when the status quo frustrates.

I’ve had close family members die from cancer; why haven’t I been consulted on the cure?

Saturday, February 7th, 2009

Losing someone you love sucks mighty bad. I feel sorry for all loss going on everywhere in the world now and into the eternal future. Plus everything in the past. But just because someone you love died because of something doesn’t make you an expert in stopping that something.

Apparently, the 9/11 families still disagree:

After an emotional, private meeting at the White House with President Barack Obama , survivors and victims’ relatives of two al Qaida attacks said Friday that the president quelled some of their fears about closing the Guantanamo Bay, Cuba detention center, promised them an “open-door” policy and a hand in shaping anti-terror policies, and said he is considering a modified military commission system to try detainees.

(more…)

07.02.2009 Punkass! 7 Comments

Not Really

Friday, February 6th, 2009

No, I’m not making this up.

It’s been over fifteen years since I was a teenager; maybe teenagers have changed. A lot. A whole lot. Unrecognizably! Then again, I have a teenager of my own at home, and much as I myself wouldn’t have been at his same age, he would not be caught dead in one of the above t-shirts under any circumstances whatsoever. Unless he is very unrepresentative of teens everywhere, no kid noplace nohow is ever gonna wear this t-shirt. It’s bewildering that anybody would invest any money in thinking that they would.

Sometimes it’s nearly impossible to believe something is for real, isn’t it? But I trust Pam! From The Passion For Christ Movement, the folks who are bringing us the above fashion craze that is about to sweep the nation’s youth:

Most people who have engaged in masturbation know that the culmination of this sexual act ends in shame. I don’t have to share with you the thousands of emails of the admittance of this shame because you know all too well since you have experienced it yourself. Curled up in a fetal position, crying, because your bed is even more empty and you’re lonelier than you did before you violated yourself…

I don’t even know what to say about this, other than that I don’t think I’ve ever had this experience, and if I did, I would immediately check myself into the nearest mental institution.

06.02.2009 Godbaggery, Sex, Unintentional Humor, for reals 14 Comments

You Guys Are Feminists: Surely Someone Has a Cat

Friday, February 6th, 2009

Question to the blogsphere:

I have a cat that not only likes to play with my beaded doorhangers, but likes to claw up the toilet paper. She has other toys, and other scratching posts that she uses, but she seems to like the toilet paper and the beads the most.

How can I cure her of these habits?

06.02.2009 Punkass! 17 Comments

What I Want To Be Like When I Grow Up

Thursday, February 5th, 2009

Okay, technically, I am grown up already. But thinking forward to my “twilight years,” you know–when I hit the age and more importantly, the appearance of the age where people assume I no longer have a sex drive–once in a while I come across a description of persons of that age that make me say to myself, “When I’m that age? I only hope I’m as cool as that.” The first time it happened to me was when I read a news article about a group of fifteen or so over-65 citizens that tours the country doing classic rock covers. I was so jealous I nearly fainted–I’m not talented enough to do that now, never mind thirty years from now!

These two ladies are my current over-65 icons, and not only are they admirable merely based upon their blogular existence, they are also doing all of us the favor that cannot be too much appreciated of reading Ann Coulter’s new book so that we don’t have to:

So I made some calls and found a copy of Ann Coulter’s new book at a used bookstore here in town. I was happy to know that my dollars would not go to support her, but I am a bit worried about a book that ended up in a used bookstore two weeks after it was published. Now Margaret told me she probably couldn’t find a Coulter book new, used or otherwise where she lives, so I told her to relax. I’ll read it and give her (and all of you) a summary here. Sort of a my version of the old Cliffs Notes concept. Do they still have those?

When I’m done anyone wanting the book can send me their address and we can mail it around until everyone has read it. That way no one has to actually buy it firsthand.

It’s the best thing I’ve read since stoney321 reviewed the entire 4-book Twilight series. I hope you enjoy it as much as I have.

