Nocturnal cuteness missing from cute overload: adorable bat "wallpaper". This is not because bats aren't cute, of course, it's because photographing them isn't easy for amateurs.
What? You can get Black Death fuzzy dolls and I don't have one yet?
It's cool that this company wants to make a big deal out of offering mixed-race or same-sex figurines to top wedding cakes. But I'm not sure how necessary it is. The last time I looked at wedding-cake toppers, they were sold individually, so you could mix-n-match brides and grooms at will.
Speaking of gay marriage, a recent poll finds opposition declining from almost two-thirds (63%) to approximately one half (51%), in the two years since February 2004.
And, just for the record, I am not in favor of making Canadians show us passports to get into the country. It'll cost money, cut down on lucrative cross-border tourism, and I don't believe for a second it will make me any safer.
Guess what? Ritalin causes hallucinations.
Dr. Kate Gelperin, an FDA drug-safety specialist, described the case of a 12-year-old girl who said insects were crawling under her skin. Another child was found by his parents crawling on the ground and complaining that he was surrounded by cockroaches.
In both cases, the hallucinations disappeared after drug therapy was stopped. The boy's doctor persuaded his parents to give him stimulants again, and his hallucinations reappeared.
Speaking of popular psychoactive drugs, if your SSRIs aren't working like you hoped they would, that might be because antidepressants fail to cure the symptoms of major depression in half of all patients even if they receive the best possible care. Notably, the study that found this was taxpayer-funded rather than industry-sponsored. Make of that what you will.
Once again, young people seem confused by the fact that if you put something online in a public forum anyone can look at it. Including your parents. Including University officials who want to bust you for underage drinking.
So it goes like this: The Washington Post hires right wing blogger Ben Domenech, founder of redstate.com, because heaven knows you can never have too much naked right wing bias to counter alleged left wing bias.
(And you can never have too much pointless blogging, either. Although they did have this op-ed about the Bush Administration with the killer opening line, "Is President Bush the leader of our government, or is he just a right-wing talk-show host?", which is about how Bush talks about the failures of government with a vaguely perplexed "outsider" air like he's not the one in charge of it. I guess to offset that clarity of thought you need a real redstater, you know, the sort of person who can, without a trace of irony, claim that eating cake and strumming the guitar while New Orleans drowns constitutes great leadership, but it doesn't matter because attending to national disasters isn't his job anyway.)
Then it turns out that, as a student writer, Domenech engaged in blatant plagarism of diverse sources. And, lest you be tempted to excuse this as college shenanigans, post-college, in June 2002, he is on record as having simply made up a quote by "Meet The Press" host Tim Russert.
Perhaps that's all because, as a new study suggests, annoying, whiny children grow up to be conservatives. Yes, I'm oversimplifying. But in your heart you know it's true. You just know that Rush Limbaugh and Bill O'Reilly were sniveling tattletales in nursery school.
According to the ANES Guide to Public Opinion and Electoral Behavior, for twenty-five years public opinion on abortion has barely budged. And only 14% would approve of the recent South Dakota law. So there.
FRED DE SAM LAZARO: Napoli says most abortions are performed for what he calls "convenience." He insists that exceptions can be made for rape or incest under the provision that protects the mother's life. I asked him for a scenario in which an exception may be invoked.
BILL NAPOLI: A real-life description to me would be a rape victim, brutally raped, savaged. The girl was a virgin. She was religious. She planned on saving her virginity until she was married. She was brutalized and raped, sodomized as bad as you can possibly make it, and is impregnated. I mean, that girl could be so messed up, physically and psychologically, that carrying that child could very well threaten her life.
Now, tell me again how your opposition to abortion is about saving the poor
widdle babies, and not about trying to punish horrible "loose" women
and their potential offspring.
Speak up. I'm not convinced.
Oh, and I just ran into this article from 2000 with anecdotes from physicians about pro-lifers having abortions and not changing their anti-abortion stance. You know, going in for an abortion and telling the staff that she thinks they're all murderers. This lends credence to my theory that, while anti-abortion activists say they think it's murder, they don't actually. They actually think it's on a moral par about with adultery, which helps explain the otherwise inexplicable "sodomized virgins" exception quoted above.
The reason I link to this syndicated column about Laura Bush isn't because I care about Mrs. George W. Bush, except to point out once again that she killed a classmate with her car when she was a teenager, which is only notable because of how the right wing would always be harping on it if Hillary had done such a thing, and also to point out that the media has been unusually respectful of Bush family privacy, given that not only does the FLOTUS have a grisly death in her past, but also the Bush twins Jenna and Barbara have a criminal record. No, I am fascinated by the Republican trolls, particularly "big R" and "spirit" who are always among the first to attach their childishly inflammatory comments to anything in the PI that could remotely be considered partisan. Who are these people? Fourteen year-old-boys without girlfriends? Paid agitators? Authentic crazy people? The mystery tantalizes.
But not that much.
This first flaw is that the only thing children reliably inherit from their parents is DNA and neuroses.
Longman sort of acknowledges this, but imagines a future consisting of isolated, lonely rebels looking around their "red states" for "fellow travelers" and not finding them.
Which brings me to the second flaw: big cities, with their tendency to foster liberalism, aren't densely populated because people there have a million kids. Cities are densely populated with people who moved there from somewhere else.
In fact, this tendency of freely-moving Americans to self-sort based on inclination is one reason we have such increasing political polarization.
But, Longman isn't exactly an unbiased observer of social trends: he's a fellow at the New America Foundation and author of The Empty Cradle: How Falling Birthrates Threaten World Prosperity and What to Do About It. So, being alarmed at falling birthrates is his deal, and I can't help but feel he's trying to trick me into thinking I need to want kids when I actually don't. Oh, no! I'd better reproduce so there will be people in the next generation who share my values!
Better yet, I'll corrupt them with literature.
