Beezow Doo-Doo Zopittybop-Bop-Bop, 30, Arrested By Madison, Wisc. Police.

“According to Zopittybop-Bop-Bop’s apparent Facebook account, when he’s not in trouble with the law he enjoys activities including “eating,” “standing,” walking,” “thinking,” and “diamond.” “

Top marks for originality! Not that drugs had anything to do with it, obviously.

GZS

"...for the sale of Old mans eye, should old rhubarbrhubarb be forgot, blah blah blah blah... Old mans eye...""

New Years’ Eve is one of those occasions of forced jollity that never fails to make me a teenie-weenie bit Grumpy. Wa-haayyy! Come on! Get pissed and spend a month’s salary on a taxi to and from some crowded shithole of a pub where getting an overpriced pint takes an hour, with the added excitement of possibly getting your head glassed-in by the alcohol-fuelled meathead next to you at the bar, and topped off at midnight by the hypocrisy of ‘Auld Fucking Lans Syne’ followed by a violent jab to the ribs by a dozen elbows scrambling to get the single taxi that’s waiting outside to royally rip punters off. Hooray.

Ahh – that’s better.

Well, on the plus side we might be on the verge of discovering the Higgs Boson (s0-called ‘God Particle’) which could spark whole new areas of physics; our radio and orbital telescopes are identifying new Earth-like planets outside our solar system with amazing regularity (confirming that the odds of life elsewhere in the universe really do begin to stack up); and several doomsdays (as predicted by several religious figureheads) have, predictably, failed to come to pass. I’m sure they won’t run out of new doomsday dates, but you’d think they’d learn their lesson by now… Hands up who wants to be part of an exclusive God Club which will reserve you a seat in the afterlife, but let your friends and family burn just because they took a long hard look at the inconsistencies, inaccuracies, cruelties and blatant fantasies of the chosen ‘religious text’ and rejected it as the cause of most of the world’s conflict. “Let ‘em burn, just as long as I’m okay – afterall, they must have been evil/stupid/sinners. I deserve to go to heaven because every time I got the urge to kill/fornicate/steal, I turned to God and he stopped me from doing it!” Well done – you needed telling that stealing was wrong then, did you? Misguided, deluded, morally-twisted morons.

Ahh – that’s even more better.

Okay, have a good 2012 and I sincerely hope that any readers have a year without being subjected to violence, religious bigotry, and Strictly Come Dancing.

GZS

Ah, ohhhhhhKaaayyyyyy… They the’ye both clearly deluded / programmed with the same religious imagery. Of course it’s the spitting image of Christ! Of course it’s not Budda or Ganesh (despite there being an elephant-trunk like shape in there if you want there to be..!). It can only be Jesus Christ. Yeah, right. Funnily enough, despite the fact that it’s demonstrably NOT an uncanny resemblance (for any image to hold an ‘uncanny’ resemblance I’d argue that you need a slightly higher resolution than knit-one-pearl-one over 20 lines of wool..) it can of course reflect any image that the human brain wants to, or is programmed, to see (it’s called Pareidolia) . So, let’s take a look at the image in question:

Is it a bird? Is it a plane? Is it a sock? No, it's Jesus.

Woman sees face of Jesus in sock – Telegraph.

Well, I see:

- Darth Vader
- Gollum
- Ming The Merciless
- A cylon
- Jar Jar “Bloody” Binks  or Sy Snootles (the first image)
- An alien grey side-on, but head facing (the first image)

-  A crumpled sock with a vague pattina, vague-but-just-defined-enough to provoke Pareidolia in the human brain.

It’s only some people’s lack of even a general understanding (or even self-awareness) of science or psychology that leads them down this laughable path. The couple in question were even considering opening a SHRINE to the sock. Yes, an actual shrine. Well, just as well that the creases dropped out of the sock – obviously a sign from God that they weren’t meant to make even bigger twats of themselves than they already have…

GZS

PS: I swear I saw a message in my food the other day from the Flying Spaghetti Monster himself!! It must be a message to all true believers – go spread the word!

