And no mention of sunscreen

At Wellesley High School in Massachusetts, they may have just gotten the greatest commencement speech ever.

It was delivered by their English teacher, David McCullough, Jr. And it includes the following flowery description of these self-involved little snowflakes.

You are not special. You are not exceptional.

Contrary to what your soccer trophy suggests, your glowing seventh grade report card, despite every assurance of a certain corpulent purple dinosaur, that nice Mister Rogers and your batty Aunt Sylvia, no matter how often your maternal caped crusader has swooped in to save you… you’re nothing special.

Yes, you’ve been pampered, cosseted, doted upon, helmeted, bubble-wrapped. Yes, capable adults with other things to do have held you, kissed you, fed you, wiped your mouth, wiped your bottom, trained you, taught you, tutored you, coached you, listened to you, counseled you, encouraged you, consoled you and encouraged you again. You’ve been nudged, cajoled, wheedled and implored. You’ve been feted and fawned over and called sweetie pie. Yes, you have. And, certainly, we’ve been to your games, your plays, your recitals, your science fairs. Absolutely, smiles ignite when you walk into a room, and hundreds gasp with delight at your every tweet. Why, maybe you’ve even had your picture in the Townsman! And now you’ve conquered high school… and, indisputably, here we all have gathered for you, the pride and joy of this fine community, the first to emerge from that magnificent new building...

But do not get the idea you’re anything special. Because you’re not.

I mean, his overall message is great.

Resist the easy comforts of complacency, the specious glitter of materialism, the narcotic paralysis of self-satisfaction. Be worthy of your advantages. And read… read all the time… read as a matter of principle, as a matter of self-respect. Read as a nourishing staple of life. Develop and protect a moral sensibility and demonstrate the character to apply it. Dream big. Work hard. Think for yourself. Love everything you love, everyone you love, with all your might. And do so, please, with a sense of urgency, for every tick of the clock subtracts from fewer and fewer; and as surely as there are commencements there are cessations, and you’ll be in no condition to enjoy the ceremony attendant to that eventuality no matter how delightful the afternoon.

But going through those first several paragraphs, you kind of get the feeling that is a guy who didn't make tenure.

(Complete text, which is well worth reading, is here.)

Tim Minchin: Woody Allen Jesus

Tim Minchin was supposed to be on the Jonathan Ross Show this week, and got cut by the network.

I see the reason he got cut: despite the myth of the "Liberal Media," networks are not run by liberal/conservative ideas, but by ratings (exception: parts of MSNBC and all of Fox "News") But that's a story for another show. And in the simple, uncomplicated-by-agenda media, you can't do something that will endanger those all-important ratings.

Nonetheless, I liked the song.



And if you care, Tim Minchin's reaction to getting cut from the Jonathan Ross Show is here. (And by the way, the Bonus Material after the video is actually way better than anything that came before it...)

So, you know, Merry Christmas and stuff.

Missed

From PvPOnline:

To the Wayback Machine!

Maybe this is how we should teach history.

Today's recommendation

Go here. Read this guy (it's completely apolitical, for a change).

You'll thank me.

Cooking Comically

A bullet come an' drilled the beggar clean.

OK, I can beat the bacon story. And I don't even need to fisk it. The most I've laughed this week was when I tried to read it out loud. And the more research I did to see if it was true, the worse it got.

I'm not even going to try to rephrase this: I'm not sure I can write about it without commenting. I'm just going to assemble the story from three different sources, because nobody seems to have all the good details.

A security guard came up with a bizarre remedy to remove a wart - he shot off his finger with a shotgun.

Sean Murphy, 38, from Doncaster, had seen his GP repeatedly about the problem and also tried a variety of traditional ointments and creams. But when the persistent wart refused to disappear, he opted for the firepower of a 12-bore Beretta he claimed he had found under a hedge a few months earlier.

South Yorkshire Police are still trying to discover how the Beretta found its way to the hedge where Murphy found it. They know it was stolen in a burglary two years ago, but have no further record of its passage through the criminal underworld.

Murphy, who hails from Doncaster in northern England, had lost his job as a security guard shortly before the incident in March. The wart, which was about the size of a dime, plagued him for at least five years. "It was hurting a lot and causing my finger to bend," Murphy said. "I'd been to the doctors and tried all sorts of things, but it wouldn't go."

