Comments

  1. says

    Dia de Los Muertes, probably?

    Very disappointed, me, just now. Having seen him recommended by a number of people, I watched a Tim Minchin show on Netflix tonight, and turned it off after about fifteen minutes when he made a rapey joke (the lights went out, and he suggested a nonconsensual sex act to the audience), after a few jokes that had skirted the edges of my tolerance for the problematic. I ought really to have kept to my usual “no standup shows on TV EVAR” rule. :(

    I mentioned good-but-bad news the other day. The good is that I met with my lawyer for the appeal on the disability ruling, and she thinks we’ve a decent chance. Then I went to see my doctor, and she took my double-vision issue seriously (it’s vertically misaligned and monocular, so I was concerned too). And had me come back on Friday for a referral to a back surgeon (my last one, a man with an Arabic-related last name, suddenly took a year off to return to his first country and look after his family).

    So, the bad-but-good part: my doctor, unusually, was running late, and I didn’t get in to see her until an hour past my appointed time. At that point, I’d been sitting in a bad chair for 1:10, after 15 minutes in the car. And I was approaching (half an hour later) the next med-time, meaning I was about at the bottom of the pain-relief cycle, AND it was a grey, rainy cool day. All of which together meant that for the first time in a long time, she got to see me halfway along the downstroke of my pain-relief cycle instead of the peak.

    Usually, knowing I’ve got an appointment, I schedule my meds to peak just before I leave, allowing me a few hours to reasonably function. That means I get to my doc’s at the crest of the cycle, and I’m in as good shape as I get when I see the doctor’s. That’s best for me short-term, but long-term, i’d be better if my doc could see how bad it gets, even with the meds. It’s difficult for me to express how my life is affected by my disability, because I don’t have a baseline to measure it against, and I’m culturally predisposed to minimise my own pain – yes, believe it or not, what I talk about here is the minimised version. So I tend not to be able to show her the real impact.

    Anyway, this time, she got to see me stagger to my feet and slowly hobble down the hall after my long sit. And then see the greatly reduced range of motion that I’m left with when I’m not at the best point of my cycle.

    The bad-out-of-good part is that I was turned down for the interim support funding during my disability appeal, and that decision is not appealable. So I’m stuck with the OW payment and its punitive clawback for a while yet – probably be spring when my hearing is scheduled, about six months or so.

    The good-out-of-bad part is that Her Ex-cellency directed people to my GoFundMe page from her Facebook yesterday, and now I can pay the October rent, and probably the November too, as well as paying my phone bill.

    The unalloyedly good part is that I got some chocolate (and some colourful bits of paper with numbers on!) from Latvia today.

  2. Nerd of Redhead, Dances OM Trolls says

    Ah, typical Tuesday evening at Casa la Pelirroja. Nerd timed everything beautifully, so the Redhead was fed and changed by the time her parents called at 7:30 ct….The Redhead hadn’t shut off the local radio phone handset, and had been open air for four plus hours….Found the message once it was turned off. *Sigh*

  3. Ogvorbis says

    Gentle hugs to CatieCat. I’ve experienced pain before (12 knee surgeries) but my current back injury is a new experience. With medication, I can function. Without I become a hobbling question mark. I’m hoping physical therapy (which starts next Tuesdy, not today like I thought it did!) will help. This is short term for me, I cannot imagine this kind of pain as a chronic condition. Safe hugs to you.

  4. says

    *Hugs* to CaitieCat and Ogvorbis.

    This is annoying; every time I try to subscribe to the thread, I get taken to a page that tells me an email’s been sent with a link. The email link takes me to a page where I can unsubscribe from previously subscribed threads, but doesn’t seem to have a way to subscribe to a new one.

  5. martha says

    Hope this can make someone else laugh too- my teen is researching religions for school and says to me, “Well, I would qualify a lot of religions as sort of hippie things.” Then I laugh hysterically and she says, “What?”

  6. stellatree says

    I’m a long time lurker and I just wanted to pop my head up and let the Horde know how grateful I am for all of the education I have gotten from so many of you. I also want to thank you for the support you didn’t know you were giving me. To see so many other survivors speaking up and being supported has given me hope. I thought it was only fair to let this community know that you are making a difference, even though speaking up is hard for me. Thank you.

  7. cicely says

    rq:

    Posterity will admire your work no matter how well they are done […]

    Or, as a wise woman in the SCA once told me, “Even shit is Period”.
    :D

    I have understood that rhythm is universal.

    Not in my feet, it ain’t!
    My fingers know where the beat is, but my feet are stoopid. I nearly killed The Husband trying to learn to dance Scotland the Brave.


    *gentle hugs* for CaitieCat.
    At least, if you must have bad, it’s good that some good comes of it. And good is better. And unalloyed good is best.
    *moar feather-light hugs*

    *soft-and-gentle hugs* for Ogvorbis, as well.
    Hoping for the best possible results from the physical therapy.

    Hi, martha—have we met?
    If not, Welcome In.
    If so, also Welcome In.
    :D

    Welcome In, stellatree.
    There are a lot of people in here who are made of unalloyed—and therefore, best—Awesome.
    And they let me hang out here, too—but don’t let that put you off.
    :)

  8. toska says

    CaitieCat and Ogvorbis,
    I’m sorry about your pain. Over a year and a half ago, I had an injury that I’ve mostly recovered from. This was my first taste of long term pain, and it certainly hasn’t been fun.

    I hope you both are able to reach an improvement in pain management. *hugs* or other gesture of support, if wanted.

    stellatree
    Speaking up can be difficult for me as well. The Horde has helped me deal with casual sexism, racism, homophobia, transphobia, etc. just by reminding me every day that other people see it too. It’s frustrating to feel isolated with a view point that should be so easy to figure out – treat other people as individuals who deserve respect.

  9. jrfdeux, mode d'emploi says

    Caitie Cat and Ogvorbis:

    I hurtle towards you at all possible speed (“Damn the torpedoes, Gridley!”) and put you both in a hug with a muffled **PLUMF**. I turned myself into a massive pillow, see, infused with lavender. I really hope you guys like lavender, because I have that crap all over me.

    (And I empathize with your pain. Twisted my back something fierce earlier this year.)

  10. Azkyroth Drinked the Grammar Too :) says

    There are a lot of people in here who are made of unalloyed—and therefore, best—Awesome.

    Again with the alloy bashing *grumble*[/engineer]

  11. stellatree says

    Thanks, cicely! It’s funny, I have been reading Pharyngula, including the comments, for years – I feel like I know people here, and I agree that the Awesome is strong!

    toska, it really does help to know other people see what I see. Beyond that, many people here can seen so much more than I, and have strengthened my knowledge and sensitivity on social justice issues.

  12. rq says

    So last night I was being restless and having trouble falling asleep, and I was all ‘Heh, maybe it’s because my dad’s about to die!’
    Then my mum texted me (well, and all other siblings, I presume) shortly before 5AM. It’s possible that I am psychic after all.
    (And as sad as I am, I can’t help but feel relieved – mostly in the ‘he’s no longer suffering’ aspect, but also substantially-more-than-a-tiny-bit in the ‘he can’t scare me anymore’ aspect, for which I feel like an undecent person.)

  13. FossilFishy (NOBODY, and proud of it!) says

    Gentle hugs and commiserations to CaitieCat and Ogvorbis. I’m on the other side of severe pain now. It’s fresh enough in my mind that I can imagine what it must be like to live like that with no end in sight. All the strength to you.

    Waves at stellatree. Welcome to the delurk zone.

    How about this for the good that comes of this place:

    Today I wrote and sent a letter to an old friend of mine. I haven’t spoken to him in six years. We stopped being friends, or at least active friends, when he was going through a rough patch in his life. To cope he turn to alcohol, and my past being what it is, I couldn’t handle that. I cut him loose to protect myself, but in truth, in hindsight, I’m pretty sure I was actually strong enough to stick around. Laziness and fear, a damning combination.

    So what has this to do with Pharyngula and the Horde you ask? I found the courage to send that letter because of what I learned here about apologies. My previous attempt rattled around in the bottom of my bag until the address was illegible. It just never felt right to send it.

    This time I wrote it with no expectation of being forgiven. I wrote it to explain how I’d wronged him, and how I felt about it now. That’s it. I made damn sure I didn’t state or imply that I wanted his forgiveness. I learned this here. I learned that how he feels about things is his, and his alone. That his reaction to my past transgression and my current remorse is none of my business. And that understanding made it possible for me to apologise.

    Thank you Horde.

  14. FossilFishy (NOBODY, and proud of it!) says

    Oh rq I’m so sorry. Hugs if you want them.

    May I presume to comment on this:

    …substantially-more-than-a-tiny-bit in the ‘he can’t scare me anymore’ aspect, for which I feel like an undecent person.)

    ? If you’re in a place where unsolicited advice is unwelcome please just skip the rest here, okay? [mild tigger warning for psychological abuse]
    .
    .
    .
    .
    .
    .
    .
    .
    My father was an alcoholic. An abusive one, though never physically. I grew up in a house full of anger and fear, and even these thirty years later it still marks me. The sound of dishes being put way roughly or a door closed a little too hard causes me to freeze in place, and I have to work at not seeking a place to hide.

    After he died a went through a cycle of grief and guilt. I was sad because for all his faults he was my father, and I could remember times that weren’t bad. And even that close to all the shitty things he did, I could feel pity for him. But I’d also catch myself feeling relieved that he was gone. And then the guilt would slam down. Repeat ad nauseam, with literal nausea on occasion.

    I can’t say how I got over it, I suspect it was simply time’s dulling hand. But I can say that your reaction, at least from my experience, is perfectly natural. It’s okay to feel contradictory things, human beings are vast, complicated things, and our relationships to them even more so.

    Feel as much as you like, however you like.

    Forget as much as you like, however you like.

    Do whatever you must to get through, and damn anyone who would question your choices. For in the end, he’s gone, and you’re here. The only one that matters now in that relationship is you.

    Be well my friend, and please believe that I speak truth when I say that you are not an undecent person.

  15. toska says

    rq
    I’m sorry for your loss. Hugs for you and your family.

    And as sad as I am, I can’t help but feel relieved – mostly in the ‘he’s no longer suffering’ aspect, but also substantially-more-than-a-tiny-bit in the ‘he can’t scare me anymore’ aspect, for which I feel like an undecent person

    I had the same exact feelings about my grandmother, who died October last year. I was so relieved that she wasn’t in pain anymore (She was 94 years old, so life had certainly become difficult), but I also was glad that I didn’t have to worry about her injuring herself anymore, and I didn’t have to think “Oh god, that could be the last time I see her” every time I drove away after visiting with her. I don’t know if that makes me an undecent person, but I think maybe it means that the feelings you have are normal and understandable, and they don’t mean that you don’t love your father. From what I’ve seen of you here, I think you are far beyond just a decent person. Extra hugs for you.

  16. FossilFishy (NOBODY, and proud of it!) says

    Shit, reading toska’s 21 makes me think I mis-read ‘he can’t scare me anymore’.

  17. toska says

    FossilFishy
    Looking again, I’m not sure if I properly interpreted it either, but I think it certainly shows how different experiences can cause people to read and react very differently to the same exact sentence.

  18. FossilFishy (NOBODY, and proud of it!) says

    toska 25

    different experiences can cause people to read and react very differently to the same exact sentence.

    Ain’t that the truth? My post says way more about me that it does about rq and her situation. I really should learn to ask questions before I offer advice. Sigh. Sorry if I got it all wrong rq.

  19. says

    CaitieCat @2:
    I guess a mixture of good news and bad news is better than all bad news?
    ((hugs))

    ****
    rq @16:
    My deepest condolences. I’m so sorry to hear that.
    All my love and sympathies to you and your family.

  20. says

    stellatree @10:
    Welcome in.
    Thanks for delurking and sharing :)

    ****

    FossilFishy @17:
    Good on you for writing that letter.

    ****

    I agree with CaitieCat @20–it is completely natural to have mixed feelings about a loved one after they die. No one should feel bad for having mixed feelings. Those feelings merely reflect how you felt about that person. Hell, by having mixed feelings, perhaps you do honor to the true memories of the loved one who has passed.

  21. toska says

    FossilFishy

    Ain’t that the truth? My post says way more about me that it does about rq and her situation. I really should learn to ask questions before I offer advice. Sigh. Sorry if I got it all wrong rq.

    This goes for me, too.

  22. jrfdeux, mode d'emploi says

    Oh no, rq! I’m so sorry. May you find solace and peace when the time is right. :-(

  23. says

    Gentle hugs for Caitie
    Your Ex-cellence is a wonderful person, please tell her that from me

    +++
    rq
    Lots and lots of hugs.
    You’re a decent person. Feelings towards parents can get complicated, especially if they’re not the beacon of human kindness.

  24. opposablethumbs says

    CaitieCat, I’m sorry-but-glad for the timing of your doctor’s appointment – sorry you had to endure the extra pain, but glad they got to see how bad it is. Argh. Solely virtual and hence physically non-damaging hugs to you and Ogvorbis, with hopes for relief of pain.

    rq, I hope you are all right and that you’ve got all the family-and-friends support around you. Thinking of things you’ve mentioned about your father in the past, I’d reckon those feelings you describe are absolutely right and there is no way they reflect undecently on you – no way at all, so don’t you even think that for a minute, all right? All the hugs to you. I hope you get some really great squishes from the kids today and in the coming days. There’s often a whole huge emotional maze to cope with when something like this happens; fwiw I hope you know there are a lot of people here who will be thinking of you and who know what Good People you are and who are wishing you well as you get through all of this.

  25. rq says

    Thanks, everyone.
    (And you got it right, FossilFishy, though your interpretation, toska, is probably the one I would prefer.)

  26. Reginald Selkirk says

    Mormons address mystery surrounding undergarments

    The video’s focus on the offensiveness of flippant remarks about the undergarments shows the church no longer will tolerate them, Armand Mauss, a retired professor of sociology and religious studies at Washington State University.

    “No longer will tolerate them” – I wonder what that means. Are they going to go all Mountain Meadows?

  27. Saad says

    Elizabeth Warren on experiencing sexism in politics

    CNN asked Warren whether she had experienced any different treatment as a woman. “Yes,” she said. Would she elaborate? “Nope.” But was it surprising? “Not really, I wish it were,” she told CNN. “But it’s hard to change these big, male dominated institutions. What I am very happy about is that there are now enough women in the United States Senate to bring change to that place and I think that’s just powerfully important.” There are now 20 women in the senate.

    Warren didn’t want to talk specifics, or how the different treatment manifested itself. “I’ve said all I am going to say,” ending that part of the conversation.

    I wonder what the specifics are. I’m guessing it’s the condescending branch of sexism like she doesn’t understand politics and should leave it to the big men.

  28. toska says

    Saad
    Not too long ago, Senator Kirsten Gillibrand also publicly talked about male senators making sexist comments about her appearance and weight.

  29. says

    Reginald Selkirk @39:
    Mormons are no longer going to tolerate flippant remarks about their undergarments? What are they going to do, threaten to drink coffee around people? Create blasphemy laws that prevent people from mocking the magic underwear? Oh wait, this is Utah we’re talking about…they might just try that.
    Although if they’re so tired of the mockery, the simplest solution is to go commando…

    On a more serious note, I find it so funny that they expect others to revere their religion so much that they don’t laugh at the idea of magic undergarmets.

  30. says

    First world problems…

    I have spent the morning so far dealing with (a) washing a pile of Husband’s clothing that a Bad Cat (couldn’t be one of ours, oh, no!) peed on, and (b) the bedroom carpet and old Indian throw rug that Patches horked all over. It’s cat effluvia Wednesday.

    I can haz hugz naow plz?

  31. Ogvorbis says

    rq:

    Hugs and sympathy. Family relationships, with all the good and bad, all the history can make things complicated. And the feelings of relief when a family member dies seems to be both normal and difficult.

  32. Azkyroth Drinked the Grammar Too :) says

    Today I wrote and sent a letter to an old friend of mine. I haven’t spoken to him in six years. We stopped being friends, or at least active friends, when he was going through a rough patch in his life. To cope he turn to alcohol, and my past being what it is, I couldn’t handle that. I cut him loose to protect myself, but in truth, in hindsight, I’m pretty sure I was actually strong enough to stick around. Laziness and fear, a damning combination.

    So what has this to do with Pharyngula and the Horde you ask? I found the courage to send that letter because of what I learned here about apologies. My previous attempt rattled around in the bottom of my bag until the address was illegible. It just never felt right to send it.

    This time I wrote it with no expectation of being forgiven. I wrote it to explain how I’d wronged him, and how I felt about it now. That’s it. I made damn sure I didn’t state or imply that I wanted his forgiveness. I learned this here. I learned that how he feels about things is his, and his alone. That his reaction to my past transgression and my current remorse is none of my business. And that understanding made it possible for me to apologise.

    It’s unclear to me what you would have to apologize for in the first place.

  33. says

    Azkyroth @48:

    It’s unclear to me what you would have to apologize for in the first place.

    I thought it was obvious–FossilFishy feels bad for cutting off a friend who was going through a tough time.

  34. Azkyroth Drinked the Grammar Too :) says

    For taking care of himself by removing himself from, at best, a triggering situation with an addict?

    I mean, I can certainly understand wishing one would have been able to be more help, but self-care is not actually blameworthy.

  35. Ogvorbis says

    Azkyroth @50:

    . . . but self-care is not actually blameworthy.

    No, it is not blameworthy, but it can be a source of internal guilt. The decision to cut off relations with someone to prevent pain to one’s self, or (in my case) the decision to hurt another to avoid being hurt, can create of well of guilt that can seem endless.

  36. says

    209 people implicated in a corruption investigation will not stand trial. Instead, a cartoonist will.

    Turkish prosecutors have filed an indictment against a famous cartoonist working for the Cumhuriyet daily over a caricature he drew criticizing then-Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s attempts to cover up a graft probe that shook the country late last year, seeking up to nine years and 10 months in prison for the cartoonist.
    Cumhuriyet reported on Monday that according to the indictment filed by the İstanbul Chief Public Prosecutor’s Office, Erdoğan filed a criminal complaint against cartoonist Musa Kart for insulting him and slandering him via the media in a caricature that was published in the daily’s Feb. 1, 2014, edition. The press bureau of the prosecutor’s office initially ruled that there were no grounds for legal action over the caricature. However, upon objections from Erdoğan’s lawyer, the Bakırköy 14th High Criminal Court ruled that the cartoon went beyond the boundaries of criticism and revoked the initial decision. The indictment filed afterward calls for a prison sentence of up to nine years and 10 months for Kart. The court will begin to hear Kart’s case on Oct. 23.
    In the cartoon that led to his trial, Kart depicted two thieves stealing money from a safe box. One of the thieves is saying “Don’t rush, our watchman is a hologram” and Erdoğan can be seen keeping watch as a hologram in the background. Kart was referencing Erdoğan’s appearance at a party meeting as a 10-foot-tall hologram in late January.
    “It once again becomes clear that there is caricature of justice in Turkey, not justice itself,” Kart said while commenting on his trial.
    Pointing out that not one of 209 people who were implicated in the corruption investigation, which went public on Dec. 17 and Dec. 25, will stand trial following last week’s decision by İstanbul prosecutors to drop charges against them, Kart said: “Now there is a cartoonist who will stand trial. … Even cartoonists would not have imagined such a scene.”
    The highly-publicized investigation on Dec. 17 was followed by a second wave on Dec. 25, and was labeled by authorities as a “coup against the government.” It had implicated the sons of several then-ministers, pro-government businessmen and the chief of a state bank.
    At the heart of the probe was Iranian businessman Reza Zarrab, who was allegedly involved in a money-laundering scheme as part of his strategy to bypass US-led sanctions on Iran.
    Barış Güler and Salih Kaan Çağlayan, the sons of former Cabinet ministers, were also among the suspects whose charges were dropped.
    The alleged crimes against the former suspects, as mentioned by the prosecutors, included: “The transfer of lands with a value of billions of dollars at very low prices, the seizure of mines from businessmen by force, tender-rigging, illegally giving state tenders worth billions of dollars to businessmen, changing the status of protected areas through bribery, opening these [areas] for construction and making large profits off of them.”

    9 years in prison for a cartoon bc a caricature went too far?! What did it do, take on a life of its own and start killing people (bet there’s a Warehouse 13 gadget that can do that or something from Friday the 13th: The Series)?

  37. says

    A followup to rq’s post #43 about the shooting in Canada, video is available here:
    http://talkingpointsmemo.com/livewire/video-shots-fired-canadian-parliament

    Here’s the CNN link:
    http://www.cnn.com/2014/10/22/world/gallery/canada-shooting-parliament/index.html

    Here’s the MSNBC link:
    http://www.msnbc.com/newsnation/watch/police–multiple-suspects-in-ottawa-shooting-346286147851

    Seems there were multiple shooters.

    On other matters, sorry to hear about the extent of pain that CaitieCat had to endure; and empathy to rq for having mixed feelings about the death of her father. Been there, for both my mother and father. You just have to go through it at your own pace, and in your own way. Try not to berate yourself for having mixed feelings.

    Re the mormons, as discussed in comment #39 and #45: Mormon leaders are trying, once again, to make their religion look normal, and to fit themselves into the pantheon of other religions. They failed. The more information they put out, the more mormonism looks like a cult. Both their temple clothes and sacred undies look ridiculous on real people. The undies are so inappropriate for most climates that they are known to cause more-than-normal yeast infections in women, and crotch-rot of various varieties in men. Mormons are forced to adjust the bottoms so frequently that the gesture is known in the morridor as “the mormon salute.”

    Mormon leaders definitely used to teach that the undies were “protective” in both physical and spiritual terms. Mormon garmies supposedly saved people from burns, dying in plane crashes, etc., etc. This latest ploy to rewrite history and say they are not “magical” is another common mormon ploy. Just rewrite whatever is embarrassing — pretend the embarrassing stuff never happened. Older mormons will probably just dismiss it as a “lying for the Lord” episode in which mormons have to protect themselves and their reputation from the big bad evil outsiders.

    The underwear/temple garments video is part of a plan. It belongs in the same category as the “Meet the Mormons” movie. All of it is PR and proselytizing mixed with an attempt to stem the tide of people leaving the so-called One True Church.

  38. gillyc says

    Hi Folks,
    Just delurking briefly to say – I know, it’s only October, but soon it will be Christmas, and even sooner than that, there will be people moaning about the War on Christmas.
    Well, THIS is how you do the War on Christmas. We’ve got to raise our game; I’m sure we’ve never threatened to shell a Christmas tree… have we?
    On a less frivolous note – internet hugs to everyone who’s going through a tough time at the moment (everyone who wants one, that is).

  39. says

    http://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow-show/shooting-unfolds-canadian-capitol

    […] A soldier was shot Wednesday in the Canadian capital of Ottawa, and dozens of shots were fired minutes later in the nearby halls of Parliament, where lawmakers barricaded themselves in their offices for safety, witnesses and authorities said.

    Authorities said that one gunman was shot by security forces, but Ottawa police told MSNBC that they were looking for more than one suspect. Prime Minister Stephen Harper was safely escorted from the scene, his spokesman said.

    Shots were also fired at Rideau Centre, a shopping mall in the area, police told the Canadian television network CTV.
    Canada’s parliament was in session at the time, and lawmakers could hear the gunfire.

    NBC News’ report added that the local law enforcement would not confirm how many people were involved in the attack but said there were “multiple suspects.”

    Reports from local media added that the first round of gunfire occurred at the National War Memorial, before moving across the street to Parliament.

    This comes on the heels of a hit-and-run incident this week, which left one Canadian soldier killed and another injured, which is being investigated for possible terrorist connections.

    The U.S. Embassy in Ottawa was locked down and President Obama has been briefed on the attack. […]

  40. jrfdeux, mode d'emploi says

    I have to fire someone today. Crap.

    And the soldier who was shot in Ottawa by the gunman died from his wounds. :-(

  41. says

    What judges are appointed to the courts by conservative doofuses in the USA? It mattered, and it still matters.

    […] As Bush has retreated to painting, federal judges he placed on the bench have been implementing a conservative vision in some of the most contentious areas of federal law. The best example of this is a string of recent decisions on hot-button issues from the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals, which the ABA Journal has dubbed “the nation’s most divisive, controversial and conservative appeals court.”

    […] This month, the court—which has six George W. Bush appointees out of 15 judges—infuriated civil rights and pro-choice groups with two decisions overturning lower court rulings in Texas.

    In one case, the 5th Circuit cleared the way for a new Texas voter ID law to take effect just days before early voting begins, even though a lower court judge had found, after a long trial, that the law amounted to a poll tax and unconstitutional suppression of voting, particularly by minorities.[…]

    The 5th Circuit has been consistently hostile toward abortion rights. […]

    http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2014/10/george-bush-fifth-circuit-court-abortion-voting-rights

  42. says

    I’m being cynical when I say that I would bet Harper will make this into a spur for more ‘security’ on the Hill, which will have the ‘unintended’ effect of moving pulic protest ‘safely’ out of sight, and for more authoritarianism and secrecy. I admit it. But he does have form on this, and that it involved the Hill will allow him space to claim it’s justified.

    And, to add a bland merdaise to that shit sandwich, I am left, again, hoping it’s not Muslims, because we don’t need to give this Dominionist barsteward any more impetus to push us back into more War on Terror bullshit that will inevitably be spun into ‘let’s go smack the IS around!’ meme that Harper has so desperately wanted.

  43. rq says

    CaitieCat
    So far I’ve been loving the twitter response (Stats Canada said 100% of Canadians are angry and in 100% solidarity, or words to taht effect). Also some smackdown of people who were trying to use the shooting for political means already.
    But yes, everything that you said.
    Also *hugs* for the painful appt.

  44. cicely says

    rq, *many hugs* and sympathies.
    I’m sorry, in so many ways, about your dad.

