Founded in 1980 to fight for the rights of animals, PETA made headlines in 1981 by publicizing the Silver Spring monkeys. They apparently blew their idea wad early and have since come up with some ridiculous stunts to promote themselves. This article looks back at the 8 most retarded PETA stunts.

1. Save the Sea Kittens

PETA decided that people eat fish because they aren’t adorable enough (and not because they’re delicious) so they tried to give them a more cuddly image. They produced plush dolls and cute pictures of “Sea Kittens” frolicking like Snorks along with a plethora of sea kitten facts, including gems like: “Sea kittens talk to each other through squeaks, squeals, and other low-frequency sounds that humans can only hear through special instruments. Most ichthyologists – scientists who specialize in sea kitten biology – agree that this is just about the cutest thing ever.” They capped off the insanity by asking jam band Phish to rename themselves “Sea Kittens”. Phish was presumably too stoned to respond. The campaign didn’t resonate with anyone. In fact, only 14,000 people signed the petition and considering that PETA’s membership is over 2 million (by their own numbers), that means that less than 1% of their own organization gave a shit about the campaign.

2. Feeding kids meat is child abuse

News stories made it sound like poor 14-year-old Alexander Draper ballooned to 555-lbs because his mother, Jerri Gray, fed him like a goose being prepared for foie gras. It put him at risk for serious health problems – including potentially needing a liver transplant – and caused a lot of angry talk radio listeners to call in and rant about the disintegration of America. Not wanting to miss an opportunity to cash in on someone’s misfortune, PETA launched an ad campaign that blamed the obesity epidemic on meat. Most of the mouth-frothing died down when interviews with Gray showed that Draper’s obesity was partially due to poverty. Gray worked an astronomical amount of hours to make ends meet and simply did not have time to cook. She brought fast food home because it was affordable and time saving. PETA responded by sending her a copy of Meatless Meals for Working People, a book that mostly contains lists of vegetarian items one can select at fast food places.

3. Westminster Kennel Club dog show protest

Someone at PETA sat up and said: “Hey, we haven’t pissed off anyone lately, what can we do that is terribly offensive?” The result was a bizarre protest at the 133rd annual Westminster Kennel Club dog show where protesters dressed as the KKK. You see, according to PETA’s logic, selective dog breeding is equivalent to the white supremacist ethnic purity stance that the KKK espouses. Protesters stood outside the show handing out leaflets, carrying signs, and generally being pleasant, except for dressing as one of the most violent and intolerant groups in history. Admittedly, some dog breeding can produce unpleasant and painful effects for the dogs in question, but the AKC doesn’t burn crosses or lynch mutts in the street for being impure. Fortunately for the forces of logic, no one seemed to get the point of the protest. According to the AP: “Most passers-by seemed more puzzled than offended”. In the end, no one really paid attention to the protesters, except as interesting curiosities, and PETA failed not only to spread awareness or help the cause of purebred dogs, but they failed to piss anyone off significantly.

4. Cooking Mama

Cooking Mama is your typically bizarre (yet fun) Nintendo game where the player “cooks” various meals using the Nintendo DS’s touch screen. The stylus is used to move objects around, chop veggies, and slice meat. PETA thought that the fun, E-rated game would be a great platform to protest eating meat from, so they released a Flash version of the game called Cooking Mama: Mama Kills Animals where the player prepares a turkey by plucking feathers, ripping out innards, and cutting its head off. The insane PETA version of the game is a lot more fun than the original, possibly because there is something viscerally exciting about tearing the insides out of a turkey and then eating it. Response to the “unauthorized” version of the game was small, limited only to gaming sites trying to figure out what PETA was trying to accomplish. Once again, people seemed more bemused and uncertain than shocked and offended by PETA’s actions, so it once again begs the question: what was PETA was trying to accomplish?

5. NASCAR chicken dance

NASCAR is an event best left alone unless you have a mullet. Its fans are strange, its appeal is… evasive, but thankfully it is mostly avoidable outside of certain sites beneath the Mason-Dixon line. That’s why the rest off the world ignores it when NASCAR fans attempt to break the world record for something. Unless, of course, you’re PETA, in which case, you protest it with vigor. KFC sponsored an attempt to break the world record for most people chicken dancing at a 2009 event at the Talledega Speedway. PETA immediately took issue with this harmless event. The reason? Failure to adopt “even modest human reforms” with regards to the care and treatment of KFC’s chickens. You would think that someone at PETA would have realized that protesting KFC directly would have been a better idea than a high-profile attack on a large event that was barely related to chickens to begin with. Again, no one really paid attention to the protest. NASCAR: 1, KFC: 0.

