Sweet vindication

I told you Neil deGrasse Tyson was a fraud…

Why Is Wikipedia Deleting All References To Neil Tyson’s Fabrication?

Religious fanatics have an odd habit of overreacting when people have the audacity to question their fanaticism. In Iraq, radical Islamic jihadists are systemically murdering and beheading Christians, Jews, and even Muslims who do not pledge fealty to ISIS’s religious tenets. Hundreds of years ago, church authorities and Aristotelian acolytes imprisoned Galileo for having the audacity to reject geocentrism in favor of heliocentrism. The bible recounts how Christians were persecuted and stoned, and Jesus himself was crucified for contradicting the religious dogma of the day.

You will bow to the religious zealots, or you will pay the price.

Which brings us to l’affaire de Tyson. Neil Tyson, a prominent popularizer of science (he even has his own television show) was recently found to have repeatedly fabricated multiple quotes over several years. The fabrications were not a one-off thing. They were deliberate and calculated, crafted with one goal in mind: to elevate Tyson, and by extension his audience, at the expense of know-nothing, knuckle-dragging nutjobs who hate science. Tyson targeted journalists, members of Congress, even former President George W. Bush. And what was their crime? They were guilty of rejecting science, according to Tyson.

There’s only one problem. None of the straw man quotes that Tyson uses to tear them down are real. The quote about the numerically illiterate newspaper headline? Fabricated. The quote about a member of Congress who said he had changed his views 360 degrees? It doesn’t exist. That time a U.S. president said “Our God is the God who named the stars” as a way of dividing Judeo-Christian beliefs from Islamic beliefs? It never happened.

Schadenfreude. You should try some.

A man who will lie about the little things has no trouble lying about the big.

Headlines that make me LOL

Cannabis

MARIJUANA INDUSTRY BATTLING STONER STEREOTYPES

DENVER (AP) — Tired of Cheech & Chong pot jokes and ominous anti-drug campaigns, the marijuana industry and activists are starting an ad blitz in Colorado aimed at promoting moderation and the safe consumption of pot.

To get their message across, they are skewering some of the old Drug War-era ads that focused on the fears of marijuana, including the famous “This is your brain on drugs” fried-egg ad from the 1980s.

They are planning posters, brochures, billboards and magazine ads to caution consumers to use the drug responsibly and warn tourists and first-timers about the potential to get sick from accidentally eating too much medical-grade pot.

Folks, in my day I pretty much smoked up Mexico and parts of Hawaii, so I do know of what I speak. And I was a Stoner. No ifs, ands, or buts. I smoked reefer; I was a Stoner. And damn proud of it.

And, ya know what? I listened to music, stoned. I drove my car, stoned. I went to concerts and ballgames, stoned. That was my intention. I smoked dope so I could do those things. I’m not sure I or my friends ever reached the Cheech & Chong stage but we came close, and face it, that was all exaggerated for effect anyway.

Call me a pollyanna, but Ima thinkin’ this whole “change the image of the stoner” thing is doomed from the start… by the way, have you seen that bag of Cheetos anywhere?

What were we talking about?

The best post I’ve seen on 9-11

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9/11 — like every great and terrible thing and event that has ever come before it — is invoked to demand and justify a wide array of ends and prove a confusing jumble of conclusions. Many of those ends and conclusions were sought by their advocates well before 9/11. It has ever been so. People will seek power, seek prominence, seek money, seek their religious and ideological goals by invoking events — by trying, as I suggested in #4 above, to blur the line between the thing and our reaction to the thing. This has been a constant theme on this blog: the government has sought more and more power over us, and more and more limitations on our rights, by invoking 9/11, only to use those new powers to fight old fights unrelated to terrorism and to suppress things they didn’t like before 9/11.

Ten Things I Want My Kids To Learn From 9/11

Crash

Some thoughts from hither and yon-

If we’re living on dandelion greens and the market envies the 1932 lows, an asteroid crater where Toledo used to be, or a solar EMP that blanks out the Northeast Corridor may not rate our full attention. That’s the way it works. Maybe low-probability events are a species of self-actualizing virtual particles, they spring into being by feeding on the energy of instability itself, or perhaps in the spectrum of events there’s a slot labeled BIZARRE that must be refilled should its former contents seep into the everyday. The event itself will be an artifact of probability, its so-called inevitability a product of learned but after-the-fact Feinman diagrams. But assuming we’re among the survivors, we can’t help ourselves from considering it.

What will be our signature event? Like Rome, the aqueducts still stand but the era that built them is gone. Which suggests one event. Nations, like people, go broke secretly, then publicly and to all appearances, instantly. And we’ve been broke for a very long time. The decisive, irretrievable losses are like a corpse hidden in the ceiling, not yet acknowledged but more evident with every passing day. Perhaps our black swan will be the sheer speed of the closing act, after all, what’s to stop it, confidence in the market? The thousand-point drop in the Dow took ten minutes or near enough, and once it went vertical the next five thousand would have taken about a minute and twenty seconds longer. An automated crash of an automated rally is not a confidence builder.

Think confidence in DC will save it? It typically runs twelve per cent or so, about the same per cent as the population with an IQ of 85 or less, not coincidentally. Will the financial system itself stop it? The words financial and collapse are rarely seen very far apart of late, although we sometimes use the word collapse too freely, as past events reveal. It’s said liquidity nearly went to zero during the investment bank debacle of 2008. It was claimed at the time to be so precipitous we were within a couple of hours of an irretrievable economic implosion. An economy can’t save itself if there isn’t an economy to save.

Woodpile Report

Gold is the money of kings, silver is the money of gentlemen, barter is the money of peasants and debt is the money of slaves.

The socialist ideal eventually goes viral, and the majority learns to game the system. Everyone is trying to live at the expense of everyone else. In the terminal phase, the failure of the system is disguised under a mountain of lies, hollow promises, and debts. When the stream of other people’s money runs out, the system collapses.
Kevin Brekke

When you see that in order to produce, you need to obtain permission from men who produce nothing; when you see that money is flowing to those who deal not in goods, but in favors; when you see that men get rich more easily by graft than by work, and your laws no longer protect you against them, but protect them against you … you may know that your society is doomed.
Ayn Rand

One small difference – When blacks run riot, their neighborhoods burn. When white men run riot, continents burn.

Cowards

Cowards.

We have lost the willingness to call evil by its rightful name, and the courage to stand in the face of it and say: “No. Not here. Not on my street. Not in my city.” There is no limit to the hells men devise when no one opposes them. “What’s the point?” a Rotherham victim asked investigators. “I might as well be dead.”

The men and women who failed her might ask themselves the same question. We might all ask it. What is the point, really, in preserving our comforts—our lives, even—if to do so we must become so small, so dark-hearted, that we turn our backs on the most vulnerable among us?

I suppose none of us knows whether he will be a coward until the moment demands courage. “Be prepared in season and out of season,” the apostle Paul wrote to Timothy. As far as we are concerned, perhaps this entails recognizing that the season is upon us—an evil season, a season when children worldwide are treated like so much trash, when questions once governed by common sense are now fodder for intellectual word-play, when an army gathering under a black flag is both a reality and a metaphor, for war rages in the hearts of men, and it is coming, is here already, in our neighborhoods and our homes and our own hearts, we good and decent people who are perhaps only better than these cowards because the hour has not yet come when evil stands on our doorstep and demands entrance.

Words fail me.

But a reckoning is coming.

1400

1400- as in 1400 molested children.

1400- the cultural timescape of the savages who did so. (Though I may be being generous.)

I like this quote from Sir Charles James Napier the British Army’s Commander-in-Chief in India in 1843, in reference to the Hindu custom of burning the widows of deceased believers-

“Be it so. This burning of widows is your custom; prepare the funeral pile. But my nation has also a custom. When men burn women alive we hang them, and confiscate all their property. My carpenters shall therefore erect gibbets on which to hang all concerned when the widow is consumed. Let us all act according to national customs.”

Call me a throwback, but my custom upon discovery of the raping of children involves a rope and a tree- at minimum. The jelly-spined Brits are so intimidated by their ‘Asian’ (I’ll say it for them- ISLAMIC) immigrants that they were arresting folk for trying to report the horror.

I wonder if we would act any differently here, in our lovely new PC world.

There is a reckoning coming.

Now that Ferguson has died down to a dull roar

…this is probably worth noting-

How will the world seem to you, a new cop just out of the Academy?

First, you will quickly find that the public doesn’t like you. People do not like being told what to do. They particularly do not like being punished—e.g., given a ticker—for misbehavior. Successful people of middle age do not take well to orders from a kid of twenty. They have no choice.

Next, you discover that being a cop affects your social life. People are nervous around you even when you are not in uniform. When and where does your authority stop? They aren’t sure. You probably are not either. What if someone at a party lights up a joint? Your neighbor parks in front of a fire plug? Your off-duty life comes to consist mostly of other cops. It is more comfortable that way.

Just as the public doesn’t like you, you will not much like the public. Cops do not see humanity at its best. The young woman hiking her skirt up at traffic stops.

Couples screaming obscenities at each other on domestic-violence calls. “Why don’t you catch real criminals?” The lies. The excuses. The lame attempts at manipulation. The threats (“I know the mayor.”)

As a real cop on real streets, you learn never to smile, to maintain an implied aggressiveness. When riding with a reporter, you will joke and tell stories. With the public, you will learn to be wooden-faced and authoritarian. You can’t lose your dominance or you are useless.

A few months on the streets will take the bloom off your dewy rose of morn. You will see the baby’s brains on the windshield. You will see the paramedics at the crash scene working hard on the guy who went through the windshield, pumping his chest, trying to intubate him with red gunch pouring from his mouth and no hope at all. You will find a guy lying on the sidewalk with his brains swelling like pink lips from the groove made by a nine-millimeter round, still breathing but with nowhere to go.

After a few scenes like this, you will learn to turn off. It will cease to bother you because if it didn’t, you would go crazy. And then you will wonder whether there is something wrong with you.

You will learn things that you don’t want to learn.

Full, very thoughtful article here. It doesn’t justify everything, but may cause a few to draw back and take a breath- I hope.

That said, I think we may be only months away from open warfare on our own streets.