The National Review will cry a Thousand Oceans

And they’ll cry a thousand more… if it’ll somehow erase that black bastard from ever existing in THEIR White House. Actually, scratch that, they’ll cry a thousand oceans either way.

Mark Steyn, National Weeping Child Brigade:
Constitutional Contortions

So the manly-men of manly National Review has been in perpetual fail mode since the ACA Supreme Court decision. Because nothing says stalwart intellectualism like weeping like a toddler because Mommy wasn’t willing to knock over a 7-11 for you.

But of all the responses, perpetual slimeball Mark Steyn has possibly the most ironically titled, so he wins the Kewpie doll.

Shorter (or the last port before Jungle):

  • The Supreme Court barely avoiding making a mockery of the Court system in one single case is a violation of our constitutional right to win at everything!

The Affordable Care Act decision, much like the bill itself, has me feeling rather ambivalent. On one hand, the ACA is an important political victory for Democrats and may make small, but important reforms in how healthcare works in this country. Not to mention that the exchange part of the bill and the protections against pre-existing condition horseshit are extremely sexy. And the Supreme Court rejecting the “but we wanna destroy the black man” nonsense is possibly a sign that the Judicial Branch isn’t completely fucked yet…

Buuuut, the bill is also deeply problematic. It’s a conservative idea in the first place and mostly serves to entrench our dysfunctional insurance-based health care system and make it harder to get rid of on the day we decide to join the first world nations. Additionally it mostly papers over problems of lack of health care access by making it about “lacking health insurance” instead, which opens some big gaping doors to shady practices already going on in the insurance world of giving insurance on paper which is almost impossible to take advantage of in any real way.

And the decision itself was a narrow decision it had no reason to be and elides over the deep rot going on in our Judicial Branch and the need to fix it. Not to mention that for as much of a political victory this was, I imagine in a purely cold political calculation, running against the fuckers gleefully celebrating denying people health care would have been the easiest fucking campaign in the world and possibly one even Democrats couldn’t have fucked up.

But still, it’s probably a net good thing as any incremental change out of the horror show that was the state of our health care system would have to be.

And now that that’s all out of my system, let’s enjoy the most important thing about all of this. No, not the people who might receive better health care, that’d just be silly. No, it’s obviously wingnuts experiencing such extreme butthurt it can be heard from space.

Three months ago, I quoted George Jonas on the 30th anniversary of Canada’s ghastly “Charter of Rights and Freedoms”: “There seems to be an inverse relationship between written instruments of freedom, such as a Charter, and freedom itself,” wrote Jonas. “It’s as if freedom were too fragile to be put into words: If you write down your rights and freedoms, you lose them.”

Yes, actually writing out some sort of Constitution or Bill of Rights to protect the people from their government is the surest sign of an autocratic nightmare.

Why if you do that, you lose the ability to fuck over the people like you want and deny them rights if they start getting uppity about their lords and masters and what other freedom could possibly matter against that?

Also, is anyone at all shocked that Conservatives have gotten to the point where they are arguing against Constitutions and Bill of Rights?

For longer than one might have expected, the U.S. Constitution was a happy exception to that general rule

I need to include this line because we got the rubes all riled up on fetishizing the Constitution and our Founders as a pantheon of Gods and thus can’t immediately start passing out the armbands without popping the clutch.

— until, that is, the contortions required to reconcile a republic of limited government with the ambitions of statism rendered U.S. constitutionalism increasingly absurd.

Until… there was a Constitutional Convention to write the thing? Cause, yeah, that’s what the Constitution WAS. We tried the whole State’s Rights thing with the Articles of Confederation and it failed so hard it left impact marks in the ground. And so we deliberately wrote something where a central confab of cool cats got to rule over the states and actually get shit accomplished.

But hey, to all the Secessionist Wannabes, I gotta say, I’m finally to the point where my answer to you is:

Fine, go.

Let’s let America balkanize into its constituent parts and see just how long the conservative ones can survive entirely on their conservative economic and social policies without the liberal states underwriting their mistakes and cleaning up the big messes when they happen.

I’m sure it will be illuminating.

As I also wrote three months ago (yes, yes, don’t worry, there’s a couple of sentences of new material in amongst all the I-told-you-so stuff)

Ha!

As if he bothered to update the screed he’s probably had waiting on his desktop for months. I mean, if your job was to scare the rubes before and scare them after and you weren’t constrained by things like reality, would you bother updating anything or writing anything new?

“The United States is the only Western nation in which our rulers invoke the Constitution for the purpose of overriding it — or, at any rate, torturing its language beyond repair.”

Oh no! Not torturing its language! Why, is there anything worse than torturing language (by following explicitly written rights of the Legislature enumerated in the actual Constitution part of the Constitution)? Why that’s like double Hitler and is totally infinitely worse than actually torturing meaningless people in violation of International War Crime Law!

I mean, how can liberals sleep at night being party to such a thing!

Thus, the Supreme Court’s Obamacare decision. No one could seriously argue that the Framers’ vision of the Constitution intended to provide philosophical license for a national government (“federal” hardly seems le mot juste) whose treasury could fine you for declining to make provision for a chest infection that meets the approval of the Commissar of Ailments.

Philosophical License of the Constitution?

Well, yeah, without hitting the hash pipe with a piece of fucking paper, I’d definitely be unable to figure that one out.

Of course, I could ask my good buddy Alexander Hamilton when he wrote out the philosophical defense for the existence of a Federal government in the Federalist Papers (30-36 being the most apt).

I could also ignore that hand-wave and just look at the explicit Legal right written RIGHT FUCK THERE in the Constitution’s list of powers given to the Legislative. Specifically the clause allowing regulation of interstate commerce and allowing the setting of fines, levies, and taxes.

But hey, maybe Mark Steyn is a time-traveler from 1776 and thus assumes that the Articles of Confederation are the current Constitution.

Yet on Thursday Chief Justice Roberts did just that. And conservatives are supposed to be encouraged that he did so by appeal to the Constitution’s taxing authority rather than by a massive expansion of the Commerce Clause. Indeed, several respected commentators portrayed the Chief Justice’s majority vote as a finely calibrated act of constitutional seemliness.

Yeah, I know you’re just working the refs and all, but calling a routine aspect of the Commerce Clause a “massive expansion” doesn’t actually make it so.

Also, I’m not sure you get to bitch about any motion around Constitutional clauses. Yeah, maybe if you weren’t the fuckers inventing Free Speech Zones, deciding money was free speech, but free speech counters to money wasn’t, deciding that the right to a militia gave you the right to gun down kids without even needing a trial, or that you could decide rights to a fair trial just straight up didn’t apply to people you didn’t like.

But since not, fuck you and your weepy horseshit about something actually enumerated in the Constitution. If you didn’t like it, maybe you should have passed a constitutional amendment. Or hell, maybe you could have actually read the thing.

Just throwing out ideas, Marky boy.

Great. That and $4.95 will get you a decaf macchiato in the Supreme Court snack bar. There’s nothing constitutionally seemly about a Court decision that says this law is only legal because the people’s representatives flat-out lied to the people when they passed it.

Really? We can just strike out laws we don’t like if the people who passed it lied to get them passed? Cause if that’s the case, I’m rather looking forward to the last 30 years of conservative legislative victories being erased from existence.

Throughout the Obamacare debates, Democrats explicitly denied it was a massive tax hike: “You reject that it’s a tax increase?” George Stephanopoulos demanded to know on ABC. “I absolutely reject that notion,” replied the president. Yet “that notion” is the only one that would fly at the Supreme Court. The jurists found the individual mandate constitutional by declining to recognize it as a mandate at all. For Roberts’ defenders on the right, this is apparently a daring rout of Big Government: Like Nelson contemplating the Danish fleet at the Battle of Copenhagen, the chief justice held the telescope to his blind eye and declared, “I see no ships.”

So, lemme get this straight. Since Roberts only did his fucking job and didn’t make the Judicial Branch a wholly owned subsidiary of the Republican Branch in this single case when he was allowed to give credence to a right-wing scare-word to help out his party, that proves that your nonsense horseshit was correct?

Seems legit.

But hey, taxes are also super legal according to the Constitution, so again how is this a bad decision that flaunts the Constitution and all that?

If it looks like a duck, quacks like a duck, but a handful of judges rule that it’s a rare breed of elk, then all’s well. The chief justice, on the other hand, looks, quacks, and walks like the Queen in Alice in Wonderland: “Sentence first — verdict afterwards.” The Obama administration sentences you to a $695 fine, and a couple of years later the queens of the Supreme Court explain what it is you’re guilty of. A. V. Dicey’s famous antipathy to written constitutions and preference for what he called (in a then largely unfamiliar coinage) the “rule of law” has never looked better.

Instead, constitutionalists argue that Chief Roberts has won a Nelson-like victory over the ever-expanding Commerce Clause. Big deal — for is his new, approved, enhanced taxing power not equally expandable? And, in attempting to pass off a confiscatory penalty as a legitimate tax, Roberts inflicts damage on the most basic legal principles.

Wow. Not even gonna try, are you?

Just going to roll in the dirt and scream until Mommy lets you have your way. Well, sorry Marky boy, but Mommy said fuck this noise and went into the alley with those 3 good looking boys from the local Community Center.

