The Real Interrobang -- You STILL Can't Do That On Slashdot

These are the pearls that were her eyes

2010-01-08T05:13:11Z

Argh: I'm pretty sure I passed a kidney stone (albeit a fairly small one) early Wednesday morning. Compared to an eight-hour gallbladder attack, it was a walk in the park, but that was one wicked backache.

Argh, again: My friend Sian was missing for a few days, but she's back again -- apparently even though she'd promised people she'd do stuff with them, she went to bed because she wasn't feeling well, and didn't call, which is her primary means of assholery. (She hates the phone, but one of these days, all of her friends screaming at her, and/or sending the cops, will get through to her, I think.) The bad news is, she has gone to the hospital because she thinks she has appendicitis, and as of about 10:30 tonight, hadn't been heard from since about 2 this afternoon.

Heh. I was over at a friend's house today helping him organise his files. I can now say with some certainty that I'm not the least organised person in the world. :) Maybe now my mother will get off my case. (Ha ha ha! I kill me!)

Whoops, Nero wants me to go to bed...

Quotes, Ouch Edition

2010-01-07T03:23:33Z

I find that arguing with creationists works well if you know how to turn arguments on them. Take that hoary old bastard, the 2nd law of thermodynamics argument. I immediately start asking things like, "Explain what you know about it." Or, "What is the first law?" Or, best of all, "How many laws of thermodynamics are there?" And so forth. Think of it as a reverse Gish Gallop. I bog them down with defining and explaining and details, details, details, until they get so cornered that they never bring it up again within my hearing--or that of anyone who would tell me about it. Of course, I'm dealing with the booboisie, not the paid shit-shovelers, so maybe that makes a difference.
-- Aquaria, Pharyngula, comments

Seriously, read a few books, but slowly: you don't want to sprain a lip.
-- Amadan, Dispatches from the Culture Wars, comments

Guys, guys, the cops are right. Always. They NEVER make mistakes. Everybody else does, but when a man or woman becomes a cop, they stop being human and therefore are no longer prone to the same stupidities as we mere mortals. When will you ever learn? Cops are a world unto themselves. They should always be allowed to police their own because no civilian board could ever truly understand how horrible their job is and wouldn't be likely to cut them some slack for the occasional overreaction or bad decision or refusal to investigate a complaint or misuse of their authority or -- oh, wait, I forgot -- cops never make mistakes. You don't even need to ask them; they say it with every news conference to explain why, once again, they're accused of getting carried away and doing more harm than good in their professed pursuit of doing more good than harm, and why nobody really understands them and yada yada yada. What I don't get is why they call themselves "public servants" when they serve only those members of the public they want to serve and leave the rest to get by as best they can or get tasered if we happen to be ill or injured, be it physically or mentally.
-- Kyle Michael Sullivan, Hullabaloo, comments

Practicing nonscience is only one way to not practice science; you could also practice science improperly,
-- Matt Young, "An Atheist Defends Intelligent-Design Creationism," Panda's Thumb

I tend to believe that most anti-vaccine activists really and truly believe in their pseudoscience. Consequently, when they spread misinformation and outright nonsense, they are not technically lying, at least not most of the time, because they have no clue that what they are saying is false.
-- Orac, " Suppression of speech through legal intimidation: Anti-vaccine edition," Respectful Insolence

Relationships should be valued intrinsically, not based on how legally binding they are.
-- Well, what?, Pandagon, comments

I'm only mentioning Little Lord Rupert's foreign birth because the righties never seem to castigate an immigrant who actually did come here and take jobs Americans wanted.

Do not forget that Murdoch became an American citizen not by going through the usual immigration rigamarole, but through an Act of Congress, which conveniently allowed him to become a citizen in time to purchase broadcast stations.
-- Tensor, the Underpants Bombing Gnome and M. Bouffant, Sadly, No!, comments

Twenty or more years ago, I asked at a skeptics' conference, "I'd like to know what we are afraid of. Why don't we simply teach creationism as the bunk that it is, etc., etc.?" I was rudely awakened to the idea that more is involved than just logic, that too many teachers would not teach it as bunk, that many parents would object, and in short that matters were not so simple. Indeed they are not; what we teach in school is a social and political matter, as well as an educational matter. It is naïve to think otherwise.
-- Matt Young, "An Atheist Defends Intelligent-Design Creationism," Panda's Thumb

Wasn't there a thread here a week or two ago about rampant corruption in the Chicago police force? And a bunch Chicagoans chimed in about how they don't bother to call the police for minor crimes, because they'll just get harassed and nothing will be done anyway? Apparently, in Chicago, you shouldn't call 911 for medical emergencies either, because some asshole will tase you if you accidentally hit him. Jesus F*ing Christ.
-- KristinMH, Dispatches from the Culture Wars, comments

This critical-thinking stuff is gobbledygook.
-- David Bradley, conservative activist, quoted in "Revisionaries," by Mariah Blake, Washington Monthly

My taser story is I was forced to the ground with an officer's knee in my back and my arm twisted behind me until it almost dislocated my shoulder. "I will taser you," shouted a second officer. I wasn't resisting. "Fine," I said, "I've never had that before." Alas I was not tasered. But I met a guy who was. He showed me scars on his chest he said were from hot wires. I've never seen scars that bad from a Taser before, but I can't think of anything else that would cause that. It is definitely a torture weapon, and police are using it--and threatening to use it--in situations that are entirely inappropriate.
-- B. Mull, Hullabaloo, comments

It might be useful to note here that creationists are vigorously opposed to teaching creationism as just one of a laundry list of odd beliefs presented in comparative religion courses. They way they see it, their faith is God's Truth, and shouldn't be presented as one more faith, but rather as what God (theirs taken for granted as the One True God) intended. This is the big appeal of putting creationism into science classes: science is taught as though it were true, as "here is how reality is" rather than "here is what one group of people thinks."
-- Flint, Panda's Thumb, comments [This is also why hardcore religious righties hate literary studies -- too much exposure to the way different people think, not enough unitary Truth™, and entirely too much fiction, which is a great inoculation against bullshit -- I mean, how many different and disparate cultures' stories of the dead and resurrected god do you need to read before, if you're smart, you say, "Hmmm..."? -- ?!]

Wingnut is the Cold Fusion of the Internets.
-- eine, Sadly, No!, comments

Mathematical physicists sin with their coffee cups, donuts, or anything else resembling a torus ... and then they come up with an elegant formula to express the interaction. I'm sure I have that right.
-- Lynna, OM, Pharyngula, comments

[T]hat’s part of the endgame for the Xtian fantasists—they see marriage and indeed any romantic relationship as legitimate only if it has the possibility of producing offspring. In all things, they want a state that regulates the status of a woman’s reproductive organs.
-- Gracchus, Pandagon, comments

Somebody's gotta stand up to [these] experts!
-- Don MacLeroy, Texas Board of Education head, quoted in "Revisionaries," by Mariah Blake, Washington Monthly

The woman needs to try the unfermented juice boxes for once.
-- Robert Johnson, Sadly, No!, comments, on Ann Althouse

There really hasn't been that much new in philosophy since Plato.
-- raven, Panda's Thumb, comments

I had Citibank as a client in the 1980s, and even though it was a mess even then, it was an impressive and intriguing mess, like an extremely accomplished actor that regularly goes on binges and tears up hotel rooms.
-- Yves Smith, "Sandy Weill’s Je Ne Regrette Rien at the NYT Falls Very Flat," naked capitalism

It's such a joke. The local press keep calling the murder "a crime of passion", "that grievous tragedy that *happened*" - you know, like no one actually did it. Like it's somehow appropriate tha a jealous prick goes on a killing spree. It's always the same! Even a premeditated mass murder is "happenstance", if a male human being conducts it.
-- Myytinmurtaja, Echidne of the Snakes, comments

Cheney's circle. Is that the Eighth (Fraud)? Or the Ninth (Treason)?
-- dmsilev, Balloon Juice, comments

[E]ven if you think that all theories are technically false, good theories are useful within their ranges of validity.
-- Matt Young, "An Atheist Defends Intelligent-Design Creationism," Panda's Thumb

There's nothing like inventing a disease and then selling the cure.
-- anonymous Google user, Pharyngula, comments

For instance, I used to live in a group house. WE were constantly dissuaded from creating useful structures to support and help each other because society discourages this type of arrangement. WE couldn’t get a group loan because it would be more unstable than a married loan, despite the 50% divorce rate. We couldn’t create a group for health insurance because of legal barriers. We couldn’t even get a joint checking out for paying common bills without terrible hassle, because most banks don’t have a setup for non-incorporated human units. But if marriage wasn’t the default option, maybe our society would spend more time developing thoughtful legal and financial structures that could benefit a wider swath of people. Why can’t most extended families all ive in the same house without it being considered a violation of zoning policies, for instance?
-- t-ster, Pandagon, comments

Do reindeer have cloven hooves? Cause I would totally roast up a Rudolph. Not that I eat meat. But I'd make an exception.
-- becca, White Coat Underground, comments

I'm so glad that high-level Bush officials are comfortable with Obama's policies. It's not like I donated money I couldn't afford to Obama's campaign because I wanted change or anything.
-- Notorious P.A.T., Balloon Juice, comments

The demarcation between philosophical naturalism and methodological naturalism is not sharp. I can surely apply the methodology of science to a claim of the supernatural without betraying that methodology.
-- Matt Young, "An Atheist Defends Intelligent-Design Creationism," Panda's Thumb

Isn’t this thread testy enough without bringing up the Rigellian word for “the right to beat one’s domestic servant about the face” ????????
-- seeker6079, Pandagon, comments

I’m really a kind person, and generally abhor violence as a solution to anything. But, really, these rich assholes need to be introduced to a mob of starving people with clubs. Or pitchforks. Or guillotines. Pick your method; I’m results-oriented
-- Mister Colorful Analogy, Balloon Juice, comments

We scientists created a modern Hi Tech civilization which a few people claim to hate and virtually no one bothers to leave.
-- raven, Panda's Thumb, comments

Exactly how far out on the lunatic fringe must you be when Glenn Beck is the voice of reason?
-- Ed Brayton, "Beck Loses One Wing of Wingnuts," Dispatches from the Culture Wars

"Merry Christmas" as a normative greeting intensifying Otherness, FWIW.
-- James Sweet, White Coat Underground, comments

I fucking hate Twitter, fr’example … just can’t stand its truncated format, which seems to me to be essentially a celebration of the spectacularly unexamined life and a giant ‘eff you’ to the studied craft of writing.
-- D. Aristophanes, "Thinks That Make You Feel Old," Sadly, No!

To place each discovery in time, we identified the year when the earliest journal publication on preparation, isolation, or synthesis appeared or the earliest patent was awarded (whichever occurred first). Overall, the median translation lag was 24 years (interquartile range, 14 to 44 years) between first description and earliest highly cited article,
-- John Ioannidis, "Life Cycle of Translational Research for Medical Interventions," quoted at Science-Based Medicine, on the length of time it takes a discovery to turn into a workable treatment

Yes, it's terrible that skeptics sit around snickering while others do the real work of bullshit.
-- Dangerous Bacon, Respectful Insolence, comments

Cheney shoots his friends in the face. Of course folks who used to merely work for the mother-fucker are scared of him. [And then makes his friends apologise to him in public like cringing servile dogs for inconsiderately getting their faces in front of his oncoming birdshot. --?!]
-- Legalize, Balloon Juice, comments

It's typically known as "Sturgeon's Law":

A.k.a., "Caviar emptor"
-- John Kw*k and Stanton, Panda's Thumb, comments

They are overlooking the other half of the conspiracy: this cabal actually succeeded in placing in office a Republican administration so bad, and selecting candidates so outrageous, that a majority of American voters would elect an African-American as the more palatable alternative.

[I]f I were prone to believe in conspiracy theories, I think you would have just made me wet my pants. Indeed, it is almost more palatable for me to believe that the modern GOP is a sinister Afro-communist plot than to believe they are just a bunch of pandering incompetent greed-stricken buffoons.

Beck is Obama's KGB control.
-- Herod the Freemason, James Sweet, and blf, Dispatches from the Culture Wars, comments

Oh I get it, in the Congo Free State the black people who were enslaved by King Leopold had to pay taxes to him. And since everyone knows that Obamacare is going to forcibly amputate everyone’s hand this is a very clever historical reference. And people say I need their fancy “risperdol” to function.
-- Anthony, Sadly, No!, comments (context is for the weak)

The process is not mobilization, then liquidation of the left as the fascist tradition goes. The template is post-Soviet Russia. IMF reported that the US share of GDP fell 8 percentage points this decade - comparable only to COMECON in collapse. America's end-stage corruption will be checked by autocracy, as in Russia. Obama has all the emergency powers he needs but he lacks the institutional power base. The real reformer will be sponsored by the security bureaucracy, not the banks. Watch for a Republican spook in 2012. That's when we hit bottom and elections stop.
-- squabble away, Hullabaloo, comments

Girl on phone: Topless anarchy is still anarchy, man.
-- from Overheard in New York

Quotes, Fine, I'll Kill You Later Edition

2010-01-05T05:35:03Z

james joyce dined on quashed quotatoes
-- Tacitus Voltaire, Sadly, No!, comments [Get away from me, James Joyce, and take your quashed quotatoes with you, you pervert. -- ?!]

Citibank sure isn’t in it for the consumer banking. In the early ‘80’s my first husband and I banked with them because of their ubiquitous ATMs and they were one of the first to have online banking. (At 300 baud.) Yet they either had a helluva training school or they were using brain wave manipulators, because every single one of their personnel were the most obnoxious, psychotically indifferent, casually cruel people to deal with. It took a screaming fit on my part to get some service as a recently widowed person, and even then they didn’t thaw and become human; they just sighed and actually provided service. This led to my vow to never do business with them again. Not that they have noticed.
-- WereBear, Balloon Juice, comments

If God is responsible for combining my DNA, my allergies, attention span, eyebrows and skin would like to have a word with him.
-- Alyson Miers, Pharyngula, comments

[I]n old europe they pay high taxes and get more, here we pay big bidness and get less. what an obama deal that is, but hey its not socialism.
-- hilldick, Hullabaloo, comments

He’s always been so stuffed full of WIN that he couldn’t have a normal-sized body to keep it in. WIN, I say. WIN.
-- slippy, Sadly, No!, comments, on Rush Limbaugh

Can you show me how to be a pharma shill? Is there a secret handshake or something? Because I’ve been dealing with pharmaceutical companies for years, and all I have to show for it is quite an impressive collection of pens and sticky-note pads. I’d really prefer the cash.
-- provaxmom, Science-Based Medicine, comments

Strange, indeed, that you should not have suspected that your universe and its contents were only dreams, visions, fiction! Strange, because they are so frankly and hysterically insane - like all dreams: a God who could make good children as easily as bad, yet preferred to make bad ones; who could have made every one of them happy, yet never made a single happy one; who made them prize their bitter life, yet stingily cut it short; who gave his angels eternal happiness unearned, yet required his other children to earn it; who gave his angels painless lives, yet cursed his other children with biting miseries and maladies of mind and body; who mouths justice and invented hell - mouths mercy and invented hell - mouths Golden Rules, and forgiveness multiplied by seventy times seven, and invented hell; who mouths morals to other people and has none himself; who frowns upon crimes, yet commits them all; who created man without invitation, then tries to shuffle the responsibility for man's acts upon man, instead of honorably placing it where it belongs, upon himself; and finally, with altogether divine obtuseness, invites this poor, abused slave to worship him!
-- Mark Twain, The Mysterious Stranger, quoted at Pharyngula

The dachshund is a dog that is just not meant to be crossed with any other breed, as the result ALWAYS comes out looking messed up.
-- Nora Bombay, Pandagon, comments

[C]laiming that [something] is “a major mistake” is NOT accepting responsibility, it is an acceptable way to assign blame.
-- Yves Smith, "Sandy Weill’s Je Ne Regrette Rien at the NYT Falls Very Flat," naked capitalism

My idea of “roughing it” is if the hotel pillows aren’t fluffy enough.
-- Major Kong, Sadly, No!, comments

We have a single going concern in this country anymore, the wealthcare industry.
-- Sharkbabe, Hullabaloo, comments

I know that there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in my philosophy. But you have to prove it to me.
-- Mark Crislip, "Causation and Hill's Criteria," Science-Based Medicine

The problem with all these bankers is that, unlike the robber barons of a century ago, they’ve never built anything. They did not build this country’s industrial infrastructure or anything else. They are deal-makers, not builders.
-- beltane, Balloon Juice, comments

There’s something terribly funny about watching Obama’s vacation plans being squealed so loudly about by the same people who thought George W. “Now watch this drive” Bush was the Second Coming of Jesus Reagan.
-- Chris, Sadly, No!, comments

An argument from authority is not necessarily a logical fallacy if that authority is a legitimate authority. Similarly, expressing extreme doubt about material on a site that is “renowned” worldwide for its extreme crankitude is not necessarily the mirror image of an “argument from authority.” Given the history of Whale.to, it is not unreasonable to assume that any “science” presented on that site is false until proven otherwise. True, on occasion it’s possible that there may be accurate information there, but when that happens it’s almost certainly by coincidence only and not design. I mean, really. Whale.to is a repository of an unbelievable amount of misinformation. No, when a source has proven itself to be so wrong for so long, it is not unreasonable to reject it out of hand unless there is other corroborating evidence to argue why it should not be dismissed.
-- David Gorski, Science-Based Medicine, comments [That is why the actual, formal name of the fallacy is Ad Verecundiam, the Appeal to Improper Authority. Legitimate authorities are fine; Whale.to and other cranks are not fine. You'd think people didn't study rhetoric anymore or something. -- ?!]

