Saturday, October 12, 2013

Our Wacky World—10/12/2013

How to make chumps out of Ken Ham zombies:
"My suggestion for how to respond to the 'Were you there?' question is to simply say 'Yes, I was'. This is likely to stump the stumper who will not expect it. If the person says that he/she does not believe you, you can respond, 'How do you know? Were you there?”
Mano Singham

Be sure to read the linked article for a sample conversation. BTW, Ken Ham wasn't there. I know because I was and I didn't see him anywhere.

Branding
I just love it when people dish dirt on con artists like Kevin Trudeau. Check out this "secret" invitation he sent out to who knows how many suckers:
"There has existed for many years an exclusive association, a secret society, of some of the world’s most famous and powerful people... I have some incredibly exciting news to share with you. The association has analyzed your profile (you’d be unbelievably flattered if you knew who these individuals were). Please forgive us, but we’ve discovered something special about you. It seems you, [sucker], possess several rare traits we are searching for. Because of these traits, which we’ll talk about later, you are eligible to become part of our exclusive club and to share our Greatest Kept Secrets, too, absolutely free!"
Cherry Teresa

Here's the post she mentioned at the beginning, describing how she got sucked into the Trudeau con in the first place and then figured her way out.

"Dark web hoodlums linked to the underground drugs bazaar Silk Road are preparing to launch revenge attacks on the FBI agents involved in the shutdown of the site.... Although the rabid activists have stopped short of calling for violent attacks on the FBI, they discussed carrying out a campaign of fear aimed at making Feds 'think twice' before targeting any anonymous drugs market in future."
The Register


It's official—Michelle Bachmann says these are the End Times:
"Rather than seeing this as a negative, we need to rejoice, Maranatha Come Lord Jesus, His day is at hand... When we see up is down and right is called wrong, when this is happening, we were told this; these days would be as the days of Noah.”
Crooks & Liars

"A leading Saudi cleric warned women who drive cars could cause damage to their ovaries and pelvises and that they are at risk of having children born with 'clinical problems.'"
CNN


Oh the irony:
"Julian Robertson, a Wall Street moneyman who has agglomerated billions from his hedge-fund investments, has sold all of his stock in Apple Inc., not because he necessarily believes shoveling his spondulicks towards Cupertino is a bad bet, but because he has come to the conclusion that Steve Jobs was a 'really awful' person."
The Register

"'The officers posed as regular high school students and would ask other students for drugs. Twenty-two students were arrested - the majority of them are reported to be special needs students like the Snodgrass' son. Their son...is noticeably handicapped and has been diagnosed with autism as well as bipolar disorder, Tourettes, and several anxiety disorders. Their son's list of disabilities have many in the community wondering why he was targeted in this undercover drug operation."
Reason

"Michael Selleneit, shot their neighbor, Tony Pierce, after claiming that Pierce was 'telepathically raping' his wife."
Salt Lake Tribune

Something to remember
"A USA TODAY investigation finds that consumers buying Reumofan dietary supplements are trusting their lives to a company that uses fake addresses, lies about ingredients and may not even exist."
USA Today


Rupert Murdoch's foray into hi-tech education hits a snag:
"Newscorp’s entry into the education market, the Amplify tablet, didn’t receive a lot of user reviews before being sold to waiting school districts; that may have been a mistake... One school district in NC put their 1:1 program on hiatus just one month into the school year. They discovered that some 10% of the Amplify tablets issued to students were being returned with cracked screens or suffering from malfunctioning power supplies.

10% failure rate in the first month. Mean little punks, aren't they? Meanwhile, in Thailand...


A classic psychic fail from 1921:
"What Thomas Bradford planned was no less than an empirical demonstration of the afterlife. Not satisfied with waiting to die a natural death, he decided that committing suicide would allow him to make the needed arrangements to send a message from the other side afterward. To recruit a willing partner in this bold project, Bradford placed an ad in a local newspaper for “someone interested in the spiritualistic sciences.” There seems to be no record of what kind of response he received to this ad but he managed to find one person... Doran would later insist that she had responded to the ad on a whim."
JREF

Sunday, September 22, 2013

Our Wacky World—9/22/2013

Wonderfully ambiguous headline: "Brain-eating amoeba girl leaves hospital"

Click for info
Lots of trigger-happy loons running around lately. Lots of stupid statements, including the spectacle of Alex Jones claiming the Navy yard shooting was a false flag operation aimed at taking him out. I was going to give him the coveted Most Fucked Argument/ Excuse/ Explanation/ Completely Irrelevant Aside Award™ but screw it, he's always saying shit like that. Far more interesting is watching the Republicans in the House slide into utter irrelevancy as they try to stop Obamacare/distract everyone from the silent death of any immigration bill.


