Monthly Archive

PZ Myers points us to Answers in Genesis BUSTED, a new blog devoted to grinding the claims of the creationists into tiny tiny pieces.

Tell me again that it’s only Muslims who resort to violence over matters of religion...

A melee broke out in Sweden outside a photography exhibit depicting Jesus as a homosexual.

Artist Elisabeth Ohlson Wallin created the Ecce Homo exhibit 10 years ago, and it has been controversial ever since.

On Sunday, a group of young people tried to set fire to a poster at the Jonkoping Kulturhuset, The Local reported.

Staff members tried to stop them, leading to a fight involving about 30 people, said Tony el Zouki, the director of the Kulturhuset.

More at Pam’s House Blend...

Posted without comment… from Daily Kos: “MSM” vs. “Traditional Media”:

We need an effective media, one that reports the truth, whatever it may be.

The right wing needs to co-opt or destroy the traditional media because, quite frankly, reality isn’t a friend of conservative ideology. The last thing they need is anyone reporting “the truth”. Instead, they need to create their own alternate reality to justify their beliefs. And any bit of reality that doesn’t conform to their rigid conservative ideology is “liberal”.

Thats why conservatives seek to denigrate, destroy, and belittle traditional media outlets, trying to scare them from reporting “truth” and “reality”.

Some folks, it seems, are incapable of learning from their mistakes. Jim Hoft, who blogs as “Gateway Pundit”, is apparently one of these.

Despite the fact that his lies have been exposed again and again and again, he continues to lie. This time, he posts a deliberate misquote of a statement from Barack Obama:

"US Troops Are Just Air Raiding Villages & Killing Civilians"

Hoft even posts the video of Obama’s remarks:
 

Listen to the video. Does Obama use the phrase “US Troops Are Just Air Raiding Villages & Killing Civilians”? Nope.

Yes, he says something very similar, and the meaning of what he said can certainly be debated — but that debate can take place without deliberately misquoting the man. Yet that is what Jim Hoft, a lying pig turd of a non-man if ever there was one, has done.

There is no lie that Jim Hoft will not tell.

That bears repeating:

THERE IS NO LIE THAT JIM HOFT WILL NOT TELL.

Keep lying, Jimbo.

It really is the only talent you have.

UPDATE 08/16/07 07:12 AM: Notice the tactics employed in the attacks on me in the comments below. This is what could be termed the “pack of hyenas” gambit. The idea is to flood the comments thread with multiple declarations that my detractors have “won the debate” — and therefore, magically, they have won the debate without ever demonstrating that my original statement was in error.

As to Duncan Avatar’s argument that Hoft “paraphrased” Obama: That might be believable if we did not have multiple instances of Hoft lying to his readers in the past. But since we do know that Hoft deliberately lies about what other people have said, the “paraphrase” defense is untenable.

An article at lifehack.org explains succinctly the benefits of "Becoming an Effective Skeptic":

There are a lot of practical applications for using skeptical thinking. Unfortunately, with the recent popularity of programs like The Secret and positive thinking self-help, rational thinking is being subverted for a self-induced placebo effect. Here are some benefits you can get from using skepticism on practical matters:

• Creativity – The best way to prevent new solutions is to believe you already have the answer. Allowing a gap of doubt can allow creative alternatives to flow in. If you are adamant that advertising will not work for your product, you might cut off hundreds of ideas for improving your business.


• Planning – Assumptions are the enemy of planning. A common rule of thumb for software development is to plan to use double the amount of time you need; then add six months. Write your plans too narrowly and they may collapse under new information.


• Quickly Integrate New Facts – When you also maintain a small margin of doubt, you can allow in new facts easily. If you are completely certain your approach is perfect, you won’t be able to adjust when evidence points that it isn’t.


• Reveal Weaknesses – Many of the things that sabotage your efforts will be completely unknown. Thinking critically and examining the information can reveal some of these traps.

Worth a read. I am certainly aware that I apply the principles listed imperfectly… but I do try.

Jim Hoft, who blogs as ‘Gateway Pundit’, has been exposed as a liar before. He’s at it again.

Hoft links to a photo published by the BBC, as part of a story about a recent US raid in Baghdad:

US-led forces have killed 30 militants in the Iraqi capital, Baghdad, the US military has said.

They said most had died in an air strike following a raid in the Shia district of Sadr City. Twelve people were also detained in the operation.

The US military said the dead were part of a network that was smuggling weapons from Iran, but witnesses said women and children were among those killed.

The photo shows a young man lying atop what appears to be a coffin, crying. Hoft jumps to a totally unwarranted conclusion, effectively lying about the contents of the BBC article:

The BBC mourns the loss of 30 heroic terrorists killed by Iraqi and American troops in Baghdad.

Read the BBC article. Not one word of “mourning” will you find. But because the BBC dared to publish a photo of an unknown young man crying over the death of someone close to him (and note that we have no idea whatsoever who is in that coffin), Hoft decides that lying about the contents of the BBC article is something he wants to do today.

Is there anything that Jim Hoft will not lie about?

Yup. Our boy Justin has been duped again — mostly because he’s too damn lazy to look up the facts.

