Anonymous asked: What's your argument against people who scream "I'm an adult, I'm responsible for my own choices, I don't need a nanny state to tell me what to do"?
One of the hardest things about being a Dark Overlord is finding competent minions. I have populace to terrorize. I can’t waste your time on trivialities. Decent minions will know what I want without having to ask a bunch of stupid questions. I want my coffee brought to me at 8:30 in the morning, black, and served in the skull of my most recently vanquished enemy. It shouldn’t be poisoned. And if some plucky hero type whose uniform doesn’t fit well asks to prepare it, kill him and brew a new pot. If I want the poisoned coffee some day—I’ll tell you. But if you hope to last long here, you’ll figure out how to do things the right way without requiring excessive supervision.
The great thing about being the Dark Overlord is that I can do whatever I want. That doesn’t mean I want a huge array of options for every dumb thing. If I decide we’re going pillaging today, I want you to do the work of lining up a decent raiding party, choosing somewhere that needs pillaging, and making sure we’re back in time for the evening’s feast. If I don’t like your plan, I can always have you sent to the black cells. And I don’t even want to hear about the terrible options. “Do you want to ride straight into the trap?” No? Do you think I’m stupid? Your job is to deal with the traps on your own so I don’t have to worry about them.
Don’t annoy me with bad options. Competent minions don’t plague me with questions about every blasted decision
Yesterday I noted how ironic it was that some of Romney’s super-rich Super-PAC donors were outraged that the Obama administration had released the same sort of information about them that becomes publicly available whenever normal people give normal political donations.
nonyap writes:
Here’s the difference - if you and I donate our measly five dollars to a GOP candidate or group, President Obama is not going to place you on an enemies list, and tells left wing reporters in their weekly morning strategy meetings to target you in “hit pieces” that assassinate your character and then uses his campaign website to lie about your business.
First, the “enemies list’ is not a real thing. This is the page the Republicans are calling an “Enemies List. It just lists some of the massive donors to the SuperPAC to help some of us know where the soft money is coming from. It’s not called “the enemies list” or anything like that. The term is just a smear to try to make a relatively innocuous campaign page sound Machiavellian.
Second, how is disclosing money somebody gives away character assassination? If I write a check to something I consider a worth cause, you have my permission to trumpet how much I gave and to who. Granted, I don’t write large checks to shadowy organizations bent on subverting democracy by filling the airwaves with vicious half-truths. But I’m sure people who give that sort of organization money believe it’s a good cause. Shouldn’t they be willing to stand behind their donations?
zigziggityzoo asked: New York City is already the healthiest city (in terms of eating) in this nation. All this before the soda ban. So I ask: Why do we need the soda ban in the healthiest city in this nation? (I could cite the source if tumblr didn't ban links in asks).
New York City’s impressive public health numbers should not be considered independently of New York City’s willingness to take public health issues seriously. The indoor smoking ban, the transfat ban, and so on have had an effect. Soda shrinkage is another step in a trend that the raw numbers suggest is working. But that’s not the real reason I’m okay with the New York City ban.
The real reason is that I don’t live in New York City.
If you think about it, society is fragile. The little stresses of daily life add up. The cop that pulls you over for a broken tail light and expects you to act grateful when he doesn’t ticket you, even though you both know the tail light was a pretext. The guy who honks at you the second the light turns green, even if somebody is still parked in the intersection. The alarm clock’s obnoxious beep. The alarm clock’s second obnoxious beep after you run out of snooze time. Umpires. These things add up. This stuff gets to you.
Society has a delicate balance. By some miracle, most of us are able to keep it under control most of the time. The pressure doesn’t build too high. But … just a little nudge in one direction or the other and … oops. Society crumbles. Bang, crash, hope you own a chainsaw.
I’m not saying the ability to buy a sixty-four ounce bucket of sugar water before a movie is all that’s keeping the madness at bay. I’m just saying you can’t be too careful. If we’re going to risk losing a city to the Reavers because some bureaucrat decided to play God with the soda machine, I don’t want it to by my city.
HotAir’s Ed Morrisey thinks that New York City’s proposed ban on soda cups over 16 ounces makes no sense. I’m not convinced. You know what really makes no sense? Soda sizes over sixteen ounces.
A normal can of Coke has 12 ounces. It has zero nutritional value. But we all have vices. And that mixture of cold carbonation, sugars, acid, and caffeine makes irresponsible and nerdy things feel that much more irresponsible. It’s also a traditional drink to serve with pizza.1
Morrisey is of the view that people will order however much they want to drink and that reducing serving size won’t do anything. I’m of the view that Morrisey is dumb, strange, or otherwise lacking a grasp on human behavior.
“SunTrust Mortgage Inc…. has agreed to pay $21 million to resolve a lawsuit by the Department of Justice that it engaged in a pattern or practice of discrimination that increased loan prices for many of the qualified African-American and Hispanic borrowers who obtained loans between 2005 and 2009 through SunTrust Mortgage’s regional retail offices and national network of mortgage brokers.” —
Department of Justice. Three things to notice here.
