Product Demo OTD

Behold the wonders of non-Newtonian materials technology.

It seems not to be available in America yet, darn it.

So what if he drowned his dates?

At least Teddy could be counted on to try to torpedo American presidents with the Soviets!

Kennedy concluded that the Soviets needed, in effect, some PR help, given that Reagan was good at “propaganda” (the word used in the memo). The senator wanted them to know he was more than eager to lend a hand.

This kind of casual treason seems quite fashionable on the Left.

Precision Voting

The essential Michael Yon posts one of his most intense accounts yet from Afghanistan.

The upshot is that the British soldiers are amazing, and the Ministry of Defense is foolish. But there’s a lot more detail. Don’t miss it.

It includes this great observation in a photo caption:

Many believe that the Pashtun people are one of the lost tribes of Israel.  If true, some Taliban might actually be descended from Jews, which would be one of the most severe ironies of humanity.  Some branches go off and earn Nobel Prizes and unravel the secrets of the universe while advancing humanity by leaps and bounds, while another turns malignant and doesn’t know how to build a road.

WaPo: “Cheney Was Right”

Well, that’s not exactly the headline their editors chose for this Saturday admission.

The debate over the effectiveness of subjecting detainees to psychological and physical pressure is in some ways irresolvable, because it is impossible to know whether less coercive methods would have achieved the same result. But for defenders of waterboarding, the evidence is clear: Mohammed cooperated, and to an extraordinary extent, only when his spirit was broken in the month after his capture March 1, 2003, as the inspector general’s report and other documents released this week indicate.

Gosh. Enhanced interrogation techniques work. Who knew?

Remember: The Media Are The Enemy

Here’s a great illustration of how you need to be careful (and have friends watching the setup) if the media interviews you at a town hall.

Then I realized what didn’t feel right… Of course, they’d framed him with  the Hitler posters in the background so viewers would infer that he  supported that position.

I started to walk into the shot to “accidentally” interupt it and quietly inform him what was happening, but they stopped shooting as I took  my first step.

I told the young man what had happened and it was heart-wrenching to  see his expression change from “proud that I said my piece eloquently” to  “damn, I was used as a pawn.”

The media, even when not openly your enemy, is never your friend. What they don’t get wrong through malice they will get wrong through incompetence.

That’s when they bother to show up. The MSM in San Francisco chose to completely ignore the tea party held right in Pelosi’s back yard, even though 5,000+ attended.

When do we get to call it treason?

Eric Holder, and his boss, The Messiah, have developed a way to aid and abet the enemy in a time of war. It’s called Release the Terrorist, Investigate the CIA.

Binyam Mohammed was released outright by the Obama administration in February. He is now living freely in England. That’s our new counterterrorism approach:  Release the terrorist who planned mass-murder attacks against U.S. cities but investigate the CIA agents who prevented mass-murder attacks against U.S. cities.  I suppose that’s what happens when control of the Justice Department shifts from the lawyers who spent the last eight years going after the terrorists to the lawyers who spent the last eight years representing the terrorists.  That certainly is Change.

Homeopathy & Nutritionists

I found this Dara O’Briain video via Science Based Medicine. This is a wonderful rant. The language, for those who care, is a bit PG-13-ish.

I agree with this observation:

I just wish more comics did routines like this. Sometimes humor can get the message through where analysis can’t.

What a Surprise

Who could possibly have forseen Eric Holder being sicced on the CIA the beginning of this week? cough Jonathan Adler cough.

Let’s see now. Deficit projections are once again on the rise as Obama’s approval rating falls. Health-care reform is faltering, climate-change legislation is stalled, and David Axlerod is under fire for his conflicts of interest. Seems like a good time to change the subject. Contents of the CIA inspector general’s report on harsh interrogation methods have already leaked, so it won’t do the trick. If I were a betting man, I’d expect something else to drop Monday or Tuesday.

Running with it, leak or no leak. And why would they do it? Gosh, that’s a toughie.

A few weeks ago, Eric Holder saw nothing wrong with Black Panthers using billy clubs to intimidate voters. Today, he thinks intimidating terrorists with cigars is a crime. Holder is the one who should be answering tough questions under oath.

Too Stupid for Arbys

How a bunch of jackbooted morons is making life difficult for someone trying to re-enact (without the getting lost and dying part) Amelia Earhart’s historic flight.

