I just received this heart-wrenching email from a solider serving in Iraq who desperately needs my help:
My name is Sgt kenny Baker, Jr. I am in the Engineering military unit here in Ba'qubah in Iraq, we have about $10, Million US dollars that we want to move out of the country. My partners and I need a good partner someone we can trust. It is oil money and legal.
We are moving it through diplomatic means, to send it to your house directly or a bank of your choice using diplomatic courier service. The most important thing is that can we trust you?. Once the funds get to you, you take your 15% out and keep our own 85%.
Your own part of this deal is to find a safe place where the funds can be sent to. Our own part is sending it to you. If you are interested I will furnish you with more details. But the whole process is simple and we must keep a low profile at all times. I look forward to your reply and co-operation. You can reach me via email.
Waiting for your urgent response. Regards, Sgt.kenny Baker.
I just don't know. It sounds pretty fishy, but I do support the troops!
It's nice to see email scam artists getting more topical. Meanwhile, I suddenly have a burning desire to watch Three Kings…
Flu mania is kicking into full gear and everyone is ready to flip out, crawl over each other for their flu shots, and zip up their biohazard suits as fast as they can! But wait! It might be easier than you think to avoid the flu. Take a deep breath (but not near someone with the sniffles!) ...
First, the flu shot. As Jim Macdonald at Making Light reminds us, "October is the time for vulnerable folks to get 'em: That’s the people who are 65 or older, folks with chronic health problems, pregnant women, children ages 6-23 months, and health-care workers. November is the time for household members who live with the previous folks, people aged 50-64, and everyone else."
Next, washing your hands.
Macdonald reminds us how to do it properly:
1) Turn on the water and get it to a temperature you like. 2) Lather up using soap. (Soap does not kill germs in the time that the germs are exposed during hand washing. There’s stuff that grows fine on a bar of soap. The surfactant action of soap helps the running water flush the germs away. That’s how it works. It’s purely mechanical. Antibacterial soap is a waste of time and money, and just helps breed antibiotic-resistant bugs.) 3) Rub your hands vigorously together, paying special attention to the fingernails, getting up onto the wrists, for as long as it takes you to sing one stanza of "The Star Spangled Banner." 4) Rinse off the soap with the running water. 5) Dry your hands with a paper towel. 6) Use the expended paper towel to turn off the water.
This brings to mind fond memories of when I was a child. My grandma was always sort of on the OCD side and would constantantly order me to wash my hands. Everywhere I went, before and after meals, after touching any animal or playing outside, basically each day was framed around washing my hands. Here's a video clip of that experience:
Leonard Pitts warns us that ignoring people like Ann Coulter and Michelle Malkin only allows them to grow and fester in the dark.
Last week, Coulter said that in her perfect America, everyone would be a Christian. She said this to Donny Deutsch, who was hosting her on his CNBC program, The Big Idea. Deutsch, who is Jewish, expressed alarm. Whereupon Coulter told him that Jews simply needed to be ''perfected'' -- i.e., made to accept Jesus as savior. Which is, of course, one of the pillars (along with the slander of Christ's murder) supporting 2,000 years of pogroms, abuse and Holocaust.
I suspect the reason some people believe that kind of ignorance is best ignored is that they find it difficult to take it seriously, or to accept that Coulter -- or those who embrace her -- really believes what she says. After all, this is not 1933, not 1948, not 1966. It is two-thousand-by-God-oh-seven, post-Seinfeld, post-Gore-Lieberman, post-Schindler's List. We no longer live in the era when open anti-Semitism could find wide traction. This is a different time.
But time, Martin Luther King once observed, is neutral. Time alone changes nothing. It is people who make change in time. Or not. So you have to wonder if this determined sanguinity in the face of intolerance is not ultimately an act of monumental self-delusion.
While some of us are cheerfully assuring one another that They Don't Really Mean It, the Southern Poverty Law Center reports that the number of hate groups in this country has risen by a whopping 40 percent in just the last seven years. If you had spent those years, as I have, jousting in print the agents of intolerance, you would not be surprised. It would be all but impossible to quantify, but I've noted a definite spike, not simply in the hatefulness of some people, but in the willingness to speak that hatefulness openly and without shame. What used to be anonymous now comes with a name and address.
