O_O

Let's play with women by lying to them and then pretend it doesn't matter! We'll call this a game, in fact, The Game. Let's exploit the fact that sexism harms women in a number of understood ways. We can call that the "special psychology" of women, and use it to get them to do things that they don't want to do! Hahahahaha - yeah, dude, dehumanizing rocks!

Lookie What I Found!

It's a big ol' bug, just hanging out by my apartment.


What kind of bug is this?

And here is a video with my shoe in there for perspective. My shoe is a size 10 hiking shoe cuz of my ginormous feet.

To Our Favorite Drug Addict

I'm so sorry I called you ugly so I sent you an apology note.

Pop Quiz!

A friend calls you at home one evening. She tells you that she received a chain letter email on a topic that both of you are very interested in and she forwarded it to your work email address.

Your friend asks you to read the email when you return to work, and to please forward the email to ten other people to help keep the email chain growing.

What should you do?

1. Run to work, open the email, and forward it to ten people because, like your friend, you too are a complete idiot.
2. Find out what the message is about, read it the next day, then forward it to your mom and your brother cuz they would find it interesting too.
3. Hang up the phone and defriend the person immediately, you don't need anyone that stupid in your social network.
4. Tell your friend that you would rather have her send this to your personal email address and also that you check your email constantly, so there is no need to call you to announce that an email has been sent. Then check the calendar to make sure that you have not gone through a time warp back to the year 1996.

I would probably do number 4, but be very tempted to choose 3.

Is This My Birthday?

Ok, so first, I see the article about Crist, but I skip past it, and decide to read what my dear leader was saying:

Governor Sanford says that he does not want to take the money, the federal stimulus package money. And I want to say to him: 'I'll take it.' I'm more than happy to take his money or any other governor in this country that doesn't want to take this money, I take it, because we in California need it. ... You know, you've got to go beyond just the principles. You've got to go and say, 'What is right for the country right now?'

-Gov. Schwarzenegger (R-CA), "GOP Civil War: Schwarzenegger Slams GOP Govs' Stimulus Refusal"

The visual of Ahnold calling their bluff was pretty amusing and a good pick-me up. The title is pretty corny though. Scrolling doesn, I next saw an article called "Poor Bush: Websites Mocking W. Rank Higher Than His Own Presidential Library Site". It was a nice little 'feel good' piece that served to satisfy our national need for schadenfreude.

The next one down, however, got me thinking about international women's rights and strategies to be effective in more ways than just raising awareness. Those thought processes can get very depressing or frustrating pretty fast. The emotional response can become similar to the kinds of feelings I have when I am worried about my friends and loved ones. So, after I came to a conclusion to the thought process, I really wanted to see actual good things happening instead of work to be done. I decided to go back up top to read what Crist was saying:

The people elected him. And I'm willing to give him a good shot and try to help make this work. We're in a tough time, as we talked about before. I think we do need to be bipartisan. We need to be, in fact, nonpartisan.

-Gov. Crist (R-FL), "There's Only One National Leader, 'His Name Is President Obama'"

And I was shocked. I read the whole post and returned to that phrase in the article. His utterance of 'nonpartisan' reminded me of an awesome Pandagon article that I was unable to locate so I cannot supply a link. It has been a good birthday morning today.

WRONG

Once again, we see that Obama, despite his mention of "non-believers,"* still needs to play to the delusional.

"There is no god who condones taking the life of an innocent human being," [President Obama] said, and all religions teach people to love and care for one another.

Not the god of the Old Testament! That god LOVED killing anyone and everyone. Oh, but I guess because they were living on land that some other people wanted, no one could consider them "innocent". It all hinges on the definition of that word, and few, if any humans (American or not) are actually "innocent" according to these outdated, hateful, xenophobic, and misogynist texts. And I’m talking about the Bible, the Koran, the Torah, and yeah, even Eastern religions have crap about what women should and should not do because guys got all freaked out by us shedding unused uterine lining once a month. It’s easy to put on blinders and think that because one character in a book told us to love our neighbors as ourselves that religion is harmless. Just be careful that you don’t get stoned, set on fire, or cast out of your family for accidentally breaking one of the other asinine rules also written in those mega-violent novels.

*I actually don’t like that term and was not that encouraged by it in the inaugural address. It wasn’t until I read other blog posts that were so happy about our inclusion that I even know that it was a big deal. I don’t like being defined by what I lack. The terms atheist and even godless are less bothersome, even though they mean the same thing. I’d love to start using the term rationalist, but there are so many religious misogynists (though misogynists can also be atheist) that also think they are rational so the word isn’t very descriptive.

Fight Oppression by Pants

From a Michigan friend

You can de-pant if you want to.
You can leave your trowsas behind.
Because if you wear pants, and if you use pants, then you're no friend of mine.
Hey depant.
Hey depant.
Everyone loosen their pants.

It seems she has also learned the excitement of skirts :D

Like 1993 All Over Again

In grad school, I processed a collection around the passage of the Federal Direct Loan Program and learned that I never, ever should have cursed my FAFSA. The system in place before the FDLP was similar to the situation most students now have with private lenders but far, far worse. The government backed the loans in this case and the private companies involved learned that they made more money when students defaulted on the loans. With that information, they began a practice of not sending the loan statements so that students never knew that the needed to begin repayment. In the first Bush administration, most members of congress were in support of changing this system. Enter William Jefferson Clinton and suddenly, congresspeople that once liked the idea of Direct Loans found them to be a terrible idea. Interestingly, all of these individuals happened to be members of the Republican Party.

I don't seem to recall Democrats just flip flopping on issues like this (and with so much evidence about their change in stance) when Bush came in to office. It was more that Bush was doing so many things that Democrats plain didn't like. Oh, sure, Obama is going to do a lot of things that Republicans don't like either, but they're also dragging their feet on issues that they loved in mid-2008. Rachel Maddow played a clip of one such Republican Senator on the "Keep F*cking Things Up" Tour. He indicated that Republicans didn't think that giving money to make broadband and other internet connections available to people was a good use of money. This was why they didn't like the stimulus package as Obama and the Democrats presented it. Interestingly, this same Senator - I forget his name, John or something - actually promoted the same idea he now hates when he was on the campaign trail this year. I guess it was for re-election or something - no, wait, that's right, he was on the Joke Ticket, I remember now. Yeah, Candidate John McCain loved broadband for the people, but suddenly, now that the American people resoundingly rejected his ideas and his party, Senator John McCain hates the proposal.

Welcome to 1993, folks. To bad for Republicans that most of America is far more informed and we have recordings of your flip flops. And to Americans, never forget that this economic crisis is the result of deregulation and the destruction of the New Deal Era policies. We've been through this before, and that it isn't exactly the same is meaningless. If you disagree, well, you probably also weren't in on the joke from this last election cycle. Hope you enjoy your Obama tax cuts.

We're back to doing our best

Also, it was kind of stupid for no Republicans to vote for the stimulus in the House. You know that now the Democrats know that it doesn't matter how much they cater to them, they'll still be stubborn babies. I hope they like being shut out and ignored cuz they've shown that listening and even giving in to their idiotic ideas is pointless.