Quotes, Secret Cloud Bunker Edition
Now is not the time to politicize politics.
-- hellslittlestangel, Lawyers, Guns, and Money, comments
In 1935, Hawaii's Mauna Loa erupted, threatening the town of Hilo with its lava. Admittedly, that's an average Tuesday in Hawaii, but famed volcanologist Thomas Jaggar was determined to teach that lava a lesson it wouldn't soon forget.
Luckily, there was a nearby U.S. Army Air Corps base, commanded by a young George S. Patton, who of course later became famous for wearing ridiculous pants while standing in front of a big American flag. At Jaggar's prompting, Patton ordered his planes to take to the skies and bomb the erupting volcano. The hope was that the explosions would collapse the volcano's underground vents, blocking the flow of lava to the surface. It wasn't so much "mad science" as "Screw it, let's give it a shot" science. But it was one hell of a shot; Patton deployed a squadron of biplanes to swoop down and drop 20 600-pound bombs. The explosions, of course, sent molten lava hurling 200 feet into the air to burn holes in the planes' wings.
-- Alex Hanton, "5 Bonkers Supervillain Plans Real Governments Actually Tried," Cracked
It may seem medieval for an elected official to leverage the monarchy , but as the old saying goes "the past is prorogue."
-- @_mike_schilling, Twitter
Whenever my parents talk to other parents about shenanigans their young children pulled, my dad brings up the time he came home from work to see 3-year-old me up on the kitchen counter with an entire package of cinnamon raisin bagels having been split in half and de-raisined. When he asked me what I was doing, I very proudly exclaimed, 'I'm eating raisins!'
-- alexm42, Reddit
I may have shared this story before but I Love it, so here goes. Several years back I was listening to "SCI FRIDAY" with Ira Plato on the npr. His guest was one of the founders of the internet (no it wasn't Al Gore) It was the 25th anniversary of the internet, They lamented on all sorts of things that have changed since its inception. At the close of the interview Ira asked his guest; So what has been the most surprising thing you have seen since this all began.. (Now I am waiting with baited breath for some deep reflection perhaps how the transfer of data has exponentially increased our understanding of the universe.) He simply responded with. "I didn't know there were so many cats"
-- Jim Dandy, Facebook, comments
Climate denialism tends to move through predictable stages, i.e., it’s not happening, it’s happening but it’s a natural not anthropogenic process, it’s happening and we’re causing it but it’s not that bad, OK it’s real bad but there’s a technological fix just around the corner, aka capitalism to the rescue again, to whatever rationalizations will be deployed next month or year or decade to ensure that no rich person ever has to give up anything in the present to avert catastrophe in the future.
-- Paul Campos, "Heat Wave," Lawyers, Guns, and Money
ICYMI this morning there was a 2.9 mag earthquake in the Blackpool area in North West England, right next door to Cuadrilla’s fracking site. It is the largest one thus far and according to the rules further fracking has been suspended temporarily. Normally there would be about 10 to 20 protesters at the Preston New Road site but today there were about 400. Even the area’s Conservative MP has called for it to banned after previously (natch) supporting it. Everyone is fed up and it doesn’t help that Cuadrila’s spokeweasle was just on my teevee lying his arse off.
-- Litlbritdifrnt, Balloon Juice, comments
[T]he leaders of the BDS movement and its leading ideologists say, sometimes indirectly, sometimes explicitly, that their aim is the destruction (or, as Omar Barghouti writes, more kindly, the “euthanasia”) of the Jewish state. The occupation for them began in 1948, not 1967; the struggle is against “settler colonialism” and imperialism, and it will only end when Israel no longer exists. In the old days, we used to call the people who joined front groups, “useful idiots.”
-- Michael Walzer, "Don't Be 'Useful Idiots' for BDS," Third Narrative
No society ever comes back from "half of us are willing to usurp the rule of current law for power and control" without violent revolution. It does not happen that way, and it won't happen that way here.
-- David Simons, Facebook, comments
[Greater Victoria School] Board chair Jordan Watters, the driving force behind Victoria’s new policy, says that when school staff tell certain students that their clothing distracts others from learning, it sends “really loud messages to certain children about whose education is valued.” Ms. Watters said that while dress codes disproportionately target girls, they also impact boys, with Indigenous and racialized boys often facing greater scrutiny.
-- Zosia Bielski, "Is ‘modesty’ no longer the best policy? On dress codes, Canadian schools begin to change their approach," The Globe and Mail
Is money speech if nobody hears it?
-- Daglock, Lawyers, Guns, and Money, comments
I must admit to having a soft spot for the book of Deuteronomy, given its passion for and concern for the just ordering of society. However, in the course of reviewing this sefer, week by week for this regularly composed vort, I have been reacquainted with the hard, even brutal side of biblical justice. In the section following the opening salvo, Moshe Rabbeinu provides instruction on what to do if a community finds within it evidence of theological deviance, or heresy. If the suspected person is found guilty of this elemental crime, they are taken to the settlement’s gates and executed by means of stoning. The same punishment is meted out to those who rebel against human authorities, as well. (Deut. 17:11-13)
However, even within this example of (what antisemites call) Old Testament justice, there exist conditions and controls which temper this legal process. Before any sentencing can occur, says Moshe, there must be a thorough investigation of the alleged matter at hand. “When it is described to you and you heed, you [must] search out the matter well, and then [only] if it is true…” (Deut. 17:4) The Torah is clear that capital punishment can only be decided upon on the testimony of at least two corroborating witnesses. The Talmud, in reams of folio pages, expands this principle, creating a pristine, almost unachievable standard for the burden of proof. Strikingly, when the Torah describes the primal scene of the execution itself, it is the witnesses, whose testimony condemned this person to death, who must be the hands that cast the stones. They must face what they have caused to occur, they must physically occupy the space of responsibility.