05.02.2009 Punkass!, Crazy Lady Ann Coulter, sharing the awesome 1 Comment

I Need to Go to a New Law School

Thursday, February 5th, 2009

In my Constitutional Law class, we are currently going over racism and Supreme Court cases having to do with eliminating it. On our school’s website, we have a discussion board where people are encouraged to post things to facilitate discussion. Imagine my surprise when I discover this in the website today (horrible formatting included)

Group 2 thought this was on topic for the “social aspect of racism today” in our last assignment… This was attributed to Michael Richards after he made racial comments during his comedy act.

“Proud to be White”: Michael Richards better known as Kramer from TV’s Seinfeld makes a good point…………..
“Someone finally said it. How many are actually paying attention to
this? There are African Americans, Mexican Americans, Asian Americans,Arab Americans, etc.

And then there are just Americans. You pass me on the street and sneer
in my direction. You call me ‘White boy,’ ‘Cracker,’ ‘Honkey,’
‘Whitey,’ ‘Caveman’… and that’s OK.

But when I call you, Nigger, Kike, Towel head, Sand-nigger, Camel
Jockey, Beaner, Gook, or Chink .. You call me a racist.

You say that whites commit a lot of violence against you… so why are
the ghettos the most dangerous places to live?

You have the United Negro College Fund. You have Martin Luther King Day.

You have Black History Month. You have Cesar Chavez Day.

You have Yom Hashoah. You have Ma’uled Al-Nabi.

You have the NAACP. You have BET… If we had WET (White Entertainment Television), we’d be racists. If we had a White Pride Day, you would call us racists.

0A
If we had White History Month, we’d be racists.

If we had any organization for only whites to ‘advance’ OUR lives, we’d
be racists.

We have a Hispanic Chamber of Commerce, a Black Chamber of Commerce, and then we just have the plain Chamber of Commerce. Wonder who pays for that??

A white woman could not be in the Miss Black American pageant, but any color can be in the Miss America pageant.

If we had a college fund that only gave white students scholarships…
You know we’d be racists.

There are over 60 openly proclaimed Black Colleges in the US . Yet if
there were ‘White colleges’, that would be a racist college.

In the Million Man March, you believed that you were marching for your
race and rights. If we marched for our race and rights, you would call
us racists.

You are proud to be black, brown, yellow and orange, and you’re not
afraid to announce it. But when we announce our white pride, you call
us racists.

You rob us, carjack us, and shoot at us. But, when a white police
officer shoots a black gang member or beats up a black drug dealer
running from the law and posing a threat to society, you call him a
racist.

I am proud… But you call me a racist.

Why is it that only whites can be racists??”

MODIFIED
The response I posted is below the fold:
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05.02.2009 discrimination 11 Comments

Exploding glass tears.

Thursday, February 5th, 2009

Today was Fun Physics Day at work, as often happens the afternoon after a whole morning is killed by meetings. I have no idea how we got on the subject, but today’s project ended up being Prince Rupert Drops. Prince Rupert Drops are tear-drop shaped glass balls with long, trailing tails. The base of the bulb is shockingly strong, but the tail can be snapped fairly easily. When this happens, the entire drop explodes into a fine dust. The short explanation:

When molten glass hits cold water, its outer surface cools rapidly and shrinks as it solidifies. Since the center is still fluid, it can flow to adjust to the outer shell’s smaller size. As that center eventually cools and solidifies, it also shrinks, but now the outer shell is already solid and can’t change its shape to accommodate the smaller core.

The result is a great deal of internal stress, as the center pulls the outside in from all sides. Like a tightly wound spring, the glass is set to release a lot of energy. If you break the thin glass at the tail, a chain reaction travels like a shock wave through the drop. As each section breaks, it releases enough energy to break the next section, and so on, shattering the whole drop in less than a millisecond.

Paradoxically, the same tension also makes the Prince Rupert’s drop stronger. Glass breaks when tiny scratches pull apart and spread into fractures. Since the surface is compressed by internal stress, scratches can’t grow, and the glass is very difficult to break.

