Category: Uncategorized

The Lizard Queen has no time for past pets:

AS THE “first pet” of the Clinton era, Socks, the White House cat, allowed “chilly” Hillary Clinton to show a caring, maternal side as well as bringing joy to her daughter Chelsea. So where is Socks today?

Once the presidency was over, there was no room for Socks any more. After years of loyal service at the White House, the black and white cat was dumped on Betty Currie, Bill Clinton’s personal secretary….

That’s pretty cold. Not as cold as swallowing Socks whole, as I assumed she had, but nevertheless, cold. Unfortunately, the fact that she is pure evil won’t prevent her from winning in November 2008, thanks to George Bush, the former Republican Congress and the Republican Party leadership.

I can’t say I’m shocked, considering how often he liked to invite young Harry to his office, alone:

Albus Dumbledore, master wizard and Headmaster of Hogwarts, is gay. J.K. Rowling, author of the mega-selling fantasy series that ended last summer, outed the beloved character Friday night while appearing before a full house at Carnegie Hall.

After reading briefly from the final book, “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows,” she took questions from audience members.

She was asked by one young fan whether Dumbledore finds “true love.”

“Dumbledore is gay,” the author responded to gasps and applause.

Even so, it’s probably just as well that she left out the scenes where Dumbledore is rubbing Harry’s shoulders and asking him if he ever feels lonely and in need of a friend at Hogwarts.

Jason Whitlock about hip-hopping blacks in a team game:

You get one NFL Truth today. Watching Chad Johnson and Larry Johnson undermine their respective head coaches, Marvin Lewis and Herm Edwards, on Sunday gave me a singular focus, forced me to contemplate an uncomfortable truth.

African-American football players caught up in the rebellion and buffoonery of hip hop culture have given NFL owners and coaches a justifiable reason to whiten their rosters. That will be the legacy left by Chad, Larry and Tank Johnson, Pacman Jones, Terrell Owens, Michael Vick and all the other football bojanglers.

It’s already starting to happen. A little-publicized fact is that the Colts and the Patriots — the league’s model franchises — are two of the whitest teams in the NFL.

Wait, you mean that a gang-banging, look-at-me, self-centered individual isn’t conducive to team success? Really? The thing that’s funny about Whitlock’s recognition of the obvious is that it’s not actually about the hip hop, the race or the culture, it’s simply about the willingness and the ability of an individual to fit the role his team needs him to play.

(Yes, the Ray Lewis-led Ravens were an obvious exception, but then, they were also an exception to the rule that you need your offense to be able to score more than one touchdown a month in order to be compete in the NFL.)

Real Madrid’s famous galacticos strategy was a complete failure, not because the players were self-centered would-be rappers, but because the team composed entirely of world-class stars had no one to do the dirty work for them. Starting both Zizou and Figo in the midfield was rather like trying to play Peyton Manning and Tom Brady at the same time. The legendary club didn’t win a single championship or cup until after they gave up on the superlative skill uber alles strategy and let a few of the galactics go in favor of some (relatively) blue collar players.

To fully appreciate the irony of this post, you have to understand two things. First, I play soccer with a pretty good Italian veterans team, (our next regional cup game is postponed because our opponent is a team of former professionals that is playing in the national cup), second, Italians don’t believe that Americans are capable of either understanding or playing the sport.

I’m not the very worst player on the team, but my technical skills are definitely rock-bottom so I’ve started only two games in three years, both times because the only other option was playing with ten men. And while we’ve done very well the two previous seasons, winning promotion two years ago and nearly winning it again, to the highest level, last year – we collapsed in the last two games and finished third – this year we’ve gotten off to a horrific start in the campionato. Six games, eight goals, one win.

Part of the problem is that we have only one new midfielder while losing three defensive starters. Another part of it is that we’ve gotten older and our midfielders on the wings can’t run well enough to support our 4-4-2 tactics. And, at the risk of sounding self-serving, our manager doesn’t make much use of his substitutes; I might have played a total of one game’s worth in those first six games.