Also, wingnuts of the world, please do start a Scorched Earth campaign against the right to levy fines. I’m sure the Finance and Insurance industry would love you for that once you’ve completely destroyed the Car Insurance industry and prevented any means of banks to nickel and dime us to death.

I have great respect for George Will, but his assertion that the Supreme Court decision is a “huge victory” that will “help revive a venerable tradition” of “viewing congressional actions with a skeptical constitutional squint” and lead to a “sharpening” of “many Americans’ constitutional consciousness” is sufficiently delusional that one trusts mental health is not grounds for priority check-in at the death panel.

Oh how cute, the wingnuts are still pretending that death panels are a real thing.

Though apparently they no longer are the evil government forces that sentence little old ladies to death, but an actual physical place much like Auschwitz wherein the reaping of conservative souls will take place.

How very sad… that that somehow got out. Fess up, you bastards, who squealed?!?

Back in the real world, it is a melancholy fact that tens of millions of Americans are far more European in their view of government than the nation’s self-mythologizing would suggest. Indeed, citizens of many Continental countries now have more — what’s the word? — liberty in matters of health care than Americans. That’s to say, they have genuinely universal government systems alongside genuinely private-system alternatives.

DEAL!

So very much a deal. We will scrap this evil Obamacare in a nanosecond if you give us the European health care system and we all get free universal health care while you get to pay extra for the ambiance of specialness.

Just tell us where to sign. But remember, no takebacks.

Only in America does “health” “care” “reform” begin with the hiring of 16,500 new IRS agents tasked with determining whether your insurance policy merits a fine.

Oooooh, scary IRS people! Be scared of the IRS, they’ll break into your home and shoot your dog… wait… that doesn’t sound right.

It is the perverse genius of Obamacare that it will kill off what’s left of a truly private health sector without leading to a truly universal system. However, it will be catastrophically unaffordable, hideously bureaucratic, and ever more coercive. So what’s not to like?

God damn, would I pay money to live in the world wingnut’s imagine they do!

A world where the ACA, instead of propping up a dying private health care industry and making it nearly impossible to excise, actually did just straight up give us full government health care?

Where it was so amazing it made European systems look like American ones? Fuck, they couldn’t take my money fast enough for that to be true.

To give Chief Justice Roberts’ argument more credit than it deserves, governments use taxes as a form of incentive. There is mortgage tax relief because the state feels home ownership is generally a good thing. Conversely, not buying health insurance is a bad thing, so such anti-social behavior should be liable to a kind of anti-social tax. But, as presently constituted, the Supreme Court’s new “tax” is a steal — $695 is cheaper than most annual health-insurance policies. Especially when, under Obamacare, you’re allowed to wait till you get ill to take out health insurance, and you can’t be turned down. Which is why the cost of insurance is already rising, and will rise higher still down the road. Which means that in a few years’ time paying the penalty will look even more of a bargain, at least until you fall off the roof or acquire an uncooperative polyp.

This is an amazingly persuasive argument…

For a universal health care system and a rejection of the very watered-down bullshit your side fought to compromise to.

Again, we’re perfectly happy with a redo as long as you stick to these totally not disingenuous arguments and go fully behind a real universal government health care system.

Also, on a whole other note, OF COURSE YOU DON’T NEED HEALTH INSURANCE UNTIL YOU GET SICK, THAT’S THE FUCKING POINT!

You have health insurance or insurance in general so that when something catastrophic does happen, you’re not completely fucked over. It’s like how car insurance is useless if you never get into an accident or life insurance is useless if you never die.

Right now, many Americans are, by any rational measure, over-insured.

A-what now?

That will be far less affordable in the future. Some are already downgrading to less lavish-

No, don’t go on, what the fuck was that line? Americans are, by any rational measure, over-insured? Just plopped into the middle of a paragraph like it wasn’t a rotting log left in the middle of the dinner party?

No, Mark, you don’t get to do that. I demand an explanation.

That will be far less affordable in the future. Some are already downgrading to less lavish policies. Those with barebones policies might likewise find it makes more sense to downgrade to the $695 penalty. What Chief Justice Roberts sees as the Alternative Mandate Tax, millions of Americans will see as a de facto Alternative Minimum Health Plan.

Fine. Ignore me.

Dick.

Who knows? Chances are I’m wrong

Yes, the chances are very high on that.

, and the justices are wrong, and the government’s wrong, and the consequences of Obamacare will be of a nature none of us has foreseen.

Wouldn’t that normally be the setup for a bad thing? I mean, I had my own wishy-washy bit up top, and at least had the sense to have the good stuff preceded by good-leaning rhetoric.

Have you spent so much time writing scare-tactic bullshit that your rhetoric is permanently stuck in “oogie boogie”?

Cause, wow… that’s actually legitimately sad.

I’m not entirely sure how to feel about the rest of your-

But we already know Obama’s been wrong about pretty much everything — you can keep your own doc, your premiums won’t go up, it’s not a tax, etc. — and in the Republic of Paperwork multi-trillion-dollar cost overruns and ever greater bureaucratic sclerosis seem the very least you can bet on. It should also be a given that this decision is a forlorn marker on a great nation’s descent into steep decline and decay.

And I’m back!

So let’s see here, on the false-o-meter how high we can go. Um, let’s see, since there’s nothing banning people with health insurance from having it, I’m not sure how the fact that National Review cheaped out and switched carriers is Obama’s fault. Ditto on premiums.

Hey, you know how you could have avoided having our shitty private health care system? Not fighting for it.

Don’t like the consequences of a private health care system that can jack up the prices, eliminate doctors and otherwise fuck with you like the peon you are, then maybe you should stop being utterly terrified that the pencil pusher in charge of your paperwork received a government salary.

Fuck, I’m not sure how any government involvement would be worse. We already have insurance pong whenever anyone is foolish enough to use their private insurance, thus forcing endless reams of paperwork fighting someone whose job consists of rejecting everything. At least the uncaring government bureaucrat has a job description of actually helping you rather than fucking you over.

And on a serious note, let this be yet another stone marker in how the successful right-wing campaign to turn words like government into religious evil words one must shun to prove membership in the tribe royally fucks over the tribe most of all.

He really really wants a government run system where he doesn’t have to fight through 12 companies just to pay for a routine checkup. But the government=bad so he’ll fight tooth and nail in service to the shit he’s stuck with now, mostly by using arguments against the shit he’s stuck with now.

If you ever wanted to know how religion convinced serfs to not rebel against their abusive feudal lords, look no further!

Granted the dysfunctionalism of Canadian health care, there’s at least the consolation of an equality of crappiness for all except cabinet ministers and NHL players.

How did we get on Canadian health care? Is it because you referenced the Canadian Constitution in your first paragraph, cause…

Not gonna lie, that’s a pretty big rhetorical stretch even for you fuckers.

Here, it’s 2,800 unread pages of opt-outs, favors, cronyism, and a $695 fine for those guilty of no crime except wanting to live their lives without putting their bladder under the jurisdiction of Commissar Sebelius.

Wow, that’s a lot of dog whistles in one place. It’s almost like this entire post was a giant temper tantrum. And brushing up against sanity by arguing against our broken current health care system and abuses caused by the All-Sainted Free Market, triggered your Cognitive Dissonance something fierce. So fierce, that you needed to let loose a meaningless explosion of random scare-words and right-wing boogiemen just to avoid rational thought.

But that would be craziness brought on by not having Kathleen Sebelius control my pee…

Actually I’m not entirely sure where that last dog whistle was going.

Do… do you think that your being oppressed by female watersports participants?

And the Constitution is apparently cool with all that.

I don’t think the Constitution really has an opinion one way or another on female watersports. I’d imagine it’s one of those things covered by the Ninth Amendment, you know, the one you wingnuts like to pretend never existed.

So be it. It’s down to the people now — as it should be.

Well, yes, it was a legislative victory, so the correct response was always trying to get your dystopian nightmare society passed by the Legislature, ideally by arguing on behalf of making things worse on the national stage.

But you wanted to do an end-run around all that and ask Daddy Supreme Court to make it all better so that the Republicans would have another victory to rub in the face of Obama for the 2012 election.

Maybe you should have tried not sucking. I hear it’s very popular among non-losers.

But, meanwhile, a little less deference to judges wouldn’t go amiss. The U.S. Supreme Court is starting to look like Britain’s National Health Service — you wait two years to get in, and then they tell you there’s nothing wrong. And you can’t get a second opinion.

Another health care system I’d love to have instead of what got passed. Damnitt, Mark, could you stop with the teases already!

Also… I’m not sure I can tackle all the fail in this.

Um, yes, if you demand to go onto a specialist’s waiting list in any country for an imaginary disease, you probably will be told that there’s nothing wrong, so stop wasting the time of people who are actually sick.

But hey, why bother pointing that out, because we all know that it was just a disingenuous “be scared of Europeans and their health care jab” already undercut by you admitting that those are vastly superior because they are more government run and cut out the useless private-industry middle-men who only make money when they fuck people over.

And yes, when you waste everyone’s time appealing to the Supreme Court rather than trying to build public support for “the shitty system we have now, but this time forever” you do get to be beaten like a chump with no do-overs. Again, downside of being a total chump loser.

