warning: sex may result in pregnancy.

"It was a shock for both of us, so unexpected," said Jamie Lynn Spears of her pregnancy. "I was in complete and total shock and so was he."

I'm a bit ashamed for even mentioning anyone connected to Britney ("Leave her alone!') on my blog, since I cannot for the life of me fathom the reason for America's fascination with her, but the above quote by Britney's freshly impregnated 16-year-old sister deserves some mention for its airheaded ignorance.

You see, when a boy and a girl have sex without adequate birth control, then there's a pretty good chance that the girl will get pregnant.  Alas, that information is taught in Biology and Sex Ed, two subjects that get pretty short shrift in the schools of the region where Britney's mom parked her million-dollar quadruple-wide luxury trailer.

Robin and I sometimes joke that sex education in her native Western North Carolina consists of the father telling his daughter, "If you come home pregnant, I'll fucking kill you."  It's amusing to see that the Fundies on the Right use the exact same approach to teach kids about sex that the touchy-feelies on the left use to teach kids about guns: don't mention it, pretend it doesn't exist, and tell them to not even think about the subject until they're twenty-one.

When you have a culture that connects sex with shame and guilt to such a degree that teenagers won't carry condoms with them because "they don't want to look like they were planning to have sex", you can't be surprised when you end up with the highest teenage pregnancy rates in the Western world.

Oh, yeah...little Jamie Lynn wants to raise her child in her native Louisiana, to make sure "it has a normal childhood".

Yeah, good luck with that.  Little hint: don't go to your big sister for parenting advice.

lordy, not again.

Another day, another genius arrested for trying to pass a million-dollar bill as legal tender.

What really slays me about this particular incident is the picture of the million-dollar bill in question:

There's not just one, but three marks from a counterfeit detector pen on that thing. Someone actually had to use the detector pen to ascertain the counterfeit nature of the bill.

I'm starting to think that we need to look into those Soylent Green factories, 'cause that's all some folks are good for. In this case, the folks on both sides of that bank counter would make fine candidates.

news from surrender-monkey land.

The immigrant youths are rioting in the suburbs of Paris again, showing their host nation how truly grateful they are for the hospitality and all the free government stuff.

The reason for the latest riots?

Two immigrant kids ride an unregistered motorcycle at top speed, without helmets, and ignoring traffic rules. They run a red light, and crash into a police car that was inconveniently occupying the same intersection through which they had intended to zoom. End result: two dead kids, one dented police car.

Now the other immigrant youth are torching cars and throwing rocks at police because they feel that the police, rather than stupidity, killed their two buddies. Apparently, the infrastructure is to blame as well, because the rioters torched not only police cars and a police station, but also a library, a kindergarten, and a bunch of stores.

The French aren't exactly strangers to violent pogroms, and the current immigrant trend of pooping into (and torching) one's own nest may just have a severe backlash in a few years. Then again, the demographics in Europe are shifting to a point where it may just be the native French who will be at the receiving end when that happens.

better sell some property, fred.

This just in:

Crazy Fred Phelps' Westboro Baptist Church was found liable in a civil lawsuit brought forth by the family of Marine Lance Corporal Matthew Snyder, whose funeral was picketed by Phelps' inbred bunch of bigots. The jury in federal court ordered Westboro Baptist to pay 2.9 million dollars in compensatory damages for invasion of privacy and infliction of emotional distress.

Freedom of speech does not shield you from the consequences of that speech, and that's one of the reasons we have civil courts. That judgment will do more damage to Westboro Baptist than all the ass-beatings in the world, and it sets precedent for many more. I have a feeling that Westboro's picketing days are coming to an end.

Update: The jury has awarded an additional eight million dollars in punitive damages, for a grand total of $10.9 million. I'd say that'll make a dent in Fred's fuel budget.

it boggles the mind, part xvii.

This just in:

A third of Americans believe in ghosts. A fifth of the population believes in the existence of spells and witchcraft, and almost half believes in ESP.

How about leprechauns? Or unicorns, perhaps? Do you believe in those, too?

Morons.

We routinely split atoms, we've sent men to the moon, and we have increased the human lifespan almost threefold in just two centuries just through the power of reason and logic...and a huge chunk of the population still believes in invisible, unmeasurable, unprovable ghosts and spirits.

thirty-six years old today.

And you know how I know that I'm getting old?