-- R' Joshua Schwartz, Facebook
My father was so poor I remember him telling me he had the first good meal of his life after he enlisted in the army (immediately after Pearl Harbor)
-- germy, Balloon Juice, comments
Only one Wall Street executive ever served jail time for the financial crisis. Rampant foreclosure fraud during the crisis, in which mortgage companies illegally forced millions of families from their homes on the basis of false evidence, went largely unpunished. Lanny Breuer, President Obama’s assistant attorney general for the criminal division of the Department of Justice, was so notoriously lax that Obama’s White House counsel Kathy Ruemmler once jokingly asked him, “How many cases are you dismissing this week?”
-- Dylan Matthews, "Donald Trump and the crisis of elite impunity," Vox
If you travel 8 hours with a YouTuber pillow to support a subreddit then I feel bad for your parents.
-- @scottytaco, Twitter
Despite his vast wealth (however he got it) and his weird, evil charisma and all the dirt he had on all the rich and powerful men the fact remained that Epstein was not royalty, and nor was he heir to a political/financial dynasty. He was a creep with sick urges who got very very rich and pandered to other rich perverts. If Epstein, whose entire life was a fever dream of sexual intrigue and power games, simply died (and his records destroyed) life would be much easier for all his rich and powerful friends/clients/accomplices. Many of these rich and powerful men ARE aristocrats and heirs of political and financial dynasties.
And yet despite this, and despite the world we live in (where ex Nazis helped build NASA, where Kim Jong-nam is assassinated in a crowded airport in broad daylight by giggling women, where the Republican hold on power is based on criminal conspiracies) so many Reasonable People are going to chuckle and say "Oh come come. No need to see conspiracies everywhere. People kill themselves in jail all the time, nothing to see here."
-- cgoldvine, Lawyers, Guns, and Money, comments
The BDS website claims that the campaign is supported by Palestinian civil society, that a large number of organizations of different sorts have endorsed it. This is a phenomenon without precedent in the history of military occupation-in a civil society subject to foreign rule, a civil society that exists under military occupation, there are many groups, dozens of groups, actively, openly, and freely opposing the occupation. Please take a minute to consider the radical disjunction between this description of Palestinian civil society and the accompanying description of Israeli oppression.
-- Michael Walzer, "Don't Be 'Useful Idiots' for BDS," Third Narrative
Is it OK to call him a yawning abyss of cluelessness?
**hopes abysses don't have a lawyer**
-- Cindy Shoemaker Clayton, Facebook, comments
Conservatism is about maintaining existing hierarchies and preventing individuals from moving up or down within them.
-- Major Major Major Major, Balloon Juice, comments
Over the past 10 years, Fox News has outstripped CNN as America’s most-watched cable news network. On the day special counsel Robert S. Mueller III released his report on Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election, Fox News’s online articles racked up more reactions and shares on Facebook than all the stories by CBS, ABC and NPR combined. Conservatives control the presidency, the Senate and the Supreme Court.
Is it true that it’s “career-ending” to be of the reasonable right? Shapiro’s recent “The Right Side of History” was a New York Times No. 1 bestseller. Rubin’s YouTube channel has more than 1 million subscribers, and last year, he was the subject of an admiring 4,000-word profile in Playboy. Peterson bragged that scalpers were charging more for a sold-out appearance of his than for tickets to a Toronto Maple Leafs playoff game.
-- Eve Fairbanks, "The 'reasonable' rebels," The Washington Post
A strange little theory of mine is that God gives you plenty of chances to turn over a new leaf and be good. Explains why the good people often die young and evil bastards get to live a long lives, because it's just God patiently waiting for them to change.
Given the number of times that's actually happened, you'd have thought He'd have wised up by now.
-- Mark Lyons and Gabriel Ratchet, Lawyers, Guns, and Money, comments
“Political correctness is killing comedy, here are 87 separate specials entitled ‘Triggered’ or ‘I Blew Up Your Safe Space,’ or ‘I Beat Your Trigger Warning to Death with a Shovel’"
-- cjane87, Twitter
If you aren't operating from the assumption that they [the Republicans] are trying to fuck you at this point, you are just too dumb to live.
-- Gin and Tacos, Facebook, comments
Asked whether schools (and their dress codes) shouldn’t serve as more of a training ground for the workplace, Mr. Jeffers [Ken Jeffers, senior manager of Equitable & Inclusive System Culture] responded that students “are not professional employees getting paid to be there, or interns.”
