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”
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.
As the creationist movement continues it’s march into public school classrooms all over the US (thanks to Texas FFS??), it behooves all parents to consider the motives and implications of those who are championing this cause.
If you are one of the eighty million Jeebus Camp supporters the answer to the question, “Can math really be trusted?” is not something you need look any further than your Bible to answer. Why, you ask?
Without written proof from the divine, devout believers are nervous to trust even their own observation that there are an “equal” number of fingers on each of their own “two” hands.
If the Bible said otherwise, then they would assume that their personal observations were being influenced by demonic forces that (somehow) needed expunging. The emperor runs naked in their kingdom with no fear of over exposure. The native instincts of any youth who might see it otherwise are squelched at Jesus Camps, which seem to inflict the exact type of emotional mayhem on the participants as the Jihadi variety we are more akin to being shown on US television, though I’m sure they would argue otherwise. But I digress. Can we trust math?
I mostly trust math, but then I am considered mostly a godless atheist by many of my fellow countrymen. Because I lack the necessary fervor to engage in cheer-leading for supernatural causes (or genuflecting to imagined creationist deities), my personal “faith” curries about as much favor in the US as Mitt Romney these days (or alternatively the Mormon idea that beer, coffee, Coca Cola, tea and hot chocolate are all a gateway drugs to Hell). I love the math. It is the math that is telling me Romney and the Republicans are going to be tossed on their butts in spectacular fashion come Nov 7. #cleansweep
To the minor extent that I don’t trust mathematics, I blame Richard Feynman. I doubt he is very well known in Christian Fundamentalist groups because of his personal views on God.
I decided to check into the issue of how the evangelical fundamentalists in the US feel about math, since it is so obvious that they have total disregard for many of the physical sciences that are entirely reliant on it, with evolution and evolutionary biology being a particular thorn in the side of the lunatic fringe (80 million) activist evangelicals. Upon review, I found the Bible to be as hazy on the subject of math as it is on just above every other subject. Questions involving Jeebus the carpenter making misstatements on math are brushed aside, explained as a consequence of his situational humanity. Pi is three in the Bible because God was rounding to the first digit for brevity’s sake (remember, this is a guy that supposedly created everything else in just six days so he was used to taking shortcuts).
Believe me when I tell you that the “field” of Christian Apologetics is truly getting a workout these days, and the number of people “employed” in that regard is an astonishing thing to behold. God literally has an army of people out there making apologies for all the crap he did in the Bible that no morally sound and reasonably minded imperfect human would ever imagine. Takes a great mental leap to “faith away” the ancient slaughter of innocent women and children by the “loving” deity you propose to extoll.
For the Christian Fundamentalist, mathematics is a good thing when it is used in science to cure Grandma’s cancer. On the other hand, they view work done in fields of math and science that undermine their belief system as an inevitable (evil) consequence of man’s sinful nature. A desire to know too much.
Rick Santorum, one of the more virulent and high profile of their genre, and a fellow whose Christian belief system leads him to want to impose national laws forcing our wives and daughters to carry the illegitimate spawn of rapists to term, recently stated that people who “know too much” are of no value in his vision of America’s Republican future. The problem for people like Mr. Santorum, Mr Romney, and the rest of the American Taliban that supports them, is that they have now overly expanded and demonized the group of people who “know too much” to include nearly the entirety of the US voting population. At the end of the day, I am left to conclude that these folks definitely have more reverence for the crazy ideals they trumpet than the math of public polling that clearly shows how out of touch they are with the electorate they wish to represent. #cleansweep.
Democrats need only incarcerate the vast legions of Republican war criminals before the November election to offset the advantages the Republicans are trying to gain through voter intimidation and poll rigging. There are at least 100 certified top level miscreants yet to feel justice for every case of certified voter fraud.
Are you aware that it got so bad that Bush authorized the torture of toddlers testicles in Iraq. He was torturing the kids in front of their parents in his Quixotic delusions over the available of WMD’s THAT DIDN’T EVEN EXIST!! John Yoo gave him the “legal” authority. It is all on tape. Cheney went on Sunday TV after they got nailed for torture and fucking BRAGGED about it!!
I will never forget what some of you pretended never to see.
