An Important Perspective on Obama and Ayers

During the April 16 debate between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, moderator George Stephanopoulos brought up “a gentleman named William Ayers,” who “was part of the Weather Underground in the 1970s. They bombed the Pentagon, the Capitol, and other buildings. He’s never apologized for that.” Stephanopoulos then asked Obama to explain his relationship with Ayers. Obama’s answer: “The notion that somehow as a consequence of me knowing somebody who engaged in detestable acts 40 years ago, when I was eight years old, somehow reflects on me and my values, doesn’t make much sense, George.” Obama was indeed only eight in early 1970. I was only nine then, the year Ayers’s Weathermen tried to murder me.

Read the whole thing.

Alex Jones is a Psychopath

I've seen signs posted for someplace called Infowars.com, the first being in a bathroom stall with pictures meant to suggest conspiracies and such. I never thought much of it . . . just loony stuff.

Unbeknownst to me, it is the website for radio show host Alex Jones, who is a conspiracy theory nut. The self-written Google blurb suggests that the site contains "strong opposition to socialism, communism, and the New World Order", yet the guy is apparently a supporter of leftists. Go figure.

Now, Alex Jones has gone utterly bonkers, behaving like quite the monster upon sighting conservative blogger Michelle Malkin.

After seeing the video of Alex Jones going bonkers, I can only hope that a monster like him gets hounded and harassed by someone twice his size in similar fashion someday.

Whereas Michelle Malkin handled the event with dignity and grace, a cowardly psychopath like Alex Jones would certainly wet his pants from their tiny, tiny contents.

Meh

I wish I had more time to elucidate my thoughts here. But I don't, for now. I'll be back to this someday.

A Legal Defense is a Federal Crime?

A rather interesting article, alarming at times. Perhaps the most alarming thing is this:

The U.S. Attorney’s office also added new charges of felony obstruction of justice, citing the disruptive nature of the flesh-and-blood defense. The prosecutors weren’t just rejecting the defense as an argument for innocence. They were saying that it was, itself, a crime.

Um, excuse me, but if I'm a defendant in a death-penalty case, the attempt to call my legal defense a crime . . . even if it is based on tenuous and objectively illogical legal theories . . . is horsecrap of the first order. I mean, if I shoot the judge or kill a witness or something, then yeah, I'm obstructing the hell out of some justice. But arguing a point of law is, however sadly it can sometimes be, what courts are for.

Also scary in the article is the use of federal law to retry cases where a conviction has already occurred in order to get a harsher penalty. The occurrence of local or state dismissals being retried federally has increased, which seems an obvious case of double jeopardy despite whatever legal loophole arguments are employed. For a case to be retried directly in the way described is even worse on the double jeopardy front.

It seems that there is a lot of convergence these days that would allow a new liberal fascism to develop. Perilous times, indeed.

Bacterial Awesomeness

This is fascinating, though you wouldn't think so if you were doing it. Taking a population of bacteria, dividing it by twelve, and watching the populations develop for twenty years sounds like great fun, no?

Twenty years into it, Richard Lenski of Michigan State noticed that one group of bacteria were eating the other component of the feed they were given. The bacteria weren't supposed to be able to do that . . . their little bacteria species was identifiable, in part, from the fact that they couldn't eat that. It was just in there because it was part of the standard growth medium.

This is basically akin to cats . . . who cannot taste sweets according to various sources . . . developing a sweet tooth all of the sudden, snarfing down Reese's Pieces and ice cream (after batting the Pieces across the floor for awhile, of course).

Now as for me, I'm curious to know whether their sudden citrate-tooth . . . which other bacteria have . . . is something that might've involved some vestigial code from a common ancestor that was simply reactivated, or if this was a major change that occurred quite independently.

Either way, though, massive kudos for Lenski, and more pointing and laughing at young-Earth creationist loons.

Fascinating: Obama's Record

Haven't heard much on this before. It's a must-read and must-confirm and must-discuss.

