Vacation: Meme Dump ... Just For Fun

Bobservations

Yesterday, after breakfast, Carlos announced that he was going to work in the yard trimming the azaleas and pulling weeds and such; he said he’d seen a vine growing up into one of the azaleas and wanted to pull it out and cut it down before it killed the plant.

He was outside about an hour before he came back in and said he couldn’t find the vine; he told me that he had coiled it up and left it on the ground the day before because he didn’t have his shears. I asked if he had checked all the azaleas along the fence and he snidely said, “Yeeeeessssss!”

I knew what I had to do.

“Perhaps it was a snake, and after you coiled it up it slithered away.”

And now he won’t go into the backyard either.

Tuxedo wants to play off of Carlson’s idea of berating people who wear masks by asking the entire country to berate anyone who works for, listens to, or believes Fox News.

Good news … in Arkansas, a bill that says teachers may teach religious creationism alongside the scientific theory of evolution failed to advance from the Senate Education Committee. GQP wingnut and bill sponsor, Mary Bentley, claims that “many” teachers asked her for the ability to teach “counter-theories”.

Hey Mary? Creationism is taught in church. And there is a Separation of Church and State—even in Arkansas—that comes into play here. I mean, unless you wanna have the theories of evolution taught in Sunday school.

Uh huh, Thought so.

As we watch state after state, well, the Republican ones anyway, try to discriminate against trans youth, we are getting more good equality news from the Biden Administration,

The Housing and Urban Development Department has recommitted to Obama-era protections that ensure transgender people experiencing homelessness can stay in shelters that correspond with their gender identities.

Another smackdown to the hate-filled agenda of the last guy.

In Flori-duh and Oklahoma, the state’s GQP Governors, Ron DeSantis and Kevin Stitt, have signed “anti-riot” bills into law that vastly increase law enforcement’s powers to crack down on civil unrest. But another thing they do? They grant civil legal immunity to people who drive through protesters blocking the road.

That’s right. If you are protesting, and in the streets, a wingnut Floridian or Oklahoman can literally drive into the crowd, injuring or killing anyone, and be granted immunity.

Think about that white supremacist who ran over and killed counter-protester Heather Heyer during the Charlottesville protests in 2017.  Under these two asshat’s new laws, if he’d said it was accidental he’d be free and Heyer would still be dead.

Oh, and make no mistake this is a direct result of the Black Lives Matter protests which means, without saying so, the laws target running down people of color legally.

This past weekend, following reports on Fox News, that bastion of criminally insane lying, a bunch of RepubliQAnon asshat politicians claimed that President Biden would remove hamburgers and steaks from every restaurant and home to combat climate change.

Seriously. These tools either are stupid enough to believe this or think their constituents are stupid enough to believe this.

Fox News was forced to retract their story because … lies.

A German police bomb squad was called to investigate a suspected hand grenade in a Bavarian forest and luckily determined that the object actually was a rubber sex toy.

Just another reason Carlos and I keep our real grenades in a separate box from the butt grenades.

In another case of Liars Gonna Lie, the New York Post—owned by the same company as lying Fox News—reported that a children’s picture book written by Vice President Kamala Harris was being handed out in “welcome kits” to young migrants at a shelter in Long Beach, California.

Fox News also aired the story until Long Beach city officials told The Washington Post that Harris’s book is not being handed out in welcome kits. A single copy of the book was donated during a citywide donation drive.

But hey, if a lie works, then spread it.

Josh Hawley, liar and insurrection-supporting traitor to his country, has written a book on the “Tyranny Of Big Tech.” And he took to Twitter to advertise the slim, 200-page book pamphlet treatise and tagged onto the message was a link to Amazon.com, the third-largest technology company in the world.

Oh, and Hawley did all this using the Twitter application for iPhone.

You seriously cannot fix stupid, but you can make fun of it all day long.

Ah, German Fontanini, a six-foot tall, brown haired, gray-blue-eyed Argentinean model. There is no need to say another word.

Who Do I Hafta F**k To Get A Decent Senator For South Carolina? Part Three: Senator Kevin Bryant

Down here in South Carolina, where it’s not the heat, it’s the stupidity, and where we are trying to take the ‘duh’ away from Flori-duh, comes the story of a South Carolina state Senator, who apparently doesn’t have a single active brain cell in his head.

