The GOP: NO more rump, no more tits.
Fuck, I thought we were done with this shit with the Crisco™ man.

SaTHERSday Night Fever!

Somehow I don’t think any of these supposed Xtianist Rethuglicans has ever actually read the Bible, especially the parts directly attributed to the Rabbi Yeshua. They are, after all, objectively anti-Christian.

What is it with wingnuts and titties in classical-style art? We know they don’t mind them when they’re mounted to some buxom young staffer, so why do they have to be covered when they’re on Virtus or Justicia?

Evening all.

The tit thing is more funny, but the decision to go after Mann for his scientific conclusions is more frightening, and consequential.

Launching an investigation of a scientist because you don’t like his science is just, you know, well, fascist.

Virginia’s new Attorney General deciding that a Smart Use of Taxpayer Money involves burdening a state university with a frankly crazy witch-hunting subpoena…

They are not like the Taliban – they are the gold-standard for the Taliban to meet.

…”I dreamed I was on the State Seal of Virginia in my Maidenform Revere-ware Bra!”….

Yeah, the documents that have to be pulled and combed through – could take years.
One tiny flaw in an innocuous email is all they want.

Somehow, I don’t think this is what “peer review” is all about.

Yep. They just took it to the next level. I expect them to start burning us as witches any day now.

Even fascists believe in science. This is more like the inquisition and the persecution of Galileo.

I think Kook’n'Nelli’s only peers are folks like Mullah Omar.

Not that I’m trying to cut in line or anything, but I think they’ll be after the heretic pastors first.

Instead of invading and co-opting a backwards country from which to launch their Jihad, through the ballot process they invade and co-opt… Oh yeah, Virginia.

On the bright side, I don’t want to see them doing any sort of dancing, so that works out…

In the eyes of these folks, Galileo got off lucky.

They may have to flip a coin on that one to determine who is the bigger heretic.

Fascists only sort of believe in science: if the Nazis hadn’t had this thing about Jews doing science, WWII might have ended differently. Of course, if they had not had this thing about the Jews, WWII wouldn’t have happened at all. But you see my point.

Ah hell. What Fred said. Go read that last link. I’m not entirely sure I agree with everything he says, but you should be reading his blog anyway.

I liked this part:

These stupid people [tea partiers, Palinites, Beck-ians, etc.] do not have to be stupid. Their stupidity is a choice, an act of will.

Kind of gives a whole new meaning to “pro-choice,” doesn’t it?

If he’s a hetero guy, shouldn’t he love tits?

Frankly, I’d uncover the right one if I was in his ‘position’.

At least I have Joe Bonamassa, Sonny Landreth, Jonny Lang, and Jeff Healey playing on the stereo to reassure me that the whole world has not gone totally to shit.

Unbelievable in 2010:

So – good luck, Ken Cuccinelli. We are with you all the way.

S. Fred Singer, PhD
Professor Emeritus of Environmental Sciences, University of Virginia
Chairman, Virginia Scientists and Engineers for Energy and Environment

He runs a good site, don’t he? I’ve been looking for an excuse to send folks his way.

Apparently he recognizes there is only room for one boob in Virginia.

Here’s a Fred Singer story to warm the cockles of your heart…

I do believe you have won the thread.

In some versions of the Gospel what He said translates as, “Scientist, shmientist, such a pain in my tuchas, they make me meshuga!”

Sadly, there are far more than that there these days.

For all we know, Singer’s Ph.D. is in English. It would explain his evident views on climatology.

Indeed. Gotta poke around there more later, when I’ve got more time. Alas, tomorrow is a work day . . .

G’nite, all.

Night!

I’m not convinced that Sarah chooses to be stupid. You’re giving her too much credit!

What is the difference between being stupid and choosing to be stupid?

Hey, nix! My PhD is in English!

The chief value of this is that I get agita at the misuse of the apostrophe in handwritten signs in supermarkets…

Perfect! Might as well laugh.

Read the last link in the post, it’s an argument hard to boil down…

It would be rude to suggest that Palin is to money, what a pig is to truffles.
Yes. Quite rude.

Oh well, better than a degree in Communications (“Is phony major. Lubchenko learn nothing. Nothing!”).

Well, that makes me want to smoke funny cigarettes, Thers. Wish I had access.

A breastplate?

No doubt she’s wearing a chastity belt, too? Who the hell are these shmucks running around thinking they can just make adjustments to things like this? You work for us, buddy, don’t fuck with the furniture.

Now, now, no need to get snooty.

She does have a lot of people rooting for her.

Accurate, but rude. How could say such things about a perfectly decent pig trying his best to earn an honest living?

Strange, that whole Palin thing, no? She clearly is not a bright person, but has the ability to capitalize. Who is running her now that her press secretary quit. (Sorry, can’t even remember her name, and she doesn’t come up on the first page on google!)

Unfortunately, due to an olfactory deficiency what they thought was a truffle turned out to be merely dung.

There’s no prosuitto in her family fridge. I used to wonder why, but now…

As far as I know, there’s no academic track to become a gifted grifter. You get it from your parents.

Sarah Palin is what she is. The cheerleader in high school that everyone felt sorry for.

OK, I’m a sleepy. Nighters!

Nighters! Think I will toddle off, too. Take care all.

Whazzup with the car bomb scare in Times Sq? Live on MSNBC now.

Sarah being ghosted by that Steve guy now? The really sleazy Rethug consultant? Her BFF Megan went back to her baby, apparently.

Palin’s gifts correlate well with the I.Q. level of most baggers.

By the pound or the inch?

By the pound and/or the inch.

I have to go lay down. I have been thinkin’ way to hard all day. See ya’ll late, later.

nite mary

Nite, Mary.

Frank Rich says it.