He said he drank several pints of beer to build up his courage before carrying out the operation outside the caravan where he was living at the time. He stretched out his left hand, pointing the end of the barrel at an angle to the offending wart, and used his other hand to hold the stock steady and pull the trigger.

Murphy denies that the beer affected his aim. He insists the fault lay with the weapon’s recoil."I didn't expect to lose my finger as well when I shot it, but the gun recoiled and that was it," he said. "The wart was gone and so was most of my finger. There was nothing left of it, so no chance of re-attaching it."

His lawyer, Richard Haigh, said Murphy "has been a victim of his own stupidity when domestic pressures got to him." Murphy was also ordered to complete 100 hours of unpaid community work and pay costs of £100.

After leaving Doncaster Magistrates' Court with a suspended 16-week prison sentence, Murphy said, "I'm happy with that. I know I could have gone to jail for up to 15 years for a firearms offence. My solicitor did a very good job. The best thing is that the wart has gone. It was giving me lot of trouble."

Why can't the Media get science right?

h/t Dead-Logic

Are You Smarter Than a 10th Grader?

Brilliant At Breakfast points us to a letter purportedly written (unverified at this point) by Amy Myers, a high school sophomore, to Congresswoman Michele Bachmann (MN-6).

Dear Representative Bachmann,

My name is Amy Myers. I am a Cherry Hill, New Jersey sophomore attending Cherry Hill High School East. As a typical high school student, I have found quite a few of your statements regarding The Constitution of the United States, the quality of public school education and general U.S. civics matters to be factually incorrect, inaccurately applied or grossly distorted. The frequency and scope of these comments prompted me to write this letter.

Though I am not in your home district, or even your home state, you are a United States Representative of some prominence who is subject to national media coverage. News outlets and websites across this country profile your causes and viewpoints on a regular basis. As one of a handful of women in Congress, you hold a distinct privilege and responsibility to better represent your gender nationally. The statements you make help to serve an injustice to not only the position of Congresswoman, but women everywhere. Though politically expedient, incorrect comments cast a shadow on your person and by unfortunate proxy, both your supporters and detractors alike often generalize this shadow to women as a whole.

Rep. Bachmann, the frequent inability you have shown to accurately and factually present even the most basic information about the United States led me to submit the follow challenge, pitting my public education against your advanced legal education:

I, Amy Myers, do hereby challenge Representative Michele Bachmann to a Public Forum Debate and/or Fact Test on The Constitution of the United States, United States History and United States Civics.

Hopefully, we will be able to meet for such an event, as it would prove to be enlightening.

Sincerely yours,
Amy Myers

(Lacking a picture of Ms Myers, her part will be played this evening by this attractive kitten.)

_______________________

Update: OK, so I can't help myself. Apparently, Ms Bachmann only takes emails from people in her district, so I became Michael Smith of St Cloud for long enough to send her the following.

Representative Bachmann,
I understand that you're a busy woman. But there are some things you can't let pass. A Constitutional scholar such as yourself cannot allow this challenge from some punk New Jersey teenager to go unpunished. She should be shown for the snot-nosed little tramp she is. You should crush her. You are a scholar, and she is just a democrat kid with no idea of the force she is facing. You should take her up on this, and once and for all end all these annoying, back-biting rumors that you're nothing but an ignorant talking head in a nice suit.
Thank you.

It's not going to do any good. She's a hollow shell of a woman, a talking head with no depth, no soul, and no brains. But I had to try.

Big Mike Breaks It Down

So, let's have a quick chalkboard look at reality. Glenn Beck isn't the only one who can do it.

Gitmo Files

Goddamn it!

Just... just god damn it!

Here I am, at work today, composing something relatively lucid about Mohammed Basardah in my head, and I get home, have dinner, sit in front of the computer, and the fucking Rude Pundit has already said it, and better than I was going to.

Bastard.

Gitmo Files: We Can Handle the Truth, But We Just Don't Give a Damn About It

Some day in the near future, in the post-apocalyptic hellscape America that will be left after Republicans refuse to raise the debt ceiling unless President Obama publicly hangs himself from the Lincoln Memorial, when we're all squatting in ditches, foraging around for the food scraps dropped from the sky mansions of the mega-wealthy that hover hundreds of feet above our heads, some European or Asian student, who is writing a thesis about just what the fuck happened to drive a once-near-great nation off the cliff of civilization, will come to a conclusion, one that can be debated and argued over and torn apart, as hypotheses ought to be. She will decide that the most significant marker of eventual American doom was people's adamant refusal to give a shit about what happened to detainees during the long, hopeless war that began in 2001.

