blacksundae

Other than the last item (I don’t eat meat), this could describe me.

A California appeals court ruling clamping down on homeschooling by parents without teaching credentials sent shock waves across the state this week, leaving an estimated 166,000 children as possible truants and their parents at risk of prosecution.

Read on. [via Digg]

Exactly what it sounds like. For pure badassitude (and versatility) the Dobbertin Surface Orbiter is clearly the best, but it’s pretty hard to beat the Wothahellizat in the name department. Really, all of them look like winners in the zombie squishing department.

[via Boing Boing Gadgets]

Gregory Conley over at Your Video Store Shelf (who once gave my own Rise of the Undead a very nice review) is being sued over a negative review. Bizarre stuff. Read all the updates.

If zombies are to be counterexamples to physicalism, it is not enough for them to be behaviorally and functionally like normal human beings: plenty of physicalists accept that merely behavioral or functional duplicates of ourselves might lack qualia. Zombies must be like normal human beings in all physical respects, with the physical properties that physicalists suppose we have. This requires them to be subject to the causal closure of the physical, which is why their supposed lack of consciousness is such a challenge to physicalism. If, instead, their behavior could not be explained physically, physicalists would point out that in that case we have no reason to bother with the idea: there is plenty of evidence that our movements actually are explicable in physical terms, as the original epiphenomenalists realized (see e.g. Papineau 2002).

Read the whole entry. [via del.icio.us/camelCase]

From now on, as far as I’m concerned, every single Republican legislator is a Reeking Freak Closet Case until proven innocent.

These men wouldn’t know “safe, sane, and consensual” if you tied it to their weener with a red flag. I won’t call them “gay” or “kinky” because that would be an insult to the healthy spectrum of human sexuality. Instead, they’re the worst face of sexual repression, because they don’t care who they hurt, or how many lies they tell. Their whole life is a SHAM.

The GOP Narcissists aren’t the exception to the rule— they ARE the rule. They personify the very sexuality they campaign against. If they vote against gays, we know they’re queer. If they’re hopped up about “child porn,” we can guess their internet habits. If they hold up monogamous marriage as a Christian ideal, we know they’re adulterous, blasphemous fools.

Read on.

Holy cow. To think I used to like Ben Stein on his game show. What a maroon. [via]

Major-general of the reserve of the Russian Federal Custodial Service Boris Ratnikov tells that Russia and other countries work on making special devices that turn humans into zombies.

It was already twenty years ago that mass media first mentioned the strange word combination ‘psychotronic weapon’. All information about such weapons arrived from military men transferred to the reserve and from researchers that were not officially recognized by the Russian Academy of Sciences. They usually told about some generators that could make people muddleheaded even when they were distanced at hundreds of kilometers.

Such devices were said to be able to control people’s behavior, seriously impair psyche and even drive people to death. As soon as information of the kind was published some people immediately claimed themselves as victims of impact of such psychotronic weapons. They stormed editorial offices of newspapers and magazines that reported about the psychotronic weapons and complained that some strange voices dictated orders to them. Journalists in their turn recommended such people visiting psychiatrists.

Read on. By the way, since when is “zombie” a verb? Isn’t “zombify” the correct term?

These are impolite questions. Nobody asks them here by the cool pond tucked into a gentle hillside. Increasingly, nobody asks them outside the gates, either. It is impolite to wonder why our parents sent us all to college, and why generations of immigrants sweated and bled so their children could be educated, if it wasn’t so that we would all one day feel confident enough to look at a museum filled with dinosaurs rigged to run six furlongs at Belmont and make the not unreasonable point that it is all batshit crazy and that anyone who believes this righteous hooey should be kept away from sharp objects and his own money.

Read on.

“Zombies?”

(Even for me, I’ve been on a bit of a zombie kick lately. That’s mostly because I’ve subscribed to the “zombies” tag on del.icio.us.)