“Love sex. Hate condoms. Love SKYN.”

Yes, you read that correctly. Maybe there should have been a few question marks in that statement, but there aren’t. It’s an advert for (ironically enough) a new type of condom by the company SKYN, which appears to promote unsafe sex, and definitely promotes a distaste for condoms.

Way to go, guys!

This advert is currently to be seen on a forty foot-high billboard on Manchester’s Canal St, right in the heart of the city’s gay village. Grahame Robertson, the photo’s uploader says:

The ‘Love Sex Hate Condoms’ message - in 6 foot high letters - is irresponsible and disrespectful to a community that has been at the forefront of promoting condom use for over 25 years.

SKYN condoms, who are made by the Mates brand, need to seriously rethink their advertising strategy. This advert will be looming large (literally) over Manchester’s Gay Pride festival, which kicks off in less than two weeks, and it is simply insulting.

If you wish to complain, you can find SKYN on Facebook here.

 
Via The Herald, Scotland (abridged):

Schoolchildren in Louisiana are to be taught that the Loch Ness monster is real in a bid by religious educators to disprove Darwin’s theory of evolution.

These private schools follow a fundamentalist curriculum including the Accelerated Christian Education (ACE) programme to teach controversial religious beliefs aimed at disproving evolution and proving creationism.

One tenet has it that if it can be proved that dinosaurs walked the earth at the same time as man then Darwinism is fatally flawed.

The textbooks in the series are alleged to teach young earth creationism; are hostile towards other religions and other sectors of Christianity, including Roman Catholicism; and present a biased version of history that is often factually incorrect.

One ACE textbook – Biology 1099, Accelerated Christian Education Inc – reads: “Are dinosaurs alive today? Scientists are becoming more convinced of their existence. Have you heard of the ‘Loch Ness Monster’ in Scotland? ‘Nessie’ for short has been recorded on sonar from a small submarine, described by eyewitnesses, and photographed by others. Nessie appears to be a plesiosaur.”

Another claim taught is that a Japanese whaling boat once caught a dinosaur. It’s unclear if the movie Godzilla was the inspiration for this lesson.

Well, If you believe in the existence of one mythical being, why not believe in them all?

Perhaps one day the popular BBC kids show The Family Ness will be revered as gospels:
 

Belligerent fast food customer loudly demands a cheeseburger; counterforce is employed; God bless America. This gets particularly good around 1:58.

(Via Encyclopedia Dramatica)

This rather grim tale has been circulating the lefty net. This version is from The Nation. Pic related.

In November 2008, the National Intelligence Council (NIC), an affiliate of the Central Intelligence Agency, issued the latest in a series of futuristic publications intended to guide the incoming Obama administration. Peering into its analytic crystal ball in a report titled Global Trends 2025, it predicted that America’s global preeminence would gradually disappear over the next fifteen years—in conjunction with the rise of new global powerhouses, especially China and India. The report examined many facets of the future strategic environment, but its most startling, and news-making, finding concerned the projected long-term erosion of American dominance and the emergence of new global competitors. “Although the United States is likely to remain the single most powerful actor [in 2025],” it stated definitively, the country’s “relative strength—even in the military realm—will decline and U.S. leverage will become more constrained.”

That, of course, was then; this—some eleven months into the future—is now, and how things have changed. Futuristic predictions will just have to catch up to the fast-shifting realities of the present moment. Although published after the onset of the global economic meltdown was underway, the report was written before the crisis reached its full proportions and so emphasized that the decline of American power would be gradual, extending over the assessment’s fifteen-year time horizon. But the economic crisis and attendant events have radically upset that timetable. As a result of the mammoth economic losses suffered by the United States over the past year and China’s stunning economic recovery, the global power shift the report predicted has accelerated. For all practical purposes, 2025 is here already.

The article concludes:

How much longer will Washington feel that Americans can afford to subsidize a global role that includes garrisoning much of the planet and fighting distant wars in the name of global security, when the American economy is losing so much ground to its competitors? This is the dilemma President Obama and his advisers must confront in the altered world of 2025.

It’s get off stage gracefully or try and take everyone else with you, I think. Bush tried the second one. It doesn’t work, and the planet doesn’t have the resources to support it.

(The Nation: Welcome to 2025: American Pre-eminence Ends Fifteen Years Early)