A professor at Purdue University clocked the fractures at over 4,000mph. Unfortunately my university doesn’t carry the journal he published in, so I don’t have anything more than that abstract to share.

My coworkers made about 5 of these things using glass stirring rods, pipettes, and an ordinary propane torch, although it was a massive pain in the ass. It took forever, and not every tear-shaped glass drop is a Prince Rupert Drop. But when it works, it’s fantastic. My coworker said it felt like a bomb going off in his hand when our drop became a rough silt. It’s also possible to make the tail too fine, so that you have to snap off more than one section to get the explosion. The explanation I read, that I can’t seem to find right now, suggested that the diameter of the glass has to be sufficiently large to allow the cracks to propagate, i.e. if you snap too thin a piece off, the rest of the structure can just shrug it off. If you’ve got a nice traily tail, this means you can flirt with danger by flicking at the flexible bit at the end and dramatically snapping off several pieces before the whole thing disintegrates. Of course, you’d have to play with a lot of them before you got a feel for where that point is.

You can also make your own glass fibers by heating the middle of a glass rod until it softens and glows red, then removing it from the flame and pulling really fast. If your rod was solid, you’ve just made a fiber optic cable. If your rod was a tube, you now have a very small capillary tube.

05.02.2009 Punkass!, Yay! Science!, sharing the awesome No Comments

Let’s Keep an Eye on This

Thursday, February 5th, 2009

Hmmm.

Obama made that clear Thursday morning at the National Prayer Breakfast, announcing a new Presidential Advisory Council on Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships that will weigh in on matters ranging from funding of social-service providers and poverty alleviation to the more controversial issue of abortion reduction.

Why is “abortion reduction” controversial? “Abortion increases,” now, that would be controversial! It seems like we could look at this one of two ways:

1. The number one cause of abortion is unplanned pregnancy. “Abortion reduction” could be directly translated, then, as “unplanned pregnancy reduction,” which I think everyone except the looniest of the Quiverfull types is in favor of. No controversy there, right? Of course, how to best reduce unplanned pregnancy is a topic full of manufactured controversy, with scientists on one side (who define “best” as “most effective”) and religious fundamentalists on the other (who define “best” as “most acceptable to God”). There’s definitely a corollary to the “controversy” over the Theory of Evolution here.

2. The easiest way to reduce abortions would be to make them legally unavailable. Certainly that’s a controversial idea, but it’s been one for decades–not exactly a new controversy, is it?

Perhaps the controversy lies in nobody’s ability to make out exactly how “abortion reduction” is being defined?

But, moving on:

“The goal of this office will not be to favor one religious group over another — or even religious groups over secular groups,” Obama said.

Or even religious groups over those Godless heathens! Sigh

“It will simply be to work on behalf of those organizations that want to work on behalf of our communities, and to do so without blurring the line that our founders wisely drew between church and state.”

Slightly better tone there at the end, Boss.

One of those controversial points was the question of whether faith-based groups that receive government funding should be allowed to hire only individuals who share their religious beliefs. Early in Bush’s first term, he signed a series of Executive Orders exempting religious organizations from nondiscrimination laws.

That hiring question is the first landmine Obama will face. In Zanesville, he left no question as to where he stood on the issue. “If you get a federal grant,” Obama said then, “you can’t use that grant money to proselytize to the people you help, and you can’t discriminate against them — or against the people you hire — on the basis of their religion.”

The statement caused an immediate uproar within the ranks of Obama’s religious supporters, who pushed him to back off from the promise to undo Bush’s Executive Order. He has not done so publicly, but several of them insist that Obama and his aides have given them private assurances that there will be no rapid movement to change the status quo with regard to religious hiring. If so, it would be a rare case of political ham-handness by the Obama team, because his secular supporters say they have been assured that the hiring change will take place.

It’ll be very telling to me, personally, which way he ends up going, or if he manages to neatly dance around going any way at all for as long as possible.

We’ll see what happens.

