You may recall the American Crisis of Atheist Attack Ads from last year around this time. You may also look forward to seeing them next year around this time. Why do we, as humans, repeat the same, useless behaviors, over and over? Because of this:

Last year, a similar campaign by the association drew strong reactions.

The head of the Catholic League linked secular humanists to figures like Hitler and the serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer.

Crazy Bill Donohue is our god.
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At a Time Magazine panel last night designed to hype speculation over who the stupid "Person of the Year" will be, two distinct, stupid favorites emerged: Twitter, and The Economy. Neither of which is a person. Christ. Even "You" was technically a person, despite being the stupidest choice ever. How about "Americans Who Are Getting Stupider," as a dark horse candidate?


It looks like money issues could finally force Hugh Hefner to sell Playboy. The company's stock went erect yesterday amid reports that it's in discussions with Iconix, which specializes in turning around brands that have fallen off. If you listen to wild blogosphere estimates, Playboy is now worth significantly less than Gawker Media. That's when all the models disappear.


Optimistic words are flowing forth from the mouths of fashion magazine executives! Conde Nast's Tom Florio says Vogue's profits will double next year! Other fashion mag publishers are equally gung-ho about next year! That's the benefit of getting to compare your profits to the worst year ever, in history. They will be better than that.


CNN had been pouring lots and lots of greenback$$$ into producing an entire online-only, all-day newscast on its website, for some reason. Now they're laying off four of their online anchors and cutting way back on that whole project, because they remembered, hey, we have a whole channel on TV, already. Always thinking!

What are the chances that any particular envelope full of unknown white powder is, in fact, full of deadly weaponized anthrax? Quite small! Exceedingly small. Vanishingly small. The original 2001 anthrax attacks were so spectacular precisely because it is so fucking hard to pull off something like that. Much easier to send bombs, really! Said bioweapons expert Richard Spertzel, "In my opinion, there are maybe four or five people in the whole country who might be able to make this stuff, and I'm one of them." Also: "And even with a good lab and staff to help run it, it might take me a year to come up with a product as good."

Here's what that means, in practical terms: The envelope full of white powder that you just opened in your Congressional office or governmental office or media outlet office or UN office is full of flour or baking soda or maybe even cocaine, but it is almost surely not full of anthrax. So stop evacuating place and shutting everything down. For chrissake. Some nut in Texas knew he could force the UN one-world foreigners to run in fear with less flour than it takes to make a cookie, and that's exactly what he did, and now it's worldwide news. Contrast that with what these places could have done when they got that envelope: Nothing. Set it aside, let the cops come test it, and keep working in the meantime. There's at least a 99% chance that you'll be fine.

We've said this before. Anthrax! It's a ridiculous thing. Just forget it. Do you smell that? No? That's because we had our operatives fill the room you're in with sarin, a colorless, odorless nerve agent 500 times more toxic than cyanide. You better evacuate now, because it kills in less than one minute.

Kidding! But sending you an envelope full of white powder would have been only marginally more difficult than that. So, seriously. Until further notice, just put it in the trash can. At least make the crazies come get you in person.

Paul Joegriner hasn't worked since March 2008, when he was laid off from his $200,000-a-year job as chief executive officer of a small bank. But you wouldn't know it by appearances.

His wife, Marzena, shuttles their two young children to private school every morning. The family recently vacationed in Virginia Beach, Va., and likes to dine on Porterhouse steaks

Steaks! Sunny Virginia Beach! It is all just as fleeting as the pleasure afforded by a soothing shot of heroin. Because as Mary "Intern Mary" Pilon ably points out in the WSJ today, all those fat, funemployment-funding severance checks are running out after months of joblessness. Regular old unemployment checks will be running out soon enough, too! So if you're a typical bitter struggling member of the creative underclass for whom both "severance" and "Funemployment" are both rage-inducing, untouchable fantasies, take heart in the schadenfreude provided by the stories of the once-affluent who fell so fast, so hard, so dumb. One 50 year-old ad exec married a 32 year-old woman in a $40k wedding, had a baby on the way, and was promptly laid off. So he did the prudent thing:

Although their rent was cheaper, Mr. Hipsher says the family continued to spend like before. They moved with three cars — two BMWs and a Chevy Silverado. They continued to buy cases of $36-a-bottle wine. They spent $250 a month on a cleaning lady, and Mr. Hipsher dropped $50 a week on flowers for his wife. The couple still dined out regularly.

