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[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

Because people in burkhas are always up in that convenience store business, right?

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

All those scary burkha-clad students at my school make me really uncomfortable.

Oh wait. No, actually they don't.

[Nephew Twiddleton]

All those scary burkha-clad students at my school make me really uncomfortable.

Oh wait. No, actually they don't.

I had to laugh. Because seriously, Republicans would be all over that shit if it even happened once.

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

All those scary burkha-clad students at my school make me really uncomfortable.

Oh wait. No, actually they don't.

I had to laugh. Because seriously, Republicans would be all over that shit if it even happened once.

Right? Even once. EVER.

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

Unrelated to anything here: I love boys, all thinking I care about  how they feel about things that don't concern them. That's just adorable.

[ñͤͣ̄ͦ̌̑͗͊͛͂͗ ̸̨̨̣̺̼̣̜͙͈͕̮̊̈́̈͂͛̽͊ͭ̓͆ͅé ̰̓̓́ͯ́́͞]

http://online.wsj.com/articles/pain-in-trains-falls-mainly-on-grain-1414972402

ONIDA, S.D.—The worst rail delays in more than a decade are impeding crop shipments in the Midwest, causing grain-storage facilities to fill up and sending pries for corn, soybean and soybean meal up sharply.

Congestion on railroad networks, now threatening to extend into a second year in the U.S. Farm Belt, is forcing some buyers to purchase additional soybean meal, used mainly in animal feed, to ensure a steady supply, analysts said.

That helped push futures prices up 11% in the past week. And soybeans and corn both jumped by around 7% as livestock and poultry operations in the eastern U.S. rushed to avoid feed shortages and speculators bid up the price of the commodities related to soy meal, analysts said.

The transport problems are caused by several factors: Rail companies are experiencing an overall rise in demand to move goods, including consumer goods, crude oil from the shale fields of the upper Midwest, as well as increased grain from two years of bumper crops. Last year, an unusually harsh winter compounded problems by forcing shippers to run shorter, slower trains.

My boss just recently negotiated some "we're sorry" money from the railroads for the fuck in the ass we're taking not being able to ship by rail near as much as we need.

Even though this article just lists it as one small factor among many, the effect increased oil traffic has had on railroad congestion has been an open secret since much longer than one unusually harsh winter, and a bumper crop of grain-ago.

The delicious, delicious tr;dl of it all: Increased domestic oil production is resulting in drastically increased transportation costs. Hail Eris!

Oh it actually gets even better than that—a lot of the oil that they're shipping are fucking bomb trains. The containers that they ship that oil in are supposed to be upgraded to stronger ones that don't explode, but they don't because that would cost money. Gambling with people's lives in densely packed urban centers that those trains run through is clearly the preferred option:

https://news.vice.com/video/bomb-trains-the-crude-gamble-of-oil-by-rail

I like to imagine that oil executives were so butthurt by the 2011 Muppet movie that they said, "Fine, you want to make us out to be villainous caricatures, then we'll BE villainous caricatures. Muahahaha!"

[Cain]

It's only Tuesday, but I'm going to have to call dumbest argument of the week. The month is still young:

I see a feminist wearing a hijab like a black civil rights worker wearing a KKK hood and robe. It does not make sense. I also think its dangerous to wear a burka as you cannot identify them if they commit a crime.

My response:

Ok, your first point is, what would your reaction be if you did see a black civil rights worker dressed up like a Klansman. Seriously. What would your reaction be? Your second point, what the fuck is this, Fox News? People in burkas might rob a convenience store and we'd never know who they were from the security camera... You'd think that if that was a legitimate concern, we would see that in the news all the goddamn time until they actually did make it illegal.

Afterthought:

Hell, let's tell Pussy Riot not to wear balaclavas just in case someone robs a store near them.

Incidentally, a new branch of the KKK is welcoming blacks, Hispanics and Jews into its ranks.

No, I'm not joking.

[Nephew Twiddleton]

It's only Tuesday, but I'm going to have to call dumbest argument of the week. The month is still young:

I see a feminist wearing a hijab like a black civil rights worker wearing a KKK hood and robe. It does not make sense. I also think its dangerous to wear a burka as you cannot identify them if they commit a crime.

My response:

Ok, your first point is, what would your reaction be if you did see a black civil rights worker dressed up like a Klansman. Seriously. What would your reaction be? Your second point, what the fuck is this, Fox News? People in burkas might rob a convenience store and we'd never know who they were from the security camera... You'd think that if that was a legitimate concern, we would see that in the news all the goddamn time until they actually did make it illegal.

Afterthought:

Hell, let's tell Pussy Riot not to wear balaclavas just in case someone robs a store near them.

Incidentally, a new branch of the KKK is welcoming blacks, Hispanics and Jews into its ranks.

No, I'm not joking.

I don't even know what to say about all of that.

