the Night before Solstice

Twas around winter solstice, alone in the house
I was reading the Bible, as quiet as a mouse.
The stories were thrown in the book without care;
contradictions abounded, mistakes everywhere.

I could not understand, or believe what it said,

its tall tales of people come back from the dead;

original sin, which was such a bum rap,

blood sacrifice, curses, and other such crap.

When deep down inside I knew something's the matter
I sprang to the Web to make sense of such chatter.
Away to the Google I flew like a flash,
to try and make out heads or tails of this trash.

The search engine gave me back millions of hits;

molesters, and con men, and other such shits.

When, what to my wondering eyes should appear,

but hundreds of gods from the earliest year.

With a little old edit, the story of Horus
I knew in a moment it must be the sou-rce.
More numerous than seagulls, gods and goddesses came,
and I whistled, and marveled, and called out their name;

Osiris! Adonis! Dionysus! Mithra!

There's Attis and Ishtar! And Baldr and Krishna!

To the land of the dead! Down to hell they all went,

to the underworld, after their lives were all spent.

Like fertility symbols these gods they all die,
and then get resurrected, back up in the sky.
So back up to heaven these deities flew,
to start new religions, and Jesus did too.

Right there in the gospels, just like you would guess,

a brand new Messiah turned up in this mess.

As I willingly tried to suspend disbelief

from the pages this Jesus guy came like a thief.

He was beat all to shit, from his head to his foot,
and put onto a cross just like Horus was put;
His birth in a manger, and marked by a star,
that's a detail he stole from the Goddess Ishtar.

His magic trick changing his water to wine,
was a ripoff of Bacchus who used to brew 'shine.
He claims to have brought people back from the dead,
 that's just like the other gods—what they all said.

And in some of his stories he acts like a cad:
“Hate your mother and father! Don't bury your dad!”
Sends his guys to steal donkeys, and kills farmer's pigs,
and cusses a tree out for not giving figs.

He's a crazy old preacher, who just seems kind of silly
though I had to admit that his book was a dilly,
that tried hard to steal those old stories by stealth,
and I laughed when I read it, in spite of myself.

A shift of my eyes and a twist of my head,

to the headlines, told me I had nothing to dread:

all the Pope's rules have been shown not to work,

evangelicals picket, and act like a jerk;

They cry “war on Christmas” and make silly fusses,
when we put up billboards, or signs on our buses.
But to all the fanatics I give this epistle,
away from your church people fly like a missile,

And I have to exclaim, on this solsticey night,

that millions of us, without gods, are alright.

Hail, Sol Invictus

 The Freedom From Religion Foundation placed an 8.5-foot-tall Scarlet A monument and banner in downtown Chicago. Here's the banner.

The text reads,

At this season of the Winter Solstice, we celebrate the Birth of the Unconquered Sun--the TRUE reason for the season.

Wait, what does that even mean? The Unconquered Sun, it turns out is Sol Invictus, one of the main gods of the old Romans.  One can only conclude that the stereotypical "militant atheists of the "FFRF worship the sun god.   They've been doing a good job of hiding it, but now that they've outed themselves as sun worshippers, will the christstains still call them godless?

Monsters

A pretty nice performance by Jeremy  Loveday


from Upworthy, hat tip to Margarita del Norte

2ndAmendmentville

A song dedicated to this genius who just blew the shit out of himself.

-----

Second Amendmentville

Fondlin my pistol
nibblin meth crystal
holdin my weapons all covered with oil 

strokin my six gun
sippin a cold one
suddenly felt a loud noise and recoil


Chorus: wasted today here in 2nd amendmentville  
   not really sure if I committed assault 
  some people claim there's a red neck to blame
 but I know, it's nobody's fault


Don't know the reason
I find guns so pleasin
Here let me show you this Ruger Mark II

It's this one I favor
though it shot my neighbor
how it went off I haven't a clue


                    wasted right here in 2nd Amendmentville
  victim of an inadvertent assault
  some people claim there's a red neck to blame
 Now I think, Hell it could be my fault


Blew away someone
while cleaning my shotgun
round in the chamber but I didn't know

But I got a permit
that lets me do dumb shit
with lethal contraptions that boost my ego

        wasted by a responsible gun owner      

        victim of an inadvertent assault

     Some people claim that there's a redneck to blame

    but I know it's my own damn fault

Yes and some people claim that there's a redneck to blame

And I know it's my own damn fault 

Hail Satan

This should be good.  The ACLU is suing to get a Ten Commandments

monument removed from the Oklahoma City Capitol grounds, and now the Temple of Satan applied to donate a monument to go next to the 10 C's.  ROFL!




