Ricky Gervais Stuns with Guns on Daily Show

As you may know, Ricky Gervais is about as outspoken atheist as they come in the world of Hollywood and on Monday he was a guest on the Daily Show where he put his new physique on display, here are some screen grabs.

















The interview is also hilarious, and almost immediately degenerates into homoerotic humor which climaxes (forgive the wordplay) with Stewart gargling and spitting water. You can watch the ep below, just skip to the last segment for the interview with Gervais.



Congrats on the new bod Mr. Gervais, can't wait to catch The Ricky Gervais Show on HBO... even though I don't get HBO...

Ted Haggard Gives Tiger Woods Marriage Advise

I've got some advise for Tiger Woods, DON'T LISTEN TO TED HAGGARD. That's right people, the douchebag who went from being the head of the largest Evangelical Christian group in the country, to "that dude who did meth and had gay sex with a man-stitute," has come back to prove that the only thing religion is REALLY good at, is healing some awful person's torn and tattered reputation.

I like the part where he rants about having a soft heart versus a hard heart. Clearly a lot of research has gone into this theory. I enjoy the implication that somehow the fate of their relationship hinges on how dense Tigers' wife chooses to keep her heart. Hey Haggard, heart density isn't a choice, IT'S SOMETHING WE'RE BORN WITH! I also enjoy when he says he's in the best position to know whether his marriage is a sham or not, yeah because he's been so forthright and honest in the past. Oh except that time he repeatedly lied about doing meth and having an ongoing homosexual relationship with a gay prostitute. Fortunately, whether it's the hardness of one's heart or their sexual orientation, according to Haggard nothing is beyond our control. In case you forgot how creepy this dooder is, here are some videos to hopefully reopen those wounds time has so thoughtlessly healed. The first is my favey.

In Defense of Elon Musk (CEO of Tesla Motors): Why I don't care that he took his private jet to lobby D.C.

There's a lot of hoopla on the interwebs about the fact that Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla Motors, charged the company over $100,000 for the flights he took in his private jet to lobby the government for a half-a-billion-dollar low interest loan, which he eventually got from the DOE. But before you start with the hand-wringing, let me tell you a few things about the man.

First, that loan? It was part of a program called the Advanced Technology Vehicle Manufacturing Program. Considering Tesla makes the ONLY highway capable electric car in serial production, it's hard to imagine a better candidate for that loan. In addition, a lot of people credit him (even Bob Lutz, the guy responsible for bringing us the Chevy Volt) with proving to the big auto makers that manufacturing an all-electric car was feasible, which has led to a boom in the number of electric vehicles coming to market. That makes his impact on carbon emissions from cars practically immeasurable. Not only that, but the car is faster than most Porsches. His salary from Tesla? $1. He has personally invested around $60 million in Tesla. He is CEO of two other companies, Solar City and SpaceX, though he's not as involved with Solar City, but it completed the largest commercial solar installation San Francisco. SpaceX, which already has the NASA contract to shuttle goods back and forth to the Space Station, requires most of his attention and is far larger than Tesla and Solar City combined, with 900 employees. The goal of SpaceX is to provide low cost transportation for individuals into space. His office in SpaceX headquarters is a cubicle. He's personally invested around $100 million in SpaceX. And don't forget to thank Musk every time you make a payment using PayPal, because he started that company from nothing.

Finally, the loan from the DOE was a low interest loan that was not required to keep the company solvent, and therefore wasn't a bailout. In fact, most of it has to be used to produce their next car, the Model S sedan. That's relevant because it shows the loan isn't a bailout. The company could go on making the Tesla Roadster (which generates a profit) forever. The loan is to speed up the time table on the lower-cost, broader-appeal sedan. So what are people so enraged about? Is it that he charged the company for his flights? The same company he gave $60 million to and from whom he collects 1 DOLLAR a year? Also, according to the New York Times he served as one of the inspirations for the Tony Stark character in the Iron Man movie, and will be making a cameo in Iron Man II along with his SpaceX headquarters, and Iron Man ROCKED... so point proven I think. And if you're asking what this has to do with religion... well I think he's an atheist... that's all I got.

Evangelicals Try to Rewrite History

The Times has an interesting article on how Evangelical Christians are trying to rewrite America's history and attack the separation of church and state. The article is a bit long-winded, but it's well-written and fairly unbiased (something I can be sure of since I kept wanting to scream "They were all DEISTS!"). So here are a bunch of excerpts that should give you the general idea:

• The cultural roots of the Texas showdown may be said to date to the late 1980s, when, in the wake of his failed presidential effort, the Rev. Pat Robertson founded the Christian Coalition partly on the logic that conservative Christians should focus their energies at the grass-roots level. One strategy was to put candidates forward for state and local school-board elections — Robertson’s protégé, Ralph Reed, once said, “I would rather have a thousand school-board members than one president and no school-board members” — and Texas was a beachhead.
• There is, however, one slightly awkward issue for hard-core secularists who would combat what they see as a Christian whitewashing of American history: the Christian activists have a certain amount of history on their side.
• The Connecticut Baptists saw Jefferson — an anti-Federalist who was bitterly opposed to the idea of establishment churches — as a friend. “Our constitution of government,” they wrote, “is not specific” with regard to a guarantee of religious freedoms that would protect them. Might the president offer some thoughts that, “like the radiant beams of the sun,” would shed light on the intent of the framers? In his reply, Jefferson said it was not the place of the president to involve himself in religion, and he expressed his belief that the First Amendment’s clauses — that the government must not establish a state religion (the so-called establishment clause) but also that it must ensure the free exercise of religion (what became known as the free-exercise clause) — meant, as far as he was concerned, that there was “a wall of separation between Church & State.”
• The language in the Mayflower Compact — a document that McLeroy and several others involved in the Texas process are especially fond of — describes the Pilgrims’ journey as being “for the Glory of God and advancement of the Christian Faith” and thus instills the idea that America was founded as a project for the spread of Christianity. In a book she wrote two years ago, Cynthia Dunbar, a board member, could not have been more explicit about this being the reason for the Mayflower Compact’s inclusion in textbooks; she quoted the document and then said, “This is undeniably our past, and it clearly delineates us as a nation intended to be emphatically Christian.”
• Randall Balmer, a professor of American religious history at Barnard College and writer of the documentary “Crusade: The Life of Billy Graham,” told me: “David Barton has been out there spreading this lie, frankly, that the founders intended America to be a Christian nation. He’s been very effective. But the logic is utterly screwy. He says the phrase ‘separation of church and state’ is not in the Constitution. He’s right about that. But to make that argument work you would have to argue that the phrase is not an accurate summation of the First Amendment. And Thomas Jefferson, who penned it, thought it was.”
• Cynthia Dunbar published a book called “One Nation Under God,” in which she stated, “We as a nation were intended by God to be a light set on a hill to serve as a beacon of hope and Christian charity to a lost and dying world.” But the true picture of America’s Christian founding has been whitewashed by “the liberal agenda” — in order for liberals to succeed “they must first rewrite our nation’s history” and obscure the Christian intentions of the founders. Therefore, she wrote, “this battle for our nation’s children and who will control their education and training is crucial to our success for reclaiming our nation.”
• Americans tell pollsters they support separation of church and state, but then again 65 percent of respondents to a 2007 survey by the First Amendment Center agreed with the statement that “the nation’s founders intended the United States to be a Christian nation,” and 55 percent said they believed the Constitution actually established the country as a Christian nation.
• Yet few of these elected overseers are trained in the fields they are reviewing. “In general, the board members don’t know anything at all about content,” Tom Barber, the textbook executive, says. Kathy Miller, the watchdog, who has been monitoring the board for 15 years, says, referring to Don McLeroy and another board member: “It is the most crazy-making thing to sit there and watch a dentist and an insurance salesman rewrite curriculum standards in science and history. Last year, Don McLeroy believed he was smarter than the National Academy of Sciences, and he now believes he’s smarter than professors of American history.”

Swedish Court says Muslims > Women

A Swedish court ruled that a Muslim man was discriminated against when he was expelled from a job training program for refusing to shake the hand of his supervisor because she was a woman... That's right, the court found that discriminating against someone... for discriminating, is a crime. So let me get this straight, refusing to give someone something because they're a Muslim is a crime, but refusing to give someone something because they're a woman is not a crime, in fact it's a protected right. No? Oh so when a Muslim refuses to give something to a woman because she's a woman, but also because he's a Muslim... cool? So confused. Let's just make a rule, Muslims can do whatever they want as long as they say it's part of their religion. Phew, that makes things so much easier. We should have done this ages ago.

Original Article

Religion Doesn't Do a Body Good?

It's been a long-held belief that religious believers are healthier than non-believers, but a recent study published in Circulation found that this doesn't appear to be the case. The study, which had a sample of 5,500 people, found that heart disease events, high cholesterol, diabetes, and high blood pressure were unaffected by religiosity. Religious people tended to be more obese, but smoked less. They didn't say whether they were testing between varying degrees of religiosity or between religious and non-religious. Of course, the more important question is, "Who cares?" Is the religion with the healthiest followers the "right" one? I guess the real question is, "When your theory is impossible to prove or disprove, what kind of evidence do you look for?" For all those religious people who used to take comfort in the fact that they were more healthy than the heathens, let me offer an interpretation of the data which you might find equally as comforting. Religion is better for your health, BUT God is still eager to get you up to the big rave in the sky, and that counters any beneficial effects of religion. So heads you win, tails you win, just the way you like it.

Original Article

French court finds Scientology: GUILTY

Today rationality won a small battle over the cult known as The Church of Scientology. A French court found that the cult's use of it's "e-meter" to justify "prescribing" vitamins and supplements to it's members was fraudulent and fined several members of the church somehwere around 400,000 euros each. The original cnn article can be found here: http://m.cnn.com/#___2__

Specifics are not given, but presumably the court found that the e-meter is a very rudimentary polygraph machine, a fact that has long been known, which is why the device is not FDA approved for medical use in the states. The court probably found that since the device has no diagnostic abilities, the cult was being fraudulent by using "results" obtained through use of the device to justify any kind of treatment regimen.