Filed under: belief, Delusion, dogma, Faith, fanaticism, God, idiots, ignorance, indoctrination, irrational, mind control, misguided, morons, rationality, religion, religiosity, religious symbols, The God Delusion, Twats, waste of time, we want our planet back Tagged: christians, Delusion, dogma, Faith, fanaticism, God, God is not Great, hypocrisy, idiots, ignorance, indoctrination, irrational, misguided, misguided morals, morals, morons, rational thinking, rationality, religion, religiosity, Twats, unfunny, we want our planet back ]]> http://grumpyzachsmith.wordpress.com/2011/12/28/woman-sees-face-of-jesus-in-sock-my-arse/feed/ 0 grumpyzachsmith Woman sees face of Jesus in sock - Telegraph a message JUST for ME! http://grumpyzachsmith.wordpress.com/2011/12/19/25-ridiculous-reactions-to-godisnotgreat/ http://grumpyzachsmith.wordpress.com/2011/12/19/25-ridiculous-reactions-to-godisnotgreat/#comments Mon, 19 Dec 2011 07:27:06 +0000 grumpyzachsmith http://grumpyzachsmith.wordpress.com/?p=1322 ]]> Rest in peace, Christopher Hitchens, author of ‘God Is Not Great’ amongst others. Well, despite being an agnostic, there’s actually infinitely more ‘Christian sentiment’ in what I just wrote than in the average drum-beating Christian who is somehow intelligent enough to use a computer but not quite intelligent enough to recognise hypocracy of the highest order – even when it comes out of their own mouths.

25 Ridiculous Reactions To #GodIsNotGreat.

Christopher Hitchens book was perfectly titled – and there’s no doubt these reactions to his debate prove his case perfectly. There’s plenty of  ’wrath and smiting’ in the name of the Lord to go around, even in the 21st century it seems. Merry Christmas!

GZS

And today’s silly leg-related news:
BBC News – G4S sacks pair who tagged offender’s false leg.

Okay, so you’re a criminal. A criminal who’s been caught in the act – ergo: not too smart. Then along comes a professional security company to fit you with an electronic tag – the kind that would go ‘beep’ and tell the cops if, for instance, he left his house high on drugs, armed with a machete, intent on stealing someone’s car before generally going on the rampage.

Job done. But not quite – as this particular criminal mastermind managed to get the security company to fit the tag to his false leg. Wa-haaayy! Off goes the leg and out hops Stumpy the Crim on his drug-fuelled monopedic spree.

But by far the best bit of this story is this:

“The pair were fooled by Christopher Lowcock, 29“

Methinks the security company might have had a third option for fitting that tag…

GZS

“…the girl was taken to Scarborough Hospital with cuts to her legs.

Police say the pair are from South Yorkshire.“

I’m pretty sure the cops are know where the pair of legs come from. So, this week’s F-grade (awarded for ambiguous nouns and general semantic failure) goes to A. Nonomous of the BBC. Well done.

GZS

Hoorah! Not only did I pass, like 97.8% of everyone else, but I got 9 at grade A-to-C! The uni's will surely accept me now, along with 60-80% of everyone else!

Well, no doubt some of these students will be very intelligent – but unless we’re genuinely witnessing an accelerated evolutionary leap in the mental capacities of our young people, my money is on the exams getting easier. Sure, students who hear this are quick to shout about how hard they’ve worked – but surely, as intelligent people, they realise the difference between the words ‘easier’ and ‘easy’? No one is saying A-levels are ‘easy’ – but when you read a story like this for the umpteenth time, with this kind of statistic:

‘The overall pass rate increased for the 29th year in a row to 97.8 per cent, figures show.’

it kind of tells the whole sorry story. If you’re an A-level student then it’s a done-deal. You only have 2.2% to go before YOU literally CANNOT FAIL!

