A significant fraction of the American electorate wants this whiny brat to be president.
I am totally gobsmacked.
Pharyngula
Evolution, development, and random biological ejaculations from a godless liberal
A significant fraction of the American electorate wants this whiny brat to be president.
I am totally gobsmacked.
In a mildly interesting discovery, a toe bone from a 1.7 million year old hominin has been found to bear an osteosarcoma. The poor individual would have been suffering with pain when they walked, it might even have killed him (not the toe, but the possibility of metastatic cancer) and it’s suggestive that there might have been some social care for them.
But you know what’s not interesting at all? That cancer has been around for millions of years. That’s old news.
The precise origins of cancer have been a source of debate due, in part, to the scarcity of historical evidence. Possibly the earliest reference to the disease is attributed to the great Egyptian physician Imhotep, who lived around 2600 B.C. In his writings, Imhotep describes an affliction characterized by a “bulging mass in the breast” that was resistant to any known therapies.
Errm, Dogs get cancer. Mice get cancer. Whales get cancer. Reptiles get cancer. Sharks get cancer, despite myths you may have heard. Insects get cancer.
That an old mammal got cancer is not surprising at all. And while the subtitle might claim that the observation “could have important implications for modern medical research”, the article doesn’t say what those implications are. It can’t, because there aren’t any.
I just find myself annoyed that here is a thought-provoking but ultimately anecdotal datum that humanizes our distant ancestors and might have some implications for the history of human social behavior, but it’s getting shoe-horned into the trite and pragmatically false paradigm that it’s a discovery that could lead to the Cure for Cancer. Stop the hype, please.
He’s doubling down on his slavery remarks.
He’s also freaking out with paranoia. He invited a couple of his odious pals — Geraldo Rivera and Eric Bolling — to whine at each other in their very own little safe space (on Fox News!) about how persecuted they are by liberals who want them dead.
I don’t want them dead. I’d be content if they were fired for incompetence and I never heard from them again.
What’s also annoying is that they keep patting O’Reilly on the back and telling him he’s a “historian”. He’s not. He’s a hack who has a ghost-writer churning out conspiracy theory books that he slaps his name on. I like this comment: “History isn’t just a word, it’s a discipline“. O’Reilly isn’t qualified to use it.
If he were a historian, he’d know that Abigail Adams wrote about the slaves building Washington DC.
it is true Republicanism that drive the Slaves half fed, and destitute of clothing…whilst the owner waches about Idle, tho his one Slave is all the property he can boast, Such is the case of many of the inhabitants of this place.
Not much has changed, I guess.
I also rather like this paraphrase of O’Reilly’s claim.
"Slaves were beaten, tortured and raped with impunity. Their children were sold for money. Slaves were well-watered."
— Liam Hogan (@Limerick1914) July 28, 2016
Never forget: they were slaves, with all the deserved horror that word evokes. Americans stole people’s freedom and dignity and used them for profit.
Which is also a nice summary of modern Republicanism.
Resign, Bill.
According to Politico, I’m a “Sarah Silverman Democrat“, or a Bernie Sanders supporter who was able to cheerfully switch to supporting Hillary Clinton…or, as I prefer to think of it, someone who is aspirational but pragmatic at the same time.
But I’ll take the title. The alternative to voting for Clinton, obviously, is simply ridiculous.
I just saw this, and it’s important to keep in mind.
I know some people are unhappy that they didn’t get the presidential candidate they wanted, and have declared that they will never vote for Hillary Clinton.
Fine.
Refocus.
You aren’t going to get Bernie Sanders this time around. You aren’t going to get Jill Stein or Gary Johnson, either. But if you could work to shift the balance in those lower level offices, you can make a difference.
I mentioned that one of the dignified trees in our yard was marked for death — we got the detailed diagnosis. It’s Dutch Elm disease. We have some guys coming by on Monday to hack it to death and haul away its dismembered limbs.
But it’s not all sad and grisly news. We’ve also talked to the city, and they’ve given us their list of trees to be planted around town this fall (the number is how many of each they have on hand), and we can get on the list and name a preference.
10) Accolade Elm
10) Acer Sienna Maple
5) Hackberry
5) Deborah Maple
5) Thornless Hawthorn
10) Cathedral Elm
5) Ivory Silk Japanese Tree Lilac
10) Siouxland Poplar
5) Ironwood
5) Bur Oak
10) Northern Acclaim Locust
5) Silver Maple
5) Willow Weeping
We’re going to do some research ourselves, but I thought I’d be lazy and ask all of you readers — which ones do you like and why?
I haven’t been on YouTube for quite a while. I wonder why?
Oh. This is why.
I stopped bothering because I didn’t want to be associated with these goons, and it didn’t matter what I said…any video would be swarmed with abuse. Every once in a while I tell myself I shouldn’t surrender the medium so easily and that I should at least make a little effort now and then, but meh…I’d have to come up with a vainglorious name, figure out how to animate a goofy avatar, and learn how to overlook a lot of gross logical fallacies.
Maybe I should take up some invitations to appear on more youtube podcasts, but the latest one I got just today…hoo boy. I don’t accept blindly, so I looked up some of their recent videos, and first thing I saw was one announcing that transgenders are mentally ill
, and decided that no, I can just ignore that person forever and not miss anything of interest.
We might be able to get a few of us on FtB to try a joint project, but again, I think they all share Steve Shive’s impression of the youtube atheist community.
As always, Gender Workshop is brought to you by your friendly neighbourhood Crip Dyke.
For the past two months I’ve been staying in a hospital – you know, one of the places where people are relentlessly educated and re-educated on ending the stigmatization of health conditions. Even better, I been staying in a Canadian hospital, where the perfect joy of a Utopian health system goes entirely uninterrupted. [Read more…]
Michelle Obama has reduced the right wing to spluttering excuses with one simple fact: slaves built the White House. But it’s true! The White House is located in the South, between Maryland, a slave state which didn’t ban slavery until 1864, and Virginia, which fought on the other side in the Civil War. Of course slaves were heavily used in the construction.
But now we’re seeing standard neo-Confederate apologetics on Fox News. But the slaves were treated kindly by their masters, suggests Bill O’Reilly.
After Michelle Obama’s speech mentioned “a house built by slaves” as part of a beautiful rhetorical arc putting the lie to the idea of some fabled perfect America of some unspecified past, the usual suspects have been performing their gymnastics, trying to reclaim the myth of the perfect Founding Fathers. Bill O’Reilly is just one of them, but yup, he uses the phrase “Slaves that worked there were well-fed and had decent lodgings provided by the government.” He needs to watch Roots again, but the thing that gets me on these usual suspects is, they so often seem to be the same ones bleating “give me liberty or give me death” when confronted with what seem to me to be constraints that are… a little bit less than actual enslavement.
Exactly. People who wax wroth about losing their twitter privileges or having to leave their assault rifle at home are now protesting that slavery wasn’t so bad for the slaves.
O’Reilly needs to be fired. It won’t be so bad…he’s rich, he can count on steady revenue from speaking engagements with the KKK and the League of the South. He’ll continue to be well fed and have decent lodgings. As long as he’s got that, we can do anything we want to him.
