Category News

Reality Catches Up to The Onion. Again.

Today’s Washington Post:

There are changes in how parents nag. In what they nag about. In frequency. Parents know more about flubbed tests and skipped homework because of online grading systems. They know more about social lives because of Facebook and MySpace pages.

The Onion Video, five days ago: Facebook, Twitter Revolutionizing How Parents Stalk Their College-Aged Kids.

http://www.theonion.com/content/themes/common/assets/onn_embed/embedded_player.swf
Facebook, Twitter Revolutionizing How Parents Stalk Their College-Aged Kids

A New Republican Strategy?

Just saw this in my RSS reader:

GOP Uses Job Data to Attack Stimulus

Wall Street Journal

Republicans are using data now? Did they decide that the old strategy
of yelling at town hall meetings and making shit up *cough*Michele*Bachmann*cough* wasn’t working
anymore?

BillDo Teaches Us About Moral Absolutes

BillDo in his
1998 annual report:

March 25

Comedy Central’s “South Park” continued its notorious Christian-bashing, with an episode that linked Christians to Nazis as oppressors of homosexuals. In a segment describing homosexuality throughout history, the character “Big Gay Al” interrupted his commentary to say, “Uh-oh, look out, it’s the oppressors—Christians and Nazis and Republicans.” The scene showed Hitler with a Catholic priest to the right and a Republican on the left—the priest waving a cross, the Republican an American flag.

BillDo in 2004:

George Soros, the billionaire left-wing Bush-hater who funds the website (MoveOn.org has compared Bush to Hitler)

BillDo in 2006:

Want a sample of his politics? In 2005, McCourt took part in a rally, ‘The Call to Drive Out the Bush Regime,’ that compared the Bush administration to Hitler’s regime.

BillDo in his
2008 annual report:

Bill Maher continued his non-stop assault on Catholicism in 2008 by lashing out several times on TV and in movies. After he mocked Transubstantiation early in the year, I said on TV that I would love to step into the ring with him in Madison Square Garden so I could “floor him.” The comment was made in jest, but he kept repeating it all year, feigning victim status. His rant against the pope, made just before the Holy Father visited the U.S. in April, included a comment calling Pope Benedict XVI a Nazi. He apologized (sort of) after we went after him.

So I think the lesson is clear: comparing people to Hitler or Nazis is
unacceptable, and rightfully causes outrage. Right?

BillDo yesterday:

CBS/SHOWTIME AIRS NAZI-LIKE ASSAULT

Catholic League president Bill Donohue comments on last night’s edition of Penn & Teller’s show. The program aired on Showtime which is owned by CBS:

The Nazis couldn’t have done better.

Ah, but that’s different, isn’t it? Behavior that’s completely
unacceptable in one set of circumstances may be okay in another.
Right, Bill?

BillDo in 2002:

Moral relativism is not only an intellectually bankrupt idea, its real-life consequences can be deadly.
…

Not until our society comes to accept
what the Catholic Church teaches—that there are moral absolutes and that all
life is sacred—will we turn the corner.

BillDo in 2004:

What I’m a little bit tired of is the same kind of cruel caricature. And I love the way the movie ends. You know, here we have this idea that moral absolutes are bad. We need gray areas. Oh, really? Let me tell you something, Brian, you made this movie. Millions of people have lost their lives in the last century because of selling the idea that there are no moral absolutes. If there are no moral absolutes, we are back to different strokes for different people. We put pizzas into ovens in this country, they put Jews into ovens in Nazi Germany. Yet, that may not have been your intention, sir, but you’re selling an idea which is toxic.

BillDo in 2005:

Pope Benedict XVI knows that a society absent moral absolutes is capable of great evil. His homily on the "dictatorship of relativism" owes much to John Paul II’s encyclical, Veritatis Splendor, one of the most brilliant statements ever written on the relation between morality and liberty.

Hm. Maybe BillDo should learn how to delete embarrassing archives from
his site.

Or maybe the lesson to be learned is that pointing out Billy-boy’s
hypocrisy is like walking up to a barrel filled with slow-moving fish,
with a rocket launcher bolted to the side and aimed straight into the
barrel, and only someone with too much time on his hands, like me,
would bother to actually pull the trigger.

Truncated Headlines
RIP Ted Kennedy

As you’ve no doubt heard,
Ted Kennedy has passed away.
My earliest memory of him is from my college days, when he and Bob
Dole had a five-minute debate program on WTOP that I enjoyed listening
to on my way to school.

He was also the guy who, every year, introduced a bill to raise the
minimum wage. Every time, it got shot down, and every time, he
introduced another one, until one finally passed.

Last, and certainly least, he spoke with a true New England yankee
accent. In an age when it seems that American regional accents are
being eroded, Kennedy’s speech had a certain exotic quality about it.

Truncated Headlines

For those who don’t know, when Google News creates an entry for a
story in one of its RSS feeds, it picks an article from one of the
newspapers that reported the story, and generates a title for the RSS
entry by taking that paper’s headline, followed by its name.

But to prevent overflows or something, the headline is truncated to 36
characters, sometimes with amusing results. Here are a few I’ve
noticed recently:

  • California Senate OKs plan to reduce … – Los Angeles Times
  • US officials eye hanging chads — in … – Los Angeles Times
  • Kennedy asks Massachusetts to change … – Los Angeles Times
  • Prison plan clears Senate, but faces … – San Jose Mercury News
  • Authorities in Midwest crack down on … – Chicago Tribune

I’m not picking on the LA Times. They just happened to be bitten by this behavior most often.

Recession Forces People to Resort to Common Sense

From today’s Washington Post:

Bottled Water Boom Appears Tapped Out

[…] sales of bottled water have fallen for the first time in at least five years, assailed by wrathful environmentalists and budget-conscious consumers, who have discovered that tap water is practically free.

I’ll let Penn and Teller
show the lack of difference between bottled and tap water.
I’ll just add that the

I found with a quick search costs $6.23 for 24 0.5l bottles. That
works out to $1.97/gallon. My water utility, on the other hand,
charges a
maximum rate
of $5.08 per thousand gallons.

Who could possibly have predicted that in a recession, people would
turn to the generic product, when it costs 630 times less than the
name-brand?

CreoZerg Rush!

For those who, like me, didn’t manage to make it to Ken Ham’s
Creation Hebrew Mythology “Museum”
for the
Student Secular Alliance‘s
Zerg rush,
you can read the raw twit log
here.

Some of the highlights are collected at
Attempts at Rational Behavior,
but I’m sure that more will follow.

I’m not sure who first twote that “Adam sinned so I could enjoy bacon”, but now I want that on a tee-shirt.

Local 12, a news station in Cincinnati, has a
brief story
about this, with nothing of real interest.

The MSM is obviously engaged in a coverup, since Google News doesn’t
show any reports of hundreds of baby-eating atheists raping and
looting their way through the Kentucky countryside. And Cephalopod
Überhauptmeister PZ Myers is
in on the conspiracy.

Update: 17:04: PixelFish’s LOLCreashun and Dino Haiku.

US Legal System Says Prayer Doesn’t Work

From the
Associated Press:

WAUSAU, Wis. — A Wisconsin man accused of killing his 11-year-old daughter by praying instead of seeking medical care was found guilty Saturday of second-degree reckless homicide.

Dale Neumann, 47, was convicted in the March 23, 2003, death of his daughter, Madeline, from undiagnosed diabetes. Prosecutors contended he should have rushed the girl to a hospital because she couldn’t walk, talk, eat or speak. Instead, Madeline died on the floor of the family’s rural Weston home as people surrounded her and prayed. Someone called 911 when she stopped breathing.

Neumann’s 41-year-old wife, Leilani, was convicted on the same charge in the spring and is scheduled for sentencing Oct. 6. Both face up to 25 years in prison.
[…]

The six-man, six-woman jury deliberated about 15 hours over two days before convicting Neumann. Jurors submitted four questions to Marathon County Circuit Judge Vincent Howard before reaching a verdict. In one, the panel asked whether Neumann’s beliefs in faith healing made him “not liable” for not taking his daughter to the hospital even if he knew she wasn’t feeling well.
[…]

Neumann, who once studied to be a Pentecostal minister, testified Thursday that he believed God would heal his daughter and he never expected her to die. God promises in the Bible to heal, he said.

“If I go to the doctor, I am putting the doctor before God,” Neumann testified. “I am not believing what he said he would do.”

(emphasis added.)

There have been a number of cases recently in which people were
charged with criminal negligence for praying instead of providing
medical care. And for the most part, I think sanity has prevailed, and
parents who chose superstition over medicine have been convicted. This
case is one more example of that.

And what I find interesting is what this says about the US legal
system and American society. What people do is a better indicator of
what they believe than what they say. If I say that I think the stock
price of Amalgamated Widgets is about to skyrocket, then short their
stock, that means I don’t really believe the company’s doing well. If
I say that the world will end in five years, tops, but am socking
money away in a pension plan, then I don’t really believe what I’m
saying.

In the Neumann case, I’d wager money that a majority of the jurors are
Christians, and that some significant number of them would say that
prayer has beneficial effects. And yet, when push came to shove, they
found Neumann guilty of reckless homicide. The message is that prayer
doesn’t work nearly as well as medicine, and that Neumann should have
known this.

It’s disappointing, though, that push has to come to shove before
people call bullshit.

Headline O’ the Day

Takoma Park Man Beats Ex-Girlfriend with 18-Pound Crucifix

And the article contains this tidbit:

The victim bought herself time during the attack by telling the man to stop long enough to turn on a Barbie DVD for their two girls to watch in another room so they wouldn’t see the assault, authorities said.

Despite the implement in the headline, this appears to be a case of ordinary craziness, not religious craziness.