Tag: trainwreck

Our underoos are not magic!

This announcement betrays an almost shocking naivete concerning human nature:

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has declared that it is
offended by ridicule about the undergarments worn by its faithful and
references to them as “magical underwear”.

A video released by the church on YouTube compared the underwear, known as “temple
garments”, to nuns habits, priests’ cassocks, Jewish prayer shawls,
Muslim skull caps, and the robes of Buddhist monks.

It said: “Some people incorrectly refer to temple garments as magical, or
magic underwear. These words are not only inaccurate but offensive to
members of the church. There is nothing mystical or magical about temple garments and church
members ask for the same degree of respect and sensitivity that would be
afforded to any other faith by people of good will.”

Look, I have zero problem with Mormons. They are, by and large, good people. Numerous readers here are Mormon. Larry Correia, Brad Torgersen, and Orson Scott Card are all Mormons. They may harbor a few strange beliefs, but then, so do I. But look, you simply cannot wear special, funny-looking underwear and expect people to find no amusement in it. You just can’t! And then informing the pulic your underwear stirs “the deepest feelings of
the soul” is just asking, nay, demanding amusement at your expense.

The Church would do much better to grin and bear it than try to play the offense card on that basis. Because, like it or not, underwear is intrinsically funny to most people and “magic underwear” is downright off the charts.

UPDATE: Josh has a better solution:

Honestly…the best way for them to handle this would be to say: “Because of our masculinity and virility, we Mormons require undergarments that offer more support for our massive penises.”

Once, twice, three times a failure

They’re not called The Stupid Party for nothing:

Romney, the 2012 GOP presidential nominee and now the tacit head of the Republican Party, visited Iowa as part of a feverish nationwide tour designed to help the GOP take control of the Senate. He has insisted that he is not interested in running for president a third time. But his friends said a flurry of behind-the-scenes activity is nudging him to more seriously consider it.

Sometimes, people seriously ask me why I’m not a Republican. I usually just laugh. In part due to things like this. America has just staggered into its sixth year of the Obola-ridden Democratic administration, so naturally the Republicans are discussing whether to field a legacy, a loser, a lardass, or a legal immigrant.

A failure in tech support

Spacebunny has an amusing encounter with Adobe’s fascinating approach to technical support.

Space Bunny ‏@Spacebunnyday
I have a new focus for my battle. @Adobe they are the reason I can’t print…..

Adobe Customer Care ‏@AdobeCare
@Spacebunnyday Hi there, can you provide more detail on your printing issue? Which Adobe app are you using? ^M

Space Bunny ‏@Spacebunnyday
@AdobeCare Reader – document could not be printed, no pages selected message. Uninstalled XI reinstalled version 8 and it works.

Adobe Customer Care ‏@AdobeCare
@Spacebunnyday Glad it has been sorted- thanks for letting us know! ^M

Space Bunny ‏@Spacebunnyday
I like the fact that you don’t CARE that your newest version doesn’t work….

Full points to Adobe Customer Care for being proactive and trawling Twitter in search of customer problems to attack. That’s great. But we really do have to subtract a few points for reading comprehension. And their subsequent response is not exactly confidence inspiring.

Mailvox: Abomination and Galatians 3:28

Needless to say, I did not respond in a supportive manner:

The Galatians 3:28 Movement is a grassroots Christian movement (of all denominations) demanding civil rights and marriage equality for all people — straight, gay, of any race, of any orientation, non-cisgendered, etc.  This movement has no leadership and is completely organic.

Galatians 3:28 states:  “There is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.”

Now, many people get the first part about race not being important to Jesus (but unfortunately not everyone does as there are still tons racists around).  But most people ignore the second half where Jesus explicitly denies the importance of gender. For Jesus, gender and gender differences are unimportant.

Then why do we still insist that marriage be between a “man and a woman”?  This outdated, non-Christian way of thinking only highlights gender difference, the exact thing Jesus was trying to get away from.

In other words, for marriage, your gender does not matter.  Marriage can be between a man and a woman; two men; two women;  or between transgendered people.   Jesus loves everyone.  And that is what Galatians 3:28 is all about.  Marriage equality and civil rights.

Share some love.  Spread the word of Christ.  Support marriage equality and civil rights.

Another verse springs to mind. Namely, Isaiah 5:20.

Woe to those who call evil good and good evil, who put darkness for light and light for darkness, who put bitter for sweet and sweet for bitter. 

One certainly can’t say that America doesn’t fully merit a plague or two these days.

Brave women warriors

What was that again about women being capable of front-line combat?

The man who scaled the White House fence and was able to run through the front doors made it farther into the building than was previously reported, CBS News has learned. Secret Service Director Julia Pierson is scheduled to answer questions about the incident when she appears at a hearing of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Tuesday morning.