Indeed, an engaged, active electorate should have greeted the leak of hundreds of files on prisoners at Guantanamo Bay with something more than a sigh about having to think about this shit... again, or with a half-hearted scoff at those who would dare leak classified documents. No, one might think that a nation that once worked itself into a frenzy over a president lying about getting his cock sucked in the Oval Office would be able to grip the outrage tube a little harder and squeeze a little smudge of anger out. Alas, it is not to be.

No, there will be no reckonings, great or small, other than the cruel, cruel treatment of Bradley Manning (and if Manning is being treated according to any rules, those rules are fucked and need to be changed) for allegedly daring to break a single law in order to reveal the breaking of many. There will be no arrests of people responsible for the creation or implementation of a system of torture and imprisonment that, at its base, makes hypocrites and fools of every single American citizen.

The documents from Gitmo reveal a level of absurdity in our detention policies that'd make a Catch-22-composing Joseph Heller put down his pen and say, "Fuck it. I can't top that shit." It's amateur hour, and it's been run by people who insist on saying that it's not. Check this out, just one story we can piece together from the files:

There's this former Gitmo prisoner, Mohammed Basardah, a stoner from Yemen who was arrested in Pakistan. He claimed he did the usual shit - trained in camps, fought in Afghanistan. But, and here's where it gets really fucking funny, Basardah decided to just say whatever the fuck his interrogators at Gitmo wanted. Unlike Abu Zubayah, who was tortured like a son of a bitch, Basardah just liked fucking talking, making himself seem bad-ass, giving up names, saying he knew tons of things about al-Qaida and the Taliban. For seven years. Hell, one analyst wrote of Basardah, "The current US government knowledge base of the personnel and activities within Tora Bora would not have been possible without the co-operation and truthfulness of this detainee whose reporting has directly supported US tactical operations in Afghanistan." Yeah, he even told of a London-based al-Qaida cell about which U.S. intelligence created an entire dossier based on his information. In 2008, he was transferred out of Gitmo, sent to Spain, and released. In essence, he said enough to get himself freed.

Now hold onto your sides: motherfucker was lying. Pretty much about everything. Yeah, and other analysts suspected it from the start. "Research into the other detainees' timelines does not readily support [Basardah's] information," they wrote. "In every interview where [Basardah] was questioned on detainee, [Basardah] has changed his story. Detainee's identity as a bodyguard has not been substantiated through other known sources," they warned. So basically, what Basardah did was play his captors. You gotta admire a man for keeping his wits about him in a fucked-up situation. You gotta wonder just why the hell they kept questioning him and why the hell they didn't just let him go to begin with.

And that London sleeper cell? Well, one of the men Basardah said was part of it was 11 years old at the time Basardah said he joined. And others, who had been tracked for years, had never even visited Britain. But, like Curveball later, we just bought his shit. Basardah was a pot dealer in Mecca. You can bet he sold some schwag weed. You can bet that the CIA would have purchased it and pretended they were stoned from tits to toes because of it.

Because Mohammed Basardah said so, there are men being held without charge, men who will never be released, men who were tortured, more than likely. And President Obama continues the detentions, with no more hope than a loaded military commission.

Yet we don't care, as a nation, that any of this is done in our names. We are tired of it and want it to go away. We don't want to make the effort anymore. That's why the new Gitmo files are greeted with a shrug and a turn to whatever stupid shit stupid asshole Donald Trump has said (god, isn't he so stupid?). A decade of a certain action makes that action into the new normal. If it's normal, if it's just the way we do things now, then we don't want to be bothered with changing it. When you beat a populace into apathy, you can get away with, well, murder.

Please Remove Your Wallet from Devvy's Vagina

OK, so I'm just going to throw in a cut from what may well be the perfect post from "Forever in Hell." Go read the whole thing. The woman's a poet.

This is Devvy. She is surprisingly calm for having everyone's wallet in her vagina.

