Vox Popoli

The OC shares a beautiful moment of irony:

Minnesota Public Radio was supposed to host a big public forum on global warming last night —

(drum roll, please)

— but they had to cancel it because of the blizzard.

I grew up in Minnesota. I’ve been outside in too many 40-below wind chills to view global warming as anything but a Very Good Thing. As for the threat to the coasts, screw them. If that means ocean swells swamping Washington DC and New York on one side and Hollywood and San Francisco on the other, I’ll start running my air conditioner with the windows open this summer.

How you like flyover country now, bitch?

Even the top lefties have serious comprehension issues:

Democratic Party boss Howard Dean demanded that Republican presidential candidates denounce conservative columnist Ann Coulter after she referred to Democratic presidential hopeful John Edwards as a “faggot” during a speech Friday at a national conservative gathering.

Coulter, who was addressing the Conservative Political Action Conference in Washington, D.C., said:

“I was going to have a few comments on the other Democratic presidential candidate John Edwards, but it turns out you have to go into rehab if you use the word “faggot,” so I — so kind of an impasse, can’t really talk about Edwards.”

Of course we all know that this was a roundabout way of insulting Senator Hairbrush, but you can’t claim that someone called someone something that they quite clearly did not. Saying “I can’t talk about X because I am not allowed to say Y” certainly allows us to deduce a desire to call X Y, but it is not the same thing as actually doing so.

It’s an open question as to whether Dean would have looked more or less ridiculous if he had more accurately complained that Miss Coulter had not referred to John Edwards with a logging slur. What is the world coming to when a leading political commentator refuses to refer to a political candidate as a collection of wood?

Not to defend Ann, she’s a big girl and perfectly capable of taking care of herself, but the ironic thing is that I find the tree-related interpretation to be more descriptive of Edwards than the sex-related one. He may be a pretty boy, but he has never struck me as being a big Pet Shop Boys fan.

You have to hand it to Ann, though. If I was John Edwards’ PR guy, I’d want to take Howard Dean out and shoot him about now; the last thing Edwards needs is a bunch of Republicans solemnly intoning their sincere belief that he is not a flamer. I mean, what on Earth is the casual political observer going to make of all that. You’d think it was Team Clinton at work, except for the fact that Edwards is such an obvious non-starter.

UPDATE: Hog on Ice calls everyone out: “You’re on the pro-slur side or you’re not. You can’t straddle the border.”

Right, put me down on the pro-slur side, twinkletoes.

PS: Just for the record, I believe that it is important that we all make a formal statement regarding our beliefs about John Edwards’ sexual orientation. So, for the record, let me state that I do not believe John Edwards enjoys having sex with men.

I suspect that for Senator Hairbrush, having a hairdresser of either sex run hands through his hair for an hour or two is all the pleasure he needs.

For humanity. But we may not even need fembots to finish us off:

A chap working for an iPhone news site claims that a reputable source who wishes to remain anonymous (it’s funny how they are always reputable and always anonymous) tipped him that WoW is coming to Apples first mobile. This source claims that they have seen a beta version of the game running on the iPhone with full touch screen functionality….

At present we here at Pocket Gamer think this is unlikely. To go from Tetris to WoW in one bound is kind of like going from warm milk with honey in it to crack. However (wait for it…) there are a few things to consider here. Believed to have (careful wording, Carlos you have made me paranoid) at least one ARM11 processor on board, the iPhone could easily be capable of outperforming something like the Nintendo DS in the graphics department and certainly has its share of processing grunt under the hood.

I have to admit, after the first flush of technoptimism wore off and I realized that the iPhone wouldn’t do half of what I require in a mobile device, I had decided to stick with the Treo line. But I’ll admit, WoW or any decent MMO onboard would make me switch in a heartbeat.

Or perhaps a more accurate conclusion would be that National Review is no longer even pretending to be conservative. I shall henceforth remove it from my list of Day Trips and move it to a more appropriate venue, namely, Target-Rich Environments:

Any delay in improving the integrity of identification documents is potentially dangerous, but the administration’s move was probably a practical necessity. What’s important is that it stood by REAL ID.
– The Editors

I have never been so pleased with the well-deserved Republican massacre this past November. And I look forward to Hillary Clinton’s inevitable victory, not because I expect anything but even more national socialism from the Lizard Queen than Bush is currently pushing, but because it will demonstrate the total fecklessness of the big government conservatives as well as prove my point about the inherent self-contradiction in putting political pragmatism above political principle.

