I'm gonna check out for a while. I've recently discovered it's way more healthy both mentally and physically for me to wonder around outside and catch imaginary monsters with my phone, instead of obsessing about the real-life monsters involved in this stupid fucking election. I'll be back... oh I'd guess about Wednesday, November 9th. Yeah, that sounds like a good, completely random day.
Wait, no, not "tempting" that other thing that's the opposite of that.
I mean it's true that they give you a "side of the news that you just can't find anywhere else" -- the greasy, racist, Cheeto®-stained, basement-dwelling side is just so, so unrepresented in print these days. Oooh, ooh, they have "unsurpassed book and movie reviews" too! I do so wish I could stay up-to-date with the latest in shitty right-wing "entertainment" gossip.
Alas, I think I'll have to pass.
Evidently all the things that were cool and hip and swingin' long ago in 2003 are back "in" again! Yay. Here, have an album released that year:
Here are a couple other things from that year. Nina Simone died:
So did Noel Redding:
So did Warren Zevon and Johnny Cash, and more.
And the Challenger Shuttle blew up on reentry.
And there was some war or something and a bunch of people in some country across the ocean might have died or been horribly maimed, but they don't count so whatevs.
Now I'm just gonna sit back and wait for the reanimated corpse of Robert Novak show up on my TV to out a CIA agent. Man, those were the days!
I've posted a comment at a couple places that the Teahadi's new Benghazinvestigator looks like Greedo from Star Wars and that Barry (and/or Hillary) should shoot first, just like Han Solo did. I couldn't resist making a hideous animation:
(click to enjoy it in it's full-sized hideousness)
Yes, the color and typeface surrounding the asshole in the first frame are both hideous, because Trey and the Teahadis deserve nothing better.
You're welcome.
Maddow just teased a story from Oregon and the teaser contained Art Robinson. I predict the story is about Art wanting our urine, because that's what a mailer I got from Robinson over the weekend was about.
[Popcorn.gif]
Here's the video: (go here if the embedding doesn't work)
Can you imagine if a Democratic candidate solicited people's urine for a study? The nutjob-wing of the Republican party (but I repeat myself) would flip right the fuck out. It'd be worse than eleventy-five Benghazis times nine U.N. Agenda 21s. Carnage!
There's an amusing article from a local rag about it here. They actually sent away for the kit.
Just got this e-mail:
At its November meeting, the State Board's Academic Strategies Committee approved OSU's proposal for the Ph.D. in Business Administration degree program. This program will be effective Fall Term 2014.
The program will offer two graduate options: Innovation/Commercialization and Accounting. The primary objective of this degree is to prepare its graduates for careers in research and teaching at research-oriented colleges and universities.
It's bad enough that campus is infested with a bunch of dudebros working on their MBAs, now they will be able to continue their studies even longer.
I wonder what their theses will look like? Hmm...
Maybe my vast commentariat can suggest some more. No fair cheating and looking at the actual topics Stanford's Ph.D. program has produced for ideas.
So it turns out if you try to shrink government small enough to drown in a tub, there are eventually some consequences.
What!? This came as a huge surprise to me too. Nobody could've predicted, etc.
Thankfully, the brilliant "job creators" that are so busy creating jobs in other countries to make cheap crap to sell to rubes here will be able to sail their yachts off to the Cayman Islands and live out their lives in peace while we fight for scraps.
I mean that's obviously what's really important after all.
I still have a job. For now. Yay.
Unfortunate that nobody even notices May Day in the U.S. anymore, even though the change from a traditional spring holiday to a modern worker's rights holiday celebrated in pretty much the whole rest of the world is related to an American incident.
Anyway, cheers! If you don't have a job, may your search be short and your résumé be type-o free. If you have a job, may our glorious international corporate overlords not decide that it's more efficiently done in a deadly Bangladeshi sweatshop.
...that our glorious corporate overlords (all hail!) pushing for more "skilled" immigration to solve our desperate "skills shortage" were doing so solely in order to keep wages in the STEM sectors low.
A brief excerpt:
If there was a shortage of IT jobs then you'd expect wages to rise, but in fact the team found wages in the field (on average) peaked in 2001 and have remained flat ever since, and in some cases have fallen over the last 14 years. The reason, according to the research, is that overseas workers are being recruited to keep wages low.
The researchers found that the US produces a surfeit of STEM graduates, but only half of them are hired. The rest of the jobs in the IT industry, primarily entry-level positions for the under 30s, are filled using foreign workers and may account for up to 50 per cent of new hires.
"Even our high-end estimate, of 50 percent, is a conservative estimate of the proportion of guestworkers hired," Professor Salzman told The Register. Salzman has spent the last 13 years researching this area of the market and has amassed a large body of evidence to support his claims.
I'm so surprised.
Just to be clear, I'm totally fine with immigration. Let people come here, whether they want to be ag workers, or tech workers. Just don't pretend that a certain kind of immigration is all swell and good and shiny while a darker icky smelly kind of immigration is eleventy times as bad as Hitler.
