What’s that about clinging to guns?
The Freedom of Choice Act is not pro-choice. At this point I hope all people supporting Obama understand that he is pro-ABORTION. I hate to sound so single issue but seriously 3500 babies are killed every day in the US and Obama wants to increase this number. That’s like 7 million babies since the start of the war in Iraq. and nobody seems to care cuz Obama is the hip, cool vote. Es absurdo! qué pena
I like to imagine that one day, before the alien takeover, most of our more nutty citizens will move to Alaska and be our secesh neighbors of the northwest. In their own country, they squeeze all of the abortion, socialism, liberalism, nipples, Jews, Satan, gays, masturbation, and vegan cookbooks out of the minds of their youngins.
The same goes for the current crop of “Libertarian” whiners of which, from his Facebook updates, singer/songwriter Jude seems to be a part:
McCain finally won a debate, but Obama can never lose. The real losers are any of us left with Libertarian tendencies…
There may be whispering small-l-libertarians on my shoulders and the shoulders of most self-efficacious adults; but, we shouldn’t be under the illusion that our libertarian beliefs are shared by the people whom we repeatedly send to Washington to do something.
These do-something-ners are always going to find a way to find a way to do something. And if that means creating more departments of we-gotta-save-you-all-from-yourselves and hiring more do-something-ners , they’ll find a constituency who will be dramatically supportive.
My point is, haggling over marginal issues, like the barely-moving tax rate and the pureness of a politician’s Christianity, is a lot like drinking Bud Light: You get louder and louder until you pass out and forget everything that happened. If you really want “change,” you’ve got to “get out there” and make a good impression. By their nature, whiners and self-declared losers don’t impress. It’s the reason why Obama, a black man from an underprivileged family, has done so well.
It’s not often put into words and it’s a social issue that may keep Obama in Chicago. The coverage allotted to those pundits who lean a particular way on this issue increased immeasurably after 9-11 and the unethical behavior publicly displayed by the Bush posse has become a stronghold for those pundits.
I’m referring to what some white people consider to be a sacred right. They don’t want to apologize for their racist tendencies and they feel the need to “speak out” if they believe that they are being forced to tap dance around their “reality based” assessments.
And, really, there’s nothing inherently wrong with this. Groupthink and preference for similarity are human conditions. Furthermore, man’s struggle to establish his identity as one who is dominant over the totality of his domain is as old as the sky is blue. So, ultimately, white people can rationalize racism by believing that, if a minority is given an inch, he will take a mile.
Using racist language secures this hierarchy. It not only defines a minority as inferior, it defines the white person as superior. McCain’s use of this language may shock Doug Thompson; but, as anyone with an ear to the ground knows, McCain’s only hope of winning this thing is to appeal to white people who are angry that they can’t call it as they see it. As much as they want to they can’t, you know, call Obama a nigger.
Via NHS Blog Doctor, a collection of cigarette commercials. Because I was born in ‘83, these commercials fascinate me as cigarette marketing via television and radio was banned in the United States beginning January 1971.
Here are a few from the ’40s and ’50s:
And the ’60s:
Post title is explained here:
I was tidying up my miscellaneous website files yesterday and discovered that I had saved the myspace page of Jacob Robida, the psychotic Juggalo and murderer whom I referenced in this post. To read through the comments is to witness an exercise in rationalization and friendship:
In addition to Robida’s profile, I also managed to save James Dungy’s myspace profile. James, the son of Colts coach Tony Dungy, committed suicide in December 2005. Apparently, soon after James’ suicide, the sports site Deadspin posted a link to a copy of his profile and controversy ensued. The media, however, made frequent references to the emotional darkness of the profile without providing any visual context. So, if you weren’t able to catch it, here it is:
Reflexive morbidity aside, I post these as a warning. The way in which one “cries for help” changes with technology. Robida and Dungy’s display of violence worship were not obvious cries for help relative to, for instance, a purposely unsuccessful suicide attempt. But, if your family member or friend advertises their love for and fascination with guns, drugs, killing, dying, and/or Hitler, something is awfully wrong. And these profiles testify to this fact.
