Comin' Back On Ya, Barry

OK, to be real clear - I hate the thought of the Secret Service guys brainstorming on how to handle this new type of potential threat, and coming up with the idea of carrying Obama around in a bullet-proof sedan chair or some-fuckin'-thing, but at the same time, why am I having such a hard time not thinking, "Payback's a bitch, ain't it?"

--and--

As Meat-Space becomes too dangerous for everybody but the cops and the military, when might we expect the emergence of the first All Cyber-Space President?

Today's Quote

"If you're very very stupid, how can you possibly realize that you're very very stupid?  You'd have to be relatively intelligent to realize how stupid you are.  This explains almost the entirety of Fox News." --John Cleese

Monday Tunes

Fever (cover) --A Fine Frenzy





Albatross --Fleetwood Mac





Duck Before You Drown --Dinah Washingtion




La Vie En Rose (cover) --Sophie Milman




Exactly Like You --Diana Krall





Dance Me To The End Of Love --Madeleine Peyroux





Europa --Santana

Dearest Anti-Vaxxers

Sunday Funnies

Outa The Mouths Of Babes

So, "conservatives", DumFux News gets called out and then spanked by a dozen teenagers because it's just way obvious that Rupert World is a fantasy (aka: bald-faced lie), but you still hang in there believing practically everything that falls out of Bill O's ass - what does that say about you?  

We all find it difficult admitting we've been wrong, and/or that we've been bambozzled, but seriously, you can't just go on denying reality when a high school journalism class knows more about Press Corps Ethics than your #1 Cable News Channel.

The real danger in having your head that far up your ass is that even if you open your eyes, all you're gonna see is your own shit.

Today's Chart

I have to think long and hard about how the hell I'm gonna get a coupla 17-year-olds thru the next 4 years of college.

I don't like thinking about that right now, but what I really don't wanna have to fuck with is the belief on the part of so many rubes that "them durn thugs are getting all the scholarship money, and all the good placements in all the good schools just because they're black and it ain't fair that they're takin' the spot of a deserving white child blah blah blah."

(btw - the rubes really do use the word "thug" in polite company so they don't have to use the word "nigger".  Yes. Really.)

Anyway, here's another of my handy dandy charts to illustrate just how stupid some of these clowns can get.

That tiny blue line at about 12 o'clock on the doughnut is the one-quarter of one percent of the total scholarship money available which is actually "earmarked" for use by kids with brown skin.  Which means that the white people, who make up about 80% of the total population are collecting most of the remaining 99.75% of the bucks.  Sound familiar?

Could you please stop bitching about it now?

The Honesty Episode

Keep it 100.

Get Your Bucket List In Order

The hard-workin' kids at The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists did this presentation midday yesterday.  

But somehow, it just wasn't deemed quite as important as the story about Boehner once again gettin' butt-fucked behind the coat rack in DC.  

It didn't have the appeal of The NFL Scandal du Jour (I helped on this one - my bad).  

Somehow, we needed to know about the awesome manliness of Chaz Bono more than we needed to know that the people who actually understand this shit are kinda fucking worried that we're about to screw the pooch like we're all amped up on Ex and Crystal at a Lady-N-The-Tramp costume party.  

What the fuck, you guys!?!

See the whole nightmare here.

Billy Belichick

...rhymes (in a Slant Rhyme kinda way) with Lyin' Sack O' Shit.

hat tip = FB friend KH

Maybe That's It

We spend an awful lot of time and energy trying to figure out what's wrong up in this joint.  And for once, maybe looking to a nice simple bumper-sticker exlanation is all we need to do.

"You know that being American is more than a matter of where your parents came from.  It is a belief that all men are created equal and that everyone deserves an even break." --Harry Truman

"...everyone deserves an even break."  That's it.  So now all we have to do is figure out - do we have too many suckers, or do we have too many PT Barnums?

hat tip = FB friend VWE

Today's Pix

Playing The Turn-Around

It's all in the talent of the speaker to use the language of Reasonability and Anti-Theocracy in order to manipulate the crowd into 1) agreeing that what we have now is a Theocracy, and 2) since you agree that's what we have, then how can you disagree with replacing it with a better one?  Of course, he's banking on the rubes not being able to recognize the false premise, ie: that Atheism is just another religion.  