And the creatures in congress that they own. Fuck them right in the ear, with the biggest example of one of the fucking guns they worship.
What a horrible, fucked up, shitty week.
Oregon's Stupidest Fucking Shithead Glibertarian is at it again.
All you need to know about today's stupidity is that "taxation is theft" -- as if that's a new and clever idea -- and that everybody was better off 100 years ago before income taxes.
No really, that's pretty much it.
I really can't even bother with this shithead anymore, it's just not worth it. I mean you'd think he would at least try!
Fuck it.
Oregon's Dumbest Glibertarian has a new article in today's campus paper. (See here and here for the previous installments if you can stand it.)
Today we get the pleasure anguish of reading yet another article about same-sex marriage. Because nobody else in the media is talking about it from that super-special-snowflake of glibertarian perspective. Or something. At least the glibertarians usually want to allow same sex marriage, like sane people should. Unfortunately that's typically where the sanity stops with them, and indeed we'll see that here as well.
As with the last installment in this series, he starts off in semi-sane mode, if you're willing to ignore the usual "government must stay out of governing" angle:
Since the Supreme Court heard arguments for and against gay marriage last week, the bandwagon for marriage equality returned. However, the real issue remains dormant on both sides. We should not be asking government to give us “marriage equality.” Instead, the government should have no part in marriage.
Of course, it immediately continues to accelerate downhill from there:
Marriage has existed longer than the government. Marriage is not a product of the government. Many people believe marriage comes from religion and in America, we have the separation of church and state, but many other ideas of marriage exist, as well. Regardless of any one view, why does the government regulate marriage when it should not?
That's some awesometastic sentence construction there. Good thing you don't write for a newspaper or anything. But yes, why does the evil government have an interest in regulating marriage? It's not like society has any interest in encouraging healthy relationships between people. That's why we also don't regulate any sorts of violence between individuals. And have no regulations whatsoever about interaction between folks in various transactions and how various people treat other people. Because America! FREEDUMB! Fuck yeah! WOLVERINES!!!
Oh wait, what do you mean we do have all sorts of laws and regulations about all sorts of relationships between people? Contracts and such between folks that want to conduct trade without the threat of violence? Oh, yeah, we do! How silly of me.
But still, this one particular form of relationship is one the government should stay completely out of. Uh, because freedom, I guess? Let's see what he thinks:
The government requires marriage licenses in order to call a couple married. But what business of the government's is it if two people want to, and do, get married? The government should not have any rules about it. The government even requires marriage licenses. Why? The original intent of marriage licenses was to prevent interracial marriages. Marriage license laws began in the mid-1800s to stop whites from marrying anyone who was not white. By the 1920s, 38 states had state laws prohibiting the marriage of whites with other ethnicities.
As is his typical pattern, now he's just started making shit up. While he's correct about about states in the '20s specifically using laws to prevent interracial marriage, his assertion that the "original intent" was to prevent them is laughably false. Marriage licenses have been around since at least the middle ages, and were all about contracts between families. That is something glibertarians usually like, sacredfreemarket and all that. I should really stop being surprised by this guy's complete lack of historic knowledge and/or utter contempt for facts, but whatever.
At this point we know how this is going to end, and indeed it proceeds down through all the standard glibertarian tropes of evil government stealing people's money and freedom. I can't be arsed to dissect the rest of it, so just read it if you must. Here's the concluding paragraph:
Marriage equality may be the big uproar right now, but we need to look at the bigger picture. The government erodes our freedoms, and turning to them for more laws and oversight will only wear away at the few freedoms we have left. We need to tell the government to get out of marriage, to get out of our lives, and not return.
At this point I think he only wants the government to stop regulating marriage so he'll finally be able to marry Ayn Rand's corpse. I hope somebody's keeping an eye on her grave.
As I'm sure you've already heard, pope Ratz, chief enabler and coverup artist in the child-rapist cult that is the catholic church, is resigning. I'm sure he'll be succeeded by an equally horrible individual, but at least we can always fondly remember Ratz as The Sexy Soup Nazi.
Note also, in that linked LGM post this comment. It doesn't matter how many kids get raped how many indigenous cultures get destroyed, how many women are forced into lives of oppression and poverty -- there will always be a deluded mass to continue to believe in the infallibility of their magic sky cult.
It turns out that covering up child rape isn't enough, when you get caught and have to payoff the victims, the classiest way to do it is to desecrate the dead just for good measure (found via Booman). Stay classy, catholics!
