1. Wham, bam, thank you ma’am: Jujitsu in Suffragette City. Lysistrata, modernized, in 60 seconds (NSFW).
2. Ten years from now, when opposition to contraception is an essential and non-negotiable “stance” for all legitimate white evangelical Protestants, I hope that at least some of them will try to remember that this wasn’t always true. If by then it has become impossible and unthinkable for any within the tribe to disagree with this new and radically altered stance, I hope that at least they won’t forget that it is a new and radically altered stance.
3. Congratulations to Very Serious Person and Mainstream Evangelical Thinker Eric Metaxas for being judged the No. 4 “Hottest Conservative Superman Author.” This is no joke — the prestigious panel of “hot conservative women” judges included TownHall columnist and seven-time Love Boat guest star* Morgan Brittany.
4. All of us misapprehend some things, and wind up embarrassed later to realize that what we thought we knew isn’t actually so. But we’re also lied to, intentionally, by people who have an enormous financial interest in getting us to believe their lies.
So this long, humorously human list of mistakes and mondegreens from The Blogess is a lot of fun because it reminds us that innocence and ignorance are close cousins. But there’s nothing amusingly innocent about the widely held false beliefs listed in this post from Charlie Stross. These popular beliefs are popular precisely because these are well-financed lies deliberately spread by the powerful in order to preserve their power at others’ expense.
If you’ve somehow come to believe that hippos and rhinos are just the female and male of the same species, then you’re just adorably, amusingly mistaken. If you’ve somehow come to believe that welfare fraud is a statistically significant problem, or that foreign humanitarian aid is a big share of the federal budget, or that crime and teen pregnancy are massively more common than they really are, that’s because you’ve been hoodwinked, bamboozled and led astray by rich people who find it’s easier to keep taking your money if they can keep you convinced of such things.
I don’t know if Louie Gohmert is one of those powerful liars or if he is just the most enthusiastic of the dupes they have deceived, but the man says many viciously untrue things about the working poor, and he really, really hates hungry children.
5. Well it’s not just me and it’s not just you, this is all around the world. … “Mobile home life not so rosy” reports the Brisbane Times, with an all-too familiar story from the other side of the globe. Encouraging news, though, from Lakeville, Mass., where residents of the Edgeway Mobile Home Park are working toward buying the land beneath their homes.
6. To be naked is to be vulnerable — unclothed, unarmored, unprotected. It says something about the prurient obsessiveness of One Million Moms and of Charisma magazine that they are wholly unable to understand that meaning of nakedness. For them, nakedness always means one and only one thing: Sex. Dirty, sinful sex. “Censorship feeds the dirty mind,” Dick Cavett said. And vice versa.
7. Here’s another piece of evidence strongly suggesting that Walmart’s claim to pay an average of $12.40/hour is hogwash: The retail giant is throwing a huge hissy fit and threatening to close its stores in the nation’s capital if D.C. passes an ordinance requiring it to pay a living wage. Walmart says that would cause it’s D.C. stores to lose money and would force them out of business. How much is this “living wage”? $12.50/hour.
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* Impressive, certainly, but not a record. Morgan Brittany’s seven appearances tie her with Judy Landers, but Audra Lindley has them both beat with eight guest appearances aboard the Pacific Princess. Until I hear otherwise, I’ll regard Lindley as the Queen of Love Boat Guest Stars. (I’m not counting Charo, of course, because her 10 appearances as recurring character April Lopez put her in a category unto herself.)
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