They've done this sort of thing before. Back when Rick Perry was pimping a bill to get prayer in school they

staged a Satanic rally thanking Rick Scott for endorsing a bill that allowed Satanism in schools, ensuring that children who might otherwise never learn of the Satanic creed could be exposed to it in the classroom. This was a harsh reminder that religious freedom applies to all, and the United States is a nation based upon religious pluralism.

More lulz--some of the ten commandments were spelled wrong. 


So what's the Temple of Satan about? Lucien Greaves explains

Religion can and should be a metaphorical narrative construct by which we give meaning and direction to our lives and works. Our religions should not require of us that we submit ourselves to unreason and untenable supernatural beliefs based on literal interpretations of fanciful tales. Non-believers have just as much right to religion—and any exemptions and privileges being part of a religion brings—as anybody else.

Well that sounds pretty interesting on a couple of fronts.

• Churches aren't supposed to dabble in politics, ostensibly, and these guys are as much a political activist group as a church
  
  
• They reject anything supernatural—yay, them—and most atheists I argue with  talk to insist that
  
  religion = belief in a supernatural deity 
  but they haven't objected that these Satanists aren't a real, atheist, religion. Awkward.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  

How to talk to women

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the War on Incubators

If you thought the war on  incubators  women couldn't get any worse than state-mandated rape of pregnant women, think again.

A pregnant woman has had her baby forcibly removed by caesarean section by social workers.

Essex social services obtained a High Court order against the woman that allowed her to be forcibly sedated and her child to be taken from her womb.

This happened in  the Republic of Gilead  Not-So-Great-Britain, but the forced birth crowd here are flies on the same turd, and there's a lot of them.

Margaret Atwood was not writing an instruction manual.  At least, not intentionally.

the War on Solstice

There actually is a war on Christmas, no matter what the Daily Show says, but call it by its right name: Winter Solstice.

Take the CHRIST out of CHRISTMAS

Way long ago the Pagans had it, all over the world. They brought in the harvest, settled back with serious brew and debauchery.  Until a certain genocidal death cult renamed the Solstice after their idol and managed to kill off mostly everybody else.

Then for a couple thousand years nobody hardly remembered  the reason for the season, but the heathens are making a comeback now.  Unlike the suicidal death cult that actively works to destroy the Earth, they actually respect the world we all live in and want to honor it. It's time we get back to basics.

The Bible

 

Page 1

1 “In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.” Check

2 “And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep.” Hold it. The earth was void? That means it didn't have anything in it. No form, nothing in it; not much of an earth; where's the deep?

 And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.” Wait, what? We've got heaven and we've got earth, but the earth has no form, nothing in it, but somewhere there's waters, so apparently the earth is made of water? Unless the deep is in heaven—don't know yet, although wherever they are, the spirit of god is moving around on them. Another puzzle: it isn't god moving around, just his spirit. Odd.

The universe looks like a sex ed diagram. Anyway,
3And God said, Let there be light: and there was light. No problem there. Go, god. 

4And God saw the light, that it was good: okay. and God divided the light from the darkness.
Wait, what? First we had darkness, over the deep, then he created light, but the light wasn't separate from the darkness? How is that possible? Did he make it first as kind of twilight, and then later divided the light into one spot? This is weird.

5And God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. Good names there, god. And the evening and the morning were the first day. 

6 And God said, Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters, and let it divide the waters from the waters.
All right, that clears up about the waters. He's got a firmament, “the arch or vault of the sky” in the waters, so the waters are not in earth, they're in heaven, and heaven is apparently in the sky. Got it.

7And God made the firmament, uhhh, you already said that. Presumably he didn't make two firmaments. I sure hope not. and divided the waters which were under the firmament from the waters which were above the firmament: and it was so.
 

8And God called the firmament Heaven. And the evening and the morning were the second day. Hold it. He created heaven, that had water in it, or was made of water, and he called it 'heaven'. In the middle of it he put this 'firmament' thingy, and says the firmament is 'heaven'. Is heaven still 'heaven' too? How do I tell them apart? 

9And God said, Let the waters under the heaven The 'heaven' heaven or the firmament 'heaven'? be gathered together unto one place, and let the dry land appear: and it was so.
Huh? The waters coalesce into one lump, and reveals dry land, right up there above the earth. The earth is land, so “the dry land” was already there. Shouldn't he have said “let more dry land appear?” confusing. 

