April, 2012 archive
“An Armed Society Is a Polite Society” 0
More politeness on the highways and byways:
Nature Red in Tooth and Claw 0
We often see the noses of turtles poking above the surface at our nearby pond, but yesterday was the first time we’ve seen most of a turtle poking above the surface.
Filling Their Teabags 0
Nothing but Astro-Turn from the git-go.
Now those incumbents are collecting thousands of dollars for re-election campaigns from the same Wall Street firms whose excesses they criticized. They have taken no significant steps to curb them or prevent future taxpayer-financed rescues.
Everybody Must Get Sick 0
In case you wondered why the Republican Party is adamantly opposed to reforming the US health care system, consider this bit from MarketWatch:
For people in the top 1% of income earners, avoiding those two tax provisions would translate into savings of, on average, about $21,000 per year, according to the Tax Policy Center, a joint venture of the Brookings Institution and Urban Institute.
And the richest Americans — the top 0.1% — would avoid about $125,000 more in taxes per year on average if the health law is overturned.
It is living up to its core mission: to make the rich, richer and the poor, poorer.
Making the poor sicker and the sick poorer is just collateral damage.
Update from the Foreclosure-Based Economy 0
Why the effrontery of these people! How dare they take the initiative!
The banks, natch, are against this. They want to be able to foreclose just on their say-so.
We know how well that has worked out.
Shrink-Wrapped Lives 0
Americans’ paranoia about germs appears to be counterproductive:
(snip)
Calling the hygiene hypothesis the most compelling of theories about increased food allergies, he explained that allergies crop up as a result of the immune system perceiving something innocent as a parasite. If a child isn’t exposed to enough allergens at an early age, the hypothesis is that their bodies are less likely to develop tolerances.
“If you have a cat in the household when less than age 1, in infancy, then you are less likely to have asthma at age 5,” he said. “Studies show children who grow up on farms have less asthma, too.”
I had a friend who told that, when her daughter was young, she was sickly and frequently ill.
She asked the doctor what to do and the doctor said, “Let her play in the dirt.”
She did and the illnesses went away.
What If Jesus Ran? 0
This is a little bit dated, but the core still rings true, he said, merrily mixing metaphors.
Droning On, Drone Summit 0
Fighting robots from the skies:
Pay for Performance 0
As designed by Dillinger and Assocs, Compensation Consultants:
Likewise, CEO pay at the companies on the Fortune 500 list rose four times faster than the firms’ combined profits, which squeaked up barely 7 percent in five years.
QOTD 0
Charles Caleb Colton, from the Quotemaster (subscribe here):
Silence is foolish if we are wise, but wise if we are foolish.
Both Sides of the Mouth 0
Chancey Devega observes (emphasis in the original)
For the conservatives who have embraced George Zimmerman as a martyr and victim, his racial status is circumstantial, contingent, and wholly dependent on the political whims and needs of a given moment. Ultimately, if George Zimmerman was accused of hunting down and killing either a white teenage boy (or God forbid, a young white woman!) in exactly the same circumstances, his “Hispanic” identity would be turned into a liability and a sin, his honorary whiteness quickly and inexorably revoked.
Graphic via Contradict Me.
Seen on the Street 0
Now this is a car! It started life as a 1950s-something Plymouth.
Click for a larger image.
This used to be a car.
(Never did learn how this happened.)
Sauce for the Goose 0
Hanlon:
Ted Nugent hints that he might try to assassinate the president (Obama), but it doesn’t look like they’re gonna be quite as incensed.
Funny how that works.
Driving while Brown 0
So I say, “Well, next day I [am] going to go and talk to the principal. And I ask her why [did] they give this paper to my daughter? What was the reason they [gave] this paper to my daughter, and her answer was that they [gave] this paper to all the children that appear they are not from here. And I ask her, “Why [do] you think my daughter is not from here?”
Far as I can see and far as I can feel my daughter is being singled out and racial profiled and discriminated because of her color and race and origin from where they think she is from.
