Hahaha no.

A few weeks ago commenter “permanganater” took time out of his busy schedule to mansplain to me why, how and what I “should be focusing on tackling” on my own blog. I mocked him for that (per #deathtosquirrels protocol), then Brony took him apart for completely misreading the very post he was complaining about. He floundered on, and I ignored him.

Also relevant: readers here will no doubt recall with great reverence and awe my brilliant new hashtag #muschniwogdowis, an acronym for Most US Citizens Have No Idea What Our Government Does Or Who It Serves.

Well here comes permanganater again on a #muschniwogdowis post to say this:

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Nine Eleven.

I wasn’t going to write anything today about September 11, 2001. I haven’t done so for the last few years, and before that I never said much about it anyway.

But just so you know: I watched the towers burn and then fall that day. I helped my work colleagues evacuate 30 Rockefeller Center that morning, when we still weren’t sure how many hijacked planes were still flying or what landmarks they might still target. I breathed the acrid, yellow air that hung over Manhattan for days. I brought flowers and candles to my local fire station in Hell’s Kitchen, and I wrote sad and grateful messages in a big book they kept there on the sidewalk.

From a high floor at 30 Rock, I heard bagpipes day after day after day after day. The funerals at St. Patrick’s cathedral—so, so many goddamn funerals— could only be seen from the north side of the building, but it seemed no matter where you were, you could always hear those bagpipes. I still recall those days vividly whenever I hear bagpipes.

I find this subject very, very difficult to write about, talk about or think about, and I’m pretty sure I know why. It’s that I am still processing the events of that day, and the wars, opportunistic power grabs and unconscionable greed unleashed over the last fifteen years. It was and still is traumatic.

But it’s a different kind of trauma than any I’ve every experienced, before or since. All of the others were strictly personal. September 11, 2001, and my government’s actions since that day, have profoundly affected not just me, but my city, my country and much of the world. And I have come to realize that the way I am dealing with the grief, the rage, the insights and revelations that come later whether you want them to or not, is much the same: I make art. I make a life. I write.

It is not lost on me that when I write about abortion rights and feminism and rape and abuse, I am also saying something about my own life. And when I write about politics, war, religious conservatives and conservative Democrats, I am also saying something about September 11, 2001.

If I have learned anything on my journey that I can share with you, it’s this: find joy in your day. Today and every day. Bring joy to others where you can. Otherwise, the terrorists really do win.

__________

Justice is the only worship.
Love is the only priest.
Ignorance is the only slavery.
Happiness is the only good.
The time to be happy is now,
The place to be happy is here,
The way to be happy is to make others so.
–Robert Green Ingersoll

peacesign

PEACE.

Gangs of New York.

Over at The Nation, Simon Davis-Cohen has a piece up that will surprise no one who follows #blacklivesmatter. What’s new here, at least to me, is not the NYPD’s over-the-top militarization, or the disproportionate targeting of communities of color for aggressive over-policing. It’s not even that in the United States of La-La-Land, the criminal justice system does not work the way we whites think it does, the way were propagandized to believe it does. It’s that as the system’s tactics morph, new and different harms continue to befall these communities in unexpected—and unexpectedly devastating—ways. With apologies to our cephalopod friends for the unfair comparison, the tentacles of state violence are constantly shape-shifting without reason, compassion or constraint.

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Grave dancing! Phyllis Schlafly edition.

Phyllis Schlafly is dead. Whoo-hoo!

Yes I know, I know. I am a terrible person and you should definitely stay far, far away from me and especially my blog. It’s true that I was actually a bit sad when Scalia kicked the bucket, but that was only because I would forever be denied the number one experience on my bucket list: mooning that fucker.

But Schlafly? I feel nothing but unadulterated joy in her passing. #sorrynotsorry

I cannot wait until Dick Cheney’s day comes. I might throw a goddamn parade!

#muschniwogdowis of the day.

Remember that time I invented the exciting new acronym #muschniwogdowis? You know the one: it stands for Most US Citizens Have No Idea What Our Government Does Or Who It Serves? Of course you remember. It’s unforgettable! And it just rolls right off the tongue, doesn’t it?*

All right, so it didn’t exactly trend on Twitter as much as I had predicted. Or at all, really—as in, not even a single retweet. But that’s okay! When it comes to humanity’s most breathtakingly brilliant, paradigm-shifting creations (like #muschniwogdowis for example), the inventor is often far, far ahead of her time, and it just takes the rest of the world a while to catch up. Typically after she dies penniless and alone…

:o

Anyway!

