Halloween is a busy night for demonologists

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Note: rough earlier versions of this post briefly appeared for some reason. I take full responsibility for that which I did not cause and cannot control.

Karl Payne is a certified demonologist, whatever that means. We can safely assume it means he deeply believes, or claims to deeply believe, in super-natural critters the rest of us can’t see or hear and science has never been able to detect. Apparently Halloween is a busy night for demonologists, kinda like New Year’s Eve in an ER. Karl Payne is deeply concerned that this Halloween will intentionally or unintentionally open the door for demons to swarm through from the pit of hell or nearest parallel dimension.

But you probably won’t be surprised to learn that back when Karl was trick or treating, it was all innocent fun and games, a harmless quest for candy undertaken by wholesome kids facilitated by red-blooded American neighbors. It’s only lately, when Karl is older and no longer participates, that Halloween has taken such a dark turn. Beyond that it just gets hilarious: [Read more…]

Intelligent design my ass

These days, every-time I read about or hear someone refer to our bodies as “miracles” it makes me sick to my stomach. Our bodies aren’t miracles, they’re hopelessly bugged-out collections of molecular Rube Goldberg contraptions which seem to excel solely at delivering intractable pain to a helpless brain. The only miracle is they can operate for any time at all without breaking down. Last Sunday was the first day I felt anywhere close to normal in the last three goddamn months. It felt like, finally, the blood-cell counts were getting back to normal, I didn’t have the spins as bad, night sweats and the aches and pains had eased up. It had been so long since I’d felt that good it was almost like being high on some kind of designer drug. Well, we know that can’t be allowed to continue huh?

By that same night, the very same fucking night — I didn’t even get one full 24 hour pitiful goddamn day of relief — completely out of the blue, completely unrelated to anything else, I came down with the worst sore throat I’ve ever experienced. Calling it a sore throat is laughably inadequate, it’s more like having a lit blowtorch waved over hornet stings, wave after wave of raw fiery intense pain combined with a high fever. One side, from jaw to collar bone, has swollen up like a football, so much I am now physically deformed and too self conscious to be seen in public. I cannot talk or eat, I haven’t been able to sleep for more than an hour at a stretch all week, and I can barely even swallow. Only vicodan taken by the handful has kept me halfway sane with the pain while the antibiotics slowly work — and they are working very, very slowly if at all.

This came completely out of the blue, just my bad luck, probably some bug I picked up in one of the many, many doctor’s offices I’ve been in over the last few weeks, combined with being on immune-suppresant drugs for a rheumatoid disorder.

I’m just fucking goddamn furious about it, so angry at how shitty someone’s luck, my luck, has to be to suffer that kind of timing, so near enraged I want to start smashing shit like a rabid chimp. It’s clear this will utterly dominate my entire fucking week now, another week wasted, on top of the last 12 wasted weeks, another week spent in complete misery, another week where all I can think and talk about is how much it hurts. In fact based on recent experience I fully expect it will stretch into next week, or maybe suck down the entire month of November, or maybe I’ll hit the jackpot and it will become some kind of super-duper expensive chronic immensely painful deformity that never, ever goes away. For no other reason than 4 billion years of evolution haven’t come up with a better defense against a dumb microbe 100 times smaller than the period at the end of this sentence. What a sad excuse for a fucking miracle.

WSJ publishes woo-sayer nonsense

Suzanne Somers once played a part on a less-than-exciting, thank-god-it-ended 1970s TV show that exploited the twin stereotypes of flaming gay men and brainless blond bimbos. She tried to jack her costars for an extra cut of the loot when the series became briefly popular, they told her to get lost, and her career promptly took giant shit. Somers mercifully almost disappeared from the public eye, only surfacing more recently after medical technology saved her life, a favor she returned by putting out books hawking quackery and quack cures. So clearly when the Wall Street Journal needed an expert on healthcare, she told them to come and knock on her door. The link below goes to LGF so don’t feel like you’re rewarding the Journal for the bait. Let’s do a quickie fisk: [Read more…]

How to shut down a teatard

Nicely done and obviously not the answer Rep Camp (R-grifter) was angling for. Shorter version: “The insurance company was jacking your constituent for premiums on a junk policy they planned on cancelling the minute he got sick or injured, and the ACA has put that particular scam out of business. … and you’re welcome.”

The horror of comprehensive health insurance

It wasn’t my choice to become a walking, talking healthcare reform example. But lately that is my fate. Friday night I got a sore throat — these things seem to always happen on the weekend of course. By Sunday it was incredibly painful and so swollen my face was beginning to be deformed. Fortunately, Monday my PCP was in, a quick visit, a $20 copay and $10 more for prescribed antibiotics and now, less than 24 hours later, it’s already noticeably better.

It was bad enough that I was completely out of the game all day yesterday and I’m still running a pretty good fever. It’s scary to think what might have happened without health insurance, because this was the most painful sore throat I have ever experienced and it was spreading rapidly — a side effect of being on auto-immune drugs and cortisone no doubt.

First thing I see now that I’m up and running is this lovely article making the rounds with the usual suspects: [Read more…]

Things are definitely turning up, anyone live in DC?



I have a … well it’s not really a job interview so much as a private brainstorming session on Space Exploration with some trade associations and manufacturers next month in Washington, DC. But there could be a consulting role in it for me and even if there’s not, it’s an issue near and dear to my dark atheist heart. I really do believe this is the future of humankind, and whether I have only a year or two left on this Earth, or a normal healthy lifetime ahead as all signs currently point to, I want to spend as much of that time as possible doing something that matters and something I like. After three years in near poverty working in dead-end tech support job, leading up to this last year of abject financial desperation caused in large part by unending anxiety over health issues, there’s little in the way of low pay or lifestyle sacrifice that could scare me away.

If there are any readers who live in that area we might be able to get together for a cup of coffee or something.

The singularity approaches

One important fundamental difference in value between a diamond ring and an armful of kindling is man-hours, one takes a lot more to make than the other. But it’s conceivable, one day, with sufficient advances in hardware and software, that man-hours will be rendered moot. Which would mean money as we know would cease to matter and that sounds great to those of who don’t have much. But there could necessarily be a phase along the way that might not be so appealing: [Read more…]

New Titan porn

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False-color mosaic courtesy of NASA’s Cassini spacecraft shows differences in the composition of surface materials around hydrocarbon lakes at Titan, Saturn’s largest moon. Kraken Mare, which is Titan’s largest sea and covers about the same area as Earth’s Caspian Sea and Lake Superior combined, can be seen spreading out with many tendrils on the upper right. The orange areas are thought to be the Titan equivalent of salt flats on Earth. Click image for more info at National Geographic online. Image via NASA/JPL-Caltech/University of Arizona/University of Idaho