About 1:50 Bill O'Reilly washes up on the beach when he equates the tides to an unexplainable mystery of God. (Note: tidal forces are caused by the moon. It's science!)
At 2:40, world-traveled man of mystery has "never" seen a Christian sign on the side of the road referring to hell. Damn, you think he'd see one even if he never ventured outside of Fox studios.
Here's just one example, Bill-O. You can find this one in a field on the eastern side of I-71 between Columbus and Cincinnati (travelling north it displays the 10 commandments).
And that concludes today's lesson. Now drop to your knees and pray to the invisible man in the sky.
That biased fool pushes every blurb of "colder than thou" at every chance he gets.
Today? "OMG It's snowing in Colorado in October!" Guess what? It usually snows in Ohio in October, but today's an unseasonably warm 74 F in Cincinnati. Colorado has fucking mountains. Surprise! It snows there! It's altitude!
I need to calm down. I'm pushing my exclamation point quota through the roof.
Point: Drudge is farting a biased view of reality carefully crafted to that everyone who's conditioned to believe him will eat his feces and say it tastes like yummy stew.
On Labor Day, tens of thousands of people will be gathering for the coal-powered “Friends of America Rally” in Holden, WV. The point of the gathering is to rail against the Waxman-Markey clean energy legislation. It will feature right-wing guests such as Sean Hannity and Ted Nugent (who once ranted about killing Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton), and is being pushed by mountaintop-removal mining company Massey Energy. Last week, Massey CEO Don Blankenship even recorded a video inviting people to attend the rally, saying they would learn about how “environmental extremists and corporate America are both trying to destroy your jobs.”
Click that link above and follow it to the action link. This is bullshit. If you use Verizon, make certain you do something. Your money is your voice in this case.
The Green movement has NOTHING to do with employees of the coal industry losing their jobs, nor is it a current threat. The single largest reason why people in the coal industry lose their jobs is the greed and increasing efficiency of the coal companies themselves. To avoid backlash they blame it on the environmental movement and ignorance reigns, especially if you're CEO of Verizon and apparently suckling at the money teat of the coal industry.
If you've seen the ads put out by the Corn Refiners group where some actor-playing-douchebag says "Well, you know what they say about high-fructose corn syrup" (apparently aware of all foods that contain it but not what the concern is) but cannot come up with one thing that "they say" and the other person intelligently and succinctly states some crap about it being natural, you might have had two thoughts concomitantly: 1) What is it who's saying about HFCS? and 2) Ooh, it must be natural and ignorant whackos are causing a fuss.
And that's what the Corn Refiners group would like you to think.
But here's just one of the things "they're saying" about why HFCS is some funky shit:
A new study in mice sheds light on at least part of the reason for the insulin resistance that can come from diets high in high-fructose corn syrup, a sweetener found in most sodas and many other processed foods.
Fructose is much more readily metabolized to fat in the liver than glucose, and in the process can lead to nonalcoholic fatty liver disease. NAFLD in turn leads to hepatic insulin resistance and type II diabetes.
Researchers showed that mice fed a high-fructose diet could be protected from insulin resistance if a gene known as transcriptional coactivator PPARg coactivator-1b (PGC-1b) was "knocked down" in the animals' liver and fat tissue. PGC-1b controls the activity of several other genes, including one responsible for building fat in the liver. This suggests an important role for PGC-1b in the pathogenesis of fructose-induced insulin resistance.
But, hey, what's so bad about insulin resistance and nonalcoholic fatty liver disease?
Anyone else find it weird that people who are supposed to sell corn are selling medical advice that benefits their bottom line?
If you are planning on getting a tattoo, at the first inkling, you must be thinking about your artist. Who is going to put permanent ink into your skin? You should probably not run out to the first tattoo shop you find.
Maybe I'm biased because when Mrs. Shambles and I were planning our matching pieces, we dug in deep and found Marty Holcomb working out of Columbus, a brilliant artist who was only taking ink jobs by appointment (yes, I'll add a pic of the finished piece within 2 days - promise).
But when I caught this bit on Discover's website, my first thoughts were "Oh, no, you didn't."
Take the time. Check out Discover's Science Tattoo Emporium. And please, please realize that just because you have a brilliant idea doesn't mean the artist knows what you want or can execute it well.