Bloomberg and Police Commissioner left DC will make public comments within the hour from Times Sq. MSNBC saying this is an IED.

Hey you guys, Suzanne is in Late Late
http://firedoglake.com/2010/05/01/late-late-night-fdl-the-wise-quacking-duck/

WORD! Just posted this to TCU’s most recent diary, but it’s perfect here, too.

Whence this creepy and weird idea? It’s the mythology!

There are nature mythologies, whose goal for the individual is to realize identity and harmony with nature: putting oneself in accord with nature is the supreme goal; and anti-nature mythologies, that conceive of nature as fallen, corrupted, and evil, and the supreme goal is a war to subdue and dominate nature.

Guess which one we have dominating us right now? /s

Problem is, anti-nature mythologies believe war to be the way the world was made to work. Life as holy war, for them, is the epitome of the Good life, just as they believe their gods intended it.

(This is from my recent diary, How do borders, like the skins we’re in, both join and divide us?)

What’s a border? How do borders function like the skins we’re in?

Here’s a very simple demonstration of the basic, fundamental, foundational mythology, and subsequent socio-psychology, at work here.

What is this?

____________________________

Is that an absolute, impenetrable, air-tight barrier? Or a series of segments arising in a field?

Borders, like skins, are regions of joining at least as much as they are of separating. Were that not true, we’d be dead already. No, we wouldn’t even have been alive to begin with, now would we?

This is the principle of the semi-permeable membrane. Every cell in our bodies is joined with every other cell by semi-permeable membranes.

Without the ability to move stuff, very selectively, back and forth across the membrane, life itself would not exist. So we have to manage the transport, not imagine we can achieve what amounts to a crime against nature: air-tight borders that absolutely and perfectly separate us from the “evil-doers,” who always seem to be located in exactly the same place: “over there.”

Also note that, since there is stuff forever in transport, the concepts of “self” and “other” cannot be absolutely and mutually exclusive. Any self-other division is an arbitrary imposition, not an absolute and eternal fact simply “discovered.”

As some may know, this is the ultimate mystery, of the self-same nature of self and other. It’s at the heart of the one of the oldest Upanishads, succinctly summarized as tat tvam asi, thou art that.

So, for example, when a child asks, “What’s that?”, the ultimate answer is, “Child, thou art that. And guess what? That loves that!”

The thing is, we’ve based our conception of being human on an absolute falsehood: the inviolable self-other divide. That right there is the progenitor of every subsequent socio-psychological division.

The trick is realizing, there wasn’t a wall between self and other to begin with. We imagine it into existence, then defend that illusion at all costs.

For example, BP believed they could control any contingency with their technology. Their environmental impact statements defined the threat of a catastrophic spill as nothing, compared to their ability to dominate Mother Nature Herself. Likewise, the nuclear power industry says it can contain highly radioactive wastes for 50,000, which is only 10 times longer than we’ve been living in cities. Some even think the same type of thinking (life as scientific holy war against nature) will save us from the problems it brings us. That’s insanity of mythic proportions!

It’s just this type of Machine World Uber Alles thinking, embedded in a hypermechanized world born of an anti-nature mythology, that has given us disastrous oil spills, and, moreover, global climate disruption.

What ails us today? We’ve taken one of Newton’s assumptions, that the cosmos may be modeled as, studied as, understood as, a mechanism, as a given. Over the last few centuries, Western science has progressively denatured humanity, beginning by basing our conception of being human on an absolute falsehood: the inviolable self-other divide, the progenitor of every subsequent socio-psychological division.

The late Stephen Jay Gould said as much, in his unprecedented February 19, 2001 New York Times op-ed, Humbled by the Genome’s Mysteries.

If we apply Gould’s thesis about this discovery to politics, we see clearly how Cheneyesque machinations are based on the old model: one direction of causal flow, from command to control to execution.

Gould goes on to address the the implications of the failure of the old order (namely, reductionism):

The implications of this finding cascade across several realms. The commercial effects will be obvious, as so much biotechnology, including the rush to patent genes, has assumed the old view that “fixing” an aberrant gene would cure a specific human ailment. The social meaning may finally liberate us from the simplistic and harmful idea, false for many other reasons as well, that each aspect of our being, either physical or behavioral, may be ascribed to the action of a particular gene “for” the trait in question.

But the deepest ramifications will be scientific or philosophical in the largest sense. From its late 17th century inception in modern form, science has strongly privileged the reductionist mode of thought that breaks overt complexity into constituent parts and then tries to explain the totality by the properties of these parts and simple interactions fully predictable from the parts. (“Analysis” literally means to dissolve into basic parts). The reductionist method works triumphantly for simple systems — predicting eclipses or the motion of planets (but not the histories of their complex surfaces), for example. But once again — and when will we ever learn? — we fell victim to hubris, as we imagined that, in discovering how to unlock some systems, we had found the key for the conquest of all natural phenomena. Will Parsifal ever learn that only humility (and a plurality of strategies for explanation) can locate the Holy Grail?

We’re human organisms, not Newtonian voodoo dolls. We have to understand our selves, and our source: nature, as a living organism, to be nurtured from within, not a Newtonian mechanism, to be dominated from without.

I’d like to see those BP execs, who approved the EIS, in their Gucci suits and Ferragamo loafers, down on the beach, cleaning up their mess.

Let the lords of the black gold come forth, that poetic justice may be done upon them!

Hummm I don’t get it. Mann is being investigated for possible mis-use of government funds, but somehow, you people conflate this to the church prosecuting scientists? Somehow, you people seem to have stereotyped people of faith and their believe in “science”. I thought “stereotyping people, labeling people, etc went out of favor in the sixties?

I submit that, on balance, oil, and the industries it has spawned, have been more of a plus, for mankind, than a negative.