[...]
And if some of us are laughing that off, not everybody is.
So this is not about bashing conservatives. It is, rather, about challenging them, and all of us. Within living memory, we have seen Jews in boxcars and blacks in trees and silence from those who should have been shouting. They pretended it wasn't happening until it already had.
So, what about Ann Coulter? What about the push-back against diversity, pluralism and tolerance, that she represents? I keep hearing that we should just ignore it.
My point is, that's been tried before. It didn't work.
Anybody who's read my stuff for any length of time will know that I agree with Mr. Pitts's advice wholeheartedly; to ignore the bullies like Ann Coulter is dangerous, but I also don't believe in giving them the credibility that they think they're entitled to because they can get a gig on Hardball. I've always said that the best way to deal with them is the Mel Brooks approach: make fun of them. The quickest way to deflate pompous and self-important people is to laugh at them and let the limelight point out how ridiculous they are. Sure, it will sell their books for them, but the more people who read them will discover that they are screeds of bilious crap, and there has to be some subconscious shame in collecting a royalty when you know that some of it is being paid for the express purpose of making a mockery of you.
As I've also noted, it takes a certain skill to make a mockery out of people like Ann Coulter, Rush Limbaugh, and Michelle Malkin. It's easy to take cheap shots at them and speculate about Ms. Coulter's gender identification or her scanty clothing choices, Mr. Limbaugh's weight and addiction to pain pills, and Ms. Malkin's ethnic heritage. But that's counterproductive; all it does it make it about irrelevancies, even when their hypocrisy about gays, drug use, or interning immigrants begs for the comparison. In order to truly make a mockery of these clowns, you have to go after their outrageous opinions and statements and turn them back on them. You can't shame them; they have no sense of shame, or if they did, they long ago gave it up as a part of the deal. You can't shout them down because they don't allow people to speak their piece; on a TV pundit panel they constantly interrupt and talk over their host or the other people, either because they never learned any manners or they're deathly afraid of someone actually making sense and leaving them gasping for air. This was proven with amazing alacrity on Real Time with Bill Maher last week when Tucker Carlson was constantly interrupting Paul Krugman and Joy Behar. He was just plain rude.
The response to these people shouldn't be scolding or flaming rage; all that does is prove that someone is actually taking them seriously. The Mel Brooks approach of bare-knuckle mockery and burlesque laughter is the best weapon. If you want proof of that today, look at how the right wing is completely thrown off the track by Hillary Clinton's laugh. They're baffled that she's laughing at Chris Wallace of Fox News and his furrowed-brow questions about "hyperpartisanship" on the part of the Clintons, which is a question you'd expect from Stephen Colbert. Suddenly the pundits are analyzing the hell out of Senator Clinton's laugh, and the subtext is a worrisome concern that she's not taking them seriously. "But we're pundits! She has to take us seriously!"
This isn't to dismiss Leonard Pitts's point, either. We shouldn't ignore the Ann Coulters and Tucker Carlsons, but we don't have to give them credibilty they crave. We should just laugh them off the stage.
PS: Fellow Shaker Zack has a great take on how to deal with bullies.
Yesterday, Susan Orr became deputy assistant secretary for population affairs in the Dept. of Health and Human Services. So?, you might say. Well, this position is one which is responsible for the reproductive health programs--from the ineffective $30 million dollar abstinence-only "education" nonsense to funding contraception, STD testing and related counseling. Orr, of course, is adamantly anti-contraception:
In 2001, she was quoted in the Washington Post favoring a Bush administration plan to drop a requirement that health insurance plans for federal employees cover a broad range of birth control.
“We’re quite pleased because fertility is not a disease,” she said at the time. “It’s not a medical necessity that you have it.”
