A Labor Day Message from Robert Reich

Science Funnies

Who says scientists don't have a sense of humor?

"It is rather unfair to assume that there is anything improbable about science overlapping with humour. Popular TV and radio shows such as The Big Bang Theory, Infinite Monkey Cage, Museum of Curiosity and Dara O’Briain’s School Of Hard Sums happily marry science with jokes. And, as Brian Cox, the scientist and presenter of Wonders of the Universe, points out, comedians such as O’Briain and Ben Miller are physics graduates. “There is a strange nexus between physics and comedy that I seem to be a part of,” Cox told the Daily Telegraph. “It’s a powerful if strange alliance. 

Dara O’Briain did mathematics and physics, and is passionate about it. Ben Miller did a PhD in physics. Robin Ince [his co-presenter on Infinite Monkey Cage] is a very good friend of mine.”

Here are some for you to chortle or groan over:

A Higgs boson walks into a bar and asks everyone to take part in an act of penitence. “What are you doing?” asks the barman. “Giving mass.”


Did you hear about the man who got cooled to absolute zero? He’s OK now.

A photon checks into a hotel and the porter asks him if he has any luggage. The photon replies: “No, I’m travelling light.”

What does a dyslexic, agnostic, insomniac spend most of his time doing? Staying up all night wondering if there really is a dog. 

A TCP packet walks into a bar, and says to the barman: “Hello, I’d like a beer.” The barman replies: “Hello, you’d like a beer?” “Yes,” replies the TCP packet, “I’d like a beer.”


Pavlov is enjoying a pint in the pub. The phone rings. He jumps up and shouts: “Hell, I forgot to feed the dog!”

There are 10 types of people in this world. Those who know binary, and those who don’t.


When I heard that oxygen and magnesium hooked up I was like OMg!

The barman says: “We don’t serve faster-than-light particles here.” A tachyon enters a bar.

Two atoms are walking down the street. One says to the other, “Hey! I think I lost an electron!” The other says, “Are you sure?” “Yes, I’m positive!”

What do you call two crows on a branch? Attempted murder.

An infinite number of mathematicians walk into a bar. The bartender says: “What’ll it be, boys?” The first mathematician: “I’ll have one half of a beer.” The second mathematician: “I’ll have one quarter of a beer.” The third mathematician: “I’ll have one eight of a beer.” The fourth mathematician: “I’ll have one sixteenth of a…” The bartender interrupts: “Know your limits, boys” as he pours out a single beer.


Never trust an atom. They make up everything.

A Roman walks into a bar, holds up two fingers, and says: “Five beers, please.” 

A programmer’s wife tells him: “Run to the store and pick up a loaf of bread. If they have eggs, get a dozen.” The programmer comes home with 12 loaves of bread.

A student travelling on a train looks up and sees Einstein sitting next to him. Excited, he asks: “Excuse me, professor. Does Boston stop at this train?”

This is, like, HUGE, man!

Moments ago, I was masticating on a bucket of crustaceans (with a side of munchies), when this story pinged my computer screen:

The DOJ Will Let Washington, Colorado Marijuana Laws Go Into Effect:

WASHINGTON -- The United States government took an historic step back from its long-running drug war on Thursday, when Attorney General Eric Holder informed the governors of Washington and Colorado that the Department of Justice would allow the states to create a regime that would regulate and implement the ballot initiatives that legalized the use of marijuana for adults.A Justice Department official said that Holder told the governors in a joint phone call early Thursday afternoon that the department would take a "trust but verify approach" to the state laws. DOJ is reserving its right to file a preemption lawsuit at a later date, since the states' regulation of marijuana is illegal under the Controlled Substances Act. 

Deputy Attorney General James Cole also issued a three-and-a-half page memo to U.S. attorneys across the country on Thursday outlining eight priorities for federal prosecutors enforcing marijuana laws. According to the guidance, DOJ will still prosecute individuals or entities to prevent:

• the distribution of marijuana to minors;

• revenue from the sale of marijuana from going to criminal enterprises, gangs and cartels;

• the diversion of marijuana from states where it is legal under state law in some form to other states;

• state-authorized marijuana activity from being used as a cover or pretext for the trafficking of other illegal drugs or other illegal activity;

• violence and the use of firearms in the cultivation and distribution of marijuana

• drugged driving and the exacerbation of other adverse public health consequences associated with marijuana use;

• growing of marijuana on public lands and the attendant public safety and environmental dangers posed by marijuana production on public lands;

• preventing marijuana possession or use on federal property.