-- Zosia Bielski, "Is ‘modesty’ no longer the best policy? On dress codes, Canadian schools begin to change their approach," The Globe and Mail
Women weren’t included in clinical trials until the 1990s. While we make up 70% of chronic pain patients, 80% of pain medication has been tested only on men. Even in preclinical trials with cell lines and rodents, males have been favoured over females. Researchers have justified this bias by claiming that oestrous cycles in female rodents - and menstrual cycles in human women - would potentially corrupt results. If that were so, wouldn’t it be quite important to find out before selling the drug to women?
-- Gabrielle Jackson, "Why don't doctors trust women? Because they don't know much about us," The Guardian
Every other day or so I will read a little squib in the B section of the paper, p. 2, listing some woman who's been killed or assaulted by husband/boyfriend/stalker. Sometimes the children die too. It's about the same frequency as car accidents. A plague upon our land that simmers along quietly, barely in notice. The rage of men attempting to control a particular woman doesn't always have limited boundaries. In some it just seems to overspread and become a rage against humans themselves.
-- MacCheerful, Lawyers, Guns, and Money, comments
People are so idiotic. We have a mayoral race in which there are 5 Democrats about to have a primary, and only one Republican candidate who’s a former mayor. He once screamed at me at a young woman’s graduation party about how Obama had increased the deficit 1,000,000 percent or something like that - I mean screaming, red-faced. He’s an incredible jerk. Today at lunch a highly liberal woman said that if X or Y wins the Democratic primary, she’s voting for the Repub. I was so upset. WHY????
-- zhena gogolia, Balloon Juice, comments
The wing nuts thought the FEMA Camps were where the evil lefties were going to put the right wingers. Why would they think something so insane? Because that's what they would do. Ask the refugees at the border (anyone still remember them?) Apparently it is true that the "Land of the Free" has a greater percentage of its population in prison than Stalin had in the Gulag Labor Camps.
-- Charles Glidden (Prior Aelred), Facebook, comments
I've never seen anything more pathetic in my life, and I look into the mirror every day
-- @deno_st, Twitter
My 2-year-old attempts to hide the 75-pound family dog in various places in his room, so that the dog can sleep in there with him. So far, I've found the dog in the closet, behind the curtains, surrounded by stuffed animals to 'blend in,' and on many occasions, I see a giant mound under the comforter at the foot of his bed. My son is astonished every time I find the dog, and on more than one occasion, he even attempted to persuade me that he didn't even know we had a dog.
-- katievantassell, Reddit, comments
My cousin's husband tried the family destroyer route, shooting both their sons and then himself. One of the kids survived but was blinded; my family tells me he's doing extremely well and is a very competitive swimmer. Nota bene that my cousin's husband kept his guns in a safe and followed good firearms hygiene. But when the marriage fell apart, it was easy for him to let his impulses destroy two lives.
-- CL Minou, Lawyers, Guns, and Money, comments
“One of the ways that white supremacists and anti-Semites are able to evade the censors is by using coded language, which is very difficult to deal with because when you use coded language there is plausible deniability,” he said.
An example that ADL researchers have found, for example, revolves around one of the most common white-supremacist theories, what’s often called “the replacement problem” - the belief that there’s a concerted effort to supplant the white race with racial and ethnic minorities. This was famously on display when neo-Nazis were chanting “Jews will not replace us!” at the Charlottesville rally in August 2017.
Now, Truchman said, white supremacists are simply referring to this theory as the “R problem” to avoid flagging the platform’s monitors.
-- Eric Cortellessa, "How YouTube became an open, lucrative stage for anti-Semitic conspiracy theories," The Times of Israel
Lincoln didn’t train his political fire on the most vicious proslavery advocates. Instead, he focused it on people like Sen. Stephen Douglas (D-Ill.), who insisted that he didn’t support slavery per se. Instead, Douglas claimed he was duty-bound to defend the South’s rights on the basis of certain fundamental American principles, including the right to freely choose how you live.
Lincoln understood that antebellum reasoning was more dangerous than straightforward defenses of chattel slavery. He feared that by claiming to stand for freedom, reason and civility, and by framing themselves as beleaguered victims, pro-Southern thinkers could draft new warriors who thought they were fighting for something fundamentally American, even if they were wary of slavery itself.
And that’s what happened. One reason slavery was not abolished in America through the political process, as it was in Britain, is that abolitionists were rhetorically straitjacketed by the proposition that they were the hard-liners who sought to curtail freedom. When the Charleston Mercury wrote that it was the “duty” of Northerners to “prove” that they were willing to defend Southerners against “fanatics,” Northern newspapers reprinted the editorial. Northerners, not Southerners, had to watch what they said and strain to compromise so they didn’t confirm the dictatorial notion Southern rhetoricians had implanted in the public mind.
-- Eve Fairbanks, "The 'reasonable' rebels," The Washington Post
[L]ast month a 62-year-old woman was hospitalised with second-degree burns after steaming her vagina. ... Confusion that results in (as a 2016 study revealed) only 56% of British women being able to locate the vagina on a diagram.
-- Eva Wiseman, "Jennifer Gunter: ‘Women are being told lies about their bodies’," The Guardian
We do not give electoral affirmative action to any other group in America. Do Black Americans have their votes count more bc they have been disenfranchised for 100s of years? Do Reservations get an electoral vote? Does Puerto Rico and US territories get them? No. They don’t. The Electoral College isn’t about fairness at all; it’s about empowering some voters over others.