If that doesn't have you shaking your head and saying "oh for fuck's sake", Think Progress has more:
– At the 2001 Conservative Political Action Conference, Orr cheered Bush’s endorsement of Reagan’s “Mexico City Policy,” which required NGOs receiving federal funds to “neither perform nor actively promote abortion as a method of family planning in other nations.” Orr said that it was proof Bush was pro-life “in his heart.”
– In a 2000 Weekly Standard article, Orr railed against requiring health insurance plans to cover contraceptives. “It’s not about choice,” said Orr. “It’s not about health care. It’s about making everyone collaborators with the culture of death.”
– Orr authored a paper in 2000 titled, “Real Women Stay Married.” In it she wrote that women should “think about focusing our eyes, not upon ourselves, but upon the families we form through marriage.”
Quite the peach, eh? Going back a bit further into her résumé, Orr worked for the Family Research Council as "the senior director for marriage and family". Yes, that FRC. The group that opposes federal money for contraception. The group that says contraception = abortion. Their ex-senior director is now in charge of overseeing the federal contraception funding. I would say un-fucking-believable, but really, it's quite believable as far as this administration goes.
If you were wondering, no, the position does not require senate confirmation.
That's the strategy that James Watson, co-decrypter of the mysteries of DNA, chose to employ to sell some books on his current tour. The money quote:
The 79-year-old geneticist reopened the explosive debate about race and science in a newspaper interview in which he said Western policies towards African countries were wrongly based on an assumption that black people were as clever as their white counterparts when "testing" suggested the contrary. He claimed genes responsible for creating differences in human intelligence could be found within a decade.
It's a shame that the person who took "part in the unravelling of DNA" didn't come across anything in his research that would prevent the unravelling of his mind. Crazy like a fox, I suppose.
Shaker Gay As Xmas emailed me this link morning: "Thought you might like bad memories dredged up to score a nonsensical political point." Why, yes—I would!
The nonsensical point in question being made by Radar's Ray Gustini, is that the media is being too easy John Edwards, and as evidence: "Remember the revelation that two Edwards campaign bloggers authored anti-Catholic posts on their personal blogs? No, right?" This is an important point to make, by the way, because the MSM isn't widely reporting a National Enquirer story that Edwards had an affair. (Goat-blowers are all over it, however.)
Funny thing, though—lots of people actually do remember that "revelation." It was just brought up in that (now-1,300+ comments strong) MRA thread. Nearly every time a rightwing blogger links to me, they mention it. I was just obliquely quoted in The New Yorker's Shouts & Murmurs this week (question 7). And if you Google "Melissa McEwan," you have to go to something like page 58 of returned searches before you reach a page with no reference to that "revelation" on it.
So on that whole not remembering thing? Not so much.
And for added shits and giggles, here's another look at the sum total of my heinous anit-Catholicism as described in the WaPo article to which Gustini links:
On Tuesday, Donohue called for Edwards to fire the bloggers, citing posts that the women made in the past several months in which they criticized the church's opposition to homosexuality, abortion and contraception, sometimes using profanity.
…McEwan had written that the pope is among those who "regularly speak out against gay tolerance." Other postings used more graphic language.
So, perhaps Gustini ought to be forgiven on the basis he doesn't read good, because the evidence of anti-Catholic bigotry appears to be so profoundly lacking, it's almost incomprehensible that someone who did read good would come to the conclusion I wrote "anti-Catholic posts" and report it as fact.
But, as you know, the Queen Cunt is nothing if not understanding and generous, so help is on the way.
Reuters reports the Big News: In an interview with Norway's NRK public television, Gore at long last has finally ruled out a presidential run. Or so you'd think if you read the headline given their wire at MSNBC—Gore rules out presidential bid despite Nobel.
But if you read the actual news item, it's the same quote he's been giving all along: "I don't have plans to be a candidate again … I'm involved in a different kind of campaign, it's a global campaign. It's a campaign to change the way people think about the climate crisis." And if you look at Reuters' own site, the story is simply headlined Gore says no plans to run for presidency.
Yay for accuracy.
