I then spoke the title of this blog post. Mrs. Fungus insisted. I'm henpecked!
...we just watch TV after she gets off work, because she's tired and doesn't want to do anything that requires sentient thought. One of us or the other picks something to watch, and off we go. It's been Kitchen Nightmares lately because there's been nothing on I really care about seeing and it is usually rife with situations I can make wisecracks about.
Eh, good enough, I guess.
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Arse Technica, the global warming resource, continues to beat the same dead horse. Look at how the thing begins:
Although the climate changes that are being driven by human carbon emissions are likely to cause serious disruptions on their own, one of the additional worries is that the initial warming will set off events that keep changing the planet even if humanity gets its carbon emissions under control. So, for example, warming the oceans could heat up the clathrates that exist there, releasing methane that greatly enhances the greenhouse warming.They go on to say that "scientists" have looked at "twenty years" of Arctic data. They don't say which two decades (ie "the past two decades" or "1929 through 1950" or whatev) but they found out that--gee!--the natural environment has all kinds of negative feedback mechanisms which prevent the kind of catastrophic and runaway climate change these goobers have been predicting for thirty years.
Evidence: Earth remains at a temperature we find habitable. If it were possible to drive Earth's ecosystem into runaway heating it would already be there, because Earth has been much warmer and has had atmospheric CO2 concentrations ten times higher than now.
...and none of this takes into account the fact that there has been no warming since 1998. That means that out of the last 20 years, only five have included positive deflections of the global temperature anomaly.
"The climate changes that are being driven by human carbon emissions" are not nearly as obvious as these people would have us believe.
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Letterman jokes, "I don't make jokes about [Obama] because I don't want the FBI tapping my phone."
Fortunately, we all can make jokes about it...for the moment.
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Bob Woodward might just be an actual journalist after all, not just a shill for Democrats.
I have to go back 40 years to Watergate when Nixon put out his edited transcripts to the conversations, and he personally went through them and said, "Oh, let's not tell this, let's not show this." I would not dismiss Benghazi. It's a very serious issue. As people keep saying, four people were killed.That's exactly so. I mean, if Nixon's edited transcripts were heap bad juju, then the whole Benghazi situation is equally heap bad juju.
Nixon, at least, was enough of a statesman that he resigned rather than put the US through an impeachment; the press was decidedly not on his side and he wouldn't have survived the proceedings (not against a Democrat-run Congress) so it was easier on everyone for him just to resign.
Clinton's offense--perjury--was impeachable (obviously) but he knew the press would cover his ass. That was before Al Gore invented the Internet, so there was not really any alternative media which could report on his use of the IRS to strike back at his political enemies, and his other various abuses of power.
Obama's offenses--using the IRS to target his enemies, trying to cover up what happened in Benghazi, etc, etc--if this were 1995, he could do exactly as Clinton did and survive it.
(George W. Bush--in spite of the press' best efforts, the only thing they could find on him that was already not general knowledge turned out to be faked National Guard documents. Nothing like Obama's or Clinton's scandals were found, and believe me the press was looking. Bush isn't a conservative but at least he has a modicum of honesty. I say "modicum" because he is, after all, a career politician.)
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Elizabeth Scalia talks about French parenting and child psychology, and she blockquotes this gem:
French parents have a different philosophy of disciplinine. Consistently enforced limits, in the French view, make children feel safe and secure. Clear limits, they believe, actually make a child feel happier and safer—something that is congruent with my own experience as both a therapist and a parent. Finally, French parents believe that hearing the word “no” rescues children from the “tyranny of their own desires.”Gee, y'think??
When you have a child, you are not there to be the kid's friend. You are there to be the kid's parent; that means setting limits and making sure they are obeyed.
Look: your kids are going to say hateful things like "I hate you!" and "You don't love me!" They're going to do it because kids are manipulative and don't know any better; all they know is that they want their way. If you want to raise kids who will mature into productive, healthy, and decent adults, you must learn how to say "no" to them and make it stick.
Buying your kid every treat or techno-gewgaw they want is a sure ticket to raising spoiled, entitled little bitches.
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Speaking of entitled little bitches, Detroit politicians go to Hawaii on the taxpayers' dime. Detroit's pension funds are some $600 million in the hole, so I suppose $22,000 blown on travel expenses is a drop in the bucket, but it certainly doesn't look good.
Then people wonder why the blue model fails so badly.
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Fracking doesn't contaminate groundwater. The main reason? You don't frack shale at groundwater depths. If you're drilling more than five hundred feet for water, you live in a desert with a seriously low water table and you have problems; meanwhile the shale is typically down thousands of feet.
If groundwater is being contaminated by fracking, it's happening at the surface and the stuff is seeping down to the water table.
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A beautiful, and pointless, gesture. The GOP doesn't have the votes in the Senate to pass a repeal of Obamacare. Even if they did, Obama certainly wouldn't sign such a bill, so the GOP in fact needs a supermajority to excise the Obamacare carbuncle.
"This is the third time the House has voted to fully repeal Obamacare, and there have been a number of other votes to repeal parts of it — 37 votes in total." Why is this the first story I've heard about this?
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Ace clearly remembers the old Advanced Dungeons & Dragons books: "It wasn't a glaive-guisarme or bec-de-corbin. That's all I know."
(AD&D had a huge list of medieval polearms in its weapons tables, of which Ace mentioned two. There were many more, and I never knew anyone actually to equip a character with a polearm...except in jest.)
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Oleg Volk links to a new novel and the blurb on the cover caught my eye. Sarah Hoyt apparently said the novel "evokes Heinlein's work".
Wouldn't you know it, that's one of the reasons my short story submission was rejected?
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Anyway, today is Friday, and we're going to have a grand old time here at Casa Fungus...cleaning! Whee!