North Korea on their nuclear bomb:

“It will contribute to defending the peace and stability on the Korean Peninsula and in the area around it.”

PS, I’ve been playing Defcon.

[From BoingBoing

So ex-Rep. Foley says a priest molested him. Well boo fucking WAAA, you ratfink. There’s nothing I find more reprehensible and slimy than a person who comes up with some great past wrong done to them as some kind of balm for the rancor that follows a hideous act. I have no beef with homosexuals or politicians having sex drives. But this guy, borderline pedophile that he is, is slime. Titans DT Haynesworth is a better, bigger man. In an NFL culture of megalomaniacs, he did something stupid and took his desserts. Foley is a whinging, flailing, closet boytoucher wannabe, a hypocrite, and a dumbass. I hope he goes down and I hope whatever he leaves behind sticks to everybody who tried to cover his tracks.

Fezzick, you did something right!

Reading this Yahoo! News article on Operation Return to Sender has me thinking about housekeeping. Well, I’m wondering if “sweeps” are really an efficient way to do law enforcement. As usual, everything I write here is just me pulling my opinion out of my ignorant tuchus. I don’t know a hill of beans about law enforcement operations. But I do know housecleaning.

Everyone does. I think most people have the sense that doing things as they need done is preferable to procrastinating until the job is overwhelmingly large. Laundry, anyone? Dishes? It’s so much easier to do one or two days’ worth of laundry than it is to wait two weeks and spend an entire day doing the work. Laundry, however, doesn’t require much preperatory investigative work–but if it did, would that make a difference?

Here in America, where it seems the number of things a police officer can arrest you for grow each year, the problem is probably akin to a young working couple with three kids. Who has time to do the laundry? If you’ve followed the immigration reform news for the last month or so, you know that the illegal immigrant problem is intractable. I’m not talking about border security, but the fact that we don’t have enough officers or funds to address the millions of illegal immigrants living in our country. I know a certain crowd is crowing for the immediate arrest and deportation (or inprisonment) of every illegal alien in the country. Well, good luck with that. It’d be like having $2 and a shovel, and being instructed to use those resources to move a medium-sized hill into the next county.

So like the couple with the kids and no time, we let the laundry pile up until it’s really starting to stink up the bedroom. Maybe have a little domestic spat about why the laundry isn’t getting done. A little finger pointing. And then have a laundry day.

But what about next week?

Everybody’s talking about Gardasil — the idea that vaccinating girls and women against the Human Papillomavirus might encourage them to be slutty. I’d like to point out, simply, that Motrin doesn’t encourage people to have migraines, that antibiotics don’t encourage people to get urinary tract infections (or syphilis, for that matter), and more directly, that Jonas Salk wasn’t hoping people could finally eat more shit when he created a vaccine for polio, just as Edward Jenner wasn’t looking for a revolution against covering our mouths when we cough when he developed a vaccine against smallpox.

For fuck’s sake people; get some perspective. Is there really nothing better you can think to use your political energy on? Isn’t A Cure For Cancer the Holy Grail of pharmaceutical research? If this were a vaccination that prevented testicular cancer, do you think people would try to suppress it for fear it would lead to more masturbation? Actually, yeah. America is so puritanically repressed that’s probably exactly what would happen.

You know what? “Slut” isn’t the opposite of “abstinence,” and not just because one is a personal slur aimed at a woman and the other is allegedly a way of life. The state of living life as a person who has had sex is so much more complex than such a juvenile, binary system can represent. Maybe it’s time to stop treating the citizens of America like they’re too stupid to understand anything except Good versus Bad. Sorry: Good versus Evil.

Don’t you remember the stages of moral development and the test: If a man steals drugs to save his wife’s life, should he go to jail?” Once a child reaches about 7 years old, they begin to see that it’s a complicated question. I remember learning in High School that most press in America is written at the 7th grade level. Have we gotten stupider? Has someone decided that we can’t even be treated as, like, super-mature 12-year-old middle schoolers? Were NKOTB really so advanced? …Because when I was 12 they were the hottest thing around. Have we regressed to being six-year-olds? Hey! Let’s hear it for Teletubbies!

If we know so little about sex that we must be treated like six-year-olds, maybe the cure is education.

It’s God’s job to judge, if you believe in that sort of thing, and it’s our job to love our neighbors. We don’t have to have sex with our neighbors, but neither do we have to stand with our noses at their windows being offended if they bake their pies with a different recipe.

See also here for a short blog entry, here for an evaluation of the study which led to the FDA’s approval, here for Gardasil’s own page off Merck.com (similar to the “Gardasil” link above), and here, believe it or not, for wikipedia’s entry on Gardasil. See here, here or here for pie recipes.

In 1870, Julia Ward Howe, a poet and abolitionist, called for a Mothers’ Peace Day Observance–a day that mothers would set aside to come together to work for peace. In 1872, the first Mothers’ Peace Day Observance was held, and the meetings continued for several years. Below is her proclamation that explains, in her own words, the goals of the original Mothers’ Day in the United States.

Arise then…women of this day!
Arise, all women who have hearts!
Whether your baptism be of water or of tears!
Say firmly: “We will not have questions answered by irrelevant agencies,
Our husbands will not come to us, reeking with carnage,
For caresses and applause.
Our sons shall not be taken from us to unlearn
All that we have been able to teach them of charity, mercy and patience.
We, the women of one country,
Will be too tender of those of another country
To allow our sons to be trained to injure theirs.”

