May, 2014 archive
Market Rate 0
There’s nothing like an informed consumer.
Airlines want to keep it that way.
“An Armed Society Is a Polite Society” 0
Play with yourself, politely.
“At some point around the baseball field, Mr. Boyd produces a firearm and is playing with the slide and the gun accidentally discharges shooting him in the leg,” Capt. Robert Swanigan, of Georgetown Police, tells us.
Boyd is being held in the Scott County Detention Center charged with first degree wanton endangerment.
News, Ripped from the Ticker 0
Warning: bad taste.
Nothing To Do, Nowhere To Go 0
A little better. We’ll see what happens when the schools let out.
(snip)
The four-week average of claims, a less-volatile measure than the weekly figure, climbed to 324,750 from 320,250 the week before.
(snip)
The number of people continuing to collect benefits dropped by 76,000 to 2.69 million in the week ended April 26.
Ghouls 2
It mystifies me, not just as a news junkie, but also as a human being and ex-married person, how anyone could seriously propose that any member of the Clinton family would be in favor of, let alone promote and delight in, reliving the Lewinsky story.
Our public discourse has become a colossus of salacious stupid moderated by the stupidly salacious.
Avoid the Draft and You Won’t Get the Fever 0
Sports writer extraordinaire Bob Molinaro explains why NFL draft and the attendant fuss is, as my mother would have said, the biggest nothing. Old timers remember when it was enough to read about it the next morning over coffee, without the beer and ripple chips.
There is more live action in an episode of Sponge Bob.
The TV coverage of the draft is hype, a scam, a con, a something-made-from-nothing so that ESPN can sell higher-priced commercials. It has no other reason for being.
Don’t Stand a Prayer 0
The Rude One is distressed by the Supreme Court’s recent sidestep closer to theocracy and argues that public prayer is always coercive. He recalls what happened when he was a young ‘un and sat down for a little-last minute studying during the “voluntary moment of silent prayer” mandated by his school.
A snippet:
In other words, he was coerced into participating, whether he liked it or not.
Find out why he finds this story worth telling at the link.
In related news, the resident curmudgeon of my local rag finds the ruling quite okay, provided that
But, really now, unleashing your private beliefs and practices on others who are forced to just take it is inherently obnoxious, isn’t it? That is what those who would pray loudly in the public square wish to do.
The persons who most loudly demand prayer at public functions, and particularly prayer in schools, want to make people squirm. At the least, they see forcing their prayers on unbelievers as a form of proselytizing and indoctrinating them; at worst, they are the religious variant of gun nuts who parade around the Little League park with assault weapons just because they can.
Afterthought:
In Fundamentalist Christian lingo, forcing one’s beliefs on those who are not interested is called witnessing for the faith.
Family Values Republicans 0
Republicans have turned pandering into high art. They now parody themselves.
Honest to Pete, you can’t make this stuff up.
Hell, National Lampoon in its short-lived glory days could not have made this stuff up.