If Pete Peterson fell into the Grand Canyon he'd find something to steal before he hit the bottom.
-- Gareth G, Hullabaloo, comments

Obamalamalamadingdong totally wants to utterly destroy America, because then he will be the socialist fascist leader of nothing, which is totally what his power-mad psyche drives him inexorably towards, resultingly.
-- Comrade PhysioProf, Sadly, No!, comments

Pharynguloids are expected to understand the deep and manifold meanings of the word "sniny", yes.
-- PZ Myers, Pharyngula, comments, on a typo in an entry ["keep your fangs sniny"] pointed out by a commenter

At some point greed is a mental illness.
-- sloan, Balloon Juice, comments

INTERPOL and ACORN are somehow going to join forces to form the ultimate acronym, CLARINET PORNO.
-- flea, Pandagon, comments

I know no one will probably believe this, but I think I was one of the ones they were listening to. I was very active in a peace group that was on the terrorist watch list, considered very radical. I used to always have my bag searched when I flew. I was the media rep for a period. And for about six months i was havinga lot of phone sex. My sig ot was across the country finishing his dissertation. All of a sudden we'd notice this clicking on the line. It went on for a couple of months. We both knew what it might be. Then afterwards, I read a story about this, and the phone sex calls. And I remember one of them said that "the president got a kick out of some of them" (the calls). And even then I thought that what that frat boy got a kick out of were phone sex calls. So I suspect that a bunch of idiots were sitting around listening to me talk dirty when they are supposed to be working keeping the country safe. I take some small satisfaction in knowing they must have went home with blue balls, because I can talk really dirty.
-- Catherine, Hullabaloo, comments

Becoming a doctor is, in part, internalizing frameworks. Early in training you carry lists and papers that remind you how to evaluate acidosis, or the physiology of heart failure or suspected meningitis. After time and repetition these lists are internalized and you can evaluate the problems without resorting to lists. As an intern one of the papers I carried around was The New England Journal of Medicine article on the physiology of the Swan-Ganz catheter, and I would refer to it with each patient who had a Swan. One day I did not need to refer to the paper. I had internalized the information, and tossed the paper into the trash.
-- Mark Crislip, "Causation and Hill's Criteria," Science-Based Medicine

The state should disregard this widespread and common desire for the recognition of a romantic relationship (in this case, marriage) for the same reason the states have been slowly disregarding the widespread and common desire for it to take violent revenge on behalf of aggrieved and rightly emotional individual victims of crimes. We are a country founded on Enlightenment principles, and a key goal of those principles is to remove irrational and emotional components from the purview of the state and the law, even as we recognise their legitimate presence in individuals.
-- Gracchus, Pandagon, comments

Really, children, let’s not start that argument again. It doesn’t matter who is gayer than who, everyone is sufficiently gay in Jesus’ sight.
-- Woody Tobias Jr, Sadly, No!, comments

I'm a lawyer and have had several face-to-face encounters with creationists. They always end up simpering and backing off, because I don't play their game the way they want. For instance, when a creationist starts talking about the laws of thermodynamics, I tell them I'm not a scientist and neither are they. They don't know what they're talking about and I tell them I won't engage in a discussion about the fine points of science. Rather, I ask them whether they really believe such nonsense as God impregnating a woman, who somehow remained a virgin, so that he could become his own father and commit suicide by being crucified, to provide himself with a blood-sacrifice so that he would forgive all of us for sins we didn't commit (since we weren't born yet) and then rise from the dead so he could go up to heaven and sit by his own side. I then suggest that it's based on such foolishness that they refuse to actually consider the evidence of evolution, because to do so would shake the foundations of their faith. They start muttering and backing off and explaining that they really don't believe those stories and they start redefining terms. I keep pushing and they keep redefining their terms. They look stupid and everyone around -- including the religious -- know it.
-- ShockedISaid, Pharyngula, comments

[T]he Republican reaction to an attempted and failed terrorist attack on xmas day provides evidence for what many of us already knew: If Al Gore had been president on 9/11 (providing the attacks still happened, and I do believe a different adminstration may have prevented them), they would have impeached him. If there is a terrorist attack on this country under obama, and the r's have the power, they will impeach him. Republicans are heros if an attack occurs on their watch, Democrats are culpable.
-- Catharine, Hullabaloo, comments

The enemy of my enemy is the friend of my friend…

With benefits? I’m guessing “enemies with benefits” mainly involves no lubrication. And no consent. So, not really “benefits”, I guess. Which, if I had a point, would be central to it.
-- Dorothy, Sadly, No!, comments

“Enemies with benefits” sounds like our relationship with Iraq: bomb, murder, rape, torture, shovel cash, distribute baseball caps, bomb, murder, rape, torture…
-- N__B, Sadly, No!, comments

[Y]ou can always tell when something is a raw deal or a trap if it’s easier to get into than out of.
-- t-ster, Pandagon, comments

Current medical journal writing is often an excellent replacement for Ambien, even when you are fascinated by the topic. To call it the medical ‘literature’ is to refer to the phone book as literature.
-- Mark Crislip, "Causation and Hill's Criteria," Science-Based Medicine

Every nation is three meals away from a revolution.
-- jenniebee, Balloon Juice, comments

I've heard that one of Stephen Hawking's great disappointments is that his voice simulator doesn't handle the phrase, "Go fuck yourself, you ignorant bonehead" with nearly the force he intends. This is, of course, probably not true...but it should be.
-- cousinavi, Pharyngula, comments

The issue is less taser technology, then the unfitness and incompetence of the police, which is hardly surprising given the salaries and working conditions. As our Betters never tire of telling us, you can't expect good work short of an 8 figure salary in the business world. But apparently $25K is enough to attract thoughtful police officers.

And schoolteachers.

As a symptom of how truly perverted our values have become, there are actually cities where cops make MORE than school teachers. That's when "Idiocracy" starts to look like a historical documentary.
-- jamesd, Tokyokie, and john, Hullabaloo, comments

Marriage has a prepackaged series of privileges which come with it because in traditional societies it has been the cornerstone of social order, control and self-continuance. It is right and proper (and inevitable and overdue and damned difficult) that now that our society has far more (and more complex) means of social order, control and self-continuance that we discard its privileged position.
-- seeker6079, Pandagon, comments

"Fair” in American media means you tell both sides of the story. But what if some of the arguments made on one side are rubbish? Yes, both sides no doubt have a case to make, but don’t media outlets like the Times at least have a duty to make sure that the arguments presented are valid?
-- Yves Smith, "Sandy Weill’s Je Ne Regrette Rien at the NYT Falls Very Flat," naked capitalism

Once upon a time in a far away land, I tried to explain Rush Limbaugh to an Iraqi interpreter. He worked every day in an office where one of the military guys blared Rush over his PC speakers. I fumbled through an explanation of the Conservative movement and fear politics and I realized I wasn't getting through. Finally I said "Limbaugh's an asshole." The interpreter's face lit up. What he really needed to hear was that not all Americans buy Rush's line of BS.
-- Preston, White Coat Underground, comments [How come "asshole" is one of those words that non-native English speakers pick up almost immediately and understand with a fluency far better than most of the rest of their English? Linguistics paper, anyone? --?!]

You heard it here first

2010-01-03T18:22:19Z

We've moved to another phase in Canada's economic micromanagement. Even as recently as a couple of years ago when I suggested that the economic mavens in charge were deliberately fucking with the economy in order to keep the loonie artificially low relative to the US dollar, people were looking at me like I was some kind of paranoid conspiracy theorist with a grudge against the Bank of Canada.

Then I started pointing out examples reported in the media where they were fairly blatantly doing it.

Now they're actually openly admitting they do it. I guess I'm not as paranoid as people think, and it isn't a conspiracy theory if there are, in fact, conspirators. My justifiedly well-founded grudge against the Bank of Canada is practically the point here.

You're all on notice

2010-01-03T04:37:52Z

I say this with the greatest possible degree of affection, but...

The next wiseass who suggests I store some random article of whatever "under the bed" should know that I have a 9x9' bedroom which currently contains a double-sized bed, two bookcases, a nighttable, a laundry hamper, a lyreback chair, and various other oddments. I don't have a dresser; there isn't room.

The stuff that might otherwise be in a dresser are in a couple ad-hoc storage units in the closet, and my pants are folded up and stored in two disembodied drawers that occupy most of the space under the bed. The drawers themselves are the last haggard survivors of my old waterbed frame, which otherwise has gone long since to the Great Bedroom in the Sky, and I think they've only lasted this long because they have an inexhaustible supply of heroin and some of their limbs.

Also sharing space with the drawers are the media box (which contains things like phone cables, splitters, spare computer microphones, wall warts, various jacks, plugs, and adaptors, and suchlike), my guitar case, and my bag which contains odd socks, in the hopes that someday some of them will turn up in the laundry.

In other words, I'm already leveraged to the max, folks...

Quotes, Wotta Klutz Edition

2010-01-02T06:53:21Z

I don't want something that's realistic, I want something that's believable.
-- Chuck Jones, from Extremes and Inbetweens: A Life In Animation

The trouble with the overarching, big dangers is that they are big. One child falls down a well, and you have a drama, with a happy ending. But there are 3.5 million US children under age 5 with insufficient food. Where do you start? And worse, where do you stop? The big problems need the most attention, but there's a reason why they don't get it -- they're too big. Individuals and private charities cannot tackle these problems or the structures that create them -- only very large organizations (like, um, governments maybe?) can do it. And if they have been suborned, well that's a problem.
-- Noni Mausa, Hullabaloo, comments

The one great thing about Obama is that even though he's sorta kinda a fuck-up, I know in my heart that the aggravation I felt by having that colossal, once in a millenium, failure Bush in office for 8 long, America ruining years is being exacted upon trolls by a factor of eleventy gajillion. It just warms my heart to know that trolls are, every day, eleventy gajillion times more aggravated than I ever was in the past 8 yrs. It *almost* makes it worth it to know there will be tens of thousands of coronaries and suicides by cops over the next 8 years simply because Barack Hussein Obama is the moderate Republican in the White House. I can't tell you how many times I've told angry asshole thugs in person "sucks to have that black dude shoving socialism up your ass for the next 8 years, don't it?" just to see the looks on their faces. Priceless.
-- Bigby, Sadly, No!, comments

Being gullible about things like the age of the earth or how many dinosaurs Noah had has a habit of spreading into other parts of their lives.
-- raven, Pharyngula, comments

My mentor Irving Kenneth Zola had polio as a child and was disabled. My aunt had polio and has sequelae. I had a friend in school who had leg braces. And of course many people wound up institutionalized and dependent on ventilators, and many died. These people want this to happen again, in order to make some point which as far as I can tell is the exact opposite of what it would actually prove. They are completely out of their minds and utterly depraved.
-- cervantes, Respectful Insolence, comments, on antivaccinationists

Right wingers often use the "feelings" of police and soldiers as a shield to excuse their authoritarian impulses.
-- Digby, "Why does Max Boot hate the troops?", Hullabaloo

You see what it look like when you type blindfolded with the keyboard behind your neck? Don't do it again.
-- Marion in Savannah, Sadly, No!, comments

It seems to me that this concept has less to do with people really thinking [intellectual] work is easy as people thinking the route to the work is something you're born into. They face problems even getting to school, and when they do school is hard. It's easy then to see that as a intentional opposition, a block, to keep "people like us" out while letting other people in to do work that they don't understand because they perceived themselves as being the wrong class for it... etc. I heard this recently from a guy who's going to go to Liberty to get his PhD. "I just think it'll be funny when all them college snobs have to call me doctor." Well if that was your motivation... but realistically it's hard. They know it's hard but they don't see the actual work as hard, only the means to getting it and therefore cashing in.
-- Ol'Greg, Pharyngula, comments

You should definitely be concerned about your safety when traveling by car. Statistically speaking.
-- slag, Balloon Juice, comments

Ya know what they call "safe vaccinations"? Vaccinations!
-- firemancarl, Respectful Insolence, comments

We need wingnut welfare reform.
-- jr, Hullabaloo, comments

If 21st century civilization is not to your liking, it is a free country. Drop out, grab your spear and head into the outback for a rewarding career as a hunter gatherer. Some people actually try this. They frequently last a few months and end up dead.
-- raven, Pharyngula, comments

Having lived for extended periods without the sweet sweet delights of electricity or plumbing, I can tell you: it doesn’t make you tough – just uncomfortable & unhappy. The people who think that’s “noble” or “romantic” can simulate the experience in the comfort of their own homes simply by bending their fingers the wrong way until it hurts like hell, with my blessings. Those pioneers would’ve snapped up cell-phones, GameBoys & SUVs with heated seats in a New York Minute if they’d had the chance, & they’d consider anyone who admired or envied their poverty & suffering “a mite tetched in the haid.”
-- jim, Sadly, No!, comments

[G]o to any hospital pediatric ward and ask some of the older nurses if the Rotavirus vaccine is crap. Ask them about the times they had to stick a baby numerous times to start an IV in a dehydrated baby with diarrhea. Ask them about crying as they stuck a screaming child for the nth time, praying that THIS time the IV will go in and the baby gets fluids before the doctor has to do a cutdown for a deeper vein. Ask them about the babies who came in limp and non-resisting because they are so dehydrated, even though their mothers were breastfeeding, bottlefeeding, anything to get fluid into the baby. Ask them about the babies who died. Watch the tears. THEN come back and tell me the vaccine is crap.
-- MI Dawn, Respectful Insolence, comments

Obviously they have only those two choices because in the corporate media there are only ever two choices, one extreme response or the opposite extreme response.
-- thebewilderness, Hullabaloo, comments [Unless, of course, there's always the "third way," which, in the corporate media, is always halfway between batshit crazy and utterly insane. --?!]

[W]henever a boyfriend doesn't eat a food I do, or eats a food I don't, I joke that we're occupying different biological niches and can thus co-exist without trying to glom on each other's resources. (It is mostly a joke, but it's nice to know that the mushroom risotto will remain untouched if I want the leftovers.)
-- pixelfish, "Dumb Dumb Advice from CNN and The Frisky," pixelfish's LJ

God is the answer to the idea "it ain't illegal if you don't get caught". The only counter they can come up with is "god will catch you eventually."
-- Steve P., Pharyngula, comments

Public Radio Reporter: “Hey, do you have The AP Style Guide App for your iPhone?”
Associated Press Reporter: “No. My brain is an AP Style Guide App.”
-- from Overheard in the Newsroom

What is it about autism that causes some parents to see it as a fate worse than death?
-- Kaethe, Respectful Insolence, comments

First it was the stimulus package (still can’t see or hear that phrase & keep a straight face) that was about to doom America to eternal perdition – but due to a distinct lack of ragged baby-eating gangs of Satanist lesbo-terroists roaming Main Street, Anytown, & the cruel neocon-buzzkill of the US economy beginning to recover (about five or ten years ahead of schedule), Abracafuckindabra! Next thing you know, it’s Obama’s healthcare reform that was going to destroy America … but I guess now that it’s going to pass, it won’t (WTF?!?) – yep, it’s going to be Cap-&-Trade that does it. Definitely, 100% for sure! Um, at least until the Climate Change bill comes up, that is. Then THAT will surely be the final nail in America’s really big weird-shaped coffin*!

*Offer subject to change without notice. Some conditions apply. All destroyers of America must answer a skill-testing question.
-- jim, Sadly, No!, comment

I pay almost 10k now for me and my partner/employee whom I cannot marry because we could then not get group insurance or qualify for indv. coverage (I've been denied 3 times - I took aspirin for rheumatic fever once 15 years ago) . No I am not exaggerating.
-- lb0313, Hullabaloo, comments

Honestly, I hate when people play the "why does a newborn need a Hep B shot?" canard. As someone had said in a different thread (please nominate yourself for the appropriate hat tip), is it possible that anti-vaxxers are racist? Yes, I think it is possible. At best, I think many of them are so narrow in their upper-middle class white realm of privilege, that they cannot comprehend that a lot of diseases are disproportionately problematic for communities of color in the US, Canada, Australia and parts of Europe. Hep B is a great example of this. HBV is endemic in Asian populations at a rate of about 9% (mostly through vertical transmission), and HOUSEHOLD EXPOSURE is a common way of transmitting the virus. So good for mom and baby if they're negative. But what about dad? What about Oji-san or Ah-ma? Get HBV as an infant, and you will likely become a carrier and eventually develop cirrhosis and hepatic cancer. Of course that's of no consequence to the antivax crowd. Sure they might have some Asian friends from college, but by and large it stays outside their view of how the world is. Collateral damage?
-- Rogue Epidemiologist, Respecful Insolence, comments

If, in any culture, children are taught, 'We are all equally unworthy in the sight of God' - "If, in any culture, children are taught, 'You are born in sin and are sinful by nature' - "If children are given a message that amounts to 'Don't think, don't question, believe' - "If children are given a message that amounts to 'Who are you to place your mind above that of the priest, the minister, the rabbi?' - "If children are told, 'If you have value it is not because of anything you have done or could ever do, it is only because God loves you' -"If children are told, 'Submission to what you cannot understand is the beginning of morality' - "If children are instructed, 'Do not be "willful", self-assertiveness is the sin of pride' - "If children are instructed, 'Never think that you belong to yourself' - "If children are informed, 'In any clash between your judgement and that of your religious authorities, it is your authorities you must believe', - "If children are informed, 'Self-sacrifice is the foremostvirtue and the noblest duty' - "- then consider what will be the likely consequences for the practice of living consciously, or the practice of self- assertiveness, or any of the other pillars of healthy self-esteem."
-- Nathaniel Branden, The Six Pillars of Self-Esteem, Bantam Books, (New York, 1994), p. 295-296

I think that if I graded stuff before it was even completed, I'd still have kids bitching about not getting their grades fast enough.
-- Doc, "Let it be resolved...", First Draft

It seems like there's this weird industry generating lame apologetics for religion now, busily churning out half-assed books for the faitheists. To me, it looks like a gang of people making up bushels of glittery, repetitive sequins to dress up the Emperor's nudity. I think they need to spend a little more time figuring out exactly what they're going to stitch them to.
-- PZ Myers, "Yet more sequins for god," Pharyngula

Copy Editor to Reporter: “What do you mean by ‘waste-water bio-solids?’ Do you mean shit?”
-- from Overheard in the Newsroom

You know, I can’t say it enough, as someone who has been poor almost my entire adult life and thanks in no part, to the help of Ronnie Reagan’s fantastic policy changes of the eighties, such as taking away a single mother’s ability to attend college and get benefits, paring down of affordable housing grants. I mean I could go on. When I organized poor women I was astounded at how many seemed trained to absolutely hate themselves and blame themselves for every portion of their condition, even when it was clear that government policy was unjust and unfair: they still felt that if they had just “worked harder” or been more religious, or whatever, that they wouldn’t suffer. They didn’t seem to understand that many of them were more intelligent, more talented and more moral than many of the privileged assholes who spent everyday on the tube telling them they were worthless scum. In fact many believed they’d be in high ranking social positions, enjoying vast comfort and luxury if they had just been better persons; a Calvinist fatalism seemed all too prevalent. They believed that 1) either they hadn’t been lucky yet or 2) that they deserved their suffering and struggles and just blithely accepted it. Having not been born in poverty, I had an entirely different take on society and never experienced, until I was poor, the feeling of being completely outside the realm of even deserving to be heard. Many of these people have given up before they even had a chance to get started, defeated early on as children and accepting their misery as their lot in life. What’s worse is that many feared getting involved in politics and working to change policy, as if it would incur some more deserving punishment on their part. Listen to the mantras of the wealthy wingnuts and they daily reiterate this bullshit.
-- kate, Sadly, No!, comments

More than 800 bases in over 100 countries and god-only-knows-how-many covert "advisory" operations, while citizens die from lack of health care. When has a garrison empire ever succeeded in the long term?
-- Asterix, Hullabaloo, comments

He believes everyone is out to do him in, which is a perfectly justified supposition -- they are out to do him in.
-- Chuck Jones, on Daffy Duck, from Extremes and Inbetweens: A Life In Animation

Not too long ago, when I was in nursing school and early in my nursing career, epiglottitis was a feared problem. As I am sure Orac remembers from medical school, in a peds rotation it was strictly stressed that you NEVER do an oral check of a child who is sitting leaning forward, drooling because it hurts too much to swallow until the surgeon is next to the pediatrician and you have a tracheostomy kit at bedside ready to open, since epiglottitis could be deadly. You see, in epiglottitis, caused by HIB, opening the child's mouth wide might lead to the epiglottis snapping down on the trachea so the child can't breathe and will die. Nice, isn't it? Sure. Let's go back to those days, not give vaccines. It wasn't all that long ago. So some kids die. OK, it's more kids than die from vaccines, but it's OK, right? Right? As long as it's not your kid.
-- MI Dawn, Respecful Insolence, comments

[W]hen Christians sing "All things bright and beautiful", they rarely seem to consider the fact that if God created the butterfly and the orchid, he must also have designed the tapeworm and the influenza virus.
-- Walton, Pharyngula, comments

There are no Big Altie Shills — only brave mavericks struggling against Big Pharma.
-- Sastra, Science-Based Medicine, comments

The middle class will have to lead this charge against the ruling elites, the poor are damn tired, defeated and are spending every ounce of their energy surviving (which is what the elites want for everyone).
-- kate, Sadly, No!, comments [People like me, who were raised upper-middle-class or lower-upper-class, left home, and became poor immediately, then have worked our way up to working-class/middle-income (non-management professional type) jobs are most likely to do this, because we've been on both sides of it. Unfortunately, we're scarce. -- ?!]

