Denigrating the Venerated

It looks like I am not the only blogger willing to risk the backlash of an angry mob by going against custom and speaking ill of the dead. The subject of today’s tirade is the recently departed Margaret Thatcher, who is certainly a much more prominent target for scorn than the lowly Tea Party fundamentalist I took aim at just the other day,

The individual invoking the same type of vituperative invective against Thatcher as I did to Mark Krebs is none other than George Galloway, a long-time politico and current member of the British parliament. A brief pause is in order to allow for a standing ovation for Mr. Galloway!

The tendency to gloss over even the most blatant public vulgarities of our dead on the event of their demise is highly over-rated and counter productive to society. It also gives a warm and fuzzy feeling to the living monsters among us that their legacy (of torture and death) won’t become the highlight reel for their remaining kin and countrymen. Screw that.

Here are a few tasty bits on Thatcher from Mr. Galloway. The whole post is here at this link.

On one of my first political demonstrations – against the Conservative government of Edward Heath (1970-74) the slogan of the day was “Margaret Thatcher- Milk snatcher”. It was the first but not the last time I spat out her name in distaste.

She destroyed more than a third of Britain’s manufacturing capacity, significantly more than Hitler’s Luftwaffe ever achieved.

In the infamous sermon on the Mound in Edinburgh addressing the Church of Scotland she opined that there was “no such thing as society”…”only individuals”

Enjoy

PZ and his Pusillanimous Pixies

As the most prominent atheist comedian on the planet,I give thanks to the many godless blessings that PZ Myers and his not-so-merry band of Girlyban Skepdinks have provided me. A virtual cornucopia of idiocracy to choose from. The only other comedic assignment with more low hanging fruit than I’ve been provided would have been writing jokes for Bill Mahr during the Bush administration. I could have never have imagined (We all knew!) it would still be going strong at this late stage of the game.

But I don’t make the news, I just report it. PZenu and the pusillanimous pixies of Feminology are holed up over at Pharyngula, which to those unfamiliar with Feminology, is the Internet equivalent of the safe haven carved out by Scientologists in Clearwater FL. Like their cohorts in nonsense, the Feminologists were quick to invent their own rules and jargon. Being blocked and banned as a suppressive person was their initial mimicry. Here we are a couple years on, and now they’ve got an automated process for blocking content off their computers that’s even slicker than the blocking software the Scientologists make their people use to protect them from vicious (truthful) Internet content!)

I swear on the imaginary soul of my long departed mother that I am only adding the tiniest bit of hyperbole as I recount these cult-like similarities, and we haven’t even touched on the Feminologist-specific jargon issue yet! Suffice to,say that those idiots over at Pharyngula HQ are so Out Tech on proper skepticism that rehabilitation seems out of the question. The girls over at the PeezOrg have spent way too much time hooked up to their she-meters. There is always a little hope for their recovery but that’s assuming you could wrestle them away from their firm grasp of PZenu’s balls in the first place (Please no photoshops! (I see it already!)) I run a clean ship over here.

This will probably break the heart and soul of those like Michael Nugent (pity the poor dumb bastard) who favor a policy of NOM (non overlapping menseshysteria) between skepticism and the outright bat shit insanity that appears in faithless femininity, but I see no place for allowing evidence free claims to invade and dilute organizational attention away from the mission of figuratively (trigger warning) bitch slapping creationists and Jeebus slobberers who employ the same techniques (tactics).

One final little dingle dongle to make note of. A sad reminder that the virulent nature of memes (both good and bad-thank you Richard Dawkins) goes on unabated, and can laterally transfer from one group of pusillanimous pixies to another. In the latest example it caused a death (of Adria Richard’s career) and she wasn’t even a part of the skeptic movement! It’s not “something in the water” at conferences or a germ picked up off an unsanitary toilet seat at the buffet restaurant loo (unless that’s where Adria happened to be sitting when she got infected reading the Rebecca Watson Slate article e.g.). There is protection available for those who need it. Simply following this blog or my Twitter feed is a good first step.

Hat Tip to the many positive women of skepticism. Their inspiration and support instills a tingling sense of wonder in the nether regions near my dangling tender jiggly bits. I would name them but I’d sound like Brigham Young reading off a list of his many wives and besides, I’d never kiss and tell.

