Paranoia as a permanent state of being – –

This post about a panicked cautionary note was sent to me today, obviously well after the tea-party fact, but I thought it was quite amusing. The ultimate effect being, of course, that their efforts at keeping any sort of grassroots movement going was shot squarely in the foot, as they effectively censored themselves out of communicating with each other. Some of the responses to the post are hilarious. Seems of late I've been reading too many rightwing kneejerk responses, barely literate and rarely logical, to eloquent liberal articles and posts, and I was beginning to feel an unease that "they" are going to take over again. I was reminded, reading these responses, that the left side of the general public is still out there, making merry and feeling confident. Whew. Now, is it just me, or does anyone else find that the further to the right one lands on the political spectrum, the less functional one's sense of humor seems to become? Not only can they not poke fun at themselves, which all of my friends (read: left-leaning people with brains) do pretty well, but they can't put words together to CREATE humor, either. Just fear, volume and paranoia. And ranting. Lots and lots of ranting.

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Herr Ratzinger continues the massacre

HIV/AIDS is possibly the worst health crisis to hit this planet. It's also arguably the worst thing to happen to the African continent since white people were regularly kidnapping its inhabitants and trading them like farm machinery. But the one hopeful thing about the whole situation is this: while there's no cure yet, AIDS is easily preventable. Ridiculously easily preventable. Avoiding the sharing of needles & using contraception are the two most effective ways to avoid the long, tortuous, wasting death we've all come to associate with this horrendous epidemic. And if you're not an intravenous drug user (or you studiously avoid sticking sharp, blood-stained things in your body), there's 50% of your prevention pretty much sorted already. So ... how the hell are you supposed to react when the gold-robed, paedophile-protecting dictator-for-life of the Catholic Church continues to threaten people with eternal torment for using contraception during sex (based on a very, very, um, interpretive interpretation the Bible) and instead tells people "just say no" to sex? In this story (BBC) Pope Oberstumbannfuhrer Herr Kaiser Ratzinger (I refuse to use his picked-out stagename, he's not Axl Rose for crying out loud) once again proves to the world that not only is his outlook anachronistic, unrealistic & laughable, it's also flat-out fatal. To millions upon millions of people.

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Ed Brayton discovers a GOP member who’s woken up

Ed adds a nice commentary at the end of his latest post, detailing James Richardson's call for the GOP to get real and stop pandering to ignorance and bigotry: The country has changed dramatically over the last 30 years. With more and more gay and lesbian Americans coming out of…

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Human culture as forceful agent of human evolution

Learn about the effects of human culture on human evolution in this article at Seed Magazine. Yes, it appears to be a two-way street; biological evolution affects human culture and human culture affects human biological evolution.  This article includes a detailed analysis of an oft-cited example: the spread of genes…

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