Oklahoma: Filling in the Blank

So why am I even here in Oklahoma? Why do I continue to live in a state that can’t even kill people on purpose cleanly, accept federal dollars to improve the health care provided to its citizens, resist electing the most extreme kind of dumb-asses the country has to offer, etc?

It’s simple: I was born here, my kids live here and if I were to just write the state off… well, the terrorists would win.

It wasn’t but a year or two ago when a co-worker came to me to ask if it wasn’t true that “Obamacare” required that children be injected with a microchip (“the Mark of the Beast”). 70+ percent of the voters approved a statewide referendum to prohibit ‘Sharia Law’ here. As many people that claim, nationally, their belief that the Hebrew God created the world less than 10,000 years ago, I’d bet that almost twice as many Oklahomans believe the same. If a plurality of my statesmen aren’t home-schoolers that are ‘hooked on phonics’, they wish they had the patience/resources to be.

Oklahoma’s people are largely an ignorant and fearful folk: they fear negroes (especially the President), non-European immigrants, change, secular anything,  books, the commie United Nations, most new ideas and the Big Scary World.  Believe me, I know about Oklahoma. I was born here, grew up here and stayed here.

Believe me: it was not always this FUCKING STUPID A PLACE TO LIVE.   No, the Dark Flame of Ignorance has been carefully tended and stoked to make Oklahoma a Beacon of Idiocy:

• Governor Mary Frick’n Fallin, the adulterous darling of the Tea Party, has been paid to oppose damned near everything that could make things better for this state while her spoiled brat daughter openly mocks Native Americans
• Senator James Mountain Inhofe, who has for years been a global laughing-stock over his conspiratorial thinking on human sexuality, climate change and the dang-nabbed 20th Century in general
• The numb-skull state representative that put a 10 Commandments monument on the grounds of the capitol but couldn’t get the spelling right
• Another cretin on the state payroll that campaigned against using human fetuses in food products
• The list goes on and on!

So why am I still living in Oklahoma?

Some amazing things have happened here.
I have fond memories of ‘liquor by the wink’.
Once upon a time, we had the highest per capita membership in the Communist Party in the nation.
Cannabis was once the number one cash crop.
The musicians are amazing here.
The state bird, the scissor-tail flycatcher, is cool.
Gas prices are low.
Maybe I’m too lazy to move and if I did only the Crazies would be left!

Fuck Governor Fallin and all her kind.
Fuck the followers of Oral Roberts and his fellow travellers.
Fuck the Koch Brothers and their veinal scheming.
Fuck all the manipulators of well-meaning Okies! Their hearts are pure, but —

I’m staying here to fill in the blank, the blank that they told me to erase and write something else in (but I won’t!).
I’m staying here to remind them of every time they are so terribly wrong that they pretend like they weren’t.
I’m the fly that stays clear of their patent medicine ointment.
I’m no Tom Joad, but for crying out loud, if people like me left this state, what would be left besides the easily led?
I am an Oklahoman, and I’m  staying here whether they like it or not: I want to rub them the wrong way.

Maybe I’m staying just to annoy the rest of ‘us’… because ‘we’ need to be annoyed.
What they’ve done to us shouldn’t be forgiven or forgotten or excused.
Those bastards did it for money and power and greed, straight up.
I wanna be here to watch the payback, if it ever comes.

 

 

Sometimes the Name Says It All

Britain has more than it’s share of really bad place and street names.

Last Laugh Department: German media report that Heinrich Mueller, head of the dreaded Gestapo, was buried in a Jewish cemetery in 1945.

Contrary to popular belief, the biggest reason for the rise in U.S. health care spending is not an aging population or patient demand, but rather the increasing price of drugs, procedures and hospital care, a new study finds. Cough-<nationalize the gougers>-cough! 

In other quack medicine news,  a weight-loss ‘dietary supplement’ called OxyElite has been pulled off the shelves after over 50 cases of serious liver damage or acute liver failure among its users.

Show of hands: who is shocked by this? A new study finds that many pills labeled as ‘herbal supplements’ are little more than powdered rice. Americans spend an estimated $5 billion a year on dubious ‘herbal’ preparations.

