Author: Raymond

 
From nojo:

Mad had a “reputation”. We had to campaign for permission to read it. Dad finally relented, and of course it didn’t take long until he was swiping our issues so he could read them.

Don’t recall what Dad thought of the infamous middle-finger cover. Not one of our favorites, although it’s inescapably memorable. Too on the nose.

Better: The cover with the giant barcode, stating they hope it breaks every supermarket scanner in the country. That was their response to being required to desecrate their cover with a barcode in the first place. That was Mad’s first barcode cover.

That was Mad.

We remember those covers. We remember those artists. We remember the cross-section of an engine, paired with a “happy section”. We remember the “Nixxon” sign above the White House — timed to when Enco/Esso changed its name — and the tagline “But it’s still the same old gas!” We remember that someone sent a letter to the editors on MADison Ave., the envelope bearing nothing but a smiling Alfred E. Neuman and a zip code. We remember the letter being successfully delivered.

We remember a lot. We haven’t looked at those issues in more than forty years.

And now, well, looks like it’s gone.

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From Batocchio at Vagabond Scholar:

Thursday, July 04, 2019

I’m afraid this is not a happy Independence Day. As several people have pointed out, we have tanks in DC and concentration camps on the nation’s Southern border, both at the insistence of Donald Trump. The cruelty of the camps is the point; it’s a feature, not a bug.

Most years for Independence Day, I post some videos, but this year, I thought I’d link a great poem I just discovered, “A New National Anthem,” by Ada Limón. Follow the link for the full poem, but this may be my favorite section:

And what of the stanzas
we never sing, the third that mentions “no refuge
could save the hireling and the slave”? Perhaps
the truth is that every song of this country
has an unsung third stanza, something brutal
snaking underneath us as we blindly sing
the high notes with a beer sloshing in the stands
hoping our team wins.

It’s a great piece and timely. Check out the rest.

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From Jonathan Bernstein:

The restraint of a superpower was one of the ways in which America used to be great. Now a civic holiday is an occasion for self-aggrandizement.

Which gets to the very worst part of Trump’s Independence Day travesty: putting the military front and center in his vision of the United States. We’ve had altogether too much of this in every context over the last few years, which is pretty much what one would expect from a nation that has been at war for so long. But it’s just wrong for the Fourth of July, which has always been about freedom and democracy and which should be about politics at its best.

Nations that have nothing but military hardware to brag about center their celebrations on tanks and warplanes.

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From Robert P. Coutinho at The Moderate Voice:

What has not seemed to have been discussed in the over-all horror of the situation is the rationale for such malfesance. For instance, let us assume (I don’t, but that is beside the point for the observation) that:

1. One believes that harsh treatment of detainees will give a disincentive for them to enter the country.
2. One believes that it is acceptable to imprison people who come across the border illegally, regardless of their stated reasons.
3. One believes that the detainees need to be kept secretly (at least to the point of no visitation) because they may be harboring anti-social ideas.
4. One believes that a person who is in this status needs only to request repatritation in order to go back where they came from.
5. A person may be held responsible so long as they have chosen this action, regardless of age.

One of the specific claims of the investigators was that a young, teen girl was given a toddler to care for. The toddler was urinating on the floor and had no diaper. The girl just watched as it happened, not knowing what to do. Another claim was that the children had not been allowed to shower—or not until just a few days before the inspectors (who gave the government a 3-week notice) arrived. Other horrible situations also occurred.

We are talking about children here!

We are talking about some very young children here!

Even if you want to be so callous as to suggest that a ten-year-old child chose to come here illegally, that it is acceptable to jail such a child, even that the child should face harsh conditions as a deterrent to the other pre-pubescent scallywags; even given all of these assumptions, why the toddlers?

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From North Carolina pastor John Pavlovitz:

I’m getting really tired of people saying that this President isn’t a religious man.

The assertion is incorrect and unfair and it does him a terrible disservice.

Donald Trump is unquestionably a man of deep and abiding faith.

The evidence is unmistakable.

His words and his actions all testify loudly to his spiritual convictions.

The tangible fruit of his devotion is impossible to miss if you look closely.

He is steadfastly devout, zealous in his fervor, and peerlessly pious.

The President passionately worships a god to whom he is fully beholden:

Fear.

This is his true religion.

