Today's Freedom From Religion

This is Eddie Castillo - a student at Texas Tech:

Eddie is fighting the good fight.  The Texas DMV allowed him to wear his pasta strainer for his driver's license picture.

From Raw Story:

A Texas Tech student said that he was celebrating religious freedom for atheists when he fought to wear a pasta strainer on his head in his official driver’s license photo.

KCDB reported on Saturday that Eddie Castillo spent four months researching and contacting government officials before he got approval to wear the pasta strainer, which he claims is religious garb worn to “worship” the Flying Spaghetti Monster. Castillo is part of a group of “pastafarians,” a name coined by atheists protesting the Kansas School Board’s decision to teach intelligent design in 2005.

“You might think this is some sort of a gag or prank by a college student, but thousands, including myself, see it as a political and religious milestone for all atheists everywhere,” Castillo told KCDB.

Way to go, Eddie.

College Then And Now

How do I get into a decent school?
1983: Pay enough attention in high school to graduate with a 2.5 GPA, then fill out 3 forms and mail them to a college somewhere that sounds like an OK place, and where a few of your friends plan on going.
2013: Graduate HS early with a 4.8 GPA, be fluent in 3 languages, write the greatest Entrance Essay anybody ever read explaining how easy it was for you to find a cure for cancer in your spare time after church.

How do I pay for college?
1983: Work a construction job in the summer after HS, and then bus tables for a few hours a week during the school year when you need cash for beer and pot.
2013: You know you don't need both of those kidneys, right?

Once I get my degree, what can I do with it?
1983: Find a good job in your chosen field (or in almost anything, really) and begin building a rewarding life for yourself.
2013: Hang onto that diploma - you'll be short on toilet paper soon enough.

Out There Amongst Them

So here I am at the Dunkin' Donuts on US29 north of town - for reasons I don't need to explain - and there's this old guy at the counter feeling a bit chatty, complaining about all the bums and freeloaders he's encountered lately.  He tells of the panhandler he talked with not long ago, who claimed to be making $300 or $400 a day, and how he has a late model Mercedes, and one of his panhandler buddies just bought a nice new RV.  I successfully resisted asking him if he's in the habit of striking up conversations with people he has so little respect for when they accost him on the street and ask him for a handout.  I'm always a bit curious how you can get such a wealth of information from someone you think is a total bum.  Unless of course one of you is a liar.

The kid doing the cooking chimed in with his story of a "homeless guy" he met who told him about getting a boatload of hotel vouchers - at $60 a pop - and how he stays at the Hilton four nights a week, and blah blah blah.

Then, wanting not to be left out apparently, the cashier lady just had to throw in with "if I have to take a drug test to get a job, then they should take a drug test to get their free stuff".

Maybe I've been around too long or something, but these stories and the standard reactions and observations and what somehow passes for insightful comment have all grown pretty fucking boring.

I don't believe most of what spills out of people's gobs most of the time anymore.  I get the weird feeling that an awful lot of these "regular folk" have heard these anecdotes in one form or another for so long, they not only take them as the truth, but have actually absorbed some of them to the point where they think the tale in question has sprung organically from their own experience.  It seems like a variation on Munchausen's Syndrome - Munchausen's By Osmosis maybe?

So, Here's A Question

What if Antoinette Tuff had been laid off?



If the school district in Decatur had come up a little short this year (because of a thoroughly bizarre problem we have of not being able to figure out that we have to pay for stuff), then there's a real probability that this one turns out just a bit different.

PS) Ms Tuff can "give it all" to her god if that's what she feels the need to do - for myself and (I'm bettin') for the 870 kids in that school, and the thousands of their family members, we're just pretty grateful for Antoinette Tuff.

A Special Message

For all of our friends out there who're still hung up on the conventional wisdom - stuck in the rut of False Equivalence  - still convinced that "both sides do it" - "they're all the same".  These are otherwise good people.  And no matter how fucked up the Repubs get, they're just always going to say, "Yeah, but the Democrats..."

This is for them - because we love them:

Fuck - Really?