Wow. Never in the history of education has so much been bestowed upon so many by so few irresponsible exam boards.

As for employers or Universities using A-levels as a tool to sift through the applying-masses, they’re now next to useless. Grades schmades – if you look at the spread of grades there are also record numbers of A, A+, A*, A*** (or whatever other silly merit system they’ve had to bolt onto the end of the A grade lately…)

I guess A*** is the new A grade, with A** and A* and A as B, C and D respectively…. What a mockery of the grading system this is. By that reckoning , the new B and C grades would be E and FAIL. Perhaps that’s what needs to be done – reclassify all the results this way and reset the clock. A levels might actually become meaningful and useful tools for employers/colleges again. Won’t do the ridiculous government and exam board stats any good though. They won’t rest until they can safely say they’ve ‘achieved’ a 100% pass rate. Well, as commendable as that sounds, lowering the standard to achieve it doesn’t sound like progress or a good solid education to me. It’s not good for the students or the country.

A-levels used to be challenging enough, purely in terms of study time, that teachers would recommend against taking more than four. Now students are actually taking double that… If you can study for 6-8 A-levels at the same time it only proves one thing: each A-level requires LESS study – it’s simply a time thing. it doesn’t come down to intelligence or hard-work. As hard as they might want to study and as clever as a student may be, as I said: A-levels used to be so challenging that students with 9 or more A grade O levels or GSCEs would be advised against taking more than 4.

Well done if you’ve passed your A-levels recently – you’ve worked hard and studied well. But clearly and demonstrably not in as much depth or breadth as were required with the A levels of 10+ years ago. And there’s (almost) no way you can fail! Leaving college with a thousand A-levels falling out of your pockets which employers/uni’s can’t use is, to my mind, far less valuable than leaving college several years ago with a handful of old-school properly graded A-levels. But then, what do I know.

GZS

AWAY

THE KEY.

GZS

Wagwan, irie? Me wanna lickle toke on da reefa. Me is tree-year old, bo.

When this dubious excuse for a cuddly kids character came out I realised right away that someone somewhere was really trying far too hard. But I was also outraged as a parent, because as a parent we all (well, most of us….)  try to steer our children away from drugs and culture that is linked to drugs. We tell them that characters on the TV who smoke cigarettes are ‘hurting themselves’; we gently lead them away from the paths that can lead to smoking cannabis and becoming a brain-addled drop-out who uses the word ‘like’ sixteen times in one sentence because their vocabulary was stunted by ‘da weed’.

So, things are going well in the land of innocent youth… And then along comes the BBC with an animated character called ‘Rastamouse’. If you look up Rasta and Rastafarian on the web you’ll easily confirm what you already know: the Rastafarian ‘religion’ practices the use of cannabis as a tool for worship. [Wow - now there's a terrifying thought: a mind infected with religiosity with a heavy dollop of psychoactive sauce for good measure just to help things along a bit.]

Does BBC stand for ‘Babies: Buy Cannabis’ now? I really really really don’t want my children growing up saying ‘ting’ instead of ‘thing’; ‘irie’ instead of ‘happy’, or ‘wagwan’ instead of ‘what’s going on?’. As they grow up, they’ll soon realise that the only people (especially white people) who speak like this invariably do so with a mega-spliff hanging out of their gob as they amble to the job centre to sign-on so they can “like score more like weed for like later, innit” before returning to their luxury squat. Remember, this isn’t a tenuous link or rampant knee-jerk stereotyping - just look up Rasta on wikipedia – Rastafarians and use of cannabis are intrinsically linked.

