December 2008

When there isn’t enough to fearmonger about, Jeff “can’t be bothered to read the whole thing” Burhans will just make shit up:

Remember, it’s not restricting Free Speech,it’s just protecting the children!

Wired News – AP News

A proposed Internet filter dubbed the “Great Aussie Firewall” is promising to make Australia one of the strictest Internet regulators among democratic countries.

And the same deal is happening in Great Britain – who have high hopes of working with Great Leader to do the same thing here. Soon we’ll be even MORE like China and Stalinist Russia.

Burhans’ insinuation that Obama (“Great Leader”) will conspire with Great Britain to implement the sort of draconian Internet content filters proposed in Australia is, of course, based firmly on… um… on… errrr… well, on nothing at all, it would seem.

That’s what lying wingnuts like Jeff Burhans do, you see — they invent boogeymen to scare themselves with. Must be exhausting, working so hard to terrify yourself all the time…

UPDATE 12/31/08 1:57 PM EST: Burhans has also invented “a coup which destroyed what little was left of our Constitutional government”. You must have seen it, it was in all the papers…

Shorter Ogre:

• Price gouging is great! I love being gouged! It’s right up there with Mom, baseball, and apple pie! Gouge me, baby! WOLVERINES!

‘Shorter’ concept created by Daniel Davies and perfected by Elton Beard, and shamelessly pilfered from Sadly, No.

Science education in the US has failed miserably to produce a scientifically literate citizenry. Case in point: William Teach Porter Good, who burps out his ignorant meanderings at a blog called Pirate’s Cove. Discussing the predicted increase in sea levels worldwide due to the melting of the ice caps, he bellows:

OK, all you Climahysterics try a little experiment. Take a glass. Fill it with water about 1/2 way or so. Take an ice cube, drop it in. Mark the water level. Now, let it melt. When done, where is the mark? The same level? Holy cow!!!!

Good. Freaking. God. Is it actually possible (barring a lobotomy) for a human being to be this jaw-droppingly ignorant?

Now, Billykins Porter is right about the ice cube and the glass. When the ice cube melts, the water level in the glass does not rise appreciably. Why? Because the ice had displaced an equivalent volume of liquid water. Of course, this requires that the ice be in the water in the first place.

Billykins Porter is trying to tell us that, because ice floating in a glass does not raise the water level in the glass when it melts, there cannot possibly be any resultant increase in worldwide sea levels were the ice caps in Greenland and the Antarctic to melt. This means, of course, that Billykins Porter actually believes that the ice caps of Greenland and Antarctica are floating in the ocean.

Poor cretinous Billykins Porter apparently missed the news in geography class: Greenland and Antarctica are actually land masses. This, of course, means that the ice resting on those land masses is not displacing water in the oceans, and that any runoff from melting ice must increase the total volume of the oceans — thus increasing mean sea level.

This is what the civilized world is up against in dealing with the issues raised by global climate change — flat-out, blatant ignorance. The words of Friedrich Schiller could not be truer than they are today: “Against stupidity, the gods themselves contend in vain”.

Most people could look at this holiday image and see it for what it is: an elderly toymaker building a toy…

Cao looks at this, and through the wingnut haze that filters her entire perception of reality, sees:

…George Soros counting his gold at what looks like a gambling table.

Deranged.

Jim Hoft, the lying nutball who posts his droolings under the nom de moron “Gateway Pundit”, is under the impression that he gets to decide who goes to heaven:

President Bush and Vice President Cheney earned their way to heaven.

You can’t make up this kind of insanity, folks. You can only watch the wingnuts implode under the weight of their own delusional self-importance, and laugh.

