I was out for my morning saunter when I spotted this at a local pond: a baby turtle hitching a ride on a swan. Clearly, this is the laziest turtle in the world.
This is revealing. According to Laura Ingraham, demographic shifts are not organic, but have been forced upon the country by the mysteriously powerful Left, which has the ability to compel people to have children and to move to new places.
The words she says are even worse.
In some parts of the country, it does seem like the America that we know and love doesn’t exist anymore. Massive demographic changes have been foisted upon the American people, and they are changes that none of us ever voted for, and most of us don’t like. From Virginia to California, we see stark examples of how radically, in some ways, the country has changed. Now, much of this is related to both illegal, and in some cases legal immigration that, of course, progressives love.
The America we know and love doesn’t exist anymore
…because there are more brown people living here. Most of us
— meaning Fox News viewers, not intelligent, compassionate people — don’t like these brown people living here.
I guess “demographic change” is the new code phrase for non-white people that we
don’t like.
There was a lot about the America we knew that didn’t deserve our love, and I’d be glad to see it change, if only there weren’t people like Laura Ingraham trying to make sure all the changes make it worse.
I’ve been seeing versions of this claim since at least the Reagan years.
Jesus made conservative women attractive so we would be attracted… he also made liberal women ugly so we would stay away.
— Michael Moates (@freedom_moates) August 9, 2018
I don’t think the proper response is to point out that Michael Moates is kind of homely himself. The core problem is judging people by artificial standards of appearance — something that is totally irrelevant to their humanity and moral standards and intelligence. Isn’t the “We win the political debate because we can find pretty women in our clique” intrinsically wrong and fallacious?
I think we can just say that someone who makes this stupid argument has already lost.
The Kochs have been in the news lately because they’re expressed unhappiness with Trump, and Trump has sniped back at them. This is a reminder that the enemy of your enemy is not your friend — the Kochs are major backers of the Heartland Institute, and have been and still are promoting science denialism. They’re all evil liars, even when they’re having a falling out among themselves.
I agree with that video: keep all capitalist enterprises out of the school room. Capitalism promotes short-term thinking, and short-term exploitation. But of course places like the Heartland Institute and the fully-owned subsidiary of moneyed interests, the Republican party, have been working for years to starve the educational system so that teachers will be reliant on handouts from corporations.
Also, keep religion out of the classroom. Religion promotes delusional, fantasy thinking. Can we just keep the schools focused on reality?
Caine was a long-time commenter here, which led to her taking on her own blog at Affinity — she was notoriously strong-minded and independent, and I greatly appreciated her perspective. If you’ve been following her blog, you know that she was struggling with cancer, and as usual, she was forthright and honest about it.
Unfortunately, the cancer has killed her. She will be greatly missed.
Here’s her last post: pissed off but hopeful. We all expected her to be back doing her art by now.
Fuck cancer.
We had all these window treatments installed in our house yesterday. In almost every room. They arrived in great big cardboard boxes with bubble wrap. Installation went fine, but now our house is full of cardboard boxes and bubble wrap. So many cardboard boxes, so much bubble wrap.
My day has been spent breaking down and wrestling with cardboard boxes. I won; all were collapsed and broken, and we hauled them away for recycling. But now we have to deal with the plastic stuff. First approach: just leave it all over the floor as a burglar warning system. At least for now, because battling immense quantities of cardboard all day in this heat has left me sweat-soaked and worn out. In the next day or two, though, we’ll recycle the bubble wrap, too, a local dropoff place, which isn’t so local — the nearest is over 50 miles away.
Anyway, that’s been my day, how was yours?
Next on my agenda, maybe tomorrow, is to spend some time at the Stevens County Fair. I’m sure you’re all reading the blog to enjoy the exotic, exciting things I do.
McCarthy is still around, and she has just issued a “call to action” — the anti-vaxxers are supposed to rush out and promote a book by JB Handley.
Yeah, JB Handley. Anti-vax, autism-obsessed crank. I think both of them can crawl back into the hole they crawled out of.
This JB Handley:
How did your life change when you discovered your son had autism?
Everything changed from the day it happened. It was an immediate nightmare. It was 30 days of six, seven, eight hours of nonstop crying by both me and my wife. It was the painful realization that my son may not have the kind of life that I expected for him. And once the grief had passed just enough to get up off the floor, it was a mandate to do whatever I could do with the rest of my life to give him the best possible life.
There’s a kind of annoying selfishness there. Guess what? Your children generally will not have the life you plan for them. Learn to appreciate them for who they are.
They just cried non-stop for a month? Over-react much? It’s like hearing that someone melted down when they discovered their child had a birthmark. Calm down. There are degrees of autism, and none of them are a death sentence.
Even more bizarre, he then declares that his son is now “recovering dramatically, getting all his words back, going to a normal school”. Maybe the diagnosis didn’t warrant a month of bawling? Autistic children are children — they grow and change. Freaking out over autism is just silly.
So this is the guy who has a new book. I don’t care, and am not interested. This is the guy who has Jenny McCarthy excited — I am unimpressed with the endorsement.
I guess there is now.
Begin the entry in the works-cited list with the author’s real name and, in parentheses, user name, if both are known and they differ. If only the user name is known, give it alone.
Next provide the entire text of the tweet in quotation marks, without changing the capitalization. Conclude the entry with the date and time of the message and the medium of publication (Tweet). For example:
Athar, Sohaib (ReallyVirtual). “Helicopter hovering above Abbottabad at 1AM (is a rare event).” 1 May 2011, 3:58 p.m. Tweet.
The date and time of a message on Twitter reflect the reader’s time zone. Readers in different time zones see different times and, possibly, dates on the same tweet. The date and time that were in effect for the writer of the tweet when it was transmitted are normally not known. Thus, the date and time displayed on Twitter are only approximate guides to the timing of a tweet.
Setting aside the whole issue of why you would want to cite a tweet, this is not a well thought-out format. It assumes way too much: it ignores other potential microblogging media, like Mastodon, and assumes that there is only one such service, Twitter, and that the username is sufficient to identify the source. As the article I lined to mentions, there ought to at least be a URL associated with the citation — otherwise, you have to go to the service and search to find that specific set of words. And Twitter search is terrible.
Oh, well, there’s an easy way around this limitation: don’t dignify Twitter with formal citations.
Our President* is now claiming that allowing rivers to flow into the ocean is bad, and that we could stop wildfires but clear-cutting everything.
California wildfires are being magnified & made so much worse by the bad environmental laws which aren’t allowing massive amounts of readily available water to be properly utilized. It is being diverted into the Pacific Ocean. Must also tree clear to stop fire from spreading!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 6, 2018
We could probably end all the fires if we paved over the entirety of California.
We really need to elect a swarm of Democrats in the midterms so we can end this misery.
We’re prepping the house today because we have some installers coming by to finally put up blinds on our windows. They’re doing 8 rooms: my office, the sun porch, the kitchen, 3 bedrooms, and 2 bathrooms. We’ve been getting by with nothing for a couple of months, and it’s been very annoying. Today, the cat gets to be annoyed at all the strange people tromping through her domain.
You realize what this means, right? All you peeping toms have missed the golden opportunity to spy on me in dishabille, and that window is closing today.