05.02.2009 Filtered Propaganda, Godbaggery, Lick My Jackboots of Love, Obamarama, Politics, Reproductive Rights 2 Comments

Contemplating Obama and Economic Recovery

Thursday, February 5th, 2009

While I don’t agree with everything he has to say in the column he wrote today for the Washington Post, I can’t help but admire his obvious literacy. It’s funny how one falls into habits of thought without realizing it–I’d really come to view the President of the United States as merely a symbol for a specific ideology, not as an individual who acted upon national matters after giving them in-depth and intelligent thought specific to their particular circumstances and concerns.

I’ve had the same mental whiplash lately with feminist issues–I had subconsciously come to accept that women were going to be irrevocably second-class citizens where the national government (and most state governments) were concerned; the fight was to move the populace as much as possible to limit the powers of governance that naturally adhered to this ideal. The notion of “top-down” changes in women’s status had completely left me as something that actually came to mind as a possible solution. All directives coming from the “top” were going to be anti-woman; the only workable strategies were going to have to come from we-the-masses.

But, back to the economic stimulus package–I’ve been really hesitant to weigh in because economics is not my area of expertise, especially on the macroscopic scale. I never feel qualified to make pronouncements about what will and will not work to help repair our national economy; however, I will go ahead and venture my tentative opinions here; I’d love to hear from others with better knowledge than me of how macroeconomics work (and who are not simply quoting a party line, from either side of the aisle).

The Prez writes, in his WaPo article:

Now is the time to protect health insurance for the more than 8 million Americans at risk of losing their coverage and to computerize the health-care records of every American within five years, saving billions of dollars and countless lives in the process.

Now is the time to save billions by making 2 million homes and 75 percent of federal buildings more energy-efficient, and to double our capacity to generate alternative sources of energy within three years.

Now is the time to give our children every advantage they need to compete by upgrading 10,000 schools with state-of-the-art classrooms, libraries and labs; by training our teachers in math and science; and by bringing the dream of a college education within reach for millions of Americans.

And now is the time to create the jobs that remake America for the 21st century by rebuilding aging roads, bridges and levees; designing a smart electrical grid; and connecting every corner of the country to the information superhighway.

From which I distill the following*:

(*If I’m partially or completely off-base with any of these, definitely let me know! Like I said, this whole area of understanding is not really my forte.)

(more…)

05.02.2009 A million ways to mortgage the future, Brilliant Ideas, Economy Blues, Obamarama, Politics 3 Comments

Economic Crotchbatting

Wednesday, February 4th, 2009

No more Lexus SUVs. No more smartphones. No more plastic bags. No more hair gel. No more 60″ HDTVs. No more suburbia, really, because how will people be able to live so far from everything they need?

Hey, I own some of those things; I get that the dream of never-ending consumption built on the backs of people we can’t see is intoxicating for us first-worlders. But the end of the fossil fuel age and its absurd combination of luxury and rapid change is coming whether we like it or not. So why is everyone in the media (and in wingnuttery) so hellfired concerned about us returning our economy to what it was for a few more decades (at best)? Why is that the only lens through which we can talk about getting America “back on track”? Isn’t this track a dead end? Hasn’t everyone admitted it? Why are we trying to recreate this unsustainable economy as fast as possible?

(more…)

04.02.2009 Punkass! 1 Comment

Huh, There Really Are Lesbian Separatists Colonies

Sunday, February 1st, 2009

I was reading the New York Times, and ran across this article. It talks about lesbian separatist colonies, and how they are dying out.

While I would never want to actually live in these communities (not that I could; only lesbians allowed), I must admit in some way I was jealous of the description of the places. To not have to worry about some of the male-female dynamics that made these women leave in the first place would be heavenly.

But, these communities are dying out, and in one sense, I think that’s a good thing. Maybe it means that men are starting to pick up this feminism thing to (even if there’s always some backlash), or maybe it means that women don’t feel as threatened out here. While I’m not one to bad-mouth “identity politics”; I think of feminism as a way to have my identity as female just be a trait, instead of the trait that defines me.

What does everyone think?

01.02.2009 Punkass! 6 Comments

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