eVille Times

Feb 9, 2015

Today's Quote

"What stuns me the most about contemporary politics is not even that the system has been so badly corrupted by money. It is that so few people get the connection between their lives and what the Bozos do in Washington and our state capitols...Politics is not a picture on the wall or a television sitcom that you can decide you don't much care for." --Molly Ivins

What She Said

Actually, what she didn't say.

The Rev. Lindsay Hardin Freeman began scouring the Bible three years ago to do something that apparently had never been done: the cataloging of every word uttered by every woman in the more than 2,000-year-old holy book.

Meeting in a church library, Freeman and an unlikely research team systematically pored over every Bible chapter, documenting the words on spreadsheets and inserting context and highlights. Week after week. Month after month. Year after year.

The results give surprise insights into the lives of women ranging from Abigail to Zipporah. Eve, for example, may be the Bible’s most well-known woman, but she utters only 74 words. Yet an unnamed “Shulamite woman” in the Song of Solomon holds forth with 1,425.

Here's a brief recap of the scorecard for ya:

Fewer than 100 woman say anything at all in the bible. We get to know the names of fewer than 50 of those women. And while there're about one-million-one-hundred-thousand words total in the bible, those very few women speak fewer than fourteen-thousand of those 1.1 million words.

Not to put too fine a point on it, but how is it that roughly 50% of the human beings on the planet account for less than 1.3% of the words in the "most important book in the entire history of the fucking world"?

Please explain to me how the bible isn't mostly horseshit.

hat tip = HuffPo

Feb 8, 2015

Today's Toon

A rather simple and elegant lesson about the Law of Unintended Consequences:

Feb 7, 2015

Following Up

So I went to Mark Warner's website and left a message about how I needed to see him blah blah - going along with my idea to give him an excuse to duck out on Netanyahu next month (see my post from earlier today), and this is what I got back from a guy who made his fortune in the "Communications Technology" bidness:

We are so very fucked.

Lend 'Em A Hand

From National Journal:

There will be no "boycott" of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's speech before Congress next month, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi said Thursday.

But while she downplayed reports of an organized protest, she suggested some lawmakers might just be too busy to attend. And at least two Democrats have already decided they won't be on hand.

"I don't think anybody should use the word 'boycott,'" Pelosi said in her weekly press conference. "When these heads of state come, people are here doing their work, they're trying to pass legislation, they're meeting with their constituents and the rest. It's not a high-priority item for them."

Pelosi's pretty cagey. This is a wink-wink-nudge-nudge-say-no-more proposition, and here's what I think we can do to help out:

Call all three of your Congress Critters and insist that you have an urgent matter requiring their attention; that you don't feel comfortable discussing it with a staffer; and that you can only make time for a visit on the exact date and at the exact time of Netan-fuckin'-yahu's address to the joint session.

Most of them will blow you off - Repubs especially have shown a particular affinity for turning their backs on us if there's a good grandstanding opportunity at hand - but we'll be giving the others some cover if they decide to stay away (ie: constituent service is still supposedly a thing).

And here's the plum - by calling the Repubs and giving them a chance to rebuff your requests, you have some nice advertising fodder for the 2016 election cycle.

Kinda like this:
"I called [insert Congress Critter's name here] regarding [insert urgent thingie here], but I guess hearing Uncle Bibi's sales pitch about sending more American kids to get all fucked up in some desert shithole was more important to him."

You're welcome. Limber up, be creative and let the shit fly.

"One" More Time

I can almost say that some of this Anti-Vax bullshit is getting to be kinda fun.

As it turns out, in a "free society", we've made it pretty hard to mandate certain health-related issues. There're loopholes in some of the laws (I know - surprising, ain't it?) and creative ways of using other laws that make it all but impossible to enforce any kind of Anti-Dumb-Fuck Policy like "get your stoopid ass vaccinated because I don't need a smug and disease-carrying-fart-smellin'-over-confident-and-under-thinkin' twat waffle like you fuckin' up my little part of the world".

So, anyway - we have to go on trying to talk sense to these jag-offs, but we should also take a shot at moving them by way of social pressure. Simply put, we take some of the bullying tactics that so many overprivileged yahoos get away with, and turn it around on them.

hat tip = Democratic Underground

Un-Vaccinated = Unclean

Keep your uwashed filth away from my kids

You see yourself as a Libertarian Hero -

the rest of us see you as that Pigpen kid in the Charlie Brown cartoons.

Your right to refuse vaccination gives me the right to chain you down in the basement, feed you chicken scraps, and throw shit at your head for fun.