The Gaytheist Agenda

Another day, another issue for the perpetually offended.

A CHURCH has condemned the opening of a Hell Pizza outlet – claiming the chain is making dough out of the devil.
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As if churches don’t do that every day of the week.

“The flyers they send you have the word hell all over it and a devil as well and you can not choose to ignore that form of advertising,” Pastor Van Bennekom said.

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Of course you can. Toss it in your waste basket or recycling bin and be done with it, just as I do when I get those religious tracts that have the word Hell all over them.

One of Springfield church’s eight core principals is a belief in the devil.

“We believe in the personality of the devil who by his influence and power brought about the downfall of man and now seeks to destroy the faith of every believer In the Lord Jesus Christ,” the church’s website said.
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So naturally nobody else in Australia can use the concepts of Satan or Hell because they’ll offend your chosen, contrived beliefs which are designed purely to scare and manipulate people. I imagine it puts a real dent in your ability to terrify small children into compliance with threats of hellfire and damnation if the pizza joint down the street has turned your biggest weapon into a joke.

The restaurant’s Australian chairman Mike Hird said he was not concerned that the Springfield church found the eatery offensive.

“Some people find the advertising interesting and see the humour, other people find it offensive – it doesn’t bother me if they don’t like it,” Mr Hird said.
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Hell Pizza was established in New Zealand and has previously courted controversy through its ad campaigns.
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Good for him. I wish him continued success with Hell Pizza. I rather hope he expands into the US some day. I’d love to patronize his establishment. (BTW, check out their Website. It’s quite amusing.)

 

Yes, it sounds dreadfully boring. That is, until you start reading and see how many of your tax dollars are going into things like farm subsidies for some of these anti-gay people. These are the sort of people who rant and rave against “welfare” and “socialism”, but don’t seem to mind sucking up every form of government aid they’re eligible for. Then they turn around and use that money against you, and laugh because you’re buying their product on top of it all.

Of course if you know who they are you can at least, if you choose, buy somebody else’s product…..

Base8: Agriculture, Forestry, Fishing and Hunting

 
Related post:
How Much Land Underneath Your Town Do the Mormons Own?

 

Being a vegetarian I can have a difficult time finding the foods and personal care products I need, particularly if I want to do it without going to multiple stores every time I go out shopping. Whole Foods, while admittedly more expensive overall than most stores, made it possible for me to not only find what I needed (including some things I simply couldn’t find elsewhere) but helped me avoid running all over town. But I’m now willing to make the extra efforts necessary. I am officially boycotting Whole Foods.

Yes, I was thoroughly disgusted by John Mackey’s diatribe in the Wall Street Journal in which he claims health care is just another commodity for people to buy rather than an inherent right. If you’re not wealthy enough to pay for it then too bad for you. But it goes far beyond that. I dug a little deeper after reading that article and I didn’t like what I discovered. In fact, I was appalled.

What’s wrong with Whole Foods?