I've now received two copies of the following idiocy in my email:
Date: Wed, 30 Jan 2013 10:45:39 +0700 Message-Id: <201301300345.r0U3jdEh028401@siamnaliga.com> To: [REDACTED] From: Freedom@Network.net Subject: Sandy Hook Shooting Didn't Happen Excerpt from Muad'Dib's January 7th, 2013 Critical Mass Radio interview: ..They used a poster child for this to get everybody's sympathy and to get everybody's emotions up so that they could hopefully bring in a gun ban. They used a little poster child, a little blonde-haired blue-eyed six year old girl. She was the face, the poster child. She was supposedly killed along with the other 19 six year olds and seven year olds at Sandy Hook. Three days later Obama was there doing a photo op and she's sitting on his knee. She's supposed to be dead, used as a poster child, this little girl died - she's sitting on Obama's knee three days later. The same little girl. And then they have her parents interviewed. It shows that they're all actors. It never really happened, because the guy that was supposedly her dad, is shown in the video where he's to the side and he's laughing and joking with other people and then he's called up in front of the camera. He's off to the left. Then he's called to the center, to the focus of the camera to be interviewed and to give his speech about Sandy Hook and about his daughter. And he goes from on the side from laughing and joking with everybody, he comes up to the center and ... he takes the joking, smiling face off and you can see him physically trying to force his face to look sad and then he starts talking about how his daughter's been killed. They're actors. There were no bodies. It was a made for TV drama to try to ram through the gun control laws, because they want to kill the American people and they can't kill armed people. That's why Hitler disarmed the Germans, it's why Stalin disarmed the Russians, it's why chairman Mao disarmed the Chinese and they killed between them something like 120 million of their own people. And that's what they want to do in America and they can't do it because the people have the Second Amendment and they have guns. So they have to do all of this, and they'll keep doing it. There will be more incidents like this, which are made for television, until they manage to persuade the American people to give up their guns. And then they'll start killing the Americans. Because the Americans are the only people stopping them from doing what they want to do already. They know they can't put their next phase, which is reducing the world's population, they can't put that phase into operation whilst the Americans have got millions! of guns.
How the fuck did I get on this person's mailing list?
What do you even say about this level of crazy? I mean we could examine the little details like how this massive conspiracy is necessary so the ebil gubmint can kill all its citizens. Because obviously if we citizens have our cute little semi-automatic rifles to protect us, we'll be completely invulnerable to the government's drones and vast stockpiles of biological weaponry. Right. But that's just the tip of the crazy, crazy iceberg in this one. Definitely not willing to examine this person's various issues any further.
The "author" (I'm being generous -- "screed spewer" is probably more accurate) closes with this:
This message has no links to help it get through spam blockers. If you are interested in the subjects being discussed, please search the Web for more information.
Uh, thanks, but no, really, I'm fine.
Welp, this is it, another election day has come and the usual anticipation, trepidation, and knotty naughty stomach are present.
Rather than do my usual election night schtick and stay home drinking myself into a stupor, I'm going to go out to dinner and drink myself into slightly less of a stupor. Hopefully wherever I end up with doesn't have a TV so I won't see waht's going on 'til I get home late.
Until then, I'll just leave these here:
And for something completely different:
You're welcome.
Against my better judgment I watched the debate last night. I was pleasantly surprised not to be tempted to toss my pint glass at the TV more than a couple of times.
With regard to the WTF moment and fucking hilarious "binder" thing, this bit immediately after that also caught my attention:
Now, one of the reasons I was able to get so many good women to be part of that team was because of our recruiting effort, but number two, because I recognized that if you’re going to have women in the workforce, that sometimes they need to be more flexible. My chief of staff, for instance, had two kids that were still in school. She said, I can’t be here until 7:00 or 8:00 at night. I need to be able to get home at 5:00 so I can be there for — making dinner for my kids and being with them when they get home from school. So we said, fine, let’s have a flexible schedule so you can have hours that work for you.
...
What we can do to help young women and women of all ages is to have a strong economy, so strong that employers are looking to find good employees and bringing them into their workforce and adapting to a — a flexible work schedule that gives women the opportunities that — that they would otherwise not be able to — to afford.
That is just condescending as all hell. Everybody wants a flexible work schedule, you fucking asshat! It's not just "mom" who should have to be able to work, take them to soccer, go home and make dinner, tuck the kids into bed, do the dishes, etc. Y'know, if women made as much (or more, FFS!) than men for the same work, maybe dad might like, and be able, to do some of those "home" things while mom stays late for a meeting?
Is it really so fucking hard to imagine a world where everybody had flexible schedules and equal pay for equal work? Just a possibility? Ever thought about that Willard?
No, of course you haven't. You'd prefer we still lived in the pretend 1950s America that only ever existed on TV, you pathetic fucking misogynistic Mormon wanker.
In a just and sane world (i.e., not this one) women would be seeing this bullshit and Willard's general contempt for the moderator and the women asking the questions and run away screaming from his candidacy. Perhaps in this world it'll translate to fewer votes for the wanker. We'll see.
Oh, also, too, etc.: vaguely related
UPDATE: I see I'm not the only one to notice this part.
UPDATE AGAIN: I want to make clear that I, a (married) man with no children would also like a flexible schedule.
Because flexibility.
Just in case that wasn't entirely clear here.
