Monthly Archive

A filing by prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald yesterday [PDF] reveals that Valerie Plame Wilson was, in fact, a covert CIA operative at the time her identity was made public:

At the time of the initial unauthorized disclosure in the media of Ms. Wilson’s employment relationship with the CIA on 14 July 2003, Ms. Wilson was a covert CIA employee for whom the CIA was taking affirmative measures to conceal her intelligence relationship to the United States.

Fitzgerald has taken this information from an unclassified summary of Ms. Plame’s employment history released by the CIA.

The right wing blogosphere has been vociferous in its denial that Ms. Plame was a covert operative. They’ve done this because, if Plame were covert, then several members of the Bush administration complicit in the exposure of her identity could also be complicit in the commission of an act of treason. It’s an article of winger faith that nobody on the right would ever commit a crime for political gain. Oh, merciful heavens no. Read the rest of this entry »

There’s a cliche in the movies known as “the idiot plot”. This is the movie in which the major conflict would be solved instantly if not for the fact that all the characters are a complete idiots. The classic example is the standard horror movie scenario: The hockey-masked killer is stalking the hallways of the high school/hospital/office building/whatever looking for fresh victims to dismember, and the main characters come up with the stupidest possible plan: “Let’s split up!”

Well, Crybaby Clay has come up with an improvement (?) on the idiot plot. Let’s call it the “drooling moron plot”. This variant requires that the reader be a drooling moron to accept Clay’s so-called “arguments”. A bit over a month ago, Crybaby Clay published a cartoon that repeated the long-discredited wingnut claim that the New York Times revealed a big secret when it published, in June 2006, an article detailing the US government’s use of the international banking transaction database called SWIFT to track the movement of money by terrorists. I pointed out to Clay that this fact was well known long before the NYT article, primarily due to a 1998 article in the Washington Post that noted the use of the SWIFT database for this precise purpose.

Crybaby Clay claimed he had a devastating counterargument that would demolish the assertion that the Washington Post article tipped off the terrorists years before the 2006 article appeared in the Times. He refused to reveal this bombshell, apparently believing that his claim alone would end the argument, and has maintained this farce for the past several weeks. Yesterday, Crybaby Clay finally deigned to publish this amazing work of deductive logic.

There’s only one word to describe what CC hath wrought:

BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!

We all have biases. What are yours? Most, if not all, of them will be found in this handy list of cognitive biases...

• Bandwagon effect – the tendency to do (or believe) things because many other people do (or believe) the same. Related to groupthink, herd behaviour, and manias. Carl Jung pioneered the idea of the collective unconscious which is considered by Jungian psychologists to be responsible for this cognitive bias.
• Bias blind spot – the tendency not to compensate for one’s own cognitive biases.
• Choice-supportive bias – the tendency to remember one’s choices as better than they actually were.
• Confirmation bias – the tendency to search for or interpret information in a way that confirms one’s preconceptions.

Hat tip to linkfilter.

The “Creation Museum” opens this weekend near Cincinnati, a multi-million-dollar monument to ignorance and superstition. It’s designed to do just one thing: spread lies and ignorance to as many people as possible.

Over at Pharyngula, PZ Myers has collected a huge list of posts from around the blogosphere, reacting to this travesty. Go read the whole thing. I agree with PZ: the last entry is the saddest…

Does the opposition to creationism matter? Yes, it does. Answers in Genesis is a predatory organization: it thrives on ignorance, and it misinforms and misleads and lies specifically to inculcate the kind of gullibility and fear and desperation that will send more donations to its coffers.

It’s not just children who are scammed. Read my father knew no science for an example of what Ken Ham really feeds on.

He needed more care, himself, but there was no money left to pay for a homemaker, or even a cleaning woman. I went out weekly and did as much as I could; church people mended his clothes and brought food, neighbours checked on him. But there was always a shortfall.

When he died, at 92, and I picked up the reins of his finances, I found that month’s bill from AIG: $70. For DVDs. To give away, of course; Dad had no TV, no DVD player, no video player: he was almost blind.

That’s what the museum is all about: fleecing the poor, the weak, the ignorant, the confused.

