Over a 20-year period, the percentage of Americans who said they find overweight people less attractive steadily dropped from 55 percent to 24 percent.
The survey ... also found that obese boys and girls were half as likely to date as normal-weight kids.
Yesterday, apparently, Supreme Court nominee Samuel Alito was "unflappable." But his wife, Martha-Ann Bomgardner, left the room in tears. Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C. (a guy), said, "Judge Alito, I'm sorry that you've had to go through this. I am sorry that your family has had to sit here and listen to this."
Um. Right. Mean, mean Democrats...how DARE they ask searching questions of somebody who, if approved, is GOING TO BE ONE OF THE 9 MOST POWERFUL PEOPLE IN THE WHOLE COUNTRY. Look, if you can't take being asked searching questions for days on end, maybe you're just not cut out to be a Supreme Court judge.
Or, you know, if Alito doesn't have a problem with it, but his wife does, maybe she should stay home. Hey, you ever notice how those right wing types are always talking about how great it is for women to be in their "proper place in the home" and yet all their poster girls are never there?
But that's the right wing for you. It's all about what they think other people should do.
(To be fair, liberals do that sort of thing too. For example, urban liberals think that other people should ride the bus to work.)
Speaking of right wing poster girls, here's a recent gem of mind-blowing illogic from Phyllis Schlafly's (I wish an) Eagle (would peck out her eyes) Forum. (Okay, not literally, as such, peck out her actual physical eyes. But it really gets up my nose that right wingers are always eagle this and eagle that, when, if they had their way, the Endangered Species Act would vanish in a puff of industrial smoke and there wouldn't even BE any eagles to get all misty about. So anybody who uses an iconic American Bald Eagle, and isn't an environmentalist is a big fat hypocrite. And an idiot.)
Where was I? Oh, yeah.
Fact v. Fiction #1: Some evolutionists who claim to be Christians — but also evolutionists who label themselves "theistic evolutionists" — argue that God could have used the evolutionary process hypothesized by Darwin to create the universe. But evolutionism reduces man to an animal. Theism, conversely presents man as made in the image of God. If man is an animal, but man is also made in the image of God, what does that make God?
Fact v. Fiction #2: Evolutionists claim that their battle against creation-science is primarily a "scientific" issue, not a constitutional question. But our treasured U. S. Constitution is written by persons and for persons. If man is an animal, the Constitution was written by animals and for animals. This preposterous conclusion destroys the Constitution. The Aguillard Humanists leave us with no Constitution and no constitutional rights of any kind if they allow us to teach only that man is an animal.
(Emphasis in the original)So...if man isn't an animal, what is he? Mineral, perhaps? (Of course, Ms. Schlafly, I've known for years that you've got rocks in your head where the rest of us have squishy biological thinking brains.)
Anyway, while the "arguments" above make me feel my head is going to explode like a confused Star Trek robot, it is somewhat refreshing to see the right wing case against evolution presented so nakedly. They don't like it because they don't like seeing humans as connected to nature in any way. We are not animals; we are not subject to the laws of nature. Food, sex, sleep, pain, illness, death -- none of that applies to us. We are creatures -- no, not creatures, beings -- of pure personhood, divine and unsullied. We barely have bodies at all.
So, Ms. Schlafly, if you really believe all that...jump off a cliff and see what happens.
"On Men and Monkeys: The Oldest Fight in the Culture War, II."
For years, University of Washington neighbors have argued that the city of Seattle is creating firetraps by allowing landlords to stack renters into houses like cordwood.
Rules allowing eight unrelated people to live in a single home, or 16 in a duplex, have encouraged owners to convert once-stately mansions into crowded rooming houses or student party pads.
As a sometimes consumer, and friend of consumers, of "crowded rooming houses or student party pads," this article raises my hackles considerably. Note the extremely loaded wording: "stacked like cordwood" "once-stately mansions." It was prompted by a genuine deadly fire in a genuine U-district rooming house, but even the article states "investigators have not documented any fire code violations that contributed to last week's accidental fire."
Crowded rooming houses are a natural and inevitable response to high housing prices and low wages. I suspect that neighbors with money hate them because they don't always look nice (keeping the already inflated property values from rising even more), and because they cause extra cars parking on the road -- extra people, extra traffic, extra noise. Just don't come to me pretending that you're all concerned about fire safety violations.
And nobody wants Courtney Love's house. Poor Courtney.
It turns out that, contrary to impressions you might have gotten from prime time television, dressing real sexy for work does not enhance your corporate power image.
I have sometimes restated the info-bit that Albert Hofmann, the chemist who invented LSD, still thinks of it as a valuable drug. He turned 100 recently, which prompted this feature article on the "Father of LSD". I didn't know that LSD was actually synthesized by isolating the hallucinogenic compound from ergot, the mold that grows on rye and is hypothesized to be related to some outbreaks of witch-hunting.
[Hofmann] calls LSD "medicine for the soul" and is frustrated by the worldwide prohibition that has pushed it underground. "It was used very successfully for 10 years in psychoanalysis."
But the drug was hijacked by the youth movement of the 1960s and then unfairly demonized, he said. He concedes LSD can be dangerous and calls its promotion by Timothy Leary and others "a crime."
"It should be a controlled substance with the same status as morphine," he said.
Sleep inertia -- the real medical reason that we're all stupid in the morning.
People awakening after eight hours of sleep have more impaired thinking and memory skills than someone kept awake for 24 hours -- equivalent to being drunk.
... The results showed the most severe impairment from sleep inertia in the first three minutes after awakening, and that level of grogginess dissipated within another seven minutes, although effects were detectable in some subjects for up to two hours.
