Our LD CIC

President George W Bush (The Learning Disabled Commander In Chief) is even stupider than I thought. He is trying to start a war with Russia. Putin is trying to help him. The peoples of both nations are now hostages of our idiot leaders who are playing chicken with WWIII. You thought the cold war was over. Psych! They have started it back up in just a couple of days and are trying to make it a hot one. Each of them is more afraid of looking weak than they are of war. That is what we get for electing cowards to run our countries.

Adage Proved By Bush

Grey's Law - Any sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice.

Boris McCain

Mitchell Aboulafia has a contest on his blog asking who McCain reminds you of. Here is my entry.

Boris McCain sayd:

Bomb, bomb, bomb,,,bomb, bomb,B-Bulwinkle

The Law Is An Ass

It has happened again. Where is Jury Nullification? How do citizens in good conscience convict a person of dealing drugs when the person being sold to is the parent of a teenager with cancer?

The Evolution Of A Concept

Inception

Refinement

All Gayed Up!

Proof That Women Are Less Competent Than Men

With her reply to one of my comments over at Womanist Musings Renee got me to thinking about suicide. I have been making this tongue in cheek observation for years but did not look up the statistics. Women actually perform worse than I had been saying. One only needs two statistics to prove that women are grossly less competent than men. Attempted suicides and the suicide rate.

Women were three times as likely to attempt suicide in 2001. In that year 24,672 men committed suicide compared to 5,950 suicides committed by women. That means that men commit suicide 4 time as often as women do with 1/3 the attempts. That means that men are 12 times as likely to succeed at trying to kill themselves.

Killing a human being is not a difficult task. It is no secret what it takes to end a life. It is especially easy to do if the victim is co-operative. In a suicide the victim is by definition co-operating with the killer because they are the same person. How incompetent does one have to be to fail at such a simple task.

/snark








Statistics are from suicide.org.

Has A Surfer/Snowboarder Who Lives In A Van Rewritten Physics? Maybe.

I would love to be educated enough to have an opinion on wether this guy is right.

You Ain't Cool...

till you do your thing on Sesame Street.

GOP vs Democrats

I saw this in a comment by likelydemented over at TPM.

I say what is going on here is some kind of split--separate emotional universes. On one side are people who are essentially authoritarian by nature and who want rules, clarity, and predictability. They support cops, the military, and President Pinocchio. On the other side are people who, for whatever reasons, are able to put up with ambiguity and the messiness of democracy. They don't understand us; we don't understand them.

That is an excellent observation. My libertarian friends are missing the point by hanging out with the GOP which is the authoritarian party.

This was also a learning experience about bookmarking things you want to comment on. It took me forever to find this again today because I did not.

Matrix vs Metamucil

You will hate yourself if you do not look at this picture.

McCain Tries To Get Obama Killed

Sen McCain appears to have decided that his chances are so slim for winning this fall that he should make life as dangerous as possible for Sen Obama. His first move in this new strategy is announcing Sen Obama's travel plans for Iraq.

Whoose Children Count

I had managed to remain mercifully unaware of the number of Brangalina's children until I read this post.

I cannot understand our fascination with who is poking whom with what in Hollywood. It is in my eyes a defect of our society. To me an artist should be judged by their work and their lives are completely uninteresting. Angelina's pregnancy, lovers, habits, humanitarian efforts, vices, are irrelevant to my life and the fascination that others have with it is as unintelligible to me as some peoples fascination with who wins a child's game played by grown men who never grew up and do not know how to behave in public.

Independent of that, the points made in the post about our societies failure to provide basic services, like education and health care that includes reproductive services to the least fortunate among us are dead on. It is our national shame. That does not mean that it is wise to have children at a young age and out of wedlock. Trying to convince the young of the truth that they should pursue an education and try to lift themselves up before having children is a service in and of itself. It is hard enough to raise a child with all the support in the world. Alone and in poverty it is a challenge that none of us should have to face.

If Sen Obama or Mr Cosby tell someone to get an education first and try to find a mate that will stick with you for life because the work is lighter when it is shared they are only giving the same advice I give my daughter. Do you advise you child to get pregnant as young as possible by an anonymous father? Why would you rail against these men for giving sound advice. Our nation clearly needs to do more but in the mean time each of us should try to make the lives of the young we have influence over as easy as possible by giving them sound life advice.