Stuxnet, the first real 21st Century cyber-weapon, wasn’t content to just muck up Iran’s uranium enrichment centrifuges. It’s infected a Russian nuclear plant, according to Russian anti-virus guru Kaspersky, and there’s not much to prevent it from infecting the International Space Station, what with all those infect thumb-drives floating around. The ISS has already seen infection by the W32.Gammima.AG worm. Is this why NASA is switching to Linux?

Russian performance artist Pyotr Pavlensky nails his scrotum to the ground in Red Square to protest ‘apathy, political indifference and fatalism of Russian society’. Okay, so some Russians make more sense than others.

A culprit has been fingered in the mysterious mass die-offs in the North American elk population. Nope, it’s not Bigfoot.

U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry has voiced his own doubts about the ridiculous conspiracy theory that Lee Harvey Oswald acted as a lone gunman.

Despite being considered extinct for nearly 80 years, an intrepid group of British naturalists from the Centre for Fortean Zoology has set out to find proof that the thylacine (AKA ‘Tasmanian tiger’) is still alive and kicking. 

The oldest big cat fossils ever found  have been unearthed in the Himalayas – from a previously unknown species “similar to a snow leopard”.

Respect The Hamster-Ball of Personal Space: enjoy reading “Dr. Carmella’s Guide to Understanding the Introverted“.

“Tulsa: Where ‘Good Government’ Just Doesn’t Pay!”

T-town is in for another three years of scandal-plagued government with the re-election of Dewey  F. Bartlett yesterday. I’d like to wish him good luck, and his pants a higher ignition temperature, this time around! The good news from last night is that the infrastructure improvement projects all passed, so maybe the ‘street-crater slalom’ will get a little less challenging.

This is one of those elections that left me wishing for a “None of the Above” option on the ballot. More than $4 million was spent on the mayoral campaign, and I found both candidates unworthy. Why should we have to get stuck with lemons like this? Voters should be able to say “Sorry, try again!” and call for a fresh slate of candidates.

Sandia’s Multi-Modal Vehicle concept is just weird enough to love. Look for something like it under your X-mas tree (or circling your compound) in the near future!

Gods and Monsters

Dark Horse has launched a new comic book series where atheist superheroes protect the Earth from supernatural forces they don’t even believe in.

Here’s 11 horror movies that are incredibly scary because of what they say about humanity. I thought they all were!

Rare non-face palm news out of Indian Territory! The first 24 hour automated library in the U.S. has been installed in Norman OK!

The robot apocalypse has been postponed! In front of dozens of journalists yesterday in Hong Kong, DARPA’s 330 pound Atlas robot lost its balance and broke its ankle during a demonstration of walking.

Law of Urination: all mammals empty their bladders over the same duration.

A new study published in the American Journal of Medicine finds that heavy pot smokers tend to be slimmer than former marijuana users and non-smokers. So that’s what happened to my 30 inch waist!

Poor children are now the majority in American public schools in South, West. Standardized testing won’t fix that.

Yes, Evil Knievel endorsed a scooter-chair in his declining years. Sad, isn’t it?

Authority > Leadership. “Authority in the Village from Italy to Ireland“.

There’s an interesting “sedition petition” that’s got over 40,000 signatures.

At a loss for words? Try the Tea party Insult Generator! It’s powered by actual insults spewed on John Boehner’s Facebook wall!

Beloved Imbeciles

“The righteous hates falsehood, but the wicked brings shame and disgrace” – (Proverbs 13:5). Yea and verily, my own district’s Rep. Jim Bridenstine (R-Pekoe and Orange Pekoe) issued the following statement on his vote to continue the government shutdown Wednesday night:

I voted ‘No’ on the bill to raise the debt ceiling without any spending controls and fund the government without providing any relief to millions of Americans being harmed by Obamacare. The President’s policy of funding all of the government or none of the government violates the principles of a representative republic and is devastating to a nation historically governed by consensus.

Yep, them Obamacare casualties are just littering the streets, aren’t they?  This kind of hyperbole, coupled with the fact that Bridenstine is known to be able to both read and write, is why I conclude that he is a very lazy liar that just doesn’t care to sound even a little credible. Because, hey, TYRANNY!, right?

