Even scarier is why people have stopped thinking global warming is real. One major reason pollsters say is we had a very cold, snowy winter. Which is like saying the sun might not be real because last night it got dark. And my car’s not real because I can’t find my keys. That’s the problem with our obsession with always seeing two sides of every issue equally — especially when one side has a lot of money. It means we have to pretend there are always two truths, and the side that doesn’t know anything has something to say. On this side of the debate: Every scientist in the world. On the other: Mr. Potato Head. There is no debate here — just scientists vs. non-scientists, and since the topic is science, the non-scientists don’t get a vote. We shouldn’t decide everything by polling the masses. Just because most people believe something doesn’t make it true. This is the fallacy called argumentum ad numeram: the idea that something is true because great numbers believe it. As in: Eat shit, 20 trillion flies can’t be wrong.
– Bill Maher (via azspot) Via AZspot Comments (View)
Right now, the health care bill that passed Congress this month is causing an almost inexplicable torrent of rage amongst a small portion of Americans. These are the small minority of very vocal people who always want to stop the American experiment of accepting and driving social change (see The Great American Experiment), a reactionary fraction who always believe the past was better than the present and far better than the ominous future the latest social change is going to unleash.
In these times, it’s good to be a historian, because you have the long view. You know that there have always been these reactionary groups, ranging from the inane to the harmful. The “Know-Nothings” or American Party in the 1830s and 40s terrorized Catholic Americans and won many political seats on a platform of stopping immigration from undesirable countries, eradicating Catholicism, and generally setting up a police state run by white Protestants. In the late 1800s, groups like the Immigration Restriction League and the Workingmen’s Party authorized terror against immigrants; WP leader Dennis Kearney led his men on a rampage through San Francisco’s Chinatown in 1877, destroying homes and businesses, to inaugurate his campaign against Chinese immigration. The state of California eventually passed several laws stripping Chinese immigrants of their civil rights.
In more recent history, the reaction of the fringe against the Civil Rights movement and the federal laws and Supreme Court rulings that championed equal rights for all races is fresher in our memory.
So when faced with the Tea Partiers and brick-throwing anti-health care fringe of 2010, we can defuse their seeming power by reminding ourselves, and others, that these groups come and go at moments of national crisis or change, they spew their hate and then after a decade or so they disappear. Temporarily, of course; there’s always the next fringe group to take over for them. But they remain fringe because of their illogic and their basis in hatred and fear.
Right-wing extremists who question the legitimacy of Barack Obama’s presidency tried to take on local law enforcement recently — and they seem to have come out on the losing end.
First, a Tennessee man was arrested after walking into his local county courthouse to try to effect a citizen’s arrest of a grand jury foreman who had refused to investigate President Obama’s legitimacy to serve — an encounter partially caught on video. That enraged one Georgia-based member of the far-right OathKeepers group. Responding to a call from an extremist leader, he drove to Tennessee with an AK-47 in a bid to get his comrade released — only to wind up getting arrested himself.
These people are crazier than shithouse rats.
I believe this is a video of the attempted citizens arrest.
When George Alan Rekers, a cofounder along with James Dobson of the Family Research Council and a leader in the ex-gay movement, was caught walking off a plane from Europe with a young male prostitute, he first insisted that he didn’t know the young man was an escort until halfway through their 10-day vacation.
“I had surgery,” Rekers told the Miami New Times, which broke the story yesterday, “and I can’t lift luggage. That’s why I hired him.”
Rekers had hired the escort, dubbed “Lucien” by the New Times, through the websiteRentBoy.com (NSFW), a popular site that hosts ads for gay male escorts. There’s little mistaking what the site is for.
The site’s users first encounter a disclaimer that the may encounter “content and materials that are of a graphic and/or sexual nature,” and must agree to terms and conditions before entering. The homepage is predominantly photos of naked men. To search for an escort, or “find boys,” one can even select a specialty: “rentboy,” “sugardaddy” or “masseur.”
Take it away Iron Maiden:
Believe in me - send no money
Died on the cross, that ain’t funny
But my so called friends they’re making me a joke
They missed out what I said like I never spoke
They choose what they wanna hear - don’t tell a lie
They just leave out the truth as they’re watching you die
Saving your soul by taking your money
Flies around shit, bees around honey
Holy Smoke Holy Smoke, plenty bad preachers for
The Devil to stoke
Feed’em in feet first this is no joke
This is thirsty work making Holy Smoke
finished chocolate, banana, salted caramel and peanut cake (by cannelle-vanille)
Why did someone tie dog turds together and put them on a plate?
(View)
(via Zandar Versus The Stupid)
In the spot, which ran over the weekend on a Fox affiliate in central Florida, Fanelli stands between a middle-aged white man and a younger, swarthy fellow. “Does this look like a terrorist?” he asks, gesturing towards the white. Then, pointing to the darker dude, he adds: “Or this?”
I forgot that Timothy McVeigh, the Unabomber, and those Hutaree blockheads were all swarthy and of Middle Eastern descent.
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