    *hugs* for Anne.
    If it’s any consolation—in the “misery loves company” sense—we had Surprise Cat Barf In The Night, last night.
    I never can decide whether it’s worse stepped in fresh-and-warm, or old-and-cold.
    I resist collecting the necessary data, whenever possible.

    Hi, gillyc; Welcome In!

    *hugs* for jrfdeux.

  45. Morgan!? Militant Pacifist, SJW says

    rq,

    Hugs and condolences. Transitions can be complicated and painful and a relief. So is life.

  46. rq says

    Thank you, everyone. You’ve all been great, and I’m sorry I can’t take the time to list you out. And yes, even short supportive comments are great right now. ♥ to everyone, I really appreciate all the thoughts and words. And I will continue to be conflicted, though I will feel less worse about feeling conflicted. Y’all rock.

  47. jrfdeux, mode d'emploi says

    Text from a friend in Atlanta on the Ottawa shooting. “Huh. Are shootings up there rare or something?”

    My response: “Fucking-A they are. :-(“

  48. Thomathy, Such A 'Mo says

    This attack in Ottawa. I’m so sad and so conflicted. I was on the verge of tears, perhaps only because of the mix of emotions. It’s just so awful that someone was killed. And, then, I’m thinking how awful it is that one of my first thought on reading about this was, ‘No, not here. Other places, but not here.’ And no one even knows the motives of those who did this or even who they are.

    Who knows how long we will have to wait for some definitive answers, if any even exist, as to the motives of those who did this? Or, indeed, if they’ll even be arrested.

    I don’t know how to feel. I guess confused and sad.

  49. rq says

    … And yes, I had to get involved in a discussion about same-sex partnerships in Latvia on Facebook, today. So far I’m winning.

  50. rq says

    Also, where does that whole ‘I have a bridge to sell you’ line come from? I realize it’s something to do with selling the Brooklyn Bridge (right?), but what’s the origin?

  51. Thomathy, Such A 'Mo says

    Tony @ #69, you’re right. But these are very foreign feelings to me.

    rq, I’ll add my voice to those of others re you’re father.

    On your #71, it’s an odd thing for Blair* to do and to claim that it will ease minds. Especially considering his statement suggesting people be vigilant, even after also stating that there were no specific or credible threats. The only thing that such a response from Blair could do is to create or increase tension. I can only hope this does not lead to the murder of a person because brown.

    *Chief of Toronto Police Services

  52. Nerd of Redhead, Dances OM Trolls says

    Also, where does that whole ‘I have a bridge to sell you’ line come from? I realize it’s something to do with selling the Brooklyn Bridge (right?), but what’s the origin?

    From a con-man who actually did that.

  53. says

    rq
    Well known (eventually, after the trial) 19th century con artist George C. Parker (and others, but he appears to have originated or at least popularized the scam), made his money by telling immigrants and farmers new to the city that, e.g., the Brooklyn Bridge had been found to be structurally unsound, and was going to be dismantled and sold for scrap, or alternately that it was being sold as a toll bridge to raise money for a city project and, either way he just happened to be the official in charge of setting up the scrap contract, at an excellent rate because I like your face, kid. He would sell other landmarks, but the Brooklyn Bridge was the best known scam. Hence, ‘I’ve got a bridge to sell you’, meaning ‘you’re a gullible rube’.

  54. rq says

    Thomathy
    Yes, I was wondering if Blair had been moved to Ottawa, but I guess he’s still in Toronto… Why is he the go-to person on this?
    Anyway, I hope your conflicting feelings find some sort of resolution, too.

  55. Thomathy, Such A 'Mo says

    Thanks, rq!

    Nope, he’s in Toronto, the current Chief, and he’s being an alarmist.

  56. says

    People have short memories. Terrorism in Canada dates back to the 1960s, and has included attacks by home grown terrorists like the FLQ and the Squamish Five, and actions by Cuban, Sikh, Armenian, and Croatian groups. The Sikh separatist attack that destroyed Air India Flight 182 killed more Canadians that any other, and was one of the most lethal incidents prior to the September 11th attacks. There was even an American bomber, Thomas Bernard Bingham, who killed three when he attacked the Montreal Metro in 1984. “It can’t happen here!” should really be “We’ve been lucky it hasn’t happened here more often.”

  57. says

    Yeah, so this happened: New Jersey Governor Chris Christie made public the Republican plan to control “voting mechanisms” at the state level. Republicans plan to continue to chip away at the voting rights of likely Democratic Party voters.

    Governor Christie pushed further into the contentious debate over voting rights than ever before, saying Tuesday that Republicans need to win gubernatorial races this year so that they’re the ones controlling “voting mechanisms” going into the next presidential election.

    Christie stressed the need to keep Republicans in charge of states — and overseeing state-level voting regulations — ahead of the next presidential election.

    North Jersey Bergen Record link.

    […]political scientist Norm Ornstein paraphrased Christie’s comments this way: “How can we cheat on vote counts if we don’t control the governorships?”

    Previous comment in the Lounge on Republicans restricting voting rights. And here.

  58. Thomathy, Such A 'Mo says

    timgueguen, thanks for the rundown, but no one has said it doesn’t happen here*. And, of course, I think everyone is grateful it doesn’t happen more often than it has.

    *Except me, quoting myself with the caveat that that thought was awful, to which I will add the further caveat that it’s awful because it’s not true and that I certainly don’t think it should happen anywhere else.

    I don’t think any of those attacks you mentioned are gone from memory.

    Further, the FLQ attacks, in fact, should remind us that not only is our top parliamentary officer capable of the draconian action that CaitieCat expects of Harper@ #60, but that they have gone much further.

    (I highly recommend those reading to look into the actions taken by Prime Minister Trudeau during the October Crisis. That was 1970!)

  59. says

    You really want to see more campaign ads on TV, right? Well, the Koch brothers are here to help you out. They’ve already spent about $16 million on mostly deceptive Republican campaign ads for the midterm elections, and now they are going to throw another $6.5 million into Alaska, Arkansas, Colorado, Iowa, New Hampshire, and North Carolina.

    This is the conservative push in states where the race is close, and the Koch brothers want Republicans to take over the Senate (they already control the House).

    Maybe everyone will be so fed up that they vote for the Democratic Party or Independent candidates? [eternal optimist]
    Daily Kos link.

  60. says

    Nerd @83, I like that Illinois constitutional amendment. Wish we could do it nationwide. I wouldn’t bet on Republican governors and states attorney general not finding a way around such ballot measures, but it might slow them down considerably in their efforts to disenfranchise voters.

  61. says

    Well, this is a disgustingly sneaky way to get around the academic requirements for college athletes. NY Times link.

    A blistering report into an academic fraud scandal at the University of North Carolina released Wednesday found that for nearly two decades two employees in the African and Afro-American Studies department ran a “shadow curriculum” of hundreds of fake classes that never met but for which students, many of them Tar Heels athletes, routinely received A’s and B’s.

    Nearly half the students in the classes were athletes, the report found, often deliberately steered there by academic counselors to bolster their worrisomely low grade-point averages and to allow them to continue playing on North Carolina’s teams. The existence of the classes — though not necessarily how blatantly nonexistent they were — was common knowledge among the academic counselors, and in some cases among coaches of the university’s sports teams […]

    The revelations have cast a decidedly unflattering light on U.N.C., Chapel Hill, which has long boasted of its ability to adhere to high academic standards while running a premier sports program. Until […]

  62. Portia (aka Smokey the Advocate) says

    rq:
    All my love.

    What. A. Day. That domestic violence training may have impacted the life of one of my clients today, in that the prosecutors who were present may have been influenced positively by their new knowledge about the life of a DV survivor. I have no way of knowing whether they would have made the same call before the training, but…I have suspicions. Anyway. It was a hard, but good day. Six straight hours in court, being defense then prosecution, and about 14 cases in two counties and …I am ready to go to bed with my Delsym and my hot tea. Life advice based on my day: if you’re going to call the prosecutor a sexist slur, maybe don’t do it three feet away. First time I’ve ever tossed someone out of court (to the big bad hallway, but still). The bailiff was very proud of me and my sternness.
    Kudos if you were able to decipher any of my run-ons there…

    *hugs* all around.

  63. says

    Anita Sarkeesian was featured on the Melissa Harris Perry Show on MSNBC three days ago. I forgot to post the link then, but here it is: Link.

    The interview portion with Sarkeesian is quite good. I enjoyed watching her answer the questions.

  64. Nerd of Redhead, Dances OM Trolls says

    Running my first virus/malware scan since upgrading to Yosemite. Apple is regressing. The number of files after each upgrade kept decreasing. Now, a huge jump in the number of files. Gives a dirty look towards Cupertino….
    This all came about because the iMac went spinning beach ball of death in the middle of the night, and upon reboot, I had a request for permission dialog box pop up to complete an index I hadn’t seen before. Looks OK so far. Might be a good idea to change the administrator password to something stronger….

  65. Azkyroth Drinked the Grammar Too :) says

    Might be a good idea to change the administrator password to something stronger….

    Have you considered encasing it in concrete? :)

  66. FossilFishy (NOBODY, and proud of it!) says

    Azkyroth #50

    …but self-care is not actually blameworthy.

    Look, I felt at the time that I had good cause to take the actions I did. In hindsight I’m less sure, but that’s not the point.

    The question of blame is not up to me. I harmed my friend, this is beyond dispute because he told me so. I apologised for causing that harm. My intent, the need for self-care, mitigates that harm only if he chooses to see it that way. He has that right and my self-blame or lack thereof has nothing to do with it. And to be clear: even if he chooses to be completely unfair in how he feels about all this, that is his business and none of mine.

    Shorter: I didn’t apologise for choosing self-care over his needs, I apologised for the harm I caused.

  67. Saad says

    Lynna, #91

    So awesome to see MSNBC straight up describe Gamergate as a war on women without dishonest references to journalistic ethics, etc.

    I completely share her frustration about the police and school refusing patting down, metal detector and checking for permits even in the presence of a very explicit threat. Unbelievable.

  68. Nerd of Redhead, Dances OM Trolls says

    Have you considered encasing it in concrete? :)

    Nice thing about being a chemist. Acetone is simple, 2-propanone more esoteric, and dimethylketone is antiquated. So I can use even the German equivalent….

  69. Portia (aka Smokey the Advocate) says

    Anne:

    Yep, it did work, and thank you for commenting and confirming that it worked :)

  70. Portia (aka Smokey the Advocate) says

    cicely:
    ^_^ Thank you.
    And a good thing, too, because I made a pot of tea, brought it with me to bed, and curled up about…oh…7:15. :D

    How are you?

  71. cicely says

    Portia, I am, if not good, then at least not out-right Evil. The Grandson prospers, and grandparentalness is awesome.
    One day, there will be colored chalk all over the driveway and poster paint on the walls—safely buffered by butcher paper, oh indeed there will.
     
    And I have discovered that capsaicin patches are Things Of Joy And Beauty Forever.

  72. rq says

    When your anti-gay argument comes down to the fact that Jesus Christ invented human rights, I think I win.

  73. Beatrice, an amateur cynic looking for a happy thought says

    Good morning.
    I should be working while it’s still nice and quiet at work but I don’t wanna..

  74. carlie says

    A friend died yesterday.
    There’s a little overlap here with Shakesville; one of their contributors, Phil Barron, died of a flu-like infection that went septic.

    Another friend of his, a writer, wrote this: A friend on twitter died today. It sums up how I feel about him, but also how I feel about you here as well.

    Why does it feel weird to cry? I probably interacted with him more in the brief time that I knew him than I have in recent years with people I’ve known for decades. And yet, it feels weird. Because I never met him face-to-face, my tears feel trumped up. Inauthentic. Borderline histrionic. Twitter also blurs the timeline. I don’t remember when I followed or was followed by someone because at some point, they were just there. Having a conversation.

    We’re conditioned to say things like, “My friend…on Twitter” or “We’re friends. Well, we’re facebook friends,” like we must acknowledge or justify that the social media connection is somehow less legitimate than the high school or hometown or college or work connection when it isn’t really. Not for me at least.

  75. carlie says

    It was a minor loss for me, compared to his close friends and family, but I so wanted to share that piece to let you all know I love you. :)

  76. says

    cicely @118, I loved the “Scalia” dog in John Oliver’s presentation. The fact that Oliver used words the justices’s had actually spoken was part of what made it priceless comedy.

  77. says

    Mormon church leaders have been publishing a series of essays meant to assuage the doubts of true believers, and to combat the historical information found on the internet. They’ve been doing this for more than a year. So far, they’ve thrown Brigham Young under the bus as the acting-as-a-man-not-a-prophet guy to blame for past sins, (racism, etc.), and now they are trying to explain away Joe Smith’s polygamy.

    Ex-mormon, pulitzer-prize-winning cartoonist, and all around good guy, Steve Benson, is having none of it:

    The Mormon Cult is, once again, lying through its telestial teeth over its bedrock, doctrinal “divinely-revealed” belief in polygamy. In its CUlt-reviewed and -approved LDS.org essay entitled, “Plural Marriage in Kirtland and Nauvoo,” the conveniently anonymous author(s) disingenuously claim that “Latter-day Saints believe that monogamy–the marriage of one man and one woman–is the Lord’s standing law of marriage.” […]

    Bull pucky. It’s fact-check time (and we’re talking the here and now, not just pre-Manifesto days). What follows is the actual historical reality on the Mormon Cult’s belief in, and practice of, polygamous sealings (combined, for the benefit of TBM lurkers here, with a bit of temple ritual-like repetition to make that point in behalf of clarity and emphasis).

    The truth is simple: Contrary to what the Mormon Cult would have people believe, Mormon men are today being secretly and polygamously married/”sealed” in LDS temples to their unholy harems. Despite its efforts to mislead the general public and press, the so-called “mainstream” Mormon “Church” continues to permit faithful LDS men to be multi-married in heaven-sanctioned, clandestine temple-sanctified rituals to other women, in the event of the death of the man’s previous wife or in the case of divorce. […]

    “In the case of a man marrying a wife [in the Mormon temple] in the everlasting covenant who dies while he continues in the flesh and marries another by the same divine law, each wife will come forth in her order and enter with him into his glory.”

    (Charles W. Penrose, “’Mormon’ Doctrine Plain and Simple, or Leaves from the Tree of Life,” p. 66). […]

    “’President Hinckley affirmed the eternal nature of the marriage between Sister [Inis] Hunter and the former Church president [Howard W. Hunter], whose first wife, Claire Jeffs, died after a long battle with Alzheimer’s disease and is now buried beside him in the Salt Lake Cemetery. Inis Hunter “will now be laid to rest on the other side,” he said. “They were sealed under the authority of the Holy Melchizedek Priesthood for time and for all eternity,” he said, recalling the marriage ceremony he performed for them in the Salt Lake Temple in April 1990.’ (‘Sister Hunter’s Humor and Cheerfulness remembered as She is Laid to Rest,’ in “Deseret News,” Oct. 22, 2007). […]

    http://exmormon.org/phorum/read.php?2,1411333

    And there’s this from another ex-mormon:

    Somebody submitted to TSCC [The So-Called “Church”] that I was dead. They married me to somebody in heaven that I had never met. My brother, then TBM [True Believing Mormon], had to request a correction for the temple marriage as I was still alive.

    http://exmormon.org/phorum/read.php?2,1411408

    “Sealed” to a corpse, that’s nice. Bleh.

  78. rq says

    I’m going to complain about the bloody cold outside, because it’s the first day this season that has been below 0 during daytime hours (this in addition to nighttime hours). And windy. Oof.
    And I can’t find the bags of winter accessories at home (Husband insists he didn’t put them in the attic, but they’re nowhere else to be found and I broke the hook for the attic door, so I can’t actually check), so I’m stuck with mildly inappropriate fall apparel for now. So are the kids, which sucks for them more.
    Come spring, I’ll be excited in a good way about such small minuses, but for now, ARRRGGGHHH!!!!

  79. says

    Here is a mormon columnist for the Salt Lake Tribune discussing the polygamy essay: Link. (In reference to posts 121 and 122.)

    She is being torn apart in the comments. A few examples below:

    Interesting that he ‘married’ Alger before the ‘authority’ to do so was ‘restored’ to earth.
    Face it folks, trying to paint a sexual predator as a great guy doesn’t work unless you are speaking to deluded fools.
    —————
    Polygamy in the church isn’t hard for Mormons to understand, it’s just hard for them to accept. Joe was pulling a Warren Jeffs, plain and simple. There’s nothing hard to understand about that. Just hard for them to admit it.
    ————-
    “church distinguished between bonds for this life, which included full matrimonial relations, and partnerships that would exist only in eternity.” If this were really the case then why did Joseph Smith send faithful men on missions and marry their wives who were already sealed to them himself? The church is grasping at straws here they are trying to show how up front and truthful they are, explaining events away but leaving out important details.
    —————
    Not to mention, men can have plural spirit wives in the afterlife, but women cannot have plural husbands. And if you get a civil divorce in real life, you are not spiritually divorced…you are stuck with them for all eternity. Only men can request and be granted a temple divorce to unstick them for the eternity. Women who ask for a temple divorce are pretty much shunned from the church and give up any claim to their celestial glory.
    —————
    Have you ever read more nonsense than that which the Mormons feed us when trying to spin a subject that they have hidden since the inception of this fraudulent organization??!! All this fraud is slowly being disclosed, and it’s the only reason that they finally address certain issues. The leaders of the church know full well that lies have underpinned it and they fully go along as they have this master (the church) to serve. If they don’t they are oustered. The consummate liar, Joseph Smith, started the lies, the current leadership has willingly complied with them […]
    —————–
    Remember these articles were not written for non-Mormon or intellectual people. They are designed to re-enforced, or simply brainwash those that already deeply involved in this cult. I have been living in Utah for several years, and no one could come up with any convincing argument to defend this unholy organization.

  80. says

    Republican says stupid stuff:

    Joni Ernst, the Republican candidate for U.S. Senate in Iowa, said during an NRA event in 2012 that she would use a gun to defend herself from the government.

    “I have a beautiful little Smith & Wesson, 9 millimeter, and it goes with me virtually everywhere,” Ernst said at the NRA and Iowa Firearms Coalition Second Amendment Rally in Searsboro, Iowa. “But I do believe in the right to carry, and I believe in the right to defend myself and my family — whether it’s from an intruder, or whether it’s from the government, should they decide that my rights are no longer important.”

    Ummm, Joni, if you disagree with government policies you are supposed to address that at the ballot box and/or in the courts. You are not supposed to whip out your sweet little Smith & Wesson and start shooting government officials.

    As a political candidate, you are also not supposed to encourage citizens to whip out their own weapons and start shooting government officials.

    And this totally addlepated woman looks likely to win in Iowa. [headdesk]
    http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/10/22/joni-ernst-guns_n_6032164.html

    Ad in which Joni does whip out her gun and indicate that she would be willing to “unload on” President Obama: Washington Post link.<a?

  81. says

    Whoops, I should clarify: Joni is going to unload on Obamacare with her gun, and not on President Obama himself. Sorry. (In reference to comment #125.)

  82. says

    More on Republican candidate, Joni Ernst: she also wants state law enforcement officials to be able to arrest federal officials who are enforcing laws the rightwing doesn’t like. Obamacare is one example, but Ernst would apply this principle across the board if she could.

    State Sen. Joni Ernst, the Republican nominee for U.S. Senate in Iowa, once said she would support legislation that would allow “local law enforcement to arrest federal officials attempting to implement” Obamacare.

  83. Saad says

    Please sign this petition to the President of Afghanistan:

    Protect 10-year Old Rape Survivor from Honor Killing

    Brishna, a 10-year old girl from Kunduz province in Afghanistan, was raped by a local mullah in May 2014. While she was recovering in the hospital, her family and community members threatened to kill her and “dump her in the river.”

    Months ago, police removed Brishna from the Women for Afghan Women’s shelter and returned her to her family, where she is at grave risk of an “honor killing.” The director of Women for Afghan Women, Dr. Hassina Sarwari, has also been threatened by the girl’s family and powerful members of her community for protecting Brishna.

  84. cicely says

    *hugs* for carlie. I’m sorry for your loss.
    Long-distance-media friends, are still friends.

    Anne, your shiny thing is, indeed, a shiny thing. :)
    What is raku?

  85. says

    Thank you, cicely!

    Raku is a firing technique – the ceramic is taken from the kiln while still hot and put into a container of dry leaves or other combustibles. The glaze reacts to the carbon and you get nifty iridescent colors and smoky bits and there’s no way of predicting how it’ll come out. At least that’s my understanding of how Western raku works. I don’t make them, I just buy them.

  86. says

    Republicans saying stupid stuff:

    U.S. Rep. Steve King, R-Kiron, suggests gays won’t make it to heaven. What’s more, in an interview, King intimated that the divorced or cohabitators could be thwarted in the pursuit of eternal salvation as the Christian faith teaches it.

    That’ll be nice for Steve King, he won’t have to put up with any gays in heaven.
    Bee Herald link.

    A Republican woman on Fox News made this point in a discussion about women voting:

    “It’s the same reason why young women on juries are not a good idea. They don’t get it!

    “They’re not in that same life experience of paying the bills, doing the mortgage, kids, community, crime, education, healthcare. They’re like healthy and hot and running around without a care in the world.”

    Daily Kos link.

  87. says

    Mitch McConnell pays people to show up at his political rallies.

    Sen. Mitch McConnell’s (R-Ky.) campaign is offering volunteers all-expenses-paid trips to join his bus tour and “contribute to an enthusiastic atmosphere” at his events.

    In an email sent earlier this month and obtained by The Hill, Taylor Bumgardner, a Kentucky Republican Party regional political director, offers volunteers the opportunity to join McConnell on his tour, which launched Monday. Meals, lodging and transportation are included in the trip.

    “Senator McConnell is seeking volunteers to join him on a 3-day campaign bus tour around the state on October 20-22 to show our support for Kentucky coal. You would join local supporters in contributing to an enthusiastic atmosphere at each of his events,” she wrote. […]

    The Hill link.

    Mitch McConnell is deluded.

    McCONNELL: We’ve got a lot of enthusiastic supporters. You’ve seen them at every stop. And I’m happy to have them.

    Meanwhile, his opponent, Alison Lundergan Grimes, is treated to genuinely enthusiastic crowds who were not paid to hear her speak.

  88. Reginald Selkirk says

    The abominable mystery: How flowers conquered the world

    Last year, the plant finally spilled some of its secrets. The Amborella Genome Project unveiled a draft version of the plant’s genome. The first angiosperms must have evolved from one of the gymnosperm species that dominated the world at the time. The Amborella genome suggests that the first angiosperms probably appeared when the ancestral gymnosperm underwent a ‘whole genome doubling’ event about 200 million years ago.

  89. says

    Dizzy, vomiting and struggling to breathe, 11 Iraqi police officers were rushed to a government hospital 50 miles north of the capital last month. The diagnosis: poisoning by chlorine gas. The perpetrators, according to the officers: Islamic State extremists.

    The chlorine attack appears to be the first confirmed use of chemical weapons by the Islamic State on the battlefield. An Iraqi Defense Ministry official corroborated it, and doctors said survivors’ symptoms were consistent with chlorine poisoning. […]

    Chemical weapons! Sheesh. Bad gets worse.
    Washington Post link.

  90. says

    Seniors at Broken Bow High School in Nebraska have been granted their God-given right to pose with guns for their upcoming senior portraits, just as long as the photos are taken off campus and done “tastefully.”

    “The board, I believe, felt they wanted to give students who are involved in those kinds of things the opportunity to take a senior picture with their hobby, with their sport, just like anybody with any other hobby or sport,” Superintendent Mark Sievering explained to local paper, the Omaha World-Herald.

    One would think such a bizarre proposal would prompt some level of debate, a modicum of sane opposition! After all, we’re talking about mere teenagers eerily striking poses with weapons in their adolescent hands. Alas, the idea was met with a unanimous yes by all members of the Broken Bow school board. […]

    Mother Jones link.

  91. says

    Republicans say even stupider stuff.

    An hispanic man collected and delivered sealed absentee ballots to a polling station in Arizona. This was all done in a legal and correct way.

    As is his right, the hispanic man was wearing a Citizens for a Better Arizona (CBA) shirt.

    Now Republicans want to kill the guy. “Surveillance video apparently catches guy doing something at the ballot box that left Republican monitor stunned,” is what Glenn Beck said on his website.

    […] A.J. LaFaro, the chairman of the Maricopa County Republican Committee, told the Arizona Daily Independent that Marine’s behavior was suspicious, and complained that Marine was “a vulgar, direspectful, violent thug that has no respect for our laws. I would have followed him to the parking lot to take down his tag number but I feared for my life.” […]

    Commenters on the video’s YouTube are calling for Marine’s death. “This is a high crime, it is treason to this country and a betrayal of democracy,” one writes. “This should be a crime punishable by death.”
    “I am going to find this illegal-loving scumbag and kill him,” writes another.

    You can watch the scary video of a brown person who is a community volunteer as see for yourself the terror he inspires … not.

    http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2014/10/a-hispanic-man-delivers-absentee-ballots-and-now-conservatives-want-him-dead/

  92. rq says

    TW for DATE RAPE and DETAILS OF RAPE
    Was this man date-raped? The answer is quite obvious, but the last line just pisses me off:

    “Gay or straight,” he continues, “sexual violence against men does happen. As I came to learn, it’s the grey area of is this assault or just harmless aggressive behavior? is where the confusion begins.”

    Umm, when someone isn’t listening to your explicit no? That’s not ‘harmless aggressive behaviour’. Just sayin’.

  93. says

    BTW, the Republican interpretation of the legal delivery of sealed absentee ballots by a brown person in Arizona is: “Ballot Box Stuffing Caught on Tape!” (In reference to comment #140.)

  94. Nerd of Redhead, Dances OM Trolls says

    BTW, the Republican interpretation of the legal delivery of sealed absentee ballots by a brown person in Arizona is: “Ballot Box Stuffing Caught on Tape!” (In reference to comment #140.)