What DumFux News went with on the morning show:




What actually happened:



So it's a little weird - for some months, DumFux News has insisted on running with a kinda-sorta slant that seems to be aimed at bringing the wingnuts back from the abyss, but then they spike their morning show with the standard crap they've been wallowing in for 12 or 15 years.  It's a puzzlement.

Haiku You

Red State haiku from Addicting Info:

Vanilla is great
Other flavors are scary
Finish the damn fence!


Protect the fetus
Abortion is pure evil
SNAP for kids? No way!


Welfare is just wrong
THOSE people are robbing us
OK if you’re white


Filibuster gone?
How will we stop Obama?
Obstruction is hard!

Election results:
GOP loses badly
ACORN stole the vote


We are patriots!
Liberals hate our freedom!
Take away their rights!


All life is precious
Jesus said. Next week we cheer
Lethal injection


The United States
Turning brown is just not fair
Voter suppression


Welfare queens lazy
CEOs work really hard
On better golf score


We are in danger
Obama ignores terror
Bush never did that


Wall Street’s not that bad
Corporations are people
Need more tax cuts please


Regulation’s wrong
Corporations don’t break laws
Here, have some lead paint


Delicious and fresh
Waterways don’t need new rules
Dump some toxic waste


Economy bad
Obama must be to blame
George Bush? Who is that?


Abomination
Gays offend all good Christians
Pass the shrimp cocktail


All the unions
Cut into the bottom line
No pensions for them!


Benghazi “scandal”
We’re outraged at lost lives
Bush kept us all safe


Cheer the CEOs
Ayn Rand’s heroes all, watch them
Plunder the pensions


We love ‘Murika!
Constitution is sacred!
We want to secede!


Brown people voting
Means right wing will always lose
Where is your I.D.?


Have AR-15
Must stop liberal gub’mint
Jesus would approve


Jesus is pure love
Love fellow man but not gays
Put them all to death


Tax cuts for the rich
The poor and the sick perish
Our base is happy
(courtesy of Mark Janes)


Taliban zealots
Kill all of those they dislike
Tea Party jealous


No war on women
Get back in the kitchen, slut
Barefoot and pregnant


Hey, we’re not racists
“You” people can’t get ID?
It’s not OUR problem


Black guy in WHITE House!?!
BENGHAZI-BENGHAZI-BOO!
HELP, baby Jesus!

The Real America

The Colbert Report
Get More: Colbert Report Full Episodes,Video Archive

Are the people in Vicco just some weird anomaly, or is it that the wingnuts have been lying to us about who the folks in some of these small towns really are?

What Does (The) GOP Stand For, Anyway?

Grizzled Old Pettifoggers

Glorified Obstructionist Party

Gloppy Orifice Predilection

Guarantors Of Putrefaction

Greasy Obsequious Pricks

Grunting Obfuscation Pukers

Anybody got some more?

Today's Pix

The Theater

I love it and it makes me nauseous; and I can't think of anything more repulsively silly than most show tunes, but I remember way too many of them; and I still can't figure out why I know so much about all this shit - and all of that goes on inside my head all at the same time.  Sometimes I hate my brain.

Hurts So Good

Have Some Coffee

Zappa

"Without music to decorate it, time is just a bunch of boring production deadlines or dates by which bills must be paid." --Frank Zappa

How it starts:



And before too long:

"Scrutinizer Postlude"

[Central Scrutinizer:]
This is the CENTRAL SCRUTINIZER... again.

Hi!...It's me again, the CENTRAL SCRUTINIZER... Joe says Lucille has messed his mind up,
but, was it the girl or was it the music? 

As you can see...girls, music, disease, heartbreak...they all go together.
Joe found out the hard way, but his troubles were just beginning.
His mind was so messed up... he could hardly do nothin'.
He was in a quandary...being devoured by the swirling cesspool of his own steaming desires. The guy was a wreck. So...what does he do? 

For once, he does something SMART. He goes out and pays a lot of money to L. Ron Hoover... at the First Church of Appliantology.