If you didn’t want to look like a complete moron, maybe you shouldn’t have rested all your 2012 hopes on your trained seals throwing away the rest of their dignity to serve Party first and try and rescue your failed ideology from itself by giving you a meaningless win.

Seriously, if they had handed you the win, what was the follow-up plan?

To trumpet to the heavens how you showed that black bastard and denied everyone health care?

Cause… probably wouldn’t have worked out the way you hoped it would.


‘Shorter’ concept created by Daniel Davies and perfected by Elton Beard. Ensuring a long fisking is completely derailed by my early ambivalence to the decision itself is inventing by me. We are aware of all Internet traditions.™


 

Comments: 192

 
 
 

“Chances are I’m wrong” should be the disclaimer on every wingnut rant.

 
Bozo the Cocksucker
 

It causes me genuine physical pain to think that Michael J. Nelson reads this cunt and nods along to every shit-covered phoneme.

 
 

So they’re like 15 and 1 in this court and they’re crying like bitchez. This is what happens when you breast feed from your father!

 
 

But, meanwhile, a little less deference to judges wouldn’t go amiss.

Dear judges: Please rule on the constitutionality of this law. Note that we will only consider your ruling binding if we agree with it. Sincerely, Dumbfux, Inc.

 
 

“Chances are I’m wrong” should be the disclaimer on is the closest thing to substance in every wingnut rant.

Fixxed. Improved.

 
 

It’s a conservative idea in the first place and mostly serves to entrench our dysfunctional insurance-based health care system and make it harder to get rid of on the day we decide to join the first world nations.

Bingo.
~

 
 

OK, we’re officially in Bizarro-World territory here: Steyn is essentially making (modulo the “OMG LIBERTY” fetish) the *progressive* argument against The Heritage Foundation’s original proposal…

 
 

A. V. Dicey’s famous antipathy to written constitutions and preference for what he called (in a then largely unfamiliar coinage) the “rule of law” has never looked better.

Ohhh, I get it! Calvin ball!

Nooooo. Wait. Errrr. Pfft.

hipcoolneatocalculatorwatchandstuff

The Romney Family Olympics?

 
 

From the dead thread:

“Have you ever read anything by Jack Vance? The Dying Earth is a collection of weird fantasy short stories which have an evocative beauty to them.”–BBBB

Yes I have, but it’s been many years. I really liked his style. Last year I resolved to read more, and did some research into him. I only managed to find some short stories to read then. But now that I’m employed I can go Vancian in earnest.

He still seems to have my number. I never quite forgot a certain story (excerpt?) about diving for valuable scales in a mucky well. It’s a testament that any details at all remain in memory after 20+ years. What remains is the tone, the cleverness, the one-of-a-kind milieu. Different but not strained.

 
 

Golem Heart: give the Demon Princes pentalogy a try. They’re SF rather than fantasy, but still very readable and stylish.

 
 

Cerb, yer brilliant, and I’ve started a couple religions for you, but

Not to mention that for as much of a political victory this was, I imagine in a purely cold political calculation, running against the fuckers gleefully celebrating denying people health care would have been the easiest fucking campaign in the world and possibly one even Democrats couldn’t have fucked up.

I gots to quibble. First off, I sinks the Democratic party could fuck up scrambled eggs given a chicken and a 90 foot cliff. Second, I don’t see that political calculation. I don’t believe there are many ‘undecideds’ in this years politickling, at least undecideds who typically/plan to vote. Each side will be able to pick up a few low info voters, maybe, but I think that very few likely voters were going to have their opinions swayed by this ruling alone.

Lotta anger – I myself have been trying to approach things with a bit of a sense of humor, as, for example, it does no one’s career any good to argue with coworkers, nor family relationships. These are very easy tangles for me to get into as I am known to be somewhere’s to the left of, well, everybody on earth, but after the mindboggling hissy-fits yesterday (“this is the last Independence Day in US history” “Google picked a commie anthem for an avatar on July 4” “Health care is doublegestaposeptembereleventhedaythemusicdied”) I have lost my cherub-like demeanor.

 
 

I love the wingnut argument against the ACA that whines that it empowers employers to dump healthcare insurance packages for their workers because there will be an exchange where the workers will be able to get their own coverage. They say this with a straight face and earnestness without ever realizing that the employers, all of them, today, can dump all their plans and leave their workers with absolutely nothing. And of course, the same wingnuts support businesses screwing over their employees however they want, including dumping health plans, and then say we have the greatest system in the world.

 
 

‘“Chances are I’m wrong’ is the closest thing to substance in every wingnut rant.”

Thank you @tensor – that’s what I was trying to say, but I was woozy from the fermented mangoes.

 
 

… could fine you for declining to make provision for a chest infection that meets the approval of the Commissar of Ailments.

…is sufficiently delusional that one trusts mental health is not grounds for priority check-in at the death panel.

Great. That and $4.95 will get you a decaf macchiato in the Supreme Court snack bar.

…it looks like a duck, quacks like a duck, but a handful of judges rule that it’s a rare breed of elk, then all’s well. The chief justice, on the other hand, looks, quacks, and walks like the Queen in Alice in Wonderland: “Sentence first — verdict afterwards.”

Looks like someone read “The Tyranny of Cliches” and decided to do something about it!

 
Big Bad Bald Bastard
 

He still seems to have my number. I never quite forgot a certain story (excerpt?) about diving for valuable scales in a mucky well. It’s a testament that any details at all remain in memory after 20+ years.

Ahhh… you want this book, then– don’t let the awful cover dissuade you.

Golem Heart: give the Demon Princes pentalogy a try. They’re SF rather than fantasy, but still very readable and stylish.

Also available in two volumes. I’d recommend the awfully titled Planet of Adventure tetralogy, with the even more awfully (yet hilariously) titled second part Servants of the Wankh.

 
Big Bad Bald Bastard
 

Looks like someone read “The Tyranny of Cliches” and decided to do something about it!

Well obsoived, wiley!

 
 

A fourth grader could have written a better researched, more nuanced review than Steyn. Said fourth grader would at least attempt to read the bill and the decision. Steyn, on the other hand, is just a link in the great wingnut circle jerk in which they all rely on each other’s made up “analysis” to write their screeds of butthurt.

 
 

Meanwhile…

The Conservative Cow Doctor has revealed that Karl Marx and Bambi are collaborating on a four-step plot which will enable future leftists to utilize immense herds of bison to crush the republic and grind the world’s economy to a halt. You have been warned, citizens.

(Via Mahablog and Charles Pierce)

 
 

Great Cthuhlu, Snorg! That guy is a real state rep? Yikes!

 
 

Oh yeah, the Human Steyn can eat a bag of salted dicks.

 
 

BEWARE! Those bison are already rounding up terrified, screaming herds of Amerkans and stampeding them off the cliffs!

“Our great American experiment in freedom is stampeding off a cliff. Surrounded by bison, there are American patriots in the leads hollering about this being a trap, but their screams are ignored as they disappear from view and ear shot over the horizon. Slaughter on the western plains has come full circle.”

This guy is a state rep? Hi-larious!

 
 

If he thinks that tax/fee thing is going to spill anyone’s beer, he’s even dumber than I thought. How many voters will resent a “tax” that the huge majority of them won’t have to pay?

 
 

I, for one, would pay good money to see wingnut “patriots” caught in a thundering herd of bison, but I can’t justify wanton cruelty to such noble animals.

 
 

Thanks for the Vance tips, you two.

Gary Gygax turned me on to Vance, though as I said I never got very far. The AD&D 1st ed. Dungeon Masters Guide featured a now-hallowed “Appendix N: Inspirational and Educational Reading” recommending Vance’s Eyes of the Overworld, The Dying Earth “et al.” It’s a solid list, so far as I know.

Gygax had good taste in fantasy, in spite of being a bad novelist and ending life as a fundie wingnut. Who woulda guessed?… well, anyone who read his Dragon magazine editorials, I suppose, and could recognize a certain type of naive businessman and moralist in them.

 
 

Notice that the word “Romney” does not appear in Steyn’s column. Romney and his aide are tripping over their dicks on the tax/fee thing, which goes to show you what a winner of an issue this is for the goopers.

 
 

Which Gygax stuff demonstrated fundie wingnuttery (as opposed to word-a-day calendar abuse)?

 
 

Notice that the word “Romney” does not appear in Steyn’s column. Romney and his aide are tripping over their dicks on the tax/fee thing, which goes to show you what a winner of an issue this is for the goopers.

Do you recommend Bermuda, the Caymans or Switzerland as a haven to evade this historic tax?
.

 
 

Which Gygax stuff demonstrated fundie wingnuttery (as opposed to word-a-day calendar abuse)?

A few posts that I know of at the Dragonsfoot forums. Not necessarily here: http://www.dragonsfoot.org/forums/viewforum.php?f=50&sid=2a023e3e01bd2b3cff2754b6686ca336

I firmly recall an absurdly jingoistic video he linked to, approvingly, as well as a few others. Of course he mainly was interested in fun and games on those forums. But on at least a few occasions he went out of his way to express a certain side of himself.

I can find links if you like; I wouldn’t malign this guy without reason.

 
 

Eh, don’t stress yourself about it. I already know there’s a distressingly reactionary streak in geekdom.

 
 

You mean “flouts the Constitution,” not “flaunts the Constitution.”

