RealAge = RealShill

I keep seeing ads on the web for some on-line “test” to find my “real age”. I never bothered clicking because I knew it would be bogus.

Just how bogus, though, I didn’t suspect.

Well, well, well, well, well. Isn’t that interesting? “America’s Doctor,” friend to Oprah, and that die-hard supporter of CAM and “integrative medicine” who recently testified in front of Senator Tom Harkin’s committee about how the U.S. needs to “integrate” more woo into its medicine is shilling for a company that gathers health care information about its members from its surveys and serves as a middle man for the targeted distribution of big pharma advertisements designed to sell them the latest and greatest pill! His picture is even right there on the front page of the RealAge website! Moreover, RealAge appears to be playing it–shall we say?–coy when it comes to informing its members about its relationship with big pharma

Just think what I’ve been missing by not watching Oprah.

Dim Bulbs

Remember those CFL bulbs the dimwits in congress want to force you to buy in order to “save the planet” from the imaginary threat of anthropogenic “global warming”?

I have refused to buy a single one. And now I’m feeling smug about it.

Consumers who are trying them say they sometimes fail to work, or wear out early. At best, people discover that using the bulbs requires learning a long list of dos and don’ts.

John J. Miller tried buying some, not to save the planet but to save some money, and got stung.

But the dumb things keep blinking out. They don’t last 10,000 hours, as advertised. I’m lucky to get a few of them to last 10 hours.

Monkey’s Uncle in Texas

Well, the steadfast ignorant in Texas have succeeded in muddling the science education standards.

Someone check a calendar. I thought this was the 21st Century. And here’s another thing that chaps my hide:

The standards adopted were generally good, but there are several that are flawed, fortunately most in minor ways that textbook authors and publishers can deal with. I think we can work around the few flawed standards. But the point is that there shouldn’t be ANY flawed standards. The science standards as submitted by the science writing teams were excellent and flaw-free. All the flaws were added by politically unscrupulous SBOE members with an extreme right-wing religious agenda to support Creationism.

Right-wing? It’s true that most young-earth creationists are right wingers, but that does not mean that being right wing, or conservative, implies a severe disconnect with reality. Most criminals are blacks, but you’d have to be as duplicitous as Michael Behe to construe that to mean that most blacks are criminals. Meanwhile, this minority of unscrupulous morons from the Organized Ignorance wing are being used to tar all conservatives.

So the damage done is double: Kids will be taught that the earth is flat in spite of the shape they can clearly see, and conservatism will be damaged in perception. And, in politics, perception is reality.

Too bad there isn’t a hell. If there were, everyone in the Discovery Institute would  go there for their dishonesty.

What a shameful day for Texas.

FAA’s New Bird-Strike Plan

It’s called hide the statistics.

The federal government plans to block public access to its records of aircraft and bird collisions such as the one that forced a US Airways jet to splashdown in New York’s Hudson River in January.
The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) says that the information could mislead the public and its release could prompt some airports and others not to report incidents, but the proposal is drawing sharp criticism from bird safety experts and public records advocates.

I guess the theory is that no aircraft has ever collided with an ostrich that had its head in the sand.

Just Because it’s Friday

Friday is the day we dance!

And Sing, Sing, Sing!

The Lost Tribes of New York

Nice. But where’s the hat tip to Nick Park?

Simon Says

that Pat Oliphant did us a favor.

BTW, have you noticed how Jews all over the world are burning cars and threatening Oliphant with beheading as a result of this cartoon?

Welcome to Fascism

California style.

The California legislature is considering regulating the color of cars and reflectivity of paint to reduce the energy requirements to cool them. A presentation on the proposed legislation by the California Air Resources Board is below.

The problem isn’t the color per se, but the reflectivity of the paint overall. And dark colors just don’t reflect well, so they are likely out. “Jet black remains an issue,” says the report.

Just try to read this without laughing

I dare you.

A would-be suicide bomber accidentally blew himself up on Thursday, killing six other militants as he was bidding them farewell to leave for his intended target, the Interior Ministry said.

“The terrorist was on his way to his destination and saying good-bye to his associates and then his suicide vest exploded,” a statement from the ministry said.

World Irony Shortage Averted

The irony supply has hit new highs thanks to two braying jackasses.

Michael Ledeen, call your office.

A Work of Art

I just got to see The Secret of Kells for the second time. Unfortunately it does not yet have distribution in the U.S. but, if you’re in Ireland or France, you can see it now.

Loosely based on the history of the Book of Kells, and very much based on the look of said book, this is an emotionally-satisfying movie that is also art that moves. They broke most of the usual rules of animation (avoiding flat poses and tangents, for example) and made one of the most beautiful and successful blends of hand-drawn and computer animation ever. Note that there is practically no 3D CG in this film: the computer was used to animate flat art in some really innovative ways.

If you get a chance to see it, do yourself a favor and get a nice dose of eye candy.