-- Chris Barklay, Facebook
Taking guns away from domestic abusers would do a lot to protect their domestic abuse victims. The issue here is not that they might hurt "real" people, but rather that domestic abuse isn't treated as a serious crime and is often shrugged off as an internal family matter.
-- Nobdy, Lawyers, Guns, and Money, comments
Eight of the 10 prescription drugs taken off the market by the US Food and Drug Administration between 1997 and 2000 owing to severe adverse effects caused greater health risks in women than men. A 2018 study found this was a result of “serious male biases in basic, preclinical, and clinical research”.
-- Gabrielle Jackson, "Why don't doctors trust women? Because they don't know much about us," The Guardian
wow, i didn't know it was possible smell BO and doritos thru a photograph
-- @TomCokeIsABlunt, Twitter
Visas? Most of these people don't have socks anymore. Whatever documents they may have had have been blown into the Gulf Stream and are halfway to Nova Scotia by now.
-- Charles P. Pierce, "The Bahamas Is Learning That the United States Has Pulled Up the
Drawbridge," Esquire, on an unannounced change requiring Bahamians to get visas I’m so white I scare ghosts. It takes me a week in the tropics to get up to Pale Blue. The only brown my ancestors ever saw came in the form of gravy.
-- Tony Jay, Balloon Juice, comments
just think how much better the world would be if (white) men could take no for an answer with a little more grace
-- jim, Lawyers, Guns, and Money, comments
They describe Israel as the only agent in the Middle East. The politics of the surrounding countries is ignored. The Palestinians are accorded only the status of victims of Israeli oppression; the pathologies of their own politics, the authoritarianism and brutality of both Fatah and Hamas, are never mentioned. For men and women who are professional students of politics, this cannot be a convincing story. So, please, don’t act as if you are convinced.
-- Michael Walzer, "Don't Be 'Useful Idiots' for BDS," Third Narrative
If you evaluate Israeli politics through the prism of American democracy, you will be disappointed (and embarrassed). You will also miss what Israel is all about.
-- Daniel Gordis, quoted on Facebook
Hard-right American commentators like David Horowitz have noted the tactical advantages of sounding “outraged” and “morally certain,” and of stressing their status as renegade thinkers to argue for right-wing policies such as much more restrictive immigration laws or institutionalized prejudice against Muslims. And he may indeed have learned this from elements of the left: a toxic “cancel” culture has existed there for a long time. But that doesn’t justify so disingenuously magnifying the threat.
-- Eve Fairbanks, "The 'reasonable' rebels," The Washington Post
Virginia passed the Racial Integrity Act in 1924. On a birth certificate or marriage licenses, each person was identified as “white” or “colored,” and the act said the two should never mix. Support for the law was driven by Walter Plecker, registrar of the state’s Bureau of Vital Statistics and an indefatigable racist. After prodding the law’s passage, Plecker took it upon himself to investigate “white” marriages he deemed suspicious and threatened midwives and new mothers with marital data. In a 1943 letter bragging of the thoroughness of his records he told a federal official, “Hitler’s genealogical study of the Jews is not more complete.”
Under Virginia’s law, people with one-sixteenth or less Native American blood were allowed to call themselves “white” - a concession to the legacy of John Rolfe and Pocahontas that infuriated Plecker. He claimed there were no true American Indians left in Virginia and all were “colored,” a decree that impedes tribal recognition to this day.
-- Rachel Weiner, "‘Aryan’ and ‘Octoroon’: Couples challenge racial labels to get married in Virginia," THe Washington Post ['Aryan'?! 'Octoroon'?! Mind blown. -- ?!]
Nearly a century ago, cars started taking over the public roads essentially by force, killing other users at astonishing rates and frightening them out of the roads, while launching a propaganda campaign to stigmatize road use by non-drivers. The laws granting them their dominant place on the roads came after the successful, often extra-legal attempt to take them over. I doubt we’ll ever take our cities back from cars without some direct action.
-- DJW, "Bus Lane Hero," Lawyers, Guns, and Money
[A] school-friend of my partner who lived with us in a shared house way back in their University days. One of two sisters, her Mum was a pasty white Irish Catholic nurse and her Dad a former soldier from Jamaica. Now, thanks to how her genes shook out, she was white, like super-white. Red hair, blue eyes, skin like yoghurt, but she was INTENSELY into her black culture, while her sister, who was a coffee-and-cream skinned black girl with brown eyes, was a comic-book reading geek and a metal-head. Much frustration was expressed by the one who had to work mega-hard to be taken seriously as a ‘woman of colour’, and many eye-rolls from the one who had never been treated as anything else. Funny thing was, the ‘white’ sister was the spitting-image of her Dad, while the ‘black’ sister was a double for her Mum.
Colour, man. It’s ridiculous that people think it matters, and infuriating that it actually does matter, because some people have shit between their ears and other people are happy to exploit that defect.
-- Tony Jay, Balloon Juice, comments
Canadians are born all over the world, it just sometimes takes a bit of time for them to get here.