In lobbying for defeat of a congressional plan that would cut off taxpayer support for the abortion business' leading player, (Planned Parenthood executive Cecile) Richards claimed: "If this bill ever becomes law, millions of women in this country are going to lose their health-care access ­ not to abortion services ­ to basic family planning, you know, mammograms." But Live Action workers who called 30 Planned Parenthood business locations across the nation said "every single one admitted they could not do mammograms."

I will never have a mammogram, but having one is a personal decision and expense. The Outlaw Congress has NO authority to steal the fruits of your labor to fund abortions or mammograms.

Devvy apparently wants to find out about her breast cancer when it's difficult to impossible to treat, because that's how she rolls. The rest of us, however, are not looking forward to radical mascetomies, radiation and chemotherapy.

Here's the thing Devvy, and I'm sure it's hard to listen to facts and logic with even one wallet in your vagina, let alone 300,000,000 wallets in your vagina, it is far cheaper to pay for cancer treatment in the earliest stages than in the later stages. And here's another thing: unless you want to cut off all health care access to the poor, which you probably do, eventually that person is going to end up in the ER and then they will run up an enormous bill everyone gets to pay for.

Would you, Devvy, find it to be a better idea to change your brakes when they start squeaking, or after you cause a ten car pileup on the highway? One costs, what, $250 max, the other hundreds of thousands of dollars, if not millions if you end up killing someone. Now, changing the brakes when they squeak is like giving out free pap smears. The ten car pileup is not giving out free pap smears and instead treating women with end stage cervical cancer in the ER.

Ignoring, of course, that "poor women should die preventable deaths so that my taxes can be 0.8% lower" is sociopathic and appalling on every level.

(snip)

Just for fun, here's the wallet-vagina line:

Get my wallet out of your vagina because you have no constitutional right to steal the fruits of my husband's fixed retirement to pay for your abortion.

She's bitching that her husband's social security is being used to pay for abortions through Planned Parenthood. Now that is some performance art quality irony right there.

Democrats in Congress on Paul Ryan Budget: "Aw, C'mon"

OK, so I think he doesn't see Obama's longer game. But other than that, I think that the Rude Pundit pretty much nails it.

If you're a Democrat in Congress, yeah, you're probably appalled by Rep. Paul Ryan's savage budget proposal (or you oughta be). But in your gut, there's gotta be this little acid burn, this ember of envy, that, with the support of his leadership, Ryan just went balls out for the shit that Republicans believe in. Because you know what would have happened if the situation was reversed.

If a Democrat had proposed a budget that radically cut the military, raised the top tax rate by nearly a third, ended all the wars, created a national health care system through a new payroll tax (thus relieving businesses of a huge financial burden), expanded EPA and food safety enforcement, and jacked up discretionary spending on education, scientific research, and more, and still yielded trillions of dollars in long-term savings, and then explained the document by saying, "This isn't a budget. This is a cause," do you think that that Democrat would have been hailed as "courageous" by any Republicans? Do you think that anyone in the media would have taken the thing seriously? Don't be fucking stupid. What would have happened is that most Democrats would have run away like beaten bitches afraid of Rush Limbaugh's switch, Republicans would have called it "un-American" and "the mostest radicalest budget that anyone has ever put out in the history of forever" and taken the word "cause" to mean "Marxist rape of your children," and Fox "news" would have gone to TardCon 5 in demonizing everything: "Do you want the government telling you what diseases you can have? Do you want Barack Obama to decide how much shit should be on your chicken?"

Paul Ryan's budget is not a serious document. It is, instead, a few pages of dried ejaculate on paper. It is a wishlist out of every conservative wet dream, and, as such, it is ballsy just how brazen it is. If nothing else, you can't say in the future that Republicans didn't warn us. Ryan's plan, his "Road Map," sets the bar so low that it pretty much guarantees that Democrats will be negotiating away many of the programs they worked on for decades and then declare victory because they didn't give in to everything Republicans wanted.

A decent comparison would be to imagine that you have grown a beautiful apple tree, but your neighbor wants it down so he can see the factory on the hill better. You say that you can trim the branches. He offers to cut down the tree, burn down your home, and kick you in the nuts. If you're a Democrat, you figure if you can convince your neighbor not to kick you in the nuts, it's a victory. If you're a Republican, you say, "No, I'm still gonna kick you in the nuts." If you're Barack Obama, you offer your ass instead.