Eventually it was discovered
That God
Did not want us to be
All the same
This was
BAD NEWS
For the Governments of The World
As it seemed contrary
To the doctrine of
Portion Controlled Servings
Mankind must be made more uniformly
If THE FUTURE
Was going to work
Various ways were sought
To bind us all together
But, alas SAMENESS was unenforceable
It was about this time
That someone
Came up with the idea of TOTAL CRIMINALIZATION
Based on the principle that
If we were ALL crooks
We could at last be uniform
To some degree
In the eyes of THE LAW
Shrewdly our legislators calculated
That most people were
Too lazy to perform a
REAL CRIME
So new laws were manufactured
Making it possible for anyone
To violate them any time of the day or night,
And
Once we had all broken some kind of law
We'd all be in the same big happy club
Right up there with the President,
The most exalted industrialists,
And the clerical big shots
Of all your favorite religions
TOTAL CRIMINALIZATION
Was the greatest idea of its time
And was vastly popular
Except with those people
Who didn't want to be crooks or outlaws,
So, of course, they had to be TRICKED INTO IT...
Which is one of the reasons why
Music
Was eventually made
Illegal

A Blind Hog

Even a blind hog roots up an acorn once in a while.

With that in mind, let's check in with the late great WaPo, where it doesn't matter what's true or what's good or what's right (this is the age of "New Media" y'know - all that matters is delivering readers to advertisers).  But I'll pat 'em on the back on that rarest of occasions when they manage to break through the deafening clutter (that they're helping to create) with something that isn't just their usual Red Team / Blue Team bullshit:

For prosecutors, the key question is whether there was a clearly articulated “quid pro quo.” If so, the gifts were bribes. If not, they were gifts. To me, as an anthropologist, this largely misses the point.

Across the massive cornucopia of human culture, anthropologists have found relatively few universals. One of the strongest of these, however, concerns gift-giving. Gifts are given in all cultures, and to remarkably similar effect. As every graduate student in anthropology learns, gifts by their nature create social ties and a sense of reciprocal obligation. To give a gift is to expect something in return, though it undermines the power and mystique of the gift to spell out too clearly what that something is. It would be uncouth to give a friend a birthday present and say “now when it’s my birthday I expect you to give me this model of this product,” but the expectation of a well-chosen gift in return is no less powerful for that. The failure to give something in response can end a friendship.

 --and--

When politicians accept gifts such as Rolex watches and Oscar de la Renta gowns from multimillionaires, they often lack the means to reciprocate as equals. Surely, Williams has wealthy friends — his equals — with whom he exchanges gifts, but the McDonnells are not wealthy. From an anthropological perspective, Williams gave McDonnell gifts that the governor lacked the means to repay in order to subordinate him. Unable to afford, say, a $10,000 purse for Williams’s wife in return for what was given to his own wife, the governor can only return Williams’s generosity by lending him the power of his office in some way. Whether the expectation of a return was ever crisply articulated as a “quid pro quo” is really beside the point — even if it is the whole point to lawyers.

My guess is that Vaginal Bob will dodge the indictment, and maybe get slapped around a bit by an "ethics committee" stacked with politicians who will give us a great look at Irony In Action by deciding not to be so "hypocritical" as to condemn McDonnell for something most of them have been doing for as long as they've been in politics - all in the name of good government and bipartisanship and fairness.

But, of course in the end, it all fits neatly into the "Both Sides Do It" narrative.

If everybody does it, then there's nobody to hold anybody accountable for anything - and we're right back to status quo.  Never mind.

Egyptian Quickie

I don't know what Obama's supposed to do about Egypt - I don't know that any of it is up to anybody but the Egyptians.

What we all do know is that whatever Obama does, the Repubs are gonna shit on him for it, so he might as well take his best shot no matter how it plays in Punditsville or Kibitzburg or Blogistan.

So it comes down to this:  we have to look after our own, and in the Middle East, "our own" = Israel.  Without Egypt's willing support, the Arab-Israeli Peace Deal goes straight into the shitter and we're right back to 1977; and an Islamic Theocracy in Egypt (even a "democratically elected" one) is bad for that peace deal, which would be bad for Israel, which would be bad for us.