A nude maid cleaned up good at a Florida man’s home.
The Hillsborough County Sheriff’s Office says the maid stole more than $40,000 from a Cheval home despite not wearing any clothes.
The 50-year-old man hired the maid from the Internet on Friday to clean his suburban Tampa home.
Authorities say the woman arrived at the home in a one-piece, light colored dress. She took off the dress and cleaned the house for $100-per-hour.
Sheriff’s office spokeswoman Debbie Carter says the man told deputies he left the maid alone in the bedroom to clean.
When the man’s wife came home from vacation, she discovered $40,000 in jewelry missing from their bedroom.
Police are investigating.
Florida’s ABC Action News tracked down the poor wife and reports:
The wife of a man who hired a nude maid to clean their home while she was away is speaking out over the theft of $40,000 worth of jewelry from the residence.
The wife, who asked not to be identified, says she plans to file for divorce. “My mom is very ill so I was away caring for her and when I came back that is what I came back to,” the wife told abcactionnews.com.
She agreed to the interview hoping it will help investigators locate the stolen goods.
Deputies say Kenna DiMartini is a person of interest in connection with the so-called “nude maid” jewelry theft case. The valuables apparently were stolen from the couple’s Cheval home in northwest Hillsborough County while the maid was “cleaning.”
The husband reportedly located the maid through Craigslist and hired her to clean the home while his wife was out of town. It’s believed the maid cleaned out the jewelry while cleaning up the bedroom.
Deputies say the man’s wife discovered her jewelry missing when she returned to her newly spic ‘n span home.
The husband pointed officers to the woman’s web site and provided a physical description of her appearance, minus clothing details.
The wife says she questions whether the “nude maid” actually “cleaned” the home.
“I’m gonna divorce him because I can’t trust him. He violated every core of marriage and trust, ” she said, adding, “I bleached my whole house because she’s been inside my house, and there’s a stain in my heart that bleach is never going to erase.”
So, being a good blogger, I googled Kenna DiMartini and snapped shots of personal pages before they all disappear. She claims she does porn but does not do prostitution. First, Kenna DiMartini’s sexyjobs page:
Second, her myspace page:
Third and fourth, her modelmayhem and modelingcorner pages:
Fifth, Kenna DiMartini’s NSFW dymondstaffing page:
And, finally, I searched the Tampa craigslist for maids and found this listing which might be the “service provider” that the hapless gentleman used:
A Juggalo (male or female) or Juggalette (more commonly used for a female) is a member of the group that has grown up around the fanbase of the Michigan rap/horrorcore group Insane Clown Posse (ICP), and related recording artists at Psychopathic Records. Much of the predominant philosophy of the group stems from the Dark Carnival, a mythology that was carried as a theme in six ICP albums known as the 6 Joker’s Cards.
Yuppies, they are not. But, just as yuppies consider themselves the keepers of the finer aspects of American culture, Juggalos consider themselves the keepers of music. I think they consider themselves music’s gatekeepers because the Insane Clown Posse is so amusingly awful that their music is technically conceptual.
The Insane Clown Posse is comprised of these two fine gentlemen who appear to be impervious to the effects of fire:
But, fret not. According to Wikipedia, they are human:
The group consists of Joseph Bruce and Joseph Utsler,
until they take the stage:
who perform under the stage names and personas of Violent J and Shaggy 2 Dope, a pair of murderous “wicked clowns.” Insane Clown Posse performs a style of hardcore hip hop known as “horrorcore,” and are known both for their dark and violent lyrics and their elaborate live performances.
in order to help us become better people:
The majority of their work centers on the Dark Carnival, an omnipotent force materialized as stories surrounding a series of characters, each one offering a specific lesson designed to change the “evil ways” of listeners before “the end consumes us all.”
