God Oil Good For You says God Oil Council

The media is reporting only a few people have done unfortunate things fearing the end of the world but even three would be too many. There may be scores of people who inflicted damage to themselves and others that we know nothing about. It is unfortunate that the mentally ill in particular suffer, and what other way would you describe them, when fear is fostered by every grifter with an internet connection.

PZ Meyers passes on the news that one woman attempted to kill herself and her children, a man committed suicide and another person gave away all their money anticipating the Rapture. NONE of which makes sense even in their strange world view. In accordance to their own wacky rules the mother and the man in Nairobi could have just repented and been saved and the children were innocents so no problem, they would have been removed from the world by a higher power. Their actions display not only illness but a profound lack of faith in their own system.

And why give away money to strangers when you would just leave it all behind for sinful looters anyways? It isn't like the cash you left behind would be used for good purpose in any case. Even if you left it with someone you trust to do good deeds with it, they are going to be left behind and since being irredeemably sinful, they would divert the funds to their own purposes once you were gone.



As of 10 am pacific time the Harold Camping website has not been updated to reflect the world not ending. I am curious as to what form the next installment of the message will take. Undoubtedly the news from all the various God oil salesmen will be full of squirming, convoluted weasel words to explain why God's plan is unknowable and the Rapture did not occur because Jesus is still holding out for a percentage of those WWJD bracelets and send more money or you will face damnation. Who knows? Since Harold is hiding from the faithful and mocking alike it might be a while before we get an update.

You know what? Right now I'm asking Harold to do some good in the world. Shutter your 120 million dollar radio empire, liquidate everything and donate the funds to some charities that actually accomplish something positive and not do something stupid and wasteful like build more prayer buildings or programs that teach abstinence. There are a lot of organizations out there that will actually make people's lives better and make the planet a nicer place to live. All those bucks could really do a lot of great things if sent to the right places. Let good things and not bad jokes be your legacy, Harold.

THE RATURE!

You know, this just means that the only rodents left behind are irredeemably evil!

IZ BEGGIN U

ONE DAY LEFT UNTIL...

THE RATURE!

Are You Rature Ready?

RATPENT, SINNERS!

The Rature is Coming

21 May 2011
Are you ready?

Vinylite plastic protects sleeping baby

I don't know what was worse; the parents that would have bought this product or the company that sold it.

From People Today (9-26-51).

Gone too soon and never was

Almost bought this until when leafing through it at the check stand I noticed that fictional people were included.

Carbon? Try reducing your stupidity footprint

Ultimately disposable paper coin banks that could be folded into the shape of the new energy-saving buses that were rolled out into service in San Diego were handed out by the hundreds, if not thousands to kids and parents a few weeks ago in a parking lot of the mall where I shop.

I wonder how many of these exist anywhere but a landfill by now? Once the novelty wore off , the nickel was removed or lost out of one of the folds and the buses were damaged by play I imagine they went right into the trash. Generating thousands of pounds of waste paper to tout an environmentally friendly bus doesn't make any sense at all. Kind of similar to the paper tags hung on bottles of soap claiming the product conserves water. Guys, you can't trade one for the other as IT IS ALL CONNECTED.

And the room exploded with applause

"...And herewith introduce to this body for consideration to render into law Bill H5150, in which any person found to be using homeopathic remedies will be considered a danger to themselves and others and be remanded for psychiatric counseling and physical health maintenance by an accredited medical practitioner until such time as they are no longer deemed a threat to their own person, or in the case of communicable illness or mental impairment of judgment or behavior, to the public."

Not real but I can dream. Of course, if anything as awesome as dropping the hammer on the billions of dollars a year fake medicine industry ever really occurred Faux News would start shrieking that the Obama administration was trying to outlaw the drinking of water.

I've got an idea

You know how to fix the problem with those two Utah State employees who released 1,300 names of suspected illegal immigrants to the police and media?

Retroactively to when the data was accessed immediately make every single person who is named on that list who is in the United States illegally a Naturalized Citizen. No questions asked, no waiting period.

That would be an epic backfire.

We're gonna show them who's on top!

Tagging a toilet plunger with your 'gang' graffiti? I mean, what turf is being claimed here?

That's just nasty.

My Left Foot

On the side of the store that caters to males a shoe is advertised that protects the wearer from wear and tear of exercise while simultaneously allowing the user to benefit from the activity. The shoe differentiates all the harmful activity from the beneficial through some sort of I don't know, shoe magic, I guess.

Meanwhile, the other side of the same store caters specifically to women. On the flip side a shoe is for sale which reportedly does nothing other than mercilessly work the muscles of the lower extremities in order to tone the legs and backside.