I don't like it; we seem to be stuck in a kind of World-According-To-Kissinger loop where we think the only thing we can do is to maintain the balance of terror.

Gotta be a better way.

Last One

Fuck you, NSA

Today's Pix

Cousin Magilla Sez

...fuck you, NSA

The Cost Of Doing Nothing

My youngest was recently recruited for a study being done at UVa's Behavioral Sciences Dept - what the hell; somebody's gotta be able to figure this joker out - anyway, while I was there yesterday signing the waivers and various other forms, pretending to be a responsible adult who's able to understand the 5 pages of disclaimers and willing to abdicate any and all rights to any and all recourse if anything goes "wrong", what I remember most about the visit was getting the feeling that we were at some cut-rate "Med School" in the Caribbean or some such.  The offices weren't dirty and dingy, but they weren't spiffy and newly painted either.  And the furniture would have to be upgraded three or four levels to qualify for the discount section at the Goodwill Thrift Store.

And I remember thinking this is another in the string of daily reminders that we're getting dragged down by what I consider our National Allergy To Paying For The Shit That Matters.

And then this pops up at HuffPo, talking about what's happening to most of our once-great research infrastructure:

CHARLOTTESVILLE, Va. -- On the first floor of Jordan Hall at the University of Virginia School of Medicine is a 12-by-8 room that, at first glance, looks like a rundown storage space. The floor is a mix of white, teal and purple tiles, in a pattern reminiscent of the 1970s. Trash cans are without tops and half filled. There are rust stains on the tiles, and a loose air vent dangles a bit from the ceiling.

--and--

You wouldn't know from his giddy, optimistic tone that Dutta is currently navigating the biggest obstacle of his career. Five years after he received a $1.3 million grant from the National Institutes of Health to undertake this microRNA project, he's nearly out of cash. His proposal was placed in the 2nd percentile of all grants reviewed by NIH in 2007, meaning that it was deemed more promising than 98 percent of the proposed projects.

When he asked for the same amount of money in 2012, his proposal was scored in the 18th percentile. In years past that score may have been good enough, but in the age of sequestration, NIH is supporting a much smaller pool of applicants. Late last month he was told that there would be no funding. UVA has stepped in to help, but Dutta estimates that 40 of his colleagues are in the same boat.

"I am living off of fumes," he says.

A feeling of despair has taken hold within research communities like Dutta's, Top officials at academic and medical institutions have grown convinced that years of stagnant budgets and recent cuts have ushered in the dark ages of science in America.

--and--

For-profit companies can play a role too. But they are much more likely to support projects with a clear return on investment, leaving explorative research like that being done by Dr. William Jackson at the Medical College of Wisconsin in the lurch.

Since 2007, Jackson has studied how viruses create a pool of membranes inside a cell. He hypothesized that viruses went into these "acidic vessels" in order to turn the cell into a factory for other viruses, meaning that if he could stop the development of these membrane pools, he could stop the spread of the virus itself. Most promisingly, he found that chloroquine, which is used to fight malaria, could be used to disrupt this process.

Despite the potential ramifications of such a finding -- everything from the common cold to foot-and-mouth disease is thought to follow this pattern -- the private sector won't fund the work. "There is no money to be made from chloroquine," Jackson said. "Only if the drug companies found something they could copyright or patent would they do it."

Here's a guy named JJ Thompson:

In the 1890s, Thompson was first in proposing the existence of subatomic particles, and the first to show real evidence of what he called a 'corpuscle', which soon would become known as the electron - which was nothing but the birth of The Electronic Age which is exactly how I can post this shit here on my blog (and how you can read this shit here on my blog).

Oh yeah - the guy was on the royal payroll at the time - in fact he spent pretty much his entire career as a gubmint worker - and his research was funded by the British taxpayer.

So go ahead and build your simpleton's ideology around some stoopid precept like "Starve The Beast", but try to remember that the beast you're so busy starving might be the one leaving all these golden eggs all over the joint.