Victims? No, not really.

I'm going to quote from an AP article. Come sue me.

LAKE CITY, Ga. - More than 1,800 people showed up to help ABC's "Extreme Makeover" team demolish a family's decrepit home and replace it with a sparkling, four-bedroom mini-mansion in 2005.

Three years later, the reality TV show's most ambitious project at the time has become the latest victim of the foreclosure crisis.

Gosh. How can a family who was given a FREE HOUSE on their existing lot get foreclosed?

After the Harper family used the two-story home as collateral for a $450,000 loan, it's set to go to auction on the steps of the Clayton County Courthouse Aug. 5. The couple did not return phone calls Monday, but told WSB-TV they received the loan for a construction business that failed.

They don't say whether they started their own business with this irresponsible financing or just gave the money to someone else to lose, but either way, they're not a "victim of the foreclosure crisis", they're a victim of their own selves. They gambled and lost--they weren't robbed by the banking industry.

Anyway, if someone would like to give me a free "four-bedroom house with decorative rock walls and a three-car garage" with "a lobby that featured four fireplaces, a solarium, a music room and a plush new office" (or even two bedrooms and a basement with a sink) I promise I can hold on to it, unless I get shot on the way home from work or crunched by a FIB on the freeway.

Your tax dollars at work!

I can't figure out which level of government is funding the construction on the Teutonia Ave/Silver Spring Dr bridge (which needed the work), but they're not getting their money's worth from the sign rental:


Oh, look! The culprits:


815 is an Illinois area code...which doesn't excuse whoever is responsible for procuring the signs. It might even make it worse, if it's city money being sent out of state for substandard equipment... (My Google-fu is unable to locate any information about this construction project, but it did turn up this bit of entertainment).

I have to look at this abomination twice a day; my funk is not improving.

It's like they're writing about me...

(They are, sorta. I was a research subject at SMPY at Iowa State, although they don't seem to have used data from those years in the referenced study.)

The harpies who continue to push Title IX into places it wasn't meant to go now want the federal government to start insisting on hiring quotas for women at research universities.

I've spent 20 years observing all this "chicks in science" stuff from the inside--from special summer programs to jobs at companies that make a big show of hiring women and minorities first--and probably the only thing I can say with some certainty is you can't make women who'd rather play with babies be interested in calculus or debugging circuit boards. Especially if they don't have the abilities to do calculus in the first place (remember the variation amongst women is greater than the difference between the male and female average, thanks).

Ms. Pinker, a clinical psychologist and columnist for The Globe and Mail in Canada (and sister of Steven Pinker, the Harvard psychologist), argues that the campaign for gender parity infantilizes women by assuming they don’t know what they want. She interviewed women who abandoned successful careers in science and engineering to work in fields like architecture, law and education — and not because they had faced discrimination in science.

Instead, they complained of being pushed so hard to be scientists and engineers that they ended up in jobs they didn’t enjoy. “The irony was that talent in a male-typical pursuit limited their choices,” Ms. Pinker says. “Once they showed aptitude for math or physical science, there was an assumption that they’d pursue it as a career even if they had other interests or aspirations. And because these women went along with the program and were perceived by parents and teachers as torch bearers, it was so much more difficult for them to come to terms with the fact that the work made them unhappy.”

Wow. That sounds exactly like me. Lots of encouraging talks from men and women in science/engineering careers about how exceptional women should go on and succeed; lots of scorn and derision from women not in science/engineering about how women shouldn't bother (men outside frightened away by my job title, sigh). And I've tried to leave the field twice post-college, and ended up unemployed and broke both times. I love science, I liked math enough, but the business is soul-destroying.

I'll have to pick up a copy of this book.



I'm sure I could rant much more, but it's time to watch Ben Sheets and Ryan Braun and Corey Hart. :) Keeping focused on what's important here...

In which I consider gender-reassignment just to avoid derision by association

DEAR ABBY: I dress my Siamese cat, "Belle," in clothes and pajamas. (Yes, they make apparel for cats.) I also push her around in a stroller. My friends think I'm crazy, but I consider Belle to be my daughter.

One time, a teenager came up to me as I was pushing Belle in her stroller and asked, "Where's the baby?" I told her that Belle was like my baby.

Is it nuts to treat a cat like a child? -- MOM OF A FUR KID IN N.Y.

DEAR "MOM": Nuts? No. A bid for attention ... perhaps.

Dear Abby and Not A Mom:

You're both pathetic, deluded, insensitive assholes. Please stop making the rest of us barren spinsters with cats look even sadder, crazier, and despisable (despicable?) than we really are.

Peace/Love/Arugula!

Radish

P.S. Nobody is fooled by the phrase "Fur kid." See below for handy educational diagram:



The one on the left can be left home alone all day with a bowl of water and some crunchies. If you do that to the ones on the right, better hope you get arrested before their actual Mom (or Grandpa or Aunt Radish) find out about it and come looking for you. See? Not the same.

Shhh! I'm on the phone with Jaber al-Banna!

Feingold fights for your right to plot with known terrorists. The article also contains an entertaining quote from Dick Durbin where he claims to believe the Constitution grants rights. C'mon, comedy has to be plausible...

I marvel at the narcissm of people who seriously believe their phone calls are so completely fascinating the Bush administration--if not the Chimpy himself!!--wants to listen in. Like he doesn't have better things to care about the sawbuck you're putting on the F-Pats or the contents of your baby's diapers or that you're ordering the lo mein instead of your usual General Tso. And the conversations you're having with the Izzadeen al-Qassam Brigades about that ammunition? Those are private, dammit. I'm glad I can count on Mr. Feingold to make sure no one finds out.