And how the Democrat before him was Joe “Bomb Them All” Lieberman?
Say what you want about Biden,1 he’s a way better pick than either of those guys.
Biden will say what he wants too ↩
A Church posts a billboard apology to North Carolinians for “judgmental, deceptive, manipulative actions” done against the LGBT community with the passage of Amendment One.
You know what, I know I’m supposed to like this, but I don’t.
It’s just passive-aggressive.
Don’t post billboards letting secular people know You’re Not Like Those Christians.
Rally your people.
Actually get mainstream Christianity to not be a homophobic mess.
I don’t care about your stupid billboard.
So you’re not anti-gay, and you’re Christian. Do you want a cookie?
I always want a cookie.
I have some mixed feelings about the billboard. It’s aggressive and not very attractive. But this is a place where big statements are necessary.
I’m a member of a welcoming church that has done a whole lot to make mainstream Christianity not a homophobic mess. But that’s not enough. At first I was a bit turned off by the sheer number of rainbows the church displayed. Just welcome everybody, I thought.
After talking to a few people at the church, I realized that to be truly welcoming a church has to make a big deal about it. As horrible as it is, a same-sex couple cannot walk into any church and feel confident that they will be embraced. For many people, the baseline assumption is that they will not be welcome. In some cases, this is just a matter of the church’s reputation. Others have been pushed out of churches for being who they are. To be welcoming, churches must be explicitly welcoming.
Not everybody wants a church. I get that. But many who want a church don’t think any will welcome them. If reaching the guy who’s considered himself an outcast for years because his church wasn’t big enough to welcome him takes a giant billboard, let’s put up billboards.
(via golden-notebook)
The Heritage Foundation and other conservative groups have accused President Obama of keeping an “Enemies List.” That sounded a bit … dramatic, so I though I would check out what they were upset about. It turns out it was this little page listing names, donation amounts, and a bit of biographical data. As you might imagine, these donors are outraged, feel targetted, and some are worried their businesses will suffer. Perhaps if people knew their money was supporting people giving to fund Romney’s attack ads, maybe they’d take their money elsewhere. (Seems reasonable.)
But are these ultra-rich donors actually being treated so harshly? When normal people make normal political donations, their name, industry, and the amount they give becomes part of a public record. You can, for example, look up which Bain Capital employee gave a half million dollars to Romney’s SuperPAC and which gave maximum donations to Democratic PACs. Our campaign finance laws are in tatters—but they still provide transparency on normal people making normal donations.
Apparently the ultra-rich are outraged that they may be held to the same standard.
Massachusetts has a law stating that you do not have to tell somebody that your house is haunted before selling it. However, if somebody specifically asks if a property is haunted, you still can’t lie about it.
The fact or suspicion that real property may be or is psychologically impacted shall not be deemed to be a material fact required to be disclosed in a real estate transaction. “Psychologically impacted shall mean an impact being the result of facts or suspicions including, but not limited to, the following:
…
(c) that the real property has been the site of an alleged parapsychological or supernatural phenomenon.
No cause of action shall arise or be maintained against a sellor or lessor of real property or a real estate broker or salesman, by statute or at common law, for failure to disclose to a buyer or tenant that the real property is or was psychologically impacted.
Notwithstanding the foregoing, the provisions of this section shall not authorize a seller, lessor or real estate broker or salesman to make a misrepresentation of fact or false statement.
MGL c. 93 § 114. The law was passed in 1998.
Is, Or Is Not, Mitt Romney a Unicorn? -
The time has come for Mitt Romney to prove it once and for all: Is he or is he not a unicorn?
Let me stipulate that I have no proof that Romney is a unicorn, and indeed I want to believe that he is not. But I have not seen proof of this because he has not released the original copy of his long-form birth certificate.
There are many others who feel as I do — 18,000 people to be precise. I first began to consider the possibility that Romney might be a unicorn when I heard that LeftAction, an online petition operation created by Democratic PR guy John Hlinko, was campaigning to get the Arizona secretary of state to certify that the presumptive Republican nominee is not a mythical beast before allowing his name to be on the presidential ballot.
“There has never been a conclusive DNA test proving that Mitt Romney is not a unicorn,” the group wrote last week. “And if Mitt Romney is or may be a unicorn, he is not Constitutionally qualified to be president.”
The mittromneyisaunicorn.com campaign came about because Arizona Secretary of State Ken Bennett, citing allegations that the birth certificate President Obama released is a fraud, threatened to take the incumbent off the ballot….
I want to emphasize that it’s my personal opinion that Mitt Romney is not a unicorn. But if other people disagree, they are entitled to their opinions. And I think the Romney campaign needs to answer the concerns of the American people.
Some people, have pointed out things like this tapestry that really appears to be Anne Romney stroking a unicorn.
Others are concerned that if Romney is a mythical beast, he may have an anti-reality bias. The time has definitely come for the Romney campaign to provide definitive evidence that Mitt Romney is not a unicorn so the country can move on from this senseless distraction.
(Source: barticles)