 
 

The United States is the only Western nation in which our rulers invoke the Constitution for the purpose of overriding it

Indeed, the rulers of the Europeens and Canuckistanis don’t ever invoke our Constitution for the purpose of overriding it, well spotted.

There’s nothing constitutionally seemly about a Court decision that says this law is only legal because the people’s representatives flat-out lied to the people when they passed it.

HAIL PRESIDENT GORE!

 
 

gads…reading mark steyn always makes me want to punch something…really hard…

 
 

Eh, don’t stress yourself about it. I already know there’s a distressingly reactionary streak in geekdom.

Indeedy. Now you’ve spared me some trouble. I was worried I’d have to document my hazy memories.

 
 

It is to be assumed that had our Charter included property rights, Teh Human Steyn would consider it the judicial jewel of the industrialized world.

Also safe to assume that outside some dedicated window-lickers on freerepublic.com, nobody’s going to accuse the Heritage Foundation of being a crypto-Marxist sleeper cell, even though the mandate was their baby.

 
 

…several respected commentators portrayed the Chief Justice’s majority vote as a finely calibrated act of constitutional seemliness…

Surely not SEEMLINESS!? We are so fucked. I think. Well at least it’s constitutional. Pretty sure I know of no dogwhistle emitting this frequency, and thank goodness. I wanna say the last time I saw this word was on reading Sense & Sensibility.

 
Right-Wing Troll
 

What’s next? Taxing stupidity? You’ll pry my ideology out of my cold, dead hands . . .

 
 

I normally just lurk but if that idiot is going to slander Lord Nelson, I’m going to correct him.
Nelson did not put the telescope to his blind eye so he could pretend to see no ships (??!!).
He did so in order to avoid seeing the signal of his nominal superior, who was ordering him to retreat because all was obviously lost, lost, run away, leave the wounded!
Nelson, who had lost many body parts, but retained his spine, just denied seeing the order to retreat and went on to win the battle.

He would not be very happy about being slandered by yet another idiot declaring ‘all is lost’ while remaining safely beyond sight of the battle.

This historical moment brought to you by People Who Actually Studied History.

 
 

longstreet63 said,
July 6, 2012 at 13:50

Great! Another religion to start. Longstreet, how do you prefer to be addressed? “The Majestic Nibs” or “Bearer of Magnificent Genitalia”?

Your tax exemption will arrive shortly. Don’t check the kerning.

 
Lurking Canadian
 

Among Steyn’s other errors, I must point out thy what Nelson failed to see through his blind eye was the signal ordering him to withdraw, not the enemy fleet.

And, of course, I must humbly apologize, on behalf of the whole damned country, for Mark Fucking Steyn. Don’t you wish we’d stuck to exporting crappy pop acts?

 
 

Thank you, Paleotectonics.
The Proper Form of address, however, is “Viscount Funkadelic”.
Now that I have a tax exemption, I can live the good life of a millionaire, getting to keep an extra 30 percent of my income.
OK. well, millionaires only get an extra 11%, because job creators, but still.
Lurking Canadian–beat you by 15 minutes, but you can still join my PAC.

 
 

Does anyone besides Mark Steyn think Mark Steyn is funny?

 
 

LC, You beat me to it. I was about to beg you Canucks to quit sending us stuff.

 
 

We exported Conrad Black and Americans wisely put him in jail. Good for us!

 
 

you wait two years to get in, and then they tell you there’s nothing wrong. And you can’t get a second opinion.

Could it be that you are actually fine? You know, doctors don’t have any incentive whatsoever to give you multiple, expensive tests to find something wrong with you because of your insistence. Then prescribe ____ that will probably cause a different problem all together.

But sure, you get 20 wasteful tests because of Wingnut Welfare while another guy — who actually needs welfare — can’t even get a free, decent meal let alone a test.

 
 

I’m sure we could find a cell for Steyn, it’s a growth industry that incarceration.

 
 

I normally just lurk but if that idiot is going to slander Lord Nelson, I’m going to correct him.

I thought Nelson was a journalist. Didn’t he have a column in the London Times?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nelson%27s_Column

 
 

Does anyone besides Mark Steyn think Mark Steyn is funny?

I find him funny. But in a “does-this-milk-smell-funny?” kinda way.

 
 

Beware the Oreamnos!

Where’s the Chupacabra when you need him?

 
 

This guy is a state rep? Hi-larious!

what’s more troubling is that he’s a veterinarian…

 
 

in that his disregard for humans is to be expected, but you’d think that being a vet, he actually, like…cared about animals?

 
 

There is a great synchronicity here with Mark Steyn and bison running off a cliff.
I would be sad about the bison, however.

 
 

Well, I was prepared to come down here and say something to the effect of: “At least the wingnuts aren’t going on about death panels anymore. Just the opposite, in fact – instead of bitching that you’ll be denied coverage, they’re new nightmare is that you’ll have coverage forced upon you.” But no, Steyn had to slip it in there just to be a dick.

Seriously, though, Steyn doesn’t seem to know what he’s talking about – going on about free riders even though the whole point of the mandate is eliminating free riders, or those weird jokes about “Comrade Sebelius” which seem to miss that this is about coverage, not health care. It’s almost as though no one in the right-blogosphere ever reads a primary source. I’d call it a circle-jerk, but it’s more like those flies that eat each other’s vomit.

 
 

Does anyone besides Mark Steyn think Mark Steyn is funny?

Well, someone buys his books, and they ain’t doing it because he’s informative.

 
 

Well, someone buys his books, and they ain’t doing it because he’s informative

kindling? toilet paper? something to use as a blunt instrument to beat someone about the head?

 
 

Don’t you wish we’d stuck to exporting crappy pop acts?

DONT BE CRACKIN ON BRYAN ADAMS!

“I got my first real six string
Bought it at the 5 and Dime
Played it ’til my fingers bled
Was the summer of ’69”

Little earworm for your ass. YOU’RE WELCOME.

 
 

LC, You beat me to it. I was about to beg you Canucks to quit sending us stuff.

They’ll be well compensated with Rush the Fat Shit makes good on his promise to leave the country because of the ACA.

 
 

Which is totally gonna happen. Aaaaany minute now….

 
 

what’s more troubling is that he’s a veterinarian…

It sounds to me like he eats a LOT of meat…

 
 

Again with the disappearing act? I’m beginning to think you people don’t like me much. VALIDATE ME NOW

 
Xecklothayyquou Gilchrist
 

‘“Chances are I’m wrong’ is the closest thing to substance in every wingnut rant.”

I knew it was still too wordy.

 
 

Canada’s infamous geologically-epic wait times sure get some hella buku press in the US … gee, I wonder why?

Considering what sort of wacky fun & games we’re missing out on up here, I think I’ll just suck it up & wait longer to see the local shaman, thanks.

 
 

VALIDATE ME NOW

I only stamp parking slips of people who buy, not browsers.

 
 

Kiss me Hardy!

Arrrrrgggggghhhhh.

 
 

Throughout the Obamacare debates, Democrats explicitly denied it was a massive tax hike: “You reject that it’s a tax increase?” George Stephanopoulos demanded to know on ABC. “I absolutely reject that notion,” replied the president. Yet “that notion” is the only one that would fly at the Supreme Court. The jurists found the individual mandate constitutional by declining to recognize it as a mandate at all.

More bullshit in bold. The “jurists” (plural) found no such thing. The other four justices who voted to uphold accepted the Commerce Clause argument. It was only Roberts who needed to twist himself into a pretzel with an argument on the Congress’ broad powers of taxation in order to preserve the bigger prize for his corporate sponsors, while at the same time saving the court from becoming an undeniably disreputable body deciding all questions before it on the grounds of political partisanship and radical ideology rather than, you know, law.

Beyond that, it’s not a tax per se in the sense that income tax is a tax. If you think of it as a tax, the category it would fall into is that of the so-called “sin taxes,” which are voluntary. You don’t pay it if you have insurance, in the same way you don’t pay federal or state tobacco taxes if you don’t purchase tobacco. So much for the “tyranny of oppressive taxation.”

Likewise, all this horseshit about “the largest middle-class tax increase in history!!!!” is, well, horseshit. Most people in the middle class have employer-provided insurance; many others who are self-employed are already covered under individual plans. In the middle class, the uninsured people you find usually are uninsured because the insurers wouldn’t cover them, or because they won’t cover them for anything approaching a fair price. That’s been fixed now. Those who have gone without coverage are typically working class and poor, because they couldn’t afford coverage. We’ll have to see how all the exchanges and Medicaid expansion shapes up, but the chances are that many or most of them will now be able to afford coverage that was out of reach previously, and certainly for those who receive assistance in purchasing or free coverage via Medicaid that brings the cost for purchasing below the cost of the minimum penalty, getting the insurance is the more attractive option in terms of both personal economics and having access to care when needed.

I think it’s a real stretch to characterize the fines as taxes, even if you liken them to sin taxes (in that if you engage in the preferred behavoir you escape the “tax”), because they more closely resemble fines and penalties such as you would receive for driving without insurance. We have a law (many of them – this is a state-level thing) that says it’s illegal to drive without insurance, and if you get caught doing it, you pay a fine. Clearly those laws are constitutional because they’ve been on the books for decades. It’s hard to see how failure to carry health insurance differs. Both are examples of externalizing risk to others and forcing them to pick up the costs from the inevitable cases where the gamble doesn’t pay off.