But let’s start at the beginning, shall we?

Earlier this year eight-year-old Olivia McConnell wrote her state representatives to suggest that since South Carolina doesn’t have a state fossil — and before you ask, no, Nikki Haley doesn’t count — and she thought we should have one.

And Olivia decided that she needed a legitimate reason to suggest this besides liking fossils, so she came up with three:

1. One of the first discoveries of a vertebrae fossil in North America was on an South Carolina plantation when slaves dug up wooly mammoth teeth from a swamp in 1725.
2. All but seven states have an official state fossil.
3. “Fossils tell us about our past.”

And she sent her reasons in a letter to South Carolina State Representative Robert Ridgeway and state Senator Kevin Johnson, both Democrats, asking them to sponsor a bill to officially make the Wooly mammoth — and again, not Nikki Haley — our state fossil:

“Please work on this for me. Your friend, Olivia.”

Ridgeway liked the idea, saying it showed the children of the state how government works, and how they can have a say-so in what happens here. So, Ridgeway and Johnson filed two bills to make the Wooly Mammoth the official state fossil.

The bill passed the House with overwhelming support, but then it hit the state Senate where Senator Kevin Bryant, a Republican, pharmacist and self-described born-again Christian who once likened President Obama with Osama bin Laden, who helped block funding for a rape crisis center, who calls climate change a “hoax,” and blocked evolution, EVO-freaking-LUTION, from the state’s science standards — saying “I don’t have a problem teaching theories. I don’t think they should be taught as fact.” — proposed amending the bill, a legislative government bill, to include three verses from the Book of Genesis detailing God’s creation of the Earth and its living inhabitants, including mammoths.

See, God made mammoths and that should be in the bill.

 “I think it’s a good idea to designate the mammoth as the state fossil, I don’t have a problem with that. I just felt like it’d be a good thing to acknowledge the creator of the fossils.”—Kevin Bryant

And when Bryant’s proposed amendment was ruled out of order by Lt. Governor Glenn McConnell, on a technicality — it introduced a new subject — Bryant then submitted a more on-topic amendment, describing the Columbian Mammoth “as created on the Sixth Day with the beasts of the field.”

So, for now, the bill is on hold, and Olivia McConnell is getting a lesson in South Carolina state politics:

It’s not the heat, it’s the stupidity of folks like Bryant and Fair, the two biggest fossils in the statehouse.

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In South Carolina This Is A Science Test

Yesterday I poked a little fun at the people of Tennessee for their continuing reelection of anti-LGBT, pro-NRA, delusional wingnut Stacey Campfield, but today I’m gonna aim the spotlight on South Carolina.

This is a test, in a science class at a school In South Carolina; ALLEGEDLY. The “test” was reportedly given to a fourth grade class at a Christian school somewhere in this state. The man, whose daughter was given this test, says he will reveal the name of the school in June because next year his child will be going to a real school where science is fact not fiction.

Oy. South Carolina. Really?

PS: for what it's worth, Snopes rates this story as 'probably true.'

via Daily Kos

14 Wacky "Facts" Kids Will Learn in Louisiana's Voucher Schools

I've often said, of the South, that it's not the heat, it's the stupidity, and lo and behold, this morning I was gifted with another example of Southern Idiocy.

The good folks in Louisiana wanted to privatize public education, and use a Bible-based curriculum to edu-mah-cate their younguns all at the expense of the tax-payer. So, under Asshat Guv'nah Bobby Jindal's voucher program, Louisiana will spend tens of millions of dollars to help poor and middle-class public school students receive a private education. Now, some say Jindal's plan is a good one--well, that's mostly GOP wingnuts--but others say the program is riddled with problems,

See, of the 119, mostly Christian, participating schools, there are twenty or so that will teach creationist nonsense, er, nonscience and will receive some $4 million in public funding from the initial round of voucher designations.