Mark Tiedemann makes a point about those who deny evolution (and global warming, for that matter) that I’ve not heard articulated in quite this way before:

The evolution deniers are frightened, whether they recognize the source of their fear or not.  Evolution is scary because it means that we, homo sapiens sapiens, have no particular claim to special treatment at the hands of nature.  In the vast landscape of biological history going back a couple billion years, our manifestation isn’t even a noticeable hash mark on the scale.  We have found evidence of extinction after extinction, tremendously successful forms that one day became expendable.  It means that we can be replaced.  We’ve painted our self-portrait for several thousand years as the top of the food chain, the ultimate flower of Creation, but evolution comes along and says, well, no, not really.  We have a big brain, but other than that, we’re not so special.  We’re place holders along the continuum.

If science is right about Global Warming and evolution, then god ain’t gonna make everything all right.

Which brings me back to that big brain.  Turns out that if we actually use it, we have a shot at extending our tenure.  That we have the potential to be an even more successful form, and have a little longevity.  We might even last as long as the dinosaurs, assuming an asteroid doesn’t smack into us.

Which means We have to do the work.

And that’s really a bother.  A pain.  A nuisance.

But there’s no point in denial.

A few days ago I posted an article pointing out that Judy Doucette, aka ‘HoosierArmyMom’, was spreading the lie that Al Gore claimed to have invented the Internet. She fell back on the slimiest of wingnut defenses (“this is humor”).

When I dared to point out that accusing someone else of “contempt” after posting a known lie, she reacted the way any whackaloon with the emotional maturity of a three-year-old would: she deleted the entire post. Fortunately, I preserved a mirror of the post for entertainment purposes.

That’s how it is on Planet Wingnut: when someone comes along and points out just how gormlessly inept a liar someone like Judy Doucette is, they simply destroy the evidence of their lies.

Amazing. ‘HoosierArmyMom’ Judy Doucette has posted a graphic that shows an image of Al Gore, with the caption “He invented the Internet just so you could be indoctrinated about global warming”.

This is how the wingnuts spread their ignorance, folks: by repeating the same long-discredited lies over and over again, hoping that sheer repetition will magically turn their fairy tales into truth.

UPDATE 12/17/08 3:12 PM EST: Well, golly, what a surprise. When caught in a lie, Judykins falls back on the hoary old it’s-just-a-joke dodge.

No, Judykins. A lie is a lie is a lie — and you’ve been caught deliberately spreading a lie. You’ve given away the game by repeating the lie: ”…we all know Al lied when he claimed to invent the internet…”.

The stupid, it burns.

The lies just never end with the wingnuts. At Flopping Aces, a hack calling himself “Mike” pimps another lie that the far right has been spreading lately. Quoting from a column by another hack named Lawrence Kudlow, Mikey cites a fabricated statistic:

Average compensation for the Detroit little three is $72.31.

This is a lie, and Mikey repeats it at his own site. As has been well documented — and as GM itself now acknowledges — this bogus figure is arrived at by including the cost of retiree benefits. In other words, this number includes in the wages of current GM workers the cost of benefits paid to other people.

Can the wingnuts get much more dishonest than this? Actually, they can. Mikey goes on to quote Kudlow:

But the UAW refused to make concessions.

Kudlow (and Mikey) utterly ignore the parade of concessions that the UAW has in fact made in recent contracts. In 2007, the union agreed to the transfer of retiree health-care payments from GM to the union, to forego annual raises over the course of the contract, and to a cut in wages for new hires. And the union had already agreed to new concessions as part of the effort to assist the Big Three automakers secure federal aid.

Remember this, folks: There is no lie that the far right will not tell in their quest to destroy the American economy and cost Americans jobs. If Mikey were a decent human being, he would apologize for his part in spreading this lie.

I expect he’ll do no such thing. Instead, we can expect Mikey and his fellow fools to go right on parroting the falsehoods they are fed.

Shorter “Robert”:

• Until somebody else starts murdering the terrifying brown people that I’m so frightened of, the US will be a laughingstock.

‘Shorter’ concept created by Daniel Davies and perfected by Elton Beard, and shamelessly pilfered from Sadly, No.