The Nappy Cat Chronicles

It could be an Eagles versus Cardinals NFC Championship game.

Ann Coulter returns and says mean things about nice people. She’s that piece of bad Halloween candy that sticks to the top of your mouth, you know what I mean? But, dayamn, look at that body. It’s something only a Republican could love.

I’ve been hitting the Newsweek again. This time I’m left wondering, what is with the desire of post-God scholars to have everyone remain alive for as long as possible?

However the experts explain our tendencies to self-destruct, they all agree that we could use some help negotiating these choices better—and that government can provide it. For Keeney, it’s by adding “decision making” to the standard curriculum in public schools so that more children grow up empowered to recognize and mine all their options, rather than accept those presented by others. “Imagine if they taught World War II as decision making,” he says. “That’d be fabulous.”

We participate in a culture that demands instant performance and instant access and we slowly kill ourselves to remain competitive in this environment. So, it’s 5 minutes before a meeting, you’re hungry for lunch and you’re tired. You can sleepwalk through the meeting, lose the deal, and lose your job or you can drink another soda and develop diabetes in 10 to 20. Since you’ll need money for insulin anyway, you opt for the pick-me-up.

Because it pathologizes practical decisions made within a cultural context, the desire of folks like Keeney to protect everyone from “early death” ironically furthers our collective acceptance of the coercive expression of cultural authoritarianism. We enjoy our lifestyle. We’ve accepted that taking unallocated personal time can cost us a job. Unfortunately, substances that facilitate our desire to meet our daily demands are also deleterious over the long-term.

Fast food, frozen food, junk food, cigarettes, soda, Red Bull, donuts, doctor-prescribed stimulates, etc. Most everyone is touched by a harmful substance. Ban or tax the hell out of one of them, people will grudgingly accept reality, move on to another, and forget about their resolution to start exercising.

Instead of advocating pedagogy that involves “decision making,” a high-cognitive process that cannot be imparted to students by teachers, Keeney should be burning down the fucking schools. Unfortunately, when the technology is borne, folks like Keeney will want the government to relieve the anxious of their distressing thoughts by restricting access to the relevant memory banks.

Sullivan asks:

Leave aside the usual huffing and puffing. Can you answer this question for me:

Is there any other significant issue in American political life, besides Israel, where (a) citizens split almost evenly in their views, yet (b) the leaders of both parties adopt identical lockstep positions which leave half of the citizenry with no real voice?  More notably still, is there any other position, besides Israel, where (a) a party’s voters overwhelmingly embrace one position (Israel should not have attacked Gaza) but (b) that party’s leadership unanimously embraces the exact opposite position (Israel was absolutely right to attack Gaza and the U.S. must support Israel unequivocally)? Does that happen with any other issue?

Not that I can think of, off the top of my head.

One issue that comes to mind is drug war, though I’m not sure if the debate is equally split between the 3 or 4 positions (criminalization, decriminalization, legalization, and a medicinal exception). Either way, the adults believe that they know what is best for the family. In case of the Israel issue to which Glenn refers, it’s the American-Israeli union. The opinions of the children do not matter.

But, you know, perhaps they do know what’s best. What would happen to Israel if it did not have such a complete backing?

(Baltimore Inner Harbor image courtesy of Dining@Large.)

It’s four hours before 2009 and I just now put this post together! What’s wrong with me? In short, I had to create a Wordpress plugin to automate the process. Hand typing a twenty-track list is tad tedious. So, I wasn’t putting off the post, per se. I was putting off writing the plugin code.

Anyway, these are the tracks released in 2008 out of which I got the most enjoyment. I hope you enjoy as well:

(Click the arrow after each track for Last.fm info)

For your downloading pleasure:

• Adem - Hotellounge
• Cassettes Won't Listen - Cutting Balloons
• Cloud Cult - When Water Comes to Life
• Elbow - Grounds for Divorce
• Goldfrapp - A&E
• Grand Archives - Torn Blue Foam Couch
• Jukebox The Ghost - Good Day
• Kings Of Leon - Sex On Fire
• Lykke Li - Chapter 1- Little Bit
• MGMT - Weekend Wars
• Mono In VCF - Spider Rotation
• Pete & the Pirates - Come on Feet
• She & Him - Why Do You Let Me Stay Here
• Sons And Daughters - This Gift
• The Cotton Jones Basket Ride - Midnight Monday And A Telescope
• The Heavenly States - Morning Exercise
• The Little Ones - Forgive Yourself
• Throw Me the Statue - About To Walk
• We Landed On The Moon! - Re- Your Letter
• Windmill - Tokyo Moon

In the past, Michael Newdow has tried to remove “One nation under God” from the pledge and “In God we trust” from the currency. Now:

An advance copy of the lawsuit was posted online by Michael Newdow, a California doctor and lawyer who has filed similar and unsuccessful suits over inauguration ceremonies in 2001 and 2005.