I can dream about being Bugs Bunny, but when I wake up, I'm Daffy. And there's no two ways about that.
-- Chuck Jones, from Extremes and Inbetweens: A Life In Animation

Quotes, Good Riddance Edition

2010-01-01T05:09:43Z

Carrie Prejean is just Anita Bryant all over again. The homophobes have always been very good at selling hate. Their stereotypes of gays are ready-made for cold-blooded anti-gay murder justifications so that the flimsiest of murder excuses can sway juror sympathies.
-- aratina cage, Pharyngula, comments

Even Deepak Chopra probably remembers to brush his teeth, in his only act of sanity every day.
-- PalMD, White Coat Underground, comments

Class war and envy are communist? In econ 101, they tell us that's the basis for the Amercian economy.
-- zombie rotten mcdonald, Sadly, No!, comments

Since my birth in 1929, I have not seen such a catastrophe. These people should be arrested for resisting treatment and putting the health of our children in danger. These apostolic elements are a danger to our community because they are the conduits through which this dangerous measles disease is spreading. The most painful thing is that many of the victims are children and women, yet we all know that denying them treatment is a violation of their fundamental rights and unpardonable transgression.
-- Machona Bumhira, quoted at Respectful Insolence, on a measles outbreak that has killed over 300 people in Zimbabwe

What were they thinking? Mostly, they probably weren't thinking at all. To the extent that there was a theory of the case, however, it went something like this: pass whatever legislation was needed to win the next election, then, once total conservative political dominance has been achieved, dismantle the whole welfare state.
-- Paul Krugman, "Part D, revisited," The Conscience of a Liberal

If you actually watch toddlers playing together, you will see the same behavior from boys and girls. What happens is the adults around them: they notice and speak about the "girly" things the girls do and ignore any aggression and vice versa for boys. If a girl gets aggressive, or even starts exploring "too far" away, she'll be called back or physically removed from the situation. Boys will be encouraged or otherwise excused b/c "boys will be boys". Same behaviors. Different cultural response.
-- Caren, Echidne of the Snakes, comments

If it's economically wasteful, that's money that won't be spent helping people who aren't wealthy.
-- JGabriel, Balloon Juice, comments

I met Ted Nugent between sets at a gig in a small bar in Mason City, Iowa during a blizzard in 1975. There were probably 30 people in the whole place, so the Motor City Madman was mingling freely with the crowd. Even though I was barely out of high school, I thought he was one of the dumbest people I had ever met. He smelled bad too.
-- Sam Simple, Hullabaloo, comments

This isn't the way I like to see someone I know in the news.
-- balloonguy, Pharyngula, comments, on the murder of one of his former professors [Me neither. -- ?!]

My wife and I both had chickenpox as kids. For the last three years she has struggled with the consequences of optic shingles. David Letterman had the same disease. Even though treatment (famivir, predforte, percocett) was within 24 hours of onset, she has lost most of her sight in her right eye due to retina damage. Her cornea was eaten away and cratered like the moon surface by the virus and cannot be corrected except with a risky cornea transplant.
-- Geoffrey, Aetiology, comments

One of the things that interests me about this is that degree to which it is common to take precisely the wrong intellectual lesson from something.
-- Sharon Astyk, On Becoming a Domestic and Laboratory Goddess, comments

[F]rankly, let's face it - given his chosen career and his actions to date, it would be hard to say that your client really has any reputation of social probity and standing to damage at this point, now does he?
-- Gaby Darbyshire, lawyer for Gawker, on Joe "Girls Gone Wild" Francis' defamation of character lawsuit against them for referring to him as "an alleged rapist"

If we actually ban flaming pants, a Republican would never be able to fly again.
-- Stroszek, Balloon Juice, comments

In 2006, the largest outbreak of mumps in over 15 years, centered in Iowa and involving 10 other states, effected over 2,500 people. Last year, measles cases in 15 states contributed to the largest US outbreak in over 10 years. In Brooklyn, an unimmunized traveler from Israel infected other unimmunized children in a pediatrician’s office, sparking the borough’s largest outbreak of measles in almost 20 years. Other recent outbreaks in Indiana, San Diego, Arizona, Milwaukee, Washington State, Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Texas are just the tip of the iceberg if this dangerous trend of vaccine refusal continues.
-- John Snyder, "The New Plague," The Gotham Skeptic

Obama is certainly not a communist. He's a Republican.
-- Roman Berry, Hullabaloo, comments

Anyone who thinks it's a good idea to deliberately bring an infectious disease into a public restaurant, a place of food preparation, with the intent of spreading it around, deserves to be prosecuted.
-- Dan, Aetiology, comments, on an antivaccinationist parent who wanted to host a "chicken pox party" in a McDonald's playroom

I just love when people say atheism is the cause of horrible things.

Crusades? That was against brown people.
Inquisition? Who cares about Jews, really?
The 30 YEars War? Pshaw.
Religion propping up slavery? (as in, if you don't turn in a slave, you're going to hell, like in The Adventures of Huck Finn) Those weren't /true/ Christians.
The burning of witches? Well we don't do it NOW.
The execution of Gays in Rwanda? Well if those darn homos would just live like God intended, there'd be no problem.
Rampant child molestation? Feh, Catholics.
Sri Lankan horrors? Asians aren't people.

The list goes on and on, even still. Just, ugh.
-- Rutee, Shrieking Harpy of Dooooom, Pharyngula, comments

You need see only one person with Brucellosis to want your milk Pasteurized. Twice.
-- GruntDoc, White Coat Underground, comments

Ted Nugent is playing stormfrontapalooza.
-- jr, Hullabaloo, comments

That's one of the real problems with American politics today: I think the Republicans, and those who vote for them, have gotten good at throwing out arguments that seem to make sense, but aren't true. It takes time and work to work out just why they're wrong, and sometimes you have to go look something up, and when these things happen on television or on the radio, there's no time to check.
-- Mumphrey, Balloon Juice, comments

My alien friend from outer space would have a hard time understanding why we need to sex babies so bad that everything (pretty much everything) they wear is gender-color-and-pattern-coded. That friend might also wonder why the bedrooms for a girl baby and boy baby must look so exaggeratingly sex-stereotyped. Would the sky really fall if a boy baby had to sleep in a room with a few pink objects? Are pictures of footballs truly a necessary part of the male-baby-experience? Are frills as important for a female-baby-experience as mother's milk?
-- Echidne, "Baby Men and Women," Echidne of the Snakes

[S]ince people have known for 100+ years that bad milk can kill, no, we're not going to be super nice to the raw-milk crowd.
-- JustaTech, White Coat Underground, comments

I've laughed at plenty of Palin comments, but the maddest I've ever gotten is when she said the country might be tired of elitists who haven't worked hard. Not work hard?!?! My fellow students and I didn't work hard in grad school, putting in 12+ hour days? My advisor didn't work hard putting in 14+ hour days to get tenure? Doctors don't work hard at their residencies? Lawyers don't work hard at their internships? So, it's not only that she's ignorant, but she has no idea that it's possible to not be ignorant. She clearly thinks we 'elitists' have no better way to know anything than she does. It's not like we worked hard to gain that information!
-- Kathy Orlinsky, Pharyngula, comments

There's a common misconception that using your brain isn't work, usually held by those who have never actually done it.
-- tsg, Pharyngula, comments

Sending a stupe to buy salon products to make a bomb to blow up NYC, strapping chemicals to another wannabe.....either al Qaeda isn't too bright or they're playing elevendieth dimensional chess with Petraeus & General Mac. They go "boo" we go "eeekkk!" and The Empire Strikes Back with borrowed money, ridiculous overkill. Genius it is, outsourced Homeland Security, that's working out well or not if you're Liz Cheney (did she have anything to say on this yesterday?
Oh, I see she wasn't booked, maybe next week). I've wondered if that 1% the war mongers argue why we torture was tossed once we found Saddam, after all if anyone knew where the WMD's were it was him, I wonder why we didn't water board him to find out where he sent them. He was a little nuts who would have known, in the end we smoked him out and hung him. The rest of the world laughs or cries depending on if they're reading their newspapers or their balance sheets. We've lost it.
-- der, Hullabaloo, comments

Hib is an extremely nasty bacterium that used to cause invasive disease in a startling 1 of every 200 children in the U.S. under 5 years of age. That was, until the vaccine pretty much eliminated it from our country after its introduction in the late 1980s. The vaccine has been so successful, that pediatricians my age and younger have likely never even seen a case of invasive Hib disease. Not true for those trained just a few years earlier. They remember that, of the children unfortunate enough to come down with invasive Hib disease, approximately two-thirds will develop meningitis, and about 5% will die. Up to 30% of the survivors suffer permanent brain damage. Those children lucky enough to avoid meningitis develop pneumonia, septic arthritis, osteomyelitis, cellulitis, epiglottitis, or generalized sepsis. Now, because of pockets of underimmunization and the spread of so-called “alternative” vaccine schedules, younger pediatricians will be able to learn, first-hand, about a disease they could previously only read about in text books.
-- John Snyder, "The New Plague," The Gotham Skeptic [HiB is also one of the primary causes of sinus infections. If fewer people caught this (and spread it around), I'd be much healthier. -- ?!]

The initial screening for outbound passengers in Israel is done by uniformed military – that is, a 19-year-old (who looks like a middle-schooler to me, anyway) carring an Uzi. They engage you in conversation for about five minutes. If they decide not to put any extra holes in you, then you and your luggage can proceed to the next steps.
-- Joey Maloney, Balloon Juice, comments [Aw, but the little guys are so cute in their funny uniforms and all... -- ?!]

A definitive experience for me was when I was about three and at a nursery school run by some South African ladies (ie. not part of my culture). I was a loner then as I am now, and one of the hardest concepts (which I still haven't managed to come to terms with) was how to "play" in a way that was prescribed rather than spontaneous. When play was spontaneous -- in other words, on my own, (or around the middle of primary school, with a group of friends who were similar to me), I could keep going for hours. But at the age of three, I was required to do orchestrated play, and I couldn't wrap my mind around how to seem to be spontaneous whilst not actually being so. I believe this puzzle has been at the core of much of my orientation towards socialization as an adult. I perceive that I am supposed to act as if I believe I am free to behave in any spontaneous manner that may appeal to me, but at the same time to conform to rigidly circumscribed gender roles, in many cases. I find I can't hold the two things in my head at once -- to maintain the appearance of seeming to be free, whilst knowing that I am not actually so. Anyway, these South African ladies would not allow me to play alone, even in a way that I already felt to be very circumscribed (because it had to be within the walls of a brightly coloured prison, crowded and claustrophobic, when I wanted to be outside.) I had taken the building bricks from the shelf to play with, and was trying to occupy myself with them, when these ladies interrupted to tell me that I was not playing in a way that was suited to my gender. "Those are boys' toys! You need to play with other girls. Here is a group of them, playing house..."
-- Jennifer F Amrstrong, Echidne of the Snakes, comments [I never could figure out how to 'play house', either. -- ?!]

I've said since I was a child that the universe does revolve around me, it just complicates the mathematics.
-- Miki Z., Halfway There, comments

One of the things you notice when you read a lot of undergraduate papers, besides how badly they suck, is *how* they suck. And one of the major ways they suck is like this - undergraduates read academic prose whether essays or lab reports, and they see a jumble of big words that are hard to translate. And they look at that prose, and say "ok, I'll be doing what they are doing if I use big words, even if it doesn't make sense." So they write shitty papers and use their thesaurus function and think "I did what my teachers did."
-- Sharon Astyk, On Becoming a Domestic and Laboratory Goddess, comments

It's too late at this point, but I wish atheism could be thought of by the general public as also "anti-dogmatism". I'm so f*ing tired of atheism being trotted out as the cause of the crimes of Stalinism, and Maoism, which were essentially dogmatic religions.
-- airbagmoments, Pharyngula, comments

People who moon over the lost frontier lifestyle probably don't have any real historical background in their reading. Teeth were pulled with pliers and a shot of whiskey if available. Surgery was done live with no anesthesia. In a typical frontier dwelling, particularly in the West, you had to deal with swarms of flies everywhere all the time, because there was no A/C and your livestock was right the hell there and you had to have some way of keeping cool. I also enjoy imaging these second and third generation millionaires drawing up their own well water, splitting logs to heat their homes, beheading their own chickens for dinner, and constantly scraping horse and cow shit off of their shoes wherever they walk. A pampered buffoon like Bennett (or Kristol) would last about four hours in those kinds of conditions before they just curled up into a ball and cried until it was over.
-- slippy, Sadly, No!, comments

My father just died of post polio syndrome and I wouldn't wish that on anyone. My usually reticent, live and let live mother has been known to back total strangers into a corner with her finger jabbing their chest if they say they are not getting their children vaccinated.
-- SAS, Respectful Insolence, comments

My first real job was in garage. I grew up in a newsroom during college. Cussing just happens, almost to the point of not realizing that "goddammned" isn't an adjective.
-- Doc, "Let it be resolved...", First Draft

Quotes, You Thought I Was Gonna Say 'Son of a Bitch,' Didn't You? Edition

2009-12-31T05:45:36Z

C'mon now. Think about it. 35,000+ of us are killed every year in auto accidents in the U.S. Yet we blithely get in our cars with nary a qualm. Trains can be deliberately derailed, dams detonated with nuclear explosives carried in a backpack, power grids shut down at the flip of a computer switch, public water supplies poisoned in all manner of ways-- and we get our knickers in a twist about a failed terrorist attack on one airplane. We are such selectively terrified folk.
-- Muldoon, Hullabaloo, comments

In the way some kids might be awed by a youth gang, I was awed by admission to the fraternity of newspapers. I adopted the idealism and cynicism of the reporters I met there, spoke like they did, laughed at the same things, felt that I belonged. On Saturday nights about midnight at The News-Gazette, when we put the Sunday paper to bed, we gathered around the city desk, tired, released, and waited for the first papers to be brought upstairs. Ed Borman, the news editor was in the slot; Bill Schmelzle, the city editor, had Saturday nights off. Borman would crack open a six-pack. I tasted beer for the first time. I was a man. My parents, my family, my friends at school, nobody, would ever really understand the fellowship into which I entered. Borman didn't care that I was drinking at 16. We had all put out the paper together. Now we would have a beer.
-- Roger Ebert, "The best job in the whole damn world," Roger Ebert's Journal

[D]id Ceiling Cat have a pet Jesus? As support for this position, who opened the cans for Ceiling Cat?
-- Martin, Balloon Juice, comments

Christmas dinner was surreal because we sat in the dining room with a Jewish couple from New Orleans who moved to St James after their house was flooded when the London Street canal crapped out back in 2005. Mr. Levy is a retired businessman whose longtime avocation, art, is now his passion and he's damn good. Our meeting, however, was a bit disconcerting as he greeted me with a booming "Merry Christmas." I was startled and said: "Did I hear your name correctly? Levy?" He shrugged and said, "So, I'm a gentile one day a year?" I love people who answer a question with a question, it makes me feel right at home...
-- Adrastos, "Some Fantastic Place," First Draft

Pawlenty is also a hero to those who believe that it's socialistic to spend tax dollars on public works. The next of kin of the people who died in the I-35W bridge collapse might have a different opinion.
-- Zeno, Pharyngula, comments

It's staggering, the extent to which parents are now having to trade off their own values against the commercial interest of companies. Today's marketing assigns simple and very separate roles to boys and girls, and whips up peer pressure to police the difference. ... it's no exaggeration to talk of a gender apartheid.
-- Ed Mayo, quoted in The Guardian

What's more dangerous: a shark or a bee? For me, the bee. Which is more likely: killed by lightning or a terrorist on an airplane? Lightning, by a few orders of magnitude. So, if you do want to be afraid of dying, you should at least know what to be afraid of.
-- fostert, Hullabaloo, comments

When Pawlenty says about having signed a law "prohibiting discrimination based on sexual orientation in public accommodation, housing, and employment": "That statute is not worded the way it should be. I said I regretted the vote later because it included things like cross-dressing, and a variety of other people involved in behaviors that weren't based on sexual orientation, just a preference for the way they dressed and behaved. So it was overly broad." I hear: Look, if we can't tell at a glance who gets fucked and who does the fucking, how will we know how to treat them? And the nerve of them, having a preference for the way they dress and behave.
-- MikiZ, Pharyngula, comments

Don't the copyright owners realize they are contributing to the destruction of their property by removing it from knowledge?
-- Roger Ebert, Roger Ebert's Journal, comments

No one mentions that "Cadillac plans" are the kinds of health plans that lots of Americans used to have. My granddad was a civilian employee of the DoD from the time he returned from WWII until his retirement. My grandma still has his health plan, and it's a level of insurance that you probably couldn't buy for any price anymore. Instead of playing all these mind-games with copays to discourage health care consumption by a 90-year-old woman with chronic health problems, it does this thing where the insurance company just PAYS for what she NEEDS because she has HEALTH INSURANCE. I know! Crazy! That's "gold-plated" by the standards of our modern culture of misery, where every life event is an opportunity to force an economics lesson down your throat.
-- KevinBaker, Shakesville, comments

There's a Marine saying: "Marines never die. They just go to Hell to regroup."
-- Yutsano, Balloon Juice, comments

Look, for those who want to profile....I'm blonde and blue eyed, an American woman from the midwest. I was raised ultra conservative Christian. As a teenager I fell in love with a Muslim and converted to Islam. I would happily have done anything they told me to. Keep my old name, wear my former blue-jeans style of clothing, go into the airport. If you only profile, you'd never pick on me, and yes, I would have blown up your plane. Are you so sure that racial profiling would work now? Religous cults recruit everybody. There are two blonde Germans fighting the jihad in Afghanistan right now. You'd never suspect them getting on a plane either. Be careful what you think is practical. The shoe bomber was named Richard and looked like a hippy. Profiling won't work.
-- tinwoman, Hullabaloo, comments

In a mostly-male design group, I once had a female engineer working for me who had trouble holding onto pens. People (men) would borrow them and not return them. (I was having the same trouble, too.) Her solution was to go out and buy some "Hello Kitty" pink and purple pens. Instant solution to the problem of having male engineers walk off with pens. Not being a fan of "Hello Kitty", I just switched to purple pens. Same result -- suddenly nobody was walking off with my pens.
-- Karen, On Becoming A Domestic and Laboratory Goddess, comments [I had a former friend ask me about this regarding socks. She said her husband would always "borrow" her socks, and then, because his feet were too big for them, punch holes in them. (He was not the swiftest horse on the track, and tempermentally inclined to assholedom from the beginning.) She asked me if I knew where to find some nice plain socks that her husband wouldn't steal. I found her white ones with pink stitching across the toes. Problem solved. -- ?!]

Do Republicans recognize Detroit as part of the US? I'm pretty sure they don't.
-- Martin, Balloon Juice, comments [Well, we sure as shit don't want it... -- ?!]

