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Archive for February, 2007
Although this video is painful to listen to — hilariously so — it probably destroys brain cells, and I doubt that pregnant women should watch it (they might laugh too hard). Thanks to Hot Air!
And you thought the initial round of American Idol auditions was bad!
The Anchoress has a collection of creative solutions to math problems. I’m still laughing.
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It seems clear to me that Romney is a pretty conservative guy, who for political expediency’s sake tacked left in Massachusetts and now for the same reason is tacking right—although this latest tack is probably more consistent with what he really believes. If Romney had made his career pretty much anywhere else but in Massachusetts, he wouldn’t be having this problem.
Nail. Head. Bang.
There has been a lot of idiocy in the news lately, though a handful stand out as particularly stupid examples. There was Shiela (or is it Betty?) Jackson-Lee’s federal “hate crimes” bill. There was the embarrassingly idiotic cigar incident (no, not Clinton’s cigar — get your mind out of the gutter!) There was the resurrection of the idiotically-named Fairness Doctrine. There was the attempt to prohibit the “N-word.”
Even stupider were the two “I want to be Josef Stalin” speeches, from Hillary, then from Doyle. Stupid enough for you yet? I hope not, because yes, it gets even stupider.
Running to the absurd end of the stupidity spectrum, we have the recent attempt in Arizona to ban mudflaps that were deemed “obscene or hateful” (it fortunately failed). Even stupider are the leftists who are now whining because this idiotic bill failed.
We have D’Souza’s most recent book, which is so amazingly stupid that to address it would be to give it validity it doesn’t deserve. Personally, I don’t think Dinesh is that stupid; I suspect (cynical? me?) it’s nothing more than simple prostitution: I’ll write a book so outrageously stupid and offensive it will get lots of press and sell, sell, sell, sell! And by the way: Anybody who buys that book qualifies as breathtakingly stupid.
But the stupidest thing of all, without question, is this idiot, Janet LaRue, who wants to protect our military from pornography.
This is the stupidest thing I’ve seen in months. Here’s how stupid it is: Ace agrees with Pandagon on this — and so do I. That’s how stupid it is. I agree with Amanda Marcotte.
Listen, you air-headed, pornography-obsessed bimbo. We’re at war. If our troops want pornography, I’ll pack it up and sent it to them. Our troops are under fire from terrorists, and you want to protect them from porn?
How can anyone be as stupid as you? How do you manage to get dressed without help every day — or do you? How did you manage to find the right keys to press when you were writing your idiotic drivel?
Seriously, bimbo. Grow frontal lobes — and please tell us you have not reproduced those defective genes.
Congratulations, Janet. You have won the Clown Award! Wear your red rubber nose with pride!
Now to flush this idiot out of my brain, I’m going to go contribute to Dr. Phat Tony’s Porn for Troops charity.
“Liberals are wedded to the childish philosophy of ‘multiculturalism’ … the fantasy that all cultures are equally good and equally right. It is why liberals “believe we should ‘celebrate diversity,’ as if all differences – say freedom of religion and massacring all infidels – are equally worthy of celebration.â€
–Evan Sayet
Also from Andrew Bolt:
A VIOLENT man who inflicted horrific injuries on his toddler nephew was given custody despite fears expressed by childcare workers that he posed a danger.
Court documents allege a magistrate deemed it more important to keep the boy with someone of the same culture.
The 20-month-old tot was in the man’s care less than a month before ending up in intensive care with head injuries and his body burned and bruised.
A medical report found the boy had 25 injuries, including bone fractures, cigarette burns to his abdomen and what appeared to be a ligature mark where something was tightened around his neck.
The boy’s mother was murdered by an abusive partner and Department of Human Services workers rejected the uncle—who previously had little contact with the child—as a suitable carer, saying the child’s safety was more important than maintaining his indigenous cultural links.
But court documents claim the magistrate ruled cultural identity a priority and that a police check revealing the man’s history of crime and violence was not enough to rule him out as a carer.