(1) Aggressive monopolization. Tons of independent co-ops throughout the country don’t exist any more because Whole Foods bought them out. Whole Foods also absorbed all its significant competitors (Wild Oats, Bread & Circus, Fresh Fields, Bread of Life, Merchant of Vino, Nature’s Heartland, Food for Thought, Harry’s Farmers Market, Mrs. Gooch’s Natural Foods Markets, and U.K.-based Fresh & Wild). They’ve thus created a near-monopoly in the natural foods grocery business. Consumers are better served by a diversity of stores, but Whole Foods has been trying to wipe out the competition — and has been quite successful at doing so.
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(5) CEO posing as someone else on the Internet. For seven years, Whole Foods CEO John Mackey posted on the Yahoo Finance board about his company and its competitors while pretending to be someone else. By trashing rival Wild Oats, their stock price could drop and he could buy them out for less money. Mackey also had the gall to anonymously praise himself. (”I like Mackey’s haircut. I think he looks cute!”) (6) He didn’t stop there: He also criticized specific employees, under the cover of anonymity. Daily Kos said of this, “The very idea of the founder and CEO of a major national corporation hiding behind a pseudonym to lambaste one of his own hourly wage earners on an online message board says something about the personal moral integrity of union-busting executives.” (7) After being discovered, he was unrepentant, trying to justify his behavior in a long blog post, and making a point to say specifically that his actions weren’t unethical.
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(7) Anti-Union. Whole Foods is so fiercely anti-union it has actually fired employees who were trying to organize one. As Common Dreams says, “Whole Foods matches Wal-Mart in its reputation for corporate anti-unionism. It’s a hostility rooted in a management whose ‘core values’ are intrinsically patrician and antidemocratic. The latter qualities were revealed in all their dismal hypocrisy most forcefully in 2002 when employees of the chain’s Madison, Wisconsin, store voted to unionize and join the United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW). In a story that caught the attention of the New York Times and other media, Mackey had what might be described as a New Age temper tantrum, treating the specter of collective bargaining at one of his stores as a disaster of almost unspeakable proportions….The yearlong effort to defeat Madison’s first organizing drive revealed Mackey as a “socially enlightened” poseur, a New Age business type who talks about love and ecological footprints and other enlightened things, but who turns to the hard boot of corporate scare tactics and disinformation when confronted with a group of employees who dare to assert their democratic right to self-representation.” (1,10)
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(11) Misleading shoppers about its support of small farmers. Signs at Whole Foods Market say, “Help the Small Farmer — Buying organic supports the small, family farmers that make up a large percentage of organic food producers.” What they’re not telling you is that while the number of family farmers is a large percentage of the total, overwhelming majority of organic output comes from corporate farms. As Slate put it: “There are a lot of small, family-run organic farmers, but their share of the organic crop in this country, and of the produce sold at Whole Foods, is minuscule.” Slate also pointed out that Whole Foods has pictures and profiles of small organic farmers in their stores, but doesn’t actually carry products from those farmers. (14)
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(13) Obfuscating executive compensation. Forbes magazine says, “Media reports frequently tout Whole Foods’ pay policy, which caps the chief executive’s salary and bonus at 14 times the average worker’s pay. The Wall Street Journal, Slate.com, Harvard Business Review and BusinessWeek have all mentioned the pay cap, generally in favorable terms. But they all omitted one thing: stock options.” When you count stock options, Mackey really made close to $3 million, or eighty-two times the average workers’ salary. Forbes continues, “Whole Foods manages to obscure Mackey’s total pay package by ballyhooing the salary cap.” A company is certainly entitled to pay its execs whatever it wants, but the issue here is that WF is deceptive about how much its execs actually receive, relative to the lower-paid workers. (16)
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I shudder to think how much I’ve spent at Whole Foods over the past several years but they will not get another penny out of me. John Mackey can, to be quite frank, stick his greed, his dishonesty and his callous disregard for others where the sun doesn’t shine. While he’s at it he might want to start selling Velveeta, corn dogs and Tater Tots. Those seem to cater more to the tastes of the “I got mine, screw you” crowd he’s part of.

 

Last month the FDA issued a warning to consumers regarding a variety of products manufactured by Clarcon Laboratories in Roy, Utah. The irony is that all of the products are sold as skin sanitizers/antimicrobials.

Risk of bacterial contamination has led the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to warn consumers to not use any products made by Clarcon Biological Chemistry Laboratory Inc.

The Roy, Utah, firm voluntarily recalled some skin sanitizers and skin protectants sold under a variety of brand names after a recent FDA inspection found that the products contained high levels of disease-causing bacteria.

What products are consumers being warned not to use?

