It's Valentine's Day, Dammit

...so make sure you clear your box(?)

C'mon ya bastids - aerobicise!

Virginia Is For Lovers

...again...kinda.  (The judge stayed her own decision to allow for appeal)

A federal court decided yesterday that Virginia's constitutional amendment banning same-gender marriage is stoopid.  Yay, Judge Allen.

Richmond Times-Dispatch:

A federal judge struck down Virginia’s same-sex marriage ban Thursday, finding that it violates the equal protection clause under the 14th Amendment to the United States Constitution.

U.S. District Judge Arenda L. Wright Allen followed arguments by the plaintiffs in Bostic v. Rainey who had argued that the 2006 amendment to the state Constitution defining marriage as between a man and a woman denies gays and lesbians the fundamental right to marry, essentially making them second-class citizens.

"There can be no serious doubt that in America, the right to marry is a rigorously protected fundamental right," the judge wrote in her ruling. "The Supreme Court has recognized repeatedly that marriage is a fundamental right protected both by the Due Process and the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment."

Wright Allen, appointed to the bench in 2011 by President Barack Obama, added that marriage rights are "of basic importance in our society, rights sheltered by the Fourteenth Amendment against the State’s 'unwarranted usurpation, disregard, or disrespect.' "

"The right to marry is inseparable from our rights to privacy and intimate association."

I guess I can only assume the wingnuts are unhappy, cuz it seems a rather mysterious silence has descended over Goober Nation.

RedState = nuthin'
Fox Nation = crickets
Breitbart = zip
WND = it shows up, but it's just a link to a very short piece at NBC

As of 10:45AM today: Mostly Bupkis.

There was one story (well below the headlines) on the DumFux News site, but gosh, "Comments are currently closed for this article".  What on earth could that be about?

For Your Valentine

Here We Go Again

When do we learn to stop fuckin' around with all this shit?

WV Gazette:

CHARLESTON, W.Va. -- More than 100,000 gallons of coal slurry poured into an eastern Kanawha County stream Tuesday in what officials were calling a "significant spill" from a Patriot Coal processing facility.

Emergency officials and environmental inspectors said roughly six miles of Fields Creek had been blackened and that a smaller amount of the slurry made it into the Kanawha River near Chesapeake.

"This has had significant, adverse environmental impact to Fields Creek and an unknown amount of impact to the Kanawha River," said Secretary Randy Huffman of the state Department of Environmental Protection. "This is a big deal, this is a significant slurry spill."

"When this much coal slurry goes into the stream, it wipes the stream out."

--and--

There was an alarm system in place to alert facility operators of the broken valve, but the alarm failed, so pumps continued to send the toxic slurry through the system. There was a secondary containment wall around the valve, but with the pumps continuing to send slurry to the broken valve, it was soon overwhelmed and the slurry overflowed the wall and made its way to the creek.

Huffman said they did not know why the alarm system failed.

--and--

For most of the day, the DEP was operating under the assumption that MCHM, the chemical that contaminated the drinking water of 300,000 West Virginians last month, was included in the spilled slurry. Huffman said that they learned late in the day that the facility had stopped using MCHM just a few weeks ago, so a different coal-cleaning chemical was involved.

Huffman said that the new chemical was polypropylene glycol, although he also referred to it as polyethylene glycol. He said that that chemical is such a small part of the slurry that they don't believe it, specifically, will have an impact.

Huffman said they had been testing for MCHM, but will now have to change their testing protocols.

Residents near the spill had complained of MCHM's telltale licorice odor, but Huffman said that the odor was from a tank of MCHM that the company was moving off site.

Oddly, in Patriot's statement the company mentioned testing for MCHM in Fields Creek.

--and--

Among other things, the 2009 OSM report found it hard, using DEP inspection reports and databases, to definitively quantify the number of blackwater spills. When spills occur, state inspectors cite companies for violating different regulations, and inspection narratives don't always explain clearly what happened, OSM said.

The lack of clear data may lead some operators to face less-serious enforcement action than they should and may hurt the DEP's ability to cite companies for a "pattern of violation," which can lead to operations being shut down and operators being blocked from receiving new permits.

