Quick Brains

[elfs]

This was all I had time to read today and I still have a dozen tabs open!

Evil

Just the headlines turn your stomach:

Brazil girl, alleged rape victim, aborts twins

Catholic Church excommunicates everyone who performed, authorized, or assisted in procuring the procedure

But the stepfather who made his nine-year-old charge pregnant? It's cool. He's a fine Catholic, makin' babies and puttin' women and girls in their place as breeding factories. The Archbishop said that abortion was worse that the stepfather's "deplorable" crime.

Illinois GOP leader assaulted by wife after she finds him with two prostitutes in their children's playroom

Gary Skoein is denying that he had hookers in his children's playroom when his wife came into the room and hit him with a plastic toy guitar, but that's what the police wrote down as the reason for the assault.

Get into a credit union, NOW!

Since 1996 (that's Clinton-era stuff), the FDIC has been unable to secure the insurance premiums it was supposed to have collected from the banks it ensures. Congress believed the FDIC was over-capitalized and refused to grant the FDIC the authority needed to enforce premiums collection.

Naked Jesus Handstands, this country is just going to fall apart.

A better, quieter female condom

Huzzah! Omaha and I were testers for the first generation of female condoms (at the time called Reality, with all the puns on the box that implies: "Keep Reality out of the reach of children," "Reality may tend to move during sex," etc.) and apparently the company that makes them (now boringly called "FC") has come up with an FC2, made of a cheaper but better material. More importantly, the material doesn't sound like you're scrunching a baggie while having sex.

Homosexuality likely cause of Blue Duck extinction

The last three English Blue ducks known to be alive have been put together in a zoo pen in the hopes that the one remaining female would breed with the two males, but zookeepers now say that the two males, named Ben and Jerry, are content to hang out together, parading up and down their pen and whistling to one another as if calling to mate.

I bet their nest is so tastefully decorated. This is absolutely guaranteed to send the right wing into a froth about how if homosexuality were legalized, the human species would die off. (via Stephanie Miller)

Comments

[solarbird]

They named the male ducks BEN and JERRY?

So what exactly were they expecting, then?

[sirfox.livejournal.com]

fair wages and a favorable environmental impact, probably. *nods*

[rhonan.livejournal.com]

Inventiveness, whimsy, and good taste?

[http://users.livejournal.com/_candide_/]

Aaaactually, it's not what you've been told.

First Blue Ducks aren't natives of England. Or the northern hemisphere. They live in New Zealand, where there not doing too terribly.

The UK zoo/park in question first tried breeding both males, one at a time, with the female. She rejected them both. (And, more recently, died of old age. Probably why she rejected them.)

They then put the two males together, to leave the female unbothered for a while. The two males started acting not like lovers, but like siblings. They're jointly defending their territory, which Blue Duck brothers will do in the wild.

So, sorry, no gay ducks to blame here, at least not in this case.

[solarbird]

Aw. Go ahead, spoil my funny. ^_^

[shockwave77598.livejournal.com]

A very good question. Why wasn't the stepfather - whose original crime created the conditions for the other "crimes" - not excommunicated as well? If not for his actions, the abortion wouldn't have been possible.

The family and the doctors are better off without this Dogma-over-reason church.

[gromm.livejournal.com]

Yup. Give a blowjob? Go directly to hell. Have unprotected (OK!) vaginal (OK!) intercourse (OK!) with your own daughter (not quite so ok), resulting in twins (not quite so ok, under the circumstances, but twins are always welcome at baptisms), for whom, if the pregnancy were carried to term, I guess *you* would be the one to have to care for (OK!).

But then, he wasn't married to the girl, he was married to her mom, so I guess that means he's going directly to hell, for either sex-before-marriage or adultery, or maybe even both. Perhaps you could add rape to the mix, but that might just be in some kind of a gray area. IIRC, the church says you can rape your wife with impunity, for example.

Now, do sins have scores in the Catholic church? Like if murder were weighted at 100, and impure thoughts were weighted at like a 5 or something. If they did, then I think this guy would probably get over 100 if you added together adultery, rape, sex-before-marriage, and probably unwanted pregnancy (which to them doesn't seem to be the sin in an of itself, but the inevitable consequence of the sin of sex-before-marriage). It might also make sense to add together the number of times each sin was committed. Knowing how things work in the real world, he probably didn't rape his daughter only once, so he was probably working on a score of 1000 before he got caught.

But then, maybe I'm expecting sin to be like spamassassin. It would be a logical approach, and even if the church is completely without reason (which I maintain is true), they are big on logic and philosophy. For this reason, the guy ought to be excommunicated. At the very least.

the ducks

[hydrolagus.livejournal.com]

It's possible to do sperm collection/administration with birds. Much trickier than with mammals, but possible.
Not that three is a relevant breeding population, anyway.

[ionotter.livejournal.com]

Both my banks are credit unions, and not going anywhere. I've already offered to let my friends declare themselves room/housemates so they can join.

[hugh-mannity.livejournal.com]

I loves me my credit union. All the stuff I'd get from a big bank (online banking and bill payment, overdraft protection, etc.) and none of the fees. Plus when I have questions, I get to talk to a real person. When I go into the bank (not often I admit) they know who I am.

Ah yes, Reality. Caused me to have a "birds and bees" conversation with my then 6-yo son because a friend sent me the instructions and dear son wanted to know why I was laughing so hard. By the time I'd explained what a condom was and why one needed one he was all "eeeeew gross!"

[satyrblade.livejournal.com]

Conservatives seem utterly blind to the corrosive effect their hypocrisy has on the very values they profess to uphold... but then, liberals often do the same thing!

The Catholic Church, however, just needs to collapse under the weight of its own stupidity.

Oh, and ya gotta love the "link not found" message that your first post routes to. Somebody had fun with that one! :)

[(Anonymous)]

Actually, I don't think the Church's actions are particularly hypocritical in this case. Deplorable, yes, and illustrative of the terrible consequences of trying to use irrationality as the basis of an ethical system, but still internally consistent to someone who believes humanity begins at conception.

Anonymous Blog Reader #127

[satyrblade.livejournal.com]

Actually, I was referring to the Republican with the hookers in his kids' playroom... although a "church" that spends billions of dollars on opulence while urging poor people to remain "pure," pays survivors of clerical abuse to remain silent, damns rape victims to hell while sheltering valued criminals, and instates a former kid Nazi as its "infallible" leader gives new dimensions to the word "hypocrite."

Tyrannical bishops, homo-hating Mormons, terroristic imams, televangelists - I wish their god(s) would just smite the whole fucking lot of 'em and be done with the pretense.

[gromm.livejournal.com]

The fact that this hasn't happened yet is proof enough that there's no god. Or at least, he doesn't smite those who deserve to be smote. Which is really a shame. Religion could get cleaned up so quickly if that were the case.

[shunra.livejournal.com]

Wow, thanks for the FDIC article.

A few weeks ago I posted that that was what I was doing (moving a chunk of cash from a bank to a credit union, on the theory that the NCUA, which is like the FDIC for credit unions, is under less strain than the FDIC). I felt a little paranoid even to be thinking that way. No one commented at the time, which was good (because no one was shouting "you loon! the full faith and credit of the U.S. are behind that FDIC insurance!" (which I was actually shouting at myself inside my own head)) but also bad (because no one said "hey, yeah, that makes sense") and I was kind of starving for reassurance.

Your post today counts as that reassurance. My only question now is whether I should bail on the banks completely.