    I had the USPS legally deliver our “Vote my mail” ballot. Given the USPS personnel I see, the chances of it being a white male were less than 50%, since they are as diverse as the city (surprise).

    So, I’m stuffing the ballot box am I????

  95. says

    This is a followup to comments #140 and #141.

    […] As a capper, the aforementioned Republican official who is so concerned about the vulgar (brown) disrespectful (brown) violent (brown) thug (brooooooown guy) delivering ballots? He knows perfectly well it’s legal. He was part of a far-right movement to make it illegal, as part of HB 2305, but it was so widely condemned that the legislature (yes, even the crackpot Arizona legislature) caved in and repealed it. A.J. LaFaro is part of the Russell Pearce hard-right xenophobe racist monster wing of the Arizona Republican Party, which in Arizona has no other wings, and was trying to start a freakout over a legal thing because he’s been part of the effort to make Arizona conservatives soil their pants over the brown people for years. The conservative internets took him up on it because, and I repeat myself for emphasis, they are the stupidest damn jackasses to ever put themselves behind a keyboard.

    Daily Kos link.

    Yep, it is all legal. This is from the AZ Elections manual: “After they have securely sealed the voted ballot inside the early ballot return envelope,voters may voluntarily give their voted early ballot to a person of their choice for delivery to the Recorder or a polling place. The designated person shall not tamper with the envelope or the ballot and shall not deliberately fail to deliver the ballot to the Recorder or a polling place within the voter’s county of residence.”

    As an aside A.J. LaFaro seems to be part of the Russell Pearce wing of the mormon/Maricopa County mafia-like Republicans who are constantly messing up the politics in that area.

  96. says

    *reads Lynna’s links*

    *goes back to pillow fort and hides in the farthest, deepest corner*

    rq, long story about swastika designs – i have a couple books with counted-thread embroidery patterns based on Chinese (among other things) designs. When I decided to embroidery some towels for Aged Mum to match her phoenix-pattern china, I had to modify the swastikas out of the designs.

    Also swastikas show up all over American Indian pottery and rugs and jewelry; I think they symbolise the four winds or something like that in some cultures. It’s a lovely design, but I just can’t use it, because it’s been spoiled past reclamation.

    I hope I’m making sense. My head feels like it’s stuffed with soggy towels this afternoon. Please be kind to my mistakes.

    Also whilst I was typing, we had two earthquakes, a 2.8 followed by a 3.0, right up the road. No damage, lots of rattled nerves.

  97. says

    rq
    My dad has quite a nice tapestry with a swastika border on his piano. It was given him by some Assamese students of his, and it would have been terribly rude of him to turn it down.

    Lynna
    Conservatives really are terrified of absolutely everything, aren’t they?

  98. says

    Good morning
    Did you know that today is Halloween?
    Well, for us it is. Since we’re in Berlin next week we celebrate early.
    BTW, has anybody seen David recently?

    +++
    rq
    In one part of Germany there are currently protests against the plans of the state government to teach kids that non-straight and cis people exist. There signs are blue with the male sign and pink with the female sign and never should anybody allow anything else (why the hatred against green, I’m asking) and of course, since they’Re for the “real” families they bring their kids.
    Now I’m not against kids having political opinions and being involved in activism. I pretty much grew up on demonstrations and such. But yeah, it’s all about the content. Statistically speaking some of the kids who get brought along, or who stay at home while mummy and daddy protest against teh horrible gays sexually inddoctrinating their kids, will be LGBTQ. And that breaks my heart, because those children will grow up knowing that their parents hate them, hate who they are, hate what they can’t help being. And those parents want to take away all the other resources from those children, too.

    +++
    Portia
    I’ve long thought that anybody who works in the judicial system where they have to do with rape, abuse and domestic violence should be required to get training in these matters.

    +++
    Feminist ranting ahead, you’ve been warned
    Now, in the last months the dreaded Lego Friends have moved in. Now there are some things I really like about them. I love the taller, more realistic figures and the attention to detail, which is something I always found intriguing about Playmobil. I like that the sets are not dumbed down construction wise, though it means that atm I got to build most of it (a feature, not a bug).
    I don’t like most settings. Apart from the Jungle Series they’re all about beauty, shopping, be a pop star, groom pets etc. Now even in the Jungle Series they can’t just be explorers and scientists, no they rescue the aniimals and, ultimately take care of them. It’s a sneaky way to reinforce gender stereotypes: Even when you get to fly a fucking helicopter it’s ultimately about being caring and nurturing and cleaning up others’ shit.
    But looking through the catalogue, the boys don’t get a much better deal: Most of it is about fighting, fighting, fighting and, did I mention fighting? Boys only get fierce animals, animals that fight. And just like with girls it’S not just Lego but TV and games and movies and books and then people are surprised that those boys turn violent when they never ever got any other strategies for solving conflicts than might makes right and fighting?
    Of course, Hoff-Sommers calls that misandry and it’s feminists’ fault that we just don’t allow boys to beat other kids black and blue anymore…

  99. carlie says

    David was just on one of the other threads – I can’t remember which one, but it was just yesterday. I was going to make a big to-do, then realized I haven’t kept up enough to know if he’s been more absent or if I just haven’t noticed, and didn’t want to make a fool of myself. :)

    Speaking of which, rq is inspiring me. I’ve been mulling over joining a community choir for the last couple of years, and I think maybe it’s finally time to do that. Not right now, because it’s too late to join before the christmas concert, but maybe for the spring. It’s about a 40 minute drive away, but I’ve been realizing that I don’t do anything I used to love any more, and maybe it’s worth it. I sit around being depressed and thinking nothing is enjoyable, but I don’t go out and do enjoyable things, and I could really do with meeting more people who have nothing to do with my job. It’s kind of scary, though – I used to be “really good” at choral singing, but “really good” from the perspective of a) for a high schooler and b) 25 years ago. I don’t know if I can even sight read any more. I don’t know if I can blend properly with the people next to me any more. I don’t know if I have any breath control. I don’t know if my voice totally sucks now. They are performing the christmas concert in my town this year, though, so maybe I’ll go and see if they look like nice people.

    Now even in the Jungle Series they can’t just be explorers and scientists, no they rescue the aniimals and, ultimately take care of them. It’s a sneaky way to reinforce gender stereotypes: Even when you get to fly a fucking helicopter it’s ultimately about being caring and nurturing and cleaning up others’ shit.

    Oooooh, that is annoying, and subtle enough for most people to not even notice.

  100. birgerjohansson says

    NB:
    When parallel worlds collide, quantum mechanics is born http://phys.org/news/2014-10-parallel-worlds-collide-quantum-mechanics.html
    — — — —
    IAS, Princeton; “What does the next generation telescope need to detect life?” http://phys.org/news/2014-10-telescope-life.html
    — — — —
    Two families of comets found around nearby star Beta Pictoris http://phys.org/news/2014-10-families-comets-nearby-star-beta.html
    — — — —
    The search for habitable worlds, from sub-Neptunes to super-Earths http://phys.org/news/2014-10-habitable-worlds-sub-neptunes-super-earths.html

  101. birgerjohansson says

    Archaeologists document highest altitude ice age human occupation in Peruvian Andes http://phys.org/news/2014-10-archaeologists-document-highest-altitude-ice.html
    — — —
    Ancient Europeans intolerant to lactose for 5,000 years after they adopted agriculture http://phys.org/news/2014-10-ancient-europeans-intolerant-lactose-years.html
    — — —
    Genomic data support early contact between Easter Island and Americas http://phys.org/news/2014-10-genomic-early-contact-easter-island.html
    — — —
    Finally: A missing link between vitamin D and prostate cancer http://medicalxpress.com/news/2014-10-link-vitamin-d-prostate-cancer.html
    “Now from this starting point of Vitamin D in prostate cancer, we’ve come a long way toward understanding how we might use GDF-15 to target NFkB, which may have implications in cancer types far beyond prostate.”

  102. birgerjohansson says

    “I’m Not a Scientist” Is a Dangerous Cop-Out -Politicians brag about their ignorance while making ignorant decisions. http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/science/2014/10/i_m_not_a_scientist_excuse_politicians_don_t_need_to_be_experts_to_make.html
    “In response to questions about climate change, political candidates, including high-profile politicians such as Senate Minority (for now) Leader Mitch McConnell, Florida Gov. Rick Scott, and Florida Sen. Marco Rubio are frequently saying: “I’m not a scientist”
    (snip)
    American populist rhetoric has always had a dark side of anti-intellectualism, the belief that the common sense of the average man on the street is equal to or greater than the expert knowledge of people who spend years studying a particular question, and that has been on full display in recent years. Who can understand what those weird, other-worldly scientists are talking about, anyway? Somebody needs to “stand up to the experts.” Despite what any politician says, the overwhelming evidence supports the scientific consensus that climate change is happening because of human activity and that we should take action to stop it because it will be a significant threat—a position the U.S. military agrees with.”

  103. birgerjohansson says

    Devil in a Trenchcoat “the secret history and uncertain future of DC Comics` John Constantine (Hellblazer) ” http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/culturebox/2014/10/john_constantine_examining_the_dc_comics_character_s_history_and_uncertain.html
    “There’s never been a comics character like John Constantine, DC Comics’ trenchcoat-sporting magician and wisecracking righter of wrongs. He’s openly, specifically political. He’s queer. He’s working class. He’s wordy. He’s indelibly and un-stereotypically English. Astoundingly, he’s remained largely unchanged since he first took to the page in 1985 and throughout 26 years of constant publication—a kind of character consistency that’s unheard of even among icons like Superman or Batman.”

  104. Saad says

    Saudi Arabia warns women not to protest against driving ban

    “The Interior Ministry emphasizes it will firmly apply the laws against anyone who participates (in a protest by female drivers),” the ministry said a statement carried by state media.

    Any such attempt by women to drive in public in breach of the law was “an opportunity for predators to undermine social cohesion”, the ministry said.

    [. . .]

    Some leading members of the country’s powerful Sunni Muslim clergy have argued against women being allowed to drive, which they say could lead to them mingling with unrelated men, thereby breaching strict gender segregation rules.

    In Saudi Arabia, a top Arab ally of the United States, women are legally subject to a male guardian, who must give approval to basic decisions they make in fields including education, employment, marriage, travel plans and even medical treatment.

  105. rq says

    carlie
    If you do join the choir, you’ll find that both the sight reading and the singing voice come back fairly rapidly. So does the breath control. As for the blending in, well… depends on who’s standing beside you! :) Good luck!

  106. carlie says

    Thanks, rq!

    Saw this on twitter today – I think it was written about gamergate, but it could just as easily apply to what’s happening in the atheist movement: Good Old Jim Hornets.

    (visual description: it’s a multi-panel comic. A guy tries to join a charity group, but is surrounded by a cloud of hornets. He says it’s no big deal, he’s called exterminators, the hornets aren’t actually him, and we need to work together and be positive and he’s helping! As the hornets sting everyone around him)

  107. says

    This is a followup to the discussion up-thread of Republicans freaking out over supposed ballot-box stuffing in Arizona, and, of course, to Nerd and the Redhead also stuffing ballot boxes. Reference comments #141, 143, 144, 145.

    By Tuesday, the story was all over the rightwing blogosphere. The Blaze and The Daily Caller both ran with it, although we should note that the Daily Caller at least framed its headline as a question: “Does This Video Show A Hispanic Activist Openly Committing Vote Fraud?” (The answer is definitely yes, by the way). The story was also reblogged by the Stupidest Man on the Internet, Jim Hoft, who keenly observed from the video, “They don’t even try to hid [sic] their lawlessness anymore,” and claimed that “a vulgar, violent Democratic operative was caught on tape stuffing a ballot box.”

    Commenters are, of course, quite outraged as well, and have suggested that this obviously illegal immigrant “wetback” thug who is ruining democracy should be deported or perhaps shot. And this incident proves what they’ve been saying all these years — that President Obama only won his election (twice) because of these illegal thugs stuffing ballot boxes all the time. It’s right there on tape! [link: http://wonkette.com/564064/latino-guy-delivers-absentee-ballots-in-arizona-youll-never-guess-what-happens-next ]

    Republicans should look for more damning videos. That guy is only carrying a few hundred or so.

    Moreover, according to the president emeritus of the CBA, Randy Parraz, the group typically delivers thousands of ballots at a time, making the hundreds delivered in the video “look like a pittance.” [from Raw Story.]

    “I believe it’s inconceivable, unacceptable, and should be illegal for groups to collect hundreds, if not thousands, of voters’ ballots and return them to the elections offices or polling locations.” [so says A.J. LaFaro, the chairman of the Maricopa County Republican Committee.]

  108. David Marjanović says

    BTW, has anybody seen David recently?

    Er, yes! ^_^ I’m having a productive phase, tending to work nonstop, I have a deadline approaching (this conference here in Berlin from Nov. 5th to 8th, preceded by an associated field trip that begins on Sunday, Nov. 2nd), and I’m sort of afraid of trying to catch up with the timesink that is Pharyngula!

    Let’s meet! :-)

    David was just on one of the other threads – I can’t remember which one, but it was just yesterday. I was going to make a big to-do, then realized I haven’t kept up enough to know if he’s been more absent or if I just haven’t noticed, and didn’t want to make a fool of myself. :)

    *pouncehug* ^_^ ^_^ ^_^ ^_^

    Genomic data support early contact between Easter Island and Americas

    From there:

    “On that note, a second article that will appear in the same issue of Current Biology by Malaspinas along with Eske Willerslev and their colleagues examined two human skulls representing the indigenous ‘Botocudos’ of Brazil to find that their genomic ancestry is Polynesian, with no detectable Native American component at all.”

    Brazil?!?

    “Now from this starting point of Vitamin D in prostate cancer, we’ve come a long way toward understanding how we might use GDF-15 to target NFkB, which may have implications in cancer types far beyond prostate.”

    Uh, yeah. NFκB is one of those things that are, like, everywhere and do everything. :-)

    Ceramic moon face pendant

    That’s beautiful. :-)

    =====================

    And now the link dump:

    Behold the mass extinction at the end of the Middle Permian (the Guadalupian). And follow the link to the GSA conference abstract. And there, follow the link to the rest of the symposium. :-)

    Donate to the Emergency Black Voter Fund which wants to get out the Black vote. The accompanying e-mail said horrifying amounts of people don’t even know when election day is – and that in an election where the polls say Georgia has become a swing state! – I don’t know if you have to be a US citizen or resident to donate; it doesn’t say so, which is unusual, and obviously this is not a campaign, but then ActBlue has to be affiliated with the Democratic Party in some way…

    Pledge now what you can to stop Ebola — Avaaz will only process our donations if we raise enough to make a difference.”

    *facepalm* On palaeos.com, they call the first amniote – the last common ancestor of mammals, turtles, lizards/snakes, tuataras, crocodiles and birds – “Bob the Basal Amniote”. Fair enough, and probably a nod to Robert L. Carroll who has worked on that general area of the tree for decades. But now there’s a tradition on LiveScience of calling the first placental mammal “Shrëwdinger”!!! Also, lots of interesting news about tenrecs, tropical hibernation, and Madagascar… which is slowly turning into Easter Island.

    And the latest from the corruption scandal that is Austria: as part of the corruption-ridden sale of the Federal Apartment Corporation in 2002, the minister of finance at the time allegedly got a total of 9.61 million € in bribes.

  109. says

    LDS (mormon) leaders ran into some trouble with their video about the sacred undergarments and temple garments. (Reference comments #39, 45, and 54.)

    […] One short clip used in the video came from stock footage filmed several years ago. It has just been brought to our attention that criminal charges had been brought against a Church member shown in the clip. We have therefore replaced that eight-second clip with new footage, but the script, imagery and all other aspects of the video remain unchanged. […]

    http://www.mormonnewsroom.org/article/church-updates-temple-garment-video

    I feel for them. It’s hard to find a mormon leader without a criminal background — though there are plenty who just haven’t been caught yet.

  110. The Mellow Monkey says

    GamerGate is now imploring anti-GG people to check [their] privilege. Because GamerGate has a “Native American POC” (Vox Day!) and a feminist (Christina Hoff Sommers!) and a…”disabled”…? (WTF?!?)

    #NotYourShield indeed.

  111. says

    Salt Lake City police have a problem when it comes to investigating rape cases:

    […] between 2003 and 2011, Salt Lake City police had not analyzed 788 of 1,001 rape kits — 79 percent.

    By contrast, Burbank said that he always has approved forensic-evidence analysis if his detectives believe it will further a case […]

    See, that right there is your problem Police Chief Chris Burbank, you and your detectives just don’t see the need to analyze rape kits in 79% of cases. The problem gets worse if you look at the whole county, and not just at SLC. Only 6% of reported sexual assaults are prosecuted across Salt Lake County.

    http://www.sltrib.com/news/1739633-155/police-council-assault-rape-sex-department

  112. David Marjanović says

    Many of you will have heard of Herrerasaurus and Eoraptor, perhaps also Eodromaeus: some of the oldest known dinosaurs, found in Argentina.

    Turns out there’s more where they came from:

    “Encontramos 12 especies nuevas, desconocidas hasta el momento para la ciencia”, aseguró a Tiempo Argentino el jefe del equipo, Ricardo Martínez, titular de la División Paleontología de Vertebrados del Instituto y Museo de Ciencias Naturales de la Universidad Nacional de San Juan.

    […]

    Han encontrado pterodáctilos, tortugas primitivas, dos clases nuevas de mamíferos (reptiles mamiferoides), sauropodomorfos que luego dieron origen a los famosos herbívoros de cuello largo (por ejemplo el Argentinosaurus del Cretásico, en la Patagonia, el más grande que se descubrió hasta el momento). “Conocer este período es muy importante, porque es cuando aparecen los primeros mamíferos, los primeros dinosaurios, las primeras tortugas. Es cuando se producen grandes extinciones y apariciones de nuevos grupos que se asemejan más a la fauna actual, como aves o reptiles”, desarrolló el especialista en paleontología. “De los más sorprendentes que encontramos fueron los dinosaurios terópodos, que dan origen a las aves y a los tiranosaurios de dos patas” agregó Martínez.

    *Homeric drool*

    In German: lots of people in Syria and Iraq seem to be playing Inglourious Basterds, murdering IS members anytime, anywhere, to terrorize the terrorists. Some of them belong to biker gangs; one of those – which consists mostly of Kurds and calls itself “Median Empire” because Kurdish nationalists have long claimed to be descended from the Medes – is based in Germany.

    The countries of the EU pay membership fees; that’s where 70 % of the EU’s budget come from. According to this article in German, those fees are determined around the beginning of each year, based on the prognoses each country makes about its economy. Later in the year, like right about now, those predictions are compared to reality and the fees reassessed: those whose economy has done worse than predicted get money back, those whose economy has done better than predicted have to pay surcharges.

    Germany gets almost 780 million € back.

    The Netherlands are supposed to pay 642 million till December 1st. The government is unpleasantly surprised, wants details on how that amount was arrived at, and wants to “look at all aspects, including the juridical ones”.

    The UK is supposed to pay 2.1 billion. Cameron told Barroso Barroso has “no idea” what that’s going to do to public opinion in the UK. Nigel Farage is furious – and says Cameron is in a weak position where he can’t do anything, in other words, Farage is campaigning already.

  113. David Marjanović says

    Actually, I can’t deduce “furious” from the article. Ihould have said “duly outraged”.

    Cretásico

    Misspelling of Cretácico in the original.

    GamerGate has a “Native American POC” (Vox Day!)

    Srsly?

    How many Cherokee princesses is he descended from? I weep for all the discrimination he has experienced for his ancestry. *closes eyes for a moment, because the air here is so incredibly dry*

  114. says

    Two mormon-run “essential oils” multilevel marketing schemes are fighting with each other.

    A judge has dismissed much of a lawsuit in which one Utah therapeutic oils company is suing another for allegedly poaching from its network of independent distributors by using confidential information.

    Fourth District Court Judge Christine Johnson has dismissed all of the claims made by Young Living Essential Oils LC of Lehi against competitor doTERRA Inc. of Orem, which was formed by officers, employees and distributors who left Young Living. […]

    Scammers fighting over who is the best scam artist, over who stole what “confidential information” (a list of the most gullible mormons?).
    http://www.sltrib.com/news/1739671-155/living-doterra-claims-distributors-judge-companies

    Neither company is admitting wrongdoing, but they issues a statement:

    “essential oil chemistry is complex and that some tests can be confusing for the public to interpret. … As a result, Young Living and doTERRA have withdrawn their negative claims and published testing results about the purity of each party’s respective products.”

    Laughable.

    The allegations brought up in court included:
    – theft of trade secrets
    – faked lab tests
    – false advertising
    – claims that “pure” products were contaminated with unnatural substances.

    Quack wars!

  115. Yellow Thursday says

    TW HARASSMENT

    I yelled at a customer yesterday. Well, I raised my voice to a chronic harasser. He said “attagirl” at me in the most condescending way. If it was an isolated incident, I would have let it slide. But he’s a chronic harasser, not just of me, but my coworkers, too*. I told him not to say that to me, that it’s something you would say to a dog or a child. He tried to argue with me. -_- After some back and forth, I finally got him to say he wouldn’t say it again, but it’s a small victory.

    I came here to complain because at the forum where I normally go to complain about work-related things, commenters are telling me to let HR handle it. Besides that I don’t trust our HR person to handle internal issues, much less issues with customers, I would much rather call out the behavior as inappropriate when it happens. I don’t want to wait for some manager or HR person to have a talk with the customer when he’s abusing me and my coworkers.

    Thanks for letting me rant.

    *The harasser has called me “sweetpea,” which I called him out for, and called a coworker “floozy” and “bimbo.” He makes unwanted comments about our appearance. He stands in the lobby and stares at us with a slight smile on his face. He calls us “cranky” when he doesn’t get his way, and he gives us over-the top compliments when he does. He gets a lot of benefits in the form of waived fees and such because no one wants to deal with him. They(we) just want to get him out of the office as fast as we can.

  116. dianne says

    Re the nutcase in Iowa ranting about Obamacare: Obamacare has been documented by the department of HHS to have saved the feds money. Any person who opposes it can not be considered a fiscal conservative. Or rational. The old adage about “if you’re not a liberal when your young you have no heart, if you’re not a conservative when you’re old you have no brain” is officially defunct: conservatives have allowed their brains to be taken over by the parasitic infection known as the tea party and they no longer have any claim to being the “hard headed” party. If they ever did.

  117. rq says

    Lynna @169
    Don’t be silly, everyone knows a rape-kit will not further a case, so the forensic evidence is not needed. After all, it might point towards the guilt of a MAN.

  118. Saad says

    dianne, #175

    Re the nutcase in Iowa ranting about Obamacare: Obamacare has been documented by the department of HHS to have saved the feds money.

    Do you have a source for that?

    (not asking in a challenging way; I’d love to get my hands on a source that says that so I can bring it up in conversations)

  119. says

    Saad @117, here a few sources for journalists talking about the successes of Obamacare:
    Talking Points Memo link. Excerpt:

    Obamacare is working largely as intended. More than 10 million Americans have gained coverage and the national uninsured rate is falling, with better results in states that embraced it. Some states which rejected the law’s Medicaid expansion saw modest upticks in uninsured. The sprawling law has certainly created its share of losers, but many of the horror stories touted by opponents have turned out to be exaggerated or false.

    In Kentucky, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R) has been tripped up by the fact that Obamacare has cut his state’s uninsured rate by more than 40 percent. In Connecticut, early warnings of a 12.5 percent premium hike by one insurer turned out to be wrong; the insurer actually revealed it will lower its average premiums in 2015, albeit very slightly.

    Rachel Maddow Show link. Excerpt:

    […] a little over 91% of the 8 million consumers who enrolled through an ACA exchange marketplace ended up getting insurance and paying for it. Everything Republicans claimed and predicted about this figure turned out to be wrong – which is a sentence I feel like I’ve typed quite a few times when it comes to Republicans and “Obamacare.”

    Rachel Maddow Show link. Excerpt:

    When congressional Republicans predicted that private insurers would want nothing to do with “Obamacare,” and the lack of participation would be a disaster for consumers, the GOP lawmakers had it backwards. Competition has already helped hold down premiums, and with more insurance companies now eager to get into the system and compete for Americans’ business, consumers are poised to benefit even more.

    This follows more good ACA news from the day before, when we learned consumers who shop around next year can expect to find some great deals, including premium increases of about 1%. And even if Americans don’t shop around and stick with what they’ve got, premium increases will be a fraction of what they were before the Affordable Care Act became law.

    Daily Beast link. Excerpt:

    Despite its continued unpopularity, the Affordable Care Act has been a success, and conservative predictions of ‘death spirals’ and huge premium spikes just haven’t come true.

  120. says

    Saad @117, here is the Whitehouse fact sheet on the Affordable Care Act:
    http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2014/04/17/fact-sheet-affordable-care-act-numbers

    This is from April 17, 2014. We have even better numbers now. Excerpt:

    – 8 million people signed up for private insurance in the Health Insurance Marketplace. For states that have Federally-Facilitated Marketplaces, 35 percent of those who signed up are under 35 years old and 28 percent are between 18 and 34 years old, virtually the same youth percentage that signed up in Massachusetts in their first year of health reform.
    – 3 million young adults gained coverage thanks to the Affordable Care Act by being able to stay on their parents plan.
    – 3 million more people were enrolled in Medicaid and CHIP as of February, compared to before the Marketplaces opened. Medicaid and CHIP enrollment continues year-round.
    – 5 million people are enrolled in plans that meet ACA standards outside the Marketplace, according to a CBO estimate. When insurers set premiums for next year, they are required to look at everyone who enrolled in plans that meet ACA standards, both on and off the Marketplace.
    – 5.7 million people will be uninsured in 2016 because 24 States have not expanded Medicaid.