10And God called the dry land Earth; Oh, no! This again? Is god just trying to confuse me? Does he mean the moon? If the moon is 'earth'; what's earth?


and the gathering together of the waters called he Seas: and God saw that it was good. That's beginning to be a matter of opinion.

11And God said, Let the earth bring forth grass, the herb yielding seed, and the fruit tree yielding fruit after his kind, whose seed is in itself, upon the earth: and it was so.
On which earth? Either all this shit is on the new dry land and the original earth is underneath it, or, there's a huge blob of dry land up in the sky with a lot of plants growing on it. Does NASA know about this? 

12And the earth brought forth grass, and herb yielding seed after his kind, and the tree yielding fruit, whose seed was in itself, after his kind: and God saw that it was good. 

13And the evening and the morning were the third day. So now, after three days, earth (one of them) has
(a) grass, (b) herbs that bear seeds (c) fruit trees, (d) no water (e) darkness on earth, light is somewhere else. How do these plants live?

14And God said, Let there be lights in the firmament of the heaven WTF? You want lights in the what? The firmament you now call heaven has a firmament inside it? Lights Where? What?
to divide the day from the night; The fuck?? Day and night have been divided since the first day. God said so already. and let them be for signs, and for seasons, and for days, and years:
15And let them be for lights in the firmament of the heaven (wherever that is!) to give light upon the earth: (the original one or the fruity moon one?) and it was so. so that light he made on the first day wasn't on the earth at all. What good was it? 

16And God made two great lights; the greater light to rule the day, and the lesser light to rule the night: Huh? He already made lights for the earth. Why's he need another one? Maybe there's two suns? Why the hell not, he just made another moon to go with the fruits & herbs one. he made the stars also. Now that would impress me,ordinarily. I'm getting a little jaded. 

17And God set them in the firmament of the heaven (@#@*#&!!) to give light upon the earth,
18And to rule over the day and over the night, and to divide the light from the darkness: (didn't he already do that? and God saw that it was good. Well, at least somebody likes it. 

19And the evening and the morning were the fourth day.
20And God said, Let the waters bring forth abundantly the moving creature that hath life, and fowl that may fly above the earth in the open firmament of heaven. 

 
Ohhhh, kay!
And that's more than we need to know about this book.

Thanksgiving Casualties

walmart-santa-claus-arrested-black-friday

Wal-Mart CEO Bill Simon told TODAY that 

the company had a “terrific night” 

 Thursday and expected a busy Black Friday too. To wit:

After buying a big screen TV, a Las Vegas shopper was shot at around 9:45 p.m. local time (12:45 a.m. ET) late Thursday as he tried to take his purchase home,

Early Friday shoppers started arriving at a Chicago-area Kohl's store just hours after a police officer shot the driver of a car that was dragging another officer responding to a call of alleged shoplifting  

A man in Claypool Hill, West Virginia, was slashed to the bone with a knife after threatening another man with a gun in an argument over a Wal-Mart parking spot

Terrific: because what's a few deaths when you can add more bucks to the 14,900,000,000.00 dollars you've already got?

 

Also too, Fights!

 & Tazer Fights!

Josh at Salon is keeping tabs ...

wal_marts_bizarre_self_defense_retailer_defends_activists_firings

debunking_wal_marts_latest_lie_unions_paid_50_to_anyone_who_protested/

Meanwhile, here are a million children who are not fighting over iphones.

Happy Thanksgiving

source

Source: Huffpo

Source: low pay is not ok

Tax Churches

Woot! This is big news.

U.S. District Court Judge Barbara B. Crabb of the Western District of Wisconsin ruled that the so-called “parish exemption,” which allows religious ministers to avoid paying taxes on the value of their housing granted to them by their religious employers, “violates the establishment clause” of the U.S. Constitution and must be discontinued.

The tax exemption was estimated to cost U.S. taxpayers $2.3 billion from 2002-2007 alone, likely more in the years since.

We'll have to wait for the appeals process to play out, but if this goes through it's sure a step in the right direction.

Me, I'd still like to know what pastors actually do to earn all this compensation. They go around spouting off half-baked opinions about the bible, you can get that at any corner barroom for free. Tax the shit out of them. 

Rape, don't steal.

 

WTF?!?

 If you want to stay out of jail, these are the things you should never ever do:

• Possess stolen wrenches
• Siphon gasoline from a truck
• Shoplift three belts from a department store
• Make a drunken threat to a police officer while handcuffed in the back of a patrol car
• Take an abusive stepfather's gun away

To be safe,  just stick to raping children   

• when only "two of the rapes were violent", you get into a program for non-violent offenders
• it isn't a "forcible beat-up rape" even if she kills herself
• raping little girls doesn't mean you aren't a fit parent for little girls
• girls are "older than their chronological age"
• above all, remember, it's her fault! 

and nobody will remember anyway 

Church of Free Beer

Boy, churches are getting desperate.

to-stave-off-decline-churches-attract-new-members-with-beer  Insert joke here about the holy spirit.


