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.

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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.

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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.

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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.  

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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?

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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 ... 

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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.