Joining Newdow in the suit are groups advocating religious freedom or atheism, including the American Humanist Association, the Freedom from Religion Foundation and atheist groups from Minnesota; Seattle, Washington; and Florida.

The new lawsuit says in part, “There can be no purpose for placing ’so help me God’ in an oath or sponsoring prayers to God, other than promoting the particular point of view that God exists.”

Stirring the pot is fine with me. In fact, I think “allegiance” pledges are acts of fucking hokey idolatry. But actions like this make Americans and everyone else on Earth hate atheists. Seriously, a solid 99% of everyone believes in the hocus-pocus bullshit. If one man really wants to effectively change the expectations of a significant percentage of all of those people, he should stick to abstention and thoughtful and culturally relevant essays. Only the president and, ironically enough, the fucking pope can have his cake and eat it too.

My post titles are so damn misleading.

And here I thought it was the gays who were the deranged sex perverts:

[M]ens [sic] sexual nature is far closer to that of animals. So what? That is the way he is made. Blame God and nature. Telling your husband to control it is a fine idea. But he already does. Every man who is sexually faithful to his wife already engages in daily heroic self-control. He has married knowing he will have to deny his sexual natures desire for variety for the rest of his life. To ask that he also regularly deny himself sex with the one woman in the world with whom he is permitted sex is asking far too much.

I get what he’s saying, but, heroic? Oddly enough, after reading his post I’m left with the impression that Prager wholeheartedly despises celibate monastics.

Yes, that’s a trashbag full of CDs.  Thanks to my iPod Nano and subsequent iPods, I’ve not listened to a single one of those since 2002.

Loading the trashbag was an odd experience. I felt like I was throwing away a favorite childhood toy. Who would appreciate the physical aspects of each album contained within that bundle of CDs now?

Whether perfectly organized or in complete disarray, a CD collection is visually appealing. Ownership of an album on CD or, for that matter, on vinyl, is ownership of a piece of history. As well, owning a physical copy is to be imbued with a sense of security.

I’ve not been able to replicate these aspects of the ownership experience with my digital collection. I am able to delete tracks and albums at will. The album is no longer a part of my music experience. Possessing the best 10% of an album is fine enough.

The laughs and the cringes that are experienced when listening to an album’s lowlights calibrate a listener’s musical radar. You appreciate a band’s sweet spots more profoundly when you know, from experience, that they can disappoint you.

As for the security aspect, drops are more frequent than floods. But, since my music collection is strictly digital now, I have to believe that it’s not the medium. It’s the music.

A Christian feels the love:

Rebecca Hancock told FOXNews.com that Grace Community Church, a non-denominational church in Jacksonville, Fla., was against her relationship with boyfriend Frank Young because the two were sexually active but not married.

When she wasn’t willing to obey the church’s orders to leave him, she decided to leave the church instead, allowing her two children to remain active members.

Now, she says, church elders have given her the worst ultimatum yet: In a Dec. 8 letter, they told her she either has to meet with them and end her “immoral” relationship or she will face public humiliation.

Here’s my advice to her:  Your sex life is your business, so ignore these nutbags. Focus on teaching your children that their actions do not need to be approved by a committee of quidnuncs and high school virgins.

Probably the worst thing in the modern world is the ability for the items that we write, or say, to be recorded.

Why is this a “problem?”  Well, it’s not really a problem, per se.  However, it will make your brain work doubly hard to keep the cognitive dissonance alive.  Don’t believe me?  Well, while you do not have to, you also probably never will.   But, if you are reading this far, maybe you are willing to go just a little bit further.

Why don’t you try this link, from a man who thinks that Sarah Palin hit a “home run” during the Republican National Convention.  Now, there are just as many examples of this on the Democratic side regarding Barack Obama.

So, how does the problem apply?  It’s simple; most people latch onto a political party and in doing so, end up going whatever stupid direction that party takes them.  By the end of the journey, all they can do is win some sort of contest where they go, “I’m not as bad as so and so.”  And with that, the standards for government will continuously de-evolve into oblivion.  All so that some one or some party can win and say they don’t suck as bad as someone else.

For example, how can someone who is an atheist still call themselves a Republican?  This would be akin to me calling myself a “Lincoln Republican.”  At this point - with names like “Roosevelt Democrat”, or Jacksonian Democrat” - we are just keeping up political party pretenses with sub sections so that we can have the ability to lie to ourselves, saying we are different, while at the same time latching onto the larger party structure so that we can claim victory when “whatever your political party” wins.