If the wingnuts now want to wail and cry that people who are offloading their responsibilities onto the rest of us are being subjected to an onerous and unfair tax, our response should be to continue to point out that their “solution” (such as it is) to do nothing to reform the existing system puts them squarely in the camp of advocating massive ongoing “tax” increases on the rest of us, as we continue to pick up the costs for the uninsured through ever-escalating insurance premiums and profits for insurers and medical providers.

 
 

kindling? toilet paper? something to use as a blunt instrument to beat someone about the head?

Hopefully not in that order.

 
 

So I’m wondering, with the recent revelations about the manipulation of LIBOR rates, which affect everything from your mortgage to car loans to commercial loans to credit card rates, to the tune of $350 trillion in economic activity…I’m wondering when we’re going to see bankers’ heads on fucking pikes?

 
 

I’d be your Nelson if you’d be my Hamilton, what fun

 
Helmut Monotreme
 

I’m wondering when we’re going to see bankers’ heads on fucking pikes?

Don’t bother, they’ve got the market on pikes cornered, and a have a hedge position on petards.

 
 

Jennifer, that was typically excellent.

 
 

Oh Jennifer, you are correct but that’s all facty and shit – yer preaching to the choir sister.

 
 

I’m trying to figure out why anyone gives a fat shit if it’s called a tax or a penalty or a polar bear pussy.

It’s an indisputable fact that we are forced to engage in all sorts of commerce even at the federal level. Let’s ask Haliburton and Xe how they feel about the Commerce Clause. There are certain needs that have to be met if a society wishes to maintain it’s status as elible to be called civil. Health care is one of them. Sickness will always be among us, as will poverty, but allowing people to go untreated or essentially steal services from a busy emergency department doesn’t help anyone.

I think this whole debate is pure semantic bullshit and I don’t know why the Obummer admin is playing along with it. That doofus always manages to legitimize right wing neo fascist idiots who blab on the goddamned radio all day long. Bragging about all of the government jobs he’s managed to snuff out in his short tenure, bragging about austerity level cuts in spending, mud wrestling with stupid assholes…WTF?

 
 

IT’S THE BIGGEST POLAR BEAR PUSSY IN THE HISTORY OF THE WORLD!!!!!

 
 

Beware the Oreamnos!

Where’s the Chupacabra when you need him?

At first I was going to make a play on the goat genus Capra with “Chupacapra” or something. A teeny alarm went off in my haid leading to me (probably re-)learning that those mountain goats are not true goats, not genus Capra.

There’s a moral to this comment somewhere.

 
 

I, for one, would be uncomfortable having a GIANT POLAR BEAR PUSSY forced down my throat. But maybe that’s just me.

 
 

While I’m preaching at the choir…

I’m a small business owner. Regardless of the size of the business, no business owner will ever tell you that getting rid of the expense of health insurance isn’t something they would jump all over without giving it a thought. There is no defensible argument against open enrollement to Medicare. Strictly from a business standpoint, I can tell you that my business would be much more competitive and I would be making more money if our SINGLE LARGEST expense went away. I’m still baffled by the vehement defense of a single industry that could provide a pretty nice infrastructure (regional headquarters types of stuff under government contracts) for a nationalized system.

 
 

Also–

What the FUCK are they thinking leaving the task of using Medicaid block grants to the states to use wisely? At the expense of the poor in their states, some fuckhead governors have sworn to not implement the changes. That was a stupid way of doing it. You NEVER give states like Texas that kind of authority with federal tax dollars. We all know that way too much of that money will be stuffed into the pockets of campaign donors and oil tycoons.

 
 

Hogeye Grex said,
July 6, 2012 at 20:11

IT’S THE BIGGEST POLAR BEAR PUSSY IN THE HISTORY OF THE WORLD!!!!!

Okay, you have my attention.

 
 

I, for one, would be uncomfortable having a GIANT POLAR BEAR PUSSY forced down my throat. But maybe that’s just me.

Oh, honey, it’s JUST you.

 
 

There is no defensible argument against open enrollement to Medicare. Strictly from a business standpoint,

Sure there is, if your business model relies on entrenching people in dead end jobs and making them fear for their lives the idea of mobility.

 
 

Also,

POOP

Someday, all fonts will support this.

 
 

𕒩

Oh poop.

 
 

That looks like a painful poop, right there, pupienus.

 
 

Gygax had good taste in fantasy, in spite of being a bad novelist and ending life as a fundie wingnut

Maybe TSA caught him trying to sneak a guisarme-voulge onto a plane… the second amendment is a sacred right! Odd to think of him becoming a fundie after all that hounding he got from Evangelicals.

 
 

At last winter’s gathering of the Polar Bear Club the temperature was somewhat lower than usual and Fred, all 6’9″ of him, refused to jump in the icy waters with the rest of us. I tell you, Fred is THE BIGGEST POLAR BEAR PUSSY IN THE HISTORY OF THE WORLD!!!!!

 
 

Fred, all 6’9? of him, has a promising career ahead of him in pornography.

 
 

Oh poop.

Someday.

 
 

Sure there is, if your business model relies on entrenching people in dead end jobs and making them fear for their lives the idea of mobility.

Hm…yeah, I suppose so, except that 8.2% of the nation is officially unemployed, several million more are grossly underemployed. There are literally millions of people lined up for those shit jobs. Health coverage isn’t that much of a concern to those who are worried about having food and clothes for their kids.

 
Helmut Monotreme
 

Maybe TSA caught him trying to sneak a guisarme-voulge onto a plan
Rookie move. I’ve heard you can totally smuggle a bec de corbin on any flight you want if you tell the TSA that it’s a medical prosthetic.

 
 

The National Review will eat a 1000 dicks.

 
 

The National Review will eat a 1000 dicks.

but will they choke on them and die? that’s the optimal outcome…

 
 

Maybe TSA caught [Gygax] trying to sneak a guisarme-voulge onto a plane… the second amendment is a sacred right! Odd to think of him becoming a fundie after all that hounding he got from Evangelicals.

Heh. His “Nomenclature of Polearms” impressed upon me that they’re often mixed up, and that trying to combine two or more specialized functions into a single polearm often resulted in crap. Halberds are good, though.

To be precise, I dunno if he was a fundie. He was a Christian, and seems to have grown more devout over time. But one source says that during the height of the D&D controversies, he intentionally avoided stating that he was Christian, even as he defended himself vigorously.

I did try to find the jingoist forum post he made, but it seems to have disappeared. The recent wars brought that out in alot of people.

 
 

I can fully believe that Gygax was open to jingoistic war cheerleading.

Let us not forget that the interest that got him to make Dungeons and Dragons was playing tabletop war games and wanting to make individual stories for the people in them.

Now whether that extended into wingnuttery in any other field is another question. I’m going to lean on the no side of the equation what with otherwise being just another long-haired hippie hounded by the religious right as a Satan figure.

But I can fully believe the “war as game” imagery hitting him in a weak point.

 
 

o ffs! just got off the phone with self involved inappropriately dressed hypochondriac mother who just underwent a procedure because of some ‘tightening’ in her throat…here’s the converstation:

siidhm: (weakly) hi…
me: how did it go
siidhm: oh, we’re in the car driving down mainstreet and they didn’t find any cancer or anything…
me: that’s good…what is causing it then?
siidhm: oh…i don’t know.
me: so they didn’t say what’s causing the throat tightening?
siidhm: he said everything looks fine, there was a little irritation in my stomach. but it’s probably just side effects from taking plavix and an aspirin every day…

then follows a rather lengthy description of when and how she takes her pills everyday and how she will change that to include food…even down to what type of food she will eat before taking…this concluded with: ‘but they didn’t find cancer, so that’s good…’

cancer is definitely her go-to when she so much as has a sore toe…which she has gone to the doctor for even though she usually says doctors don’t really know all that much…although i literally cannot keep track of all her appointments…

can you guess that she has some pretty kick ass insurance?

 
 

So, any comments on Bobo Brooks’ latest inanity?

 
 

Sure there is, if your business model relies on entrenching people in dead end jobs and making them fear for their lives the idea of mobility.

That and also making sure the ones with health insurance and comfortable white collar jobs don’t complain too loudly about pay raises, benefits, or healthy hours or think too much about starting new businesses to compete with yours. Not to mention keeping the peons from just straight up revolting by making change synonymous with complete collapse into poverty for the middle class.

If you remember that the most important things to most large companies is exploiting the workers for those “improved quarters” and preventing any new competition providing your abused customers with options, then it makes a lot more sense.

Inadequate health care is a small price to pay to ensure your underpaid and overabused college-educated workers don’t start shopping around or getting ideas about basic decency.

And a very small price to pay when you keep in mind that many of these owners are conservative activists and it’s practically free for how much it encourages workers to fear the very concept of change and upheaval and thus support terrible conservative policies that fuck them up more.

 
 

I usually just go straight to Pierce for that. Not being witty myself, I simply read and chuckle.

 
Lurking Canadian
 

I, for one, would be uncomfortable having a GIANT POLAR BEAR PUSSY forced down my throat. But maybe that’s just me.

I’d be more concerned about how the lady bear feels about the transaction, frankly.