I'm not sure how to articulate it, but it's a thread that binds together a lot of otherwise disparate issues -- if the government is going to build roads, they should be toll roads so you get to worry every morning as you locate enough quarters to pay to go to work; if we're going to have health reform, it has to be as expensive and ungenerous as possible, so you can now live in fear of both your insurer AND the IRS; if we're going to have unemployment insurance, the state has to contract some private firm to constantly hound you about applying for non-existent jobs. We are seemingly unwavering in our belief that we don't deserve happier, more civilized lives, and that saddens me deeply. But then, I don't believe that suffering is morally edifying. I'm in favor of more happiness and less suffering wherever possible, which is apparently a radical position.
-- KevinBaker, Shakesville, comments

When, if ever, will supporters of abortion rights, gay rights, etc, get to the most important point of the laws that would prohibit these - namely that these prohibitions are based on theological dogma and are unconstitutional. Its not 'family values' or 'social traditional' - its religion.
-- Anonymous Google User, Pharyngula, comments

I have a suspicion that all these remakes and reimagingings are the result of copyright laws gone awry. (Notice that the trend started in 1998) Since you can't come up with anything original anymore without risking a court battle, it's easier and cheaper to simply buy the rights of an older work and update it.
-- Jeremy Knox, Roger Ebert's Journal, comments

I had one grunch, but the eggplant over there.
-- Perception Management, Hullabaloo, comments

That's what I say regarding those warning us about peak oil, that there are limits to economic and population growth on a finite planet and that our current version of capitalism won't work in a steady state or contracting economy. When will we have "enough" growth? What do we do when we reach those limits? How is that going to work? What bank is going to risk lending if they don't think they'll get more in return? Who is going to risk their life savings starting a business if there is no prospect of growth? Every time I turn on the TV and hear an economist cheer about economic growth I feel powerless. Personally, I think the writing is on the wall that we've reached some hard limits on how much human beings can consume. Many of the economic problems we face are symptoms of this problem. Yet the ones who are trying to warn us are derided as "fringe" while the unlimited growth crowd is on CNN, CNBC and MSNBC every night.
-- toujoursdan, Balloon Juice, comments

Indian philosophy and religion is often like that... discussed with less overbearing reverence and more colloquial humor. One can't be too serious when discussing the underlying meaning of some parable involving four-armed gods or couples joined in cosmic copulation for 10,000 years. What if one of them has to go to the bathroom? For how long? Is that what monsoons are?
-- Rubin Safaya, Roger Ebert's Journal, comments

Pink is fine if you, as an individual, like the color. Pink is not fine if you are told that you, as a woman, must like it, and must be willing to settle for less in order to use your pretty pink toys.
-- PZ Myers, Pharyngula, comments

I quite agree that it's really a sad thing that we have to use pink stuff to get the guys to leave it alone. On the other hand, my lab is like a black hole of sharpies, post-its, and hand tools of various sizes. These get picked up and then shed like old skin by my male lab mates, who then deny entirely that they had anything to do with the missing implements until I find it sitting on their desks. Seeing as writing "This is mine and I will CUT YOU" on my tools did not stop the behavior, I'm getting pretty desperate.
-- Scicurious, On Becoming A Domestic and Laboratory Goddess, comments

[M]y wingnut BIL and sister were dead serious when they said-I shit you not-the earth could actually support 85 billion humans. Thus ensued a very heated Christmas argument, and a dearth of raw data to support such insanity that they could obviously not supply. So, yes, there are a lot of peeps out there who are oblivious to the dire nature of our ecosystems.
-- Punchy, Balloon Juice, comments

If you say something aligned with conventional establishmentarian wisdom, you don’t have to prove your case. If you say something to the right of conventional establishmentarian wisdom, you don’t have to prove your case. If you say something to the left of conventional establishmentarian wisdom, you’d better be prepared to present documents and videotapes for every single moment of human history, social science, and economic theory for the last 10,000 years, and even then you won’t get a chance to do so in the 15 seconds you’re given, if everyone stops screaming at you.
-- El Cid, Hullabaloo, comments

That bond between grandma & grandgirl is a special thing.
-- Maitri, First Draft, comments

In the absence of a god-given absolute morality, all that matters is how we treat one another in this one life we have. What flows naturally to me is not brutality, which requires an absence of awareness of the suffering of others, but recognition of the fact that my fellow human beings really are my equals: we're all going to die, we only have these few brief decades of life, and who am I to deny someone else the same opportunities I've been given?
-- PZ Myers, "I'm so sorry for you, Indiana," Pharyngula

To break religious dogmatism in societies, you're going to need the other 50% of the human race to be an equal part in the intellectual process.
-- Ali, Aetiology, comments

The fallacy of the free enterprise argument is that there is a faith that corporations are motivated to bring about the public good. Corporations are motivated to maximize profits for shareholders. That is the primary mission of all corporate executives, and they retain their jobs by placing the bottom line and the stock price above all else.
-- Roger Ebert, "Sign the Social Contract," Roger Ebert's Journal

It’s pretty impressive how many piss-ant minor incidents right wingers compare to Katrina. Yeah, it’s awful that some dude at Ft Hood went crazy and shot a number of people and military members there, but it’s not a whole city drowning with rescue resources being kept away.
-- El Cid, Sadly, No!, comments

Fundamentalists believe that there is no such thing as morality— might makes right, all that matters is power, but God is so powerful that we can't defeat him even if we ganged up to take him on together, so you have to do what he says. By misusing terms like "morality" to mean "obeying the dictates of the most powerful" and generally co-opting the language of morality to refer to obedience to the will of the powerful for no reason other than power, and putting it all in terms of their delusion of a phantom source of absolute power, fundamentalists manage to give the impression that they have some understanding of right and wrong. But it's a false impression, as is seen whenever they try to understand atheist morality. Then it becomes clear; they believe morality doesn't exist, they believe that behaviour should be restricted only by the limits of power, so if the phantom source of absolute power is removed, that leaves only humans with finite power to consider. The values of the variables have changed, but the equation is the same; might makes right, and suggesting that something is "wrong" means only that you are physically incapable of doing it without consequence.
-- Maronan, Pharyngula, comments

If the terrorists figure out our actuarial tables we will be doomed!
-- mjs, Hullabaloo, comments

Hey – defunding the Maginot line makes you weak on national defense. Also, why do you keep bringing up the Ardennes? What, do you think that Nazism can be fought with forestry? Silly, dangerous liberals. This message brought to you by the National Council of Cement Interests, which reminds you that the cement industry employs 12,000 men and women nationwide.
-- jenniebee, Balloon Juice, comments

But wait, you ask: At the moment of the oil spill, why didn't the oil company act immediately to clean it up? Why did it knowingly pump tainted water into the river? I don't know. My best guess is: Cleaning the spill and treating the water would have cost money. That money would be charged against profits. The corporation had the national government on its side, and the Ecuadoran share of the oil was good for the national treasury. Local officials were plied with gifts and trips. The corporation thought it could get away with it.
-- Roger Ebert, "Sign the Social Contract," Roger Ebert's Journal [Because corporations privatise the profits and socialise the externalities. That's what they do. -- ?!]

I have not yet done a lot of drugs in the ’60s, but I plan to.
-- El Cid, Sadly, No!, comments

Girl: So why didn't your dad like Giuliani again?
Boy: I think it was the casual fascism.
-- from Overheared in New York

June Foray is not the female Mel Blanc, Mel Blanc was the male June Foray.
-- Chuck Jones, quoted at Wikipedia

Interestingly, as a discipline becomes more feminized over time it is considered less of a "hard" science and funding because increasingly difficult to come by. So women have 1) the work/life problem, 2) the misogyny problem, 3) the funding problem, just to get started on what they're up against.
-- Kate, Aetiology, comments [This is approximately equally true for any profession. Once women become a significant percentage of the professional population, wages drop, and the public begins to consider the field less technical and/or less worthy of respect. I see this all the time with technical writing, which was formerly almost entirely dominated by male engineers, and which is now about 75% female. -- ?!]

All of the childhood vaccines combined, are but a mere drop in the bucket compared to the immunological challenges an infant faces every day. Not only can an infant’s immune system easily handle the combinations recommended in the routine schedule, but the number of immunologic stressors, if you will, contained in the current schedule (that enormous, and growing list the anti-vaccine community complains so much about) has actually been decreasing due to improved vaccine technologies.
-- John Snyder, "The New Plague," The Gotham Skeptic

+5, Insightful

2009-12-30T17:54:43Z

Yesterday while poking around watching documentaries on YouTube, I found an interesting piece of legislation that I'd never heard of: Public Utility Holding Company Act of 1935. While the consumer-protection aspect of this law was very good, one of its major side effects was that it basically regulated a lot of streetcar companies owned by public utilities out of existence, partially on antitrust grounds.

(Pause and lolsob with me for a moment when we consider that ten years later, General Motors, which by then owned half the world and had a lien on most of the rest, got hit with antitrust violations under the Sherman and Clayton Acts, and paid a mere $5000 fine, and nobody ever passed a specific law to stop, say, bus manufacturers and oil companies and things from forming holding companies that owned bus lines all over the place. It's almost as though there's some kind of double standard becoming apparent here...)

This act predates Charles Wilson's tenure in the Eisenhower administration.

Interestingly, I note that the act itself only goes after public utlities; ostensibly privately-held utilities could do whatever they want, much the same as private corporations in general have pretty much always been able to do whatever they want. (We already know, as stated explicitly in the DuPont case, antitrust law in the US is a bad and mostly-unfunny joke.)

Quotes, Putting the Faux in Folkways Edition

2009-12-29T23:31:20Z

It's staggering, the extent to which parents are now having to trade off their own values against the commercial interest of companies. Today's marketing assigns simple and very separate roles to boys and girls, and whips up peer pressure to police the difference. ... it's no exaggeration to talk of a gender apartheid.
-- Ed Mayo, quoted in The Guardian

The right has shown repeatedly that they'll gladly move the goalposts of what's considered "left" to just outside the gates John Birch Society.
-- darrelplant, First Draft, comments

Based on talking with right-wingers, I'm pretty sure they feel strongly that no one -- not the government, not the Gates Foundation, not tiny little local charities, not a donation jar at the corner coffee shop -- no one should make it easier for people to get health care. The reason why hasn't ever been clear, but it's been very clear that they feel people should somehow take care of these little heart bypasses and cancer ops and so on by themselves, somehow, and certainly without the help of principled conservatives. I've been trying to find the right adjectives. Bloodthirsty doesn't really work; uncaring is too weak; selfish is an understatement too. Vicious?
-- fleas correct the era, Hullabaloo, comments

We had a Unibomber; now we have the Undiesbomber.
-- Jennifer, Sadly, No!, comments

The GOP has become one of those movies where if you've seen the trailer, you've seen the whole thing.
-- Beltane, Balloon Juice, comments

Big Pharma hates vaccines. They've been leaving the vaccine manufacturing business. Why? Vaccines are cheap and make the companies little money compared to infectious diseases and their consequences. An aunt of mine contracted polio as a child. Growing up and throughout the remainder of her long life, she was a metaphorical license to print money for drug and medical supply companies. Ka-Ching. Ka-Ching. Ka-Ching. On the other hand, I was vaccinated against polio, will never get polio, and will never need the services that my aunt did. Big Pharma made a measly $15 dollars off me. Not much.
-- History Punk, Respectful Insolence, comments

Just because you don't understand the answer doesn't mean it's wrong.
-- Miki Z, Pharyngula, comments

Consumer culture is exploiting the disappearance and devaluation of feminism - actually, it even claims to replace it, by being a 'champion of girls' in some respects, all the while creating new and younger markets.
-- Angela McRobbie, quoted in The Guardian

...and what's this I keep hearing about sending AIDS to starving people in foreign countries? Don't they have enough problems already? ....Oh. Never mind.
-- Arno, Whiskey Fire, comments

For all the years we’ve been lecturing the south about racism (not undeserved), no major southern city has ever been abandoned and left to rot because of a high, or even majority, population of the coloreds. My dad, who grew up in Atlanta in the 30’s and 40’s and was a bigot (though not of the violent white supremacist variety) always said that the difference in race relations between north and south was in the south, you could get (or live) as close as you like, just don’t get too high (read: uppity), while in the north it was the reverse. I think there was something to that.
-- Jennifer, Sadly, No!, comments, on Detroit

Win an election, by hook or crook...and Republicans break all land-speed records to loot the place outright and tow the wreck of whatever is left the Impound Lot of History. Lose...and Republicans stand on the Overpass of History lobbing cinder blocks into traffic. And they can to this because they pay absolutely no penalty for; because their moral imbecile minions actual delight in it and rewards them for it. These millions of jerks -- the Pig People -- who giggle as the world melts. Who smirked as New Orleans drowned. Who reliably whine out the single biggest Big Lie in Modern American political history -- that "Liberals are just as bad" -- when they get cause red-handed gloating over the suffering of the poor and the weak in another fascist circle jerk of orgiastic sadism and misanthropy. These are the fruits of the 30 years Conservative Base Breeding program designed to produce a crop of berserker wingnuts who regard any Democratic Administration as de facto illegitimate, any Liberal as a dangerous internal enemy to be crushed, and even the most modest attempts to govern responsibly as something (and I am quoting now from a conversation I had recently with an otherwise-pleasant Conservative colleague) straight out "of some Marxist Central Planner's playbook!"
-- Driftglass, "Attack of the 50 Foot Mamzer," d r i f t g l a s s

Within a week after 9/11, some conservatives I know blamed it on Clinton. I assume it started on talk radio. Within a month, George Bush himself was blaming the attack on Clinton. Their aim is to alter the history books so that they say “Some Democrats say that the 9/11 attacks occurred under president Bush, while Republicans argue … ” I’m pretty sure they’re going to be successful.
-- ds, Balloon Juice, comments

[I]f George Bush had spent the money on retrofitting all American airports to the standards of the Tel Aviv airport instead of squandering it on tax breaks for his rich buddies and waging a vanity war, things would be a lot safer for travelers.
-- Karen Zipdrive, distributorcap NY, comments [I might pay what El Al charges people flying out of Israel for their agent to come to my house, pack and inspect my things the night before, and issue me my boarding pass, so that all I had to do was clear security the next day, if it were available here. -- ?!]

As soon as I heard Obama refer to these "Cadillac plans" I immediately flashed back to the 80s and Reagan's "Welfare Queens."
-- roseroby, Shakesville, comments

Phase One: Bomb Underpants
Phase Two: ???
Phase Three: Profit! Terror!
-- Underpants Bombing Gnome, Sadly, No!, comments

Al Queda doesn't even need to blow up anything at this point. All they have to do is put some sad sack on a plane and have him set something on fire--and the conservative babies start screaming about how we're all gonna die.
-- doggril, Hullabaloo, comments

The typical unholy trinity of woo is "ignorant, confused and hostile".
-- Dangerous Bacon, Respectful Insolence, comments [Ignorant, confused, and hostile is no way to go through life, son. --?!]

Average salaries for a Washington DC police detective is about $60k. That's before bonuses, kickbacks, payoffs, shakedowns, bribes and unreported confiscations.
-- Abby Normal, Dispatches from the Culture Wars, comments

Working in IT, I know the importance of reading the documentation - and only my job depends on that. If I believed the stakes included either eternal bliss or eternal punishment, I'd damn well spend a few days reading the manual.
-- Moggie, Pharyngula, comments

[T]his is the same Republican party who said that Social Security would turn the US into a fascist state, who demagogued against Medicare by invoking a bleak post-apocalyptic landscape where doctors can't practice medicine, etc. And yet they consistently get about half of the vote in every federal election. Nothing they say can discredit them - they learned that a long time ago.
-- Corey, Balloon Juice, comments

We don't get to hide under our beds and flagellate ourselves over what WE could have done better, for the very simple reason that ain't nobody on a progressive blog cashing fat checks from Aetna while demonizing poor women on national TV and then going home to prime rib. I realize that some hippie somewhere maybe said something dumb to Joey's wife, but I'm saying that it does in fact matter who is right and who is wrong on this.
-- Athenae, "It's Always the Left's Fault," First Draft

Dateline August 2014: TSA announced today all passengers will be anesthetized before their flights so please arrive an hour early and don’t bring a carry-on.
-- owlbear1, Sadly, No!, comments

One doesn't have to be "Progressive" or "Liberal" to oppose TORTURE, kidnapping & imprisonment without charges, or spying on all Americans.
-- Kathy W, Hullabaloo, comments

You aren't going to stop two horny, headstrong teenagers from banging each other. However, if you punish and ostracize them, they won't stop having sex -- they'll just keep quiet about it, and will likely NOT be getting comprehensive sex education, which means unwanted pregnancies and STDs. Stop punishing teens for being horny teens! Educate them, be there for them, tell them they should wait until they have grown a bit, but if they do decide to have sex, here's a pamphlet and here's a place you can get some condoms...
-- marilove, Dispatches from the Culture Wars, comments

I'm not sure how to articulate it, but it's a thread that binds together a lot of otherwise disparate issues -- if the government is going to build roads, they should be toll roads so you get to worry every morning as you locate enough quarters to pay to go to work; if we're going to have health reform, it has to be as expensive and ungenerous as possible, so you can now live in fear of both your insurer AND the IRS; if we're going to have unemployment insurance, the state has to contract some private firm to constantly hound you about applying for non-existent jobs. We are seemingly unwavering in our belief that we don't deserve happier, more civilized lives, and that saddens me deeply. But then, I don't believe that suffering is morally edifying. I'm in favor of more happiness and less suffering wherever possible, which is apparently a radical position.
-- KevinBaker, Shakesville, comments

There is nothing humble in believing one has an inside line to god. Sure, Christians talk about being "fallen" and "sinners", but what it's all about is false modesty: we're all fallen, but Christians get to be saved, and you don't.
-- PZ Myers, "I'm so sorry for you, Indiana," Pharyngula

Sadly, the neocon agenda is also alive and well up here in Canada. The current minority CONservative government is working as hard as possible to destoy our country from within, and most Canadians are simply standing back and watching them do it.
-- double nickel, d r i f t g l a s s, comments

Start a petition? Run for city council? Organize a boycott? None of those things can silence the voices in your head. Why did McVeigh bomb the Murrah building? What else could he do?
-- Notorious P.A.T., Balloon Juice, comments

Richard Dawkins has called pantheism “a sexed-up atheism.” (He means that as a compliment.)

I love that he feels he has to explain this to his readers. Why? Because if there’s anything worse than atheism in Douthat’s book, it’s sex. He can’t think of a single good thing about either sex or atheism, and assumes that you the reader would be equally baffled. What a strange world Dawkins must live in, where getting laid and sleeping in on Sundays could be considered anything but hell itself.
-- Ross Douthat and Amanda Marcotte, "Okay, Avatar sucked, but…," Pandagon

Me and Obama parted company on that shithead homophobe mailorder catalogue preacher that he had at the inauguration If the nitwits are his backers, good luck asshole.
-- Less is better, Hullabaloo, comments

The problem is voir dire. In most of the world, the idea of letting lawyers and the judge cherrypick a jury is flat out insane. On its face, voir dire cannot be expected to work. In the rare case that the two sides are equally matched, we'd expect no net result; in all other cases, we'd expect the better player to stack the jury in his favor. Thus voir dire is a method of systematically biasing the jury. And that's voir dire on its face. It is really a three-handed game with the prosecution, defense, and the bench working in concert against the citizenry to purge the jury of the wrong kind of people, to wit, people who have no faith in the police, the judicial system, lawyers of any kind, or judges. Slip up and let one of those people get on the jury and you can bet your bottom dollar you will never get a conviction, unless the judge bounces the troublemaker and replaces him with a ringer from the already-vetted alternates. This is why we get juries who want to convict. The jury pool itself is biased in favor of conviction, so even without voir dire, the jury is seriously biased. Voir dire is there to weed out the miscreants that don't want to side with the government against their fellow citizens. Good Germans only, please.
-- Rose Colored Glasses, Dispatches from the Culture Wars, comments

It's a sad day when the Evangelicals aren't keeping up. I'd have given high odds on an Antichrist meme, but it hasn't happened. I blame anti-depressant abuse.
-- srv, Balloon Juice, comments

If someone like Palin were truly "conservative", wouldn't she be furiously against trashing the environment of the beautiful state of Alaska? Wouldn't she be trying to sink every supertanker before it got there? Why don't conservatives want to conserve the environment? In practice, it seems like conservatives can't destroy it fast enough to be happy. They pretend to revere the 1950s, but push for development and sprawl that guarantee that small-town values are wiped out. And the "be fruitful and multiply" thing.
-- cat_named_zoe, Sadly, No!, comments [My dad is a conservative greenie, so I can tell you they do exist. -- ?!]

