The Inside of a Dog Is to a Casket As the Outside of a Dog Is to a Eulogy

At long last, finally criticism of Trump that 100% of us can get behind. (You think I'm being coy, but there's mathematical proof!) He says that either he'll win the election, or it was rigged.

First of all, that's a quintessential example of the False Choice logical fallacy. (Think, "We bomb Iraq or Osama bin Laden wins.") So we don't even need math, logic suffices.

Since I promised you math though, what he's really saying is that he has a 100% chance to win, Biden a 0% chance. Please work out the math explaining how Biden has a 0% chance of winning Pennsylvania suburbs for instance. Outside the city limits, zero people vote for him??? See, impossible!

Of course he doesn't really mean it though, right? It's just his trademark Trump-style blather, right? Yep, until it's not! If he loses, do you know what percentage of Trump supporters will think it was indeed rigged, just because it's something he said? (Hint, not 0%.)

It's almost fascinating to behold somebody with such a preternatural ability to cheapen and diminish themselves a bit more every single day. Reminds me of what Christopher Hitchens said about Jerry Falwell- if he was given an enema, he could be buried in a matchbox.

August 19, 2020

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Mark Twain- "Under certain circumstances, profanity provides a relief denied even to prayer." 

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Babe Ruth- "If it wasn't for baseball, I'd be in either the penitentiary or the cemetery."

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Imagine you are Trump. (It won't last long, I swear.) Imagine you were just hit with this cavalcade of criticism and what you came back with was, "BUT SHE TAPED THAT SPEECH A WEEK AGO, IT'S ACTUALLY 170,000 DEATHS!!!"

Michelle Obama: "Four years later, the state of this nation is very different. More than 150,000 people have died, and our economy is in shambles because of a virus that this president downplayed for too long. It has left millions of people jobless. Too many have lost their health care; too many are struggling to take care of basic necessities like food and rent; too many communities have been left in the lurch to grapple with whether and how to open our schools safely. Internationally, we’ve turned our back, not just on agreements forged by my husband, but on alliances championed by presidents like Reagan and Eisenhower."

I guess he's right, he's actually worse than she was saying!

August 19, 2020

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A perfect joke by Jerry Seinfeld:

"According to most studies, people's number one fear is public speaking. Number two is death. Death is number two. Does that sound right? This means to the average person, if you go to a funeral, you're better off in the casket than doing the eulogy."

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How pitiful must your argument be when you have to resort to "truth isn't truth"? I mean come on, you're not even making the argument for your own side!

August 19, 2018

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Goodbye to Dick Gregory, revolutionary African-American comedian and activist:

Last time I was down South I walked into this restaurant, and this white waitress came up to me and said: 'We don't serve colored people here.' I said: 'that's all right, I don't eat colored people. Bring me a whole fried chicken.'

August 19, 2017

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It amazes me that the sun at 93 million miles away and the moon at 238,000 miles away appear to be the same size in our sky. Seems almost designed that way, until you realize we can't look up and enjoy it. Our ancestors must have all burned out their eyes every 40 years.

August 19, 2017

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‪Buzz Aldrin- "It occurred to me that I got to see quite a few solar eclipses. Every time we orbited into the shadow of the moon."

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W.C. Fields- "Start every day off with a smile and get it over with."

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A train is speeding along a track toward five people who are trapped on the rails. They will be killed unless the train is diverted and you are the only person able to do it. The problem is that your only option is to divert it onto a track that will kill a different person. Would you do it? Of course, better that one person dies instead of five. Let's follow the same logic- in a hospital 5 people are dying, each due to a different failing organ. If it were up to you, would you choose to have a person in the waiting room killed, and his functioning organs given to the five patients so they can live? In each scenario one is sacrificed for the benefit of five. What's the difference?

August 19, 2014

Postscript- Based on the comments of this post, people fucking hate thought experiments!

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The Phillies are 10.5 out of the wild card with a month and a half left, and there are two wild card teams this year. I'm crazy to retain hope, right? Of course I am. But can they make up half of those games in half half that time? And then after that...

