The Zingularity
Just another Freethought Blogs site
I’ve been sitting here all weekend waiting for money in Paypal to hit my checking account so I can actually use it, budgeting out doc appointments and stressed that I’ll lose my health insurance along with my job this week, and it just struck me as I see the transfer has still not posted: how is Paypal still in business? There’s no other financial institution I have to deal with that delivers such shitty service as those assholes. Nothing even close. I can move money from a savings and loan to a checking account at another bank in another state over night, but Paypal can take up to a week or more to do it. [Read more…]
It wasn’t quite the million vets Teaparty activists bragged about. In full a media managed performance art circle of absurd, dozens of arch conservative and neo-confederates did stomp through DC demanding democrats reopened government sites closed down by Teaparty Republicans, who were in turn purportedly pandering to the same ugly grassroots element yelling about the closures. But among the couple of hundred that attended were clowns like Larry Klayman, Ted Cruz, and Sarah Palin. And supporters did manage to proudly wave around a confederate flag. Watch.
Judging by the standards of the wild jungle the Internet has long been, there’s nothing particularly snarky or biting about her response. If anything, given that she was just called a whore for not working for free, and then overwritten by SCIAM to boot, I thought she showed remarkable restraint on the matter.
Does anyone have any idea where that “making pigs run off a cliff” dealio came from? Because I try to stay on top of these grifters and religious fanatics for a semi-living, and it seems like several times a month something bugfuck crazy like that still comes out of nowhere, and yet turns out to have a storied etymology in the pious pews ringing Bullshit Mountain. Think how jarring that is: if it were parent-student career day at the local elem school, and a local judge came in wearing his robes presumably to talk to eager young children about legal careers, and started ranting instead about the devil being a real person who chases pigs off of cliffs, wow, you might want to pull your kid out of that school.
I’m still stoked that nature put a gun to my head, pulled the trigger, and the hammer fell on an empty chamber.
But, back to the world at large … remember when polling started to show the race slipping away from Romney a year ago? And wingnut sites sprung up claiming the polls were skewed, illustrating the one thing wingnuts excel at, denial of widely-observed empirical facts? Now that polls have swung against the GOP on the shutdown and debt ceiling, they’re back: [Read more…]
So, newsflash, waiting in the doc’s office to find out you probably have one of ten different kinds of cancer is not a fun activity. The ghost of Lorenz was present, space-time stretches and distorts, minutes drag by; it’s an ordeal. Every time a door opens into the waiting room, you wonder if now’s the time, the beginning of the end, where you will be beckoned back into the bowels of medical wonderland for a grim pep talk on the kick-ass advances in chemo-therapy or bone-marrow replacement waiting for you. An adventure of sorts, into the irreducibly broken side of human physiology, where someone will play the anatomical model with a hidden pathological condition. Today, I landed that starring role, the door finally opened, my name was called. [Read more…]
I’ll see the doc in a couple of hours. Prepared for the worst. Drop me a few shekels if you can. Hopefully this won’t be another vague “something is wrong but we don’t know what it is go do some more expensive tests” deal. I’ll probably get canned next week if they don’t come up with something, and that means I lose my health insurance.
The mind reels when speculating how creationists and other Old Testament literalists might spin this one. For the rest of us, it’s just fascinating scientific detective work: geo-astronomers have confirmed a healthy sized comet lit Egypt on fire millions of years ago. If they’re right it would have made the 1908 Tungaska Event look like a shoe-bomb: [Read more…]
A new poll showing a jaw dropping plunge in popularity for a notable Teaparty shutter could be an ominous portent for Republicans who got dragged into the shutdown mess by Ted Cruz. The poll conducted by the Center For the Study of Elections and Democracy at Brigham Young University using a rigorous methodology in one of the most conservative states in the nation shows Cruz sidekick Mike Lee losing favorability in a big way. [Read more…]