Thursday

Well, it is true enough that Manti Te'o's girlfriend is not alive.    Beyond that though, is the world entire populated by idiots?  'Lennay Kukua' the perfect damsel who suffered through leukemia and a car crash and a coma at the same time.  Wasn't there anything about that that struck someone as a little off?  Is the world of serious journalism awash with people who take 'Funky Winkerbean' for documentary?  I'm somewhat reminded here of the old wives tale about signers of the Decleration of Independence meeting fates much harsher than what winners can typically look forward to.  I would remind whoever needs to be told that suffering is suffering and nothing else. Suffering is not romantic.  Suffering is not in any way ennobling, validating or morally edifying.  The fact that we are all doomed to suffer does not mean that there must necessarily be something redeeming about it.  There is not.  We are going to hurt it is going to suck and there will be absolutely nothing worthwhile to be gained from it.  That is all. 

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In Nebraska Governor Heineman has gone full out and proposed eliminating the income tax, and making up the difference with more sales taxes on more things.    This will of course put the burden of paying for the state on 'Those people', lower class people who might be brown (and thus illegal immigrants) and are sometimes even uppity enough to vote Democratic.  But it will make the big ag execs of the countryside as well as the insurance and auto dealer men or west Omaha very happy, and it is their state, after all.  The rest of us are only here to serve them. 

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Amanda Marcotte today on the tenacity of the Creationism in schools movement.  Nail; head. 


 As women are believed to be the servants of men, children are believed to be extensions of the father, and to display utter fealty to his way of thinking so he can demonstrate his power to other men.

Indeed, the Orwellian fantasy of gaining second-hand immortality via one's beliefs being universally held and unchallenged forever need not come from a cold and impersonal State.  It is in fact within one's own family where this delusion is most common.  Given religions direct evocation of the eternal this is especially true when family is combined with whatever the 'Faith of Your Fathers' happens to be.