The bigger the piece, the more research you need to do, the more portfolios you need to view, and know that there is never a better time to say "um, no" than when you see the mock-up of what they are planning. Walk away. Better a pissed-off artist than thousands to remove something you look at a week later and think "WTF?"
Which comes back to the demonstrated art bit. Never let any tattoo artist tell you "everyone I've ever inked has been happy." Of course they're happy, initially. They just let you put permanent ink into their skin. If they admitted to themselves that they were not happy, they would have to admit that they had made a grave mistake, and in the ever-looming interest of self-preservation, I would guess that 99.999% of people who get tattoos, no matter how horrendous, initially claim happiness with the work.
Boil it down, now: Research. If you're a scientist, research more. Find the name of an artist, an actual person. View many, many portfolios. Get a good representation of what will be on your skin. Then - and only then - commit.
If we don't start shouting very loudly, contraception could - on a national level - be redefined as abortion.
From MoveOn.org:
Can you imagine living in a place where birth control is considered an "abortion" and health insurers won't cover it? Where even rape victims are denied emergency contraception?
It seems unbelievable, but the Bush Administration is quietly trying to redefine "abortion" to include birth control. The Houston Chronicle says this could wipe out dozens of state laws that protect women's reproductive freedom and protect rape victims.1 Access to basic health care for millions of women would be jeopardized. And it's being pushed as a "rule change"—meaning, it doesn't need congressional approval.
Health and Human Services Secretary Mike Leavitt denies it.
In a world where some insurance companies cover Viagra but not birth control pills, and one of the men running for leader of our country shies away from that discrepancy like blushing nun poking a dildo, I would not be surprised for a second.
In a monumental victory for the gay rights movement, the California Supreme Court overturned a voter-approved ban on gay marriage Thursday in a ruling that would allow same-sex couples in the nation's biggest state to tie the knot.
Domestic partnerships are not a good enough substitute for marriage, the justices ruled 4-3 in striking down the ban.
This is exactly what the right wing calls "activist" judiciary, but in reality is what us educated folks call "checks and balances." Even if you vote on limiting the rights of certain individuals, our constitution - and judges serving true - will not stand for ignorance.
It's not a be-all, end-all, but a happy step in the right direction for human rights.
Now, if we could get someone to not just decriminalize but fully legalize marijuana, we'd be kicking some ass. Unfortunately, our government, in sanctimonious bullshittery (similar to "protecting marriage"), ignores all scientific data in order to spend billions in tax dollars as opposed to legalizing and accepting tax monies.
I've talked before about the Read It Later Firefox download, which is basically a button that files URLs in to a Bookmarks folder called "Read It Later."
It is both a curse and a blessing. Blessing because I otherwise might not keep track of some of the stories I come across and you would lose out. Curse because I tend to both procrastinate and lose track of when "later" should occur. Because of this, I need a steady cleaning session, and today's the day!
US-funded health search-engine censors all results for searches on "abortion"
Popline is the world's largest health-information search engine, run by the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health with funding from the US government. They have just changed their database so that queries for "abortion" show no results, even though the system has access to more than 25,000 documents on the subject. They say they've done this because they believe it's a requirement of their federal funding.
The Bush Administration limits most of their sex ed funding to abstinence-only training, the results eight years later show higher incidence of teen pregnancy and STDs, the media ignores it, and we're supposed to be surprised by this? Bush != Science. Surprise!
Flu Vaccine Not So Good
(fake update: where I Chanel the Flaming Fashionista) Another one for the Sur-prise! cache. The CDC done fucked up. Again. It's not their fault; they have to guess, during the nadir of influenza outbreaks, what three, hot, fashionable strains will be picked up by the most folks in the coming season.
The reason they have to do all this mad guessing? They've freaked so many people out about the necessity of getting a flu shot that they've got to deliver. Okay, so it is their fault. And constant reminders that Bird Flu Gonna Getchu - not even going there, my chicken-lovin' sistahs. No Whammies!
And this time around, it looks like two of the three picks were duds. Better luck next season! Even Vogue gets it wrong some of the time. Who am I kidding; Vogue never gets it wrong.
Cafferty is Plated Chinese Shit Sandwich
I was going to go all out, rage for paragraphs on this one, but I think it's better in concentrated format.
