The most read post on LinkedIn today is “How To Not Cry At Work” with (as I write this) 241,549 views.
The second most read post — and a very distant second with 101,906 views — is “It’s time to stop using recruiting agencies.”
That can’t be good. What does it say about the American workplace that the most pressing issue is how to avoid crying?
“What’s your beef with Tony Dungy?”
“He said he wouldn’t draft Michael Sam. He’s not showing the requisite level of tolerance and inclusiveness toward people who are different than he is.”
“Isn’t Dungy himself entitled to tolerance and inclusiveness?”
“Oh, no. No. Absolutely not. Because he’s being different in a way that’s totally unacceptable.”
“So you’re not against intolerance as a matter of principle, so long as the ‘right’ people and groups get ostracized.”
“Right.”
“I don’t remember anyone until fairly recently saying that having openly gay players in the NFL is a good idea. Now that we’ve reached a point in history where everyone in America has a breezy indifference to homosexuality . . . everyone knows people, works with people, has people in their family who are openly gay . . . every single TV show and movie has at least one gay character — NOW people like you are ‘brave’ enough to support the idea, for the same stupid reason you never supported it before: because you don’t want to be on the wrong side of public opinion.”
Her parents must be pretty strict. They reported her missing just because she wasn’t home by 9?
“You should live every minute of your life as though it’s your last.”
“You’d spend the last minute of your life giving other people dopey advice?”
“This article says that lovers are more willing to forgive a partner for infidelity than for leaving dirty dishes in the sink.”
“Just so you know, I wouldn’t forgive you for either one.”
When I go to Starbucks on weekends I always get a pup cup — a short cup of whipped cream — for Lightning. No one ever asks me about it . . . I just place my own order, ask for a short cup of whipped cream, they write “Paul” on both cups and serve them up.
Today the Starbucks girl was puzzled. “You want a short cup of whipped cream?” she asked.
“A short cup of whipped cream, right.”
She still had a puzzled look on her face. Maybe she thought what I really wanted was cream.
“It’s for my dog,” I said.
“Your dog likes whipped cream?”
“He loves it.”
“What’s your dog’s name?”
“Lightning.”
“Lightning?”
“Right. Like thunder and lightning.”
So this morning, after years of eating pup cups with someone else’s name on them, Lightning got his own personalized pup cup.
I am sick unto death of this guy. I just read a sentence from his speech:
You beat cancer by how you live, why you live, and in the manner in which you live.
Ugh. Sickening. Millions of people fighting cancer and he’s the one guy who’s figured out how to fight it the right way.
Like a lot of people, we have an immediate family member who had cancer, and like a lot of people, she battled it bravely, quietly, with humanity and dignity, and without any expectation of receiving an award, which she didn’t get. Unlike Stuart Scott, she never told anyone about all the unpleasant medical procedures she had to undergo and she never presented herself as a model for how life should be lived under difficult circumstances.
Fuck this guy.
I’m hearing on the radio this morning that Stuart Scott received something called the Jimmy V Perseverance Award at the ESPYs last night . . .
Who knew you could get an award for having cancer? I am exhausted by sports people, media people, entertainment people, sports media entertainment people sucking each other’s dicks.
Stuart Scott and people like Stuart Scott have killed my enjoyment of sports with their endless self-promotional bullshit while I’m trying to watch highlights. I hate sports and it’s all because of Stuart Scott. And now he gets an award for having cancer.
Everyone unfortunately has family members and/or friends who get cancer and battle it to the best of their abilities without receiving a goddamn award. It’s insulting to all of those people to give someone an award for having cancer and it’s doubly insulting to accept an award for having cancer.
I have come to bear witness! I have faced my own mortality. I have seen the eternal Footman hold my coat and snicker.
Yes, you and 1.7 million other people diagnosed with cancer every year in the U.S alone.
I am exhausted with people putting their lives on display based on a delusion about their own uniqueness and importance. Oh what a plague.
Fuck Stuart Scott.