6. Holocaust on Your Plate

Unless you are a Holocaust denier, member of 4chan, or 4chan member who also happens to be a Holocaust denier, joking about the Holocaust is considered off limits. That is unless, you guessed it, you are PETA. They thought it would be appropriate to compare the raising and slaughter of farm animals to this rather unpleasant event in human history. While there are a thousand appropriate ways to make the comparison, PETA went balls to the wall inappropriate: PETA toured a giant display that consisted of eight 60-square-foot panels where chickens, cow, and pig carcasses were juxtaposed with photos of Holocaust victims. Genius. Once again, this action produced little but a resounding “What the fuck?” from the community at large, and several pissed off statements from Jews and actual Holocaust survivors.

7. Obama’s fly swat

In mid-2009, Obama swatted down a fly during an interview with CNBC. “That was pretty impressive, wasn’t it? I got the sucker,” Obama riffed. Not even Birthers found issue with the event outside of the press fawning over his lighting fast reflexes. A few blogs decided that this was something PETA had to do something about. Falling for the troll bait, PETA found it inexcusable. They declared it an “execution” and demanded that Obama show a little more compassion to even “the least sympathetic animals.” The declaration largely became fodder to make fun of PETA so they backpedaled a bit and released the following statement: “In a nutshell, our position is this: He isn’t the Buddha, he’s a human being, and human beings have a long way to go before they think before they act.” They then sent him a “humane” flytrap.

8. WoW seal clubbing

World of Warcraft can quickly turn into a grinding process to level up and generally become a neckbeard. Players find inventive ways to combat the boredom and entertain themselves such as raiding in game funerals. One of the most popular pastimes is slaughtering a server’s wildlife for shits and giggles. A few Canadian players decided to host an in game seal hunt and PETA flipped a wig when they found out about it. While the slaughter of actual seals is frowned upon by the general public because baby seals are adorable, WoW seals aren’t real so no one really cares if they are attacked. So instead of directly protesting groups that club seals in Canada, PETA decided to raid the event because it would somehow open the eyes of Canadians who supported the killing of cute pups. Again, no one really seemed to care.

9. PETA’s lobster nightmare

Only poor coastal Americans ate lobster before lobster houses started opening up in-land. Americans couldn’t boil enough of the little crustaceans and fishermen almost wiped out the population to meet demand. These days, the “poor man’s chicken” enjoys a gourmet status and is often used in fundraisers, much like the one that the Child and Family Resources holds each year. In 2009, PETA arranged for the Child and Family Resources to use the “humane” $3,500 CrustaStun, which electrocutes the lobsters in less than a second. They flew in the inventor and generally acted smug until disaster struck: the machines didn’t arrive in time so the agency decided to boil the 1,800 lobsters instead. “It’s a total nightmare,” said a spokesperson for PETA.

LIFE has an interesting photo collection by Anthony Karen. The photographs take a look at the day-to-day activities of the modern Klan. From the website:

“The majority of people I’ve come across,” Karen told LIFE, “you’d only know they were in the Klan if they decided to share that.”

Link. Via.

History can be extremely forgiving if you are a genius. So much so, that most people seem to have forgotten that the following five geniuses were massive assholes when they were alive and kicking. Petty fights, driving people to suicide, and even electrocuting an elephant – it is all here.

1. Thomas Edison

The Genius:

Thomas Edison realized the benefits of teamwork in the invention process. He created one of the first industrial research laboratories with the purpose to profit from the patents behind the ideas it generated. The phonograph transformed entertainment and his version of the light bulb lit the night. Edison pushed the world into a modern industrial era by thinking up and implementing power generation and distribution. The secret to Edison’s success was fairly simple: own the rights, be first to market, mass produce, and relentlessly attack competitors.

The Asshole:

Unfortunately, Edison had a habit of stealing ideas. He famously promised Nikola Tesla $50,000 to improve his direct current generators and then balked when Tesla delivered, saying: “Tesla, you don’t understand our American humor.”  This, along with Edison’s dismissive attitude towards Tesla’s ideas on alternating current, led to the War of Currents. Edison took out page-sized newspaper ads, created the electric chair (which some people argue he stole from an employee), and even electrocuted an elephant to death to prove that Tesla’s ideas were unsafe. Edison also ruined groundbreaking French filmmaker Georges Méliès. Méliès had spent a fortune creating creating the popular film Le Voyage Dans La Lune (A Trip To The Moon) but never saw a cent from the profits in the United States because Edison distributed pirated copies of it and ignored Méliès’ pleas. Méliès eventually went bankrupt and died a penniless vagabond.

2. Nikola Tesla

The Genius:

Nikola Tesla thought up, or invented, practically all of the technology we enjoy today. Edison’s light bulb would have been worthless if it wasn’t for Tesla’s genius. He crushed Edison in the War of Currents, making alternating current the basis for practically all electricity on the planet. Tesla was also the mind behind the X-Ray, wireless technology, radio, radar, and fluorescent lights but never got credit for any of it for various reasons. Tesla became obsessed with developing death rays in his later years and might have been responsible for the Tunguska explosion.