Many of these schools rely on the A Beka Book curriculum, aka Bob Jones University Press, textbooks to teach their Bible-based "facts." Let's look at what they'll be teachin' down in Loser-iana:

1. Dinosaurs and humans probably hung out: "Bible-believing Christians cannot accept any evolutionary interpretation. Dinosaurs and humans were definitely on the earth at the same time and may have even lived side by side within the past few thousand years."—Life Science, 3rd ed., Bob Jones University Press, 2007

2. Dragons were totally real: "[Is] it possible that a fire-breathing animal really existed? Today some scientists are saying yes. They have found large chambers in certain dinosaur skulls…The large skull chambers could have contained special chemical-producing glands. When the animal forced the chemicals out of its mouth or nose, these substances may have combined and produced fire and smoke."—Life Science, 3rd ed., Bob Jones University Press, 2007

3. "God used the Trail of Tears to bring many Indians to Christ."—America: Land That I Love, Teacher ed., A Beka Book, 1994

4. Africa needs religion: "Africa is a continent with many needs. It is still in need of the gospel…Only about ten percent of Africans can read and write. In some areas the mission schools have been shut down by Communists who have taken over the government."—Old World History and Geography in Christian Perspective, 3rd ed., A Beka Book, 2004

5. Slave masters were nice guys: "A few slave holders were undeniably cruel. Examples of slaves beaten to death were not common, neither were they unknown. The majority of slave holders treated their slaves well."—United States History for Christian Schools, 2nd ed., Bob Jones University Press, 1991

6. The KKK was A-OK: "[The Ku Klux] Klan in some areas of the country tried to be a means of reform, fighting the decline in morality and using the symbol of the cross. Klan targets were bootleggers, wife-beaters, and immoral movies. In some communities it achieved a certain respectability as it worked with politicians."—United States History for Christian Schools, 3rd ed., Bob Jones University Press, 2001

7. The Great Depression wasn't as bad as the liberals made it sound: "Perhaps the best known work of propaganda to come from the Depression was John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath…Other forms of propaganda included rumors of mortgage foreclosures, mass evictions, and hunger riots and exaggerated statistics representing the number of unemployed and homeless people in America."—United States History: Heritage of Freedom, 2nd ed., A Beka Book, 1996

8. SCOTUS enslaved fetuses: "Ignoring 3,500 years of Judeo-Christian civilization, religion, morality, and law, the Burger Court held that an unborn child was not a living person but rather the "property" of the mother (much like slaves were considered property in the 1857 case of Dred Scott v. Sandford)."—American Government in Christian Perspective, 2nd ed., A Beka Book, 1997

9. The Red Scare isn't over yet: "It is no wonder that Satan hates the family and has hurled his venom against it in the form of Communism."— American Government in Christian Perspective, 2nd ed., A Beka Book, 1997

10. Mark Twain and Emily Dickinson were a couple of hacks: "[Mark] Twain's outlook was both self-centered and ultimately hopeless…Twain's skepticism was clearly not the honest questioning of a seeker of truth but the deliberate defiance of a confessed rebel."—Elements of Literature for Christian Schools, Bob Jones University, 2001"Several of [Emily Dickinson's] poems show a presumptuous attitude concerning her eternal destiny and a veiled disrespect for authority in general. Throughout her life she viewed salvation as a gamble, not a certainty. Although she did view the Bible as a source of poetic inspiration, she never accepted it as an inerrant guide to life."—Elements of Literature for Christian Schools, Bob Jones University, 2001

11. Abstract algebra is too dang complicated: "Unlike the 'modern math' theorists, who believe that mathematics is a creation of man and thus arbitrary and relative, A Beka Bookteaches that the laws of mathematics are a creation of God and thus absolute…A Beka Bookprovides attractive, legible, and workable traditional mathematics texts that are not burdened with modern theories such as set theory."—ABeka.com

12. Gay people "have no more claims to special rights than child molesters or rapists."—Teacher's Resource Guide to Current Events for Christian Schools, 1998-1999, Bob Jones University Press, 1998

13. "Global environmentalists have said and written enough to leave no doubt that their goal is to destroy the prosperous economies of the world's richest nations."—Economics: Work and Prosperity in Christian Perspective, 2nd ed., A Beka Book, 1999

