My favourite videos from The Onion

Use of ‘N-Word’ May End Porn Star’s Career

One day pornography will be respectful, mainstream and earnestly discussed on nightly news programmes and this video will cease to be funny.  Until that day…

College Basketball Star Heroically Overcomes Tragic Rape He Committed

This was not CNN’s coverage of the Steubenville Rape Trial, but you wouldn’t know it if you compared the two.

Rare Pornographic Movie Shot At Vatican For First Time Since 1982’s ‘Pope Fisters IV’

The Pope’s residence has actually been a prime porn movie location for the past 30 years.

Full article.

What Is Your Amateur Porn Telling Future Employers About You?

Americans Observing 9/11 By Trying Not To Masturbate

With all the tragedies unfolding around the World and thanks to modern 24 hour media, when is a good time to choke the bishop or stroke the budgie’s tongue?

I know that I probably shouldn’t masturbate today.  But, I dunno.  Should I not masturbate on Pearl Harbour Day too?

Right on, brother!

DNA Evidence Frees Black Man Convicted of Bear Attack

Issues of racial discrimination in the United States have clearly progressed so far since the abolition of slavery that the difference between a brutal killing carried out by an African-American and a grizzly bear is a distinction without a difference.

Live From Congress: Representative Wants To See, Meet More Kids Online

Rep. Gelinas proposes an educational bill to increase the number of young people he meets in under-13 chat rooms.

Eewwwwooooh.  I mean, just… Eewwwwoooh!

Prague’s Kafka International Named Most Alienating Airport

Up there with Camus’ The Outsider as one the best potted existentialist nightmares.

Prison Economy Spirals As Price Of Pack Of Cigarettes Surpasses Two Hand Jobs

If there is a funnier, more succinct demonstration of how humans are natural capitalists, I would like to see it.

Police Say That School Shooter Had History Of School Shootings

With America’s approach to gun laws clearly not fucking working, they may as well let the perpetrators roam free to commit further massacres.

Victim In Fatal Car Accident Tragically Not Glenn Beck

Fox News hard-right reactionary hack gets the epitaph he deserves.

Justin Bieber Found To Be Cleverly Disguised 51 Year Old Pedophile

The Onion predicts Operation Yewtree two years early and 30 years younger.

Pedophiles Upset at Girls Field Hockey Team Uniform Change

Best read alongside this missive from the head of a local paedophile action group:

So please.  Speak up.  Pedophiles alone cannot change the tide of pedophile-unfriendly behavior at girl’s field hockey and girl’s diving and co-ed wrestling and boys fencing.  Call up your school board and demand change, or else call, breathe heavily into the phone and emit a high-pitched cackle. Together we can make a difference.

Together, we are all pedophiles

Well, quite.

Scientists Find Skeleton Of Nature’s First Sexual Predator

Darwin would be proud.

Sam Harris, The Moral Landscape, The Monty Hall Problem and Genocide Neglect

manicstreetpreacher’s brain is feeling rather sore.

Following his extraordinary appearance at TED 2010 discussing the link between science and human morality, this lecture by Sam Harris discusses in greater detail his upcoming book, The Moral Landscape, due to be published on 5 October 2010.

Harris raises The Monty Hall Problem.  This is an intriguing game of probabilities that appears to be a total affront to common sense.  People have it explained to them and they still don’t get it.  When it was first published in Parade magazine thousands of people, many with PhDs, wrote in to tell the publishers that the solution was wrong.

Suppose you’re on a game show, and you’re given the choice of three doors: Behind one door is a car; behind the others, goats. You pick a door, say Number 1, and the host, who knows what’s behind the doors, opens another door, say Number 3, which has a goat.  He then says to you, “Do you want to pick door Number 2?” Is it to your advantage to switch your choice?

Many people think that switching doors will have no effect on increasing your chances of winning the car at all.  It will be 50/50.

However, this is incorrect!  Switching doors will increase your chances of winning the car to 2/3s!?!?!?!?!

I’m not sure that I understand it completely.  Wikipedia has the full story!

Aside from this brain ache, Sam Harris discusses the intriguing contradictions in human morality.  An interesting paradox he raises is “Genocide Neglect” as described in this paper by Paul Slovic: the more suffering people that humans are faced with, the less they will care.

Genocides such as those carried out in Rwanda and Cambodia attract minimal attention in the media, whereas the story of Jessica McClure, the 18 month old girl who fell down a well in Midland, Texas in 1987 gained round-the-clock television coverage during her 58 hour rescue and transformed CNN into a fledging cable channel into a global news service provider!

Harris has hit on something depressingly solipsistic about the human moral condition.  New Coke backlash anybody?