The Padded Cell

I'm not a Republican, and I'm not a Democrat. I'm not affiliated with any political party.

But when it comes to moral proselytizing, the Republicans and their media apologists really take the cake with stupidity and hypocrisy.

Case in Point: Republican Vice-presidential nominee Sarah Palin.

Palin and Republicans in general deem it necessary to tell you what you can and cannot do sexually. They rail against abortion, even in the case of rape or maternal health issues. They tell us homosexuals are the root of all evil. And of course they think teen pregnancy is a bad thing, since it basically means sex out of wedlock.

So, perhaps a Republican can tell me why Sarah Palin is a good role model with a pregnant teen daughter? The daughter in question is 17 and about to have her baby. So there's a good chance she actually had sex when she was 16, maybe even before that. And where's her husband? Is she not married? You mean the Republican Vice-Presidential nominee will have a bastard grandchild?? How can this be?

Now, I know John McCain didn't used to be your average Repub, but recently he's been leaning further and further right, especially with his endorsement of Falwell's Liberty University, a bane of rational thought everywhere. And of course his irrational support for a failed policy in Iraq. But he had to know that choosing a running mate with such obvious "moral" skeletons in her closet would be a detriment. I guess his judgement has lapsed in recent years, to say the least.

And the media apologists, O'Reilly in particular. He'll call other people pinheads when their teens get pregnant, but when it's a Republican, oh, they're just picking on them because they're Republicans, riiiight. O'Reilly is one of the biggest pinheads in existence, right up there with Limbaugh and Olbermann (on the other side of the fence).

It will be interesting to see how much support McCain/Palin gets from the religious idiots out there. Will they be hypocrites too? Well, we already know the answer to that one, don't we.

Idiots

Revenant

Here I am on a business trip in Chattanooga Tennessee.

Flipping through channels, I come across several religious shows. Same old crap. Moronic-sounding preachers and healers screaming and yelling inane bullshit. And the audiences are yelling and screaming and singing back. I really don't get it. I can't think of any other place I'd least like to be than one of those idiotic events. The collective gullibility is simply mind-numbing. I'm reminded of Hitler and his massive sycophantic rallies, hordes of people feeding his mania and flocking to his cause.

And to top it all off, people give the preachers and fake healers money. I'd also say that 9 times out of 10 the people who give this money probably don't have two dollar bills to rub together. But Jeezus will help them, oh yes, help them empty their wallets and stay on welfare. Wonderful philosophy.

Someone once said that the definition of stupidity is constantly doing the same thing and expecting a different result. So how many times will these people go, scream and yell, give all their money, and no Jeezus?

Idiots

Revenant

Though this is number 1, we all advertising is mostly lies. This is the first post I'm doing to expose these lies for what they are. Mostly they're abuses of the word "free", as in "free with your paid subscription". If you have to pay to get something, it isn't free. It's that simple.

So, the first one here, not really monumental, but just to get things started:

Lenscrafter TV ad: "Free Lenses!"

And in slightly smaller print beneath, "With purchase of frames."

Complete lie. The lenses aren't free. Isn't that false advertising, and therefore illegal?

Revenant

Blunt answers about risks of global warming

Rajendra Pachauri isn't nearly as famous as Al Gore, who shared the Nobel Peace Prize with an international panel on climate change that Pachauri, an Indian scientist and economist, has led since 2002.

But as chairman of the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Pachauri has an urgent message for world leaders about the perils of global warming. He talked to the Tribune recently while he was in town to meet with Mayor Richard Daley and Chicago civic leaders. An edited transcript follows.

Pachauri and Gore, two idiots intent on destroying modern society, while retaining power for themselves.

I can't help but think how ridiculous this all is, and how it ties into religion.

Anthropogenic Gobal Warming (AGW) is a religion. Those who practice this religion refuse to acknowledge the facts which dispute it. Of course it's a unique hypothesis in that it doesn't seem falsifiable. Any weather/climate event is attributable to AGW; hot, cold, floods, droughts, more intense storms, less intense storms, you name it. Normally, all it takes to falsify a theory is one contradictory fact. AGW has many, yet they don't give up the hypothesis.

How does this relate to Pachauri? Well, in the above-linked story he states:

Q: What have you done personally to shrink your carbon footprint?

A: I've become a vegetarian. I try to minimize the use of cars. Where I've failed is my impact with regard to air travel. I tell people I was born a Hindu who believes in reincarnation. It will take me the next six lives to neutralize my carbon footprint. There's no way I can do it in one lifetime!

So, he believes in two fairy tales, AGW and Reincarnation. How can you really take someone seriously who believes in previous and future lives, with zero evidence? Well, just look at the AGW hype, lots of belief there with only computer models as "evidence". Actual observational science doesn't support the hypothesis. It needs to be thrown out.

Revenant

A recent program on the History Channel speculating about Chinese discovery of North America 71 years before Columbus, was nothing but a pile of speculation without substance.

I have no problem with the concept, but you actually need evidence to backup the claims. One claim was that since 1421, when the Chinese supposedly first landed, North America, and presumably South America, was completely populated by the Chinese. The archaeologist making the claim had as his "supporting evidence" that DNA doesn't support the Bering Straight land bridge theory of emigration from Asia. Hmm, really? Ok, maybe it doesn't. But DNA also doesn't support a Chinese population of North America either. And to populate and spread across an entire continent in just 70 years? And into the Caribbean islands? And is this enough time for the now indigenous peoples to change dramatically from the Chinese?

And what does this mean for South American civilizations which we know existed a good thousand years before 1421?

To try and bolster the theory, one entrepreneur decided to go searching for an ancient Chines boat hull buried in the sands of the American west coast. His search tools? Divining rods.

Wow.

This is the state of science these days?

So, he takes his team to some point along the California coast, I think it was, and got out his dowsing rods, and proclaimed he had found a spot. They start "drilling" a hole using forced water through a series of PVC pipes and then when they reached the desired depth of approximately 40 feet, they used a power drill and very long corer to obtain a sample.

They came up with small bits of wood. Instantly the dowser proclaimed "That's it, that's part of the keel. That's Chinese wood there." Instant analysis. Don't need no stinkin' labs and such.

But of course, try as they might, they couldn't find any more wood. Guess it was a teeny weeny boat. They couldn't even get enough for carbon dating (50 grams).

Now, judging from the amount of wood that collects on the shorelines here in Washington state, chances are he bored into a piece of old driftwood, which is probably extremely plentiful.

And, as the one skeptic voice in the program pointed out, "Discovery means finding something, and communicating it back to other peoples." There is zero evidence of this happening in any Chinese historical record. The Vikings were more successful than the Chinese in this respect, having at least written about the discovery of Vinland and reporting back to their homeland. They just weren't in a position to exploit it.

Nice to see History Channel is keeping up their high quality programming, based on speculation and little fact.