Exploring The Creation Museum – America’s New Mecca of Fanatical Ignorance
Excellent article on religious super-fundamentalism!
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Tag: crazed and dangerous
Ben Stein, who we no doubt all know and love from his appearances on Ferris Bueller’s Day Off and Win Ben Stein’s Money, has made a little movie. It’s called Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed (my thoughts exactly), and it’s a cute little rickroll of an adventure flick with Pro-Nazi Chuck Darwin leading the hoary brigades on a fell mission of genocide and eugenics. Only problem is, it’s a big fat fart-sucking lie. Unfortunately for Mister Stein, he got all of his facts wrong. Well, nearly all, as the credits (both opening and closing) do appear to be accurate.
Here, then, is Scientific American’s John Rennie and Steve Mirsky, reporting on the pitiful, outright lies perpetrated in this ridiculous movie.
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unholy thing
Oh my god. This creepy, unthinking mechanical thing is the precursor to the terrible things that will replace us. I, for one, welcome them with open arms.
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The Highest Cost of War
If i were living in a video game, i would probably do video game things: senseless slaughter, reckless driving, and generally causing mayhem. It’s sure as hell fun in a video game.
I’d probably have a real itchy trigger finger; blowing character’s heads clean off would cause me to ceaselessly cackle as i wheel about looking for more victims, and more nastiness to get into.
Soldiers, however, do not live in video games. They kill real people. Actual human beings, with lives and families and friends and day jobs – be they evildoers or just innocent civilians, caught in the line of fire. Sometimes, though, things go wrong. Horribly, horribly wrong.
Frankly, it’s getting a little tedious, hearing and reading about all the civilian deaths in Iraq. It has been going on for a long time, after all.
That’s why i put off reading this The Nation piece (alt.link.print) for about a week before i got around to reading it.
The Iraq War is a vast and complicated enterprise… Fighting in densely populated urban areas has led to the indiscriminate use of force and the deaths at the hands of occupation troops of thousands of innocents.
I can not and will not blame soldiers en masse or individually. It’s a real bad situation over there, and we need to get those guys out of there as quickly as we possibly can, before more soldiers crack under pressure and bring the whole damn thing down.
It’s ok to be against the war and NOT spit on returning soldiers. That kind of folly is for idiot hippies with misguided frustration. These guys need a lot of help, from many different angles. War does terrible things to a man’s soul. But we must have hope that these inner demons can be defeated, every last one of them, for every last soldier who was there and saw bad things happen.
The bottom line: we’ve gotta get out of that place.
In the four long years of the war, the mounting civilian casualties have already taken a heavy toll–both on the Iraqi people and on the US servicemembers who have witnessed, or caused, their suffering. Iraqi physicians… published a study late last year… that estimated that 601,000 civilians have died since the March 2003 invasion… [They] found that coalition forces were responsible for 31 percent of these violent deaths, an estimate they said could be “conservative,” since “deaths were not classified as being due to coalition forces if households had any uncertainty about the responsible party.”
“Just the carnage, all the blown-up civilians, blown-up bodies that I saw,” Specialist [Jeff] Englehart said. “I just–I started thinking, like, Why? What was this for?”
“It just gets frustrating,” Specialist [Garett] Reppenhagen said. “Instead of blaming your own command for putting you there in that situation, you start blaming the Iraqi people…. So it’s a constant psychological battle to try to, you know, keep–to stay humane.”
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religion is phony
I’ve been pretty down about my PC lately. It’s hard to read the screen most of the time, and it crashes often, failing to reboot about 90% of the time. But I just had to try and write this.
I just picked up Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion. It’s a thoroughly enjoyable, inspiring, and engrossing work. So I’ve been thinking lately, you could easily guess, about religion and god and death/afterdeath and all that.
Here’s what I’ve come up with:
Looks like the Army may get its way: Rumsfeld is quitting a disgraceful failure. The man who made Saddam Hussein is finally leaving.
These are good times, indeed!
Former CIA chief Robert Gates may be taking over. I’d like to think that any human being (or chimpanzee, for that matter) could do the job of U.S. Secretary of Defense better than Donald Rumsfeld has, but I’m not counting my chickens until they botch the war in Iraq further. Kind of feels like waiting for the other shoe to drop in a way, doesn’t it?
More human remains have been found at the former site of the World Trade Center.
According to the Washington Post article above, ~20,000 pieces of people have thus far been found. ~2,749 died in the attack. This means that, statistically, every person who died at the World Trade Center that day was blown into an average of about 7 pieces.
