And Bobby takes another hit for his ignorance...

Recently there were some comments made about federal spending for volcano monitoring being wasteful," Murkowski, a Republican Senator from Alaska, piling on Jindal from the Senate floor, "I can assure you that monitoring volcanoes is critically important to the nation and especially to my home state of Alaska." And, of course, California, Oregon, Washington, Wyoming, Idaho and anyone downwind...

If you remember, Jindal's rather odd speech, he said: "While some of the projects in the bill make sense, their legislation is larded with wasteful spending. It includes ... $140 million for something called 'volcano monitoring.' Instead of monitoring volcanoes, what Congress should be monitoring is the eruption of spending in Washington, DC."

It's funny how all them 'scientists' think things like this are important... While the Republicans think that deregulating everything is important...

I guess we're doomed to live in a global warming hell in sub-tropical, soon-to-be-third-world economy Alaska while the continental US reverts back to the desert state that was present during the last global heat wave. The one were crocodiles lived in Canada.

Marilyn Manson - The Nobodies

An anthem.

Bobby Jindal, the face of ignorance...

Remember Bobby Jindal's rambling, at times incoherent, speech after Obama's State of the Union address? You know, the one where he mocks volcano monitoring...

WILLOW, Alaska (AP) — Alaska's Mount Redoubt volcano erupted five times overnight, sending an ash plume more than 9 miles into the air in the volcano's first emissions in nearly 20 years. Residents in the state's largest city were spared from falling ash, though fine gray dust fell Monday morning on small communities north of Anchorage.

"It's coming down," Rita Jackson, 56, said Monday morning at a 24-hour grocery store in Willow, about 50 miles north of Anchorage. She slid her fingers across the hood of her car, through a dusting of ash.

Ash from Alaska's volcanos is like a rock fragment with jagged edges and has been used as an industrial abrasive. It can injure skin, eyes and breathing passages. The young, the elderly and people with respiratory problems are especially susceptible to ash-related health problems. Ash can also cause damage engines in planes, cars and other vehicles.

I'll be honest, I think governing is too important a task to give to Republicans any more. They just can't do it as they lack any connection to the real world and it's issues.

Honestly, I can't think of a single important issue on which the Republicans have been on the correct side for a decade, if not more. Which is why I left them in dust in 2000 and hadn't been "staunch" for years prior... Too much stupidity. Too much religion. Too much ignorance.

Government, a well run government, is necessary for the common good. And that means things like taxes, scientific research, public projects and, for Christ's sake, dropping the imperial ambitions we've taken on the last few decades.

Penn and Teller: Placebo Effect

Mocking medical woo...

Why arguing with creationists is futile:

Jesus rode dinosaurs... And I guess Fred Flintstone was his father...

Honestly, it takes Olympic-Class denial to believe this...

DFH

Worth watching.

And he's a Senator?...

Sen. Charles Grassley is so angry over AIG bonuses that he says the executives should resign or kill themselves.

In a comment aired this afternoon on WMT, an Iowa radio station, Grassley (R-Iowa) said: “The first thing that would make me feel a little bit better towards them if they’d follow the Japanese model and come before the American people and take that deep bow and say I’m sorry, and then either do one of two things — resign, or go commit suicide.”

I have a better idea, every Republican (and Democrat) that voted for the Patriot Act, that enabled this idiotic "War on Terrorism" that enabled the even more idiotic "War on Iraq" because they fell for the WMD lies, that voted to re-institute the very inhumane social and economic ways of laissez-faire capitalism by deregulating AIG, the banks, etc., and a whole other host of ills to long for me to rant about should kill themselves. Starting with Grassley and his homophobic, christianista, wing-nut ways...

I mean, really, this is insane that crap like this comes out of his mouth considering the blood and wreckage on his hands.

This is change?

Really? Change we can believe in? :

Obama administration: Guantanamo detainees have 'no constitutional rights'

Like I said in so many posts before, Obama has repeatedly shown himself to be a gutless wimp who will not tackle the hard issues. Not only is he keeping Bush/Cheney positions, but he's complicit in their war crimes as he refuses, despite the evidence, to fulfil our Constitutional requirements vis the Convention Against Torture Treaty we ratified during Reagan.

The West Wing - bible

This is great!

Christmas at Ground Zero

Sing along!!!

It's Christmas at ground zero
There's music in the air
The sleigh bells are ringing and the carolers are singing
While the air raid sirens blare

It's Christmas at ground zero
The button has been pressed
The radio just let us know
That this is not a test

Everywhere the atom bombs are dropping
It's the end of all humanity
No more time for last-minute shopping
It's time to face your final destiny

It's Christmas at ground zero
There's panic in the crowd
We can dodge debris while we trim the tree
Underneath the mushroom cloud

Ronald Reagan:
Well, the big day is only a few hours away now.
I'm sure you're all looking forward to it
as much as we are.

You might hear some reindeer on your rooftop
Or Jack Frost on your windowsill
But if someone's climbing down your chimney
You better load your gun and shoot to kill

It's Christmas at ground zero
And if the radiation level's okay
I'll go out with you and see all the new
Mutations on New Year's Day

It's Christmas at ground zero
Just seconds left to go
I'll duck and cover with my Yuletide lover
Underneath the mistletoe

It's Christmas at ground zero
Now the missiles are on their way
What a crazy fluke, we're gonna get nuked
On this jolly holiday

What a crazy fluke, we're gonna get nuked
On this jolly holiday!

The Large Hadron Rap

And if we're going to go nerdy...

Regulatin' Genes

It'd be less frightening if I didn't understand much of this...

Requiem for a dream

Enjoy.

Too crazy for words....

...so I'll just let Glen Beck speak for himself:

GLEN BECK: So here you have Barack Obama going in and spending the money on embryonic stem cell research, and then some, fundamentally changing – remember, those great progressive doctors are the ones who brought us Eugenics. It was the progressive movement and it science. Let’s put science truly in her place. If evolution is right, why don’t we just help out evolution? That was the idea. And sane people agreed with it!

And it was from America. Progressive movement in America. Eugenics. In case you don’t know what Eugenics led us to: the Final Solution. A master race! A perfect person. …. The stuff that we are facing is absolutely frightening. So I guess I have to put my name on yes, I hope Barack Obama fails. But I just want his policies to fail; I want America to wake up.

Actually eugenics was pseudoscience face of the ancient practice of racism by the right-wing and was supported by the Rockerfellers, Bushes, Harrimans, etc. Who also, deep into WWII, were supporting/collaborating with the Nazis.

Stem cell research, OTOH, is just basic science. No master race. Just looking to see how things work and how they may, in some way, be used to help humanity to fight disease and disorder.

Blasphemy -- The Game!

This is too funny:

Blasphemy® is a board game of fun, action, and adventure in the Holy Land for 2 to 4 players who can read. Playing time is 90 to 120 minutes.

In Blasphemy® you take part in the fate of a would-be Messiah. Your aim is to convince your compatriots that your Jesus, and your Jesus alone, is the genuine article.

To accomplish this, your Jesus must cut as impressive a figure as possible. He must give stirring sermons, perform miracles, attract devoted followers, and generally carry on in a Messiah-like fashion. Your Jesus must make every effort to discredit his rivals, and in the end, he must get himself killed. Yes, alas, the price of fame was dear in those days. It was clearly written that the Messiah would come to a sticky end. Accordingly, you win the game if you're the first player to get your Jesus nailed up.

Blasphemy® is the race to the cross!

What will they think of next...

Oh my!

I'm in my basement pwning ur computer!

Well, well, well...

Security researcher Charlie Miller, who last year won $10,000 for hacking into a MacBook Air via Safari in just two minutes, says he thinks Safari will be the first browser to fall at this year's Pwn2Own contest. "It might be because I'm biased about the things I'm good at, but it's the easiest browser [to hack]," Miller told Computerworld this week.

The Pwn2Own contest this year will pit hackers against a MacBook running Mac OS X with Safari and Firefox installed, as well as a Sony Vaio P running Windows 7 and IE8, Firefox, and Chrome installed. The browsers are intended to be the target vector to launch exploit code that will "pwn" the machines and earn $5,000 for each browser that is exploited.

"Apple's products are really friendly to users, and Safari is designed to handle anything, including all kinds of file formats," said Miller. "With a lot of functionality comes the increased chance of bugs. The more complex software is, the less secure it is."

Miller believes that the other browsers won't be hacked, based on his experience. "They make it so hard that, for me, $5,000 isn't motivation enough to try to break one of those guys," he said. We doubt that five grand is so unappealing to others that are more familiar with those browsers, but if Miller's prediction proves true, I can only hope Apple has plans to strengthen security in Snow Leopard.

Miller also plans to attempt to hack into the mobile platforms, which are also offered as bait to hackers at this year's contest—and offering a sweeter pot of $10,000 each. He didn't specify if he was going after the iPhone specifically, but he was one of the first to discover a vulnerability in Mobile Safari shortly after the iPhone was launched in 2007.

But they have great marketing!

The Mantra of the Market...

Self-regulation works! Trust us!

Orly?:

When food industry giants like Kellogg want to ensure that American consumers are being protected from contaminated products, they rely on private inspectors like Eugene A. Hatfield. So last spring Mr. Hatfield headed to the Peanut Corporation of America plant in southwest Georgia to make sure its chopped nuts, paste and peanut butter were safe to use in everything from granola bars to ice cream.

The peanut company, though, knew in advance that Mr. Hatfield was coming. He had less than a day to check the entire plant, which processed several million pounds of peanuts a month.

Mr. Hatfield, 66, an expert in fresh produce, was not aware that peanuts were readily susceptible to salmonella poisoning — which he was not required to test for anyway. And while Mr. Hatfield was inspecting the plant on behalf of Kellogg and other food companies, the Peanut Corporation was paying him for his efforts.

Salmonella has to be on the short-list of things you test when it comes to nuts and meats. But let's go on:

“The overall food safety level of this facility was considered to be: SUPERIOR,” he concluded in his March 27, 2008, report for his employer, the American Institute of Baking, which performs audits for major food companies. A copy of the audit was obtained by The New York Times.

Federal investigators later discovered that the dilapidated plant was ravaged by salmonella and had been shipping tainted peanuts and paste for at least nine months. But they were too late to prevent what has become one of the nation’s worst known outbreaks of food-borne disease in recent years, in which nine are believed to have died and an estimated 22,500 were sickened.

In other words, any old hack with no training or expertise can be rushed through the plant, which apparently had obvious problems, and a clean bill of health can be obtained.

Free marketers are such idiots. And, no, it's not an endorsement of a command economy based on socialism. We know the answer, it worked ever so well from the 1930's through the 1980's -- regulated capitalism and anti-cartel/monopoly enforcement. The one upside of these interesting times is that this whole "free market" mantra has taken such a beating that it'll be generations before this stupidity is taken seriously by any but the deluded.

The DOW knows all...

The Daily Show With Jon StewartM - Th 11p / 10c

The Dow Knows All

Daily Show Full Episodes
Important Things With Demetri Martin

Political Humor
Joke of the Day

It's a shame when a comedy show gets it better...

CPAC After Party...

The Daily Show With Jon StewartM - Th 11p / 10c

CPAC After Party

Daily Show Full Episodes
Important Things With Demetri Martin

Political Humor
Joke of the Day

No, really, it's not "liberal bias," when they come off looking like ignorant, hating bigots, it's because they're just ignorant, hating bigots hanging themselves with their own words.