Too Stupid For Arbys

Seems some TSA goons in Nashville can’t read their own documentation.

As it turns out, the screening episode stemmed from a TSA “playbook”—a restricted document designed to assist federal security directors in adding randomness and unpredictability to their security procedures. The problem resulted when the security directors incorrectly applied the procedures, which were intended for commercial operations, to the GA side of the airport. The TSA is in the process of correcting the guidance that was distributed to federal security directors throughout the country.

If the TSA dumbs-down their manuals enough for their employees to understand they’ll be reduced to cardboard picture books of kittens and brightly-colored blocks.

The Lying Messiah

For those few to whom it is not incandescently obvious that Barack Hussein Obama is a liar, let’s review:

He promised openness on day one. Remember sunshine?

To Obama and his oh-so useful idiots in Congress, 48 hours has been redefined down. But even 48 hours would have been a reversal on the five-day rule.

And here’s a knee-slapper:

“We will go through our federal budget — page by page, line by line — eliminating those programs we don’t need, and insisting that those we do operate in a sensible cost-effective way.” –Barack Obama, 25 November 2008

The damage that Obama, Reid and Pelosi are about to ram down the country’s throat is incalculable.

Have I mentioned that Pelosi’s number is 202-225-0100? That the House switchboard is at 202-224-3121?

Then I probably haven’t posted the number (202-224-3542) for the execrable Harry Reid and the Senate Switchboard: 202-224-3121.

You can use these links to find your own misrepresentatives and senators.

I’ve let both Pelosi and Reid know that their back-room dealings to ram this monstrosity down our throats is shockingly un-democratic, and that I will not only never vote for anybody who votes for this porker, but will actively campaign for and donate to their opponents.

This is a monstrous power grab, led by the most arrogant and underqualified president in US History and two of the most corrupt morons ever to sully their thrones in Washington.

Update:

Anybody remember change?

Cabinet Comedy

The Obamedy continues! At least this time it wasn’t because of tax fraud.

We’re now looking for Obama’s third secretary of Commerce.

It is really quite astonishing. “I screwed up” may become a bi-weekly confession.

At some point, things like this can begin to cement a (negative) image in the public imagination. Discrete issues converge and form a single, harmful impression. Obama & Company were looking increasingly amateurish before today; this is now bordering on incompetence…

Less than a month ago, Barack Obama was seemingly sitting atop the world. We all knew reality would set in soon enough; what we didn’t know was how quickly the magic would fade, and give way to what we are now witnessing. It’s still early, of course, and presidents can recover from their initial missteps. But Obama and his team have dug themselves a fairly deep early hole.

The narrative ain’t what it once was.

No, it sure isn’t. Just ask the CEO of Caterpillar.

Now this is my kind of economist

And she has a good plan, too.

Fight the power, man.

Update:

Or just get your own earmark.

Robot Love

A nice interview with Andrew.

Andrew Stanton never set out to dwell in the idea of mankind in ruin.   In the early days of the project, the “robot love story” or “Trash Planet” wasn’t going to be a film that elevated the animation genre or exposed the potential dangers we face if we keep staying plugged in, hooked up and immobile.   It was going to be the next movie in the Pixar lineup, thought up by Andrew Stanton and Pete Docter at the infamous lunch meeting.  Years later, after both had gone and done other things, it was Stanton who picked it back up and along with co-writer Jim Reardon, turned it into a masterpiece.

Round Up the Posse

Making the case that Posse Comitatus doesn’t mean what you think it does.

Posse comitatus means power of the county and is described as the male population above the age of fifteen that a sheriff could summon to keep the peace. It’s known in popular culture as a the “posse” that a local sheriff employed to capture wrongdoers. The framers of the Constitution debated the posse comitatus, and did not rule out its use. The greater concern was securing life, liberty, and property. At the conclusion of the American Civil War, the military was sent to the South to ensure that elections were orderly; that the newly emancipated Blacks were not mistreated, as they had been in the past. This deployment added insult to injury for the people of the South; not only had they been defeated, but there was an occupying army. In 1878, Rep. Knott of Kentucky proposed an amendment that came to be known as the Posse Comitatus Act.

Born This Day, 200 Years Ago

Two men who changed the world, Charles Darwin and Abraham Lincoln.