I had one grunch, but the eggplant over there.
-- Perception Management, Hullabaloo, comments

We heard this over and over during the run-up to the war, and in the aftermath of 9/11, after the 2004 election and gay marriage bans, and during every important fight of the past decade: If only the people who cared about the outcome of the debate most would shut the fuck up and calm down and not be so unforgivably and uncouthly invested in it, things would be fine. Stop giving right-wingers ammunition. Stop giving them excuses. Stop protesting. Stop running ads. Stop being loud. Stop embarrassing me the good little progressive who's doing it right.
-- Athenae, "It's Always the Left's Fault," First Draft

Don't tell me to make a compromise that, in the same situation, you would not make and, funny enough, were not asked to make because it's never The Man being told his vasectomy won't be covered or his Viagra won't be covered or his prostate surgery won't be covered. Is it. No, it's women...time after motherfucking time...who are told that our reproductive health care must be uniquely regulated, despite legality, by The Man...and that we, despite our needs and that same curiously overlooked egality, must take one for the team...again.
-- Shark-Fu, "There must be a line...a wall to hit...or the struggle for reproductive justice is merely a suggestion.", AngryBlackBitch

This is how you subjugate an entire population. You convince them that they will be punished even beyond death for disbelieving and disobeying, and you convince them to be happy about it.
-- RamblinDude, Pharyngula, comments

I'd probably hate christmas a bit less if I was any good at it.
-- tomble, chat, 21 December 2009, 12:18PM EST

For the past 30 years, "conservatism" has focused on telling people they can have whatever they want. That's not what "conservatism" meant before 1970 or 1980. My father was a conservative in the old mold. What it used to mean was "not being wasteful". Conservatives were people who didn't just automatically move to a bigger house or buy a fancy new car every year just because they had more money - they were people who were by nature frugal or conservative in the way they spent their money. One of the things I learned from my parents that really stuck was "don't be wasteful." That has stayed with me - to this day I buy a new car every 10 years - and drive it for 10 years. My recycle bin fills up faster than my garbage can. I generally don't buy things I don't need. Compare and contrast with today's "conservatives", to whom the word means, "drive a Hummer and burn as much gas as possible," "buy a McMansion in the suburbs," or, in case of national attack, "go shopping." It used to be "buy war bonds." But that was back before the GOP was in the business of telling people who will never have much of anything that "yes, you CAN have it all - the only reason you don't already is because of TAXES that go to minority leeches who won't work." They've turned it on its head - these days, support of "conservatives" is supposed to free you of actually behaving like one, as if being fiscally prudent and non-wasteful is some kind of punishment and voting for "conservatives" will free you of the drudgery of having to live within a budget.
-- Jennifer, Sadly, No!, comments

[D]id Ceiling Cat have a pet Jesus? As support for this position, who opened the cans for Ceiling Cat?
-- Martin, Balloon Juice, comments

If you put single payer out there tomorrow you'd have a solid majority in favor and you'd have every pundit and halfbright mummy's boy with an Ivy League degree opining that the 10 percent screaming with teabags are really the sensible ones in America.
-- Athenae, "What We Got," First Draft

Don't be churlish. Prophet Brownian predicts that God will begin to heal amputees precisely as soon as medical science develops the ability to regrow limbs.
-- Brownian, OM, Pharyngula, comments

[T]he surveys show that large numbers of people have effectively ceased to believe that man-made global warming is taking place, and this is profoundly ironic because at the same time the evidence has hardened up to a startling degree. And the science of man-made global warming is now as solid as the science linking smoking with lung cancer and HIV with AIDS. And it seems to me that the harder the science becomes, the more people fall into denial because they simply don't want to face the writing that's now on the wall.
-- George Monbiot, interview on Lateline, at abc.net.au

Any reality which would have Orly Taitz in it has clearly jumped the shark and is in desperate need of having its Etch-a-Sketch shaken upside down.
-- El Cid, Sadly, No!, comments

At the end of the film, every single girl was crying. One of the boys said, "What, are you gonna cry" and as he said so, his voice cracked, and he made a huffing sound to keep his own tears from leaking out. When it was over, a girl came up to me and said "Could I call my mother?" "What for?" "To tell her I love her." The students asked for the name of the movie. They wrote it down. They asked where they could buy it on dvd. They wrote it down. They loved "Grave of the Fireflies," just as I had at that age. They were unbelievably kind toward each other throughout the day. But had I commited a thoughtless, stupid error? When their teacher found out what I had done, she went straight to the principal, and banned me from her classroom.
-- Peter Fawthrop, Roger Ebert's Journal, comments, on showing Grave of the Fireflies to a class of middle school students

The lefty fringe is just aching, PINING for some lunatic who logged onto the Freeper website to start blowing people away.

Just out of curiosity, you are aware that that has already happened, not just once, but probably several times this year alone, right? You are aware of James Von Brunn, Jim David Adkisson, and Richard Poplawski? And i take it you're cognizant of the fact that most people on the left and center left weren't all that pleased about any of them? In fact, most of us regarded these incidences with a mixture of dread and loathing? I mean, it's kinda hard to accuse people of 'pining' for something that's already a reality. Unless, of course, you're pretending that something that is an objective truth doesn't exist because it wouldn't mesh with the 'sports team' narrative you've decided to arbitrarily squeeze reality into regardless of historical and political fact. The one where your team rules, regardless of what ever miscreants and deranged lunatics happen to be on it? And which completely disregards, as a matter of course, all the actual pain, suffering and lives lost you have to wave away as irrelevant in order to sustain your childish narrative?
-- Sanka and Uriel, Balloon Juice, comments

I was very struck, when I had my daughter - she's now nine - by the way girls seem to be expected from birth to live in this world of tutus. I was brought up in the late 60s and early 70s, with a mother interested in gender-neutral education, and I had just kind of assumed that things would have moved on from there. In fact, they've moved backwards. The view seems to be: 'Oh well, people tried, in the 60s and 70s, they tried all that non-sexist, anti-stereotyping stuff, and it didn't work. There's obviously nothing we can do about it, it's all laid down in our genes.' Whereas in fact that's not true: we never got the equality we set out to achieve. And now we all have to accede to the notion that little girls are naturally drawn to pink, and you're old-fashioned and over-serious and boring if you suggest otherwise.
-- Natasha Walter, quoted in The Guardian

Can we stop using the term "civil liberties"? Let's just say "liberty" instead. It makes it read more effectively, like substituting the term "lawlessness" for "deregulation".
-- dAVE, Hullabaloo, comments

This tradition brought to you by Coca-Cola, GM, and DeBeers

2009-12-29T18:12:41Z

Recently I've been doing some thinking about birthstone jewellery, mostly because my family are exactly the sort of drones who think that every woman should have at least one piece of birthstone jewellery, whether they like their birthstone or not (and most people don't), because that is The Done Thing. I keep getting rid of the ones they give me, because I don't like my birthstone (and I wear so little jewellery* as it is, I'm sure as hell not going to waste space by wearing something I don't even like), but they just keep buying me more, as though maybe this time I'll stop being so disagreeable and just give in already.

And then I started thinking about it. I realised that the whole birthstone thing reeks of fakelore -- it's supposedly a "tradition," but it's not attributable to any particular culture or location; it creates a demand for a consumer good (and turns that same consumer good, which would normally be durable, into a perishable good -- drill the birthstone thing into enough people, and you won't be able to sell a birthstone piece to someone else as easily, nor pass it along to a relative without having the stone or stones removed and another set in its place, and so on), and it creates an entire cottage industry of sub-products that can be marketed (like those "family rings" that have a band with the birthstones of mom or dad and kids). A new twist on the old scam is that asking people what their birthstone is (and, after 140 years of marketing propaganda most people know), allows you to collect birth month data on people, which you can then use to market to them.

In a book published in 1903, an author by the name of Oliver Cummins Farrington gives a compelling reason why jewellery sellers might come up with such a scheme: "In former times gems could be possessed only by rulers or the very wealthy, so that their general use in the above manner was not possible. But now that nearly every one can own a gem of some kind, the posession of 'birth-stones,' and the attachment of special sentiments to them, has become common." In other words, the price of gems had dropped enough that they became a general commodity item, not just for the very wealthy.

And what has Corporate America routinely done when it saw the opportunity to expand a market by selling people shit they don't need? Why, it created demand, of course.

According to the same author, "The particular order and kind of stones ... is given in accordance with some verses quoted in a pamphlet first published by Tiffany & Company, of New York, in 1870. The author of the verses is not known, nor is it known by just what authority these gems were chosen."

Hm. A jewellery concern publishes a pamphlet containing a supposedly "traditional poem" written by an unknown author which just so happens to wildly increase demand for the specific newly-inexpensive consumer good that concern happens to sell.

Is anybody else's "'I just happened to find this old manuscript in a trunk...'" sense tingling? Because mine sure is. I studied English literature in school; I know that ruse entirely too well from The Scarlet Letter and Moby Dick and every single other fiction author who was embarrassed and worried that having been caught making shit up would surely damage his propriety and credibility.

Want to make a bet that Tiffany felt about the same at the prospect of being caught doing something so transparently greedy? Back in those days, at least, corporations still had some shame...

______________________

* This is another thing my mother in particular gets after me about; she wears much more jewellery than I do, and almost always says I "don't look dressed up" even when I'm dressed up, because I generally favour dark, solid colours and clean lines, and don't routinely wear six rings, two pairs of earrings, and a necklace, many of which contain gems, like my mother does. Frankly, I associate that sort of thing with first-generation professional class people who grew up working class, and I simply don't have that kind of a need to signify.

Disability is expensive, part the whateverth

2009-12-28T23:12:21Z

I just took a bunch of stuff down off the top of the bookcase so I could dust up there (yuuuuck) and wipe stuff off. While I was wiping it off, I fumbled the end-of-the-day Mille Fiore glass perfume bottle Jenn and Sian gave me for my 25th birthday. The neck of it shattered.

Before anyone gets the idea that it would be helpful to say "Well, everyone breaks stuff," no, everyone does not break stuff the way someone with a motor disability breaks stuff. No matter how careful you are, when your hands malfunction unpredictably, you're going to break things. A lot.

Quotes, I Vant You Should Explain Yourself, Igor! But Not Now! Edition

2009-12-28T03:39:14Z

When it comes to economics, conservatives simply believe in falsehoods - for example, markets aren't perfect at allocating scarce resources, people don't always behave rationally and information is not always perfect in making economic choices. Yet, these dreamers continue to believe these things, despite a mountain of evidence to the contrary.
-- Sam Simple, Hullabaloo, comments

I've taken quantum physics and it definitely makes more sense than the Bible.
-- Leni, Dispatches from the Culture Wars, comments

Coburn has got to be the most low-down disgraceful worthless sonofabitch in the entire U.S. senate, and that’s saying something. His fucking aide saying “Oh, Mr. Coburn doesn’t wish ill on anyone.” Oh, yeah fucking right you don’t, Tom! If Byrd or Lautenberg croaks you guys will spend all day masturbating to a picture of Republican Jesus, thanking him for his mercy.
-- Felonius Monk, Sadly, No!, comments

People always go apeshit when it comes to children, and it's worse with religion. Among other factors, I suspect there's a tacit recognition that religious beliefs cannot stand on their own. They are more likely to be accepted if there's a matter-of-fact assumption that of course everyone agrees they're true, and this is drummed into people from birth. Diversity is only a good thing if the end result is "look how many different ways there are of acknowledging God!"
-- Sastra, Pharyngula, comments

For my part, I’ll be strapping on my Christmas sensibilitometer and creeping about the house making “zoop zoop” noises to check for fluctuations in the gravitas field.
-- snaxalotl, Panda's Thumb, comments [How come I never get cool things like sensibilometers for Christmas, huh? -- ?!]

[F]ear and superstition never die and the “alternative” health community has used that fear and superstition to resurrect primitive beliefs. It is axiomatic in the “alternative” health community that disease is caused by evil humours and miasmas. They just don’t call it that anymore; they call it “toxins.”
-- Amy Tuteur, "'Toxins': the new evil humours," Science-Based Medicine

[W]hat our elites are stupidest about is that they confuse money and wealth. Money and wealth are beginning to part company. What they are actually doing is creating more money in hopes of tricking us into selling them our wealth (work, things, etc.) in return for their money. At the end of the scam they hope to be holding all of our wealth and leaving us holding a bag full of all of their money. Where their stupidness comes in is their thinking they will get more wealth out of us after we have no more wealth left to be parted with. Also, if money becomes worth zero before the scam is played all the way out; how do they get us to sell our worthy wealth in return for their worthless money?
-- R U Reddy, Hullabalaoo, comments

As a card-carryin' physicist who earned his card under Peter Higgs hisself, I wanna tell you that large hardons belong not to physics but to biology. You want erectons, you gotta change fields. We do electrons. We do, however, do Little Bangs all the time, at very high energy. Alas, that's as close as many of us get to sex.
-- David Derbes, Whiskey Fire, comments

For the right, the bailouts were a disgraceful betrayal of laissez-faire market principles, and for the left, they were a disgraceful capitulation to Wall Street.
-- fearlessvk, "Et tu, Glenn," at home she feels like a tourist

When the faithist stop telling me I'm going to hell for not believing in their particular sky fairy, I'll consider being less "in your face". ... I'm tired of this bullshit of how atheists have to couch our statements in conditionals while the faithists can say whatever the hell they want without challenge.
-- tsg, Pharyngula, comments

Most of the conservatives I’ve talked to about it say that we should keep the death penalty even if an innocent person does get executed occasionally, because to sacrifice it would be sending a message to criminals that we’re not serious about punishing the guilty. And there’s no better way to scare a guilty person than by killing an innocent person. I bet that makes more sense if you’re the kind of person who tortured small animals as an adolescent.
-- Scruffy McSnufflepuss, Balloon Juice, comments

But of course, if there is, God forbid, a catastrophic terrorist attack, Obama will get a mulligan just like Bush did for 9/11. And his opponents will rally around him just like Bush’s did after 9/11. Right?
-- Bitter Scribe, Sadly, No!, comments

Why is it that the Obama Administration and the Senate Democrats are always willing to fight for things they say they don't like? Stuff like a HCR giveaway bill to health insurance companies, retroactive immunity for Telcos in the FISA Amendments Act, trillons in bailout money for too-big-to-fail financial institutions, and much more. And why is it that the Obama Administration and the Senate Democrats are never willing to fight for things they say they do like? Stuff like a Public Option, EFCA, Dawn Johnsen as OLC head, repeal of DOMA, repeal of DADT, re-instituting Glass–Steagall, and many, many more. Just why is it that they'll fight for stuff they claim not to like, and won't fight for stuff they claim they do like? Just why is it that?
-- Mad Dogs, Hullabaloo, comments

For the left, the structure of the economy is itself an issue of social justice. It always drives me crazy when people refer to themselves as "economic conservatives and social liberals" - because the very distinction implies that one can separate economic and social issues, which is fundamentally a right-wing position.
-- fearlessvk, "Et tu, Glenn," at home she feels like a tourist

Once you give government the power to kill people even if they kill the wrong people in the process, liberty is off the table on my scorecard.
-- DonBelacquaDelPurgatorio, Balloon Juice, comments

There’s a difference between the appeal to ignorance of “I don’t know why my child is autistic therefore it must be toxins,” and the precautionary principle of “toxic substances exist, and industry has the theoretical ability to produce high concentrations of novel substances that my body has not evolved to eliminate safely, therefore I prefer not to live in an industrial park (where concentrations of novel substances are likely to be particularly high) until it has been proven safe.”
-- Alison Cummins, Science-Based Medicine, comments

Another traditional way to spend the day before the blizzard is to scurry about stocking the larder, and I did a bit of that too…which led to the nicest, sweetest, most heart-warming occurrence. I was listening to the radio, and the announcer came on to mention the coming major snowstorm, and then — O Christmas Joy — began to read off a long, long list of church closures, religious programs cancelled, and Christian events shut down. It was like the Atheist Rapture had come. I felt my heart grow two sizes, and it wasn't just congestive heart failure brought on by over-exertion.
-- PZ Myers, "We're very traditional around here," Pharyngula

[T]he FIRST major attack on the continental US in the modern era, happened under Bush. I mean, it’s a cornocopia of epic fail on the part of the Bush administration, and by extension the Republican party, and by extension the conservative movement. They literally said “Anything But Clinton” when they took office and reaped the violent harvest sown of their deliberate negligence engaged in out of petty, small-minded spite. There is no excuse whatsoever for Bush asleep at the switch while 9/11 developed behind the scenes while all of the alarm lights in the country were blaring danger. Additionally he failed utterly to punish or even try the individuals responsible, and he NEVER made more than a token effort to capture the leader of the movement that purportedly fomented the attack on us. I only wish the dumbkopf press would have pointed this out JUST ONCE. Fact is, George W. Bush was the worst thing to EVER happen to our national security. Conservatives everywhere should be hanging their heads in red-faced bitter shame at what that failtastic fucktard assclown did.
-- slippy, Sadly, No!, comments

I recall watching the footage on the days after Christmas back in 2004 and then seeing the global response and feeling that the post-9/11 paranoia might be starting to lift a little bit. Global cooperation was in, at least for a little while. US soldiers were deployed to help not make war. It was horrible and life affirming at the same time.

Nine months later came Katrina.
-- Digby, "Five Years Ago Today," Hullabaloo

If the government can execute criminals, I really don’t see what’s to stop government from executing other groups that the majority of society find repugnant- we have safeguards in place to restrict the death penalty, of course, but safeguards can always be rolled back the next time a majority mob cries out for it, and a compliant Supreme Court ignores stare decisis.
-- Scruffy McSnufflepuss, Balloon Juice, comments

At the risk of gross over-simplification, I would argue that right-wing populists tend to focus their ire on excessively big, interventionist government, while left-wing populists tend to focus their ire on overgrown, unaccountable corporate power and accumulations of private wealth.
-- fearlessvk, "Et tu, Glenn," at home she feels like a tourist

While you have megalocardia you can claim to have a big heart.
-- MadScientist, Pharyngula, comments

I see that it’s taken the wingnuts 9 years to acknowledge that reading “My Pet Goat” during a terrorist attack is actually not the right thing for a Preznit to do.
-- g, Sadly, No!, comments

As if air travel isn't an inconvenient, privacy invading, slow-moving, depersonalizing, unpleasant mess now. Nothing like adding a few more restrictions and procedures to the kabuki theater known as "airline security," eh? I swear, my first thought when I heard of this was, "Gee, I wonder what idiotic thing they'll have us all do now?" The guy had his "incendiaries" under his pants, right? I bet money that, if they could get away with it, they would have us all take off our pants along with our shoes and put them through the x-ray machine as well. ("OK; bras off, ladies! Put them on the conveyor belt here! No underwires on this flight; you'll have to go without or put on this loaner jogging bra. What? No, we don't have them in any sizes bigger than B. Sorry.") Why stop here? How about pre-flight barium enemas, full cavity searches, chest x-rays, no carry-ons, everyone has to sit still for the whole flight, you have to ask permission to use the restroom (escorted by an armed guard), and everyone has to urinate on a Koran as they're boarding and sing Christian hymns during takeoff and landing. I'm mean, let's really go for it! Sigh.
-- Douglas Moran, Hullabaloo, comments

You are either a comic genius, or the most moronic bore in the history of blagosphere.
-- Shmoe, Whiskey Fire, comments

During the day (that's the part that's not night) you might have noticed (if there aren't any clouds in the way) that there's a big, hot, flaming yellow/orange thing in the sky. Some folks call it The Sun. Why am I mentioning this? Because it means you have to take your moronic '2nd Law of Thermodynamics' argument and cram it up your stupid ass - with walnuts.
-- Wowbagger OM, Pharyngula, comments, on the "evolution violates the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics" crap

Repeat something you know is a complete lie millions of times, and soon people won’t even bother correcting you, and eventually people just adopt what you’re saying as fact. Kids in the next generation are going to talk about how Clinton was a pretty good president, but really fucked up on 9/11.
-- ds, Balloon Juice, comments, on Mary Matalin's saying that the Bush Administration "inherited" 9/11 from Clinton, see also Ari Fleischer saying "How dare you say 9/11 happened on our watch?"