And this is why multiculturalism must be stopped.
The headline of the day: Police disarm man with chainsaw. Hat tip to Andrew Bolt.
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I’ve gotten about forty of these today:
Hi
How are you ? Call me.
stress for children
Poor you, i don’t even think how much spam you are recive.
at the beach
6D7174796A6E6A776C796E6C666E7368726A716E727368456E6D7C737379743374
Uh, I guess.
I’ve been searching all day for something I saw yesterday and didn’t bookmark — and after going through my whole blogroll twice, I decided to do a Google search. Lo! At the top of the page there were the results from my browser cache, and I found what I was looking for in about thirty seconds.
Thanks again to Parentalcation for suggesting Google Desktop. But on to the point.
Human Events quotes an interview with John Zmirak, author of Choosing the Right College:
The only hope I would hold out for a restoration of education from political sources would come in the form of funding cuts to the humanities. In most public and elite universities, these fields are hopelessly compromised, almost entirely in the hands of tenured radicals who cannot be removed, and who vote to choose their future colleagues and successors. I would be loath to see the federal government try ham-handedly to impose educational goals and political fairness on such departments; such an attempt would probably work about as well as “No Child Left Behind,” Title IX, affirmative action laws, and our futile attempt to turn Iraq into Switzerland by making the rubble bounce.
I hate to say that I agree with this — not to mention that you’d create a whole slew of “martyrs” to “McCarthyism!” (well okay, they already fancy themselves martyrs — speaking “truth” to power, claiming on television that they’re being silenced, and that sort of nonsense). However:
A large-scale withdrawal of federal and state funds from university programs (except those in math, the sciences, and foreign languages which have some relevance to national security) would force universities to cut back on programs which exist mainly to transfer leftist ideology to impressionable young minds, and to seek funding from donors (such as parents and alumni) who are much more effective at exerting positive pressure on college administrators than political hacks who work for legislators.
At first, this sounds workable, but on reflection, it just isn’t — or it would have less effect than he imagines. Universities can — and do — move funds around, and few states I know of fund programs directly. Even if the state drastically cut funding, universities would probably cut “non-PC” programs, such as physics departments, so they could shuttle the funds to the moonbatty wackjob departments, like Three-Toed People of Color Studies, and “diversity” programs.
That’s the reality of allowing universities to keep their own books and handle the taxpayers’ monies. And speaking of reality, will you academics ever stop whining and bitching about coaches’ making more money than you do?
What “intellectual value” you cook up in your head (nearly always bloated, by the way — both the “intellectual value” and the head) has nothing to do with how much you get paid. It hever has, and it never will. Get that through your dense skull.
Supply and demand determines how much you are paid. You can’t directly do much about demand, but you can affect supply. So if you really think academics in your field should be paid more, stop turning out PhDs by the hundreds. Count the number of PhD students currently in your program. Divide that number by four. Use that number as a maximum PhD program enrollment for your department (that’s maximum total, not maximum matriculations per year). In a decade or so, English PhDs will stop being a dime a dozen, and salaries will increase substantially.
And those of you who whine about teachers’ salaries, the same applies. Figure out some way to keep ed schools from admitting and granting degrees to masses of students (and while you’re at it, figure out some way to keep ed schools from granting degrees to all the students too stupid to do any other degree at the university). Drastically cut the number of ed grads, and lo, in a decade or two, teacher salaries will go up.
But stop whining about it. Whining isn’t going to increase your salaries. All whining does is make you annoying.
From Bullwinkle Blog, this little newsbyte:
SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - An asteroid may come uncomfortably close to Earth in 2036 and the United Nations should assume responsibility for a space mission to deflect it, a group of astronauts, engineers and scientists said on Saturday.
Astronomers are monitoring an asteroid named Apophis, which has a 1 in 45,000 chance of striking Earth on April 13, 2036.
Guess who’s going to pay for it.
Pam’s article on American Thinker: The disenchanted voter.
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Steve Jobs, hippie hero and ultra-liberal Democrat, comes down hard on teachers unions:
Apple Inc. CEO Steve Jobs lambasted teacher unions today, claiming no amount of technology in the classroom would improve public schools until principals could fire bad teachers.
Jobs compared schools to businesses with principals serving as CEOs.
“What kind of person could you get to run a small business if you told them that when they came in they couldn’t get rid of people that they thought weren’t any good?” he asked to loud applause during an education reform conference.
[ . . . ]
“I believe that what is wrong with our schools in this nation is that they have become unionized in the worst possible way,” Jobs said.
“This unionization and lifetime employment of K-12 teachers is off-the-charts crazy.”
And staunch Republican Michael Dell defends the teachers unions:
Dell responded that unions were created because “the employer was treating his employees unfairly and that was not good.”
“So now you have these enterprises where they take good care of their people. The employees won, they do really well and succeed.”
Black is white, up is down, in is out. The world has just turned upside-down.
Technorati: shirley jackson-lee, hate crime, aim, american indian, native american, ncaa, illini, fighting illini, university of illinois, nutcases, wackjobs, moonbats, idiots, morons, progressives, liberals, leftists, democrats, soy boy, vegans, vegetarians
Rick Moran says:
In what observers are calling a “victory that will bring the buffalo back,†the University of Illinois has dropped Chief Illiniwek as its official mascot and replaced the white-boy-dressed-up-idiotically-like-a-Native-American with the more dignified “Soy Boy.â€
What Rick fails to point out is how insensitive this is to soy beans. What more proof do you need that soy beans are oppressed and marginalized than that the university would degrade them in this way? This is clearly a hate crime!
AND ANYBODY WHO DENIES THAT SOY BEANS ARE OPPRESSED IS A HOLOCAUST DENIER!
This is a litmus test for Shirley Jackson-Lee. Shirley, add “soy status” to your list of protected groups for the federal hate crime legislation now! Show your solidarity with soy beans!
I’m going to organize a protest! We’re all going to wear soy bean costumes! WE ARE ALL SOY BEANS TODAY! THE SOY BEANS UNITED CAN NEVER BE DEFEATED! KUMBAYAH MY LORD, KUMBAYAH! BUSHITLER HATES SOY BEANS!
The sun is just up and it’s 19 degrees — and it’s going up to 26 degrees today!
Where did I put those shorts . . .
Howard Kurtz on Hardaway:
NBA star Tim Hardaway says he hates gay people. And all the league can do is ask him not to speak on its behalf? That’s pathetic. You’d think, in exchange for the millions he gets, that Hardaway could keep his prejudices to himself.
The same could be said for Babs Streisand, Sean Penn, Cameron Diaz, and any number of Hollywood morons who can’t spell their own names but are sure we need to hear their opinions.
It coincides with the rise of the pseudo-intellectual among the country’s cultural elite.
There are lots of ways to identify a pseud, that over-schooled, undereducated poser who places the highest value on appearing sophisticated rather than on sophistication itself.
That accurately describes 90% of all academics, and 99.9% of all fluff academics (the humanities, folklore, education, [insert your favorite “oppressed” group] studies, etc.)
Who thought this was a good idea? Greatest Generation Learns About Great Safe Sex:
As the teacher, Monique Binford, delved into an unexpurgated discussion covering issues from vaginal dryness to Viagra, one student’s cane clattered to the floor, another student adjusted his hearing aid and a third fidgeted in her orthopedic shoes. By the time Ms. Binford got around to describing a safe sexual act involving Saran Wrap, a woman shouted, “Enough, already!†and the room erupted in laughter.
Enough already, indeed.
Technorati: wackjobs, nutcases, morons, moonbats, vegans, vegetarians, tree huggers, treehugger.com, progressives, liberals, leftists, bestiality, inflatable sheep
I saw this over at Tim Blair’s blog yesterday and decided against posting about it, but it’s just so stupid, I have to. Warning: not work safe, but that’s not my fault!
Ready? Then click that more tag.
I’d call this a serious meat-lovers’ recipe! Oh, that Polish food! By the way, this is certainly not kosher.
Bergos (Hunters Stew)
4 lbs sauerkraut, rinsed
1 c. apple cider
1 lb smoked pork butt
1 lb spareribs
1/4 lb bacon
1 #2 1/2 can tomatoes
2 cups water
2 bay leaves
black pepper
salt
4 lbs heads of cabbage, shredded
1 lb pork loin chops or country-style pork ribs
1 lb smoked kielbasa, cut into chunks
1/2 c. onions (chopped)
16 oz. fresh mushrooms
2 T. flour
Brown pork chops and ribs in 2 T. oil in a large pot. Add the smoked pork butt with 1 c. water and simmer over low heat for an hour. Add the kraut and 1 c. of the cider. Add the cabbage, salt and pepper, cover, and simmer for 1 hour. Uncover (but don’t turn off the heat). In another pan, cook the bacon, remove and crumble the bacon, then add the bacon to the stew. Saute the onions and mushrooms until transparent, then add the flour and continue to cook until just golden brown. Add to the stew. Add the kielbasa and tomatoes and simmer for a half hour.
Here’s another one, which I am told is the traditional New Year’s Day meal in this part of the country. Not quite as extreme, but definitely a carnivore’s recipe — and simple.
Pork Roast with Kraut and Kielbasa
1 2-lb boneless pork loin roast
2 T. oil
salt and pepper to taste
4 pounds sauerkraut, rinsed
1 pound kielbasa, cut into chunks
Season roast with salt and pepper, then brown on all sides in oil. Remove. Put half the kraut in a slow cooker. Place the roast in the center, then the kielbasa chunks around it. Top with the other half of the kraut. Cover and cook for six hours.
BBC reports the incident began shortly after the Boeing 737-400 took off from the capital city of Nouakchott, bound for the northern city of Nouadhibou. A lone man, believed to be North African, brandished two pistols and demanded the plane be flown to France.
Instead, the plane’s flight crew initially attempted to land in Dakhla, in Western Sahara… but they were denied permission to do so by Moroccan authorities. So the crew headed to Gando, a Spanish military base in the Canary Islands.
A source close to the Mauritanian presidency told Reuters when the aircraft touched down, the pilot slammed on the brakes.
“When the pilot landed, he deliberately braked very hard,” the unnamed source said. “The man fell to the ground and was jumped on by passengers. He fired two bullets but there are no serious injuries.”
Vigilantes! Islamophobia! Hate crime!
Since yesterday, I’ve wondered if I was the only human being in the world who’d never heard of John Ondrasik or Five for Fighting. From the coverage in the dextrosphere, you’d think this person was some sort of major celebrity, or something.
Well, I’m not the only one — and I count myself in good company. John Hinderaker also has never heard of him.
Now, before you start the “YOU’VE never heard of John Whatshisname? Where have you been?” just stop. No, I do not much keep up on teen culture. I do not read teen magazines. I do not watch MTV (I predate the MTV generation, and am generally not entertained by music videos or see much reason to watch them).
John who again?
William Katz guts the AP’s chicken little journalism:
We’re informed in the first paragraph that last month was “by far the hottest January ever.”
We’re informed in the second paragraph that they’ve only been keeping records “since 1880.” That’s 127 years. Apparently, that’s “ever.”
The story lists the usual “global warming” horrors.
Then, toward the end, the writer casually informs us that January temperatures in the U.S., presumably the home of environmental original sin, were essentially normal, “ranking only the 49th warmest since 1895.”
Oh.
As Gilda Radner used to say: “Never mind.”
Anybody home in there?
“In the matter of the “gum game” — the yucky attempt in Montgomery County schools to impress upon teenagers the dangers of sexual promiscuity by asking them to share a piece of gum — all involved now appear to be appalled at themselves. “In hindsight, it’s gross and disgusting,” says Gail Tierney, founder and head of the Rockville Pregnancy Center, the evangelical, antiabortion clinic that taught abstinence classes to thousands of Montgomery schoolchildren until the gum hit the fan.”
In hindsight? Did you all leave your brains at Disneyland when you decided to do this?
Morons.
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News flash! Global warming strikes Pennsylvania! Pictures here! (And note that the dogs are quite happily inside where the global warming is warmer than outside).
Here are the results from that straw poll:
| Who would you prefer for President in 2008? | ||
|
Candidate
|
Percentage
|
N
|
|
Hillary Clinton |
2% |
148 |
|
John Edwards |
1% |
86 |
|
Rudy Giuliani |
42% |
3,474 |
|
John Howard |
34% |
2,836 |
|
John McCain |
4% |
341 |
|
Barack Obama |
4% |
347 |
|
Mitt Romney |
13% |
1,071 |
Heh.
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When you teach a course and you are responsible for creating the materials, assignments, and exams, you look at problems differently — more analytically, and from various perspectives one wouldn’t normally. One of the ways in which you analyze problems is in terms of difficulty or complexity. And there’s more to it than most realize.
Let’s look at this whole thing cognitively and take as our first example what most would consider to be a relatively simple statistics problem:
Andrew Bolt criticized Howard for his statement about Obama — it makes sense, since the man is running for re-election — but both Andrew Bolt and Tim Blair should find it entertaining that Howard appears on the latest online strawpoll, and right at the moment, is in second place behind Rudy, with 31% of the 6,743 votes.
Technorati: feminism, feminists, vagina monologues, vagina, vaginas, vagina costumes, san francisco, feminuts, feminonsense, moonbats, morons, idiots, wackjobs, nutcases, progressives, liberals, leftists, democrats
So I was reading Ace and saw this article:
HERNDON, VA—You know V-Day has gotten worse when people in God’s country are wearing vagina costumes. Yes, Boone, North Carolina’s Appalachian State University features as part of this year’s V-Day festivities a walking vagina on campus. And with February 14 just two days away, college students across the nation are bracing themselves for the onslaught on decency that is The Vagina Monologues.
The Monologues, a radical feminist play written by Eve Ensler and performed by college students around the world, purports to “end violence against women.†But neither the play nor its parent movement, V-Day, have any real impact on violence. They do, however, have an impact on the young people who are taken in by the vulgar pornography of the play, and buy into the negative messages that reduce women down to their intimate anatomy.
No link, because it was a press release he got in his inbox. Because even to cynical old me, this sounded too stupid to be real, I thought I’d search for it. I typed “vagina costumes” into google and found this gem of feminuttiness. Presenting (drum roll) Vagina Lady!
Welcome to VaginaLady.com, a feminist arts-and-crafts endeavor that pays homage to that loveliest of female organs.
Wait, it gets better:
And so the Vagina Lady makes vagina artwork of various sorts, They are different colors, different fuzzinesses, different shapes and sizes, but they are all pretty. Because you, vagina, you are pretty!
Isn’t that speshul! Guess where she lives?
The Vagina Lady lives and works in San Francisco
No! Really? Why, I figured she lived in Oshkosh!
If you feel that gawk-at-a-car-wreck pull, you can look at her “artwork” here and here. She felt some strange compulsion to list “1500 vagina words”, and if you really need a good belly laugh, she has a blog (though it hasn’t been updated since July or so).
Just sharing the fun.
I just got this in my inbox:
Hallo
Sie haben eine Grusskarte bekommen, klicken Sie auf dem unten
stehenenden Link, um Ihre Karte abzuholen.
[Link deleted]Mit freundlichen Grüßen
AmericanGreetings
Uhm, don’t you think it rather bizarre that spam (supposedly) from American Greetings is in German?
More snow!
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Looking through the TV schedule, I see this on National Geographic:
A cameraman uses himself as bait to attract polar bears.
Hmmm. There’s a certain Darwin Awards attraction to that, isn’t there? And speaking of the Darwin Awards, the 2006 Awards are posted!
