The hierarchy

An extremely useful listing of relative privilege, by which I mean unfair advantages it would be impossible to give everyone, as opposed to things like being allowed to drive while being the color you are or being allowed to marry the person you love.

Thanx to Making Light.

Sorry

Today's XKCD mouseover says, "A universe that needed somebody to observe it in order to collapse it into existence would be a pretty sorry universe indeed." I'm OK with living in a sorry universe like that, and I believe that we all do, though I could be mistaken. To me, a universe in which we were nothing but evolved material beings with no transcendent dimension would be a sorry one, but I accept the possibility that we are in one.

Another lie

Dubya retcons a Conversion Experience, and Amanda Marcotte catches him at it.

Thanx to Pandagon.

ETA: One wonders how he would react to a whole shelf of bottled fetuses, such as carnivals used to display, luring the rubes in with some misleading phrase like "Mysteries of Sex Revealed!!!" Long ago, I learned from a Fredric Brown book that the proprietors referred to them as "pickled punks."

On second thought

Rand Paul rises above principle, decides earmarks aren't so bad after all. Is anyone surprised?

Thanx to andrewducker

A middle-aged colossus

sturgeonslawyer informs me that "Rael," by the Who, says that the "red chins" will invade us, rather than "the wretched." I haven't been this disappointed in a song since I learned that "Groovin'" isn't really about a threesome with someone bearing the teasingly epicene name of Leslie. ("You and me endlessly," or so we are told.)

I related it to "the wretched refuse of your teeming shores" in Emma Lazarus's poem about the Statue of Liberty. I used a kinder reference from the same source last year when the fanzine-fan mailing lists I belong to, trufen and fmzfen, were enriched by the closing of the British mailing list Wegenheim. "Oh good!" I thought. "We're gonna get huddled masses."