QUOTE OF THE MONTH

 “I have no mercy or compassion for a society that crushes people, and then penalizes them for not being able to stand up under the weight.” ~~ Malcolm X,

Don’t Steel This Idea! Or Steal it Either

Okay, so I was thinking yesterday. This is not unusual with me, I usually do. Remember that episode of Star Trek where the machine sucked out your thoughts? And with nothing to think about the poor soul in the machine did not reach the state of Nirvana in perfect communion with God, but rather died from lack of anything to do?  You remember right?

See, this really produced a conflict with me. I understand that perfect meditation requires an “emptying of the mind” yet, Star Trek in Daggers of the Mind informs me that it can cause death. So, I have always decided to err on the side of keeping my mind active rather than tempt God to just say, “nothing going on in there” and pull the plug.

Which then raises the second quandary for me. I know a ton of people with “nothing going on in there” and they seem to still VOTE and worse yet, LEGISLATE.

So I have no idea which is true.

So I was thinking, as I said.

And I got this perfect idea. Well, to be honest, it wasn’t exactly my idea, but I don’t know who Theor27 is so it might as well be my idea, since anybody who goes by the screen name Theor27 probably doesn’t have the connections I have to promote this idea properly, and anyway Theor27 just sorta mentioned it, and didn’t flesh it out like I have, and that has to count for something, right? I mean I respect  work product and all that, but I’m pretty sure if you sort through my massive subconscious, you would find this idea there, and that’s pretty close to be an original idea” don’t you think? Do you have any idea how many recipes I see that are exact, I mean down to every word that don’t mention that they got the idea from somebody else, but rather pass it off as their own. Doesn’t everybody start off their brownie recipe with “best darn brownies this side of Saturn”?

So given that good old Theor27 probably will never know, I’m claiming this idea in full as my own. Since I fleshed it out, as I said.

So, I’m thinking along the lines of a Sim city interface, or perhaps a board game. Or perhaps something more along the “miniature” railroad thing. You know what I mean surely. The old guy down the block whose entire basement is a little town with a railroad that runs all around, with miniature trees and overpasses and, even a lake? THAT guy? Or the lady who every Christmas turns her spare bedroom into a village with cotton ball “snow” and a post office, and carolers and little painted houses with little tiny lights inside? You know, THAT lady?

So this will be called: Tea Party Town. And you can make it up as you like. You see?

I’m just letting my mind flow here guys.

You could have like a “lake of fire” and a big old hand that you could automate to let go of little liberal action figures and drop them into it. It would be God (the hand that is) dropping the bad bad liberals into the lake of eternal damnation for all the things they want to do, like be communists or fascists (since tea baggers generally don’t know the difference) or being for “choice” or for Obamacare, or for wanting to “redistribute the wealth”. You know, whatever dumb thing teabaggers dream up for killin’ and condemning for all time anybody not like them.

There could be a big museum and out front Jesus could be sitting atop a big old Brontosaurus teaching the flock.

How cool would that be? All the people could be wearing little tri-corner hats with little teabags hanging from them.

Everybody would be white of course.

Except for the grounds keepers, and the maids, and the bus drivers.

 

 

 

 

So, that takes care of some of the bigger plans for our Tea Party village.

But no such place would be really “home” if it didn’t have some actual Tea Party homes.

So you could, you know, fashion the decor as it suits your version of Tea Party heaven.

Of course you should have Sarah greeting all the visitors to the neighborhood.

I mean she fits in here so well doncha think?

I big ol’ happy smile on her perky face.

Welcoming all you nice tea party friends, and makin’ sure as you drive by that you are the right complexion.

Pick up a bible as you enter, so you’ll be sure to know how to act now!

As you enter, don’t forget to notice how nice everything is, all the same. Nobody here likes to be “different” because God doesn’t like different. It says so, somewhere in the Good Book.  Or is certainly implied if you get my drift.

But for sure, in your village of Tea Baggerdom, don’t forget the most important place of all.

Or not.

It really depends.

Some tea baggers don’t cotton to no formalized church you know. They found that it in the bible too. Anybody can just read “God’s word”. Long as it’s the King James Version that is. The rest are just Satanic verse, to pun.

Don’t listen to no word of men, they say. God said it, ‘nuf said.

Or not.

If you are one of them churched teabaggers, then you probably should have one of these:

The Mega Church solves all your problems, and meets all your needs. From indoctrinating the lit’lins into proper creationist, flatlander, young earthiness, to making sure that your will suitably leaves all your money to the church, it’s one for all and all for one.