McGuire had moved her Electra airplane to the tiny Santa Maria airport in California, a very nice little field very far from big cities. Restoring a 75-year old airplane meant a lot of ad hoc visits by a variety of craftsmen and suppliers who happened to come up with the right part for the plane. Putting every one of them through Federal security checks and certifying them for permanent airport ID cards, before they could drive up to the little airfield and repair an aileron, was bringing the project to a halt.

The TSA has been 100% successful at its only real mission in life, which is to give union jobs to a bunch of knuckle-dragging mouth breathers. If you think they make flying on airlines a whit safer than it was on September 10, 2001 then I have some land in Florida I’d like to sell you.

Update:

Ooh, this super-severe 90-day sentence will make them all straighten up and fly right!

“I’m not a bad person. But what I did was wrong. I wanted to say I’m sorry,” Feig said.

No, Devie, you’re not a bad person. You’re a dishonest moron, which is probably why you breezed through the TSA hiring interview.

Laugh While You Can

A glimpse of life under Obamacare:

The phone rings and the lady of the house answers, “Hello?”

“Mrs. Sanders, please.”

“Speaking.”

“Mrs. Sanders, this is Dr. Jones at St. Agnes Laboratory. When your husband’s doctor sent his biopsy to the lab last week, a biopsy from another Mr. Sanders arrived as well. We are now uncertain which one belongs to your husband. Frankly, either way the results are not too good.”

“What do you mean?” Mrs. Sanders asks nervously.

“Well, one of the specimens tested positive for Alzheimer’s and the other one tested positive for HIV. We can’t tell which is which.”

“That’s dreadful! Can you do the test again?” questioned Mrs. Sanders.

“Normally we can, but the new health care system will only pay for these expensive tests just one time.”

“Well, what am I supposed to do now?”

“The folks at Obama health care recommend that you drop your husband off somewhere in the middle of town. If he finds his way home, don’t sleep with him.”

The One’s Summer of Discontent

Fouad Ajami:

In one of the revealing moments of the presidential campaign, Mr. Obama rightly observed that the Reagan presidency was a transformational presidency in a way Clinton’s wasn’t. And by that Reagan precedent, that Reagan standard, the faults of the Obama presidency are laid bare. Ronald Reagan, it should be recalled, had been swept into office by a wave of dissatisfaction with Jimmy Carter and his failures. At the core of the Reagan mission was the recovery of the nation’s esteem and self-regard. Reagan was an optimist. He was Hollywood glamour to be sure, but he was also Peoria, Ill. His faith in the country was boundless, and when he said it was “morning in America” he meant it; he believed in America’s miracle and had seen it in his own life, in his rise from a child of the Depression to the summit of political power.

The failure of the Carter years was, in Reagan’s view, the failure of the man at the helm and the policies he had pursued at home and abroad. At no time had Ronald Reagan believed that the American covenant had failed, that America should apologize for itself in the world beyond its shores. There was no narcissism in Reagan. It was stirring that the man who headed into the sunset of his life would bid his country farewell by reminding it that its best days were yet to come.

In contrast, there is joylessness in Mr. Obama. He is a scold, the “Yes we can!” mantra is shallow, and at any rate, it is about the coming to power of a man, and a political class, invested in its own sense of smarts and wisdom, and its right to alter the social contract of the land. In this view, the country had lost its way and the new leader and the political class arrayed around him will bring it back to the right path.

Stand Alone

I never thought 60 Minutes would cover something like this. They deserve props for doing so.

Mad Robotic Skills

I had seen the shorter video, and it was impressive. This one, with explanation, is even better.

The One

Better Living Through Chemistry

A Brief History of Fauxtography

It goes back farther than you think.

Michelle Can Haz Cheezburger

I think she asked the Secret Service to do something illegal.

“Three starving Secret Service guys were literally standing over the grill as Spike made the burgers, but didn’t eat,” our source adds. Fellow patrons had their cellphones temporarily confiscated to prevent pictures from being taken.

Transparency, riiiiiight.

Meanwhile, here’s a message for her husband, The Messiah: It’s the Big Government, Stupid.

This isn’t about liberal or conservative, Democrat or Republican. A majority oppose Obama’s policies because they fly in the face of this country’s bedrock values of personal liberty and limited government. Robbing Peter to pay Goldman Sachs does violence to that fundamentally American ethos.

You’re Welcome

Further Update (and bumped again):

If you’d like to know what they’re singing, a kind Buttle’s World reader tracked down the lyrics. In fact, here’s a link to the whole story of the song. And here’s that swell dancer. Corrected Czech lyrics below.