Cause for celebration!

Update:

And here’s the celebration now! (The Dover High teachers are a very nice touch.)

Welcome to Amerika

Too many police across the country are getting the idea that photography is illegal. Here’s a Federal Reserve police officer telling a videographer that he needs permission to shoot any Federal building. The question is, is this incompetence or malice?

For more on this, see PhotoPermit.org. Also, Instapundit posts about this periodically, as in the case of this Ann Althouse post about a guy arrested for just taking a picture in a public place.

Largest Number Discovered

The largest integer ever.

PALO ALTO, CA – An international mathematics research team announced today that they had discovered a new integer that surpasses any previously known value “by a totally mindblowing shitload.” Project director Yujin Xiao of Stanford University said the theoretical number, dubbed a “stimulus,” could lead to breakthroughs in fields as diverse as astrophysics, quantum mechanics, and Chicago asphalt contracting.

“Unlike previous large numbers like the Googleplex or the Bazillionty, the Stimulus has no static numerical definition,” said Xiao. “It keeps growing and growing, compounding factorially, eating up all zeros in its path. It moves freely across Cartesian dimensions and has the power to make any other number irrational.”

To Hell with Our Constitution

Walter Williams illustrates why Allenby’s advice in “Lawrence of Arabia” still stands as some of the best advice ever. When Brighton implores, “Surely you aren’t going to just do nothing!” he replies, “Why not? It’s usually the best.”

Stimulus package debate is over how much money should be spent, whether some should given to the National Endowment for the Arts, research sexually transmitted diseases or bail out Amtrak, our failing railroad system. Dr. Higgs says, “Hardly anyone, however, is asking the most important question: Should the federal government be doing any of this?” He adds, “Until the 1930s, the Constitution served as a major constraint on federal economic interventionism. The government’s powers were understood to be just as the framers intended: few and explicitly enumerated in our founding document and its amendments. Search the Constitution as long as you like, and you will find no specific authority conveyed for the government to spend money on global-warming research, urban mass transit, food stamps, unemployment insurance, Medicaid, or countless other items in the stimulus package and, even without it, in the regular federal budget.”

Read the whole thing. It’s worth your time.

Important information on Enemy Tactics for Coalition combat troops heading to Afghanistan

Michael Yon has your back:

This information can save your life. The enemy already knows the tactics they are using, but likely not all NATO/ISAF forces are aware.

Any enemy that repeatedly attacks U.S. Marines deserves at least grudging respect.  The Marines respect this enemy, and that’s saying a lot.  Too bad the Marines have to kill so many of these guys; many would probably make good police or soldiers if they were not in cahoots with the enemy.

Beyond Parody

This kid just has to be making fun of Obama and his droids. If not, he’s a real head case. It’s so hard to tell which.

Outrage in Oregon

Remember that Marine who was arrested for a non-existant crime? The DA had to drop the charges (because, duh, there was nothing to charge him with) but that didn’t stop the school from holding a secret, kangaroo court.

Maxwell asked to have his “trial” open to the public, which is his right, but was denied.

The tribunal was told repeatedly that they lacked the authority to impose a rule dealing with firearms. But the children who sat in judgment of the veteran were not interested in the law or the facts. They were only interested in attacking and embarrassing a man who had committed no crime but had chosen to exercise his right to protect himself and others.

The “trial” was a sham. No one present even seemed to know what the “charge” was. When confronted by the fact that the school has no authority to make rules about firearms, they said that was “not relevant.” Then they said they were not charging Maxwell with having a firearm. When asked what they WERE charging him with, they seemed to not know. They then said they were charging him with having a “knife and a rifle in his car.”   When told they had no authority to make rules about guns in his car, they said THAT was not “relevant.”

The “prosecutor” was one Patrick Moser “Acting Coordinator of Campus Judicial Affairs” who can be reached at moserp@wou.edu.

Here’s what I emailed:

Subject: Maxwell deserves an apology

Congratulations on bringing shame and ridicule to your school. Your sham “prosecution” of a man who committed no crime, held in secret, has shown you and your school to be political attack dogs and legal idiots.

Maxwell is owed an apology for the insult and waste of his time and, in the spirit of the risible “punishment” handed out I suggest that you and everybody else involved in these proceedings do the following:

A) Get a psychological treatment for your obvious neuroses.