Mind you, I really don't think Gore is going to run, and I'm not mentioning this story to "keep hope alive" or something. My point, which really doesn't have to do with Gore at all (except insomuch as the incidental irony that it's got to be at the top of Gore's reasons for not running) is that our media sucks.
And one of its biggest flaws is its willingness to create narratives out of nothing, because it is impatient and hates nothing more than not knowing. And the narrative they built to try to push Gore into announcing his candidacy or making a Sherman statement was that he'd "say" if/when he won the Nobel Prize. And now he has. And he's giving the same "no plans" answer that he's always given (which long ago could have been construed as "ruling out" a presidential bid, but was incessantly parsed to leave that door open, because what a great story that would be!).
But now it's being treated as a final answer, for no other reason than that's how the story was supposed to go. He was supposed to say something definitive at this point. And so even if he hasn't—or nothing more definitive than before—the interpretation just changes. Like that.
And it's just as infuriating on a small scale like this as it is writ large—like watching the media slowly reverse itself on every single thing it ever said while cheerleading the war and sucking the president's dick. "Did we say he'd be fun to have a beer with? Oh, ha ha—we meant he's a stubborn, unpopular douchebag!"
Nicked from Chris: What is your favorite movie quote?
It's always impossible to choose just one, and I could spend the next three hours listing Woody Allen lines alone. But I'm going to hold myself to one, and this was the first one that popped into my head:
"Kill everyone now! Condone first degree murder! Advocate cannibalism! Eat shit! Filth is my politics! Filth is my life!"—Babs Johnson (played by my inner gay, Divine) in John Waters' Pink Flamingos.
Of all the many, many, many things wrong with Ann Coulter, her alleged physical flaws are right at the top of my fucking list of things about which I don't give a flying shit.
Ann Coulter is the high priestess of screeching hyperbole, whose natural habitat is the nearest studio chair on a right-wing cable hatefest, from whence she spews her bile-rich nuggets of insane vitriol like a mama bird projectile vomiting chunks of hate fuel to nourish her repellent babies, as they sit, gape-mouthed and wanting, waiting for their vile supper on couches in front of tellies across the nation so they may ever stay plump with outrage. And not only is she a monstrous font of diarrheic vitriol who disgorges a continual torrent of loathsome rhetoric to poison the public discourse; the frequency with which she manages to emit accurate (and original) assertions is approximate to photographic evidence of unicorns. She is as devoid of facts as she is of kindness and compassion. I've heard more astute political observations from a pile of day-old puke—and it didn't have to plagiarize, either.
And you expect me to care about her oversized forehead? Seriously?
Let me illustrate to you precisely how you're part of the problem and not part of the solution:
See how nothing got accomplished there? Except, of course, making fun of transgender people in three different ways, thereby being no better than Ann Coulter in the first place, and more deeply entrenching the idea that women aren't to be taken seriously. (Not that I'd expect better on that accord from Maxim.)
But if you genuinely care about the latest despicable outrage to emanate from the odious Coulter, to which you're purporting to respond, let me remind you that being misogynist, transphobic assholes in response doesn't actually improve anything.
It's just the same bag of shit she's peddling in a different package.
Congratulations.
And let me tell you something else—I imagine that there are few people on the planet with whom I share less in common than Ann Coulter, but the one thing we do share in common is being fiercely independent and intelligent women who speak their minds publicly, loudly, and often. Consequently, we are routinely subjected to all manner of attack on our looks—because that's the first tool out of the shed for lazy douchebags who can't be bothered to construct a real argument. But not only are schoolyard taunts like "Fatty!" and "Tranny!" so profoundly uncreative as to be exhaustingly boring; they also wholly lack the capacity to affect their target in even the most superficial way.
If you're picturing Coulter going home at night, walking through her door with a trembling chin and collapsing into a heap from the emotional pain of juvenile insults, I daresay you're imagining something that simply doesn't happen. I can guaranfuckingtee ya that shit is water off a duck's back—namecalling doesn't even sting, no less leave a wound that lingers.