14. Globalization is a precursor to rapture: "But instead of this world unification ushering in an age of prosperity and peace, as most globalists believe it will, it will be a time of unimaginable human suffering as recorded in God's Word. The Anti-christ will tightly regulate who may buy and sell."—Economics: Work and Prosperity in Christian Perspective, 2nd ed., A Beka Book, 1999

And that, folks, is how Louisiana will teach their children, and create a whole new generation of think-skulled, numbnuts. Okay, truth be told, they won't be teaching all their children via Bob Jones batshittery, but even the few who are punished by this lack of education, will continue to spread the word that Louisiana is, well, just dumb.

Yay.

via Mother Jones

Indiana Wants To Teach Creationism

Up there around Nutwood Junction way, the Indiana legislature is moving ahead with a bill that would allow creationism to be taught alongside other theories in the state's public school system.
Creationism, a theory with origins in the Bible's Book of Genesis, suggests that divine power created man, animal, and all earthly matters. The idea is an opposing view to the science-based theory of evolution. If the bill passes, Indiana school districts will have the option to include creationism as part of science courses.
Oops, they almost had me.
See, I'm not a big believer in Creationism, but, hey, if that's your bag, then, well, good for you. And, i don't really mind the idea of teaching the theory of Creationism in school.
As a theory. But don't call it a science, and teach it alongside science. 
Creationism is not science. Evolution is science. There is fact to back up evolution. We can actually see evolution. Now, some folks say you can see Creationism, too, though it isn't based in fact, but rather, it's based in belief. In faith.
Belief is not science. Faith is not science.
Creationism is not science.
You wanna teach Creationism to those who wish to learn about it, then go ahead. Just don't called it science.
Unless you call it science fiction.


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Big Bang or Divine Creation

I heard an interesting discussion yesterday on the Big Bang Theory/Evolution versus Divine Creation.

Of course the Bible-thumpers talking refused to accept anything other than God creating anything. God spent seven days creating all that we see, all that we are. Now, they'll tell you that it isn't seven days literally; that God's seven days are longer than our seven days. So, does that mean that God is like a dog, seven years to our one year; or is he cat-like and has nine lives. Or is his calender just messed up?

Maybe God needed a watch and hadn't created one until the seventh day.

They use this theory of God's looooooong seven days to explain away things like Natural Selection or Evolutionary changes to species based on environmental changes. Maybe a trip to the Galapagos Islands will open their eyes to the fact that species are still evolving, still changing, right in front of our faces. There are species in the Galapagos that have evolved from one island to the next, all connected, but vastly different because of environment.

Of course, maybe we're only on God's fourth day, or fifth, and so his, or her, changes are still happening.

I like to believe in a Higher Being. Does he look like Charleton Heston? Gosh, I hope not. Does he look like Zeus, with the white beard and flowing robes? Don't think so. Maybe He is not even a He; perhaps it's Mother Nature that shapes the world. Does she look like a woman from a 1970s margarine commercial? Probably not.

Is there a god? I think so. However, I don't think he's Catholic or Mormon or Jewish or Baptist or Muslim or any of those things. I think God is love. We all have that because we were all given that, and then made the choice whether to use it or discard it.

But I'm off topic. So, for me there is a God. And maybe this God, whomever he or she may be, created the world. Maybe this God was sitting wherever a god sits, in the heavens, on the moon, in a small hotel just off Times Square, behind the sun, or all around, everywhere. Maybe he or she was sitting and watching as the days unfolded and this little blue-green planet suddenly appeared. And this God was so happy to see this globe that he, or she, sheesh, clapped his or her hands out of joy. And the sound made was a Big Bang.

I think you can have both. You can believe that a god of some kind, hawking margarine on TV or parting the Red Sea in Technicolor, created a Big Bang that started all this stuff; amoebae and slime crawling from the sea; gorillas, standing upright and learning to speak; opposable thumbs; snow; stars; sunlight; trees.

If there is a God, and I think there is, although a non-denominational one I imagine, then that god divinely created evolutionary forces that are working to make us what we are today, what we were 20 million years ago, and what will be is the far distant future.

God clapped.

Boom! There it is!