-- Dawson City, Yukon, mayor Wayne Potoroka, quoted on Twitter
-- hellslittlestangel, Lawyers, Guns, and Money, comments
In 1935, Hawaii's Mauna Loa erupted, threatening the town of Hilo with its lava. Admittedly, that's an average Tuesday in Hawaii, but famed volcanologist Thomas Jaggar was determined to teach that lava a lesson it wouldn't soon forget.
Luckily, there was a nearby U.S. Army Air Corps base, commanded by a young George S. Patton, who of course later became famous for wearing ridiculous pants while standing in front of a big American flag. At Jaggar's prompting, Patton ordered his planes to take to the skies and bomb the erupting volcano. The hope was that the explosions would collapse the volcano's underground vents, blocking the flow of lava to the surface. It wasn't so much "mad science" as "Screw it, let's give it a shot" science. But it was one hell of a shot; Patton deployed a squadron of biplanes to swoop down and drop 20 600-pound bombs. The explosions, of course, sent molten lava hurling 200 feet into the air to burn holes in the planes' wings.
-- Alex Hanton, "5 Bonkers Supervillain Plans Real Governments Actually Tried," Cracked
It may seem medieval for an elected official to leverage the monarchy , but as the old saying goes "the past is prorogue."
-- @_mike_schilling, Twitter
Whenever my parents talk to other parents about shenanigans their young children pulled, my dad brings up the time he came home from work to see 3-year-old me up on the kitchen counter with an entire package of cinnamon raisin bagels having been split in half and de-raisined. When he asked me what I was doing, I very proudly exclaimed, 'I'm eating raisins!'
-- alexm42, Reddit
I may have shared this story before but I Love it, so here goes. Several years back I was listening to "SCI FRIDAY" with Ira Plato on the npr. His guest was one of the founders of the internet (no it wasn't Al Gore) It was the 25th anniversary of the internet, They lamented on all sorts of things that have changed since its inception. At the close of the interview Ira asked his guest; So what has been the most surprising thing you have seen since this all began.. (Now I am waiting with baited breath for some deep reflection perhaps how the transfer of data has exponentially increased our understanding of the universe.) He simply responded with. "I didn't know there were so many cats"
-- Jim Dandy, Facebook, comments
Climate denialism tends to move through predictable stages, i.e., it’s not happening, it’s happening but it’s a natural not anthropogenic process, it’s happening and we’re causing it but it’s not that bad, OK it’s real bad but there’s a technological fix just around the corner, aka capitalism to the rescue again, to whatever rationalizations will be deployed next month or year or decade to ensure that no rich person ever has to give up anything in the present to avert catastrophe in the future.
-- Paul Campos, "Heat Wave," Lawyers, Guns, and Money
ICYMI this morning there was a 2.9 mag earthquake in the Blackpool area in North West England, right next door to Cuadrilla’s fracking site. It is the largest one thus far and according to the rules further fracking has been suspended temporarily. Normally there would be about 10 to 20 protesters at the Preston New Road site but today there were about 400. Even the area’s Conservative MP has called for it to banned after previously (natch) supporting it. Everyone is fed up and it doesn’t help that Cuadrila’s spokeweasle was just on my teevee lying his arse off.
-- Litlbritdifrnt, Balloon Juice, comments
[T]he leaders of the BDS movement and its leading ideologists say, sometimes indirectly, sometimes explicitly, that their aim is the destruction (or, as Omar Barghouti writes, more kindly, the “euthanasia”) of the Jewish state. The occupation for them began in 1948, not 1967; the struggle is against “settler colonialism” and imperialism, and it will only end when Israel no longer exists. In the old days, we used to call the people who joined front groups, “useful idiots.”
-- Michael Walzer, "Don't Be 'Useful Idiots' for BDS," Third Narrative
No society ever comes back from "half of us are willing to usurp the rule of current law for power and control" without violent revolution. It does not happen that way, and it won't happen that way here.
-- David Simons, Facebook, comments
[Greater Victoria School] Board chair Jordan Watters, the driving force behind Victoria’s new policy, says that when school staff tell certain students that their clothing distracts others from learning, it sends “really loud messages to certain children about whose education is valued.” Ms. Watters said that while dress codes disproportionately target girls, they also impact boys, with Indigenous and racialized boys often facing greater scrutiny.
-- Zosia Bielski, "Is ‘modesty’ no longer the best policy? On dress codes, Canadian schools begin to change their approach," The Globe and Mail
Is money speech if nobody hears it?
-- Daglock, Lawyers, Guns, and Money, comments
I must admit to having a soft spot for the book of Deuteronomy, given its passion for and concern for the just ordering of society. However, in the course of reviewing this sefer, week by week for this regularly composed vort, I have been reacquainted with the hard, even brutal side of biblical justice. In the section following the opening salvo, Moshe Rabbeinu provides instruction on what to do if a community finds within it evidence of theological deviance, or heresy. If the suspected person is found guilty of this elemental crime, they are taken to the settlement’s gates and executed by means of stoning. The same punishment is meted out to those who rebel against human authorities, as well. (Deut. 17:11-13)
However, even within this example of (what antisemites call) Old Testament justice, there exist conditions and controls which temper this legal process. Before any sentencing can occur, says Moshe, there must be a thorough investigation of the alleged matter at hand. “When it is described to you and you heed, you [must] search out the matter well, and then [only] if it is true…” (Deut. 17:4) The Torah is clear that capital punishment can only be decided upon on the testimony of at least two corroborating witnesses. The Talmud, in reams of folio pages, expands this principle, creating a pristine, almost unachievable standard for the burden of proof. Strikingly, when the Torah describes the primal scene of the execution itself, it is the witnesses, whose testimony condemned this person to death, who must be the hands that cast the stones. They must face what they have caused to occur, they must physically occupy the space of responsibility.