Last night, we were facing the top-ranked team, we were missing two starters and our manager, in a half-hearted pep talk, made the case that if we played hard and with discipline, we’d be able to manage a tie. He then promptly cut out the legs from his own argument and alarmed most of the squad, including me, by handing me the number 11 jersey, which meant that I was starting at striker. He also changed the formation to a 3-5-2. You know it’s bad when everyone is patting you on the back in warmups and insisting that everything is going to be okay, except, of course, for two of the better players who are so disgusted with the manager’s decision that they can’t even look at you.

We actually started off okay, putting their defense under some mild pressure and winning a corner kick or two. Then the guy who by rights should have been starting at striker but was playing right wing instead was taken down hard and sprained his ankle badly. He came out for the night, which left us with three subs, two of whom are worse than me and one guy who has a cannon for a shot and passes well but can’t really run. Had anyone cared enough about the game to bet on it, the odds against us would have lengthened again.

In the meantime, I was under instructions to not worry about scoring or get overly involved in the action, but to focus on disrupting the defenders when they were building their attack, so a few minutes later I was chasing the ball from defender to defender, blocking the angle that would let them pass the ball up the field. Basically, they play keepaway and you burn yourself out with little hope of even touching the ball, but at least it keeps the pressure off your defense. After three passes, the last defender passed it back to the keeper, who tried to boot the ball downfield but shanked it instead. Fortunately, I’d continued with the suddenly-not-so-futile chase, which gave me the chance to beat him to the ball and put it in the net. 1-0.

This seemed to inspire my fellow striker – one of the guys who couldn’t even bear to look at me before – to actually start passing the ball to me once in a while. I returned the favor and we managed to keep the pressure up and put a few shots on goal before he beat two defenders and put the ball in the net himself. 2-0.

I was about to collapse at that point, so I took myself out of the game, which led to an amusing exchange wherein the other striker actually ran by the bench and screamed at the manager to get me back in the game. This NEVER happens, believe me. Even the manager cracked up. After ten minutes, I’d recovered enough to go back in and we closed out the half up 2-0.

They had the wind in the second half and put us under some pressure, but didn’t create any serious chances while we came pretty close on one or two of our counterattacks. Finally, one of our subs put a nice ball past the defense when they were up at midfield, I ran onto it, limited myself to two touches, and then took an early shot from about 25 meters out. It was, as one of them said later, “un gol di Madonna”, sailing over the onrushing goalie’s arms before dipping into the corner of the net. 3-0 and the game was iced. It all occasioned much amusement at the subsequent team dinner, as the guys all raised their glasses, shouted MVP, and nearly collapsed laughing at the sheer absurdity of upsetting the best team in the league thanks to the least skilled player on the squad.

It’s not my first goal this season and I scored three times that many goals in one game in the long-distant past, but I don’t know if I’ve ever played a better game. And considering that there was a time last winter when I thought I might never be able to play again, I’m very thankful to have had the opportunity. I’m not likely to start again this season, although I’ve probably earned a little more playing time, but it’s really nice to be confident that I’m not bound to let the team down if I do.

A bankrupt radio network decides that it can’t lose money fast enough:

The liberal talk radio network Air America announced this week it will launch a nationwide show focusing on atheism. The first national show will feature Christopher Hitchens, author of “God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything.”

The Freethought Radio Program, hosted by the co-presidents of the Freedom From Religion Foundation, has been airing on Air America’s Madison, Wis., affiliate since April 2006.

I think I’ll send them a copy of TIA. I’m not sure which would be more amusing, to go on the show or to discover they’re afraid to have me on the show.

This news is strangely remniscent of when a game parody news site announced that “Sega reveals secret plans to sink Dreamcast”.

Apparently not:

The Science Museum in London has cancelled Professor Watson’s sell-out speaking engagement tonight, on the ground that his views have gone “beyond the point of acceptable debate”. A spokesman also claimed that “the Science Museum does not shy away from debating controversial topics”….

As well as intellectual cowardice, the Science Museum is guilty of hypocrisy. On October 30, it will hold an event called Is Science Colour-Blind? “Might race have a useful role to play in contemporary science? Talk about the legacies of scientific racism today . . .” runs the blurb.