I don't know if China is any different, but our relationship with China is certainly different. We're in hock to the Chinese up to our eyeballs because of the war in Iraq, for one thing. They're holding hundreds of billions of dollars worth of our paper.
We are also running hundreds of billions of dollars' worth or trade deficits with them, as we continue to import their junk with the lead paint on them and the poisoned pet food and export, you know, jobs to places where you can pay workers a dollar a month to turn out the stuff that we're buying from Wal-Mart.
So I think our relationship with China has certainly changed. I think they're basically the same bunch of goons and thugs they've been for the last 50 years.
And he was right: China owns us and is using the leverage to make us smile while they walk on our nuts with a conga line of piss-poor products. Wal-Mart is King Pimp, whoring Chinese goods to us while assassinating American jobs in the back room.
The average Chinese salary is $0.35/day. A day. If the angry Chinese now protesting CNN pointed their concern at China and attacked the real problem - lack of human rights, product regulation, and a humanistic wage - then they might actually accomplish something. This is nothing more than misplaced aggression, throwing stones at the film critic when the movie truly, truly sucks.
But they're suing CNN. $1.3 billion. Enough to pay every Chinese citizen the average of about 3 days wages of the average worker. And the douchebox known as NewsBusters (semantic note: a douchebox can and often does hold many douchebags) decided to basically reprint the story and call Cafferty names. As I believe I've already noted: douchebox.
Thus ends the April Roundup. I hope you enjoyed. Good night and don't let the bed bugs bite.
Police in Congo have arrested 13 suspected sorcerers accused of using black magic to steal or shrink men's penises after a wave of panic and attempted lynchings triggered by the alleged witchcraft.
Reports of so-called penis snatching are not uncommon in West Africa, where belief in traditional religions and witchcraft remains widespread, and where ritual killings to obtain blood or body parts still occur.
Rumors of penis theft began circulating last week in Kinshasa, Democratic Republic of Congo's sprawling capital of some 8 million inhabitants. They quickly dominated radio call-in shows, with listeners advised to beware of fellow passengers in communal taxis wearing gold rings.
Well, not Earth Day per se. It's the satellite radio and right wing blogs that make me angry. They're all railing about being inundated with Earth Day and how bad and bullshit it all is. Right now I'm listening to Fox Across America with Spencer Hughes and he's crapping himself about what "brainwashing" his kids are going to come home with because they might have discussed Earth Day in school, because the War Against Global Warming is "war against capitalism" and "war against Western Civilization."
The far right wing has gone from questioning popular and well-accepted science to abject quackery. Many believe the following:
At the top tier of batshit crazy is those folks who refuse to believe that global warming is even real, often citing the ignorance of Global Cooling in the 1970's and claiming we are going to be looking at more cooling to come. None of them acknowledge that a piece of Antarctica four times the size of Manhattan collapsed into the ocean a couple weeks ago.
If they do believe that Global Warming is a reality, it is not because of humans, but a long-disputed idea that it is solely because of a complex variety of the Earth's tilt and proximity to the sun. Wingnuts say it is insane liberal egomania to think that little ol' us humans could affect the environment, could affect the planet as a whole. These folks ignore well-established theories, basic scientific understanding, and anything any liberal has to say.
Not only is Earth Day a horror and brainwashing, but because of alternative and bio-fuel research, we have food riots (and that is the sole reason, of course). This is a first: because of a generalized liberal focus on Global Warming, we've got Conservatives to give a shit about poor people - in other countries.
Global Warming is a hoax and liberals are purposefully misleading the world in order to make themselves rich, damage American industry/jobs, and institute Socialism. No mention is made of conservatives beginning wars in order to make themselves rich, damage American industry/jobs, and institute a Police State.
The obviously pagan Liberals treat the Gospel of Al Gore as their Religion.
No, this is not a joke.
And Al Gore is to blame! Understand that most people who think that Global Warming is a hoax are Conservative Republicans. Right Wing whackjobs hate liberals so damned much and, by association, Al Gore. Al Gore has made the world more aware of the problems we face with "An Inconvenient Truth." So at the detriment of the entire planet Earth, conservatives will refuse to agree with a liberal, because to do so might somehow, indirectly lead to admitting that Al Gore should have been the president, legally, about eight years ago.
