Even on FOXNews, they’re bashing that poor moron. She doesn’t even understand the concept of Africa being a continent and not a country? Wow. That’s really something.
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Tag: sad and pathetic
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Sarah Palin is still an idiot
Originally published at jeremyjarratt.com. You can comment here or there.
Even on FOXNews, they’re bashing that poor moron. She doesn’t even understand the concept of Africa being a continent and not a country? Wow. That’s really something.
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Westboro Baptist movies
OMFG why didn’t anyone tell me about this!? Westboro Baptist Church apparently has its very own movies site! It’s hilarious and sad at the exact same time. The music videos are priceless! Why on earth do people like Rev. Dr. King and the Kennedys get shot while Fred Phelps is still walking???
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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ceiling still broke
Sunday night
Murray the landlord: “I’ll have a guy come out tomorrow to fix it.”
Monday
Tuesday afternoon
Old guy, about 85 years old stumbles into the house, walks past the front room, looks up at door jamb (??!).
Holly: “No, it’s over there, on the ceiling. In there. In there. No, up! Up! On the ceiling… see it? See it? In the other room. Look where I’m pointing.”
Old guy spots the giant hole in ceiling, says, somewhat exasperatedly, “Well, that’s probably going to cost around $200. I’ll have to get with Murray, see what he wants to do.”
Exit old guy.
Wednesday evening:
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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 II
And old high school friend of mine has been posting a bunch of junk bulletins on MySpace about how evolution is a “lie.” I sent him a fairly nasty response, but i thought it worth posting here, at least for the links at the end. I have corrected it for capitalization to make it easier to read; and added emphasis, because adding HTML code in MySpace (the first time around) might have janky consequences.
I’m sorry dude, but that kind of idiocy is pure mind-pollution. Face it: religion has ruined history, and it’s threatening to destroy humanity even now.
You can not debunk so many fields of natural science with one broad swath of a very dull blade. Science is what it is: an exploration of truth. Sometimes science is wrong, and then it ceases to be science. It is science’s goal to continually reevaluate itself and update its data when better facts come into focus. Science’s entire agenda is based on questioning – gasp! – ITSELF in the search for more and more accurate answers! Can the same be said of religion?
Evolution, however, is testable, and its evidence is all around us. Natural selection is simply a process that happens, not unlike the semi-millennial phenomenon of millions of overzealous Christians propping up a mad buffoon in some leadership role because they’re sure he’ll help to bring about the so-called “end times.”
How about this one: if the world is only a few thousand years old, then how come we can see, with the naked eye, objects in space, such as galaxies, that are clearly millions of light-years away? Can light, originating from these objects, suddenly travel faster than itself? Or, if the universe was “created” whole (the distance between objects vast from the beginning), then why is it expanding, with everything rushing away from everything else at incredible speed?
If god is trying to “trick” us into thinking the world is more than a few thousand years old by planting evidence of creatures hundreds of thousands of years in the past (which we can easily verify by measuring the amount of atomic decay of carbon-14, which has already been proven to have a half life of 5730 years), then what kind of a sick bastard is this deity, anyway?
No, sir, the biggest lie ever told is that there is some mystical figure up in the sky who can (through his human – and presumably fallible – interpreter, of course) get you to DO anything and, even worse, BELIEVE any stupid idea, out of pure primal fear of some terrible “eternal” punishment.
Religion is phony. An outright lie – which has cost untold millions of lives throughout history. Think for yourself and you’ll see what i mean. It’s time to put the toys away and stop playing a sick game of pretend with the goal of destroying all of humanity. That’s just evil.
No one can save us but ourselves. If you think there is some god who, in the whole of the universe, would bother saving the practically infinitesimal inhabitants of a tiny speck floating in the inky black void of space from themselves, then ask yourself where this god was throughout all the genocides and holocausts, all the tragedies and disasters of human history. Testing our faith? That’s just fucked up. If that’s the Christian idea of “god,” then “god” is one seriously warped asshole and i don’t want anything to do with it.
Sorry, R***. Just THINK about it, man. Don’t be duped by hustlers and con-men making big promises about things they ultimately know nothing about.
And now, i present to you some recommended reading:
http://www.ex-christian.net/
http://www.exchristian.org/
http://www.christianism.com/
http://www.infidels.org/library/modern/jim_meritt/bible-contradictions.html
http://www.losingmyreligion.com/Lookin’ out for you, friend,
~jer
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ouch
tonight Holly was cooking and the fire alarm went off. i jumped at it to try and twist it to get it down and shut it off and my hand hit the ceiling really hard and now my thumb feels broken but i think it’s ok – there’s not much swelling, although Holly had it iced almost immediately.
it hurts like a f—er.
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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?
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Thirty-five (is not alive)
I’m not sure, but I’ve become really disdainful of my own birthday over the past few years. All I want are for people to forget about it. Who cares? I don’t need no stinkin’ holiday! This year, I worked on my birthday, and thankfully had plenty of non-birthday-ness. At any rate, I had a good enough time, and blew far more money on myself than, in hindsight, I should have. Maybe it’s just that I want my birthday all to myself? Maybe I just don’t want to share? Maybe I’m just godless and don’t believe in no magical Jesuses and my increasingly heathen ways* are finally starting to affect more than just my outward worldview, but my inward self-image as well.
Maybe I just resent my childhood? Or is it my adulthood, which i most certainly detest, and with profound conviction? Maybe the mere passage of my increasingly limited time is not cause for celebration or merest remembrance to me.
Or maybe it’s just that much more special when only a couple of really close friends remember?
And maybe I need counseling for my crippling social phobia.
Having said that… your birthday is a special and magical day to me, gentle reader, and I do mean that. And, regardless, thanks to those good people who did remember. Please don’t do it again until further notice.
* ironically, less amoral and illicit
Sometimes I look at all the wonderful and good things that mere people have done throughout the vast, untold millennia of history, and I feel such an upwelling of pride for my fellow human beings, and the accomplishments of this incredible civilization that we have created, that I believe I just might explode.
And sometimes I just want to stab my fucking eyes out. O, how cruelly naive I can be!
Also at work today, i received an e-mail that gave me an idea for a new micro-podcast (which i’ve christened a nanocast; get it?), and the following, unrelated, e-mail (spacing, spelling, and complete and total obliteration of conventional rules of syntax and grammar intentionally left intact for humiliation):
Two thing return . 29.99 and 14.99 just one return no . Just two things back to you . Still owe me 14.99 that is correct and miss one don’t say 14.99 I bet that you forget put on it . Thanks !
[sic]
(Translation: I also returned another item which I noticed you do not have listed on the return confirmation e-mail which I have received but failed to include for your reference. Can you provide further information on this issue? Is it possible that it could have somehow been lost?
)
Q: What was the customer’s name?
| first name | last name |
|---|---|
| Tonto | Nahasapeemapetilon |
| Tumak | Rogers |
| Sharon | , The Ape Man |
| Ayla | Bartokomous |
| Tuong | Souphanousinphone |
A: If you guessed “Sharon Rogers,” you’d be sadly correct. Not only that, but she was from Arizona.
Bonus: If you can guess to whom those other names belong, you are not only smarter than “Sharon Rogers,” you are indeed worthy of being enshrined as a Thinking Person.
NOTE: names and places have been changed to protect the imbecile’s privacy.
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.