So, I’m expecting the following characters to pop up on BBC in the next few days (no doubt under the same nicotine-stained banner of ‘multiculturalism’):

Scientolophant
 Fridays, 4pm, CBeebies Channel.
Watch the hilarious antics of Scientolophant – he’s every kids favourite cuddly Elephant who just so happens to be a devout follower of L. Ron Hubbard’s Scientology cult. In today’s side-splitting episode, Scientolophant empties the contents of his bank account into Elron the Elephants piggy bank in return for a self-help CD which promises to put him in touch with his ‘true self’. But a concerned Squirrel-Dawkins scratches the CD on purpose and ruins everyone’s day.

Peyote Coyote

Tuesdays, just before baby’s nap time, CBeebies Channel.
This week, Peyote Coyote follows the village elder into the desert in search of Chief Ticktocks lost beachball – but imagine their surprise, young kiddies, when, instead of the missing ball, they actually find a sacred peyote cactus and proceed to eat it to honour The Great One. But can his friend, Dorkins The Dormouse, piss on the impromptu peyote picnic before it’s too late? Um, no he can’t – because he’s mistaken for a chipolata by a coyote on a peyote trip.

Beelzebeetle

Monday-Friday, just before beddy-byes, CBeebies Channel.
Join Satan-loving rain-beetle Beelzebeetle and friends as they explore the deep dark recesses of the cellar at number 666 Lucifer Lane. This week, Beelzebeetle stumbles across the seventh gateway to Hell inside an upturned flowerpot and, driven by The Voices, drowns all his bug-buddies in a thimble-full of petrol before denouncing the Teletubbies, defecating on a doll of Iggle Piggle from In the Night Garden, and spending the rest of the 12 minute episode ‘speaking in tongues’.

GZS

Argos - a totally unnecessary new concept in 'buying stuff'.

Has anyone reading this been to Argos? How many of you have gone back more than three times?

Exactly. Just what I thought. And yet this chain store is still alive. How? How can such a retail concept, one which is so fundamentally unpleasant for everyone involved, persist on our high streets?

Okay, so for anyone who’s had the pleasure of never setting foot into an Argos – here’s how it works. But first, for sheer contrast, here’s how NORMAL shopping works:

1) You enter shop
2) You take item from shelf
3) You pay
4) You go home and get on with your life.

And, here’s how Argos – in it’s infinite retail outlet wisdom – decided to do it:

1)  You enter the shop.
2) You realise there are no actual products to take off the shelf or look at.
3) Then you wait in a disorderly ‘gaggle’ of clock-watching shoppers as they huddle around giant laminated catalogues.
4) Finally the bloke in front of you sods off. You thumb frantically through a catalogue looking for the item you want, all the time feeling the eyes of the guy waiting in line behind you as they burn a hole in the back of your head.
5) Hoorah! You find the item you wanted in the catalogue.
6) You key in the code on a little console and, having invested far too much of your time so far, your pulse races as you hope that the stock-check comes back as ‘available’.
6.1) You’re out of luck – the item is out of stock. You gather your broken hopes and dreams of actually buying something in your 1-hour lunchbreak, and shuffle off in a state of frustration, anger and general annoyance. Or….
6.2) You’re in luck! The item is indeed available – but then you notice there’s only 2 left! Oh no! What if another shopper at any of the other 7 catalogue consoles have also keyed it in??!  Your pulse rises, a cold sweat kicks in.
7) You grab little slip of paper and an Argos pencil in your shaking hands and, just like a gambler betting the last of his inheritance on a lame horse at the bookies, you scribble a 6-digit item code onto it and hurry your way to the tills.
8 ) You enter another queue with your little scrap of paper clutched in your sweaty palm.
9) You reach the till! You hand over the paper and the girl types in the code. Is it still available? Or did the people in front of you buy the last two?? The pressure mounts. Yes!
10) You pay for the item. It’s yours! Hahahahaha! Dribble. The last one is aaaalll yours…!
11) Um, no. No it’s not yours – yet.  You are given a receipt and another bit of paper with a number on it. This is your ‘collection point letter and queue number’ – it reads ‘Collection point D’ Customer Number: 39.
12) You now have to wait in a row of orange chairs which are a little bit reminiscent of a doctor’s surgery. You spend the next 25 minutes staring up at a red LED display, hoping that customers number one to thirty-eight die of hunger/desperation/fatigue/coronary heart disease so you can actually get the fucking item you just fucking paid for.
13) Yes – your number comes up. You approach the counter and hand the receipt over to someone who’s age is more readily measured in months. They disappear through a plastic flap door into what appears to be the warehouse from Indiana Jones.
14) The embryonic assistant arrives with your item. Your pulse slows as you realise the ordeal is over. The amoeba stamps your receipt with a fat red ‘Item Collected’ stamp and you’re free to go.
15) Outside the store, you realise two things: 1) You didn’t bother to open the box to make sure that the thing you actually got is the right size/colour/version or whether it’s been damaged; and 2) That in the time it’s taken you to achieve this purchase there’s been a global pandemic and the whole of western civilisation has crumbled to dust, allowing a newly evolved race of taking gorillas to inherit the Earth.

