Which #cosmos moment from last night had you in awe? pic.twitter.com/t0A1taPy7D
— COSMOS (@COSMOSonTV) April 21, 2014
And came across this bit of information:
One notable source of ALG (anti-thymocyte globulin), was a horse called Volcano, who lived in South America. At one point in the mid-1990s, the world’s entire supply of ALG came from this ONE HORSE.
I couldn’t find one single other thing about old pincushion Volcano. Ought he not be memorialized with a statue or a fine brass plaque somewhere?
God, Florida, is there ANYTHING you do besides oranges, Disneyland and meth that isn’t straight-up freaking god-awful?
In a cascade of cynical ratfuckery that absolutely nobody could have predicted when the SCOTUS gutted the Voting Rights Act, Florida has come up with a fun new way to keep Democrats from voting. Now, there’s no need to get all het up about these measures being a naked power grab designed to insure a permanent electoral advantage for the GOP. If people don’t like these laws, they can simply elect a legislature that will repeal them. If they can find an open polling place where they can convince someone that they’re qualified to vote…..and you don’t poop your pants.
Imagine for a minute that you live in a first-world, well-populated county and some of your fellow countrymen express concern that the bathrooms available at your polling places — where people sometimes wait for 8 hours to vote — are not sufficiently accessible to those with disabilities. Do you:
(A) retrofit the existing bathrooms to ensure accessibility?
(B) build new accessible bathrooms?
(C) close ALL the bathrooms at polling places so you don’t have to address the accessibility issue?
If you are Florida you pick (C). The Miami-Dade County Elections Department quietly implemented a policy to close the bathrooms at all polling facilities, according to disability rights lawyer Marc Dubin. Dubin said the policy change was in “direct response” to an inquiry to the Elections Department about whether they had assessed accessibility of polling place bathrooms to those with disabilities. [...]
Instead, he received a written response announcing that the county would close all restrooms at polling places “to ensure that individuals with disabilities are not treated unfairly,” a January email stated. “[T]he Department’s policy is not to permit access to restrooms at polling sites on election days,” Assistant County Attorney Shanika Graves said in a Feb. 14 email.
I keep waiting to wake up. It’s not gonna happen, is it? I am as cynical as the next guy, but did I think it would come to this? No, I did not. You made a policy that you will not HAVE BATHROOMS AVAILABLE at polling places? An actual factual policy? That you made some poor assistant county attorney write about? And said assistant county attorney probably went home and guzzled antifreeze, because that is such a bullshit thing to have to tell people?
What’s next, the “no holding a spot in line” for a voter law? No pass-outs, and a velvet rope line with an obnoxious entitled doorman, just like a typical asshole club, but letting white males jump to the front instead of hot girls?
Most people do not typically go eight hours without bathroom breaks, and not everyone is going to suffer the Nugentesque humiliation of pants wetting/pooping, lady astronaut diapers, or the difficulty of a catheter just to cast their fucking vote. We know that you’re trying to make sure the browns and the blahs and the poors and the ladeez and the disabled can’t vote, but christ, do you have to make it so obvious?
Anyone waiting in line for more than an hour to vote is prima faciae evidence of voter suppression. Not letting people in such lines use the rest room is just plain sadistic and should be called out as such. But the FEC is still hog-tied and toothless.
Remember, just because they’ve closed the crappers at your polling place, doesn’t preclude you from bringing your Racing Forum to the polls, rolling it up, and then using it to pee or poop in the pocket of the closest GOP or James O’Keefer poll watcher. And, even innocent rich white Republicans can be accidentally snared in the brave campaign to keep Negroes from voting and poop their pants, too.
You know when you’re a party in decline? When even though you’ve gerrymandered your districts to be a safe as possible for your incumbents- you need to limit the public’s right to vote in order to remain in office.
8-year-old Olivia McConnell was poring over a restaurant menu that listed all the official symbols of her state when she noticed that South Carolina doesn’t have a state fossil (not counting Strom Thurmond). She did some sleuthing, and the bespeckled third grader wrote a letter to her state legislators, Sen. Kevin Johnson and Rep. Robert Ridgeway, asking them to correct this oversight by designating the Columbian Wooly Mammoth, a huge, shaggy, tusked mammal that roamed northern Europe, Siberia and North American tens of thousands of years ago and became extinct about 4,000 years ago, making a brief reappearance in the 1960′s to act as vacuum cleaners for Wilma Flintstone.
Why the Wooly Mammoth? Olivia laid out her reasons:
1. “One of the first discoveries of a [vertebrate] fossil in North America was on an South Carolina plantation when slaves dug up wooly mammoth teeth from a swamp in 1725″.
and, most adorably:
3. “Fossils tell us about our past.”
“Please work on this for me,” McConnell wrote to Ridgeway, signing her letter, “Your friend, Olivia.”
This is Allen Quist, a retired political science professor, who helped Michele Bachmann win election to the state Senate in 2000. Allen Quist is a 70-year old soybean farmer, gay bathhouse troll who loves dragons and believes that humans and dinosaurs may have coexisted in Southeast Asia as late as the 11th century.
Quist was the 2012 GOP candidate for Minnesota’s District 1 seat in the House of Representatives. His platform and ideology bears a close resemblance to Bachmann’s – an enormous family and a love-hate relationship with modern science. In the 1990s, the power duo of Bachmann/Quist worked to take down Minnesota’s state curriculum standards, a gateway to a totalitarian society built on moral relativism. Quist has the distinction of helping facilitate Bachmann’s rise to power.
The Queen lunatic endorsed Quist while noting that in her opinion, the former state representative is a man of:
“INTELLECTUAL FIREPOWER”
Okay, Michele, let’s start with some of Quist’s prior accomplishments:
“During his time as a state representative, Quist…went undercover at an adult bookstore and a gay bathhouse in an effort to prove to a local newspaper reporter that they had become a ‘haven for anal intercourse.’”
Taking one for the team, as it were.
Quist lists himself as Adjunct Professor of Political Science at a religious college in Minnesota, the designated field of expertise for wingnuts interested in dinosaur-themed creative writing. One section of an online curriculum supplement written by Quist asks this leading question:
“Did dinosaurs and people live at the same time, and why do so many recently discovered ancient art works accurately picture dinosaurs?”
Yes, yes they did:
“The only reasonable explanation for the stegosaurus carved in stone on the wall of the Cambodian temple is that the artist had either seen a stegosaur or had seen other art works of a stegosaur. Either way, people and stegosaurs were living at the same time.”
(Elsewhere, Quist provides scientific evidence for the existence of dragons, and suggests that the Book of Job be taught as a science lesson: “Today we know beyond a reasonable doubt—Job 41 is a picture-perfect description of SuperCroc”.)
Okay, basically, here is how Time works.
There is The Past, which is everything between Ronald Reagan’s election and now, or else my birth and now, which ever happened first.
Then there is Olden Times, which is everything that happened in the olden days, between the Crucifixion of Jesus and Reagan’s election or my birth, whichever happened later.
Before that there is Prehistory, which is everything that happened between God creating the universe and Jesus’s Crucifixion.
The latter two categories all happened at once, and without years or dates or any of that because it’s all kinda vague and anyway were you there?