August 18, 2012

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Heed this tip: do not give Emma a blank check and allow her to forge your name. You might be in for a wild surprise once the check clears.

August 19, 2012

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The First Sioux War began on this day in 1854, when army soldiers killed Lakota chief Conquering Bear and were subsequently massacred.

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The first temple to Venus, the Roman goddess of love, beauty and fertility, was dedicated on this day in 295BC, by Quintus Fabius Maximus Gurges during the Third Samnite War.

An artist's rendition:

How it looks today:

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Lane and I played one-on-one kickball on this day in 2007.

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John Dryden joined us this day in 1631.

Happy the man, and happy he alone,
He who can call today his own:
He who, secure within, can say,
Tomorrow do thy worst, for I have lived today.

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Gene Roddenberry joined us this day in 1921.
"Star Trek was an attempt to say that humanity will reach maturity and wisdom on the day that it begins not just to tolerate, but take a special delight in differences in ideas and differences in life forms."

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Frank McCourt joined us on this day in 1930.

"You might be poor, your shoes might be broken, but your mind is a palace."

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Bill Clinton was born on this day in 1946. He was a liar, and I don't believe he was a very good guy, but he did hold the truth in some regard.

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Master of ceremonies at the legendary Roast of Bob Saget, John Stamos, was born on this day in 1962.

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Could Matthew Perry have been any more born on this day in 1969?

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Blaise Pascal left us on this day in 1662 at the age of 39.

Many subscribe to Pacal's Wager. They believe in God because it could have a positive outcome.

-No God, don't believe in God, no harm

-No God, believe in God, no harm

-God exists, don't believe in God, maximum harm

-God exists, believe in God, maximum reward

-Therefore, the only reasonable course is to believe in God

One problem, you don't actually believe in God, you believe that it's good to believe in God. Self-interest can't possibly be the way to determine truth.

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Old West card shark, cowboy, cattle rustler, and lawyer, John Wesley Hardin, was murdered on this day in 1895, over a disagreement with the constable over his son arresting a part-time prostitute.

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Federico García Lorca left us on this day in 1936. Maybe for the best???

"Agony, agony, dream, ferment, and dream.

This is the world, my friend, agony, agony.

Bodies decompose beneath the city clocks,

war passes by in tears, followed by a million gray rats,

the rich give their mistresses

small illuminated dying things,

and life is neither noble, nor good, nor sacred."

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Groucho Marx left us on this day in 1977. One of my all-time favorite jokes:

"Outside of a dog, a book is man's best friend. Inside of a dog, it's too dark to read."

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Otto Frank left us on this day in 1980. He was the father of Anne Frank, and without him, her diary never would have been published. I can't believe that my life overlapped with his for six years.

"I hope Anne's book will have an effect on the rest of your life so that insofar as it is possible in your own circumstances, you will work for unity and peace."

Here he is, revisiting the secret annex where he and his family hid out for two years. He was the only member of his family who survived.

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Linus Pauling left us on this day in 1994.

"I have something that I call my Golden Rule. It goes something like this: 'Do unto others twenty-five percent better than you expect them to do unto you. The twenty-five percent is for error."

He was always trying to get ahead of the curve, and that led him down some bad roads.

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Tony Scott took his own life on this day in 2012. He jumped off the Vincent Thomas Bridge in Los Angeles. He was the director of True Romance.

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Great TED talk by Kirby Ferguson- Creativity Is a Remix.

https://youtu.be/zd-dqUuvLk4

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The Chase Utley trade has me thinking about the Ship of Theseus again. At what point of dismantling does the thing lose its identity? Have the Phillies lost the thing that makes them the Phillies?

Sending this song out to Chase:

https://youtu.be/u-Y3KfJs6T0

August 19, 2015

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IFL Science, August 19, 2015- Staring Into Someone's Eyes For 10 Minutes Can Alter Your Consciousness

http://www.iflscience.com/brain/you-can-alter-your-mind-staring-someones-eyes-10-minutes

(Or stare into your own eyes.)

