Random thoughts

A new survey commissioned by Northwestern Mutual finds a new "American Reality" in which Americans value quality of life issues as more important than career, money and material possessions.

a) How can you have a quality life with no job or money? You're dependent on other people (most likely the government) to provide for you, so you're stuck with whatever they give you. I know some people really enjoy just sitting around doing nothing except letting other people pay their bills, but I like to be able to afford to leave the house every now and then...have a nice meal, see friends who don't live within walking distance, buy new underpants when the elastic gives out...selfish evil capitalist shit like that.

b) I suppose it's a good thing people don't value jobs, money, or stuff, because by 2012 only government employees are going to have any. Heh.

c) Chicken and egg. Do people say they don't value jobs and money as a psychological way to prepare for/compensate for not having any, or does not valuing jobs and money lead people to vote for the clowns who promise to take all that away from the rest of us?

d) The people who don't value jobs and money must be people who have never had either, and people who have never not had either. If I had a trust fund of sufficient size, I wouldn't be going to job interviews in Illinois...

Must stop reading the paper.

This stem cell thing

I have been offline being interviewed on the wrong side of the Cheddar Curtain (no worries, all my expertise is in functions this company outsources to India *mmmph*), so I haven't been following it, but in half an hour of catching up with personal journals, I am depressed by all the ignorant, small-minded, mean-spirited bigots who are taking Obama's executive order as an opportunity to bash Sarah Palin (she's going to drag us back to the "12th century" on a snowmachine, dontchaknow) in specific and Christians in general.

I can't make the font big enough for the WTF.

I also note none of these people have contributed a thin dime of their own money to embryo-destroying stem cell research (much less their own zygotes). So I'm not impressed by their level of commitment any more than their logic (Barry && embryos != "stupid asshole Godbag" rant).

And Congress/Obama just spent a trillion dollars we don't have on misguided crap a couple weeks ago--is there really a pressing need to spend billions more we don't have on additional misguided crap?! Really?!? Even if I didn't think experimenting on embryos was creepy, and was willfully ignorant of adult stem cells are being used in actual effective applications, I'd think the executive order was a bad idea .

(I need better friends, I think is the lesson here.)

The flip side of furries.

Cats don't actually do this, which may be a sign of superior intelligence, at least compared to a subset of humans in Western Society.

Ask-imam.com (the online fatwa resource!) is choking on searches; askimam.org returns 0 records for "furry". I would love to be in a room when someone works up the nerve to ask if it's halal, as long as you don't wear a dog suit...

Recycling

Here's my anti-DST rant from last year. My opinion hasn't changed.

Neither did the cell phone tower nearest my apartment. I went to sleep well before 2 a.m. with the alarm set for 6:30; it went off at 6:30, which was actually 7:30 according to the clock on the microwave. I'm going for a drive later on so it can get the real time from a new tower. ZOMG, energy use! Oh noes! Bwahahaha.

(Looks like Blogger hasn't changed, either. Interesting.)

UPDATE: I'm newly irritated by everyone chirping "I love DST because I can play outside with my kids after work!" You needed a literal act of Congress for this? Go home an hour early and leave the rest of us out it. Sheesh.

Wig tucked behind the ears for the win...

Gary Varvel.

Uh...

Does anyone recognize the face on Corey Hart's new tattoo?

Yeah, I'm a little behind on baseball.

I hate Web 2.0/Fun with Google

In preparation for a job interview, I'm Googling my name. There are over four hundred women with my first and last name on Facebook, and not all of the ones featuring photos of half-naked drinking have birth years and locations that make it obvious they are not me (especially the one from Milwaukee whose public profile states she is a fan of Barry O, Jim Doyle, and Gwen Moore, ugh).

According to HuffPo, women with my name gave over $1k to John Kerry in 2004.

Women with my name have also roasted Flava Flav on Comedy Central (I'm not sure I could pick him out of a lineup if everyone was wearing a clock), recorded several country albums, hold a Ph.D. in biochemistry, belong to the Toronto Bead Society, and play high school basketball here in Wisconsin. Also several brides with tacky dresses, a "genetic counselor", some graphic designers, professional cake decorators, graduates of UIowa--except for the brides, should be obvious they're not me if all you have is my resume.

Googling my whole name, which is on my resume, gets you my quilts, my Scrabble tournament results (my lifetime record is 29-28-0), and a photo I took of Freising, Germany. Also a midwife in Ontario and a couple of dead women in Australia who obviously aren't me, more chicks on Facebook, a mortgage in default in Seattle, and a real-estate agent who has done business under two additional last names.

I'm worried about someone assuming that Gwen-Moore-loving party chick from Milwaukee with no birthdate information is me and throwing my job offer in the trash. Sigh.