Mr. Bridenstine doesn’t seem to comprehend that, under the Constitution of this representative democracy, there are just two ways to undo the Affordable Care Act (since the Supreme Court has already killed the “declare it unconstitutional” gambit):

1. Pass a bill in congress to overturn the ACA, and have the president sign it into law, or
2. Pass a bill in congress to overturn the ACA, have the president veto it, then override the veto by two-thirds vote in both houses of congress

It’s a little odd to have to explain this to a congressman, even a spurious ‘wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross‘ rookie like Bridenstine, but he’s just a mendacious little tool and not an overly bright one at that. Go Okie voters!

Rep. Tom Cole was the only member of Oklahoma’s all-Republican delegation voting to re-open the government. I’ve lauded Rep. Cole in the past for being the most pragmatic member of the Oklahoma delegation, by far. We might not agree on much, but with Cole you won’t get an argument about the sky being “up” or 2+2 being equal to 4. This sets him head and shoulders above the rest.

On the other hand, in the Senate, crazy old Tom Coburn (R-Rampant Lesbian) was among the 18 senators who voted against the measure. Sen. Jim Inhofe, recovering from surgery to remove a scientific hoax, was unable to vote but released this statement:

The president has taken care of his pet projects while letting the most foundational elements of the Constitution — from budgeting to national security — sit on the back burner. Because of his leadership, we have operated from one crisis to the next. It happened once again when he and Majority Leader (Harry) Reid held Congress hostage with the debt ceiling in order to forge a deal that falls short of anything worthy of conservative support. It’s time this ends and my colleagues face the overdue discussion on the scope and size of federal government.

Does that parse as being as disconnected from reality to you as it did for me? Maybe it was only the Demerol talking, though with Inhofe how would you ever know?

Mr. Cause, meet Mr. Effect

The movie we’ve all been waiting for! “Hell No!”, the sensible horror movie.

Right out of “Creepshow“: Russian team recovered a half-tonne chunk of the space rock that exploded over Chelyabinsk earlier this year, but they broke it.

What fact do you accept intellectually, but still feels “wrong” to you? It’s quite a discussion over at Reddit.

A herpes drug can make people with renal failure insist they are dead – a condition called Cotard’s syndrome – and may provide insights into consciousness.

Here’s what the fox really says, Ylvis.

Connecticut College students and a professor of neuroscience have found “America’s favorite cookie” is just as addictive as cocaine – and just like most humans, rats go for the middle first.

Donkey Baseball (which is, as the name implies, baseball played while riding on donkeys) became a popular fad in the 1930s. In 1934, William Beck became the first fatality for the fledgling sport.

How the Bible and YouTube are fueling the next frontier of password cracking.

A drug similar to ketamine has been shown to work as an antidepressant, without the psychosis-like side effects associated with the party drug.

Billionaire businessman Richard Branson last week spoke on CNN against the ‘War on Drugs’, labeling it “an abject failure”. Speaking in purely business terms, Branson said that if he “had a company that had failed for 60 years I would have closed it down 59 years ago”.

Q: How many cops does it take to throw a suspect down a flight of stairs? A: None; he tripped. More police-state fun! 

“It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.” -Mark Twain

Besides the train-wreck the GOP and their fellow travelers are causing, the U.S. really doesn’t have a debt crisis. What we do have is a crazy crisis!

More than half of low-wage workers employed by U.S. fast-food restaurants rely on public assistance to get by, possibly due to laughably low wages.

So, let me get this straight: you voted for werewolves to dismantle the government and now you can’t get any help? SD ranchers demand to know “Where’s that gubbermint we voted against?”. Pardon my shocking lack of sympathy.

Here’s the plotting of the “Putz Putsch” conspirators, caught on video. Shipping all those teabagger pukes to Gitmo is better than they deserve.

DARPA’s Space Cannibals and Superman vs. the KKK

How Superman single-handedly thwarted the KKK. For realsies!

The bogus home page for Mankato, Minnesota may be one of the oldest running jokes on the ‘net. Created by Prof. Don Descy as a lesson on the inherent quality of information on the Web, it describes points of interest that include Mankato’s hot springs, underwater city, pyramid, nuclear submarine manufacturing plant and whale-watching areas. Unwitting tourists still get sucked in.

Help save the endangered Pacific Northwest Tree Octopus! There may be only a few left in the wild, and the captive breeding program can’t keep up with habitat destruction!

