I love a Parade

We have some pretty great parades here in Atlanta, and the last two weekends we've attended two of the best.

Last Saturday was the Dragon*Con parade (more on that later)

Yesterday we went to the annual Lantern Parade along the Atlanta Beltline.

Here are a few highlights of people getting super-creative with paper lanterns:

 

 

 

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Oh, Fer Fuck Sake, Florida!

Jeezus Christ, Florida! Are you trying to win the "most horrible fucking state in the union" award?

Florida Senator Wants Bill Making Dinesh D'Souza's 'America' Movie Required Viewing for Teens in State

Republican Alan Hays said he’ll introduce in November his one-page bill that simply states that students in the 1,700 Florida public high schools and middle schools are to be shown the film unless their parents object.

“I’ve looked at history books and talked to history teachers and the message the students are getting is very different from what is in the movie,” Hays said. “It’s dishonest and insulting. The students need to see the truth without political favoritism.”

He said, without any sense of irony at all.

 Because, I guess it's not political favoritism if the political point of view being favored is yours? Does that make sense? I don't think that makes sense, but I can't figure out any other way for that sentence to make sense either.

To that end, Hays said he wouldn’t object if teachers paired America with a liberal film to show the political differences. Indeed, many schools already show Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth 

An Inconvenient Truth is a movie about SCIENCE!! It does not have a political point of view. Why would you think that a movie about climatology needs to be balanced out with a movie about goldangit, 'Murica is jes' plain awesome?
The only reason that it might seem like An Inconvenient Truth is a "liberal" film is because conservatives have made a conscious decision to oppose science. If I decide that I hate algebra, that doesn't make algebra anti-me. It just makes me a doofus.

“The most dreaded disease in America today is political correctness. We need to inform our students of our whole history, and teach them how to think, not what to think,”

And you're going to accomplish this by forcing them to sit through Triumph of the Will America: Imagine the World Without Her?  You are going to teach students how to think, not what to think by showing them right-wing propaganda?

 

I watched the trailer for this movie. It's pretty ridiculous.





Apparently, among the things that we as Americans are to be proud of, the things that could only happen in America are Martin Luther King Jr's "I have A Dream Speech" which could never have happened without several hundred years of slavery, Jim Crow and white supremacy, so ya know, great job, America!
We're supposed to be proud of the iPhones that are made by Chinese children in appalling inhuman conditions.
We're supposed to believe that only in America could a man be sent to walk on the moon, as if we are just going to forget that the reason we went to the moon is because we were afraid that the Russians would get there first, and had we not sent Neal Armstrong to the moon, there would be some Russian dude famous for being the first man on the moon.
We're supposed to be proud of Jackie Robinson, which makes sense, but I guess we're supposed to ignore the fact that it took how many decades before one major-league baseball team finally allowed one black player to join. And we're supposed to ignore the fact that Robinson's career involved putting up with a steady stream of insults, death threats, and various humiliations from fans and other players alike.



But we're supposed to imagine in horror the thought of a world in which America did not exist. Okay, I like a good thought experiment. Let's imagine. . .

Well, I imagine the people of Iran still having their democratically-elected government in place, meaning there would never have been an Islamic revolution and the Ayatollah would be just another obscure religious leader.

I imagine the people of Chile not having their duly-elected presidente' overthrown, so no one ever has to coin the phrase "death squad."

I can imagine many thousands of young African men and women not being kidnapped and forced into slavery.

Oh, and speaking of slavery, it's worth looking at what D'Souza has to say on the subject. It tells you a lot about how guys like him think:

“Did America owe something to the slaves whose labor had been stolen?” D’Souza writes in the book … The answer is yes, but “that debt … is best discharged through memory, because the slaves are dead and their descendants are better off as a consequence of their ancestors being hauled from Africa to America.”

Okay, that is a lot of horribleness for one paragraph, but look past the usual racist blather about how slavery happened a long time ago and there are no residual effects on the descendants of slaves, and gosh aren't they better off living in the greatest country in the world blah, blah, blah. . . We're used to hearing that crap from right-wing assholes. Just look at the first sentence.

“Did America owe something to the slaves whose labor had been stolen?

So, that's it? Their labor had been stolen? When your boss shorts you on your paycheck, you've had your labor stolen. These people were enslaved. They were robbed of their freedom, their autonomy, their dignity and their humanity. They were treated as livestock. Often they were treated worse than livestock.
 

But to D'Souza, the problem with slavery is that they had their labor stolen. Because that's the only thing on which one could put a price tag. You can't put a price tag on human dignity, so that apparently is not a big issue for a right-wing nut like D'Souza. You can't put a price on horrific physical pain. You can't attach a monetary value to children being sold away from their parents, so apparently it's not important. 

Fuck this guy.

He can't go to jail soon enough.

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I swear to God, the more I hear about Ted Cruz and his lunatic father, the more they creep me out.

Ted Cruz’s Dad: “The Average Black Does Not” Understand The Minimum Wage Is Bad

The father of Republican Texas Sen. Ted Cruz said black people “need to be educated” about Democrats, so that they will vote Republican. Rafael Cruz, who made the comments at the Western Williamson Republican Club’s August meeting, added “the average black does not” understand that the minimum wage is bad.

Um, yeah. . . the "average black" somehow just doesn't understand  that thing that totally isn't true and is pretty much the opposite of true. Go figure!

During the speech, Cruz spoke at length about a recent conversation he said he had with a black pastor in Bakersfield, California.

The black pastor that he totally made up? Probably.