Jedu takhle tábořit škodou sto na Oravu.

Spěchám, proto riskuji, projíždím přes Moravu.

Řádí tam to strašidlo, vystupuje z bažin,

žere hlavně Pražáky, jmenuje se Jožin.

Jožin z bažin močálem se plíží,

Jožin z bažin k vesnici se blíží,

Jožin z bažin už si zuby brousí,

Jožin z bažin kouše, saje, rdousí.

Na Jožina z bažin, koho by to napadlo,

platí jen a pouze práškovací letadlo.

Projížděl jsem dědinou cestou na Vizovice.

Přivítal mě předseda, řek mi u slivovice:

«Živého či mrtvého Jožina kdo přivede,

tomu já dám za ženu dceru a půl JZD.»

Jožin z bažin… itd.

Říkám: «Dej mi, předsedo, letadlo a prášek,

Jožina ti přivedu, nevidím v tom háček.»

Předseda mi vyhověl, ráno jsem se vznesl,

na Jožina z letadla prášek pěkně klesl.

Jožin z bažin už je celý bílý,

Jožin z bažin z močálu ven pílí,

Jožin z bažin dostal se na kámen,

Jožin z bažin tady je s ním amen.

Jožina jsem dohnal, už ho držím, johohó,

dobré každé lóvé, prodám já ho do ZOO.

Pretty hilarious, eh? Oh, in English? Here you go:

I’m driving in a Skoda 100 to camp in Orava
Because I’m in a hurry, I risk crossing Moravia
A monster prowls around there, it comes out of the swamp
It mainly eats people from Prague, and it’s called Joe

Joe Swamp creeps through the bogs
Joe Swamp approaches the village
Joe Swamp is sharpening his teeth
Joe Swamp bites and strangles
Who’dve thought that the way to deal with Joe Swamp
The only thing that works is a plane with white powder

I was driving through a village on the road to Vizovice
I met the village elder who told me over some slivovice
“Whoever brings me Joe, dead or alive,
Shall have my daughter and half the collective farm”

Joe Swamp creeps through the bogs
Joe Swamp approaches the village
Joe Swamp is sharpening his teeth
Joe Swamp bites and strangles
Who’dve thought that the way to deal with Joe Swamp
The only thing that works is a plane with white powder

I say, “Chief, give me the plane and the powder
I’ll give you Joe, no problem”
The Elder agreed, and at dawn I rose to the skies
The powder fell beautifully from the plane onto Joe

Joe Swamp is now all white
Joe Swamp escapes from the bogs
Joe Swamp has turned to stone
For Joe Swamp, this is the end
I caught Joe and now I have him, woohoo!
Cash is always good so now I’m selling him to the zoo

Prefer it with subtitles?

Apparently the song was also a hit with Russian Animators. I guess they couldn’t afford crop dusters.

You have now been quite thoroughly Czech Rolled.

Bleg:

What is that instrument being played by the bearded man at the piano, the first one on screen, called?

Semper Fi

Oh, I like this guy.

“I saw it with my own eyes” is not enough

Here’s an excellent article by Dr. Harriet Hall, with a long-ish preamble, which should be required reading for anybody who has a friend say “My chiropractor/acupuncturist/homeopath/witch doctor made me feel better.”

I’m going to extensively quote her eight points on why people often believe something helps them that has perhaps actually done them harm. Do read her whole article, especially if you are not scientifically inclined. She wrote the article for a lay readership.

