Read this: Private prisons make money from locking up immigrant families — including young children — indefinitely.

Written by my hero, Amy Goodman of Democracy Now!

(who, by the way, is a nun!)

I think this is comically retarded: Think Tank Blasts Gore for Hypocrisy

First of all, I suspect that if you compared Gore’s resource usage with people in his tax bracket, he is not above average. Second, he claims that he offsets his usage through various means (as the article above describes). Third, neither Gore nor the rest of the “hey, let’s be smart about global climate change” movement are saying that we should live off the grid. They are saying we, as a society, should embrace things which reduce our impact on global climate change and reject those things which do not. For example, the pussy, lobbyist-written energy policies of George W. Bush, which are soft on mercury emissions, provide incentives to not modernize coal-fired plants and subsidize big oil, with our dollars and our military, are wrong-headed and leading us in the wrong direction. The only time Bush does anything remotely “green” is during his state of the union address, in between a bunch of pie-in-the-sky bullshit. You wanna talk about walking the walk?

The fact is, if you compare Gore with any rich Right Winger, there is no question who stands for “green” policies more, in words and in deeds. This is a hatchet job designed to undermine someone who has been very successful in educating people on the data and risks of global climate change.

And I’m not necessarily a huge Gore fan.

A friend of mine told me a scary story. He is a marriage and family therapist. This is a first-hand account that he witnessed personally.

A couple went out for the night and left their three children in the care of a baby sitter. The baby sitter snooped through their dresser drawers and found some marijuana. She called her parents who called the police. When the couple came home their children were gone, under the protection of the county child protection agency. The cops had completely searched their house and the couple were arrested. The children were held for 3 days by the county and then released to a relative. The parents were allowed 9 hours of visitation per week. They had to undergo drug testing and be clean for 6 months (or something like that) before the state would release their children back to their custody. If they failed any of those drug tests they were at risk of losing custody of their children FOREVER.

Had the parents been complete alcoholics, or hooked on prescription drugs, child protection would never had been involved. But, because marijuana is illegal, even a small amount of marijuana in the home can result in the placement of the children under a state child protection agency.

This is insane. My friend did an assessment on the parents and concluded they were great parents, great role models and had done a fine job of raising the kids, one of which was 10 years old. So for 10 years they had been outstanding parents.

Now obviously there are situations where children need protection from their own parents. Marijuana use is not one of those situations. Marijuana is considered less harmful in virtually every way compared to alcohol. To be clear, children should not be exposed to drugs. Nor should they be exposed to severe alcoholism or prescription pill poppers.

This is a result of the insane laws prohibiting the use of marijuana, driven largely by the fundamentalist Christian bastards that I constantly bitch about on this blog. The criminalization of marijuana is a huge failure of public policy and it has to be changed. The reason it isn’t changed is because of god damn Jesus freaks, half of whom are complete fucking alcoholics and pill poppers and who seriously harm their children by indoctrinating them into their radical, intolerant and hateful religion.

Good thing I don’t smoke marijuana. Or believe in God.

I don’t understand why newspapers and TV people can’t use the word “nigger” when discussing the word “nigger”. We all know it is a hateful word that shouldn’t be used as an insult or to refer to people. But when you are talking about the word itself, you are not insulting anybody by saying nigger as opposed to saying “the n-word“.

It also pisses me off that newspapers and TV shows can’t use profanity even when it is news. Like when Cheney told that guy to go fuck himself. They all had to report it as “the f-word”. What the fuck. We all know what the fucking ‘f’ means in that phrase. We all fill it in in our minds. Are we such children that we can’t even report the news word for word anymore?

If the Star Tribune or some other newspaper reported that Cheney said the word “fuck” and some Mommy gets mad about it, the person Mommy should be mad at is Dick fucking Cheney and not the newspaper.

The Second Carnival Of Mathematics: The Math Geeks are Coming to Town!

Check out the link above to read some fun math blogging, including an entry by yours truly!

I’ll start by saying I’m a big fan of smoking bans. The reason is simple: a minority of people smoke and yet their actions dramatically effect every one in the room. Besides the obvious health impacts, it is annoying and unpleasant.