The man, 42-year-old Omar J. Gonzalez, ran unobstructed for 70 yards across the front lawn of the White House before entering through the North Portico. On the way, he brushed by a Secret Service officer with a drawn gun, sources tell CBS News’ Bill Plante.

Gonzalez then proceeded to run through the entrance hall to the cross hall of the White House, past the staircase that leads up to the first family’s residence. He was confronted by a female Secret Service agent, who he overpowered, and made it all the way to the East Room, Rep. Jason Chaffetz, R-Utah, told CBS News, citing whistleblowers.

If trained, armed Secret Service agents aren’t able to deal with unarmed lunatics, what chance do they have against battle-hardened ISIS soldiers and elite Spetsnaz special forces?

And just think, the people overseeing these jokers are responsible for dealing with the Ebola crisis….

The anti-NFL SJWs seek more scalps

Now Floria wants to see Baltimore’s president, general manager, coach, and possibly owner to be hounded from the league as well:

The Ravens contend that the ESPN report contains “numerous errors,
inaccuracies, false assumptions and, perhaps, misunderstandings,” but
the Ravens have identified none of them yet.  Apparently, the list
alleged errors, inaccuracies, false assumptions, and perhaps
misunderstanding is coming next week, after their game against the
Browns.

Sorry, but that’s not nearly good enough.  One of the league’s
billion-dollar network partners has pinned on the Ravens and the NFL a
report that, if accurate, should result in the termination of the
employment of Cass, Newsome, and perhaps even Harbaugh.  Likewise, real
questions should be raised about Steve Bisciotti’s fitness to own the
team, if the report is accurate and if he had any knowledge of the
coverup.  (Or perhaps even if he didn’t.)

This is getting BEYOND ridiculous. The idea that an organization might *gasp* attempt to protect its own interests rather than embark upon an anti-domestic violence crusade aimed at one of its employees is not even newsworthy, let alone a rational basis for decimating its employees. There is no “coverup”.

As I have said from the start, the NFL should announce that domestic violence is, like every other crime, neither its responsibility nor its concern, and declare that it is leaving all such matters up to the relevant criminal justice system. For the obvious reason that it isn’t.

And Roger Goodell needs to be fired. Not because he is insufficiently concerned about the poor widdle womens who ain’t never done nothing but get beat on, but because he opened this whole can of worms with his own posturing attempts to curry favor with the Social Justice Whores.

The Ebola exponent

This, combined with socionomics will explain why we’ve been seeing all the pandemic-related television shows of late:

Right now we’ve had more than 5,000 cases of Ebola, and at least 2,600 people have died. Some scientists, like Alessandro Vespignani at Northeastern University in Boston, are taking numbers like that and putting them into computer models to see where this epidemic is going. “For instance, in our modeling, by mid-October, we’re already between 10,000 to 25,000 cases,” he says.

Five thousand cases of Ebola is bad; 10,000 to 25,000 is unbelievable. And that’s where the exponential curve comes into play. “Well,
an exponential curve is a curve that doubles every certain amount of
time,” Vespignani says. And with this outbreak, cases are doubling every
three to four weeks. So if help doesn’t arrive in time — and
the growth rate stays the same — then 15,000 Ebola cases in mid-October
could turn into 30,000 cases by mid-November, and 60,000 cases by
mid-December.

Meanwhile, aid efforts are hampered, to put it mildly, by the local fauna:

The bodies of eight people, including several health workers and three journalists, have been found days after they were attacked while distributing information about Ebola in a Guinean village near the city of Nzerekore, according to Reuters.

“The eight bodies were found in the village latrine,” Albert Damantang Camara, a spokesman for Guinea’s government, told Reuters on Thursday. “Three of them had their throats slit.”

Quarantine and closing the borders, as Sierra Leone is doing, would suffice to keep Ebola out of the West. So, naturally, the globalists in office prefer to literally import the disease and expose thousands of soldiers and aid workers to it in Africa, thereby risking a global pandemic, rather than simply leave the independent African nations to their own resources and permitting the epidemic to safely run its course.

And if the World Health reports that the statistics are being underreported are correct, the exponential curve may already be in effect.

Fallout from the Rice debacle

Since Ray Rice was suspended indefinitely for one punch aimed at an adult woman, how can the NFL avoid indefinitely suspending All Day for “child abuse”:

Vikings running back Adrian Peterson will not play on Sunday against the Patriots after he was indicted on a charge of injury to a child. The Vikings announced the decision to deactivate Peterson on Friday, two hours after news broke that he had been indicted by a grand jury in Houston.

The move comes during the same week that the NFL has come under withering criticism stemming from the video showing Ravens running back Ray Rice beating up his wife. The Ravens released Rice and the NFL suspended him indefinitely.