-- R' Joshua Schwartz, Facebook
My father was so poor I remember him telling me he had the first good meal of his life after he enlisted in the army (immediately after Pearl Harbor)
-- germy, Balloon Juice, comments
Only one Wall Street executive ever served jail time for the financial crisis. Rampant foreclosure fraud during the crisis, in which mortgage companies illegally forced millions of families from their homes on the basis of false evidence, went largely unpunished. Lanny Breuer, President Obama’s assistant attorney general for the criminal division of the Department of Justice, was so notoriously lax that Obama’s White House counsel Kathy Ruemmler once jokingly asked him, “How many cases are you dismissing this week?”
-- Dylan Matthews, "Donald Trump and the crisis of elite impunity," Vox
If you travel 8 hours with a YouTuber pillow to support a subreddit then I feel bad for your parents.
-- @scottytaco, Twitter
Despite his vast wealth (however he got it) and his weird, evil charisma and all the dirt he had on all the rich and powerful men the fact remained that Epstein was not royalty, and nor was he heir to a political/financial dynasty. He was a creep with sick urges who got very very rich and pandered to other rich perverts. If Epstein, whose entire life was a fever dream of sexual intrigue and power games, simply died (and his records destroyed) life would be much easier for all his rich and powerful friends/clients/accomplices. Many of these rich and powerful men ARE aristocrats and heirs of political and financial dynasties.
And yet despite this, and despite the world we live in (where ex Nazis helped build NASA, where Kim Jong-nam is assassinated in a crowded airport in broad daylight by giggling women, where the Republican hold on power is based on criminal conspiracies) so many Reasonable People are going to chuckle and say "Oh come come. No need to see conspiracies everywhere. People kill themselves in jail all the time, nothing to see here."
-- cgoldvine, Lawyers, Guns, and Money, comments
The BDS website claims that the campaign is supported by Palestinian civil society, that a large number of organizations of different sorts have endorsed it. This is a phenomenon without precedent in the history of military occupation-in a civil society subject to foreign rule, a civil society that exists under military occupation, there are many groups, dozens of groups, actively, openly, and freely opposing the occupation. Please take a minute to consider the radical disjunction between this description of Palestinian civil society and the accompanying description of Israeli oppression.
-- Michael Walzer, "Don't Be 'Useful Idiots' for BDS," Third Narrative
Is it OK to call him a yawning abyss of cluelessness?
**hopes abysses don't have a lawyer**
-- Cindy Shoemaker Clayton, Facebook, comments
Conservatism is about maintaining existing hierarchies and preventing individuals from moving up or down within them.
-- Major Major Major Major, Balloon Juice, comments
Over the past 10 years, Fox News has outstripped CNN as America’s most-watched cable news network. On the day special counsel Robert S. Mueller III released his report on Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election, Fox News’s online articles racked up more reactions and shares on Facebook than all the stories by CBS, ABC and NPR combined. Conservatives control the presidency, the Senate and the Supreme Court.
Is it true that it’s “career-ending” to be of the reasonable right? Shapiro’s recent “The Right Side of History” was a New York Times No. 1 bestseller. Rubin’s YouTube channel has more than 1 million subscribers, and last year, he was the subject of an admiring 4,000-word profile in Playboy. Peterson bragged that scalpers were charging more for a sold-out appearance of his than for tickets to a Toronto Maple Leafs playoff game.
-- Eve Fairbanks, "The 'reasonable' rebels," The Washington Post
A strange little theory of mine is that God gives you plenty of chances to turn over a new leaf and be good. Explains why the good people often die young and evil bastards get to live a long lives, because it's just God patiently waiting for them to change.
Given the number of times that's actually happened, you'd have thought He'd have wised up by now.
-- Mark Lyons and Gabriel Ratchet, Lawyers, Guns, and Money, comments
“Political correctness is killing comedy, here are 87 separate specials entitled ‘Triggered’ or ‘I Blew Up Your Safe Space,’ or ‘I Beat Your Trigger Warning to Death with a Shovel’"
-- cjane87, Twitter
If you aren't operating from the assumption that they [the Republicans] are trying to fuck you at this point, you are just too dumb to live.
-- Gin and Tacos, Facebook, comments
Asked whether schools (and their dress codes) shouldn’t serve as more of a training ground for the workplace, Mr. Jeffers [Ken Jeffers, senior manager of Equitable & Inclusive System Culture] responded that students “are not professional employees getting paid to be there, or interns.”