I have to admit, this new religion could be a viable alternative to Pastafarianism…

They’re everywhere. And there is a way to recognize them...

Ever since I visited Dr. Robert Hare in Vancouver, I can see them, the psychopaths. It’s pretty easy, once you know how to look. I’m watching a documentary about an American prison trying to rehabilitate teen murderers. They’re using an emotionally intense kind of group therapy, and I can see, as plain as day, that one of the inmates is a psychopath. He tries, but he can’t muster a convincing breakdown, can’t fake any feeling for his dead victims. He’s learned the words, as Bob Hare would put it, but not the music.

The incredible thing, the reason I’m yelling, is that no one in this documentary — the therapists, the warden, the omniscient narrator — seems to know the word “psychopath.” It is never uttered, yet it changes everything. A psychopath can never be made to feel the horror of murder. Weeks of intense therapy, which are producing real breakthroughs in the other youths, will probably make a psychopath more likely to reoffend. Psychopaths are not like the rest of us, and everyone who studies them agrees they should not be treated as if they were.

I think of Bob Hare, who’s in New Orleans receiving yet another award, and wonder if he’s watching the same show in his hotel room and feeling the same frustration. A lifetime spent looking into the heads of psychopaths has made the slight, slightly anxious emeritus professor of psychology at the University of British Columbia the world’s best-known expert on the species. Hare hasn’t merely changed our understanding of psychopaths. It would be more accurate to say he has created it.

The condition itself has been recognized for centuries, wearing evocative labels such as “madness without delirium” and “moral insanity” until the late 1800s, when “psychopath” was coined by a German clinician. But the term (and its 1930s synonym, sociopath) had always been a sort of catch-all, widely and loosely applied to criminals who seemed violent and unstable. Even into the mid-1970s, almost 80 percent of convicted felons in the United States were being diagnosed as sociopaths. In 1980, Hare created a diagnostic tool called the Psychopathy Checklist, which, revised five years later, became known as the PCL-R. Popularly called “the Hare,” the PCL-R measures psychopathy on a forty-point scale. Once it emerged, it was the first time in history that everyone who said “psychopath” was saying the same thing. For research in the field, it was like a starting gun.

I’m so ashamed. Clearly, I wasted my youth… because I scored 100% on the Name That Toon audio quiz. Oh, the humiliation…

That lying turd Gateway Pundit is at it again.

Every so often, he’ll post a graphic that supposedly proves that military deaths under Bush are far lower than they were under Clinton. What he never, ever, tells his readers is that he is comparing total military deaths (from both hostile and non-hostile actions) under Clinton to the number of deaths of military personnel under Bush counting Iraq and Afghanistan alone.

In other words, Gateway Pundit is deliberately skewing the numbers by leaving out military deaths that did not occur in those two theaters. The simple fact of the matter is that more military personnel have already died during the six-and-a-half years of the Bush administration than did during the entire eight-year Clinton administration.

One of GP’s commenters, using statistics from the Department of Defense, has pointed out the deception. As of this writing, GP hasn’t found the balls to answer. A similar tactic in a column that ran in the The New York Sun last February was quickly exposed as a fraud by Media Matters.

There’s a word for what Gateway Pundit does: lying. Nothing else fits. It seems to be GP’s main pastime. One wonders if he believes his own lies, or is simply marvelling at the ease with which he can bamboozle his readers.

From the M.K. Gandhi Institute for Nonviolence comes this list of mistakes we have all made, as individuals and as a society. Gandhi’s grandson Arun passes the list on to us (with one addition he has made):

Mohandas K. Gandhi was convinced much of the violence in society and in our personal lives stems from the passive violence that we commit against each other. He described these acts of passive violence as the “Seven Blunders”. Grandfather gave me the list in 1947 just before we left India to return to South Africa where my father, Manilal, Gandhi’s second son, and my mother, Sushila, worked for nonviolent change. In the Indian tradition of adding one’s knowledge to the ancient wisdom being passed on, and in keeping with what Grandfather said and wrote about responsibility, I have added an eighth item to the list of blunders. – Arun Gandhi

• Wealth Without Work
• Pleasure Without Conscience
• Knowledge Without Character
• Commerce Without Morality
• Science Without Humanity
• Worship Without Sacrifice
• Politics Without Principles
• Rights Without Responsibilities

While I’m on the subject of spot-on lists, I’d like to bring to your attention a great list that General J. C. Christian has compiled, showing just how few mistakes the administration of Our Sainted President™ has made. A small excerpt…

It’s not like this administration is completely mistake-ridden. These are the only mistakes I could come up with after thinking about it for a whole 5 minutes.