Obama seems capable of sugarcoating his near-communist views most excellently (so you don't even recognize them while he's saying them . . . only later in reviewing what he said), but seeing what he actually does is rather interesting.

The article's not some harsh hit piece, so near as I can tell . . . while there's mention of his long association with Wright in a quote of someone else, the author doesn't fixate on Obama's association with black racists like Wright, terrorists like William Ayers, or his America-loathing wife.

All in all, a good and informative article, but as with all things one must check it out.

Google Making Us Stupid? Perhaps, But . . .

I'm not sure that it is the internet making us stupid. I think it's more that it allows us to exercise our existing stupidity. That, and the fact that it means our village idiots and resident hippies get to roam free, spewing their babble en masse, instead of being contained and isolated and eventually trainable as once they were.

The Coming Industrial Revolution

The RepRap is a self-replicating rapid-prototyping machine. I've seen a large rapid prototyping device before at a university, and they are magnificent devices. Building a plastic object layer by layer, you end up with a near-perfect model (or, if it was a plastic object you wanted in the first place, a near-perfect object ready for use).

Calling it "self-replicating" is a bit of a stretch at the moment. In addition to a wealth of additional parts (including steel rods and assorted electronics), it must be hand-assembled and requires a computer to operate. However, future RepRaps are intended to have the ability to do circuitry. This sort of thing is manually possible even now . . . there are special conductive-ink pens that allow one to draw working low-voltage circuits. Microprocessors are certainly a long way off for any such tabletop technology, but the germ of the idea is there.

Even with what it can do now, it would be theoretically possible for RepRap to put certain companies out of business, if the units existed in sufficient numbers. For the most low-key example, you can imagine a simple "make solid" plug-in to convert 3-D graphics models (LightWave or POV-Ray or what-have-you) into solid shapes that the RepRap software could build. This would have the effect of savagely reducing the business of certain fringe model kit and toy makers. Even for more advanced model-builders who wanted to light their models, designing little conduits (or large open spaces) for running wire or fiber optics is hardly outside the realm of possibility.

The best part of RepRap is the open-source nature of it. You can make your own right now.

The active mind can certainly see all sorts of potential for a device like that. But, I want you to imagine the future. Picture a replicator similar to RepRap capable of working with many materials. I'm not even talking about nanotechnology dreams, here, but a real assembler capable of using small quantities of metals and plastics. Even with the most basic processors, what common items couldn't be made with such a thing?

This is the coming revolution. While industry will remain a step ahead for a long while owing to quantities of scale and special needs and whatnot, home manufacturing will slowly whittle away at it as time passes.

Of course, the more things can be made simply, the greater the danger, too. If you can make a simple analog telephone at home, you can make a sealed detonator circuit just as easily. The same is true even today, to be sure, but with so severely lessened cost and thought and effort requirements I have a feeling the problem would worsen significantly.

Will we make it past a home manufacturing revolution? Will nano-tech based home replication systems come and will society survive? It remains to be seen. But we're not too terribly far away now from finding out. The world of 2100 will either be extraordinary to see, or positively horrifying.

Dear US Media: Shut Up!

What is it with the press? I mean, we know they're leftist-leaning and all, and we know they also need ratings and that scaremongering seems to generate them, but good grief.

For months now they've been trying to generate a recession out of thin air. When the real numbers have failed them by showing that all is well and the economy is growing, they report as news their own polls of a few hundred people wherein they find that a majority think we're in a recession. Or, they find some economist guy to say it's probably a recession. And from there the media goons go on talking about the recession that experts and hoi polloi believe us to be in.

"Of course they believe!" I want to scream . . . "you've been shoving the idea down their throats day in and day out!"

Such so-called "news reporting" is just so jarringly opinionated that it boggles the mind that more people don't realize what's going on.

This does demonstrate the weakness of our economy, though . . . after all, it can be significantly slowed by nothing more than rumor.