Of no relevance; in ancient China there was a group of philosophers who used alcohol as an aid to enlightenment.  The Drunken Sages didn't leave much of a legacy tho, I can't even find anything to link to. 

Reverse Noah's Ark

The Animals are Leaving

    One by one, like guests at a late party 
    They shake our hands and step into the dark: 
    Arabian ostrich; Long-eared kit fox; Mysterious starling.


    One by one, like sheep counted to close our eyes, 
    They leap the fence and disappear into the woods: 
    Atlas bear; Passenger pigeon; North Island laughing owl; 
    Great auk; Dodo; Eastern wapiti; Badlands bighorn sheep.


    One by one, like grade school friends, 
    They move away and fade out of memory: 
    Portuguese ibex; Blue buck; Auroch; Oregon bison; 
    Spanish imperial eagle; Japanese wolf; Hawksbill 
    Sea turtle; Cape lion; Heath hen; Raiatea thrush.


    One by one, like children at a fire drill, they march outside, 
    And keep marching, though teachers cry, "Come back!" 
    Waved albatross; White-bearded spider monkey; 
    Pygmy chimpanzee; Australian night parrot; 
    Turquoise parakeet; Indian cheetah; Korean tiger; 
    Eastern harbor seal ; Ceylon elephant ; Great Indian rhinoceros.


    One by one, like actors in a play that ran for years 
    And wowed the world, they link their hands and bow 
    Before the curtain falls.

    Poem copyright © 2006 by Charles Harper Webb. Reprinted from Amplified Dog by Charles Harper Webb, published by Red Hen Press, 2006, by permission of the author and publisher.

-----

Much more where this came from, Daily Kos.  I leave you with this story by the late environmental activist and Nobel Peace Prize winner Wangari Maathai

One day a terrible fire broke out in a forest - a huge woodlands was suddenly engulfed by a raging wild fire.  Frightened, all the animals fled their homes and ran out of the forest.  As they came to the edge of a stream they stopped to watch the fire and they were feeling very discouraged and powerless.  They were all bemoaning the destruction of their homes.  Every one of them thought there was nothing they could do about the fire, except for one little hummingbird. This particular hummingbird decided it would do something.  It swooped into the stream and picked up a few drops of water and went into the forest and put them on the fire.  Then it went back to the stream and did it again, and it kept going back, again and again and again.  All the other animals watched in disbelief; some tried to discourage the hummingbird with comments like, "Don't bother, it is too much, you are too little, your wings will burn, your beak is too tiny, it’s only a drop, you can't put out this fire." And as the animals stood around disparaging the little bird’s efforts, the bird noticed how hopeless and forlorn they looked. Then one of the animals shouted out and challenged the hummingbird in a mocking voice, "What do you think you are doing?" And the hummingbird, without wasting time or losing a beat, looked back and said: "I am doing what I can."

In this time of escalating climate change, this is our challenge. To refuse to surrender to the apathy of denialism and fatalism.
To be fierce in our defense of the Earth.
To continue to fight in the face of overwhelming odds.
And always, always, to do what we can.
Because it is only by each of us doing what we can, every day, that we will save the Earth – for ourselves, and for the generations to come.  Like the hummingbird.

man hates himself, LOL

This is priceless. 
Racist asshole gets his ass handed on TV to him when they show his DNA is part black!



 "No blacks allowed in my all white town" sez he. LULZ! that includes you, asshole!  Fourteen percent mudblood,  LMAO!  I hope everyone starts calling him an octoroon.  Schadenfreude, it haz a flavor.

The Mail Online has a good write up of the situation.
I had these bookmarked as updates, before this happened.

Latest developments in Leith, ND

more-white-supremacists-move-to-leith/

That's some asshole named Al Borgman. The Duttons already are there, that makes four untermenschen in town.

state-and-regional/group-buys-lots-in-leith-to-balance-takeover/

Good Plan! These new guys can be residents, which means they can vote 

/leith-city-council-oks-building-moratorium/

New zoning laws, gotta have water and sewer hookups, no tents. 

I still say:  can buy flags but can't buy a can of paint; have time to harass people but not to clean up their yard.  The master race are slobs.