You just don't do this day in and day out, even on the comparatively obscure level that I do it, without developing a skin nine inches thick. (To wit: The infamously vile O&A comment thread.) As a woman who has to face comments right in public threads like "i hope you get aids while being raped by a homeless man in the alleyways of new york, you cunt" or "the only tragedy is that a bullet didn't rip through your brainstem after you were used for your one and only purpose in this world" or "too bad that terrible rapist didn't kill your fat ass," you've got to trust me when I assure you that someone calling me fat and ugly isn't particularly effective.
I am quite certain Coulter would agree.
So in the end, what's the efficacy of this strategy?
Given that Ann Coulter's revolting ideology most vigorously flourishes in a culture replete with the intolerant, oppressive accoutrements of bigotry, adding yet more fuel to the long-raging fires of misogyny and transphobia is, in fact, a win for her. Further, it's a loss for every other other woman and transgender person in America, who are inescapably subject to the culturally endemic narratives of hatred which have—once again—been validated and reinforced. Women aren't to be taken seriously. Trannies are icky. Ugly women are trannies are bad and deserving of no respect.
That's a dangerous game for us you're playing—and I, for one, wish you would stop playing it.
Especially when it comes to a woman who's built an entire career around saying objectionable things to which, ya know, it might be worth one's time to object.
According to British scientist David Levy, humans will one day be able to marry robots. Hot!
Mr. Levy was awarded a PhD for his thesis paper entitled "Intimate Relationships with Aritificial Partners." Sort of reminds me of some people's relationships with their dildos, or for the more sophisticated (and depraved), the Real Doll.
According to Mr. Levy, "Trends in robotics and shifting attitudes on marriage are likely to result in sophisticated robots that will eventually be seen as suitable marriage partners." I've actually met a few people who were less life-like than most robots, and who made less suitable marriage partners than I would imagine, say, Johnny 5 or C3PO might (although he's a bit femme for my taste), so I believe Levy's theory completely.
The thesis concluded that the findings, based on 450 publications in the fields of psychology, sexology, sociology, robotics, materials science, artificial intelligence, gender studies and computer-human interaction, "are just as applicable to human interaction with robots of the future as they are to relationships between humans of today." I'm not sure how he was able to conclude that, unless he traveled to the future and visited a human/cyborg couples therapy session, but whatever.
This calls to mind several other questions about marriage. Will two humans of the same gender ever be allowed to get married? Will the same controversy exist when humans start wanting to marry robots? Will a male human and a "male" robot (or two females) be allowed to marry? What about transgendered robots? Will two robots be able to marry? Two robots of the same gender?
As a sassy robot from an 80s kids movie might say: "You do the math!"
Pam mentioned to me earlier today that she'd been looking for a graphic with the Republican candidates in a clown car. Since the Queen Cunt tries to be nothing if not helpful and accommodating, I set to work and voila!—GOP Clown Car.
I didn't have room for Hunter, Keyes, and Tancredo, but I managed to fit the seven biggest clowns in the bunch: Rudy "Popo" Giuliani, Fred "Bobo" Thompson, Mitt "Dodo" Romney, Sam "Coco" Brownback, Mike "Hoho" Huckabee, Ron "RoPo" Paul, and John "Assho" McCain. Honk honk!
Again, take this for whatever it's worth at this point, but the NY Daily News is now reporting that Randi Rhodes was not attacked, but fell. According to police and her attorney, Rhodes never filed a police report and never herself asserted she'd been attacked. So how the report originally got on air, I don't know—and of course I can't vouch for the validity of these reports, either. Just passing them along.
And, again, I'd caution against jumping to any definitive conclusions.
"Just let me get my caffeine, and then I'll speak to the press."
["A tiny piglet has been named Tetley—because he's no bigger than a cup of tea. Tetley was the smallest of a litter of eight Pennywell miniature pigs born to his mother, Poppy Two Socks, at Pennywell Farm, near Buckfastleigh in Devon. Pennywell owner Chris Murray said 'Tetley is the star of the farmyard'."]
