Month: September 2020

 

From The Onion:

“Let me be clear: This gun is not a toy, so you shouldn’t play with it unless you can’t think of anything else to do,” said Webb, who made the 9-year-old promise he would never ever use a kitchen chair to retrieve the pistol from his bedroom closet, which he kept in a red shoebox on the top shelf.

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From Vixen Strangely at Strangely Blogged:

Watch this entire video. I’m a leftist. I don’t hate religious people, hard work, Mom or apple pie. I feel like I just got personally reamed out by this elected official, Senator Rick Scott. This man told me I had no values. He told me I don’t care about marriage or the deeply-held values of faith communities, that I disrespect the troops and law enforcement, that I am not American in the sense that he understands America from the Pledge of Allegiance and so on.

The pledge of allegiance was written by a socialist minister (because socialists can also be believers–not that there’s anything wrong with not being one) and did not include the words “under God” originally. Just as we have civilian leadership over the military–it’s the decision of the people through their elected representatives whether a nation should go to war and those elected representatives determine our treaties. Some protestors have a radical view regarding the future of law enforcement, but no one is saying that there will be no laws, nor that no mechanism of enforcement should exist.

And this man needs to back off entirely about the concept of family and the sanctity of marriage. Is he saying couples can not divorce? (Because for what it’s worth, I’ve been divorced and it worked out great for both me and my ex.) (I doubt that’s what he’s referring to, though.) I think he might be implying that some marriages are not created equal to others because of the genders of the partners involved. But I am a big fan of marriage. I think marriage is a great institution, and I love that LGBT people can enter into marriages and create warm, loving families. If he is against those bonds, maybe the marriage-hater is him, ok? Maybe he’s disrespecting those families.

And I don’t have a problem with people of faith–I just don’t think they need to tell me I have to believe as they do, which is no more than any person of any religion would say to a person of a different religion.

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Shamelessly stolen from Vixen Strangely at Strangely Blogged:

I’m Joe Biden and I approve this message. pic.twitter.com/TuRZXPE5xK

— Joe Biden (@JoeBiden) September 20, 2020

• Iron Knee at Political Irony provides a minute and a half of inspiration, reviewing the career of RBG. Video is from the Lincoln Project.
   
• JoAnn Williams defends Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s legacy on reproductive rights.
   
• Wisconsin conservative James Wigderson goes for the sort of balanced approach that afflicts much of the mainstream.
   
  Seems Republican Senator Ron Johnson is a hypocrite. He insisted in 2016 that President Obama had no right to have his SCOTUS nominee considered in an election year. But now Johnson insists that Trump has that right.
   
  However, we have to hit both sides, right? So Democratic Senator Tammy Baldwin is also a hypocrite. In 2016, she thought Obama’s nominee should be considered. But now, for some unprincipled reason, she thinks both presidents should be treated comparably. Goose and gander.
   
  In defense of James, he usually does much better than this.
   
• At The Onion, mainstream media also maintains a balanced approach, as CNN demands to know why Biden has not yet come up with his own plan to trigger nationwide violence.
   
• You know what part of world history Trump rallies bring to mind, right? PZ Myers takes a look at the the rhetorical content coming from the podium, the part about the importance of good genes.
   
  On that good genes front, I do find myself occasionally correcting friends who criticize my president for hating immigrants. It’s only some immigrants.
   
• Sarah Cooper allows my president a moment of serious denial in a clip sponsored by World War Zero:
   

  One insightful comment: Sometimes even comedy isn’t funny anymore.

Continue reading “RBG RIP, Reproductive Rights, Nazi Genes, Hypocrisy, Climate D-d-d-denial”

 

From John Scalzi at Whatever:

At the doctor’s office, of course, it was full compliance; all the receptionists, nurses and doctors wore masks (mostly basic disposable surgical masks) and wore them the entire time they were working on me. I also wore mine the entire time, as I was not there for anything that involved anyone needing me to breathe on them, or them looking down my throat. I suspect it would be a bad time for anyone trying to argue in a medical office that masks weren’t needed or required.

Then I went to Kroger, to pick up some things, and the mask-wearing percentage dropped significantly. Who were wearing masks? Well, it wasn’t middle-aged-and-younger dudes, I can tell you that much; not counting the dudes working, I was the only man my age or younger wearing a mask. Older men (and older people in general) were wearing masks, probably because regardless of their political positions it’s been drilled into their heads by now that older people are more susceptible to the ravages of COVID-19 than younger people. That said, of the younger men I saw not wearing masks, a rather lot of them had, how best to put it, obvious co-morbidity factors. It probably wouldn’t be great for them if they got sick.

Anecdotally, this has been the way of it for a while now out here: If you’re a man visibly under the age of 60 (and here where I live, in a county that is 98.5% white, this means basically white men under the age of 60), you’re far more likely not to be wearing a mask out in public, and in the retail sphere, than you are to be wearing one. Now, note that Kroger and nearly all other retail establishments have signs at the entrances telling customers that masks are required; the dudes are ignoring them and the retail workers (all of whom are masked) are not stopping them, because we’ve all seen the videos of people completely losing their shit when asked to wear a mask, and retail doesn’t pay enough for that sort of nonsense. Over the age of 60, men wearing masks becomes more common, because they don’t want to die. In my experience the ratio of women of all ages wearing masks is the inverse of the men under 60; most women wear masks, but some don’t.

