MyFatCat's Comments (73)

“Sounds exactly like a purity pledge an insurance company looks for in its current crop of job candidates in my town. The recruiter made it clear that if you want to be employed, you'd better be Republican. There are lots of elegant, between-the-lines ways to make your new employees toe the line, and then line the PAC pockets.

Democrats had better wake up and realize the conservatization of the unemployed could pour a lot of votes in Republican pockets next year. Cut back the war expenses--the rest of us have already had to cut our expenses. Cut the corporate loopholes. Tax companies that outsource work so that the "savings" go away. Give tax credits to small business that stays local. And put some teeth into the state charters for companies: it's not "bad for business" for business to pay its share. Businesses are chartered to provide employment for the people to make communities work. I hate the idea of setting off a new regulation game, but if business doesn't see any advantage in helping community in a structured way by supporting the community that supports its presence, I fail to see why it should be blessed with a charter to do business.”

“There's a lot of poetry online. Are you sure you aren't just protesting the so-called 'vook'? Or are you missing the point of art: to make life bearable and remind us of our humanity and other people's.

If you're feeling sorry for yourself because your book habit is out of control, it doesn't have as much to do with poetry as with collecting things.A lot of people love to collect comfort objects and a lot of them now regard cans of food as the most comfort they can have.

Been to any good food pantries lately? No? Thought not.”

“Laughin' out loud. I'll quote you...”

“Is science just a new religion?

I have a hard-science background and a lifelong faith. I think science is not "just" a new religion. I do think they share an uncomfortable amount in common, beginning with the notion that up to a point, you believe what you see (science), and up to a point, you see what you believe (faith). Both are present: I claim that most people aren't one or the other, but some of each.

All sufficiently advanced technologies are indistinguishable from magic, and the magic happens when your ability to frame a question about what's going on fails. And that can happen in both science and faith, but that event has drastically different outcomes in each realm. In science, proof is in persistent pursuit of incremental questions to push the knowledge horizon forward and communicate it to others. In faith, proof is in the interpretation of a non-repeatable event that is consistent with a set of values, laws, and stories.

They're both true, but only one of them is factual. That's not a disparagement. It's a recognition that there are parts of my experience that can be described but not repeated. The sense I make of them is valid, but it may not be applicable to anyone but myself.

A postulate in math is not different from an article of faith: we can't prove it to be true, but we rely on its truth.”

“It's true that climate change occurred, more than once, without industrial contribution.

It's also true that no snowflake thinks it's responsible for an avalanche.

The problem is not that people who believe something has to be done about climate change don't get that climate change has happened before and will happen again. The problem is that we don't appreciate how dependent we are on climate, how little control we have of it, or how much our now-significant contributions to changing the environment are creating conditions that can rearrange the supply of food and water.

Consider the Mayan temples. A researcher, William Saturno, showed that the Mayan propensity to cover their cities in limestone was so dramatic that it could be seen from space--NASA verified this--and it changed the heat profiles for major cities. It's now believed that the Mayans abandoned their cities because they had made them unlivable--and the religious beliefs of the time helped fuel rebellion and revolution because of the need for war to find sacrifices to the gods.

Replace the Mayans with ourselves, their leaders with the Dominionists seeking Armageddon, and continuing development of land, and you can reasonably project this cycle will continue. Starring us. But this time, it won't be confined to the Americas.”

“Mr. Varney has it partly right and partly wrong.

Jesus had a lot to say about money and its use. The paramount expression is that the love of money is the root of all evil. It's not about the profit, it's about the attitude.

The point is that someone devoted to making money is not taking a view of money as a tool in proper perspective; he's using it to keep score. Obscenely large bonuses for doing what you were hired to do is a problem, because it rewards the love of money and focuses the attention on its accumulation at the expense of its effects on others.

There's a spiritual answer he'll have to make about how he's using Scripture. Remember Dives. And the church may hear, but it will not listen: John Varney is already going down a slippery slope.”

“Jesus had nothing to say about "the gay agenda."

On the other hand, he had a lot to say about the love of money.

'Nuf said.”

“Ah, that would be "weed" not week. In any case, that which does not reproduce is therefore worthless.”