The really sick part, though, is how gleeful these bastards are when any negative number does come in. Case in point is the news today about unemployment rates, which have climbed up from historically-low figures toward more-normal-but-still-great values. I don't have more information on the released numbers themselves . . . e.g. the Bureau of Labor Statistics counts as unemployed those who are "discouraged workers" (who have supposedly given up looking, esp. due to economic conditions) and marginal workers (able-bodied folks who haven't looked recently).

(That's crap in my opinion -- if you're not looking for work, then you're not unemployed . . . you're just not a part of the labor force, slacker -- but I'd be interested to see how much of this climb is based on that sort of silliness.)

Yet you can hear the glee in the reporting, and of course you can see the attempt to convince people that it's a recession:

"the nation's unemployment rate zoomed to 5.5 percent in the biggest one-month jump in decades."

Yeah, and my neighborhood anorexic has ballooned out to 105 pounds after her three-cracker eating binge.

"Barbara Bowens, 52, of Washington, D.C., has been laid off from a janitorial job since March. The prospects of finding a new job "don't look so good," she said. "I can't pay bills off nothing." Collecting unemployment benefits helps, but "I've got to pinch pennies."

Cheryl Williams, who lives in the Tulsa, Okla., suburb of Broken Arrow, has been looking for work for two years after losing her job as a certified nurse's aide. The 37-year-old relies on $225 a month in welfare and odds-and-ends jobs to support her two kids.

"I have job searched and job searched and job searched," Williams said. "I would like to have a real job."

Just in the past several days General Motors Corp., United Airlines and others have joined the flurry of job-cut announcements.

The unemployment rate shot up from 5 percent in April, reflecting more workers losing their jobs as well as an influx of young people looking for work. It was the biggest over-the-month swing in the rate since February 1986."

For 1986, the yearly average was 7.0 percent. Indeed, through the roaring 80's the unemployment rate only dipped into the 5's in the last two years. Now it's 5.5 and you're acting like the world's ending?

"Ohhhh, but listen to Barbara and Cheryl!" Screw them. There's always a Barbara and a Cheryl who press, politicians, or other folks will use for their gain. What about the sad tales of non-leftist Americans tired of having their economy affected by the lies of the press? There are so many of them compared to Barbara and Cheryl. Oh, but that wouldn't fit the narrative of a sour economy . . . silly me.

"The increase left the jobless rate at its highest since October 2004."

2004's yearly average was 5.5 percent. A good year, overall. Better than the two post-9/11 years preceding it.

"The White House snapped into crisis-management mode. "

Yes, because it's all the president's fault, of course. Remember planetary expert Kanye West? . . . Bush hates black people.

"Employers -- and the public -- have been shaken by lots of talk about whether the economy is on the brink of or has fallen into its first recession since 2001. That determination, made by a panel of academics, is usually made well after the fact."

This is cute. Here the author reports on "lots of talk" . . . talk that came from the press, of course . . . and then suggests that a bunch of Ivory Tower folks will determine whether it happened after it passes. In other words, he's basically saying "trust us . . . we know now that we're in one." Eat my poo.

""For the average American there is not debate that the economy is in a recession," said Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody's Economy.com."

Of course not! Didn't you know that once the press starts reporting something as fact, it is fact and none may oppose it without being clearly and undeniably insane? Al Gore knows. The debate is over.

(My ass. Mark Zandi's a reject. The data says we are not receding, ergo we are not in a recession. QED, punk.)

A Well-Spun "Confession"

Here we have Rep. Kanjorski (D) of Pennsylvania. Some people are all in a twitter because he basically says here that the Democrat party leadership was blowing sunshine up their base's behinds with their claim that they would bring an end to the war (a claim which was actually made, despite Kanjorski's attempt to argue it was merely an impression left in the minds of fools). He basically says that they won by running on an anti-war platform.

That's crap.