It’s far too early to know whether the Vikings could release Peterson — a notion that would have been absolutely unthinkable a few hours ago — or whether the NFL could suspend him indefinitely. But in this week like no other in the NFL’s history, nothing can be ruled out.

This highlights the absolute absurdity of Goodell’s insane new standard. If they’re concerned about damage to the league, the number of people wearing Ray Rice jerseys at the recent Ravens game should give them a clue about how people will react to kicking a Hall of Fame running back out of the league in his prime.

And let’s face it, this “child abuse” is every bit as serious as the “domestic violence” of the Rice case:

According to the report, Peterson said he did it to punish the child for pushing another one of Peterson’s children while they were playing a video game. The report says Peterson grabbed a tree branch, removed the leaves and struck the 4-year-old repeatedly.

The child’s injuries reportedly included cuts and bruises to the child’s back, buttocks, ankles, legs and scrotum, along with defensive wounds to the child’s hands. According to the report, Peterson texted the boy’s mother and acknowledged what he had done and that she would be “mad at me about his leg. I got kinda good wit the tail end of the switch.”

According to the report, the child told authorities, “Daddy Peterson hit me on my face” and said he feared Peterson would punch him in the face if he found out police knew about the incident.

Adrian Peterson shouldn’t be deactivated or suspended. Goodell had better reinstate Rice right quickly and then announce that it is not the NFL’s job to police its players’ domestic relations or he’s going to find himself accused of running a racist, predominantly white league sooner than anyone believes possible.

Also, fire Roger Goodell. His constant efforts to supplicate to the female non-fans is actually harming the league now.

A non-starter

A good idea doomed to failure by the rapacious US tax bureaucracy:

Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) is slated to introduce legislation next week
that would revoke the U.S. citizenship of anyone fighting or providing
support to terrorist groups working to attack the United States. Cruz said he is filing the Expatriate Terrorist Act in reaction to
the threat posed by the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS). It would
provide another level of protection to prevent foreign fighters from
re-entering the United States, he said.

Prediction: once the IRS realizes that this legislation would provide an cost-efficient means for expatriates to get rid of their US citizenship, it will become a non-starter. In fact, with the recent 400 percent increase in administrative fees, (it now costs about $2,500 to drop your citizenship even though it’s about a two-minute process) it would probably cost less to do it by simply donating to ISIS.

PZ admits he’s wrong

And then promptly proceeds to dig the hole deeper. Based on his National Merit status, he’s got to have the raw cognitive capacity to do better, but it’s sometimes hard to believe because he so regularly renders himself functionally stupid. It’s as if he’s got some sort of religious derangement syndrome that handicaps his intellectual faculties. 

“The other day, I said that his book, The Irrational Atheist, was self-published. I was wrong. He actually bamboozled a publisher into taking it on.”

As one might expect, PZ is characteristically gracious about admitting his error. TIA was originally headed for publication by Crown Forum when a bigger name, David Berlinski, proposed a similar book just as Crown was on the verge of sending me a contract to write it. The editor decided, reasonably enough, that one book on the topic would be sufficient for their needs and chose Berlinski over me. I gave Glenn at BenBella a call to see if he was interested and he snapped it up right away. No bamboozling was required. It seems strange to have to explain this, but most publishers are very happy to receive book proposals on interesting subjects from popular bloggers. I’ve had standing offers from publishers who are pretty much willing to publish whatever non-fiction I want to write for years.

One of the few remaining Pharyngulans is so desperate to try to DISQUALIFY me that he suggested I paid BenBella Books to have it published. Never mind the obvious fact that I had previously contributed to several BenBella anthologies. Or the 100+ reviews and the fact that after six years, the Kindle ranking for TIA is still respectable at  “#28 in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Religion & Spirituality > Atheism” 

The Devil’s Delusion, on the other hand is at  #42 in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Religion & Spirituality > Atheism. But it has 237 reviews, so one has to conclude that Jed made a reasonable call in going with Berlinski. I suspect TIA might have done even better than TDD did with the benefit of Crown’s marketing muscle behind it, but I can’t criticize the decision, even in in retrospect. Remember, the call had to be made prior to either book actually being written.

“I said it was ridiculous for him to claim that he was cited in scientific publications, when what he was really doing was claiming that people who didn’t cite him at all were actually citing him. It’s bizarre, but he’s doubling down. He claims that Scott Atran was using his ‘data’ about the number of religious wars, which he had to have gotten from his book. I think we can safely lay this one to rest: Vox Day/Theodore Beale is not the source of any data or hypothesis published by Scott Atran in Nature.”