    More here: http://www.whitehouse.gov/healthreform/myths-and-facts

  121. says

    Republicans say stupid stuff. This time it is Representative Louie Gohmert of Texas who is enlightening us about gays, massages and the military:

    I’ve had people say, “Hey, you know, there’s nothing wrong with gays in the military. Look at the Greeks.” Well, you know, they did have people come along who they loved that was the same sex and would give them massages before they went into battle. But you know what, it’s a different kind of fighting, it’s a different kind of war and if you’re sitting around getting massages all day ready to go into the big, planned battle, then you’re not going to last very long. It’s guerrilla fighting. You are going to be ultimately vulnerable to terrorism […]

    Mediate link.

    Gohmert represents a gerrymandered district in which he regularly gets about 70% of the votes. Oh, the horror.

  122. says

    It can be difficult for Native Americans to register to vote, to actually vote, and to deliver absentee ballots to polling stations. But they are working to do just that.

    This story reminds me of the supposedly scary, voter-fraud-perpetuating brown person that Republicans are currently excoriating in Arizona. Some of these community-level volunteers exemplify democracy-at-work, and that apparently scares the bejeezus out of Republicans.

    Twenty-seven-year-old Wiyaka Eagleman registered 50 Lakota voters on the Rosebud Sioux reservation of South Dakota last week. Then he walked and hitched rides for more than 40 miles to deliver the completed forms to the Tripp County Clerk just in time to meet the Monday deadline.

    Then he walked and hitched home. […]

    This past June something changed in Wiyaka’s mind and heart. He says he felt he needed to return to the reservation. He was particularly troubled by what was happening to his people because of the threat of the Keystone XL pipeline, which, if approved, will carry tar sands petroleum through the state from Canada to Texas. […]

    The members of the community nourish each other, they share resources. But those resources are thin. In Wiyaka’s tipi camp there is one laptop which they all share.

    […] “This is how we change things,” he says. He takes the work seriously. While gathering those voter registrations, Wiyaka covered more than 100 miles traveling to Parmelee, thru the Rosebud and then on to the county seat in Winner. He set out on foot but managed to hitch four rides. When I ask Wiyaka if he stood and thumbed for the rides or did he keep walking, he replies, “I walk like a warrior; you just keep walking.” […]

    Scroll down to see the Contribute link where you can help out with money if you are so inclined.
    Daily Kos link.

  123. says

    https://www.facebook.com/video.php?v=10152463739096167&permPage=1

    This is a compilation of Fox News hosts, Rush Limbaugh etc., discouraging women from voting. Liberal women especially should not vote.

    Oh, yeah, discouraging blacks from voting too. Any, yeah, poor people shouldn’t vote either.

    Democrats should not encourage early voting. The homeless should not vote. Elderly people should not be encouraged to vote if they need special accommodations, like early voting days.

    College students should not vote because they are “ignorant of the issues.”

  124. dianne says

    @177 Saad: My apologies: I misremembered the situation a bit and therefore misrepesented it. It’s actually about $5 billion saved by hospitals in the form of fewer people presenting uninsured or with bad insurance that won’t pay them. So it’s the hospitals that saved $5 billion. But who pays for uncompensated care given at hospitals? The taxpayers. So it’s an indirect, not a direct savings to the government and probably largely on the state level. The savings is almost exclusively in states that took the Medicaid expansion. Odd, that. The link is here: http://aspe.hhs.gov/health/reports/2014/UncompensatedCare/ib_UncompensatedCare.pdf

  125. dianne says

    My bad, again. I didn’t read the report carefully enough: most uncompensated hospital care is covered by the feds, not the states. From the report: “Uncompensated care is largely federally funded…the federal government is estimated to pay for 62% of UCC.”

  126. David Marjanović says

    Gotta run. Giliell, I’ll check my e-mail in about an hour!

    Quick dump of links to all the paywalls:

    You’ve probably seen the news: “Genome sequence of a 45,000-year-old modern human from western Siberia” (News & Views article about same) – “Under the simplifying assumption that the gene flow occurred as a single event, and assuming a generation time of 29 years16, 25, we estimate that the admixture between the ancestors of the Ust’-Ishim individual and Neanderthals occurred approximately 50,000 to 60,000 years bp, which is close to the time of the major expansion of modern humans out of Africa and the Middle East. However, we also note that the presence of some longer fragments (Fig. 5) may indicate that additional admixture occurred even later. Nevertheless, these results suggest that the bulk of the Neanderthal contribution to present-day people outside Africa does not go back to mixture between Neanderthals and the anatomically modern humans who lived in the Middle East at earlier times; for example, the modern humans whose remains have been found at Skhul and Qafzeh26, 27.”

    Hallucinogenia was on the onychophoran side of things, and the tardigrades are closer to the arthropods than the onychophorans are.

    Pennaceous feathers might have evolved for signaling and used for flight later, this time argued from iridescence being possible in scales and flat feathers but not in downier ones.

  127. Nick Gotts says

    What is Beetlejuice? – David Marjanović

    Like orange juice, only made with beetles rather than oranges.

  128. Beatrice, an amateur cynic looking for a happy thought says

    re: Beetlejuice

    I haven’t seen the movie, but I used to love watching the cartoon tv series.

  129. Rowan vet-tech says

    Because I have a spare 10 gallon tank lying around the house, I decided to raise pill bugs and DO AWFUL EVILUTION EXPERIMENTS UPON THEM!… Namely, staring in about 6 months, I’m going to remove (and release) any whose colors I don’t like. I’ve done this in the past and ended up with a population of gorgeous red/orange/yellow ones. We’ll see what these 5 little isopods decide to do that catches my eye.

    MUAHAHAHAHA.

  130. carlie says

    *Hugs David!*

    Beetlejuice was just on tv this week. :) It’s a movie from 1988, and it’s one I’ve always really liked. One of the plot points, used for comic effect, is that he can only be summoned or dismissed by saying his name three times. The tv show Community honored it with a three season long gag; someone said “Beetlejuice” in a single instance each season, and at the third, you can see someone walking by in the background dressed as the character.

  131. Beatrice, an amateur cynic looking for a happy thought says

    PSA:

    Nail biting is ugly, but if you really must do it at least don’t touch people afterwards. You had your fingers in your mouth and now you’re wiping them on my shirt!
    Please also refrain from touching people after eating something with your fingers, without washing your hands in between.

    Thank you, back to regular programming now.

  132. says

    Mildly ‘rupt. Been sleeping extremely poorly of late. Knees have improved some, hopefully I’ll be back up to snuff fairly soon. Ulcer’s been acting up too. Kind of depressed, found out my mom is selling the old homestead, which means I’ll not get to visit the place again. Also some stuff involving interpersonal relationships and exes. Just was able to get a new glasses prescription though, which is nice.

    *Hugs* all ’round.

    Yellow Thursday
    Good on you. I agree that calling it on the spot is better than waiting on HR.

  133. rq says

    Dalillama *hugs*

    +++

    Well, looks like Husband’s granny, the keeper of the country farmstead, might be calling it in for living, too. In hospital at the moment, but it doesn’t look good. Double-whammy for the kids – at least next week is a school holiday, so we can work on coping at home.
    Sorry to be such a downer lately, I promise things will pick up again once things settle and CSG starts talking to me again.

  134. David Marjanović says

    As another Austrian said a couple of times, I’ll be back.

    Giliell, I overlooked your e-mail from the 15th somehow. :-( I get unbelievable amounts of Democratic donation spam, I can’t even keep up with identifying and deleting it. Now I know to expect something!

    Everyone, watch this: the Internet Party is campaigning, in Russian, for seats in the Galactic Senate Ukrainian parliament. One of their candidates, showing up at 1:57, is a certain Stepan Chubakka.

  135. rq says

    Beatrice
    Since it’s October 25 here already, happy Latvian name-day! (Or, I should say, ‘nym-day, in your case.) Parrr-taay!

  136. Beatrice, an amateur cynic looking for a happy thought says

    I have a Latvian nym day?! Cool. Thanks :)

  137. rq says

    I’m watching the first Die Hard movie in your honour. Also, I’m hoping it will save my sanity for tonight. Go Alan Rickman! Or not, as it were…

  138. Azkyroth Drinked the Grammar Too :) says

    Ooh. Rowan, I have a promise outstanding to my daughter to establish a pill bug terrarium. Any tips?

  139. says

    George Will, one of those Republican “intellectual giants” who are supposed to explain to us how nifty conservatism is, pulled a Todd Akin and started talking about “real rape” again recently:

    Speaking to Miami University students in Oxford, Ohio, on Wednesday night, conservative political commentator George Will said that he supports helping those who are “real survivors of real rape,” according to a student questioner who asked him about his position on the subject.

    The Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist was paid $48,000 through a private donation to speak at Miami, a few months after he inflamed sexual assault survivors, U.S. senators and many students by suggesting that being a rape victim on campus was a “coveted status.” Will has stood by his comments about sexual assault, suggesting that widely cited research on the issue is incorrect. […]

    Huffington Post link.

    Media Matters link.

  140. says

    Contributing to my lack of sleep and general levels of stress have been the new (~ a month) downstairs neighbors, who appear to be incapable of entering or leaving their apartment without slamming the door so hard the building shakes, and go in and out at all hours of the day and night. The also have phone conversations and arguments in the alcove that allows access to the apartments loud enough that we can actually hear what they’re saying over the music or TV show that we have playing. This is on top of the noise they make while inside the apartment. At least after the angry note we left (after talking to several of them), they’ve stopped camping on the stairs with cigarettes and beer and blocking the way (they’re on the ground floor, we’re not; they don’t use the stairs for access like we do). It’s fucking ridiculous.

  141. Portia (aka Smokey the Advocate) says

    a little rupt

    Dalillama
    *hugs*, my friend. You’ve always got my email if you need to talk.

    rq
    Same, of course. I’m so sorry for all this happening right now. *hugs*
    Love you

    I’m trying to make squash. Well, trying it again after a Cooking Intermission For [Someone Else’s] Medical Emergency. Going to try to make some tender chicken, side of green beans and crusty bread with goat cheese. I can’t say how much I love Aldi stores.

  142. Rowan vet-tech says

    Azykyroth:

    What I’ve ended up using this time is a mixture of orchid mix (tanbark, basically) and fertilizer free soil; you’ll want a couple inches of that. I need to get some more wood bits for them to hide under; right now all they have is a small piece of bark. Also, simply for the fun of it, I’m growing some various large-seed-bearing grasses in there just to see if it has any effect (and the cats will enjoy it when it’s cut). If they do poorly, I’ll just cut the grass into oblivian. In your case, I might skip the grass and collect moss. Humidity is key, without it being sopping wet so I would cover about 3/4 of the lid of the terrarium with saran wrap and mist every few days. Feed them dead leaves, fresh fruit (small amounts), potato, and fish flakes (small amount).

  143. We are Plethora says

    Hi all, just wanted to introduce ourself. We have been lurking for a little while and have finally generated sufficient courage to register and comment. Looking forward to joining the fray, as it were.

  144. Morgan!? Militant Pacifist, SJW says

    Welcome We are Plethora. I think you will find us a congenial and often amusing group. Question… Are you also Myriad?

  145. We are Plethora says

    [finds empty seat and bellies up to bar]

    Thanks! Next round’s on us, and make ours a sex on the beach of course. Who else wants some popcorn to go with tonight’s showing of Beetlejuice?

  146. says

    We are Plethora @225:
    I’ll take some popcorn please and thank you.
    Might be fun for a bunch of us to watch a movie all at the same time one day.

    Oh, and do you take your Sex on the Beach with Vodka, Peach Schnapps, OJ, and Cranberry? With an orange/cherry flag (or umbrella)?

  147. Nerd of Redhead, Dances OM Trolls says

    *Redhead update*
    The wounds are healing. The size of the covering for both wounds has dropped from 6″X6″ to 4″X4″. The wound closest to the poophole remains healthy with paranoid changes of dressings. The one further away needs some topical antibiotic, but both fibracol and calcium alginate are now available for both, due to the new month of wound supplies. But the bridging supplies was/is coming out of my pocket, not that of the insurance company.
    Apparently, once the wounds heal, the Redhead’s doctor can prescribe another course of physical therapy so she can stand and spin for transfers. Can’t wait for that to happen.
    Cooking must be fish Friday, with a talapia filet, lima beans, and garlic mashed potatoes.
    Now, can she keep it down????
    */redhead update*

  148. We are Plethora says

    Yes, in fact we are multiple, plural, myriad, and legion. You are all correct. Sort of. We are a relatively small natural-origin multiple system, also known as a plurality.

    Can you all see our profile?

  149. We are Plethora says

    Tony! The Queer Shoop @226,

    Oh that sounds delicious, let’s do the orange and umbrella please. And how do you like your popcorn – we have old fashioned with or without salt/butter, cheddar, and caremel.

  150. We are Plethora says

    In that case, here it is:

    We are Plethora, a small natural-origin multiplicity (aka multiple system, or plurality) consisting of the following headmates. We care deeply about being a force for equality and social justice, and fighting against the harmful effects of the superstitious and religious.

    – Sprinkle-Dinkle (an age-sliding brony)
    – Lady Elaine Fairchild (yes, the one of Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood fame)
    – Shap (a very ancient scaly of the crocodilian variety)
    – Mystevia (the core, primary frontrunner, and human person of the non-cis variety)
    – Sometimes we also get walk-ins, typically from eras past

  151. chigau (違う) says

    We are Plethora
    welcome in
    Tomorow, I will make pizza.
    What’s your preference?

  152. We are Plethora says

    chigau (違う),
    Thanks! In our opinion it doesn’t get any better than classic NY-style, plain cheese. Although any pizza is delicious, really.

  153. says

    Nerd @227:
    Glad to hear the Redhead is doing better. Here’s hoping the improvement continues.

    ****

    We are Plethora @231:
    (Tony is fine, btw)
    I like cheddar popcorn as well as the old fashioned kind (though with light salt and little to no butter).
    If you had sea salt/black pepper popcorn, I might have to pounce upon it. But seeing as it doesn’t appear to be among the offerings, unpounced shall I remain.

  154. We are Plethora says

    Tony,
    Sorry we just stepped out to pick up some sea salt and black pepper. :D
    We’ve never had the pleasure of trying that but it sounds great. Enjoy!

  155. Nerd of Redhead, Dances OM Trolls says

    Pat Robertson: Girl-on-girl movies to blame for young people becoming homosexual?

    Don’t tell PR is watching the porn channel *snicker* *that was a given*…

  156. says

    WMDKitty @242:
    Oh boy, I know. I hate the cold. Yeah, I live in NW Florida, so it doesn’t get bone chillingly cold, but we still get temperatures in the upper teens during the height of winter. I don’t like temps below 50°F.

    ****

    Question: I just posted the latest in my Woman of the Day entries and I was left wondering if it is at all awkward caring for hair that is floor length. Like, how long does it take to dry that much hair? When the hair is wet, does it put a lot of strain on the head and neck?

  157. rq says

    Nerd
    *hugs* And good to hear on Redhead improvement! I hope you are managing some rest, too.

    We are Plethora
    Welcome!
    Someone else will probably be around to pick up your questionnaire (although it is Saturday, so it’ll probably be me).
    But, please share your myriad thoughts on:
    1) horses
    2) peas
    3) cheese
    Bonus) Miracle Whip*

    *Not to be confused with real mayonnaise.
    And stahp hogging all the barstools!!!

  158. Beatrice, an amateur cynic looking for a happy thought says

    rq,

    I’m watching the first Die Hard movie in your honour. Also, I’m hoping it will save my sanity for tonight. Go Alan Rickman! Or not, as it were…


    and more *hugs*
    Take care of yourself. I know that’s hard whit all that’s going no.

    Dalillama,
    Ah, people. I’m sorry you’re having trouble sleeping.

    Tony,
    If you have thick hair, that’s a lot of weight. It must hurt.
    My hairdresser told me that girls’ hair often starts falling out because of the weight of very long hair (it’s in at the moment for girls to let their hair grow waist-length).

  159. Rowan vet-tech says

    Tony! Regarding hair care from a woman who has thick hair that used to be to her butt… holy crap it’s fucking obnoxious to care for. My hair is a sort that tangles if you look at it funny, so blow dryers were a no-no and I couldn’t brush it when it was wet. As such, it typically took about 4 hours to dry fully, 12 hours if I had it in a ponytail or braid. It was also really heavy when wet.

    While I loved how I looked with hair that long, I much prefer my shoulder-length hair with regards to care. It usually only takes an hour to dry now.

  160. says

    Rowan, Beatrice:
    Thank you both. I suspected long hair would weigh down the head quite a bit. Martha Matilda Harper (inventor of the business concept of franchising, as well as professional salons and the woman I wrote about) had floor length hair. From what I can tell, it looked thick.

  161. Rowan vet-tech says

    When I cut my hair the first time, my head felt so light that I almost felt like I was floating. And I kept hitting myself with the brush because I didn’t know how much force to use any more.

  162. Rowan vet-tech says

    Tony, I simply loved the way it looked. Didn’t like the whole ‘strange men coming up behind me and petting it’ aspect, but I reveled in my long hair. It was beautiful.

    And eeeeeeeeeee snakes!

  163. Beatrice, an amateur cynic looking for a happy thought says

    Hair brushing, how annoying your were. Good thing I don’t have to do that any more.

    Finger-combing is the way to go most days, two moves with a brush if I feel like making an effort after washing my hair (combing when it’s dry is useless anyway, my hair has a life and direction of its own then).

  164. toska says

    Rowan and Tony!
    Having had long hair in the past (no where near floor length though, thankfully!), the care is a pain, but the thing that really annoyed me was when it would get caught on things or laid/sat on by me or people around me (awkward sexy times sometimes resulted). I always know to cut my hair when it starts getting caught when I unbuckle my seatbelt.

  165. Rowan vet-tech says

    toska, my specialty was having strands of hair get caught around the bolts in the back of the seats in my college classrooms. Or in the buttons of my jacket. Or, yes, when I’d sit on it.

  166. toska says

    I often volunteered at an animal shelter at the time, and I’d not infrequently end up untangling kitten claws from my pony tail. Not the most practical hair style for that work ;)

  167. Beatrice, an amateur cynic looking for a happy thought says

    The most I ever managed with my longish hair was entangle it in the bottom spring of an umbrella.

  168. toska says

    Beatrice
    That’s one I never experienced, but umbrellas were the bane of my childhood existence, so I avoid them at all costs.

  169. Rowan vet-tech says

    The reason why I cut my hair was that I could NOT keep it out of grossness at work and once had an aggressive cat snag my hair, and thus me, through the cage bars. Every now and then I try to grow it out, but it promptly gets in … stuff… that I’d rather not have my hair in. Like, the ringworm kittens. Or the rotten dog mouth. Or the cat abscess….

  170. Beatrice, an amateur cynic looking for a happy thought says

    toska,

    sounds like there’s a story behind that…

  171. rq says

    Tony
    Do you have something refreshinga nd wake-uppy that isn’t necessarily coffee? I’d love one of those.

    Two airport runs today, plus assorted other obnoxious relatives arriving in the next few days.
    One of the paternal aunts is already giving my mum (religious) shit for choosing cremation over burial. I told her (mum) to just blame it on us catholic kids (mum’s a lutheran, so pretty much the devil in this aunt’s eyes as it is).

    Thanks, Beatrice. Will do my best.

  172. rq says

    Long hair? I had waist-length hair up until May of this year, when I chopped it all off, to the horror of various people (but it looks so good on you!). But I never really got it caught up in anything, just the effort of braiding it every day and keeping it more or less pinned and/or attached to my head was boring. And the shedding… :P

    But umbrella springs? Cats? Your hairs have all the excitements!

  173. rq says

    Rowan

    aggressive cat snag my hair, and thus me

    Excuse the morning brain, but I first read that as ‘aggressive cat shag my hair’, and… yeah.

  174. toska says

    Rowan
    Yeah, I’ve worked in shelters, vet clinics, and ranches, and long hair definitely doesn’t mesh with well with those work places.

    Beatrice
    I wish I had a good story to go with that! I just grew up in a desert, so what little rain we had was always accompanied by lots more wind, and I learned the hard way that umbrellas and wind don’t mix well. It’s better to just get soaked.

  175. Rowan vet-tech says

    rq, I have yet to have any sort of animal attempt to mate with my hair, though I admit that would probably be an interesting, hilarious, and horrifying experience.

    And because it’s late, and my brain loves to tangent, I am reminded of our methemoglobinemia doggy that is in foster whose penis is a truly lovely shade of lilac that everyone feels the need to admire each time he comes in for check ups.

    Vet med peoples are weird. :D

  176. says

    Good morning

    David
    You have mail!

    rq
    Big hugs
    Hope all of you get lots of snuggling

    Welcome we are plethora

    ++++
    hair
    Long
    Has been like that for the better part of the last 25 years or so. Shortest I had was chin length some 15 years ago, but it somehow just wasn’t me.

  177. FossilFishy (NOBODY, and proud of it!) says

    rq
    You have mail.

    So, may I share some good stuff for a change?

    It’s been a banner week here at Chez Fishy, literally. Today was our small town’s agricultural show. It’s the usual thing with fairground rides, and cons games, livestock, produce, and craft competitions, and all the myriad things associated with such events.

    Ms. Fishy and The Small Fry between them entered 16 craft, produce, and baking competitions. They cleaned up, Ms. Fishy got two firsts and TSF got five firsts and three seconds, as well as a ‘best in show’ for her ANZAC biscuits! And by best in show I mean they judged her’s against all the entries, adults included. That last one comes with a meter long tri-coloured ribbon, with gold tassels no less.

    They also raked in the prize money, a first place nets four times your entry fee, ten times for best in show! Yup they grossed $41.00 !!! Ice cream’s on us! Now, to be fair, some of those firsts were in categories in which they had no competition, but still…. :)

    But that wasn’t the best thing to happen this week, not by a long shot. Wednesday was the prep to grade five year end* celebration. Lots of teeth-achingly cute entertainment, followed by year end awards. The Small Fry earned the academic achievement award for her year for “Outstanding results in all academic areas.” We knew she was doing well, the parent/teacher conference was frankly boring, with both sides struggling for things to say. But we didn’t know that she was the top of her class. I is one very proud daddy right about now.

    Mind you, such achievement comes at a cost. We’ve been trying to praise her effort rather than the results, so there was a lot of “I’m so proud of how hard you worked to win that.” and the like between the beaming and the cuddling. We got home past TSF’s usually bed time and during stories she suddenly sits up and says with obvious distress “I haven’t done my reader!” All of our reassurance that this one night it would be okay to skip it was to no avail; she wouldn’t calm down until she’d finished it. Oi, unintended consequences.

    I’m also hoping that she doesn’t take after me academically. I won the same award in grade six, and you might say I peaked a bit early because I never did as well at school again.

  178. says

    Long hair – yeah, me too. Catches on everything. On the other hand, if I have mine cut short, it just sticks out all over the place. So I let it grow until it starts getting in the way, then I have it cut a few inches, let it grow out, have it trimmed…so

    I braid my hair or put it up in a knot with hairsticks or a hair fork, depending on whether or not I want to wear a hat that day. I’m one of those old ladies with the long grey witchy hair, heh.

    Yes, I’m up way too early for a Saturday. I had to feed cats and couldn’t get back to sleep, so I thought I’d just sit and enjoy the quiet for a bit.

  179. FossilFishy (NOBODY, and proud of it!) says

    Er, by “some good stuff for a change” I meant as a change for me. Reading that back it looks accusatory of those in need and that’s the last thing I want to do.

    And I forgot to append the * so:

    *The school year still has a ways to go but the power that be decided to hold the celebration early this year to try and make the end of term a little less chaotic.

  180. David Marjanović says

    Mail for Giliell!

    Rep. Chaffetz demands surgeon general head Ebola efforts. Thanks to Republicans, there isn’t one.” It’s truly hilarious to read.

    The Alaska National Guard has a gigantic rape scandal that has finally reached the elections for governor and for senator – the incumbent Republican governor received the first complaints four years ago and hasn’t done anything, the Republican candidate for senator was attorney general and won’t say if he knew anything.

    Hope in Kentucky. Also, the DSCC wants all your money, and wants you to phone all the strangers.

    Houston mayor’s daughter initially refused driver’s license, because she has two moms

    “Twenty-seven-year-old Wiyaka Eagleman registered 50 Lakota voters on the Rosebud Sioux reservation of South Dakota last week. Then he walked and hitched rides for more than 40 miles to deliver the completed forms to the Tripp County Clerk just in time to meet the Monday deadline. Then he walked and hitched home.” That’s because he doesn’t have a car or a cell phone. “One ride ended after just one mile because the white rancher who picked him up turned out to be a Republican. He says the rancher was nice enough at first but as soon as Wiyaka mentioned that he was a Democrat on his way to drop off voter registrations the man abruptly pulled over and let him out. Wiyaka shocks me a little when he says he wants to find that rancher again and apologize. Why? To say he’s sorry that the rancher didn’t believe him that things are going to change. That his kids’ futures depend on it. ‘Someday he’ll see what I mean.'”

    Scott Brown: ‘We don’t need to be experts’ to deal with Ebola (we just need Mitt)

  181. FossilFishy (NOBODY, and proud of it!) says

    Cheers Anne. And thank you for the hugs way up thread. Much appreciated.

    I do have to say that anyone who wakes early and can find enjoyment in it boggles my mind a bit. If I can’t get back to sleep I end up so grumpy that you could use me to initiate cold fusion.

    And with that cheery thought, I’m to bed. Tomorrow, scratch that, later today is our local pub’s open stage and I have to sing the song I wrote for Ms. Fishy’s birthday. Best I be rested because “it’s the thought that counts” is going to have to carry a whole heaping of weight even without me adding to the burden by being over-tired. ;)

    Night, morning, evening or afternoon, as appropriate.

