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From divegirl at Wonkette:

The Misunderstood

Down with Tyranny:

by Noah

A Trifecta of Truth, presented in a simple meme. Perspective matters even when based on bullshit.

Plus, I would add that Trump is lunatic man's idea of a sane man, or, more specifically and accurately, a Republican man's idea of a sane man, and, a traitor's idea of a great president.

Tonight's meme is adaptable to all genders of course.

You Don't Get to Have Religious Freedom That Kills Children

Is it obvious yet that the original source of all the lethal stupidity in this county is religion?  Specifically white xian fundamentalist freakazoids. On everything from global warming to gay rights to public education to racial justice, they are quite simply a clear and present danger to the nation.

Robyn Pennachia at Wonkette:

Aside from abortion, the number one issue for people who don't know what the hell they are talking about is vaccines. People who don't know anything about vaccines feel very confident that they are the ones who should be going around enacting legislation based on shit they have made up themselves, which is rather inconvenient for the rest of us! Especially those who have immuno-compromised children who need to rely on herd immunity to stay alive. The entire gist of the anti-vaccine movement is "Other people need to die to protect my right to be stupid." 

SNIP

 You don't get to have a religious belief that kills people. Human sacrifices are against the law. I can't just go and start a religion that demands I rob banks. So either vaccinate your kids or keep them the hell away from other children. 

Frankly, not giving kids vaccines ought to be considered child abuse. It should not be allowed, period. If parents refuse to vaccinate their kid and that child or someone else's dies because they refused vaccinations, parents should be charged with manslaughter or criminally negligent homicide just as they would if their stupidity caused that child's death in some other way. I mean, if someone left the gas on their stove, lit a cigarette and blew up the house and killed their kids, "I thought scientists were lying to me about gas being flammable, so I made up my own science" would not be a valid excuse in a court of law. 

People can personally believe any stupid thing they want, up to and until it affects other people. That is where the line needs to be drawn. If Bill Zedler wants to believe that antibiotics cure measles, that's fine. If someone else wants to believe in werewolves? Go right ahead! But no one should be able to push or draft legislation, or put other children in danger, just because they believe their own pipe dreams over actual science.

"Prove It"

Robyn Pennachia with yet another knock-you-back jeremiad against malignant stupidity that gets people killed, concluding:

How many times do we have to learn the lesson that there are consequences to just letting people have their stupid beliefs? Damage to the environment, measles outbreaks, idiots showing up to pizza parlors with assault rifles, assholes assaulting immigrants because they think all immigrants are murderers, people opposing social welfare programs because of weird lies they have been told about the kind of people who use those programs, people opposing affirmative action while screaming about "quotas," which for the love of god have been illegal in this country since 1978 -- not to mention Fox news anchors spreading listeria, probably, because they don't believe in germs and therefore do not wash their hands. 

There are far too many problems in this country that could be solved with a simple "prove it."

Oooh, check out the asian pron on Gov. Bevin's job site

Before it's gone.

From the Courier:

This is a developing story; please check back for updates. 

Kentucky Gov. Matt Bevin's website that originally offered a portal to apply for jobs in his administration now hosts a Japanese anime porn site.

In a news release announcing the job portal in 2015, the Bevin campaign said it "contains a comprehensive web-based application where applications can be submitted for the hundreds of unclassified, non-merit jobs that will be available." The website URL — www.bevintransition.com — now takes users to the porn site.

The website links to a site featuring cartoon images of women engaged in pornographic acts. The website's IP address is connected to a city in Japan. 

"The domain expired after the transition period, and it was not renewed," Bevin spokeswoman Elizabeth Kuhn said.

Is Bevin Joking or is the Orange Menace's Stupidity Catching?

Or is Governor I Got Mine Fuck You delivering an epic rim job in hopes of getting a administration job?

From the Courier:

Citing the deep freeze gripping much of the U.S., Kentucky Gov. Matt Bevin is crediting President Donald Trump with having “fixed global warming.”

With temperatures falling to near zero degrees across much of Kentucky on Friday night, Bevin took to Twitter to mock mainstream climate science and defend Trump. In a tweet with echoes of a recent one by the president that longed for some “good old global warming,” the governor tweeted: “Trump has been in office 1 year and has already fixed global warming.”

