"Love me or hate me, both are in my favor. If you love me, I will always be in your heart. If you hate me, I'll still be in your head."
--Wm Shakespeare
Sunday, May 22, 2016
Today's Quote
Prematurely Mainstream
A coupla other Fugelsang concepts that stand out for me:
John Fugelsang:
sometimes atheists are the best Christians-and-
separation of Church and Faith
John Fugelsang:
Friday, May 20, 2016
Today's Chart
I think it's worth noting that there's a fairly obvious connection here: a rapist being able to deny his victim's right to abort "his" "child", and then to sue for his "right" to be involved in that kid's life is coming almost straight outa the really shitty parts of The Bible that have god telling certain Israelites that it's OK to kidnap and rape women as a means of obtaining a family.
That's pretty fucked up right there, buy hey - it's what the TheoCons do.
Allow me to reiterate Mike's Manifesto on this particular subject:
Abortion is very serious, and so it MUST be closely restricted -
...to women
...who are pregnant
...and decide not to be pregnant
No exceptions
If you're not the one who's pregnant
(and especially if you were born with that Y chromosome)
then your opinion is duly noted
and you can shut the fuck up now
Thursday, May 19, 2016
Today's Stand Up Guy
On Monday morning, every American considering political office got a lesson in taking caution while posting anything to social media. Mike Webb, Virginia Congressional candidate, inadvertently revealed his taste in porn to Facebook. Initially, Webb had only meant to post a screenshot of phone records, along with a Yahoo search of Curzon Staffing Agency, whom he claims prank called him about a job offer. The candidate's post attracted the attention of the public for an entirely different reason. Before snapping screenshots, Webb apparently forgot to close what appear to be two porn sites. The sites' names, which are truncated by the tab label, read "LAYLA RIVERA TIGHT BO" and "IVONE SEXY AMATEUR."
What is it about Virginia Politicians these days?
And oh yeah - GOP - what the fuck, guys?
Tuesday, May 17, 2016
And So It Goes
Remember all that bullshit last year about "The War On Cops"?
It's open season on police - Blue Lives Matter - all those rotten brown people fomenting violence against our noble officers blahblahblah.
Well, it was exactly the bullshit many of us said it was, and the FBI confirms it.
Via HuffPo:
It's open season on police - Blue Lives Matter - all those rotten brown people fomenting violence against our noble officers blahblahblah.
Well, it was exactly the bullshit many of us said it was, and the FBI confirms it.
Via HuffPo:
The data contrasts with the claims from some conservative media outlets and police union bosses who have continued to peddle the narrative that officers are under siege. The past two years have seen a surge in police reform activism in the wake of Michael Brown’s death in Ferguson, Missouri, and other high-profile instances of police killing civilians. But critics of this movement allege that groups like Black Lives Matter promote violence against officers, and have helped wage a “war on cops.”And:
“The FBI statistics on police officer felonious deaths show that belief that the job is growing more dangerous, because of protests against police or because of the demand for reform to police practices, is simply wrong,” Harris wrote in an email. “Belief to the contrary may be sincere, but it has no basis in fact.”
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| Battling the endless parade of "conservative" crapola |
Today's Tweet
Well time for lunch catch ya'all tomorrow pic.twitter.com/doQZjbEeMN— Linda Collins (@LindaCollins11) May 17, 2016
Let the PhotoShop wars begin.
Monday, May 16, 2016
Today's Video
Things are not always as they seem (duh) - an important concept to keep in mind when it comes to choosing a candidate.
(Stay with it - the explanation is pretty informative):
So, ya gonna believe me or your lyin' eyes? Let's be careful out there.
(hat tip = Facebook buddy VW-E)
Sunday, May 15, 2016
How Wrong?
Real wrong. I ran a little video on my little blog here not all that long ago, showing Jim Webb's announcement that he was running for POTUS - and I remember saying I'd give the guy a look because he did some decent things in his one term in the US Senate (not the least of which was simply keeping George Allen out of that seat).