  182. says

    I’ll be crashing by lunch. I take naps in the afternoon. I have to feed the cats at 5:30 every morning. Patches of the great white stomach starts meowing at the bedroom door around 5, because she’s afraid I might forget to feed her. Some days I can get back to sleep, some days I can’t.

  183. David Marjanović says

    “I repeat: This may be the stupidest conservative freakout all damn year.” Complete, naturally, with death threats in YouTube comments. And make sure you read to the end.

    Thom Tillis, one-time Medicaid expansion killer, now says North Carolina should consider it

    Republican attitudes to the minimum wage in practice. There’s a surprise.

    Young, petite, UNARMED, female teacher stopped today’s school shooter” – that’s yesterday’s.

    Indians 101: The Cheyenne Migrations

  184. Rowan vet-tech says

    I’m in California, and it is raining. Just a little, but it is wet outside.

    About. Damn. Time.

  185. Saad says

    My turn to do a Republicans say stupid stuff:

    Obama, instead of nominating a health professional, he nominated someone who is an anti-gun activist (for surgeon general) – Ted Cruz (Idiot, R-Texas)

    Sooooo, having an MD from Yale, being an internal medicine physician at a leading teaching and research hospital and being an instructor at Harvard Medical School is no longer considered being a health professional?

    Also, being a health professional means you can’t be anti-gun? Dr. Murthy believes gun control is a healthcare issue, which of course, it is: Guns are a very specific risk factor contributing to injury and death. The misanthropic goons at the NRA are actually threatening senators they’ll pull support for anyone who votes for Dr. Murthy.

    I think it’s obvious that’s not the only reason for the Republican opposition. Let’s be honest:

    1. Brown-looking
    2. Non-patriotic, freedom-hating name
    3. Huge supporter of healthcare reform and the ACA
    4. Is strongly anti-gun

    So more or less they hate him for the same reasons they hate Obama.

  186. Rowan vet-tech says

    Anne, if I can figure out how to do so… sure. Or I could leave out gallon jugs, collect some water and send it to you.

  187. says

    David M. @272:

    “Rep. Chaffetz demands surgeon general head Ebola efforts. Thanks to Republicans, there isn’t one.” It’s truly hilarious to read.

    Ha! That is a great read.

    It also counts as a Moment of Mormon Madness. Jason Chaffetz is a member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, and a highly active one at that. He demonstrates the uncanny skill mormons have to spin anything and to rewrite history while sounding naive and innocent. When you combine that skill, (learned and practiced daily in church activities) with the usual duplicity of Republican politicians … oh my god is that a stunning example of lacking-a-moral-center. Chaffetz doesn’t know he’s an unethical monster. He thinks he’s more than fine, a great priesthood holder doing god’s work, so he also is annoyingly self-righteous.

  188. says

    More Pat Robertson:

    Today on “The 700 Club,” Pat Robertson insisted that he and others have the power to raise the dead, but lamented that people these days are withholding this special skill.

    Robertson, who has previously discussed dead-raising abilities, told a viewer, Margaret, that people can raise the dead when they receive and submit to the power of the Holy Spirit.

    “That power is there, we just aren’t using it,” Robertson grieved.

    http://www.rightwingwatch.org/content/pat-robertson-we-have-power-raise-dead-we-just-arent-using-it

  189. says

    If you’re dismayed that one in five Americans (20 percent) are “nones” — people who claim no particular religious identity — brace yourself.

    How does 38 percent sound?

    That’s what religion researcher David Kinnaman calculates when he adds “the unchurched, the never-churched and the skeptics” to the nones.

    Graph and more info at the link. Religion News link.

  190. Saad says

    In response to my #277

    I missed one more thing the GOP fears that Murthy has in common with Obama:

    He was born outside the United States.

  191. Azkyroth Drinked the Grammar Too :) says

    :'(

    I could never get my hair to grow out and become “long” in the conventional sense.

    I eventually gave up on it.

  192. Morgan!? Militant Pacifist, SJW says

    “For Harry, England and St. George!”
    Happy St. Crispin’s Day!

  193. Morgan!? Militant Pacifist, SJW says

    “We few, we happy few, we band of brothers!”

    Oddly, it’s also the anniversary of The Battle of Balaclava and the charge of the Light Brigade. “Theirs not to reason why, theirs but to do and die…”

  194. opposablethumbs says

    Congratulations to The Small Fry and Ms Fishy, and best wishes for a great rendition of the birthday song. Very nice to read your good news, FossilFishy!

    Welcome to We Are Plethora (great nym!) – just let us know where you stand wrt horses and peas, though, OK? :-)

    Many hugs to cicely and carlie and Portia and rq and Tony and Rowanvt and Giliell and Dalillama and Morgan and Saad and Azkyroth and Lynna and Pteryxx and Anne and David M and and and all you very very excellent people.

    I haz a tentative cautiously-quite-optimistic today – nothing earth-shattering, but SonSpawn managed to have a small and modest social occasion this afternoon (as in, it was his set-up, he invited some people, most of them (about 12-13 students) came!) for the first time ever. We provided the home-made pizza :-) (made plenty, so we knew we’d have enough left for ourselves ::burp::). It was an afternoon of pizza, beverages and bonfire, and they’re almost all going to be meeting again at an early halloween do tonight in the student halls of residence, so the afternoon had a sort of natural framing in terms of timing, as everyone had to go and get into costume for tonight. So, they ate, drank, jammed for a while, chatted round the bonfire … nothing earth-shattering, but OK.
    yay!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

  195. Portia (aka Smokey the Advocate) says

    opposablethumbs:

    That sounds like a great time for SonSpawn and all involved. :D I know I still feel really tickled when I arrange and host something social and it goes well. It’s such a fun feeling. Three cheers! And piiiiizzzzza. Yummm… *hugs* back :)

    Hello We are Plethora, welcome.

    Fire training this morning. I clambered right up the aerial ladder (the one attached to the truck) and went higher than any guy I saw do it (I’m the only woman in the class). I felt like I did it pretty deftly and managed my nerves at 75 feet in the air. When I came down, the instructor said:

    “You’re a natural!”
    {Portia happydances internally}
    “…yeah, you did very well for a female of the species.”
    {Portia screams internally}

    It was so nice for a minute : ( Now I have no idea if I actually did it well or not.

  196. says

    Portia
    Facepalm. What an asshole.
    Giliell
    Have a good trip.
    Nerd, Opposablethumbs, Fossifishy
    Yay for assorted good news.

    Azkyroth
    Different people’s hair stops growing at different lengths; I’ve never been able to see any pattern in it. My hair used to be down to my ass, but my dad’s hair never gets beyond his upper back, and this is a man who hasn’t had a haircut in my lifetime.

     
    My knees were feeling well enough last night that I rode my bike to work again. On the way, I hit a patch of wet leaves, my wheels went out from under me, and now my lower body feels like someone’s been hitting me with sticks, and my arms and back aren’t much better.

  197. opposablethumbs says

    Thank you Beatrice and Portia! It was V Scary because of all his social communication etc problems, so we’re extra thrilled that it went quietly OK :-)

    Yay Portia for being the best – I don’t know your instructor, obviously, but I’d be willing to bet that he was double-thinking and second-guessing himself at 100mph something like this:
    Portia excels at fire training activity – first impulse is to celebrate and congratulate – stoopid unfluffy blue mansplainingbrain kicks in – Portia is a woman, she did better than everybody, therefore a woman did this activity better than the men – THIS IS UNPOSSIBLE!>???!}!} – THEREFORE IT DID NOT HAPPEN – therefore she only did well for a not-male-person.
    All done in a split second, and without conscious thought let alone realising what he’d said. eh. ::sigh:: :-\
    Congratulations on the 75′, that’s fantastic. It’s also high enough to leap over this building in a mighty bound, I think.

  198. Portia (aka Smokey the Advocate) says

    Dalillama:
    Thanks. It’s almost worse when, like in this case, they think they’re giving high praise. Ah well.

    Sorry you have extra pain now :(

    opposablethumbs:
    That’s a very nice way to interpret it, I’m going with it :D
    Thanks for the positive spin. My friend who was in the pair with me (one of us up on the ladder, one at the base with the instructor) said he was saying what a natural I was without the qualifier, while I was actually up there, so that supports your version. :D
    The height was exhilarating – he did lift me above the roof of the high school, like he did with everyone, and then joked “Ok, now go ahead and jump onto the roof” I told him I’d stay on the ladder bc the view was better. He said “Ok, you want to climb down from there, or go higher?” I said “Higher.” :D Thanks for the happy commiseration ^_^

    It is such a gorgeous day. Hope those who like the rain have it and those who need rain get it. I am loving the sunny afternoon. Gonna sit on my deck and read some more.

  199. opposablethumbs says

    Thank you Dalillama, much appreciated :-)

    Shit, I’m sorry about the bike skid, though. Just what you want when you’ve already been having lowerlimbpain that makes it hard to be at work. Do you have to do a long shift now? Dog, I hope not.

    Any chance of a long hot soak later, followed by tea, aspirin/something stronger and bed? (It’s already a very dark evening here, so my feelings about bed-is-the-place-to-be may be unduly influenced by that; I keep forgetting it’s only afternoon (?) for you. ). Sympathies and very cautious hugs. :-(((

  200. says

    opposablethumbs
    It was actually on the way to work last night that it happened, and I did have to work a full shift just afterwards. I’m back at work here in a few hours again, but I’ve had time to sleep and get in a hot bath in the meantime. You’re correct about it being afternoon for me, but I work nights.

  201. Azkyroth Drinked the Grammar Too :) says

    “We only get one life. Wasting someone’s time is the subtlest form of murder.”

    From here.

    Someday I’m getting that as a tattoo…

  202. We are Plethora says

    Thanks to all for the warm welcomes.
    1) horses: beautiful, powerful, majestic creatures, although as a city system we don’t have much direct experience with them unfortunately; 10 out of 10, would ride
    2) peas: we’ll have to politely pass on the peas, unless smothered in melted cheddar cheese (see number 3 below)
    3) cheese: yes, please! we love it, cheese makes almost everything better
    4) Miracle Whip: same as above, zestier than regular old mayo

  203. Ogvorbis says

    Azkyroth @286:

    In high school and college, I had long to medium long hair. Then I was in the Army. I tried to let it grow out after the Army. It grew in all directions. I don’t look good with an afro.

    Morgan!? @288:

    Oddly, it’s also the anniversary of The Battle of Balaclava and the charge of the Light Brigade. “Theirs not to reason why, theirs but to do and die…”

    A lot of good clothing came out of that, though. Lord Raglan’s feud with Lord Cardigan, at the Battle of Balaclava . . . .

    I wonder if Lieutenant Blouse was there?

    ========

    Boy went for an interview at a nursing home (Catholic, but with a really good reputation and multiple facilities) and was, basically, told that he was overqualified for the job for which he was applying so, after most likely a great deal of communications between the kitchen manager and hunan resources, they offered him a job that actually covers three jobs (with him eventually moving to full-time cook) at more per hour than anything but the cook job.

    =========

    We are Plethora @ 299:

    Horses are evil. Intelligent and malevolent.

    Peas are wonderful (not the canned shit, but just about every other form).

    I agree with the cheese.

    Miracle Whip is not food.

    You score 25%. Please report to the spunking couch ASAP.

  204. says

    Quick question….

    Is there some reason why the wordpress account I use to comment here (infrequently, I know) wouldn’t be recognized when I try to use it for other sites using wordpress?

    I just tried to comment on a post on skepchick, and it did the “wrong info shake” when I tried to log in there. Thoughts?

    I figured I’d ask you fine folks since the commentariat has an overlap.

    Thanks!

  205. Ogvorbis says

    Today, working out in our fee collection booth, I was listening to Kniaz Igor by Borodin (the opera has the melody which became the 1960s song Stranger in Paradise) and a visitor not only recognized the opera, but began to sing along. His wife then thanked me for putting him in an opera mood for the rest of the day.

  206. says

    Portia, wow, you are as always and for many reasons, Awesome!

    Dalillama, ouch!

    opposablethumbs, how lovely, I am vicariously happy for you and SonSpawn!

    We Are Plethora, welcome! If the world gets to be too much, the pillow fort is over here in the corner, with stuffies for cuddling and soft blankies for snuggling and hiding under. If you see the bogeyman, just put the fuzziest blankie over his head and he will bother you no more.

  207. Portia (aka Smokey the Advocate) says

    Anne:
    Heeeeee thank you. I feel the same way about you.

    I’m going to cook dinner and have some wine. Anyone in here want to keep me from drinking alone? Tony’s probably working ^_^

  208. Portia (aka Smokey the Advocate) says

    Og:

    Sounds like great news for your son? If I’ve read you right, congrats to him :)

  209. sugarfrosted says

    I had a question about usefulness of the different subject GREs. How applicable is the knowledge they test to researches in the field. The math subject GRE is awful. It is stuff I haven’t done in years and likely won’t have to do much of, (though in the course of teaching a course I would likely relearn for that course and then “forget it” soon after.) I’m kind of embittered by the experience right now.

  210. David Marjanović says

    *hugs for opposablethumbs ^_^ *

    “You’re a natural!”
    {Portia happydances internally}
    “…yeah, you did very well for a female of the species.”
    {Portia screams internally}

    It was so nice for a minute : ( Now I have no idea if I actually did it well or not.

    Probably you did – and he thought he was giving you a compliment by saying other women do worse. *Picard & Riker double facepalm*

    “For Harry, England and St. George!”
    Happy St. Crispin’s Day!

    To…day is Austria’s longest national holiday: it’ll last 25 hours. ^_^ In a bit over a quarter of an hour the clocks will jump back.

  211. says

    Portia @306:
    I’m off work now (slow night, again; I’ve started searching for a second job).
    Congrats btw, on the aerial ladder climb! Was it a timed exercise?

    ****
    We are Plethora @299:
    Gonna have to disagree with you a bit. *Nothing* can make peas palatable.
    They make for great weapons in a slingshot though.

    ****

    Ogvorbis @300:
    I love that typo in your last line…

    ****

  212. Portia (aka Smokey the Advocate) says

    Tony:
    Bummer that it’s slow at work. I hope that having it as a cushion takes some stress out of the job search this time around.

    Care to share a glass of cab?

    This exercise wasn’t timed. We were timed on how fast we can put on all our gear, including air mask and turn on the air, and I passed that the first time, which was cool. This was more ranked on whether you could actually complete it (the climb, the locking in your safety harness, the gauging possible hazards on the roof of the building should you hypothetically have to climb onto it, and then climbing back down.) Mine was a little more challenging given that I climbed all the way down from the 75 ft instead of the operator lowering the ladder to about 20 feet instead. It was really interesting to feel the ladder move up and down and extend and retract and left and right, while you’re on the end of it. I expected to be much more nervous.

    Long answer for a yes or no question ^_^

    Tomorrow is training on the jaws of life, which I feel pretty comfortable with given that I’ve had other trainings on them. Although I think the set we’ll be using is different than the ones my department has so it will be a good experience. Plus cutting up cars is really really fun, especially when it’s not because someone was in a bad accident and no one is inside the car actually in trouble.

  213. says

    Portia:
    Sure, I’ll take a glass of cab. Thanks!
    For some reason I never realized that the ladders moved left and right. I always thought they were just up and down. Are the jaws of life a complicated device to operate?

  214. Portia (aka Smokey the Advocate) says

    Tony:
    It’s a cab called Irony. Irony is delicious ^_^

    Our aerial ladder truck actually has a joystick to control the various directional movements. It’s kinda funny to me. But yeah, the ladder can typically rotate all the way or nearly all the way around.

    The jaws are a little complicated. I guess the more complicated part is being able to know about the composition of your average car, so you know where to cut and what to expect to possibly fly out at you if you do. Also, “jaws” is a term that applies to several tools, really. Extrication tools include spreaders, cutters, combo, rams, and air bags. The cutters are what people think of when they say jaws.

  215. says

    The first memory I have of the car accident that messed up my back was of the jaws of life removing the door of my car. They’re pretty scary from the inside of the car, but also relieving. And Smokey already knows what I think of her heroism. :)

  216. says

    Portia @315:
    I was thinking of the spreader myself. Interesting stuff at your link. Thanks. Have you used the air bags yet?

    ****

    CaitieCat @316:
    How bad was the accident you were in (obviously the injury to your back was significant, but I was hoping there wasn’t anything else)?

  217. says

    My VW Rabbit was T-boned by a Granada doing an estimated 70 km/h. The car was thrown about fifty feet into a concrete lamppost, which cracked but held with the cable tension. The driver’s side door pillar (4dr car) ended up about 1m from the opposite side, with the seats displacing internally to accommodate.

    I had a severe concussion, with temporary amnesia and aphasia, both of which faded inside a year. Dislocated left elbow, sprained left knee, and unknown to me then, micro fractures of my lumbar vertebrae.

    The other driver was 17, drunk, and running a red light – at a confluence of two one-way streets.

    Made me very glad to live in a country with proper health care. I’d been truly shocked about six months earlier when accompanying an 80yo woman to ER in Massachetc., and seeing them stop her from entering with her clearly shattered and agonising hip until her husband arrived with a credit card. I couldn’t believe I was standing in the richest country in the world, and seeing this.

  218. Portia (aka Smokey the Advocate) says

    Cait;
    *gentlehugs* You are so nice to me.
    I can only imagine how it feels to need to be cut out of a car, having experienced a fairly severe impact with a semi truck. Last time we did the training, we had one of the more experienced firefighters sit inside the car – he was also a paramedic. At some points he hollered in fake pain – afterwards he told us he shouted when a real patient would have, like when the equipment made the car rattle or something. We’ve always gotta remember that the person in there is the whole reason we’re doing it.

    Tony:
    I have not used the air bags on an actual scene, but we did use them on the last training last month.
    As a sidenote, we’ve just discovered that the local towing company will bring us a car, let us cut it up, and then come and literally pick up the pieces. All for free. I don’t know if it fits in a compactor better that way, or what, but it’s kind of awesome.

    btw, Tony, are there other places you think you’d like to work or think about applying?

  219. Portia (aka Smokey the Advocate) says

    Cait:

    I should do that thing where I re-read comments more than twice before posting, because I end up wanting to clarify:
    I know what it’s like to feel shaken up and scared immediately after an accident, and I can’t imagine how much more terrifying it is to not be able to get out of the car and then have the giant tools coming a t you while they maybe break the glass after maybe covering you with a blanket…eep.

    *hugs*

  220. says

    CaitieCat @318:
    Damn. Those injuries sound awful. I’m glad things weren’t worse.

    ****

    Portia @319:

    btw, Tony, are there other places you think you’d like to work or think about applying?

    I have a few places in mind.
    If you don’t mind, I’d prefer we not talk about that right now, bc every time I think about it, it bums me out and I just want to crawl into a ball and cry my eyes out.

    I think I’ve had that Irony Cabernet, btw. IIRC, it was quite tasty.

  221. Portia (aka Smokey the Advocate) says

    Also,

    forgot to say:

    Thank you for saying so, David :)

    One more whine – the air packs are not made for a smaller torso. They could be functional and made to fit me better, but of course they are made for men. I get the reasons why, but it means I have to accommodate the fact that my gear doesn’t exactly fit. The weight isn’t distributed on my back properly, so wearing the pack for extended time is harder than it would be if I had broader shoulders and a longer torso. And we wore them long enough this morning that the bigger, taller, guys were even complaining about the soreness of it. And yet, I do well “for a female.” HARUMPH, I say.

    I’ll stop spamming now…

  222. says

    Portia @323:
    Do you have to have an account to view the pic? When I clicked your link it took me to the Imgur sign up page, rather than the image (which is odd, since others have linked to images from Imgur before and I’ve not had this problem).

  223. Portia (aka Smokey the Advocate) says

    WMDKItty 324:

    I’m not sure if it’s Thriller specifically. I do know it made me giggle. :)

    Tony 325:
    I’m not sure what went wrong, usually you can just look at imgur pictures without signing in.
    This and this should take you to each .gif, there were only two of them.

  224. says

    Portia @326:
    Ah, I see them now. Ha! Dancing orcs are funny indeed.

    ****

    Google exec sets new skydiving world record by jumping from the stratosphere.
    He was 25 miles up and broke the sound barrier during his descent.
    Wow.
    I’ve gone skydiving and while it was nerve wracking, it was fun as all get out. Once you’re in free fall, there’s nothing you can do, but scream and…well…fall. Once I realized there was no turning back, I relaxed and boyohboy, it’s like riding a rollercoaster times 100! The freefall wasn’t long enough though. I think it was something like 45 seconds. I want to fall for 5 minutes!

  225. carlie says

    Opposeablethumbs – yay for SonSpawn! Isn’t it the most wonderful feeling of success?

    Ogvorbis – yay for Boy and his job!

  226. Hekuni Cat, MQG says

    Hi Lounge! I have missed you all very much. Now that I’ve declared total threadruptcy, I’m hoping to be a regular again.

    Portia – *many pouncehug and chocolate* How’s life?

    Tony! and carlie *[pounce]hugs and chocolate* if and as you want them. If I hope life is treating both of you well.

  227. says

    Hekuni Cat @329:
    I’ll take a hug or three. Life ain’t grand for me at the moment (actually, that’s been the norm for this year).

    ****
    Ashley Miller criticizes the bigotry displayed by the Morehouse football team at a viewing of the movie Dear White Men. One of the characters in the movie is a black gay man, and he gets beaten by some white characters in the movie. Apparently several of the Morehouse football players cheered on the beating and showed that they were bigots themselves (yes, Ashley points out the irony).
    Several people from Morehouse have shown up in the comments. Some to apologize for the players. Others to criticize Ashley for critiquing the team. Some made excuses for the homophobia of the team. Ugh.

  228. rq says

    *hugs* for Tony, *threecheers* for opposablethumbs and SonSpawn, *hugs* for carlie, *feministfinger* in the general direction of Portia‘s instructor (plus a *highfive* for her), and general good wishes for all.
    Oh, *pouncehug* for Hekuni Cat :)

  229. nyarlathotep says

    I can’t believe it’s taken this long for me to discover the wonders of the Southern Lord record label again. Sunn 0))’s Black One and Earth’s the Bees Made Honey in the Lion’s Skull remain two or my favorite albums ever.

  230. Beatrice, an amateur cynic looking for a happy thought says

    good morning

    I’m against the summer/winter hour changing, but I could live with it if it always gave me an extra hour of sleep :)

  231. opposablethumbs says

    Anne and David M, thank you! It’s funny how much it means to be able to share things like that – it’s such a tiny thing in itself, but after so many years of speech therapy and SEN and spending half of Primary School at a specialist language unit instead of mainstream school … and for the last several years having no birthday … it’s a little thing that takes on huge significance :-))))

    Ogvorbis, yay for Boy – when I read “overqualified” my first thought was ugh, so they said no. So many people and organisations are reluctant to change a routine setup, to the point of never even considering it. The fact that they actually made the effort to adapt a situation in order to be able to have him speaks volumes! I hope it turns out to be a great place to work :-)

    We Are Plethora, hmmm. Horses are wonderful ::nyah to Ogvorbis and all the horse-haters:: but peas are a dodgy proposition (unless freshly picked, which are so rarely seen as to make me doubt their existence); cheese is essential but miracle whip? Oh dear. Tsk tsk tsk. Clearly the invention of some evil mastermind seeking to make humanity give up in despair. I’ve carefully maintained the distance of an entire ocean away from any such Abomination.

  232. opposablethumbs says

    Huge ginormous hugs to carlie and rq :-)))

    Very many hugs to Tony!, an exceptionally excellent person to whom I wish a damn sight better breaks than he has been getting lately :-(

  233. says

    Bad day. We were supposed to be home from Georgia yesterday, but there was a fire in the Charlotte terminal that shut down the airport at exactly the time we were supposed to take off for Minnesota — we were stuck in the E concourse with thousands of other people, while the plane was loading way over on the B concourse. Then they took off without us, and about 50 other people. If they’d delayed the flight just 20 minutes, it would have spared everyone a huge amount of hassle, but would have hurt their on-time stats. We know what’s important.

    So we got bumped to a much later flight. Which meant we spent all yesterday sitting in an airport, lurched into Minneapolis late at night, and were too tired for the 3 hour drive home…so yet another cheap motel for the night. We’ll probably not get home until this afternoon.

  234. opposablethumbs says

    Ugh, PZ. Sympathies for the exhaustion, frustration and airline intransigence :-(

  235. carlie says

    Oh, no, PZ! So sorry. Hope you get home soon.

    Hi, Hekuni Cat! Good to see you again!!! :)

    Hugs to everyone. :)

  236. says

    PZ:
    Sorry to hear about the travel woes.
    Hope the fire wasn’t serious.

    ****

    Model and tv personality Chrissy Teigen quits Twitter after barrage of hate following her comments on the recent shooting in Canada.

    But after getting a vitriolic response to her comments regarding the October 22 shootings in Ottawa, Ontario, Teigen posted that she’s quitting Twitter for the (presumably) safer pastures of Instagram.
    Here’s what started it all: On Wednesday, as the shooting story unfolded, Teigen posted: “active shooting in Canada, or as we call it in america, wednesday. That’s not a joke. It is a fact. … I’ve lost faith in this world. Sorry if it comes off as being unemotional. There is just so much bad.”
    It seems the negative reaction fell on Teigen pretty quickly, as she then had to clarify that she was not making a joke at the expense of Canada, but as a sardonic observation about gun control in America. (Incidentally, it was just days before the Marysville, Washington, school shooting.)
    However, that clarification apparently didn’t change the tide of response Teigen received.
    “You should probably stick to having your picture taken for a living,” replied one user. “So, how much of an stupid bitch are you?” asked another.

    Why do I think misogynistic comments made up the bulk of the responses to her?

  237. Saad says

    For people who have been following the Marysville school shooting news,

    Is there any word of the police trying to find out how Fryberg got the gun and prosecuting the person who let him have access to the gun? Doesn’t the NRA and all the gun advocates want guns to be owned by responsible people and thus want irresponsible people held accountable?