That statement on Bevin’s personal Twitter account was superimposed over a weather map showing frigid temperatures gripping much of the country.

I guess he thinks his billions of dollars will protect his nine children from the end of civilization as global warming make the planet literally lethal for human beings.

Merry Gunmas

Guns are just so very convenient for those holiday family arguments.

From the Herald:

A man is dead after being shot during an argument with his grandfather in Laurel County.

The shooting happened in a home on Arthur Ridge Road in East Bernstadt, according to a press release from the Laurel County’s Sheriff’s Office.

Laurel County Sheriff deputies say 26-year-old Anthony Ryan Thompson, of East Bernstadt, was arguing with his grandfather around 7 a.m. Sunday.

At some point during the argument, the two got into “a scuffle,” and police say a pistol fired, hitting Thompson in the chest. Thompson died at the scene. It was not immediately clear if Thompson or his grandfather was the one that fired the shot.

Police will present the case to the grand jury for possible charges after an investigation.

Wonder if that will discourage any of the people stealing guns out of cars in Nelson County, about 150 miles northwest of Laurel County.

Probably not.

Stop Targeting the Wrong People for Opioid Abuse

Visit a nursing home sometime.  Look for the old men and women sitting in their chairs with tears running down their faces. They're not lonely; they're suffering non-stop agony because Kentucky's lethal yet ridiculous KASPER law has taken away their painkillers.

Kevin Drum brings the scientific facts:

The main reason prescriptions went up is that doctors really had been undertreating pain for a long time. And it turns out that the biggest problem with high rates of opioid prescription don’t come from pain patients anyway. Addiction rates among pain patients are actually fairly low: anywhere from 0.1 percent to less than 8 percent, and very few pain patients ever move on to heroin or other drugs. Rather, the biggest part of the problem comes from people who score opioid painkillers elsewhere. And where do they get them? From leftovers sitting around their parents’ medicine chests. From friends. From the black market.

In other words, if we really want to address the opioid epidemic, our best strategy is not to focus all our attention on prescriptions among legitimate pain patients. Nor is it to refight the war on drugs yet again. Instead, we need to:

• Get better at screening people with previous (or current) addictions.
• Prescribe fewer pills after surgeries, but make it easy to get refills. The idea here is to limit the number of leftover pills lying around, but to do it without making things difficult for pain patients.
• Crack down on pill mills and on shipments plainly bound for the black market—but without making doctors live in fear of the DEA knocking on their door if they treat their pain patients properly.
• Get tougher on misleading pharmaceutical marketing.
• Fund much more research on pain management and alternative pain strategies.

This is what President Trump ought to be doing as part of his “public health emergency” over opioid deaths.

Repugs Just Guaranteed an Oklahoma City Bombing in Your Town

There is literally nothing stopping right-wing violence now.  And make no mistake: this is entirely on repugs.  This is what they've all wanted for a very long time, and now that they've got the power they're going to do it.

Charlie Pierce:

This development on Wednesday is downright unnerving. From Reuters:

The program, "Countering Violent Extremism," or CVE, would be changed to "Countering Islamic Extremism" or "Countering Radical Islamic Extremism," the sources said, and would no longer target groups such as white supremacists who have also carried out bombings and shootings in the United States. Such a change would reflect Trump's election campaign rhetoric and criticism of former President Barack Obama for being weak in the fight against Islamic State and for refusing to use the phrase "radical Islam" in describing it. Islamic State has claimed responsibility for attacks on civilians in several countries.

Leave aside the fact that everyone who knows what they're talking about thinks this move is counterproductive in the fight against that which the president* believes he's at war. This is an unmistakable signal to the camo-wearing, gravity-knife wing of modern conservatism that it's less of a priority for federal law enforcement any more.

When the Murrah building exploded, killing 169 people, including 19 children, everybody yelled "Arabs!"  (That's what we called them, back in 1995.) I didn't. DC sure.  LA or Miami, why not. New York guaranteed.  But no "Arabs" back then knew from Oklahoma City.  Had to be anti-government wingnuts, I said.

And in 22 years, nothing's changed.  Except that now the new and far more heavily armed Timothy McVeighs have a get-out-of-jail-free card direct from the all-repug federal government.

