I’ll never be able to use it, because I wouldn’t be that polite to someone wearing a MAGA
hat.
Pharyngula
Evolution, development, and random biological ejaculations from a godless liberal
I’ll never be able to use it, because I wouldn’t be that polite to someone wearing a MAGA
hat.
Hey! It’s the last day of classes! And you know what that means…it means I was up until the wee hours grading papers! And do you know what that means? It means that when I did finally get a few hours of sleep, I had terrible dreams. In this case, I dreamt about spending a day with my grandfather.
My grandfather never touched me or hurt me, so it wasn’t that kind of dream. It was…well, if I dreamed of a day when I was eight or nine, it would go like this:
“Let’s go make something in the shop!”
“This is how you use a lathe.”
“We can look at the old drawings I did in high school.”
“See, I wanted to be an architect!”
“You can be anything you want to be.”
<Falls asleep watching the Jackie Gleason show.>
That wouldn’t be so bad. But no, I had dreams about days with my grandfather when I was 12-15. Those were not so nice. Those days were more like this:
I’d get there in the morning. He’d already have a stack of six-packs by his chair.
<slurp>
<slurp>
<increasingly slobbery slurps>
Let’sh go for a ride.
You wait here in the car for a minute.
An hour later…One more shtop.
Another hour later, we’d creep home at 5mph, the car weaving from side to side.
Bitch! Bitches!
Goddamn J*ps!
Ni**ers!
<Falls asleep before the sun is down.>
As I got older, I would spend less and less time with Grandpa, and when he suggested a ride down to the tavern, I’d just leave. He got worse and worse as he got older — and I wasn’t around at all — and my younger sisters have stories of his verbal abuse they are not happy to discuss.
So, yeah, when I have bad dreams (I usually don’t), the old man sometimes makes an appearance. These aren’t fearful dreams at all, though — more like soul-crushing dreams of bitter failure wallowing in spite and cheap beer. It just makes me sad.
At least when I wake up I realize that I’m now the age he was then, roughly, and get to bounce cheerfully off to a good job and hang out with smart people, and then come home to a happy family…or I would, if my wife weren’t off grandmothering in Watertown, NY for a few more weeks. I guess I’ll have to settle for a very needy cat.
“Hey, cat, this is how you use a word processor…”
Franken is out.
His resignation is a big loss for liberals. He was a good senator, he was a sharp critic of Republican sleaze, he was hard-working and attentive to his constituents. I would have happily kept electing him for term after term. I liked him personally.
However, it would also be a loss if he hadn’t resigned. How effective could he be at criticizing sleaze with this black mark hanging over his head? How well could he continue to do his job while under a pointless investigation that the Republicans, as is their wont, would never allow to come to a conclusion? His offenses were real offenses that needed to be addressed, even if they weren’t as severe as those of Borris Miles (a Democrat in the Texas Legislature), or nowhere near the repellent behavior of Roy Moore or Donald Trump. It’s all got to be cleaned up and out.
There is one way to turn this into a positive gain, though. The Democrats have to wake up and walk the walk, and be strong in demanding ethical, responsible behavior from their representatives. Not only would it make for better government, but it would be a pragmatic step toward strengthening their electoral coalition. Let the Republicans have the bigots and racists and Nazis; Democrats should do right by women. I know who I’d rather have on my side.
And while they’re at it, take pride in being the party of minorities and immigrants and the oppressed. Build a platform for the emerging demographics in this country.
And while I’m dreaming, could the Democrats be the party of labor again? If we want to improve the economy, having a party that actually supported unions would be a phenomenal development. This would build an unstoppable base.
Nah, these are the Democrats. They’ll find a way to fuck it up, probably by continuing to pander to the elite donor class, just like the Republicans.
This article begins by wondering what Marshall Applewhite was thinking as mixed the poisons for the Heaven’s Gate cult, before they committed mass suicide. And then it leaps immediately to describing what the Republican party is doing.
Republican Roy Moore, removed from the Alabama Supreme Court for his erratic behavior and banned from the mall for harassing teenage girls, has cloaked his campaign for the Senate in the language of “spiritual warfare.” As such, he is the most apt representative of the Republican Party in our age of cult politics. Moore is pitching himself as God’s candidate and his voters are slopping it up like poisoned applesauce. The party of “family values” is about to send a known sexual predator to the Senate because God wants them to. This would be startling, except they already used the same reasoning to put a known sexual predator in the White House.
The same magical reasoning infects Republicans tax reform plans. We are in the eighth year of continuous job growth, the eighth year of economic expansion, and the eighth year of a head-spinning stock market boom. Corporate profits are at record levels and the economy has been redlining at full-employment for almost three years. By any marginally credible economic reasoning, this would be an ideal moment to raise taxes, curb debt, make investments in public infrastructure, and just generally do the things one does at the peak of a long economic expansion.
At this moment, why are Republicans trying to slash taxes for the wealthy? Why would someone castrate themselves and commit suicide? Because that’s what the cult demands.
I don’t think it’s a stretch at all, especially since the Republican cult stitched itself mouth-to-anus with the Religious Right decades ago. If you want to see an egregious expression of this behavior, watch this interview by Anderson Cooper with a Moore spokesperson — she’s got nothin’ but her insistence that Moore is a godly man who tried to support God’s commandments and the Declaration of Independence says we’ve got a Creator, and that’s all that matters, and all of his wacky statements and the court decisions can be ignored.