Common phrases you will hear are:

• Love the sinner, hate the sin.
• God hates sinners.
• God helps those who help themselves.
• If they don’t work, they don’t eat.
• Are you born again?
• Have you confessed Jesus Christ as your Lord and Savior?
• Handups not handouts!
• Fornication is a sin, but God forgives!
• Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve!

Don’t forget this important place.

You will be spending a lot of time here, looking, touching, nay caressing the fine barrels of these beautiful killers.

There is no more important Amendment to the constitution (how it wasn’t listed as the first ARTICLE of the constitution beats me, than the 2nd?

SECOND?

You see, this constitution is all F**ked up isn’t it?

I mean I’m sure the Founding Fathers meant:

ARTICLE I: We are a Christian nation!

ARTICLE II: God wants us to use guns to enforce that!

All the rest is mere filler.

 

A little humor in your Tea Party village is always good.

For she is NOT A WITCH.

She said so.

Witches cannot lie. That is a lie.

That’s a whole ‘nother Star Trek show.

I don’t want to go there.

Christine O’Donnell made my head hurt.

Does this mean that somebody has beat me to the punch?

All this work?

And somebody has already got a Sim’s Tea Park?

I am crestfallen.

Nay I am deeply chagrined.

Nay, I am pissed.

This was MY IDEA.

I was gonna make a billion bucks off this. Hasbro on speed dial. Gates wanted it as a Microsoft Windows standard game. I just know it.

Sigh………..

I suppose you expect me to do something productive now?

And I had the decor all picked out in my Hawaiian beach house. I did. Really. No I did.

 

And the Nominee for STUPID is. . . .The GOP

Oh my head hurts. I mean seriously people, the list of nominees for MOST STUPID is the most widely contested race of all.

Shall we poll the Internet denizens?

Here are some of the nominees. Feel free to add any you can think of. The winner will receive a dead fish wrapped in the NYTimes, delivered by a pony express rider wearing a Dior gown of sparkling crystals.

1. Proving that he can’t read, Governor Scott Walker of Wisconsin says he will sign a new bill requiring an ultrasound of any pregnant woman seeking an abortion. Having learned nothing from what happened in Virginia when Governor McDonnell also planned to sign the same sort of thing, Walker announces that “I don’t have any problem with ultrasound”. No I guess HE doesn’t. But perhaps if it were required that all men who decide to treat women like children and tell them what to do with their own bodies, should undergo a lobotomy, he might, just might, change his tune. But then again, maybe not.

2. Arizona House Representative, Trent Franks resurrected the old “rape victims block the pregnancy” argument of Todd Akin, stating the “incidence of pregnancy following rape is very low.”  This was in support of a bill introduced by Franks making abortion illegal after 20 weeks. Democrats had introduced an amendment making an exception for rape and incest. It appears that Republican man are raised to believe that they are doctors by osmosis. It’s a male thing.

3. So utterly against any immigration bill are some Republicans that they don’t even want to debate the issue. The reasons are obvious. The final bill may well pass the Senate, and then it’s on the House where Boehner will wring his hands and insist that he’s only there to help the House speak it’s will. The likes of Steve King and Louis Gohmert and Steve Stockton, will provide the show there. For now this group joins in a team effort to win the golden smelly carp award: Sens. John Barrasso (Wyo.), John Boozman (Ark.), Mike Crapo (Idaho), Ted Cruz (Tex.), Mike Enzi (Wyo.), Charles E. Grassley (Iowa), James Inhofe (Okla.), Mark Kirk (Ill.), Mike Lee (Utah), James Risch (Idaho), Pat Roberts (Kan.), Tim Scott (S.C.), Jeff Sessions (Ala.), Richard Shelby (Ala.) and David Vitter (La.). A finer band of brothers in stupid cannot be found.

4. Virginia Lieutenant Governor nominee, E. W. Jackson wrote a book, and published it. It is called The Ten Commandments to an Extraordinary Life. Trouble is, he misspelled Commandments to Comandments in the title. Then he said that yoga would lead to satanic possession.

5. Jim Bridenstine (R-OK) is somebody you probably never heard of. I suspect you can continue to not hear of him. He took to the floor last week in the House and ranted on about how the President was “a vengeful liar who lacks the moral compass” to lead the nation. He likened himself to Patrick Henry. He thinks he did a good job. Trouble is, I guess he forgets that the polls suggests he may be the one without a moral compass. It’s improper to cast such vitriol on the House floor. But alas it’s nothing new for the crazy crew. And by the by, all his reasoning was based on factual untruths. ALL of them. So I guess he’s intellectually impaired on top of being a flagrant abuser of the mouth.