The fact that Argos ever came into existence is a true cosmic mystery. It’s up there with the great pyramids of Egypt, the hunt for the Higgs-boson ‘God Particle’, and the Roswell crash. WHO actually thought this was a better idea than the traditional ‘shop’? The staff hate it, the customers hate it, the people who laminate the catalogues hate it.

Alright, so I can see that one reason might be the fact that Argos stock a ton of products – more than can fit into a standard shop. But here’s the crux of the matter: You simply build a bigger shop – they’re called ‘SUPERSTORES’ and they have shelves to put stuff on and everything.

So, we can see that the shopping purgatory that is Argos and it’s ’15 steps to get out of Hell’ purchasing process isn’t in any way designed to make our lives easier – it’s simply to save the company money on having to build a proper store. So, again, HOW and WHY does it continue? I suspect the answer lies in the sheep-like soap-opera-addled brains of the average consumer these days. Argos could probably refit their stores to look exactly like cattle pens with runs from the entrance to the exit; they could have a hot-iron branding machine that stamps customers on the arse with a ‘customer number’ and I bet that people would still line up to have their wallets fleeced and their precious lifetime sucked into the Argos vortex of doom.

Why not rebrand while they’re at it? This will do:

Everything you hate about shopping - all under one roof! Great! Where do I queue?

No, I know it’s not short and snappy – but then neither is the shop. Job done.

GZS

The news is presented by smirking gits who obviously practice their ‘each…and…every…over…enunciated..word’  style of delivery in front of the mirror each morning while they brush their teeth with super-cheese-E-smile toothpaste. Then, they climb into their roving reporter BBC-issue jacket and stand in front of a care home for the mentally retarded and, in all seriousness, present something like this:

“Yes, this care home, once home to over 30 patients, was closed down seven weeks ago after the BBC’s Panorama programme uncovered serious abuse upon patients by care centre staff. A report by the governing body has concluded that the care home staff neglected to meet the needs of the patients in their care and that the entire home showed systemic failure in looking after their residents”

Now, you can probably hear the appallingly stilted and bizarrely intoned standard BBC delivery of that piece in your head, so no need to go into the Dalek school of schlock and awe journalism that this post is on the edge of addressing.

Instead let’s consider for one moment just what the hell this ‘news item’ was actually telling us. Yes – that a report on a care home (a care home that we’ve already been told has ‘failed to care for it’s patients and systematically failed to prevent abuse’) “failed to care for it’s patients and systematically failed to prevent abuse”…

We all paid our tax money into a so-called governing body so that they could spend SEVEN weeks compiling a report on what went wrong. A report which even the BBC couldn’t draw any more sensationalism out of. Do we really need reports and costly ‘enquiries’ which all too often tell us EXACTLY what we already know? How many times have we heard something like this on the news:

“Today a report came out on the train crash that happened last year in which a carriage was derailed when it ran over a concrete block placed onto the line by vandals. The report concludes that the train derailed when it came into contact with the concrete and suggests that better measures are taken to keep vandals off the line”.

