The Brett Kimberlin Saga:

Follow this link to my BLOCKBUSTER STORY of how Brett Kimberlin, a convicted terrorist and perjurer, attempted to frame me for a crime, and then got me arrested for blogging when I exposed that misconduct to the world. That sounds like an incredible claim, but I provide primary documents and video evidence proving that he did this. And if you are moved by this story to provide a little help to myself and other victims of Mr. Kimberlin’s intimidation, such as Robert Stacy McCain, you can donate at the PayPal buttons on the right. And I thank everyone who has done so, and will do so.

Friday, July 23, 2010

I Like This Picture

It’s a publicity still from “I Dream of Jeannie.”


Barbara Eden looks like she is really fascinated by something.  Meanwhile, Larry Hagman looks like he is thinking, “Oh yeah, you know I am hitting that.”

Of course that’s attached to a story that ain’t half as fun, given that they seem to be mistaking epilepsy for possession by an evil Jinn, but still, the pic leapt out at me.

Wednesday, July 21, 2010

Another Liberal Accuses Others of Racism, Proves to be Racist in the Attempt

Let me introduce my reader to a new character.  This will take some verbiage, but I promise you it is fun.  And funny!  And maybe insightful.  Anyway, I know his real name, I even know his nickname, but out of some level of kindness, I will call him Stalker-boy.  You see I first ran into him around 2002-2003 tangling with him on the message boards of Findlaw.com.  Then later I went to a site called Freespeech and blogged there for a while.  And suddenly who shows up?  Stalker-boy.  I quit Freespeech for a while, quit blogging entirely, got busy and then eventually started this blog.  And guess who shows up in my email inbox?  Yep, Stalker-boy.  Indeed, it is apparently his endless desire to find me wherever I am on the internet that earns his nom de plume.

So Stalker-boy and I were arguing about Shirley Sherrod and he made an off-hand comment about Mark Williams being “disgraced.”  Williams, you might know, wrote a piece satirizing the NAACP imagining a letter by their President Ben Jealous saying that “colored people” like them wanted slavery reestablished.  It was satire of the variety Jonathan Swift would engage in, his point being to 1) mock the fact that the NAACP has the word “colored” in its name, and 2) to suggest that by following Obama they were establishing a form of slavery, albeit a race neutral one.  The first joke is feeble, yes, and the second argument is extreme.  But citing it for the proposition that the man is racist, is like citing A Modest Proposal for the proposition that Swift thought human flesh was delicious.

Or gee, its like taking Franken imagining a sexual encounter between Newt Gengrich and an Asian woman, employing many stereotypes of Asian woman, as racist.  I mean if Williams is racist, then Franken is, too, right?

Now, I don’t know jack about Mark Williams, this supposed leader of the Tea Party movement.  I never heard of the guy until the controversy over the letter blew up.  So for all I know, there might be pages and pages of racist shit the guy said.  But this is not the proof of it.

So I said to Stalker-boy that it was just a satire and he replied by saying that there was more evidence of William’s racism, than just the satire.  Like what?  Well, he explained: “Calling Allah, the deity of millions of peace-loving people, a ‘monkey-god’ (i.e., Allah's followers are monkeys) was particularly racist.  Or was that ‘satire’ too?”

Now, for the really hilarious part.  This claim that it was racist to say this, is itself racist.  That is in claiming Williams is a racist, Stalker-boy outted himself as a racist.

Speaking of Hilarious Scandals...

Here’s the laugh line from the latest Enquirer story about Gore and his chakra:

"The therapist claimed that when they were alone, Gore shrugged off a towel and stood naked in front of her.

"He pointed at his erect penis and ordered her, 'Take care of THIS.'"

I have said this several times.  I don’t know who is telling the truth, but I do know one thing for sure.  It’s hilarious.

And to be fair, the Enquirer was right, totally right, about Jon Edwards.

The Shirley Sherrod Story Gets More Hilarious

First, the NAACP purports to release the “full” speech by Shirley Sherrod.  Oh, except watch it.  There are edits there.  So its not the full speech, it’s the NAACP cut.  And even that cut doesn’t exonerate her or the NAACP.  She never condemned her own racism.  And the audience, contrary to my stalker’s opinion, showed approval of the discrimination without knowing she would go back and fix it.

Second, now Ben Jealous is claiming that the video is out of context, that in context it exonerates her.  He then gets all indignant:

“We were snookered by Fox News and Tea Party Activist Andrew Breitbart into believing she had harmed white farmers because of racial bias,” said NAACP President Benjamin Todd Jealous. “Having reviewed the full tape, spoken to Ms. Sherrod, and most importantly heard the testimony of the white farmers mentioned in this story, we now believe the organization that edited the documents did so with the intention of deceiving millions of Americans.”

But as Gateway Pundit points out, there is one problem with that story (I mean besides the fact that it doesn’t actually exonerate her or the NAACP):

Mr. Jealous was there.

Tuesday, July 20, 2010

To Refuse the Future

A bad translation results in a fun turn of phrase.


Via Volokh.

The Next Shoe Drops for Shirley Sherrod

The Washington Examiner has an excellent new article on Shirley Sherrod.  That would be the person seen in this video yucking it up about how she didn’t help a white farmer.  And it turns how she has an interesting relationship with the Department of Agriculture.

Well, you see she used to be head of a cooperative called “New Communities.”  They sued on behalf of black farmers who alleged discrimination on the part of the DOA.  The case was “Pigford v. Vilsack.”  Okay, lets get all the laugher about how it sounds like about Pig v. Sack out of the way, because shit is about to get real.

Okay, so Vilsack is the named party.  That would be the same Vilsack who appointed her to a cushy federal job.  He would also be the one to decide specifically what to do about this suit.

So look at this line from the Examiner article: “New Communities is due to receive approximately $13 million ($8,247,560 for loss of land and $4,241,602 for loss of income; plus $150,000 each to Shirley and Charles for pain and suffering).”

The Banality of Bias

The whole world is jumping about the cracking of the Journolist archives.   The Daily Caller should be praised for getting this and this promises to be the first of days to come.

So by now we all know how they tried to spike the story of Rev. Wright, the unreconstructed racist who served as Obama’s preacher for some twenty years.  Read it all if you haven’t already.

But let me add my two cents to the issue.  I think what is truly shocking isn’t that people like Spencer Ackerman proposed smearing random conservatives as racist because they didn’t recognize how self-evidently awesome Obama is.  No, what is shocking is that no one is shocked by it.  No one speaks up and says, “are you insane?  That would be unethical as a journalist.”  No instead what we saw was the sheer banality of it, in their eyes.  Just as Hannah Arendt found it remarkable that the Nazis could talk about exterminating the Jews with all the fervor of your typical county zoning commission meeting, we should find it damning that nobody thought there was anything shocking in what Ackerman said.

And isn’t that an ethical breach?  I mean in law we are required to report when other lawyers do something unethical and it’s the same rule for doctors and nurses.  But aren’t journalists required to report when other reporters are behaving unethically?  Or are we prepared to say that journalists are not held to the same high standards as lawyers?

But let’s go on, because this seems to be a running theme these days.

Wednesday, July 14, 2010

Life Imitates the Onion Example #275

Okay a few weeks back the Onion ran a piece depicting al Qaeda as big fans of the Twilight movies.

And now we learn that the detainees at Gitmo... are big fans of the Twilight movies.

Yes, really.

Creepy.

And no, I am not even the first to connect the two.

By the way, in other onion goodness, you have this dead on parody of the “there ought to be a law” syndrome where every time something bad happens, we make a new set of laws hoping we can prevent it, no matter how ridiculous the effort is.

Friday, July 9, 2010

“Sony has pulled a TV episode from the PlayStation Network after offering it for free and then discovering that it contained naked women, breast bondage, and acid-spitting nipples.”

Says the lede in an article on IGN:

The anime episode Queen's Blade: Season 1: Episode 1: High Spirits – The Vagrant Warrior was rated TV-MA according to the PlayStation Store, but that didn't stop the TV show from being deposited in the video store's "Free TV" section. Once the 322 MB file was downloaded, users could watch the show, which ends after the main character strips down naked, puts on a suit of armor and locks the main enemy in a bear hug so that the foe's nipples can't discharge the acid inside her breasts. The enemy's breasts expand like balloons, explode and kill her. The official PlayStation Store description that ran with the free episode referenced the enemy's demise: "Reina defeats Melona by stopping the acid that shoots from her breasts."

Am I the only one who is dying to see the acid-filled breasts explode?  It’s impossible to imagine that not being hilarious.

Wait, I thought Democrats LIKED Nuance?

Remember all the way back in 2004, when Democrats claimed that Bush was inferior to Kerry because Kerry’s thinking was more “nuanced.”  Well, now look at the latest smear on Sharron Angle over at Huffpo.  She is accurately quoted in an article as saying this about her personal pro-life beliefs:

[Interviewer]: What do you say then to a young girl, I am going to place it as he said it, when a young girl is raped by her father, let's say, and she is pregnant. How do you explain this to her in terms of wanting her to go through the process of having the baby?

Angle: I think that two wrongs don't make a right. And I have been in the situation of counseling young girls, not 13 but 15, who have had very at risk, difficult pregnancies. And my counsel was to look for some alternatives, which they did. And they found that they had made what was really a lemon situation into lemonade. Well one girl in particular moved in with the adoptive parents of her child, and they both were adopted. Both of them grew up, one graduated from high school, the other had parents that loved her and she also graduated from high school. And I'll tell you the little girl who was born from that very poor situation came to me when she was 13 and said 'I know what you did thank you for saving my life.' So it is meaningful to me to err on the side of life.

So the even-keeled reaction over at Huffpo: ZOMG she said rape victims should make lemonade out of lemons!  The headline: “Sharron Angle's Advice For Rape Victims Considering Abortion: Turn Lemons Into Lemonade.”

President Asshole Strikes Again (Updated)

Mostly in private, there are moments when our president is such a complete jerk, I half-jokingly call him President Asshole.  I think the first time I did was when he compared his bowling skills to that of someone in the special Olympics.  Seriously, for the most powerful man in the world to compare to make fun of some of the weakest?  That is a straight up asshole move.  Presuming to dress down the Supreme Court in the middle of the State of the Union?  Another straight up asshole move.  Giving the finger to people when he thinks he is being sly?  Big time asshole.

And now after treating Israel like a red-headed stepchild for months, he then has the nerve to suggest that the reason for the deterioration in their relationship is bigotry:

[W]hen confronted with the anxiety that some Israelis feel toward him, Obama said that "some of it may just be the fact that my middle name is Hussein, and that creates suspicion."

(Source.)  Yeah, I know we have to show respect for the office, but seriously, what an asshole.  And I am really starting to think this guy is a bit of a bigot, too.  I find that incredible if only because it is almost certainly a hypocritical bigotry, but I am starting to suspect it is true.  Weirder things have happened, especially in politics.

Of course he can’t possibly be an anti-Semitic, because some of his best friends are Jews.  Yes, really.

Thursday, July 8, 2010

Gotta Love Climate “Science” and the New York Times

By now you have probably heard that even hiding the decline was not considered unethical, supposedly.  Not only does the report whitewash the climategate scandal, but the NYT tries to as well.  The money quote:

The issue involved an effort to reconstruct the climate history of the past several thousand years using indirect indicators like the size of tree rings and the growth rate of corals. The C.R.U. researchers, leaders in that type of work, were trying in 1999 to produce a long-term temperature chart that could be used in a United Nations publication.

But they were dogged by a problem: Since around 1960, for mysterious reasons, trees have stopped responding to temperature increases in the same way they apparently did in previous centuries. If plotted on a chart, tree rings from 1960 forward appear to show declining temperatures, something that scientists know from thermometer readings is not accurate.

Most scientific papers have dealt with this problem by ending their charts in 1960 or by grafting modern thermometer measurements onto the historical reconstructions.

See, we don’t have any kind of temperature data going back before around 1850.  So in order to estimate the temperature, they studied tree rings and the like, on the theory that tree rings correspond roughly to temperature.

Meanwhile some evil, corporate, hack scientists said that tree rings didn’t correspond closely enough to real world temperatures to provide an accurate measure.

The problem, of course, for the good, pure scientists of the global warmonger movement is that, well, it turned out that during the 1960’s tree ring data and temperature diverged.  And they don’t know why.

But don’t worry, they are certain that the rest of the time there was no divergence, because...  um, why exactly?  I mean if it diverged in the 60’s, couldn’t it just as easily diverge in other times?

This is what passes for science these days.

If they were smart, they would have condemned the data, and then quickly cooked up new data to support their forgone conclusion.  But instead, they tried the “move along now, nothing to see here” routine and made their unscientific behavior plain to anyone with eyes and logic to see.  And the NYT is there to sell their little fairy tale.

By the way, exit question.  How many of the very same people who believe in a plot to assassinate JFK also simultaneously believe in global warming with slack-jawed credulity. 

Also I should totally create a shirt.  Just a citation to a website and the words, “Hide the Decline.”  Besides that specific meaning, it has a fun kind of irony to it.