So you already knew the US spends a lot on the military. How much?
More than just about everybody. Combined.
Somehow, I don’t think we’re getting the best bang for our buck here.
(via Quartz)
You know who else has internet stalkers and gets hate mail? Tina Fey! But then, she’s a woman, so I guess that comes with the vagina. Fortunately, though, she’s also a professional comedian, so she knows the best way to handle them: with snark. Apparently, her new book, Bossypants
Posted by jerkstore on Wednesday, 1/21/2009, 11:21 P.M.
“In my opinion Tina Fey completely ruined SNL. The only reason she’s celebrated is because she’s a woman and an outspoken liberal. She has not a single funny bone in her body.”
Dear jerkstore,
Huzzah for the Truth Teller! Women in this country have been over-celebrated for too long. Just last night there was a story on my local news about a “missing girl,” and they must have dedicated seven or eight minutes to “where she was last seen” and “how she might have been abducted by a close family friend,” and I thought, “What is this, the News for Chicks?” Then there was some story about Hillary Clinton flying to some country because she’s secretary of state. Why do we keep talking about these dumdums? We are a society that constantly celebrates no one but women and it must stop! I want to hear what the men of the world have been up to. What fun new guns have they invented? What are they raping these days? What’s Michael Bay’s next film going to be?
When I first set out to ruin SNL, I didn’t think anyone would notice, but I persevered because—like you trying to do a nine-piece jigsaw puzzle—it was a labor of love.
I’m not one to toot my own horn, but I feel safe with you, jerkstore, so I’ll say it. Everything you ever hated on SNL was by me, and anything you ever liked was by someone else who did it against my will.
Sincerely,
Tina Fey
P.S. You know who does have a funny bone in her body? Your mom every night for a dollar.
What I also found hilarious is that there are all these harassing assholes on the internet, from ranty obsessed angry cretins like Reap Paden to every cowardly little profanity-spewing anonymous blustering bully, who don’t even realize that they have become the butt of all the jokes. We don’t have to pick on random ethnic groups — Ole & Lena jokes are so stale — we just have to mention these clowns in the comments sections of blogs and on twitter who have no life but to squeak in impotent rage at the world in general, and we’ve already got our punchline. And they don’t know it! They pound the keyboard to fling out their ALL-CAPS ungrammatical angry splutterings, and we’re just laughing at the little capering clowns. Or if you’re a pro like Fey you’re skewering them.
(via Spectacular Attractions.)
The first bit of this video is an opalescent squid filling her egg sac; then the cool and special part is how many squid mothers carefully insert their sac into a community cluster. Oh, man, they’re just lovely.
We’re through the looking glass again, with another weird post from the Guardian’s pet anti-science writer, the philosopher/theologian Mark Vernon. He’s never met a critic of science he didn’t love, and every scientist is a promoter of scientism. He’s a knee-jerk teleologist, which is a fancy way of saying he sees god everywhere.
His latest is apparently an annual thing in which he announces “the most despised book” of the year. What that means is that it’s a book that’s recognized as bullshit by scientists, so by reflex he assumes it must be wonderful. In 2010, he gave it to Jerry Fodor and Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini for a book that was genetically illiterate nonsense. In 2011 it was a book I know nothing about, but claimed that neuroscience could never explain the mind. In 2012, the runner-up was Rupert Sheldrake, who seems to be Vernon’s good buddy (I am not surprised), but the big prize goes to Thomas Nagel, who’s a well-regarded philosopher who dropped a big clinker this year, with a book that claims we ought to consider Intelligent Design more seriously.
I’ve skimmed Nagel’s book, and it’s a lot of ponderous musing with no foundation in evidence at all. Vernon’s article is no better. It’s enough that Nagel is an advocate for teleology, and that’s really all he can say about it: “he wonders whether science needs to entertain the possibility that a teleological trend is immanent in nature.” “Wondering” is cheap, evidence is hard. He basically finds it inconceivable that all of the universe could have natural causes, so therefore science is inadequate, so therefore we ought to be considering supernatural factors.
You know, that’s a really stupid argument. If you want the details on the poverty of Nagel’s book, read Leiter & Weisberg’s review.