The ad for the men's shoe emphasizes protection and the one for women focuses on the wearer being made more attractive at the expense of safety. Are women expected to suffer more for the desired results? This leads me to question the conventional wisdom that women are the more careful and wiser shoppers. Advertising is remarkably complex and nuanced on levels many consumers never consciously detect. Do women shop for their shoes mostly alone and accompany the men? Then the difference in the execution of the advertising makes more sense. Making safety a priority for the men's shoes would indicate the woman in the relationship would have some say in the purchasing decision as she would not want her man out of work recovering from a playground injury.

Then again, it could be that this ad reveals a situation where the right foot doesn't know what the left foot is doing.

It's a trade off

I guess all that water that is saved using less soap washing clothes can be used to process the pulp to make all these paper tags hanging on bottles of laundry detergent.

BONUS: Don't forget the water saved in not nourishing all the trees that are cut down to supply the raw materials! It's a win/win!

- Found hanging on hundreds of bottles of laundry detergent in a local San Diego grocery store, May 2010.

Happy Easter

See what you get when you trust somebody who purports to speak for the Universe? Decades and decades of lies and corruption through every level of the church hierarchy because those in charge are just thieving, grifting users of gullible or desperate people.

I can't help but think that the ROBOT POPE would rather delete its hard drive than overwrite the truth about child-molesting members of the church.

Yeah, "Happy Easter".

Reason for the season? Gimme bunnies, ducks and chocolate.

Fun & Educational!

One of the things about religion that bothers me is how the sheer horror of some of the tales associated with a religious faith are sanitized. The terrible acts of man and deity that purportedly exhibit how awesome the Gods are have often been glossed over, cleaned up and presented in a manner that a relatively reasonable person could accept as not being too awful to turn away from.

This is particularly evident when religion is taught to children who have little to no reference with which to compare how the real world works. Children and unfortunately many adults do not think critically. Critical thinking must be taught in many cases. But it is hard to do so when fear of terrible retribution is the ultimate lesson. Children for the most part believe what they are told. Up to a point they do not have the capability to evaluate and decide what is real and what is fantasy. They trust and accept what their caretakers present to them. They are as apt to believe what they learn in a church as they are in a talking sponge that encourages them to share with others. Ironically, a child is probably able to determine that much of what they observe on television is fiction long before they question their belief in a magical sky fairy who will send them to eternal torment if they disobey their parents.

So when I discovered the Passover Bag of Plagues at my local grocery store it stopped me in my tracks. This "teaching tool" is a perfect example of taking descriptions of horrific events and rendering them bereft of shock so children can accept them without question. A child can not intellectually associate a plague of disease with horrible suffering. They simply accept the tale as fact. So the horrible is made to be cartoonish propaganda. In the modern era cartoon violence is often seen as harmless but there is a big difference between a cartoon and the lessons of religion: Bugs Bunny is not being taught to children as something real.

The Bag of Plagues contains fun toy representations of the fabled Ten Plagues of Egypt for children to play with and help them learn about how much God loves them over everyone else.

Here is a little background for those not familiar with the many iterations of the Bible:

According to the legend, once upon a time God punished a Pharaoh for reneging on a promise to free a bunch of slaves. Now, one would think an all-knowing universal force could avoid causing some collateral damage but that was not how the story goes.

While the Egyptians were supposedly the primary targets, even the innocent ones who did not agree with their government's domestic policy regarding slavery, pretty much everyone was boned in one way or another just because the Pharaoh wanted a year-round work force. The slaves, supposedly the chosen of God, had to have suffered along with the Egyptians. I imagine the rain of frogs put quite a strain on the infrastructure not to mention all the water was rendered non-potable and all the food was eaten by bugs. At one point the slaves even had to resort to painting magical blood spells on their homes to avoid getting whacked by over-eager genocidal angels. That's so crazy you couldn't make that stuff up. Except somebody did.

Take a look at what the bag contains and what each item represents:

I could brainwash kids with this stuff for hours! Sunglasses to simulate a darkness covering the land? How cool the Egyptians would have looked sporting some Oakleys! One of those springy sticky hands covered in disease? Keep that out of the carpet, kids! Of all these symbols of death and suffering the Cattle Plague mask is my favorite.

What could be more fun and educational for a child than pretending to be an innocent cow cursed by God with disease and sentenced to a horrible, lingering death just to spite a politician? Good times!

Cattle Plague sounds like an edgy indie band that exists only to make your parents angry.

The piece of resistance though is the Death of Firstborn 9-piece puzzle.

Heinous.