Today’s post is a reflection on something that is rolling around the feminist arena that deals with in-group discrimination tactics. In this instance the vocal nutjob of the organization isn’t Skepchick trying to artificially define or manipulate male-female interactions to her whims. In the MadFem variant of perverse reverse sexism, they are trying to set rules on in-group definitions to keep out male transgenders. Only girls “born that way” need apply. I know. Seemed pretty easy to figure out when I was a kid way back when. It is a lot more complicated these days, but by now I thought every forward thinking progressive had decided that if you are committed enough to have your weenie whacked, choke down enough estrogen to give you bigger breasts than an aging Ron Jeremy, and go through a certain level of psychiatric song and dance, you pretty much qualified as a girl.
Here’s more details for the strong stomached (h/t Scented Nectar);
Turns out that even castration and sexual reassignment surgery isn’t enough to distance oneself from the taint of your former maleness in the minds of RadFem. Holy shit, what’s a guy gotta do to fit in with these RadFem freaks? Pat on the back to Conway Hall.
Skepchick just wants you to keep your mouth shut and pretend not to look at her tits (and ferchrissakes keep your perverted desires to yourself you over-caffeinated sex machines!). Compare that to these RadFem bitches who won’t even let a dickless chick attend their Hissy Fit Convention. Wow!, and did you know a lot of Black folks don’t recognize the disconnect between hating homos even when they have been victims of discrimination themselves? I dunno why that came to mind, but it seems somehow tangentially relevant.
RadFem will find a convention hall that is more interested in money than human decency. They ought to bring their freak show to the USA and compete with the gay hating crank preacher.
RadFem, check with Mitt Romney. I think he owns Marriott. He is Mormon, but they make exceptions for sex freaks at their hotels so they can overcharge for PPV porn in the rooms. Does your organization hate gays in general? I dunno, but that would be a bonus and not a bug for a Mormon.
The most outspoken of the dickless chick haters, who I perceive as the RadFem equivalent of Skepchick “leader” Rebecca Watson is apparently this Sheila Jeffreys woman, was rumored to have been overheard muttering;
Who the hell wants a bunch of butchered up butch chicks invading our conference in the first place? Those wanna be bastard-esses have enormous feet and the RadFem toenail polish budget is already strained to the breaking point. Have they no sympathy or compassion at all for a true Sista?
For the record, here’s a couple of pictures of the aforementioned Sheila Jeffreys (spelling corrected), the woman with the most hate for these large toed monsters and their freakishly enormous Adam’s apples:
One can clearly see the need for a leader like Msss. Jeffreys not wanting to butch-ify up the organization any more than she does.
I would LOVE to know where the GASbaggers (Girlyban Apologetic Society jargon-Dam Dawkins and his meme virus) comes down on this issue. Where do they stand on the issue of chicks formerly with dicks? I have no problem with dickless chicks (most I know) or chicks formerly with dicks (so long as they keep it in their pants…uh.?..,), but I got real problems with dickless chicks ACTING like pricks. There is some serious God dam poetry, haiku or free verse in there. Fuckin’ pay attention people!
Girls of GAS works for me too. Sassy Ass Bitches ofGAS kinda rolls off the tongue. Hey I’m open to suggestions. You outta see some of the ones I get already!! I got girls writing me all the time. OH Yeah!. It’s well past the 80′s and I’m down with the ladies… But I digress.
Something to talk about around the misogynist male water cooler when you get tired of trying to catch a side boob sneak peak at one of the many assorted sideshow Skepfreaks. Thank me later.
I once speculated that after leaving office, torture enthusiast and noted Bin-Laden-determined-to-attack-American denying, Condi Rice might go to work for CHRISTTT, because she had so much mainstream religous rightwing religotard support. You do know CHRISTTT, don’t you?
Don’t feel bad if you don’t, because it is an imaginary place I created for satirical purposes based on an imaginary guy created for satirical purposes, so you are….uh…forgiven.
Center Heading Research In Support of Torturing Toddler’s Testicles
Holy CHRISTTT! Their mission; If there’s one thing imaginary satirical Jeebus hates more than anything, it’s the children of the world. Red and Yellow, Black and White, their tender dangling nubbins are in for a fright!
And for the record, (ok, and maybe even make the GASbaggers/Girls of GAS(?..evolving) MORE nervous) even an accused douche-bag like me is not twisted enough to have imagined up the perverse sexual tortures John Yoo LEGALLY authorized…against children. These girls are worried about a bunch of drunken frat boys mixed in a casino convention crowd and sick fucks like Yoo are teaching college in CA (last I noticed) and I hardly hear anybody mentioning it anymore. Seems more important somehow in the scale of things.