There’s no point worrying about vagina dentata when you already are starting ursus dentata right in the face.

 
 

Reminds me of the punchline to an old joke:

“If I can find my flashlight we can walk out of here”.

“Heck, if I can find my car keys we can drive out of here”.

 
 

Ursus dentata is that really annoying song from The Lion King, right?

 
 

Ursus dentata is that really annoying song from The Lion King, right?

Constellation in the more southerly regions.

 
 

But I can fully believe the “war as game” imagery hitting him in a weak point.

Sure. The older tabletop wargames — stuff like Napoleonics at the unit level — totally skirted questions of morality. Running Hitler’s army meant better tanks, or something like that.

Pulp fantasy with characters tends toward back-and-white morality, lacking nuance. People (and even moreso, creatures) are essentialized as having some fixed nature. R.E. Howard’s Conan stories are largely about eternal race war, without the pretense of green-skinned monsters for “others.”

So Gygax created an endless, episodic struggle between diametrically-opposed forces. Players could bring moral nuance to the table, but it was not native to the genre, I’d say. It would be unfortunate but unsurprising if Gary saw the post-9/11 world as that sort of existential struggle he’d read and fantasized about. That was the gist of the link I failed to dig up.

 
 

Back on topic — look at Steyn’s photo. See him at the NRO link. Do a Google image search. This is a man who practices eyebrow-raises in the mirror.

 
 

look at Steyn’s photo.

NO
See him at the NRO link.
NO

Do a Google image searcha Google image search

WHY DO YOU HATE US!?!?!?

 
Helmut Monotreme
 

Now that I think about it, there are plenty of ‘tactical’ situations that have nothing to do with combat. Why don’t we see games based on wilderness firefighting or search and rescue? Those are the best examples I can think of at the moment, but they both involve allocating scarce resources to accomplish an urgent goal, and the quality of individuals, and of their team work, and planning all affect the outcome.

 
 

My sympathies about your mother, bbkf.

Not trying to give you ideas, but the best thing we’ve done in years is stop talking to my wife’s mother. Keeping busy and having a rich inner life is nominally a good thing. When it’s 100% chaos and drama I begin to think fondly of electroshock and lobotomies. How can doing nothing of consequence be so very very?

 
 

HM look up the game Pandemic. it’s a collaborative effort game I’m playing tonight with some friends and very stoked

 
 

For a larf read Pierce on D.Brooks. The Hank the cinque shtick should be encouraged for maximum laffs.

 
 

but will they choke on them and die? that’s the optimal outcome…

They will when I start jamming them in there with a shovel.

 
 

“If I can find my flashlight we can walk out of here”.

“Heck, if I can find my car keys we can drive out of here”.

Which reminds me of another joke

“Put the other hand in there”
“Now try to clap”
“I can’t”
“Tight, aren’t I?”

 
 

Perhaps this weekend I’ll cruise around to the truck stops in search of bath salts. That sounds like a pretty solid plan. Anyone care to join me?

 
 

I’ll be in the third stall from the left

 
The third stall from the right
 

Goddamn leftists!

 
 

You guys know those bath salts will make you into cannibals, don’t ya?

I pity the tired-ass truckers, seeking release at a truck stop men’s room glory hole, instead finding their cranks gobbled by lower-case bath salt zombies, tsam and kg.

 
 

It’s all good fun until someone gets their crank gobbled by a lower-class bath salt zombie.

 
Privatize the Profits! Socialize the Costs!
 

Only in America does “health” “care” “reform” begin with the hiring of 16,500 new IRS agents tasked with determining whether your insurance policy merits a fine

Hmmmm, I wonder what Mr. Google has to say about that, Mark?

http://www.factcheck.org/2010/03/irs-expansion/

 
 

For a larf read Pierce on D.Brooks. The Hank the cinque shtick should be encouraged for maximum laffs.

Cripes, it’s not like Brooks thought that all up himself. He just scooped up the ideas of Christina Hoff Sommers and some other people whose names I don’t know or care about, gave them that absolutely ridiculous attempt at a Shakespearean twist, plopped them in the word processor and collected his paycheck.

I don’t begrudge him having a job. Serving warmed-over rightest ideas with home-cooked stereotypes is his thing, and everyone needs a thing. But who reads that stuff and thinks it’s worth an NYT subscription?

 
 

Ursus dentata is that really annoying song from The Lion King, right?

Palin’s reality show theme?

 
 

Not trying to give you ideas, but the best thing we’ve done in years is stop talking to my wife’s mother.

oh, were that possible! we live in too close proximity for that to happen…i live for my 1200 mile buffer zone when they go to mesa, az for the winter…

 
 

Dear King and Queen of Denmark, wotcher your majesties. I am writing to inform you that your son has been suspended from school. Hamlet is a disruptive influence in class and on the playground.
We have a sizeable Goth community here at The Larry Olivier School for Turning Fictional Characters into Nancy Boys, but Hamlet has even alienated them.
Also he was caught in the Biology classroom with the skull of the School Skeleton “Mr Skel” who has been a feature here at the Larry for many years.
Hamlet is refusing to take his medicine and he is accusing people of the most horrible crimes. He has previously been a valued member of the Dramatic Society but is now described as “full of sound and fury’ or a “right tosser”.
The boy ain’t right.
Yours
A. Hitler

 
 

Ursus dentata is that really annoying song from The Lion King, right?
– – – – — –
Constellation in the more southerly regions.

Female lead in Dr. No.

 
 

“If I can find my flashlight we can walk out of here”.

“Heck, if I can find my car keys we can drive out of here”.

Which reminds me of another joke

“Put the other hand in there”
“Now try to clap”
“I can’t”
“Tight, aren’t I?”

Eight Miles Wide

 
Lurking Canadian
 

As the father of a…spirited boy child, I am interested and concerned by this notion of schools failing boys. However, the usual “things were better before” bullshit just doesn’t ring true. In the pre-Ritalin, pre-political correctness days, my son would still not have been allowed to run wild in the classroom in order to “respect his diversity”. Instead, he would have been beaten within an inch of his life until he stood still.

Or, of course, sent to reform school. One or the other, really. The true message of Prince Hal is that privileged fuckups get lots of second chances.

While we’re being history nerds, I find it interesting that Pierce dates the fall of the Plantagenets to Bosworth Field. Sure, they started calling themselves “Tudors” after that, but messed up as the family tree is, you can argue that Henry VII was not less a Plantagenet than Richard III.

 
 

If I recall my history, Henry V was a great general and a pretty lousy king.

 
 

Eight Miles Wide

Hey, thats me! In the scene filmed in the North Park Blocks you can just get a glimpse of me way in the background. And I didnt even get a credit.

 
 

Major, these are lower-case zombies, our own tsam and kj. All I know about their social class is that they’ll be sniffing “bath salts” in a truck stop lavatory.

 
 

Hey, thats me! In the scene filmed in the North Park Blocks you can just get a glimpse of me way in the background.

You got a time for that? Damn, Smut features pretty prominently in the background of a music video, but I can’t remember which one… he has an enticingly large forehead.

 
 

So Gygax created an endless, episodic struggle between diametrically-opposed forces. Players could bring moral nuance to the table, but it was not native to the genre, I’d say. It would be unfortunate but unsurprising if Gary saw the post-9/11 world as that sort of existential struggle he’d read and fantasized about. That was the gist of the link I failed to dig up.

I don’t know anything about the games you’re talking about, but will take this opportunity to say that anyone who sees the war on terror as an “existential struggle” needs to have their fucking heads examined something fierce. The Cold War, okay. World War Two, definitely. But the idea that we face any kind of existential threat from al-Qaeda is ridiculous.

 
 

look at Steyn’s photo

MANCHILD NECKBEARD DETECTED

Presumably this was shot at the 53rd Annual National Review Urine-Taster’s Picnic.

“Ah yes, the legendary 1985 Cauliflower Falwell – insouciant yet discreet, with just a frisson of evangelical audacity.”

 
 

Agreed, Chris, although I think it’s a common view among wingnuts. I’d say they ARE locked in an existential struggle with liberalism, but certainly not al-Qaeda or “Islamofascism.”

I hope a diet of less-than-nuanced media and games does not hinder one’s moral sense. Imaginative people can use virtually anything as fodder for gainful reflection, but sadly I suppose there are war-as-video-game types out there, perhaps in the modern military.

 
 

I don’t know anything about the games you’re talking about, but will take this opportunity to say that anyone who sees the war on terror as an “existential struggle” needs to have their fucking heads examined something fierce.

Yeah, the “War on Terror”, at least on the Iraq front, was more in tune with that other Gygaxian model, killing things and taking their stuff.

 
 

Agreed, Chris, although I think it’s a common view among wingnuts. I’d say they ARE locked in an existential struggle with liberalism, but certainly not al-Qaeda or “Islamofascism.”

Shit, the wingnuts are more like al-Qaeda and the Taliban than they’d ever care to admit. Al-Qaeda and the Taliban just happen to follow the wrong Abrahamic path.

 
 

Agreed, Chris, although I think it’s a common view among wingnuts. I’d say they ARE locked in an existential struggle with liberalism, but certainly not al-Qaeda or “Islamofascism.”

If nothing else, they understand that much. Almost all of them seem much more interested in their war with liberalism than in their war with al-Qaeda.

