In contrast to arms dealers, who any terrorist or warmongering government will tell you are a laugh a minute at the very least, weapons manufacturers are not normally associated with yucks a plenty. They’re serious people who look after their bottom line, involved in the serious business of manufacturing machines to kill people.

These are some websites they would probably rather you didn’t know about. Too bad. This is the first part of an ongoing series.

HornyManatee.com

General Electric don’t just produce lightbulbs and refrigerators; they also make parts for anti-personnel landmines, weapons so brutal and indiscriminate that 156 countries have opted to ban them. 36 are still holding out, but these are the usual suspects; places where human rights don’t always take pride of place. Places like Iran, North Korea, Somalia, Syria and the United States.

As well as landmines, General Electric also makes American Gladiators, a fact that perhaps deadlock seals its reputation. It has an 80% stake in NBC Universal, the company behind the NBC television station, and movies like Welcome Home Roscoe Jenkins, an upcoming Martin Lawrence vehicle. And in turn, NBC owns HornyManatee.com, a site that urges members to sent in “amateur horny manatee pictures or stories”. The copyright principle of fair use dictates that we’re allowed to include a screenshot of the aforementioned; good taste dictates that we will not.

The Solae Company homepage

Okay, this isn’t anywhere near as funny as horny manatees, but there’s something darkly comic about Solae. Really darkly. The company produces isolated soya protein, an ingredient in many processed food products. However, as well as the corn dogs and chocolate bars that are helping America spread its influence without leaving its comfy armchair, Solae’s ingredients find themselves in all kinds of vegetarian and vegan products by partner companies: SoLean, Linda McCartney, Gardenburger, El Burrito and Mori-Nu are some of the brands that use it, according to the company website. We think you’ll agree that the customers of these brands try and buy ethically, care about the environment, avoid products whose production would involve killing animals, and so on. Lovely.

But Solae is a joint effort between DuPont and Bunge Ltd. While the latter has nothing to do with weapons, the former has historically had a number of fingers in the weapons pie, and was originally founded to make gunpowder. Historians disagree over whether or not it produced Zyklon B, but as well as revenue-makers like Kevlar, it got into a little hot water in 2002 for supplying Iraq’s nuclear weapons programme (as well as other well-known firms like HP, Eastman Kodak, NEC and Saab).

Enjoy that meat-free soya protein burger product!

Do you know about a website or otherwise innocuous product that’s owned by a weapons manufacturer?  Let us know!  It’s fun for all the family, ha ha!

January 2018

Its eyes are USB 5.1 ports; its ears pump music directly from the bowels of the Earth. It follows you wherever you go, just floating, always facing you, occasionally pausing to open its mouth in mock surprise. Swim, and it glides just above the surface of the water, waiting for you to emerge. Go to sleep and it follows you to your bedroom, gently whispering sleep throughout the night as it glows faintly in the dark. Wake up and it’s there, hovering above your bed, the technological waking terror ready to follow you around for another day. It’s an Apple fan’s dream come true.

The Devil Head comes in three variants: a vanilla Devil Head, which has all of the basic functionality, a Devil Head Air, which looks two dimensional when it faces you dead on, a bit like a halibut, and the Devil Head Pro, which is a little faster, can wiggle its eyebrows in time to The Immigrant Song, and shoots lasers at the weak and people foolish enough not to do its bidding. A tactile, multi-touch Devil Head is apparently in the works; insiders tell us that it responds to stroking and a playful tussle in productive, motivating ways, including repetitively chanting Satan over and over again. Form, function and design - Apple have done it again! Pricing starts at a reasonable $1,499,999.99.

Excerpted from TechCrunch’s direct brain transmission feed, between an article by Duncan Riley about geopolitical current affairs and the impending launch of a rumored Twitter clone

January 2023

With the introduction of the global new world order comes a new product line from Apple. Perhaps out of respect for our new masters, or perhaps because Jonathan Ive has been poached by Imperial Overlord 1 to develop his personal Helmet of Good and Just Destruction, these have returned to the style first made famous by Jobs and Wozniak in the early 1980s. The beige coloring of the iDestructoCube is a nostalgic nod to the original Mac Classic. The bomb that appears on-screen to alert you to the fact that a member of the Imperial Overlord Council has marked you for deletion is straight from System 7, and even the kiloton explosion that will subsequently rip apart your home and family has been digitally tuned to sound like Sosumi. As always, the magic is in the little touches.

Steve gave a dynamic performance as always, even despite Engadget’s snipers continually taking out Imperial Officers in the auditorium with high-powered rifles (they’ve since been banned from returning), and Admiral Huckabee’s guest appearance was a fun addition to a rewarding hour.