Uber Chicle FAQ

A bunch of people were very interested in my original posting of the price list for UBER CHICLE, the miraculous neoprene that cures all bodily and spiritual ills by harnessing the awesome power of gobbledygook. In the previous post UBER CHICLE, I point out that the sellers of the magic rubber inexplicably admit that their product is made from wetsuit material. Skeptical readers found this difficult to believe. Surely not even the most foolish snake oil representative would admit their product was a useless scam for fear of the intelligent consumer investigating their claims and shying away from their product, thereby harming sales. It seems to be an odd mixture of confession and grifting. Perhaps it is a preemptive admission so as to explain against the inevitable questions of how Uber Chicle neoprene differs from the standard wetsuit neoprene. As example, production artifacts such as glue and thread common to both Uber Chicle and a wetsuit. Well, very few people ever lost money underestimating the gullibility of others.

Posted here is the proof of Uber Chicle's origin from the actual website of the manufacturer. As before, I changed the name of the product to prevent anyone from using this site as a resource for actually looking the junk up and buying it (a public service really, much in the same spirit as not giving a toddler a loaded gun because something stupid and tragic will inevitably occur).

Grammatical awkwardness from the translation to English aside, the FAQ is full of the usual nonsensical pseudo-science word salad common to quack medicine of this sort designed solely to separate the foolish and desperate from their money.

Again I implore anyone reading this: If you are sick, please seek real medical help. Relying on quack science can be a matter of life and death for some people.

UBER CHICLE

In the post Bibimbap is the shizznit a while back I posted about the unfortunate practice of 'affinity scams', where a member (or pretends to be) of an ethnic, religious or professional group takes advantage of perceived and expected trusts to defraud a member of the same group.

On a recent visit to one of the local Asian markets in San Diego I picked up one of the fliers for a particularly heinous scam that targets the Asian community using the social and cultural pressures inherent to an affinity scam. In this post is a real advertisement for a ridiculously expensive miracle rubber that the seller claims will cure whatever ails you. I changed the name of the product, the logos and removed the inventory numbers because I don't want some poor fool looking this quack garbage up and buying it through any leads I might provide.

"Uber Chicle" (as I call it) is basically the rubber of the kind you would find in any wetsuit. In fact, the seller even admits that a wetsuit manufacturer supplies their materials. From the samples I've seen the rubber is clearly mass-produced and bears the typical quality control issues one would find in long sheets of this material such as smeared cement on the edges and seals and frayed threads. While I find the rubber indistinguishable in any way from similar wetsuit material stock the seller claims the Uber Chicle is special in some way. The advertising materials make the usual unsubstantiated nonsense text-salad claims that the special rubber (made from rocks) enriches human cells and recycles the magnetic waves the human body emits (mostly in the infra-red range) all to enable the body to retain the natural biological rhythm. Whatever that means.

This is an example of a woo-woo claim that is clearly immoral if not criminal. These pieces of rubber are sold at high prices using questionable claims of efficacy and healing powers or functions that are nothing short of magical. I worry that people with real illnesses are spending money on this junk believing and hoping it will help cure them of their afflictions. This is a very real concern as sales tactics vary depending on the customer. I have experienced this first-hand. Sales reps will variously ignore, treat with hostility or suspicion or deflect any inquiries I have based on what I presume is my race and a few other factors. Without missing a beat the very same salesperson will pounce upon my wife with spiels about miracle cures and awesome magical properties of whatever device is being sold. Often, it happens while I am standing right beside her.

Keep in mind that the average price for neoprene sheeting is about $25 dollars a yard. There is no shortage of the gullible and desperate. If I was evil, I'd be rich.

Click picture to mark-up 1000%

Sadly, it is very difficult to shut predatory scams of this nature down. This a little fish kind of problem in a very big pond and often the most that would happen is that false advertising charges would be levied, a small fine would be paid and business as usual would continue even if under a different name. Caveat Emptor rules the marketplace. Administrations that should protect consumers often look the other way or are toothless in the face of huge profits and influential dollars flowing into political coffers. The few victims that realize they are scammed are reluctant to file complaints or eagerly go on to the next quack-cure convinced that the next one or the next or the next will work as promised. Attempts by private individuals and Governments to educate the public is a slow process and feels despairingly futile sometimes. Unfortunately for every rational warning there are 500 attention-whoring celebrities praising the magic healing power of a pill, book or magnetic shoe insert.

