Fat girls are smarter than skinny girls

Ok- not to hate on the skinny girls. But for the love of Pete- I am tired of hearing how “OMG the fat is going to KILL YOU”. Even when science proves otherwise, we are still treated to “But OMG the fat- the scary scary fat!”

So I come from a family full of brainy girls with hips (we need the hips to hold up our gigantic noggins). But maybe we aren’t smarter because of the fat- maybe it’s because we don’t waste time counting calories and starving ourselves. Maybe putting yourself into perpetual hunger mode impacts your ability to think clearly. I mean, we spend a lot of time telling kids that they need to eat breakfast everyday because it makes it easier for them to learn. Couldn’t the same thing be true for grown ups?

Kid: Flowers use butterflies to have SEX!

Me: and bees

Kid: They use bees and butterflies for SEX

Me: I think that means all flowers have threesomes

Kid: I think that means flowers are gigolos!

Run- DO NOT WALK- over to Vanity Fair to read Joseph Stiglitz’s breakdown of the Bush economy.

Remember when we were talking about an economic surplus in 2000? Under Clinton- my income doubled every 2 years. I was actually middle class for awhile. Under Bush, my income has decreased by one third for every year he has been in office, and that doesn’t take into account inflation. Remember when milk was $2.50 a gallon. It’s now generally $4.00 in my neck of the woods.

Remember when you could actually buy a house without taking out a jumbo loan? Houses in my neck of the woods now average over $500k and with all the apartments being torn down to build condos, rents are skyrocketing too. $1200 a month for a 400 square foot one bedroom is not uncommon. We haven’t even hit the real estate bubble here yet, but it’s coming.

I have a term paper due tomorrow so I am busy writing that instead of entertaining you all. Sorry!

The paper is on how women who defend themselves from violent partners are punished by the criminal justice system. Some horrifying facts i have learned so far:

One third of female murder victims are murdered by their partners.

One in four men has been violent with a partner

Two thirds of women who are attacked are attacked by a partner- not a stranger in a dark alley somewhere.

$3 billion to keep the Mexicans out
$300,000 to give them a reason to stay

Maybe, just maybe if we were a little more generous with the disaster aid we could be a little less paranoid about the borders. I’m just sayin….

Hey you! Yeah you!

What?

Gimme your kidney.

What? No! I don’t want to give you my kidney.

Doesn’t matter. Gimme your kidney. I need it or I will die.

I’m sorry, but I don’t want to give you my kidney. I don’t want to risk my life to give you my kidney.

But I’ll die without it.

But I could die giving it to you. And even if I didn’t die, I’d miss a lot of work. I might even lose my job. I can’t afford that.

You might die if you give me a kidney, but I will die if you don’t give me a kidney.

So how is that my problem.

You made the choice to sit next to me knowing full well that there are people in the world who need kidneys. If you didn’t want to give up a kidney, you shouldn’t have taken the bus.

I’m just trying to get to work. I didn’t plan on giving up a kidney.

Then you should have made better choices.

There’s like 40 people on this bus. How was I supposed to know who needs a kidney? I just sat down in the only open seat.

If you didn’t want to give me your kidney, you should have stood up in the aisle. But it’s too late now. The next stop is the hospital.

There’s a dustup over at Shakesville because Melissa had the ovaries to call out Ron Paul and his supporters on their hypocrisy. See they’re all for libertarian ideas, until it comes to women having the most basic of property rights – the right to control their own bodies.

See, it doesn’t matter if you think a fetus is a person with full rights or a potential person with no rights. One of our basic principles is the idea that a person has the right to control what happens to their own body. We do not force people into organ donation. We do not force people into medical experimentation (ok- sometimes we do but it’s generally done secretly and people get pretty pissed when it happens) and for the moment we do not force people into military service. We no longer forcibly sterilize people either. We have made mistakes in not allowing liberties to certain people in the past with slavery, but our goal as a nation is to move towards greater liberty- not less.

Your body is the only thing you can be sure of owning for your entire life. But for half of us, there is a high risk that control over our own bodies will be taken from us if we get pregnant. That is not a little threat. It is a deal breaker in a political candidate, even if that candidate is the most anti-war.

If a political candidate is not willing to allow half the population liberty over their own bodies, that same candidate cannot be trusted to protect any liberties.

That Colbert-Stewart threesome may become a Colbert-Stewart-Olbermann orgy. And Daniel Levin deserves a statue for letting himself be waterboarded in order to decide if waterboarding is torture.

Water-boarding, he said, is torture.

Legally, it is torture!

Practically, it is torture!

Ethically, it is torture!

And he wrote it down.

Via Shakes

And I am going to vote the Stranger’s cheat sheet. Lazy, perhaps. But they keep much better tabs on local pols than I can and with few exceptions I am generally in agreement with the paper on politics.

Go vote folks. It may not be for president, but it’s still important.

then turtle sex is what you get. This picture was taken at the zoo in Villahermosa, Mexico. Villahermosa and most of the state of Tabasco are under water right now. Much like Katrina, very little help is coming to the poor people there. Huhm, I wonder why that is- could it be because they are brown and poor? I have to think of the fires in California just a few weeks ago. People couldn’t line up fast enough to offer evacuees yoga lessons and entertainment.

This monkey statue, also in Villahermosa looks to the sky to ask “Why is there no help for the people here? Why is the United States only offering $300,000 (yes- thousand, not millions) in aid?”

All silliness aside, Villahermosa is a lovely city and aside from it being the place where I got “whatevered” for not being a Mexican and the people are drowning in water up to their rooftops. Brownfemipower has lots of good information- you should go read over there RIGHT NOWJust a little more information- the only good pictures I found of the flood are at Brownfemipower’s place. The sad job our media is doing of covering natural disasters that affect poor people is disgusting. I am truly ashamed to be an American and a neighbor to Mexico right now.