These tiny marsupials have so much sex they just fall apart and die, That’s a party animal!

DNA from ancient skeletons has revealed how a complex patchwork of prehistoric migrations fashioned the modern European gene pool.

Miguel Ordeñana is a biologist with Natural History Museum of Los Angeles and an expert on wildlife camera traps. You’ll never guess how he lures jaguars in for their close-ups.

One way to cut costs and improve resiliency of critical orbital infrastructure would be to recycle/cannibalize defunct satellites in orbit using robots. DARPA expects a demonstration of this orbital Frankensteinery by 2016.

The tea party group FreedomWorks has fallen into dire financial straits, and was forced to take out a $1 million line of credit earlier this year, sources close to the organization told BuzzFeed.

The Council for National Policy is the most powerful conservative group you’ve never heard of. They back the government shutdown, the  “Ground Zero Mosque” bullshit, blocking  a number of judicial nominees, and just generally acting like a bunch of Visigoths.

A Message To House Republicans From Guy Fawkes. He’s been there, gang. Listen to him.

In an escalation of the stalemate gripping Washington, House Republicans voted today to shut down the prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain that controls reasoning and impulses.

Forbes suggests The Tea Party’s Demands Are Not Unreasonable. They Are Impossible.

The National Alliance of Hostage-Takers and Blackmailers, a watchdog group that monitors negative images of extortionists in the media, today blasted President Obama for his repeated comparisons between them and the Tea Party Republicans, calling his remarks “degrading and hurtful.

Psychiatrists Deeply Concerned For 5% Of Americans Who Approve Of Congress (TheOnion).

“Food is the First Thing, Morals Follow On!”

“Food Will Win the War” –  an awesome 1942 propaganda cartoon from Walt Disney. Tom Waits gives us a rougher taker on ‘food security’ (what a screwed-up euphemism)!

While  the US government is shut down, the Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) Food and Nutrition program will not be receiving its regular federal funding. Feminist Hulk is building a list of alternative sources of infants and children nutrition aid sources… while the Teahadi terrorists inflict their childish tantrums (at full pay) on the vulnerable.

Fox News host Elisabeth Hasselbeck on Thursday suggested that welfare recipients who had air conditioning and cell phones were part of the “ugly side of entitlements”. Then Jesus threw His beer at the TV and damned her and all those like her to Eternal Torment.

Have they been huffing starter fluid, or what? “Truckers Ride For The Constitution” (a Tea Party group formerly known as “Truckers To Shutdown America” before their original Facebook page was killed) plans to clog the Interstate 495 inner loop from Oct. 11 to Oct. 13. Apparently they wish to emulate French farmers, who regularly pull this kind of stunt!

Get Out Your Calculators, It’s Time To Go To Crazyland, TX for a look at Louie “Louie” Gohmert’s FEC filing. “Why does his staff get pizza but he dines at The Capitol Hill Club for $1,500 a month? Do you think the staff will try to poison him when they find this out?“. And where does he get a $10 plane ticket?

Death is permanent in Ohio, lurking everywhere in Florida… and debatably redundant in Oklahoma.

It’s that time of year again! New Pumpkin Spice Channel To Offer Fall-Themed Hardcore Pornography (TheOnion).

The Smell of Peanut Butter Could Diagnose Alzheimer’s, because your olfactory is one of the first things affected.

Noted holy man Pat Robertson cranksplains AIDS: “I think the World Health Organization was doing some experiment in the Congo on a monkey virus, a monkey injection to fight polio and it wasn’t an injection, they put it in sugar cubes and they gave it to these Africans, a couple hundred thousand in the test.”

Nature Plays Her Little Jokes

From the “You Know Nature Hates You When Department”! Absurd Creature of the Week: This Prehistoric Elephant Had a Huge Spork for a Mouth.

Breaking News! Kid Not Getting In Strange Van For Anything Less Than King-Size Bar (TheOnion)

A new ‘shape memory’ metal  is reported in the journal Nature.

Five ways to rob a bank using the internet.

In which Vitriol is put to the Test -or- how perverse is that incentive, anyway? All hail Wondermark!

A neato permaculture site: Permies (Thanks, Terry!) and here’s how to make acorn flour.

A whacko conspiracy site: Presscore. It’s Canadian but completely uncivil! Maybe they want us to think they’re Canadian, hmmmm….