McCain Cannot Tell The Difference

Between -

Sudan and Somalia
Czechoslovakia and The Czech Republic
Sunni and Shia
Leaving and Losing

Every time someone talks about combat forces leaving Iraq as part of a stabilization plan he screams "That's surrender". He obviously cannot tell the difference between leaving and losing. If leaving is losing how do we ever get out of any conflict? Why will no one ask him to give an example of what victory would look like? He has nothing to say about how he would win. He has become a caricature naysayer.

Comedians' Gravy Train Comming To An End

Let's face it. Bush has made our Comedians weak. They have had seven years of low hanging fruit. They are terrified that Obama will win with a less than completely ridiculous vice president. The Bush administration has made them into lap dogs who are not able to fend for themselves unprepared to be released into the wild.

“The thing is, he’s not buffoonish in any way,” said Mike Barry

Our likely next president will not be writing the jokes for them and they do not know what to do.

The Most Insightfull Comment I Have Read All Day.

From Markg8 commenter at TPM.

anyone who sits in front of the computer all day commenting on blogs is or is on his way to being an over-weight, middle-aged white guy. Even if he is a 11 year old black girl. It's a little known drawback of combining the computer revolution and evolutionary biology.

Words to live by.

My Favorite Argument

An Oil Man Is My New Hero

Who would have thunk it?
This add ran during MTP this morning. Here in Memphis it ran just after an add for a local candidate for the house who is trying to get elected based on arguing that we should try to drill our way out of our energy problems. It really blocked his message to have his add followed by Mr Pickens add saying that, "I have been an oil man my whole life, but this is one emergency we can't drill our way out of."

His plan is not without its problems and will not be the solution by itself, but his advocacy moves the debate in the right direction. We should be debating how to get off oil instead of how to get another fix for our addiction.

Flashy Clothes = Insecure Person

In her post Clothing, What It Really Costs Renee over at Womanist Musings was complaining about the amount we spend to to be walking billboards to show off our status at the expense of the downtrodden poor who labor for slave wages so that we can have the latest designers add on our back. She is complaining for the exploited. They do deserve our sympathy. But even if the price you paid for these goods was going to workers who were paid a living wage, my question is why would you stoop to advertising for someone who is paying you nothing for the work you do promoting their brand?

Brand consciousness just marks you as one generation away from poverty as much as to much as flashy jewelry does. You might as well drive a car or truck with rims that cost more than the vehicle wearing jewelry that cost more than the rims. You could get the same effect by painting your truck to match your boat. It is all the same motivation that makes a four year old yell "LOOK AT ME, LOOK AT ME, LOOK AT MEEEEE!!!".

So wear your designer threads and carry that handbag that cost you a weeks pay. You look like the unctuous used car salesman flashin' his Rolex, or the woman showing off her diamond engagement ring that paid for the guns in the hands of child soldiers raping other children.

Today's Postmodern and Jokey

is
Tomorrow's old fashioned and hokey

Conservatives Continue To Get It Backwards

Andrew Sullivan pointed out an interview of Ross Douthat at Newsweek from which he got the following quote.

If you look at the marriage rates in the 1950s and 1960s across social classes, the upper-middle class, the working class and the poor all got married and divorced at about the same rate. The all had children in wedlock or out of wedlock at about the same rate. That's changed dramatically over the past 50 years. So upper-middle-class Americans are still behaving like bourgeois, 1950s surburbanites. They're getting married, they have low divorce rates, they're very unlike to have children out of wedlock. That's not true for the working class. What you see in the white working class, in fact, is a trajectory that parallels, in alarming ways, what the black working class went through in terms of collapsing marriage rates and out-of-wedlock birth rates in the 1960s and 1970s. So we argue that that's one of the biggest challenges facing the American working class, and it's at the root of a lot of the inequality and a lot of the economic anxiety that are big factors in this election year.

They claim that the divorce rate is a big factor in the inequality in our society. But research indicates that they have got the direction of causation backwards. The prime causes of divorce are low income and income volatility. The union busting done by Regan and his successors that increased job insecurity, and the wage stagnation caused by our increasingly regressive tax structure (if you look at all taxes and not just the income tax) championed by the GOP cause the family breakdown they try to blame on liberals.