Really brings it home, huh?
Check out this angrily passionate editorial by the great Keith Olbermann re: the new, absolutely diabolical Military Commissions Act. (Read up on it and know that this is terrible and insane.)
[youtube]uqxmPjB0WSs[/youtube]
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Foley’s follies
Foley’s Alleged Priest Molester Named
So… I suppose this makes it… okay now?
Just like a Republican to turn around when he’s being accused of some heinous act and suddenly point the finger at somebody else. Poor priest probably never even touched the bastard. Maybe.
I can hear his voice, lo, across the great digital expanse:
“Well, yeah, I guess I did sort of do the wrong thing, kind of. But he’s the one who really did it! He made me! If it wasn’t for him, I wouldn’t have done anything wrong at all, ever! It’s all his fault! I didn’t really do anything, really!”
Massive props to Karina Garcia, Political Chair of the Chicano Caucus at Columbia University, where she is a senior, for taking on that racist, slimey, pig-fucker Jim Gilchrist (founder of the anti-Mexican Minuteman Project, a vigilante group which patrols the US-Mexican border, taking the law into its own shotgun-carrying hands).
Recently, he was at Columbia University, where his lap dogs kicked a student, who was passing in front of the stage, in the face. The resulting chaos, in which students waved banners and protested peacefully, was labeled by his hatemonger group (and, go figure, by FOXNews) as a “riot” by “thugs”! You can see a clip of this happening at the link below. Hopefully someone will post this to YouTube soon…
Check out the RealPlayer video of Gilchrist on the progressive syndicated program “Democracy Now!” (128k stream, 256k stream) where he abruptly cuts off a barely-begun debate as soon as he is asked a question. What a coward.
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Issues
Having CSS issues with IE (even IE7). Still trying to figure out why. So far, Big Urgent Wish works absolutely perfectly in Firefox and Opera, but in IE7 there’s irrational whitespace to the right (about the width of one of the sidebars), causing a horizontal scrollbar, while IE6 isn’t applying the opacity filter to the center div or footer (a width issue is my first guess on that one).
Once I get these issues ironed out, I’ll upload the thing and see what happens then.
[UPDATE] Just got back from Grog‘s (picking up CDs to review for the Chickenfish Speaks) and groceries. To make a crap day off crappier, on the way there, the “low tire pressure” light came on. Fearing an impending flat, I bolted, stopping at the gas station to pay 50 cents for three minutes of standing in the wind and rain, wishing I had a tire gauge and a flashlight. One tire was missing a stem cap, so that’s probably all it was, since all of the tires seemed reasonably inflated to me.Did anyone see Bush’s press conference today? Scary, creepy, and pathetic. I’ll blog more about that later.
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Brainlessness at Reuters
Joe Maguire lost his job at Reuters for writing a book about Ann Coulter. The book is called Brainless: The Lies and Lunacy of Ann Coulter.
Reuters confirmed that Mr. Maguire was granted conditional approval to write his book on Ms. Coulter… When asked what changed once the book was ready, a company statement pointed to Reuters’ principles of “integrity, independence and freedom from bias.â€
So what is all this talk about Liberal media? And before you point out that Mr. Maguire’s book may or may not be left of the dial, a book is one thing, but news is another thing entirely. By firing a guy for pointing out that Ann Coulter is – duh! – a mindless raving lunatic (and doing so in a perfectly legitimate venue), they are effectively supporting biased journalism of a far worse kind than that which could have ever conceivably come from Mr. Maguire himself.
And anyway, if pointing out that the Emperor* is wearing no clothes** makes you a traitor, then does that make unbiased journalists insurgents?
* 1 Coulter; or, 2 mainstream media in general
** 1 is a blathering idiot; or, 2 has no business presenting a blathering idiot’s foolish, inane lies as the truth
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Mark Foley (R-Fla) is a… Democrat?
Fox News is now pretending that disgraced Republican congressman Mark Foley is a Democrat! Simply incredible. The lies and bullshit that they spew on the unsuspecting and curiously unbefuddled masses just continue to grow in scope and effect. How this may affect the elections is anybody’s guess, but if enough people who get their news exclusively from Fox are duped that easily, it may turn ugly.
Crocodile Hunter Steve Irwin killed by stingray | The Australian
I always thought this poor guy took things a little too far. Maybe he was just crazy or had a death wish. R.I.P. Steve Irwin :(