This whole controversy demonstrates the hypocrisy and fundamentally false pretensions of the scientific community and its worshipful followers. (You know, those who claim that the scientific racism of eugenics never existed because it was “bad science”, apparently as opposed to today’s “good science”.) It isn’t anywhere nearly as impartial and empirical as scientists would have us believe, all too often, it is the very con game that science fetishists claim religion to be.

UPDATE: Can you even imagine the outrage in the scientific community if a Nobel Prize winner was suspended for questioning the existence of God or arguing that Man was descended from animals? But I have no doubt that we’ll see their dedication to unscientific equalitarian ideological dogma trumps their nominal dedication to the spirit of free scientific inquiry.

James Watson, the co-discoverer of DNA’s molecular structure, was suspended at the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in New York after his comments questioning the intelligence of Africans were reported in a U.K. newspaper.

This proves the claims about the fundamental impartiality of science to be a complete joke. Science is arguably MORE dogmatic than religion; one can never be sure whether one is violating the tenets of the scientific faith or not since those tenets are subjective, prone to mutation and are never articulated in an explicit, codified form.

UPDATE II: To my surprise, and to PZ Myer’s credit, he has openly criticized CSHL’s action despite his quixotic position on the complete non-existence of scientific evidence on intelligence. Of course, given the low level of discourse at Pharyngula, I suppose that’s not terribly difficult to understand.

Daniel Hannan methodically takes them apart, one by one:

Gordon Brown was every bit as wooden, perfunctory and unconvincing as expected. He trotted out all the standard claims about the Euro-constitution, but his heart wasn’t in it. He knows, and we know, and he knows that we know, that it’s piffle.

This is simply yet another Continental invasion of the British Isles, abetted by British traitors. That it takes the form of bureaucrats instead of soldiers only makes it less violent, at least until one of the so-called member states tries to leave.

I’ve seen far too many bugs to think that combining software with high explosive cannons is anything but a fundamentally risky idea:

Robot Cannon Kills 9, Wounds 14
Once in a while, though, these machines start firing mysteriously on their own. The South African National Defence Force “is probing whether a software glitch led to an antiaircraft cannon malfunction that killed nine soldiers and seriously injured 14 others during a shooting exercise on Friday.

Apocalyptic techno-heretics anticipate the Singularity, but this incident demonstrates that it’s not necessarily going to be the wondrous event that the apotheosans imagine.

It seems when push comes to shove, PZ Myers prefers politically correct myth to science:

James Watson’s sold-out lecture in London has been cancelled. I guess making bogus accusations about the congenital stupidity of a whole continent has consequence.

I strongly suspect that the misguided atheist belief in what they suppose to be the religious individual’s “fear” of science is actually projection of their own fear of their one god – science – dismantling their own core beliefs for which they know they have no scientific justification.

For example, there is absolutely no scientific justification for the political doctrine of equality. Absolutely all of the scientific evidence points to human inequality, therefore the logical scientist – of which there are many – knows that the method by which he attempts to guide his life undermines many of his most cherished beliefs. Thus, they are functionally schizophrenic, unless they develop a narcissistic (in the Herman Hesse sense) ideology of extreme rational materialism which precludes all such non-scientific factors.

PZ’s statement is particularly amusing given his statement a few months ago that asserted nothing should be sacrosanct from scientific investigation.

Derbyshire notes with dismay that the Midwest is turning Mexican:

I heard a couple of times the remark that in this little corner of rural Iowa, the student body in the schools is half Hispanic. The remark was passed in a polite, diffident and non-condemnatory way—of course! this is Iowa—and when I tried to probe, people just retreated into niceness (“These Mexican restaurants are really great!”)

Still, I found it hard to believe, surrounded as I was by Lundqvists and Muellers. In an idle moment, however, I looked up the stats on GreatSchools.net. Sure enough, the “Student Stats” on GreatSchools for Storm Lake show percentages Hispanic as:

* High school: 32
* Middle School: 43
* Elementary schools: 53, 66, 63, 53.

There’s nothing wrong with that, so long as you don’t mind living in a barrio. Immigrants create enough problems as it is, but a migration fundamentally changes the nature of the destination. And 60 percent of the next generation is a massive migration by any historical measure.