05.12.08
Passive-aggressive male behaviors?
It’s always something. Gotta score those points, gotta edge in on the territory of the next male over. Take a clue from the video. Enraged males may charge.
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02.21.08
RIAA Training Video: Video Piracy the Root of all Evil
Well, whadd’ya know? It turns out that the first step into a life of crack-dealing, murder, and terrorism is video piracy. I suppose it’s a good thing we have the RIAA to tell us this, because otherwise I don’t think a single person among us would have guessed.
Watch this clip from an RIAA training video and see for yourself how whacked-out they are.
STORY
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11.11.07
Hey Hillary, did you read the one about the fake FEMA news conference?
Good grief.
You’d think they’d have learned at least some lesson from that fake FEMA news conference debacle from a couple of weeks ago. You remember, where they decided to throw a news conference about the good things FEMA was doing to help put out wildfires and evacuate displaced residents. They staffed the reporters’ gallery with FEMA employees because it would have been inconvenient for real reporters to have been asking real—and possibly inconvenient—questions.
Well, they did invite the reporters, it just happened that the invitations went out 15 minutes before the “press conference” was to start. Too bad they couldn’t make it, eh?
Hillary Clinton stopped at a bio-diesel plant in Newton, Iowa earlier this week to see alternative fuels in the making and drive home the week’s campaign theme of her energy plan. After a tour, the candidate took questions from the crowd.
She called on a young woman. “As a young person,” said the well-spoken Muriel Gallo-Chasanoff, “I’m worried about the long-term effects of global warming. How does your plan combat climate change?”
Trouble is, the young woman told others and today her account showed up on the Grinnell website, including a mention that the staffer signaled Clinton who to call on.
But here’s the catch. Although other campaigns are righteously denying it tonight, virtually every professional presidential campaign plants questions. It’s a routine part of preparation for the advance people staging every event.
OK, time for a reality check. I think they need to test these people on their perceptions of reality, and if they fail, they should be disqualified from holding office.
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Redefining freedom
Government seeks to redefine privacy
WASHINGTON – A top intelligence official says it is time people in the United States changed their definition of privacy.
Privacy no longer can mean anonymity, says Donald Kerr, a deputy director of national intelligence. Instead, it should mean that government and businesses properly safeguards people’s private communications and financial information. MORE
“I just want you to know that, when we talk about war, we’re really talking about peace.” –GW Bush, Washington, D.C. June 18, 2002
Political language — and with variations this is true of all political parties, from Conservatives to Anarchists — is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind. –George Orwell, “Politics and the English Language”, 1946
So war is peace, truth is lies, and ‘privacy’ is when the government is listening in and approves of what you’re thinking, right?
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10.27.07
“Bush touts federal response to wildfires”
Umm… I guess somebody’s got to say it.
Excuse me???!!!
FEMA’s most notable response to the wildfires has been to stage a fake news conference with 15 minutes of notice, and when no reporters showed up (surprise, surprise!), plant FEMA employees to pose as reporters and ask the questions that FEMA wants to answer.
FEMA’s fake press conference: are you surprised? (Crooks and Liars)
US agency apologizes for news conference on fires (Reuters)
This is something to be proud of?
“We can and must do better, and apologize for this error in judgment,” FEMA deputy administrator Harvey Johnson, who conducted the briefing, said in a statement.”
Error in judgment?
But with no reporters on hand and an agency video camera providing a feed carried live by some television networks, FEMA press employees posed the questions for Johnson that included: “Are you happy with FEMA’s response so far?”
According to Friday’s Post account, which Walker confirmed, Johnson replied that he was “very happy with FEMA’s response so far.”
Clearly, so is President Bush.
A spokeswoman for Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff, who has authority over FEMA, called the incident “inexcusable and offensive to the secretary.”
Yeah, sucks they got caught, doesn’t it?
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09.23.07
How many people like this do you know?
Yup. Those who fail to remember the past are sure as heck doomed to repeat it, even those who have not set out to be historical revisionists.
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07.06.07
Study: Women don’t talk more than men
No, women don’t talk more than men, a recent study reveals. The often-quoted figures saying they do are strictly an urban legend.
Story
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Psychology Today: Ten politically incorrect truths about human nature.
Yes, there are definable differences in the behavior of men and women, differences that can be attributed to reproductive strategies. Some of these I have speculated and written about before. This article pulls it all together nicely, and in a quicker read than any book by Stephen Pinker.
Read it closely. This will be on the test.
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06.24.07
This explains everything
Well, well, well.
I posted a link to this Wikipedia article on the Dunning-Kruger Effect in my Breaking news blog. The more I thought about it, though, the more I realized that this is much too important to just put up a link and hope someone will draw conclusions from it.
The Dunning-Kruger effect quantifies scientifically the old saying that “ignorance is bliss”. The less one knows about a subject, the more likely they are to rate highly their knowledge or skills pertaining to it.
Apparently, when you are ignorant of a subject, you are unaware of how much there is to know. This was relatively easy to test in an academic situation. It was reliable – as students began to master a subject, they also began to downgrade their assessment of their own mastery of it.
For instance, I often run into students who tell me they speak a foreign language. When I ask if they speak it at home, they say they learned it in school. The only way they could say that they “speak” a foreign language while being so utterly preverbal – which they are – would be if they had never been exposed to a situation where the language is being spoken.
Just as when teaching science classes, where kids come up with all kinds of bogus pseudoscience. No, sorry. The world is not 3,000 years old. I don’t care if they taught you that in christian school. It’s not good science, and it’s not good religion, either. The proper fundamentalist version is that the world is about 6,000 years old.
See? To believe that is true, you need to be ignorant of science, religion, and of history. Fortunately that is an easy thing to be.
Being ignorant of absolutely everything (know anybody like this?) is the best route to becoming a know-it-all. In fact it seems that persons like that are subconsciously aware that acquiring knowledge would render their wall of ignorance permeable. Thus, they avoid all facts, and they assert that those who oppose them are tainted by, have been “influenced” by facts.
For a person like this, truth can only be discovered by pure thought untainted by facts or data. Truth achieved through pure thought in this way is eternal. It need not adapt itself to reality. In fact, for a person with this frame of mind, it is a moral imperative to dismiss, deny, or pretend that confounding facts do not exist. Reality is obligated to adapt itself to the self-conjured “truth”.
In fact, ignorance is not only blissful, it is empowering and self-affirming. Ignorance is its own reward.
Think Bill O’Reilly, George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Ann Coulter. Think about how this country seems to be heading directly into a category 5 storm with blind and deaf madmen at the helm. Need I go on?
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