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Jeezus is just not selling me on this one.

I take tremendous pride in my half-assed, poorly executed, semi-regular attempts to extract $82 billion worth of benefits per year from the Religion-Industrial-Complex on behalf of atheist U.S. taxpayers. I find this to be a worthwhile endeavor not only as a stinging retort to the appalling injustice of $82 billion in yearly taxpayer subsidies to the R-I-C, but also because I thoroughly enjoy mocking one particular church sign in the small town in Northern Maryland where my mother lives. Granted, it may not provide the full $82 billion in amusement value. But we have to start somewhere, people.

Today’s church sign does not disappoint.

churchsignprescool

THE BEST THINGS IN
LIFE AREN’T THINGS
PRESCOOL
ENROLLING NOW
TRINITY WORSHIP 9&11

Now let me underscore here that literacy privilege is A Thing, and generally speaking we should not mock those who do not have it. Earth is home to an astonishing number of amazing and interesting people whose ideas are well worth engaging, even if spelling and grammar are not their personal forte. This could be true for any number of reasons that come to mind readily enough: learning disabilities; neurocognitive effects of injury, illness or environmental toxins; poor nutrition; mental illness, including trauma from homelessness or abuse; and of course late exposure to non-native English. But here in these exceptional United States we have another problem. My friend CaitieCat explains:

Particularly in a US context, where educational options are very strongly influenced by class (and race, in an intertwined manner), riding the xenophobes for misspelling ‘illegals’ as ‘illeagles’, or “Muslim” as “muslin”, what we’re saying is, “You should have been smart enough to get yourself born to the right kind of parents, who’d give you access to the best education, who were educated themselves enough to teach you ‘proper’ English, and who were rich enough to make sure you never had to work after school instead of studying!”

So yeah, let’s not do that. Tempting as it may be to go after the low-hanging fruit, we can and we damn well should mock xenophobes for being racist and conservative and terrible entitled assholes. This way, the splash damage splatters all over racists and conservatives and terrible entitled assholes, not shitty spellers. Really, that’s the very least of our problems with these humans.

With all that said, if you accept (tax-free!) tuition money to indoctrinate educate 3- and 4-year old kids, and your curriculum explicitly states “Our students are exposed to structured centers enhancing emergent literacy skills (reading & writing),” WE GET TO FUCKING MOCK YOU FOR SPELLING PRESCHOOL WRONG.

Have a nice day.

Louisiana doesn’t have enough problems right now?!

The damage caused by the recent flooding in Louisiana has been tragic and catastrophic. Only a villain of unparalleled malevolence would deliberately compound the troubles of residents of the Pelican State as they try to salvage and rebuild their homes, businesses, institutions and lives.

And what’s this?

Thousands lose power in New Orleans … because of a squirrel

A squirrel is to blame for thousands losing power in the New Orleans area on Thursday morning, according to Entergy New Orleans.

“Crews safely working to restore power ASAP after an animal got into our equipment,” Entergy said in a tweet addressed to the East Carrollton area.

“It was a squirrel,” the company added.

At the height of the outage, about 3,500 customers were without power.

That’s the damage caused today by one squirrel. And they’re just warming up. Once they begin to coordinate their attacks on our critical infrastructure, humans may very well be looking at an extinction level event.

#deathtosquirrels

[h/t Anthony]

Ask Iris: How is Sam Harris wrong? Part 1.

A friend and Loyal Reader™ forwarded me a recent screed by Sam Harris. He asked if I would be willing to indulge him in letting him know what in it, if anything, I think is “objectionable, disagree with or find otherwise ill-advised.” Harris’s post, entitled “What Hillary Clinton Should Say about Islam and the ‘War on Terror,’” is written in the form of a proposed speech that he would like for the Democratic nominee for president to give before the November election. “Its purpose,” Harris says, “is to prevent a swing toward Trump by voters who find Clinton’s political correctness on the topic of Islam and jihadism a cause for concern.”

