March 2011
1 post
Dear Orly, you should learn your internet memes....
[caption id=”” align=”alignright” width=”240” caption=”Image via Wikipedia”][/caption] I’m not posting the link to the following quote because there’s no way I’m sending Orly Taitz, Queen of the Birthers, even one click of traffic if I can help it, and also because her site is frequently blocked by malware-detecting...
February 2011
6 posts
The idiocy of the "Birther Bills"
[caption id=”” align=”alignright” width=”300” caption=”Image via Wikipedia”][/caption] Currently, the legislatures in several states have introduced “birther bills” aimed at ensuring only Constitutionally qualified Presidential and (in some - but not all - state) Vice Presidential candidates are included on their ballots. There...
How False Information Gets Spread: An Object...
One thing that amazes me at times is just how much bad information is out there. Well, I’ve found a perfect example of exactly how that happens. The conservative website “The Post & Email” published an article titled “Time to Bust Public Sector Unions!” Under the heading “It’s NOT About Fair Pay!” author JB Williams asserts that teachers are...
Fight the scary people in red t-shirts! Disturbing...
Image by Getty Images via @daylife Whichever side of the Wisconsin Labour dispute you support, I hope that you would agree that tactics such as the ones described below are completely unacceptable for EITHER side. The following is taken from a website named “The Patriot Action Network” on a page titled: “Get ready: SEIU’s Purple Army nationwide protest schedule;...
The Unreasonableness of the Anti-Vaccine Movement
[caption id=”” align=”alignright” width=”150” caption=”Image by Getty Images via @daylife”][/caption] One of my favourite online hangouts is “The Fogbow,” a forum that focuses primarily on combating the beliefs of and disinformation spread by birthers and their multifarious claims regarding Obama’s eligibility to...
Book Review: Alfred Hitchcock and the Making of...
[caption id=”” align=”alignright” width=”197” caption=”Cover via Amazon”][/caption] Before I started reading Stephen Rebello’s “Alfred Hitchcock and the Making of Psycho,” I had never seen an Alfred Hitchcock movie. There’s no particular reason for that, I just never got around to it. Still, I find “behind...
Learned Helplessness
[caption id=”” align=”alignright” width=”300” caption=”Image via Wikipedia”][/caption] [Editor’s Note: This is a piece I originally wrote back in November of 2002 - just over a year after the 9/11 attacks had happened and at the time when the government was beginning its push to roll back our civil rights and civil liberties....
January 2011
12 posts
New Study Challenges Wisdom of Diet & Weight-Loss...
From the University of California, Davis, News: Weight-loss focus is ineffective and harmful, study suggests January 24, 2011 Dieting and other weight-loss efforts may unintentionally lead to weight gain and diminished health status, according to two researchers, including a UC Davis nutritionist, whose new study appears in the Jan. 24 issue of the Nutrition Journal, an online...
Jon Stewart, Fox News and the Nazis
Image via Wikipedia I’ve never hidden my absolute loathing of people using comparisons to the Nazis to score political - or comedic (I’m looking at you, Seinfeld, and your “Soup Nazi”) points. In fact, I tend to be very vocal about just how much I hate such rhetoric. Nazism stands as one of the greatest evils humanity has ever inflicted on itself, and we’re...
Cracked.com: The Most Badass of All The Gods
Cracked.com has a cute article on the God they consider to be the “most badass” of them all. via Crossposterous
Jon Stewart on Sarah Palin's Hannity Interview
Gotta love Jon Stewart. Here he does a great job of dissecting Palin’s interview with Sean Hannity, pointing out that while she made some very good points, she would then turn around and do the exact same thing she’d been complaining about having been done to her. It’s well worth watching. The Daily Show With Jon Stewart Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c Petty Woman ...