Also, the House repugs just voted to let mentally ill people have guns.  FREEDUMB!

Final Repug Victory: Voters Too Stupid to Understand Anything.

Repugs have been destroying American education for decades for exactly this purpose:  Make voters too fucking stupid to figure out which policies help them and which policies hurt them.  

This is also, of course, why freakazoids so frantically oppose teaching "critical thinking" in schools.  People who can think critically don't vote for lying demagogues.

Steve M.:

Here's the problem, though: When Price (a Republican congressman who's Donald Trump's choice for Health and Human Services secretary) or Ryan proposes a number like $1 billion or $2.5 billion, it doesn't matter how stingy that actually is -- the average voter out there in the heartland is thinking, A billion dollars? Two and a half billion? Hey, that's a lot of money!
Republicans always take advantage of the fact that any dollar amount over, say, $1,000 (if we're talking about a government grant for an eccentric-sounding research project) can be made to seem like a huge outlay that really picks the pocket of Joe and Jane Lunchpail. Liberals can generate all the infographics and floor-of-Congress easel charts they want demonstrating that these proposals are woefully inadequate, and still much of America will think their cost sounds like a king's ransom.
The numbers in that Commonwealth Fund study aren't all that hard to explain. If a Republican plan were to cover as many of those who were priced out the pre-Obamacare insurance market by pre-existing conditions as Obamacare does, it would be covering 13.7 million people. If those people had an average of $20,000 in annual healthcare costs and paid $7,000 of that per year in premiums, that would leave $13,000 to be covered by this high-risk insurance. Multiply $13,000 by 13.7 million people and you get $178 billion. Ryan proposes to pay for less than 1% of that. Price has proposed to cover even less.
But it's likely that explaining this would make the average voter's eyes glaze over. Maybe it's making yours glaze over. Ryan and Price are proposing outlays that are very stingy but sound like really big numbers. And that will probably be enough to bamboozle America.

Or as Wonkette put it:

Fine, we will read this article by “Melody Forbes,” because we are sure she is one of those principled, smart Trump voters literally no one on earth has been hearing about:

I voted for Donald Trump because I wanted to see change in our country. One change I didn’t want to see was access to health care at Planned Parenthood blocked.

WELL IT’S A SHAME THERE WERE NO CANDIDATES NAMED “HILLARY CLINTON” IN THE RACE WHO MADE DEFENDING PLANNED PARENTHOOD ONE OF THE LADY CENTERPIECES OF THEIR LADY CAMPAIGNS.

Fuck the Yokels. Liberals are Real Americans.

The Rude Pundit:

What you're calling "elitism" is just simply not being ignorant. We don't have our heads shoved up Jesus's ass. And when the left gets angry because of how fucking dumb some of the shit coming out of rural and red mouths is, we're told we need to understand what they believe. No, we're just gonna say that stupid is stupid.

You can stop explaining the white working class rural conservative Christian farming folk, hot-takers and self-justifiers. Instead, why don't you explain liberalism to them? Why don't you explain that jobs are drying up and communities are dying not because of abortion and same-sex marriage but because of Republican economic policies that have favored the wealthy, most of whom live in cities, including a certain president-elect they voted for who took advantage of those very policies in order to stay rich? Ultimately, though, it won't matter. Because despite every fucking word to the contrary, the real problem is that those who voted for Trump are racist. They are sexist. They are Islamophobic. They are ignorant.

The whole thrust of these "let's learn about the yokels" articles is to imply that there are real Americans and there are coastal elites. Sorry, motherfuckers. We're all Americans. And if I have to suffer under your stupid, you have to hear about our smarts.

Bugger All the Animals You Want in Kentucky, Except Pets

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You Are Not Entitled to Your Opinion

If your opinion is stupid.

 

PZ Myers:

You don’t get to declare whatever you dislike to be an opinion. You don’t get to regard your opinions as somehow sacrosanct. I am going to give you the information that shows your opinion is wrong, and the purpose of my teaching is to get you to change your opinions to something more productive and correct, and more in line with reality. Those kinds of opinions should not survive an encounter with the facts.