Kanjorski is attempting to explain away the fact that the leftist anti-war Democrats have failed to keep their promise to end the war. But it's sort of clever how its done, because he maintains the false claim that Americans voted them in to stop the war.

But that had virtually nothing to do with why the Democrats got back in during the 2006 mid-terms. In dozens of cases they ran "Blue Dog" conservative DINOs ("Democrats In Name Only"). These were not the anti-war friends-of-Code-Pink-and-William-Ayers types who are actually running the party. The Dems basically got back into Congressional authority by running Democrats who out-Republicaned Republicans, which isn't all that difficult these days.

A similar case occurred during the most recent Mississippi gubernatorial race. Incumbent Republican Haley Barbour had a bit of a challenge because the Democrats were running a guy who was pretended to be such a quintessential Mississippi conservative that I found him frightening, and any liberal policy he espoused was so wrapped up in woodsy folkisms and Bible-thumping that most people hardly noticed what he was proposing. His commercials espoused few troubling parts (e.g. his HillaryCare-for-Mississippi sort of silliness was never mentioned), instead mostly discussing his religious convictions and making use of New-Testament-based class warfare rhetoric. (If I never hear the term "money-changers" again, I'll be happy.) All this with him standing on a stage missing its pulpit, as his hair was backlit with artificial halo for the camera's diffusion filter.

It was basically a TV and radio ministry . . . and that is most assuredly NOT what today's Democratic Party is or stands for. The party is led by San Francisco friend-of-Code-Pink Pelosi, Nevada's wacko dirty-dealing "the war is lost" "Mormon, what Mormon?" Reid, "YYYYEEEEAAAHHHHGGGRRGHGHG" Howard Dean, friend-of-American-terrorist-Ayers and "my minister preaches America-hate but that's okay" Barack Obama, and of course the lying and deceptive Clintons.

If you want the truth of today's Democratic Party, you need look no further than Socialist Maxine Waters.

I just have one question ...

... regarding this complete wanker. Is it wrong of me to be so happy that he has an English accent instead of an American one?

Burma

I find it entirely rude of the universe to smash a Katrina-esque hurricane into Burma (or "Myanmar" if you wish to listen to its evil overlords). The people already have to deal with a fascistic socialist military regime.

The Anti-Science Alliance

(a.k.a. "Strange Bedfellows - Dear Al Gore: Stop Hurting America")

One hundred and fifty years ago (give or take), Darwin gave us a book that would come to be known as The Origin of Species. While borrowing from similar ideas of earlier years (e.g. the Vestiges idea of transmutation of species), Darwin's work was specific, direct, and profound. Although the concept had gained wide popularity with naturalists within about 15 years, it took over fifty years before the concept was sufficiently accepted that it came to be commonly taught in schools. Today, the concept is part of the bedrock of natural history. An insurgency has remained, of course . . . even the most absurd ideas have their adherents. But now, things are worse. A few years ago (give or take), Al Gore and others really started shoving global warming down people's throats. While borrowing from similar ideas of earlier years (e.g. the hole in the ozone layer from hairspray cans, et al.), Gore's attempt to popularize the concept even beyond earlier discussion a la Kyoto was specific, direct, and profound. While opinions differ insofar as what percentage of climatologists concur with all the alarmist predictions (at least the current ones . . . the old ones failed to occur), it took just a few years before the concept started getting taught to our children, despite the fact that climatology itself is in its infancy.

This is the backdrop for my response to an e-mail I received (regarding another website), with both reprinted below:

Greetings tireless bastion of truth and free thinking!

I'm sure you're aware of this, but your stance of encouraging a "how to think" mentality as opposed to "what to think" has inspired me beyond the boundaries of the TvW debate. I couldn't help but notice that Mr. Wong and many of his cohorts subscribe to a militant stance on Darwinian evolution. That being the case, I can only imagine his reaction toward Expelled: The Movie, a documentary released this past weekend in the States.

This movie examines accomplished members of the academic and scientific community who've been black listed for suggesting Intelligent Design might be a possible explanation for the origin of the universe.