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From Vincent at A Wayfarer’s Notes:

I suddenly remembered a piece I read long ago in Reader’s Digest, it must have been in the Sixties. I wondered if I might possibly track it down. It concerned a white man who disguised himself as black to try and find out how Blacks were treated in the latter days of segregation in America’s deep South. There’s been talk recently of white people’s inability to see beyond their own privilege. I’ve been having difficulty myself in understanding the widespread unrest arising from the Black Lives Matter movement, even in places where few Blacks are to be found, or aren’t noticeably discriminated against.

I was amazed how easy it was to discover the tale online, It’s very well-known, published in book and film as Black Like Me; reported as “required reading in schools and colleges in the United States”. Mostly, the author learned how others react to your skin. In this sense, it was literally a superficial investigation. His experiment lasted no more than six weeks, yet enough to start feeling the the hopelessness of being forever the underdog. He found his sense of self damaged, as if he were indeed unworthy.

What is it really like to be black—as opposed to being the product of European culture over several millennia, not merely white ?

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From Ned Lips at The Moderate Voice:

The Presidential election is NOT normal. It is a game, with rules, played on a big board that is the United States and it is about winning points on that Board. It is not about winning the national popular vote, and I know it’s weird, but it’s the law and that will NOT change.

If the candidates want to win, and they know this as well as anyone, they know they have to play the game. In this game, as is the case in many games, most of the spaces on the Board are already decided and therefor are simply irrelevant. They are going to go one way or the other, just as they have for a long time.

IGNORE national polls. They DO NOT matter, and are, quite frankly, harmful.

If you live in or near Florida, Pennsylvania, Michigan, or Wisconsin, get out and do whatever you can to promote your candidate, get more of your party to register to vote, get any IDs they need, and then vote any way they can, as early and as often as permitted.

If the Dems swing the three northern States, Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, which they lost by ridiculously tiny margins in 2016, THEY WILL WIN no matter what happens in Ohio and Florida, so both parties must show up in these states.

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From Tommy Christopher:

Sarah Sanders and Hope Hicks Hunted Trump’s Alleged Apprentice ‘N-Word’ Tape Per New Report

Former White House press secretaries Sarah Huckabee Sanders and Hope Hicks were both involved with the hunt for a rumored clip of President Donald Trump using the n-word during an outtake from The Apprentice, according to a new report.

A damaging new Washington Post report, compiled from “interviews with more than two dozen current and former officials,” adds some new reporting on the n-word tape that had long been rumored to exist when ousted White House official Omarosa Manigault Newman confirmed its existence in her 2018 book.

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From The Journal of Improbable Research:

… to determine the function and integrity of EpiPens … if accidentally placed through a washing machine cycle

(1) Loading some EpiPens (the little injection devices many people use to treat a bad allergic reaction) into washing machines, and then (2) washing them, and then (3) firing those washing-machine-washed EpiPens into hunks of meat was the basis for an experiment.

Details are in the study…

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From tengrain at Mock Paper Scissors:

CNN tells us that a Federal Judge ruled that the USPS must prioritize election mail, and became the second judge to order a reversal of Postmaster Grifter, er, General Louis DeJoy’s policy changes:

US District Judge Victor Marrero in New York’s Southern District became the second federal judge to side against USPS in the past week. A judge in Washington state ordered many similar changes on Friday and blasted the Trump administration for what he called a “politically motivated attack” on USPS.

Marrero made several specific orders, including:

• treating all ballots as first-class mail (something that Bastian also ordered),
• paying for necessary overtime in the weeks surrounding the election.
• a detailed plan about how the USPS will guarantee that election-related mail is delivered on time

Marrero said if he doesn’t get that plan by Friday, he’ll impose his own plan.

Pretty neat, huh?

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From The Life and Times of Bruce Gerencser:

Evangelicals love it when well-known unbelievers/atheists die. This gives them an opportunity to pass judgment on their lives and consign them to eternal punishment in the Lake of Fire. While Johnson lets his mythical God and errant, fallible Bible do the talking, make no mistake about it, he thinks Justice Ginsburg is presently being tormented by God in Hell. According to Johnson — err, I mean God — Ginsburg was a vile, evil person who was an enemy of True Christianity®. Instead of seeing her as a defender of the First Amendment, Johnson sees Justice Ginsburg as a threat to attempts to promote Christian nationalism (and she was).

As is always the case with Evangelical zealots, the important issues of our day are banning abortion and make it illegal, and turning back attempts to give LGBTQ people equal rights and protections under the law. I have no doubt that Johnson, a resolute Bible thumper, believes abortion and homosexual are capital crimes worthy of death.

Johnson’s latest screed is yet another example of why Evangelical Christianity is the most hated religion in America, right up there with Islamic suicide bombers.

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