Archive for September, 2008

Seven hundred. BILLION. Dollars.

There are about 350,000,000 peo­ple in the US, includ­ing chil­dren. $700,000,000,000, divided evenly among them, would amount to approx­i­mately $2000 per per­son. I don’t per­son­ally want to pony up two large to pro­vide an ass-​​​​catcher for some cor­po­rate cock­sucker who’s found his balls in the wringer. Here’s my cor­po­rate bailout plan: Let the overex­tended banks tank. […]

I like this one.

It really says it all. Demonstrators protest the pro­posed 700 bil­lion USD Wall Street bail-​​​​out in front of the New York Stock Exchange in the Financial District in New York on September 25, 2008. In response to the global finan­cial cri­sis, pro­test­ers, from a vari­ety of activist groups, denounced the cap­i­tal­ist sys­tem, Wall Street and the administration […]

Should have asked earlier

This ad for Sensoa (appar­ently a Belgian group ded­i­cated to sex­ual health) is clever on more than one level. The big pay­off is at the very end. I put the ad below the fold because it’s a Flash video that begins play­ing imme­di­ately, and who needs that?

More later.

Ever redesign a logo for a $150 mln insti­tu­tion on your own? Well, I did. More, as I said, later.

Again with the saber rattling?

It’s fas­ci­nat­ing to me to hear McCain and Obama expound on pol­icy, as though they were already elected and dic­tat­ing to con­gress. One of them surely will be, but the hubris required to behave as though you’ve already won is gen­uinely — well, enter­tain­ing. McCain is now say­ing that he would “pre-​​​​emptively” strike (that is, […]

Healthcare according to ‘conscience’ = Dark Ages horseshit

Those of you unfa­mil­iar with Pharyngula might have missed a link from PZ. We have a new euphemism and a poten­tial new reg­u­la­tion from the Bush admin­is­tra­tion: “provider con­science rights”. What this is about is pro­vid­ing reli­gious doc­tors with loop­holes so that they can avoid respon­si­bil­ity for treat­ing patients with the best pos­si­ble care — so they can use […]

Okay, so maybe I was wrong.

A while back I said this was prob­a­bly the best photo I’d ever taken. I didn’t count on this. Or this. Sisters, brother. Beautiful kids, beau­ti­ful day. Oh my God, what a beautiful day.

They’re not even wrong.

CNN’s story led with a provoca­tive and possibly-​​​​alarming header: “Cell phones can affect sperm qual­ity, researcher says”. That’s dis­tress­ing by vir­tu­ally any ratio­nal stan­dard, no? Cellular phones have a long his­tory of being feared and mis­trusted. There is an abun­dance of peo­ple who believe they cause brain can­cer, despite lack of any­thing like hard evi­dence; a few years ago […]

Blow, Wind Sock, blow.

Here’s the AP on McCain. No shit. John McCain embraces and expels Washington like an accor­dion player belt­ing out a song. Squeeze in and he touts his vast knowl­edge of the cap­i­tal city. Draw out and he casts him­self a reformer bent on chang­ing its ways. […] Squeeze in, and he’s the new cap­i­tal tour guide for his running […]

Get ready for insipid pulpitry.

Ike — aptly named if one knows the his­tory of the Turners — did a hell of a lot of dam­age. I don’t know how the Jesus crowd feels about what keeps hap­pen­ing to Galveston (it gets hit pretty reg­u­larly, and last I heard, it’s not a gay mecca), but I’m sure they’re try­ing to exon­er­ate their sky daddy by […]

It’s the subtle gradations that really drive you batty.

This is a hell of a fun lit­tle test to take. There are 100 hue tiles arranged in 4 rows, and you have to sort them. I only got four wrong, which isn’t par­tic­u­larly shabby. I won­der how they’re fil­ter­ing for dis­plays, though; I’m using a cal­i­brated CRT. I don’t know how the test would break down on an LCD or plasma […]

Here we are again.

There is absolutely noth­ing in the vast waste­land of tele­vi­sion worth tak­ing in today. We’re due for another day of maudlin, obscenely inane ret­ro­spec­tives. Jesus’ General kindly ref­er­ences Ani DiFranco for us, while Wonkette skew­ers the trash favored by white trash. I have noth­ing of impor­tance to add to the discussion.