.

Truth is, crime is rare. Very rare. Especially in suburbia. That is why that gun is more likely to hurt you than any criminal. It’s not that you are an idiot. It’s just that crime is so incredibly rare that gun accidents can’t help to be more likely.

So I don’t think anybody “needs” a gun for self-defense. That is pure self-serving delusional bullshit, akin to a man claiming he “needs” a new power tool for some project he will never do because he can’t just admit he bought it because power tools are cool and he wanted to play with it for a while.

Or a woman claiming she “needs” more clothes when she has a closet full to bursting with outfits, and in reality, she just enjoys shopping.

That all said… a lot of gun control legislation is pointless and punitive and kneejerk, purely based on some politician’s need to be seen to be Doing Something About It.

So yeah, background checks. That makes sense. How else do we make sure crazy people and felons do not get guns? Also basic licensing. Nothing too damned complicated.

It should be roughly as hard to get a gun license as it is to get a driver’s license. In both cases, we want to make sure that we can trust this person with a dangerous and potentially lethal machine.

Hmm. This blog entry is going to go long.

Next news item : some great news from Ottawa. Stephen Harper’s government is fraying around the edges as some of his MPs go rogue!

Sure, it’s only a few socially conservatives complaining about the Harper government leaning hard on them to make sure they do not have to talk about abortion in Parliament, but still.

Of course Harper does not want to talk abortion. It’s a third rail topic and a real vote loser for anyone right of center. The problem, of course, is that there is only so long you can string the social conservatives along and pretend you care about their concerns without letting them actually get anywhere near getting anything done.

How rapidly Canadians forgot the entire reason the Reform Party came into existence in the first place. It was because socially conservative voters were shut out of Mulroney’s Progressive Conservatives, and that set the stage for Preston Manning to come along and gather up all those dissatisfied folks and lead them under his banner.

But no, then the same kind of bastard that wrecked the Progressive Conservative party forever, basically destroyed it, started up this whole Unite the Right thing, and somehow managed to convince all those Reform people that this time it would be different.

Well guess what? They are not different at all, are they Steve? Just another bunch of crooked businessmen out to loot Canada and keep it all for themselves and their cronies, jerking the social conservatives along by the nose and basically saying “You have to vote for us because we are the only ones who will even pretend we are going to address your concerns.

Now obviously, I don’t want their concerns addressed either. I am a social liberal, after all. So I don’t feel too badly about these people being jerked around by the Conservatives.

But I do wish they would wise up and split the right again. And who knows, maybe that is coming.

I have said before, the only thing that will take the Harper government down is if enough of his own people are willing to turn against him and toss his ass out on a vote of confidence like they did many years ago to that cunt Diefenbaker.

And Stephen Harper is just the kind of smug prick who thinks he is invulnerable to make it happen, too.

So pray with me, for Canada’s sake, for more rancor, divisiveness, and chaos in the Conservative camp.

What’s left… hmmm… I know there was one more thing.

Oh yeah. KISS is hooking up with Hello Kitty.

For reals, y’all. Click the link. I shits thou not.

Seeya tomorrow folks! with SCIENCE!