March 2011
6 posts
Ouroboros
My temple is throbbing. Banks do not operate on logic or sympathy.
Me: I’m calling on the status of my debt consolidation loan.
Bank: Yes, it appears that you were not able to be pre-approved because you have debt.
Me: Yes. The point of my refinancing my loan, as I stipulated on the application, is to pay off this debt and make my monthly payments $100 dollars cheaper. I’m already paying 350 and have done so on time and without fail since 2006. Refinancing would allow me to pay off the offending debt in question and lower my payments by 100 dollars.
Bank: Yes, but we cannot do this for you at this time because you have this debt.
Me: So, you can’t approve me for a debt consolidation loan to pay off that debt, improve my credit rating, and make monthly payments more affordable for me?
Bank: No
Me: Right. Why?
Bank: Because that would make sense. Oh, ha! Make sense! See, because it’s like “cents”…it’s a homophone …we’re a bank….it’s funny, right?
Me: No. No, it is not.
“A three-day-old human embryo is a collection of 150 cells called a blastocyst. There are, for the sake of comparison, more than 100,000 cells in the brain of a fly. If our concern is about suffering in this universe, it is rather obvious that we should be more concerned about killing flies than about killing three-day-old human embryos… Many people will argue that the difference between a fly and a three-day-old human embryo is that a three-day-old human embryo is a potential human being. Every cell in your body, given the right manipulations, every cell with a nucleus is now a potential human being. Every time you scratch your nose, you’ve committed a holocaust of potential human beings… Let’s say we grant it that every three-day-old human embryo has a soul worthy of our moral concern. First of all, embryos at this stage can split into identical twins. Is this a case of one soul splitting into two souls? Embryos at this stage can fuse into a chimera. What has happened to the extra human soul in such a case? This is intellectually indefensible, but it’s morally indefensible given that these notions really are prolonging scarcely endurable misery of tens of millions of human beings, and because of the respect we accord religious faith, we can’t have this dialogue in the way that we should. I submit to you that if you think the interests of a three-day-old blastocyst trump the interests of a little girl with spinal cord injuries or a person with full-body burns, your moral intuitions have been obscured by religious metaphysics.”
—
Sam Harris, on stem cell research (via loveyourchaos)
needs to be on my wall. yes. it does. always.
(via kuuramantoonis)
…I concur. Wow.
(via ninjaelizabeth)
Schrödinger's schadenfreude
My cat, Mickey, was sitting in His Chair© when I heard him, all of the sudden, started to growl and hiss for no apparent reason (which is uncharacteristic of him as he’s a sweetheart).
I turned to look at him and his claw was caught in the end of his own tail. He then started to spin around in the chair, continuing to growl and hiss at himself until it finally became unstuck.
Honestly, I tried to help him but I was immobilized by laughter and I couldn’t see for the tears streaming down my face.
Oh my god, I nearly tinkled. XD