God's books

TL;DR

As a kid I heard talk about some Book as the Word of God, which set me to wonder, is that the best an omnipotent guy could get his message out, one crappy little book in one crappy little corner of the universe? What would he really do?

Science fiction has thought a lot about how to communicate with other races who might not have language as we know it. Or mouths, for that matter, or hands or eyes or ears. Maybe they'd be aquatic, or insectoid, or look like sea slugs. Maybe they'd be like octopi and use polarization to talk, who knows?

This came up in real life when NASA sent the Pioneer spacecraft out of the solar system. On the off chance it ran into aliens they wanted to let them know the Good News (see what I did there? and by good news they meant that here was an intelligent race--not that the Milky Way was infested with genocidal maniacs that would kill them on sight especially if they looked like spiders).

Hey aliens, look out!

So what did NASA do, write a book in some obscure language? No, they made the Pioneer Plaque, with symbols that would be universally recognized by anything with intelligence. See the pictures? Why doesn't the bible have pictures? There's no diagrams or graphs, not even an emoticon. That's the best god could do, a lot of boring text?  I could only conclude that god is dumber than NASA.

If I was god, I'd at least make a video, maybe in 3D, maybe a full on hologram, interactive in some way. Hell, if I was omnipotent I could make some kind of obvious code like the DNA sequence only easier to figure out. Best of all would be to give some them actual samples, even put them right in the middle of it so they couldn't live their little lives without interacting with it. Yeah, that's how I'd do it. 

Now I'm all grown up, into some kind of pagan nature worshipper so I'm excluded from the family's Sunday bible study and relegated to baby-sitting. I think about all this while the old folks are locked indoors poring over some musty ancient book and I'm out here in the sunshine with the kids investigating acorns and oak trees, spider webs and worm burrows.

Suck it Christians, your god authored some hoary old tome, my gods authored Nature.

No vember lynx

two vember lynx

Cascadia leads the way,  again.  I can't embed the video but this is a Big Fucking Deal. To drive from from Vancouver to San Diego would cost ?!?!?!!! dollars:  now you can do it for free.







scientists discover another cause of bee deaths and its really bad news

source: AATTP

PORN KILLS

 

Been waiting for this, surprised it was so long coming. (not a pun). Jackass truck driver looks at porn while driving, runs off the road, kills somebody, unfortunately else.

-----

Watch out, California is legalizing hemp.  Those stoners in California, ruining the country they are.

 See, I'm glad mushrooms are against the law, cos I took 'em one time, you know what happened to me? I laid in a field of green grass for four hours, going, 'My God, I love everything.' Yeah, now if that isn't a hazard to our countries...
---Bill Hicks

Everybody needs a friend

Not all football players are assholes. The ones at Olivet Middle School are just the opposite.  They snuck around behind their coaches back and pulled off the Best Play Ever.

-----

Here's an obscene picture for ya

Hope you're not too shocked by it, like the idiots at Facebook. Yea, really, they censored CARTOON boobs, but have no problem showing a woman being beheaded.  

-----

We've now Maimed a Million of our own people!   How does the govt. celebrate setting this new record?  Why, by making it secret of course.
That means we've done it to at the very least ten million people who are not ours, but who cares about bug splats,right?


Speaking of disabled veterans, 1-million-vets-face-food-stamps-cut.  Remind me again, why are they on food stamps?

-----

DU has something interesting from Japan. Guaranteed to cause conniptions in the Religious Right, lulz. No hand job jokes, please.

the future is calling

Y'know what's really cool? That you you have hands and fingers, and can pick up little things, like quarters, and now, SO CAN LIAM!

Some guys were mucking around with robotics, lady had a kid with no fingers, she talked to them and they built this thing for Liam.

Awesome?  It gets better.  The two guys are making their designs open source,  posted to the MakerBot Thingiverse.

Awesomer? It gets better.  The guys put a video on Youtube, where a guy from Massachusetts saw it who had a son without fingers too. But the guys, are in South Africa. No problem!  They did it all over the internet and used a 3D printer to run out a new hand for Leon.

Awesomer yet. Instead of the thousands of dollars this usually costs, they did it for like ten bucks. 



When I think of all the injured, war-damaged, birth defected children in the world, the difficulties of helping them, and the possibilities of this,  I'm just  overwhelmed.

Yeah, yeah, some dick made a working gun with a 3d printer too. Fuck him.  This is something to talk about.   And those inventors, Rich Van As and Ivan Owens, that aren't holding out to make money off this thing,  THEY are saints.


 

Roger Ailes for President?

