Got a bunch of stuff that’s been in tabs for a while that need clearing out, but that deserve to be seen. Might as well do another Random Crap in my Tabs to catch up, and take back some system resources. A bunch of it is meme-worthy, so I expect you’ve probably seen them before. Maybe even on FtB. Possibly. Frankly, I’m too lazy to check, and either way, I know I haven’t talked about them, so you’re certainly missing my keen insight!
Continue reading “RCimT: Saturday tab clean-up”
Month: March 2012
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Monckton and Watts cut and run from debate with Potholer54
Welp, this one’s dead in the water. Color me completely unsurprised. Apparently Anthony Watts is done with the Peter Hadfield / Christopher Monckton debate, all because Climate Crocks interviewed Potholer. Evidently offering evidence for assertions is “hateful” in Watts’ eyes.
Faced with real, checkable, online debate, where he would have to name his sources, put it in writing, and provide links for readers to fact check him (hmmm..sort of the way I do it in this video series) His CowardlyLion-ness decided to, well, run.
The host of the discussion, Pseudo-Science enthusiast Anthony Watts, told his faithful last weekend that, after I released a video of a Skype interview with Potholer discussing the situation, he would no longer provide a platform for discussion, since Potholer was “colluding” with that “hateful greenman”.
Continue reading “Monckton and Watts cut and run from debate with Potholer54”
Rick Santorum goes ridiculously hyperbolic
Rick Santorum believes abortions should be outlawed — except, of course, the ones that save his wife’s life, as long as you don’t call it an abortion — and that rape babies are “gifts from God”. Before I saw this video, I thought, could this man be any more ridiculous? Turns out, yes, yes he certainly can.
Continue reading “Rick Santorum goes ridiculously hyperbolic”
Underwhelming response to trans rights bill, overwhelming response to trans beauty queen
I don’t know if you realized it when it happened, but last time around here in Canada, when bill C-389 amending the standing 1977 Canadian Human Rights Act to include transsexual and transgender rights was about to pass in the last parliament, it became a victim of the 2011 election when the government was dissolved before it could become law.
The process, which had taken almost a year, fell apart before its proponents’ eyes. Transsexual and transgender persons came within a hair’s breadth of being protected under our Charter, but became an accidental casualty instead of Harper’s bid for more power. They truly snatched defeat from the jaws of victory.
If you have a memory that stretches all the way back to 2011, you’ll remember the common media narrative and pushback against this bill was that it was the “Bathroom Bill” — a bid to allow “perverts” to use a woman’s bathroom despite having a penis, and possibly prey on unsuspecting little girls. Suddenly, public bathrooms would go from safe havens to molestation central.
You know, because homosexuality and transsexuality are all about molesting little kids. Or something.
So, you might be surprised to know that this time around, now that Bill C-276 by Liberal MP Hedy Fry and C-279 by NDP MP Randall Garrison were introduced and now that by luck of the draw Garrison’s bill was read into the Parliament, pretty much nobody’s taking it seriously at all.
Not the media, not the MPs, nobody.
Continue reading “Underwhelming response to trans rights bill, overwhelming response to trans beauty queen”
SHOCKING REVELATION: Christopher Monckton is Sacha Baren Cohen?!
Got a bunch on my plate today. So, a post with a silly video for right now. Talk amongst yourselves!
Via D-Dave in the comments of my last post about Monckton’s debate-dodging, comes definitive proof that Monckton is actually a character by Sacha Baren Cohen. That certainly explains why he can’t join the debate — he’s too busy being The Dictator right now.
Candy that tastes like burgers and fries
I present to you, via wanwan.fm, for the low price of $4.50, the Happy Kitchen Candy Hamburgers kit direct from Japan. And it apparently tastes like the real thing.
You have to spend precious candy-eating minutes preparing all the parts, including microwaving the burger, bun and fries. It’s part toy, part “food.”
O SCIENCE, WHAT HAVE YOU WROUGHT?!
Tories made 6,000,000 calls, had two lists, refuse to give records to Elections Canada.
I have nothing but swear words.
NDP leadership election marred by DDoS
So, something pretty big happened in Canadian politics yesterday.
For you Yankees, the short-form of Canadian politics is: we have multiple political parties, not just two. We have the right-wing Conservatives, who are like (in so many ways) your Republicans; we have the centrist Liberals, who are like your Democrats; and we have the NDP, who are a left-wing party unlike anything you’ve seen in America for forty years. We also have the Greens, and several far-left, far-right and far-loon parties, depending on where you are. Each of them elects a party leader, and if that party gets the most seats in the House of Commons, their party leader is made Prime Minister. The party leader of the next biggest party is the Leader of the Loyal Opposition.
Canada lost a great statesman in the long-time leader of the NDP, Jack Layton, when he succumbed to cancer. The NDP just held the election for the new leader, doing it for the very first time entirely online through Spanish company Scytl, who evidently have a sterling record for security in electronic elections.
It turns out, though, that distributing the load for the four tiers of the ballot… well, less so.
Continue reading “NDP leadership election marred by DDoS”
Lord Christopher Monckton: where are you?
Potholer54, a.k.a former CBC correspondent Peter Hadfield, originally won my undying devotion for a series on Youtube debunking creationists. He’s also, recently, taken on climate change denialists, given how much overlap there is in the particular skillset you need to counter their dogmas. One of the biggest proponents of dogmatic climate antiscience is Lord Christopher Monckton. He and Potholer recently had a short dust-up over Monckton’s supposedly unassailable speeches. Anthony Watts, arch-denialist and proprietor of the Watts Up With That blog, hosted what began as an internet debate, and ended as a one-sided trouncing where Monckton retreated from the field unceremoniously with an as-yet unfulfilled promise to return and rebut.
It’s been several months since, and where I would have given up, Potholer is evidently not done with Monckton. He, and I strongly feel all Monckton’s and denialism’s proponents, deserve a rebuttal. Potholer authored an open letter to Monckton and posted it to Youtube.
Continue reading “Lord Christopher Monckton: where are you?”
Ontario judge (maybe) to anti-choice activist: “You’re wrong and your God’s wrong”
Hat tip to Ibis3 for pointing this story out to me.
Apparently, according to “pro-life” news aggregator LifeSiteNews.com, Justice S. Ford Clements dispensed approbation judiciously to an anti-choice protester by the name of Mary Wagner who’s been harassing abortion clinic patients in violation of her probation. Dammit Janet reports:
[Wagner] was charged with mischief and two counts of failing to comply with probation orders (indicating previous brushes with the law, yes?).
She’d been harassing patients and workers at the Bloor West Village Women’s Clinic. But she’s not content to stand on the sidewalk with gory pictures; she enters the clinic with flowers, brochures, and counselling in-person harassment.