Palin, Violent Rhetoric and the Presidency
Image via Wikipedia While much of the conversation about Saturday’s shooting has moved on to trying to diagnose the shooter, there are still some important points to be made about the role violent imagery may have played in the tragedy. Let me be clear on this, however: Whatever role this over-the-top violent rhetoric might have played in shaping his actions, the only person who can...
This Modern World - Don't Blame Guns
via Crossposterous
Guest Post from Mikedunford at The Fogbow
Fogbow is a message board that focuses primarily on issues related to Birthers and others who question if Obama is eligible to be President. (He is.) But we also discuss other fringe groups and beliefs as well, in particular those that could potentially turn to violence to “solve” political problems. As you can imagine, we’ve been talking quite a bit about the Arizona shooting,...
DLC and DCCC Also Used Bullseyes Symbols
Image via Wikipedia One of my Facebook friends, Peter Siegel, directed me to this post at Verum Serum from a few months ago, when Palin’s “crosshairs” map was first under scrutiny. It shows two maps, one from the DLC and one from the DCCC, which used bullseyes as symbols to indicate areas where they hoped to win seats in upcoming elections. The DLC’s: The...
Surveyor Marks?
Image via Wikipedia Sarah Palin’s spokeswoman was interviewed by Tammy Bruce earlier today and said: MANSOUR: …the graphic, is just, it’s basically — we never, ever, ever intended it to be gunsights. It was simply crosshairs like you see on maps. BRUCE: Well, it’s a surveyor’s symbol. It’s a surveyor’s symbol. MANSOUR: It’s a...
Olbermann's Special Comment on the Gifford...
Image via Wikipedia Below is Keith Olbermann’s special comment from his show last night. It, of course, is about the shooting of Rep. Gabriel Giffords, and while much of it deals with the kind of hate-filled rhetoric we’ve come to expect from hardcore right-wingers, he also acknowledges that progressives - including himself - have also used such imagery and that even if this...
Logomania
While it’s still to early to know if the shooter in today’s tragedy ever saw Sarah Palin’s page literally targeting certain Congressional Representatives, the political comic below still makes an excellent point. Right-wingers will almost hyperventilate if they think they might be able to imagine a potentially nefarious meaning to one symbol or another than the Obama government...
Untitled
Image via Wikipedia UPDATE: 1:30pm CST - MSNBC is reporting that while an announcement was made that Rep. Giffords has died, according to the Sheriff the reporter is speaking to, that is incorrect, and they are retracting that report. UPDATE II: 1:43pm CST - Reports are that the gunman was using a semi-automatic weapon and got off as many as 20 shots. Hat tip to the good folks at The...
December 2010
1 post
WikiLeaks and Treason
I’m still trying to figure out exactly what I think about WikiLeaks and their most recent document dump. I know that some of the information they’ve released can be embarrassing or might be harmful, but even the Pentagon is saying that there’s no evidence that anyone has yet been hurt or killed because of them. In fact, the Pentagon could have shut WikiLeaks down, but opted not...
November 2010
22 posts
No politics I want to gripe about today, so here -...
AT&T recently started running a new ad featuring a man wearing a Rush t-shirt. Apparently, Rush received was paid for the use of their logo, and they are donating those revenues to charities involved in the Haiti relief efforts. In addition, they’ve produced both the adult T-shirt and the baby onesie seen in the ad and are selling those at the Rush Backstage Club website, with proceeds...
Obama and racism in America
Image by Tony the Misfit via Flickr MKL, the author at My Kafkaesque Life blog, recently commented how - at least from how it appears to him from overseas - it seems that there has been so much open racism directed at President Obama, and wondered why that might be? Since the expectations were so high in 2008, Obama couldn’t possibly meet them. 2 years are too short for a decade...
Bad Apples and Bunches
John Tyner, the libertarian blogger who recently gained notoriety as the “don’t touch my junk” guy who was threatened with $11,000 in fines and a civil suit when he tried to leave an airport after refusing to go through either the “nudie” x-ray machines or the “enhanced pat-down” screening, made an interesting point a few weeks back in a post he wrote...