...

• Al Hurra, the government owned and operated public relations television network broadcasts terrorist messages, including exhortations to commit violence against Jews, to the Middle East. The mistake is excused because none of the management speaks Arabic.
• Upon taking Iraq, Donald Rumsfeld stations troops to defend the Oil Ministry against looters while leaving museums, arms depots, and nuclear facilities unguarded.
• The Vice President’s Chief of Staff makes a mistake when he lies to the FBI and a federal grand jury.
• White House Counsel Alberto Gonzales and Chief of Staff Andrew Card attempt to strongarm a drugged, semi-coherent, hospitalized John Ashcroft into approving a state security apparatus operation against the people.
• Jose Padilla is arrested for plotting to explode a dirty bomb. The charges are later changed and Padilla is accused of plotting to turn on the gas in a number of apartments and then light a match to them. Those charges were eventually dropped and currently, Padilla is charged with being a Chechen Resistance recruiter and filling out an application to be a terrorist.
• 8.8 billion dollars is placed on pallets and transported to Iraq where it is never heard from again.

Go now, and read GrrlScientist’s utterly spot-on list of what good Republicans must believe. Truer words were never spoken.

Kit Jarrell, a so-called “Christian” who advocates genocide against Iranians, has gone positively orgasmic over a street execution:

Okay, the idiot is dead. This is a good thing, and before you start whining about how he didn’t deserve to die, let me remind you that he shot a cop and then ran him over with his car. Come on, now. Use your head. Not only am I glad the piece of trash is no longer capable of procreating, I’m of the opinion that his family owes society a huge debt just for creating and raising this slime.

Then again, when you consider what kind of stupid nutcase Bode Miller is, I guess it’s not really surprising his family’s stupid too.

So, it isn’t enough that one man is dead. Kit feels obligated to smear his entire family. Nice “Christian” values, huh?

Kit is utterly unable to understand ordinary, everyday morality: that you simply do not kill someone in cold blood, no matter how much of an “idiot” you think they are. Assuming that the dead man did, indeed, shoot a cop and then ran him over with his car, we have a way of handing that: Arrest the miscreant and put him on trial. But the standards of American justice simply are not quick enough for Kit: she wants to see blood NOW, and LOTS OF IT!

The clearest, most succinct expression of just how morally incompetent people like Kit Jarrell are comes from Manoj Joshi, a blogger in India, who says of those who cheer on extra-legal murders as Kit does:

They also don’t realise that the logic of arrogating to themselves the decision as to who should live and die is exactly the one used by terrorists.

Once again, the wingnuts at StopTheACLU.com prove that there is no depth of ignorance that they are not willing to plumb. Serial idiot Glib Fortuna is suddenly terribly, terribly offended that Muslims are being accomodated at an airport. Of course, there have been chapels in airports for decades. When this is pointed out in the comments, serial idiot Glib Fortuna piles ignorance upon ignorance:

The chapels are non-denominational and may be used for worship and prayer by anyone. Thus, irrelevant.

BZZZZZZTTT!!! Wrong again. JFK International Airport in New York, for instance, has both Catholic and Protestant chapels, a Jewish synagogue, and apparently a place of worship specifically for Muslims as well. A simple search of the Internet would reveal a long list of airport chapels worldwide — but of course, doing research like this before shooting off his mouth goes against everything Glib believes in.

Glib, of course, is well-known for simply making shit up as he goes. Facts aren’t important to lying bigots of his sort, and hardly a week goes by that Glib does not provide further evidence of his contempt for both his readers and the truth.