I’ll still read National Review on a daily basis, as there are writers such as John Derbyshire, Ramesh Ponnuru, VDH and Jonah Goldberg that I quite like. But it seems that I shall henceforth be reading it in much the same way that I read the New York Times, primarily as a source of cannon fodder.

Our favorite atheidiot nobly stands by his words:

I am a biologist. Like it or not, the Republican party is being led by religious zealots who are anti-biology, who publicly and vigorously oppose reason and knowledge and evidence in my field of study. This hasn’t always been true, and it may not always be true (I hope), but right now and right here, it is inarguably the case. I will not throttle my criticisms of the despicable gang of anti-intellectuals who run this country because it might irritate all those millions of people who voted for George W. Bush; they were wrong and he is wrong and it is my responsibility as a scientist to oppose ignorance, especially ignorance that has power and influence. Let them find comfort and forgiveness for stupid mistakes in their religion, because I sure as hell am not going to give it to them.

Don’t tell me to be dispassionate or less unreasonable about it all because because 65% of the American population think creationism should be taught alongside evolution, or that Americans are just responding to common notions of “fairness”. That just tells me that we scientists have not been expressing our outrage enough. And yes, we should be outraged that the president of our country panders to theocrats, faith-healers, and snake-oil artists; sitting back and quietly explaining that Bush may be a decent man who is mistaken, while the preachers are stridently condemning all us evilutionists to hell, is a damned ineffective tactic that has gotten us to this point.

I say, screw the polite words and careful rhetoric. It’s time for scientists to break out the steel-toed boots and brass knuckles, and get out there and hammer on the lunatics and idiots. If you don’t care enough for the truth to fight for it, then get out of the way.

Perhaps he means this rhetorically. In which case, I refer those atheists who whine about rhetoric labling them as amoral assholes and socially autistic future kindling to Mr. Myers.

And if he doesn’t mean it in a rhetorical sense, then I’ll certainly be more than happy to debate the matter with Mr. Myers with the aforementioned steel-toed boots and brass knuckles.

Think of it as survival of the fittest, Mr. Biology.

The amusing thing about his outrage, as I have previously and repeatedly demonstrated, is that like his fellow atheists Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris, Pharyngurl is reliably dishonest. He claims to stand for reason and knowledge and evidence, while habitually abusing the first, lacking the second and ignoring the third.

He is, in short, a complete fraud outside of his particular field of expertise. (I shall grant him the benefit of the doubt and assume that he knows what he’s talking about there.) So he can get as mean and angry and loud as he likes, it won’t do him any good because his atheism and his sciencist ideology is constructed upon a foundation of intellectual sand.

UPDATE – Sweet Darwin, they’re learning! A Pharyngurlite comments: Religion may or not be a cause of most of the wars (I think religion at least facilitates war) in humanity’s history, but they keep on telling us that it can bring us peace. It has failed miserably.

This is one of the first times I’ve seen an atheist publicly demonstrate an awareness that the “religion causes wars” assertion is a non-starter. Of course, it’s not exactly hard to demonstrate how science facilitates war.

And it’s pretty easy to demonstrate that it is the scientific facilitation does far more damage to far more people. So, obviously if humanity wishes to pursue less lethal war, the first thing it should do is outlaw scientists.

One does have to wonder about the basic reading comprehension of these highly educated atheidiots, though. They always claim to have read the Bible, and then demonstrate a complete ignorance of what it actually says. How can you possibly get the idea that Christianity “keeps on telling us it can bring peace” given Jesus Christ’s words in Matthew 10:34

“Do not suppose that I have come to bring peace to the earth. I did not come to bring peace, but a sword.”

The Telegraph publishes a helpful list:

HOW TO SPOT A TOXIC WIFE

1 Women who are secure in themselves and have a more developed emotional intelligence and personal depth do not feel the need to show off. Check whether or not she is festooned with ‘designer’ accessories. Listen carefully to what she says. How often does she name-drop?

2 On first acquaintance, she will want to find out if you’re rich or not. If you find yourself discussing your assets within the first 10 minutes you know her agenda. She is not going to waste time on you if you don’t have serious money.

3 She will flirt without first finding out if you’re married or involved with someone else. She has no scruples about stealing another woman’s man.

4 Even though she may have an impressive job, her main asset is sex. She will come on in a highly provocative manner, be wearing lots of make-up and revealing clothes. Potential toxic wives are extremely clever. Do not equate intelligence with emotional values and worth.

5 Often she will use the FSFM tactic (feel sorry for me). This will manifest itself on the second or third date. She wants to assess how generous you can be and will tell you how ”naïve” she is and how “misled” by some nasty people she owes money to.

