The virtues of Brexit aren't entirely clear, but it's easy to admire a citizenry which doesn't want to pay for, and be regulated by, two entire tiers of federal bureaucracy.

So whatever you think of Farage, enjoy this clip, and drink the resentment of the gavel-mad meeting hostess in this clip.

Disregard yesterday's comment— As of midnight PST (Friday morning), WaPo reports all (~213) coronavirus deaths have happened within China.

Sad to see that a number of Wuhan doctors have been unable to maintain their usual office hours.

In ̶d̶a̶y̶s̶ ̶w̶e̶e̶k̶s̶ times ahead, this page may be more useful than media sources.

https://www.dw.com/en/greta-thunberg-seeks-to-trademark-her-name-and-movement/a-52192446?maca=en-rss-en-world-4025-xml-atom

Sad to see that a number of Wuhan doctors have been unable to maintain their usual office hours.

Such early reports are anti-government, you see. As Voltaire is supposed to have said

It is dangerous to be right in matters on which the established authorities are wrong.

Huh.

In this essay, I analyzed the results of over 30 questions from 22 different representative national surveys, involving over 20,000 respondents. Not one of the questions I examined here supports the idea that Trump supporters are significantly less knowledgeable than Clinton supporters, and some of them point to small or moderate differences in the opposite direction.

...

In short, Don Lemon is a bigot—and like most bigots, he's an ignorant one as well.

https://reason.com/2020/01/30/trump-supporters-verbal-ability/

Alexa, I need guns. Lots of guns.

https://twitter.com/JMontanaPOTL/status/1222302302373076992

Tho I suspect somewhere down the road when you say that, Alex will lock the safe and call 911. I'm sorry Dave, I'm afraid I can't do that.

Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) made millions of dollars through her role in rewriting portions of U.S. bankruptcy law and assisting big corporations in navigating the laws she helped write at the expense of the victims of their practices, Government Accountability Institute (GAI) president and Breitbart News senior contributor Peter Schweizer revealed during a discussion on his book Profiles in Corruption: Abuse of Power by America’s Progressive Elite on Breitbart News Daily.

https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2020/01/30/exposed-peter-schweizer-explains-how-warren-built-her-fortune-by-aiding-big-corporations-she-routinely-rails-against/

Profiles in Corruption https://amzn.to/2S7iPlV

Dicks.

https://www.wnct.com/news/georgetown-family-faces-lawsuit-over-playscape-for-terminally-ill-son/?

Always tell the truth. Some people will be gratified, others shocked.

A man who has let his 12 year old brother call him 'dad' for his entire life was left facing the dilemma as to whether to tell him the truth about their relationship.

The man, who we'll call Sam, was born when his parents were 19 and his brother, who we'll call Josh, was born years later when they were 42.

When Josh was just four months old, the parents divorced and 'both wanted nothing to do with the child'.

https://www.mirror.co.uk/lifestyle/family/ive-brother-call-dad-years-21357734?

You know you live a very safe, sheltered life when this is the only thing that matters to you during a disaster.

https://twitter.com/CNNPolitics/status/1222964716320018436

The later portion of this article:

Known more commonly as air taxis, the aircraft will bring with them a slew of new technologies that will impact aviation safety as much—if not more so—as they do commuting convenience.

The prospects are exhilarating: Passengers will be able to summon an air taxi to their location—a field or landing pad—or meet it at a “vertiport” before zipping through the air with remarkable ease. They’ll fly more efficiently and quietly than conventional helicopters due to their electric propulsion and multi-rotor configurations, which will be engineered to minimize noise. We’re seeing prototypes from Beta Technologies, Joby Aviation, Bell, Lilium, and dozens of others. Some are already flying.

https://www.popularmechanics.com/flight/a30689333/kobe-bryant-crash-helicopters-safe/

I already know the difference in sound between civilian choppers and law enforcement: the later usually flies search patterns over your area, and generally has a louder, deeper grumble than even the air ambulances.

A reply to sixclaw's cnn link:

https://twitter.com/RealTonyB/status/1222967331317481473

Addressing lenona's response to me the other day: expecting women NOT to enjoy sex, but to endure it in the name of reproduction is a pretty sick attitude to have. SBA's opposition to birth control is puzzling: even in Puritan times, 1 out of every 3 kids was born to an unwed mother.

A few days ago, I also learned, to my relief, that Margaret Sanger was not a vile individual who wanted to get rid of minorities. She actually established Planned Parenthood - then dealing with only birth control - out of the best of intentions for people who couldn't afford to have a child. The Time article that changed my view of her did acknowledge her eugenicist leanings, but again, that was not why she began PP. And her quote about not letting Black people think PP was founded to exterminate them has been taken horribly out of context by people on my side to portray her as something she wasn't, presumably to cast a blighted shadow on PP.

Sooooooo, learning is good. /Captain Obvious

Gotcher diversity right here:

https://twitter.com/MaryMargOlohan/status/1222909766462320641

mpetrie98, Orwell called, would like to have his duty to the state to reproduce even if I don't enjoy it line back.

Stolen.