Regardless of the origin of the universe, Stein suggests that a rational person should be allowed to follow the evidence wherever it may lead him or her, and should not be stonewalled by any establishment that clings to a single, unyielding doctrine. In this, I cannot help but see parallels between you and Mr. Stein (or Wong and his hero, Richard Dawkins, who appears prominently in the film with quite the dogmatic, elitist point of view).

If you have the time, sir, I would love to hear your thoughts on this matter. Thank you for your work.

If you are intrigued by Ben Stein's work, then I have failed you.

The fault is not entirely mine. Activists like Al Gore have quite literally turned their global warming concept into a secular religion, heavily politicized to boot. Instead of raising the issue and opening the proverbial floor to debate, such people have leapt headlong into the notion that the debate is over, and have long since begun poisoning the well against Holoc . . . er, I mean, Global Warming deniers. The appeals to Pascal's-Wager-esque "logic" are the icing on the cake.

All that is over and above the poor measurements, slipshod treatment of data, plain ole faulty science, absurd leaps of reasoning, grandiose empty claims, and many other such details that are outside the scope of this missive.

The principle here, though, is that the perilously young science of global climatology is being pressed into service for extraordinary claims, predictions that don't come true, and so on. Yet this young theory from the young science is suddenly being shoved down everyone's throats, taught in schools, and so on.

The comparison to the era of Darwin is striking . . . not for similarities, but differences. In the time of Darwin, the evidence was all around that the Earth was far older than religion suggested. The evidence was staring everyone in the face that information was passed on via some mechanism of heredity. Darwin is lauded (or profaned) as the father of evolution, but his work was hardly revolutionary . . . it was the inexorable conclusion to be drawn from all the information from all of the natural sciences that was available at the time.

Now, midway through the second century since Origin of Species, we have seen the concept grow and thrive. Cellular-level discoveries that Darwin could scarcely have dreamed of have reached back through time to confirm and expand upon the ideas he presented.

In short, we know evolution happened. We can look to the wild itself to determine the basic mechanism, as Darwin did, and we can expand upon the simple concept of natural selection to show the hows and whys of where assorted details fit in. We can, like the geologists of Darwin's era who were thinking Earth must be "millions" of years old, clearly establish that Earth has billions of years of antiquity under her belt. We can look to the cell . . . DNA, RNA, and mitochondrial genetic material giving us the whys and wherefores and sometimes even the traces of the millions upon millions of generations before. And we can look to the vast expanse of the heavens, and in its processes determine that Earth, compared to the universe itself, is a relative newcomer.

Evolution fits neatly in this constellation of knowledge.

Yet despite the beautiful simplicity and explanatory power of the concept of natural selection, the adoption was not instantaneous . . . rather obviously. Although the concept had gained wide popularity with naturalists within about 15 years, it took over fifty years before the concept was sufficiently accepted that it came to be commonly taught in schools. And, of course, this was not without challenge, as the Scopes trial made plain.

It is my contention that Al Gore and the like, by pushing and politicizing and 'religionizing' a theory -- at best on wobbly legs and at worst stillborn -- are hurting science.

The Ben Stein thing is, to my mind, a prime example.

There is a difference between being shunned for one's own abject stupidity and being shunned due to the abject stupidity of others. It can appear to be a fine line, and many skip across it without realizing which side they were really on to begin with.

Without evolution, life sciences just don't work. As soon as you start inserting miracles and deleting logic, understanding what life is up to suddenly becomes a confusing mish-mash. I once knew a biology major who rejected evolution . . . he could pass the tests, but he had no idea what was going on. In his mind, God was always behind the corner monkeying with things.