For the last two or three hours, these two neighborhood kids have been driving their cars up and down our quiet, residential cul-de-sac. One's a moderately riced-up Honda, the other's a Chevy Cavalier with a busted ("gutsy-sounding") muffler. Every once in a while, they'll goose it and dash to the end of the street at top speed...on a street where lots of kids live and play. If I went to fetch the mail, and Quinn dashed out of the house behind me, he'd get turned into road pizza before those teenage morons would be able to brake their shitboxes, and then I'd be going to jail for a very long time.

Anyhow, I know I'm getting old because I've had an almost irrepressible urge to step out into the street, make them stand on the brakes, and then yell, "Slow the fuck down, sport, this is a neighborhood."

how un-american.

There's a sort of mass email going around in conservative circles, one of those "send it on" propaganda pieces that pop up every once in a while.

It shows this picture:



On one of the gun boards I frequent, someone posted the above picture, which shows Barack Obama not putting his hand on his heart during recitation of the Pledge of Allegiance. The poster also included his own assessment of the situation, which is reproduced here verbatim:

"Barack Hussein Obama's photo (that's his real name)......the article said he REFUSED TO NOT ONLY PUT HIS HAND ON HIS HEART DURING THE PLEDGE OF ALLEGIANCE, BUT REFUSED TO SAY THE PLEDGE.....how in the hell can a man like this expect to be our next Commander-in-Chief????"

He titled his post "The future of our beloved freedoms???"

I don't usually wade into this kind of discussion before my first cup of tea in the morning, but I just had to respond to that.

Saying the Pledge and putting your hand on your heart are not indicators for patriotism. Those gestures are easily done, and they cost the person doing them absolutely nothing.

A true measure of one's patriotism is the degree to which one respects the Constitution. While it's likely that Obama is no better than any of the people in that picture who do have their hands on their hearts, it's also pretty damn likely that they're no more patriotic than he is, seeing how at least one of them has voted for stuff that amounts to wiping your butt with the Constitution.

The Devil can cite Scripture for his own purpose, the saying goes. Well, the biggest Statist would-be tyrant can say the Pledge of Allegiance, put a flag pin on their lapel, and wrap themselves in the flag. (Witness the picture as evidence--that's Senator Clinton in the center.)

External gestures have precisely zilch to do with patriotism, especially when they're done at no cost to the person performing them. Just hanging Old Glory out in front of your house doesn't make you a patriot, respecting and defending the Constitution does.

I'm not saying that saying the Pledge of Allegiance or flying Old Glory are un-patriotic actions. I'm merely saying that they're not patriotic actions by themselves. A person who performs them without trying to incorporate the principles for which they stand is no better than a person who buys a Silver Star at the surplus store, pins it on his jacket, and expects the credit and recognition that is owed to the legitimate recipient.

Quote:

Barack Hussein Obama's photo (that's his real name)

Yes, we get it. Obama sounds almost like Osama, hence they must be the same. And Hussein is a raghead name, ergo he's a Muslim, regardless of what Christian church he professes to attend. Thanks for pointing that out to us unenlightened folk.

Of all the reasons why I won't vote for the guy, his name is probably the least important one.

Good heavens, man. "The future of our beloved freedoms"? Where was your indignation when they nullified the Fourth Amendment in the name of the War on Drugs? Where was it when they nullified the Fifth through Eighth Amendments in the name of the War on Terror?

But one of the Presidential contenders won't put his hand on his heart while saying the Pledge, and you're all over that...and his un-American name!

If you want to know why the future is looking grim for our freedoms, there's your answer right there.

in the lair of the swine-people.

I had to venture out of the house today to get a birthday present for my niece.

Since I didn't want to drive clear across town to the Toys-R-Us, I had to bite the bullet and head over to the Lair of the Swine-People, which is always a dangerous undertaking on a Sunday afternoon.

Now, those creatures are not only fat, slow, and stupid, but also terribly unaware of their surroundings, grazing the aisles at speeds that can be measured in geological epochs. They usually don't bother anything that's not a.) junk food, b.) rhinestone-studded, or c.) emblazoned with NASCAR or college football symbology, but I did feel safer knowing that my trusty sixgun is always loaded with 158-grainers, which have the necessary sectional density to penetrate to the vitals in the event of being caught between a charging sow and the pork rind display.

I did manage to procure three packs of Barbie "Fashion Fever" outfit ensembles. On the way out, I took the route least likely to contain any concentrations of Swine-People: from the exercise equipment over to the books, and then through the vegetables & fruit aisle of the grocery section.

how stupid can you get?

One of our fellow citizens, undoubtedly a product of our fine public schools, walked into a Pittsburgh grocery store and attempted to pay for his purchases with a one million dollar bill.

Then he had the unmitigated, brazen gall to ask for his change.