Really? Really? I mean fucking really? Do we really need to be told this, let alone by a reporter who sounds like he’s constipated.

You can add to that massive insult to the intelligence of the species with 998 other channels all covering variations of the following:

The Best and the Shit (AKA: The Apprentice, Celebrity Apprentice, Celebrity Apprentice USA, Masterchef, Celebrity Mastershef, Ramsays Kitchen, Strictly Dancing bollocks, Talent,  X Factor, etc etc etc ad nauseum)
There’s even a new one called ‘Show us the Funny’ where wannabe comedians ‘battle it out’ for some top prize or other whilst doing some irrelevant ‘who’s the best at this’ task. Is this what society in the UK is all about now? The VERY BEST and the UTTERLY SHIT? You’re fired, you’re hired. You’re the best chef in England, and you on the other hand can fuck off back to the family chip shop. Are these the values we want our kids to grow up with? Totally cut-throat, black and white, do-or-die, shit-or-godlike, mega-success or total failuredom. Nice world to live in, that. The headlines are going to fill up with teenage suicides and leftover notes which say something like ‘if Simon Cowell thinks I’m crap then it’s not worth living’.

The Police, Ambulance, Drunk & Disorderly, Joyriders in A&E Caught on Camera Show
Need I say more? Cheap cheap cheap cheap cheap cheap programming. What does this do to the brains of our youth? Half the audience will be despairing over the collapse of society whilst the others make notes on the best way to TWOK a car and try to spot themselves on the telly later.

Find or Tart up Your Old Shit and Sell it For Cash in the Attic at an Auction Gameshow StyleThingie
Yes – you too might be sitting on a pile of cash. Who knows, that painting of the green oriental lady your grandad shoved up into the loft in 1973 might be a Monet! Or, bloody not. Anyway, lets’ split you up into meaningless teams and make you buy/sell/swap all this shit and we’ll add up every last 50p of it until we get to an equally meaningless ‘winner’. Perhaps some viewers will even get out the stepladder and venture into their loft in search of old priceless family heirlooms… and then paint over the fucker with plasticote and screw on some MDF just so that Lawrence Llewellyn Bowen can pin a ‘I am the Beeb’s Daytime TV Bitch’  badge onto your sweaty winner’s forehead.

The “You Eat/Dress/Act/Shit like a Twat – So Let’s Fix You By Inviting Members of the Public to Take the Piss out of you before Staging a Humiliating Makeover” show
This is just another breed of the ‘you’re not good enough for anyone unless you measure up to an impossible standard’ show. The only function of these shows is to make huge portions of UK society feel inadequate. Those that are inspired by these shows will always fail because, unfortunately (for them…) there is no personal trainer, no Gok Wan, no personal stool-inspector like Gillian Whatsername, to step in with camera teams to make you look superficially good by the end.

The Police/Hospital/Murder-in-a-sleepy-village Gritty Drama Show
Why are these so popular? I don’t care if you start calling the characters silly names like Jack Frost or annoying wordplay type names like ‘Doc Martin’ (“ooh, now I think about it, he is just like a curmudgeonly old boot  isn’t he – he’s so moody he’s always giving people a ‘good kicking’, just like you can with a doctor martins boot!” etc). Once again, they’re cheap to make. Loads of ready made costumes and easy, modern sets or locations. Look, chances are we’re all going to spend far too long in A&E or hospital ourselves at some point in our lives – why in the merry fuckville would you want to spend hundreds of hours in TV hospitals worrying about the health of fictional people for several years – before you finally end up there for real and wish to hell that the BBC camera crew trying to film an expose of falling hospital standards would just fuck off and leave you and your colostomy alone.

