I think now he is just starting to get irritated with me:
I swear, Friday nights used to be a lot more exciting.
This post is in: Cat Blogging
I think now he is just starting to get irritated with me:
I swear, Friday nights used to be a lot more exciting.
by John Cole| 25 Comments
This post is in: Cat Blogging
I have named this video “And the Mouse Died of Boredom”:
I swear he does move. The really irritating thing about this is that I have to hide that toy from him. If I leave it sitting somewhere, I will hear him grab it and drag it through the house. Now, I put it right in front of him, and he just looks at me disgusted.
The Tunchcam is turning out to be rather anticlimactic.
by John Cole| 51 Comments
This post is in: Cat Blogging
The maiden voyage of the Tunchcam, and I tried to get some footage of him playing with his favorite toy. Instead, the lazy bastard just sort of sat there and batted it a little. Figures.
Lazy SOB.
by DougJ| 66 Comments
This post is in: Open Threads
When I suggested earlier that the National Review soup kitchen putsch sounded like something communists would do, several of you pointed out that I must only mean Maoists and Soviets, since many of today’s commies eat well (the Slow Food movement and Gambero Rosso were both started by Italian commnists), and that under the Soviets, obtaining edible food was was sufficiently difficult that it left little energy for worrying about what kind of mustard your comrades were using. In other words, in United States, you make fun of soup kitchen, in Soviet Union, soup kitchen make fun of you.
But this got me to thinking that there really are some remarkable similarities between today’s conservatives and communism in the style of the Mao or the Soviets. I went to a talk a few years ago about Chinese math under Mao; Chinese mathematicians were allowed to study nonstandard analysis (but not many other kinds of math) because it dealt with a formal notion of infinitesimals, and Marx once said he liked the Leibniz infinitesimal approach to calculus. Similarly, Stalin favored Lamarck over Darwin (and forced it on Soviet scientists), because his theory seemed more in keeping with the tenets of Marx-Leninism.
Is this not exactly like intelligent design, the desire to find Burkean solutions to social problems, and so on? And to take this a step further, isn’t the idea of conservative songs and movies very much like the notion of good Soviet art? And of course, conservatives now engage in regular ritualized party purges.
Am I taking this all too far?
by John Cole| 25 Comments
This post is in: Excellent Links
The backstory about the Bronx Four miscreants and this post at LGM reminded me of this great post by John Rogers.
In other words, this is just another edition of “What the Kung Fu Monkey said.”
This post is in: Torture, General Stupidity
This doesn’t really interest me that much, but a lot of you are talking about it in the comments, so I might as well link to it and get it over with. Here is Mancow being waterboarded and deciding it is torture:
A couple points:
1.) I’m not sure why we have to keep waterboarding wingnut radio hosts to prove that torture is in fact torture, but this is just starting to get silly. How many times have we now waterboarded someone like this to prove what we have known all along- that waterboarding is torture.
2.) One of the things that supposedly separates humans from other animals is that we are able to learn from the experiences of other people. Apparently this ability is not available to right-wing radio hosts.
3.) Not to diminish Mancow’s experience, but if he thought that was torture, think what the real deal must be like. You are snatched out of nowhere, flown across the world, kept awake for days on end in a freezing room with little food, woken every time you fall asleep on your metal bed, thrown against the wall with that lovely procedure known as collaring, slapped, had dogs threatening you, yelled at and beaten, and so on and so forth. That goes on for a couple weeks to soften you up, then you are dragged by multiple burly men and waterboarded repeatedly. You have no dead man’s switch like Hitchens did, you have no “safe” word to stop the process, there are no cameras and friends there to make sure you are alright. These people have been abusing you non-stop for days or weeks, for all you know this is when they finally kill you.
Of course it is torture. I’m sick and tired of having this stupid damned debate.
This post is in: Cat Blogging, Dog Blogging
So I stopped by the kitty prison to check out what kind of dogs and cats they had up for adoption, and every single dog in there was beagle or part beagle. I supposed I should take advantage of the fact that Sullivan is on vacation to note how much I can’t stand beagles, because I think they are the worst behaving dogs on the planet. I will adopt a mutt, just so long as I am sure that no more than 5% of its bloodline is beagle. The fact that the kitty prison is filled with unwanted beagles merely reinforces my opinion.
They did have some pretty adorable cats, though, although I really think I am set on getting a dog. This kitty was particularly adorable:
That is a pretty cruddy picture of her, and she is standing on a door-jam, so she doesn’t have a club foot even though it looks like it. At any rate, she was really friendly, and could not meow- she did the purr/meow instead, and climbed all over me the whole time. She was also a fan of the across the room headbutt, in which she would run across the room, jump into your lap, and headbutt you. At any rate, I am going to think about this over the long weekend, because I really want a dog, but this cat was pretty adoptable. Her name was Shayla, btw, although that would have to change.
Tomorrow is Saturday, though, so I will go to the Animal Rescue and see what is going on there.