Now, despite the lyrical violence and performative depravity, who are these better people? Ignoring this guy who “attacked patrons at a Massachusetts gay bar, murdered a police officer, shot a female companion, and ultimately shot himself after fleeing to Norfork, Arkansas”, the Juggalo subculture is really a portly and mostly congenial subculture who would be just like you and me if we dressed in black, wore face-paint, and kept our hair plenty greasy:
They have a meet-up every year called the “Gathering of the Juggalos” (FYI, the 2008 gathering will occur in Illinois which is, incidentally, the home of Popeye). Here’s the only photo from a gathering that I could find online:
You can find more on the Juggalo subculture at the Juggalo World website.
Via Andrew Sullivan, the Catholic mental ward also known as the American Life League is, on June 7th, bestowing the nation with “Protest the Pill Day ‘08: The Pill Kills Babies” protests that will occur in front of Planned Parenthood buildings and abortion clinics.
Because they’re a Catholic organization (which is synonymous with complete and utter honesty), let’s check they’re claims about the evil things that will happen to the pill taker (also known as the baby murderer):
- Cerebral hemorrhage (bleeding into the cranial cavity)7,8
(This one sounds bad.) - Cerebral thrombosis (blood clot that drains blood from the brain)7,8
(This one sounds horrible.) - Retinal thrombosis (blockage of the central retinal vein that carries blood away from the eye)7,8
(Oh. My. God.) - Thrombophlebitis and venous thrombosis with or without embolism (blood clots in the veins)4,7,8
(Alright, this is getting scary.) - Budd-Chiari Syndrome (closing of the veins that carry deoxygenated blood from the lower half of the body into the heart)7,8
(Sweet Jesus! I need salvation!)
But, wait. What do their sources say? Source 4 is a book or booklet or something entitled Infant Homicides through Contraceptives. I’m sure that it’s just a coincidence but you can purchase it for $1.95 from something called CatholicStore.com.
That leaves sources 7 and 8. Again, I’m sure that it’s just a coincidence but they both link to Ortho Tri-Cyclen inserts. Ortho Tri-Cyclen is also known as “the pill.” Source 7 is for regular Ortho Tri-Cyclen and source 8 is for Ortho Tri-Cyclen Lo which contains 10 micrograms less estrogen than the standard pill. So, they have, essentially, the same side effects.
But, wait. Side effects? No, not really. Taking “the pill” is associated with an increased risk of developing a condition listed above. A side effect is nausea. Those are adverse reactions. Another adverse reaction is death and death can occur after taking for the first time something as common as Tylenol.
But, wait. What’s that commandment? Number 9? Thou shalt not bear fal… Hmmm, I can’t recall. Anyway, I’m sure it’s not an important one.
McNEIL-PPC, Inc. for their Zyrtec-D packaging:
Yes, 24 individually wrapped nasal decongestant tablets. The lot of wasted plastic might be redeemable if the packaging wasn’t ridiculously child and old-person proof. The packaging works well if you’re carrying one in your pocket. Unfortunately, the packaging is more annoying than those sticky things on DVD holders and will work against you if you would like to, say, remove the tablet.
Now this is the sort of activism I can stand behind. No rioting and no dying. Just passive-aggressive anarchy and a disruption of the constancy of the status quo.
Economically, we’ve sold our soul as a country to China and politicians inflict political suicide upon themselves for citing China’s tremendous array of human rights violations. Bizarrely, such action is akin to Holocaust denial. However, despite the political obfuscation, it is clear to those with their eyes wide open that China is the greatest travesty of our time.
Welcome to Miss Bimbo. Enter the exciting world of the first ever, virtual fashion game ! Become the most famous, beautiful, sought after bimbo across the globe!
- Find your own cool place to live.
- Find a fun job to pay for your needs and all the clothes a Bimbo could possibly want.
