Saturday, May 03, 2014

States' rights ... and wrongs

You go, Georgia!
A Georgia man panicked parents and children at a local park and baseball field by randomly walking around and displaying his gun to anyone he encountered in the parking lot. According to witnesses who spoke with WSB-TV, the man wandered around the Forsythe County park last Tuesday night showing his gun to strangers, telling them “there’s nothing you can do about it.”
Just what exactly did you think would happen when you pass these kinds of laws? That people would behave in a civilized manner?  Really?

You go, South Carolina!
SC GOP candidate: Women cause ’95 percent’ of divorces by loving their kids too much
And
SC Republican wants to end public schools: Nothing ‘in the Bible about state education’
And you go, Tennessee!

TENNESSEE PASSES BILL ALLOWING THE BULLYING OF LGBT STUDENTS IN THE NAME OF ‘RELIGIOUS FREEDOM’

You go, Alabama!
Alabama’s chief justice: Buddha didn’t create us so First Amendment only protects Christians
You go, New York!
 NYC cyclist arrested for using cellphone to film cop, told iPhones are ‘being used as guns’

Sunday, April 27, 2014

Ethanol and Meteorites... what could possibly go wrong?

Corn ethanol is useless, but we could have told you that...

Something else I'll need to beat to death when it shows up at my door...

The blind leading the blind.  What ignorance is doing to teaching evolution.

Cereal that looks you in the eye.

Oops... the NYPD attempts to hashtag its way to popularity.

Is the seafood you're eating illegal?

Tracking the meteorites that have hit Earth.

Friday, April 18, 2014

From books to pork

The 10 most challenged books of 2013.

Sticking with XP..  if you care.

Jesus's wife.

Super rats?

Showtime's climate change scientist:
An evangelical Christian, married to a pastor, living in conservative West Texas, and widely regarded as a top-notch climate scientist, Dr. Katharine Hayhoe is a rare breed on paper — in person, she’s even rarer. Deftly moving between topics like science, religion, and gender with equal parts insight and levity, Hayhoe is an unassuming force of nature.
Rabid Christianists trying to get rid of no-fault divorce.  As if making it harder to divorce will make marriages better....

What democracy?

We're number one!

How safe will our pork be if the Chinese are in charge of production?  Here are the companies that Smithfield owns:
The acquisitions have caused concern among regulators in the United States regarding the company's control of the food supply. After Smithfield's purchase of Murphy Family Farms, the Agriculture Department described it as "absurdly big."[6] As of 2006 four companies – Smithfield, Tyson, Swift & Company, and Cargill – were responsible for the production of 70 percent of pork in the United States.[14] 
The company had 46,050 employees in the United States, Mexico and Europe as of 2012, and an annual revenue of $13 billion. It raises 15.8 million pigs a year, producing 3.8 billion pounds of fresh pork and 2.7 billion pounds of packaged meat, sold as 50 brands of pork products and 200 gourmet foods.[15] Along with specialty brands such as Paula Deen Collection, and international brands such as Weight Watchers, the company's 12 core brands are Armour, Carando, Cook's Ham, Curly's Foods, Eckrich, Farmland, Gwaltney, Healthy Ones, John Morrell, Kretschmar, Margherita, and Smithfield.[16] The company also operates The Genuine Smithfield Ham Shoppe and a restaurant, Taste of Smithfield, both in Smithfield, Virginia.[17]

Friday, March 28, 2014

Is Saudi Arabia mad at us? Do we care?

Well... we've never really discussed why 15 of the 17 hijackers were from Saudi Arabia, have we?  And bin Laden was Saudi as well.... But Saudi Arabia has oil, so we must be friends...

Is America's relationship with Saudi Arabia broken beyond repair?
Barack Obama arrives in Riyadh seeking rapprochement with an aggrieved Arab ally whose interests are increasingly at odds with its key western backer. 
The president's flying visit – no more than an evening in the Saudi king's palace – is his first since the ousting of Hosni Mubarak, which drove an initial wedge between both capitals. 
Ever since, relations have tangibly soured, with US outreach to Iran and ambivalence on Syria particularly irking Saudi leaders, who believe their arch-foe, Tehran, has been empowered at their expense. 
So bothered has Riyadh become by what it sees as naive appeasement of Iran that it now seems ready to project itself regionally without US cover. 
"The US has underwritten the regional security order for the past 70 years and it sees now as a good time to disengage," one senior figure told the Guardian recently. "We will have to do it all ourselves." 
Saudi anger is rooted in the US response to the Arab awakenings that rumbled through North Africa and the Middle East in the three years since Mubarak, a staunch regional ally, stood down.
Another top heavy bloated monarchy perched on top of an increasingly angry neglected population wondering when the Arab Spring uprising will start in their country and whether the US will ride in on its white horse?

Weirdness and beyond

The weird things we've found to eat.  Can you imagine how hungry we had to be to figure out how to eat them?

Wells Fargo.. foreclosing people one client at a time.

Hobby Lobby... going after birth control.  The definition of rape culture.

Anybody have an invention they'd like to have produced?

Women in the gaming industry.

Should we worry if the engineered bacteria making jet fuel (which is fantastic) escapes into the wild?

Ten cooking tips for the kitchen.

Maybe there's a Super Earth out there too?

And speaking of weird things... a spider as big as your face.  That's one more country I'm not visiting....

Thursday, March 20, 2014

Women, grammar, and exercise!

What women were wearing when they were sexually attacked... debunking one myth about rape.  And myths about birth control.

English, the language of oopses.  And grammarphobia.

We're drinking the wrong kind of milk?  And look!  We've made a superbug to eat the supercorn!

What do you still do now that you did when you were poor?

Scars (nsfw)

No wonder I feel like California didn't have a winter!  We didn't!  And:
A new study sponsored by Nasa's Goddard Space Flight Center has highlighted the prospect that global industrial civilisation could collapse in coming decades due to unsustainable resource exploitation and increasingly unequal wealth distribution. 
Noting that warnings of 'collapse' are often seen to be fringe or controversial, the study attempts to make sense of compelling historical data showing that "the process of rise-and-collapse is actually a recurrent cycle found throughout history." Cases of severe civilisational disruption due to "precipitous collapse - often lasting centuries - have been quite common."

Fukushima fallout.

Elizabeth Warren and what she has done for you.

US Government to Deregulate Meat Industry

Scary scientist is scary.

Underwater archaeology.

Why this runner runs.

Friday, March 14, 2014

This affects all of us who border the Pacific... and beyond.

Tepco?
Fukushima operator may have to dump contaminated water into Pacific: As Japan marks the third anniversary of the earthquake, tsunami and nuclear disaster, Tepco is struggling to find a solution for hundreds of thousands of tonnes of contaminated water  
What gives you the right to poison our oceans with radioactivity?  (Ignore our 'work' on the Bikini Islands.) Is this the best idea you can come up with for the continuous leaks and the huge quantity of radioactive water?  Tepco, the company that has gangsters taking over contracts and hiring homeless people to work clean up?  Why should we trust you when you tell us it is safe to do this?

We must never forget Fukushima and the lessons it has taught us.  At least we can see some changing attitudes about nuclear power.