“I support the freedom to marry for all”

Hey, California, you could learn something from Virginia’s bad example. Let’s all hope the California Supreme Court can do something right.

People of West Central Minnesota who might be reading this: I’ve heard from Roy Zimmerman that we could get him to swing by Morris ’round about 3 April. I’m in the awkward state of being on sabbatical and also doing a lot of traveling, so it’s difficult for me to arrange a performance, but I can take a shot at it. Is there any interest out there? Write to me and I’ll work on it, and maybe draft you to help.

All is well!

For everyone writing to me concerned about the status of the stranded Trophy Wife™: she’s fine. She was going to be stuck in a gas station in Hancock, Minnesota for a night, and a local minister stepped up and offered her a place to stay…and when the weather cleared a bit, helped her get back home to Morris. So she has survived the storm, is doing fine, and is even going to work today.

If it’s Tuesday, it must be Sacramento City College

I’ll be speaking tonight at 7 in the Student Union of Sacramento City College.

i-6ad0566233634302d36280cd7d0c4523-saccity.jpeg

Holy crap, they’re charging admission. Maybe no one will show up now…unless I add extra value to my performance. Strip tease? Singing the Narwhal song? My imitations of celebrity creationists (warning: they all involve drooling)? Oh, man, where can I get a puppet, some KY, and a rabid wolverine at such short notice?

Stop sitting there reading this and growl at someone with power

As a member of the global liberal conspiracy, it is my obligation to occasionally toss out something disgustingly prurient to lead you all into the path of corruption. Here is my contribution today.

i-c00e26f2171310bcbf74a204c21b913c-oralsex.jpeg

That’s it; a rather dry entry from the New Oxford American Dictionary. Are you aroused yet? Are you frantically closing the screen because it is so NSFW? Are you becoming a communist or a lesbian or a gay man or a Democrat now?

A moronic mother in Menifee, California discovered a similar entry in her child’s school dictionary and must have felt the first twinges of conversion to a werewolf or liberal or something — she was actually just confused, and was baffled by the unfamiliar situation of encountering a calmly stated fact — and did the usual conservatard squawk of protest to the school district. No big deal; anyone can complain about anything.

Unfortunately, the Menifee Union School District reacted stupidly: they yanked all copies of the dictionary from the shelves of all the schools in the district.

Moronic Menifee mom must feel so proud, I’m sure she’s suffused with a deep sense of accomplishment, and she’s probably scanning all of her children’s books right now for another word she can use to make the administrators dance to her tune. She has become a problem. But she’s a minor one compared to the cowards and idiots running that school district.

Menifee, hang your head in shame. Or better yet, could the sensible parents living in that district charge on down to the offices and fucking howl in protest? Don’t sit back and take it. Don’t shrug your shoulders and move on. Get in the faces of these administrators and make them fear for their jobs.

And that’s true everywhere. NO COMPLACENCY. When some dimwit with a delicate sense of propriety can get offended over a dictionary entry, why aren’t you getting offended at a bureaucracy that is censoring simple, straightforward factual information from your schools?

You don’t want your schools to end up like Texas’. Their school board is right now in the process of banning books from the curriculum willy-nilly. For instance, communism is evil, and that’s all the kiddies need to know about it; any text that might actually inform and explain the historical facts about communism are to be expunged, so they can better produce a generation of graduates who are proudly ignorant about everything they hate.

Stupid mothers are a problem. Craven administrators are a bigger problem. But when you’ve got a curriculum set by odious ideologues like Terri Leo, who would ban an author’s name wholesale because she read a title like Ethical Marxism (no, she hasn’t actually read the book, of course), you’re in a whole wide new world of pain, in which your local school has become a temple to ignorance.

We aren’t going to take it anymore. Howl. Be a proud lesbian Democrat liberal communist socialist (even if you’re a Republican heterosexual shop owner) werewolf and get out there and make noise. When a dumb parent can squeak and make administrators jump, we’re fools not to roar.