The Asshole:

While Edison later regretted his mistreatment of Tesla, Tesla never forgave. The only negative comment in coverage the New York Times ran after Edison’s death came from Tesla:

He had no hobby, cared for no sort of amusement of any kind and lived in utter disregard of the most elementary rules of hygiene. [...] His method was inefficient in the extreme, for an immense ground had to be covered to get anything at all unless blind chance intervened and, at first, I was almost a sorry witness of his doings, knowing that just a little theory and calculation would have saved him 90 per cent of the labor. But he had a veritable contempt for book learning and mathematical knowledge, trusting himself entirely to his inventor’s instinct and practical American sense.

While this burning hatred might be justifiable, Tesla’s treatment of people he felt were below him earns him a spot on this list. He had an unmatched disgust for overweight people and once fired a secretary for knocking over equipment. When she begged for her job on her hands and knees, Tesla launched into a diatribe about her physique. An impeccable dresser, Tesla expected all of his staff to dress to the nines while in his laboratory. He frequently sent people home for not dressing to his standards.

3. Ludwig van Beethoven

The Genius:

Ludwig van Beethoven was damn good with the piano. The son of a piano teacher, Beethoven was considered a miraculous prodigy by the age of nine and was considered to be one of the most influential composers by his twenties. He even wrote some of his most famous pieces after going completely deaf. Most music historians consider him the most influential figure during the transition from the Classical era to the Romantic era.

The Asshole:

Beethoven redefined the term “crabby asshole”: he threw things at people speaking during his concerts and attacked anyone who asked him to repeat himself. Beethoven outdid himself  after his brother passed away. Even though he never cared much for his nephew, Karl, but he hated his sister-in-law so much that he put composing on hold for a few years and doggedly focused on making sure she had no custody over the child. He used his connections to win guardianship and dragged his sister-in-law’s name through the mud in multiple trials. All of this was too much for young Karl, who attempted to commit suicide by shooting himself in the head. He survived and was eventually taken back to live with his mother.

4. Robert Hooke

The Genius:

Robert Hooke discovered the law of elasticity, pioneered use of the microscope, and coined the term “cell” to describe the smallest part of an organism that can be classified as living. Hooke was also an influential architect who was responsible for surveying London after the Great Fire. As the curator of the Royal Society, he was involved in hundreds of experiments. These led him to become one of the first people to promote evolution, to suggest that air expands when heated, and to develop one of the first gravitational models. Just like Tesla, he never received credit for large portions of his work.

The Asshole:

Unlike Tesla, who was an asshole to anyone he felt was beneath him, Hooke rarely received credit because he was a jealous douchebag who used his position to bully people around. He routinely claimed full credit for work that involved multiple researchers , would dramatically claim he had been plagiarized every few months, and was incredibly caustic towards anyone who stole his limelight. Hooke’s relationship with Isaac Newton transformed into an intense feud after Hooke forced Newton to present a working reflecting telescope and then openly tore his ideas apart. Newton was so offended that he refused to debate in public again and would respond to Hooke only by writing letters back to him. When Hooke claimed Newton stole his ideas about optics, Newton wrote back:

If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.

If you missed the masterstroke, I’ll explain it: Hooke was a short hunchback and Newton was implying that Hooke was both a physical and mental midget.

5. Isaac Newton

The Genius:

Isaac Newton was one of the most intelligent people, ever. He built the first practical reflecting telescope and  figured out that white light was made up of many colors, all of which formed the visible spectrum of light. But, his biggest accomplishment was publishing Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica. It laid the core for classical mechanics by describing universal gravitation and the three laws of motion. Newton’s discoveries influenced practically every major scientific discovery for the next three centuries. It shouldn’t come as a surprise that most scientists consider him to be the most influential scientist that ever lived.

The Asshole:

Newton was also a passive-aggressive curmudgeon who spent his entire career involved in nerd battles with his peers. His behavior bordered on the bizarre so many times that many historians believe he might have suffered from Asperger’s Syndrome. His feud with Hooke ended with Hooke’s death, but Newton had the last laugh years later by pettily making the only  authenticated portrait of Hooke disappear. Historians still debate Hooke’s appearance because of his action. When Newton disagreed with astronomer John Flamsteed‘s zealous approach to research, Newton stole his work and published it under Edmund Halley, Flamsteed’s mortal enemy. Newton’s douchebaggery is most apparent in his feud with Gottfried Leibniz. Newton discovered calculus first but Leibniz was published first. Newton accused Leibniz of plagiarism, orchestrated a “review committee” filled with his personal friends, personally wrote the committee findings, and even wrote the anonymous review of those findings. Discredited and heartbroken, Leibniz died of a heart attack. When Newton heard about this, he reputedly commented that he had enjoyed breaking Leibniz’s heart.