And while we’re on that subject…
The Reality Hospital/Vet/Estate Agent/Lorry Driver/Boss back to the Shopfloor/Day in the life of a Turd Polisher Show
Cheap cheap cheap-o-vision. Stick a camera anywhere, including up their arses, down their sewer, in their company car, in a shop, in a restaurant – anywhere, and the great British public will sit and watch it.

This is the Bullshit Society. A place where entertainment and the mundanities of real life are indistinguishable. Where our kids learn that there’s only superstardom or super-failuredom and NOTHING inbetween. Where the grimness of life is brought to the fore and any enlightenment is shoved onto BBC4 at 1:30 in the morning for fear that too much knowledge might actually make people switch off the TV and read a book. Do we really need to be told what to care about by the news editor of the BBC/ITV etc? And then have it spoon-fed at us like the news equivalent of a soggy Farleys Rusk? I don’t want Mister ‘I End All My News Reports A….Lot….Like…This’  to tell me what I should find important or dramatic. Or, are we getting the media that we deserve I wonder?  If so, the Bullshit Society is here to stay.

GZS

“Football is a gentleman’s game played by thugs, but Rugby is a thugs game played by gentlemen.”

Okay, let’s put aside the blindingly obvious drum-beating and simple-minded one-upmanship that this turn of phrase embodies and look at the actual logic of this half-witted statement.

Firstly, if football is a gentleman’s game played by thugs then that means that it’s not a gentleman’s game – it’s a fucking thugs game.

Secondly, if rugby is a thugs game played by gentlemen then that means that it’s a thugs game played by gentlemen who lower themselves to the status of a thug to play it. Ergo, it’s a fucking thugs game.

A thug is as a thug does...

I might as well use the same basic thinking-error to produce any manner of bollocks in an attempt to ‘big-up’ whatever claptrap I might feel like defending:

“Weed is a graduates drug taken by idiots, but Cocaine is an idiots drug taken by graduates“

Or, to put things on the same level of mundanity as ‘rugby versus football’:
“McDonalds is a thin mans restaurant that fat bastards eat in, but Burgerking is a fat bastards restaurant that thin people eat in”

Or, to  take things to their logical semantic conclusion:

“White is a winner’s shade used by losers, but Black is a loser’s shade used by winners “

It doesn't matter if you're black or white.

The sheer starkness of the tautology used here is actually making my head hurt.

These self-satisfied tribal fuckwits can all climb on a giant rocket on a one-way trip to the little known star system of Circularus Argumentius. Once there, and entirely powered by the miracle of the Logical Fallacy Drive, the rocket would circle the largest star for exactly infinity-1 second before finally imploding in a cloud of moronic self-righteousness. Or something.

GZS

It'd be funny - if several sheep hadn't spent their kids' college funds and sold their homes beforehand...

Well, I’m off to make a cup of post-apocalypic tea using milk from my post-apocalypic fridge which is powered by post-apocalyptic mains electricity. Thank god for post-apocalyptic daytime TV. Welcome to Armageddon everyone!

GZS

Anyone would think that the War on Terror has been won outright, especially when there are people outside the Whitehouse chanting “U S A…..U S A…. U S A” at the moment. But I wonder who is waiting in the wings to take his place and avenge what some will regard as the murder of their glorious leader?

Yeeee-hawwww!

Forget all this gung-ho uber-nationalism. I find it distasteful – despite Osama’s deeds, he was shot whilst unarmed, and I fail to see how a nation can continue to take the moral high ground whilst simultaneously flag-waving and drooling like a pack of rabid Uncle Sams in response to this event.