-- Zosia Bielski, "Is ‘modesty’ no longer the best policy? On dress codes, Canadian schools begin to change their approach," The Globe and Mail
Women weren’t included in clinical trials until the 1990s. While we make up 70% of chronic pain patients, 80% of pain medication has been tested only on men. Even in preclinical trials with cell lines and rodents, males have been favoured over females. Researchers have justified this bias by claiming that oestrous cycles in female rodents - and menstrual cycles in human women - would potentially corrupt results. If that were so, wouldn’t it be quite important to find out before selling the drug to women?
-- Gabrielle Jackson, "Why don't doctors trust women? Because they don't know much about us," The Guardian
Every other day or so I will read a little squib in the B section of the paper, p. 2, listing some woman who's been killed or assaulted by husband/boyfriend/stalker. Sometimes the children die too. It's about the same frequency as car accidents. A plague upon our land that simmers along quietly, barely in notice. The rage of men attempting to control a particular woman doesn't always have limited boundaries. In some it just seems to overspread and become a rage against humans themselves.
-- MacCheerful, Lawyers, Guns, and Money, comments
People are so idiotic. We have a mayoral race in which there are 5 Democrats about to have a primary, and only one Republican candidate who’s a former mayor. He once screamed at me at a young woman’s graduation party about how Obama had increased the deficit 1,000,000 percent or something like that - I mean screaming, red-faced. He’s an incredible jerk. Today at lunch a highly liberal woman said that if X or Y wins the Democratic primary, she’s voting for the Repub. I was so upset. WHY????
-- zhena gogolia, Balloon Juice, comments
The wing nuts thought the FEMA Camps were where the evil lefties were going to put the right wingers. Why would they think something so insane? Because that's what they would do. Ask the refugees at the border (anyone still remember them?) Apparently it is true that the "Land of the Free" has a greater percentage of its population in prison than Stalin had in the Gulag Labor Camps.
-- Charles Glidden (Prior Aelred), Facebook, comments
I've never seen anything more pathetic in my life, and I look into the mirror every day
-- @deno_st, Twitter
My 2-year-old attempts to hide the 75-pound family dog in various places in his room, so that the dog can sleep in there with him. So far, I've found the dog in the closet, behind the curtains, surrounded by stuffed animals to 'blend in,' and on many occasions, I see a giant mound under the comforter at the foot of his bed. My son is astonished every time I find the dog, and on more than one occasion, he even attempted to persuade me that he didn't even know we had a dog.
-- katievantassell, Reddit, comments
My cousin's husband tried the family destroyer route, shooting both their sons and then himself. One of the kids survived but was blinded; my family tells me he's doing extremely well and is a very competitive swimmer. Nota bene that my cousin's husband kept his guns in a safe and followed good firearms hygiene. But when the marriage fell apart, it was easy for him to let his impulses destroy two lives.
-- CL Minou, Lawyers, Guns, and Money, comments
“One of the ways that white supremacists and anti-Semites are able to evade the censors is by using coded language, which is very difficult to deal with because when you use coded language there is plausible deniability,” he said.
An example that ADL researchers have found, for example, revolves around one of the most common white-supremacist theories, what’s often called “the replacement problem” - the belief that there’s a concerted effort to supplant the white race with racial and ethnic minorities. This was famously on display when neo-Nazis were chanting “Jews will not replace us!” at the Charlottesville rally in August 2017.
Now, Truchman said, white supremacists are simply referring to this theory as the “R problem” to avoid flagging the platform’s monitors.
-- Eric Cortellessa, "How YouTube became an open, lucrative stage for anti-Semitic conspiracy theories," The Times of Israel
Lincoln didn’t train his political fire on the most vicious proslavery advocates. Instead, he focused it on people like Sen. Stephen Douglas (D-Ill.), who insisted that he didn’t support slavery per se. Instead, Douglas claimed he was duty-bound to defend the South’s rights on the basis of certain fundamental American principles, including the right to freely choose how you live.
Lincoln understood that antebellum reasoning was more dangerous than straightforward defenses of chattel slavery. He feared that by claiming to stand for freedom, reason and civility, and by framing themselves as beleaguered victims, pro-Southern thinkers could draft new warriors who thought they were fighting for something fundamentally American, even if they were wary of slavery itself.
And that’s what happened. One reason slavery was not abolished in America through the political process, as it was in Britain, is that abolitionists were rhetorically straitjacketed by the proposition that they were the hard-liners who sought to curtail freedom. When the Charleston Mercury wrote that it was the “duty” of Northerners to “prove” that they were willing to defend Southerners against “fanatics,” Northern newspapers reprinted the editorial. Northerners, not Southerners, had to watch what they said and strain to compromise so they didn’t confirm the dictatorial notion Southern rhetoricians had implanted in the public mind.
-- Eve Fairbanks, "The 'reasonable' rebels," The Washington Post
[L]ast month a 62-year-old woman was hospitalised with second-degree burns after steaming her vagina. ... Confusion that results in (as a 2016 study revealed) only 56% of British women being able to locate the vagina on a diagram.
-- Eva Wiseman, "Jennifer Gunter: ‘Women are being told lies about their bodies’," The Guardian
We do not give electoral affirmative action to any other group in America. Do Black Americans have their votes count more bc they have been disenfranchised for 100s of years? Do Reservations get an electoral vote? Does Puerto Rico and US territories get them? No. They don’t. The Electoral College isn’t about fairness at all; it’s about empowering some voters over others.
