September, 2009 archive
Smart Is Bad. Dumb Is Good. It’s a Wingnut World. 0
Steve has the IQ dump.
Yeah, the links check out.
Honestly, you can’t make this stuff up.
Up is down, in is out, and the sky is green.
It’s a wingnut world. Tra-la-la and a hey-nonnie-nonnie.
(Can you tell I’m down to my last nerve?)
Stray Thought 0
Spackle is your friend.
Greater Wingnuttery XLI (Updated) 0
It used to be considered bad form to advocate the violent overthrow of the government of the United States of America (although the wingnut in question claims to merely musing . . . .)
Indeed, it was considered an “unAmerican activity.”
The right wing in this country is profoundly disturbed by the scary black man in the White House.
Addendum:
Eating Choking on their words. From Josh Marshall:
Whittle Your New Computer from That Log . . . 0
. . . then make a back up.
No Laughing Matter 0
It’s not a good idea to joke about assassination, though the wingnut brigade seems to think it is.
(Link fixed.)
Those Secret Service folks take their jobs very seriously:
Facebook is working with the U.S. Secret Service, which is investigating the matter, company spokesman Larry Yu said today. The application, which allows users to conduct surveys of Facebook members, was used to create the Obama poll.
“We take any threat against our protectees very seriously, and we will investigate it thoroughly,” Darrin Blackford, a U.S. Secret Service spokesman, said in a telephone interview, adding that the investigation began Sept. 26.
My guess is that it was one of those quizzes like the new one, just released, “Which Bunk Do You Want?”
Aside: I do not recall lefties joking about assassinating elected officials in the preceding eight years. Sure, I heard a lot of lefties say a lot of unpleasant things about what Bush, Cheney, and their accomplices did. I said my fair share.
And, ya know what? We were right.
They did do all the things we said they did.
But I did not hear or read anyone who wished or even joked about their being assassinated, just who wanted them out of office.
Now it seems that you can’t turn around without hearing someone joke about assassinating President Obama.
What the hell is wrong with these people?
Fresh Air and No Water 0
Keeping the Chesapeake Bay Bridge-Tunnel full of clean air and empty of water. Follow the link to read the whole thing and see the slideshow:
Quiet and spare, the only clue that they control a major transportation facility is the view out of a window of cars and trucks zipping by below at 55 mph.
From these rooms, operators monitor all aspects of the tunnel with 10 cameras at each tunnel, three computers, and a control panel of buttons, lights and alarms.
When water starts collecting somewhere and pumps start running, a light and alarm are activated and stays on until the controller walks around the desk, stands before the panel and turns it off.
As I pass through the tunnels today, I shall do so with different eyes.
Electric Limbo 0
So you think electrical service is a no-brainer, huh? They build their dream house, then found out that it was in no-man’s land:
From that point on, the onus was on Community Electric, Penn said.
The problem was discovered seven months ago. Neighbors indicate that they have been willing to provide the required easements from the git-go.
They’ve been living in an RV since June 1 (at which time they had expected to be in their new home).
Supposedly the power was to be turned on by today.
Your non-government bureaucrats at work.
Devolution 0
At Scientific Blogging, Michael White dissects creationism’s laughable efforts to offer credible criticism of evolution. Follow the link to see the concrete evidence for his reasoning:
(snip)
Creationists have no credibility on this issue of common descent because they don’t know what they’re talking about. The main intelligent design textbook Of Panda’s and People can’t even get the basic argument used by biologists straight. The authors clearly don’t understand how biologists infer evolutionary relationships from DNA sequence, because they make a basic blunder that anyone who has taken Biology 101 in the last 20 years could refute.
(Here’s another discussion of the blunder, from the Kitzmiller trial transcript – scroll down to the part that starts with “I think the treatment of biology by Pandas is inaccurate…” In a nutshell, Pandas falls for the basic ‘if humans descended from chimps, why are there still chimps?’ fallacy, by suggesting that today’s living amphibians are intermediates between fish and reptiles. The correct answer is that today’s reptiles and amphibians are both descendants of a common amphibian-like ancestor – and DNA sequences reflect that.)
Stray Thought 0
GIven that Jesus says in the Bible that no one can know when he will return, those who claim to predict his return are ipso facto heretics.
Dis Coarse DIscourse 0
When Congressman “I Know I Am but What Are You?” Wilson accused a truthful President Obama of lying during a speech to a joint session of your elected representatives incongruously assembled, many American reporters compared his to that in the British House of Commons.
An Englishman says not:
It is this kind of unbridled malevolence, accompanied by deliberate disinformation, that is so shocking.
The only thing I have seen in Britain that even comes close to the kind of viciousness so prevalent in American politics emanated from the now-banned Federation of Conservative Students, who sold the infamous “Hang Nelson Mandela” badges and had a centrefold in their magazine showing an electric chair with the slogan “IRA Terrorists: Plug ‘Em In”. This was back in the mid-1980s and they appear to have been reprogrammed since then.
(……..) 0
“I don’t know how to answer that that’s not a trap.”
–Beck the Feckless
r>
Afraid to stand behind his own statements. Feckless defined (emphasis added):
Via Andrew Sullivan.
The Problem with Polls (and Other Statistical Studies) 0
Scientific Blogging takes a look and considers that it’s often not the data, nor the scholarly interpretation, but the journanimalism:
- The media already often get the details wrong in reporting scientific studies. It makes it worse to compound that with confusing reporting.
- The media often highlight the wrong bits, in efforts to get catchy headlines and “interesting” copy.
- Readers don’t understand statistics, and misinterpretation is likely even when the stats are there. Don’t make it worse by eliminating them.
- Readers are prone to generalize results beyond what’s valid, and they’ll likely apply a group trent to specific individuals, as in the example above.
- Readers don’t understand the limitations of studies. Reporters should try to talk about one or two key limitations.
Read this. It makes it easier to understand the mess.
Docking the Ike 0
Read about it here.
There’s a neat, non-embeddable video that shows what it takes to get a ginormous aircraft carrier into a slip.
“Blackwashing” 0
| The Colbert Report | Mon – Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c | |||
| The Word – Blackwashing | ||||
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We Need Single Payer 0
The crappy U. S. health care system takes another life.