If you're a plumber looking for a loss of pressure, you can't operate on the assumption that God is hiding in the pipe making some water disappear. If you're an electrician or electronics tech trying to troubleshoot unexpectedly high resistance in a line, you can't assume that God has his finger in the copper causing electrons to flow around it. If you're a PC tech trying to figure out why a hard drive is going bad, you can't assume God is riding the platter whacking the read head a little off track each time he passes at 7200 RPM. (Though, in fairness, if I was God I'd totally do that once, just for kicks.)

The basic point here is that, from the perspective of science, assuming the involvement of God serves no purpose whatsoever. If I can give you a naturalistic, testable explanation of an event, and you reject it because you think some omnipotent being snapped his fingers and caused something to flash into existence . . . well, who is the scientist and who isn't?

This is why one can see the rationale for biologists opposed to evolution to be discarded. In the modern era, one could present the case that such people shouldn't progress much beyond lab techs. Sure, like a stopped clock they can turn out lucky twice a day . . . but, contrary to popular opinion, that never meant that on those two occasions they were *right*. Better to use your resources in support of someone who "gets it".

And yes, that's dangerous territory to tread, because it can be far too easy to jump straight there over any disagreement. Wong and the gang jumped there long ago, for instance, and of course as mentioned the weird envirofascists online are long since there.

What we're seeing with this Ben Stein idiocy is the proof of dangerous territory, because the same foolish facts-be-damned closed-minded elitism of the global warming crowd . . . and its natural resistance . . . is something that can all too easily be turned against other areas of science. It's not human stupidity, as they might claim . . . it's human nature.

Put simply, someone claiming to be a nutritionist ramming horse manure down a patient's throat won't make it taste better, and they're still going to puke. If a real nutritionist is offering them a real meal in the same packaging, should we be surprised when they say no thanks? Even if what they eat is little better than the manure, they'll still think they've improved their lot.

Of course, we've had people trying to spread lies about the real nutrionist and the real meal for some time.

You can google absurdities like the "water canopy" for examples . . . basically Bible-thumpers in scientist lab jackets they got from a Halloween store tried to suggest that Earth had a watery shield over it whose primary purpose was for God to drop during Noah's flood.

Behe's "intelligent design" nonsense is simply a sneakier version of the same creationist tomfoolery. ID'ers pretend to accept the timeline and events of history and our knowledge of biology's past, but anytime there's a question mark yet to be filled in (or, more likely, the *claim* of a question mark), they scream "goddidit!" and cackle with glee.

It's absurd, deceitful, and dishonest. And Ben Stein, self-proclaimed member of the intelligentsia, fell for it hook, line, and sinker.

For someone claiming to be so smart, he suuuure is dumb.

Oh, and for the record, Dawkins rocks.

Score One for the Good Guys: Fred Phelps in Trouble"

This is great news.   At last, those Westboro Baptist Church bastards of "God Hates Fags" fame are finding their strangely slick legal maneuvers a bit empty this time out.

More like this, please.

It's worth pausing, though, to report something I found altogether fascinating.   Fred Phelps is a Democrat.

That probably didn't register at first, so let me repeat:

Fred Phelps of the aforementioned "God Hates Fags" fame is a Democrat.

What the hell is he doing in the party of San Francisco?   You can't tell me that he is unaware of the Democratic Party's platform reputation regarding gay rights, gay marriage, et al.  Per Wikipedia (yes, I know, but it was fast), he started out as a civil rights lawyer, too.  

I realize that one's political views need not invariably follow the current separations as selected by the parties . . . I am, after all, a conservative agnostic, and thus I also slip through certain cracks in the whole New-Deal-vs.-Conservative-coalitions thing.

But applying all the stereotypes, it seems to me that a raving lunatic homophobe who bases his hatred of homosexuals on quasi-Calvinist Biblical teachings would, alas, be a more natural fit for the Republican, conservative party. The fact that he's a Dem is almost enough to put me in a conspiracist mood. (And c'mon, lefties . . . you can't tell me that finding out Osama bin Laden was a Republican wouldn't make you jump right to the conspiracist conclusion.)

How do they afford all that protesting everywhere, anyway?