6. Darrell Issa claimed through selected editing of testimony, that the order to select “conservative” applications for tax-exempt status came “from Washington”. He promised that the full transcripts would be released shortly. Of course the full transcripts said just about the opposite. The person who has owned up to the screening methodology, describes himself as a Conservative Republican and says he doesn’t believe there was any political motivation in the process, but merely a method to extract those applications that would undoubtedly necessitate deeper analysis. Issa now claims that release of the full transcripts would be “dangerous and irresponsible.” He now claims it is Cummings who is the problem.

7. Now I admit, this is not a Republican. But well, we have loved Carl Levin for many years. But we are pretty darn happy he’s decided to retire. He voted to keep the decision-making on rape charges in the hands of command. It was wrong. He sided with the military men. It was wrong. This kind of thing makes no sense on any level. It doesn’t promote cohesion in the ranks. It promotes distrust. Shame on him. And on Clare McCaskill who also voted this way.

So that’s my line up for today.

As I said, please add your favorites.

It’s hard to miss a week without Gohmert being on the list I know.

But he’ll be back in the top ten. He won’t let us down.

So.

Vote.

Vote often.

 

Related articles

• The GOP’s cleansing of its ‘stupid’ wing will never work (deathandtaxesmag.com)
• Ted Cruz and Mike Lee outshine Rand Paul on immigration (powerlineblog.com)
• Sen. Ellis shouts down Dems during ultrasound bill vote, breaks gavel base (host.madison.com)
• At hearing for ATF nominee, more Republican obstruction (afjjusticewatch.blogspot.com)
• GOP wunderkind drives Wisconsin into the ground (dailykos.com)
• MEMO: New GOP Assault on Women’s Health Care is Akin-Like (democrats.org)
• Non-Todd Akin GOP congressman: ‘The incidence of rape resulting in pregnancy are very low’ (dailykos.com)
• GOP Sen. Candidate Bashes ‘Moron’ Trent Franks For Rape Remarks: ‘Stupid Has No Specific Affiliation’ (mediaite.com)

 

The Cutlery Wars

I really need your help.

Seriously.

I trust you.

I am married to the Contrarian, and that places a special burden upon me as a woman, nay, as a human. I am stressed daily, nay, minute by minute with entanglement in a world that is simply not normal.

This is a world where up can sometimes be sideways, and out is almost always inside out. I have adapted over the years, and can carry off this feat quite well now, few strangers would ever guess that my mind is so twisted with incongruity.

So, why I need you?

Well how do you deal with the cutlery wars in your house? I’m utterly stymied by this family dilemma and look as I may, have been unable to find a good self-help book on the subject. I can but assume that there is some childhood training that I totally missed. I’m the only one on the planet who seems unable to fathom how to deal with this obvious problem.

You have no idea what I’m talking about?

Surely you jest.

You seriously don’t?

Ahhh, well it’s not me then?

Let me explain then.

Our happy home is utterly disturbed on a regular basis by the digging about in the drawer reserved for all things called “eating utensils.” I mean digging. As in pushing aside, throwing spoons into the knives, pawing to the bottom, cursing, growling, and pointed periodical statements such as “where are all the decent spoons in this house?”

Let me back up a bit.

I did not learn of this issue during the early time of our courtship. All those e-mails, phone conversations, leading up to our meeting in February of 1999, gave no clue that forks would come to divide us. Even during the whirlwind weeks of co-habiting, nary a clue could be garnered by the romantic food interludes we enjoyed.

As with all secret nut cases, my husband kept all these things hidden until the ring was squarely implanted on the third finger left hand.

And then it began.

The complaints.

The whining.

“Why don’t we have any decent forks?” he mewed.

“These spoons are the wrong shape!” he exclaimed.

I looked at them each time. Fork = longish rod with four tines. Spoon = longish rod with ovalate shape at the end depressed in the middle for holding liquids.

They seemed fine to me.

But they were not.

No, not by a long shot.

They were “bad” forks and spoons.

Knives, well we don’t even bother with knives. Knives are either sharp or to be tossed. They are either large, or useless. This man takes my biggest chefs knife of some twelve inches to cut a piece of pie. Moreover he doesn’t like knives much. He used to bone hams in a past life, yet he is terrified of them.

“You’re walking!” he screams.

“Yes, I am, I learned that around age one.” I intone.

“You have a knife in your hand–the blade is up. TURN IT DOWN!”, his face turning shades of red I’ve only dreamed of seeing on paint chips.

“Parker, I’m 63 years old. So far I’ve never stabbed myself.”

“THERE’S ALWAYS A FIRST TIME”, he snorts.

But at the table where we consume victuals, he doesn’t have much to say about knives, other than the obvious, “I think we need the steak knives babe, since WE ARE EATING STEAK.” He usually grins broadly following such an exclamation and you can see how proud his mother was when he smiled like that. Time to take the kid off the pot. He’d done his poop.

