2015 archive
Multi-Tasking Is Bunk 0
Turns out we really can’t walk and chew gum at the same time.
Flash Point 0
Too many cameras at too many events in the hands of too many narcissistic prima donnas leads to no good.
Officers responding to the episode reported that the fight started when words were exchanged over one of the men blocking others by taking a photograph.
“Physical altercation,” indeed.
Afterthought:
Graduation ceremonies from middle school are silly and stupid.
Second Son had a graduation ceremony from pre-school to kindergarten. That was also silly and stupid.
The “Marvel Movie Universe” 0
Six-minute cartoons that are three hours long. Who woulda thunk?
Republican Family Values 0
One more time: Republican Family Values (TM) are a con, a fraud, and a flim-flam, hot air you can use to dry your socks, as a sounding brass or a tinkling cymbal, signifying nothing.
The only question is this: which “family values” Republican will be the next to be hoist on his own pe-er, um-tard?
Give me an honest lech every day of the week and twice on Sundays.
(Honest to Pete, you can’t make this stuff up.)
“An Armed Society Is a Polite Society” 0
The father appears to have been examining the gun, which was legally owned, to determine if it was in working order when it accidentally discharged, Spruill said. No arrest has been made as of this evening.
I guess it worked.
Facebook Frolics 2
Gwendolyn Seidman puts Facebook on the couch at Psychology Today Blogs.
“Welfare Queens” 0
They aren’t who you think they are, as The Bangor Daily News explains. A snippet (emphasis added):
Following the money, the focus should be on provider fraud, not demonizing individual recipients of benefits.
“We shouldn’t ignore eligibility fraud,” (Maine–ed.) Attorney General Janet Mills said last year. “We shouldn’t ignore recipient fraud; we shouldn’t ignore any allegations that somebody is getting state or federal benefits who isn’t really eligible for them, but the big fish are the corporations, the major pharmaceutical companies and the providers that have been ripping off the state Medicaid program for years to the tune of millions of dollars.”
Think about that the next time you see one of those commercials for something you probably don’t need at a price which goes unstated along with assurances that it’s “covered by Medicare.”
“An Armed Society Is a Polite Society” 0
Politeness must start young.
Just one of those things, one of those crazy things in NRA Paradise.
Speaking of “Them” . . . 0
. . . Marco Rubio is very, very afraid of “Them.”
“Them” 3
Back when spy movies were all the rage, James Bond was still played by Sean Connery, and the villains were always faceless underground organizations with names such as SPECTRE, SMERSH, and THRUSH, someone I forget who made a parody spy flick in which the bad guys represented a shadowy outfit called THEM. As I recall, the film’s silliness made anything by the Three Stooges look like high art (unfortunately, I can’t remember enough of it to find a citation).
Leonard Pitts, Jr., reminds me that the film may not have been as much parody as I thought at the time:
Us versus them.
As in, an implicit promise to defend the former against the latter. This was its mission when it pushed for immigration quotas in the 1920s, when it animated the Red Scare of the 1950s, when it defined civil rights as a clear and present danger in the 1960s, when hardhats rioted against hippies in 1970. It is its organizing principle even today, as red states pass legislation to protect themselves from Sharia law and some of us define religious persecution as baking a cake for a same-sex couple.
Us versus them.
Always, social conservatism defined “them” as something faceless and frightening against which the rest of “us” must struggle with everything we had, or else be overrun. It is an ideology that has contributed virtually nothing of value to the life of the nation — unless you count mindless panic as a good thing.
He goes on to wonder whether the appeal of such tactics may be waning.
I fear that he is wrong. Fear sells, and hate always finds buyers.