Brian calls’m Spineless Bottom Feeders and asks:
Why are we paying these 535 people?
Hey, their big money comes from the folks they feed at the trough with.
An institution not focused on securing the life, liberty and pursuit of happiness of its citizens and primarily devoted to stealing from some and giving the money to others and often to themselves via those others ought to be eliminated.
Just why the hell would anyone stand in line for not an autograph:
Author Margaret Atwood has grown weary of the traveling that comes with promotional book tours. Such tours are grueling, and her experience with delivery drivers who hold out an electronic device for a signature gave her an idea: maybe there was a way to create a system whereby she could sign a book from a distance.
She teamed with Matthew Gibson and several others to produce the device, naming the firm Unotchit pronounced “you no touch it.” The device was given its first-ever public demonstration on Sunday, and despite technical glitches that had to be overcome, they managed to get the device working.
This gives a whole new meaning to autographed first edition and no enhancement in value: either emotional or financial.
I’ve been to a few book signings over the years and enjoyed hearing authors read from their work and discuss related issues with the audience. This would be ok via teleconferencing which probably will be standard once holographic/virtual presence technology becomes the norm.
There is no way, though, that mechanical scribbling is an acceptable stand in for the author’s in the flesh signature.
If you are too skinny or too heavy you have a higher risk of fatal injury in certain car crashes(reg):
Male drivers with a body-mass index (BMI) greater than 35 or lower than 22 were significantly more likely to die after front-end or left-side collisions, compared with men with intermediate BMIs, reported Shankuan Zhu, M.D., Ph.D., and colleagues at the Medical College of Wisconsin here.
Moderately overweight men (with BMIs around 28) were least likely to die, compared with their larger or skinnier counterparts,
One reason is that vehicles are not designed for you:
Current vehicle cabin designs are based on a standard crash test dummy in the driver’s position with a BMI of 24.3, the authors said.
“These cabin designs may not be optimal for drivers with a different body habitus and may contribute to the higher fatality seen at both ends of the BMI continuum,” the authors concluded.
This seems another good incentive to maintain yourself in reasonably good shape!
I wonder, though, if we will start seeing law suits by families of dead heavyweights claiming unsafe design or misrepresentations about safety.
Read each and every one of these posts: Digby, Amanda, Avedon, Tena and Echidne. They chew up and spit out a daft person who argues that complete abstention is a woman’s only answer to unwanted pregnancy.
Echidne, closes her fine piece with the following:
The truth of course is that our choices do matter, but they matter in a probabilistic sense, not in the sense of being meted awards and punishments by some cruel wingnut god. And humans are human, which means that none of us can control everything in our lives. Not even wingnuts can do that, though they would love to control other people’s lives.
Sadly, wanting to control other people’s lives does little to differentiate wingnuts from the common liberal. For example, with respect to the war on drugs wingnut and liberal politicians are pretty much indistinguishable. Combine the wingers and the liberals together the result is a beast that would have every aspect of your life under tight reign.
Originally via Atrios.
Diane nails the appropriate response:
To all Michael Brown apologists
Please. Spare me the tears.