    The only thing I’ve been able to find is this:

    Law enforcement sources said Fryberg used a .40-caliber Beretta handgun. Officials said the gun was legally acquired, but did not say if Fryberg was the owner.

    I have little knowledge on this topic, but what the fuck? Can 14-year olds legally own handguns?

  238. blf says

    Of course poopyhead is having travel problems. He didn’t take the TGV.

    Oh, sorry, this is in a ÜberStupidbAckwardstan… the place where deliberately destroying the environment is mandatory.

  239. Portia (aka Smokey the Advocate) says

    Tony @327
    I went skydiving when I was 18. We had the silliness to go in November, so it was reallllly cold. But yeah, pretty neat:D I felt really relaxed, too, once I was able to breathe after the parachute opened. :)

    Tony:
    *moarhugs*
    Those football players should be required to attend a class on systematic oppression. Or something :(


    Hekuni Cat:
    *pouncehug* Hi! Great to see you, how are you? Life is treating me pretty well, overall. Doing a semester-long fire class, and working quite a bit, and doing election/campaign stuff. Right now I’m working up the energy to make some coffee. :)

    *waves at carlie

  240. Seven of Mine: Shrieking Feminist Harpy says

    Doesn’t the NRA and all the gun advocates want guns to be owned by responsible people

    Everyone’s a responsible gun owner until they’re not at which point how dare you bring up gun control so soon after this horrible tragedy?

    and thus want irresponsible people held accountable?

    The irresponsible people are the ones who failed to already be armed so they could save the day.

  241. blf says

    Doesn’t the NRA and all the gun advocates want guns to be owned by responsible people

    No. The nra is (largely) composed of nutters, far too many facist and/or racist for them to be taken seriously, and (possibly most) of the rest just plain stooooopid, who want only people similar to them to have guns, voting rights, money, be in the county legally, and be eligible for government jobs and society’s welfare. Everyone else should either be executed, driven out of country, or enslaved.

    The nra is one of the most dangerous and regressive groups in USAlientstani today, disturbingly similar to the israeli military and “government” (who can do and never are wrong), the child raping and moronic cults (ditto), al-qaeda and daʿish (ditto), and other totalitarian groups (ditto), including USAlienstani’s own thugs (ditto), which they seem to control.

    What is astonishing is there are groups in USAlienstani, such as the gun owners of america, who are even further more extreme (the president of that group, Larry Pratt, is so extreme he has hinted that politicians you(? probably he) disagree with should be afraid of assassination, and that gun control advocates were directly responsible the mass-murder of children in Sandy Hook (“because” there were no armed guards or teachers)).

  242. blf says

    Some time ago, I asked for suggestions on how to enjoy Kraken Black Spiced Rum. To-date, the beast (I meant to type “best” there but “beast” is more appropriate…) is to take some organic apricot juice which is several years past its use-by date (but has been keep cold or frozen the entire time) and use it as a mixer, probably at about a 4:1 ratio (4 parts ancient juice, not monster rum). I call it the Lethal Organi
     …
       …
         SPLAT!

     

    +++ OUT OF RUM ERROR +++
    +++ REDO FROM MOAR CHEESE +++

  243. Nerd of Redhead, Dances OM Trolls says

    Today is ghostie and ghoulie day here in Redheadville, the city decreeing 1-4 only, but this will be the first time that we won’t be handing out treats when we have been home. That is the Redhead’s job, and we can’t get her bed outside. If we could, she would be out handing out treats. Being in a wheelchair doesn’t stop her, but is does cause some of younger ghosties and ghoulies to be a little more shy.

    I have other work to do today, like putting up storm windows, getting the cars checked for winter, and tightening the clutch spring on auger for the snowthrower. This on top of feeding and depooing the Redhead. Busy day.

  244. blf says

    Being in a wheelchair doesn’t stop [a certain redhead], but is does cause some of younger ghosties and ghoulies to be a little more shy.

    An big axe or sword will solve the problem: “Is that a real axe?”
    “Yes.”
    Groovy! Can you chop up my bother, please?”
    “Brother. And with pleasure…”
    WHACK!
    Ohhhhhh! Neat! Thanks.”
    “No problems.”

  245. Beatrice, an amateur cynic looking for a happy thought says

    Anne,

    Or you could do the wheelchair up to look like a throne, and the Redhead could be Supreme Empress.

    Sounds like fun, but it seems like Nerd already has more than enough to do. :(

  246. says

    Two Stunning Trailers for ‘Tant de Forets,’ an New Animated Short by Burcu Sakur and Geoffrey Godet

    Tant de Forets is an animated short by french illustrators and animators, Burcu Sakur and Geoffrey Godet that was released on French TV earlier this year. According the the animators, the piece is based on a poem by Jacques Prévert by the same name that “speaks of the irony of the fact that newspapers warn us about deforestation although they are made of paper themselves.” The film’s illustrative style seen in the two trailers here is unlike anything I’ve seen before, with beautiful use of color, depth, and geometry that’s somewhat reminiscent of Charley Harper in parts but with a bit more depth.

    At 43 seconds and 38 seconds respectively, the trailers are incredibly short, but visually striking.

  247. Beatrice, an amateur cynic looking for a happy thought says

    This country has come to a point where I’m actually taking into consideration voting for a priest for president because he is more progressive than most other candidates. O.o

  248. carlie says

    I saw the kraken rum at the store yesterday! But it was a bigger bottle than I wanted, because I was just making my first rum cake.

    Side note: rum cake glaze tastes really good straight. ;)

  249. says

    Grammar question. In response to Ashley Miller’s post about the Morehouse football team, I blogged about the reaction of several of the commenters in that thread. One of my comments contained this phrase “an historically black college”. When I spell checked the post though, the phrase was corrected to “a historically black college”. I always thought the rule was an before a vowel sound or silent letter like the “h” in historically.

    (I know there’s not a question in there…humor me :)

  250. blf says

    Beatrice, I have no idea what country you are talking about, but… (1) Priests should be assumed to be child rapists; and (2) Politicians should be assumed to be corrupt. In the extremely rare case neither is true, you must be in an different Universe, on a planet with pink skies and everripe strawberry and cheese vines.

  251. rq says

    Tony
    I’ve seen both used in front of ‘historically’ and related words. *shrug* I guess it’s just one of those grammar things.

  252. blf says

    Tony, With exceptions, “spell checkers” are rarely cognizant of surrounding context; that is, in your example, because the word following the “an” didn’t start with vowel was very possibly why it was flagged as poor grammar. Whether or not it is poor grammar is for the nazis to argue over, but unassumingly / unquestionably taking the advice of an automated spell checker is perhaps rarely sensible.

  253. blf says

    NOT THAT I DRANK ALL OF THE RUM GLAZE OR ANYTHING

    I should hope not. What you don’t drink makes rather good bath suds.
    Then you drink it…

  254. says

    Beatrice @369:

    H in historically isn’t silent… no?

    I think if you say the word aloud without any prior words, I always though you pronounce the “H”, but when it’s said in a sentence it’s often…muted(?) or silent.
    For instance:
    “Historically, the Stonewall Riots kicked of the Gay Rights Movement”
    vs
    “The Stonewall Riots were an historically important moment in the Gay Rights Movement”.

    Maybe it’s just a queer shoop thing…I’ve been told I am unique in all the 9 worlds.

  255. blf says

    I’ve been told I am unique in all the 9 worlds.

    Nine-sided dice, you mean…
    (Which probably means yer one of the tenth-or-other sides, the main question being: In which dimension?)

  256. says

    PZ @#337, when you travel the microbes in your gut suffer.

    As Time reports, the microbes became lax at important duties such as DNA repair, growth and detoxification. Their communities also changed in composition, and the mice became more susceptible to weight gain and catching diseases. When the researchers transferred some of the jet-lagged microbes into the guts of other mice whose microbiome had been sterilized, Time continues, they found that those mice, too, suffered from problems like obesity.

    Finally, the researchers took the study one step further, extracting microbes over a three week period from two people who had just arrived in Israel from the U.S. The bacteria in the jet-lagged people showed “startlingly similar” issues as the bacteria in the jet-lagged mice, Time writes. The team even went so far as to transfer those human microbes into other sterile mice, finding that “transferring the gut microbes from the point where jet lag was at its highest induced much more obesity and glucose intolerance,” the researchers told Time. […]

    May only apply to travelers who change time zones, but I’m betting it applies to all weary travelers.
    Smithsonian magazine link.

  257. says

    Tony!, Beatrice
    Basically, in some dialects of English, the initial h is sometimes or always dropped. Whether it’s customary to precede such a word with a or an locally depends on which dialect is more prestigious, usually. IME, most Yanks use a, but most Brits use an.

  258. opposablethumbs says

    fwiw (as a Brit-type person; sample size – one) I always sound the “h” and therefore always precede it with “a”, not “an”.

    I also have a (probably class-ridden) strong aversion to calling the letter itself (when spelling aloud etc.) “haitch”. It is pronounced “aitch”, dammit. ::shudders unreasonably::

  259. Seven of Mine: Shrieking Feminist Harpy says

    Tony!

    “Historically, the Stonewall Riots kicked of the Gay Rights Movement”
    vs
    “The Stonewall Riots were an historically important moment in the Gay Rights Movement”.

    Arguably the “H” is minimized in the 2nd one because enunciating it takes more effort after a word ending in “n”. If you said “a historically”, enunciating the “H” is easier. YMMV.

  260. Nerd of Redhead, Dances OM Trolls says

    Ah, the joys of machine maintenance. Craftsman stuck the wrong manual into the snowblower kit, and the job looked tedious and obnoxious. Turns out with the right manual, the maintenance was much easier, since the cable adjustment was much different.

  261. says

    I vote for “an historically …” in the sentence Tony referenced up-thread.

    Here’s an addition to our list of Republicans saying/doing stupid stuff: Rick Scott’s campaign for governor of Florida is sending white hecklers to the rallies of his opponent … to those rallies which are held in mostly black neighborhoods.

    What began Saturday afternoon in Fort Lauderdale as an early voting rally for Charlie Crist turned into a shouting match, featuring the former governor’s supporters squaring off against those backing his opponent Rick Scott.

    Crist’s bus pulled into the parking lot of the African-American Research Library and Cultural Center at about noon Saturday and was greeted by a crowd of supporters, mostly black Democrats. Also on hand were Scott supporters, mostly white, carrying “shame on you” signs. Scott’s group included one person barking into a megaphone.[…]

    Miami Herald link.

    […] Rick Scott eliminated early voting the Sunday before election day for the sole reason of preventing black Churches from organizing poll drives.

    You know, Rick Scott has spent the last four years suppressing the African-American vote, fiercely defended George Zimmerman while refusing any changes to our “Stand Your Ground” law, cut completely state support for our black colleges, refused to appoint minority judges, and even told black legislators they had a sixth-grade education. […]

    It would serve Rick Scott right if black voters turned out in droves, despite Scott’s voter-restriction efforts. That guy needs to go.
    Daily Kos link.

  262. blf says

    It would serve Rick Scott right if black voters turned out in droves, despite Scott’s voter-restriction efforts. That guy needs to go.

    Don’t worry. The pope-controlled supreme “court”, with the assistance of the money-is-all-that-matters legal “profession”, will ensure that after his mandatory three terms as President of USAlienstani, he is crowned Emperor of the Universes. Assuming, of course, the Kochroach brothers agree.

  263. says

    Weirdness afoot in Canadian media land. Canadian readers, and some of the American ones as well, are likely to be familiar with Gian Ghomeshi, host of CBC Radio 1’s weekday pop culture show Q. It was announced today that the CBC is dropping him. They’ve said there is some issue that “precludes” them from continuing their relationship with him. This follows an announcement on Friday he’d be taking indefinite leave from the show. In response Ghomeshi is apparently going to sue CBC for 50 million bucks for breach of contract and bad faith. Rumours are starting to fly around about what the issue might be, and I’m getting a bad feeling about all this.

  264. chigau (違う) says

    Personally…
    I say the word ‘history’ with a hard aitch … A History of Whatever
    I say ‘historical’ with a soft aitch … An ‘Istorical Overview of Whatever
    I … ‘ereby refuse to even try to justify this

  265. Beatrice, an amateur cynic looking for a happy thought says

    Sidebar menu often won’t open on my mobile, does anyone else have that problem?

  266. rq says

    timgueguen
    I read about the publicly amicable departure earlier today.
    Did not read about the 50 million lawsuit. Whoa.

  267. toska says

    chigau
    Winter has come to my little splotch on the map too. A little late this year, but it is here… Ugh. I’ll enjoy outside again in April or May.

  268. thunk: metallocene says

    Hello again. I’m quite threadrupt, mainly because I’ve been busy with schoolwork that finally decided to happen. I bid a welcome to all newcomers (or something of this variety).

    Going to university in a conservative state has been an interesting experience. The administration is tolerant enough, and the school paper has quite enough social justice stuff for me, but my immediate neighbors have quite the religious conservativism in them. My fellow meteorology students, quite often raised in rural areas on a steady diet of pushy religion and Fox News, grate on my nerves quite a bit. But we still somehow get along.

    This has freed me up to once again examine my political preferences (slightly less leftist than I thought I was, but not much), my weather preferences (warm is nice), and my music preferences (less dudebro-ey). I’m working on the new media preferences. All in all, while it may seem like I’m becoming a hermit, college has been enriching.

  269. chigau (違う) says

    thunk
    *hugs*
    welcome back

    Why do the “pushy religious” take up meteorology?
    Doesn’t praying work?

    It’s SNOWING here.

  270. Portia (aka Smokey the Advocate) says

    blf @378

    with the assistance of the money-is-all-that-matters legal “profession”,

    The thing about wild generalizations is that it only takes one data point to disprove them.

    *raises hand and gives pointed look*

    Please stop it.

  271. Portia (aka Smokey the Advocate) says

    thunk:

    Good to see you. Weirdly religious people are hard to take, obviously, but the “getting along” part of that is good news. Sounds like you’re doing well?

  272. Nerd of Redhead, Dances OM Trolls says

    It’s SNOWING here.

    It’s not snowing in Dah YooPee yet. But it will
    I scared off any snow by working on my snowblower (never mind today was the nicest weather we have had in years for the ghosties and ghoulies, low sixties and sunny).

  273. FossilFishy (NOBODY, and proud of it!) says

    timgueguen #379

    He’s released a statement. It doesn’t look good. My first impression is that it amounts to a “women be irrationally vindictive” defence and bit of pre-emptive well poisoning. I guess with the lawsuit, assuming CBC doesn’t settle, we’ll find out. Blockquoted here because I couldn’t find it outside Facebook.

    Dear everyone,

    I am writing today because I want you to be the first to know some news.

    This has been the hardest time of my life. I am reeling from the loss of my father. I am in deep personal pain and worried about my mom. And now my world has been rocked by so much more.

    Today, I was fired from the CBC.

    For almost 8 years I have been the host of a show I co-created on CBC called Q. It has been my pride and joy. My fantastic team on Q are super-talented and have helped build something beautiful.

    I have always operated on the principle of doing my best to maintain a dignity and a commitment to openness and truth, both on and off the air. I have conducted major interviews, supported Canadian talent, and spoken out loudly in my audio essays about ideas, issues, and my love for this country. All of that is available for anyone to hear or watch. I have known, of course, that not everyone always agrees with my opinions or my style, but I’ve never been anything but honest. I have doggedly defended the CBC and embraced public broadcasting. This is a brand I’ve been honoured to help grow.

    All this has now changed.

    Today I was fired from the company where I’ve been working for almost 14 years – stripped from my show, barred from the building and separated from my colleagues. I was given the choice to walk away quietly and to publicly suggest that this was my decision. But I am not going to do that. Because that would be untrue. Because I’ve been fired. And because I’ve done nothing wrong.

    I’ve been fired from the CBC because of the risk of my private sex life being made public as a result of a campaign of false allegations pursued by a jilted ex girlfriend and a freelance writer.

    As friends and family of mine, you are owed the truth.

    I have commenced legal proceedings against the CBC, what’s important to me is that you know what happened and why.

    Forgive me if what follows may be shocking to some.

    I have always been interested in a variety of activities in the bedroom but I only participate in sexual practices that are mutually agreed upon, consensual, and exciting for both partners.

    About two years ago I started seeing a woman in her late 20s. Our relationship was affectionate, casual and passionate. We saw each other on and off over the period of a year and began engaging in adventurous forms of sex that included role-play, dominance and submission. We discussed our interests at length before engaging in rough sex (forms of BDSM). We talked about using safe words and regularly checked in with each other about our comfort levels. She encouraged our role-play and often was the initiator. We joked about our relations being like a mild form of Fifty Shades of Grey or a story from Lynn Coady’s Giller-Prize winning book last year. I don’t wish to get into any more detail because it is truly not anyone’s business what two consenting adults do. I have never discussed my private life before. Sexual preferences are a human right.

    Despite a strong connection between us it became clear to me that our on-and-off dating was unlikely to grow into a larger relationship and I ended things in the beginning of this year. She was upset by this and sent me messages indicating her disappointment that I would not commit to more, and her anger that I was seeing others.

    After this, in the early spring there began a campaign of harassment, vengeance and demonization against me that would lead to months of anxiety.

    It came to light that a woman had begun anonymously reaching out to people that I had dated (via Facebook) to tell them she had been a victim of abusive relations with me. In other words, someone was reframing what had been an ongoing consensual relationship as something nefarious. I learned – through one of my friends who got in contact with this person – that someone had rifled through my phone on one occasion and taken down the names of any woman I had seemed to have been dating in recent years. This person had begun methodically contacting them to try to build a story against me. Increasingly, female friends and ex-girlfriends of mine told me about these attempts to smear me.

    Someone also began colluding with a freelance writer who was known not to be a fan of mine and, together, they set out to try to find corroborators to build a case to defame me. She found some sympathetic ears by painting herself as a victim and turned this into a campaign. The writer boldly started contacting my friends, acquaintances and even work colleagues – all of whom came to me to tell me this was happening and all of whom recognized it as a trumped up way to attack me and undermine my reputation. Everyone contacted would ask the same question, if I had engaged in non-consensual behavior why was the place to address this the media?

    The writer tried to peddle the story and, at one point, a major Canadian media publication did due diligence but never printed a story. One assumes they recognized these attempts to recast my sexual behaviour were fabrications. Still, the spectre of mud being flung onto the Internet where online outrage can demonize someone before facts can refute false allegations has been what I’ve had to live with.

    And this leads us to today and this moment. I’ve lived with the threat that this stuff would be thrown out there to defame me. And I would sue. But it would do the reputational damage to me it was intended to do (the ex has even tried to contact me to say that she now wishes to refute any of these categorically untrue allegations). But with me bringing it to light, in the coming days you will prospectively hear about how I engage in all kinds of unsavoury aggressive acts in the bedroom. And the implication may be made that this happens non-consensually. And that will be a lie. But it will be salacious gossip in a world driven by a hunger for “scandal”. And there will be those who choose to believe it and to hate me or to laugh at me. And there will be an attempt to pile on. And there will be the claim that there are a few women involved (those who colluded with my ex) in an attempt to show a “pattern of behaviour”. And it will be based in lies but damage will be done. But I am telling you this story in the hopes that the truth will, finally, conquer all.

    I have been open with the CBC about this since these categorically untrue allegations ramped up. I have never believed it was anyone’s business what I do in my private affairs but I wanted my bosses to be aware that this attempt to smear me was out there. CBC has been part of the team of friends and lawyers assembled to deal with this for months. On Thursday I voluntarily showed evidence that everything I have done has been consensual. I did this in good faith and because I know, as I have always known, that I have nothing to hide. This when the CBC decided to fire me.

    CBC execs confirmed that the information provided showed that there was consent. In fact, they later said to me and my team that there is no question in their minds that there has always been consent. They said they’re not concerned about the legal side. But then they said that this type of sexual behavior was unbecoming of a prominent host on the CBC. They said that I was being dismissed for “the risk of the perception that may come from a story that could come out.” To recap, I am being fired in my prime from the show I love and built and threw myself into for years because of what I do in my private life.

    Let me be the first to say that my tastes in the bedroom may not be palatable to some folks. They may be strange, enticing, weird, normal, or outright offensive to others. We all have our secret life. But that is my private life. That is my personal life. And no one, and certainly no employer, should have dominion over what people do consensually in their private life.

    And so, with no formal allegations, no formal complaints, no complaints, not one, to the HR department at the CBC (they told us they’d done a thorough check and were satisfied), and no charges, I have lost my job based on a campaign of vengeance. Two weeks after the death of my beautiful father I have been fired from the CBC because of what I do in my private life.

    I have loved the CBC. The Q team are the best group of people in the land. My colleagues and producers and on-air talent at the CBC are unparalleled in being some of the best in the business. I have always tried to be a good soldier and do a good job for my country. I am still in shock. But I am telling this story to you so the truth is heard. And to bring an end to the nightmare.

  274. cicely says

    Playing catch-up.
    But first, a link: This Date in Labor History October 26, 1676

    <cumulative reaction to Revealed Stoopid>
    Just when I think Republicans can’t say/do anything dumber….
    *sigh*
    </cumulative reaction to Revealed Stoopid>

    Azkyroth, I recognize that meal all too well.
    In fact, my stomach gave a mighty *lurch* when I clicked into your link and saw…that.

    carlie, it may be different with vocal music, but I do know that the breath control comes back more easily than I expected, where woodwind is concerned. After a more than 20 year gap, even!

    The Beetlejuice cartoon series was Son’s Intro to Bad Punmanship.
    :)

    *hugs* for Dalillama.
    I hope the noisy neighbors get sorted out soon.

    Welcome In, We are Plethora!
    I think rq is a little bit distracted just now, so I will take it upon myself to administer the Questionnaire:
    1) Horses—pro, con, other?
    2) Peas—ditto.
    3) Cheeses—how much is Too Much? And what kind/s?
    4) Write a short essay on Miracle Whip™, and what constitutes its Best Use.

    225

  275. carlie says

    Personally…
    I say the word ‘history’ with a hard aitch … A History of Whatever
    I say ‘historical’ with a soft aitch … An ‘Istorical Overview of Whatever
    I … ‘ereby refuse to even try to justify this

    I do the exact same thing.

    Yay, thunk’s here! :)

  276. thunk: metallocene says

    Oh yes, I’m doing fine. Also fun. That’s nice. My studies are mostly fine, and I’m distracting myself with geography. This is why I keep forgetting to come here.

    Nothing too eventful happening in my life, aside from this. I saw both eclipses this month, which were nice. The boredom is relaxing, but it also means I don’t have much to talk about.

    –I pronounce initial h in a lot of words, including those wherein it is considered wrong.

    blf: Keep in mind population densities are lower in the United States. Even if high-speed rail networks are built, Morris, MN is not likely to be the first destination. This isn’t purely out of environmental malice.

  277. says

    I will not be posting for a little while my wrist is all messed up and I can’t type because it hurts. please excuse punctuation I am using my hat my phone’s voice command text thing y

  278. cicely says

    Nerd, it’s good to hear that The Redhead’s condition is improving.
    And you are One Awesome Fellow.

    Good to hear you’re still alive, WMDKitty.
    Hibernation season is approaching.
    Currently unseasonable warmth means that I am still in communication with my toes.
    And I am trying to grow a begonia on my desk at work. In a pot. With dirt. In hopes that colorful blooms may help deflect the Doldrums.
    We shall see….

    Tony!, I never wore mine longer than down to my butt, but (ha!) it took frickin’ forever for it to dry; and if I didn’t braid it up for the night, I would get it trapped under me in bed, with much resultant owwiness.
    I imagine that the thickness of the hair would determine the weightiness of the load.
    Keeping it tangle-free is the nightmare that lead to my cutting it off, and wearing it much shorter, for the last…hmm…(*mathing*)—32 years. I think the longest in that time was to just past my shoulders, and then only by accident.
     
    And long hair and fine-link necklaces are Two Tastes that, in my experience, entirely fail to Taste Good Together.

    *hugs* and much encouragement for rq.
    Eventually, the bulk of the relatives will Go Away, back to Whence They Came.

    Congrats to the Fishy Family!

    *pouncehug* for David (who will probably have Escaped Into The Wild, by now; but, still….)

    *waving* back at Pteryxx.

    *hugsback* to opposablethumbs.
    Congrats to SonSpawn on the success of his Social Occasion!

    *hugs* and congrats for Portia; sorry your instructor had to damn you by faintening his praise.
    Asshole.
     
    Him.
    Not you.

    Dalillama—Breakages, sprains, bruises? Are you okay?
    Also, I don’t know if this is any help to you, but I am finding that capsaicin patches on my knees at night mean that I am able to get more sleep. These right here.. I cut them in half, plaster one half over each knee, and Bob is in some way related to you.
    It may be that this could be more cost-effective, but we have yet to run that experiment.

    298

  279. says

    I hate to make another post about this, but the Gian Ghomeshi story is getting bad really fast tonight.
    http://www.thestar.com/news/canada/2014/10/26/cbc_fires_jian_ghomeshi_over_sex_allegations.html
    Scuttlebutt I’ve seen is that he’s had a rep as a creep, who had a bad habit of ignoring boundaries and interacting with women inappropriately, in some Toronto circles for a good while now.

    Sometimes you wonder if any famous person isn’t screwed up in some way.

  280. Hekuni Cat, MQG says

    rq – *return pouncehug with internet chocolate* =^_^=

    carlie – Great to be back and able to keep in touch. I’ve missed you all.

    Tony! – I’m sorry that life has been so rough this year. Would internet chocolate and kittens help at all? How about more *hugs*? Let me know. You have been awesome in the comments on Ashley Miller’s Morehouse post.