When the manager confiscated the fake (duh!) megabucks bill, the guy got irate, broke some store equipment, and got himself arrested and charged with forgery and criminal mischief.

As Law Dog would say: "Kee Riced All My Tea."

UPDATE: Oh, my God, Becky. There are more of them.

hugo, you blew it now.

Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez is cranking up his efforts to transform still-prosperous Venezuela into a Latin American version of East Germany. Taking a break from nationalizing the oil industry and scaring off foreign investors, Hugo has now shifted his benevolent gaze towards the average Joe on the street.

In his opinion, Venezuelans drink too much, and they're too desirous of consumer goods. It all doesn't fit in with his vision of the "New Man", a proper socialist who eschews all luxuries and distractions for the benefit of the collective. Venezuela's government announced new heavy taxation of booze and luxury goods, which will really give legs to the black market there. Once the taxation policy fails to curb the boozing (and we know it will), there'll be an outright ban on booze and bling...which will, of course, be just as futile.

Look, Hugo: it's the twenty-first century. You can no longer keep information in your country or out of it, because we now have all sort of instantaneous global communications options. No matter how much you go pimping the "New Man" ideal, human nature is what it is, and part of what makes us what we are is the desire to acquire things. Your countrymen and -women can turn on the TV or go on the Internet, and see how the rest of the civilized world has a good time quaffing Martinis and delicious beer while wearing blue jeans and riding to the liquor store in chrome-bumpered Hummers. People aren't buying the "New Man" thing anymore.

It's amazing how every single crusader for socialism thinks that it hasn't worked yet because the right people (namely, them) haven't been in charge. Since the inception of that insidious ideology, no nation has ever prospered under it. Socialism simply doesn't work, because it contradicts the human desire to own stuff, and because it negates the biggest productive force in any society, which is self-interest.

It'll be interesting to see how quickly Hugo can turn a relatively prosperous nation awash in oil revenue into a communist hellhole. It'll get really interesting once he decides to stop asking people to be "New Men" and starts telling them. At gunpoint.

Because that's the only way socialist systems can prolong their existence long enough for the Dear Leader to live a lifetime of power and privilege--they have to start building fences to keep people from voting with their feet, and then they have to break out the guns to ensure compliance. (Notice that all socialist and communist nations in history share one characteristic--they place more restrictions on people leaving than they do on people coming in.)

Alas, Hugo Chavez will soon find out that the best way to piss off the proles is to try and take away their booze, their car keys, their tasty foods, and their CD collections--in other words, everything that makes a guy get up in the morning and go to work. Sheesh--even the Soviets may have rifled through their citizens' drawers on a daily basis, but at least they left the liquor cabinets alone.

breakfast blogging.

Our toaster oven has a warning on the glass door that says IF CONTENTS IGNITE, LEAVE DOOR CLOSED AND UNPLUG OVEN.

I wonder what kind of incident prompted the manufacturer to cover themselves against that particular lawsuit direction. When I took out my breakfast roll and read that warning for the umpteenth time, I suddenly pictured a Homer Simpson-esque guy trying to fish his flaming breakfast out of the oven with bare hands.

"Oh, no! The Pop-Tarts! Gotta save the Pop-Tarts!"

on grammar, once more.

To the moron running "Antique's Etc." down the street:

The apostrophe has a very specific range of legitimate functions in written English.

It is used to denote possession (Frank's shoes, the dog's bowl, the cat's meow), or an omission ("it's" standing for "it is").

It is not used to indiscriminately separate all occurrences of the letter "s" at the end of a word from the rest of it. (In the words of a writer whose name escapes me at the moment, the apostrophe is not employed to alert the reader that the letter "s" follows.)

So, please, unless your name is "Antique" (and I know it isn't), please remove the improperly employed apostrophe at the earliest opportunity, so I won't have to do it with the aid of a putty knife and the cover of early morning darkness. That way, I won't have to flinch each and every time I have to take a left turn in front of your store on the way home.

vote buying, once more.

Via pdb, we find out that Hil wants to give five thousand dollars to every newborn child. pdb rightly points out that those five grand per kid sum up to twenty billion dollars per year, every year. That money doesn't just materialize out of thin air, of course--it has to be confiscated from productive citizens first.

Like someone in the Comments section at pdb's blog points out, there'll be a jump in the purchases of $5K spinning rims among new parents. Hell, can you think of a better incentive for welfare mommas to pump out even more kids? Not only do they get increased payments from Uncle Sugar for each additional kid they can't feed to begin with, but now they'll get a nice lump sum payment on top of that, too. If I was in the habit of voting for whoever promises me the most money out of my neighbor's pocket, there's no way I wouldn't vote for Hil.

another foiled darwin award candidate.