-- Chris Barklay, Facebook
Taking guns away from domestic abusers would do a lot to protect their domestic abuse victims. The issue here is not that they might hurt "real" people, but rather that domestic abuse isn't treated as a serious crime and is often shrugged off as an internal family matter.
-- Nobdy, Lawyers, Guns, and Money, comments
Eight of the 10 prescription drugs taken off the market by the US Food and Drug Administration between 1997 and 2000 owing to severe adverse effects caused greater health risks in women than men. A 2018 study found this was a result of “serious male biases in basic, preclinical, and clinical research”.
-- Gabrielle Jackson, "Why don't doctors trust women? Because they don't know much about us," The Guardian
wow, i didn't know it was possible smell BO and doritos thru a photograph
-- @TomCokeIsABlunt, Twitter
Visas? Most of these people don't have socks anymore. Whatever documents they may have had have been blown into the Gulf Stream and are halfway to Nova Scotia by now.
-- Charles P. Pierce, "The Bahamas Is Learning That the United States Has Pulled Up the
Drawbridge," Esquire, on an unannounced change requiring Bahamians to get visas I’m so white I scare ghosts. It takes me a week in the tropics to get up to Pale Blue. The only brown my ancestors ever saw came in the form of gravy.
-- Tony Jay, Balloon Juice, comments
just think how much better the world would be if (white) men could take no for an answer with a little more grace
-- jim, Lawyers, Guns, and Money, comments
They describe Israel as the only agent in the Middle East. The politics of the surrounding countries is ignored. The Palestinians are accorded only the status of victims of Israeli oppression; the pathologies of their own politics, the authoritarianism and brutality of both Fatah and Hamas, are never mentioned. For men and women who are professional students of politics, this cannot be a convincing story. So, please, don’t act as if you are convinced.
-- Michael Walzer, "Don't Be 'Useful Idiots' for BDS," Third Narrative
If you evaluate Israeli politics through the prism of American democracy, you will be disappointed (and embarrassed). You will also miss what Israel is all about.
-- Daniel Gordis, quoted on Facebook
Hard-right American commentators like David Horowitz have noted the tactical advantages of sounding “outraged” and “morally certain,” and of stressing their status as renegade thinkers to argue for right-wing policies such as much more restrictive immigration laws or institutionalized prejudice against Muslims. And he may indeed have learned this from elements of the left: a toxic “cancel” culture has existed there for a long time. But that doesn’t justify so disingenuously magnifying the threat.
-- Eve Fairbanks, "The 'reasonable' rebels," The Washington Post
Virginia passed the Racial Integrity Act in 1924. On a birth certificate or marriage licenses, each person was identified as “white” or “colored,” and the act said the two should never mix. Support for the law was driven by Walter Plecker, registrar of the state’s Bureau of Vital Statistics and an indefatigable racist. After prodding the law’s passage, Plecker took it upon himself to investigate “white” marriages he deemed suspicious and threatened midwives and new mothers with marital data. In a 1943 letter bragging of the thoroughness of his records he told a federal official, “Hitler’s genealogical study of the Jews is not more complete.”
Under Virginia’s law, people with one-sixteenth or less Native American blood were allowed to call themselves “white” - a concession to the legacy of John Rolfe and Pocahontas that infuriated Plecker. He claimed there were no true American Indians left in Virginia and all were “colored,” a decree that impedes tribal recognition to this day.
-- Rachel Weiner, "‘Aryan’ and ‘Octoroon’: Couples challenge racial labels to get married in Virginia," THe Washington Post ['Aryan'?! 'Octoroon'?! Mind blown. -- ?!]
Nearly a century ago, cars started taking over the public roads essentially by force, killing other users at astonishing rates and frightening them out of the roads, while launching a propaganda campaign to stigmatize road use by non-drivers. The laws granting them their dominant place on the roads came after the successful, often extra-legal attempt to take them over. I doubt we’ll ever take our cities back from cars without some direct action.
-- DJW, "Bus Lane Hero," Lawyers, Guns, and Money
[A] school-friend of my partner who lived with us in a shared house way back in their University days. One of two sisters, her Mum was a pasty white Irish Catholic nurse and her Dad a former soldier from Jamaica. Now, thanks to how her genes shook out, she was white, like super-white. Red hair, blue eyes, skin like yoghurt, but she was INTENSELY into her black culture, while her sister, who was a coffee-and-cream skinned black girl with brown eyes, was a comic-book reading geek and a metal-head. Much frustration was expressed by the one who had to work mega-hard to be taken seriously as a ‘woman of colour’, and many eye-rolls from the one who had never been treated as anything else. Funny thing was, the ‘white’ sister was the spitting-image of her Dad, while the ‘black’ sister was a double for her Mum.
Colour, man. It’s ridiculous that people think it matters, and infuriating that it actually does matter, because some people have shit between their ears and other people are happy to exploit that defect.
-- Tony Jay, Balloon Juice, comments
Canadians are born all over the world, it just sometimes takes a bit of time for them to get here.
-- Dawson City, Yukon, mayor Wayne Potoroka, quoted on Twitter