Lee's Blog

With respect to the vile vermin named Lizz Winstead, who thought that a tornado wiping out two elementary schools and a hospital along with most of a town was a suitable target for bigoted political “humor”, cullen observed that, “I doubt she made similar jokes about hurricane Sandy.”

I had the same thought, and last night I tried to come up with a comparable “humorous” observation about hurricane Sandy. This is the best I could do:

God got tired of NYC not cleaning rats out of the subways and sent hurricane Sandy to do it for them.

Ha ha, right? The dead, maimed, homeless, freezing, and destitute were just collateral damage so let’s all laugh.

No, it just won’t do. Somehow I need to work in that God was trying to exterminate what I regard as life unworthy of life, like the vile vermin named Lizz Winstead did.

I guess I won’t quit my day job. I don’t really have a talent for hate-filled, bigoted, eliminationist “humor”.

Exhibit Two: Via Why Evolution Is True, we get the story of a Moore tornado survivor who was interviewed by a CNN reporter named Wolf Blitzer. Now, I don’t know much about CNN or Wolf Blitzer, but CNN has a reputation online for despising us red-state, fly-over people. So, Blitzer interviews a woman who escaped the tornado by the skin of her teeth, and he asks,

You’ve gotta thank the Lord, right? Do you thank the Lord for that split-second decision?

Well, I know enough about blue-state politics that I do not believe that question was in any sense sincere. I think he just wanted her to say, “Oh yes, thank the Lord!” so that he and his fellow minions could laugh at the idiot superstitious Okie. But she didn’t; she answered,

I — I’m actually an atheist … We are here, and I don’t blame anyone for thanking the Lord.

Now, I think that’s a perfectly reasonable response. She doesn’t thank the Lord because she’s an atheist, and why should she blame anyone for thanking the Lord, if that’s how they feel? What skin is it off her nose?

Of course, this is why I hesitate to read Why Evolution is True. Naturally one of the commenters screeched,

Shows what it’s like living in a theocratic state similar to Iran, only this is a Christian one. Same difference in my book.

Oh yes. We’re just exactly like Iran.

Well, except for the death penalty for apostasy, atheism, and homosexuality, of course. Other than that we just exactly the same.

And except for the women having no legal rights or protection and being property so that seven-year-old girls can be sold off as sex slaves “married” to fifty-year-old pedophiles. Other than that we’re just indistinguishable.

Oh, and except for the government not only encouraging but funding murderous terrorism. Other than that we’re just like them.

Yeah.

rogercottonsr = moron.

After Obama was elected the first time, there was a conversation between talking heads on television that went something like this:

“Oh, now the inbred incestuous subhuman red-state racist scum will want to secede because a black man was elected President.”

“In the first place, when Bush was elected the first time — and when he was re-elected — you were saying the blue states ought to secede. And in the second place, why wouldn’t they want to secede from a nation where the media almost uniformly regard them as inbred incestuous subhuman red-state racist scum?”

Well, they still despise us.

Exhibit One: some vermin named Lizz Winstead involved with “The Daily Show”, before the debris had even stopped falling out of the sky and the rescuers had begun digging dead children out of the rubble, tweated “This tornado is in Oklahoma so clearly it has been ordered to only target conservatives.”

Ha ha. That is so funny. Within minutes after the tornado hit, we knew that it had scored direct hits on two elementary schools and a hospital. For all that vermin knew there were hundreds of dead children. But hey, they were only red-state children, so their deaths are just hilariously funny.

I am too angry to go on with this.

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Update: Edited to say “The Daily Show” instead of the “Today Show” since cullen corrected me. I’ve never seen either one so I didn’t know the difference, but at least I’d heard the name “Today Show”. That’s what I get for not copying and pasting unfamiliar names.

Orac has a post about what he calls “animal rights extremists”. I don’t call them that; they’re terrorists, and they’re trying to terrorize scientists who work with animals.

They are vile.

They are also stupid.

Because of my interest in ferrets and other mustelids, I have actually read about how those beautiful little carnivores live. For one thing, they live by eating other animals. They are obligate carnivores; they have no choice but to eat other animals. Usually they kill them first, but not always. Carnivores are not known for their deep concern for the suffering of their prey, and they may start eating once they’ve got their prey under control, even if it’s not quite dead yet.

(In another context I read about someone who saw a live toad being swallowed rear-end-first by a snake. They kindly tried to rescue the toad and got … well … about half a toad, the rest having been dissolved already. Nature is not kind.)

Getting back to the mustelids, their lives aren’t exactly great either. Weasels and stoats are little animals preyed upon by larger predators, both mammals and birds. There’s a reason why a ferret taken outside will immediately sprint for the nearest cover: millions of years of evolution tell her that death comes from above.

Of course, it doesn’t always come from above. Weasel skulls are usually found to have been infested by worms that start in the nasal sinuses and chew away the bones. Does that sound like a pleasant experience? They get the worms from the voles which are the mainstay of their diet.

Voles and other rodents may have population explosions on occasion, and these tend to be followed by similar population explosions of carnivores such as weasels and stoats. Of course, the rodents get eaten and then most or even all of the carnivores in the area starve. The book that I read memorably described the last starving carnivores desperately hunting down the last of the prey.

Given the natural course of their lives in the wild, would these little animals — rodents and mustelids alike — really choose living that way over living in a warm, comfortable cage with food and water and no predators, even if they occasionally got stuck with needles or ate things that made them sick? Even if in the end they were sacrificed for autopsy? After all, in that case they are swiftly and mercifully killed, rather than being torn apart or eaten alive by a predator.