Consumers should not use any Clarcon products. Examples of these products include

• Citrushield Lotion

• Dermasentials DermaBarrier

• Dermassentials by Clarcon Antimicrobial Hand Sanitizer

• Iron Fist Barrier Hand Treatment

• Skin Shield Restaurant

• Skin Shield Industrial

• Skin Shield Beauty Salon Lotion

• Total Skin Care Beauty

• Total Skin Care Work
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I noticed their Website provides this outrageous “miracle cure” testimony that might lure in the credulous but would send any skeptic’s BS detectors off the scale:

For a little over 7 years I have suffered antibiotic resistant staph infections throughout my nasal cavities which led to six ICU life threatening pneumonias back to back, each worse than the last. My doctors suspected mutated mold infections in my sinus triggering each reoccurrence, a condition which is now at an epidemic level for frequent hotel and air travelers. This condition would not clear up, and for seven years I have been taking massive amounts of antibiotics just to get through the day without ever being able to go off of them, until I met Bill Markham, the President of Clarcon Biological Chemistry Laboratory Inc. Bill suggested I place a product they call Clarcon Anti Microbial in my nasal passages, which contains live altered, but naturally good bacteria to eat the mold, this, at first scared me. For weeks from the first time I had your bottle in my possession I would just look at it without trying it, but I felt in some strange way it may just be the answer to my problems. Then with the return of a bad infection I knew I was in trouble and tried the product. I had nothing to lose but my own life anyway as I was heading down the same old path of pneumonia and did not want to end up in ICU again! In 72 hours the infection reversed. In 72 more hours I was with the clearest sinus I’ve had in the last SEVEN YEARS. For the first time in all those years I went off antibiotics. I have been off of all these antibiotics since I took CLARCON ANTI MICROBIAL the only time I had any challenge was when I ran out at which time I immediately ordered a case. I’m in for life! You have miracle solutions and everyone will know your name.

 
Today US Marshals entered Clarcon Labs to seize products and ingredients considered to be contaminated.

Aug 02, 2009 (SmarTrend(R) News Watch via COMTEX) — – 8/2/2009 - The U.S. Marshals Service has seized all skin sanitizers and protectants, including the ingredients and components, from Clarcon Biological Chemistry Laboratory’s facility in Utah, according to the FDA. The FDA also warned consumers not to use any Clarcon products because they contain harmful bacteria, but no cases have been reported yet. The products are promoted as antimicrobial agents that are used to treat open wounds, damaged skin, and protect against certain infectious diseases. The recall followed an FDA inspection that revealed the high levels of bacteria in the products. The FDA also uncovered serious deviations in the facility from the their regulations.

If you have any Clarcon products on hand I recommend you dispose of them now, for the safety of one and all.

 

There’s been quite a buzz the past few days over Amazon.com and their removal of rankings on LGBT themed books. Amazon first issued a statement that it was done out of consideration for all their customers and that certain “adult” material had to be unranked for that reason.

Probst, the author of a novel with gay characters in the Old West, said he was perplexed by the move and used his status as a publisher to contact Amazon for an explanation. He said he received the following response from an Amazon Advantage service representative:

In consideration of our entire customer base, we exclude “adult” material from appearing in some searches and best seller lists. Since these lists are generated using sales ranks, adult materials must also be excluded from that feature.

Then they changed their story and claimed there had been a system “glitch” that they were trying to fix as quickly as possible. Needless to say many of us weren’t buying it after their official statement excerpted above. In fact my wife and I were looking for a new outlet to buy from and sell through just today. However I stumbled across something that, if it’s true, may lend credence to the “glitch” story. It seems, at least from this post, that a heroin junkie has a bone to pick with gay people he considers “hypocrites”. He decided that hacking and manipulating Amazon’s system would be the way to do it. (Full disclosure: I don’t understand computer languages or coding in the slightest but my wife, who very much does, read over the post and said to the best of her knowledge what this guy claims is possible. I’ve substituted asterisks for any lines of coding or URLS he includes. You can see them at the link if you wish. )

Amazon removed its customer-based reporting of adult books yesterday. I guess my game is up! Here’s a nice piece I like to call “how to cause moral outrage from the entire Internet in ten lines of code”.