“By that logic, if you aren't either a virus or a week, you might as well be dead.”

“Another mind lost to humanity for the lack of humanities education.

The state is increasingly a geopolitical convenience for multinational corporations indifferent to citizens. Perhaps the boy hasn't learned to think about the metaphor and allusion: it's the monopoly control that's the problem. The monopolist itself is nearly irrelevant.”

“Does anybody else think Michelle Bachmann was elected to Congress so that she could get mental health care?”

“You rock my world! I don't live in Detroit, but your post made me smile.

Let's hear it for hometown: wherever you are, there's no place like it. In my hometown, there's a sign on a billboard in an especially depressed area: Recession 101: It's a test, not a final.”

“There are so many people whose limited exposure to, and knowledge of, mental illness, forces anyone with mental or emotional illnesses to go to any lengths to hide the condition. Like all things forced into secrecy, it deforms the personality to have to live a lie because of the uninformed fear of the many. It makes volcanoes of people who would otherwise be the salt of the earth, and demons of those who are only a little lower than the angels.

Reporting of these events seems to underscore the mystery and perpetuate the misery: for as long as we can't make talking about the prelude safe for many, we will all continue to be reading about the postlude. We can't break the cycle until we make mental and emotional health, and the social pressures that damage people, a discussable topic outside of a reportable event.”

“As a part of that, they're going to have to rethink supply chain issues so that people's lives don't just fall like dominoes.

Employers seem to have thoroughly unrealistic expectations about training. 70% of what you need to know, presuming that you have appropriate education and experience, is learned on the job, but companies are still demanding tools and skills in combinations that often don't reasonably exist. Positions age, close, and finally reopen, and like the tides, the applicants sweep in to compete, and then get swept out to sea, floundering around trying to get new training with an ever-diminishing amount of money to spend.”

“"The food industry has figured out what works. They know what drives people to keep on eating" and "Rather than getting used to the aroma, as is normal, hypereaters found the smell more tantalizing with time" links the information that the skinny just don't get.

1. If you don't like natural foods, it's hard to get excited about the prospect of vegetables.
2. One mind v. an army of marketing people with PhDs in psychology is not going to win.
3. A body chemistry conditioned by habit to an eating style becomes progressively harder to convert over time, and the conversion can also trigger deprivation anxiety (one of the drivers behind binges).

It's all very well to say that it's "easy to do" when what you substitute for love, acceptance, comfort, and safety is something other than food. The problem with a conditioned hypereater is that the food is not being consumed for its own sake: the need is triggered by caloric hunger + emotional hunger.”

“Not to the lighten up comment, but to the original post”

“Amen to that.”

“That's assuming he actually wants to know how it feels to be worked into the ground and then thrown away.

And yes, the headline writer is incompetent.”

“I added an (adult) cat to my (two adult-cat) household. Best to give the new cat a place of his/her own, even if it's just a cabinet spot. Needs a safe place to go while territories get renegotiated. Feed everybody well and hug your pre-existing pets a LOT.

I defer to angeldog's wisdom, natch, but I've been there. There's a good step-by-step in The New Natural Cat. A feline-online vet would also have good observations to offer.

Good luck to all the "fur people" (as per author May Sarton).”

“Employment contracts are worth nothing to the employee. They exist to legitimize coercion by the employer, who can also afford better lawyers.”

“I'd like to know how you're surviving, too! Great story, but how do you live?”

“A modern and modest proposal!”

“Mmm. I'n not getting that. More along the lines of the whole set, the tie...who thought THAT was a good idea?...Ji­ndal's posturing for President.

In the age of TV, that might have worked (think Kennedy/Nixon) but it's not that way now.”

“Geology major here. And the majority of students from my alma mater graduated with med school as a target.

Men don't take harder courses. They, generally, take courses that are easier for their neurochemical wiring, which includes spatial relations, although this advantage, if you can call it that, disappears in cultures where LANGUAGE also mimics spatial thinking.

Which would explain all the Asian engineers I know of both (all?) genders.”

“There's an 20's or 30's American folklore saying it reminds me of:

"I could take forty thousands souls such as his, put them in a thimble, shake them, and they would rattle!"”