Animal rights terrorists don’t know much about nature if they think laboratory animals are suffering compared to their wild brethren.

You may say that you would rather die on your feet than live on your knees, but you are a human being who can think far beyond your next meal. These animals cannot do that. A full belly, a warm nest …

I admit that I would not be comfortable experimenting on animals, but then I would not be comfortable killing an animal for meat. I enjoy the benefits that come from other people doing these things, and I will not condemn the people who do them, so long as they are humane about it.

I attended a public “school” in third and fourth grade. I learned almost nothing there; indeed, in some respects I unlearned. Specifically, when I started third grade I could already write in cursive. Our first assignment was to write “What I Did on My Summer Vacation”. Well, what I did was to move from London to Oklahoma City, crossing the Atlantic on the S.S. France. I thought that was pretty interesting.

I turned in my paper, and got it back with a big red F. No other marks — no spelling or grammar corrections — just an F. I asked the teacher what I had done wrong and she said, “You wrote that in cursive. The other children don’t know how to write in cursive, so until they learn, you will get an F on anything you write in cursive.”

Well, I’m not stupid. I started printing all my papers. And I continued to print all through third and fourth grade, by the end of which the other students still had not learned to write in cursive. I then transferred to a real school where the other students had been writing in cursive for years. My cursive was so rusty from lack of practice, and my printing was so fast and clear, that I asked for and received permission to just print my papers.

I still print. I do not remember how to write in cursive. That is the result of public “school”.

On the other hand, I did learn something in that “school”: I learned complete and abiding contempt for authority (this was not the only incident of contemptible behavior).

Recently a friend of mine was required to take training for the job she’d been doing for a decade or so. She read the review questions from the training to me, and I got them all right despite never having done her job or done the training. They were that stupid. She told me that she was required to state “what I learned from this course” and she was stumped. I suggested, “Contempt for authority?” and she replied, “No, that doesn’t count; you already had that.” I guess I don’t really make an effort to conceal it …

All of which brings me to this case, where a student failed to learn appropriate contempt for authority in time. He forgot that he had left an unloaded shotgun in his locked truck which he drove to school. Personally, I would have just got in my truck and left without explanation, since playing hooky — especially if you’re eighteen, which apparently he was — is not a felony and may not even be a crime, but telling the authorities that you accidentally brought a gun on campus means a felony conviction.

Patrick Non-White on Popehat gave an excellent summary of the case:

In particular, Principal Denning taught a boy that when he makes a mistake, he should always conceal his wrongdoing. He should lie and prevaricate, rather than manfully confessing and attempting to correct the error.

Principal Denning has taught his students that lies and hypocrisy are rewarded, while integrity and courage are punished. He has taught his students to fear their government.

My lesson is simpler: people in authority are contemptible. Govern yourself accordingly.

– to quote Gawker’s title.

I won’t link to her alleged poetry and I refuse to read it myself. The bit that Gawker quoted was quite enough for me. What a bunch of drivel.

But in a totally hideous sort of way that I’m sure the alleged poet was utterly unaware of, one line was actually meaningful:

you don’t know how little you’ve been paying attention until you look down at your legs again.

… and notice that they’re ten feet away because the murderous thug that Amanda Palmer is praising blew them off with a bomb.

What a horrible person. And she graduated from Wesleyan. So did I. I am ashamed.

I must confess that the idea of the Politics image in the preceding post is not original with me. Stoaty Weasel, who is a real artist, did it first and better, but I wanted to test out rigged figures in Vue. The two figures are actually the same, but you can see that I posed them a little differently and I also changed the colors for the one on the right.

I did the color changing in Photoshop, yet another program that I’m just learning to use. I changed the t-shirt from blue to red, darkened the pants, and removed the scruffy beard.

I need to work on realistic cliffs. Stoaty’s cliffs are beautiful. Mine are … meh.

The divide is very wide and very deep, and the hour is growing late.

Let’s see if this works…

Turn up the volume. Notice no meat on the plates.

Make it go viral.

Update: Mutter snarl. What is with these bots? Why do they suddenly want to stick trackbacks on these posts?
Update II: Well, the embed seems to have vanished. Sigh. Here’s a link where you can see it.

In case you did not see the flap about The One’s personal flag, here’s what happened.

As during the 2008 campaign when The One had his personal symbol and his personal seal of the president-elect, a month or so ago The One had his personal flag displayed on a poster offered for sale on his website.

It’s a remarkably ugly flag and there’s been some speculation as to what in the world his minions were thinking in designing it, but no one much noticed until the Ambassador to Libya and three other Americans were murdered. The claim was that these unfortunates were “evacuated” from the building, but this claim fell apart with publication of images of bloody smears where they had tried to cling to the walls as they were dragged off to torture and murder.

Unfortunately for The One, these images were strikingly similar to his personal flag:

Note that I did not create this image; it is all over the Web but it appears that the creator gave permission for republishing:

As you might imagine, once the juxtaposition of the two images spread across the Web, the page offering The One’s personal flag went missing.

I have seen various people accusing The One of violating laws pertaining to desecration of the American flag.

This is clearly a false accusation. The One’s personal flag is, and is intended to be, reminiscent of the American flag, but it is clearly not, and clearly is not intended to be, an American flag.

Our flag has seven red and six white stripes; The One’s personal flag has no stripes and five red smears. Our flag has white stars on a field of blue; The One’s personal flag has no field of blue and no stars, having instead a circular logo. There is no sense in which The One’s personal flag could be an American flag; you could not even cut up an American flag to produce this.

So I wish people had not made that accusation because it is not true and just makes them look stupid and partisan.