Rep. Paul Ryan discusses the Republican alternative budget in the Wall Street Journal today, and I must say, it is very close to being something that could serve as the foundation for a series of ideas which could become a budget.
As the prophet of a new but well-attended (in spirit, though not in body) church---the Church of the Mouse and the Discoball---I find the language of my fellows in other religions that have preposterous origin stories to be mystifying when it comes to an insistence that one must "teach the controversy" about that most uncontroversial of claims, that the world as we know it is very old and that life as we know it evolved painstakingly through time. How is there a conflict? Yes, I understand that many Christians believe an origin story about how god made man and then made woman to be his slave and made a bunch of animals to be tasty for man and that anything that's bad that happened is woman's fault. But I believe something equally preposterous, that the world was coughed up in a hairball ejected from the Great Cat, as he was trying to distract the Goddess from making love to her new amour, the Roller Disco King. My story is even less preposterous than the Christian fairy tale, because at least we know that cats do that sort of thing. And the "blame women for everything" has the distinct stench of complete bullshit, emanating as it does from a culture that is suspicious of granting women the power that would allow them to fuck up anything, much less everything. And yet, I'm the one who gets that whatever fool thing I believe shouldn't be competing for classroom time with the actual scientific theories that are evidence-based.
Ben Shapiro declares bravely that RAP IS CRAP, because it's all the blacks with their banging and their tim-tutting and clothes branded with obscenities like ENYCE and FUBU and POLO.
Matt recently had an interesting post reminding everyone that a lower population has the strong benefit of decreasing the number of people who need to share resources. Predictably, Ross Douthat, knowing that low birthrates are often an indicator of dangerous levels of female equality, threw a minor fit over it. Congrats to Matt for not caving to the disingenuous panic about pension programs, and pointing out a relevant point indicating that there is some level of hypocrisy/bullshitting going on:
Some very good news for the teenage girls being persecuted for having a sexuality in Pennsylvania---the judge has ruled in their favor, and ordered a prosecutor to drop child pornography charges against three teenage girls who committed the "crime" of engaging in a routine sexual display for their boyfriends. And by routine, I mean laughably routine---they showed the boys they were with and/or interested in pictures of themselves in bras, and one girl actually showed some nipple. The problem is they exposed themselves to a prosecutor who believes female sexuality should be criminalized by sending these pictures by text message on their phones.
Jesus H. motherfucking Christ, am I pissed. I canceled my Tmobile contract back in February, roughly the day my contract obligations ran out, because I wanted to get an iPhone and be on AT&T. I must have asked the woman who canceled my phone a dozen times if it was really, truly over, and she assured me that the phone would be shut down. My mistake was believing that it would be so simple, and throwing the beaten-up, barely surviving phone away. But since I had a) called ahead of time to warn them I was canceling and b) I was reassured a bunch of times that my contract would be canceled because I canceled it.