    Portia – Life has been treating me pretty well. I’ve been very busy recovering from my trip and getting back on top of life at home after my absence. I have also done election-related volunteering, and I will be glad when the upcoming election is over; I’m tired of both placing calls and receiving calls related to the election, and my email volume will drop by at least 60%.

    thunk – Welcome back! Good luck with finding a balance between your studies, your needs, and your ability to limit your stress related to neighbors with belief/moral systems different from your own. My life at my mother’s house (where I have been recently) is frequently a minefield in that regard when I come into contact with my siblings who live in that area.

    cicely – *many pouncehugs and lots of chocolate* I hope you have been well. Life has been very busy and occasionally filled with things that made me very sad. Fortunately, I have learned to deal with the sadness, mostly by accepting that I cannot change how my siblings will behave. Being home definitely helps too.

    Dalillama – I hope your wrist heals soon.

  281. says

    From timgueguen’s link @403:
    (Trigger Warning)

    The women now accusing Jian Ghomeshi of violence began as his fans. Two had very similar early experiences with him. After Ghomeshi met them at public events, which he had promoted on CBC Radio, he contacted them through Facebook and asked them on dates. They eagerly accepted.
    Each woman said she remembers Ghomeshi being initially sweet and flattering, then later suggesting or hinting at violent sex acts. When they failed to respond or expressed displeasure, they recalled Ghomeshi dismissing his remarks as “just fantasies,” reassuring them he wouldn’t ask them to do anything they weren’t comfortable with. The women deny that “safe words” were employed in the relationship.
    In one woman’s case, she visited Ghomeshi at his Toronto home and alleges as soon as she walked into his house he suddenly struck her hard with his open hand, then continued to hit her and choked her. The woman alleges Ghomeshi repeatedly beat her about the head and choked her.
    The Star’s interviews of the women were lengthy. The women, all educated and employed, said Ghomeshi’s actions shocked them.
    Another woman, who described a similar alleged attack, said that in the lead-up to their date Ghomeshi “warned me he would be aggressive.”
    “I thought this meant he would want to pull my hair and have rough sex. He reassured me that I wouldn’t be forced. (Later) he attacked me. Choked me. Hit me like I didn’t know men hit women. I submitted.”
    None of the women has contacted police. When asked why by the Star, the women cited several reasons including fears that a police report would expose their names and worries that their consent or acceptance of fantasy role-play discussions in text or other messages with Ghomeshi would be used against them as evidence of consent to actual violence.
    Only one of the alleged victims worked at the CBC. She never dated Ghomeshi. She alleges he approached her from behind and cupped her rear end in the Q studio, and that he quietly told her at a story meeting that he wanted to “hate f—” her.
    The woman said she complained about Ghomeshi’s behaviour to her union representative, who took the complaint to a Q producer. As the woman recalls, the producer asked her “what she could do to make this a less toxic workplace” for herself. No further action was taken by the CBC, and the woman left the broadcaster shortly thereafter.

    This guy sounds like scum. I completely understand why these women wish to remain anonymous. I just wish they didn’t have to be.

  282. Beatrice, an amateur cynic looking for a happy thought says

    Dalillama,
    I hope your wrist heals well. Take care

  283. rq says

    Tony and FossilFishy
    All I can say right now is Wow. I mean, I can understand a public figure having a stalker or similar, but this? This is not that, especially when Jian goes out of his way to say that there’s a bunch of women out there trying to badmouth him. It sounds like a pre-emptive attempt to give himself the upper ground in anything that might follow in the way of accusations of abuse and other sexual violence. :(

  284. birgerjohansson says

    So Gian Ghomeshi is a kind of Canadian version of the raping (and occasionally corpse-fucking) media guy in Britain who died a year ago?

  285. birgerjohansson says

    Very Important Science Concept: Feedback (New Scientist):
    “Buttered cat array” http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg15220528.200-feedback.html
    — — — — — —
    Letters (New Scientist) : “Paws for thought” http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg1522061A.600-letters–paws-for-thought.html
    — — — — — —
    Letters (New Scientist) : “Cat’s curdle” http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg15320637.400-letters–cats-curdle.html
    Excerpt: ”This effect may be the reason for the apparent underutilisation by visiting aliens of the buttered cat array to power their spaceships (Feedback, 19 October and 16 November). To make a journey between star systems, a large quantity of milk is required to keep the moggies going, which is kept in saucers hung from their necks. (From the ground these look like flying saucers). As the spaceship travels through the atmosphere of a planet, the …”
    .
    (I do not have the archive access to get the last bit, but I recall that the purring of the interstellar moggies would account for the odd humming sound of “flying saucers”)
    — — — — — —
    “Personal helicopter will be as easy to drive as a car” http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg22429924.000-personal-helicopter-will-be-as-easy-to-drive-as-a-car.html -But wouldn’t a buttered cat array give a better mileage than batteries????

  286. birgerjohansson says

    Scandinavia and the World: “Only the most necessary things” http://satwcomic.com/only-the-most-necessary
    — — — —
    ‘Missing’ disaster led to all-time worst extinction http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg22429922.300-missing-disaster-led-to-alltime-worst-extinction.html
    A “double whammy led to the worst mass extinction in geologic history (You may also recall that the smaller end-Cretaceous extinction was preceded by the “Deccan traps” magma flood event just before the asteroid hit).
    — — — —
    Earth hit by double asteroids 458 million years ago http://phys.org/news/2014-10-earth-asteroids-million-years.html
    — — — —
    Dietary cocoa flavanols reverse age-related memory decline, study shows http://medicalxpress.com/news/2014-10-dietary-cocoa-flavanols-reverse-age-related.html

  287. bassmike says

    Hello everyone! I’ve been away being ill along with the rest of my family. So I’m sorry for missing all the things that have happened in the last week or so. I’ve been coughing and sneezing and generally feeling very sorry for myself. My wife has it now too and my daughter had an alarming but temporary rash, but she’s now better.

    So I’ll stay in the quarantine area of the lounge until I’m fully well again.

    Anyway, welcome to We Are Plethora . Congrats to FosssilFishy & opposablethumbs on their excellent offspring. I’m afraid anything else will just have to wait until I’m back to ‘normal’……once I understand what that is!

  288. says

    Regarding Tony’s post @407 about the Ghomeshi mess, he did something I should have when linking to the Toronto Star article. I hope no one got triggered by looking at it without warning.

    birgerjohansson, if allegations are true I don’t think Ghomeshi is anywhere near the Jimmy Savile level. Of course that’s because Savile’s crimes were so extensive, and over such a long period of time, that few can easily reach that level of horror.

  289. says

    When it comes to Republicans saying stupid stuff, it is hard to beat this segment from Rachel Maddow: Republicans who deliberately undermine confidence in public health authorities with made-up disinformation.

    This segment includes Republican doofus Darrell Issa confusing Guyana (in South America) with Guinea (in Africa); and also includes numerous references to “eboli” etc.

    Ignorance, confusion, disinformation. This genius has decided that he should head a committee to oversee the response of the Surgeon General’s office to the Ebola crisis.

    “Absolute freaking no idea what he is talking about …”

  290. opposablethumbs says

    hugsbackback to cicely!

    Thank you, bassmike – sorry to read that you have the lurgi :-( and have passed it on to your wife (who must be delighted :-\ ) . At least the rash was short-lived … eh, the joys of very small people having health Things Happening! I’ll admit to feeling quite relieved that mine are no longer technically very small people. :-s

  291. says

    Republicans saying more stupid stuff.

    This is what David Perdue said:

    Kurt Salmon Associates, some of my experience there was helping footwear companies develop the ability to import shoes from Asia” and “Sara Lee did not have a centralized sourcing operation in Asia, and we built that from the ground up” and “In terms of the cost of goods, you know, you had significant advantages on cost of goods there compared to what Sara Lee was doing domestically.

    Because he did not actually say the word “outsourcing,” Perdue is claiming that ads depicting him as an outsourcer of jobs are misleading. “[…] never says I outsourced jobs, not one time […]”

    Yeah, we get it. You want to be a Senator from Georgia, but describing your past outsourcing efforts as “outsourcing” is not allowed. Sheesh. Daily Kos link.

  292. cicely says

    A comic for Halloween.

    Go To Fuck To Sleep, with LeVar Burton.

    We are Plethora:
    Horses may be powerful creatures—but it is an Evil power. The majesty and beauty, however, is a sinister glamour that They use to conceal Their essential maliciousness.
    Here is the true visage of the Beast.
     
    Peas are, if not in league with Them, then at least passively complicit in Their sinister plans for multidimensional domination.
    No tonnage of cheese, however immense, can do other than thinly veil this malevolence.
    Do not be fooled!
     
    You are, however, entirely correct about cheeses, and Miracle Whip™.
    Pass, friends!
    :)
     
    (As Tony! notes, however, peas do make for excellent slingshot ammo; I would add that they also work well in mini-ballistae and informal blowguns. Just don’t inhale….)

    billygutter01:
    1) I’m pretty sure I’ve never Welcomed In anyone with your ‘nym before, so Welcome In!
    2) I, myself, would very much like to overhearread the answer to your WordPress question! I run into that same problem often, and with no pattern that I, in my non-tech-savviness, can discern.
    *begin Expectant Waitfulness*

    Ogvorbis, my best wishes to Boy in his new employment.
    How are you doing?

    Hekuni Cat!
    *pouncehug-in-blueberry-yogurt*
    (Just wipe off the yogurt, if you don’t like/want it, or if it sasses you.)

    thunk!
    *pouncehugs-or-replacement-affectionate-gestures-of-equal-or-greater-value*
    Do I remember correctly that you are in—*shudder*—Oklahoma?

    Tony!:

    How do you smuggle $70 K in your stomach?

    In a non-digestible container, with intent-to-puke, once past customs?
     
    Ah, yes…the numbers….
    They are just my way of keeping track of how far in a thread I’ve gotten, when for some reason I’m either going to have to get off the computer (but have something composed in Wordpad for posting), or when my computer starts acting…erratically. Like it’s plotting to eat my posts and dump me off of the computer against my will. Because it’s stoooopid.
     
    IOW, significant to no one but myself.
    :)

    *haz-mat-suited hugs* for bassmike.
    I’m sorry you and your family are ill; here’s hoping you all recover soon.

  293. says

    Bradlee Dean, a Republican with Michele Bachmann-like brain activity, just said some more stupid stuff:

    […] he contended that openly gay elected officials and executive branch appointees are destroying the country: “God didn’t give us a right to institute, friends, a bunch of homosexuals into federal government in this country.”

    He also argued for impeaching Obama’s “criminal administration,” which he said is “attempting to implement Sharia law.” […]

    Right Wing Watch link.

  294. says

    Rick Wiles, Republican and rightwing religious nutjob, says some more stupid stuff:

    […] “persecution of the true Christian church will be carried out by America’s ‘gaystapo’ under the direction of America’s first gay president, Barry Soetoro.”

    Claiming to have received a message from God, Wiles then prophesied the impending doom that will befall the country as punishment for being in apparent “outright rebellion against God,” otherwise known as advancing LGBT equality: “We’ve been taken over by homosexuals and sodomites, and lesbians and transvestites, and a bunch of communists and socialists and atheists and God-haters. And this country is about to be judged.”[…]

    Right Wing Watch link.

  295. says

    More Republican/Religious rightwing nutjobs saying stupid stuff:

    In an interview last week on Voice of Christian Youth America’s “Crosstalk” radio program, Peter LaBarbera of Americans for Truth about Homosexuality denounced President Obama as “the most pro-homosexual president in our history.”

    LaBarbera told host Vic Eliason that Obama has “homosexualized our military” and “has done great damage to the morality of this country by helping persuade people that this sin is okay through his actions of helping to normalize homosexuality.”

    “So Barack Obama will have to answer to God for all that he’s done to help normalize this terrible sin of homosexual behavior,” LaBarbera said, before attacking Republicans for their “cowardice” on the issue of gay rights and letting “homosexual activists buy off the Republican Party.” […]

    Right Wing Watch link.

  296. says

    A drunk man in a Dallas airport punched another man in the mouth because he perceived the man to be “queer” and because, “This is America!” He also suggested the victim shove his iPhone up his ass.

    Several citizens and law officers tackled the perpetrator.
    Daily Kos link.

  297. says

    Gun rights extremists are engaging in online harassment of members of Moms Demand Action and of other women who support Moms Demand Action. Here’s an excerpt from a much longer article:

    Secret Facebook groups such as “People Who Were Blocked by Moms Demand Action Demand Action Now” — which has well over a thousand members — disseminated gun rights propaganda and helped orchestrate attacks on individuals commenting on Kroger’s page. Some gun nuts combed the profile pages of people commenting in support of gun reform, harvested personal photos of them and Photoshopped them to include obscene or humiliating comments, before reposting the photos on Kroger’s page, or on other social media sites. Because Kroger frequently bans users who post that kind of content, the gun extremists created disposable fake accounts — sometimes using the name and profile photo of an opponent— to quickly dump posts without being held accountable.

    In one case, they found a photo of a woman’s preschool-age child and wrote on it, “My mom sucks more cock than Richard Simmons” and circulated it online. In another case, they grabbed a photo of a mother and her child and wrote “Big retard, little retard” on it before reposting it. One woman posted to Kroger a photograph of a receipt showing money she spent elsewhere, and gun extremists swarmed her post, with hundreds of responses, including comments like “what you could do is shut your god damned whore mouth,” “calm your tits,” and “fuck her right in the pussy,” which Kroger’s Facebook admin allowed to stand over a day later.

    Salon link.

  298. says

    Rolling Stone published an interesting article on the number of Republican governors who, after being swept into office in the 2010 flood of conservatism, proceeded to tank their state economies though the implementation of trickle-down or supply-side or tax-breaks-for-the-rich policies.

    The article looks at the Kansas Tea Party disaster in depth.

  299. says

    You’d think the right wingers would look at Canada, and want gay marriage to happen. After all it was after gay marriage became legal in Canada that our equivalent of a Republican, Stephen Harper, became Prime Minister. So the evidence from Canada is clear, introduce gay marriage, get a right winger running the country. Romney would probably be President right now if gay marriage had been introduced in all 50 states prior to 2012.

  300. jrfdeux, mode d'emploi says

    Saad #413:

    Marysville was the 50th school shooting this year.

    Shit, that’s more than one a week. :-( :-( :-(

  301. rq says

    Dammit. Finishing translation, TV on, James Bond intro comes on. Excitement!
    Starring Pierce Brosnan.
    Crap.
    (And yes, I’m a bit of a sucker for those movies. The old ones. Sue me.)

  302. Ogvorbis says

    How are you doing?

    No better, no worse over the last two weeks. I start physical therapy tomorrow (most likely will get a TENS unit).

    Kinda annoyed that the asswipes still can’t come up with anything new other than “PZed lets a rapist comment therefore HYPOCRISY!!11!1!!!!!” Reminds me of creationists and the evolution of eyes, or the evolution of feathers and flight, or any of the other ‘gotchas’ they’ve been flinging for decades. Hell, I even got hit with Niobrara Man. Today. From a volunteer who is a creationist. I pointed out how the error was corrected, but facts just seem, well, optional to some people.

    Other than that, the play was fine.

  303. Ogvorbis says

    And I think I invented a new dish.

    I had some leftover pasta (gemelli) and some pomodoro sauce. So I tossed it together, slid it into a wide flat casserole dish, crushed up some good crackers, cubed up some provolone, mixed up the crackers and cheese, spread it over the noodles and sauce, and tossed on some pepperoni. Baked it until the cheese was lightly browned and melted, the pepperoni was almost crispy, and then we ate it. And it was good. Really good.

    I call it “Pizza Casserole!”

  304. opposablethumbs says

    Hey, how about that – we had pizza pasta leftover improv casserole tonight too! It was soooo good. The pasta was new, but we used up leftover pizza toppings from Saturday – tomato-and-onion-and-garlic sauce, a little spinach béchamel with nutmeg, a scrap of serrano ham and – swoons – taleggio cheese (I love that stuff). Plus a small sprinkling of parmesan when it was done. Om nom nom.

    Ogvorbis, they are indeed arsewipes. And I am so glad you’re around here – yours is one of the voices I want to read, and I’m glad that you know a very large lot of us want to read you.

  305. FossilFishy (NOBODY, and proud of it!) says

    Ogvorbis and opposablethumbs

    Stop already, you’re making me hungry!
    [glances over at the lunchtime peanut butter sandwich]
    Sigh. Ah well, at least it’s *Award Winning* bread. ;)

    So, I’ve mentioned I wrote a song for Ms. Fishy. I’ve mentioned that I was going to sing it at last Sunday’s open stage. I suppose I should mention how it went. To do so I think I have to post the lyrics. Be kind.

    Love at Last Light

    A sudden breath and time slows down
    You stop mid-stride and the world becomes
    The curve of their cheek and the colour of their eyes
    Love at first sight makes your heart fly

    Seconds stretch and minutes expand
    Days pass as you hold their hand
    Months page by and then it’s been years
    And you wonder when came all these fears

    It’s easy to love what you don’t really know
    Passion is a mask that covers us so
    Time strips us bare leaves it all exposed
    Life together that’s just how it goes

    I’ve seen you angry
    I’ve seen you scared
    I’ve seen you unhappy
    I’ve seen you unfair
    And all of this I’ve been too
    It’s me and you

    We’re human

    Just human

    Love at first light
    It’s easy ’cause it’s free
    Love at last light
    That’s where I want to be

    And I hope we make it
    To the curtain’s fall
    ‘Cause I’ve seen the whole of you
    And. I. Love. It….
    All…

    If you’re wondering how I get all those syllables in, the thing is in 7/4 except the “I’ve seen you…” bit which is in 4/4 phrases over the 7/4 sequence.

    So. I said up front to Ms. Fishy that if ever there was a time that the thought should count that this was it. And I told her, and incidentally the rest of the tiny audience, that there was one note that I really should be forgiven for and that they’d know it when it happened regardless of any other that I bodged up.

    That note was the one on “All” at the very end of the song. It’s about the highest note I can hit with any degree of reliability, and I missed it. Completely.

    Anyone with some life experience can point back in their life to a place where something fundamental shifted within themselves. Usually we don’t notice it at the time, or at least I don’t. That note, that horrible croak and desperately seeking wobble was one such point in my life. And I knew it almost instantly.

    You see, when I fuck up a performance, even one as low stress and unimportant as an open stage for 8 people, most of whom know me, I get angry with myself. I hate not doing my best. But this time was different.

    As soon as I gave up trying to hit that note I laughed, a deep gut shaking, ‘Crap! Keep playing fool!’ kind of laugh. The absurdity of how badly I’d missed it, coupled with how important that note/lyric is to the song, and with my sincerity in the sentiment towards Ms. Fishy, well, it was overwhelming.

    I laughed!

    And with that laugh something broke in me that needed breaking. That note in all it’s awful dissonant glory shattered an unwarranted seriousness that I’ve been dragging around for most of my life.

    You see, one of the many tiny abuses my father heaped upon me was to tell me to “shut the fuck up” every time I tried to practice. Somehow, somewhere, that got twisted in my brain from being the shitty abuse it actually was to a criticism of my ability. If I’d just played better he wouldn’t have told me to stop. And I might be reaching a bit here, but I’m pretty sure that there’s a connection deep in my mangled emotions that has been telling me that if I’d played better he would have loved me better. Yes, I know how pathetic that sounds, but there it is.

    I wish I could break how this realisation feels down into one’s and zeros and send it out into the world in a way that everyone could receive. I haven’t felt this light in, well, ever, if I’m going to be honest about it.

    Who knew that one note, one fucked up note, could do such a thing?

    As to how Ms. Fishy took it, the first thing she said was: “It’s funny.”

    Huh?

    Turns out she misheard “…makes your heart fly.” as “…makes your heart fart.” I’m still laughing about that.

    A little laughter, a little joy, and for once the world doesn’t seem so big and hurtful.

  306. says

    Hi. I’m going to stay over here away from all the food talk, as I seem to have picked up some sort of gastrointestinal thing. I haven’t actually thrown up since this morning, but the potential is there.

    So no food talk for me. Not going to hug anybody either, because I don’t know if this is a virus or something I ate. Love you all, don’t want to share my illness.

    I don’t have time to be sick, dammit.

  307. FossilFishy (NOBODY, and proud of it!) says

    Sorry to hear that Anne.

    [dons E-Hazmat suit]

    Hug?

    The Small Fry has a touch of the gastro, as they call it here, and is staying home from school. She hates that. Today especially because they’re suppose to be going to the local museum.

  308. FossilFishy (NOBODY, and proud of it!) says

    Oi, I just noticed a typo in that lyric.

    It should read:

    “Love at first *sight*
    It’s easy ’cause it’s free…”

  309. Nerd of Redhead, Dances OM Trolls says

    *says a few choice swear words about the nurse ordering wound supplies*
    No adhesive pads in the box to cover the wounds/dressings. But plenty of dressings. And only one box left of the 4″X4″ adhesive pads. Online to the rescue. Sixty here by the end of the week, for about what 5 boxes of 5 would cost locally. Makes a difference when one wound is easily soiled by poo and must be replaced a few times a day.
    Hopefully, that will be the last order.
    I’m torturing her for dinner. A honey glazed chicken thigh, mashed potatoes with butter and pepper, and corn with butter and paper. Half of a normal dinner, but even that may be too much for her stomach at the moment.

  310. FossilFishy (NOBODY, and proud of it!) says

    Thanks chigau.

    I was trying to write a realistic love song, one that acknowledges that sometimes it ain’t easy because no-one is perfect and the probability seeing someone at their worse creeps up to 1 the longer you stay together. I think I mostly managed. I’m also happy that it’s gender and orientation neutral. The decision to write it that way is a direct result of my time here.

  311. FossilFishy (NOBODY, and proud of it!) says

    Nerd. I don’t think I’ve mentioned just how much I admire you. The love you evidence for the Redhead is beautiful to read.

  312. thunk: metallocene says

    hi!

    To people who are sick: Get well soon. Please have some delicious tea, delivered right to your usb port.

    Fossilfishy:
    Aww, how romantic. Good work anyway

    Cicely:
    You would be correct that I am in Oklahoma. No need to shudder for me though, I’m doing fine.

  313. Azkyroth Drinked the Grammar Too :) says

    Ogvorbis, they are indeed arsewipes. And I am so glad you’re around here – yours is one of the voices I want to read, and I’m glad that you know a very large lot of us want to read you.

    And I’m glad to hear you’re annoyed by it instead of going “OH MY GOD THEY’RE RIGHT D’:” again. Because they aren’t.

  314. FossilFishy (NOBODY, and proud of it!) says

    Thanks thunk.

    Could I ask you a meteorological question?

    It seems to me that 3 day forecasts have gotten pretty damn accurate over the last few years given the complexity involved. But Is it just me, or are they getting a little less accurate? I wonder about this because it occurred to me that with the world getting hotter that could mess up the assumptions that our forecast models are based on. Mind you, my noticing discrepancies in the three day forecasts coincided with my notion that they may be getting less accurate, and now I’m wondering if it’s just confirmation bias on my part.

    So, are short term forecasts getting less accurate?

  315. JAL: Snark, Sarcasm & Bitterness says

    And with that laugh something broke in me that needed breaking. That note in all it’s awful dissonant glory shattered an unwarranted seriousness that I’ve been dragging around for most of my life.
    You see, one of the many tiny abuses my father heaped upon me was to tell me to “shut the fuck up” every time I tried to practice. Somehow, somewhere, that got twisted in my brain from being the shitty abuse it actually was to a criticism of my ability. If I’d just played better he wouldn’t have told me to stop. And I might be reaching a bit here, but I’m pretty sure that there’s a connection deep in my mangled emotions that has been telling me that if I’d played better he would have loved me better. Yes, I know how pathetic that sounds, but there it is.
    I wish I could break how this realisation feels down into one’s and zeros and send it out into the world in a way that everyone could receive. I haven’t felt this light in, well, ever, if I’m going to be honest about it.

    It’s not pathetic, Fossil Fishy and neither are you. It’s an extremely common thread weaved among a lot of abused children. (I don’t have numbers but I’ve yet to hear of someone in our situations not feeling something similar) I’m so sorry for what he did to you. I know those feelings all too well. I’m glad for your happy, breaking moment. It gives me hope that’ll happen for me too.
    =============
    (Semi-Related self-centered ramblings)
    This reminds me of how much I hate the little voice inside my head. It’s been corrupted by my abusers and continues their work. (Hyperbole alert) I’d wage war to make it shut up and kill for actually feeling how wrong it is, instead of just knowing it intellectually and having to remind myself constantly and fight and fight and lose every time. To me FossilFishy’s breaking moment sounds like freedom from that hell. For tonight it’ll at least help knowing it’s possible.

  316. toska says

    FossilFishy
    Your song is beautiful. I’m happy for you that you didn’t let the abuse stop you from playing and writing music. That takes a lot of strength, and it sounds like music is a medium that continues to enrich your life. I’m also seconding JAL’s 449; it doesn’t sound pathetic at all.

  317. toska says

    Is it ok if I rant about something?

    My cousin (an 18 year old woman) has been working for the state Conservation Core since early this summer and volunteered for them last summer. One of the last things they do before cold weather sets in is to go to low income families and help them insulate their homes against the coming winter. She has found this rewarding and eye opening – seeing the extent of poverty in her community was a wake up call – but last week, on one of her last runs for the year, she had such a bad experience that she doesn’t want to work for the CC again next year.

    She and her male partner (they go in pairs with a man and a woman to try to ensure safety and comfort for the workers and the home owners) headed to their last house, and she called the home owner to verify his address. At that point, this guy started being completely disrespectful to her, and it got worse when they arrived at the house. The home owner, much older than she, was not only completely rude, but he kept staring at her and licking his lips. Her partner put himself between her and the home owner, and they ended up leaving and reporting the incident, but the whole thing really makes me angry. This disgusting creep ruined what had been a good thing for her. She felt so unsafe and shaken by the situation that she’s not planning on ever signing up for the CC again, despite her positive experiences before this.