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

It's only Tuesday, but I'm going to have to call dumbest argument of the week. The month is still young:

I see a feminist wearing a hijab like a black civil rights worker wearing a KKK hood and robe. It does not make sense. I also think its dangerous to wear a burka as you cannot identify them if they commit a crime.

My response:

Ok, your first point is, what would your reaction be if you did see a black civil rights worker dressed up like a Klansman. Seriously. What would your reaction be? Your second point, what the fuck is this, Fox News? People in burkas might rob a convenience store and we'd never know who they were from the security camera... You'd think that if that was a legitimate concern, we would see that in the news all the goddamn time until they actually did make it illegal.

Afterthought:

Hell, let's tell Pussy Riot not to wear balaclavas just in case someone robs a store near them.

Incidentally, a new branch of the KKK is welcoming blacks, Hispanics and Jews into its ranks.

No, I'm not joking.

I don't even know what to say about all of that.

Pacific Northwest.

[Nephew Twiddleton]

It's only Tuesday, but I'm going to have to call dumbest argument of the week. The month is still young:

I see a feminist wearing a hijab like a black civil rights worker wearing a KKK hood and robe. It does not make sense. I also think its dangerous to wear a burka as you cannot identify them if they commit a crime.

My response:

Ok, your first point is, what would your reaction be if you did see a black civil rights worker dressed up like a Klansman. Seriously. What would your reaction be? Your second point, what the fuck is this, Fox News? People in burkas might rob a convenience store and we'd never know who they were from the security camera... You'd think that if that was a legitimate concern, we would see that in the news all the goddamn time until they actually did make it illegal.

Afterthought:

Hell, let's tell Pussy Riot not to wear balaclavas just in case someone robs a store near them.

Incidentally, a new branch of the KKK is welcoming blacks, Hispanics and Jews into its ranks.

No, I'm not joking.

I don't even know what to say about all of that.

Pacific Northwest.

[Cain]

Corey Robin says it is yet more disturbing evidence in favour of his thesis in "The Reactionary Mind":

Beyond these simple professions of envy or admiration, the conservative actually copies and learns from the revolution he opposes. "To destroy that enemy," Burke wrote of the Jacobins, "by some means or other, the force opposed to it should be made to bear some analogy and resemblance to the force and spirit which that system exerts."

This is one of the most interesting and least understood aspects of conservative ideology. While conservatives are hostile to the goals of the left, particularly the empowerment of society's lower castes and classes, they often are the left's best students.

Sometimes, their studies are self-conscious and strategic, as they look to the left for ways to bend new vernaculars, or new media, to their suddenly delegitimated aims. Fearful that the philosophes had taken control of popular opinion in France, reactionary theologians in the middle of the eighteenth century looked to the example of their enemies. They stopped writing abstruse disquisitions for each other and began to produce Catholic agitprop, which would be distributed through the very networks that brought enlightenment to the French people. They spent vast sums funding essay contests, like those in which Rousseau made his name, to reward writers who wrote accessible and popular defenses of religion.

...

Even without directly engaging the progressive argument, conservatives may absorb, by some elusive osmosis, the deeper categories and idioms of the left, even when those idioms run directly counter to their official stance. After years of opposing the women's movement, for example, Phyllis Schlafly seemed genuinely incapable of conjuring the prefeminist view of women as deferential wives and mothers. Instead, she celebrated the activist "power of the positive woman."...When she spoke out against the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA), she didn't claim that it introduced a radical new language of rights. Her argument was the opposite. The ERA, she told the Washington Star, "is a takeaway of women's rights." It will "take away the right of the wife in an ongoing marriage, the wife in the home." Schlafly was obviously using the language of rights in a way that was opposed to the aims of the feminist movement; she was using rights talk to put women back into the home, to keep them as wives and mothers. But that is the point: conservatism adapts and adopts, often unconsciously, the language of democratic reform to the cause of hierarchy.

[Nephew Twiddleton]

So Villager is in San Diego this week visiting her friend in the Navy and our drummer and we've been texting the past half hour while I'm skipping work and hypothetically studying and totally not procrastinating, and she says this:

They have vodka at cvs

That means San Diego has some horrible truth they don't tell the outlanders until it's too late.

I have to say, this is probably the only time I've ever actually wanted to go to California. Seems like she's having fun.

[Cain]

Bleh.  Not working in Cambridge.  Well, that's £130 in ticket costs I wont see again anytime soon.

Also, I'm meant to be attending a work meeting today.  I'm planning on having a last minute unavoidable emergency, because I can't be bothered.

[Eater of Clowns]

Bleh.  Not working in Cambridge.  Well, that's £130 in ticket costs I wont see again anytime soon.

Also, I'm meant to be attending a work meeting today.  I'm planning on having a last minute unavoidable emergency, because I can't be bothered.

Sorry, bud.

[Cain]

Eh, it happens.  I wasn't especially thrilled with the place anyway, but I would like my travel costs to be covered.