B) Write on the blackboard a thousand times “THE LAW APPLIES TO EVERYBODY”

Transparency

is for the little people.

Judgement Day

LGF has linked to an episode of Nova with much to recommend it. Judgement Day covers the story of Kitzmiller v Dover School Board. First, the caveats: It’s a PBS production, so it perpetuates the “separation of church and state” myth and, missing no opportunity to smear conservatives, calls the so-called “Discovery Institute” a conservative think tank.

What it gets right far outweighs those quibbles. I wish I had seen such a clear take-down of “irreducible complexity” a long time ago – like right after I read and was impressed by Michael Behe’s articles in The American Spectator. The shame I feel at having been taken in, albeit for a few years, is mollified by having been swayed eventually by the evidence.

Judgement Day is abundantly clear in presenting and explaining the piles of evidence introduced at that trial. If you harbor even the slightest doubt about the veracity of the theory of evolution, or currently think that “irreducible complexity” puts it in doubt, you owe it to yourself to spend a couple of hours watching this show.

If you think the show is hostile to religion you will be pleasantly surprised. It does show that a few particular religionists were highly dishonest. But, to spoil one bit of the show, evolution’s star witness in the trial is a confirmed Roman Catholic.

Accepting the reality of evolution is completely orthogonal with a belief in god. Anybody (including the risible Pat Robertson) who tries to tell you otherwise is full of something – and it don’t smell like incense, if you take my meaning.

Update:

Almost on cue, the Vatican buries the hatchet with Charles Darwin.

As Thick as Two Short Planks

This is the kind of idiot who just helped us get hopelessly in debt. I’ve often wondered if Kerry knows how stupid he sounds.

I rather doubt it.

Not Ready to Throw in the Towel on Afghanistan

If Michael Yon has reason for any hope, albeit with downgraded expectations, then there’s reason for some hope. As he points out in this email, the second war starts this year.

The Afghanistan-Pakistan war increases in complexity with each passing year.  Fighting will likely be more intense this year — probably kicking off in earnest at around April or so — than ever before.  It’s dangerous to try to predict the course of a war, though my guess is that 2010 will see even greater fighting than 2009.  By Fall of 2010, we likely will know if our new President has gotten hold of this tiger.

The good news is that Iraq just keeps doing better and better.  Truly an amazing turnaround.

It’s not all great news in Afghanistan. Not by a long shot.

While we prepare to shunt perhaps 30,000 more troops to Afghanistan (which still will not be enough), Russia continues to play the Asian chessboard.  The Russians are picking off pawn after pawn, and steadily eroding our foreign policy influence with them and other Central Asian countries.  The Russians know that we need a land route through their country to Afghanistan, especially as we begin the slow process of increasing our combat presence.  The Pakistan land route is one Achilles’ heel to our Afghanistan effort, and Russia is working hard to make sure that Russia is the other Achilles’ heel, which will strengthen the Russian position on matters such as missile defense.  Russia, at the present rate, will eventually exercise considerable control over the spigot to Afghanistan.  The Russians are successfully wrestling us into a policy arm-lock.  While Russia takes American money and gains influence over our Afghan efforts, we will continue to spend lives and tens of billions of dollars per year on Afghanistan in an attempt to civilize what amounts to Jurassic Park.

As linked above, Yon recommends this article by Frederick Kagan. It’s well worth reading if you want a primer on why Afghanistan is not Iraq.

You Have to Laugh at These People

Because if you stopped and thought what these littlebrains really mean for the country you’d cry a river.

Update:

You vote for a Wizard, but you get a man behind a curtain.

Con Artist

During the campaign I blogged about those Stalinist-style Obama posters. Now it turns out that the artist not only lifted the visual style from the Soviet Union, but stole the base image from the Associated (with terrorists) Press.

Shepard Fairey last week was sued for copyright infringement by the Associated Press, which claims he stole photographer Manny Garcia’s work and made it the basis of the iconic off-red, white and blue posters whose signed editions are being sold on eBay for thousands of dollars.

If found guilty — a liberal application of “fair use” law could protect Mr. Fairey — we have a case of the white man stealing from an ethnic minority in order to turn a quick profit. (I thought an Obama presidency would automatically end such practices.)