In 1799, George Washington fell ill with an infection. Doctors at that time believed that illnesses were caused by an imbalance of fluids in the body. In particular, they believed that fevers were caused by an excess of blood, so they treated Washington’s fever with five separate bloodlettings, which together drained off over half the blood in his body.
Not only did the bloodletting not have a healing effect, it probably hastened his death.
The human body is a very complex mechanism. Society is a very complex mechanism. You might decide, with good intentions, to tinker with a complex mechanism thinking that even if your intervention doesn’t achieve the full benefit you’re hoping for, it will at least be better than nothing.
No — tinkering with a complex mechanism when you have no idea what you’re doing is only going to make things worse.
“In Praise of Passivity” by Michael Huemer
Via MSN News:
It’s a little-known fact that if a woman survives an honor killing, the would-be killers must themselves be killed in an honor killing for botching the original honor killing.
“Don’t tell me what to do” and “Do what I say” – these are not compatible admonitions. — James M. Buchanan
I just saw this Boycott Hobby Lobby group on Facebook . . .
There’s a longstanding liberal maxim — Keep Government Out of the Bedroom — i.e., “Don’t tell me what to do,” which has gone out the window on the Hobby Lobby case, where the liberal position is “Do what I say,” i.e., that a law requiring everyone to buy certain bedroom supplies whether they want to or not is not only a really great thing, it’s a moral imperative.
Individual liberty is a two-way street, folks . . .
This was on the front page of MSN this morning. I’m guessing that “Bush” is Reggie Bush and “Kim” is Kim Kardashian . . . who “Brody” is I have no idea but evidently that’s him in the photo.
Why does anyone need to know what weddings this Brody person attends or doesn’t attend? Isn’t there anything else you could tell us?
R.I.P. America.
An ovulating female chimp, that is. Nearly all female primates advertise their days of fertility with colorful genital swellings.
It seems like a useful indicator for humans trying to have babies or trying not to have babies, but for some reason evolution has seen fit to conceal the reproductive state of human females from observation.
Think about our distant ancestors . . . energy in the form of food was scarce and hard to obtain. Those who survived had a genetic predisposition to not use energy wastefully but rather to store it up for times when it was really needed. This gave them an evolutionary advantage.
And that’s why I slept in and didn’t go to the gym this morning . . .
Via Philip Greenspun:
Amanda Ripley identifies the following major problems with American schools:
- people who are poorly educated are hired as schoolteachers
- teachers have limited autonomy (partly as a result of their low level of knowledge and ability)
- schools have multiple missions, only one of which is education, which leads to a loss of focus
- teachers and administrators dwell on student and family backgrounds so as to build up a catalog of excuses for poor educational outcomes
- parents are complacent regarding the low expectations set for their children
What I want to know is why there are so many people who don’t want me to know things . . .
And that doesn’t even include all the things that people “won’t tell me.”
If a man neglects education, he walks lame to the end of his life.
— Plato (@PlatoQuote) July 11, 2014
(HealthDay News) — Add another possible woe to the growing list of consequences of climate change: Kidney stones.
A new study of American cities suggests that rising temperatures may increase the number of people who develop the painful urinary obstructions.
You have to read all the way down to the second-to-last sentence of the article to find this:
The study uncovered a connection between higher temperatures and risk of kidney stones, but didn’t prove cause-and-effect.
The article implies cause and effect only to fess up right at the end and admit that there is no cause and effect. In the absence of cause and effect, what exactly is the point?
In the epilogue of War and Peace, a peasant notices a “connection” between smoke and locomotives and infers cause and effect: the smoke causes the locomotive to move. The point being that it’s easy to infer causality from “connections” in ways that have no grounding in reality.
In other climate news, the Wall Street Journal reports that researchers have, for the first time, counted all the world’s Adélie penguins — a sprightly seabird considered a bellwether of climate change — and discovered that millions of them are thriving in and around Antarctica.
Rather than declining as feared due to warming temperatures that altered their habitats in some areas, the Adélie population generally is on the rise.