Shit, the wingnuts are more like al-Qaeda and the Taliban than they’d ever care to admit. Al-Qaeda and the Taliban just happen to follow the wrong Abrahamic path.

And the Taliban & co wish they had the kind of power at their fingertips that the wingnuts do, and could do the amount of damage to the world that the wingnuts have done. Instead they’re basically just our world’s version of the Thuggee…

 
 

I dimly recall that the British finally got fed up with the Thuggee and put an end to a problem the natives had tolerated. I’d like to learn more.

 
 

I dimly recall that the British finally got fed up with the Thuggee and put an end to a problem the natives had tolerated. I’d like to learn more.

I don’t think it was a matter of being more tolerant of the Thuggee than the British, exactly, so much as the British bringing in modern investigative/policing techniques that succeeded where whatever the Indians were using didn’t.

Otherwise what I know’s mostly what I gleaned from the internets. Secret society that had a thing for killing travelers and stealing their stuff, existed in India for a few hundred years before the British squashed it, and while they did have some of the ritualistic/superstitious things they’re associated with in pop culture, mostly driven by profit rather than religion (so, on second thought, more like MS-13 than al-Qaeda).

Having just looked at the wikipedia article, I learn that there’s also a school of thought that says the Thuggee never actually existed, and that it was either a British misunderstanding of India or an outright invention in order to justify their own military presence (sound familiar?)

 
 

I just looked at Wikipedia too, Chris. I’d guess the Thuggee were not a British invention, and were genuinely cultish, though in the manner of a persistent subculture; driven by profit but not having other realistic means of subsistence, its members being narrowly acculturated as a group of insular predators. That they’d have strong beliefs justifying their predations is unremarkable. Reliable information about them would have been destroyed first by the crackdown, and then by the next-generation breakdown of the subculture supporting what seems to have been an oral tradition. Mainstream Indian and British information would have been biased and sensational, near-useless to scholars. So the authorities relied on Thuggee informants, but sought information useful in breaking the subculture, not in creating an ethnography we’d like to see today.

 
Helmut Monotreme
 

The Thugee, were rolled up by the modern policing technique of being lucky enough to catch one alive that would crack under torture. Once they had one, they wrung him dry, he ratted out his friends, and they repeated the process up and down the subcontinent. Clearly they only tortured the guilty and the guilty never ratted out their enemies. That would have been uncivilized.

 
 

Hear, hear now. Bully on that.

 
 

And the Taliban & co wish they had the kind of power at their fingertips that the wingnuts do,

Made me think of this. (Possibly disturbing gory pictures, but it’s a from a radio show, so scroll it off and listen.)

AQ is definitely third table compared to the wingnuts.

 
 

And the building of an excellent railway system in India from around the 1850s made it pretty much impossible for them to waylay travelers. The poor Thuggee fell victim to advances in technology.

 
Lurking Canadian
 

There was no way for the Thuggee to survive after Indiana Jones stole their magic rocks.

OT: I was stung on the temple by a wasp last night. Now my right we is swollen shut and it feels like somebody’s using a pair of pliers on my eye socket. Fuckin wasps.

 
 

Wasps got no respect for a person’s dignity, that’s for sure.

 
 

So I got to the hotel in Huntington WV this morning, went up to the room and the light was on and I could hear someone moving around in there!

I made a hasty retreat back downstairs and the front desk determined that, yes indeed, that room was occupied. Doh!!!

Note – this is also why you should always set the deadbolt when you’re in a hotel room. Not the first time this has happened to me.

 
 

“I was stung on the temple by a wasp last night.”

Stay offa that old temple. Who do you think you are, Indiana Jones?

 
 

Helmut, I like your idea upthread about a wilderness firefighting game/simulation, but you’d probably need a Cray to crunch all the numbers.

 
 

And what’s a Wasp doing at Temple anyway? They’ll let just anyone in these days. Sheesh.

 
 

Wasps/Hornets/Yellowjackets etc scare me. At least a bee only gets to sting you once.

 
 

Political calculation? I doubt it: if there’s one thing the Right worship, and assume everyone else worships (not without cause, but incorrect as to extent) it’s ‘winners’.

The modern American Right’s ideology is the bastard child of Calvin and Rand, and neither has any room for the losers at…well, anything, unless said losers can blame their loss on the Evil Gummint.

 
 

Buuuut, the bill is also deeply problematic. It’s a conservative idea in the first place and mostly serves to entrench our dysfunctional insurance-based health care system and make it harder to get rid of on the day we decide to join the first world nations.

I miss the days when S,N! was less wrong than the wingnuts. The bill is not one idea. It’s many ideas rolled into one bill and few of those ideas are conservative. For example, it removes much of the dysfunction you’re talking about by regulating our insurance-based health care system and it moves us closer to treating them as utilities. Like the systems in place in Germany and the Netherlands. Are they not in the first world when it comes to health care even because they insure their citizens through private health insurance companies? Following their model by adapting our system to function like theirs is a lot more realistic than scrapping the system entirely and starting from scratch with something like single payer. It would be kind of stupid to even try doing so when there’s an obviously easier alternative which can work at least as well. It’s awesome that with the ACA we’ve now entrenched something a lot closer to a private insurance utility model and just as awesome that we’ve got a path to getting closer.

What the FUCK are they thinking leaving the task of using Medicaid block grants to the states to use wisely?

Maybe they were thinking Medicaid is a jointly run federal and state program, which it is.That’s why the bill attempted to put conditions on Medicaid funding that would have forced states to use it in a way that we would probably all consider wise. They were thinking what you are are wondering why they weren’t thinking but the Supreme Court shot them down.

 
 

I wish I was indianna jones! He wore the coolest hat e Ed.
In other news, my iPhone’s autocorrect is a JERK

 
 

I wish I was indianna jones! He wore the coolest hat e Ed.
In other news, my iPhone’s autocorrect is a JERK

hubbkf has taken to wearing a straw hat much like indiana jones…i tell him he looks like an amish guy on vacation…

 
 

Does anyone besides Mark Steyn think Mark Steyn is funny?

I know of at least one such person– for certain values of “think”. A few years ago a friend-of-a-friend started posting increasingly wingnutty shit online, of the “liberalism has left me behind” variety, but in such a poorly-informed and cheerful style that at first I thought it was just an innocent failure of reading comprehension. So I argued a little… trying to suggest that, for instance, Mark Steyn and NRO were not the best sources on immigration issues, and that someone who claimed (as this FoaF did) to despise Rush Limbaugh’s ilk should recognize that this was the same shit. FoaF responded in high dudgeon, disowning me as just another paranoid loony lib, because of my insane claim that National Review Online was somehow right wing. As for Steyn, “Well of course Steyn says some provocative things, but he’s not claiming to be one of those “academics” with their “facts”, he’s just saying stuff, because it makes you think, because he’s really a humorist.”

 
 

I miss the days when S,N! was less wrong than the wingnuts.

MEOWCH!

The bill is not one idea. It’s many ideas rolled into one bill and few of those ideas are conservative.

The coverage mandate – the idea that makes the bill functional – is indeed fundamentally conservative, enough so that it played no small part in Obama beating Clinton in the 2008 primary … & it’s also the single biggest gratuitous bonanza for private insurers in American history.

Yes, I’m sure that rewarding the insurance industry’s many years of rank abuse of the injured & sick for profit with an epic freebie will produce no bad results – after all, look at how wonderfully that approach works with stockbrokers & bankers!

Following their model by adapting our system to function like theirs is a lot more realistic than scrapping the system entirely and starting from scratch with something like single payer. It would be kind of stupid to even try doing so when there’s an obviously easier alternative which can work at least as well. It’s awesome that with the ACA we’ve now entrenched something a lot closer to a private insurance utility model and just as awesome that we’ve got a path to getting closer.

Many liberal-type Americans would find your description of working toward legislating American single-payer healthcare as “kind of stupid” to be, er, A VERY INTERESTING POINT OF VIEW … but I very much doubt that the ACA is likely to dissuade them from their folly in carrying on a struggle on behalf of basic human decency & common sense.

In any case, the question is moot. You’re not going to get to find out if moving to single-payer would be easier, harder, or about the same – because the Democrats unilaterally took it off the table before the push for reform even began, despite its broad popularity & its proven value as a cheaper & more humane alternative. That major political failure was only one of many that marred the entire history of the ACA from start to finish.

Simply making Medicare universal would’ve given America something a lot like single-payer at a fraction of the heinous cost of the ACA, since much of the bureaucratic infrastructure (& the knowhow to make it work properly) already exists … with a bill so short even a simpering yut like Herman Cain could read the whole thing … & the net result would’ve been true universal care, which the ACA won’t be, even after 2019.

One amendment to the bill included a few mild reforms to the shambling atrocity that is McCarren-Ferguson, but the final version of the ACA contains no such reforms. That Act gives the industry near total carte blanche to treat Americans like shit, & to conspire to do everything from price-fixing to outright terrorism of patients or any hospital that gets out of line (Bayonne being the classic case), & no amount of regulating the system they operate in is likely to change that – assuming that deregulation never again emerges as a dominant political force in American politics – nor is there likely to be meaningful reduction in costs in the long run in the absence of a robust public option.