From the bosom of a devastated Earth a voice goes up with
Our own. It says: Disarm! Disarm!
The sword of murder is not the balance of justice.
Blood does not wipe our dishonor,
Nor violence indicate possession.

As men have often forsaken the plough and the anvil at the summons of war,
Let women now leave all that may be left of home
For a great and earnest day of counsel.
Let them meet first, as women, to bewail and commemorate the dead.
Let them solemnly take counsel with each other as to the means
Whereby the great human family can live in peace…

In the name of womanhood and humanity, I earnestly ask
That a general congress of women without limit of nationality,
May be appointed and held at someplace deemed most convenient
To promote the alliance of the different nationalities,
The amicable settlement of international questions,
The great and general interests of peace.

(Thanks, Litbrit!)

Echnide is at it again, this time taking a look at the gender of the Right to Choose, and wondering why all those wingnuts have a problem with enjoying life.

Maybe the thing isn’t pleasure, it’s about self-control. Ah, the Protestant revolution. If you don’t want to have to break your back to support all those extra kids, don’t have the kids. If you don’t want to have the kids, don’t have sex. It’s that easy. Therefore, people with loads of kids are free-wheelin’ yobs with no self-control. Since God needs a flock it’s righteous to have one or two kids, or maybe even three, but more than that is gratuitous. See, if you truly love God, that’s more pleasurable than any fornication could possibly be. All this anti-choice nonsense isn’t about the right to choose, it’s about having a signal for who’s righteous. And according to America’s current power class “Rich” is as good as “Righteous,” so it’s ok for politicians and misers to have mistresses and abortions.

Is it possible to equate Choice with Righteousness? What’s Free Will, if not an exercise in Choice, approved of by the Maker himself?? Ah, but didn’t Free Will lead to the Fall? Right, right, it’s all coming back to me now: and the Fall was Woman’s fault. So women can’t be trusted to choose because it inevitably leads to the demise of alll mankind.

You know what? Tommy Gnosis was right. When God put Adam and Eve into the Garden and said “But stay away from *this* one!” he was so micromanaging. Eve just wanted to KNOW. If everything in the World of God is black and white, good and bad, and Eve wanted knowledge, did Adam want ignorance? Compliance? If taking the fruit was Eve’s doing and it led to the Fall, why then did man get to be in charge, and why did he run things so poorly? What’s with all this war, and isn’t “Thou shalt not kill” also one of God’s commands? Let’s just keep that one under the carpet until some woman wants back her right to think.

Those who use the Bible to prove their points must truly know its secrets, because I can’t see any pattern to what they take literally, what they take metaphorically, and what they ignore.

So Choice is evil, especially in the hands of women, who because of their very nature can’t be trusted to control their whims or vaginas. So one: No choice for women. Two: Birth control and the Right to Choose are shortcuts to *appearing* righteous, because with them women can have no self-control but also no children. Therefore three: God bless America and all its Righteous vaginas, and God may have his way with any who aren’t interested in doing it Dogma-style.

You know, maybe women who subscribe to this system of thought actually don’t want to have sex. Living under an authoritarian patriarchy isn’t much of a turn-on, and maybe they really do think believe in that whole madonna/whore stuff and maybe they really do feel madonnish when they pack up their righteous 1.7 kids (or whatever) to go to church on Sundays.

Is denying abortion a matter of ego? Do the Righteous and Saved want a way to identify the Heathens (and feel superior to them)? If that’s the case, how can we reframe “Pro-Choice” to resonate with those on this fence?

Salto Sobrius: “Martin Rundkvist’s blog. Archaeology, Skepticism, Sweden. And Books and Music and Stuff.” Today the “stuff” is this post, which draws an interesting parallel: bikini tops and headscarves.

Sadly, I’m torn. I’d love to do away with headscarves and bikini tops. I wonder if all women stopped wearing bikini tops if men would regard them all as uppity and feminist and therefore think boobs are unsexy? It’d be nice if women could choose what they wear and allow it to genuinely be an expression of themselves — and men, too, who I’m sure don’t all feel their deepest sould expressed by wearing a suit.

But then, clothes do send a message: status, lifestyle, expectation, and all that. Aren’t we most likely to find friends and partners who are like us? What better — what easier way to send a concise message about your life than with the image of yourself? Who will I befriend if I go topless at Virginia Beach? Who will befriend me? Maybe I’ll buy a hat to go with my bikini.

Science Blog: Underage boozers fill industry coffers

Underage drinking contributes an estimated $23 billion yearly to the alcohol industry, more than 17 percent of the total consumer expenditures for alcohol, according to an article in the May issue of Archives of Pediatrics & Adolescent Medicine, one of the JAMA/Archives journals.

Shakespeare’s Sister does a run-down of George Allen’s authenticity. Did you know that his sister wrote a book about growing up in the Allen family?

Rush Limbaugh was arrested today on perscription drug charges. I guess his dreams of rounding up & punishing U.S. drug offenders are coming true. Good for you, Rush!

Everything I Know I Learned From The Bush Administration

There is such a thing as the International Community. And in that comminity, the U.S. is getting a reputation for bullying and taking lunch money. I wonder why?