Justin is a global warming denialist. He’s only too happy to help spread the denialist propaganda, and that’s exactly what he’s doing in a post entitled “Whats Really Behind Global Warming?”. He quotes a claim made by wingnut columnist Bill Steigerwald:

In 2004, a study by the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research said Earth was getting hotter because the sun was burning brighter than it had in 1,000 years.

This is where Justin’s gullibility comes into play. Had he bothered to actually investigate the facts, he’d have found that Steigerwald is lying through his teeth.

Steigerwald is actually conflating two papers here. The first, entitled "Millennium-Scale Sunspot Number Reconstruction: Evidence for an Unusually Active Sun since the 1940s" [PDF], does in fact present evidence that “the period of high solar activity during the last 60 years is unique throughout the past 1150 years”. But those authors assiduously avoid making any claim of causation between solar activity and climate change. In fact, they specifically state:

To clarify whether this similarity reflects a real physical connection requires a more detailed study of the various proposed mechanisms for a solar influence on climate.

And now we move on to the second paper, which actually does look at the influence of the sun on climate. This one is entitled "Solar Variability and Global Warming: A Statistical Comparison Since 1850" [PDF], and its authors come to a very different conclusion than Steigerwald and Justin would have you believe.

We assume that the Sun has been responsible for climate change prior to 1970 and that their inter-relation remained unchanged afterwards. Then, employing reconstructions and measured records of relevant solar quantities as well as of the cosmic-ray flux, we estimate statistically which fraction of the dramatic temperature rise after that date could be due to the influence of the Sun. We show that at least in the most recent past (since about 1970) the solar influence on climate cannot have been significant.

Oops.

These papers weren’t hard to find. A few minutes of Googling was all it took. But this was a few minutes too many for our good little propagandist Justin. He’d much rather have someone else do his thinking for him.

Somehow, it seems likely that Justin will be suffering the effects of this inability to check the facts before shooting off his mouth for a long time to come.

Over at StopTheACLU, JonJayRay posts an article under a title that tells us pretty much all we need to know about him: “Doing the raghead rag”.

From the Urban Dictionary (slightly edited):

The rag being a turban and the head being that of a middle eastern or far eastern male. Although not all middle eastern or far eastern people wear turbans the term raghead is used in any case. It’s the same as calling an Iraqi a Paki. See alse: towelhead, sand ni**er, Paki, camel jockey, oil ni**er.

From Wikipedia’s article ‘List of ethnic slurs’:

Raghead
an ethnic slur used against Arabs, Indian Sikhs and some other peoples, denigrating them for wearing traditional headdress such as turbans or keffiyehs.

I’m not surprised that JonJayRay decided to expose his innate racism. I’m just surprised that he did it so casually, almost as an afterthought. It’s probably an indication of just how deeply ingrained the racism has become in his character, if you could call it that.

Read William K. Wolfrum’s latest at Shakespeare’s Sister. This country once fought its battles with honor. What have we come to, that someone seeking to become President would suggest mass murder as a deterrent?

Oh. Mah. Gawd.

Everyone’s favorite wingnut teen, Justin Higgins, has topped himself this time for sheer moral vacuity. In a post in which Justin lists his top ten reasons for teachers to become extreme rightwing whackjobs just like him, this one stand out for sheer unbe-fucking-lieveability:

#5- War! Come on folks, face it, History Class is much more interesting when we can discuss how were fighting our enemies instead of how were frivilously negotiating with people who have no intent of backing down. Vote Conservative and well actually take the Islamofascist thugs on.

Read it again. Then pick your jaw up off the floor.

Yes, folks, that’s what he said. We should be at war because it makes widdle Justin’s classes more interesting.

Gee, what do you suppose would keep Justin awake in history class? Read the rest of this entry »

You know, if Raven had actually set out to demonstrate to the world that she has all the moral comprehension of a bucket of dead hagfish, she could not have done a better job than she has managed in the last few days.

I pointed out earlier that Raven was engaging in the eliminationist rhetoric so beloved of the wingnut fringe. Eliminationists of Raven’s stripe are not content to merely vent their spleen on those with whom they disagree; no, they insist that anyone not in their camp must die. In this case, Raven was expressing her desire to see Congressman John Murtha, an outspoken critic of the war in Iraq, killed in a terrorist attack on the US Capitol Building.

The result was predictable. Some of Raven’s equally unhinged buddies came over here, and the bile flowed like the mighty Mississippi. Raven’s most recent contribution to the ‘discussion’ is a masterpiece of spluttering outrage, unleavened by anything resembling rational thought. Read the entire outburst here; I’ll hit the highlights below:

nananananah

sticking my tongue out at you!!

Whacha gonna do? Go cry to Mommy? Make her get me?

pfft.

One can always count on a whackjob who is as far gone as Raven to revert to the mannerisms of a six-year-old at some point.

And to answer the question: I’m going to go on doing what I have been doing — pointing out the amoral cesspool in which dwell the extreme rightwing hatemongers like Raven. Read the rest of this entry »

For my good friend Buddy Don, just because I can…