tbentley.com

From Paul Krugman, today:

Conservatives seem, in particular, to believe that freedom’s just another word for not enough to eat.

From the Atlantic:

From Wapo, 9/19:

In 2010 through 2012, the Navy outsourced out its ID processes to an Oregon-based company called Eid Passport

Well, gosh!  Was there not the slightest hint in the fact that the outsource was named for a Muslim holiday, the end of Ramadan?

Slate raves about xkcd;  and the actual drawings,

Compiled into one video, about 40 minutes, on YouTube.

This is well-said a good list.  From a NYTimes letter-writer in North Carolina:

I can imagine an America that has the following values:
1. Single payer healthcare, similar to France or Canada, so that no American need worry about gaining access to affordable healthcare.
2. Education that leaves the student debt free.
3. A living wage premised upon the idea that if a company makes money off the back of your labor, you are able, after 40 hours of toil, to pay for rent, food, transportation, etc.
4. Ample public spaces for people to enjoy.
5. Publicly financed arts unleashing the massive artistic talent in our country, and bringing arts to people who currently cannot afford to attend plays and concerts.
6. A redirection away from militarization to non-military foreign assistance, so people around the world view us as humanitarians, not imperialists.
7. A massive movement away from fossil fuels to renewable resources, so that our children and grandchildren have the chance of surviving.
8. A realization that none of us are more important than the other person, and we are only given one chance at life. Do no harm and leave earth a little better than how you found it.

He says it’s all over; no more sexy texting.  But why stop now?  Because FormSpring, the posting site he had been using, was closed in April of 2013.

Here’s Sporting Kansas City of Major League Soccer in all their newborn glory:

So there they are all got up in long pants and droopy cardigans…oh, wait: do I espy a hint of knee joint there?  So much skin, so very revealing…..heavens forfend!

But shorts are getting longer and longer.  Here’s how I remember soccer shorts:

Or maybe this:

This is a trend not only in soccer:  think basketball:

Here’s the extreme–maybe from the 60’s

Why are men so frantic about sex?  Why are they so concerned with sex that they will allow themselves to abuse women (who, after all, should be their partners in life), to dominate women?  One reason, an evolutionary reason, is:  men have no penis bone.

All the other primates have a penis bone; most male mammals have a penis bone.  But not male humans.  The human penis depends upon hydraulics to stand erect.  We may call it a “boner” but there’s no bone there, just flesh and blood.  As much blood as possible, enough to get it stiff.  “Hard on” is a much more descriptive term, really better than ‘erection’ (since it’s not necessarily in an erect position; cf A. Weiner’s foto).

With a penis bone — more properly called a baculum, or os penis — it would be so much easier to get it up, and to keep it up.  With a baculum, a man could keep it up for hours on end, with no need for the 4-hour Viagra  warning.

So a man, a human male, needs to have a very, very strong libido, big enough to ensure the necessary engorgement with blood. This requires a large production of testosterone, which can lead to hyper excitement, racing heartbeat, violence, anger and general confusion.  Having this strong libido, he also has a tremendously large ego and outsize opinion of himself. This makes for an evolutionary advantage as he goes about his duty of squirting his DNA everywhere imaginable.  But it can make life unpleasant for those around him.

Walrus baculum — wiki commons

Sweet Fascism in the Piney Woods

It should be a constant source of amazement to foreign observers that Americans, while proudly insisting that Fascism is Un-American and must never be permitted to find a foothold in the United States, so insistently ignore the fact that the long-leaf pine and pellagra belt which stretches from the Potomac to the Gulf of Mexico and from the Atlantic to the Mississippi River has been governed by Fascist methods since 1876.

All of the stigmata of European Fascism are there — though none of the glory.  There is a Government by a single political party–the Democratic instead of the Nazis or the Fascisti; there is coercion and terrorization of the opposition and minority by armed bands of licensed bullies–Ku Kluxers, night-riders, lynching mobs instead of Storm-Troopers and Squadistri; there is of course the issue of racial supremacy and the proscription of a subject race–Negro instead of Jewish–with respect not only to public office and economic power but also with respect to culture and marriage; there is the rigid regimentation of the individual in matters of opinion and conscience, as witnessed by Tennessee’s “monkey-law” and the short shrift given Northern investigators into social conditions, and there is the effective dragooning of organized labor by deputy sheriffs, militias and legislation,

Students of current trends in Europe could do far worse than study the revolution led by the lower middle class in the south after the plantation-owners had been discredited by their defeat in the civil War, and their establishment of a crystallized Fascist type of civilization south of the Mason-Dixon line.  Here and there the South is beginning to stir under the iron grip of this “bourgeois” dictatorship, allied as in Europe with powerful corporations, but generally de facto Fascism still reigns in the piney woods and offers the most determined resistance to the reforms and reconstruction proffered by the New Deal.

–John Franklin Carter (“The Unofficial Observer”), American Messiahs, Simon and Schuster, New York, 1935