- Shop for the latest fashions and become the trendsetting bimbo in town !
- Become a socialite and skyrocket to the top of fame and popularity.
- Date that famous hottie you’ve had your eye on and show the Bimbo world the social starlet you are !
- Even resort to meds or plastic surgery. Stop at nothing to become the reigning bimbo !
- Tackle your 104 tasks as quick as possible to become the rising star bimbo !!
Boob jobs, diet pills and boyfriends are the name of the game for many girls joining a new online game that allows users to do whatever it takes to become “the most famous, beautiful, sought-after bimbo across the globe.”
“Miss Bimbo’s” users — who are primarily teenagers but are as young 8 — create virtual characters known as bimbos, dress them, groom them and can even navigate them right onto a plastic surgeon’s operating table.
Launched by business partners Chris Evans and French entrepreneur Nicholas Jacquart two months ago in Great Britain, “Miss Bimbo” has already attracted more than 200,000 users in Britain. The French version, created a year ago, boasts more than 1.2 million users.
Described by Evans as a cross between “Barbie” and “Tamagotchi,” the virtual pet game created in Japan, “Miss Bimbo” hinges on users creating bimbos and then making sure they’re taken care of.
“It’s a virtual reality fashion game,” Evans told ABCNEWS.com. “[Users] create a bimbo, buy her clothes, send her to university and love her and nurture her.”
But it’s the kind of loving and nurturing available in the game that has alarmed many body image experts who charge that the site is sending a bad message to young girls about what it means to be attractive and sexy.
“The fact that the game is encouraging girls to get boob jobs or go to the tanning salon or nab a rich boyfriend to make them more attractive or happier is just a sad awful message,” said Leslie Goldman, the American author of “Locker Room Diaries: The Naked Truth About Women, Body Image.” “It’s a horrible example to set for girls in terms of what is fun and cool and what it means to be a woman.”
I’m sort of on the fence about this. On one hand I can see this as satire and a typical Ponzi scheme. On the other hand, if you read the entire ABC News article, you’ll see that Chris Evans uses the words “in real life” a few times. He’s lying of course. Sitting at a computer and “nurturing” a fictional character (also known as “leveling up” in in fantasy game circles) is not an activity that confers real life lessons.
The byproduct of of our digital revolution is, for some, a loss of autonomy, personal authority, and socialization with family and friends. Digital concepts like Miss Bimbo represent the inevitable culmination of technology and the human desire to become a slave to the pursuit of achievement. Just one more hour and you’ll be a few pegs higher on the leaderboard. All the while, time spent with the shareholders of your life is lost.
I went through this with my father. The thrill of competing on America Online with others for the attention of others led to his estrangement from myself and my mother. That end isn’t inevitable of course. But, what sort of life vest do you throw to someone who is drowning in the belief that maintaining a virtual character is more personal and relevant than taking care of him or herself and those to whom he or she is responsible?
On the Thursday edition of NPR’s Most E-Mailed Stories Podcast, I heard the sad story of Charles Morris, the banker and economic historian who noticed the recent economic travesties and wrote a book about it. However, regardless of his place on the best-sellers list, evolutionary psychology teaches up that, essentially, many people could have read his book but would have not heeded his warning.
Error management theory posits that, when faced with a decision of which we are not sure of the consequences, we are more apt to “play it safe” and deny the option that is likely to produce the most adverse consequences. Ponder:
The allure of “getting rich” and the notion of economic scarcity are so strong that, in my opinion, people will gamble away their savings. However, this assumes a level playing field: If you play your cards well enough, you will procure a gain. Even a modest gain would be acceptable. Unfortunately, everyone else plays the game to make money and the few who have the resources to make the system work to their advantage will do so. They will purposefully create a scenario in which you will give them your savings and you will never see a return. And there will always be a plethora of people willing to take that risk. Hence obtaining more money and engaging in more wars will always be the goal of our wonderfully jingoed rulers.
