Comments or suggestions: Gerard Van der Leun
Politics As We Like It: You have the "charisma of a damp rag" and the appearance of a "low-grade bank clerk."
Continued...

Posted by Vanderleun Feb 28, 2010 1:29 PM | Comments (12)  | QuickLink: Permalink
Dead Sister's Teeth! The "Oh Blow Me" Moment of the Summit So Far

File this Congresswoman under, "I'm from your gummerment and I'm here to humm you...."

Continued...

Posted by Vanderleun Feb 25, 2010 10:03 PM | Comments (14)  | QuickLink: Permalink
Linktellectuals
Continued...

Posted by Vanderleun Feb 25, 2010 12:52 PM | Comments (3)  | QuickLink: Permalink
Tempest in a D-Cup: Bikini Barista Crackdown!

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"Coffee, tea or me?"

And now for some local Northwest color wherein X marks the spots: Puyallup bikini barista charged with exposure

TACOMA, Wash. - Pierce County prosecutors filed a charge of unlawful public exposure against a 19-year-old barista accused of wearing only a thong bottom and X-shaped pasties on her breasts.
Prosecutors filed the misdemeanor charge Tuesday against the woman who worked at the Bikini Bottoms espresso stand in Puyallup.
A passer-by had complained last October about seeing the woman topless. When a sheriff's deputy went to investigate the woman went to the back of the stand, took off the pasties and put on a bikini top.
The News Tribune of Tacoma reports the deputy confiscated the pasties as evidence.
Hands-on evidence collection! We expect no less from our local constables. I want to have the video tape running in the courtroom when the DA rises to place them into evidence, and the defense attorney says, "If the pasties fit you must acquit!"

Still, a quick scan of the news tells us that Bikini Barista Espresso stories are more than just a handful. In fact these stands seem to be busting out all over and, on ocassion, being busted in return as the bikini baristas try to make the breast of a bad situation.

Continued...

Posted by Vanderleun Feb 24, 2010 7:40 PM | Comments (9)  | QuickLink: Permalink
Toleration Thy Name is Charles Johnson

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Posted by Vanderleun Feb 24, 2010 11:05 AM | Comments (21)  | QuickLink: Permalink
Something Wonderful: Horsing Around at the Airport

Via The Anchoress who notes/quotes that this girl is, "Apparently one of the few people who remembers that the fundamental purpose of the universe is to allow you to have fun."



Posted by Vanderleun Feb 24, 2010 7:49 AM | Comments (11)  | QuickLink: Permalink
Something Wonderful: Bubbie Gets Jiggy With It

Now this will... Make. Your. Day. Time's a wastin'. What are you waiting for? DANCE!

Starring Ben Kweller's remarkable 82 year old grandmother, Bubbie.

Filmed by Ben and edited by Ryan Foregger in NY

HT: Sippican



Posted by Vanderleun Feb 23, 2010 2:56 PM | Comments (6)  | QuickLink: Permalink
Obamacare Now! Because What We've Got Isn't Bad Enough

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"The President's Proposal," as the 11-page White House document is headlined, is in one sense a notable achievement: It manages to take the worst of both the House and Senate bills and combine them into something more destructive. It includes more taxes, more subsidies and even less cost control than the Senate bill. And it purports to fix the special-interest favors in the Senate bill not by eliminating them—but by expanding them to everyone. -- President Obama and Health Care - WSJ.com

When Obama steps up with his personalized version of Obamacare, many in the pundit pabulum game express their Kabukiesque befuddlement. Why, they ask, would – in the face of the widespread hatred of this program – Obama and the Democrats still push this pig down the throat of the python? There’s a lot of clucking of tongues over Obama strapping the Rising Sun bandana on his forehead and going full kamikaze on the sitting Democrats in the halls of Congress. Some say it makes no sense. Others say it’s full-court cynical. None of these people gets it.

Why is Obama insisting the Democrats give unto him massive and repetitive Obamallatio when it comes to health care in America? It is simplicity itself. It is because, even after decades of fiddling about and dicking around with American healthcare on the local, state, and national level, the American government has given us a system today that, frankly, is not yet fucked up enough!

Continued...

Posted by Vanderleun Feb 23, 2010 2:28 PM | Comments (11)  | QuickLink: Permalink
Something Wonderful: New Looks for Old Garage Doors

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Garage doors have until now mostly been mouse grey and ugly – and often spoil the appearance of well-maintained homes. But now, the days of those hideous garage doors are numbered! Online and availble from style-your-garage.com

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Here's a few of the choices:

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jumbodoor.jpg

Smaller garage door? No problem.

hotgarage.jpg

jetdoor.jpg

And finally, last but by no means least:

hellgarage.jpg



Posted by Vanderleun Feb 23, 2010 11:42 AM | Comments (3)  | QuickLink: Permalink
Climate Control Made Stupid: More Pyramids Now!

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As the religion of warming implodes Greens need to reach back to more ancient attempts at terraforming. Here's one with a lot of potential as proposed in Modern SCIENCE Predicts Made-to-Order Weather in 1934.

This has the dual advantage of combining a tomb with terraforming:

Continued...

Posted by Vanderleun Feb 22, 2010 12:18 PM | Comments (11)  | QuickLink: Permalink
Unknown Unknowns: The Found Poetry of Donald Rumsfeld

Knowing

As we know,
There are known knowns.
There are things
We know we know.
We also know
There are known unknowns.
That is to say, we know
There are some things
We do not know.
But there are also
Unknown unknowns,
The ones we don’t know
We don’t know.

-- Donald Rumsfeld, 2003

To many, this seemed silly at the time it was first recited by the author. But of late it seems to be more and more prescient and prophetic with every passing day.

[Thanks for the memory to William M. Briggs, Statistician サ Rumsfeld and Keynes on Probability]



Posted by Vanderleun Feb 21, 2010 11:44 AM | Comments (8)  | QuickLink: Permalink
What's Not to Like About iOwnTheWorld.com?
Continued...

Posted by Vanderleun Feb 20, 2010 12:12 PM | Comments (7)  | QuickLink: Permalink
All Purpose Apology for Tiger Woods

sorrypup2a.jpg "What a revoltin' development this is!" -- Chester A. Riley

Tiger Woods, that wily old horndog, finally felt that enough time had passed that he was ready for his "amends that must be made" close-up. Because he is Tiger Woods, a wealthy businessman whose cash flow has been crimped by extra-curricular quim of late, he can afford one of the very best apologies money can buy. And he got it.

With no little rehearsal Woods delivered his ritual mea culpa about as well as could be expected. Smooth, forthright, sanctimonious, and with only a whiff of irritation that his honey-pot gravy train had come off the rails. He'd worked it up enough with professional media coaches that it actually had the flavor of real sincerity to it, even as it ran the standard changes of stars saying they're sorry. I'm sure the whole spectacle cost him a lot in time and money, but, well, "mistaeks wur made," and it had to be done.

If only Tiger had come to me before he drove into a tree I could have just given him my "Standard Apology for 21st Century Schmucks" out of the goodness of my heart. It would have saved him at least $100,000 in speech writing fees and media consulting. And he wouldn't have had to spend weeks sitting around in some half-baked 12-Step Program for Horndogs. I've been honing my "Standard Apology" for years now. It goes like this:


First let me say that I'm sorry I'm saying I'm sorry. I'm sorry because after you hear this apology you'll be sorry too. So I'm sorry for making you feel sorry by having to say I'm sorry.

I begin by noting that at present, as above, I'm sorry. Yes, I am very, very sorry. It was all my fault and I am sorry for it all. I failed, first and foremost, to understand that on tour golf is a game limited to eighteen holes.

Duffers cannot understand the pressures on the pros. It's hard to wind down after an exhausting day strolling on a very long lawn to polite applause. You just somehow have to keep driving, and pitching, and wedging, and putting long into the wee-hours of the morning. No matter how many pars, birdies, and eagles I got, I was always looking for that perfect hole-in-one to round off the round. What began as confusion became compulsion powered by room service.

I am sorry, as always, for what I did. It was thoughtless and rude even though it was intensely gratifying at the time I did it. It wasn't really what I meant or felt in my heart, but was just what I wanted to do. Many have taken my deeds to mean other than what I said they meant after I was discovered. Why, I even meant them to mean other than what they meant when I did them.

Well, the damage those deeds did is done and I can't undo my doing that dropped me the do-do. All I can do is stand here strapped in the pillory of the present as all those whom I have so wrongly (but without malice I swear) harmed cry like the little girly-men they are, especially the girls. Their heartbreak is now my ass ache. I cringe to see them writhe with the bleeding agony of those raw wounds I ripped open by my harsh and unconsidered actions.

Have I said I feel really bad about this? I do. I feel even worse that I, through my abject failure to realize how deeply the awl of my deeds would bore into them, even, yea, down to the living blue-veined bone, that I simply stood by and allowed the burning salt of my senseless screwups to pour without limit into their raw and festering souls. I am, as I said, deeply sorry and feel bad besides.

But even inside the cloistered walls of my expensive institution, I have heard the rising torrent of justifiable outrage; the howls of those whose most sacred, festering and inane values I have eviscerated with the senseless whirring chain-saw of my betrayals.

To them I offer, in deep and abject humility -- since I am, because I did what I did, lower than a cockroach's stool stuck to the bottom of a homeless hermit's shabby sandal in the storm drains of Las Vegas -- my most sincere if unworthy apology.

I have heard the skin-shuddering shrieks of those whose souls have been sliced into bloody gobbets of flesh by my dull-edged errors. Though I am unworthy to feel that pain, I feel it still as if it were a red-hot 3/4 inch Makita drill bit driven into the base of my skull and left there set on "Wash-Rinse-Repeat."

In closing, I come to you today penitent, conscience-stricken, regretful and contrite. I have been deep-fried by your pain and deeply regret my actions. I repent them with every shred of my soul. I am, for having hurt your feelings and bruised your tender buttons, a base and abject man mortified by my cheesy, contemptible, insignificant,. shabby, small, and pathetic being. I know now the low things I have done and I am filled with remorse, melancholy, shame, and self-reproach. If I could have myself flogged fleshless by an flock of Carmelite nuns on Methamphetamine I would so. But I can't locate those sisters right now -- and they would be suspect if they showed up.

But I digress.

I am compelled by my inner idiot and 12-step sponsor to say that I bleed for you, wish only to console you, empathize with you, and open my heart in an anguished lament that my actions, wittingly or unwittingly, have raised upon your soul these unlanced boils of existential angst. It is my hope you will allow me to lance them with my sincerity and bandage them in the saline soaked cloth of this apology.

I come before you today an abashed,
chagrined,
conscience-stricken,
guilty,
shamed,
demeaned,
crestfallen,
humiliated,
penitent,
mortified,
and broken man.

I can only seek, humbly, that one thing that will make me whole again after ripping the flesh of your feelings so senselessly. The single thing that would bring infinite balm to my being would be your acceptance of this, my guilty apology, and your eventual, even at the last ding-dong of doom, forgiveness.

In this simpering sorrytude I dwell in the hope to be one day resurrected to the realm of the acceptably American.

Thank you for letting me share.



Posted by Vanderleun Feb 19, 2010 10:34 PM | Comments (20)  | QuickLink: Permalink
Something Transformational
Continued...

Posted by Vanderleun Feb 19, 2010 12:01 PM | Comments (8)  | QuickLink: Permalink
Something Wonderful: Pat Condell on the Wilders Trial and the Crooked Judges of Amsterdam

Condell gets you up to speed on the shameful trial of Geert Wilders in the Netherlands. His "crime"? Speaking the truth about Islam in Europe.



Posted by Vanderleun Feb 18, 2010 12:49 PM | Comments (6)  | QuickLink: Permalink
Dear Cuba, Shut up and get a job!

castroshirt.jpgIf anybody still has any doubts about the degenerative effect a long, strong dose of Communism can have on the human brain, let him read the following "news dispatch" from Cuba:

Cuba Implements Program to Fight Effects of Climate Change | Cuba News Headlines. Cuban Daily News (CDN is of course a state news agency and has to be wery, wery careful about what it says and how it says it. As a result it has become an outlet skilled in saying nothing.)

Cuba began to implement a comprehensive program to face the consequences of climate change, mainly regarding the mitigation and adaptation to its negative effects caused by the developed world’s consumerism.
Well, all one can say, Fidelistas anonymous, is it's about time! It's nice to see your "planning" kick in just when the rest of the world is chucking the scam and moving on. But in case we're missing some hidden point, tell us again what's going on down Havana way... Continued...

Posted by Vanderleun Feb 18, 2010 12:30 AM | Comments (6)  | QuickLink: Permalink
The Data is Errata: Lies, Damn Lies, Statistics, and Junk Graphs
Continued...

Posted by Vanderleun Feb 17, 2010 12:37 PM | Comments (9)  | QuickLink: Permalink
An Important Graphic Presentation About Important Graphic Presentations

An essential visualization concerning visualizations from Flowing Data:Data Underload #9 – Big Graphic Blueprint:

Continued...

Posted by Vanderleun Feb 16, 2010 9:52 PM | Comments (4)  | QuickLink: Permalink
Just when you think the greenwhacks can't get nuttier and more shameless...

Fog Decline Threatens California’s Towering Redwoods from sad Wired Science @ sad Wired.com



Posted by Vanderleun Feb 16, 2010 7:34 PM | Comments (10)  | QuickLink: Permalink
The New York Times Truth Will Out. Or Be Outed by Recent Employees

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Revkin: "Stuff that the Bush administration got involved in was a no-brainer getting that on the front page of the New York Times."

I've said it before and I'll now say it again: Your go-to point man for everything significant on Climategate is Tom Nelson's aggregation blog. Nelson's got so many links links and pointers going up that you can't really keep up with it all, but Nelson will help you out if you keep scanning.

The most important item this morning is Nelson's quick review of a long audio starring Andrew Revkin, late of the New York Times (Revkin Taking NYT Buyout : Veteran climate reporter to leave paper after Copenhagen summit -- CJR ). Revkin, during his 14-year tenure as one of the Times' top environmental reporters, was often a willing tool and fool of the Alarmists -- before "The Big Cutoff". How did that work for them? Well, as Revkin admits in this long recording from a Harvard / Shorenstein Center seminar "on news coverage of climate change," it was easy....

Continued...

Posted by Vanderleun Feb 15, 2010 1:45 PM | Comments (7)  | QuickLink: Permalink
Something Wonderful: Hitler on Climate Change

The great military blogger Neptunus Lex says "It'€™s probably a sign that the whole "Hitler parody"€ thing has run its course when I jump in." But he's wrong, wrong, WRONG!

This one sums up the state of how the flaming wheels are flying off the AGW juggernaut with every passing day. It's got it all and is so densely packed with the lunacy of the scam that it's worth playing several times.

In short, "Dee-licious!" Such intense mockery couldn't happen to a more rotten group of people.

Check it out. Pass it on.

Continued...

Posted by Vanderleun Feb 15, 2010 2:34 AM | Comments (30)  | QuickLink: Permalink
Palestinians: Na'vi or Nuts?

Ah, the Palestinians. Always at the cutting edge of victimology studies. Always in the running for "most innocent and oppressed people ever." Always with the "hand full of gimme and mouth full of 'much obliged'." Why just the other day they were out traipsing around in blue trying to garner another dollop of attention with bad costuming.

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Palestinians dressed as the Na'vi from the film Avatar stage a protest against Israel's separation barrier
Continued...

Posted by Vanderleun Feb 12, 2010 10:50 AM | Comments (26)  | QuickLink: Permalink
Something Wonderful: Democrats' Decadent Party

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Detail only

Brilliant mockery. You have to go to the large original by iMaksim.com here for the full interactive flava'.

Party guests from left to right: Tim Geithner, John Kerry, KSM, Oprah, Nancy Pelosi, Joe Biden, Axelrod, Barack Obama, Michelle Obama, Hillary Clinton, Party Crashers #1, Rahm Emanuel, Eric Holder, Party Crashers #2, Harry Reid, John Edwards, Bluto, Andy Stern, Bill Clinton, Chris Matthews, Keith Olbermann, Barney Frank, Kevin Jennings

Statues left to right: Che Guevara, Saul Alinsky, Obama, Chairman Mao, Lenin



Posted by Vanderleun Feb 11, 2010 4:14 PM | Comments (5)  | QuickLink: Permalink
And Charlie Wilson's War Goes On

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Charlie Wilson's dead but we're still a long, long way from home: SEALED WITH A KISS: A U.S. Marine read a letter covered in lipstick kisses at his outpost near Marjah, Afghanistan, Thursday. U.S. and Afghan forces were in the area to seal off escape routes ahead of a major offensive against the Taliban.



Posted by Vanderleun Feb 11, 2010 3:25 PM | Comments (3)  | QuickLink: Permalink
New World Trade Center Images Released Today: Just In Case You Like to Forget

Deadly: A total of seven World Trade Centre buildings were destroyed that day, killing 2,752 people.

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[Click to enlarge]

SO WHY ARE WE SEEING THEM NOW? After 9/11 the U.S.'s National Institute of Standards and Technology collected images from amateur, professional and freelance photographers as part of its investigation into the collapse of the World Trade Centre. It completed its research in 2005. In the summer of last year, ABC saw that NIST was asking the photographers' permission to release the images and filed a request under the Freedom of Information Act to get access to them. The images seen here are ones taken by NYPD helicopters and come from the 2,779 pictures supplied on nine CDs to the news organisation. -- More chilling images at New World Trade Center 9/11 aerial images from ABC News | Mail Online
I was standing on the Brooklyn Heights Promanade, less than a mile away, when this happened. At times I think I'll get over it, get beyond it, move on.... but I never do. And I pray I never will.

Anyone - public official or private citizen - who tries to convince you this sort of thing is over, is trying to get you and your loved ones killed. You need to get in their face and back them down.



Posted by Vanderleun Feb 10, 2010 8:38 PM | Comments (20)  | QuickLink: Permalink
Something Revolutionary: Frozen Wasteland

The climate change scammers might be able to survive the email hack at CRU and the meltdown at the IPCC, but this, THIS, will put a stake in their chests and nail their coffin shut. [HT: Comstock]

FROZEN WASTELAND

Up here on the farm
We chop wood
To stay Warm.
We all could use some
Glo-bal Warm-ing!

We all need to fight
To preserve our rights.
I don't want to be taxed
Just for breathing.

Open your eyes.
Don't believe their lies.
It's just a
Fro-zen Wasteland!

Al Gore is a liar.
His pants are on fire.
Plus he's getting rich
From carbon offsets.

He's loose with the facts.
All he wants is a tax.
Let's get together
Before it gets much colder.

Frozen Wasteland.
Its just a Frozen Wasteland.
Frozen Wasteland.
Frozen Wasteland.

WE'RE ALL FROZEN!!



Posted by Vanderleun Feb 10, 2010 7:34 PM | Comments (11)  | QuickLink: Permalink
Something Wonderful: The People Yes

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Between the finite limitations of the five senses
and the endless yearnings of man for the beyond
the people hold to the humdrum bidding of work and food
while reaching out when it comes their way
for lights beyond the prison of the five senses,
for keepsakes lasting beyond any hunger or death.
      This reaching is alive.
The panderers and liars have violated and smutted it.
      Yet this reaching is alive yet
      for lights and keepsakes....

This old anvil laughs at many broken hammers.
      There are men who can't be bought.
      The fireborn are at home in fire.
      The stars make no noise,
      You can't hinder the wind from blowing.
      Time is a great teacher.
      Who can live without hope?

In the darkness with a great bundle of grief
      the people march.
In the night, and overhead a shovel of stars for keeps, the people
march:
      "Where to? what next?"

-- Carl Sandburg: The People Yes (excerpt)



Posted by Vanderleun Feb 10, 2010 5:35 PM | QuickLink: Permalink
What's That On Obama's Hand

Twitter has taken note of the Obama / Gibbs / Progressive / Liberal meltdown over the words Sarah Palin wrote upon her hand last weekend and is meting out its own harsh justice with:




Posted by Vanderleun Feb 9, 2010 3:59 PM | QuickLink: Permalink
How Would Sullivan Know? He's an Ass, Man

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Andrew Sullivan: The Atlantic's Breast Expert?

More and more it's becoming clear that Andrew Sullivan must have been abused as a child by some woman in his life at the time. Following that I guess it was open season on the young and unfortunate lad. Still, the child is father to what passes for the man in Andrew's case, and I guess he has to get his six of the best sans safeword daily or he doesn't feel "normal."

The Atlantic's star-class misogynist reveals his bad craziness today in Palin's Triumph. By any measure, it's a masterpiece of psycho-sexual projection. See if you can even begin to comprehend the diseased brain that can blurt out:

She can electrify a crowd. She has the kind of charisma that appeals to the sub-rational. and she has crafted a Peronist identity - utterly fraudulent, of course - that is political dynamite in a recession with populism roiling everyone and everything. She is Coughlin with boobs - except with a foreign policy agenda to expand Israel and unite with it in a war against Islam.
Do not under-estimate the appeal of a beautiful, big breasted, divinely chosen warrior-mother as a military leader in a global religious war.[Emphasis added]
Whew! Even for the accommodating Andrew that's quite a mouthful. One hardly knows where to begin in this paragraph where Sullivan's nature wars with his nurture with an assist from his dubious education. To begin with you've got to love the Father Coughlin reference in which Andrew, a severely lapsed Catholic, grafts breasts onto a dead Canadian priest who promoted Hitler. That's the sort of high and hard inside referencing that signals we're dealing a writer that's "smar-r-ter than the av-er-age bear." Then there's the "Peronist" gambit in which one might think of the historic Evita Peron, except for the fact that when it comes to Andrew the tres-campier Madonna is no doubt first in his mind. (Especially she of the Truth or Dare period.)

Continued...

Posted by Vanderleun Feb 8, 2010 9:30 PM | Comments (26)  | QuickLink: Permalink
It Had to Happen: Hitler Informed About the Fiorina "Demon Sheep" Political Ad

But not in the Hitler Bunker Downfall scene you're used to seeing. (We note that the use of this new scene now means the number of forthcoming Hitler / Downfall parodies has gone from extremely large to virtually infinite.)

Continued...

Posted by Vanderleun Feb 8, 2010 5:34 PM | QuickLink: Permalink
Something Snowpocalyptic: Greatest Weatherman Forecast Evah!

When they tell you the Earth is warming, send them this link.



Posted by Vanderleun Feb 8, 2010 11:11 AM | Comments (5)  | QuickLink: Permalink
The Full Monty Fisking of Climategate

Climategate—analysis by John P. Costella, Ph.D.

The key phrase here, from a scientific point of view, is that it is “unprecedented” warming. There is absolutely no doubt that mankind has liberated huge quantities of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere over the past two centuries. But mankind did not “create” this carbon dioxide out of nothing. It was released by the burning of “fossil fuels”, created by the Earth over millions of years from the remains of plants and animals (who themselves ultimately obtained their nutrition from those plants). So where did those plants get their energy and carbon dioxide from? They absorbed the radiant energy of the Sun, and breathed in carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, as plants continue to do today. In other words, when we burn fossil fuels, we are utilizing a small part of the solar energy that had been collected and stored by plants over millions of years, and in the process we are liberating into the atmosphere the carbon dioxide that those plants had absorbed from the atmosphere in the first place.

This may sound like a fairly benign sort of natural cycle, until you realize that a couple of hundred years is a mere blink of an eye compared to the millions of years it took for the planet to build up those resources. It is right for scientists to worry about whether that massive and almost instantaneous “kick” to the planet may throw the equilibrium of the biota into complete chaos. It is a valid question, of ultimate global importance—one that most people would have thought would have demanded the most careful, exacting, and rigorous scientific analyses that mankind could muster.

Climategate has shattered that myth. It gives us a peephole into the work of the scientists investigating possibly the most important issue ever to face mankind. Instead of seeing large collaborations of meticulous, careful, critical scientists, we instead see a small team of incompetent cowboys, abusing almost every aspect of the framework of science to build a fortress around their “old boys’ club”, to prevent real scientists from seeing the shambles of their “research”. Most people are aghast that this could have happened; and it is only because “climate science” exploded from a relatively tiny corner of academia into a hugely funded industry in a matter of mere years that the perpetrators were able to get away with it for so long.

But as wisely noted by both P. T. Barnum and Abraham Lincoln,

You may fool all the people some of the time, you can even fool some of the people all of the time, but you cannot fool all of the people all the time.



Posted by Vanderleun Feb 8, 2010 1:44 AM | QuickLink: Permalink
The Tebow Commercial: This is What All the Griping and Whining Was About?

Let's review: The Pam & Tim Tebow in Focus On The Family Commercial was, if you had the sort of insect soul that put credence in such things, supposed to be some sort of knife in the gut of a woman's "right to choose." The 30-second-spot was played up to be the most heinous, knuckle dragging chunk of pure Conservative propaganda ever to be foisted on a gullible American public. It was proclaimed to be something that could return all American women to the age of coat-hangers and back-alley abortionists.

Well, here it is. Judge for yourself...

Continued...

Posted by Vanderleun Feb 7, 2010 7:41 PM | Comments (33)  | QuickLink: Permalink
Something Wonderful: Only "The Ordinary Sins of Ambition"
Move aside, and let the man go through.

Cobb: "Ignorance is a privilege.
It is the privilege you have when you own your own land, your own house, and you have enough Dosh to handle your business and that of your offspring. So you can ignore the rest of the world. I'm striving to be that kind of ignorant, so I don't have to fill my head with other people's news to feel at home in the world....
"I don't want to share the bonds of the bondsman, and though my conscience recognizes his predicament, I don't want to be a part of it. I want to be a freer man than my father and my son to be a perfectly free man. I want that my daughters would marry such men. Let my drama be the human drama of the ordinary sins of ambition in men of ways and means, not the acts of desperation of those migrant prisoners. A free man never becomes a suicide bomber, but he'll try for your wife all the same. The more free men we have, the better our prospects for justice." -- When You Don't Care Enough To Care - Cobb


Posted by Vanderleun Feb 6, 2010 5:33 PM | Comments (4)  | QuickLink: Permalink
Barack Obama: Imaginary Friend of Democrats. Cause and Cure.

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Before the flowers of friendship faded friendship faded. -- Gertrude Stein

Atheists, like songwriters, are always seeking lines more glib than true. Glib is golden because it obscures the fact that deep down atheism is, like a pop song, shallow. One of the more tedious quips, oft repeated with a tone that oozes ‘What a good boy am I,’ is "God is just an imaginary friend for adults.”

The possibility that God may have given glib atheists everything – space, time, a planet, evolution, and free will – that allows this bromide to roll trippingly off their tongues is something they will not and can not conceive. Their wetware is not evolved enough to perceive God should He deign to reveal himself. God is not finished buffing out their fatal flaw, although He will be, by and by. Until then they cannot grasp that, in some cases, “imaginary friends” can be as real as their friendship is illusory.

Exhibits A, B, and C today are the Virginia and New Jersey elections last fall and especially the Massachusetts senate election of Scott Brown. These established the new truth of contemporary American politics, Barack Obama is the imaginary friend of Democrats.” This dovetails well with another of his many roles: Stand-in lower-case god for the vast majority of American atheists.

If there were still any doubt he's only an imaginary friend, last week's run-in between the President and panicked members of his party removed it. The depth to which Obama is willing to betray Democrats is trouble was summed up by a Washington Post writer, PostPartisan in Obama dismisses Blanche Lincoln's plea to be more centrist:

Continued...

Posted by Vanderleun Feb 6, 2010 11:46 AM | Comments (22)  | QuickLink: Permalink
New Obama Security Measures in Place for Meeting with Democrats

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Posted by Vanderleun Feb 6, 2010 10:40 AM | Comments (1)  | QuickLink: Permalink
Origins of the State

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They expose the unwanted infant
On a hot flat stone, or throw it
Whirling head over foot into the ravine
For the raven's obscene brunch,
And walk back down
Their barren blasted Hill
To their village of rocks,
Hearing the mother’s moans,
Approving the father's stern smile.
All male, the state demands,
And sound.



Posted by Vanderleun Feb 6, 2010 12:39 AM | Comments (9)  | QuickLink: Permalink
Troubles in Threes: Yet Another Toyota Recall

Mark H reports: Hasn't been officially announced yet, but there's a new recall on electric mowers made by a Toyota subsidiary....



Posted by Vanderleun Feb 5, 2010 10:52 PM | Comments (2)  | QuickLink: Permalink
Weasel Watcher Winners: "What Do Heinrich Himmler and Yahoo Have in Common?"

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Vultures of a feather! “To his eminence the Grand Mufti, 4 VII 1943, in remembrance H Himmler”

The Watcher @ Watcher of Weasels notes that both, though separated by time, distance, and death have sided with Palestinians against the Jews; as shown in two pieces of original research that have won this week's contest.

First in the Council category is Mere Rhetoric's deeply researched and illustrated - Yahoo Wipes “Ariel, Israel” Off The Map, Replaces It With “Jenin, Palestinian Occupied Territories”. It's an article that will make you regret you ever Yahooed:

Apparently someone has convinced Yahoo to go into their News Weather data, erase “Ariel, Israel” as a valid location, and replace it “Jenin, Palestinian Occupied Territories.” The 20,000 residents from Ariel, where the relevant weather station is built, apparently don’t deserve their own weather. Yahoo has decreed that it belongs to the residents of Jenin, which is 25 miles north and 850 feet lower.

Paired with Mere Rhetoric, is Pamela Geller's article @ Atlas Shrugs - historical investigation, From Himmler with Love: “His Eminence, the Grand Mufti, In Remembrance”.

Here the tale of two monsters gets personalized. The captured files of the German High Command in Flansburg at the war’s end reveal that the Arab riots of 1936 in Palestine were carried out by the Mufti with funds supplied by the Nazis. The report states: “Only through funds made available by Germany to the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem was it possible to carry out the revolt in Palestine.”
History that many have forgotten and are, as a consequence, on the verge of repeating.

In my own idiosyncratic "Best Headline" category, best in show has to go to Wolf Howling - The Three Stooges Meet Al Qaeda In Undiegate.

After Obama has had a full year in office, and after he had inherited a functioning system from the Bush administration, this is truly scandalous - not to mention incredibly dangerous for America. Call it Undiegate.

And my own "Oh, This Is Going to Be No Fun at All" category choice is J. E. Dyer's description of the grand SNAFU that will be the elimination of the Don't Ask Don't Tell policy, Commentary Contentions - When the Telling Starts.

The issue will be forced by lawsuit if by no other means. A 20-year veteran with combat tours in Iraq and Afghanistan may not be comfortable, for example, endorsing “Gay Pride Month” or participating in scheduled military celebrations of it. He may be charged by a gay subordinate with creating a hostile work environment or ordered by a senior officer to get onboard with gay-pride celebrations. Perhaps his chain of command would back him up and force the issue to a higher level. The serious question remains: what does this have to do with warfighting readiness?

The complete listings of the awards follows:

Continued...

Posted by Vanderleun Feb 5, 2010 7:06 PM | QuickLink: Permalink
Good! Morning! NASHVILLE!

It's a cloudy rain day here in Seattle. Ditto Nashville. "Listen; there's a hell of a good universe next door: let's go."

Dated? You bet. But update the hair and the clothes and you've got a Tea Party anthem for 2010 right there. Better still, everybody knows the words.

Continued...

Posted by Vanderleun Feb 5, 2010 7:45 AM | Comments (8)  | QuickLink: Permalink
Something Powerful: Now This is How to Get the FCINOs and the RINOs in the Election

This May Be the Greatest Campaign Web Video of All Time

"In California’s GOP Senate primary, Carly Fiorina released a web attack ad against Tom Campbell that is being called “psychedelic.” I think it’s destined to be remembered as a classic. It combines what sounds like the soundtrack to “The Exorcist,” a narrator who sounds like he's imitating Morgan Freeman with the stratospheric dudgeon of Keith Olbermann’s “Special Comments,” and then the grand finale: evil, menacing, vaguely cybernetic sheep with glowing red eyes. Two minutes and thirty seconds into the video, you will be screaming, “What the hell is that?!?” and reaching for any available firearms." -- Jim Geraghty


Posted by Vanderleun Feb 4, 2010 6:10 PM | Comments (6)  | QuickLink: Permalink
Senator Scott Brown Takes "The People's Seat"

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[Original image courtesy of Insty. ]



Posted by Vanderleun Feb 4, 2010 5:06 PM | QuickLink: Permalink
Unclear on the Concepts of Boating and Voting

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From Curmudgeonly & Skeptical -- Your go-to source for demented insanity that somehow makes sense.



Posted by Vanderleun Feb 4, 2010 12:57 PM | Comments (8)  | QuickLink: Permalink
Something Wonderful: The Post American Bandstand

What can I say? Around here, it's just all videos all the time lately. It's a great thing that folks everywhere are starting to use original videos as the attack dogs of alternative media. Keep it up and it won't be so "alternative" any more.

Come to think of it, it's not. It's "Citizen Media."

The Post-American Bandstand with Pat Boone. Yes, Pat Boone.



Posted by Vanderleun Feb 4, 2010 12:16 PM | Comments (7)  | QuickLink: Permalink
Something Wonderful: Too Late to Apologize: A Declaration

In which the Founding Fathers rock the house world! Amazing.

Continued...

Posted by Vanderleun Feb 4, 2010 11:39 AM | Comments (7)  | QuickLink: Permalink
No Quarter on Climategate

Armed and Dangerous » Blog Archive » Naming and shaming the AGW fraudsters

The best reason not to relent, to name and shame the fraudsters and shatter their reputations and humilate them — ideally, to the point where there’s a rash of prominent suicides as a result — is this:

If we don’t destroy them, they’ll surely ramp up yet another colossal, politicized eco-fraud to plague us all.

Conspiracy #1: Most of the environmental movement is composed of innocent Gaianists, but not all of it. There’s a hard core that’s sort of a zombie remnant of Soviet psyops. Their goals are political: trash capitalism, resurrect socialism from the dustbin of history. They’re actually more like what I have elsewhere called a prospiracy, having lost their proper conspiratorial armature when KGB Department V folded up in 1992. There aren’t a lot of them, but they’re very, very good at co-opting others and they drive the Gaianists like sheep. I don’t think there’s significant overlap with the scientists here; the zombies are concentrated in universities, all right, but mostly in the humanities and grievance-studies departments.

Conspiracy #2: The hockey team itself. Read the emails. Small, tight-knit, cooperating through covert channels, very focused on destroying its enemies, using false fronts like realclimate.org. There’s your classic conspiracy profile.

My model of what’s been going on is basically this: The hockey team starts an error cascade that sweeps up a lot of scientists. The AGW meme awakens chiliastic emotional responses in a lot of Gaianists. The zombies and the green-shirts grab onto that quasi-religious wave as a political strategem (the difference is that the zombies actively want to trash capitalism, while the green-shirts just want to hobble and milk it). Pro-AGW scientists get more funding from the green-shirts within governments, which reinforces the error cascade — it’s easier not to question when your grant money would be at risk for doing so. After a few times around this cycle, the hockey team notices it’s riding a tiger and starts on the criminal-conspiracy stuff so it will never have to risk getting off.



Posted by Vanderleun Feb 3, 2010 11:44 AM | QuickLink: Permalink
THE HEAT WAS ON

Golden Age Comic Book Stories



Posted by Vanderleun Feb 3, 2010 11:32 AM | QuickLink: Permalink
Something Wonderful: Glenn Beck Wears Chris Matthews' Guts for Garters

Glenn Beck is good on TV but his real genius blooms on the radio. Here he takes on Chris Matthews' racist statement,"I forgot Obama was black for an hour," and riffs it into shreds.

"Boy this surgeon that was doing the surgery on me was so unbelievable I forgot he was black for an hour."

"I was talking to my pharmacist behind the counter, and he was such a nice guy I forgot he was black for an hour."

HT: The Morgan.



Posted by Vanderleun Feb 1, 2010 11:19 AM | Comments (9)  | QuickLink: Permalink
Just Say No to NPR

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Ask Alice: Originator of the Tea Party idea, Keli Carender, in a brand new Wonderland. April, 2009

In my mail this morning from NPR.org was a request for permission to use my photograph above from Don't Tread - Seattle Tea Party, 2009 @ AMERICAN DIGEST.

Hello, I work for NPR.org and I am preparing a Web page for tomorrow’s Morning Edition story about Keli Carendar. I found a photo of Carendar on americandigest.com that we would like to use to accompany the story. The specific photo is this one: http://americandigest.org/eatpartyorganizer.jpg. My story is due today at 4 pm Eastern time. Thank you so much for your time and help.
Having seen how NPR operates during the recent "How To Speak Tea Bag" episode, I felt I had to reply as follows:
I regret that I must decline permission for the use of my photograph in the forthcoming NPR. org story. Although I was once a contributor to NPR and worked for several years as a broadcaster for Pacifica Radio @ KPFA, I no longer trust either organization as a source. As a result I cannot, in good conscience, support them.
I'll be watching how they treat Carendar @ Morning Edition.



Posted by Vanderleun Feb 1, 2010 8:15 AM | Comments (22)  | QuickLink: Permalink
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