The fact is, if any of this crap worked as advertised the world if not our marketplace would not be recognizable as it is now. This special knowledge and technology, if it was real, could not be contained or controlled by a select, powerful few. As most of the advertising claims the knowledge is everywhere, part of everyone and can be manipulated and touched. It is natural and miraculous and cures all ills. There would be no need for specialists or sales reps as every person on Earth would be at their ultimate potential of health just by common everyday exposure to these natural fantastic elements. Medical science, Doctors and hospitals would exist only so far as to ensure each individual died without pain and with dignity, though a comfortable hospice with a bucket of crystals in each room would conceivably replace the function of the physician in regards to the transitioning soul also. Keeping what is claimed to be so reportedly fundamental out of the hands of the average layman would be like trying to control the secret of making fire 10,000 years after the first bonfire was built and used to cook Mammoth steaks.

Please. If you are sick, visit a Doctor. A real one.

Take it home, Glen

As expected, I lost several subscribers in the hours after I posted my little opinion of Pat Robertson and his twisted, sick, hate-filled, bigoted and insane Cult of Suffering yesterday. I have no real idea who routinely drops in or when they stop doing so beyond the limited amount of tracking I do for the site, but I usually lose a number of the registered 'Followers' whenever I stray too far from the subject of comic books.

So?

When The Magic Goes Away

In the race to say something stupid about the disaster in Haiti it is Pat Robertson who is once again the clear winner, taking the gold medal. Almost as bad as Pat is his cohort in crime, that woman who sits on the couch next to him on the telecasts and who nods in sage acknowledgment to every insane and ridiculous statement this guy spews. I know it is her job, if not her actual calling, to play hostess but there should be a limit to what a person can stand.

I really can not think of any situation that is made better by adding in religion. It does nothing but allow self-limiting behavior that crushes human potential and deflects responsibility for both the good or ill that people do.

I'd like to think that organized religion is in it's death-throes and that all the attention and exposure is the reflexive actions of a twitching corpse before it finally dies. That is likely hopeful thinking on my part. What I hope is the last gasp of an irrelevant dying giant is probably been going on in some form for thousands of years, much the same as the Woo-Woos seeing signs of the Apocalypse occurring at any moment.

It would be so great though if Pat and the entire disgusting Cult of Suffering he is a part of was rendered irrelevant. Maybe another couple of decades will see some progress. I'd like to think my grandchild will live in a world where superstition is relegated to the fantasy of e-books and the cinema and not serve as an actual human impetus.

Think of how great the world would be if religion was looked back on as being as equally real as the cartoon adventures of Scooby-Doo.

NSFIQ Video (Not Safe For IQ)

Oooh, Burn!

Found in the college area

One of the few positive aspects of being beaten down by life is that while you wander aimlessly about the streets because the thought of staring at the television another second is too much to bear, you usually hang your head down as you walk. While this has the danger of accidentally walking into poles, low-hanging signs and other stationary objects there is the rare benefit of finding interesting things on the ground that does not consist of pebbles, twigs, unconscious homeless people and soda cans.

Like the memory card out of a camera, for instance.

Like most discoveries of this nature the card is jam-packed with photos of cool music concerts, vacations I can't possibly afford, fun parties I will never be invited to, complete tools who need a beating and attractive women, one of whom is apparently the owner of the card. Don't get excited. Since I am over the age of twelve I will not be posting or sharing her personal photos, ever. So don't ask. Young women have enough to worry about without some tool who is way overdue for a whupping zapping her photos all over the planet. *

If possible I would like to find the owner and send her back her card as it undoubtedly contains some very special memories that may otherwise be lost forever. The card was found in a college area of San Diego in September 2009 and there are very few clues as to the identity of the owner. Perhaps the dazed and confused couple in the photo below are able to identify the owner and have her contact me.

I have found about six memory cards laying about on the ground in the last year. I usually find more flash drives and SD Cards than coins. Amusingly, with the exception of one that stored an elderly couple's Arizona vacation all of them contained photos or videos depicting drug use. The last one I found was full of photos of two guys doing nothing but smoking crack.

It is disheartening to see that kids are not any smarter than they were back in the late-1980s. During inspections of military housing I'd often find taped to the walls of service member's rooms Polaroids of the soldiers smoking a bong or holding huge bags of marijuana in that very same room. The photos were invariably mounted in plain sight. Usually the new photographic evidence of illegal activity would have visible in the background one of the older pictures of illegal activity.

For the record I'm currently against the legalization of the Devil's Weed. Not because it is allegedly harmful or hysterically designated as the first step to an inevitable heroin addiction but because people act like morons 95 percent of the time and our society hasn't proven itself mature enough to use it responsibly. People generally act stupid and I've never met anyone who was high that didn't act stupider from the effects of it, as shown in Exhibit A above. As a rule we can't even handle sugar, booze and trans fats much less recreational narcotics.

* Unless she is a entertainer, celebrity, politician or other public figure. In that case Perez Hilton can call me and we can discuss my awesome payday because finders are keepers.