(no subject)

Ok if you're planning to meet at my place on Friday to carpool to OotP please comment here. Also if I need to round up costume bits for you, again, comment here. My goal would be to get to the theater no later than 6:30 as I expect the place will be crazy busy and the parking lot will fill up. If you can't make it until later also let me know that so that the rest of us know to save you a spot in line and/or can pick you up some food.

Also I'm beginning to rethink my costume idea as I have the unnerving feeling I'm going to feel like the biggest idiot in the line. And I'd have to remove my wig inside the theater so as not to obstruct the view of others. Perhaps I should wait to bust out Bella until the book release party where I won't be the only person in such an outrageous costume. I could do Trelawney again for the movie, my hair's not quite long enough but I could frizz it out and layer on the hippie clothes and I'm there. I dunno'.

Boy, you meet the stupidest people at the intersection of Bigot Avenue and Mouthbreather Lane

Dennis Prager, filled with the stupid:

Why Are Atheist Books Best Sellers?

It is not due to their eloquence, originality or persuasiveness that these books have become best sellers. I believe other factors are at work. And they are:

First and most significant is the amount of evil coming from within Islam. Whether Islamists (or jihadists, Islamo-Fascists or whatever else Muslims who slaughter innocents in the name of Islam are called) represent a small sliver of Muslims or considerably more than that, they have brought religious faith into terrible disrepute.

How could they not? The one recognized genocide in the world today is being carried out by religious Muslims in Sudan; liberty is exceedingly rare in any of the dozens of nations with Muslim majorities; treatment of women is frequently awful; and tolerance of people with different religious beliefs is largely nonexistent when Muslims dominate a society.

But wait, just when you think, "Oh he's just your average wingnut bigot, nothing to see here" he goes and adds this:

If the same were true of vegetarians — if mass murder and violent intolerance were carried out by vegetarians — there would be a backlash against vegetarianism even among people who previously had no strong feelings about the doctrine.

And if kittens carried Uzi's they'd...um...something bad! Seriously, WTF? Sadly, No! labels this is the worst analogy ever and I've got to say I haven't run into a worse one that I can remember. Or is he perhaps attempting to make some connection between vegetarians and fascists (if you use the old myth that Hitler was a vegetarian it all makes sense in a wingnutty sort of way), perhaps it's a version of wingnut semaphore. Though I must say I can't make heads nor tails of the Muslims = Atheists argument.

A-fuckin'-men

24 Hours of American Liars:

Here's what we've learned in the last 24 hours or so, none of it terribly surprising in and of each separate thing, but in the aggregate, quite, umm, bowel-releasing frightening. We've learned there's different kinds of lies:

Lies of Omission - The Surgeon General of the United States was ordered by the White House to lie to America about everything related to, you know, health. When Richard H. Carmona was the Surgeon General from 2002-2006, Carmona wasn't allowed "to speak or issue reports about stem cells, emergency contraception, sex education, or prison, mental and global health issues" and to water down a report on secondhand smoke (something he actually resisted). He was discouraged from attending the Special Olympics, for chrissake, because of Ted Kennedy's involvement in it. Also (and this is the Rude Pundit's favorite part), Carmona "was ordered to mention President Bush three times on every page of his speeches." Apparently, George W. Bush is such a needy little bitch that he gots to get his props whenever he can force people to do it.
[...]
Lies of Bureaucracy - Alberto Gonzales was shown, again, again, again, to have lied to Congress. In 2005, when he was testifying on the renewal of the Patriot Act (aka the "Let's Strip Search Grandpa" Act), he told Congress, "There has not been one verified case of civil liberties abuse" under the Act. And that'd be true, except that he had been told, repeatedly, of, well, shit, civil liberties violations by the FBI acting under the Patriot Act. But, according to a Justice Department lackey douchebag, it depends on what you mean by "abuses." See, if it's intentional, it's an abuse. If not, it's just - what? A meaningless fuck-up? If the FBI agents know you're not a terrorist and still beat the shit out of you for fun, that's an abuse. But if they just get your name wrong and beat the shit out of you, that's an innocent mistake. Par for the course for this administration. No one is accountable for "errors." Mistakes are made, don't you know? They just appear in the ethereal realm and inflict themselves on us. Shit, next thing you know, Gonzales will claim the Devil made him do it. But don't worry, America, there's a-gonna be a hearing.
[...]
So here we are: the Surgeon General, the Attorney General, the Commander-in-Chief, all lying to us. Add the "Lies of Necessary Fears" by Michael "Gut-Feeling" Chertoff, and you've got a government that is actually functioning to bring harm to its citizens. If this was a real democracy, we'd be out in the streets shutting the nation down until Bush resigned, taking Cheney with him. The unions would call for general strikes, as would immigrant rights groups, poverty groups, families of soldiers. All seventy percent of us. Clogging the cities and towns, demanding that we take back the country from the people who want to harm us.

But this is not a real democracy. It is a group of geographically tied together people with pretense to democracy, fearful of actual power because it means actual responsibility for themselves, for each other.

I dare you to make less sense!

Roy at Alicublog sums up Lisa Schiffren thusly: "she is stupid for a living"

Why, you might ask, would he do that? Well, try try this on for size:

The struggle between good and evil, freedom and enslavement is, of course, an eternal literary theme. Still, one can't help but notice the astonishing manner in which Gordon Brown has taken a page directly from Harry Potter — and the just released film of Book Seven, at that. Specifically, Brown's strong desire not to call Islamic terrorism by name echoes the insistence of the head of the Wizard government, the Minister of Magic, Cornelius Fudge — to refer to their mortal enemy, Voldemort, as "he who must not be named." So, even greater kudos to J.K. Rowling, who understood back in the 90's that the world's youth needed a rousing tale of heroism in the face of evil...

Stupid? You're soaking in it!