Today's mind-bender: A MIT student is arrested for walking through Boston's Logan Airport with a "fake bomb" strapped to her chest.

Regardless of your position on the government's approach to fighting terrorism, one thing is pretty much a given. If you cannot understand that walking around a major airport with a contraption made of Play-Doh, wiring, and circuit board in plain sight on your chest can result in the premature cancellation of your birth certificate, you may want to get yourself sterilized and do us all the courtesy of not propagating your obviously defective genetic material.

Looks like the admission standards at MIT have dropped sharply in recent years. Of course, it could all just be a deliberate attempt to get publicity and provoke a police response, like Andrew "Don't Tase Me, Bro" Meyer's recent stunt at the Kerry Q&A. However, it's one thing to play "Zap the Douchebag" with campus police, and quite another to walk around with a Play-Doh bomb on your chest in an area that's crawling with jumpy cops who carry automatic weapons.

This is in Boston, where the cops shut down half the city over a Lite-Brite stuck to a bridge...you'd think a MIT sophomore would be smart enough to figure out that wearing a wired sweater and holding a nice big lump of Play-Doh in her hand wouldn't be the smartest thing to do at an airport.

tales from the queen's realm.

Via my friend Mark, a long-suffering subject of the Queen, comes this outrageous little tale from the Place Formerly Known As Great Britain.

The Cliff Notes: a woman is accosted by two hoodlums while dropping her son off at his house. One of the yobs blocks the path behind her car with three dogs, and the other jumps onto her hood and grins through the windshield, telling her that "she's not going anywhere."

She revs the engine, asks the yob on the hood repeatedly to move off, and honks her horn for a minute. Then she puts the car in gear, and weaves the front end a bit at 10mph. When the yob on the hood of her car still hangs on, she gives the brakes a tap to fling him off, unhurt.

She drives a bit, pulls over by the side of the road, and dilligently calls 999 to report the matter to the police.

They show up...and arrest her, for "dangerous driving". She ends up having to hire a lawyer and spend the next 18 months defending herself against the charge.

The two yobs are not charged with anything.

It seems that the powers in charge of the UK have lost the ability to properly distinguish between offender and victim. My friend Mark asked whether 1-800-MARINES was still the proper number to dial to request an invasion...I told him to just leave a message with his name and the country to be invaded, and the Gator Navy would be dispatched within 24 hours.

let there be health care for all.

"A government that robs Peter to pay Paul can always count on the enthusiastic support of Paul."

So the cat is out of the bag, officially. Senator Clinton unveiled her "Mandatory Health Care" proposal, once again proving that you can be a U.S. senator and not have the faintest clue about economics.

Some of the highlights:

--She'll offer federal subsidies for those who can't afford their own health insurance.

--She'll require insurers to insure anyone who applies for coverage.

--She'll bar insurers from charging higher premiums for people who have increased health care costs.

Now, any freshman economics major at Harvard can point out the flaws in that plan, so I have to surmise that Clinton either has nobody on staff who reads Wall Street Journal on occasion, or she's fully aware of the implications of her plan and decided to push it anyway. (That makes her either really daft or really deceitful...take your pick.)

"Federal subsidies" is a Thesaurus term for "everybody's wallets". Subsidies don't materialize out of thin air, they have to be taken from the paychecks of working folks. That means everybody with a paycheck gets to subsidize the health insurance of everybody without a paycheck, thereby removing a major incentive to actually get up in the morning and earn a paycheck.

The biggie, however, is the thing about requiring insurers to take anyone who applies, and then preventing them from charging higher premiums for higher health care costs.

Those costs don't just magically evaporate, of course. If the health insurance company has to take the 50-year-old smoker with Stage 1 lung cancer, and they're prevented from recouping some of the costs that person is sure to rack up in the next few years, then there are two possible options for the insurance. They can either fold altogether, because they're unwilling or unable to eat the costs involved in charging a lung cancer patient the exact same premium as they do a marathon runner who's never sick, or they can avoid violating the law by defraying the cost of the cancer patient's treatment. The only way to do that is to raise insurance premiums for everyone across the board, so everyone still pays the same amount. That brings us back to the previous point, as this would in effect require everyone to pay for everyone else's health care. I cannot for the life of me figure out how forcing me to pay for the consequences of someone else's bad lifestyle choices is "fair".

