Today's Internets - Easter Weekend Edition.

"I was over in Australia during easter, which was interesting. Interesting to note they celebrate Easter the same way we do; commemorating the death and resurrection of Jesus by telling our children a giant bunny rabbit left chocolate eggs in the night. Now, I wonder why we're fucked up as a race, anybody? Anybody got any clues out there? Where do you get this shit from, you know? Why those two things you know? Why not ‘Goldfish left Lincoln Logs in your sock drawer’? As long as we’re making shit up, go hog wild. At least a goldfish with a Lincoln Log on it's back goin' across your floor to your sock drawer has a miraculous connotation to it. 'Mummy, I woke up today and there was a Lincoln Log in me sock drawer!'. 'That's the story of Jesus'. Who comes up with this shit?! I’ve read the Bible. I can’t find the words ‘bunny’ or ‘chocolate’ anywhere in that fucking book." - Bill Hicks



Made of Awesome.  Filled with Victory - Michael 'Flathead' Blanchard Obituary Could Be Best Ever:
"Judging from his paid obituary, Michael 'Flathead' Blanchard was one heck of a guy. In an obit published in the Denver Post, Blanchard is described as a man who enjoyed "booze, guns, cars and younger women until the day he died." From the obit: Weary of reading obituaries noting someone’s courageous battle with death, Mike wanted it known that he died as a result of being stubborn, refusing to follow doctors’ orders and raising hell for more than six decades. He enjoyed booze, guns, cars and younger women until the day he died. So many of his childhood friends that weren’t killed in Vietnam went on to become criminals, prostitutes and/or Democrats. He asks that you stop by and re-tell the stories he can no longer tell. As the Celebration will contain Adult material we respectfully ask that no children under 18 attend."

Oops - El Chuco | delicioustacos: 

"But he got into some legal trouble. I don’t know what, yet, except it’s a restraining order and he’s gotta get rid of seven grand worth of guns. Going to transfer them into my name and I’ll have to sell them. I hope someone tries to rob me when they’re in my house. Last time he got a restraining order it was from this chick Mandy. They had an S&M relationship, were into swinging. They’d go to big parties full of sweaty old people and he’d swap her ass around. She liked to get choked; she liked to get hit. I’d walk in on her sucking his dick and she’d be complaining that she wasn’t into it because he wasn’t punching her hard enough. They had sex swings, those weird fake whips, all that shit.

But they got in a fight and she freaked out and called the cops. Which was a problem, because, her father is the sheriff of (REDACTED) County. They came and dragged his ass to jail. He’d done time already for stabbing a guy, had a record. They had evidence because she had bruises on her thighs and ass. She said he beat her. Well yeah, she demanded to get beaten across the thighs and ass and he complied. She was what they call a smart ass masochist. A person who has to taunt someone into hitting them to get off. By the way, what are the odds that she liked to get hit because the Sheriff of (REDACTED) County punched her after he made her suck him off? If it were a horse, I wouldn’t bet against it."

The Most Astonishing Cosplay at Wondercon 2013:

Grant Morrison Answers All Your Questions About The Death Of Robin: 

"She's very angry, but she mostly hates Batman. And the thing for me was to tell a story about divorce. Because when I was a kid, my parents divorced. So I always kind of wanted to tell the story of what if you were a child of Batman and this incredible, exotic, brilliant woman who runs a criminal empire? There was once a time when Batman was in love with her and she was in love with him, but now she hates him, she hates him so bad. Because that's what happens to people, and it's really sad — people who used to really love each other end up in divorce courts, shouting at each other and bringing out the worst qualities of one another, and they hate each other. So I thought, let's expose this little kid to this. This new Robin, who is right in the middle of these two people, and because it's Batman and Talia, it's not just Damian's parents falling out, but when they fall out, the whole world ends. A superhero against a super-criminal. So it's really a way to explore what happens to kids when their parents really grow to hate one another.

...it's about the hate that grows between lovers and the horror of being a little kid trapped in between that — and wondering why your parents don't just get on, and why everything isn't OK."