“Look out, God–behind You!”"Nothing’s the same since Julie started those wars.”“The New World has that New World smell.”
“We, the jury, find the defendant cute as a button.”
“Shoot him again, Mr. President. He doesn’t mind.”
“Yummy plague!”
“I claim this land in the name of Phyllis T. Brunell.”
“Let the ant-shaving begin!”
“No man is so tall as when he stoops to help kill a child.”
“That was no lady, that was Iraq.”
Source: Marshall Sella in Created In Darkness By Troubled Americans: The Best Of McSweeney’s Humor Category, 2004, p. 224.
Regarding this blog post, the Politico reports:
“If it insulted people, that was not the intent,” Outlook editor John Pomfret told me this morning, calling the piece “tongue-in-cheek.”
Ms Allen’s article is imbued with sarcasm. That’s obvious. I initially thought that it was too over the top to be serious. I mean, how could someone with such a prominent vocabulary commit such a glaring relativist fallacy. You can get away with hating people for being wrong. It’s harder to get away with arguing that the people you hate are wrong because you hate them and you are right.
However, after reviewing her previous attempts, I determined that her aforementioned argument is, indelibly, her style. As proof I direct you to this WaPo opinion-editorial. Ms Allen asserts:
In fact, when I contemplate the concept of “dying well,” I can’t avoid the uneasy feeling that it actually means “dying when we, the intellectual elite, think it is appropriate for you to die.”
And then, without the slightest regard for the irony, Ms Allen asserts:
Furthermore, according to a 1990s study by the National Institutes of Health, even when patients have living wills, if those wills contain directives with which doctors and hospitals disagree (such as, I myself suspect, prolonging the patient’s life instead of terminating it), many doctors simply ignore the patient’s desires.
Hilariously, she’s completely ignorant of the fact that those “intellectual elites,” for whom her disdain is made palpable, proliferate every “National Institute.” I feel sorry for Ms Allen. Not only did those nurses bother her but, also, one of her doctors is obviously going to end her life against her wishes.
So, it’s obvious that Ms Allen is sardonic and bothered and the WaPo got caught with its pants down. Her article is, hopefully, a eulogy–albeit a premature eulogy–to the sort of narcissistic and self-contained journalistic structure in which people like Ms Allen thrive.
I wake up this morning and I find this wonderful example of what passes as modern opinion-editorializing in my reader inbox:
I can’t help it, but reading about such episodes of screaming, gushing and swooning makes me wonder whether women — I should say, “we women,” of course — aren’t the weaker sex after all. Or even the stupid sex, our brains permanently occluded by random emotions, psychosomatic flailings and distraction by the superficial. Women “are only children of a larger growth,” wrote the 18th-century Earl of Chesterfield. Could he have been right?
I’m not the only woman who’s dumbfounded (as it were) by our sex, or rather, as we prefer to put it, by other members of our sex besides us. It’s a frequent topic of lunch, phone and water-cooler conversations; even some feminists can’t believe that there’s this thing called “The Oprah Winfrey Show” or that Celine Dion actually sells CDs. A female friend of mine plans to write a horror novel titled “Office of Women,” in which nothing ever gets done and everyone spends the day talking about Botox.
We exaggerate, of course. And obviously men do dumb things, too, although my husband has perfectly good explanations for why he eats standing up at the stove (when I’m not around) or pulls down all the blinds so the house looks like a cave (also when I’m not around): It has to do with the aggressive male nature and an instinctive fear of danger from other aggressive men. When men do dumb things, though, they tend to be catastrophically dumb, such as blowing the paycheck on booze or much, much worse (think “postal”). Women’s foolishness is usually harmless. But it can be so . . . embarrassing.