I don't understand this.    Earlier on I blogged about how the Sith Lords contributed brazillions of dollars to keep from having to tell people what they're eating, and sure enough it worked, the people voted democracy out the door.  Rachael had the details.

Cliff note:  Everybody in the state wanted labels + corporations donated millions of dollars =  no labels.  Same old same old in the Homeland, but here's what I don't get.

Where does all that money go?  Sure, to bribe politicians but in this case they had an election. People voted.  Haven't heard anyone was handing them bundles of cash to vote 'no' so what made them?

Ad campaigns, is what I hear. Now I quit watching TV over twenty years ago, but as I understand it people plop down in front of those things for a good portion of their lives to absorb obvious propaganda, then go do whatever it tells them, mostly to go buy useless crap. Only, don't at least some people still have the synapses to ignore the obvious bullshit for something this important .

If I spent trillion of dollars to run enough ads saying eating shit was yummy and nutritious, would we see a massive trend of people chowing down on raw sewage?

Come to think of it ... 

-----

If we're just going to do whatever we see the most ads for, Let's just shitcan the government and let the richest advertiser run the country.  Cut out the middleman

Humans baffle me.

Marsha's Choice

Fuck  Her 

Millions for Planned Parenthood

A bill introduced by nine Republican lawmakers assholes in Iowa would define abortion as “murder,” sending doctors and women who terminate pregnancies to jail. The bill defines a “person” as “an individual human being, without regard to age of development, from the moment of conception, when a zygote is formed, until natural death.

Try to think this through.

What if a foreign invader attacked a US citizen? Suppose they threatened to kill them, took them hostage, and hooked them up to some sort of medical device to extract blood for their own use? What should be our response?

The answer to this has been clarified by Bush 2003 and by Obama more recently in the DOJ white paper which states that the US government can kill even its own citizens so long as “the targeted individual poses an imminent threat of violent attack against the United States”. Not sure, but I assume attack on a US citizen could be treated as an attack on the United States.

This invading 'person's actions seem to qualify as violent, and the threat of death is definitely imminent. The odds of being killed by childbirth are one in 333, unless you live in Sierra Leone, where it's one in eight, far greater than the one in twenty million odds of being killed by a terrorist that the DOJ was talking about. Definitely an imminent threat. Definitely justified to assassinate the invading person.

Since the US government routinely assassinates persons who are merely plotting or providing material support for such attacks, those nine assholes in Iowa better be watching the skies, but aside from that, since US citizens currently suffer over a million actual attacks per year by these foreign invaders who are now to be legal persons, and since the US has enthusiastically spent billions of dollars to prevent a dozen or so attacks, there can be no serious objection to spending billions, even trillions, to protect our American citizens from this onslaught. The infrastructure is already in place in the form of a nationwide network of clinics capable of dealing with these threats, all that is necessary is to funnel UNLIMITED FUNDS TO PLANNED PARENTHOOD.

Maybe this could work.

Screwie Louie

Huffpo

Sometimes I waffle; these guys can't possibly be so stupid as to believe what comes out of their own mouths, the only explanation is they are being paid to spout crap.

 the perennial question, stupid or evil?

Then along comes Screwie Louie to idiotsplain what to do if your baby's brain never develops.

shouldn’t we wait, ... and see if the child can survive before we decide to rip him apart?"

Yeah right, jackass, let him be born and then decide if you should abort. It's settled, then.

 Evil AND Stupid

 Terrifyingly, this imbecile used to be a judge. He wants the US to be like El Salvador where a trip to the hospital can get you life in prison for something you never even knew about.
He's getting his wish, too. 

15-yearold_girl_faces_life_in_prison_for_a_miscarriage

 case-explores-rights-of-fetus-versus-mother.

 unborn-children-now have-lawyers-women don't


In South Carolina alone, an estimated 300 women have been arrested for actions taken during pregnancy. 
Christine Taylor of Iowa found herself arrested and sent to jail after she fell down the stairs while pregnant.
South Carolina’s Regina McKnight was sentenced to 20 years for having a stillbirth.
Rennie Gibbs of Mississippi age 15 faces life in jail after a miscarriage, 

Alabama Mother of 3 Amanda Kimborough faces 10 years behind bars if convicted of miscarriage

There's even lawyers who specialize in these types of cases.

(source: Talks Many Moons,  from two years ago! )

This is scary, scary shit.

October Lynx

And here I thought Lysistra was fiction!

/women-end-sex-strike-colombia

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Unsung Hero of the day = This guy. Hard to believe story, the state ordered this nursing home closed, so everybody just went home. All the residents there who are depending on you to keep them alive?

Fuck'em. I'm not getting paid—let'em die.