Anyhoo - I've been wrong about a lot of things, but never wronger than thinking Jim Webb as a candidate for Prez was worth more than a spit shine a dead man's shoes.
Samantha Bee:
In the early 1800s, Jackson was doing what most people were doing, and it all seems to be in line with the standards of his time.
Tubman was doing things that were illegal in the mid-1800s; things that were considered by at least half of her contemporaries to be seditious and treacherous and evil.
Looking back on it all, which one was actually doing the good things, and which one was doing the shitty things? What would you want to be remembered for - The Underground Railroad or The Trail Of Tears?
So by Webb's metrics, Bull Connor (eg) was an OK guy because we need to think of his complete assholery as something other than complete assholery because he was a man of his time and so we have to judge him by the standards prevailing in Alabama in 1963? What-the-actual-fucking-fuck?
Webb decries the PC / White Privilege criticism while arguing a position that is totally embedded in it.
Here's the thing, Jim - when you've got your head up your ass, even if you open your eyes, all you're gonna see is your own shit. I need you to work on that one for me, OK?
Anyhoo - I've been wrong about a lot of things, but never wronger than thinking Jim Webb as a candidate for Prez was worth more than a spit shine a dead man's shoes.
Samantha Bee:
The OpEd piece Ms Bee refers to is still up at WaPo, and I was kinda struck by a line Webb uses in the last paragraph:
Mark Twain once commented that “to arrive at a just estimate of a renowned man’s character one must judge it by the standards of his time, not ours.”OK, but let's look at the behavior of both Jackson and Tubman thru the lens of those standards - which, btw, change over time. You don't get to suspend the rules to suit your convenience - we play the full nine innings here.
In the early 1800s, Jackson was doing what most people were doing, and it all seems to be in line with the standards of his time.
Tubman was doing things that were illegal in the mid-1800s; things that were considered by at least half of her contemporaries to be seditious and treacherous and evil.
Looking back on it all, which one was actually doing the good things, and which one was doing the shitty things? What would you want to be remembered for - The Underground Railroad or The Trail Of Tears?
So by Webb's metrics, Bull Connor (eg) was an OK guy because we need to think of his complete assholery as something other than complete assholery because he was a man of his time and so we have to judge him by the standards prevailing in Alabama in 1963? What-the-actual-fucking-fuck?
Webb decries the PC / White Privilege criticism while arguing a position that is totally embedded in it.
Here's the thing, Jim - when you've got your head up your ass, even if you open your eyes, all you're gonna see is your own shit. I need you to work on that one for me, OK?
Saturday, May 14, 2016
It Ain't Broke
Ordinarily, I'd ask - why don't all those clear-eyed pragmatic capitalists understand this and do something about it?
I'm not asking that anymore because I think they do understand it; they've done pretty much what they intended to do; and it's working pretty much as they intended it to work. So this is not some software bug. It's not a glitch. It's a feature.
This is what Unfettered Free-Market Capitalism ends up looking like. When you reduce everything to a simple transaction; when every decision is based almost solely on Risk/Reward/Penalty, then you've removed the ethical dividing line between Right and Wrong - they become interchangeable - and suddenly those aren't people any more; they're revenue opportunities.
Seems like we've been here before.
It Sounds Familiar
Way back in the old days, if the boss wasn't pretty watchful, one of the pranksters would sneak onto the mainframe and start some weird shit thing like:
10 PRINT TO SCREEN: HELP ME - I'M STUCK IN AN ENDLESS LOOP
20 GO TO: 10
And the terminal would eventually lock up and the supervisors would get all pissed off and we'd laugh and laugh cuz it'd take a good 20 minutes to clear the memory partition and restart the sector - or whatever magic the uber-nerds did to get it all back up and runnin'.
And somehow, we didn't know we were just being assholes.
Well, now we seem to have kinda the same thing going on in certain sectors of our politics.