Dawn Herb faces up to three months in jail and a $300 fine if she's convicted of using foul language inside her Scranton, Pa., residence.
"The toilet was overflowing and leaking down into the kitchen and I was yelling (for my daughter) to get the mop," she said, according to The Times-Tribune. "A guy is yelling, 'Shut the [expletive] up,' and I yelled back, 'Mind your own business.'"
Except the dude, her next-door neighbor, was an off-duty cop, and he decided to get all "asshole cop fuck you" about it and called the (on-duty?) police, who then charged her with disorderly conduct.
"It doesn't make any sense. I was in my house. It's not like I was outside or drunk," Herb, a mother of four, told the paper. "A cop can charge you with disorderly conduct for disrespecting them?"
Yep. That's what Patrolman Gerald Tallo seemed to think when he wrote the ticket. "At the end of the day, the opinion that counts is of the magisterial judge," Public Safety Director Ray Hayes told the paper.
Luckily, Ms. Herb lives in Scranton, not Philly—where Judge Deni would undoubtedly have sentenced her to death by lethal injection.
Btw, the Philly ACLU chapter says that swearing isn't a criminal offense. (Gee, really?) Also that they have to "bring one of these cases a year and sue some police departments because they do not remember that they are not the language police."
It's always the big tough guys with the delicate sensibilities, isn't it?
"Al Gore is rapidly depleting one of the earth's precious resources—awards. The man is plowing through our prize-scape like an unstoppable bulldozer of acclaim. Every day another precious, irreplaceable acre of trophies disappears into his gaping maw, never to be seen again!"
My friend Caryn gave this to me and it is excellent (not to mention super easy)!
White Chili
* 1 lb Great Northern Beans * 2 lbs Boneless/Skinless Chicken breast * 1 tb Olive oil * 1/3 cup chopped onion * 4 cloves garlic, crushed * 2 (4oz) cans chopped green chilies * 2 tsp ground cumin * 1 1/2 tsp oregano * 1/4 tsp ground cloves * 1/4 tsp cayenne pepper * 6 cups chicken broth * 2 cups shredded Monterey Jack cheese * salt and pepper to taste
--Soak beans according to package directions; drain well
--Place Chicken in large dutch oven and cover with boiling water simmer 15 min or until tender. Drain, cool and chop into cubes.
--Saute onion in oil in the dutch oven over med heat for 5 min. Add garlic, chilies, cumin, oregano, cloves and cayenne and cook 2 min. Add beans and broth; bring to a boil. Reduce heat and simmer stirring occasionally for 2 hrs or until beans are tender.
--Add chicken and cheese stirring constantly until chili is throughly heated and cheese is melted. Season with salt and fresh ground pepper.
Instead of boiling and cubing the chicken, I bought a rotisserie chicken and shredded by hand. I also used one hot and one mild can of chilies, which worked well for balancing the tastes of the spicy-lovers and spicy-haters in our house. Paired with fresh-baked cornbread--this is an awesome meal for the cool nights!
If you want to participate in Shaker Gourmet, email me at: shakergourmet (at) gmail.com Include a link to your blog, if you have one!
This fiery figure is being hailed as Pope John Paul II making an appearance beyond the grave.
The image, said by believers to show the Holy Father with his right hand raised in blessing, was spotted during a ceremony in Poland to mark the second anniversary of his death.
…The pictures were being broadcast continuously on Italian TV and also posted on religious websites, some of which crashed as thousands logged on to see for themselves the eerie figure formed by the flames.
Why did God let those websites crash when His believers were making their holy virtual pilgrimage to the images of the conflagrant cleric? Well, I guess God controls the universe, but Al Gore still controls teh internetz.
Anyway, the image of the fiery father is quite a mystery—and Catholics the world over are clamoring to find out more. Did he have a message? Is there a secret communiqué to be found about the nature of the afterlife? Was he just stopping by to say hi? The Vatican is being pretty tight-lipped about it, but one of my top secret spies has told me that they plan to send Monsignor Tommaso Stenico to check it out, since he's been refining his research of flamers for just such an occasion.
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