U.S. Attorneys will individually be responsible for interpreting the guidelines and how they apply to a case they intend to prosecute. A Justice Department official said, for example, that a U.S Attorney could go after marijuana distributors who used cartoon characters in their marketing because that could be interpreted as attempting to distribute marijuana to minors. 

But the official stressed that the guidance was not optional, and that prosecutors would no longer be allowed to use the sheer volume of sales or the for-profit status of an operation as triggers for prosecution, though these factors could still affect their prosecutorial decisions.

Now, will someone PLEEZE turn on the Ravi Shankar music and pass the chocolate.

A Quiet Revolution

Gay marriage seems to have come to New Mexico. Under the radar, and buoyed by a force no stronger than a simple reading of the law.

In July, State Attorney General Gary King noticed something that state Republicans would have preferred to keep hidden away. New Mexico law does not prohibit gay marriage. Of course, it doesn't specifically authorize it, either, but up until now, nobody has banned it. And any attempts to do so appear to be unconstitutional.

The Associated Press reports that King made the argument after the court asked him to weigh in on a lawsuit filed by a gay Santa Fe couple who were denied a marriage license. In his filing, King urged the court to approve more broadly of gay marriage rights in a ruling in favor of the men.

"New Mexico’s guarantee of equal protection to its citizens demands that same-sex couples be permitted to enjoy the benefits of marriage in the same way and to the same extent as other New Mexico citizens," King said in the filing.

On the strength of that, on Wednesday, Dona Ana County clerk Lynn Ellins, began issuing marriage certificates to gay couples in Las Cruces, NM. Nobody told him that he could - he simply noted that nobody could tell him that he couldn't.

And today, in Albuquerque, a judge ordered the county clerk of the most populous county in New Mexico to begin issuing marriage licenses to gay couples, stating that any seeming prohibitions in New Mexico statutes against same-sex marriage "are unconstitutional and unenforceable."

In his ruling, Judge Alan Malott quoted Article II, Section 18 of the New Mexico State Constitution, which is pretty straight-forward (so to speak).

No person shall be deprived of life, liberty or property without due process of law; nor shall any person be denied equal protection of the laws. Equality of rights under law shall not be denied on account of the sex of any person.

So now, with roughly a hundred same-sex couples legally married in the state of New Mexico, any action by the state government (or our Republican governor Susana Martinez) will be met with an almost-unwinnable lawsuit.

So it would appear that gay marriage is here to stay in New Mexico. Not through what the GOP will undoubtedly be calling "judicial activism," but simply through strict adherence to the law.

That's gonna leave a mark - a big, rainbow-colored one.

Something Rotten in the State of North Carolina

By (O)CT(O)PUS

There seems to be a callous, "fuck-you" attitude metastasizing cancer-like throughout the state of North Carolina.  Recently, former Secretary of State Colin Powell condemned newly enacted voter suppression laws in North Carolina, warning fellow Republicans: “These kinds of actions do not build on the base. It just turns people away."

Now, authoritarians in the state of North Chinalina Carolina are turning against religious groups that minister to the poor:

Raleigh Police Threaten to Arrest Church Volunteers for Feeding the Homeless: 

Nearly every weekend morning for six years [my bold], church groups have passed out free biscuits and coffee to the homeless at Moore Square in downtown Raleigh, N.C. This Saturday at 9 a.m., when volunteers from Love Wins Ministries arrived, 100 sausage biscuits and coffee carafes in hand, Raleigh police officers met them on the sidewalk and threatened to arrest them if they passed out the food. 

A city ordinance, officers said, banned food distribution in public parks. 

Hugh Hollowell, an ordained Mennonite minister and the executive director of Love Wins, was outraged. The ordinance was no surprise — the city requires that groups purchase an $800 permit to use the park, and since that would require non-profits to pay $1,600 per weekend to distribute food, Love Wins never sets up in the park but on the sidewalk along its edge [my bold].  $1,600 could, after all, buy a lot of biscuits and coffee. 

More than 70 people had already lined up outside the park for the free breakfast when the cops issued their threat. Soup kitchens do not operate in the county or city on the weekends, and so the Love Wins breakfast is one of the only ways the homeless can have a free, warm breakfast on the weekends. Feeding the homeless, Hollowell told TIME, is a spiritual calling. 