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From Infidel753:

Most of Europe has been strongly secular for decades, and in the US the non-religious percentage of the population has also been growing, with the trend speeding up in the last twenty years with the rise of “New Atheism” — though the US remains much more religious than Europe. Some have argued that even as religion dies out in the most advanced countries, it remains vigorous in the developing world, and that secularism will always be a regional peculiarity of Europe, the US, and a few other places such as Japan.

The clearest signs that this view is wrong have come from Latin America, once the demographic heartland of the Catholic Church, where the dominant position of religion has also clearly been faltering. The clearest evidence of this change can be seen in the growing acceptance of gay marriage, which is being legalized in country after country, and in the willingness of national authorities to aggressively confront the Church over the issue of priestly child molestation, especially in Chile. Strikingly, it’s the least economically developed countries in Latin America where religion remains strongest.

More recently further confirmation has come from a region most Americans think of as irrevocably in thrall to religion — the Arab world. A survey of over 25,000 people in ten Arabic-speaking countries plus the Palestinian territories, compared with a similar survey from 2013, shows that the number of people who self-identify as non-religious is surprisingly high, and rising fast.

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From driftglass:

David Brooks Cannot Stop Being David Brooks

I honestly think management was afraid of her. Her reaction was so unnerving and they were such a timorous bunch that I believe to this day they just decide it would be easier to do nothing — to give her smaller and smaller projects and let her do her thing until she retired and have people like me clean up her messes — than to risk whatever they were afraid she would do if they tried to rein her in or lay her off.

Plus, on the balance sheet, Debbie looked good. After all, because she just dumped her shitty code into Production in whatever error-riddled state it was in when the project budget ran to zero, she never went over budget. Which was the only metric the Counters of Beans used to measure success. My team, on the other hand, was constantly going over-budget running up the overtime fixing her fuck-ups. This made the Counters of Beans very upset because Going Over Budget was the only metric they had for measuring failure.

When we tried to explain why we were running up so much overtime, we might as well have been speaking Aramaic. To hamsters.

Plus corporate management had much bigger problems on their hands. This was a family business which was now in the hands of the third generation, and that third generation was spectacularly bad at managing the company. They had brought the place to the brink of ruin, so the problems of a bunch of programmers twelve tiers down the corporate food chain arguing about Who Struck John never rose to their attention.

Which brings us now to the subject of Mr. Brooks and the question of what error-riddled twaddle he dumped onto op-ed page of The New York Times — on time and on budget — today.

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From Physics Girl:

Join Physics Girl and PBS Digital Studios’ new show SoundField as they experiment with giant $100,000 speakers and aim them at your body parts looking for resonance, at oobleck, at googly eyes, and at candles to explore the physics of sound.

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From PZ Myers:

I haven’t done one of these in a while — it’s a dispiriting time to be an atheist — but I was inspired by a sign near my house. This is a truly excellent motto.

Expanding Minds & Inspiring Service

That would be a great theme for an atheist community, but of course, that sign was posted outside the Campus Lutheran Ministry Christus House, which is cause for some reservation. Religion does not expand minds, but instead narrows them. You would not go into the Campus Lutheran Ministry and find the pastor explaining how you should question everything, explore the wide world of ideas, and be reluctant to accept dogma, because their mission is to get you to accept their peculiar, limited, tightly circumscribed interpretation of Jesus Christ. The place where you’ll get your mind expanded is a few blocks north, on the campus of the University of Minnesota Morris, a secular institution.

I’m not going to accept the literal truth of that part of the sign. It’s a nice ideal, though. Too bad they don’t implement it.

The second part of the sign, though, “Inspiring Service”, is more legit. I remember from my church-going days that that was a serious and important message. Some of it was self-serving: service meant volunteering for the church or donating money to the church. Some of it was well-intentioned but horribly harmful: we were regularly exhorted to support missionary efforts in Africa. There was also, however, real good that was done. There were food drives to help the poor, visits to shut-ins, call for donations to help those who had fallen sick, requests to assist the elderly. I mowed the lawn of one little old lady who would invite me in afterwards to say a little prayer and praise the Lord. I went along with it, to be nice, and because she definitely didn’t need an argument.

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From Andy Borowitz:

NORTH KOREA (The Borowitz Report)—Setting foot in North Korea for the first time, on Sunday, President Donald Trump praised that nation’s dictator, Kim Jong Un, for his efforts on immigration, telling Kim, “No one is trying to get into your country.”

After crossing into North Korea from the Demilitarized Zone, Trump remarked to the North Korean leader, “Your border is amazing! There are no people whatsoever trying to get in. You should see our border—it’s a complete mess.”

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