I did a debunking of Harris almost two years ago on this very topic. It was a tedious exercise, mainly because like all right-wing conservatives and reactionaries, he bases his irrational, evidence-free, simplistic, black-&-white views and arguments, such as they are, on falsehoods and factual inaccuracies that are a cakewalk to disprove. The task was all the more unbearable because I’ve always found Harris an unoriginal and uninteresting thinker and a witless and dull writer, so much so that I’m genuinely amazed he is not a regular op-ed columnist for the New York Times.

That said, he is certainly an incendiary polemicist. Or he tries to be anyway, but for me he comes off as smug and comically uninformed as any ordinary Fox News host. Except for a few items that popped up in my feeds, Harris had largely dropped off my radar. Those sure were a couple of doozies, though. Last year he made his jaw-dropping claim that far-right fabulist and then-presidential candidate Ben Carson is “one of the best people” on the subject of Islam and terrorism, even as Carson’s “own advisers admit [he] struggles with grasping basic facts surrounding international conflicts.” Before that, Noam Chomsky—who is the farthest thing from an unoriginal and uninteresting thinker or a witless and dull writer—ate him for lunch. Oh, and then there was that one time I made a bobblehead of Sam Harris for absolutely no reason whatsoever.

harrisbobblehead

Researching for today’s post, however, I came across many more Harris grotesqueries that I was fortunate enough to miss, ignore or block from memory: support for racial profiling, torture, preemptive nuclear war, demanding that the US government admit that it is and ought to be “at war with Islam” and that “The people who speak most sensibly about the threat that Islam poses to Europe are actually fascists.”

Sensible fascists. Jeezus.

A decade ago, Harris wrote that Muslim immigrants to Europe exploit the Western values of their host countries by “demanding tolerance for their backwardness, their misogyny, their anti-Semitism, and the genocidal hatred that is regularly preached in their mosques.” He is inexplicably unaware that, in accordance with his much-touted “Western values,” his fellow US citizens not only demand “tolerance for their backwardness, their misogyny, their anti-Semitism, and the genocidal hatred that is regularly preached in their mosques churches“—and also happens to be the foundational principle upon which US “civilization” is and has always been based—they fucking receive it. He’s also unaware that immigrant populations assimilate to their host culture within a few generations—well, at least if they’re treated decently, for instance by having their host country not declare war on their religion or its presidential candidates threatening and demonizing them.

I honestly don’t know why I am undertaking this task again. Maybe because I find it troubling that anyone but a Fox News viewer would take the guy seriously on this issue, when conducting a cursory investigation into the facts and evidence for yourself will reveal how completely and utterly wrong he is about a unique nexus between Islamic religious ideas and terrorism (and misogyny), as well as how unethical, irrational, irresponsible and dangerous it is to promote such falsehoods. Maybe I’m doing this because I have some unhealthy masochistic tendencies I really should bring up in therapy. Maybe it’s because I like honoring the 1940s-era pianist and comedian Oscar Levant who said, “The first thing I do in the morning is brush my teeth and sharpen my tongue.”

Well, regardless, now I’ve gone and done it. My comments and edits to Harris’s latest…whatever it is are in blue.

SPOILER ALERT: Sam Harris is still wanking all over the same, tired hobbyhorse. He has learned nothing. And he likely never will.

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GUEST POST: All Olympians Are Great Athletes; A Few, However, Are Not Yet Good Role Models for Rational Decision-Making.

This is a post by my improbable dear friend Don Ardell. I say improbable because Don is, among other things, a seventy-something year old world champion triathlete and duathlete, while I on the other hand can barely drag my ass to the gym a few measly times a week, muttering and groaning and complaining bitterly before, during and after every single fucking workout. He is also a pioneer in wellness (no, not the fun kind at the day spa—the REAL deal) and author/co-author of several books on the subject, the latest of which (with Grant Donovan) is Wellness Orgasms: The Fun Way to Live Well and Die Healthy.

wellnessorgasms

Don also has a fantastic sense of humor: one day he asked me to be on the advisory board of his newsletter publication, the Ardell Wellness Report. Hahaha! I almost choked on my chocolate marshmallow vodka breakfast smoothie! But then I remembered a deeply moving and powerful quote by the author Carroll Bryant: “Everyone in life has a purpose, even if it’s to serve as a bad example.” And so I told Don I would be honored and happy to serve.

As long as I could do it from a superluxe day spa that offers full bar service to the massage rooms. OBVIOUSLY.

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