1. The disease may have run its natural course. A lot of diseases are self-limiting; the body’s natural healing processes restore people to health after a time. A cold usually goes away in a week or so. To find out if a cold remedy works, you have to keep records of successes and failures for a large enough number of patients to find out if they really get well faster with the remedy than without it.
2. Many diseases are cyclical. The symptoms of any disease fluctuate over time. We all know people with arthritis have bad days and good days. The pain gets worse for a while, then it gets better for a while. If you use a remedy when the pain is bad, it was probably about to start getting better anyway, so the remedy gets credit it doesn’t deserve.
3. We are all suggestible. If we’re told something is going to hurt, it’s more likely to hurt. If we’re told something is going to make it better, it probably will. We all know this: that’s why we kiss our children’s scrapes and bruises. Anything that distracts us from thinking about our symptoms is likely to help. In scientific studies that compare a real treatment to a placebo sugar pill, an average of 35% of people say they feel better after taking the sugar pill. The real treatment has to do better than that if we’re going to believe it’s really effective.
4. There may have been two treatments and the wrong one got the credit. If your doctor gave you a pill and you also took a home remedy, you may give the credit to the home remedy. Or maybe something else changed in your life at the same time that helped treat the illness and that was the real reason you got better.
5. The original diagnosis or prognosis may have been incorrect. Lots of people have supposedly been cured of cancer who never actually had cancer. Doctors who tell a patient he only has 6 months to live are only guessing and can guess wrong. The best they can do is say the average patient with that condition lives 6 months – but average means half of people live longer than that.
6. Temporary mood improvement can be confused with cure. If a practitioner makes you feel optimistic and hopeful, you may think you feel better when the disease is really unchanged.
7. Psychological needs can affect our behavior and our perceptions. When someone wants to believe badly enough, he can convince himself he has been helped. People have been known to deny the facts – to refuse to see that the tumor is still getting bigger. If they have invested time and money, they don’t want to admit it was wasted. We see what we want to see; we remember things the way we wish they had happened. When a doctor is sincerely trying to help a patient, the patient feels a sort of social obligation to please the doctor by improving.
8. We confuse correlation with causation. Just because an effect follows an action, that doesn’t necessarily mean the action caused the effect. When the rooster crows and then the sun comes up, we realize it’s not the crowing that made the sun come up. But when we take a pill and then we feel better, we assume it was the pill that made us feel better. We don’t stop to think that we might have felt better for some other reason. We jump to conclusions like the man who trained a flea to dance when it heard music, then cut the flea’s legs off one by one until it could no longer dance and concluded that the flea’s organ of hearing must be in its legs!

After you read that, check out Val Jones’ article on why false positives are so common in science. Scientists, you see, are those who know that the one we fool is most often ourselves.

Avatar

Someone I know had a rather funny take on the new Avatar trailer. It’s pretty close to my own reaction, so I begged him to let me post it.

Cameron is a smart guy, and maybe the Avatars are supposed to look all computery within the story. But this trailer makes me wonder.

Update:

Ouch.

16: Moments

It’s worth going to the YouTube page to watch in higher res. For some reason I can’t embed here at 840. But you can just watch it here, too.

Bait and Switch

Thomas Sowell on The One’s favorite sales technique.

It’s called “bait and switch” when an unscrupulous business advertises one thing and tries to sell you something else. When politicians do it, it is far more dangerous to far more people. Deception is not an incidental aspect of this medical-care legislation. It is at the very heart of it.

This legislation would bring about a massive change of our entire medical-care system, from top to bottom. That an attempt was made to rush it through Congress before the August recess — before anybody in or outside of Congress had time to read it all — should have told us from the outset that we were being played for fools.

Related:

Promising FedEx, but delivering the Post Office.

The Messiah’s Grasp of History

demonstrates its scissor-like grip on NASCAR.

White House OK With Armed Protestors

I’m with Jeff Soyer in thinking that public displays of arms at protests may be politically risky. But I also have an open mind. The White House reaction to the stunt in Phoenix is quite out of character, but very welcome.

Robert Gibbs, the White House press secretary, said people are entitled to carry weapons outside such events if local laws allow it. “There are laws that govern firearms that are done state or locally,” he said. “Those laws don’t change when the president comes to your state or locality.”

Hey, when this crowd does something right I’ll happily acknowledge it. Although I confess it makes me suspicious.

I still think the gun rights community has to be careful. While any sane person longs for a country where open carry doesn’t raise an eyebrow, we have to be careful about giving the anti-freedom crowd any ammo.

It turns out that the people who staged that little show in Phoenix are part of a conspiracy nutcase group called “4409”. They buy into the 9/11 “Truther” nonsense, are anti-vaccine and, in general, seem ready to believe any whacked-out theory. With friends like that…

Line By Line

Brilliant.

Krauthammer Quotes Monty Python

“What happened is they understand that with the public — the public anger is so high they will pass nothing, and that is why  [the public option] is abandoned. All of this [denial] is a way to placate the left, which understands it is a kabuki dance. It’s a way of pretending that it’s still on the table. It’s off. It’s gone. It’s dead. It is a dead parrot.”

For those lacking sufficient culture:

Unscientific American

Losing You

Randy Newman on the heart-wrenching story behind his song, Losing You.

Have a hanky handy if you watch the video.

Domestic Tranquility Act Passes

Drink up!