Month: June 2016

 
From Green Eagle:

Ryan Bundy is not happy in jail. Well, I guess that’s the idea of jail, but Ryan has some very specific complaints. He can’t hang out with his friends, which violates his constitutional right of assembly, he can’t wear his Mormon underwear, and perhaps most notably, this:

“He also argues that his Second Amendment rights have been violated, presumably because guns are not allowed in jails.”

Now, I know that, at first reading, that seems to be one of the most ludicrous things that you have ever heard in your life, but after thinking about it, I am not so sure.

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From libertarian Michael A. LaFerrara at Principled Perspectives:

The Obama Administration dumped new regulations onto the financial industry “that would require financial advisers to serve the best interests of their clients,” according to Politico. On the face of it, this makes no sense. As any merchant knows, the path to sustainable profitability is precisely to “serve the best interests of their clients.”

You don’t have to be an expert to see that this rule to override natural market incentives has nothing to do with serving consumers’ interests. In reality, it’s another government power grab intended to give government officials the power to dictate to consumers what is and is not in their best interests.

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From Max’s Dad:

Damn, they keep dying. Though The Greatest, Muhammad Ali, has in effect been dead for a long time, when they actually go away I can’t help but think about what they meant to me when I was young. I loved boxing as a kid. The history, the great fights, and Muhammad Ali.

I was pretty young when Cassius Marcellus Clay first burst upon the scene in 1964 by beating Sonny Liston (when the hell is a movie about that guy going to be made?) in what was considered to be a shocking upset but in reality was nothing of the kind. Then he got all goofy (my Dad said that) and became Muhammad X and eventually Muhammad Ali and hung around with Malcolm X and then Malcolm got killed and Ali was under guard before the second Liston fight.. Oh it was a mess, that I only remember because I have read about it.

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From The Life and Times of Bruce Gerencser:

A man by the name of Patrick Holt from Grover Hill, Ohio responded today to my May 25, 2016 letter to the editor of the Defiance Crescent-News concerning the Transgender bathroom use issue. Holt, as far as I can tell, pastors an Independent Fundamentalist Baptist (IFB) church in Grover Hill. I featured his church in the On the Road Looking for God’s True Church series. Here’s what Holt had to say:

This is a reply to the May 25 letter by Bruce Gerencser.

In his letter he implied that someone, like myself, who objected to a male using the same bathroom that my mother, wife, daughters, and granddaughters were using was hateful. So, basically, if you disagree with someone, then that, according to Bruce, is hateful. Using that same logic, then Bruce Gerencser, must hate Christians, God and the Bible. Would that not be a proper statement?

Patrick Holt, Grover Hill

Holt would like people to think that the whole Transgender bathroom use issue is all about differences of opinion. It’s not.

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From tengrain at Mock Paper Scissors:

I lived in San Jose for years, and what happened at the Trump rally was as predictable as it was regrettable. If Trump has a California campaign manager, I can only suspect that the violence that the rally incurred was planned.

San Jose is a majority-minority city, with the majority being Latino. It is the third largest city in the state (Los Angeles, San Diego, San Jose), and it is a tough, proud town. This is also a reliable Democratic stronghold, though the white-flight gated communities to the south are probably reliably red. Why would you choose to hold a rally there?

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From Frances Langum at Crooks and Liars:

Remember six years ago when Michele Bachmann gave away the game and said before the 2010 midterms that “all we should do is issue subpoenas and have one hearing after another.” in the House of Representatives?

Genius plan, Republicans. Kudos for sticking to it. The Hill reports that the Republican House is now issuing subpoenas for memos on how the Obama administration came up with funding plans for parts of Obamacare.

You read that right. Memos.

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From Yellow Dog at Blue in the Bluegrass:

It will not mean as much as if we’d done it before he died, but honoring this champion of political dissent and black power in place of the champion of treason in defense of slavery will be the best thing Kentucky has done for its citizens and the nation since refusing to secede 155 years ago.

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From Brotha Wolf at The Intersection of Madness and Reality:

By now, you’ve heard of the tragic story of a four year-old African-American boy who fell into a gorilla exhibit at the Cincinnati Zoo. The child was approached by a large silverback named Harambe. The 17 year-old gorilla started to drag the young boy through the water. The child was screaming for help. His mother Michelle Gregg, powerless to save him, tells her son to be strong and that she’s there for him.

There was no other choice than to kill Harambe in order to save the young child.

It’s hard to have to put an animal down, but in this case it was the only way to save the life of a young child. Sadly, the usual brood of faux-liberal animal lovers see Harambe’s death as a bigger tragedy than the thought of a young boy almost getting killed or that a mother nearly lost her son to a wild animal. According to Racism in America, people are already at-the-ready with petitions against the child’s mother calling for her punishment for leading to the execution of their now-beloved primate.

This happened almost immediately after it was acknowledged that the boy and his parents are black.

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From Infidel753:

Dâ’ish (ISIL) has made itself synonymous with religious barbarism in the territories it has seized — executing homosexuals by throwing them off tall buildings, openly and explicitly enslaving non-Muslims, killing off educated women, and even burning at least one prisoner of war alive. Dâ’ish has also carried out terrorist attacks in Beirut and Paris, on a Russian airliner over Sinai, and elsewhere.

But the tide has clearly turned. The peoples targeted by Dâ’ish for such atrocities are fighting back and winning.

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From PZ Myers at Pharyngula:

Jared Diamond’s 1987 article, The Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race, got me wondering. How do you define “mistake”? He doesn’t. What would a successful species look like? He doesn’t say. While it’s thought-provoking, it’s very hard to pin down his meaning without some explanation for those concepts.

The biggest mistake, he claims, was agriculture. He argues against a progressivist view of history, which argues that agriculture couldn’t possibly be a mistake, because it must have improved human lives or we wouldn’t have adopted it, and on those grounds, I think he’s right in principle — we adopt stupid ideas all the time. But then he tries to take an extreme opposite tack, that agriculture was bad for human beings, and there I think he’s going wrong.

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