So I’m already in agreement with this philosophical position that “No, you’re not entitled to your opinion”. There are different kinds of opinions, and this is a very useful explanation.

Plato distinguished between opinion or common belief (doxa) and certain knowledge, and that’s still a workable distinction today: unlike “1+1=2” or “there are no square circles,” an opinion has a degree of subjectivity and uncertainty to it. But “opinion” ranges from tastes or preferences, through views about questions that concern most people such as prudence or politics, to views grounded in technical expertise, such as legal or scientific opinions.

You can’t really argue about the first kind of opinion. I’d be silly to insist that you’re wrong to think strawberry ice cream is better than chocolate. The problem is that sometimes we implicitly seem to take opinions of the second and even the third sort to be unarguable in the way questions of taste are. Perhaps that’s one reason (no doubt there are others) why enthusiastic amateurs think they’re entitled to disagree with climate scientists and immunologists and have their views “respected.”

I have to agree. The statements “I like chocolate ice cream” and “I think the earth is 6000 years old” are both opinions all right, in a shallow and colloquial sense, but they are qualitatively different. That I respect your right to have your own taste in ice cream should not imply that I also grant you the privilege to ignore our shared reality. The author, Patrick Stokes, explains all this with examples from anti-vaxxers and climate change deniers, but it’s true for lots of phenomena.

It’s the core of the Answers in Genesis claim that they are using the same facts, but different views (they prefer to use the word “worldviews” over “opinions”, but it’s the same thing). They think they’re entitled to their own opinions and interpretations of reality, and that they can look at a Cretaceous fossil and declare that, in their opinion, that dinosaur died in the Great Flood in 2304BC…they certainly have the right to say that, but they go further and demand that you respect that opinion as equally valid to that of a scientist.

We also see it in politics. Look at this claim by Scottie Nell Hughes:

“On one hand, I hear half the media saying that these are lies. But on the other half, there are many people that go ‘No it’s true,’” Hughes said. “And so one thing that has been interesting this entire campaign season to watch, is that people who say ‘facts are facts,’— they’re not really facts.”

“Everybody has a way—It’s kind of like looking at ratings, or looking at a glass of half-full water. Everybody has a way of interpreting them to be the truth or not true. There’s no such thing, unfortunately, anymore, as facts,” she added.

I’m pretty sure Hughes would argue that the facts show that she is a mammalian humanoid, with records to show that she was born to fully human parents, but it is my opinion that she, and all the other Trump surrogates, are actually alien reptoids who hatched from eggs incubated in a dungheap. And apparently, she’d agree that her facts are useless and my interpretation is perfectly valid.

Unless, of course, we can agree that some opinions are falsifiable.

As always, if your opinion is that scientific facts like global warming, heliocentrism and evolution are wrong, please report to the roof of the nearest 10-story building and jump off. Gravity is just an opinion.

Stop Wooing Repugs, Tim Kaine: You're Wasting Time and Pissing Off Real Democratic Voters

Yep, he's exactly the repug-lite motherfucker we thought he was. 

 

How anyone with the sense dog gave a goose could have lived through the last 20 years and imagine that there is a repug anywhere who will ever, EVER vote for a Democratic candidate is beyond me.

Not only will no repug vote Democratic, but all those pearl-clutching repugs disowning Donald Traitor are going to fall in line and vote for him come November.

Meanwhile, all the easily-discouraged Democratic voters that Hillary needs to turn out in November are watching Kaine and wondering what the fuck is the point, I've got better things to do than vote for repug-lite candidates with a D next to the name.

Well done, Clinton-Kaine.  Convention's not over and you've already lost the election.

HT End Opiate Abuse: Legalize Pot

But they won't because ending opioid abuse is not the point of stupid laws like KASPER. 

 

The point of KASPER is to keep Big Pharma obscenely rich, the population permanently disabled by chronic pain and doctors cowed into obedience by the terroristic threat of losing their license and livelihood.