Anyway. Who's running against this clown in 2010? I'll be happy to volunteer. It will be futile, but it might be therapeutic.

(Who's Jaber al-Banna, you say?)

Oh, look. Nannies for grown-ups.

The DNC thinks its members shouldn't be allowed to choose tasty, familiar foods. Is this an admission that DNC members are too stupid to be trusted to make decisions?

In promoting healthy eating habits, the Democratic guidelines say every meal should be nutritious and include “at least three of the following colors: red, green, yellow, purple/blue and white.”

Looks like a bag of M&Ms is a perfect meal!

I don't know if I want to be the guy with the bar/fast-food joint across the street from the convention. On one hand, people are gonna be sneaking out for snacks. On the other, too many smelly hippies trying to use the bathroom without paying.

What I really want to know: Is there going to be a smoking area for the Big O! to get a hit of nicotine before his big speech?!?! Smoking! That's a form of aggravated assault!! *snort*


RELATED: A commenter at Tim Blair calls these guys "the four doofuses of the Apocolypse." Note the wrongly-installed helmets.

The second saddest thing I've read in weeks.

Disgusting-sad, not sorrow-sad like the previous post.

What if no one were fat?

Also the stupidest thing I've read recently. Since when do liberals care about corporate profits, seriously? And how do increased corporate profits translate into "giving every household $4000"?? I'd laugh if the premise wasn't so disgusting...

Let's do a little thought experiment:

What if no one were black?
What if no one was gay?
What if no one were Jewish? (I think this has been written)
What if no one were old? (In the UK the NHS is working on it...)

Etc.

I don't see how this is any different.

I'm not sure what the right noun to use is

"Hypocrites" doesn't seem quite right, but there does seem to be a bit of double standard in fretting over "well educated and financially stable" hippie types choosing to intentionally expose their children to preventable diseases while blithely ignoring a multitude of people who haven't had their shots streaming into the country. Yeah, some of the vaccines aren't perfect, but they seem to be better than nothing, which might be why they're required for a visa.

I'd file "measles party" under "child abuse" but I just press buttons for a living.

OTOH, if their sons contract mumps as adults, these women--there are no fathers in the article--may have removed themselves from the gene pool. (One of my friends in Iowa caught the mumps in that epidemic--not a college student, just had the misfortune to sit in a waiting room with an infected individual while his immune system was compromised by leukemia. He's fine now, but apparently orchitis is unpleasant, and I'm waiting for the phone call where he and his wife are devestated by sperm count...)

Thoughts on Spitzmas

I knew Ann Coulter would be worth reading today...(season the end of that sentence to taste).

It's absurd to talk about Spitzer's problem being "hypocrisy" -- as if everything would be fine if only he had previously advocated legalized prostitution.

Or money laundering. Or not destroying people's lives over perceived financial malfeasance. Heh.™

It's absurd to talk about "alpha males" and political power -- an alpha male does not bring his family shame and disaster. Who was more alpha than Ronald Reagan? Think he ever had a "whore problem"? This is more like a dog who wee-wees on your leg.

I'm sure he left a few broken hearts in Des Moines, but that's altogether different.

And I knew Linda Hirshman would have some wife-bashing to do.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard Law School, she was one of the highest-billing associates at the incredibly successful mergers and acquisitions law firm Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom. Later, she went to the office of the general counsel of Chase bank. But sometime in the 1990s, like many of the other women of her class, she decided to "opt out," to quit her job, in her words, as her husband began his electoral career to devote herself to raising their three daughters and to her philanthropies. She helped start the Children to Children Foundation, which teaches rich children social responsibility for the poor.

Yeah, that sounds like a woman who'll never be able to land a paid straight job again, 'cept maybe at a sweatshop or mopping floors. *rolls eyes*

And even if the marriage does not break up, women's decisions to make their social position completely dependent on the ambition, discipline, judgment, and steadiness of another human being is not only an act of extreme self-abnegation, it risks the very dramatic fall we have just witnessed in the Spitzer matter. Does anyone think that even as well-heeled a divorcée as Mrs. Spitzer would be the same force in philanthropic Upper East Side circles as the governor's wife?

Not only does she contradict herself--marriage both increases and decreases her social status?--nobody anywhere in the world, not even NYC, would afford barren spinster Silda Wall the same social status as the former Silda Spitzer, no matter how many mergers and acquisitions she billed.

Sorry, feminists, the world you think we should live in does not and never will exist. Believe me, I'm on the bottom end of it.


Mostly this week I'm intrigued by this whole idea of women being paid for something I can hardly give away. :P

Take-home lesson for hygenically-challenged morons everywhere

This article was brought to my attention by a self-avowed "socialist" (who brags incessantly about the spa treatments her salary has allowed her to purchase--why am I the only one who sees a logical flaw here?) with the title "Holy shit! The government really is out to get Michael Moore!"

Michael Moore Faces U.S. Treasury Probe
Academy Award-winning filmmaker Michael Moore is under investigation by the U.S. Treasury Department for taking ailing Sept. 11 rescue workers to Cuba for a segment in his upcoming health-care documentary "Sicko," The Associated Press has learned.

(Two paragraphs of Bush-bashing deleted)

The Treasury Department's Office of Foreign Assets Control notified Moore in a letter dated May 2 that it was conducting a civil investigation for possible violations of the U.S. trade embargo restricting travel to Cuba. A copy of the letter was obtained Tuesday by the AP.

Here's some friendly advice: When you break the law, don't show yourself doing it on movie screens all over the country. Unless, of course, you want to get caught, so you can cry about being a victim. Sniff, sob.

I can't imagine how blinded by BDS and/or criminally stupid you have to be to see this as "Michael Moore is persecuted! Waaaah!"