Instead of being treated like some brave hero facing the "real" problems in the nation, Paul Ryan should have been burned in effigy across America yesterday.

The GOP and the government shutdown

Funny how quick they are to deny it, now that they're actually planning it...

The part I find funniest? Newt Gingrich's bit. After all, he was responsible for the last government shutdown, in 1995. (Which, incidentally, might have helped improve Clinton's approval ratings - so good planning there, guys).

Two notes from my reading list

Citizen K leads us to a New York Times article by Timothy Egan, who points out that the Fox "News" channel's latest buzzword isn't quite as bad as they want us to think. Go read the entire article, entitled In Defense of ‘Dithering.’

Had Obama done nothing, as the Dennis Kucinich fringe Democrats and the Ron Paul isolationist Republicans would have it, the blood of many civilians would be filling the streets of Benghazi. Don’t forget: the regime had promised to chase its own citizens into closets and butcher them.

Or, had Obama put U.S. troops on the ground, as the imperious former Bush “diplomat” John Bolton insisted, a humanitarian mission would now be seen as another superpower invasion of an oil-rich Arab nation.

In his deliberative fashion, Obama ultimately saved countless lives in the short term, and will allow the rebels in Libya to own their revolution in the long term, if they can push ahead — a big if, of course. In the meantime, the economic and diplomatic noose will tighten around Qaddafi and the people he pays to kill on his behalf...

Still, Republicans can’t cope with a president who tries to think before he leaps. Mitt Romney, who wakes most mornings in a groggy scramble to find his principles, faults Obama for the nuance of his Libya policy. How dare the president see shades of gray instead of black and white!

Newt Gingrich first criticized Obama for not imposing a no-fly zone, but now hits him for imposing a no-fly zone. You read that right. "I would not have intervened," Gingrich said a few days ago. This followed a statement, barely two weeks ago, where he said he would intervene "this evening." And he now calls the air strikes over Libya the worst foreign policy blunder in his lifetime.

Overstatement and misjudgment are Gingrich’s stock in trade — two reasons why he’ll never be president. He can always be counted on to fulminate on demand, with consistency the only casualty; the subject doesn’t matter.

The real problem for Republicans is that they are perplexed over what position to take on an issue that defies partisanship. So, Obama’s least-thoughtful critics attack him for thinking.

And Progressive Eruptions points out that, in the process, all this "dithering" has given America a 14% boost in our global popularity ratings. From one of the least popular countries in the world, to the single most popular, in just two years. Making us both safer and more secure.

Just thought I'd point that out.

Dear Right-Wingers: You Are All Muslims Now

You know, once again, the Rude Pundit hits it on the head. And then steals its wallet while it's unconscious.

Oh, dear, sweet conservative Americans, how you must have shit yourself on Saturday when you heard that someone had shot up an event with a Democratic member of Congress in, of all goddamned places, Arizona. And, worse, a Representative who had voted in favor of health care reform, which you have demonized as nothing short of a resurrection of the Nazi Party. It must have been awful for so many conservatives, thinking, praying, "Please, please, please, don’t let it be some Tea Party dick who says he did it because Glenn Beck told him to. Don’t let it be someone who wants to fuck Sarah Palin and thinks that if he starts taking out her congressional crosshaired targets, he’ll get into her pants."

How you must have heaved in relief when you saw that it would be quite easy to portray Jared Lee Loughner as a raving psychopath, an effort that’s helped a great deal by the apparent truth, which is that Jared Lee Loughner is a raving psychopath. Yeah, he's a psychopath whose mad rantings are heavily peppered with an insouciant flavor of Beck or Ron Paul or loony conspiracy theory nutsiness, but a psychopath just the same.

Now, ah, yes, now, lovely right-wingers, you could defend yourself. You could work yourselves into a huff about how unjustly you were accused of driving this obviously disturbed individual into an act of calculated, cold-blooded violence. But that's because you're sitting there in your shit-filled underpants, thinking, "I don't believe in violence. I don't approve this. I hope the government doesn't try to crack down on us."

So, welcome, assholes, because you are Muslim now.