Happy Pagan Fertility Day! Celebrations of rebirth predate Christianity by centuries and are a feature of any civilization that managed to figure out the equinoxes and when longer days, good weather and life was returning to the world. The Roman cult of Cybele, a mother goddess, for example, featured Attis, the consort of Cybele and a god of vegetation, and in his self-mutilation, death, and resurrection he represents the fruits of the earth, which die in winter only to rise again in the spring. Cybele's worship featured a "Holy Week" in March, called Hilaria, that culminated in a procession on March 28th located at what is now, wait for it, Vatican Hill. Easter is named for Ēostre, the Great Mother/fertility goddess in Germanic paganism, whose symbol was a rabbit or hare.

How the News Media Betrayed Us on Iraq - Reason.com: "Put bluntly, the disastrous invasion of Iraq, which was sold on the basis of lies told by President George W. Bush, Vice-President Dick Cheney, Secretary of State Colin Powell, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, national-security adviser Condoleezza Rice, and others might not have happened without the enthusiastic help of The New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, ABC, NBC, MSNBC, CBS, CNN, Fox News, and others. The blood of more than a hundred thousand — perhaps more than a million — Iraqis and 4,500 Americans is on their hands too."

How the News Media Betrayed Us on Iraq - Reason.com: "Today, like the Bush administration alumni attempting to duck responsibility, the media blame “bad intelligence” for their conduct. But that will not wash. The dissenting reports of Knight Ridder’s Warren Strobel and Jonathan Landay, along with a very few others, show definitively that in 2002–03 solid intelligence information undermining every propagandistic administration claim was readily available to anyone willing to use traditional reporting techniques. Strobel and Landay were mostly ignored. On the rare occasions when The New York Times or The Washington Post reported on the doubts intelligence personnel had about the Bush narrative, the stories were buried deep in the paper. (See Bill Moyers’s special “Buying the War” and Greg Mitchell’s book Wrong for So Long.)"

How the News Media Betrayed Us on Iraq - Reason.com: "The media did not merely pass along baseless assertions; the television channels also attempted to shape public opinion with a biased selection of guests. Prowar voices abounded, while informed war skeptics were scarce. Even when an opponent of war was featured, he or she had to share the time with a prowar advocate, yet the prowar side was often featured unchallenged. As the war became regarded as inevitable, the cable news channels shifted almost exclusively to military analysis, as though the question was no longer whether the nation ought to go to war, but rather how it would be fought. Many of the retired generals who were presented as objective experts had seats on the boards of defense contractors and were getting Pentagon briefings."

How the News Media Betrayed Us on Iraq - Reason.com: "What motivated those who covered the run-up to the Iraq invasion this way? Several factors were surely at work. Groupthink and the fear of going out on a limb must have played a large role. The vaunted courage of journalists is more pose than fact. (This makes the work of Strobel and Landay, Phil Donahue of MSNBC until he was cancelled, and Bob Simon of CBS’s Sixty Minutes all the more admirable.) “Pack journalism” is reinforced by a fear that reports suggesting skepticism about a military action will be interpreted as unpatriotic. The smear factories run by militarist right-wing media watchdogs ensure this will be the case. Moreover, being branded un-American for doubting a president’s case for war may lead to viewer or reader boycotts, which in turn may lead to pressure from advertisers. Thus, the corporate bottom line played a role.

Another factor is the simple truth that war makes better news than peace. No one wins a Pulitzer Prize for being a peace correspondent. We must not underestimate this as a motive for favoring war. Finally, we can’t overlook that many in the media were simply motivated by nationalism and deference to the state with its dazzling war technology."

These crack me up.

2/10 Would Not Bang | Know Your Meme: 

"2/10 Would Not Bang is an image macro series in which photos of physically attractive women (and occasionally men) are scrutinized for minor or imagined flaws, prefaced by an ironically low rating on a scale of one to ten. The images are meant to parody hypocritical judgments made about women’s sex appeal on the Internet."

And the requisite deviations...

Psychology is Physiology: "“It might be a placebo effect, but it’s still an effect,” Chuck Liddell said at the same time he was the most dangerous man on the planet. Placebo effects are real. Belief will boost your probability of success regardless of endeavor. “Psychology trumps physiology every time,” said bestselling fitness author, Alwyn Cosgrove. Psychology will directly influence physiology and how you perform."