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Think Progress, August 19, 2018- White House attorney talked for months to Mueller probe, New York Times reports, "McCarthyism at its WORST," Trump tweets in response to the bombshell story.

Trump would know McCarthyism when he sees it! His early lawyer and mentor, Roy Cohn, was McCarthy's aide!

(If you haven't noticed, when Trump notices his own weakness, he accuses his opponents of it.)

https://bit.ly/2OKORkA

August 19, 2018

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The Creepiest Things Kids Have Ever Said To Their Parents

My step dad passed away, and my nephew had to stay at my moms for the night while they dealt with things and they were struggling on how to tell him about his grandfather's passing. In the morning they broke the news to him, but he already knew. Said paw paw and his war buddies, he named them, were in there teaching him how to play poker cuz he was all alone. The kid will clear a poker table to this day.

And another...

“My 6-year old came home from school one day, bursting through the door with tears streaming down her face. ‘I miss my other family,’ she said. ‘What other family?’ I asked, thinking she may have been talking about her grandparents, or other friends or relatives. ‘My alien robot family,’ she explained, continuing to explain that she lived with them in the sky before she came into my tummy. She chose to come down because she was angry with them, and chose our family, but now she missed them and wanted to go back for a visit.”

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From a meme:

"Prove God doesn't exist? That's a tough one. You prove to me that Zeus doesn't exist and I'll use your method."

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Ursula K. Le Guin, American SF and The Other in Science-Fiction Studies 7, 1975:

“If you deny any affinity with another person or kind of person, if you declare it to be wholly different from yourself—as men have done to women, and class has done to class, and nation has done to nation—you may hate it, or deify it, but in either case you have denied its spiritual equality, and its human reality. 

You have made it into a thing, to which the only possible relationship is a power relationship. And thus you have fatally impoverished your own reality.”

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William Goldman, Adventures in the Screen Trade- "Writing is finally about one thing: going into a room alone and doing it. Putting words on paper that have never been there in quite that way before. And although you are physically by yourself, the haunting Demon never leaves you, that Demon being the knowledge of your own terrible limitations, your hopeless inadequacy, the impossibility of ever getting it right. No matter how diamond-bright your ideas are dancing in your brain, on paper they are earthbound."

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William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell- "Without contraries is no progression. Attraction and repulsion, reason and energy, love and hate, are necessary to human existence."

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Steve Martin- "I believe that sex is one of the most beautiful, natural, wholesome things that money can buy."

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Groucho Marx again, warning us of the former perils of old age:

“I’m going to Iowa for an award. Then I’m appearing at Carnegie Hall, it’s sold out. Then I’m sailing to France to be honored by the French government – I’d give it all up for one erection.”

Addendum

Myspace Blog

August 19, 2007

notes on the iowa democratic debate

clinton- always playing the girl card, perfect example of talking at length and saying nothing... always the strategy of the front-runner

dodd- in the debate's best unscripted moment a giant iowa horsefly landed on the senator's head, in striking contrast to his silver hair... I see rove imagining a campaign commercial- "his policies stink!"

edwards- this guy's eyes are closed mid-blink longer than they're open... and what's up with him talking out of the corner of his mouth, he can't be trusted... still I have an irrational feeling that he actually cares about poor people

gravel- playing the insanity card, he mixed up spain and iran, and generally forgot that answers are supposed to somewhat deal with the question... perhaps make him ambassador to the arctic ocean?

richardson- has the best resume... best he "resume" being governor of new mexico

biden- a little intense for sunday morning, and that "I say too much" joke... boy, it just gets funnier with age, doesn't it?

obama- he's been stumbling over his words lately, trying to stay neutral... I believe little of what he says, but can't help an irrational feeling that he'll say what he needs to say to get elected, and then do the right thing... ala lincoln, and wasn't he from the same illinois district?

kucinich- best speaker up there, says what he's going to do and how he's going to do it, smart policies, obvious that he genuinely cares about the so-called common-person, hot wife (so they say), pipsqueak (but so what), best thing going him- no strings... worst thing going for him- no strings