I really hate reputation systems based on user input. This started a while back on Craigslist, when I was trying to score chicks to do heroin with. My listings like “looking to get tarred and pleasured” and “Searching for a heroine to do the paronym of this sentence’s lexical subject” kept getting flagged. The hypocracy of the gay community disgusted me. They would flag my ads down but searching craigslist for “pnp” or “tina” reveals tons of hairy dudes searching for other hairy dudes to do meth with. How is homosexuality and meth okay but heterosexuality and heroin bad? So I decided to get them back and cause a few hundred thousand queers some outrage.

I’m logged into Amazon at a far later date and see it has a “report as inappropriate” feature at the bottom of a page. I do a quick test on a few sets of gay books. I see that I can get them removed from search rankings with an insignificant number of votes.

I do this for a while, but never really get off my ass to scale it until recently.
So I script some quick bash.
*********
There’s some quick code to grab all the Gay and Lesbian metadata-tagged books on amazon. Then I pull out all the IDs of the given books from those URLs:

and I have a neat little list of the internal product ID of every fag book on Amazon.

Now from here it was a matter of getting a lot of people to vote for the books. The thing about the adult reporting function of Amazon was that it was vulnerable to something called “Cross-site request forgery’. This means if I referred someone to the URL of the successful complaint, it would register as a complaint if they were logged in. So now it is a numbers game.

I know some people who run some extremely high traffic (Alexa top 1000) websites. I show them my idea, and we all agree that it is pretty funny. They put an invisible iframe in their websites to refer people to the complaint URLs which caused huge numbers of visitors to report gay and lesbian items as inappropriate without their knowledge.

I also hired third worlders to register accounts for me en masse. If you ever need a service like that, you can find them in a post like this advertising in the comments:
*****
Then they would log into the accounts, save the cookies in a cookie file and send it to me.

Then I used the cookie files like so to automated-report all the books:
*****

The combination of these two actions resulted in a mass delisting of queer books being delisted from the rankings at Amazon.

I guess my game is up, but 300+ hits on google news for amazon gay
and outrage across the blogosphere
ain’t so bad.

The only person to figure it out was dely from Six Apart: ******
but he has been ground zero at my work, cleaning up my messes before. Who else trolls via moral outrage? Not many in the scene that I know of.

So it’s possible Amazon didn’t purposely relegate Heather Has Two Mommies and thousands of other LGBT titles to the “adult” category intentionally. Of course that’s the case it would have been better if they’d not issued that ridiculous statement claiming they had to protect all of their customer base (code for “coddle the fundies”). If they’d merely played the computer glitch card in the first place it would have, at the very least, given them time to work while they figured out what to do next. Then they could have figured out that they really did have a glitch–or a hacker–which may very well have been the case.

At any rate, don’t ditch Amazon just yet. Wait and see what happens, and if things don’t return to normal post haste there are many other sellers in the sea.

 
BTW, “weev”; next time you decide to play childish revenge games you might want to choose the right target. Gay meth users don’t give a fig about you and your heroin junkie girl hookups. They aren’t the ones flagging your stupid Craigslist posts. Why don’t you instead look toward the busybody people who spend their time trying to run everybody else’s lives: the RRRW “moral values” crowd.

 

 
Update: After further research, particularly considering what my lovely wife has discovered, it appears Amazon is not innocent regardless of who did what. We’ll definitely be shopping elsewhere and are seeking other outlets for our affiliate accounts. As I said above, there are plenty of other sellers in the sea.

 

I can’t say that I’m surprised, and I’m definitely delighted. You may recall that I held my wedding at the Cypress Hotel, which is a part of the Kimpton chain. Sapphocrat and I also stayed in one of their beautiful suites the night before and the night of our wedding and were treated like royalty. I couldn’t recommend them more. But on with the story.

Kimpton Hotels & Restaurants has announced that it earned the top rating of 100 percent in the 2009 Corporate Equality Index (CEI), an annual survey administered by the Human Rights Campaign Foundation. Kimpton joins the ranks of 259 other major U.S. businesses which receive top marks for their treatment of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) employees and consumers.