Well this guy thought that was wrong, and wouldn't leave until they got what they need. He's still not getting paid, and he's still out there doing what's right. Mad props.

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Well, I'll be damned, The last survivor of the atomic bomb dropped on South Carolina has just died. I live there and I didn't even know about this. 'Course, I'm twenty miles from a national park and most of the people I talk to have never been there or even know it exists, so there's that.

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Show this guy some love. He's suing the NSA and Dept of Homeland Stupidity, and you gotta love that. Why? Because they're trying to shut him down for using their stupid logos. Bookmark this page for your Winter Solstice shopping --- lotta win in some of these shirts'n stuff.

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In news that will surprise no one, the cop who shot down a 13 year old appears to be a gun-waving nutjob.

How big is Africa? Pretty damn, is how

We're Number One! Uhhh.... yay?

Today's grammar lesson:

Capitalization is the difference between helping your Uncle Jack off a horse and helping your uncle jack off a horse. 

Tits 'r Taz 'er

Wish this was a Halloween prank, but it's a real news story.  Uniformed cop goes to where this woman works, demands she show him her tits.
She refuses. He pulls a tazer. She runs, he chases her, firing the tazer "numerous times".
Because she wouldn't show her tits.

Read it and weep.

OWWWW!

This hurts to even think about!
A shin-kicking tournament ?!?!

Getting to the bottom of ... things

Sigh. In their ongoing efforts to make me ashamed of my country,  our so-called leaders have held a so-called hearing wherein they compete like a pack of Jr. High Mean Girls, to bully a woman because some website is slow.

While Time Warner Cable had me on hold, I watched Kathleen Sebelius earn my everlasting admiration. She not only took responsibility but endured their degrading pile-on with real class; not once did she scream  FUCK YOU YOU HYPOCRITICAL LYING CORPORATE WHORE like I would've. 


But that's minor.

 At the same time they were putting on their clown show there was a hearing about all the thousands of people  we  they are murdering, and none of them BOTHERED TO SHOW UP.   

I no longer love blue skies. In fact I now prefer gray skies. The drones do not fly when the skies are gray, and for a short period of time the mental tension and fear eases.
--Zubair Rehman, teenager

Raw Story covered the hearing, you can watch the video with the crying translator.  Just lately we met Malala, and now we're meeting the Rehman family. This is long overdue, and I hope Americans will begin to see them as people, just like the victims of Newtown.

Here's the honor roll, the five congresspeople who have souls.

Rep. Alan Grayson, who called the hearing in the first place
Rep. John Conyers (D-Mich.)
Rep. Jan Schakowsky (D-Ill.)
Rep. Rush Holt (D-NJ)
Rep. Rick Nolan (D-Minn.)

QFT

There’s no logical reason to argue, “Men are so irresponsible and flighty that they can’t keep their dick in their pants, so let’s give them the power to run the world and give none of it to women.” You need to add, “God said so,” at the end of that so that people stifle the obvious questions.

That's Amanda talking about men who cheat. You can read the whole thing here if you want, but that just leapt out at me. 

Lynx

This is incredible. First off, most people wouldn't even care about some dead snakes, but this guy did.   Second off,
/indian-man-single-handedly-plants-a-1360-acre-forest

Who says one person can't make a difference?


I've built some boats myself, but this, this  is just ....  impressive.
a kayak that's a submarine!


Does your car have a pup holder?

The plot thickens.  Way long ago all the dinosaurs died, and just before that, all the bees died, just like they're doing now.   


Hooray for the Red Brigade. Sometimes a good ass-kicking is what people need.  These ladies bring it.


Judges in Iran are devout Muslims have shit for brains so they sentenced some guys to dress up like women. That, y'unnerstand, will humiliate them unbearably.  ROFL, didn't work. Check it out, some of these guys are hot!

Here's a song I like
Somebody claimed there aren't many good protest songs now, like back in the day, when the women and children 'we' killed were in Vietnam. He could be right, I don't get out much. Half the songs then were protest songs and they gave a lot of momentum to the antiwar movement. That was before our Sith Lords figured out to get control of the media.

Anyways,


Yeh, this one's for the workers who toil night and day
By hand and by brain to earn your pay
Who for centuries long past for no more than your bread
Have bled for your countries and counted your dead

In the factories and mills, in the shipyards and mines
We've often been told to keep up with the times
For our skills are not needed, they've streamlined the job
And with sliderule and stopwatch our pride they have robbed

We're the first ones to starve, we're the first ones to die
The first ones in line for that pie-in-the-sky
And we're always the last when the cream is shared out
For the worker is working when the fat cat's about

And when the sky darkens and the prospect is war
Who's given a gun and then pushed to the fore
And expected to die for the land of our birth
Though we've never owned one lousy handful of earth?