With that antitrust exemption for insurers left alive & well, ANY healthcare reform that lets them remain the middle-man is putting makeup on roadkill.

Awesome that some can no longer be denied coverage … not so awesome that those providing it remain free to play all kinds of dirty pool with said coverage – & to charge a fortune for it. A requirement to justify rate-hikes is no more than an invitation to get creative for them, & the idea that making them join an exchange will somehow inspire them to compete & voluntarily surrender massive advantages like colluding to keep rates high is a sick joke.

That the GOP’s objections to the ACA were/are/will be infantile & idiotic does nothing to vindicate the breathtaking orgy of pork that was conducted to get it passed, nor the Democrats’ casual rejection of both single-payer (if only as a vital bargaining chip) & of the strong public option that was the central facet of the reform plan that Obama ran for POTUS on.

If its objective was to guarantee affordable healthcare for all Americans, it is a failure.

If its objective was to temporarily get insurance companies off the Democrats’ backs (& hopefully off the GOP’s speed-dial) while largely maintaining their status quo, while granting them a titanic windfall, it is a success.

 
 

You know, if global warming is a hoax, they sure have some awesome special effects.

 
 

You know, if global warming is a hoax, they sure have some awesome special effects.

It’s just Al Gore nestling you under his fat, sweaty armpit.

 
 

I’m back in the sweltering jungle that was once Minnesota, where the wood ticks and mosquitoes are slowly devouring the puny humans who thought they were on top of the food chain.

 
 

Guess the Muslimusurper killed that women because he was served bacon.

But seriously, of all the bizarre tics that reporters have, the one with which they describe the meal a presidential candidate had in a restaurant is one of the more odious in my book. Why? WTF?! It’s the next worst thing to following that candidate into the restroom and giving us the scoop on whether it was number one or number two and if two, was it strained.

I now know that our President had two eggs, bacon, and grits at the restaurant with the dead owner and can’t unknow it and cannot not resent it a little that that information is taking up dwindling space in my brain. If the lesions on my brain should lead to dementia, I bet that’s just the useless kind of information that I would have easy access to and would obsess over. Is that their excuse? That they are demented? Why else would they think that what the President had for breakfast is significant enough to be on the record?

The Fourth Estate is a bag of salted dicks. I hate them.

 
 

Guess the Muslimusurper killed that women because he was served bacon.

I’ve heard that the restaurant owner was the widow of the Chicago comptroller.

 
 

@Cerberus you are correcting about the peons revolting. Just read a great book that everyone needs to read about a small town in America that finally stands up to federal tyranny. I recommend it cause it’s about each us taking a stand.

http://www.booksbyoliver.com

Often, I wonder where the outrage is from American citizens. I don’t see it coming from anyone at the National Review & it’s the conservatives demand for national health insurance (corporate profits).

 
 

And she was the Grandmama of Vince Foster.

 
 

Grand-mothering the foster.

 
 

Ohio River sed

HAHAHAHA That is some crap writing there, that is. Both the comment and the book.

 
 

@OhioRiver

Yes, I can see it now – The Predator drone locking on to me from 5 miles up is going to be really impressed when I unholster my Kimber .45 ACP and “take a stand against tyranny”.

Shortest revolution ever.

 
 

Predator drones are confused by three-cornered hats. WIN!

 
 

Yes, I can see it now – The Predator drone locking on to me from 5 miles up is going to be really impressed when I unholster my Kimber .45 ACP and “take a stand against tyranny”.

I love how they believe that victory through brute force and superior technology was totally possible in Vietnam and Iraq (if only DFHs hadn’t stabbed everyone in the back), despite the vast quantities of guns laying around those countries and the much greater number of people who know how to use them for war – yet they also believe that their .45s and shotguns could totally protect them from the military might of the “black helicopter” squadrons they think are coming for them.

Because American Exceptionalism, or something.

 
 

‘A Time to Stand’ author Jerry Clinton Oliver not only writes bad wingnut fiction, he also models for Japanese Lon Chaney Sr Phantom of the Opera toys.

 
 

Do I want to know how you picked up on that resemblance?

 
 

“he also models for Japanese Lon Chaney Sr Phantom of the Opera toys.”

Now THAT’S a niche occupation.

“I sometimes dig for buttered rolls,
Or set limed twigs for crabs:
I sometimes model for Japanese Lon Chaney Sr. Phantom of the Opera toys.
And that’s the way” (he gave a wink)
“By which I get my wealth–”

It doesn’t scan.

 
 

Many liberal-type Americans would find your description of working toward legislating American single-payer healthcare as “kind of stupid” to be, er, A VERY INTERESTING POINT OF VIEW …

So what? Many others would agree that it is kind of stupid to look around the world at the different models of universal coverage and decide the only one that will work for us is the one that is most different than our current set up. The crux of my argument is that, given where we’re starting from, the German or Dutch model makes more sense for us. Nowhere in that long reply did you even try to refute that argument. Why not? Because shut up single payer, that’s why?

Simply making Medicare universal,,,,,,

Yes, so simple.

And you know nothing of the regulations contained in the bill. Nothing. And nothing about what it’s like to be uninsured here in the US vs. what it’s like having insurance.That the insurance companies will be getting millions of new customers is great news for those millions of new customers. Try coming down here and getting access to healthcare without insurance and see what that’s like. Then compare your experience to that of someone like me who has health insurance. Then STFU because It’s a LOT better for me and that’s prior to the regulations. You have no fucking idea what you’re talking about.

 
 

Chris-

I suspect it’s because the reasoning actually goes:

“Those damn brown foreigner types couldn’t possibly defeat proud manly white American forces, so any loss must be the result of liberal treasons robbing us of the victory that was coming any day now. Whereas, the government is the shadowy liberal pussy force made entirely of the whiny traitors who rob us of victory with their cowardice and so couldn’t possibly stand against a force that was only Proud White American Patriots Taking A Stand TM!”

In reality, turns out brown people using guerrilla tactics can defeat even the cyborg-ninja squad that is our Armed Forces, but some backwoods hick with a shotgun probably isn’t going to do much of fuck all if he really ended up going against a legitimate army. Fuck, the hick is rarely able to reliably beat his own deluded fantasies of an enemy.

 
 

Do I want to know how you picked up on that resemblance?

Our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ has called upon me to devote my life entirely to the intensive study of East Asian rubber novelty items.

 
 

’m back in the sweltering jungle that was once Minnesota, where the wood ticks and mosquitoes are slowly devouring the puny humans who thought they were on top of the food chain.

stop by! we have the camper set up in the backyard and there is a lovely cross breeze right now…also, beer…

 
 

Hmmm. They are inbred, psychotic and insanely self-destructive. Maybe they think they’re Mother Hitton’s Littul Kittuns.

 
 

Mother Hitton’s Littul Kittuns. Yeah baby!

 
 

Pup: unfortunately, we can’t keep them in drugged comas until such time as they prove useful.

 
 

Just read a great book that everyone needs to read about a small town in America that finally stands up to federal tyranny.

Amherst, MA?

 
 

No, I didn’t want to know.

 
 

Sorry bbkf, we are up on the Shore right now. One of these days…

 
 

Sorry bbkf, we are up on the Shore right now. One of these days…

the door’s always open…and we’ll have to call paleo as well…and maybe the major can be routed to sioux falls and we’ll have a little sadly reunion…and all the coasters can be super jealous!

 
 

also, too…i’m finding the different viewpoints on aca to be quite interesting…i’m still not thrilled about the mandate…i would much rather see single payer, but at least SOMETHING has been done to at least TRY to change the system…and lawnguylander is correct in that treatment between the insureds and the not insureds vary wildly…and even the treatment for the insureds varies…basically our system sucks for a huge swath of people and i’m just glad the conversation is finally started…

and i find it absofuckinglutely galling that my hypochondriac mom is on medicare and my dear departed dad’s rural carrier insurance and gets fucking carte blanche when it comes to being treated…no matter how minor the cause…does she think that single payer or any healthcare reform is necessary? hells no! that’s socialism…and she in no way sees the irony of her situation…

 
Caliph Garrett
 

According to American Exceptionamalism, any one of our three levels of government-sanctioned healthcare systems—TRICARE, Medicare, or FEHB—should be workable for the rest of us, right?

At least the ACA is sending us in the direction of the FEHB, which could resemble the German Bismarck system (with some more oversight).

At the same time, I’ll reserve my ire for those who think the status-quo-ante, Deadwood model of care is preferable. Cocksuckers!

 
 

Huzzah, finally finished the rough draft on a story I’ve been working on for about a month and thinking about for a year. Now I have two days to edit it before I send it off.

I will now go do the photoshop for today’s new post.

 
 

Wow, Cerb, it’s like Christmas is coming early!

 
 

Deadwood model of care

Costs are kept down by feeding uninsured patients to the pigs.

 
 

New post.

And this one is worth reading to the end.

 
 

Ignoramus!

It was the King, not the Queen, who said “Sentence first, verdict after”.

If he’s wrong about that, how can we trust his opinion on the Constitution?

 
 

S. cerevisiae, July 7, 2012 at 15:54 — not so sure about that Cray; one of my kids, way back (way way back) (35+ years) when he was learning to program, wrote a forest fire fighting game in Basic that impressed his parental units (who had much USFS service) with its life-like qualities.

 
 

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