No, at the table, we reflect on the limitations of our forks and spoons.

And there is no good reason for this.

When we moved from the meadow and I was engaged in the endless task of sorting and packing, I omitted some of the worst offenders from the “stuff going south.” The near round spoon? Out it went. “Ridiculous shape” it was called. “Who can get their mouth around that?” it was taunted.

When we arrived in Las Cruces I planned on a new set of regular stainless steel. We shopped. He picked.

Did you hear me?

HE PICKED.

Has the complaining stopped?

Hell no.

Case in point.

Salad fork.

An innocent piece of cutlery. It sits first in line for forks. To be used for salads, and desserts. Perhaps for appetizers if necessary.

We have some. They come with the “set”.

But the Contrarian cannot use a salad fork.

Why you ask?

Because the handle is too short.

Did you hear that?

THE HANDLE IS TOO SHORT.

That IS what defines it as a salad fork Mr. Contrarian. If the handle were longer it would be a FORK as in DINNER FORK.

“But it makes the food too close to my hand. I don’t like that.” he moans.

How exactly does one answer such a statement?

The soup spoon.

It has a lovely place in the line of cutlery, for using for soup. It allows the slurping of liquids not drunk with enough speed that the entrée doesn’t get cold/burn up awaiting the finishing of the soup course. It is larger than a regular spoon but smaller than a serving spoon.

What’s the matter?

“It’s too large for my mouth!” he laments.

This delicate mouth that I love to kiss is frightened that the one-quarter of an inch increase in width will harm the corners of his delicate lips.

Short of giving this man his food through a feeding tube just what am I to do here?

Signed: desperately seeking food moving tools.

PS: Diego still disdains the use of stainless steel, preferring silver plate or his tongue. I live with a couple of heathens I tell ya!

God, I Can’t Get the Stench of Ick Off Me!

I mean seriously. Suddenly Geraldo Rivera is making sense? I’m in the same camp as Ms. Lindsey? This can only mean one thing.

I’ve been transported once again in my sleep by aliens to a far, far distance universe. I wanna come home!

It all started innocently enough.

You know me, speak first, think later. It’s been a lifelong methodology for me. Being nimble of mind, I usually can wriggle myself into some sort of explanatory pose without looking the complete fool. (Some would say–my no-named detractors, all noted I might add for an inability to add 2 + 2 and get 4 regularly, where was I? Oh yes, my detractors might claim I’m a complete fool all the time, but of course they are wrong).

Anyway.

Yesterday, in view of the revelations of one Glenn Greenwald and the Guardian, I was pretty down on the President. I’m not, and never have been a Patriot Act fan, neither liking the term patriot, which seems always used by those who really aren’t,  nor liking the flag-waving exceptionalism it tends to signify. Therefore hearing that the Obama Administration has continued a policy of sorting through my telephone calls gave me reason to lament his policy, all the while suggesting that the GOP in general would have a tough time railing against something they wrote (the Patriot Act) and passed on several times already under President Bushy. I also noted that of course faux news groups like Fox would forget all that history, and condemn their favorite whipping boy with nary a dropped beat.

So, then I actually learned what this is all about.

And I’m not nearly so upset as I was, since facts have a weird ability to actually turn wild speculative gut reactions into calm reasoned understanding of truth.

Okay, so let’s review. Under Bush, the government started this data mining process of collecting phone records. It began the process in around 2002, and without authorization from the FISA court which had been started in 1978. They were proceeding without court authority. This monitoring was done to foreign persons and American citizens.

Sometime around 2006, FISA was brought into the mix and the program continued to the present albeit with FISA oversight procedures in place. Congress regularly is called upon to renew the government’s ability to proceed, and so far it has. In fact Senator Diane Feinstein indicated that the issue of data mining of phone records has been debated by her committee, the Senate Intelligence Committee, no fewer than twelve times.  Ultra conservative Senator Lindsey Graham also suggested that he was not at all troubled by the “revelations” announced and that he found there was “nothing to worry about.”  Ditto Republican Mike Rogers, chair of the House Intelligence Committee.

Of course, the fact that it started under Bush is not some imprimatur upon the practice to be sure. In fact it might be close to the opposite. But it behooves us to look at what the practice actually entails before we condemn it as government overreach, no matter how legal it may be–and no one suggests it was illegal.

What goes on here is called metadata  mining.

Metadata, essentially, is data about data. Data mining programs use computer algorithms to search large collections of data for patterns.