OSM investigators also found that other strategies -- including settlement agreements with mine operators and federal criminal prosecution -- don't always work in stopping future blackwater spills.

"It appears that the consequences for violating the law, even when the violations are intentional, willful and blatant, are not significant enough to be a deterrent," the OSM report said.

The alarm that was supposed to tell somebody there was a problem with the valve malfunctioned (assuming it was even hooked up); the inspections to make sure the safety measures were being followed weren't happening; the coal company decided to test for a toxic chemical that they weren't using, while neglecting to mention to any-fucking-body that they were using some other toxic shit; and the mine safety guys had done practically nothing about known problems for goin' on 5 years.

So really there's no system; no protocol; not a goddamned thing in place to ensure these Noble Job Creators and their Coin-Operated Politicians aren't just fuckin' us with a wood rasp.  Isn't that pretty much it?

Yo - Goddies

One of the Anti-Evolutionist's favorite crapola arguments is usually along the lines of, "you can't show me one example of one species evolving into another" or some such.

This might be one:

Amphibians are ectothermic, tetrapod vertebrates of the class Amphibia (Greek ἀμφí, amphi, "both" + βíος, bios, "life"). They inhabit a wide variety of habitats with most species living within terrestrial, fossorial, arboreal or freshwater aquatic ecosystems. Amphibians typically start out as larva living in water, but some species have developed behavioural adaptations to bypass this. The young generally undergo metamorphosis from larva with gills to an adult air-breathing form with lungs. Amphibians use their skin as a secondary respiratory surface and some small terrestrial salamanders and frogs lack lungs and rely entirely upon skin.

It's most widely accepted that life started in the ocean, and some of the critters evolved ways of getting out of the water and up onto the land.  Seems to me an amphibian just might be the example that way too many god-botherin' dingle-butt derps keep telling us can't possibly exist.

Logical Fallacy #1 - Straw Man

From Wikipedia:
The straw man fallacy occurs in the following pattern of argument:

1. Person 1 has position X.
2. Person 2 disregards certain key points of X and instead presents the superficially similar position Y. The position Y is a distorted version of X and can be set up in several ways, including:
   1. Presenting a misrepresentation of the opponent's position.
   2. Quoting an opponent's words out of context—i.e., choosing quotations that misrepresent the opponent's actual intentions (see fallacy of quoting out of context).^[4]
   3. Presenting someone who defends a position poorly as the defender, then denying that person's arguments—thus giving the appearance that every upholder of that position (and thus the position itself) has been defeated.^[3]
   4. Inventing a fictitious persona with actions or beliefs which are then criticized, implying that the person represents a group of whom the speaker is critical.
   5. Oversimplifying an opponent's argument, then attacking this oversimplified version.
3. Person 2 attacks position Y, concluding that X is false/incorrect/flawed.

This reasoning is fallacious because attacking a distorted version of a position does not address the actual position. The ostensible argument that Person 2 makes has the form:

"Don't support X, because X has an unacceptable (or absurd or contradictory or terrible) consequence."

However, the actual form of the argument is:

"Don't support X, because Y has an unacceptable (or absurd or contradictory or terrible) consequence."

This argument doesn't make sense; it is a non sequitur. Person 2 relies on the audience not noticing this.

My Pillow Never Dries

Lonely Teardrops --Michael MacDonald

Drowning In The Sea Of Love --Eva Cassidy (cuz she does it better'n Boz Scaggs that's why)

A Question

Repubs seem to love arguing about the silliest things.

Benghazzi, IRS, ammunition purchases, birth certificates, FEMA camps, Bill Ayers and on and on and on.

And way too many Dems follow right along, trying to rebut all that crap instead of saying, "yeah - that's just dumb - come back when you're ready to speak rationally about immigration or sequetration or a grotesquely bloated DoD budget or over-stressed infrastructure or clean water or or or".

So I gotta ask - with so many things we really oughta be haggling over, why are they constantly going so far out of their way to find something stoopid to fight about?

Stick to the fuckin' point and stop helping those assholes hijack the debate.