    I know there are assholes everywhere, but it pisses me off that the world is like this. I still want to believe that it doesn’t have to be this way, but I right now (due to this and other things), I feel so worn down by these issues that my confidence in cultural change is almost zero. It feels like the world doesn’t want to change. People don’t want to be better. Fuck them and their lack of empathy.
    /end word vomit

  318. FossilFishy (NOBODY, and proud of it!) says

    JAL
    Thank you for that. It means a lot to me. And I’m right there with you: I fucking hate the judgemental asshole that lives in my head. I’m not going to lie, he’s still there, but in this one area the bastard has been given the boot. I hope you find your way to some of that kind of peace too. You deserve it. And hey, if I can do it anyone can, seriously. I’m nothing special.

    toska

    Thanks. That was another big realisation for me. I had a therapist point out to me just how strong I was continuing on in music after that kind of discouragement as a child. It had never occurred to me to look at it that way before. Mind you, I didn’t really believe him in that moment. Like a lot of these deep-seated things it took living with the notion for a long time for it to really mean something to me. I got there though, and sometimes when I don’t want to practice I can motivate myself by thinking of it as a big “Fuck You!” to him.

  319. FossilFishy (NOBODY, and proud of it!) says

    toska

    I can understand that feeling. But here’s the thing: you have proof, right here on these very pages that things can change.

    I was never that bad of a misogynist, I’d have to say that I was your typical privilege blinded sort, ignorant and unaware. I just never really thought about it, and because of that I said things, and did things that hurt people and contributed to the fucked up aspects of our culture. But no more. I’m aware now, and despite still making mistakes occasionally I’m actively engaged at changing the world for the better. And I’m not the only one, the Horde is full of such people.

  320. toska says

    FossilFishy
    re 453
    Yeah, I think about how I became disillusioned with team sports as a kid. I was always a very athletic child, but in high school, the bullying in PE class really caused me to lose complete interest in team sports. Since then, I’ve only been involved in sports that are not of the team variety. And that’s no where near the abuse and discouragement you went through, so I really admire your continued dedication to music.

    re 454
    I know, logically, that people do change. I have changed a lot myself, and recently too (and I was quite anti-femininity and misogynistic until I started changing around age 18. In spite of, or perhaps because I am female). The Horde often gives me encouragement and hope, and I can’t even begin to describe how much I appreciate you all. But in meatspace, I’ve never lived outside of conservative areas, and I know so few people who give a damn about social justice, so I can feel a bit isolated. For the most part though, my pessimism is likely a funk/bad mood.

  321. rq says

    Because science:
    Eldest and the others are right now watching Papa, Please Get the Moon for Me, an animated Eric Carle story (the same guy who did the Very Hungry Caterpillar.
    Monica’s dad climbs a really long ladder to reach the moon. Eldest: “Doesn’t he know that once he climbs out into space, it will be horribly cold and he will have no air to breathre??” Then he leans the ladder against a star, to carry the moon down. “How can he lean the ladder against a star???” I’m waiting to see what other science mistakes he will catch.

    *hugs* for all – toska, Anne, JAL, Ogvorbis, etc.; that was a beautiful lyric and no doubt performance, FossilFishy. Good on ya for keeping up with the music.

  322. says

    toska @452:
    I understand your frustrations. It sucks what your cousin had to deal with from that homeowner. It sucks all the more because she was there trying to *help* him.
    Just remember that change is possible. It’s only one anecdote, but I know *I’ve* changed a metric fuckton in the last five years and a significant reason why is due to interacting with the more progressive members of the atheist movement, such as people here at FtB in general, and Pharnygula specifically, as well as Skepchick and other sites.

    ****

    FossilFishy @435:
    I…
    um…
    that gave me goosebumps. Seriously. That was so far beyond touching that I really don’t have words for how it moved me. That was absolutely amazing. I don’t know how you intended it to be sung aloud, but I found a very nice rhythm to sing the song to and again, just…wow. Your eloquence is incomparable.

    And I might be reaching a bit here, but I’m pretty sure that there’s a connection deep in my mangled emotions that has been telling me that if I’d played better he would have loved me better. Yes, I know how pathetic that sounds, but there it is.

    I don’t think it sounds pathetic at all. It sounds very human and very relatable. I’m sorry your father made you feel so small. And I’m happy that something in you that needed breaking finally snapped.

    (incidentally, the ending of your song really struck a chord with me. As you may know, I long to find someone special in my life and those lyrics speak so powerfully to something I dearly want to experience one day)

  323. says

    This may be of interest to any women writers in the Lounge:
    OPEN CALL GUIDELINES FOR “SHE WALKS IN SHADOWS”

    She Walks in Shadows, the first all-woman Lovecraft anthology, will hold an open submissions period from November 15, 2014 to December 15, 2014. DO NOT SEND STUFF BEFORE THAT DATE. Keep the following in mind:

    Submit short stories inspired by the work of Lovecraft that focus on a woman or female deity. It may be a character from Lovecraft’s work or someone of your own creation. You are not restricted to the 1920s as a setting. Steampunk, dieselpunk, noir, and any other sub-genre you can imagine are fine with us. Give us your best and most polished work. And yes, you must be a woman to submit. Women only.

    To avoid the Asenath effect (that means every character in the anthology would be Asenath Waite), we asked the authors who are contributing stories to pick a different character from a Lovecraft story. While you are not bound to these restrictions, we suggest that if you use a character from Lovecraft’s fiction, you avoid the usual suspects (Asenath and Lavinia).

    Consider interesting and novel settings for your stories. Surely, strange Lovecraftian entities haunt contemporary Nunavut or the Inca fought strange webbed monstrosities centuries ago. Anne Boleyn, evil sorceress or woman fighting the good fight against the Mi-Go? We may never know. Or maybe we will.

    POCs are highly encouraged to send stories. Transgender writers: same thing.

    Stories may be sent in French, English, or Spanish. We can read all three languages.

    Story length is up to 4,000 words with a pay rate of 6 cents a word (Canadian $, eh). No reprints, please.

    (hat tip to Andrew Wheelr

  324. bassmike says

    FossilFishy as someone who has been attempting to write lyrics to songs his whole life, I have to say that your lyrics are beautiful. I can get the sentiment underlying the whole thing. I am very impressed! The fact that you wrote the song in 7/4 makes it all the more impressive. If ever you have a recording and feel you wish to share, I’d love to hear the song. You have my email.

    Your breakthrough in the performance is wonderful too. The beauty of live music is the danger in the performance. I’ve never played anything live to my entire satisfaction, so I’m used to making mistakes. But to come to the realization that you did during such a performance is incredible. I’m sure you don’t need me to tell you to carry on writing and performing. But please do!

  325. opposablethumbs says

    FossilFishy, I think the song is really beautiful. The the love that comes through so clearly made me – ahem, made the air go all dusty here ::snf:: (just wondered, was it “when came” or did you mean to type “whence came”?). What you wrote about your father breaks my heart. His massive, infinite fuck-up – seriously, how could someone do that to their child – and your incredible strength of character. I’m hugely admiring of what you have done.

    toska I’m so sorry about the shithead who behaved like that to your cousin. What an arse. I hope that maybe she might be able to recover her engagement with the work at some point later. Maybe they need to have a kind of protcol for all the volunteers for if householders treat them unacceptably, to leave immediately and document it rather than try to put up with it. Shit, that makes me angry for her.

    Got to run – read you later, Horde.

  326. Portia (aka Smokey the Advocate) says

    Spottily rupt, sorry all.

    toska:
    I know there are a lot of positive examples of change here and elsewhere, but i just wanted to tell you I can relate to the frustration and hopelessness. It’s so hard when it feels like the gross awfulness is everywhere you turn. It chips away at your resolve. *hugsifyouwantthem*

    rq:
    *hugs* Your Eldest is such a good questioner and so adept and observant. I love the Eldest stories ^_^


    FossilFishy:
    Thank you for sharing that. *hugs*

    Ogvorbis:
    I like the “screw the haters” approach :D

  327. consciousness razor says

    Contemporary music and women in music, as per composer data from The Met. My favourite part? The dancing skeleton gif.

    I’ve got no idea why they’re supposed to be nationalistic and play music by Americans. Featuring no women composers (ever!) is sad, but it’s not too surprising. There are at least now more women performers/conductors (generally), although I couldn’t vouch for the Met specifically on that front.

    Much of the rest is explained by film and radio. Opera was historically a much more important (and cutting-edge, multimedia) artform than it is now, as well as being one of the few public places to hang out in its prime. It was a big cultural hotspot/landmark/whatever in larger cities, and now it competes with many other things that people could do instead. I figure live theater in general is in a similar situation. It still fills a certain niche, but it tends to be “old” music which is just getting older. (Therefore it’s not “relevant”? That seems to be the implication.) “New” works are generally in other media or at least different kinds of ensembles. So…?

    The market is saturated with lots more crap than it ever was, which seems to be getting worse every year. In any case, it’s hard to know what sort of conclusions we’re supposed to draw. Should there be more contemporary opera composers, who’ll be ignored (and send the Met and themselves into the red) or write crap to make these graphs look pretty? Or should the Met just give up and shut its doors? What are the options supposed to be?

  328. rq says

    consciousness razor
    I’m going to go with ‘dancing skeleton’.
    More seriously, I think it’s fine if their ‘opera’ category focusses on what is classically known as opera, with some more contemporary pieces thrown in every now and then. They do ballet, too, which often allows for branching out into more modern styles or contemporary re-interpretations of the classics (hoooo boy does the local opera ever do this, to no negative effect).
    So I don’t know what options the article wants to present, but I think having a niche for the classics is nice. Maybe if they dug up, every now and then, pieces by women from the same time period (at least one must be out there?), or something… But yeah. Locally, what we often get is the traditional opera in a modern/alternate setting, sometimes even tailored to local historical events (hence, the fight for Latvian liberation in 1919 set to The Troubadour; Lucia di Lammermoor in 1930s Mussolini’s Italy; Figaro’s Wedding in the style of 1980s South American soap operas, for example). Not a problem, in my opinion.
    *shrug*

  329. consciousness razor says

    rq:

    Locally, what we often get is the traditional opera in a modern/alternate setting, sometimes even tailored to local historical events (hence, the fight for Latvian liberation in 1919 set to The Troubadour; Lucia di Lammermoor in 1930s Mussolini’s Italy; Figaro’s Wedding in the style of 1980s South American soap operas, for example).

    Sure. That’s part of why I put “old” in scare-quotes, because modernized versions (of operas, plays, etc.) can be “new” in an important sense, not to mention that every performance is a new opportunity to interpret a work differently. (If you’re not, then…. what are you doing??? There’s really no need to be stuck in the “this is how it sounds on the album” mentality, even though sometimes it’s exactly what people want.) Even if it’s not more modern, as you said, putting it in a different setting, having new dialogue/characters/cuts or whatever sort of alteration, can make a big difference. Several Shakespeare films come to mind (Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet, The Tempest, and some others I’m sure) which stick to the text very closely but practically everything else is very different.

  330. Ogvorbis says

    opposablethumbs @434:

    yours is one of the voices I want to read, and I’m glad that you know a very large lot of us want to read you.

    Not sure why, though.

    Azkyroth @446:

    And I’m glad to hear you’re annoyed by it instead of going “OH MY GOD THEY’RE RIGHT D’:” again. Because they aren’t.

    Well, in my mind, the argument goes on. And on. And on and on and on.

    =============

    Boy’s new job goes apace. He still has not the actual written job offer, but he will be getting that today — I mean, hell, they’re already setting up his direct deposit. Stands to make about $4,000 more per year with the new job (gross) and they plan to move him up quickly. When he applied and they told him he was overqualified, and he explained that, since he had never worked in a nursing home, he wanted to get a feel for the routine and that impressed the woman interviewing him.

    It’s a Catholic nursing home, part of a small chain, that has a really, really good reputation for patient care and for management quality — probably because it is run by nuns, not priests?

    He is going to be at the new job, full time, before Thanksgiving (US version) which is freaking the hotel out because their Thanksgiving buffet has, in the past, needed three buffet runners, three carvers, and gone through about 60 turkeys and 10 legs o’ lamb. Right now, Boy is the only buffet runner left. And he’s leaving. Because they kept screwing him.

  331. says

    Loving FossilFishy’s song lyrics, and the wife’s mistaken interpretation of heart farts. [big smiles]

    Congrats to “Boy” on new job. Sounds very promising.

    In other news:

    Rachel Maddow did a great job of covering the fear-driven response to Ebola by Governor Christie. That dude was not just stupid and afraid, he was impractical and anti-science, anti-medicine … anti-everything-reasonable. Video Link.. Maddow at her best.

    So glad that nurse fought back. After Christie reversed his decision, he lied about reversing his decision. Text link.

  332. says

    What do you do if you’re New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie and you’ve been publicly embarrassed by a high profile and highly stupid policy that you implemented on the fly, and badly bungled? Of course, you go on offense. […]

    Daily Kos link.

  333. says

    Good examples of how Fox News uses misleading graphics to sneakily support their racist and/or bigoted take on national news: Link. Excellent comparison illustration of how Fox News does not apply the same standards to white criminals — see link and scroll down. Memorable.

  334. says

    This really should be big enough news to affect the senate campaigns in Kentucky: Mitch McConnell finally admitted that, yes, he does want take health care away from 500,000 people in that state.

    For the past several months, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell has tried to have it both ways on Kynect, Kentucky’s popular implementation of Obamacare that has delivered health insurance to more than 500,000 Kentuckians. On the one hand, McConnell has said he wants to repeal Obamacare, but on the other hand, he also says Kynect should remain in place if Kentucky wants to keep it.

    There’s no reasonable way to square those two positions—you can’t repeal Obamacare without repealing Kynect, and you can’t keep Kynect without keeping Obamacare—but that hasn’t stopped McConnell from taking them both. […]

    A spokesman for the minority leader confirmed that he wants to repeal the full health care law, including not just the federal subsidies for people purchasing on exchanges like Kynect, but also the mandates and taxes on high-cost plans and other features of the legislation.

    Keeping Kynect without keeping its subsidies would be like keeping Social Security without Social Security checks—it would be keeping it in name only. […] McConnell is now on record conceding that is what his position is.

    Daily Kos link.

    Huffington Post link.

  335. says

    Republicans plagiarizing the stupid stuff they say:

    Marilinda Garcia, a Republican U.S. House candidate from New Hampshire, plagiarized portions of a 2012 speech she gave against same-sex marriage, according to an analysis by the left-leaning group Granite State Progress.

    Garcia, who was named a “rising star” by the Republican National Committee, delivered the speech as a state representative in an effort to repeal New Hampshire’s marriage equality law. The language she used is nearly identical in some passages to a 2010 editorial by the National Review. […]

    Link.

    […] the fairly bizarre story of Oregon Republican Senate candidate Monica Wehby and the health plan that she plagiarized from Crossroads GPS. Her candidacy has long been a favorite of conservative pundits who convinced themselves that Wehby, a pediatric neurosurgeon running in a state that had an especially rough experience with the Affordable Care Act rollout, was ideally positioned to campaign hard on health policy and take down Democratic incumbent Jeff Merkley.

    […] At first they denied everything. “The suggestion that a pediatric neurosurgeon needs to copy a health care plan from American Crossroads is absurd,” a spokesman told Kaczynski, throwing in this gloriously passive-aggressive kicker: “Dr. Wehby is too busy performing brain surgery on sick children to respond, sorry.”

    Then came the inevitable reckoning: the campaign pulled the plan from the website […]

    Wehby also plagiarized portions of her economic plan from Sen. Rob Portman. […]

    Link.

  336. opposablethumbs says

    Ogvorbis,

    Not sure why, though.

    because you’re good people, because you get what’s important in political-personal dimensions, plus the additional qualities of being engaging when you elect to entertain, knowledgeable when you elect to inform, and frequently both at once.

  337. smhll says

    I just saw a post (on, ahem, Reddit) that claims that Pope Francis has said that evolution is true. Anyone else here that from a better source?

  338. says

    smhll @477:
    It’s funny you ask that. Have you seen PZ’s latest post?

    ****

    opposablethumbs (speaking to Ogvorbis) @476:

    because you’re good people, because you get what’s important in political-personal dimensions, plus the additional qualities of being engaging when you elect to entertain, knowledgeable when you elect to inform, and frequently both at once.

    All of this (which is so perfectly stated)? QFT.

  339. thunk: metallocene says

    Hi?

    Fishy:

    It seems to me that 3 day forecasts have gotten pretty damn accurate over the last few years given the complexity involved. But Is it just me, or are they getting a little less accurate? I wonder about this because it occurred to me that with the world getting hotter that could mess up the assumptions that our forecast models are based on. Mind you, my noticing discrepancies in the three day forecasts coincided with my notion that they may be getting less accurate, and now I’m wondering if it’s just confirmation bias on my part.

    I would disagree with you. Forecast accuracy from what I’ve seen (I don’t have the figures off hand) is incrementally improving as we get new and better data to integrate into the models, and as the models themselves get more detailed. The assumptions numerical models are based on stem more from the fundamental equations that govern the atmosphere; F=ma will not be changed by a warming world. They don’t take into account climatology (but forecasters might). In fact, the ECMWF predicted the left turn of Hurricane Sandy six days out; a clearly unexpected event that is possibly influenced by AGW-induced blocking patterns. But I’m just a first year student, so I don’t know much yet…

  340. opposablethumbs says

    psst, Tony!, here’s a coincidence … it happens to be extremely similar to what I’d have said if I’d been talking to you :-)

  341. says

    Here’s an addition for our Republicans-saying-stupid-stuff file:

    House Judiciary Chairman Bob Goodlatte (R-VA) told The Kelly File [on Fox News] last night that there was “increasing evidence” that the government was planning to import ebola patients, […] though he did not elaborate on that evidence.

    […] “Unless we come up with a cure, which they are working on, I don’t see any way there is a single lawmaker that would support the president bringing a single infected person from West Africa back to the United States,” he said Tuesday morning. “We can bring people with a contagious deadly disease with a 50 percent mortality rate to our shores? That makes the GITMO thing seem reasonable!”

    Mediate link.

    [from a Republican TV ad]: “ISIS gaining ground. Terrorists committing mass murder. Ebola inside the U.S. Americans alarmed about national security. What’s President Obama doing? Making plans to bring terrorists from Guantanamo to our country…. November 4th, Obama’s policies are on the ballot. Vote to keep terrorists off U.S. soil. Vote Republican.”

    YouTube link.

  342. says

    Republican journalist in Charleston, West Virginia says stupid stuff:

    This summer I had an epiphany as I watched packs of racists riot in Ferguson, Missouri, in support of a gigantic thug who was higher than a kite when he attacked Ferguson Police Department Officer Darren Wilson, who unfortunately had to put this animal down. …

    UPDATE: I made a factual error. Michael Brown was not an animal but a man. Big. Brutal. High. His death was a justifiable homicide and not a putting down.

    Link.

  343. says

    Dark money is taking over judicial elections. In 39 states of the USA, judges are in office as a result of direct input from voters. This may be the result of an election process, or of a vote to retain or dismiss a judge that has been appointed.

    Conservatives see this as an opportunity. They’ve thrown lots of money at what they see as a problem of too many “liberal” judges.

    […] Historically, judicial elections involved little in the way of campaign spending, but in Texas in the 1980s, Karl Rove recognized the potential of backing judges favoring a conservative agenda. The strategy soon spread, with donations to state supreme court candidates nationwide totaling $83 million in the 1990s and more than $206 million in the 2000s. […]

    Rove went on to work with business power brokers in Alabama; donations to that state’s Supreme Court candidates since 2000 (including “Ten Commandments Judge” Roy Moore) have been higher than in any other state, totaling more than $48 million.[…]

    But direct spending by judicial campaigns was just the beginning. Over the last decade, outside spending by special-interest and partisan groups has soared. And Citizens United is accelerating that trend: In the 2011-12 cycle, spending from outside groups came in at a record $24.9 million—a nearly sevenfold increase since 2000.

    This year, partisan groups have continued to spend millions in states like North Carolina and Tennessee, aiming to unseat supreme court justices. Judges in these scenarios “have had to become professional fundraisers,” says Bert Brandenberg, executive director of the judicial-reform group Justice at Stake, “often soliciting money from parties who will appear before them in court.” […]

    In their efforts to control the judicial system, people like Karl Rove are ruining it.
    http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2014/10/judicial-elections-dark-money

  344. rq says

    Comet 67P in photos. It is Beautiful. And Awesome. And it is just a rock in space. OMG THERE’S AN EARTHSHIP ABOUT TO LAND ON A COMET OUT IN SPACE.
    And people have been to the moon.
    *tear*

  345. rq says

    And How to Talk to Your Guy Friends About Not Threatening to Rape and Murder Women on the Internet, some suggestions included:

    Fear not. In fact, in case you need a head start, I’ve written up some suggested scripts for talking to your buddies:

    “I don’t know, I’m more of a merlot guy. Speaking of, I think it’s pretty fucking shitty to threaten to rape and murder people on the Internet.”
    “You shouldn’t yell out your car window at women on the street and call them horrible slurs and grab at at their clothes and bodies to try and get a reaction out of them. I wish Rick would leave his dog at home.”
    “Every time you post about ‘raping’ a quiz or test, I lose heaps of respect for you, and it’s honestly getting to the point where I’m not sure we should be friends anymore. Watch out, there’s a pothole.”
    “Thanks a lot, Doc, I can’t wait to take this sweet-ass vasectomy for a spin. By the way, young women who use social media are especially likely to have to deal with sexual harassment and stalking.”
    “Ted, are you as good at respecting other people’s personal space as you are at baking? This angel food cake is phenomenal.”
    “Everyone please proceed to the closest exit, I’m sure this is just a drill. While I’ve got you all here, I’d like to point out that prison rape jokes are a good way to get unfriended by me.”
    “Woof, I thought that last pigeon pose was never going to end! I’m really looking forward to going home and having the same expectations for my sons as I do for my daughters.”
    “Man oh man, Bumgarner is on fire! Hey by the way, have y’all ever promised to kill someone on Twitter? I haven’t, because that would make me a garbage person.”
    “I wanted to let you know that I’ll be actively not driving people out of their own homes by threatening to photograph their mutilated bodies for the foreseeable future, and also I can’t come to pasta night.”
    “I’m thinking of planting some succulents out back. Everybody’s bodies are their own and no one owes me or my boner anything at all.”

    Try a few of them in the mirror. Feel free to come up with some of your own. However you do it, wherever and whenever you do it, just do it.

  346. rq says

    Oh, and a thing on political correctness. Found it on FB, and of course a friend of mine worried about tone and put up a nice comment about how social justice people currently are being too impolite and driving people away from the movement. Eh.

  347. says

    Rq sent me a link to this survey, which I took and found to be quite interesting. It’s geared at black, gay men. I thought I’d share the link here, in case anyone was interested in taking it. These are comments that followed the completion of the survey.

    Various studies have supported the Minority Stress Theory (Meyer, 2003). One tenet of this theory is that people who identify as members of minority groups may experience different types of social stress. One type of stress is internalizing negative societal beliefs about one’s own minority identity. For example: a gay man believing that gay men are immoral.
    Internalizing negative beliefs and stereotypes is thought to reduce internal and external conflict in interacting with a majority culture from day to day. However, it can be stressful because, in part, believing that other gay people are immoral, means also struggling with what it means to be a gay person (i.e. walking around feeling that part of one’s self is immoral).
    This study is investigating the following hypotheses, based on the Minority Stress Theory:
    Do internalizing negative beliefs lead to depressive symptoms?
    Is having more than one minority identity (race and sexuality) more stressful?
    Does using coping skills from one minority identity (coping common in African-Americans) reduce the effects of internalized negative beliefs?
    Knowing this information can better help mental health professionals to serve clients who are both Black and gay, acknowledging the effects of social stress as well as using a strengths-based approach that values healthy contributions of African-American identity.

    It is important to acknowledge that gay/bisexual/questioning Black individuals live in a culture that is oppressive and that they are affected by that oppression. It is equally important to know that gay/bisexual/questioning Black people are resilient and have many ways of coping with oppression.

    I hope that part of your experience in participating involves the opportunity to assess for yourself what may be stressful about being a member of a minority and in what ways you cope. I am grateful for your contribution, helping the counseling field to better understand and serve the population of gay, bisexual, and questioning Black men.

  348. says

    rq @487:

    Found it on FB, and of course a friend of mine worried about tone and put up a nice comment about how social justice people currently are being too impolite and driving people away from the movement. Eh.

    I find it amusing when people say this. They’re really just talking about themselves, but they try to make it seem as if a harsh tone is turning off legions of potential allies, when they don’t actually know that. I don’t doubt that there are many people who don’t like the tone many social justice advocates take, but there are a lot of people who *do* like that tone. I don’t know how many comments I’ve read from lurkers or new commenters about how they *liked* the tone (around here, for instance) and the fact that we don’t put up with bullshit and we aren’t going to water down our discourse all in the name of civility.

  349. Pteryxx says

    Tony: I’m hearing that’s *fifteen years* of interrelated movies, culminating with Thanos?

  350. tbtabby says

    I sometimes enjoy visiting the video game section of Memebase, but it’s got a nasty infestation of Gamergaters. When they’re not uploading propaganda, they like to downvote everything even remotely critical of them en masse. Case in point: This video, which depicts female gamers treating the opposite sex the same way male gamers far too often do. Right now it’s at 77 upvotes and 157 downvotes. Can I request some Pharyngulation?

  351. says

    Pteryxx @491:
    Pretty much.
    I guess they’re going with Avengers: Infinity War rather than Avengers 3. Can’t wait to see how it turns out, and I really hope Joss Whedon is still attached.

  352. chigau (違う) says

    WMDKitty #496
    I have not yet looked up who is this {Ofer Zur, Ph.D.} person but they are not very nice*.
    [*rephrased from shrieking outrage and offers of violence]