Still sound like gobbledygook? It works something like this. Billions of phone calls are made daily. The numbers are gathered along with length of conversation. It’s essentially dumped into a data base. In other words, one computer downloads its billions of numbers into another computer. There it sits. When a terrorist suspect comes under scrutiny, his specific number is plugged into the database and “hits” are looked for. The computer has the ability (which no human could do) to see patterns in the calls this person X makes. For instance. X is in Istanbul. He is a “known” terrorist. He places a calls Yemen, Colorado, and Miami. The numbers in Yemen make calls to New Jersey and Miami and Charleston. The number from Colorado makes calls to New Jersey and Charleston.  Charleston called Colorado. A pattern is established.

At this point, (with perhaps other surveillance information)  as I understand it, the government goes to the FISA court and requests a warrant to subpoena the actual names of those persons in the pattern. And with further investigation it may lead to actually looking at the actual conversations or lead to wiretaps.

Similar things are done with the Internet, now a preferred means of communication between terrorist cells.

So nobody is reading your e-mails. Nobody is listening to your calls, or noting that you called Cousin Dotty last month. It’s just numbers and no human is even looking at the metadata at all, since it is meaningless anyway.

Geraldo Rivera suggests that this leak of the program, is directly related to the anger of the journalistic community at the subpoenaing journalist phone records in an attempt to uncover leaks by government employees. It’s a “in your face” sort of response.

The Rivera claims are in fact real. Terrorists do learn from our leaks and move to new ways of doing business. It is thought that it is this reason that caused the Obama Administration to move into the Internet data mining arena. At least Nicolle Wallace, former communication chief for Bush suggested this on Morning Joe this morning.

So, in all, I’m a lot less upset now than I was.

But of course I now find myself in a quandary. I recall that I was supportive of the leaking of the Pentagon Papers back in the Nixon years, and I have been similarly supportive of Bradley Manning and his leaking of information about the wars in the Middle East. But I find myself rather supportive of the government’s attempts to stop leaks from those who may in fact be more interested in harming a president than they are about the “immorality” of that which they leak about. (I’m of course reading that in).

So I am conflicted. I don’t think that the Pentagon papers situation or the Manning leaks compromised “security”, but rather reflected our government’s being deeply involved with corruption without those countries. Perhaps my memory is faulty. Here I see real attempts to undermine THIS government as a political ploy to gain advantage for a party or group within a party. Predictably Rand Paul is screeching that 1984 has arrived. Paul of course would be happiest without any government at all, and his squawking has to be held in that context. It should be noted that Paul introduced an amendment last year to ban this stuff when it was PASSED once again in December.

So are my positions irreconcilable or not?

Hopefully some of you can assist me, for a mind divided cannot stand. (Unless you’re a fundamentalist, and then all bets are off).

So help me out here guys.

For an excellent timetable of the Patriot Act/FISA/NSA database, see What you Should Know about the Government Massive Domestic Surveillance Program.

 

Related articles

• Senator Franken Calls for FISA Court Opinions to be Made Public When Possible (politicususa.com)
• Patriot Act at the center of the storm (cnn.com)
• Intelligence chief blasts NSA document leaks (cnsnews.com)
• guardian tecnologia: Fisa chief judge defends integrity of court over Verizon records collection (guardian.co.uk)
• ‘Fox and Friends’ suddenly against wiretapping they supported under Bush (rawstory.com)
• What You Should Know About The Government’s Massive Domestic Surveillance Program (kstreet607.com)

Franken-Women! Run For Your Lives!

During the run up to the 2012 election, the GOP became rather famous for sticking their foot into their collective mouths, up to the knee. Nothing was more famous than their “war on women” an attack they assured us was both unfair and unwarranted.

After all, as countless state legislatures populated mostly by white men, continued to introduce bill after bill that limited the availability of reproductive health care for women, inserted medical instruments into their lady parts, and otherwise suggested that they didn’t really know what was best for themselves, how can that be considered unwomanly?

To say nothing of the strange and mind-shattering medical opinions from men like Todd Aiken on rape. On and on it went, yet, there was no war on women, but in the minds of Democrats who were just playing on the (shh) paternal concerns of husbands and fathers for political benefit. And on and on they went. On election night, 55% of women in America decided that Democrats best served their interests.

That still leaves an amazing 44% of women who voted for the other side, the side doing all the woman-basing.  What can we say about these women? I think we are learning that in the months since the election. In fact, we have always known it, but we grant some leeway that in the heat of battle, some women may in fact grip their thighs and support that which rankles for the “greater good.” So a fairer assessment can be given now.

And it suggests, that what we have is a hybrid creature I have dubbed the Franken-woman. She is in appearance a woman,  but resembles her sisters in very little else. I’m afraid if you look under the skirt, you may well find balls instead of a vagina.