Gay Football Politics

"I applaud Michael Sam and wish him the very best as he continues the pursuit of his NFL dream. We will evaluate Michael just like any other draft prospect -- on the basis of his ability, character and NFL potential. His announcement will have no effect on how we see him as a football player." --John Elway, Exec VP Football Operations, Denver Broncos

And with that, any lingering political aspirations Elway may have had with the GOP are now officially and irrevocably dead.

Today's Pix

A Simple Remedy

One Time On Michael Sam

Mostly, I don't care that Michael Sam came out because I don't care if he's gay, straight or other.

So I'll just do this one little post and be done with it.

The thing I find interesting is that the people who're willing to stand up and throw the the guy a little encouragement are (generally) people who stand behind what they say and aren't afraid to own their thoughts and actions.

While the ones who just wanna tear people down and fuck it all up - well, they do things from the shadows.  The tendency for them is that they don't use their real names.  They seem more than a little scared to come out in the open and let the rest of us see them for who they really are.

I have a basic test for everybody, and it consists of 2 questions.

1) Will you at least try to carry your end of the boat?

2) Can I trust you around my kids?

If I believe you can answer in the affirmative to both of those questions, then I don't care if you fuck frogs.

The Morality Gene

Bible Thumpers think they win the God vs No God argument by claiming we have to have some kind of outside agency that dictates morality to us.  And that one's always been a really tough nut to crack in rebuttal.  Except that it isn't.

From the last of a 5-part YouTube thingie:

Meet The New Bubble

...same as the old bubble - more or less.

The ticks on Wall Street work really hard (gotta give 'em that much).  Unfortunately, the hard work and long hours they put in are in service to finding new and exciting ways of picking the bones of whatever's left of the American Middle Class.

From Mother Jones:

Over the last two years, private equity firms and hedge funds have amassed an unprecedented real estate empire, snapping up Spanish revivals in Phoenix, adobes in Los Angeles, Queen Anne Victorians in Atlanta, and brick-faced bungalows in Chicago. In total, Wall Street investors have bought more than 200,000 cheap, mostly foreclosed houses in some of the cities hardest hit by the economic meltdown. But they're not simply flipping these houses. Instead, they've started bundling some of them into a new kind of financial product that could blow up the housing market all over again.

--and--

As of November, Blackstone had acquired 40,000 houses, most of them foreclosures, worth $7.5 billion. Today, it is the largest owner of single-family rental homes in the nation.

Blackstone's deep pockets—$248 billion in assets under management and a $3.6 billion credit line arranged by Deutsche Bank for buying houses—allow it to outbid individual buyers, driving up local real estate prices and pushing families out of the market. "You can't compete with a company that's betting on speculative future value when they're playing with cash," says Alston. "Institutional investors are siphoning the wealth and the ability for wealth accumulation out of underserved communities," adds Henry Wade, cofounder of the Arizona Association of Real Estate Brokers.

and it just gets better and better:

But buying houses cheap and then waiting for them to appreciate isn't the only way Blackstone is making money on these deals. It wants your rent check, too. In November, after many months of hype, the firm released the first-ever rated bond backed by securitized rental payments. Joining forces with Credit Suisse, Deutsche Bank, and JPMorgan (whichrecently paid a record $13 billion fine to settle accusations of ripping off mortgage investors), Blackstone has bundled the rental payments from more than 3,200 single-family houses, offering investors its mortgages on the underlying properties as collateral. After investors tripped over themselves to buy into the $479 million bond, Blackstone's competitors announced that they, too, would develop similar securities.

 A bond backed by Securitized Rent Payments.  What could possibly go wrong?

Today's Quote

Give 'em hell, Harry.

Republicans approve of the American farmer - but they are willing to help him go broke.

They stand four-square for the American home – but not for housing.

They are strong for labor – but they are stronger for restricting labor’s rights.

They favor minimum wage – the smaller the minimum wage the better.

They endorse educational opportunity for all – but they won’t spend money for teachers or for schools.

They think modern medical care and hospitals are fine – for people who can afford them.

They consider electrical power a great blessing – but only when the private power companies get their rake-off.

They think the American standard of living is a fine thing – so long as it doesn’t spread to all the people.

And they admire the Government of the United States so much that they would like to buy it.

-
~Harry S. Truman