Love Wins is not the only group in Raleigh that has been told to cease and desist in recent weeks. Church in the Woods and Human Beans Together, two groups that also serve meals downtown, report being told to stop feeding the homeless without prior notice, too. 

“Rather than threatening to arrest people for sharing food with people experiencing homelessness, these folks should be applauded for dealing with the hunger that is faced daily by the homeless population nationwide,” said Jerry Jones, executive director of the National Coalition for the Homeless. “Cities are just trying to cut off homeless people’s source of food in hopes of forcing them out of downtown areas.”

How low can North Chinalina Carolina go!

Al Sharpton is a lying son of a bitch

"So many unscrupulous people have got hold of the progressive cause of late and have so distorted in their own interests everything they touched, that the whole cause has been dragged in the mire"

-Fyodor Dostoyevsky-

So we have yesterday on MSNBC, the cable network we liberals prefer by default, the millionaire Al Sharpton smearing the memory of Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. by acknowledging that although the cause of justice and equality in America has made great strides we still need to overturn the Florida 'stand your ground' law that makes it illegal for someone like Trayvon Martin to walk home.

You'll notice that I didn't put Reverend in front of Sharpton's name.  He doesn't deserve it.  He's a liar and he knows he's a liar today as well as he knew he was a liar when he amplified the lies of Tawana Brawley and used them fraudulently to vilify innocent people in the name of  the Progressive cause, used the lies to ignite hatred, used the hatred to make himself rich and important.  He could have picked a better day to insult the preacher of non-violence than the 50th anniversary of his famous "I have a dream" speech  -- a better day to drag the cause of equality before the law and justice through the mire.

That law was not invoked and did not apply to the shooting. That law would have justified Martin's resistance to someone trying to chase him out of his neighborhood, had the gun been pointed in another direction.  That law does not make it illegal for any one to walk anywhere. It played no part in the acquittal.

The world is full of dishonest men and men who use sincere and well intentioned people wrongly. Sharpton recruited many influential African American figures back in 1987 and he's doing the same today and aren't we being duped when we raise our liberal voices against things that didn't happen, presuming prejudice and bigotry where it isn't?  There's a difference between righteous and right and self-righteous - a difference between acting from virtuous indignation and reacting to our own ingrained and unexamined prejudices, which makes us little different from vicious dogs loosed on the innocent by an unscrupulous master. 

Once again, Mr. Sharpton has put his wedge between people Dr. King dreamed about uniting and once again he rung the Pavlovian bell, but instead of the food we've been trained to expect, he's once again given us a full plate of shame.

Shorty Belton and he banality of evil

The battles for the Japanese islands toward the end of WWII were as horrific as they were necessary and in an age where we can be appalled at a few thousand casualties in a year, losing thousands in a hour seems unimaginable. In an age where we feel obligated to thank everyone who ever wore a uniform for his service in perpetuity and call him a hero; in an age where every dubious deployment is a fight for our "freedom," it might be worthwhile to remember the few remaining survivors of the assaults on Japan and Europe with a little extra respect.

I don't know whether Shorty Belton was considered a hero in 1945 or whether he considered himself one for having taken a bullet at Okinawa, but I do. What then can I think of  the two teenage boys who beat him to death for sport in Spokane Washington on Wednesday?  Certainly no less than I think of the teenagers who shot the Australian baseball player to death for no goddamned reason.  I take it personally. If it weren't for guys like Belton the world would be unrecognizable and a lot worse than it is.

In some way I take it personally that much of our nation has, despite all the lip service and jingoistic rhetoric, forgotten not so much the sacrifice of a generation but forgotten the horror they fought and died to end.  Not only has time seemed to erase the infamy, but generations of propaganda and decades of stage managed amnesia have transferred the infamy to us.  I'm betting these monsters never heard of Pearl Harbor much less the violent murder of millions perpetrated by the Empire of Japan -- as many as 16 million in China alone.  Like December 7th, 1941, September 22, 2013 is a date that should live in infamy.  It's the date Shorty died. Unfortunately infamy is as mortal as everything else. We forget.

No, I'm not one of those people who will attempt to profit or make some point by raging about an increase in violent crime in a year when murder is at a hundred year low. I'm not proposing some program, some legislation, some stronger or more lenient laws. The significance of this to me is that there is no significance. It's about the banality of heroism as well as the banality of evil. It's about human nature.  Some people murder for money, some for hate, some for revenge, but they killed Shorty Belton out of boredom - for amusement, because they could. The most vicious and fanatical military on Earth couldn't get Shorty, but some bored bastards without a conscience and without respect did. There is no explanation.