Wingnuts are not only sadly attacking liberals and science, but their own. The attacks have gone from "try the science" to "I'm throwin' my shoe at the stupid train because it's stupid. Trains 'r' stupid. Trains." Bush recently announced a focus on climate change and then there's Newt Gingrich, former Speaker of the House of Representatives, sitting on a couch with - gasp! - Nancy Pelosi addressing - GASP! - Climate Change. Take a look:
And then there's NewsBusters, the self-proclaimed Right Wing equivalent to Media Matters. Unfortunately for them and as is par for all direct comparisons between Liberals and Conservatives on the internet, we're piloting advanced aircraft and they're wearing a shit grin over the two pence kite they just bought. But we're on Global Warming on Earth Day today, so let's address Brent Baker's "NBC 'Green with Envy' Over Swedes for 'Showing Kindness to Planet'."
Let that title sink in for a second, because that's the meat and potatoes of it. Brent Baker is apparently outraged that NBC turned Earth Day into "Earth Week," changed their logo to green to signify something to pay attention to, and did a story on how Sweden pays attention to the planet by lauding and providing an accessible public transportation system, is trying to be fossil fuel (an admittedly-limited fuel source) free by 2020, and keeping the environment clean.
Thank God for Brent Baker for exposing "the network's activist agenda." Earth Day - or Week - is about understanding and trying to eliminate the horrible things us human beings are doing to our environment, an environment that we need to support us: plant trees, stop pollution, etc. You know, the basics.
Based on this outrage for keeping our planet habitable, Mr. Baker is ostensibly shitting on his dining room table, eating from the rim of his toilet, or both.
Athletes are fearing going to China for the 2008 Olympics because of what the Chinese have done to the environment. Of course, it's pure hubris to think that we can affect the planet.
This is the politics of Global Warming. Here's the reality: no matter what you believe, dumping tons and tons and tons of waste into the environment in the form of solid, liquid, and gas is going to affect the environment. Lil ol' us nothin'. No, even if we fired every nuclear weapon in every arsenal we would not "destroy the Earth," but we would make life as we know it impossible. We can affect the planet. We are affecting the planet. And should our houses not be in order very soon, it shall be a plague on both them, Conservative and Liberal alike.
Sirius Radio has given me new perspective on the horrors of right wing talk shows. First it was Andrew Wilkow. I can almost stomach the whole show. Now...
Right wingnut radio neo-con, Mike Church - also known as "King Dude" because of an apparent unhealthy love affair with "The Big Lebowski" but ironically looks like every other straight-laced repub - was spouting flat earth global warming "myth" garbage and bragging about how well-versed his daughters are in the mythos of global warming caused by the proximity of Earth to the sun on Thursday.
Specifically, he talked to his daughters about how the lumber industry is doing the world a great service because if they didn't cut down those trees, those trees would grow old and dry out and die. Or some shit. He went on to say that because of hippie lawsuits, the lumber market is suffering, and that the folks on the show "Ax Men" on the History Channel are actually Canadians because they couldn't find any Americans who were loggers anymore.
Couple things, Mike:
Cutting down trees kills those trees. As you stated, those trees are reseeded. This is not a "natural process." Lightning and fires and decay are.
The lumber market is suffering because of the failure of the housing market which was artificially inflated by rich, white repub bankers.
The History Channel show "Ax Men" features American loggers logging in the American Pacific Northwest. Take two seconds not to sound like a boob.
Oh, Jesus, he just said the Liberals demanding religious tolerance in Tibet have no desire to extend the same tolerance to Mormons here in America. If he's referring to the recent spat in Texas where over 300 kids were taken into custody, Mike must be equating under-age sexual abuse - rape - to something that lives in the realm of acceptable religious practices. For someone with an 11 year old daughter, he should be ashamed.
I could write all day on this, but listening to him spew verbal diarrhea, yelling over the callers, putting everyone on defensive because of a perceived level of intelligence, and showboating musical parody as high comedy is giving me an ulcer.
UPDATE: 2 years later, I've been noticed by Mike Church. Read the comments here, then go to the modern post.
For anyone who has heard Rush or Savage or any other ignorant douchebag shout that Global Warming is junk science, liberal scare tactics, because someone had to put on a jacket in Florida in winter, and wanted to punch them in the dick, here's your fist:
A chunk of Antarctic ice about seven times the size of Manhattan suddenly collapsed, putting an even greater portion of glacial ice at risk, scientists said Tuesday.
Satellite images show the runaway disintegration of a 160-square-mile chunk in western Antarctica, which started February 28. It was the edge of the Wilkins ice shelf and has been there for hundreds, maybe 1,500 years.
160 square miles. Gone. Just in case there was any fucking question.
A California appeals court ruling clamping down on homeschooling by parents without teaching credentials sent shock waves across the state this week, leaving an estimated 166,000 children as possible truants and their parents at risk of prosecution.
The homeschooling movement never saw the case coming.
I don't care about the abuse case that brought the issue to light; my initial and overall reaction is: it's about fucking time.
My first experience with a homeschooled kid was when I was working at a movie theater at 16. To all appearances, he was a normal kid. Unfortunately, 5 minutes with him showed him to be completely, socially retarded. When children are very young, they come to a realization that not everyone has the same ideas and thought processes that they do. I don't think he ever got past that.
Watch the movie Jesus Camp. All those kids? Homeschooled. Why? Because public schools teach the Devil's lies of evolution.
So back to the four-alarm dichotomy. I'm listening to Sean Hannity rail against the story and it hit me like a tire iron in the xiphoid process: Conservatives have been screaming about the quality of education for years (because NCLB itself is crippling America, in actuality) and screaming about getting rid of tenure and teacher's unions and making quality assurance a mandatory part of a teacher's life - who is paid dirt and works twice as hard as many full-time employees - to guarantee that our children are receiving the best education possible.
Amen: knock out the unions, pay them a minimum of 50K a year, and implement a fair rating system.
But how do you go from "We need full reform of the education system because teachers are not qualified enough to teach our kids" to "Moms with no educational background, formal post-secondary education, or accreditation are the best teachers evar?" Someone tell me how that fucking logic even remotely works!
Here's the logic: It's okay - in the conservative world of rainbows and unicorns and intelligent design - for conservative parents who don't want their kids to learn actual science - to keep them home and teach evolution instead. This, in and of itself, is a root problem; if you can't pass a general science test because the teachings being tested were written by the Devil, there is a serious problem.
Which is why this whole issue is long overdue. If you want to teach your kids at home, more power to you, but you better be held to the same bullshit NCLB tests that every other kid is held to, and you better damned well have at least a college degree.
If not, regardless of how this story is labeled or ignored by the media, we are dis-servicing the future of America and guaranteeing a continuance of idiocy and ignorance.
But maybe that's the plan. Ignorance breeds complacency breeds compliance. And that's what those in power would like to see every day; they love it and kiss it and dry hump their tailored-pants-clad chubbies all over it.
It's always good to have something to look forward to. Actually, the posts are upcoming, not the notes. Sorry for the disappointment. Well, the notes are technically upcoming, but right here. Now. Really, just below this sentence.
1. More Debate Notes Just because you can't stomach it doesn't mean you can't enjoy the gems that fall from the verbal feces on both sides! I, your loyal reporter, will be constantly monitoring the schedules, vigorously viewing the Democratic and Republican debates, and coming back to you with only the essentials. Next installment: Tomorrow. Enjoy and thank the higher power you are not me.
2. World Net Daily's January Witch Hunt I was floating about the WND site - because I'm a romantic and I need pain in my life - when my eye spied a wonderfully fey, made-up woman looking something out of A Midsummer Night's Dream or Legend and the heavy title "Witchcraft in America." It's WND's WTF January Whistleblower. Looks like some of the basic conservative rhetoric explaining that Christians think Wicca is the devil while leaving out the part of Christianity's devil-ing of anything pagan starting some 1900 years ago while only flirting with aspirations of becoming an imperialistic religion. Seems it's even more terrifying now, though, because soldiers - God help us, soldiers - are worshiping overseas (implied: Christians > Muslims > Pagans). Anyway, I'll be chipping in my $7.50 for you, yes, you, so I can read it, become outraged, and you, too can be outraged and save almost $10. That's the kind of guy I am.
3. Best to Come: Creation Museum Holy crap, I found out in the last month or two that, here in Cincinnati, I live a river crossing from one of the biggest and bestest and well-funded Creation Museums in the region. I giggle at the prospect and get butterflies knowing that in the next 3 weeks, I will be attending, and I will be blogging. There will be snark. There will be pictures. And we can we can all have a good laugh at Intelligent Design as notScience.
I'll keep knocking out the posts until the last of you lingers nevermore. Thanks for your time!
In a rather rare case of Ricky Shambles not going all the way down the rabbit hole, back when I posted the "Talk to Kids PSA," I neglected to investigate the reference made at the beginning that noted the video was in response to 4Parents.gov.
You can help your son or daughter make healthy choices, including deciding to wait until marriage to have sex. 4parents.gov can help you talk to your child, pre-teen, or teen early and often about waiting to have sex, what happens as he or she grows, and other important topics.
So 4Parents is a resource for parents to talk to their kids about sex? No.
It is a poorly conceived and designed site with content focused around why sex is bad, why sex is risky, and - if you don't heed your mother's words - why all contraception will fail you. Yes, seriously. Check out the Birth Control Chart and subsequent verbiage. In other words: this is an abstinence site.
Who is 4Parents.gov?
4Parents.gov is part of a national public education campaign to provide parents with the information, tools and skills they need to help their teens make healthy choices, including waiting until marriage to have sex.
As noted, this site is actually about not talking about sex.
4Parents.gov is sponsored by the Office of Public Health and Science, Office of Population Affairs, and the Public Health Service. "Teen Chat," and "Parents, Speak Up!" guides are the result of a collaborative effort between the Administration for Children and Families and the Office of Population Affairs, Office of Public Health and Science.
And you probably guessed this from the whole ".gov" thing, but this is a United States Government website.
What does science say about abstinence-only education?
The study found that while abstinence-only efforts appear to have little positive impact, more comprehensive sex education programs were having "positive outcomes" including teenagers "delaying the initiation of sex, reducing the frequency of sex, reducing the number of sexual partners and increasing condom or contraceptive use." ... A spending bill before Congress for the Department of Health and Human Services would provide $141 million in assistance for community-based, abstinence-only sex education programs, $4 million more than what President Bush had requested.
What's the big deal?
Abstinence-only education is and has been the focus of this administration from the beginning because of President Bush's repeatedly revealed religion-over-science agenda. As the above-noted and other reports have stated, abstinence-only ed does not work. But having sex before marriage is a "sin," so government websites that purport to help parents and government programs aimed at educating children centralize around the ineffective church tactic of ignoring reality and attempting to scare kids away from sex.
The problem is in the repetition, with Bush consistently Jesus-izing government spending at the peril - and sometimes direct interference - of real, hard science. The Administration is failing parents and their children across America. And they're doing it with our tax dollars.
And that should be a pretty big deal for all of us.
[Note on this Unrelated note: This note was originally appended to a previous post, but as it was unrelated to anything being said in that post I felt it should have its own post, which makes it either completely related unto itself or completely unrelated in its ostracization.]
[Unrelated note: I'm listening to Glenn Beck's TV show and he's decrying Hollywood for "Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results" in their treatment of war. 1. Isn't that the definition of what we're apparently doing in Iraq and why it's not working? 2. The trite, mishandled, misquoted, mis-attributed saying is a representative symptom of Glenn Beck being a tremendous douchebag.
Like I said, unrelated.]
[Unrelated unrelated note (could we quit with the brackets already?): A few weeks ago I was out on a lunchtime jaunt and heard Rush Limbaugh spout that if global warming was to blame for the forest fires in California, it should also put them out because global warming causes flooding. That's right: flooding in the mountainous, forested regions of California. This is the twisted idiot junk science that we hear repeated and why the words out of Rush's mouth are a disease, spreading through the ignorant masses like the clap. Rush Limbaugh is also a douchebag, which, I guess, doesn't make this note so unrelated as I had anticipated.
We are told this is a new strain of staph. But the good doctors are either ignorant of epidemiology or afraid to tell the truth.Let us reason together.New, drug-resistant strains of bacteria appear in our hospitals over the past 10 years. Some are the result of over-use of antibiotics. But others are being brought into emergency rooms by the millions of illegal aliens who use our hospitals for primary care. Doctors, nurses and others then spread these "germs" throughout the hospital. And, of course, when illegals visit their relatives in the wards they also spread the gift that keeps on giving, drug-resistant staph infections. This is my own theory. I have an earned Ph.D. in epidemiology and human nutrition from the University of California, Berkeley (1978).
On his October 17th show, he follows it up with some DNA-famed Watson ideology that Africans are simply not as smart as white folk.
I'm not even going to touch the second half, but Dr. Epidemiology should have at least as much learning as Ricky Shambles, Armchair Scientist.
The DNA of the staph changes through natural mutation and has for millions of years. However, it has recently (in the last 50 years or more) come into contact with a heavy arsenal of antibacterial sterilization in hospitals and even in homes across America and the world. Any kid in an advanced high school Bio class can tell you that spreading bacteria on an agar plate laced with certain antibacterial or antibiotic will reveal bacteria that has a resistance to that antibacterial or antibiotic. After many bacterial generations proven through different antibiotics, you get a super-bacteria.
If you go to a foreign nation, you might get a different version of the bacteria. You might get the runs or throw up, perhaps be sick for several days and maybe even die. But not because of proper treatment gone bad. Savage bumped against this at the beginning of his diatribe, that even us liberals get stomach bugs when we travel. True.
But that's different bacteria, not super-resistant bacteria fostered in the corners of super-clean hospitals. The only reason the conquistadors killed so many was mostly due to viruses, and that was only because they carried strains of viruses that were completely new to the humans they encountered.
Not only does Michael Savage suggest that the different bacteria that might be brought into the country by illegal aliens is the super-bacteria, he suggests that they are doing it on purpose to dissolve our society. Not only does he not have a grasp on epidemiology, but he doesn't have a grasp on basic biology and evolution which Watson was a part of.
We are causing this, Michael. Rail against rampant use of antibacterial soaps and the unfortunate necessity of "clean rooms" during operations that save millions of Americans yearly, not illegal immigrants; the cause is basic biology, not your pseudo-racist ideology.
Intel Co-Founder, Gordon Moore, stated that the number of transistors you can inexpensively place on an integrated circuit will double about every two years. This is known as Moore's Law. This relates to processing speed, memory capacity, and computer hardware of that nature.
Unfortunately, Moore's Law is often misquoted as doubling every 18 months.
And sometimes that 18 months rule is linked to something that is completely unrelated to the original prediction. And you get an HP ad:
Along with saying the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle explains that the observer affects the nature of what is being observed, Moore's Law misquotes are up there on my list of pet peeves. Pop culture rapes again.
Your next laptop could have a continuous power battery that lasts for 30 years without a single recharge thanks to work being funded by the U.S. Air Force Research Laboratory. The breakthrough betavoltaic power cells are constructed from semiconductors and use radioisotopes as the energy source. As the radioactive material decays it emits beta particles that transform into electric power capable of fueling an electrical device like a laptop for years.
Amazing? You bet. BoingBoing's admonition? Horseshit!
My thoughts exactly.
As Joel Johnson noted, if the U.S. Air Force Research Laboratory was seriously working on something this commercially viable, something we'd see on store shelves in 2 to 3 years, they'd probably have it on the front page of their website. A deeper search reveals the term "betavoltaic" appears nowhere on their site.
At this point, horseshit is close, but it gets soupier and nastier than that. A brief search of betavoltaic reveals how deep the poop chute goes. A shady company called Betavoltaic Industries, American Antigravity touting the technology, and a handful of other "free energy" sites. A couple voices of reason ring out: Eric Krieg and Shawn Bishop illuminate the junk science, misunderstandings, and purely theoretical basis of the technology. Crunch Gear calls it a classic pump and dump scheme.
[Side note: what good is a laptop battery that lasts 5-6 times as long as the usefulness of the laptop? When was the last time you could switch out a battery from one laptop to another, newer version? Manufacturers consolidating and standardizing, perhaps? Have you ever tried to charge your phone, maybe home for the holidays, where there are seven or eight different chargers and not one fits? Exactly like that.]
Why am I putting such effort into something so obviously untrue? Because the good people at SciFi Tech should know better. It's only a matter of time before it makes Headline News. The retraction will be aired once at 5am. And then that asshat at work who's always wrong about everything will nonchalantly sneer at you charging your cellphone and say "you know, in two years, you'll never have to do that again. The Air Force is makin' a 30 year battery." And then you can donkey punch him. Verbally, figuratively, of course.
Posts