Tom Tomorrow on Security Theater
via Crossposterous
Birthers and logic... why the twain shall never...
Image via Wikipedia For those of you just turning in, Birthers are people who believe that President Obama is ineligible to be the president because either (a) he wasn’t actually born in the United States, that the copy of his birth certificate that he posted online before the election is a forgery, that he was actually born in Kenya and then smuggled into the US, and that anything...
Book Review: Spy: The Inside Story of How the...
Image via Wikipedia This is a very revealing book on Robert Hanssen, the FBI agent who spied on the US for the Russians for over 20 years before he was finally caught. If you saw the movie “Breach” with Ryan Phillipe and Chris Cooper, this is a much more in-depth view of the incident, though, interestingly, Eric O’Neill (Phillipe’s character) is never mentioned. ...
Book Review: Poison Pills: The Untold Story of the...
Image via Wikipedia “Poison Pills” is an interesting - and scary - book. It’s no secret that drug companies have been known to put profits ahead of patient care, but to see it spelled out at plainly as Nesi shows it to have been in this case is a bit unnerving - especially for someone like me who, due to a number of medical problems, depends on several medications just to...
Book Review: The Book of Runes by Ralph Blum
Image via Wikipedia This is perhaps the worst book I’ve run across regarding the runes, and in my 20 years as a practising Heathen, I’ve run across quite a few. There are numerous problems with this book, most notoriously the inclusion (or, more likely, the invention) of the “blank rune.” No such thing exists in the Elder Futhark, the runic alphabet on which...
Untitled
By Daryl Cagle of MSNBC.com and PoliticalCartoons.com via Crossposterous
Book Review: Brad Meltzer's "The Inner Circle"
NOTE: This review is based on a galley proof of the book provided for advanced reviews and included the following disclaimer at the beginning: Uncorrected page proofs: Material from this copy should not be quoted or used without first checking with the publisher, as some of this material may not appear in the finished book. I recently had an opportunity to read Brad Meltzer’s...
Bush, Lazy? Who'd've Thunk?
Image by Getty Images via @daylife The Huffington Post has an article pointing out several passages they’ve found in George Bush’s forthcoming memoirs “Decision Points” that are either directly copied from or are suspiciously similar to other books about the Bush years. In some cases, Bush writes about events as if he witnessed them directly, even though he...
More Kudos for Rush
The rock band Rush were given the Living Legends award by Classic Magazine’s Classic Rock Roll of Honour. In a comment to the BBC, when asked about the band’s longevity, lead singer and bassist Geddy Lee said: “It’s easier if you’re a three-piece and you stay alive,” lead singer Lee said in an interview with BBC. “We’re pretty fortunate...
How Soon We Forget
Image via Wikipedia Patrick Smith is an airline pilot who writes a column on air travel for Salon. In his column he’s discussed virtually ever aspect of air travel from an inside look at what its like to be a pilot to why airlines have some of the policies that they do. He’s also written quite a bit about airline and airport safety, and this week, he takes a look at how our...
Why the Democrats lost - This Modern World -...
via salon.com via Crossposterous
Amazon.com: The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks...
Cover of The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks What an amazing book, and what an amazing story! Rebecca Skloot takes on a very complicated issue - what should - or does - happen to our bodies or tissue after we’re done with it - and who gets to make that decision - and gives us a well-written, well-paced book looking not only at the issue itself, but the people involved in and most...
Bush's lowest point? Really?
Image via Wikipedia In a current Salon article, Maxwell Strachan comments on twelve things we’ve already learned from the pre-publication publicity, including this comment on what former-President Bush (Gods, it feels good to be able to write that “former”!) says was his lowest point: Kanye West’s post-Katrina comments hit hard: George Bush’s presidency covered...