Take Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton’s campaign. By all measures, she has run one of the worst — and, yes, stupidest — presidential races in recent history, marred by every stereotypical flaw of the female sex. As far as I’m concerned, she has proved that she can’t debate — viz. her televised one-on-one against Obama last Tuesday, which consisted largely of complaining that she had to answer questions first and putting the audience to sleep with minutiae about her health-coverage mandate. She has whined (via her aides) like the teacher’s pet in grade school that the boys are ganging up on her when she’s bested by male rivals. She has wept on the campaign trail, even though everyone knows that tears are the last refuge of losers. And she is tellingly dependent on her husband.
This article is written by vapid anti-feminist and religious conservative Charlotte Allen. To be fair, her article appeared here with the title “Why do women cling to pre-feminist stereotypes?” before it was published nationwide by the WaPo with the title “We Scream, We Swoon. How Dumb Can We Get?” Still the substance of the article is quite unappealing. Ms Allen dresses herself in the “feminism is the new oppression” independent woman garb. But, in actuality, she dons a black suit and tie: She is a misogynist and a pot to someone’s kettle.
Take this article on Harvard University President Lawrence Summers for instance:
Even if you’re not up on the scientific research - a paper Mr. Summers cited demonstrating that, while women overall are just as smart as men, significantly fewer women than men occupy the very highest intelligence brackets that produce scientific genius - common sense tells you that Mr. Summers has got to be right.
Unless you’re at Harvard. There, the professoriate - quickly joined by academics and media intellectuals from all over the country - has deemed Mr. Summers’ mild references to innate sex differences to have been so outrageous as to deserve severe censure.
The reason? The statements violated the central tenet of feminist ideology: that the two sexes are intrinsically identical except for a few superficial physical characteristics and that any perceived differences between them can be blamed on sex discrimination and social conditioning [emphasis mine]. Scientific evidence to the contrary be damned; a feminist professor in Mr. Summers’ audience announced that his remarks made her feel as though she was “going to be sick.”
Of course men and women are different. Ms Allen makes it clear in her most recent article that men’s mostly phyiscal idiosyncrasies are “cavemanish” and women’s mostly emotional idiosyncrasies are “embarrassing.” Unfortunately, Ms Allen doesn’t seem to be aware that if you take away a woman’s estrogen–the hormone that produces the “embarrassing” emotional idiosyncrasies–the woman becomes a man. Now that is the equivalence that Ms Allen believes is so unnatural.
However, I’m not proposing that there aren’t some thinkers in the social sciences that ignore the biological and neurological differences and truly believe that, absent social conditions, men and women would obtain equal amounts of achievements in the same fields. But, Ms Allen likes to argue that biological and neurological differences between men and women produce those social conditions. Therefore, the social conditions are an acceptable fact of life.
What both sides miss, and the reason why I refer to her as a pot to someone’s kettle, is that biology, neurology, and social conditions interact to such a degree that it is nonsense to posit which came first, which has the strongest relative influence, and which should receive the strongest relative deference. It is also unacceptable to believe that the three variables are immutable.
To finish, let’s return to Ms Allen’s “lots of women are dumb but I’m not” article. Ms Allen ends with the following advice:
So I don’t understand why more women don’t relax, enjoy the innate abilities most of us possess (as well as the ones fewer of us possess) and revel in the things most important to life at which nearly all of us excel: tenderness toward children and men and the weak and the ability to make a house a home. (Even I, who inherited my interior-decorating skills from my Bronx Irish paternal grandmother, whose idea of upgrading the living-room sofa was to throw a blanket over it, can make a house a home.) Then we could shriek and swoon and gossip and read chick lit to our hearts’ content and not mind the fact that way down deep, we are . . . kind of dim.
I agree: Ms Allen should relax and enjoy being a woman and all of the emotional idiosyncrasies. However, although she believes that women scream and swoon at an embarrassingly high degree and frequency (men do those things to a quieter and lesser degree when watching sports), she should appreciate the fact that way down deep, women are, relative to men . . . kind of different.