 

From Kevin Drum:

Here's a fascinating study. A pair of researchers at the University of Georgia took a look at what happened to prescriptions for opioid painkillers in states that passed medical marijuana laws. Over at the Washington Post, Christopher Ingraham summarizes their results:

They found that, in the 17 states with a medical-marijuana law in place by 2013,prescriptions for painkillers and other classes of drugs fell sharply compared with states that did not have a medical-marijuana law. The drops were quite significant: In medical-marijuana states, the average doctor prescribed 265 fewer doses of antidepressants each year, 486 fewer doses of seizure medication, 541 fewer anti-nausea doses and 562 fewer doses of anti-anxiety medication.

Needless to say, the painkiller industry would much rather have you gulp down their addictive and lucrative product. They are not taking the threat from medical marijuana lying down:

The tanking numbers for painkiller prescriptions in medical marijuana states are likely to cause some concern among pharmaceutical companies. These companies have long been at the forefront of opposition to marijuana reform, funding research by anti-pot academics and funneling dollars to groups, such as the Community Anti-Drug Coalitions of America, that oppose marijuana legalization.

Pharmaceutical companies have also lobbied federal agencies directly to prevent the liberalization of marijuana laws. In one case, recently uncovered by the office of Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.), the Department of Health and Human Services recommended that naturally derived THC, the main psychoactive component of marijuana, be moved from Schedule 1 to Schedule 3 of the Controlled Substances Act — a less restrictive category that would acknowledge the drug's medical use and make it easier to research and prescribe. Several months after HHS submitted its recommendation, at least one drug company that manufactures a synthetic version of THC — which would presumably have to compete with any natural derivatives — wrote to the Drug Enforcement Administration to express opposition to rescheduling natural THC, citing "the abuse potential in terms of the need to grow and cultivate substantial crops of marijuana in the United States."

The study estimates that if all 50 states legalized medical marijuana, Medicare would save $500 million per year in painkiller spending. It's hard to extrapolate that to overall spending on painkiller medication, but the total savings would be on the order of $2 billion per year—maybe more.

Why Conservatives Are Better Than Liberals

Logic, that's why.

Read and enjoy.

Via Pharyngula.

Why Freakazoids Should Never Run Anything

Or do anything difficult or dangerous that could hurt anyone but themselves.

 

Divine Irony:

(Source: anonymousatheist420)

 

And if you think that cartoon is a literal interpretation of a metaphor, you don't know many freakazoids.  They ruin everything.

Stay Out of West Virginia

West Virginia set the standard for smart moves by states when it seceeded from Confederate Virginia and threw its lot in with the Union.

 

Its decision-making has been downhill ever since.

 

Spocko at Hullabaloo:

Starting today, May 24, 2016, legislation goes into effect that will allow most West Virginia residents to carry concealed handguns without a permit.

They also aren't required to have any training. At all. As in zero. Nadda. Zilch.

That means no safety training with a gun is required. No live-fire training with a gun is required. They aren't even required to watch a 5 minute video on gun safety.

This is insane.

West Virginia is now one of eight states where no permits are required: Alaska, Arizona, Wyoming, Kansas, Maine, Mississippi and Vermont.

I watched some of the video of West Virginians legislators talking about this decision and it boggles my mind this passed.

Friends who carry concealed guns take the required training very, very seriously. One has explained how dangerous it is for people from states with weak or no training requirements to be allowed reciprocity carry with his state.

The people in the conceal carry world hammer on the need for training. I was watching a live fire conceal carry training video today. A guy who regularly carries a gun and spends hours at the firing range froze up and screwed up in a live fire training session. And he knew this training was happening!

But apparently the good legislators from West Virginia know better than the experts in the conceal carry world and their own experts in law enforcement.

Who Has a Cure for Cancer?

Divine Irony:

Responsible Gun Ownership: Horseback Edition

Somebody's been watching too many cowboy movies. Pssst: those guns weren't loaded, moron.

From the Herald:

A Morehead mother was in stable condition Wednesday after she was accidentally shot by her son’s gun, according to a release from Kentucky State police.

Jereen R. Stamper, 39, was shot in her left side and taken to Cabell Huntington Hospital in West Virginia around 7:30 p.m.

Stamper was shot when her son’s .22-caliber pistol fell from his holster and hit the ground while he was getting off a horse on 1270 Stamper Ridge Road, police said.

Police said the shooting is still under investigation.

Read more here: http://www.kentucky.com/news/local/counties/fayette-county/article71763207.html#storylink=cpy