GetGlue
Image by alternatekev via Flickr GetGlue is a fun social app from AdaptiveBlue. It’s similar to Foresquare, but seems to offer a much wider variety of things you can check-in on and topics of interest (that you might, say, be chatting with someone about or possibly attending a club meeting on.) It has a rating system, similar… continue reading at Thunderhaven via Crossposterous
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Not bad for a bunch of dinosaurs....
via billboard.com According to Billboard’s Hot Tours chart, Rush has the number one tour this summer, bringing in over $18,000,000. What makes that even more impressive is that they did it without having a new album to prod fans to the shows. They did release two new tracks prior to the tour start - a sampler of what they’re working on for an album they hope to release in 2011 -...
George Takei Calls Out Anti-Gay Arkansas School...
via youtube.com George Takei has done a great job over the years of addressing homophobia in a way that is both very pointed and very funny. This is no exception. An article I read recently pointed out that this rash of suicides among GTBTQ youth isn’t so much an increase in suicides, but rather just an increase in them making the news - which is pretty sad when you think about it....
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Followup on my "Tale of Two Actors" post from...
BaldwinPeriphetes 03:15 AM Invite a friend to comment @thorswitch: Well for one, Isiah Washington’s comments caused a problem with his co-workers in his workplace. Charlie Sheen as far as we know doesn’t have a beef with his workmates. If his behaviour...
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How Does This Make Any Sense? A Tale of Two Actors
A few years ago, there was a big flap over “Grey’s Anatomy” actor Isiah Washington referring to his co-star TR Knight a “faggot,” (something Knight himself did not hear, but which was heard by several others at the time of the incident) and making inappropriate comments about the incident at a subsequent awards show. As a result of the negative publicity, ABC opted...
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Vote or dont complain
Vote or dont complain By Steve Greenberg | October 31st, 2010 | Comments: 1 | PERMALINK via blog.cagle.com Don’t forget to vote tomorrow! It’s just the fate of our country over the next few years you’re deciding, eh?
October 2010
4 posts
8 Myths You Need to Know About Before You Go to...
These myths are more prevalent than you might think, and because we are now down to the wire, it’s more important than ever to spread truthiness! From Dave Johnson: 1) President Obama tripled the deficit. Reality: Bush’s last budget had a $1.416 trillion deficit. Obama’s first budget reduced that to $1.29 trillion. 2) President Obama raised taxes, which hurt the economy. Reality:...
My current fantasy wish (also, BE SURE TO VOTE...
I’ve been voting by mail for a number of years due to my disability, and many states are making voting-by-mail easier each year, which I think is a fabulous idea (if for no other reason than it very nicely defeats such voter-suppression techniques like telling people they’ll be arrested if they have warrants or speeding tickets and go to their local election place, hanging up posters...
Invisible Hand vs. Regulator - This Modern World -...
via salon.com
Interview with Michael Costello from The Desert...
Sunday, September 19, 2010 Interview with Michael Costello from The Desert Sun Posted by Laura K at 7:00 PM Labels: Michael Costello via bloggingprojectrunway.blogspot.com This season on Project Runway, one contestant in particular, Michael Costello, has been on the receiving end of some of the most vituperative criticism...
September 2010
28 posts
4 tags
FactChecking ‘The Pledge’
Summary The Republican “Pledge to America,” released Sept. 23, contains some dubious factual claims: It declares that “the only parts of the economy expanding are government and our national debt.” Not true. So far this year government employment has declined slightly, while private sector employment has increased by 763,000 jobs. It says that “jobless claims continue to soar,” when in fact...
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The Associated Press: Judge orders lesbian...
By GENE JOHNSON (AP) – 1 hour ago TACOMA, Wash. — A federal judge ruled Friday that a decorated flight nurse discharged from the Air Force for being gay should be given her job back as soon as possible in the latest legal setback to the military’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy. The decision by U.S. District Judge Ronald Leighton came in a closely watched case as...
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Hmmm... seems to be XKCD day here :)
I’m always surprised by just how well this comic fits my life… :D
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Natural Parenting - from XKCD.com