Nope, sorry, still don't get it

President Bush on the killings at Virginia Tech:

"We lift them up in our prayers and we ask a loving God to comfort those who are suffering."

Oooor... you could ask that "loving" omnipotent [addition and emphasis mine] god to have prevented the shooting in the first place instead of comforting people after the fact. I've never understood the "god let man have free will" argument. It just seems like an easy cop out for when things don't go believers' ways (which they often don't). If god is omnipotent, but he supposedly let people have free will, then he just turns a blind eye to humanity's suffering, so why would he want to comfort you? He clearly abandoned you, and isn't that a total bummer?

Thanks but no thanks. I'll stick to atheism, which actually affirms and celebrates life.

Music that's hip with the kids

My musical tastes tend toward the vintage (really vintage), but I've been sampling some of the latest records that are popular with the youth. Among them, Rehab by Amy Winehouse. Observe:





Pretty good, right? The lyrics especially speak to me, especially if you replace the word "rehab" with "work." To wit: "They try to make me go to work and I said no, no, no." Because really isn't work a lot like rehab? Forced attedance at someplace you don't want to be, forced interaction with people you don't really want to talk to. See what I mean?


This song--Ride A White Horse by Goldfrapp--is also good, and the only redeemable thing about the last season of The L Word:

The Imus Imbroglio

My only regret about this whole Don Imus mess is that he didn't call the Rutgers University women's basketball players "nappy headed lesbians." Wouldn't that have been awesome? Then we could've seen the nation's gay media watchdog lumber into action, issuing painfully hard-to-read statements days after the incident occured, all the while claiming to work impactfully behind-the-scenes.

Damn you, Imus, for missed opportunities!

(Psst. In the interests of full disclosure, I did once work for aforementioned gay media watchdog, but that was many, many quittings ago. Before. After.)

As if we needed more proof that student loan companies are evil

It was reported this week that the nation's largest sudent loan provider, Sallie Mae, has agreed to pay $2 million into a fund to educate high school students about their student loan options. Of course, they wouldn't do this out of the goodness of their cold, black, shriveled corporate heart; they're doing it to resolve an investigation into their shady loan practices by New York attorney general Andrew Cuomo.

I particularly loved this bit of spin:

In a statement on its Web site, Sallie Mae said that it “cooperated with this inquiry since its inception, and, as the industry leader, we have been confident throughout that our policies and procedures would stand tall.”

Oh really? The exemplary policies and procedures that got you to pony up $2 million dollars to get the New York Attorney General to stop looking into those amazingly wonderful policies any further?

I could buy a nice condo or small house in a quaint town for what I owe Sallie Mae in student loans. I have been relatively lucky in my dealings with them so far (others, not so much), but it is still my dream to win the lottery, hire several semi trucks to haul the sum of my debt to them in nickels, drop them off at the door of their payment processing center, and make them count every last coin like the money grubbers they are. There's your payment, bitches.

Could there be a more fitting way to begin this blog?

For this inaugural post, I--the heretical half of the co-authors of this blog--have chosen to discuss the biggest pile of crap built on a lie ever: religion! The Associated Press reports that Pope Benedict XVI says that Darwin's theory of evolution can't be proven and that he "cautioned that evolution raises philosophical questions science alone cannot answer."

Science may not be able to answer them--yet--but at least scientists don't say that they know the answer and that the answer is some magical sky being that supposedly controls everything even though the only "proof" of this is an old, dusty book that came into vogue 2,000 or so years ago and whose veracity is doubted by a whole lot of people (Muslims, atheists, etc.).

The article also said:

Benedict added that the immense time span that evolution covers made it impossible to conduct experiments in a controlled environment to finally verify or disprove the theory.

"We cannot haul 10,000 generations into the laboratory," he said.

But I thought the earth was only 6,000 years old?