The whiplash from this kind of rhetorical gymnastics is enough to put normal people in traction.  But the rubes ain't normal people - they eat this shit up like it's 2-fer Tuesday down at Luby's.  It actually makes sense to 'em.

But in case you missed it, the kicker's up front; when he says it's not about how ol' Pappy Huck wants to be president - no - he hears the call of that god feller sayin' HE wants Ol' Pap to be president cuz we need somebody who's right with the lord; somebody righteous to straighten us all out and help us get our minds right; somebody god has anointed to be our leader.  So gosh, if god says he needs me to do it, I guess I should do it even tho' I really don't wanna do it unless of course god-his-own-bad-self says I should do it, so tarnation, I reckon I'll just hafta go ahead and do it then.

They pull this shit cuz it works.  Huckabee knows I'll see this clip, and he knows I'd never support him anyway so it doesn't matter what I think of it.  And he knows it'll get thru to his intended audience on the "conservative" websites, and he knows they're all duly afraid of guys like me so they're at practically no risk of reading anything contrary like my little post here, and he knows that even if a rube does hear some criticism, it'll make exactly zero difference because they're all pretty much the brand of "christians" who've been innoculated against the truth anyway.

And just for the hell of it (file this next bit under "I really don't give a fuck about Godwin"):

The bad guys don't come in looking like the bad guys.  The Little Corporal didn't just pop up in 1933 and say, "Hi, my name's Adolf and I'll be your fuhrer this evening - OK, so let's go fuck up the jews."

Star-Spangled Exceptions

Jon Stewart on DumFux News apology (no-go zones), and the one exception we have to make to The First Amendment in order to protect America from things like The First Amendment:

VICE is Nice

What we don't know will kill us.

DumFux News vs France

John and Mike from Fox News - Eric et Quentin du 16/01

Everybody knows:

--you never get involved in a land war in Asia
--you never go in against a Sicilian when death is on the line

But only slightly less well-known is that you're just never gonna out-bitch-slap the French.

Just Shut Up And Listen

17 minutes that started continued some pretty momentous change.  The prospect of change (and the agents of that change) proved so scary and dangerous that the authoritarian assholes among us moved quickly to try to kill it.



The problems King was trying to tell us about haven't gone away.

Here's one of the more imprtant points from a longer talk by Tim Wise - I've put this one up a coupla times before, and I'll keep going back to it until I can recite it verbatim:



It's about what's fair vs what's unfair.  It's about getting USAmerica Inc to live up to its promises, and to stand by its word.  It's about demanding "the power" to behave like regular human beings.

We should never expect anything more, and we must never accept anything less.

And also too - if this doesn't apply to you, then why're you gettin' all bent outa shape about it?

Today's Worst

Seems like every other day or so, something pops up about something I've really loved for a long time that makes me have to consider blowin' it off for a while or telling it to take a flying fuck at a rollin' doughnut.

The world just kinda sucks right now.

Some Charts

So Obamacare isn't quite the disaster we were told it would be.  In fact, it's begininning to work very much like it's supposed to work, which isn't as good as it could be, but a shitload better than what we had before.

More people have coverage, which means the risk is spread thinner, which means the average cost goes down some, which means more people can get coverage, which means etc etc etc - gee it's almost as if there's some kind of Basic Principle Of Economics at work or something.

Anyway, The Commonwealth Fund did their survey, and guess what:

For the first time there are fewer working people without coverage.
For the first time, there are fewer working people struggling to pay their doctor bills.
For the first time, there are fewer working people putting off a visit to the doctor due to cost.

For the first fucking time - seems vaguely significant to me.

And yet it still seems like we've got a particular bunch of rat-bastard politicians trying to pull a very standard maneuver - where they fuck something up and then stand aside and say, "Hey look everybody - it's all fucked up.  We need to trash this thing and start over" 

("so we can take the credit for solving a problem we caused in the first fucking place" - that's the part you don't ever say out loud).

These people have no soul and no honor.

hat tip = Democratic Underground

Happy National Religious Freedom Day, Everybody

From a proclamation by The Prez in 2014:

In 1786, the Virginia General Assembly affirmed an ideal that has long been central to the American journey. The Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom, penned by Thomas Jefferson, declared religious liberty a natural right and any attempt to subvert it "a departure from the plan of the Holy Author of our religion, who being Lord both of body and mind, yet chose not to propagate it by coercions on either." The Statute inspired religious liberty protections in the First Amendment, which has stood for almost two and a quarter centuries.

