Quote of the day

"I fear that those of us who stand up in front of America’s children every day have made a Faustian bargain. In accepting history courses shaped by war and structured around war, we allow our students to internalize war as normal, constant, at times attractive. In telling stories about war, we fall back on noble explanatory devices and encourage our students to appreciate high moral outcomes over bodies on the ground." -- Dwight Simon

Quote of the day

"Does Viagra facilitate desire (the view of Pfizer’s scientists), or create it? What is 'natural' in sexual life? If, before the discovery of Viagra, it was 'nature’s course to diminish sexual power in men once their peak reproductive fitness had passed'—as  Sylvanus Stall wrote in a 1901 book—is it 'unnatural' to change that aspect of senior-citizen life through drugs? 

Or is drug-assisted virility simply better living through chemistry—like raising life expectancies from 45 to 75? Is the appropriate meaning of 'natural' not what existed in the past, but anything that can be achieved through physical means at any time? How does one integrate the complaints of older women, documented by studies, about the frequency of desire in Viagra-fueled mates, and the lengthened duration of lovemaking itself?" -- Carlin Romano

Quote of the day

"[The kind of people who elect Michelle Bachmann:] Scum of the earth. Parts of Michele Bachmann's district contain the most smug, pious, conservative rat-buggering jerks on the planet (like Marcus Bachmann and his anti-gay "clinic", for instance). And the symptoms are beginning to show: the Anoka-Hennepin school district, part of Bachmann's domain, home of the Elmer Gantry-wannabe Bradley Dean, is also the epicenter of an epidemic of teen suicides, 9 in the last two years. These are kids who were bullied for being gay, or suspected of being gay, or not fitting in to the their inbred little community (and who would want to?), and the school district has been acquiescing to pressure from religious groups to maintain a policy of intolerance and even demonization of gays." -- PZ Meyers

Quote of the day

"Like any mother, I want life to run smoothly for all my darling daughters, or at the least I want a level playing field for Holly, Tiffany, and their little girl. I don’t want them to have to worry about legal property or inheritance problems in the event of a death or a split or any of the other brickbats that life might throw at them. I want them to be able to get insurance and mortgages and health care as a family.

Holly intends to adopt Huckleberry, but until she does, she has no legal right to her as a mother, and by the same token I have no real right to call myself her granny. But I am, and I do."

Wait... Huckleberry?

Read the whole thing here.

Quote of the day

Religious beliefs are lazy jokes with bad punchlines. Why do you have to chop off the skin at the end of your penis? Because god says so . . . Why do you have to revere a bit of dry biscuit? Because it magically turns into a god when a priest mutters over it. Why do I have to be good? Because if you aren't, a god will set you on fire for all eternity. These are ridiculous propositions. The whole business of religious is clownshoes freakin' moonshine, hallowed by nothing but unthinking tradition, fear and superstitious behavior, and an establishment of con artists who have dedicated their lives to propping up a sense of self-importance by claiming to talk to an invisible big kahuna. It's not just fact-free, it's all nonsense. -- PZ Meyers

Quote of the day

"Over the past 50 years, televisions have [become] a lot cheaper and college . . . a lot more expensive. Consequently, even a low income person can reliably obtain a level of television-based entertainment that would blow the mind of a millionaire from 1961. At the same time, if you’re looking to live in a safe [American] neighborhood with good public schools in a metropolitan area with decent job opportunities you’re going to find that this is quite expensive. Health care has become incredibly expensive. The federal poverty line for a family of three is $18,530 a year." -- James Kwak

Quote of the day

"What kind of word is 'gotten'? It makes me shudder."

Read more here.

Quote of the day

"When a brutal homophobe sounds and looks like a parody of a big old queen, suppressing that fact becomes close to impossible."

Read more here.

Quote of the day

"[C]an you imagine what the punitive damages would be in a wrongful imprisonment case if there were dementors involved?"

-- Alyssa Rosenberg