 “I said, as a matter of fact, ‘Did you know that Civil Rights legislation was passed by Republicans? It was passed by a Republican Senate under the threat of a filibuster by the Democrats,’” Cruz said. “‘Oh, I didn’t know that.’ And then I said, ‘Did you know that every member of the Ku Klux Klan were Democrats from the South?’ ‘Oh I didn’t know that.’ You know, they need to be educated.”

 

Yes. The Democratic Party used to be the party of choice for white Southern racists. Excellent point.

 

And while we're on the subject, do you want to go ahead and tell the fictional black pastor who led this filibuster?
Because it was Strom Thurmond, the right-wing conservative. The right-wing conservative who led the Dixiecrat rebellion and then slid into the Republican Party and stayed there.

Telling people they should vote for Republicans because of the Civil Rights Act filibuster is like saying you should bet on the Dallas Cowboys to win the Super Bowl this year because Staubach is such a great quarterback. Because you know perfectly well which party is infected with the white southern racists these days.

“I am going to try to encourage everybody I can to buy a book written by a black journalist. His name is Jason Riley. He wrote a book called Please Stop Helping Us, talking about how all the handouts to blacks have kept blacks in the poorhouse. And I’ll tell you what, I am going to make it my task to buy 15 to 20 copies of that book and hand it out to some black leaders to read.”

Oh, good. That should earn you 15 to 20 punches in the nose! Black leaders probably love being told what they should think by some raving lunatic racist. I know I would!

“Jason Riley said in an interview, Did you know before we had minimum wage laws black unemployment and white unemployment were the same? If we increase the minimum wage, black unemployment will skyrocket. See, he understands it, but the average black does not.”

Yeah, it's a real shame that the "average black" doesn't understand total bullshit that isn't true.

 

How pathetic is this?

 

Broga. And, yes, it is actually what it sounds like. Yoga for bros.

Broga: Finally, Yoga for Dudes

By Aylin Zafar @azafar

If you’re a guy who feels too shy or emasculated by the idea of attending a yoga class among a sea of women, you can now feel at ease at “Broga,” a studio and practice geared toward men, with two locations in Massachusetts.

How pathetic are these guys? Oh, no, there's too many women here, I might get emasculated! Waah, mommy, the girls are picking on me!

(Pictured: Every Men's Rights Activist ever)

Why does there have to be a "for men only" version of everything?

 

How insecure do you have to be to need constant reassurance that every product you purchase, every activity in which you engage is sufficiently "manly?"
What do they think is going to happen if they use some product that has some association with women? They'll sprout breasts? Their weenis will retract itself into a vagina?
How pathetic would you have to be to actually be afraid to go into a yoga studio because there might be too many women there?

Co-founders Robert Sidoti and Adam O’Neill created Broga as a safe space for men who may be self-conscious about not being as flexible as the woman on the mat next to them in class

Yes, a "safe space."
Because you know how hard it is for us to feel safe, what with all these women constantly eyeballing us!

Broga® Yoga Overview

Broga is a yoga class geared for men (where it’s okay if you can’t touch your toes).

Finally! I was so sick of being jeered at by women when I couldn't touch my toes. Because everyone knows that every woman ever is as lithe and flexible as a willow branch and no man ever is.

  

Well, ok, this guy. But he's obviously some sort of gymnast or contortionist!

Our Mission…

…is to offer men real tools for coping with daily stresses and demands through an accessible yoga-based fitness program taught from a man’s point of view.

There's a point of view?
To Yoga?
How does a series of movements and postures have a point of view?
I don't know, but somehow it does and that point of view better be male or I'm not setting foot in there! I'm not letting those yoga women castrate me!

Our Brograms^©…

…help men to live in their most organic selves: strong, peaceful, guided, internally and outwardly connected, powerful and compassionate from the inside out. Our Brograms, services and merchandise enable men to walk, compete, and live stronger, balanced lives.

Oh, fuck me. "Brograms?" And you felt you needed to copyright that gem?

 

How pathetic is this?

Normally, I would Laugh

Usually when a gun nut gets himself shot while engaging in gunnuttery, I find it amusing. Even laughable. But this is a bit different.

Child firing Uzi at Ariz. shooting range accidentally kills instructor, police say

By Steve Almasy, AnneClaire Stapleton and Ray Sanchez, CNN

 

Ordinarily, a guy who teaches gun nuts how to fire military-grade assault weapons being shot by the very military-grade assault weapon he is teaching some nut to fire would give me an attack of schadenfreude.  But this little girl is going to have to live with this the rest of her life. 

She is going to carry this weight of having killed a man for the rest of her days because her idiot parents thought that their irrational obsession with weaponry was more important than the health and safety of their child. This poor kid is going to have nightmares the rest of her life because her mouth-breathing, knuckle-dragging parents placed more value on their love affair with deadly weapons than on the well-being of their little girl. Absolutely despicable.

Honestly, it's amazing this doesn't happen more often, given our nation's dysfunctional relationship with firearms.

 

 

 

 

Although, that's not to say that it doesn't happen.

7-year-old S.D. boy accidentally shot to death by 9-year-old brother

Unsupervised 7-year-old shoots cousin in face in Texas

5 year old son of North Carolina law enforcement officer injures himself with father's gun

6 year old Florida boy shoots grandfather with assault rifle 

2 year old Pennsylvania toddler kills 11 year old sister

6 year old Indiana boy shoots 13 year old sibling with M-4 belonging to his father

6 year old Florida girl injured in attempt to shoot her mother

 

And it goes on and on and on because we don't dare risk hurting the feelings of people like this

 

who believe that their "right" to dress up and play Army man in public trumps the right of the rest of us not to have to live with the knowledge that any one of us can be shot dead at any moment for any or no reason because FREEDOMMMM!!!!