All of these things the worker has done
From tilling the fields to carrying the gun
We've been yoked to the plough since time first began
And always expected to carry the can

-Dropkick Murphys

Women Drivers

Today's the day women in Saudi Arabia taking a big risk by "stirring the stagnant waters" they call it, by driving cars, civilly disobeying the brainless controlfreaks that won't allow such sluttiness.   Good analogy; your country's pretty damn stagnant when a person can't drive to the grocery store. 

Well fuck those guys. They're doing it anyway, and so far it's gone off with no arrests or anything.   Woot!  Eighteenth century here we come!

Everybody seems to really like this song, so here's it too

A genetically modified fable

Update, Democracy concedes. See scorecard at bottom. 

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"Excuse me, but this food you served us? I think there's something wrong with it."

"Don't be silly, it's good for you."

"It has a funny chemical taste. What's in it?"

"I'm not going to tell you."

"We're all getting nauseous, I think this food is poisoned.  Tell us what's in it!"

"Fuck you, I'm rich."

--- or, ---

Way long time ago, in a mythical land that probably only existed in our imaginations but was still a nice place to aspire to, there was an ISSUE.  Since this mythical land was a DEMOCRACY, the people put the ISSUE up for a vote. 350,000 people voted YES! Only 10 people voted NO!  So the land did what the 13,000 people wanted, and everyone was happy, even the ten people.

But an evil wizard cast a spell over the land, and all was changed. When there was an ISSUE, instead of counting their votes the people counted their MONEY. The 13,000 people had TWENTY FIVE dollars! The ten people had HALF A MILLION dollars. So the not-so-mythical land did what the ten people wanted, and fuck everybody else.

Washington state is trying to get ingredients listed on GMO products. The makers of Napalm, Agent Orange, and Bhopal don't wanna.

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Update,  latest score:

    93% of the population:   550 

                ten so-called "people" :  21,000,000

Democracy concedes.

What you're worth

You're not a person. Get used to it, in this shiny new Homeland we're not people, we're “human capital”  ( isn't that an evocative name?)

Four units of human capital

and Human Capital Management Software is the coming thing in business. Corporations love it, so much that only one worker in five is now on a regular schedule.

What it means is that you, the slave,  indentured servant  team member are expected to set aside any plans you have for anything, ever, because you might have to be there for work, and you won't find out till the last minute. Goodbye college, second job, child care arrangements, life.

Also too, full time work? LOL! How quaint. You work as many hours as the company says, and beg for enough to be able to pay a bill. Hoping for a raise in the minimum wage? They've got a way to stiff you even then.

You have to go to work and come home after, not just magically be there. It takes about a half hour each way to cover the average commuting distance of 13 miles, and that's not counting any time you have to spend getting ready—shutting down whatever you're doing, putting things away and such, cleaning up, changing clothes—so every day you work you give your employer at least an extra hour of your time.

Also, most people drive to work so they have to pay for gas and maintenance on a vehicle. The standard mileage allowance from the Dept of Transportation is fifty cents a mile so that 26 mile round trip costs you $13.00. Three or four dollars of that buys gas and the rest, well, auto shops--$80/hour.

Minimum wage is $7.25 / hour. Approximately ten per cent goes to taxes so you take home $6.53. Three hours work gives you $19.59, minus the thirteen dollars you spent to get there, so you get $6.59 for your day's work.

A day's pay: six and a half bucks.

Since you spent a total of four hours to get it,

you're being paid $1.64 per hour.

What if they raise the minimum wage to $10 like in California?

$10 minus 10% tax →$9

X3 hour shift → $27

less transportation → $14

spread over four hours = $3.50 per hour.

What if they let you work a full eight hour shift?

Then the Californian goes from $3.50/hr to $6.50.

The minimum wage worker's $1.64 becomes $4.36.

It puts more money in your pocket to work a full shift than to get a raise in wages.  Not that human capital has any need for money, or pockets.

Scary Assed Machines

“We’ve talked about this. You can be brave.”

 changed to

 "Can we come back tomorrow?"

This is a CT scanner

To a little kid an MRI machine is terrifying.  They're so scared they can't lie still long enough, and have to be sedated usually.

Well this guy went and did something about it.   There should be a Nobel Peace Prize for stuff like this, and  should get it.  In this case, seeing  "patient satisfaction scores ... up 90 percent" is even better.