That plan would almost instantly decrease the availability of health care, make its administration subject to a new and exciting federal bureaucracy (how would you like to make your doctor's visit just like trips to the DMV?), increase the cost of health care to everyone except those who can't (or won't) work, and completely remove all incentives for moderation of consumption when it comes to health care.

You can't wish, vote, or legislate yourself free money. Someone has to pick up the tab in the end, and that someone is invariably the demographic who has something to loot--namely the folks who pull in a paycheck every week or two. The rest of the population will have no trouble voting themselves "free" health care.

Me, I'd rather have a crown or root canal treatment available at $600, than no crown or root canal treatment available at $0. Then again, I have at least a faint grasp on economics, something that seems to be a disqualifying property for a Congressperson.

on the avoidance of physical exertion.

I just made a pit stop at the grocery store on the way home from the bookstore.

At ten o'clock in the evening, the parking lot at Ingles is almost empty. There were maybe a dozen cars in the lot, all parked either on the far side of the lot (employees), or in the spots near the doors (customers). The empty spots were no further than three rows of cars away from the doors of the store--yet there were three cars parked directly by the doors, in the clearly marked "NO PARKING-FIRE LANE" zone right next to the building.

No wonder they now carry jeans at WalMart approaching triple-digit waist sizes. If you can't be bothered to park your gorram truck in a proper parking spot twenty-five yards away from the door, and you absolutely have to hop right from the truck's cabin through the automatic doors onto the electric cart intended for handicapped folks, then you win some sort of prize for lazy, and you fully deserve the public humiliation when they have to cut down the walls of your bedroom so that the industrial lifting equipment can get your fat ass out of the house.

Put down the frakkin' Nachos, and at least walk a few dozen yards to the trough. Seriously.

In the land of the gullible, the bullshitter is king.

This article just boggles the mind. Apparently, there are a whole bunch of people in this country who claim they can not only see dead people's spirits, but actually interact or converse with them. Apparently, there are enough of them (and by extension, enough gullible people to support them with patronage) that they can congregate in thirteen camps all over the country in the summer.

Folks, "supernatural" is a null word. In the entire history of recorded science, there isn't a single credible, tested, and verifiable claim regarding "paranormal" phenomena. Fortune-telling, mindreading, PSI, ESP, seeing ghosts, talking to the dead—it's all a bunch of bullshit, with not a smidgen of hard proof that those phenomena exist anywhere outside of the minds of their practicioners.

Ah, but the key of the whole article, the code to understanding the motor behind these "Spiritualist Camps" is mentioned in the second paragraph. It starts with a dollar symbol—forty bucks per half hour of supernatural mumbo-jumbo. These are professional bullshitters, parasites who extract the money from the pockets of gullible customers with the promise of one last glimpse or conversation with a lost loved one.

Then again, selling tickets to the afterlife is one of humanity's oldest, most destructive, and least productive professions, and this is just another form of mystic pick-pocketing, a new breed of tribal campfire shamans who have discovered that taking messages from the spirit world is more lucrative and less back-breaking than actually going out and hunting or gathering.

when two tribes go to war.

Matt expresses his puzzlement at the ability of some folks to get physically violent over something as inane as allegiance to a sports team.

I think it actually makes perfect sense from a sociological and psychological standpoint. Sports teams are a perfect way for some people to claim allegiance to a tribe. It's basically stylized tribal warfare. You have face paint, tribal colors/clothing, flags, fighting songs, and a great herd of people all dressed exactly like you...and then you go to a stadium (a battlefield with beer vendors and arena seating) to watch the best warriors of your tribe go to battle with the best warriors of the Others. Conveniently enough, the Others are easy to identify,because they too have their own colors, flags, and songs.

Such a convenient way to have instant identifiers of Us and Them is deeply satisfying to humans on a primal psychological level. No need to understand circumstances, read situations, or consider nuances--it's as simple as "our color good, their color bad."

Is it a wonder when some folks get a bit caught up in the spirit of things and revert to their neolithic programming in their desire to defend their own tribe?

feel-good public policy #2,283,388.

The Omaha Housing Authority has decided to make public housing citywide a gun-free zone. Under a new policy effective in October, all public housing residents may not possess guns in their dwellings, even if they own them legally.

Omaha Housing Authority spokesmuppet Stan Timm says that the rules are "one more tool in trying to be ahead of and prevent crime."

Good going, Stan. For all practical purposes, you just painted "CRIMINALS, COME AS YOU ARE" on the door of each residence under your authority, in twelve-inch tall day-glo orange letters.

Just another reason why I'd rather sleep in a cardboard box among rabid weasels than accept a public handout: if you take the King's shilling, you have to sing the King's song.