I know that this is vitriol, no solution

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/05/09/george-w-bush-requests-more-taxpayer-dollars_n_1502819.html

$1.3 million. That's how many schoolteacher salaries? How many GS 6-10 Fish and Wildlife employees? And it's not like otherwise he'd have nothing to fall back on. How much money are we paying so that he can catch flights to book deals and talk with conservative think tanks and oh, play more golf? Is he getting treatment for medical problems that us uninsured plebes can only dream of (give you a hint, my only viable treatment plan for dealing with potential cancer starts with "meta" and ends with "stasis")? Is this all so that he can fly internationally in private where otherwise immediately a big crowd of people, including legal authorities, would immediately descend on him and throw him in the slammer or worse? Where's he calling with a phone bill like that, the entire population of Chicago during peak hours? The fucking red states wanted this guy screwing our country that badly, why don't THEY pay for his extended lifetime tee time and us Americans can opt out?

The man should be stripped of his assets, he should be in fucking Geneva being tried by international tribunal (VE Day was yesterday, it's kind of on my mind), and he should be nigh broke because of legal settlements paid out to families of those killed and injured in his wars. Instead I find that he's going to be scamming this country for probably the rest of my natural life. FUCK this.

Here, have an article about gigantic crocodiles, because extinct predators are always a happier topic than living kleptoparasites.

re: North Carolina

"Any law that uplifts human personality is just. Any law that degrades human personality is unjust. All segregation statutes are unjust because segregation distorts the soul and damages the personality. It gives the segregator a false sense of superiority and the segregated a false sense of inferiority. Segregation, to use the terminology of the Jewish philosopher Martin Buber, substitutes an "I it" relationship for an "I thou" relationship and ends up relegating persons to the status of things. Hence segregation is not only politically, economically and sociologically unsound, it is morally wrong and sinful. Paul Tillich has said that sin is separation. Is not segregation an existential expression of man's tragic separation, his awful estrangement, his terrible sinfulness? Thus it is that I can urge men to obey the 1954 decision of the Supreme Court, for it is morally right; and I can urge them to disobey segregation ordinances, for they are morally wrong.

"Let us consider a more concrete example of just and unjust laws. An unjust law is a code that a numerical or power majority group compels a minority group to obey but does not make binding on itself. This is difference made legal. By the same token, a just law is a code that a majority compels a minority to follow and that it is willing to follow itself. This is sameness made legal."

- originally written in 1963

it seems to be consistently appropriate