Now that's all gone (including the wedding ring), and the couple is $70k in debt. Feel better now? Funemployment is for the weak. Bask in your poverty. It makes you tough. For when shit really gets bad. Like now!
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The Detroit Free Press ran a series of articles about Medicare on the suggestion of the health care company Humana, which also bought ad space to go with the series. Incredibly, the Detroit media situation just got slightly more wretched.


Mika Brzezinski says that when she was canned from her CBS gig a while back she tried to act all brave and happy for her kids but then one day her daughter got really upset about her losing her job because she knew mommy loved that job so much and ever since then Mika resolved not to lie to her kids about how she felt about being fired. Not sure what the point of all that is.


Sportswriters at the Denver Post are no longer allowed to make predictions about sporting contests they're covering. Sez their editor: "It is an ethical move. Sports writers are no different than other news-beat reporters. We would not have political reporters picking sides in a political contest." Huh. Cause I could swear that sort of horse race coverage is the majority of what political reporters do? Reporting on who's winning. With polls and things like that? So you have a good idea, by election day, who's going to win? And also I could have sworn that you just made sports beat writing 50% more boring? Ah well. You don't want sports beats writers changing the outcome of a game by predicting one team will win. Which always makes that team win. So.


The Washington Post's ombudsman brings back the ol' throwback question, "Does Howard Kurtz have a conflict of interest because he's a WaPo media reporter and also has a show on CNN, which he covers?" The answer of course is "Yes." Jesus. Please stop discussing this face-smackingly obvious "question." A better question is, "Why doesn't Howard Kurtz ever have anything interesting to say?"

Media Matters found Rush reading this item on air today and agreeing with it, somehow. We're thrilled to hear we're on the same page in terms of made-up economic theories, Rush. Do you want to go bowling some time? Email us.

This Carl Bialik column is not a direct assault on the existence of numerology (although such an assault would be warranted, and welcomed, by us, so anybody out there, just go for it), but it does contain subtle reminders that numerology is totally made up.

Beverly Kay, a numerologist in Mequon, Wisc., doesn't buy fears of 13. However, she says her work reading meaning into clients' birth dates and names is consistent with math. "This is scientific," Ms. Kay says.

Stop lying, Beverly Kay. That is so dumb. Stop making things up. I just read RZA's new book and while I enjoyed it, message to RZA: Too much numerology. Numerology is totally fake and made up and based on nothing except the ease with which it can be employed to fool uneducated people. So stop with it.

On the other hand, the same article totally makes you wish you were friends with some mathematicians.

Thomas Garrity, a mathematician at Williams College, has always had a particular fondness for the number 9. The number 51, however, doesn't make his favorites list.

"This might stem from childhood, when I regularly thought that 51 should be prime, even though 51=3x17," he says, taking a trip down mathematical memory lane.

Haha, wonderful! Tell us another one, UC Berkeley mathematics professor George Bergman: "Today, when Bergman parks at a commuter rail station, he finds it 'amusing' to get the spot numbered 233 (a Fibonacci number), 235 or 238 (atomic weights of uranium isotopes), 245 (the course number of a course he's taught) or 256 (two to the eighth power)."

If you are a (sexxxy) mathematician, email me and let's be friends.

• South Park: In its famous "Cartoon Wars" episode, Cartman decides he hates Family Guy, hilarity ensues.

• Deborah Solomon: The NYT's stern question lady had a decidedly pissy interview with Seth Macfarlane last month. Sample Solomon questions: "Personally, I find the show's rape jokes especially unfunny...Why is that funny?...I would say Groening is a better colorist...Are you contemptuous of families?...Are you straight?" God, shut up, Deborah Solomon.
• Richard Lawson: Famous cultural critic who did not care for the show. He called it "crude, sloppy, shamelessly Simpsons-derivative non sequitur humor," which is relatively non-debatable, as insults go.
• Microsoft: Microsoft and their supercool ad agency Crispin Porter Bogusky were all signed up as sponsors for an upcoming prime time Family Guy special, but then somebody at Microsoft accidentally watched Family Guy, and, whoa! Microsoft can tolerate jokes about nerds, Apple, the blind, barely legal hoes, and Rwanda, but this show's "riffs on deaf people, the Holocaust, feminine hygiene and incest" were too much, according to Variety.

