Billingham

You know someone named Arsenio Billingham? No.

Praises portion of the Constitution promoting the slave trade.

Even if it comes from Canada.

The rules of English can be awkward. We struggle to make do with what we have, continuing to spell "knife" with a "k" and placing our adjectives before the nouns, unlike the wise French who understand that I’d like to know what’s being called "warm and sweaty" before I decide if it’s going to be erotic or not.

This happened.

A veteran NFL kicker writes a novel about terrorism?  What could go wrong?

Note:  The football player/special agent plays for a team called "The Colorado Mustangs."  Longtime Denver Bronco Elam has no idea why you might think he’s projecting himself into the novel’s hero.

White supremacist teenage songstress Charity Pendergraft, on the origins of Mexican cuisine:

Spaniards are white and second Mexicans are a mix of indian, white, and negro…True native food in Mexico was a mixture of roasted and/or boiled lizard, rat, and boiled root vegetables. No, I’m not trying to be mean, just telling the truth. It took the creativity of the white Spaniards to make the food of ‘Mexico’ edible.”

Apparently the Spanish were the ones who developed a cuisine based on tomatoes, corn, and chocolate well before any Spaniard had even seen the plants those things grow on.

Looking at naked women on the internet.

 Why?  Well, we’re going to have to back up and see what Michael Schwartz, Chief of Staff to Senator (US Senator) Tom Coburn thinks about life and values.  And no, this isn’t shit on Oklahoma week (Coburn represents the Sooner State).

 First:  But it is my observation that boys at that age have less tolerance for homosexuality than just about any other class of people. They speak badly about homosexuality. And that’s because they don’t want to be that way. They don’t want to fall into it. And that’s a good instinct.

He’s talking about preteens.  12-year-old boys are now are new standard for moral and honest behavior, apparently.  Coburn has sponsored a resolution to make October 19th National Armpit Farts Day.

It’s remarkable how much people are willing to rely on their kids’ actions as being based on ‘instinct,’ rather than carefully learned behavior.  If you hate on gay folks for 12 years, and send a kid to a school with a bunch more homophobes, and he comes out homophobic, that BS ain’t instinct.  Eating when he’s hungry is instinct.  Reactions to social behavior are socially learned.  He continues:

[A]ll pornography is homosexual pornography because all pornography turns your sexual drive inwards. Now think about that. And if you, if you tell an 11-year-old boy about that, do you think he’s going to want to go out and get a copy of Playboy? I’m pretty sure he’ll lose interest. That’s the last thing he wants.” You know, that’s a, that’s a good comment. It’s a good point and it’s a good thing to teach young people.

Hoboy.  So now, apparently, ‘turning your sexual drive inwards’ makes you gay.  I don’t really know how that works or really what it means.  Then, he’s trying to use boys’ homophobia to drive them away from porn - this is sort of a small scale example of how bigotry gets promoted even when the goal isn’t promoting bigotry directly:  you rely on homophobia to fight porn.  You rely on racism to fight health care reform.  You rely on sexism to fight environmentalism.  These things arise because of all these uses to another aim, not because there’s a secret conspiracy of racists.

And that’s putting the cart before the horse in this particular case:  porn makes boys gay?  I mean, I could see that in the context of pornography, boys will find themselves looking at a lot of penises, and may be a click away from actual gay porn, which could at least make them aware of latent homosexual desires.  But that’s not even at play here:  Playboy doesn’t have hardcore anything, just naked ladies.

So he wants us to believe that looking at sexualized depictions of members of the opposite sex will make boys who would otherwise be hetero decide that they only want cock from now on.

Yowza.

83% of children from committed Christian families attending public schools adopt a Marxist-Socialist worldview

Who knew the Revolution was already so far advanced?

Original source.

So next time the right wants to accuse the liberals of having a mental disorder or some sort of madness, consider that this mental illness must be contagious and that we conservatives just may have given it to them. After all, it is the right who still send their children and youth every year to the left’s schools for an "education."

Wow, people start abandoning your beliefs after they go to school?  You think it might have something to do with the idea that your beliefs are fundamentally incompatible with an intelligent population?

Quick, brown thief caught in the act

As seen on CNN.com.  I should get a t-shirt (not offered) and mail it to David Duke.  I mean, really, "Brown thief?"   Is that what you’re going for.

 The video isn’t about any ethnic minority, of course, but rather a fox (as in "the quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog" I assume).  But I mean, that’s up there with the Walden Galleria’s "White Parking" lot.

We knew you executed more people per capita than a paranoid Roman Emperor, but this?

In order to pass the citizenship test, an applicant must answer six of the 10 questions correctly. As you can see in Table 2, only 2.8 percent of Oklahoma high-school students attending public schools answered six or more questions correctly, and thus pass the citizenship test. Out of the sample of 1,000 students, only six students got seven questions correct, and none answered eight or more questions correctly.

I can’t promise these numbers would be better in other states, but it’s worth noting that the reason New York has higher taxes than other states is that we spend more money on health care and education, and as such, have significantly higher quality health care and education.  This New York State public high school graduate can do what apparently no Oklahoman can do, and answer all ten questions correctly.

Here’s the test, and the percentage of Oklahomans answering correctly:

What is the supreme law of the land?                                                        28

What do we call the first ten amendments to the Constitution?          26

What are the two parts of the US Congress?                                          27

How many justices are there on the Supreme Court?                              10 (note:  the correct answer was 4th on the list of guesses)

Who wrote the Declaration of Independence?                                          14 (Jefferson places behind Washington and Lincoln)

What ocean is on the east coast of the United States?                            61

What are the two major political parities in the United States?             43

We elect a US senator for how many years?                                             11 (wrong answers 10 and 4 passed the 6)

Who was the first President of the United States?                                  23 (10% answered "Barack Obama" or "George W. Bush")

Who is in charge of the executive branch?                                                29

CNN.com’s poll today:

Quick Vote

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What is your favorite dinosaur?

Tyrannosaurus rex	39%	21671
Brontosaurus	16%	9269
Triceratops	19%	10473
Barney	26%	14792
Total Votes: 56205

read related article »

This is not a scientific poll

 

I’m glad they made sure to note that they weren’t offering a scientific poll, because 42% of Americans voted for dinosaurs that don’t exist.  Yeah, there’s that purple one at the bottom, but there’s also no such thing as a Brontosaurus.  The discoverers who claimed to have found a brontosaurus actually found a dinosaur that had already been discovered and named apatosaurus.  It’s so deeply ingrained for one that my spellchecker doesn’t even recognize Apatosaurus, so I guess CNN can be forgiven here.

 

But perhaps today you’ve learned something new about dinosaurs.  And that’s a good day in my book.

 

There’s more, in comic form, here.

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Reality!

 Seriously, the expression ‘make friends’ stops making sense after about the first ten of these.