But if you want to claim that there is a purpose or a pattern of goal-seeking behavior by the universe as a whole, show your work. Give me good cause to think there is positive evidence of something shaping our history; don’t just cite your incomprehension.
Well, unless that is you want to win an award from Mark Vernon. Unfortunately, that’s worth less than nothing.
It’s a Monday in January. Nothing can rescue this day…except maybe some Wild Sex.
Bondar mentions the detachable penis episode: she tells me that it’s coming up this week, and it involves a cephalopod, so now you’ll have to visit the site every day anxiously waiting for it.
My digital TV guide tells me “The Dead” is on right now. I love that story! It’s really the best of James Joyce.
Wait… on the SyFy channel? I’m a few minutes in, and seriously, I don’t remember machine guns and swarms of zombies in that story. Although it has been a few years since I read it…
It’s an interesting video from Peter Sinclair that claims that Americans are finally waking up from their refusal to recognized the evidence for global climate change. We’ll see. I wouldn’t be surprised to see a few of the usual idiots popping up in the comments shrieking about “Warmists!”.
But who knows? Maybe they’ll realize they’re living in the Anthropocene.
We’re coming up on Burzynski’s 70th birthday — it’s a bit ironic that the man responsible for so many shattered hopes has had such a long life himself — and there is a plan to remind him of the grief he has caused.
Burzynski, if you’ve forgotten, is the guy who claims to have a cancer treatment called antineoplastons, a small set of compounds isolated from urine that he injects at high dosages into cancer patients. These drugs have not had their efficacy demonstrated, but Burzynski keeps cycling through clinical trials, taking the preliminary steps to demonstrating scientific utility, but never quite advancing the results to the point where they can demonstrate significance. He’s cunning that way; by constantly playing the game and running the mill of phase II trials, he puts up a pretense of scientific seriousness, but he never goes further, where his snake oil would be shown to be ineffective. Burzynski’s claims are total nonsense.
What he does do is promise remarkable results, and bilk people out of buckets of money — tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars gouged out of desperate patients — and then go home to his 6 million dollar, gated, wooded estate. Crime does pay, and it pays well. This fraud is living in luxury while his patients pour money into his clinic in the frantic hope that maybe the sciencey-sounding jargon of his well-practiced spiel means they’ll really get a cure.
They don’t. You can read the accounts of the other Burzynski patients — the ones he’d rather you didn’t know about. The Burzynski clinic is a place you go to die, and pay extravagantly for the privilege.
Right now, he and his propagandists are claiming to be doing “Personalized Gene-Targeted Cancer Therapy”, and touting the relevance of information from the human genome project for their treatment. But they’re still just injecting people with concentrated extracts of human urine! The lies are simply outrageous, but nothing seems to hinder him from making them.
Burzynski has plenty of lawyers and has fended off many attempts to shut down his quackery, so what can you do? We can raise money for a legitimate cancer center, St Jude’s Children’s Hospital, and challenge him on his birthday to match our contributions. The goal is to raise at least $30,000, an amount that is minuscule compared to the millions he has bilked from the sick and dying, but the point is to shame the man, and maybe get some money redirected to legitimate hospitals, where it can do some real good.
Read the latest on Burzynski from Science-Based Medicine, and get angry/inspired. Every penny raised does double-duty, making both a contribution to real medical work, and helping to raise attention about this shameless quack.
This is the lounge. You can discuss anything you want, but you will do it kindly. Wallaby.
Status: Heavily Moderated; Previous thread
They’ve come up with a novel solution to the dilemma of accommodating gay priests. They can form civil unions, but they have to be abstinent within them.
Men in a civil union will now be allowed to become bishops in the Church of England, but they are not allowed to have sex.
Intercourse between two men — or two women — remains a sin.
"Homosexual genital acts fall short of the Christian ideal and are to be met with a call to repentance and the exercise of compassion," according to Anglican doctrine.
It always leaves me gobsmacked that they can talk about a universal “Christian ideal” issued by the will of an omnipotent deity that specifies exactly where you can put your penis. It’s kind of cute that their holy book can be interpreted to constrain penile activities, but at the same time, endorses slavery and treats rape as a property crime (it is not an abomination to stick your penis in an unwilling woman, after all!)
I’m also wondering how they plan to enforce their proscription. Will they be installing cameras in gay priests’ bedrooms?