Although I recommend staying away from career women altogether, if you absolutely insist on dating one such, I’d strongly recommend talking to her co-workers early on in the relationship. If she’s a user who relies on other people, especially men, to cover for her inadequacies, don’t waste a single day in getting out of that relationship.

Actually, this would be beneficial to women as well. You can hide your character from someone you’re dating, at least for a while, but you can’t hide it from people who work with you for more than a short period of time.

In general, if a woman plays damsel in distress, you’d be better off marrying the monster.

Mr. Reversion to the Mean does it again:

One point, if I may, about the tempest-in-a-teapot stirred up by Leftist bloggers who seem to claim that it’s illegitimate to cite web responses in talkback features as though they had been edited and selected by the website itself. The decision to run unmoderated forums of the kind used at the Huffington Post is itself an editorial decision. Its purpose is to give readers a sense of ownership in the site, to provide them with a sense of community…to make them co-authors of the site in a sense. It’s a way of making and keeping loyal readers. That’s fine, but if your readers are also going to be your authors, you’ve got to bear some responsibility, even minimal responsibility, for what they say on your site.

That’s ridiculous. Absolutely, utterly ridiculous. The only editorial decision that has been made at the Huffington Post, or here for that matter, is to allow a very wide range of freedom of speech. That does not make me responsible in any way, shape or form for what you or anyone else chooses to post here.

Now, that being said, it is fair to characterize the readers at a site that permits such free speech on the basis of their comments. Huffington is being disingenuous when she claims, on no factual grounds, that the many posts expressing disappointment over Cheney’s survival do not represent the typical views of her readers. The correct answer is “insufficient evidence to derive a conclusion”, so her statement is incorrect, especially since the only available evidence suggests the opposite.

We do, however, have sufficient evidence to conclude that both Podhoretz and Huffington are functional morons.

As for the idea of the Iraqi rebels taking out Cheney, I suspect that a majority of readers there really do wish that they had. The much bigger problem for the Republican party is that I also suspect that a majority of readers on many conservative sites wish that the Iraqis had been successful, and also nailed the President, the Supreme Court and the Congress with him.

John Scalzi laments the death of a boy due to an infected tooth:

Some folks will want to blame the insurance system in the US. Some folks will want to blame the dentists. Some folks will want to blame the government. Some folks will want to blame the mother. Some folks will blame some combination of any or all of the above.

I’m not particularly interested in whom to blame. You all can argue about that. I just think it’s a shame that ultimately this kid is dead for no other reason than because he was poor.

While I agree that it is a genuine pity, one must note that the routine $80 tooth extraction “might” have saved him. Furthermore, don’t two operations and six weeks of hospital care cost a bit more than $80? How does poverty apply to being able to afford the latter and not the former?

Finally, how on Earth do two young boys manage to have seven cavities between them? Obviously we don’t know the facts, but I’m guessing that the family’s poverty didn’t get in the way of buying relatively expensive high-sugar trash instead of less expensive basic foods.

Scalzi is an intelligent man, but in this case, he’s letting his ideology sabotage his cognitive functions. Not only is it clearly NOT the case that there is “no other reason than because he was poor”, but there’s no indication, let alone proof that it had anything to do with his mother’s poverty.

And what about the boy’s father? Apparently he doesn’t come in for any of the blame… let’s just say it isn’t likely to be difficult to deduce some of the unreported facts of this sad case.

Poverty in Western society is relative and it cannot be solved by government action. Intelligent individuals with liberal leanings will continue to render themselves functionally stupid until they manage to get this through their decades-thick skulls. The only reason that it’s nearly impossible to see a doctor or dentist without insurance is due to the government policies that actively discourage them from doing so.

And if you think more government involvement is the answer to that, I’d strongly suggest visiting the UK or the Netherlands to understand just how badly that will backfire on you.

Since I can never remember who has requested an addition to the blogroll, but dimly recall that somebody recently made a request, this is the time and place to do so. The requirements are, as always:

1. Ask.
2. Have a link to this blog on your blogroll.
3. It must be an actual blog, not a coati porn site or whatever.

I’ll give pride of place among the new blogs to the one who can either name seven Umberto Eco books off the top of their head (counting English titles only) or name my favorite pop historian. And if there are any dead blogs currently on the rolls, please let me know that as well.

On an unrelated note, does anyone know if Windows Movie Maker lets you continue the audio from a video clip while superimposing a static or animated graphic over it? Something like the following, if A is the audio track for clip V:

A—————–
V—-|****|——-