Let’s Hear It for the Twins

This is one place where NASA has given us more than our money’s worth.

Hopeful planners are already setting future operations for the twins, assuming the pair will continue to plow ahead but acknowledging that one or both of the rovers could fail at any time. After all, these robots aren’t exactly spring chickens. Spirit has been driving backwards since one of its wheels jammed in 2006, and a broken electrical wire has reduced movement of Opportunity’s robotic arm.

Good thing there are no VHS tapes of Hello, Dolly up there.

A Fine Tongue-Lashing

Enjoy Daniel Hannan MEP dressing down the “devalued Prime Minister”.

We’re In The Best Of Hands

Fortunately for us, Timmy “Turbo-Tax” Geithner has experience with fixing broken economies.

In a speech to a closed gathering at the Lowy Institute in Sydney on Thursday, Paul Keating gave a starkly different account of Geithner’s record in handling the Asian crisis: “Tim Geithner was the Treasury line officer who wrote the IMF [International Monetary Fund] program for Indonesia in 1997-98, which was to apply current account solutions to a capital account crisis.”

In other words, Geithner fundamentally misdiagnosed the problem. And his misdiagnosis led to a dreadfully wrong prescription.

John Galt Heard From

The consequences of the criminal foolishness of The Messiah and the “thugs” in congress are starting.

We have a president who shows no instinct for economic issues; a Treasury Department that, in a supposed crisis, is just one designated fall guy rattling around an all but empty building for whose senior positions no one has even been nominated; and thug legislators-for-life who bear far more direct responsibility for this mess posing as champions of da liddle guy in order to extend their already disastrous “oversight” ever deeper into the private sector. Things are going to get a lot worse.

Time to stockpile food and ammo.

The New Humanism

I think that Dawkins and his peeps were foolish to take out those bus ads. It makes them look unserious, because they draw exactly the wrong conclusion from the fact that there “probably is no god.” Roger Scruton writes in the American Spectator about the contrast between this new humanism and the old.

The British Humanist Association is currently running a campaign against religious faith. It has bought advertising space on our city buses, which now patrol the streets declaring that “There probably is no God; so stop worrying and enjoy life.” My parents would have been appalled at such a declaration. From a true premise, they would have said, it derives a false and pernicious conclusion. Had they wished to announce their beliefs—and it was part of their humanism to think that you don’t announce your beliefs but live them—they would have expressed them thus: “There probably is no God; so start worrying, and remember that self-discipline is up to you.”

and

Like so many modern ideologies, the new humanism seeks to define itself through what it is against rather than what it is for. It is for nothing, or at any rate for nothing in particular. Ever since the Enlightenment there has been a tendency to adopt this negative approach to the human condition, rather than to live out the exacting demands of the Enlightenment morality, which tells us to take responsibility for ourselves and to cease our snivelling.

If Dawkins wants to win converts he needs to offer something positive, not just be against something.

Do You Want to Raise Corporate Taxes?

If so, you need to listen to professor Williams.

If there’s an imposition of a property tax on your land, who pays the tax? I guarantee you that land does not pay taxes; only people pay taxes. That means a tax on your land is a tax on you. You say, “Williams, that’s pretty elementary, isn’t it?” But what do you say to a politician or news media people who propose increasing corporate taxes as means to get rich corporations to pay their rightful share of government? They should be told that they speak nonsense because corporations, like land, do not pay taxes; only people pay taxes.

If a tax is levied on a corporation, and if it is to survive, it must raise the price of its product, or lower dividends or lay off workers. In each case, it is people, not some legal fiction called a corporation, who bear the burden of any tax levied on the corporation. An important subject area in economics called tax incidence says that the entity upon whom a tax is levied does not necessarily bear the burden of the tax. Some of the tax burden can be shifted to another party. That’s precisely what corporations do and as such they are merely government tax collectors.

Read the whole thing.

There Was No World War II

It was just a multinational contingency operation.

It’s not that “Global War on Terror” was ever anything but a stupid name for the global war against radical Islam, but at least it had the word war in it. Not calling a war a war is part of losing it.

Perhaps Not What the Photographer Intended

This is brilliant photography, because it works no matter what you think of The Annointed One. (But it works better if you think of Him as I do.)

Bush Left Us In A Deep Hole

But nothing like the one The One is digging.

Zobama Tonight

Heh.

Working Hard

Or hardly working.

You Can’t Get There From Here

But the internet can.

Enter a domain name in the “Remote Address” box and click “Proxy Trace”.

Pretty entertaining, in a geeky sort of way.

Shh! Don’t tell the Code Pinkos!

The One, apparently in blind squirrel mode, is keeping up the Predator attacks inside Pakistan.

“This last year has been a very hard year for them,” a senior U.S. counter-terrorism official said of Al Qaeda militants, whose operations he tracks in northwest Pakistan. “They’re losing a bunch of their better leaders. But more importantly, at this point they’re wondering who’s next.”

