March of the Volunteers

Illustration by Sarah Rogers/Daily Beast, from a piece of last July by old Joel Kotkin taking astonished umbrage at conservatives supporting anti-sprawl zoning.

I'm enchanted by this parade of Republican geezers ready to sacrifice themselves and die for the market economy: Texas lieutenant governor Dan Patrick

“No one reached out to me and said, as a senior citizen, ‘Are you willing to take a chance on your survival in exchange for keeping the America that all America loves for your children and grandchildren?’ And if that’s the exchange, I’m all in … I just think there’s lots of grandparents out there in this country like me — I have six grandchildren — that what we all care about and what we love more than anything are those children. I want to live smart and see through this. But I don’t want the whole country to be sacrificed and that’s what I see.”

(From Matt Stieber at New York Magazine, who noted that the 2.6 million American children are being raised by their grandparents, which is not to mention who knows how many millions of American grandparents putting themselves in danger by providing daycare for the kids while the middle generation goes to work in the current crisis.)

radio rodeo clown Glenn Beck

Ross Douthat's Electric Slide

GIF by ifoundabritty.

That Monsignor Ross Douthat, Apostolic Nuncio to 42nd Street, is such a sneaky guy! Here he is ("Trump and the Madness of Crowds") chewing yet again through the mystery of how an apparently nonconservative person such as Donald J. Trump seems to be capturing the apparently conservative Republican party:

1. They aren't really that conservative:

This [the party's refusal to nominate "mavericks" thought to be not purely conservative from McCain through Kasich] doesn’t mean that all Republican voters care about the conservative movement’s goals and shibboleths. Many clearly don’t, and it was obvious that there was an underserved constituency for policy heterodoxy among Republican voters — especially working-class voters— long before Trump came on the scene.

Eggs marks the spot

Holiday Rerun: Silly Easter piece from March 2013, before Bill O'Reilly succeeded in killing Jesus, which I felt like posting again, if nobody minds.

From David Lynch's Inland Empire (2006), via the Guardian.

O’Reilly points to a handful of small community centers and elementary schools that are hosting “spring egg hunts,” sometimes with a “spring bunny” emceeing the festivities. Nowhere to be found is the word “Easter,” laments O’Reilly, fearful that the nation’s six year olds will one day forget the religious symbolism of crawling around a grassy schoolyard on all fours searching for chocolate-filled plastic eggs. (Adam Peck, ThinkProgress) 

Peck probably thinks he's being funny here, under the assumption that the word "Easter", to say nothing of rabbits and eggs, has nothing to do with Christianity.

Certain scientists

Ordovician sea with trilobites and other animals, ca. 450 million  years ago,  from  Paleoart. But then there's evidence on both sides of the table (on top of it and under it), and Certain Scientists say it's only about 4,000 years old, contemporary with the beginning of the Bronze Age in China, and the migration of Ethiopians to Kenya.

Generations Radio host Kevin Swanson interviewing the documentary filmmaker Kevin Peeples, from Right Wing Watch via Wonkette:

Swanson: I’m beginning to get some evidence from certain doctors and certain scientists that have done research on women’s wombs after they’ve gone through the surgery, and they’ve compared the wombs of women who were on the birth control pill to those who were not on the birth control pill. And they have found that with women who are on the birth control pill, there are these little tiny fetuses, these little babies, that are embedded into the womb. They’re just like dead babies. They’re on the inside of the womb. And these wombs of women who have been on the birth control pill effectively have become graveyards for lots and lots of little babies.

Peeples: We’ve actually heard on both sides of that. We’re researching that and want to make sure we speak correctly to that in our second film. But we have medical advice on both sides of the table there, so we want to make sure that we communicate that properly.

Swanson: It would seem, and I realize that people are a little split on what are all the effects of the birth control pill, but it would seem that there’s a tremendous risk in the use of it for the life of children.

Just wow. This man still has the creativity of a six-year-old. The mommy and the daddy do it, you see, and the violence of the action makes an egg hatch, up in the mommy's fallopian tubes. Out drifts a tiny sleeping creature, like a fairy, toward its bed in the womb—but no! There's this noxious birth control gas, it struggles to breathe, beats its tiny fists against the wall, and expires! And this happens again and again until this womb is a catacomb.

But we have medical advice on both sides of the table there, and other explorers say what we're talking about is just trilobites, ancient marine fossils, evoking babies, the way manatees made people imagine mermaids and rhinoceroses seemed to be unicorns. Who can say? The womb is so old, and vast!