Following Mary’s logic, Obama inherited the failed airline bombing, the current unemployment rate, the entire Middle East conflict, and everything else that went on prior to his election. Republicans basically have nothing to run on in 2010 and 2012.
-- Annie, Balloon Juice, comments

You know, as soon as I read that news story I was thinking to myself, “Self, how long until the wingnuts are all over this like stupid on a book by Jonah Doughpants?”
-- Pere Ubu, Sadly, No!, comments

Thuycidides wept.
-- charles pierce, Hullabaloo, comments

I knew a buxom young lady in the 80s whose last name was Higgs. Later when I read about physicists searching for the Higgs Boson I thought, hey I've seen that. Turns out I'd misread "boson."
-- parsec, Whiskey Fire, comments

[I]n the old days you might not agree with a conservative position, but at least you could relate it to something that had actually happened. You know - one woman gets a senior job and you hear the "they're taking over." But these days, when a conservative rants, more and more, we can't even tell what the hell they are talking about.
-- JohnN, Hullabaloo, comments

The rhetoric of kitchen gadgets

2009-12-27T04:31:06Z

When a kitchen gadget box says that the gadget inside is "dishwasher safe," that probably means the gadget itself is next to impossible to clean by hand.

I Called It, Folks

2009-12-26T06:36:09Z

Things I asked for: A new coat, Air Miles, a crockpot (which I knew I was getting anyway because I mentioned it months ago and my grandma had already gotten me one).

Things from that list I got: A crockpot...

Conversations about American football and television commercials: Check, and check.

Stuff from Wal-Mart: Check. Also some really horrible stuff from the Superstore. (A lot of their stuff is nice. This wasn't.)

Things I am Getting Rid Of, Which Local Readers May Want:

1. A two-piece rather nice cast-metal wine set including a small wine rack and a wine bottle stand for the table so your wine bottle can breathe. It's really nice and all, but I simply don't have space for it, and I don't drink enough wine for it to be practical.

2. A black fake-fur throw with microfibre on the back that looks rather like a sasquatch pelt. I don't want it because it's dry-clean only (in this house?!) and I think it smells like VOCs. If neither of those things bother you, you're welcome to it.

3. One on-the-counter metal spice rack with magnetic spice bottles, of the sort that spins and only holds about eight spice bottles. I have about three square feet of counter space as it is, and all my "discretionary" counter space is taken up with my two knife blocks. I also need space for about fifty spice bottles, honestly, which is why an entire shelf of my pantry is taken up with spices. It also comes with attractive pre-printed spice jar labels.

4. One on-the-counter wooden spice rack with glass jars, of the sort that spins, and only holds about six spice bottles. (I don't live in a fucking McMansion, people; I don't have 300 sft of kitchen!)

5. A weird Christlike statuette called "Happiness" of a faceless, gynandrous figure in a white robe, arms outstretched, with bluebirds perched on the arms.

6. A 2010 calendar with horse pictures. I don't have wall space for a calendar and don't use a paper calendar, and don't want to look at pictures of horses because it hurts. too. much. (This may be going to Sian if she wants it.)

7. A polished amethyst pendant (mostly pale whitish-mauve with some darker purple) on a cord. Comes complete with card full of woo-babble about the magical properties of amethyst, if that turns your crank. (Amethyst is my birthstone, but I don't do purple; it matches the rings under my eyes beautifully.)

Any remaining items not taken by the crew here in town will be going to Women's Community House or similar...again.

Things I did not get that would have been nice: Books, DVDs, CDs, stationery...

I asked my dad to tape more of the Hilarious House of Frightenstein for me, and he asked me for the tape back. Jesus Christ! What the fuck?! Is it impossible to get blank videotapes anymore, or something, or is he just being an asshole as usual, and considering that nothing I ever want to watch would be worth saving?

Like hell I'm ever giving him any of my videotapes ever again... Back in the '90s, I spent about three years of compulsive Prisoners of Gravity-watching compiling an entire tape full of snippets, including I think every interview with Harlan Ellison that ever appeared on that show (including the famous "Awards are BUUUUUUULLL SHHHHHIIIIIT..." unbeeped one), the commercial David Cronenberg did for Nike (that only ever aired on PoG as far as I know), and various other oddments...and then because apparently I'm not worth opening an entirely new videotape for or something, despite the fact that I had the tape clearly labelled and marked (there was an itemised list on the tape spine and a more detailed list on the side of the box), Dad taped six hours of Ren and Stimpy over it, and then acted like I was being ungrateful when I got mad at him for doing it. I've never forgiven him. Yeah, I liked Ren and Stimpy okay when it was on in first run back in the '90s when I was still living at home, but it didn't age well, or I aged out of it or something, but man, nothing ever quite captured l'essence Nike quite like seeing their disgusting shoes hatching from eggs that looked rather like brains. Seriously.

Just fuckin' shoot me, folks.

Quotes, Erev Xmas Edition

2009-12-24T20:09:30Z

I wish all wars were fought like the War on Christmas. One side could sit in their war room and scream about how many nuclear bombs the other side was dropping, about how much territory the other side was taking, about how badly the other side was kicking their ass. The other side would actually be sitting quietly at home playing “Scribblenauts.” They’d only hear about the war second-hand. “What, wait, we nuked Muncie? Do we even have nukes?”
-- Scott, Pandagon, comments

Intern #1: “You’re too cynical.”
Intern #2: “I’m not too cynical, the world is just too shitty.”
-- from Overheard in the Newsroom

James Cameron and originality do not go hand-in-hand. Duh. Titanic is basically Romeo and Juliet on a boat, Aliens was really Starship Troopers, and Terminator was...well Harlan Ellison's idea.
-- catseatdogs, "Movie Review: Avatar," catseatdogs

Welcome to the Corporate State. They can buy politicians faster than we can elect them.
-- sbgypsy, Hullabaloo, comments

It amazes me the way conservs believe (or at least profess to believe) that childbearing is simultaneously A Woman’s Highest Calling, but also no big deal. Therefore women who delay childbearing or have abortions just want “convenience.” As if dedicating the next 20 years (at least) to another human being is just a minor irritation. When I talk about being “inconvenienced,” it’s usually on the order of being out of laundry detergent, not bringing another life into the world. That shows how much value they think our lives have.
-- Ashley Herzog, Pandagon, comments

Serious religion is dangerous. Adult people who are healthy of mind supporting bronze age myths provide room for mentally ill people who take fairytales serious and harm themselves, other people and the environment, where in a secular society they would be spotted immediately and could be treated for their issues that most probably make their lives miserable.
-- Leonarda, TFN Insider, comments

It’s just that every time I hear “We’ll fix it later.” I have awful flashback visions of NAFTA.
-- juƒtme, Sadly, No!, comments

Ex-beauty contestants, drive-time DJs, TV sports announcers, hairstylists, newspaper columnists -- basically anybody whose math skills topped out in the 10th grade -- rarely have anything substantive to add to the sum of technical and scientific knowledge. That's what they most resent about it.
-- Gene Lyons, "Weathering the storm of stupidity," Salon [In my defense, my math skills topped out in 11th grade, and I really don't resent science. That said, my grasp of statistics is better than the average bear's by a long shot. -- ?!]

Wow our Goldman Sachs overlords got a smokin' good deal on the backs of the American tax payer AND Alan "Ayn's Boy Toy" Greenspan thinks on the eve of a historic "entitlement" expansion (not that it is it's an opportunity to be forced to be a mandatory consumer in a captured market) we'll need to "cut" entitlements? I'm shocked I tell ya. Absolutely unequivocally shocked.
-- rrheard, Hullabaloo, comments

I’ve always been very conscious of the ... non-Jesus conservatives like my family who truly, passionately hate the idea of anyone getting something they don’t “deserve”. ... They’d rather see a thousand people suffer than one person “take advantage” - they can just sit in their paid-for, heated house and blithely tut-tut that it’s a shame that a few people have to ruin it for those who might really need it, but they’re not about to see their tax dollars going to people they feel are beneath them. ... They genuinely don’t want health care for everyone - pay your own goddamn way. Get a fucking job and keep it. I did, why can’t you? I’m miserable, you should be too.
-- suet, Pandagon, comments

Did you know Jim Inhofe has opposable toes?
They don't make him any smarter but he can climb the fuck out of trees.
-- Bartcop, "Vol 2442 - Steamless," Bartcop.com

Facts and history are of little use to wingnuttia.
-- creature, Sadly, No!, comments

buggering buggertash I'm cold
-- tomble, chat, 1:59 AM EST, Tuesday, 22 December 2009

Think of the good that could be done with the money that is spent to keep the rich in control of our lives.
-- psychohistorian, Hullabaloo, comments

We should not force ourselves to self-censor strong language simple because it is offensive, when the situation it is a reaction to is itself so extremely offensive.
-- jamie d, Pandagon, comments

[I]gnorance isn't the same as being brown, and you can't excuse yourself by claiming that you were born without knowledge.
-- PZ Myers, "Christian shame," Pharyngula

There should be a law that prevents politicians upon retirement from taking private sector jobs as a bribe for services rendered while overseeing regulatory changes. Bribery delayed is still bribery.
-- purpleOnion, Hullabaloo, comments

This guy is lucky you don’t have to think to breathe.
-- TruculentandUnreliable, Sadly, No!, comments

Every regulated industry – from oil to cigarettes – has fought like rabid badgers against client-friendly regulations. Insurance will be no different. The only question is whether you want to support several thousand people working their way through the legal system to hold insurance companies accountable, or whether you want to provide people with a default “obeys the rules” policy.
-- Zifnab, Balloon Juice, comments

Christmas should have a Twin Holiday for the introverts "Happy Hibernation". Where we turn off our damn lights, are given lots of food and where nobody can come a-knocking until the sun comes out for a decent amount of time again. And people who do try to bother us, are legally food.
-- catseatdogs, You Can't Do That On Slashdot!, comments

[H]omepathy is about as pure a pseudoscience as there is. For it to be true, huge swaths of well-established physics, chemistry, and biochemistry would have to be wrong--not just wrong, but grossly wrong.
-- Orac, "Mercola sells the delusion of homeopathy," Respectful Insolence

I hate gendered anthropomorphized toys, because they're almost always male. It's "Chuck the Truck" and "Thomas the Tank Engine" ... and blah blah, which reflects little boys' male personhood back to them, whereas the EZ-Bake Oven isn't "Shirley the Oven" -- "girls' toys" just underline girls' need to engage in service and don't reflect back any personhood at all, unless it's a babydoll, which is a person that the girl needs to care for. So kids who play with "boys' toys" get the message that being male is being a person, and kids who play with "girls' toys" get the message that being female is being a servant to chores and other people.
-- Melissa McEwan, "Assvertising (93)," Shakesville

Even a drunk rhetorician drunk on his own rhetorical rhetoric finds an acorn now and again . . .
-- R U Reddy, Hullabaloo, comments

Religion is “a different way of knowing” only if you consider being wrong “a different kind of right”.
-- Brownian, TFN Insider, comments

I thought no one uses the USPS becasue of the burdensome 44 cents stamps, interminable two-three day wait for delivery, and horribly inconvenient daily home drop off and multiple pickup locations countrywide.
-- nutellaontoast, Sadly, No!, comments

If insisting that accepting reality is a fundamental requirement for me to take you seriously, then yeah, I'm a fundamentalist.
-- Everyday Atheist, Pharyngula, comments

Praise be to Isaac Newton!
-- Julius Sumner Miller, "The Professor" sketch, The Hilarious House of Frightenstein

No unions, no unemployment, no Social Security and firing at will. We're all big one Wal-Mart now.
-- Asterix, Hullabaloo, commeents

No one is arguing that McCain would have been better but to say Obama has been disappointing to-date is the largest understatement of the year.
-- Rick, Balloon Juice, comments

A few months back, when my blog was still semi-active, I made a tongue-in-cheek post about how in our society you’re a leftist if you have the heretical idea that all people deserve to have food, shelter and the basic necessities of life, and a far leftist if you go further and think that people deserve good food, decent shelter and that not being bored out of your school or kept in ignorance is part of the necessities of life.
-- Black Bloc, Pandagon, comments

IRL, I survived this decade, and given what happened during it in my personal life, that’s no small feat. I still liked it better than the eighties, but frankly, a good chunk of that had to do with the growing availability and variety of porn and good games on the internet.
-- The Goddamn Batman Got Killed This Decade, But He Punched The Grim Reaper In The Coccyx, Sadly, No!, comments

When are the people in this country going to wake up to what insurance actually is? It isn't a fund to tap into when the need arises. It's a twisted form of gambling in which both parties hope that there is never a payoff.
-- EstimatedProphet, Hullabaloo, comments

It doesn't matter how much Marxist theory you've absorbed; it doesn't matter that you can put your fall into global context; it's happening to you now, and it's going to hurt like you wouldn't believe. You're an American, and you share that culture's values whether you like it or not. So you define yourself by your job, car and house. When they go, you're going to hate yourself. Don't even bother arguing about it. It's going to happen. Just take the damn Prozac. Would you refuse a coat in Siberia? Refusing Prozac after falling into poverty makes about as much sense. Tom Cruise can go fuck himself. Prozac saved our lives. I won't go into the sordid details, but really, I don't think we'd be here now if Saint Prozac hadn't extended a sacred hand to us.
-- John Dolan, "5 Pieces of Advice for the New Paupers," Alternet

I don't like kids, but I understand that a lot of people who have them get very attached to the little motherfuckers.
-- Jude, First Draft, comments

Whenever it is pointed out that diluting a substance doesn't make it stronger and that there is no biochemical or physiological mechanism to make a remedy stronger as it is diluted into nonexistence, homeopaths will condescendingly and piously tell you that it is the succussation that imbues the magical homeopathic remedy with its curative powers. Of course, even if that were true (which it's not), there's no biochemical or physiological mechanism to make a remedy even work if there is not a single molecule left. Not to be deterred, homeopaths postulate that water has a "memory" of the substance it has been in contact with and that that memory can somehow be transmitted through the remedy for a curative effect. Of course, no homeopath has ever been able to explain to me why vigorously succussed water like Niagra Falls doesn't retain a memory of every little bit of poo that it's ever been in contact with, thus rendering it hopelessly contaminated.
-- Orac, "Mercola sells the delusion of homeopathy," Respectful Insolence

If you see illicit sex mainly as an assault on the social order, then you believe the rich do get to live by different rules.
-- Amanda Marcotte, "The link between conservatisms," Pandagon

I don’t want to have to be pretty. I don’t want to have to be adorable. Because if I’m watching that on screen I get irritated. I can’t bear it.
-- Kristin Scott Thomas, quoted at Women & Hollywood

Someday, someone will have to explain to me why it's such a good idea to have the same sleazeballs who 'insure' your car also 'run' your healthcare.
-- John Doheny, Hullabaloo, comments

What's truly amusing about this ignoramus is his babbling about how great the bible is for giving us a republican form of government, while, at the same time, hoping for a series of events where by he will be raptured up to heaven only to return when an unelected monarch establishes himself as ruler of the world after ghastly bloodshed.
-- History Punk, Dispatches from the Culture Wars, comments

Ugiyot!

2009-12-22T23:19:19Z

Hee hee hee... ♫ It's the most wonderful time of the year... ♫

I got pareve shortbreads in amusing Hanukkah shapes! On special for 99 cents a box because they're out of season already!

*munches a little Star of David shaped cookie*

I think I did this last year, too: Christmas-haters check in!

2009-12-21T21:21:38Z

I admit it: I hate Christmas. Loathe it, in fact. If I didn't have a family full of full-on gonads-to-the-wall Christmas fanatics, I wouldn't celebrate it at all.

Oh, Christmas, how do I loathe thee -- let me count the ways:

1. Christmas is a one-day holiday, so why, why, why do public places insist on inflicting Christmasiana on us starting (holy crap) sometimes the day after Hallowe'en? If the Christmas season were a person, it'd be a total baggy-hoodied dude with giant crystal stud earrings who can't ever shut up about the size of his dick. But then if you do, by some misfortune, happen to see him naked, you find out that it's approximately the size and shape of a Bic pen lid. Yeah, baby. Don't...don't don't don't believe the hype.

2. Don't make me go out in public again; Irving Berlin will eat me. Pursuant to #1, wherein Christmas has become a quarter-long annual frenzy of conspicuous consumption and moving taste violations, the music sucks. In my misspent yout', I happened across an interesting little volume called The Oxford Book of Carols, which had hundreds of interesting, traditional Christmas carols very few modern North American people have ever heard. And that's just the English ones! There are Christmas carols from a whole bunch of countries! So why, why, why, do we have to hear the same fifteen damn Christmas standards over and over again in various arrangements ranging from barely tolerable to hanging offense, plus a few maudlin contemporary junk singles and disposeable Geffen-garbage with a hip-hop backing? Please! Enough! Also, don't you think that old incorrigible skirt-chaser Henry VIII would be seriously pissed at what some asshole has done to "Greensleeves"? I ask you, folks...

3. 'Tis the season to...destroy the planet even further by fattening fucking Wal-Mart's coffers. Brilliant move, assholes. Conspicuous consumption. Mandatory shopping. This crap has to stop. My mother is a particularly egregious offender in this instance; she's going to get me things whether I want them or not and has never quite cottoned on to the fact that I'd rather have, say, one thing I really like than a bunch of things. Plus, even if I tell her exactly what I want and exactly where to get it and how much it costs, I wind up with sex-discrimination-encouraging, labour-law-weakening, human-rights-violating, right-wing-Republicanoid-scumbag-funding, labour-standards-flouting, competition-smothering, monopsonist-encouraging, Saipan-sweatshop-slavemaster-enriching, funnelling-money-from-Canada-straight-to-Bentonville shit from Wal-Mart. And it isn't even good shit; it's crappily made, low-quality shit passed off as a "good bargain" because it's a brand name (usually, sometimes, never mind that Wal-Mart just managed to force the supplier to lower their quality standards significantly just like they did to Rubbermaid) and cheap to buy (if you pay no attention to the fact that Wal-Mart specialises in a few loss-leaders and most things are better quality and the same price elsewhere). Because that's convenient for her. Of course, if I don't run all over town and at least try to get the perfect thing for everyone, I get the cold reception at the family shindig, even though my mom and dad have way, way more money than I do, and my mom drives (and I don't). Not only that, but I don't particularly like shopping (except for grocery shopping) to begin with.

4. Me First and the Gimme Gimmes, live in concert! Christmas shopping makes people turn into assholes. I dislike crowds to begin with, and crowds where everyone's trying to get that last exactly perfect thing for Aunt Matilda before Buddy over there grabs it first, so they're pushy and preoccupied, are the worst. Also, since we're now on the school break, everyone's got their germy little cranky overtired rug(b)rats with them. Oh joy, oh bliss, oh rap-tu-ahh. Interrobang will not be held responsible for the occasional urge to drop-kick toddlers. Admit it; you want to do it too sometimes...