U.S. intelligence officials said they see clear signs that the Predator strikes are sowing distrust within Al Qaeda. “They have started hunting down people who they think are responsible” for security breaches, the senior U.S. counter-terrorism official said, discussing intelligence assessments on condition of anonymity. “People are showing up dead or disappearing.”

Herbert W. Obama

Remember this so you can make conversation in the soup lines.

In the Great Depression, President Herbert Hoover raised marginal tax rates to 63%, and went on a deficit spending binge. He also signed the Smoot-Hawley tariff, which helped turn a recession into the Great Depression by triggering a trade war with other countries.
Obama is on the same path. His deficit-exploding $800 billion stimulus package blocked 97 Mexican truckers from U.S. roads. That NAFTA violation “caused Mexico to retaliate with tariffs on 90 goods affecting $2.4 billion in U.S. trade.” The CBO admits that the stimulus package will actually shrink the economy in the long run.

Dear Barry

It’s time for another installment of America’s best advice column.

Dear Barry:

Our 12 year old son Tyler is developmentally disabled. Tyler’s learning center has a Special Olympics program and we (along with his teachers) have been encouraging him to participate. Every time we bring it up to him, however, Tyler pushes back and becomes very withdrawn. We love Tyler very much and don’t want to force him into it, but we think the Special Olympics would be a terrific experience and help him conquer his shyness and introversion. Do you have any suggestions for helping him get past this fear?

Jean and Ted in Westmont

Dear Jean and Ted:

As you know I am a big fan of the Special Olympics program, and all the good things it does for young Mongoloid-Americans like your son. Nothing inspires more than the sight of these heroic young tards hilariously giving it their all in the arena of friendly athletic competition. Extra-chromosome? More like extra-awesome! That’s why I recently volunteered, on the advice of my damage control team, as an equipment manager for the U.S. Special Olympics bowling squad. At first I wasn’t sure how I would feel about polishing other people’s balls for a change, but I think those tards really appreciate what I’ve done for them. Lately they started calling me “Special O.”

Expect a Run on Brazilian Bananas in San Francisco

Lines will form outside Whole Foods.

Guess Who Said This

“The Wall Street bailout is starting to look like the most expensive tax-supported fiasco in history.”

The Ides of Texas

Dr. McLeroy, the young-earth creationist in charge of the Texas Board of Education is not only trying to destroy science in the classroom and replace it with his narrow, loony version of Christianity, but thinks that scientists are atheists, pastors who support sound science are “morons”, and parents who teach the truth to their kids are “monsters”. Here’s a quote from a book he admires:

The Greek word translated as stupid is moron, where we get our word for a mentally dull and sluggish person. In my judgment, only morons—more than 11,500 morons in this case—could sign a letter maintaining that the “timeless truths of the Bible” are compatible with the billions of unpredictable aberrations of evo-atheism. What do these apostate morons celebrate at their Sunday services, the lies about humanity’s origins told by Moses, Jesus, and Paul? (p.57-58)

The science song: Algore to the left of me, jokers to the right…

We’re living through the Flat Earth days again. The evidence is pouring in, 100% in favor of evolution. There really is just as much evidence for it as there is for a round earth. Yet a few are clinging desperately to their fables. Well, that way be dragons.

Banana Republicdom, Here We Come

John Hinderaker points out the insanity of Pelosi’s position.

Wells Fargo didn’t want any TARP money, but the government forced it to take more than $5 billion worth, so Wells Fargo employees who receive bonuses would be subject to Pelosi’s proposed tax. Say you’re a teller at a Wells Fargo branch in Minnesota and you’re married to a lawyer who makes $250,000 this year. You get a $10,000 bonus for your good work during 2008. The government steals it all (90 percent federal plus 8.5 percent state plus, unless it’s included in the 90 percent, 3 percent Medicare). That is simply insane.

If the Pelosi bill is actually enacted into law (which I still think is doubtful) and upheld by the courts, there is no limit to the arbitrary power of Congress. In that event, we have no property rights and there is no Constitution–no equal protection clause, no due process clause, no impairment of contracts clause, no bill of attainder/ex post facto law clause. Instead, we are living in a majoritarian tyranny.

Peter Robinson spoke to some people who have seen Banana Republics up close and personal. They argue that Comandante Obama is moving us that direction, and fast. Peter has a hard time arguing with them.

“It starts with a cult of personality,” the Cuban explained. “One man declares himself the jefe, the caudillo, the big leader.”

Had Obama attempted to instigate something like a cult of personality? The American found the charge impossible to refute. During the campaign, Obama had failed to advance a genuine agenda, instead campaigning on “hope” and “change.” In effect, he had asked Americans to turn the nation over to him on blind faith. He would, he promised, transcend racial and partisan divides in his very person.

Remember: It can happen here.