I think we atheists have been thinking small. We try to get religion out of government, but what we really need to do is get this cult-like religious behavior out, no matter whether it’s tied to a named and admitted religion or not.
#NotAllWisconsinites, OK? But it does have a reputation for housing some weird and unsavory characters. Sometimes, though, the stories are hard to believe. Like this one, about a Milwaukee funeral home owner making a sex doll out of body parts. I read it and found the details kept piling up and seemed increasingly bizarre and unlikely. But it’s on the ABC News site! I looked around, and the rest of the site mostly seems to be legitimate and kind of boring news stories. Except…ABC News is on ABCNews.com; this was ABCNews-US.com. When you look more closely at the sections of the site, they’re screwy: there’s a “Sport”* section with no stories in it. Something else that was off: it has an about page, on which it claims a rich history dating back to 1898
, which can’t be true. I checked the domain registry; it’s registered in Melbourne, Australia? Then I checked some of the details, and there is no “Adams Sons Funeral Home in Milwaukee”.
It’s just weird. It’s got a fairly elaborate framework of seemingly authentic news stories built as a wrapper around at least this one ludicrously bogus tale. Why? It looks like someone has gone to the trouble of trying to create a superficially credible web news site in order to promote this goofy story…or more likely, some other less stupid but more damaging story. How many of these elaborate fake news sites are around?
Someone ought to tell the real ABC News that this site has stolen their logo and other identifying marks, at least.
*Another small detail: American news would call this section “Sports”, not “Sport”.
It’s OK, though, because this open letter in McSweeney’s is entirely accurate and honest, and also hilarious. The girls explain that they don’t want to have sex with us.
But it’s not just about us. It’s about you, being ancient. You still think you’re so young, don’t you? Yeah… no. Each and every one of you is just wrinkled, withering proof that mortality comes for us all. If you remember where you were on 9/11, you’re too old for us. Did just thinking about that make you feel old? That’s because you’re old. You’re all a thousand to us. Your faces make us sad.
And you know what? Even if we seem interested — even if we SAY we’re into you — here is a cool idea: Don’t listen to us! Who lets an eighth grader just do whatever she wants? We also want to drive cars. We want to drink beer. We want to slap peanut butter on a Pop-Tart and call it a well-balanced breakfast. This Roy Moore guy, 100 percent, is the kind of dad who wouldn’t let his own daughter wear eyeliner, for fuck’s sake. So like, be the adult in the room. Okay? Don’t make us be the grown-ups here. We hate that.
All it takes is a little self-awareness to understand this. I wonder who lacks that? Only one of the creepiest guys in the country.
He’s blundering about, wailing and whining, because he used a clip from another YouTuber without attribution, and she wrote him asking for a link or a mention, as she deserves, and he had a temper tantrum. Instead of just adding an acknowledgment for her contribution, he made a whole ‘nother video which is entirely about belittling and abusing her. No surprise there, I guess.
So what was the good thing? He made me aware of this YouTube channel, Draw Curiosity, which is mostly science stuff, and it’s excellent! I’ve subscribed, and maybe if more of us do, ol’ Phil may have accomplished one worthwhile thing with his ranty, petty noise machine.
Here we go: arbitrary provocation.
President Donald Trump has announced that the US formally recognises Jerusalem as the capital of Israel and will begin the process of moving its embassy to the city, breaking with decades of US policy.
“I have determined that it is time to officially recognise Jerusalem as the capital of Israel,” Trump said in a televised speech on Wednesday.
I’m not going to praise Time magazine, since they’re just another tool of the conservative establishment, but they did make a wise choice in their selection for their Person of the Year cover, “The Silence-Breakers”, all the women who have started a wave of change against a culture of harassment.
Donald Trump gets several mentions in the article, and they aren’t flattering. He must be fuming. Frame it and put that on the wall of your golf courses, Donnie boy. I hope these women are part of the reaction that tears you down.
I hope this recognition is a small part of a change that’s beginning — just beginning. There’s a long way to go. I’m just reminded of how disgracefully our social media has been shaped to be a tool enabling harassers to thrive: how Facebook is openly discriminating against women who protest, while I know of a great many men on Twitter who are notorious abusers, and still are given a platform. Like Donald Trump.
I’m collecting lab final exams and final lab reports from each of 3 labs, one nasty big pile a day. Then at night I take them home with a pocket full of red pens and slash away until my eyes melt and drool out of their sockets.
To get in the mood, I like to have a little background noise while I’m working — I’m one of those people who can’t focus without a little static, and I get too easily distracted by the ravening beasts in my head if it’s silent. But it can’t be too engaging. So I’ve queued up a set of streaming movies that are going to be terrible and ignorable, but are appropriate for the season. The theme for the next three nights is…Christmas Horror (it’s a genre, for real: look it up on Amazon video). My work this evening, and tomorrow, and the day after, will be accompanied by screams, ugly crunching/ripping sounds, and abominable dialog.
I find the students’ work usually comes off better in comparison, so it’s all to their advantage.
If you have suggestions for awful movies to play while grading, let me know. Remember the criteria: it’s got to be so bad that I won’t actually be distracted by it, but it has to also fill the silence.