5. Put the Christ in Christmas Already, Please. Okay. I'm an atheist. I really am. I don't believe in gods, ghosts, devils, demons, mind-body dualism, souls, life after death, or the philosophical validity of the problem of evil. I don't really want to hear -- for three months -- about the wonderousness of the birth of a nonexistent mythological figure (three months hence, although if it had happened, happened in the spring according to the narrative), the tragicomic doomed boy god. Don't want to hear it. Got no need for ritual, even if you try real hard to convince me that a blatantly Christian holiday the Christians stole from the pagans is somehow secular. I don't believe in sin, or any form of afterlife, so I don't need "saving" from whatever it is that's supposed to happen -- I'm still fuzzy on this; Christianity makes a lot less sense than either of the other two major Abrahamic religions. Frankly, I'd be absolutely thrilled if Christians would reappropriate Christmas. But Christians, if you do so, you celebrate it in your homes and in your churches not in every shopping mall, public streets, public parks, every store, and every single public venue. I would really really like it if December 25th could pass for me much the same way as the dates of Diwali or Purim pass for me -- unnoticed unless I specifically want to look for them. I don't want to do this anymore and I don't think people really should -- it's stressful, it's toxic, it encourages bad freakin' habits, and it's unnecessary. Not to mention that it's yet another way the majority culture makes sure that all of us in the minority never, ever forget whose culture this really is. (What are Christians going to do when the nonreligious -- already 1 in 5 Canadians -- and everybody else who isn't Christian outnumber them? Oh, right, the same thing political Christians always do when they don't get their way in every exacting detail: Whine, scream, moan, and complain endlessly about how persecuted, put-upon, and picked-on they are. Right, sorry, forgot for a second who I was talking about.)

6. Moving Taste Violations, $500 000 Fine Since the culture seems intent on putting Christmas in front of our eyes whether we like it or not (not), do Christmas decorations really have to be that gaudy, ugly, kitschy and not in a good way, and tasteless? Gack.

7. It's Dark, It's Cold, The Weather Sucks, and You Want Me to What? The quote-unquote holiday season is a conspiracy of extraverts. Nobody but the hardest-core social butterflies should genuinely want to socialise and party hearty when it's dark, cold, and miserable. The rational response seems to me to be to sleep a lot, avoid other people (especially since this is heading into prime time for influenza!), and stay out of the weather as much as possible. I can't even say that short, dark days make me depressed; they just make me lethargic, cranky, and anti-social, and not particularly inclined to want to spend hours running around doing unpleasant chores, followed by an entire day of making pointless small talk, and eating fattening foods while avoiding the usual ambient dairy products. This year I'm also not particularly in a festive mood because I've just spent womdigious amounts of both emotional and financial capital getting my cat through his cancer, and I'm still vaguely sick from the complications of the influenza I got back before Halloween...

8. My Family Hates Me, and I Have Nothing In Common With Them, but they're sticklers for doing the Done Things the Done Way, so I'm going to have to be there. You heard it here first, folks, the major topics of conversation are going to be football and tv shows/commercials (how people can actually discuss the merits of television commercials in a non-technical manner is beyond me), followed closely by whatever charmed-life thing my cousin's got going on now. I hate having to pretend I'm happy for someone who was born with a horseshoe in her diaper when I can't catch a break from circumstances or family, frankly. My charmed-life cousin gets to go to Europe on an interesting historical tour through the school she teaches at, and everyone says, "Oh! Wow! Neat! Isn't that cool!" and talks about it for months. If I so much as express an interest in travelling, I'm told I should "wait a bit longer until you're more secure in your job" or "wait until you're retired" and then ignored. Oh, and everyone mostly ignores what I have to say anyway (unless they're all dogpiling me for having the chutzpah to be the lone liberal in a crowd of racist conservatives), and then my mother will criticise me for being "antisocial." Right, because I had so much to say while you were blathering on about American football (which is incomprehensible to begin with, and doubly so since we're fucking Canadian, jesus, why are you watching American football?!) or some goddamn tv commercial I've never seen. One nuclear family can ruin your whole day...

Granted, I will admit that a Random Present-Getting Day is mighty fun when you're a little kid, but couldn't it at least be held in, say, June, when the weather's nice? I mean, I'm not eight anymore; I'm done with this crap. Don't have kids, don't want kids, don't even like kids. I've grown out of Christmas, and it's lost whatever nostalgia appeal it might have had years ago, since it's gotten ever faster and louder and more frenetic for my whole life. I like getting together with friends and all that, but I don't really need an excuse. :)

Quotations, Better Read than Dead Edition

2009-12-20T06:16:47Z

[Her] degree is in "I know you are, but what am I?". Pee-Wee Hermeneutics is the formal title.
-- Little Pig, Sadly, No!, comments

Some time back I had a hernia operation. This was at my own expense, having cancelled our useless & hateful Blue Cross policy two years previously. Afterwards, I added up what those two years of premiums would have cost if I'd continued to go into debt to pay them (yes, I was writing credit card checks to pay the goddamned insurance). Would you believe that even with the amount Blue Cross would have paid if my policy had still been in effect, the total cost WITH insurance amounted to nearly DOUBLE what I actually paid out of my own pocket??? This is the vaunted "health care" the Democrats would force me to buy, so please don't do me and the 30 million others any favors. As you can see from this example, the mandate isn't for the uninsured: it's really a way to shovel money to the insurance companies.
-- TaosJohn, Balloon Juice, comments

Oral Roberts dead? They can't bury him deep enough.
-- Dust, Pharyngula, comments

They seem to think if you could just stuff all the things they fear and hate into a box and lock them away, then the world would go back to being like some non-existent paradise from the past they’re fixated on. And they’ll lie, cheat, steal, and kill to get it…
-- MikeEss, Pandagon, comments

Alternative medicine pseudoscientists don't seem to mind cognitive dissonance. They are content to look for evidence to support their own chosen treatment while blithely disregarding competing claims. They don't want to look for evidence that something doesn't work. While each claims to know the one cause of disease, they don't seem interested in looking for the one truth.
-- Harriet Hall, "The One True Cause of All Disease," Science-Based Medicine

My best friend has a gift giving problem with her husband, if he wants something, he buys it, leaving him with no unfufilled desires to be filled through gift giving. I think this is very indicative of the social differences between male and female gift-giving. If women were paid equally and had equal access to professions, and were socialized not to feel guilty about buying nice things for our own damn selves, I think the disparate expectations tied to gift giving would start to normalize.
-- bellacoker, Shakesville, comments

Hey, I am sure William Jefferson Clinton never realized that his signing of the media law overhaul would lead to six thousand Rush wannabes wailing from every freaking local radio station in this country. Even on XM you have one single left station and five right wingnut stations.
-- mai naem, Balloon Juice, comments [I didn't like Clinton either. -- ?!]

One thing the blogosphere has done is revive the art of the public diatribe.
-- wertys, Quackometer, comments

This is a key point that always gets missed when doctrinaire "free market" conservatives argue against regulation (and in particular against environmental regulations, including those predating the current concerns about climate change): In their ideological enslavement to laissez faire, they utterly miss the fact that regulatory change inevitably creates new opportunities for the very kinds of businesses - agile, innovative, entrepreneurial - that they claim to love so much.
-- Bill Dauphin, OM, Pharyngula, comments

It’s strange that the Family Research Council hates families, does little research, and is more of a commission than a council.
-- norbizness, Pandagon, comments

The one true cause of most of society's ills is an overabundance of morons.
-- windriven, Science-Based Medicine

Yeah, I'm just a netroot...or nutroot, maybe. That wasn't me voting in every election since I was eligible to vote, including school budget votes taking place in February sometimes. That wasn't me giving money to candidates all those years, though my name was on the checks. That wasn't me phone banking at Democratic headquarters all those years; it was a hologram (oooo, those tricky Democrats, using a hologram of me rather than getting me to actually volunteer). That wasn't me talking conservative friends, over and over again for years, into saying (who knows what they really did) they would vote for the candidate I supported. That wasn't me meeting with my representative one-on-one, attending town hall meetings, writing email after email and making phone call after phone call to my representative, trying to somehow get him to support my position. That wasn't me button-holing Erik Paulsen's (R-MN-3) staffer on health care, Andy Christiansen, and chewing his ear off until he lied about having to talk to someone just to get away from me (and he absolutely would not name anyone who had input to Paulsen's health care legislation, which was never going to be considered anyway, but I wanted to know exactly who had input to it and Christiansen wouldn't say...I pursued a level of investigation that Matthews would consider beneath him because it involved details and icky, wonky stuff like facts). No, none of those people were me. I'm a nutroot. NUTROOT! GET IT! HILARIOUS! I forgot to mention how it wasn't me who got to know every single person living within two blocks of my home when I was in NJ and making sure they knew where I stood politically and getting them to sign petitions and vote, and getting them over to my house when my representative stopped by so they could meet him and ask him questions and maybe get them to vote for Corzine. Nope, that wasn't me, either, though it sure looks like me in the photos with my representative and neighbors.
-- DBK, Hullabaloo, comments

The Jane Hamshers of the Left don't insist that our representatives win every fight. They insist that our representatives fight every fight.
-- Guster, Balloon Juice, comments

Why do all these cretins react to suggestions there might be a few too many people on the planet as a call for mass executions, rather than a suggestion that not everyone needs to have five or six offspring?
-- M. Bouffant, Sadly, No!, comments

Have I been mistaken in my belief that medical doctors first established the link between smoking and lung cancer? Was it actually a naturopath gazing into a crystal?
-- windriven, Science-Based Medicine

I have basically no school debt, living in a society that provides free health care and I would still laugh at someone suggesting I have a kid for 5k.
-- hypatia, Pandagon, comments

I'm not sure how possible it is to prove future political backlash, but this is how I see current trends ... : Republicans in office, screw up a bunch of crap. Voters say good grief, these guys are awful! Get someone new in there!/ vote in Dems / Democrats paralyzed by inaction, get nothing done. Voters say good grief, didn't you see what the last guys did? We have crap that needs fixing! Do something! Dammit! Get someone new in there! / vote in Republicans, repeat. You can call it unfair, call it illogical, simplistic, whatever, but when there's a problem that needs fixing and one political party has the executive branch and a supposedly filibuster-proof majority in the legislative branch and still can't even make modest progress on that front, then representative democracy isn't doing us any good, and the only ways we really have to express frustration about that are to not vote or vote for someone else.
-- jibeaux, Balloon Juice, comments

I wonder how many others will start to see that a party "w" for a bill that mandates paying 8% of your income to private corporations and using the IRS as a collection agency is political suicide for them, and come to the same conclusion as Massa before we're through.
-- Jane Hamsher, quoted at Hullabaloo, in comments

There are a number of small Pacific island nations who could stand to lose significant chunks of their habitable land area, up to 90%+ in some cases, if the sea levels rise even a small amount. Some of them made a diplomatic plea regarding this in Copenhagen recently, and they were summarily ignored by the industrial and oil-producing nations. There are other nations who might lose most or maybe even all of their readily accessible fresh water supplies, others that stand to lose much of their arable land. These nations are primarily small nations that have done almost nothing, nothing, to contribute to AGW [Anthropogenic Global Warming]. From their perspective, what is it that the rich industrial world has done to them, if not an act of war?
-- amphiox, Pharyngula, comments

[C]onservatives ringing this particular bell are offended at the idea that working class people, especially working class people of color, should get slots in college classrooms and jobs that they believe should be reserved for white children of privilege. And that the quickest way to put an end to class mobility is for the college-educated class to have so many children that there isn’t any room for anyone else to move up the ladder. Frankly, if their fears are right and lower child-bearing in the middle class creates more opportunities for working class people, I’d argue that it’s your moral duty as a middle class person to have few to no children. Give someone else’s family a chance.
-- Amanda Marcotte, "Quick fixes to kill feminism doomed to fail," Pandagon

There has long been a suspicion of viral infections altering the brain to unmask schizophrenia and there is an association between borna virus and OCD.
-- Mark Crislip, "Measles," Science-Based Medicine

What with Canadian subsidies, it's cheaper to import weather than make our own.
-- twoeleven, James Nicoll's LJ, comments

NYU guy #1: If a girl asked me to go buy her some tampons, I wouldn't care.
NYU guy #2: Yeah. Actually, I'd rather buy tampons than condoms.
NYU guy #1: Yeah! Because like, with condoms it's like "yes, I am planning on having sex tonight"! But with tampons it's more like, "oh, what are you gonna use those for? A nose bleed?"
-- from Overheard in New York

Alternative medicine is nothing if not irresponsible, the relative few people sacrificed in the service of staying true to one's ideals should provoke nary a shrug. Hey, when you're infallible, it's hard to be humble.
-- DevoutCatalyst, Science-Based Medicine, comments

Quotes, Eat, Igor! Edition

2009-12-19T05:29:12Z

[As a] United Empire Loyalist I have to say that the American Revolution was launched on the flimsiest of excuses and all the beautiful words were just rationalizations for skipping out on paying yer rent. Americans are the original dead beat tenants who in response to the landlords request for back rent say sorry mate this is our building now and if you don't like it you'll have to shoot us out of it. Shame the crown failed in that endeavor.
-- Northern Observer, Sadly, No!, comments

If your main goal is getting women out of the workforce, at least in high enough levels where they’re competing with middle class men for plum jobs, then it’s easier to believe that women attain those high levels of competitiveness as a mere side effect of larger forces. Picture the argument as this: Women who graduate from college have to work instead of having babies. While they’re out there working---to pay off that student loan debt, of course---they climb up the ladder and continue competing for men with jobs. They’d prefer to be at home making babies, of course, but if they have to be at work, they’re going to make the best of it. But if they were relieved of student debt, then they would immediately quit the rat race and get to knitting doilies and pushing out pups. And being good helpmeets to men, which we have plenty of statistical evidence to show helps men in the rat race. This is a preferable theory to the more likely one that women are delaying marriage and child-bearing because they actually want to do well in both their marriages and their careers. Why? In part, it’s about sales. It’s easier to sell the oppression of women if you argue that women want to be oppressed. But it’s also a matter of wishful thinking. If it’s just student loan debt that has created this situation---and deep in their hearts, women want to get married and have babies and support working husbands while not having ambition themselves---then you merely have to figure out the debt situation and voila! Feminism is defeated. But if it is in fact that women want to work and delay marriage and childbirth, then you have to unravel a whole lot of
progress to force them into it.
-- Amanda Marcotte, "Quick fixes to kill feminism doomed to fail," Pandagon

Knew a guy who spent several days of prayer and fasting. I asked him what he'd been praying about. "Praying for food!" was his honest answer.
-- Curmudgeon, in comments on a Yahoo article

When I first began writing for The Times, I was naïve about many things. But my biggest misconception was this: I actually believed that influential people could be moved by evidence, that they would change their views if events completely refuted their beliefs.
-- Paul Krugman, "Disaster and Denial," The New York Times

No, see, Goldman Sachs is Giant Conspiracy to take your job away and sell your children into debt bondage forever. This climate change business is much more a matter of making sure that your children have a habitable planet on which to live, clean air to breathe, clean water to drink and like that.
-- driftglass, "Sunday Morning Comin' Down," d r i f t g l a s s

Wait, so DC City Council votes 11-2 for same sex marriage and Oral Roberts kicks the bucket? How many states legalizing gay marriage would it take to bump off Joel Osteen?
-- Sadly, No!, comments

I'm normally opposed to race-based laws, but I'd be willing to make an exception for legislation which bans white people from even considering a career as a rapper, so long as it includes two amendments. The first would be a grandfather clause exempting the Beastie Boys from prosecution, and the second would be a clause ordering the death penalty for anyone who objects to the proposition that we should kill Kid Rock, incinerate his carcass, and launch the ashes into space where they can no longer pollute the Earth.
-- Wes, Dispatches from the Culture Wars, comments [I completely concur. Especially the part about Kid Rock, whom I despise especially for being a Confederate-flag-sucking waste of skin. My only question is, given that the Beastie Boys are a couple of NJBs from Brooklyn, are they really "white people" in that sense? -- ?!]

It won't do the atheist cause any good when I have a glass of scotch tonight, but I'm still going to enjoy it.
-- Screechy Monkey, Pharyngula, comments

Doesn’t matter if you’re pro or con when it comes to population control – if you live on a planet with a non-infinite diameter, it’s inevitable. We merely haggle over whether to get there via education & contraception or natural attrition … but you must admit, it surely takes some titanic cojones to argue that the readily-available alternative to the “organic” route (you know, the one where that winds up with far more dead bodies then live ones, & the rapid onset of a total global social meltdown) is the nihilist perspective. Who knew that all of moden civilization was actually one ginormous false-flag op secretly perpetrated by a cabal of nihilists? Not me, that’s for sure.
-- jim, Sadly, No!, comments

We no longer have government, only politics.
-- DBK, Hullabaloo, comments

Right now, I'd like to tell everyone to go to hell. (And I don't even believe in hell.)
-- avenging_angle, Shakesville, comments

The first big wave of deregulation took place under Ronald Reagan - and quickly led to disaster, in the form of the savings-and-loan crisis of the 1980s. Taxpayers ended up paying more than 2 percent of G.D.P., the equivalent of around $300 billion today, to clean up the mess. But the proponents of deregulation were undaunted, and in the decade leading up to the current crisis politicians in both parties bought into the notion that New Deal-era restrictions on bankers were nothing but pointless red tape.
-- Paul Krugman, "Disaster and Denial," The New York Times

[S]omewhere out there is a christian boy-band wondering why their latest, "Baby I want to give you a firm handshake", isn't doing as well as they thought.
-- mgjssit, Dispatches from the Culture Wars, comments

Thune said that bankers aren't loaning money to ranchers because of...wait for it...waaaait for it...cap and trade. Also health care reform. Seriously. John Fucking Thune looked straight into a camera and said banks will only start lending again once heath care reform is killed and cap and trade legislation is strangled. Thune should put up a flag, because he has managed to scale to wholly new plateau of bullshit. Sure, Republicans always start out with the list of their Usual Suspects - women, minorities, damned filthy Liberals, the Liberal Media -- and then work their way backwards into weaving them some-or-all into another Giant Conspiracy Christmas Sweater big enough to cover their problems, bigotries and paranoid fantasies. Political dialogue on the Right is, as Jon Stewart has pointed out, long ago degenerated into a game of Wingnut Mad Libs, but in the past this has usually come with at least some driveling attempt at bridging Topic and Scapegoat. With his breakthrough today. Thune has finally cracked the Subject/Predicate Barrier. Now with the development of "Thuning", Conservatives need no longer bound by offering tiresome bunches of "explainy" words which, let's face it, their followers neither comprehend nor care about. Instead they are now free to simply bark out random grievances from Column A and hated stereotypes from Column B. This will save everyone involved enormous amounts of time that could be better spent on other, more important matters.
-- driftglass, "Sunday Morning Comin' Down," d r i f t g l a s s

Men who seem like "good people" to other men frequently aren't good to women. Or children, or the weak, or the otherwise marginalized.
-- Melissa McEwan, "I See a Trend," Shakesville

My god, I can’t take it anymore. I’m starting to hope for the worst-case scenario. I want the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets to collapse completely tomorrow. I want the midwest to turn to desert and the oceans to turn to acid and start belching out hydrogen sulfide. I want a vast wave of climate refugees squatting in the homes of every denier, every concern troll, and when it happens I want to walk up to Christopher Monckton, Viscount of Deniers, and I want to slap him in the face and say, “See, I told you so.”