Enjoy.

Joe Washington

Watching and documenting the liars for Jeebus crowd has my bullshit sensitivity meter locked in so tight it was impossible to miss this right wing inspired gun nut Facebook post today:

The propensity of the Conservative party to lie about every other subject, coupled with the certainty that good old George never said anything of the sort set me to Googling. A search on that exact phrase, if it is indeed a Washington quote, should render hits from a plethora of serious presidential scholars. So, what were my results :

The quote is superimposed on one YouTube video:

It appears to be taken from a Christian Fundamentalist web page (Powered by “the Holy Spirit” the light within) posted by some guy named Joe Spenner, who apparently thinks putting quotes in the title of his web page makes his lunatic rambings attributable to Washington:

Be on guard for this kind of right wing tripe. It is pervasive and obnoxious but people are quite easily led astray by Republicans who then attribute it to the devil, or Obama.

Enjoy.

GOP Irrelevancy

Good morning all,

First off. housekeeping. Woke up 55 years old this morning. Happy birthday to me.

I’m just old enough to remember when all the “lazy blacks” in Detroit were so busy making cars that that moniker didn’t work so well.   A lot of people I remember fondly from my youth had good union jobs and lived well. Then Reagan came along and garrotted the unions in 1980.  Many believe Reagan also killed Disco, but Disco never died. Reagan stuffed it in a duffel bag and sent it to Guantanamo.

In any event, the country has been on a Republican built road-to-Hell since then.  Republican greed totally destroyed any chance for those of my generation to implement the dreams and ideals we all grew up cherishing.  Our fathers had just landed on the moon and we were poised for Mars just about the time the crazy old man got hold of the wheel and steered us off into the direction of Star Wars instead.

There’s still a ray of hope for our children and grandchildren, if we don’t allow them to drown in the slime pit of oil dependency and warmongering the Republicans have built into our system.  We’ll see.

Big shout out to all the Walmart workers who stood against the corporate tyrants.  Walmart can’t compete in an environment where civility and fair play are honored above institutional profits.  They fizzled here in Germany after pissing a billion dollars away, and at the end of the day, they weren’t even able to offer lower prices than their competitors!!

How Can the Republicans Regain Relevance?

Having graduated from high school in Fort Dodge Iowa (1976 – State of Iowa Scholar), I can say with some authority that what the Republicans need to do to become relevant again. I expect my suggestions to be received by the GOP with all the enthusiasm and applause as pre-election Nate Silver polls, but it might help if somebody from the great plains, who isn’t a highly paid (bought off) beltway insider adds a main-street view. I am pretty sure I have mentioned these things before, but the Republicans weren’t listening to me then and they likely won’t listen to me now, but if ever there was a time when Googling “mainstream viewpoints” and “U.S. voters” might interest a Republican, this seems a likely moment in time for that occurrence.

Republicans need to drop their crazy ideas on reproductive freedoms. This last election cycle saw things spin so far into crazy town that there were candidates actually advancing the cause of rapist’s rights in having their unholy offspring borne by our mothers, wives and daughters. I have a memory of Mississippi trying to outlaw condoms, but that might have been spin from their “rights of the zygote” legislation that failed, even in the bastion of the Baptist holy land. At the end of the day, the Republican adoption of the Christian Bible as a handbook for political and scientific guidance is as ill-advised, un-American and disgusting. Relying on faith over facts is not a road to success into the future.

Modern Republicanism is now 20 percent politics and 80 percent fundamentalist Christian Reconstructionism. This is something they used to know enough to hide because they knew it was a losing minority position. I remember noting the TRUE percent of “lunatic fringe” Christians when Pat Robertson ran for president. IIRC, it was about five percent, and I doubt the actual numbers are higher today (40% of US now “non-religious”).

What the Relignicans lack in numbers they try to make up for in astroturf and echo chambers. Fox (Faux) News is HELPING elect Democrats now that everybody isn’t afraid to laugh at the Naked Emperor.

I have an iPad mini to unwrap.

Happy Birthday to Me.

Enjoy.