How does it feel to stand in Muslim shoes today? Because, right now, yes, you are being treated like suspects. You are being treated like you are guilty of the crimes that are committed by the deranged in your number. Sure, you may think, you can spout all the blood-filled, gun-toting, war-flogging rhetoric you want against citizens of your own country. But those are just words, you know? You can’t, you know, be held accountable for the actions of a few. And, gosh, it’s just wrong to lump you all together, to stereotype you all as criminals in waiting. Like, you know, you have done with Muslims since September 11, 2001.

Here's the deal, though. The vast, vast, vast majority of Muslims decry not only acts of violence, but the rhetoric of it, too. The vast, vast, vast majority of right-wingers not only stay silent as conservatives shoot at targets with their opponents' names or initials on them, talk about revolution and violence, and accuse Democrats of getting ready to put Americans in forced health care camps. No, you embrace your extremist assholes and anoint them your idiot queen.

How will you live with yourselves in the future? Look, heated, vicious rhetoric is part of the political game. But, frankly, there’s a bit of difference between saying that you’re going to "target" an opponent and saying that there might have to be "Second Amendment solutions" to the nation’s problems. Let's not do the bullshit dance of false equivalence. While there was a period of time when the left was violent (which was met by officially-sanctioned violence by the government), in the last couple of decades, it hasn't been the left shooting shit up. It wasn't the left who let the assault weapons ban lapse. It wasn't the left that made access to guns as easy as a McDonald's drive-thru. It wasn't the left that cried "Fascism" to background checks for someone who wants to own a fucking machine gun. It wasn't the left that supported preemptive war and violence against individuals as solutions to our nation's problems. Time to welcome your chickens home, conservatives. Open your filthy arms.

So, yeah, yeah, cowering motherfuckers, Jared Lee Loughner was monkeyfuck insane. He wandered in the fringes of conspiracy theories and wallowed in the stinking pit of his own mad brain fluids. You can comfort yourselves and have a shaky drink to that.

But you know what, you ridiculous worms? At the end of the day, the Rude Pundit supports your right to say your stupid shit. And it's ironic that Giffords read the First Amendment during the House's big show last week of reading the Constitution. Free speech ain't a free pass. It never, ever comes without responsibility. You wanna spout crazy, violent shit? You wanna talk about end times and revolution, Glenn Beck? Then man up and know that some people will take you seriously, even if you are just a joke.

I bow to his brilliance

OK, so Christmas (and, for that matter, the annual return of the "War on Christmas") is over, and I'm recovering from a stomach flu that I'm going to blame on my dumbass Marine son, returned for the holidays from his mind-meltingly difficult tour in fucking Hawaii (and remind me to tell you sometime how he had the unmitigated balls to complain that his first post in the service of our country was to a tropical paradise). And sometime in the next few days, I have hopes of coughing up a relatively relevant post, as opposed to the mindless drivel I've been spitting out of late.

At this point, it may involve Wikileaks, but I make no promises.

On that subject, though, let me point you to the great Doghouse Riley, author of Bats Left, Throws Right, who I discovered only this year. A man with a love of the English language, who possesses a way with words that would bring tears to the eye of the sainted Robert Burns hisself (if our Rabbie had been into politics, as opposed to developing the Eighteenth Century version of the Holy Trinity of Sex, Drugs, and Rock & Roll).

I love the way the man crafts a sentence. For example, some two weeks ago or so, Mr Riley, in tearing apart a NY Times op-ed, wrote a post entitled You're Not Helping. Not That We Aren't Beyond Help Anyway, wherein he formulated possibly the perfect opening paragraphs. (The remainder of the post was more than worth reading, but I'm just highlighting the initial 200 words or so.)

I've spent a lot of time lately wondering whether the Second Coming of Richard Nixon will answer the age old question If History's A Farce The First Time 'Round, How Does It Get Repeated? or, maybe, How Many Idiots Can Tapdance On The Edge Of An Apocalypse? I don't believe in Apocalypse, for reasons having less to do with a rejection of Semitic fairy-tales, and more to do with the question of what level of collateral damage would be required to make the elimination of the species something other than a net positive, but I think if one does then one should probably admit that if God is perfection, then Her comic timing has got to require milking this gag for a while yet.