Anyway, the death of Bin Laden isn’t exactly what I wanted to write about – it’s the fact that you can already hear the grinding of jaundiced cogs in the brains of conspiracy theorists as they warm up for Osamagate. For most of them, the leap from the logical to the fantastical goes something like this:

“If Osama’s really dead, why don’t they show us a photo to prove it?”
So, let’s say that the US Government release a photo. Not good enough for Mr Conspiracy, as he’ll soon have legions of people believing that it’s a Photoshop job. Mr Conspiracy: 1 – Rationality: 0

Alrighty then –  so lets say the Government do release a doctored photo. If it’s an obvious fake (i.e.: the average conspiracy loon with a copy of MS Paint can spot it) then it beggars belief – and logic. Firstly, the US Government undoubtedly have access to some amazing photographic technowizardry, so it’s not likely that a fake would be conclusively proven. Secondly, (and this seems to be beyond most conspiracists), WHY BOTHER???? If he’s not dead then why fake it? The real Osama would only need to pop up on live TV to put that one to bed. (“Hello Mister Cowell, my name is Osama and tonight I’ll be singing Somewhere Over the Rainbow whilst juggling live grenades.”)

Okay, so the Government don’t release a photo. Again, it’s a rock and a hard place for the powers that be, as Mr. Conspiracy will simply shout “I told ya so! Bin Laden’s not really dead!” from the top of Mount Gullible.

Given that any official response to pressure to prove Bin Laden’s death will always result conspiracy nuts asserting that Osama’s actually alive, the only thing the establishment can do is sit back and watch the giant crap-encrusted snowball of conspiracydom as it starts to roll downhill, picking up any random shit as it goes. So, phase 2 of Mr Conspiracy’s view of the world goes as so:

“So, as we all know that Osama can’t be dead [at this point, wheeling out a shedload of obscure discrepancies in the official 'evidence' - usually poorly understood and thinly strung-together 'facts' - such as inconsistencies in news reports (there's a bloody first! Reporters? Getting it wrong? Never!) ] therefore he’s alive. So, he’s probably being interrogated and tortured by the CIA. Or, he got away. And here’s the proof… [etc]“

"Nurse! I ordered a cheeseburger with extra mayo! Not this liquidised vegetarian crap! Nuuurse!"

There’s no point in illustrating further, as Mr Conspiracy has – wittingly or not – just entered the land of Oz, and cast himself as Frank L. Baum. He’s about to hit the web and literally write a work of fiction strung together from a melting pot of inconsistent journalism, hearsay and (worst of all) other networks of conspiracy theorists. It’s navel-gazing plagiarism of the very worst kind. I say ‘worst kind’ because Mr Conspiracy usually comes from a breed of fairly well-educated and intelligent human beings. However, much as is the case with organised religion finding a back-door into even the most intelligent mind, these people have a curious combination of extreme open-mindedness and an unshakable belief in their own ability to be right no matter what. Odd, because this is the intellectual equivalent of making your mind up that shit is brown because the arse-pixies paint it before it comes out, then reading EVERYTHING you can about the human body online, only to misconstrue and misrepresent any fact to the contrary and stick to their original theory. Yep, those arse-pixies sure are a secretive lot.

1) If Osama’s alive, and the US has him, they’re not going to claim he’s been shot in cold blood. Why? Because, as is probably the case now, it’ll only inflame his followers to take revenge. It’s not rational or probable that they have him and then make this claim.

2) If Osama’s alive, and the US lost him, then the above still stands – there’s just no point in claiming he’s been killed.

3) If Osama’s dead and the US executed him following his surrender then, again, why claim that he was shot whilst unarmed?? Surely the best thing that President Obama’s anti-conspiracy advisor could recommend is that they stage a fire-fight and claim that Osama resisted capture and killed several people with grenades, before being shot in self-defense. But no such yarn is needed.

I’m sure that as the weeks and months go on more and more theories will follow, each more intricate than the last, with nuts everywhere embellishing them with detail and building their case on so-called ‘factual’ foundations. Yes, any individual ‘fact’ may have some validity, but connecting numerous minutiae to form a larger case is no different from the classic thinking error: Nelly the elephant is pink, therefore all elephants are pink.

Ironically, Mr Conpiracy and all his friends are experts at avoiding numerous large elephants that may be in the room at any one time.

GZS