Who said anything about Scott Atran in Nature? PZ brought up Atran, not me. Look, I don’t read Nature. I don’t follow Scott Atran. I don’t hunt for references to my historical proof that religion doesn’t cause war. People simply happen to send me news about things they think might be of interest to me on a regular basis. The only reference I ever noticed myself was the recent one in the New York Times. Anyhow, as was brought to my attention two years ago, I was the original
source of the data Atran cited in a 2012 article called “God and the
Ivory Tower”.

Moreover, the chief complaint against religion — that it is history’s
prime instigator of intergroup conflict — does not withstand scrutiny.
Religious issues motivate only a small minority of recorded wars. The
Encyclopedia of Wars surveyed 1,763 violent conflicts across history;
only 123 (7 percent) were religious”
– “God and the Ivory Tower”, August 6, 2012

“He claims to have inspired other studies…. Strange. I am not autistic to any noticeable degree, and have never been diagnosed as such. That makes it odd to claim I am the inspiration for a “hypothesis”.”

It’s a little more noticeable than PZ thinks. Self-awareness is not his strong suit. From a 2007 post entitled The socially autistic atheist: “Based on Wired Magazine’s observation that atheists tend to be
quarrelsome, socially challenged men, to say nothing of the unpleasant
personalities of leading public atheists such as Richard Dawkins,
Christopher Hitchens and Michel Onfray, one could reasonably hypothesize
that there is likely to be a strong correlation between Asperger’s and
atheism. It’s by no means a scientific test, but it is interesting to
note the coincidence that 59 of the virulent atheists over at Dr. PZ
Myers place report an average score on the Asperger’s Quotient test of 27.8. And this does not include the two individuals who actually have Asperger’s but did not report any test results.”

As PZ himself said: “I took the test and scored a 24, an “average math contest winner.” You need a 32 to suggest Asperger’s, and a 15 is the average. So there. I don’t have Asperger’s, I’m just cruel and insensitive.”

Hence the term “socially autistic” rather than “autistic”. The adjective modifies the noun. It’s not surprising PZ’s AQ score is higher than the norm on the autism spectrum because he is observably a “quarrelsome, socially challenged” man. I scored 14, by the way. Unlike PZ, I possess empathy, athletic experience, and social skills that help temper my high intelligence. I’m not as literal and pedantic as one might conclude from reading the blog, that is just an artifact of having had scores of people like PZ scouring my every written word looking for something, anything, to attack and use to DISQUALIFY for over a decade.

“Most importantly, there is no citation of Theodore Beale, or Vox Day, or The Irrational Atheist, or ‘that misogynistic asshole on the internet’. You’d think this would be rather obvious: you don’t get to count it as a citation if you aren’t cited.”

I was curious when I saw a report of the study in the news, so I emailed one of the authors and asked her if her team had derived the hypothesis from TIA or from this blog. She emailed me back, confirmed that they had in fact gotten it from TIA, and asked if I would like to be cited. I thanked her and told her it wasn’t necessary because I was merely curious if it was sheer coincidence or not. I’m not a scientist and I’m not at all concerned about petty scientistic credential games. I’m certainly not concerned with their little rules about who get to take credit and how. The facts are what they are. I deal in reality, not scientistry.

“And the final damning straw: the much vaunted paper by Hooker that claims a vaccination/autism link, that was promoted by Vox Day, has been retracted. He’s basically wrong about everything.”

No. I have not been wrong about anything he’s addressed here. I am smarter than PZ Myers and one reason he hates me is that I demonstrate this so easily every single time he pushes his godless corpulence up from the ground long enough to get slapped down again. The reason Dr. Hooker’s paper was retracted was not because it was flawed, but because he obtained much more conclusive proof of his claim that the CDC was hiding apparent evidence of a specific vaccination/autism link.

On the very same day that PZ was erroneously claiming I was wrong about this “final damning straw”, Dr. William Thompson, a senior scientist at the CDC, issued a statement through his lawyer proving that I was right to take Dr. Hooker’s assertion about statistical fraud at the CDC seriously.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE-AUGUST 27,2014

STATEMENT OF WILLIAM W. THOMPSON, Ph.D., REGARDING THE 2004 ARTICLE EXAMINING THE POSSIBILITY OF A RELATIONSHIP  BETWEEN  MMR VACCINE AND AUTISM

PZ Myers must be a remarkably dishonest man on the basis of his long-held, oft-expressed opinion that I am prone to dishonesty. One would think that after all these years of nipping at my ankles, he would have learned by now that while I do occasionally make mistakes, and I do occasionally take at face value reports that turn out to be false, I do not lie when I am writing on the blog. Not because I’m perfectly honest, but because I’m not perfectly stupid.

I also make a habit of doing the sort of look-before-you-leap research with which PZ never bothers. Which is why when he’s saying one thing and I’m saying another, the very safe bet is on the latter.