I need a vacation.
-- Proper Gander, Sadly, No!, comments

I'm convinced that Stephen Harper lies every time he opens his mouth so I just assume he's always lying.
-- CC, "One more time, trying for actual intellectual discourse," Canadian Cynic

I've never seen a "return to maleness" ad that doesn't define it on some level as a foot on women's necks.
-- SunlessNick, Echidne of the Snakes, comments

Talk to conservatives about the financial crisis and you enter an alternative, bizarro universe in which government bureaucrats, not greedy bankers, caused the meltdown. It's a universe in which government-sponsored lending agencies triggered the crisis, even though private lenders actually made the vast majority of subprime loans. It's a universe in which regulators coerced bankers into making loans to unqualified borrowers, even though only one of the top 25 subprime lenders was subject to the regulations in question. Oh, and conservatives simply ignore the catastrophe in commercial real estate: in their universe the only bad loans were those made to poor people and members of minority groups, because bad loans to developers of shopping malls and office towers don't fit the narrative.
-- Paul Krugman, "Disaster and Denial," The New York Times

Anyone who has followed [Rick] Warren for any length of time recognizes this as a pattern, where he backs vile policies and then pretends that he never did - even when he did so on video for the world to see. He explicitly compared gay marriage to incest and beastiality, then lied and said he didn't. He explicitly endorsed Prop 8 in California and told his followers to vote for that referendum, then lied and said he didn't. In both cases, we have him on video saying exactly what he later denied saying. And he has never owned up to the lies. This is Rick Warren's MO. We should all be used to it by now.
-- Ed Brayton, "Rick Warren: Too Little, Too Late," Dispatches from the Culture Wars

I love the right wing. Only they could hire as a spokesman a traitor to his country who ran weapons to a declared "terrorist government," then used the profits to finance another terrorist group in Central America, then still call themselves "patriotic." If Carter and Obama are "traitors" and "collaborators" for not being "tough enough" on Iran, what exactly do we call a guy who actually armed them? For that matter, why isn't a guy who financed terrorism in Gitmo right this minute saving a seat for Osama Bin Laden?
-- Chris Parmly, Sadly, No!, comments, on Oliver North

The idea that women might be human beings threatens ... profoundly, because the view of masculinity that has developed over the past century (I'm not sure about earlier) is subtractive. That is, a Man is defined as someone who is Not A Woman. This worked OK when men could do a lot of things women can't. But if women can be smart, then men must be stupid; if women can be moral, men must be evil; if women love beauty, men must love ugliness. ... And at the end, Barber and his ilk are faced with the horrific consequences of their subtractive masculinity: if women are human beings, men...cease to exist.
-- Doctor Science, "Gay-hatin' and Subtractive Masculinity," Doctor Science Knows

[F]or the general public there is a capacity to posit a mass conspiracy despite the implausibility of a mass conspiracy.
-- Kel, OM, Pharyngula, comments

Everyone knows that engineers are experts on one particular subject - the problems with the theory of evolution!
-- Sigmund, Respecful Insolence, comments

Copy Editor: “This first sentence is like two run-on sentences got married and had run-on babies.”
-- from Overheard in the Newsroom

I absolutely fucking hate it when people act like the "good old days" were so great for women because the poor little dears never had to exert themselves to open doors and they never had to pay money for dinners. The things women had to do to get this "deal" sucked far far worse than opening doors. ... I'd rather mow the lawn and fix my own car than to end up with a husband who acts like an overgrown child. What's the point of even "landing" a husband if you have to clean up after him all the time? I'd rather be single than settle for that deal, and no amount of open doors and free dinners and jewelry will make it more appealing to me.
-- catgirl, Echidne of the Snakes, comments

Of course, the Resurrection occured when Blue Cross refused to cover the Crucifixion.
-- actor212, Sadly, No!, comments

[S]outhern English is just 18th-century English without the frilly underwear.
-- Darren J Butler, TECHWR-L

The fact that you have a copy of of Atlas Shrugged under your arm as you evangelize, as Penn Jillette does, and not a Koran or a Bible, is not as important as whether you believe, on faith, that everything works out for the best due to the magic and wisdom of invisible entities like "the Market" who guide us with invisible hands, and ascribe personhood (and worship) to inanimate, noncorporeal persons, who are immortal, unaccountable, and suprahumanly powerful.
-- Marion Delgado, Respectful Insolence, comments

I'll make the assumption that wherever you do live, agriculture is probably a pretty important part of the economy. Global warming raises us a little, and guess what happens to that agriculture? It moves a few degrees of latitude away from where it is now. That, in many cases, means to a different country. Bye, export of agriculture! Time to import your food instead. Unfortunately, in a lot of cases it also means that it moves to areas that don't have rich enough soils to support it for very long. Bye bye, food! Oops.
-- Carlie, Pharyngula, comments

Am I imagining the fact that we're no longer in the 1950s? Is this all a crazy dream I'm actually having while baking dinner and waiting for my bread winning hubby to come home? Or waiting for my hubby to take me shopping so he can show me what I'm supposed to buy? Because last I checked, I bought my own car (with the help of both parents but I chose the car and paid/am still paying for half of it) and I pretty much bought everything I own and everything I use. So why is it that I, as a female, am left out of the brainstorming sessions at advertising HQ?
-- pmsrhino, Shakesville, comments

A college education is a class marker that’s treated as a necessary part of making someone a good wife to a striving middle class man, and also part of the conservative fantasy is that women go to college to meet their husbands.
-- Amanda Marcotte, "Quick fixes to kill feminism doomed to fail," Pandagon

That’s debate in Neocon, as opposed to English. The Neocon word means “our side gets to say whatever we wish, while the other side gets to SHUT UP, THAT’S WHY”. Neocon sounds like English, so it is easy to be confused.
-- LittlePig, Sadly, No!, comments

Some people, both men and women, find some comfort in conforming to certain roles because it makes them feel like a real man or a real woman. But what I realized is that while men get to be Men and women get to be Women, nobody gets to be a whole, complete person.
-- catgirl, Echidne of the Snakes, comments

Inkily, Slinkily,
Tool-using octopus
Armors its body with
Coconut shells;

Film has been shot of this
Cephalopoddity--
Gives me the mother of
All "What the Hell?"'s
-- Cuttlefish, OM, Pharyngula, comments

It generally isn't taught in history classes, but the reason we called it The Great Depression instead of The Depression is because depressions used to be very common in America. Not "a rough economic patch" or "a slight downturn" but full-on, bread-line, tent city depressions, roughly one a decade. That is, until we put in institutional reforms and threw the bums out, and then went generations without one. Today our government doesn't seem willing to do either.
-- Notorious P.A.T., Balloon Juice, comments

you should always short the stock of a company whose CEO is the subject of a glowing cover story in a major magazine.
-- Paul Krugman, "Bernanke and the cover curse," Conscience of a Liberal

I always thought there was a good word to describe a patient with a blood pH of 8.0: Dead.
-- spudbeach, Respectful Insolence, comments

They whinge and whinge about the liberal media, but given the chance to embrace a policy which would require the liberal media to air their views, they shriek in protest. It’s almost as if they know the media is not actually biased against them!
-- The Tragically Flip, Sadly, No!, comments, on wingnuts and the Fairness Doctrine

I found this on the Monster web site. ...

"Technical Writer,technical editor, document perpetration, desktop publishing,automated work processing, Word, Excel, Report Writing"
-- Keith Hood, TECHWR-L

Part of the problem is that in the past when people heard about a problem and took steps to fix it later they say, "Well that didn't happen." I'm thinking about the Y2k programmers. I happen to know about the millions of person hours spent fixing code so that nothing bad WOULD happen. There was a reason the world didn't shut down and it took a ton of money and a lot of work to make sure it didn't.
-- Spocko, Hullabaloo, comments

You don't automatically become a worthwhile and good human being simply for having died.
-- tsg, Pharyngula, comments

I hate driving by abortion clinics and seeing dirty old men standing around outside. I feel like yelling at them, ‘Impregnators!’
-- John Waters, quoted at The Feminist Texican

Snoopy dance

2009-12-19T03:29:21Z

There's a big hole in the middle of the food in Nero's dish. There wasn't much food in there to begin with, but he's eaten probably half of what was there...

Status Update

2009-12-18T03:34:37Z

Himself: Nero actually was drinking on his own today, but he's not eating on his own yet. He'll eat if you force-feed him, but otherwise not. I just force-fed him some special veterinary food. We'll see how that goes. He's acting much perkier than he has been, at least.

Me: The doctor thinks I may have MRSA in my sinuses, so I'm now on a long course of a completely different antibiotic...

Quotes, Fretting But No Music Edition

2009-12-17T04:40:34Z

Oh sorry, my bad. I found the science lying around on the floor, so I put it away. If you need it, it's over there, just behind that burning goat.
-- Brian, Pharyngula, comments (context is for the weak!)

I thought the psychology of his last threat was interesting: "I want every Democrat who is about to sacrifice their seat for socialized medicine to understand: after you lose your seat, you’re going to lose the socialized medicine too." That is *exactly* the logical form of a famous type of gangster threat: "I'm going to kill you slowly and painfully, and I want you to know that after I do that, I'm going to find your wife and kids and I'm going to kill them too." Nice psychic neighborhood these folks live in, especially their vaunted "idea man," who's always welcome on all the "serious" news shows.
-- Kevin Egan, Hullabaloo, comments, on Newt Gingrich

I am growing increasingly convinced humanity will never amount to anything significant, because we are too busy oppressing, attempting to kill, or actually killing one another. I want off the planet. Now.
-- Meechiru, Shakesville, comments

Beck and other wingnuts scream and yell that he’s a radical. A socialist. A tyrant. But in reality, he’s just a keeper of the status quo – even more conservative than a Clinton, IMO. Clinton signed the last bill related to abortion – The Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act of 1994. We had a doctor shot in the head in church this year. I and the National Abortion Federation asked that Congress step-up protections for doctors. Maybe making harassment and homicide of any doctor a federal crime. We were met with silence. And the other side is reloading. Barry is the best thing the Republicans have going right now. They always run against the government to maintain power and keep the status quo. And when the face of the government is a chain-smoking, do-nothing, egotistical (let’s admit that, please) black man, they have all they need to win in 2010 and 2012. We didn’t want to see this coming. We wanted a leader who would kick ass and know we had his back. Tax increases for the wealthy? Push it down their throats. And end to torture and an end to Pentagon contractors? Ditto. But when his chief of staff and the speaker of the House spend more time scolding and restraining liberal democrats and zero time investigating -let alone prosecuting - John Woo and Dick Chaney, we should know we are beyond fucked.
-- Dhalgren, Sadly, No!, comments

In the US, a bandwagon gathers steam. In Canada, people stand back and say, "You watch, Mildred, the wheels are gonna fall off that fuckin' thing..."
-- Sanders, phone conversation, 14 December 2009 7:20 PM

Why are they doing that, those good girls? Why are they killing themselves? Parents, teachers, administrators, pastors, bullies, slut-shamers, fools, woman-haters, hypocrites, tell me why YOU think they are killing themselves. Do you know? Do you know why Hope Witsell hanged herself? Do you know why she thought she had no future? It wasn’t because she made a momentary, impulsive expression of her barely-adolescent sexuality (or gave in to peer pressure from boys who felt that her body was public domain; if the latter, that is just another horrible thing to add to this horrible thing, but either way it was not because she took a picture of her boobs). It wasn’t because of a media-manufactured techno-trend. It wasn’t the internet. It was not that, as this putrid “news” article disgustingly asserts, “The downward spiral of Hope’s life was unstoppable.” If everyone I know who had a picture of their boobs on the internet before their 18th birthday killed themselves, I’d have a lot of dead friends. I wouldn’t be around to remember them, though, since I’d be dead too. It wasn’t SEXTING. It was you, adults, all the adults in her life. The high school assholes too, but they’re in high school. You’re adults. She was thirteen years old and she was driven to her grave for nothing and there was nothing inevitable about this.
-- Sylvia, "What Happened to Hope Whitsell?", Sylvia Has A Problem

If you're a bit frustrated with looking for this and don't mind struggling against a torrent of potential legal issues, it is available through less legitimate means.
-- MikeTheInfidel, Pharyngula, comments

If a King is bad, a King with a four year expiration date isn't necessarily much of an improvement, especially in a 21st century media environment.
-- Thers, "Have You Noticed There Are No Timelines?", Whiskey Fire

Me at Jack in the Box:
Speaker located at tire-level: Rugmytb?
Me: I’d like order a chicken fajita and a small chocolate milkshate.
Speaker: Dave’s not here, man.
-- Knights in Black Satin, Sadly, No!, comments

This is as much a cultural issue as anything else. In the United States the public is constantly made to fear criminals as much as terrorists, and so the result is that the humane treatment of (alleged) criminals is not exactly a priority for most people. Unfortunately these same people fail to recognise that their attitude is the symptom of a sick society, and not an adequate response to it.
-- Andrew M, Hullabaloo, comments

Assistant Editor: “Proof page 11 for me.”
Copy Editor: “What’s the magic word?”
Assistant Editor: “Now.”
-- from Overheard in the Newsroom

Speaking as someone whose parents took away any and all social contacts at the slightest excuse (getting a B, for example), I can tell you that I spent very many horrible, lonely nights crying in my room and praying that God would kill me. I developed an eating disorder, not because I wanted to be thin, but because I wanted to die. My parents moved into a rural home so that our family would be more isolated. Any friends I made in school lived “in town”. Even if I had been permitted to ride a bike off our property, it would have taken a three hour bike ride to get to the edge of town. Any kids my age within reasonable walking distance were declared “bad”, so I wasn’t allowed to make friends with them. Social isolation is a horrific thing. I look back on those times and realize just how mentally ill my father was; he lived in terror that I would encounter other people who might have a bad influence. School was my ONLY means of having a social life, outside of the telephone. During the summer, I had no one. When my parents decided to remove phone privileges (for a “bad” grade), I didn’t even have a friend’s voice. ... Now of course I’m married and live *far* away.
-- R.I., Sylvia Has A Problem, comments

The Law of Denialist/Creationist Atomism decrees that if even one error is found in any one page of the 1,000,000 published papers on a subject they don't like, that whole field of science is proven 100 percent wrong.
-- Douglas Watts, Whiskey Fire, comments

I’m totally creepily stalkerishly pervertedly in love w/food…just not stuffing my face with empty calories.
-- Vacuumslayer, Sadly, No!, comments

When the new investors took over Tip Top Tailors they were met with explanations and finger-pointing as to why the company was in such poor shape. DYLEX stands for Damn Your Lousy EXcuses which was a sign that things were about to change in the management of the company.
-- [citation needed] claim from the Wikipedia entry for Dylex, which used to own BiWay

For all of our social progress, we have yet to destroy the contemptible attitude that too many boys are taught to cultivate toward women: I desire your virginity so I can destroy it and then despise you.
-- Stella Quinn, "Rant: Leave Her Alone!", Robot From the Future

I live in New Orleans where the food is so bad for you, your cholesterol hits dangerous levels just walking down the street.
-- Matt T., Sadly, No!, comments

If you even remotely suspect that the corporate media are even marginally "Deomcratic" or liberal, you are out in the far right fringe with the other 23%ers.
-- drdick, Whiskey Fire, comments

The hullaballoo about “sexting” is ridiculous. In my day, it was Polaroids.
-- Frank, Sylvia Has A Problem, comments

my uterus is closed for business and I'd consensually bed a good chunk of NYC too if I had the chance. rawr.
-- groggette, Shakesville, comments

Soylent Green is sort of the Velveeta of cannibalistic products.
-- Wyatt Watts III, Sadly, No!, comments

I'm so tired of these ass hats threatening to cut [Social Security and Medicare]. I've been paying into these programs, in good faith, since one week after I turned 16 and got my first job. The idea that these program are "free" money is just insane. We paid for these benefits. This is not some government handout, this is our money, taken out of our paychecks and matched in part by our employers.
-- diav, Hullabaloo, comments

When a giant like Oral Roberts dies, I have to go back in time to unrealize that I thought he died 20 years ago.
-- Jay B., Sadly, No!, comments

Now we all know that LGBTs already have far too many rights as it is. Which is why its necessary that the majority tell them exactly what they are allowed to do regardless of what the constitution says.
-- Richard Eis, Pharyngula, comments

Jonah Goldberg—who has a career of any kind solely because his mother told Linda Tripp to secretly tape conversations with a lady who gave the president a blow job, and who is generally considered to be one of the most intellectually lazy pundits of any political persuasion of all time—writes about The Simpsons for The National Review Online. His last book, Liberal Fascism, was based entirely on the fact that someone told the 40-year-old Goldberg that "Nazi" stood for "National Socialist" and then he basically stopped listening.
-- Alex Pareene, "Idiot Inks Boffo Book Deal," Gawker

I am going to hell, but I might as well enjoy the ride
-- MattR, Balloon Juice, comments

Apparently the only acceptable population control methods are war, weather, disease and starvation. I guess when those folks are anti-choice, they’re anti-choice all the way.
-- tigirismus, Sadly, No!, comments

Steps should be taken to make sure he remains dead.
-- Larry W. Jewell, Pharyngula, comments, on Oral Roberts

While I'm not glad the man died, I sure am glad that he's no longer alive.
-- RevBigDumbChimp, Pharyngula, comments, on Oral Roberts

I spoke ill of him when he was alive. I don't see why I should suddenly stop now.
-- Brian, Pharyngula, comments, on Oral Roberts

It's a sad commentary on civilized society that a scam artist like this will die and get showered with post-mortem praises.
-- lose_the_woo, Pharyngula, comments

Remove and retain the four nuts securing the media panel to the old media cover and set them parts aside.
-- instruction quoted by Carla Martinek, TECHWR-L

I'm just wonder who the "four nuts" might be referring to?

Well, the four nuts are used for a media panel. So I'm guessing one cable TV news reporter, one op-ed writer for the Post, and two radio talk show hosts.
-- Tony Chung and Dan Goldstein, TECHWR-L

It's okay to be depressed if your life sucks, right?

2009-12-16T17:31:42Z

I called the vet's in Guelph today because the vet there is an excellent diagnostician, probably orders of magnitude better than the local vet, who is a bit of a screw-up. The vet in Guelph seems to think Nero probably has pancreatitis...

Happy Howlidays

2009-12-16T06:18:21Z

The Auld Fraud's Met His Gaud So Oral Roberts has died. Go on, tell me how you really feel about it. To hell with being nice to the dead; it's not like I believe in an afterlife where the bastard's listening omnisciently to everything I say, so what the hell difference does it make? Besides which, I'd say it to his face: Oral Roberts was a lying, transparently fraudulent piece of scum who conned and extorted vast amounts of money out of gullible people using religion as the most pernicious and invasive method of social control ever devised by humankind. For what it's worth, I'd say this to any of his relatives, too, and ask them when they were going to give the ill-gotten gains back. Last I heard, profiting from a crime was illegal, except when the crime was committed under colour of religion, I guess...

What Syntonic_Comma Said: This. Absolutely this. If I ever become an MP(P), I'm going to table a private member's bill making it a statutory offense to play Christmas music in public places before December 1st. Personally, I'd rather make it December 15th, since ten days of hype around a freakin' one-day holiday is fucking enough, but I realise that some people enjoy that kind of thing, so I'm willing to take one for the team and suffer for the extra fifteen days. I think I could sell the bill to both sides of the political spectrum, frankly.

Practical Oncology, Yet Again: Nero is not doing well, for some reason. I had him in at the vet's since he seems to be determined not to eat at all for the last three days or so, and threw up a bunch of foam and bile in my bed this morning. The bloodwork was inconclusive -- his liver, kidney, and pancreatic function are fine (good, no fatty liver syndrome -- yet), and he's not anemic. He got 300 ml of subcutaneous fluids because of dehydration, a shot of anti-nauseant, and some antibiotics in case he has some kind of cryptic infection, although nothing seemed evident. Sigh.

Time Off: I'm apparently working the 21st and 23rd, and I don't yet know what the company schedule is for between The Holiday and New Year's. A lot of our clients basically shut down between about the 20th of December and 1 January, so I may or may not be working then. Boxing Day is on a Saturday this year, so I get aced out of my stat pay, too. Bah.

I Has a Sad: Fortnum and Mason seems to have removed their delicious Rose Pouchong tea from their web catalogue. If I can't get more of it, I'm going to cry a lot. I'm almost out. It's delicious. The Twinings stuff, which also isn't available here, is good, but the Fortnum's stuff makes the Twinings taste like dishwater...