Today, America embraces people of all faiths and of no faith. We are Christians and Jews, Muslims and Hindus, Buddhists and Sikhs, atheists and agnostics. Our religious diversity enriches our cultural fabric and reminds us that what binds us as one is not the tenets of our faiths, the colors of our skin, or the origins of our names. What makes us American is our adherence to shared ideals -- freedom, equality, justice, and our right as a people to set our own course.

Thomas Jefferson was asked what he tho't were his greatest achievements, and he listed his big 3:

Conspicuously absent are things like Minister to France, Sec'y of State, President of the United States. You know - the small stuff.

But it's that 2nd one that makes it all really shine.  We have a legitimate claim to being exceptional because we broke free from the cynical manipulations of politicians that grow from the arbitrary bullshit of religion and religious authoritarianism.

An Act for establishing religious Freedom.

Whereas, Almighty God hath created the mind free;

That all attempts to influence it by temporal punishments or burthens, or by civil incapacitations tend only to beget habits of hypocrisy and meanness, and therefore are a departure from the plan of the holy author of our religion, who being Lord, both of body and mind yet chose not to propagate it by coercions on either, as was in his Almighty power to do,

That the impious presumption of legislators and rulers, civil as well as ecclesiastical, who, being themselves but fallible and uninspired men have assumed dominion over the faith of others, setting up their own opinions and modes of thinking as the only true and infallible, and as such endeavouring to impose them on others, hath established and maintained false religions over the greatest part of the world and through all time;

That to compel a man to furnish contributions of money for the propagation of opinions, which he disbelieves is sinful and tyrannical;

That even the forcing him to support this or that teacher of his own religious persuasion is depriving him of the comfortable liberty of giving his contributions to the particular pastor, whose morals he would make his pattern, and whose powers he feels most persuasive to righteousness, and is withdrawing from the Ministry those temporary rewards, which, proceeding from an approbation of their personal conduct are an additional incitement to earnest and unremitting labours for the instruction of mankind;

That our civil rights have no dependence on our religious opinions any more than our opinions in physics or geometry,

That therefore the proscribing any citizen as unworthy the public confidence, by laying upon him an incapacity of being called to offices of trust and emolument, unless he profess or renounce this or that religious opinion, is depriving him injuriously of those privileges and advantages, to which, in common with his fellow citizens, he has a natural right,

That it tends only to corrupt the principles of that very Religion it is meant to encourage, by bribing with a monopoly of worldly honours and emoluments those who will externally profess and conform to it;

That though indeed, these are criminal who do not withstand such temptation, yet neither are those innocent who lay the bait in their way;

That to suffer the civil magistrate to intrude his powers into the field of opinion and to restrain the profession or propagation of principles on supposition of their ill tendency is a dangerous fallacy which at once destroys all religious liberty because he being of course judge of that tendency will make his opinions the rule of judgment and approve or condemn the sentiments of others only as they shall square with or differ from his own;

That it is time enough for the rightful purposes of civil government, for its officers to interfere when principles break out into overt acts against peace and good order;

And finally, that Truth is great, and will prevail if left to herself, that she is the proper and sufficient antagonist to error, and has nothing to fear from the conflict, unless by human interposition disarmed of her natural weapons free argument and debate, errors ceasing to be dangerous when it is permitted freely to contradict them:

Be it enacted by General Assembly that no man shall be compelled to frequent or support any religious worship, place, or ministry whatsoever, nor shall be enforced, restrained, molested, or burthened in his body or goods, nor shall otherwise suffer on account of his religious opinions or belief, but that all men shall be free to profess, and by argument to maintain, their opinions in matters of Religion, and that the same shall in no wise diminish, enlarge or affect their civil capacities. And though we well know that this Assembly elected by the people for the ordinary purposes of Legislation only, have no power to restrain the acts of succeeding Assemblies constituted with powers equal to our own, and that therefore to declare this act irrevocable would be of no effect in law; yet we are free to declare, and do declare that the rights hereby asserted, are of the natural rights of mankind, and that if any act shall be hereafter passed to repeal the present or to narrow its operation, such act will be an infringement of natural right.

It's all about the freedom to think.  Like the man said, "for I have sworn upon the altar of god eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man."