And let's have this much clear: I do think the Republican party is a big part of this. I do think that the Nixonian Impulse, which I would describe as the hyperreality created at the intersection of the abject and squalid profit-taking which has hidden behind American Exceptionalism for decades and an infantile sexuality that would have put Krafft-Ebing off his lunch, is the very juice and marrow of the modern Republican party. And I think that, having in yet another election managed to milk a bull and produce ice cream, it will be drawn once again to demonstrate its essential nature the way a flasher inhabits a playground.

Don't be embarrassed if it takes you twice through to soak all that in. It's worth it.

The Bible before Solstice

Happy Solstice (if that's what you're into). The goddess Uzza gives us this reminder of all that's come before.

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.

In Her Defense, I'm Sure the Moose Had It Coming

Aaron Sorkin has probably written (or at least sold) more good stuff than bad. This piece that he did for the occasionally reprehensible Huffington post is definitely brilliant.

"Unless you've never worn leather shoes, sat upon a leather chair or eaten meat, save your condemnation."

You're right, Sarah, we'll all just go fuck ourselves now.

The snotty quote was posted by Sarah Palin on (like all the great frontier women who've come before her) her Facebook page to respond to the criticism she knew and hoped would be coming after she hunted, killed and carved up a Caribou during a segment of her truly awful reality show, Sarah Palin's Alaska, broadcast on The-Now-Hilariously-Titled Learning Channel.

I eat meat, chicken and fish, have shoes and furniture made of leather, and PETA is not ever going to put me on the cover of their brochure and for these reasons Palin thinks it's hypocritical of me to find what she did heart-stoppingly disgusting. I don't think it is, and here's why.

Like 95% of the people I know, I don't have a visceral (look it up) problem eating meat or wearing a belt. But like absolutely everybody I know, I don't relish the idea of torturing animals. I don't enjoy the fact that they're dead and I certainly don't want to volunteer to be the one to kill them and if I were picked to be the one to kill them in some kind of Lottery-from-Hell, I wouldn't do a little dance of joy while I was slicing the animal apart.

I'm able to make a distinction between you and me without feeling the least bit hypocritical. I don't watch snuff films and you make them. You weren't killing that animal for food or shelter or even fashion, you were killing it for fun. You enjoy killing animals. I can make the distinction between the two of us but I've tried and tried and for the life of me, I can't make a distinction between what you get paid to do and what Michael Vick went to prison for doing. I'm able to make the distinction with no pangs of hypocrisy even though I get happy every time one of you faux-macho shitheads accidentally shoots another one of you in the face.

So I don't think I will save my condemnation, you phony pioneer girl. (I'm in film and television, Cruella, and there was an insert close-up of your manicure while you were roughing it in God's country. I know exactly how many feet off camera your hair and make-up trailer was.)

And you didn't just do it for fun and you didn't just do it for money. That was the first moose ever murdered for political gain. You knew there'd be a protest from PETA and you knew that would be an opportunity to hate on some people, you witless bully. What a uniter you'd be -- bringing the right together with the far right.

(Let me be the first to say that I abused cocaine and was arrested for it in April 2001. I want to be the first to say it so that when Palin's Army of Arrogant Assholes, bereft of any reasonable rebuttal, write it all over the internet tomorrow they will at best be the second.)

I eat meat, there are leather chairs in my office, Sarah Palin is deranged and The Learning Channel should be ashamed of itself.

Jewish terrorist sympathizers to meet at Ground Zero

I originally saw this as an excerpt posted at Loonwatch, from the "mother post" at WhatIfTheyWereMuslim.com. Fascinating, either way, but credit where credit is due and all...

On Sunday November 7th at 3:30 pm, followers and supporters of Rabbi Meir Kahane from Canada and America will gather at Ground Zero ostensibly to rally against "political Islam." Why is this important news for many Americans who consider Ground Zero a sacred site? Because Rabbi Kahane is the founder of the villainous Kach Israeli political party, a group on the U.S. State Department's official list of terrorist organizations.

A little background on Mr. Kahane: he was a hardline ordained Jewish Rabbi who advocated the removal of Arabs from Palestine in order to create a homogeneous "Greater Israel" modeled upon Jewish religious law. His slogan is "every Jew a .22."

Widely denounced by other Jews as a racist, he gained worldwide infamy when one of his followers, the notorious Baruch Goldstein, perpetrated the Cave of the Patriarchs massacre, wherein Mr. Goldstein brutally gunned down dozens of Palestinian Muslim worshippers who were praying inside the Abraham Mosque. Another one of Mr. Kahane’s followers is on trial in Michigan for shooting an Arab man in an act of "road rage."

