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As fast as The Gays are winning battles at the ballot box — and in courts and legislatures across the country — derpy straight Republicans are devising what they see as clever new roadblocks to same-sex marriage they think might catch on with the public and stop the inexorable progress that is being made.

This GOP leader in Georgia seems to think same-sex marriage will lead to everyone being overwhelmed with fake same-sex marriages, leading therefore to people getting government benefits to which they are not entitled.

Get over it. You’re losing. The Gays are winning.

Besides that, what’s to stop opposite-sex couples from getting married simply to share health insurance or get a friend into the U.S. from overseas? I don’t hear anyone saying we ought to slow down straight marriages because some straight couples MIGHT cheat the system.

And what’s with this tired “gays shouldn’t have sex because nature didn’t give them complementary equipment” argument? Homosexuality is all over the animal kingdom.

Not only that:

1) Straight people have anal and oral sex, and they have recreational sex. Get a clue, sweetie.

2) Using your what-nature-intended logic, we never EVER should have have flown because nature didn’t give us wings. Or we should all die of infections because nature didn’t make us naturally immune to certain pathogens. It’s all so illogical.

Honestly, these people are so stupid it hurts my brain at times.

You can read the stupidity here.

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This just came up on my phone screen:

fkuverymuchandhavaniceday is now following your blog

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But right before I left, my dog stared at me with with the strangest look, and that is all I remember.

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If you live in America and watch television, you’ve no doubt seen their eye-catching commercials about how much they care about cancer patients. And how much better their survival rates are than the national average.

Well, perhaps not so much, according to the article that goes with the screen cap below. Welcome to the Cancer Treatment Centers of America.

I’m trying to think of how much lower you can go ethically when compared to playing with the lives and emotions of people dying of cancer. Still thinking….

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Got back from Costa Rica late last night after five airports, three flights and much hassle.

Costa Rica was all that I’d expected it would be, and more. I’ll write more about it later. I’ll only end now by noting that as we were having breakfast on the last day, we were disappointed that we had not seen any monkeys.

There are many species of wild monkey in Costa Rica, and you can certainly hear them making noise and moving about the trees in the jungle. But our only tour of the rainforest was cancelled because the Manuel Antonio National Park was closed on the day we went.

As we were having breakfast on our last morning, suddenly an extended family of spider monkeys appeared on the patio near the pool next to which we were having breakfast.

We fed them bananas (with permission, of course) and they generally carried on and put on a show for us until they realized we had no more food for them.

Whereupon they jumped back into the trees and headed over to the next hotel — a routine they apparently do every morning.

Enchanting and a perfect end to a visit to a magical place with amazing people.

I ended up having a non-functioning laptop, so the few postings I did were by smartphone on a very expensive and limited data roaming plan.

Spider Monkeys wait for their bananas.

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I always tell people how this is an exciting time to work around biotech and biotech researchers. Many of those researchers have made strides that would have seemed the stuff of science fiction not long ago — think of the Human Genome Project.

There are increasing numbers of maladies for which they can do genotyping in an attempt to tailor your treatment(s) for your genetic make-up for various susceptibilities or drug-resistance profiles, for example.

Of course, all of this costs huge sums of money at first, but the future payoffs could be enormous in terms of public health. Already they are able, for some cancers, to design a drug regimen based on the genetic profile of your particular tumor. There will be much more of this, if we can overcome two things:

1. The American right-wing’s lame-brained attempts to paint all of academia as a haven for lazy professors and students misusing federal money. Just one example of this was Sarah Palin during her vice-presidential campaign when she criticized how much money the government spent on what she derisively called the study of “fruit flies” — without knowing that fruit flies are genetic stand-ins for much basic biomedical research because their life span is so short and it is so easy to manipulate their genes across successive generations. (We share much DNA with all living animals, including fruit flies.)

2. The continuing financial catastrophe caused by Wall Street’s malfeasance and Congress’s inability to rein in the financial excesses of bankers and other titans of our financial system.

There was an article Oct. 3 in the Boston Globe, titled “Threat to funds haunts Boston-area labs,” that laid out the grim scenario if the Congress and White House do not get their acts together. Repeat these same scenarios across the country at every university, hospital and drug company doing NIH-funded research:

Boston-area teaching hospitals and universities are bracing for deep cuts in the federal funding that has fueled biomedical research for decades, raising fears that breakthrough work on cancer cures, stem cells, gene therapy, and other research will suffer setbacks.

Unless Congress agrees by Dec. 31 on $1.2 trillion in savings to reduce the federal deficit, National Institutes of Health spending will be trimmed by 8.2 percent, or about $2.5 billion annually, according to the Office of Management and Budget projections — part of an across-the-board budget-chopping process known as sequestration.

If that happens, hundreds of jobs and scores of grant proposals at Massachusetts labs could be lost. Some labs are already reassessing staff levels, and scientists worry they might not be able to proceed with crucial studies of serious diseases such as lung cancer and Alzheimer’s.

There are also fears that collaboration between labs will turn into competition for dwindling dollars, and ambitious young researchers might abandon the field in search of more stable employment.

“It’s like a knife hanging over our heads,” said Bill Chin, executive dean for research at Harvard Medical School. “About a quarter of new grants won’t be funded, and funding will be reduced for current projects that are working on cures for cancer, Alzheimer’s, diabetes, and heart disease, all of which have had remarkable advances recently. Ninety percent of our research budget comes from government sources, and the NIH is by far the major source.”

Conservatives, who have never been very good at looking far into the future when judging fiscal sanity, are saying that the NIH is bloated — without providing specifics as to where that bloat in located.

I work around these people every day, and I know what possible discoveries could be stopped in their tracks if these cuts happen. Private enterprise won’t pick up the slack because much of this research will not come to fruition fast enough, or produce the next blockbuster drug and therefore blockbuster profits. It’s the same reason drug companies won’t do basic research into new antibiotics because the old ones are becoming ineffective: not enough money to be made in antibiotics because you can’t charge huge sums of money to treat someone for gonorrhea or an ear infection.

You can read the rest of the Globe article here.

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You can read the rest of the hilarious story partially captured in the screen shot below at this link.

Madness. Pure madness parading around in broad daylight without any sense of shame whatsoever.

But the graphic is amusing.

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I wish I could think of things like this.

I can write. It’s just the romantic-sayings part of my brain must be broken and every time I think of something it feels (to me, at least) as if I’m trying too hard.

Pretty much all I ever come up with are “you smell nice” and “you have a great ass.”

Neither of which gets me a lot of brownie points.

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Morning coffee on the deck and the Queen Mary II pulls into port. Just gorgeous.

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