Recently there was some polling by Pew which I believe backs up studies on the subject, that women are increasingly the breadwinners in their families. This of course caused quite a stir. There has been a four-fold increase in the numbers since the 1960′s.

How is this received by the media you ask?

Well Fox News contributor, Erick Erickson cried foul. This is bad stuff he claimed. Everywhere in the animal kingdom (watch out your creationists), males dominate (actually they don’t but he’s from Fox, what can you expect). Why this flood of women breadwinners is destroying marriage and the children! Stop it now!

Of course women are used to this sort of thing.

Soon the topic turned to education and why we are falling farther and farther behind when compared to a whole list of other countries. Once the greatest school system in the world, the US educational system is by many estimations, dismal at best. Mississippi Governor, Phil Bryant (need I add the R?), gave us his assessment of the cause:

I think both parents started working. And the mom is in the work place.

Women are so used to this sort of thing. I hardly matters the topic, somehow it’s the fault of women.

I can attest to this personally.

A while back on Facebook I became engaged in rather heated debate on climate change with a man who was regularly condescending and arrogant in his assertions that there was no such thing as human-made climate change. While both of us threw some nasty ad hominens, he often retorted to my facts with  claims that I had a big mouth, and was a whack job. When I replied that apparently he had no facts, just personal assaults, I was greeted with this gem:

You provoke me!

Indeed, and women who dress in trashy clothes provoke otherwise decent men to rape them! Yes, we’ve heard that excuse.

Well my dismay was not at his remark, which was expected, but rather from the Franken-woman who came to his defense, saying that X was such a nice person, and I was always attacking, and basically, I was up against a brilliant man and was clearly no match.

Now said Franken-woman had already told me that:

1. If you count all the “crab nebula” historically, it amounts to just the number one would expect if the earth was some 6,000 plus years old and,
2. If evolution were true then why are monkeys still having monkey babies?

So you see I’m already dealing with a “woman” who if chosen randomly by an alien visitation would have answered the question, “is there intelligent life here?” with a resounding NO. What hurt however was that a supposedly a fellow woman was unable to see the misogyny in such a statement and agreed that women “cause” men to do bad things.

But as I listened to what moves through the Internet vapor, I discovered that there were indeed plenty of these Franken-women.

That gadfly Phyllis Schafley, attorney, book writer, and speaker, you know, the one who tells OTHER women to stay home and make hubby happy with good cookin’ and good sex? THAT “woman?” Well she weighed in on women in combat, telling us that women in combat would unfairly “entice” men, and the poor men would be blamed for the ensuing rape and harassments that would be inevitable! I kid you not.

Marsha Blackburn, perennial talking points maven for the GOP, had the audacity to tell Meet the Press, roundtable participants that “women don’t want equal pay laws.”  Seriously? We don’t?

“I think that more important than that is making certain that women are recognized by those companies. You know, I’ve always said that I didn’t want to be given a job because I was a female, I wanted it because I was the most well-qualified person for the job. And making certain that companies are going to move forward in that vein, that is what women want. They don’t want the decisions made in Washington. They want to be able to have the power and the control and the ability to make those decisions for themselves.”

Um, dear, how exactly are we to make that happen? By baking them some cookies? Or perhaps, forcing them to address their inequality by MAKING THEM PAY WOMEN THE SAME WAGES? And dear, don’t you EVER presume to speak for me, okay?

Not to be outdone, Ms. Schafley weighed in on this as well:

The Obama feminists recite the tiresome mantra that women are paid only 77 cents for every dollar paid to men. That’s completely false because it doesn’t take into account that men take many high-risk and unpleasant jobs, suffering 90 percent of occupational fatalities, so they should earn more.

Does that even make sense? She then claims (without a source) that men work longer hours and so deserve more. In the end, only employers can really know who does the “most” work.

She ends by taking a swipe at Hispanics. Stop courting them, she advises. After all, “they don’t share American values“.

I say congratulations to the GOP who has apparently successfully transplanted a Republican male brain into a woman. These aren’t women. These are freaks of nature, created to pat the poor man on the head and continue to tell him he is the center of their universe.

Save me from such women.

Related articles

• Rep Marsha Blackburn Backs Corporate Pay Discrimination (lezgetreal.com)
• ‘War on women’ returns (politico.com)
• Mississippi’s Bryant laments when ‘mom got in the workplace’ (maddowblog.msnbc.com)
• Why Erick Erickson Is Wrong About Women Breadwinners (usnews.com)
• All-Male Fox Panel On Female Breadwinners About What You Would Expect (wonkette.com)

The Funky World of Creationism

Creationist people are funny. I mean that literally. It’s only fair, they take everything literally too. Well, sort of. It’s a well-known fact and easily provable, that creationists only take what they like in the bible literally–the rest, they ignore.