George Who?

Here's a history quiz for you.  Which President of the United States do we see on the left, telling the incompetent Mr. Brown he's doing a "heckuva" job responding to hurricane Katrina?  

29% of Louisiana Republicans said in response to a TPM poll that it was Barack Obama - still only an obscure freshman senator from Illinois who bears most of the blame.  44% weren't sure just who was responsible for the poor response to the devastating hurricane. George who?

These people vote.  These people say Liberals are retarded. These people are happy to lecture you about history and science and laugh at your education. George who?

I credit Libby at The Impolitic for bringing this to my attention, but I wish she hadn't.  Of course, being a Floridian, I'm glad for evidence for the argument that Florida isn't the Stupidest State as long as we have Louisiana, but none the less; how can I not feel despair at reading a poll showing, as she says, that "73% of Louisiana Republicans don't remember who was president when Katrina hit NOLA."

The Daily Race-Baiter

So, there's this internet "news" site out there going by the name the Daily Caller. It was started by Tucker Carlson, a bow-tied right-wing twat-weasel who was once famously savaged by Jon Stewart.

Now, despite the fact that he staffed his little paper with GOP advisors and got most of his funding from Foster Friess, who famously bankrolls presidential candidates like Rick Santorum, Carlson likes to claim that "we're not enforcing any kind of ideological orthodoxy on anyone."

Which might even be true, except... well, they ran with this story on Monday. A fluff piece, about Obama buying a new dog. Another Portuguese Water Dog named Sunny, to give First Dog Bo a playmate. Cute, right?

Well, kind of. It's a story that means absolutely nothing to anybody. Man buys dog. Until, not even 50 words in, you come across the following sentence.

Apparently it’s a girl and it was born in 2012 in Michigan, where the unemployment rate was 8.8 percent last month.

OK, motherTucker, define "non sequiter" for me, will ya?

What exactly is that little factoid doing in the second paragraph of a human-interest fluff piece? Is it, maybe, to show that "Obama reigns over a failed presidency"? "Obama doesn't care about poor people"? How does that even belong there?

But that's not the gold. Oh, no. Here's the gold - the last two sentences in the piece.

With the addition of Sunny, the Obamas now have two black Portuguese water dogs.

The Obamas do not have any white dogs.

Yes, that's right. They aren't even trying to hide it anymore.

We now officially have a new definition for "dog-whistle politics."

Of Mice and Old White Guys

As Republicans struggle to re-brand the Grand Old Party, perhaps we should trade in our old clichés:

Old Wine in New Bottles

… and have some fun with mixed metaphors:

Old Pigs, New Lipstick

New labels and new faces will not mask the fact that rotgut will always rot your gut; and a pig is a pig no matter how much rouge you put on a rogue.  Swill’s the word that binds our mixed metaphors together.

In an attempt to rebrand their flagging flag-bearers, the Republican National Committee has announced a new initiative to showcase diversity within their ranks.  Not just old white guys anymore, meet the Rising Stars of the New GOP:  Marilinda Garcia, T. W. Shannon, Scott Erickson, and Karin Agness.

Marilinda Who? Scott What? How will these rising stars outshine the stellar performances of Governor Gaffe, Senator McFluff, Congressman Corn Dog, former Speaker Nitwit, and tea nominee More Schlock?  Let’s play Trivial Pursuit.  Match these blunders to the blunderbusses who spoke them:

[Immigrant children have] “calves the size of cantaloupes because they’re hauling seventy-five pounds of marijuana across the desert.” 

"You know that old Beach Boys song, Bomb Iran? Bomb bomb bomb, bomb bomb Iran." 

“Texas is a unique place. When we came in the union in 1845, one of the issues was that we would be able to leave if we decided to do that” 

"Even when life begins in that horrible situation of rape, that is something that God intended to happen." 

I was going to suggest to you that you serve your eggs with hollandaise sauce in hubcaps. Because there's no plates like chrome for the hollandaise.”

Will the Rising Stars walk a new walk and talk a new talk?  Hardly!  Not according to Karin Agness, who argues that the GOP would benefit by tackling the problem of liberal bias in universities.  Oh nos!  Not that old shibboleth again!  See my point:  “Old wine in new bottles” doesn’t mean the GOP has changed when the faces are new but the message remains the same.

Speaking of mixed metaphors, lipstick on a pig will not resurrect a dead horse.