Okay, I couldn't resist this little analogy. Because it's about killing spiders.

This weird anti-homosexual letter and ensuing discussion cracked me up repeatedly. So I'm sharing it with you. The writer of the wacky letter is a real guy who really thinks like that.

Is there (environmentally) hope or not?

Answer: sort of.

I was intrigued that they used the "environmental debt" analogy that previously I've only heard myself use.

"What we've been doing now is running down the account, if you will," said Oregon State University zoology professor Jane Lubchenco, president of the International Council for Science. "We've been utilizing services assuming that they were free and would always be available."

More bleak hopes from a guy who sees "neocons" simply as power-hungry parasites.

The American experiment is much too complex to be destroyed by the neocons. In the end, the neocons will lose. It may take ten to twelve more years, and the costs will be horrific, but America will survive. There will be one hell of a mess to clean up, though, after the fall of the neocons.

If I wore perfume, I would totally support the Black Phoenix Alchemy Lab.

Seymour Hersh speech. For Paul.

Ten O'Clock Scholar was pretty good when they opened for The Clumsy Lovers.

What? You mean I might be able to get rid of my cat allergies? That is SOooo Cooool...

All the press on teenagers who shoot their classmates never fails to mention the shooter wore a lot of black. Some of the press also mentions that the teenager was on SSRI anti-depressants. What do you think matters more? Fashion sense, or psychoactive drugs?

Salon provides a good essay on why conservatives shouldn't have voted for George W Bush. Assuming that you did. Actually, it's from September 2004, so it wasn't intended to be retroactive.

I think Paul Fussell is funny when he talks about Class in America.

Some people just don't have the patience to wait for God to end the world and they feel like they have to take matters into their own hands.

For the last time. All the right-wingers care about the life of one braindead woman in Florida, none of them seem to care about the life of one doomed baby in Texas. Because the doomed baby is being removed from life support on account of a Texas law signed by then-governor GW Bush. Are Republicans hypocrites? Of course they are.

I liked this theory of all human life wrapped up in The Monkeysphere. How could I not like an essay that calls Charles Darwin a "Legendary monkeytician"?

I talked about Cognitive dissonance once before and included a link, but this link from Wikipedia is better. I like the theory of cognitive dissonance because it explains common human behavior (like voting for Bush in the last election) that is otherwise inexplicable.

Never let it be said that only right-wingers are crazy

Are we really as doomed as this? Maybe it's Mad Max time! (Note: I have already decided that my role in any post-apocalyptic world will be to re-establish the coffee trade, and hence, civilization itself. Kind of like The Postman, only for coffee. Unless this post-apocalyptic world has no coffee at all. In which case my role will be to die quietly, whimpering, in a dark corner.)

Am I the only one who thinks it is purely outrageous and entirely un-American that an employer can EVER fire someone for what they do on their own time?

They don't call it shell shock anymore, but that's clearly what it is.

Five years ago this week was the peak of dot-com mania, according to the Seattle PI. I have this theory which I am too lazy to prove that Y2K stuff played a big role in driving all the tech jobs in the late 90s. That is, a lot of programming jobs were generated by the need to redo stuff that might be affected by the year 2000 rollover, and this created a spillover effect. Once those jobs were eliminated by the fact that 2000 had come and gone, the whole job market sector started a major decline.

Brain pacemakers? Wow...

Some people just don't appreciate a fashion sense.

Credit card companies are still evil.

So many right-wingers just sound like parodies of themselves.