And British activists in the Kahane-inspired Jewish Defense League have cozied up, ironically enough, with the thuggish English Defense League despite their attachment to the violent neo-nazi outfit Combat 18. In short, Mr. Kahane is something of a folk-hero for extremists bent on Jewish domination of the Holy Land at the expense of indigenous Arabs and Muslims, including Arab Christians. In a few weeks, Mr. Kahane’s followers are bringing their message of hate and racial supremacy to Ground Zero.

I repeat: supporters of an officially designated terrorist organization that advocates an unforgiving expansionist religious-political ideology are meeting to honor their racist terrorist leader on the site of the worst terrorist attack in U.S. history.

Stereotyping Jews or any group because of the actions of an extremist fringe is deeply wrong. But this situation begs the question: what if they were Muslim?

Imagine, if you can, the thunderous firestorm that would be unleashed if supporters of Al-Qaeda gathered at Ground Zero to honor Osama Bin Laden. The scene would be too ghastly for words, with 24 hour cable news coverage, politicians on both sides of the aisle lining up to score points for condemnation, and Muslim-bashing bloggers having a field day. All of Islam and all Muslims would bear collective guilt for their actions. Muslim leaders across the country would denounce terrorism only to be told that they have not denounced terrorism enough or that they are secret stealth jihadists. It would be said, "Where are the moderate Muslims? Why do they not condemn terrorism?" And Steve Emerson’s fear-mongering-for-profit operation would continue to rake in millions. You get the picture.

But as for Mr. Kahane’s followers, we aren't going to hear a peep out of Newt, Palin, Spencer, or Geller. We will not hear Bill O'Reilly speaking down to Jews on his show about their "Jewish problem." And we will not hear the same chorus of outrage about the holiness of Ground Zero or the sensitivities of 9/11 victims' families.

Why? Because these particular terrorists are not Muslims. It is as simple as that.

On animal rights, and embedding sound files

So, I've been reading a site called Science Digestive for some time, run by a self-identified neuroscientist and comedian, who recently ended up on in an episode of a British podcast called the Pod Delusion. (Oh, yeah, he's a Brit - don't hold that against him. Some of my best friends are Anglo.)

He said some things about animal testing that I've been saying for years, only with the advantage, unlike me, of actually having done animal testing. (And the man's reasonably intelligent to begin with - neuroscience ain't for dummies, right?)

He caught some flak for it. Especially when he posted a transcript of his article on his site and people had a target for their ignorance and wrath.

(What do you call a "podcast article," anyway? "Podicle" seems contrived and relatively stupid. "Artcast" is obviously out. I think I'm partial to "particle," but I need to think about it.)

So I contacted him and asked if he had an .mp3 of his bit, and could I post it? Turns out he did, and I could. Which led to a problem I hadn't foreseen.

Blogger doesn't have an easy way to embed .mp3's. You'd think that would be an obvious one, but not so much. There's probably a good reason for this omission - they didn't want to become a launching platform for podcasts, they didn't want to use up all their memory on people's stupid sound bites, something like that. But screw 'em - they were a problem for ME now, and that's unacceptable.

Now, I know just enough about computers to get myself in trouble, and I quickly found out that most solutions involved downloading players or plugins (and the associated malware, in far too many cases), and I didn't want to do that.

But digging around, I found DivShare, where you:

1. Upload the file from your computer
2. Go to your profile
3. Select the look of the player
4. Hit "embed" and they give you the code to copy and paste.

Simple, easy, and free. I like it. (The only real thing you have to think about: the last 3 choices of player - including the one I thought looked best - are for paying users only. That little red squiggle over the "select" is supposed to be a dollar sign.)

(Oh, and you do have to click through some "please give us money and upgrade" pages every so often. But there's always a "skip" link somewhere on there.)

(Obviously, this isn't a paid endorsement, or I wouldn't have included that last comment. So there you are.)

Now let's see if it works. If it does, we should have an .mp3 player here at the bottom of the post, where you can hear the brilliant words of the generous Dean Burnett, neuroscientist, comedian, and fellow blogger.



Thank you, technology. And thank you, Dean Burnett.

(Remember, children. Only use this power for Good.)