Chinese, Latin American and former Soviet Communist artists may also have a claim against Mr. Fairey, whose style is brazenly ripped off from the propaganda campaigns of totalitarian states. If regimes that murdered tens of millions of innocent human beings can be so revered and redeemed, can the swastika be reappropriated, too?

Update:

The hack (I won’t call him an artist) in question turns out to also be a common vandal. You can try to dress it up with names like “tagging”, but vandalism is vandalism.

It’s a Plague!

Stealth creationist bills sailing under the false flag of “academic freedom” are popping up like weeds. And, true to the Orwellian nature of these dishonest cretins, they claim to thus be “honoring Charles Darwin” in this his 200th anniversary year.

Discovery Institute “fellows” insist that their “intelligent design” agenda is different and distinct from creationism. This is necessary in order to promote these “academic freedom” bills, because the courts have repeatedly ruled against creationism in schools; hence the pretense.

But someone forgot to send that memo to Liberty Baptist University in Virginia, where they’re featuring two Disco Institute shills—Michael Behe and Paul Nelson—in events explicitly promoting “the Biblical view of creationism.”

As the 200th anniversary of Charles Darwin’s birthday — Feb. 12 — draws near, Liberty University will be hosting several events to counter this and to promote the biblical view of creationism. Mat Staver, dean of Liberty University School of Law, and LU’s Center for Creation Studies, directed by Dr. David DeWitt, have helped to coordinate the events. The events have been designed to explore the different aspects of evolution and point out the theory’s significant problems.

So the science that tells you how the world really works is under attack and, on a different front, the science that keeps you healthy is also under attack by a different band of unscrupulous, supersticious frauds.

If CAM/IM had compelling science and evidence behind it, it would not be trying to manipulate the political process to give itself an unfair advantage, while whining that it is so persecuted. Unfortunately, with the backing of the Bravewell Collaborative, the Samueli Institute, and the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine, advocates of CAM/IM are in a strong position to insert themselves into the upcoming political debate over health care reform. If science-based medicine is to repulse this infiltration, two things will have to happen. First, the Obama Administration’s science and medical advisors will have to be sufficiently savvy not to fall for the blandishments of sectarians and to promote science-based, not pseudoscience-based, medicine. On that score, I am cautiously optimistic. The second thing that will have to happen is that science-based physicians will have to mount an effort to influence legislators at least equal to what CAM advocates are already doing. Unfortunately, on that latter score, I am much less optimistic. Most science-based physicians are not political activists, and the power and wealth of the forces trying to insert CAM into any health care reform is potent. Still, that does not mean we shouldn’t try.

Aren’t you comforted knowing that the Annointed One’s administration will be “returning science to its rightful place”?

Speaking of Pelosi’s Bad Math

What’s the old saw? Figures don’t lie, but liars do figure.

Eight and Hate

If you’ve been harassed for donating to Prop 8 in California, someone wants to know about it.

Here’s the new face of the gay marriage movement: If we can hurt you, we will.  If hurting you means hurting a whole unrelated business enterprise, and all its employees,  because one person in it gave money to Prop 8—too bad. If you are an artist, and we can hurt you bad by blacklisting you, we will do that too.

I know many gay people and gay marriage activists are appalled by these tactics, but, like it or not, this is now the face of your movement. (If you can change that, please do; I can’t do it for you).

Full disclosure: The National Organization for Marriage California (my organization) is party to the lawsuit attempting to protect donors from this kind of intimidation.  If you or anyone you know is getting hate mail, threats, or other acts of harassment, because you gave money to support marriage, please let me know:  maggieiav@aol.com.

Uncle Milty

Via Powerline and Jonah Goldberg, here is Milton Friedman having a battle of wits with an unarmed man.

Another Graduate

from the Nanci Pelosi School of Math.

Ready to Upload?

Here are the benefits of mind uploading.

It’s interesting, but he seems to completely ignore the power problem, and I can just see a world where traffic jams are replaced with packet collisions.

I also wonder how well a brain simulation can take into account all the influnce of our bodies on our brains. We don’t need terminally-bored silicon entities.