Grant me the senility to forget the people
I never liked anyway, the good fortune
to run into the ones I do, and the
eyesight to tell the difference.

Xenophobia is a symptom of the corona virus?

https://twitter.com/cabot_phillips/status/1223281896433516545

The server is getting hammered right now, so don't be upset if you can't get at it, but the Indians say:

“This uncanny similarity of novel inserts in the 2019- nCoV spike protein to HIV-1 gp120 and Gag is unlikely to be fortuitous”.

No, this can't be real. Not saying disregard, but it's the kind of crisis where fancypants people will want to make noise.

We gotta wait.

Sell live wild game in open markets? What could POSSIBLY go WRONG???

From the Chinese Coronavirus Crisis, 3 Early Lessons

Inclusiveness!

We gotta wait.

My 72 hour rule is in effect. Tho that seems to be a rolling 72 hours...

Thanks, mpetrie.

But regarding the Victorian attitude as "pretty sick attitude to have," there was another old-fashioned marital duty, that I didn't mention, because I thought everyone already knew about it.

Namely: Can you say "wifely duties"?

From "Dear Abby," Sept. 1980 (the writer - presumably middle-aged - wasn't actually seeking advice):

"Just before we were married (at nineteen), my mom gave me a little pep talk about sex. She said, 'Honey, sex is a man's game, and women aren't supposed to enjoy it, they are just men's playthings. So pretend you're enjoying it and put up with it to make him feel like a man.'

"I said, 'But, Mom, what if I like sex?'

"She said, 'You're just like your father!'"

More from that column, if you like (VERY amusing):

https://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=1314&dat=19800901&id=EFtOAAAAIBAJ&sjid=wu4DAAAAIBAJ&pg=3876,72755

And, as it happens, in the book "Gone With the Wind" (but not in the movie), Rhett, when proposing, completely ignores Scarlett's unmistakable implication that she REALLY doesn't want any more children (she has two before marrying Rhett). He even has the gall to imply, subtly, that the joys of sex with him will make up for any unwanted babies they will have. Gag.

Later, when she gives birth again, she finds, to her horror, that her waist in a corset is now...20 inches. (The size of a healthy thigh, in other words.) She determines not to sleep with Rhett any more, for that reason...in theory.

But in fact, it's pretty clear, from other chapters, that she wasn't getting ANY real satisfaction in bed with him or before, with her first two husbands, mainly because she wanted Ashley and not them, of course, but also very likely because Rhett, like most men of that time, wasn't taught anything about how to Give Pleasure to a woman, as opposed to just being gentle when necessary. (Leaving aside the implication of the Big O after THAT notorious scene, which everyone has seen in the movie.)

In other words, both the women in the Dear Abby column - presumably women born before 1930 or so - AND the fictional Scarlett could have had very different and happier marriages from the start - if only their husbands had been taught that it's practically a duty to give a woman...oral sex.

So, yeah, it was bullshit.

The two best things about this column:

1. Big Mac is entirely correct.
   
   
2. The pic is exactly what Dems think of him.

Like I said before, lenona, it's sick. God obviously designed women to enjoy sex, or else they wouldn't have a clit.

Yes, and it's pretty clear by now that religions all over the world have, in the past at least, condemned any type of sex that isn't directly involved in reproduction as a sin. Since PIV intercourse - especially in the missionary position - is not very conducive to the female orgasm, it was too easy to conclude that any type of sex that DID easily bring a woman to orgasm was evil or perverted.

Granted, this wasn't always the case - exactly.

Richard Zacks wrote in "An Underground Education: The Unauthorized and Outrageous Supplement to everything you thought you knew about art, sex, business, crime, science, medicine, and other fields of human knowledge" (1997) that for centuries (until the 19th century), doctors thought, mistakenly, that a woman could not conceive without having an orgasm.

However, what doesn't get mentioned is that laypeople who managed to have a wanted baby after a year or so didn't necessarily know about that superstition, since they had little reason to talk to their doctors about the situation - and if a couple turned out to be infertile after a year or two, chances were they weren't going to make the mistake of assuming that they WERE fertile or that bringing her to orgasm was the solution. Right? After all, barrenness gets mentioned in the Bible more than once, so everyone knew about it, even if male infertility wasn't something most people considered, for centuries.

Not to mention that it wasn't until the 19th century or so that women were seen as something more virtuous than instruments of the devil. In other words, before then, maybe the female orgasm was seen as a necessary evil, in the eyes of religious leaders?

More from Zacks' book, if you like:

https://books.google.com/books?id=dQkwnc57H-gC&pg=PA289&lpg=PA289&dq=%22richard+zacks%22+avicenna+%22conception%22&source=bl&ots=YZkwL_HHGf&sig=ACfU3U0ke-qYfUn36zEcpSHORaR9Q50uZA&hl=en&ppis=_e&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwi7vIzU6LPnAhVQhHIEHUPzBm0Q6AEwAHoECAkQAQ#v=onepage&q=%22richard%20zacks%22%20avicenna%20%22conception%22&f=false

Note the quotation from the 19th-century Dr. William Acton.