I continue to post really great stuff on Facebook, most of it from scientists who happen to also be believers. I spread it around. There are Catholics, and Lutherans, and Presbyterians, you know, mainstream religious folks. And they all point out the silliness of trying to claim that the earth was formed in six days.

Normal people nod their heads and wonder what all the fuss is about, since logic is a part of daily life you know. I mean if evolution were not true, then when the human genome project was completed, there would have been a hue and cry of world-wide proportions had the DNA not supported our evolution from “lesser”beings. As it turns out, we learned something we had not thought true–some homo-sapiens today actually have DNA from Neanderthals in their bodies, proof that a more primitive humanoid actually mated with those who would ultimately become us.

All this is beyond the average creationist of course, since they are unable to wrap their compartmentalized minds around actual facts. Life is so much simpler when you simply decide what would make you happy and then “make it so” in your mind. There are dozens of shysters out there willing to take you money in return for a good sounding story that meets your needs.

Of course, such mindless ones are also prone to “doubt” anything else that they find troubling in their white-centric (and that is most always the case) world. They stout-fastly deny that the earth as portrayed in the bible is FLAT and that the “heavens” are a dome which keeps out the “waters” which surround everything. No, that doesn’t work for them, so literalism takes a flying leap off the edge on that one.

Since I was peppering the Facebook page with a lot of actual *gasp* science, one of our creationist types figured to “get enlightened” so on the advice of others of her myopic kind, she ordered her some books from a site that specializes in helping people remain god-awful ignorant of the truth.

And she read them.  Or at least tried to.

And then she told the Facebook crowd all about what she had learnt. It had to do with “if the earth was so old then we would all be buried under tons of cosmic dust”, and something about you know crab nebula only occurring once every 100 years, so where are they all? And if you count people the right way, and not the scientific way, somehow, it comes down to just 2 people some 6,000 + years ago. General junk like that.

Which proved that not only did she not think of any of this stuff herself, she didn’t understand most of what she read in the first place.

After I had deciphered the “arguments” I went to the science. Most of the really good and big ones just have an archive of these silly assertions and a scientific proof to explain the errors.  (Talk Origins is great for this by the by should you get asked one of these “yeah so, explain this” questions).

Some of you may recall that there was a thing that ran around Facebook a few weeks ago about a test given to grade schoolers about “science” and most thought it a joke, until the school system (a Christian school) fessed up and said it was theirs. Anyway, at the end, was a question which tells you that this is all about indoctrination and not about actual science. The question was “And what do we say when people tell us that the earth is millions of years old?”

The answer is “Were you there?” Yeah that’s what crazy fundie parents are teaching our children to say in response to a scientific fact. And lo and behold that question also exists on the Talk Origins “creationist arguments”.

I found every single one of the lady’s “arguments” on Talk Origins. They are simplistic and easily dispelled. The offerer of course doesn’t understand a thing about what they just regurgitated. They aren’t meant to. They are happy to find somebody who agrees with them, who writes in a way that sounds all scientific-y, and is not understandable by them certainly. (This makes it likely to be true).

I cited scientific responses and the appropriate links to read the truth in full. (By the way NCSE is another great site for scientific responses and information on evolution and climate change).  Of course there was no response from the creation lady.

When I asked for her sources, since her arguments were not hers but something she admittedly read in a book, I got the stonewall. “You won’t read them anyway!” she whined. No of course I’m not going to line the pockets of a charlatan, but I will look up his name and read reviews of his book(s) and alert others where to go to read about his credentials.

But she won’t give them to me. Plagiarism is a darn sight less dangerous in her eyes than giving her sources up to scrutiny by others.

Truth is scary stuff to some.

I suppose next she will be telling me that Revelation is all about the Catholic Church being the beast. That seems to be the level where those of her kind end up.

What does all this mean?

Not much. It is just that willful ignorance of this sort is that voice that I hear that tells me that these folks shouldn’t be allowed to vote, and definitely not raise children. They should be set down on farms far away from normal people where they can engage in their fantasies without harming others.

But then that conflicts with the other voice that tells me that I don’t approve of limits to who can vote (heck given their level of duh, I figure we couldn’t go too wrong with letting chimps vote either), and I don’t think we want to go down the road of who can procreate either.

The nice thing is that the two voices conflict and I have to resolve the dilemma, something the fundie mind can avoid. So far I come down on the side of freedom, but if these people don’t stop annoying me with their nonsense, well, I might be persuaded to at least make chocolate unavailable to them. I mean it’s a treat they should be denied, just for being so darn goofy.