Update:

But if the simulation is accurate enough most of the silocon entities will be religious. This link is interesting enough for a post of its own, so I may repent and give it one later. A snippet:

The religion-as-an-adaptation theory doesn’t wash with everybody, however. As anthropologist Scott Atran of the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor points out, the benefits of holding such unfounded beliefs are questionable, in terms of evolutionary fitness. “I don’t think the idea makes much sense, given the kinds of things you find in religion,” he says. A belief in life after death, for example, is hardly compatible with surviving in the here-and-now and propagating your genes. Moreover, if there are adaptive advantages of religion, they do not explain its origin, but simply how it spread.

An alternative being put forward by Atran and others is that religion emerges as a natural by-product of the way the human mind works.

That’s not to say that the human brain has a “god module” in the same way that it has a language module that evolved specifically for acquiring language. Rather, some of the unique cognitive capacities that have made us so successful as a species also work together to create a tendency for supernatural thinking. “There’s now a lot of evidence that some of the foundations for our religious beliefs are hard-wired,” says Bloom.

Lucy Goes Digital

This is really cool. The most famous fossil homonid in the world has been scanned.

Medical CAT scans like those done in hospitals show a cross-section of a patient’s body with 1-2 mm resolution. But because Lucy isn’t a living patient, much higher-energy X-rays can be used. The computed tomography, or CT, scans done on Lucy reveal internal details on the order of 5-50 microns — less than the width of a human hair. That level of detail could yield unprecedented insight into our ancestors.

Here’s great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-(oh, c’mon she lived 3.2 million years ago)-great-great-great-grandma’s jawbone:

There goes what’s left of The Lancet’s credibility

Anti-vaccine hero Andrew Wakefield, publisher of the infamous 1998 Lancet paper supposedly linking MMR vaccines with autism, is not just incompetent but, apparently, a total fraud.

In brief, the laboratory used was set up such that cross contamination between the plasmids used to maintain the measles virus sequences and the area where the PCR was done. PCR is very sensitive; if there is contaminating plasmid sequence, it is very easy to amplify and detect it even when there is nothing in your samples. Indeed, I’ve experienced this very problem on occasion in my own lab. Unfortunately, in the case of Wakefield’s research, no controls were done to make sure that contamination was detected in the negative controls. Finally, Wakefield’s results were roundly refuted in an attempt to replicate his work that was published last year. As you can see, Wakefield’s work and ethics are about as bad as it gets.

Or so I thought, until readers started sending me this article published in The Times, again by Wakefield’s nemesis Brian Deer. Holy crap. If only a fraction of the allegations in this article are true, not only is Wakefield an unscrupulous and incompetent scientist but he’s a scientific fraud as well.

1998 is the year my daughter was born and, as a worried new parent, I was almost taken in by this cretin and the useful idiots in the press. So I take this decipt rather personally – and am doubly glad I’ve become a confirmed skeptic. As far as I’m concerned both Wakefield and The Lancet have blood on their hands.

As if you needed more reasons to oppose the Spendulus

NCCAM is lined up with its filthy paw out.

It’s Orwellian

People who want to kill babies in the womb wrap themselves in a “pro choice” label because, really, who could be again’st choice?

Similarly, dishonest dunderheads who want to confuse students about reality wrap themselves in the label “academic freedom“.

Well, the pro-choicers have nothing to do with choice, and teaching something other than science in a science class is a perversion of the very idea of freedom.

Note that we don’t have to play “Guess That Party” when the idiot du jour is a Republican.

Update:

Now that Bobby “The Exorcist” Jindal has signed that stupid creationist bill in LA these stealth attempts to teach superstition in science class are popping up all over. Now another knuckle-dragging “Republican” is at it in Florida.

Yeah, I’m putting scare quotes around “Republican” because people in that party should be the ones fighting for truth and conversant with reality. But Derb is right: Either side of the aisle can be hostile to science. To the extent that politics is ideology, science is always going to dig up something inconvenient. But I really think people who stand mostly on the ‘R’ side of the aisle should be the honest, eyes-open ones.

This is probably my own bias talking: I think I’m right and that everyone should think like me. I’m hardly alone there. At least I don’t have to live in what Heather MacDonald calls a “theological panic.“

The Titles Are Usually Better Than The Loglines

But many of these are funny anyway.