Election Roundup 2012

I have a Facebook and Twitter feed to prove I was up REAL late here in Germany, watching the election and putting my bony fingers of contention to good use. In fact, the night of the election my fingertips were bouncing off my keyboard faster and harder than a midget cowboy riding a Dutch hooker.   For the record, I am only willing to shell out for food for the hungry, universal healthcare for the masses and a nickel more for a pizza so the delivery guy can afford $4 gas AND a dentist.  If any of you oversexed Democrats high on legalized hippy lettuce wants to see that rodeo in Amsterdam, you’ll have to pony up for your own ticket.  I promise you’ll get a far more graphic demonstration of the metaphors applied in the aforementioned simile.

Election Tweets

I have some Tweets from the evening that are more precious to me than my kids.  I’ll pull more screen shots out later and mix them in with my old vacation photos, either on a future blog post, or over at my house when we’re finished with sanctifying Christmas by stuffing our faces with cranberry sauce, before the start of the sacred NFL Xmas game extravaganza.   Just in case you think my football analogy as sui generis:

It’s times like these that are made to reminisce on things that happened back in the “good old days”.  If you can’t wait to see my full set of tweets, they are out there in the wild, but take caution.  Think of my tweets as “highly concentrated snark”.  Reading a couple of them is equivalent to chugging two large Red Bulls.  Do not read them while driving or operating heavy machinery.

The Setup

Things weren’t looking good for Romney even before the sun came up on election day.  His commie-loving son had just been caught trading arms for hostages with Putin in Russia, and only days after his Dad was on TV trying to scare everybody in America about the missing Czarist WMD’s in his foreign policy debate with Obama.

The Main Event

The spectacle of visible human suffering on election night 2012 was one I shall never forget.  A shot heard round the world.  The carnage was so total, and the chaos so complete, that at least one news anchor sprang from her perch running wildly about, on a frantic search to find somebody, anybody, who would confirm Karl Rove’s theory of a flat Earth.  This theory, bolstered by more than a quarter billion dollars of the most sophisticated research the Creation Science Institute could muster, added that extra touch of schadenfreude we’ve all come to expect in reality TV shows (or Slasher movies) produced over the last decade, so we at home were all thoroughly prepped for a big twist.

Nobody Could Have Predicted

That is, if we TOTALLY ignore this guy who had been repeated phoning, texting and emailing the Romney/Fox campaign extolling them NOT to volunteer to go down into that dark basement, but the promo trailers had been blasting America for months and it was clear from seeing those, that the Republican party was married to a stale plot device with the same loving ferocity Mitt has expressed towards the dim-bulb blonde he chose as his wife.  What a conundrum!!

Republican Reaction (Aftermath)

Dixie hadn’t experienced a November event anything nearly this tragic since Sherman’s March to the Sea in 1864.  Obama, like Sherman had “destroyed much of the South’s physical and psychological capacity to wage war”.

Just like Lincoln in the aftermath of the Great Northern War of Aggression, Obama still has a bit of mopping up in order to ensure a proper southern reconstruction.  This task is particularly difficult considering the unrepentant and thoroughly unreconstructed “Sons of the Confederacy” pictured above in Oxford Mississippi.  This strapping band of Brooks Brothers racists were busy going Johnny Reb, burning Obama campaign material in pseudo effigy, just on the off chance they could re-inspire the spirit of nineteenth century racism.  The only thing missing were the white robes and official seal of the KKK, though to be honest, I think at least half of those folks had some type of cross dangling from a gold chain around their necks.  They try to keep their racism tucked under their tshirts, but sometimes there’s an accidental “nipple slip” that makes it past the seven second delay.

Insane US politics is only one of the many minor perturbations that I have been dealing with lately, though to be fair, the 2012 election seems to have consumed the entirety of the last four years.  The megaphones on Bullshit Mountain began blaring immediately after Obama was overwhelmingly swept into office back in 2008 (in lieu of the old soldier & his organ grinder monkey sideshow act).  Good times?  You Betcha’).

Just to give the Republicans a port in the very stormy seas of their defeat, I finally found an EXCUSE for them to pass around that doesn’t rely on Karl Rove under-counting the Black kids crowding the candy aisle at Walmart.  They can thank me later:

I’m out.

Enjoy.