Oh, Michele, Say It Ain’t So–Or the Crazy Meets the Wall

Oh my goodness, my goodness, as Shirley Temple often said. Or perhaps a band of munchkins is more to your liking, “ding, dong, the wicked witch is dead.” Figuratively of course. Whatever you flavor of bygonedom, an era of crazy as in bat shit crazy is about to end. You won’t have Michele to kick around any more as Tricky Dick was wont to glower.

I could go on, but you no doubt know I have more pithy comments left to make. Soooo, I was grumbling, sitting on the side of the bed, dangling a pair of panties and searching valiantly for my toe to hook ‘em, when the Contrarian rushed in, “let me be the first to tell ya sweetie. Michele Bachmann isn’t going to run for re-election.”

Well, that almost made my day, although a 2 1/2 mile walk and a trip to the pool followed by three shopping stops still loomed large in my rear view mind. All sorts of stuff started racing through my head as I tried to figure out how a Bachmann-free world would look, feel, nay even smell like.

I scoured the Internet and managed to find all this information for your perusal.

Since she started out by assuring us that it had nothing to do with her Democratic opponent, you can assume it had EVERYTHING to do with her Democratic opponent. I mean she had already started running ads. The fact that that pesky investigation about how she mismanaged her campaign finances wouldn’t go away probably had something to do with it too.

I am told that Louis Gohmert and Steve King were heartbroken. No more weird teapotter sex in the cloak room with the ever vivacious and eye-spinning girl wonder for them. You do NOT want to know what teapotter sex consists of, trust me. People who have snuck in between the coats to spy on the threesome (de rigueur in teapotter circles), have been known to lose their eyesight. Nobody thought you could put THAT, THERE and live I tell ya.

Anyway, insiders suggest that there were some private reasons why Ms. Bachmann decided to hang up her Congressional spurs at this time.

• She was heartbroken when Speaker Boehner told her that she had not won a seat on the Intelligence Committee because  of her, you know, intelligence. Actually it all started as a joke and well, it got out of hand.
• Various members of the Armed Services called to testify at hearings, threatened to commit hara kiri if she asked them one more stupid question.
• Marcus’ reparative therapy had been going really well until marriage equality passed in Minnesota. Thereafter he could be heard roaming their Minnesota home intoning, “free at last, free at last, thank God Almighty, I’m free at last.”
• Michele was told that the campaign finance money she spent on her “wandering eye” surgery was not deductible as an “expense”.
• Her most lucrative engagement–speaking at Tea Party events was about to dry up as the last Teapotters get ready to close up shop. Sarah advised her to get in on the speaking tours while the getting was good. Grifters do as much for other grifters it seems.
• It was explained to her that Obamacare was still the law of the land and no amount of clicking her heels together would change that.
• A little-known House rule requires a Congressperson to step down after eight years of introducing absolutely no bills that weren’t laughed at by the House cleaning staff.
• It was about to get out that she had copies of Chippendales on Display” in her desk drawer–AND the pages were very very worn.
• She’s joining a new group headed up by Christine “I’m not a witch” O’Donnell, Sarah “I’m still relevant” Palin, and other failed TeaWomen, to offer their services as Public Relations experts.
• She always wanted to be a end-times preacher in her heart of hearts.
• Let’s face it, Phyllis Schlafley is getting really really old and somebody has to travel around the country, get paid tens of thousands all the while spreading the message that God wants women to stay home and support their flaccid husbands. After all, they didn’t get flaccid all by themselves, it takes a ball-buster of a woman to do that, except of course unless he’s a closeted gay.

Meanwhile,  the Contrarian has wired the entire house so that every television and Tivo box is tied together. I don’t understand the science behind all this, but I’m assured that I can turn on any TV just by pushing “puree” on my blender and I can change channels by pressing “steam” on my iron. No amount of glazed-over eyes prevents him from explaining the math of all this to me over and over again. I prefer to simply say. . . .”the Internet is like a series of tubes through which little busses carrying electrical bundles careening through intersections dump their loads at rail crossings, and yelling ‘bingo’ at regular intervals, all resulting in my getting the channel I want when I want it.”

Signing off from this tube relay platform until later.

Related articles

• Michele Bachmann says she won’t run for re-election (suntimes.com)
• Bye-Bye Bachmann! But Hopefully Not Farewell (newyorker.com)
• Michele Bachmann Calls It Quits (businessweek.com)
• Bachmann Calls it Quits! (politicalirony.com)
• Bachmann Makes Stunning Decision (huffingtonpost.com)