The notion that smoking bans hurt bars is false and it has been proven all over. Yes, there is a short-term impact while whiny smokers try to have an impact, but it is temporary. People do not stop going to bars because they can’t smoke inside. In fact, a happy side effect of smoking bans is that more and more bars are adding pleasant outdoor seating areas.

So I’m displeased that the pussies in the Minnesota Senate neutered the state-wide smoking ban bill. A state-wide ban is the best way to level the playing field for all bars. It is also the obvious thing to do in terms of public safety.

What pisses me off is these senators are bowing to pressure from a whiny, addicted but vocal minority. Why would they give in to 20% of the people when 80% of us have made it clear that we want our fucking air back.

I’ll add that the bleating of smokers who say “If you don’t like it stay home” can easily be turned back on them — you fucking stay home if you can’t get through one beer without a cigarette.

I’ll also add that I don’t care if people smoke, I have no moral objection to people smoking and it is not my intent to try to get people to stop smoking. I don’t give a rats ass. But the notion that 1 out of 5 people can ruin it for the other 4 is insane.

What really cracks me up is a lot of smokers don’t smoke at home because they don’t want to stink their house up. So they go out and stink all the rest of us up.

It makes no sense. It is just not that hard to step outside for a smoke.

This time courtesy of the New York Archdiocese of the Catholic Church:

Our political leaders fail to protect the moral tone of our community when they encourage inappropriate sexual activity by blanketing our neighborhoods with condoms,” Edward Cardinal Egan of the New York Archdiocese and Bishop Nicholas DiMarzio of the Brooklyn Diocese said in a joint statement released late yesterday. “Although in their statements they give nod to the truth that only abstinence before marriage and fidelity within marriage are failsafe, by their actions they ignore that truth and degrade societal standards.”

Giving people access to birth control does not make them have sex. Telling people to wait until marriage does not stop them from having sex. These people are naive and they do not have their priorities straight. If you have love and compassion for your fellow human beings you should be more concerned with keeping them alive and less concerned about whether you agree with every choice they make.

Oh, and PS, shove your moral tone up your ass. I don’t worship your God or believe in your silly little book and I am sick to death of you trying to ram your ridiculous “morality” down the throats of our civic institutions.

(Since I moved my blog to a new server I’M having trouble commenting. Apparently you guys aren’t, which is good. So I’m posting my comment to your comments as a comment!)

First of all, parents can opt-out of the vaccination. It is not being forced on people, per se. Second, as I understand it, the vaccine is 100% effective. As I understand it, the science results are in, have been checked and confirmed and this vaccine is a miracle drug.

So you can look at this in a few different ways. The governor was essentially bypassing a legislature that would never in a million years do this. I’m sure the Right is going nuts over this down there. In that sense, it was a brave thing to do because I do believe it is the right thing to do. Let people opt out, but make this vaccine available to everyone.

Drug companies are a big worry. The big-dollar marketing of drugs is worrisome. The stranglehold they have on our government is worrisome. I mean, we passed a law that said we, the people, can’t collectively bargain with the drug companies. What the fuck? I seriously don’t know how those guys kept their jobs after voting for a law that prohibits the US government from getting volume discounts.

So the relationship between Merck and the governor is relevant. Clearly Merck wants to sell this drug and they just made a huge sale thanks to the governor. But its a good drug, hopefully the first of a lot of good drugs, that helps fight against the deadliest disease, cancer. I think we have to see this as a good thing.

I just can’t fucking believe this. The governor of Texas mandated that all girls entering the 6th grade be vaccinated against HPV, which can lead to cervical cancer.

Now we all know how Christians are known for their love of humanity and their desire to limit the suffering of God’s creatures, right? Their reaction to this?

The governor’s action seems to signify that God’s moral law regarding sex outside of marriage can be transgressed without consequence.

WHAT THE FUCK!

This retard, who goes by the name of Rick Scarborough, is with the Christian lobbying group Vision America.

The problems with this are almost too many to dissect. In fact, I’m overwhelmed with hatred for these fucking dirtballs to the point that I don’t want to pick their insanity apart.

If your God thinks it is better for people to die of cancer than to get vaccinated, he is as much of a dumbshit as you are. I just can’t fathom that anyone would see a successful vaccine against a cancer-causing virus as a bad thing. Since when is death better than having sex?

These people are fucked up and they must be stopped.