Remaining Family Guy Fans:

• Seth MacFarlane: That guy is so rich now. Filthy, unclean rich.
• News Corp. Executives: Family Guy makes money.
• Millions of 18-34 year old males: Their taste is America's taste!

ITEM: More than 50 members of The Pagans motorcycle gang were arrested in a nationwide sweep yesterday. The crime that crippled the gang's Philly chapter: "a 'raffle' in which members of the Pagans collected cash for raffle tickets for a Harley-Davidson motorcycle." Hey, that's illegal guys.


ITEM: After some false starts, Brooklyn mobsters finally succeed in burning down a Dunkin Donuts using fireworks. They then have to wait nine years for the insurance payout. Which is $15,000. Crime pays, big time.


ITEM: A Pennsylvania woman forges a $50 check and puts it in a church offering plate. Then she steals the wallet of a lady sitting in a nearby church pew. She is later arrested.


What is next, American criminals being jailed for throwing a dog named 'Flash' at a police officer? Let's hope not

E&P reports from the front lines of the controversy that kids are totally not taking the fact that this comic strip ran in their school paper lying down or whatever:

"We don't care if it was a black, white, orange, purple, pink person who wrote this article," Audrey Foreback, a sophomore, told local radio station WYTV. "They should not have been allowed to print it and publish it throughout the school. It's just wrong."

That extraordinarily stupid statement appears even more stupid once you read the actual comic strip in question. Also stupid is the fact that "some students showed up at the student center with nooses around their necks in protest of the cartoon," which simply does not make sense, if the sight of a man in a noose offends you so (unless the offense is only taken when said noose is rendered in cartoon form).

Keith Knight himself is gracious about the whole thing on his blog but what he's really trying to say is: Shut up, college.

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Did you know that "Cheerleading accounts for 65% of all female catastrophic injuries in high school and college"—even more than Tucker Max fans? Did you know that despite this, the NCAA doesn't consider cheerleading a "sport?" Rather, it appears, they consider it a pastime for whores.

The greatest changes in cheerleading have been the growing popularity of gymnastic moves known as "stunting"

Mmmm hmm. Would the New York Times be as quick to tackle the little-known story of the pervasiveness of stuntin' in dangerous non-sport "cheerleading" so unflinchingly? Let's just say we haven't seen it yet.

In conclusion, yes, cheerleading is just as dumb as the sports for which it cheers.

People have viewed more than 500,000 times Yazdani's 2007 daredevil stunt, in which he spray paints an LA freeway overpass from a narrow ledge. The viewers included sheriff's transit investigators, who nailed Yazdani for 32 felony vandalism counts out of hundreds in which they came to suspect him, according to the LA Times. He originally got off with time served, probation and graffiti removal duty, but he violated his probation this summer with more tagging, so now he's been sentenced to three years and eight months in prison, thanks to his YouTube-enabled criminal record.

YouTube has emerged as the medium of choice for our nation's most self-destructively brazen criminals and miscreants. It's an amazingly powerful way to get in trouble with the law! In addition to having a buddy upload your tagging exploits, you can...

• ...be a cop and shove a rider off his bike for no good reason, on YouTube;
  
• ...be a bigshot tech executive who snorts cocaine, on YouTube;
• ...beat a cheerleader unconscious, on YouTube;
• ...work for Domino's and do disgusting things with food, in their kitchen, on YouTube. (This one won't necessarily land you in jail, it's just a bonus item for those who prefer national infamy to prison time.)

It's important to note that these are only the most self promotional of wrongdoers, not the worst. Everyone knows that the absolute worst criminals stick to Craigslist and Facebook.

The New York Times says the fancy school for healers was forced to rescind this policy that it put in its handbook and everything, after somebody there, from among the throngs of smart people, figured out it was dumb:

The policy says: "All interactions between students and the media should be coordinated with the Office of the Dean of Students and the Office of Public Affairs. This applies to situations in which students are contacted by the media as well as instances in which students may be seeking publicity about a student-related project or program."

All because they didn't want their students talking to the NYT about how shitty ethics are these days, among doctors! Although the school's dean tried to blame the policy on "the growing prevalence of Twitter." Seriously.
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