One blogger that I know of specifically who gets out of this mess, other than my colleague Will, is IOZ.  The catch is that in order to view the debate constructively, we need to realize that the debate is the better part of a sham.  The arguments we hear on television are on the margin.  Nothing is going to stop American hegemony. 

The problem does have itself one benefit.  Well, at least it’s a benefit to cognitive dissonance.  One way in which political parties work so well for us is that politicians can always be blamed.  The beauty of the modern American political system is that takes away any real responsibility for where we are now, or what we have done to get here.  Forget that the masses voted for these people, or that the system had been engineered in a manner to solicit our attention and active citizenship.  In the end, it’s quite amazing how a system designed to empower people inherently allows us to have the ability to give away that same power.

I see that Obama has chosen Rick Warren to lead a prayer at his inauguration. Most Americans don’t know that Warren is, in reality, a giant douchebag. Warren presents as a mild-mannered and soulful Christian man; the type of man to whom all White Christian housewives are attracted.

I am unsure as to the amount of love Damon Linker receives from Christian women. He appears to be a socio-political blogger for The New Republic who becomes high strung when criticized:

But the fact that Warren holds these views is precisely what places him on “other side of the cultural/religious divide.” So liberals are in fact angry about Obama’s choice because it’s reaching out to someone on the other side. Conversely, if he had picked a pro-choice, pro-gay-marriage preacher to give the invocation, then this would have been someone from the liberal side of the culture war and so liberals would have cheered it.

Let me make this as clear as possible: If you, a Christian like Warren, believe that homosexuality is akin to pedophilia; if you, a Christian like Warren, espouse paranoia and a persecution complex; or, if you, a Christian like Warren, claim that you have “many gay friends”, you are a liar (and I suppose that means you should be delivering the invocation at a presidential inauguration in America).

As for Linker’s “side-taking,” white versus black and red versus blue are examples of sides. Though folks like Linker may appreciate your intense efforts to masturbate in the dark, because you are not constrained by the same principle as non-liars, you do not have a “side.” Regardless of what Warren tells you, the end that you’ve chosen to puruse is a meaningless and pathetic denial of reality.

NewScientist documents the discovery of the way of the G-Spot:

Emmanuele Jannini at the University of L’Aquila in Italy discovered clear anatomical differences between women who claim to have vaginal orgasms - triggered by stimulation of the front vaginal wall without any simultaneous stimulation of the clitoris - and those that don’t. Apparently, the key is that women who orgasm during penetrative sex have a thicker area of tissue in the region between the vagina and urethra, meaning a simple scan could separate out the lucky “haves” from the “have-nots”.

It’s my experience that women have three routes to the big O: The first, clitoral stimulation, is the most direct. The second, vaginal stimulation, is a route upon which you mysteriously find yourself. The third, G-Spot stimulation, is not as utterly elusive as most non-sexperts would like you to believe. Basically, you place one or two fingers in your partner’s vagina and gently tap and rub the area that is at your fingertips and close to the curve. Combine this with gentle clitoral stimulation and stimulation of whatever else your fingers are capable of reaching and, in 10 minutes or so, you can produce a mind-blowingly intense and erotic orgasm. I suppose not all women are capable of this; however, this article reinforces the fact that exploration and experimentation are the hallmarks of a sexually-gratifying relationship.

Typically, I don’t watch television in the morning. However, this morning I awoke at 4:30 and could not claim the remaining hours that life so utterly owes me. Bored with music, I turned on CNN. A poorly dressed man with a shaven head, Ali Velshi, I think, was waxing pathetically about why the SEC “failed” to investigate Bernard Madoff. This is the respective article.

The familiarity was comforting:  Ali said something, the host asked something, Ali said something, etc., ad naseum. Unfortunately, Ali forgot to mention that they’re all fucking one another. And I don’t mean emotion-based fucking through angry letters to Dear Abby. I mean penetration: boys fucking the girls, boys fucking the boys, and girls with dildos fucking girls.

And why not? They all want a piece of the pie and they’re all willing to fuck you to get. But with you its a metaphorical fucking that will leave you with garnished wages, harassing phone calls, and big guys touching the stuff that never really belonged to you.

It only takes five minutes of looking into history to see that what we celebrate as “Christmas” has little to no Biblical reference.  It has essentially turned into a national “Gift Day”.  Our lack of realization in this is merely a triumph again of cognitive dissonance.

For anyone who asks me what I think of Christmas now, I send them this: