Wherein Paris Hilton did something that is not completely like a vapid whore.

John McCain gets owned by, of all people, Paris Hilton.

I just found a shred of respect for Skeletor, due to her being able to read a teleprompter, and accepting this gig. I did not think this would happen in a million years.

See Paris Hilton Responds to McCain Ad and more funny videos on FunnyOrDie.com

See more funny videos at Funny or Die

Oh yeah. And I kicked a dog today, just for Bob.

Wherein Paris Hilton did something that is not completely like a vapid whore.
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Status bars stuck at 57%!!!

I’m going to try for a two-fer tonight, but I’m going to split the posts up, not only because they’re disparate topics, but also because I’m not 100% certain I’ll finish the second right away.  If not, oh well, I only have three or four regular readers still.  I think I’m putting in a phenomenal amount of effort given the size of my audience, and given that I’ve done nothing thus far to actually grow that audience beyond my “base”, that being people I actually know in real life.  Sure, the search engines are linking me a lot, and I link to other blogs frequently which generates pingbacks, but I’m small-time, a very specialized blog.  I don’t even do much actual Canada material, which is something I’ve been meaning to amend as soon as possible.  Either way, once I get a bit more audience, I’ll probably throw on a Google Ads block on the left column, which you can dutifully ignore.

The house situation is cruising along, but it still doesn’t feel real.  Jodi’s extremely frazzled by the lack of specificity with regard to the timetable of the final few pieces of the puzzle — the final inspection, the trading of money for papers, the keys — and I can’t blame her, but I’d prefer to just take the last two weeks as they come.  I have a U-Haul booked, phone and internet due to be hooked up along with power, all on the 18th, the closing date.  I go get the U-Haul at 7am, pack the truck as soon as humanly possible (with what looks like possibly just myself, ReformedYankee and Jodi at the moment, unless by some miracle anyone else manages to free themselves from their pre-existing appointments), get to the new place in time to meet with the power / internet / phone folks (noon-6), get some food into us all, and get the U-Haul back to the service station I rented it from.  Should be a slice of pie.

Especially since we have one less big appliance to deal with — I sold the dishwasher that I had, just last year, rescued for free from an ignominious death at a curbside during spring cleanup, repaired (replaced the power cord and added a seal that turned out to be unnecessary), having sold it for a decent $30.  I not only got a dishwasher out of it for a year, but I made $15 after the repair supplies.  Not a bad profit margin.

We’ve been packing Jodi’s mother’s things, though she can only move into her new apartment on the 13th, as that’s the soonest power can be hooked up.  Unfortunately we live near a university town, and that means near the start of school, the utilities get swamped with hookups.  We’ve already moved a bunch there, though, and are slowly dragging stuff (like dishes) up out of storage as we bring her stuff to the apartment.

Otherwise, life is going swimmingly.

Status bars stuck at 57%!!!

If you think the Earth is flat, you fail at life!

If you’re a Flat Earther, then you’re an idiot beyond comprehension.  Explain Antarctica being one land mass that you can see the entirety of by flying a plane high enough over, explain the sun not shining on all parts of the disc at once, explain the eccentric orbits of the planets and stars (which in the 4th century BCE, scientists had already figured out, in the context of a round earth!).    Honestly, you can’t, you’re wrong, and should shut the hell up.  That the BBC published this with only a very slight modicum of criticism is galling.

Why is it the media today has devolved to the point where being “fair and objective” means reporting both sides to the argument without pointing out how batshit crazy one side is?  “Conservatives say the noon sky is a yet unnamed variety of plaid which is quite similar to the MacGregor tartan.  Liberals disagree, pointing out that the picture they referenced shows a solid blue sky.”  All you have to do is keep repeating the crazy stuff until one day it comes up in a debate framed as, “Some people say that your inability to describe the sky as plaid shows your liberal bias.  What do you say to that?”

But of course we all know reality, like the media, has a well-known liberal bias.  Some days I’m tempted to give up in the face of such a daunting task as to fend off the sheer stupidity that exists today.

If you think the Earth is flat, you fail at life!

And they want to drill… to ease costs at the pump to consumers. Sure.

Rex Tillerson, CEO of Exxon
Rex Tillerson, CEO of ExxonMobil

Wow.  Chutzpah.  Oil Profits Shatter Records and we’re stuck being gouged at the pumps, and the only solution offered by Republicans is to a) give the oil companies more tax breaks, and b) give them rights over more land to drill (despite the fact that the oil won’t be accessible for at least ten years and they aren’t developing over 80% of the land they already hold rights over).  By the way, guys, your policies affect Canadians equally detrimentally.

Whatever.  Forget I said anything, and go fill up your gas tank!  Remember, every time you do, you make this man smile.  You want to see him smile, don’t you?  Of course you do!

And they want to drill… to ease costs at the pump to consumers. Sure.

J’accuse!

Seven days after the World Trade Centre attacks, two Democrats who were in the process of trying to prevent the PATRIOT Act from passing, and several media sources, received letters laced with anthrax.  22 people developed anthrax infections; five people died.  These anthrax lacings were nearly pure, highly refined dry powder — “weaponized”, in other words.  The letters were intended to imply that a foreign Muslim was responsible, with “Death to America, Death to Israel, Allah is great” written on them.

The letters were sent to Ft. Detrick, Maryland, a US Army research facility, where they were ostensibly found to contain trace amounts of bentonite, a chemical used in Iraqi biogenic weapons research.  This is then used as smoking-gun evidence (in the form of a deadly mold spore, I suppose) to link Saddam Hussein and Iraq to the attacks, and ultimately, to conflate the 9/11 attacks with terrorism in general.

The catch is, they didn’t contain bentonite, this information was given to ABC News and they reported it as though it had come from “four well placed” but naturally unnamed sources.  In 2007, ABC finally admitted that these samples did not contain any bentonite at all.

The FBI has been investigating these attacks, despite everyone else having since forgotten all about them and their role in the instigation of the Iraq war; at one point, suspecting heavily Stephen Hatfill then subsequently exonerating him in March 2008 and settling a lawsuit he had filed for $5.8 million.   Fast forward to present day, the Justice Department was apparently prepared to accuse one Dr. Bruce E. Ivins of committing these attacks.  One Dr. Bruce E. Ivins, top anthrax researcher at Ft. Detrick, who in 2003 received a Decoration for Exceptional Civilian Service for having assisted in creating a vaccine against anthrax.  One Dr. Bruce E. Ivins who turned up dead on July 29th, 2008, of an apparent suicide by overdose on Tylenol with Codeine.  I say apparent, because for all we know, he may have been killed to keep him quiet, and of course you must realize he is innocent of these attacks until proven guilty.  This doctor however is very likely one of ABC’s “well placed sources”, though that’s mere speculation at this point, because ABC is playing this close to their chests.  I daresay it’s because of complicity in what amounts to a treasonous false flag attack on America in order to drum up support for the Iraq war.

Read more at Glenn Greenwald’s blog: Vital unresolved anthrax questions and ABC News.

This is where the “j’accuse” part comes in.  I accuse the Bush Administration of not only complicity, but of direct responsibility for these anthrax attacks in an effort to create reasons to go to war.  This isn’t the only false flag operation carried out by the Bush administration, in my eyes, either.  See the trumped up 2008 Strait of Hormuz incident where ostensibly Iranian speedboats attempted to provoke an American destroyer into firing upon them, then cross-reference Dick Cheney’s casus belli brainstorming session regarding putting US soldiers in Iranian gear on Iranian speedboats and having them shoot at American ships.  (Thankfully cooler heads prevailed on this one, and the Americans didn’t fire on the speedboats despite comically threatening radio messages like “I am coming at you, you will explode in [static] minutes”.)

I’ve never been a “9/11 Truth” squad member, having always believed that the administration had failed in a shockingly spectacular fashion on 9/11 but not being directly responsible for it.  I’m starting to rethink that position.  Considering what else we now know was lies, I wouldn’t be surprised if new evidence directly linked the Usual Suspects to 9/11 itself.

I hope to see every member of that administration one day frogmarched out of The Hague.

J’accuse!

Life, the universe, and everything (or, I’m An Atheist And So Can You!)

I feel the need to warn you right now, this is going to be an extremely long post, and I earnestly hope it spurs some honest and frank discussion amongst you, my loyal few readers.  And I’m going to try not to make the Hitchhikers’ Guide to the Galaxy references too prevalent.  This all started on reading an interview with Richard Dawkins, prominent author and noted atheist.  Read it if you want, but it’s long too, and I’d prefer you read me first.  I worked hard on this!

In this post, I’m going to do something that, normally, I dislike, when I am on the receiving end.  I’m going to proselytize.  I will try to turn your fundamental beliefs regarding the nature of the universe on their ear.  I am going to attempt to convince you that you are an atheist.

Continue reading “Life, the universe, and everything (or, I’m An Atheist And So Can You!)”

Life, the universe, and everything (or, I’m An Atheist And So Can You!)

Angry Astronomer on Stellar Formation, and arguing with a creationist.

Phil Plait at Bad Astronomy linked to this discussion on Angry Astronomer recently, and boy howdy, is it worth a read.  I haven’t even finished the thread, but I’m sure it’ll provide with much-needed distractions and chuckles throughout the day tomorrow.

And possibly into sometime next week.  What a wall of text!

The length and breadth of the discussion kind of reminds me of the discussions I have on occasion with “Bob”, only minus any sense of logic or rational thought.  If you can make it through the entirety of the thread and discussion on one sitting, and without caffeine or other recreational pharmaceuticals, you’re a better man than I.  Or woman.  Though it’s not hard to be a better woman than I, I just can’t fill out a negligee all that well with my manly physique.

Update: I made it through the entire thread and still don’t understand “Anonymous'” problem with science.  And, being prompted by Clifton throwing his two cents in, I broke down and posted, as well.  To wit:

I have a friend with whom I occasionally argue about evolution. Once in a while, the conversation devolves to the point where I’m accused of relying on faith in science. This is true to an extent. I am no polymath. I know a little bit about a lot of things, but I depend heavily upon others to have made discoveries that I cannot independently verify. I have faith that the scientists that have set down what they believe to be the rules by which the universe works, know their stuff, didn’t fudge the math, and are open to accept evidence against their own hypotheses, otherwise their theories and rules and laws would not have gained the publicity that they have — e.g., someone out there would have cried foul and presented evidence to the contrary, at some point or another.

As science is much like the open-source software model, wherein individual changes are contributed to the body of existing work and incremental improvements eventually lead to a larger oeuvre that can stand alone, I trust that science operates in a meritocratous fashion. Likewise, religion is akin to the closed-source software model, wherein one authority creates the entire body of work, and anything that falls outside the body of work is either heretical or evil. This monolithic authority system is likely what provides comfort to those that have faith in their religious dogma — it is comforting to know that even if you don’t know everything about the universe, you can simply say “God did it” and congratulate yourself for a job well done.

This implies that religious folks are incurious. This doesn’t seem to be the case in all cases, sadly, or we wouldn’t get trolls on science blogs of the ilk of our illustrious Anonymous poster in this thread. (Either they aren’t incurious, or they’re out amongst the heathen looking to convert. Not terribly palatable, and something like tilting at windmills around here, I’d wager.)

I just don’t understand what it is about the pursuit of science that raises the hackles of these types. Why is it that you cannot reconcile the idea that the universe works a certain way, with the idea that “God did it”? And has anyone ever suggested to you (as I saw in a Youtube video recently) that perhaps the Bible was actually created by God specifically to test humankind’s ability to believe in “his creation”, as opposed to creating the universe in an incredibly deceiving manner where 99% of it is a lie intended to fool you into believing the universe is a certain way, to test your faith in the book?

Bah. I don’t usually post my rants on other people’s blogs. I usually save them for my own. Apologies for my compatriot’s earlier cheap plug, by the way.

Dude.  I said “oeuvre”.  I guess I automatically fail.

Angry Astronomer on Stellar Formation, and arguing with a creationist.

Conservative hate radio influenced UU Church shooter

Unbelievable.  Simply unfathomable.  Eight people were shot, one dying immediately and another dying later in hospital, when a man with a grudge against, well, liberalism itself, decided to unload several shotgun blasts into a Unitarian Universalist church in Knoxville, Tennessee during a children’s production of Annie.  The rest of the injured are in serious or critical condition presently.

While liberalism is normally accused of creating radicals (an image it got, rightly or wrongly, due to opposition to the Vietnam War), we have today people setting fire to and bombing abortion clinics, destroying government buildings in revenge for the Waco Massacre, and now some jackass who was mad about “gays and liberals” supposedly taking jobs (THEYTOOKOURJOBS!) and preventing him from getting one himself decided to take matters into his own hands and went on a bloody rampage.

This time around, though, the media actually seems to be getting the fact that this guy was a radical conservative, whose Required Reading list included such philosophical giants as Bill-O The Clown, Michael Savage (born Michael Alan Weiner — I honestly can’t blame him for his pseudonym), and Sean Hannity.  The problem being, nobody’s going to call for these idiots to be banned from the airwaves for creating radicals — that particular tactic is generally only employed by conservatives, for starters.

He specifically picked the Unitarian Universalist church (which, by the way, if I had even a smattering of religious tendencies in my body, I’d happily convert to) because, though it finds its roots in Protestantism, it has a non-dogmatic approach to spirituality, and it is open to all walks of life, including (and prominently advertised on the sign outside its doors) homosexuals.  Don’t forget, gays “tookhisjoerbs”.  Of course he has to go shoot up a church full of good people because it’s tolerant of homosexuality.  That makes perfect sense, in such a xenophobic mind twisted by the conservative pundits’ Two Minutes Hate.  And because of the lies these pundits spewed, two people are dead, and six more are hanging by a thread.

I can’t wait to see how O’Reilly and Hannity (I don’t often get much exposure to Savage, being that he’s radio, moreso than television) try to spin this.  Well, no, actually, I don’t.  Anything they say short of apologizing profusely for categorically spreading fear and hate will likely make me vomit in my mouth, and you know as well as I do that they’re going to express their “heartfelt sympathies” for the victims of the tragedy, ignore completely their part in creating this monster, then turn back to their Two Minutes Hate of the day.

Conservative hate radio influenced UU Church shooter

Wherein I try my hand at moving and carpentry

Sorry I’ve been mostly quiet this past week.  I spent much of the week building a proxy server to use at work, then having a higher-up (not my boss, but the “network architect” for the company) smack me down for doing so despite a “corporate solution” already being in place.  Forgive me for wanting to build a server locally without costing the company a cent, as opposed to piping all our internet traffic out through a VPN connection over the public internet to a site in Ontario, then having it piped back through the same VPN.  Can you say “slow as ass”?  Anyway, so that was most of my work week (and time off as well — I can get pretty OCD when I get onto a big project), and it was all scuttled in the end anyway.  I plan on discussing the options with my boss when he’s off his vacation, and before I go on mine.  Maybe I can convince him that this “corporate solution” isn’t so good a solution without major infrastructure upgrades for cross-site bandwidth.

Packing is progressing slowly.  Our dining room is now overrun with boxes, and most of the decorations and such are all down.  Yesterday I helped ReformedYankee’s family move not one, not two, but three families’ worth of stuff yesterday — on top of moving his family’s stuff to their new house, I had to help his parents move out, and his sister got a bunch of appliances out of the move, so we had to figure a way of getting the things down into their basement down a very thin flight of stairs.  It was muggy all day, so it was a very sweaty move.  By the time I got home, I smelled something fierce.  And I’m paying for the strain today — I haven’t been this sore in a while.  It’s a good kind of sore, though.  (I hope.  For my back’s sake.)  It also means I have one guaranteed committed helper for my own rapidly-approaching move.

I also did some creative furniture alteration yesterday — I cut off the side display case from our big entertainment stand, so the remainder will fit better in our new environs once we’re all moved in.  I might chop up the old upright closet as well, to use it to rebuild the display case as a separate unit.  It’ll probably need a paint job if I do, though, since the veneer is different.

It’d be nice if I had a circular saw.  Or at least a sawhorse.  I’m not much of a carpenter, but I know that putting the board on an exercise step and kneeling on it while you use a jigsaw to cut an almost-straight line according to a pencil crayon mark, isn’t the preferred method of carpentry.  One of these days, I’ll build myself an arcade cabinet, like I’ve been dreaming of for years and years.  When that day comes, it’d be nice to have decent tools to do it with.

We’re planning on having a housewarming party on August 23rd.  Let me know if you’re interested and I’ll e-mail you the details (Jodi even made up a flyer with a map).  Don’t worry, I already know all your e-mail addresses — well, at least I do for those of you who are signed up, and those of you I communicate with regularly — so you don’t have to put them in your comments.

Wherein I try my hand at moving and carpentry