We gave a lot of money to rich people to fix the economy, but it didn't work
So we gave a lot of money to rich people to fix that, but it didn't work
So we'll give a lot of money to rich people and see if that works
And somehow, they don't know they're just being assholes.
10 PRINT TO SCREEN: HELP ME - I'M STUCK IN AN ENDLESS LOOP
20 GO TO: 10
And the terminal would eventually lock up and the supervisors would get all pissed off and we'd laugh and laugh cuz it'd take a good 20 minutes to clear the memory partition and restart the sector - or whatever magic the uber-nerds did to get it all back up and runnin'.
And somehow, we didn't know we were just being assholes.
We gave a lot of money to rich people to fix the economy, but it didn't work
So we gave a lot of money to rich people to fix that, but it didn't work
So we'll give a lot of money to rich people and see if that works
And somehow, they don't know they're just being assholes.
Friday, May 13, 2016
It Is To Laugh
If it was any less tragic, it wouldn't be funny.
And there it is - right there at the end. Did you catch it?
It's always some variation on, "Yeah, but the Democrats" - what driftglass calls "the razor in the apple".
This was a 4-minute piece about Trump dropping in on the enemy encampment in DC. They spent the whole time saying not really much of anything except that a buncha Show Ponies got together for a little meet-n-greet, followed by the usual grip-n-grin photo ops etc, and while it sounded like we were kinda getting a little subtext about the really bad shit going on in the GOP, in the end, the Press Poodles at PBS just have to bring it back to the crapola False Equivalence that keeps the coffee mugs and the tote bags flying off the shelves and blah blah fucking blah.
And there it is - right there at the end. Did you catch it?
It's always some variation on, "Yeah, but the Democrats" - what driftglass calls "the razor in the apple".
This was a 4-minute piece about Trump dropping in on the enemy encampment in DC. They spent the whole time saying not really much of anything except that a buncha Show Ponies got together for a little meet-n-greet, followed by the usual grip-n-grin photo ops etc, and while it sounded like we were kinda getting a little subtext about the really bad shit going on in the GOP, in the end, the Press Poodles at PBS just have to bring it back to the crapola False Equivalence that keeps the coffee mugs and the tote bags flying off the shelves and blah blah fucking blah.
Today's GIF
It's not luck - it's math.
Understanding the math, you can make a cool thing happen
Understanding the math, you can make a cool thing happen
Think of it as the difference between being a badass...
...and being a dumbass
So let's review: Not good luck, and not bad luck - just math.
OK? We all good?
Happy Triskaidekaphobia Day, everybody!
A Poem
The Oxymoronic English Contradictionary --Brian Bilston
Alone together for once,
I told her how I thought that, in my unbiased opinion
The incidence of oxymorons in the English language
Had been growing smaller.
"That's old news", she said
Adding that it had been the case for almost exactly ten years.
Things got pretty ugly,
But this in itself felt strangely normal,
For ours was a bittersweet relationship;
A civil war of violent arguments
I found myself annoyingly endeared to her
While she regarded my puritanical streak as seriously funny.
Our contradictions
Compliment each other perfectly
"Same difference",
I whispered loudly.
But she, with a sad smile,
After telling me how I'd left her speechless,
Went back to reading
Her textbook on business ethics.
Alone together for once,
I told her how I thought that, in my unbiased opinion
The incidence of oxymorons in the English language
Had been growing smaller.
"That's old news", she said
Adding that it had been the case for almost exactly ten years.
Things got pretty ugly,
But this in itself felt strangely normal,
For ours was a bittersweet relationship;
A civil war of violent arguments
I found myself annoyingly endeared to her
While she regarded my puritanical streak as seriously funny.
Our contradictions
Compliment each other perfectly
"Same difference",
I whispered loudly.
But she, with a sad smile,
After telling me how I'd left her speechless,
Went back to reading
Her textbook on business ethics.
Thursday, May 12, 2016
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