Constantine's Journal

1:55pm: Day 0002 - Summer
Our dog Summer after getting back from the groomers.

1:43pm: Flowers



A neighbor down the road is growing giant sunflowers and all manner of wildflowers in his yard. It's absolutely gorgeous.

1:35pm: Day 0003 - The Bee Labors

11:44am: "If there were in the world today any large number of people who desired their own happiness more than they desired the unhappiness of others, we could have paradise in a few years."
- Bertrand Russell

10:23am: Is American becoming socialist?


No, America is not becoming socialist.

8:09pm: Dosage
Balloon Juice » Blog Archive » Time To Rethink Your Conscience:

What this country really needs right now is a serious case of mind your own damned business. We’ve turned into a nation of busybodies and scolds, and people just need to back off. And that goes for the people opposed to and trying to make illegal Andrew’s marriage, for people like Andrew who sound like they want the weight of the law to come down on people making tragic medical decisions that lead to late-term abortions, for the nutjobs who thought they knew better than Michael Schiavo how to handle his horrible situation with his wife, to the lunatics screaming “murder” when we do stem cell research, and so on.

1:13pm: Beauty Pageant





Via Colby Katz Photography.

Beauty pageants are already pretty disgusting, but when it becomes about girls who haven't even hit puberty yet it just becomes downright terrifying.

9:52pm: So I've been browsing around, when I came across a year old NY Times article about "Purity Balls"

Basically it's more evangelical clap trap about saving (the girl's) sex for marriage. Also has a creepy angle to it about father's taking a domineering position in their daughter's sex lives. That's all par for the course with creepy Bible-thumbers, though, and isn't what got my attention. Instead, it was that in an image about girl's saving themselves for marriage and withholding from sex, this was the image they went with in the sidebar:



Oh yeah, you promise to abstain from sex until marriage, you dirty girl.

9:41pm: Christianity Today presents its probing, thought-provoking interview with Joe the Plumber.

At a state level, it's up to them. I don't want it to be a federal thing. I personally still think it's wrong. People don't understand the dictionary—it's called queer. Queer means strange and unusual. It's not like a slur, like you would call a white person a honky or something like that. You know, God is pretty explicit in what we're supposed to do—what man and woman are for. Now, at the same time, we're supposed to love everybody and accept people, and preach against the sins. I've had some friends that are actually homosexual. And, I mean, they know where I stand, and they know that I wouldn't have them anywhere near my children. But at the same time, they're people, and they're going to do their thing.

Emphasis mine. This man is golden.

9:32pm: Problem of the Free-Market Solved



"Our program is a professional service to the financial industry; rats are being trained to become superior traders in the financial markets. Using our own methodology in accordance with well-established animal training techniques, our subjects learn to recognize pattens in historical stock and futures data as well as generating trading signals. We provide solutions for tick based trading data and day based data. RATTRADERS rats can be trained exclusively for any financial market segment. They outperform most human traders and represent a much more economic solution for your trading desk."

11:16pm: PHOTOS: "War Fungi" to Return to China

fter being stored at Cornell University in New York State for nearly 70 years, part of a rare collection of more than 2,000 species of Chinese fungi will soon be on its way back to its native land.

5:29pm: Joe Barton


Reading the description, it appears Joe Barton thinks he's won this round.

7:59am: Wolf and Pig

8:28pm: Tom Delay can fuck himself
Delay Claims Poorer-than-Average Texas is “Wealthy” Because Texans “Work Hard”

Tom Delay advocates secession, claims Texas is super rich. This is of course because Tom Delay uses median income as a ranking, which is heavily skewed by all the super rich bastards living here. But if you look at it as income per capita, which is the amount of income per person in the state, we come up pretty fucking poor.

11:24am: Rich people need to have the shit taxed out of em
Taxing Matters

"In 1980, as "Gilded Age Taxation," a study by the Institute for America's Future shows, the richest 1% of Americans captured fully 7.7% of the nation's after-tax income. The middle sixty percent captured about 50.9%. By 2006, the latest CBO figures show the opulent 1% -- making an average $1.3 million -- captured a staggering 16.3% of the nation's income after all that tax code redistribution. While the middle sixty percent garnered only 44.1%. If class war is being waged, the rich are on the march. "

10:44am: International Committee of the Red Cross Report on the Treatment of Fourteen "High Value Detainees" In CIA Custody


Damning.

12:36pm: Oh, Texas Legislature. You have a reputation for being batshit insane. A rightly deserved reputation. Such as when one of your members proposes that Asian-American voters should change their names so they are “easier for Americans to deal with.”

8:20am: New Debtor's Prison
Edwina Nowlin, a poor Michigan resident, was ordered to reimburse a juvenile detention center $104 a month for holding her 16-year-old son. When she explained to the court that she could not afford to pay, Ms. Nowlin was sent to prison.

8:37am: Oh hot damn, all of Arrested Development is on Hulu. If you have seen it, yet, for some unfathomable reason, set your eye-peepers to Hulu and enjoy some of the finest damn comedy ever to grace the viewing box.

11:25pm: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F9BmTmMEOhQ

1:04pm: While flipping through stations on the radio in the car, I came across some preacher on a talk show ranting about how he wasn't a homophobe, he just thought that way of life "was fundamentally wrong". He bemoaned about being called a bigot and prejudiced. He acted as though he were the victim in the situation, all the while condemning gays and lesbians as just having a wrong lifestyle. He repeatedly used the phrase "love the sinner but hate the sin". I hate creeps like this.

If you think someone's lifestyle is fundamentally wrong simply because they're gay, then you are homophobic. You are a bigot. You are spreading and fomenting hate on another group just because of the way they are. The whole "love the sinner hate the sin" viewpoint is basically condemning another group. It's hateful, spiteful, and homophobic. You don't have to recoil from gays or lesbians in a Casper the Ghost kind of fear to be homophobic. You just have to view and preach that someone's lifestyle is wrong.

Maybe I should just stop listening to conservative talk radio when I find it, even though it amuses me greatly to know end that people actually believe what they're saying.

1:09pm: The Mayor
Some friends of mine have set up an experiment in Democratic Fiction, an attempt at telling a story with limited audience interaction: The Mayor

Similar to a choose your own adventure, but with other people messing up the results

11:09am: Broken Picture Telephone is such a wonderful distraction that everyone must try it.

8:27am: Pennsylvania judges accepted over $2 million in kickbacks for sending juveniles to private detention centers

"Hillary Transue, who is 15 and faced Mr Ciavarella without a lawyer, was sentenced to three months because she constructed a fake MySpace page ridiculing the assistant principal at her high school."

10:32pm: Obama's timid liberalism

"Once upon a time in the United States, public goods -- from retirement security and energy research to public roads -- were provided by the government and paid for by taxes...In the intervening 40 years, however, free-market fundamentalists of the Chicago School have managed to change the debate, redefining "socialism" to mean not only public ownership of the means of production, but also public provision of public goods."