Taken from CNet News For The Benefit Of The Goodly Imperial Emperor

January 2028

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From Dave Winer’s blog

1. Is this a joke?

2. Get your hands off me, you damned dirty ape

Huckabee was one of three GOP candidates who raised their hand during Thursday’s debate when asked if they don’t believe in evolution the development of organisms and species from a primitive state [sic].

[..] Huckabee said if given a chance to elaborate on the question from MSNBC moderator Chris Matthews, he would have responded: “If you want to believe that you and your family came from apes, I’ll accept that….I believe there was a creative process.”

ABC News, May 4, 2007

3. Let’s call it a cavalier attitude

LITTLE ROCK, Arkansas — In a desperate and cynical attempt to get some attention for his utterly forgotten campaign for the GOP nomination, former Governor Mike Huckabee pulled a Jim Webb on his own son and sent young David Huckabee through airport security with a LOADED HANDGUN.

The Glock .40-caliber was “loaded with eight rounds” and concealed in David Huckabee’s briefcase, which he cunningly put through the X-Ray machine.

Wonkette, April 26, 2007

[…] One of his sons was involved in the hanging of a stray dog at a Boy Scout camp in 1998. The incident led to the dismissal of David Huckabee, then 17, from his job as a counselor at Camp Pioneer in Hatfield, Ark. It also prompted the local prosecuting attorney— bombarded with complaints generated by a national animal-rights group—to write a letter to the Arkansas state police seeking help investigating whether David and another teenager had violated state animal-cruelty laws. The state police never granted the request, and no charges were ever filed. But John Bailey, then the director of Arkansas’s state police, tells NEWSWEEK that Governor Huckabee’s chief of staff and personal lawyer both leaned on him to write a letter officially denying the local prosecutor’s request.

Newsweek, Dec 24, 2007

On Friday Union Advisory Board President David Huckabee paid $62.50 in city fees for two companies he owns and operates in Jonesboro. […] Huckabee, a senior political science and speech communications major of Little Rock, paid the $62.50 fine after receiving a notice from the Jonesboro City Collector’s office. Huckabee paid the fine using 6,250 pennies, which took more than 45 minutes to process.

The Herald of Arkansas State University, December 3, 2001

4. Hamburglar-chic? So 1988, darling

5. Even Coulter thinks he’s stupid

As far as I can tell, it’s mostly secular liberals swooning over Huckabee. Liberals adore Huckabee because he fits their image of what an evangelical should be: stupid and easily led.

WorldNetDaily, December 19, 2007

1. Flying cars
   Vehicle of the future!  Never mind the obvious problems associated with three dimensional traffic jams, not to mention drunk driving.  Just picture rising above the urban sprawl in your very own flying machine, and consider the possibilities!  Gas stations in the sky!  McDonald’s Drive Thrus in the sky!  People forced to live on the poverty line due to our unequal economic system, soullessly wiping windows in order to make a meager buck so they can afford to stay at the homeless shelter tonight, in the sky!  Idiots flicking out still-burning cigarette ends while their subwoofer causes visible vibrations in the air around them, in the sky!  Why, that’s a veritable world of tomorrow right there.
2. Scuba bears
   Global warming is irrevocably melting the natural habitat of the friendly polar bear.  The solution is simple: get the companies responsible to kit out each individual animal with scuba gear.  Problem solved.  Alternatively, install giant refrigerators at both poles: sure, they’ll pump out massively ozone-depleting levels of CFCs, but it won’t matter!  No matter how much poison we spew out, the planet will stay frosty cool at both ends.
3. Mecha-Britney
   Britney Spears’ mortal body has been virtually destroyed, and it must be rebuilt.  This year, expect her to be kitted out with a RoboCop-like exoskeleton that allows her to belt out catchy Swedish-penned power pop while becoming unsusceptible to the vices that have blighted her existence as a mortal human.  Dealing out harsh justice is an optional extra; doing the robot for anyone who asks is free.
4. Instant learning
   Pretty soon, you’ll be able to take any piece of knowledge and have it beamed directly into your brain, like Keanu Reeves learns kung fu in The Matrix.  Simultaneously, the Internet will become humanity’s premier source of information.  Through the medium of self-aggrandizing blogs, 140-character Twitter messages, snarky Digg comments, Facebook applications and lolcats, we will collectively reach the next stage of human evolution.  Don’t be afraid.
5. A little more rum, a little more monkey
   And perhaps a little bit more of the two combined.