In 2008, Kimpton became the only company where all hotels were members of the International Gay & Lesbian Travel Association (IGLTA) and all hotels are TAG Approved, the largest directory of gay friendly hotels and resorts. Additionally, on May 1, 2008, at the IGLTA Convention in Las Vegas, Kimpton won the PlanetOut 2008 Hotel Group of the Year award. For more information about Kimpton’s LGBT program, visit Kimpton Hotels LGBT

Incidentally it was the Planet Out award that led us to Kimpton and the Cypress Hotel. When we read how LGBT friendly they were we wanted to give them our business and we were very satisfied with the results. Everybody, from the front desk clerks to our wedding planner to the waitstaff, were amazing.

The CEI rated 583 businesses in total, evaluating LGBT-related policies and practices including non-discrimination policies, transgender health benefits and domestic partner benefits. Kimpton’s efforts in ensuring LGBT equality in each of the survey’s main criterion earned it the prestigious 100 percent ranking. Kimpton was the first hospitality company to score a 100 percent on the Human Rights Campaign’s Corporate Equality Index back in 2004, and has secured that perfect score every year since then.

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Like many of Kimpton’s programs that anticipate the preferences of its guests, such as women travelers, business travelers, pet owners, health and wellness minded travelers, the company’s welcoming stance toward the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender community exemplifies its commitment to inclusion. For more information on the 2009 Corporate Equality Index, or to download a free copy of the report, visit HRC CEI

Kimpton has definitely earned that 100%. They’ll be first on my list whenever I’m travelling or if anybody needs a recommendation.

 

Bigots in South Carolina’s tourism agency yanked funding for an ad campaign designed to lure LGBT tourists from overseas. Of course the ads had already gone through, but they still refused to pay the nearly $5,000 fee for them. Now a S.C. LGBT rights group is going to pay the debt for them.

Thursday, South Carolina Pride Movement stepped in, placing its own version of the ad on its website and inviting people to contribute to pay the state debt.

The rejigged ad now says South Carolina Will Be So Gay.

“We feel it is our duty to keep the word that the South Carolina Department of Parks, Recs, and Tourism gave through their contract with ARMO Worldwide and we intend to raise the necessary funds since they have refused to pay their bill,” said Ryan Wilson, President of SC Pride.

“Someone needs to rise above and do the right thing, and the GLBT community of South Carolina should be the ones to do it, and the SC Pride Movement is going to take the lead,” Wilson said.

“South Carolina may not be “so gay” currently but we are going to show the world that we can be and we WILL BE so gay, and gay friendly some day!”

Wilson said that if it raises more than the $5,000 necessary to pay ARMO it will benefit the SC Pride Festival and Parade.

Atlanta, Boston and New Orleans also were part of the ad campaign. None of those cities backed out.

Good on them!

 

We found out a few days ago that they finally assigned a number to the Marriage Ban Initiative here and it’s #8 on the ballot. In response, my better half pulled an all nighter and created some new designs. Here they are and as always they’re available on a wide variety of merchandise including clothing, hats, yard-signs, bumper stickers, buttons and more.

There’s also this one, which we wore to Pride this weekend. It got lots of attention and has been selling well the past few weeks.

So there they are. The latest designs to help beat down the hateful anti-marriage amendment. Enjoy!

 

You will no longer be seeing them at this blog. I won’t be quoting them or linking them for any reason. Sapphocrat has the story. From now on all news will be coming from other sources. I don’t think any of us will be missing out by avoiding them, and many other worthy sources will have a chance to be heard. It’s sort of a win-win situation.

 

You heard me right. Kmart is now selling Abstinence Pants. I don’t know if they’re trying to steal some of Wal-Mart’s RRRW customer base or what, but it’s pretty freaky. here’s a sample of their selection.

Don’t get me wrong, I have nothing against people who choose to wait until marriage. But does anybody believe that a pair of sweatpants with True Love Waits written across the backside is going to inspire abstinence? (While the photo is of the front, the back has the same slogan.) Furthermore, why is it that, as always, these things are only made for women?