Insights into the Personalities of Conspiracy Theorists: distrust of authority and low agreeableness are among factors underlying the willingness to believe.

Goblinbooks is always a favorite with me. The quote is from Carpenter’s Halloween, in case you didn’t recognize it, and the face is from under some mossy rock I guess.. Scary!

“I’m Just a Law”

Thanks, BoingBoing!

The Gift That Keeps On Giving!

That Time GE Made a One-Man, Rocket-Propelled Reentry Vehicle/Body Bag. 

Judge Takes On Patent Troll With ‘Sham Employee’; Forces Troll To Defend Practice Before A Jury. This is going to be good!

Just a few holes transforms the fried chicken-peddling Colonel Sanders into a blood-vomiting demon.

Should Kratom Use Be Legal? The leaves of the herb kratom (Mitragyna speciosa), a native of Southeast Asia in the coffee family, are used to relieve pain and improve mood as an opiate substitute and stimulant.

Another form of wireless charging: Harnessing the power of lightning to charge a mobile phone. Ben Franklin on line two!

Naked mole rats live long lives—about 30 years—and stay healthy until the very end. Now biologists at the University of Rochester have new insights into the animal’s longevity—better-constructed proteins.

The Once and Future Tantrum

Happy 123rd anniversary, Yosemite National Park! It’s too bad the congressional Pubes & Goobs decided to shut down the government to celebrate!

Of course the Oklahoma delegation played its part as faux-populist Tea Party lick-spittles, but what do you expect from the likes of Markwayne “Lying Tradesman” Mullin or Jimbo “Unambiguous Tea Party-Doll” Bridenstein or the rest of the mouth-breathers that the rural base here seems to love? Calling attention to the Okie voters’ lack of critical reasoning skills would be to state the self-evident, judging from the type of pathetic douche-bags they keep sending to Washington.

And that brings us back to the current round of “Amateur Hour” at it’s most garish: the Goobs can barely muster the coordination required to drag all the furniture into a pile for the self-serving, cynical Pubes (like Ted Cruz) to apply their rudimentary fire-making skills to. There will follow much hooting and howling around the bonfire, some spirited poo-flinging and Piggy may be hunted for a time. Meanwhile, the nation’s business is put on hold. Surely this is what the Founding Fathers intended!

Eventually, the adults will show up (as they always do), kiss their little boo-boos and send them off to their warm, corruption-funded beds again. What passes for Tea Party ‘honor’ will have been served: they’ll have held their breath till they turn blue as Smurfs and thrown their tantrums for the cameras, given the global economy a limp, forced up the cost of borrowing for everyone, screwed workers out of timely paychecks, maybe even triggered some evictions… and call it ‘striking a blow for FREEDOM!” Most of these ass-clowns will probably be re-elected because Americans just aren’t very good at thinking any more. Too much kool-aid will stunt your brain.

The reality is that there are no principled positions advanced by the Right, which can only dish out a wilted word-salad of nihilistic platitudes and strategies for kicking people already laid low by the banksters and vulture capitalists that own the GOP body and soul. Their idiotic base will applaud their fraudulent malfeasance in office… and we can do this all over again in a few months! Blather, rinse, repeat!

Electric spiders and H-bomb duds

We almost lost North Carolina in 1961. Good thing the Mark 39 Mod 2 H-bombs that got dropped were more unreliable than they were unsafe.

Over 150 Americans die each year on average after accidentally taking too much acetaminophen. Good thing they put it in everything.

Do I behead them and drink their blood… or just do some household chores? How the voices in our heads reflect cultural influences.

Just what we need, electric spiders. Do arachnids dream of electric flight?

While you wait for the Navy Yard shooting “Truther” kooks to erupt (it’s only a matter of time), try this quick read: CONSPIRACY THEORIES, MAGICAL THINKING, AND THE PARANOID STYLE(S) OF MASS OPINION.

There’s a simple reason why supply-side economics doesn’t work — and the data confirm it.

The wild story of the short-notice, three-hour viewing period for a national-security document on the August Friday that summer recess started. It was on display in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying ‘Beware of the Leopard’.

“Wanna See Me Eat Some Paste?” By Sen. Ted Cruz.

The evolution of bald men: