Our Wacky World—9/15/2012

Creationists are boosting Dr. Pepper sales. "Airplane" is now oficially the funniest movie of all time. Speaking of comedy...

*Special election coverage* (skip this section if you're bored already)

The entire world has been baffled by Clint Eastwood's speech at the RNC (right before Romney's acceptance speech). Leave it to film critic Roger Ebert to give the best review:

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"Two days later, not a word of Romney's acceptance speech has entered the public discourse. But Eastwood's dialog with a chair has entered forever into political legend, and it's amusing to read reports that his viewers from around the world were mystified. Iranian Facebook pages 'treated it with suspicious befuddlement,' an Atlantic blog reports, and in China the speech is being used to teach English on a web site. The headline says, 'Gelivable English Langauge Teaching: Exchange Cooperation Model Innovation,' says the Atlantic's Max Fisher, who adds: 'I don't know what that means, either.'"

Roger Ebert

The inevitable chorus of losers turn up in the comments. The first thing I thought of was how pissed they all were after the Eastwood's Superbowl commercial. Amnesia is an amazing thing to watch.

"They gave him a time limit and flashed a blinking red light that told him his time was up. He ignored both. The actor’s decision to use a chair as a prop was last-minute, and his own.... 'The prop person probably thought he was going to sit in it,' a baffled senior aide said on Thursday night."

Dispatches From The Culture Wars

Can't make this stuff up

Then the Democrats had their convention. This review by Peggy Noonan reveals a great deal about how it was perceived by Beltway Insiders™:

"The sheer strangeness of all the talk about abortion, abortion, contraception, contraception. I am too old to get pregnant old enough to know a wedge issue when I see one, but I've never seen a great party build its entire public persona around one."

Shit

Really? This is the first time that, at your advanced age, you've ever seen it happen? It's never happened to, say, Republicans? Never? Not Once? The Tea Party perhaps? How about "intelligent" design?

WSJ

And it's Sandra Fluke who's a narcissist. Right. This coming from a professional operative who lives to hear the sound of her own voice. Speaking of which, Sarah Palin didn't get mentioned at the RNC so she's complaining about being mentioned at the DNC:

Crooks & Liars

*End Politics*

Enough politics, here's an excerpt from one of the finest pieces of science writing I've seen in ages:

“Who gave you the right to control my life? 

“You've got it the wrong way round. You gave the right to control your life away. You're the one who chose to ignore the way the world works.” 

“Hah!” said Sacha. “The way the world works! Bloody scientists. You think the world is all numbers and machines and levers. You don't understand anything about the soul or spirit.” 

“Of course I do,” said James. “I've been happily married for 20 years. I have two children that I love. I play the piano, I enjoy reading. It's just that I have additional ways of looking at things.”

Nature

"The Wet Cell Battery is mentioned in over 600 Edgar Cayce readings as a system to enhance the body's natural healing tendencies. This level of current, according to Cayce, seems to imitate the "electrical conditions" in the body. Passing this current through various "healing" solutions enhances the benefits of the Baar Wet Cell therapy. Even though Cayce first described this unit and process over 60 years ago, it appears to tap into much of the healing wisdom current vibrational medicine researchers are discovering. 

"This system is offered for those researching the Edgar Cayce readings that reference "M.S." [i.e., it's for people who have M.S.] We offer this system for personal research, only and do not make medical claims for its application. This system is not intended to replace qualified medical care."

"Price: $584.35"

They have variations of the exact same product for a variety of other ills so if you're so unlucky as to not be suffering from M.S., you're not out of luck.

Barr Products [not to be confused with Barr Engineering]

"So when he started talking about boobs I didn't really care. When he started showing me pictures of boobs of girls at the party that he had taken I thought 'okay that's weird whatever maybe he asked beforehand.' At some point he raised a concern about being Asian and women not wanting him cause of some stereotypical view of penis size, and I was like "most women will agree size doesn't matter" and went back to my phone... Then he grabbed my free wrist and put it on his crotch and asked 'Is this big enough?'"

Exploded Soda

No, no, Margaret Thatcher said it was the hooligans:

"British police and medics whose failures contributed to the deaths of 96 soccer fans in the country's worst sports disaster unfairly blamed the dead for the 1989 tragedy and sought to cover up their actions, newly disclosed documents revealed Wednesday. 

"The documents vindicated efforts by the victims' families, who had spent 23 years demanding a full accounting of the events at Hillsborough stadium that killed fans of the Liverpool soccer team. Most of the victims were crushed and suffocated in a standing-only section after they were herded there by police."

SeattlePi

"Jeffrey LaPorta traveled more than a quarter of a mile through multiple storm sewer pipes, at times completely submerged water, before finding enough breathing room to await rescue. He was eventually pulled out of the sewer in less than an hour, with only scrapes and bruises."

MSNBC


See kids, it really does happen:

"A Northern California mixed-martial artist accused of ripping out his friend's heart and removing his tongue while the two were on hallucinogenic drugs has pleaded guilty to murder and mayhem charges."

MSNBC

I'll take one in 2X, please. Love the sleeves.

"A debate continues about how much damage will ultimately result from the ill-conceived use of vaccinators by the CIA. Pakistan's leading vaccine expert, Zulfiqar Bhutta, has tried to remain optimistic about polio elimination in Pakistan. And the World Health Organization, whose polio campaign in Nigeria encountered many years of opposition from religious fundamentalists, remains uncertain about just how long the setback in Pakistan will last and whether it will spread to other countries."

Journal of Public Health Policy

"An unlicensed acupuncturist and self-proclaimed 'healer' in Switzerland is being accused of intentionally infecting 16 people with the HIV virus in cases going back for more than a decade"

Medical Daily

Along similar lines:

"Nelson knew that she had exceeded the limits of her expertise and that Maine needed advice from another practitioner, but she did not appropriately communicate that or discontinue her treatment, and she gave Maine information which accentuated the woman's fear of conventional treatment."

Stuff

Also:

"A Sydney doctor who is a member of the Exclusive Brethren Christian sect has been banned from practising as a GP after he prescribed chemical castration to a young man who sought a ''cure'' for homosexuality."

Sydney Morning Herald

"The Todd Akin thing was so blown out of proportion -- it's a joke," Jackson said at the Republican National Convention in Tampa, Fla., when interviewed for my SiriusXM OutQ radio program. "How many times do people get pregnant from rape? It's point zero zero one percent. It's a joke. I read lots of articles. I know people, because I'm 53. I've know a lot of people, and I've actually never known anyone who got pregnant from being raped."

Huffinton Post

Retail cycle

Our Wacky World—8/30/2012

Neil Young, er, Armstrong died. Did you know that he became a Muslim in 1969?

"When Louis [sic] Armstrong and co. walked on the moon, they heard sounds in a strange language they did not understand. Only later, after returning to earth, did they realize that it was actually the azaan!

"I have seen a few mosques with powerful speaker systems, but wow, somebody down here certainly turned on the power on that day!"

Answering Islam

Branding is crucial to success

"The makers of 18 Again...say it is the first of its kind in India...and fills a gap in the market. Ultratech's owner...says the cream...contains natural ingredients including gold dust, aloe vera, almond and pomegranate, and has been clinically tested. 

"It's a unique and revolutionary product which also works towards building inner confidence in a woman and boosting her self esteem," says Mr Bhatia, adding that the goal of the product is to "empower women". Mr Bhatia says the product is not claiming to restore a woman's virginity, but to restore the emotions of being a virgin. "We are only saying, 'feel like a virgin' - it's a metaphor. It tries to bring back that feeling when a person is 18."

BBC (Great TV commercial here)

"A lot of people I know are ex-Google and they have the same story. Three people here were on the midnight shift for YouTube and they were given the promise that if they were going to see beheadings and child porn and all this shit all the time, they'd get hired. YouTube’s review process is proactive — they have to sit there and look at all of it, from 10 p.m. to 8 a.m., for a year. One of my really good friends lost her life for a year doing that."

Buzzfeed

"But the best explanation for Fox glam may be the channel’s largely conservative audience. An argument can be made that conservative women are typically less squeamish than progressive ones about embracing what the sociologist Catherine Hakim calls 'erotic capital,' otherwise known as using your looks to get ahead. See the gleeful Laura Ingraham/­Ann Coulter school of beauty­ology, which holds that the angrier and better-­coiffed you are, the more attention you will receive. The Republican Party welcomes looks in a woman—Michele Bachmann, Sarah Palin, Nikki Haley—and so does Fox."

The Atlantic

"The past week or so has seen yet another wave of terrible, terrible reporting in the science media about the Amelia Earhart non-story... So now TIGHAR has released a frame of the underwater video they took of the sea floor off Nikumaroro... The picture shows nothing remotely identifiable...

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"Yet TIGHAR has placed yellow arrows on the image pointing to… well, to nothing, really; though they authoritatively state that it shows manmade objects. This is the type of image that we call a “blobsquatch”. That word comes from the evidence presented by delusional Bigfoot hunters who post photographs that show nothing clear at all, but that they interpret as Bigfoot."

Skeptic Blog

"Pope also warned that 'The government must - and has planned - for the worst-case scenario: alien attack and alien invasion. Space shuttles, lasers and directed-energy weapons are all committed via the Alien Invasion War Plan to defence against any alien ships in orbit,' he said, apparently unaware that America's Space Shuttle orbiters have been dispersed to various museums, and the rest of the system scrapped."

Bad UFOs

"Three-and-a-half year old Hunter Spanjer, who is deaf, signs his name by crossing his forefinger and index finger and moving his hand up and down... But to Hunter's school district, it might mean something else. The district claims that it violates a rule that forbids anything in the school that looks like a weapon"

Yahoo  (Surprise, they backed off)

Great headline:

"San Francisco archbishop-elect apologizes for drunken driving"

Reuters

But this story is even better:

"Bishop Tebartz-van Elst, 52, doesn't only embrace luxury when he travels to India to visit poor children and nuns. He also puts a premium on a pleasant standard of living back home in Limburg, one that befits his status. His new, multi-million-euro bishop's residence right next to the city's cathedral is about to be finished. But the complex has sparked a mix of amazement, rage and resignation among the 600,000 Catholics in the diocese. Many cannot comprehend how they are supposed to live in want while their bishop splurges."

Spiegel

Got wood?

Chiropractic in its own words:

"Moviegoers beware, the person sitting next to you could be subluxated. Cutting them off from the ability to feel pain, feel happiness, feel anything. The same peson [sic] is sitting next to your child on the schoolbus. The same person is working next to you at the office. He is on your son's baseball team. He is driving the car on your bumper. He is most assuredly the person in the waiting room at your doctor's office. He is the same person who drove a plane into the Tower in New York. It's worse than a flu epidemic. Subluxated, messed up nervous systems are everywhere. Your nervous system 'connects' you to the world around you."

Gawker

Then there's the tobacco tanning bed industry:

"Central to the industry’s message is the idea that tanning’s critics -- such as dermatologists, sunscreen manufacturers and even charities like the American Cancer Society -- are part of a profit-driven conspiracy. These critics are described as a “Sun Scare industry” that aims to frighten the public into avoiding all exposure to ultraviolet light. The tanning industry blames this group for causing what it calls a deadly epidemic of vitamin D deficiency, and tries to position itself as a more trustworthy source of information on tanning’s health effects."

NBC

“Most people realize that AIDS came from the homosexual community... It was one guy screwing a monkey, if I recall correctly, and then having sex with men. It was an airline pilot, if I recall.”

Raw Story

Yet the jury clearly said: "You're not getting everything you want, Apple, and some of your damages are worth nothing. But Samsung, you copied when you didn't have to. Now bugger off."

The Register

"an endearing and loving act, a clever reflection of
the political and social situation of our time."

Our Wacky World—8/21/2012

"It's the latest prescription for extreme ultra-Orthodox Jewish men who shun contact with the opposite sex: Glasses that blur their vision, so they don't have to see women they consider to be immodestly dressed."

Yahoo

This is a hoot. A history professor has pieced together a history of Europe using nothing but text from papers his students have submitted. Here is a paragraph (sics suppressed temporarily):

"The Reformnation happened when German nobles resented the idea that tithes were going to Papal France or the Pope thus enriching Catholic coiffures. Traditions had become oppressive so they too were crushed in the wake of man’s quest for ressurection above thenot-just-social beast he had become. An angry Martin Luther nailed 95 theocrats to a church door. Theologically, Luthar was into reorientation mutation. Calvinism was the most convenient religion since the days of the ancients. Anabaptist services tended to be migratory. The Popes, of course, were usually Catholic. Monks went right on seeing themselves as worms. The last Jesuit priest died in the 19th century."

Wilson Quarterly

Speaking of bad writing...

"To admit the possible truth that someone writing for him had actually plagiarized would expose the fact that this “World Class Pundit and Author”, was merely a “front man” representing his privileged class. If this is true of Zakaria, who else of these “serious journalistic stars” is also doing the same thing and more importantly how are they shaping the political debate?"

Turley's Blog

"Two parents who admittedly duct taped their children inside an SUV in a Walmart parking lot said they did so because they were 'demon possessed.' 

"During Tuesday’s preliminary hearing, the court learned the couple had sold most of their belongings and left their suburban Chicago home because, 'a darkness was coming over the house,' and the house was possessed by demons."

Fox2Now (Apparently they're disciples of this crank.)

Stumpin' for Jesus

“The Quantum Jumping Program is absolutely fantastic. I’ve always wanted to write so I Quantum Jumped into a parallel world and met my doppelganger who is a published author that has written many books. It was a truly awesome experience. My second experience concerned public speaking. I jumped through the doorway and found my doppelganger who is a world recognized public speaker. I learned so much that I know if I should be asked to speak, I can do so with all the flair and skill that I learned during my Quantum Jump. As I cross off items off the top of my list of ‘to do’ list, I’m adding more to the bottom. The Quantum Jumping Program has been the best investment I have made in the last 40 odd years of searching."

"Please note that these results are not typical."

Quantum Jumping

"Finally, factor in what is certainly one of the most important reasons why a rape victim rarely gets pregnant, and that's psychic trauma. Every woman is aware that stress and emotional factors can alter her menstrual cycle. To get and stay pregnant a woman's body must produce a very sophisticated mix of hormones. Hormone production is controlled by a part of the brain that is easily influenced by emotions. There's no greater emotional trauma that can be experienced by a woman than an assault rape. This can radically upset her possibility of ovulation, fertilization, and implantation."

Physicians For Life

"The report published on the Catholic website 'Family Under the Protection of the Holy Virgin' calls the show 'a large-scale experiment on Ukrainian children' to 'create criminals and perverts.' This is only slightly worse than the Teletubbies which send children into a trance and create 'an imbecile who will sit near the screen with an open mouth and swallow any information.' As a teacher for almost 30 years I can attest to seeing the same phenomenon without the use of SpongeBob."

Turley's Blog

"...the Justice Department found that Lauderdale County Youth Court, the Meridian Police Department, and the Mississippi Division of Youth Services created a "school to prison pipeline" in which dress code violations, flatulence, profanity, and disrespect could send a child to jail."

Opposing Views

"As with just about every other Scientology controversy, Narconon's problems are not new. Throughout its history, it's faced protests, as well as debunking by experts. 

"But this time, its problems seem of another magnitude. There are not only four deaths at the flagship Oklahoma facility under investigation -- three just since October -- but Narconon is also mired in litigation in Michigan and Georgia, it was chased out of Quebec, and has also apparently given up on the UK."

Village Voice

"[ebay] said it was banning all sales of supernatural goods and services, exiling its witchy and wizardly clientele to the wilds of Craigslist and other Web-based Diagon Alleys."

LA Times (snarkier report here)

"We have never in all our collective years had such an unbelievably terrible customer service experience - not ever. We estimate that we spent around 18 hours collectively on the phones, on hold, trying to track down [ten year old] Phoebe, her bags and our peace of mind. It's hard to imagine how you run a business this way, how you get away with things so close to child endangerment, and how you sleep at night training your service employees how to not be of service."

Network World

"Once a pretend multimillionaire, Michael Prozer will spend the next eight-plus years in a federal prison cell for fraud. ...After more than a year of proclaiming his innocence, Prozer admitted to swindling a now-defunct Georgia bank, Park Avenue Bank, out of a $3 million loan that he never repaid. 'I've done a lot of good things,' he said. 'This case makes it look like I'm a horrible person.'"

Tampa Bay Online

"Perez continued to ask forgiveness, and added, 'I didn't mean to hurt' the child, the boy's brother told police. 'I am just one who serves in the church, and I have sinned; don't stop believing in the church,' Perez reportedly told the victim's brother."

Oregon Live

"Back in my country, my president, he’s trying to pass a gun ban, so he’s staging all of these murders, like the ‘Fast And Furious’ thing down at the border; Aurora, Colorado, all the people that were killed there; and now the beautiful people at the Sikh temple. I was talking to JD, our promoter here tonight, great guy, I was saying, you know, I don’t know where I’m going to live if it keeps going the way it’s going because it looks like it’s turning into Nazi America. And he said move down here to Singapore."

Dispatches From The Culture Wars

Perfect. Dave Mustaine is moving to Singapore. Meanwhile, Hank Williams, Jr. is simply incoherent:

"You know, we've got a President that does a call to the Koran or Mecca or whatever. That's what I meant. That's exactly what I meant. I won't be changing my name to whatever. That's exactly what I meant."

Rolling Stone


Coming soon to a theater near...er, direct video, the much-anticipated remake of Red Dawn:

"You see, the actual North Korea is a country of 24 million people with a GDP roughly equal to North Dakota’s. It’s an impoverished, even starving, prison state that lacks modern weaponry and any ability to deploy forces globally. If preview clips posted this weekend are any indication, the movie magically gifts North Korea with a huge fleet of long-range transport planes … because it has to. Of course, how these planes get past the U.S. military’s 3,000 jet fighters is anyone’s guess."

Wired