(I also got quoted at SteynOnline in 2007 and didn't even notice! Some superfan I am...)

We've become a Soviet-era joke...

Oleg Atbashian, writing for PJM:

* Liberals believe they’re advancing people’s power — yet they don’t believe people can do anything right without their guidance.
* People can’t do anything right — yet the government bureaucracy can do everything.
* The government bureaucracy can do everything — yet liberals don’t like it when the government takes control of their lives.
* Liberals don’t like it when the government takes control of their lives — yet they vote for programs that increase people’s dependency on the government.
* They vote for programs that increase people’s dependency on the government — yet they believe they’re advancing people’s power.

Gratuitous cat photo

Don't ask, I don't know either.

Evan Bayh (D-IN) says O should veto the latest spending bill

It was impossible for me to read this and not think, "Yeah, he's just pissed he's not VPOTUS."

Summary quote:

Congress should vote "no" on this omnibus and show working families across the country that we are as committed to living within our means as they are.

As soon as things are flush again, though, he'll take the checkbook back out for more government, yee-haw!

And now for something completely different

Eija-Riitta Berliner-Mauer, who married the Berlin Wall 30 years ago. A love story, until tragedy struck in 1989.

Is there any aspect of life Democrats don't want the government to control?

W. Va. Lawmaker--party affiliation actually given in the news report!--wants to ban Barbie.

I've read enough feminist "research" about Barbie and I'm profoundly indifferent. I didn't get one until I was eight. Most of her clothes were made out of double-knit polyester scraps by a lady in a nursing home, and she spent most of her time roller-skating, so I missed the whole consumerism angle as well as the feminine beauty skills girls are supposed to learn from dolls.

I also had space Legos. Much more fun.

I don't recall getting any "body image" messages from the doll, possibly because I was getting them daily from my mother and my peers, who spent as much time belittling my "intellectual development" as they did telling me my hair and body were wrong and ugly.

I realize that the experiences of normal women are probably different.

That said, I'm fascinated in this concept that people with children are so stupid they need Democrat lawmakers to make every decision for them. If you don't want your daughter to have a Barbie, don't buy one (hey, that's what mainstream feminists used to say about abortion, back when they wanted it to be "safe and rare"...). If you can't figure that out, you ARE too stupid to raise your own kids.

I want to believe Americans aren't that stupid, but I keep seeing proof to the contrary.

Change I can believe in

More snow fell during the past two winters in Milwaukee than at any time in the past century.*

I moved here in 2006. You're welcome. :-D

Meanwhile, change I don't believe in: Barry's going to tax all forms of energy to "save us" from "warming." Well, yeah, it's really to cripple what's left of the economy, make more people dependent on the government for their daily needs, and limit the freedoms of those few who aren't, but a spoonful of "save teh planet!" helps the central planning go down.

I wish I understood why so many people feel they need to be "saved" from the future, let alone that a bumbling jug-eared Marxist is their Savior. Oh, wait, he plays basketball and waxes his chest. *snort*


* Note that there are no records of yearly snowfall before the evil white people moved in. You can get some overall climate info from tree rings and oral tradition, but not "inches of snow in February." I'd love to know how much snow fell on Milwaukee during the last Maunder Minimum, compare it to snowfall since the sunspots went dead last year...

"Everybody loves Oscar the Grouch"

Zo cracks me up.

Dear laid-off Obama voters

You wanted change. You got change. Kwitcherbitchin.

No wonder no one read it...

Randall Hoven at American Thinker went through the Communist Party USA's 2008 platform and found that the porkulus bill enacts half of their planks and gets another 47% started.

Nikita Khrushchev has to be feeling smug.

Ich habe keine Wörter.

I expect the "fat acceptance" blogs to agree with Frum

...because they're all O-bots. You can't judge a person's intellect or ideas by the person's size (which I think is a sensible position) unless that person's name rhymes with "Simbaugh".

David Frum likes Obama more than Rush because Rush is fat.

And O has stayed married to a politically-connected Klingon. Feel free to speculate how much he's motivated by twue wuv and how much he's motivated by fear of physical repercussions.

(I'm less interested in the Steele vs. Rush thing than I am that Michael Steele nods in mute agreement when partisans tell him Republican conventions "look like Nazi Germany." Hello...)

Oh, and apropos of nothing, if it's wrong to remind newly laid-off Obamatrons that they voted for business-destroying change, I don't want to be right.

18 inches??

It's been blue skies at Radishhof all day, except for thirty seconds where we got four flakes I didn't even have to brush off my car because they melted in the sun.

Odd and unfair.

Heh.