Bad, bad spouse

The perils of posting from a cell phone — I actually wrote something here as I was being driven to Chico, and my phone apparently ate it, making it a blank post. Which didn’t stop anyone since it gathered 66 comments.

Anyway, I’m feeling guilty. I was in the pleasant warmth (and moistness) of California, feeling no stress, and my wife called to report that she was stranded. She’d been on her way to work when she was slammed by a blizzard and white-out conditions, conditions which make driving literally impossible, and she’d pulled over into a gas station in a tiny town in rural Minnesota. And had been stuck there for hours, with no end in sight, and so she’d simply been hunkered down in a gas station all day. There is no motel or much of anything in that town, so she’s relying on the kindness of strangers — some charitable family in town might be able to put her up for a night, because she sure isn’t going anywhere.

Or maybe she could handle the late night shift at the gas station? Nah, they probably just close up for the night, especially in a blizzard.

It’s not my fault, but a fellow still has to feel awful about abandoning his wife to the hazards of Minnesota weather. The least I can do is tell all of you that if ever you get to meet the Trophy Wife™ you should offer her some sympathy, since she puts up with even more than you can possibly imagine. The Catholic church might as well start canonization procedures now, because living with me ought to make her a shoo-in for sainthood, despite the trivial fact that she’s not Catholic.

More laughs from the Shorty Awards

Who would have thought something so trivial would generate so much amusement? I told you all to vote on Twitter for DrRachie, because there was a bunch of quacks in the lead. The kook formerly in the #1 position, the “Health Ranger”, has flamed out hysterically. Now the #2 quack, some guy named Mercola, is showing similar signs of cracking.

Dr. Mercola explained the situation himself in a Facebook post, “An arrogant group of science bloggers that have vilified me for the past few years have started a campaign to have an Australian shill to win a health award on Twitter. This overweight non-physician has arrogantly bashed nearly every alternative therapy and encourages reliance on drugs.”

Perhaps tomorrow I’ll be able to report back that Mercola is now rocking back and forth in a corner, shouting “She’s a fatty fat fat fattie!”. At least he’s following the same trend of blatantly lying about the position of real skeptics and physicians.

I detest these people

Why do so many of our political leaders support creationism? Here’s a disturbing glimpse of the way the neo-conservative elite thinks, discussing specifically Irving Kristol:

Kristol has acknowledged his intellectual debt to Strauss in a recent autobiographical essay. “What made him so controversial within the academic community was his disbelief in the Enlightenment dogma that ‘the truth will make men free.'” Kristol adds that “Strauss was an intellectual aristocrat who thought that the truth could make some [emphasis Kristol’s] minds free, but he was convinced that there was an inherent conflict between philosophic truth and political order, and that the popularization and vulgarization of these truths might import unease, turmoil and the release of popular passions hitherto held in check by tradition and religion with utterly unpredictable, but mostly negative, consequences.”

Kristol agrees with this view. “There are different kinds of truths for different kinds of people,” he says in an interview. “There are truths appropriate for children; truths that are appropriate for students; truths that are appropriate for educated adults; and truths that are appropriate for highly educated adults, and the notion that there should be one set of truths available to everyone is a modern democratic fallacy. It doesn’t work.”

The masses must be kept ignorant and pacified. The ruling elite will keep the truth locked up, and dole out “truthiness” to the mob.

I think whenever you start talking about different “truths” for different people, you’re using the word incorrectly. There is a truth about the world, and what Kristol is actually suggesting is that there are lies, not truths, to be given to children, students, and those adults he does not fancy having in his privileged club of power.

I’ll also note that their cynical strategy does not work. Cultivating ignorance in the people in the belief that a cunning elite will be better able to manage them leads to situations like we’re facing now: where the ignorant and stupid are encouraged to thrive and take power, and where the Bushes and Becks and Palins rise to the demagogic top and find the mob malleable and easy to push into extremism and insanity. I suspect that an “intellectual aristocrat” would be appalled at the unintended consequences of his wretched plan…