A teaching moment on eBay:
"THIS AUCTION IS FOR ALL 4 ONE DIRECTION TICKETS IN SYDNEY OCTOBER 25th. You can thank my daughters self righteous and lippy attitude for their sale. See sweety? And you thought I was bluffing. I hope the scowl on your bitchy little friends faces when you tell them that your dad and i revoked the gift we were giving you all reminds you that your PARENTS are the ones that deserve love and respect more than anyone. And your silly little pack mentality of taking your parents for fools is one sadly mistaken. Anyhow. Your loss someone else's gain who deserves them! THE TICKETS ARE SEATED IN ROW O section 57. REMEMBER AUCTION IS FOR ALL 4 TICKETS and will be sent registered post 
"...OH YOUR FRIENDS THOUGHT THAT A FEW PRANKS CALLS WOULD PUT ME OFF SELLING THE GIFT WE BOUGHT FOR THEM for YOUR BIRTHDAY because YOU all LIED to us about sleep overs so you could hang like little trollops at an older guys HOUSE????? Pffft!! I find it HIGHLY amusing that you girls think you invented this stuff. Tricks like this on OUR parents is how HALF of you were conceived .....And why a lot of your friends DONT have an address to send that Fathers day card to!!! I'm not your friend. I'm your MOTHER. And I am here to give you the boundaries that YOU NEED to become a functional responsible adult. You may hate me now..... But I don't care. Its my job to raise a responsible adult..not nuture bad habits in my teen age child"
The last time I looked (before it was taken down) it was up to AU $36,000.00.


Great obit:
"Marianne Theresa Johnson- Reddick born Jan 4, 1935 and died alone on Sept. 30, 2013. She is survived by her 6 of 8 children whom she spent her lifetime torturing in every way possible. While she neglected and abused her small children, she refused to allow anyone else to care or show compassion towards them. When they became adults she stalked and tortured anyone they dared to love. Everyone she met, adult or child was tortured by her cruelty and exposure to violence, criminal activity, vulgarity, and hatred of the gentle or kind human spirit."
KRNV


An Indian-American woman wins the Miss America pageant—cue the terminally ignorant assholes on Twitter:
"Miss Arab wins Miss America and the score of the Seattle/SanFran game is 5-0 at the half? What is life?"
You knew they'd work football into it somehow, right? (Buzzfeed)


I feel safer already after visiting their web site:
"Black Ops Protective Agency is a full national firm especializing [sic] in all aspects of executive protection, investigations, security services and threat management agency with emphasis on personal threat concerns, random crime, residential privacy issues of every description. Our core approach, techniques, and training methods are based upon law enforcement and military model of discipline, proactive and precentative [sic] executive security. Our agents are the most qualified personnel with intensive background in law enforcement, military and protection services."
Note how the text doesn't fit on the pages. Note the poor writing. Did they pay someone to design their site? (Black Ops)

"An eight month old baby is recovering in hospital after a monkey tore off one of his testicles before running away and eating it."
Mirror

"Wedding delayed in Brentwood after man cuts off testicles"
Brentwood Weekly


A different kind of yeast infection:
"...the team searched the man's belongings for liquor and then isolated him in a hospital room for 24 hours. Throughout the day, he ate carbohydrate-rich foods, and the doctors periodically checked his blood for alcohol. At one point, it rose 0.12 percent."
NPR


"Feminist" "natural" "abortion":
"Muscio, who is very clear about her opinions on 'Western medicine' (she at one point refers to it as 'that smelly dog who farts across the house and we just don’t have the heart to put out of its misery'), eventually gets pregnant again, and this time she tries something else:  
"'I started talking to my girlfriends. Looking to my immediate community for help led me to Judy, the masseuse, who rubbed me in places you aren’t supposed to rub pregnant ladies. She also did some reflexology in the same vein. Panacea told me where to find detailed recipes for herbal abortifacients and emmenagogues. Esther supported me and stayed with me every day. Bridget brought me flowers. Possibly most important was the fact that I possessed not one single filament of self-doubt. With that core of supportive women surrounding me and with my mind made up, I was pretty much invincible.'"
Brute Reason

She's lucky to be alive after all that shit. Be sure to read the linked article, "The terrifying history of herbal abortion medicines." Yet another reason why clinical abortion should be legal.


James Randi weighs in on psychics and the polygraph:
"The blatant fact is that not a single spy has ever been caught by a polygraph screening exam."
Yep. (eSkeptic)


Paid liar for the Bush Admin. Dana Perino is sooo tired of atheists:
"Beckel noted that what the lawyer didn't say was that you don't have to say the Pledge if you don't want to. Dana Perino said that she was 'tired of them' and recounted how, when she worked in the Justice Department, a similar lawsuit 'came through' and before the day ended, the Congress passed a resolution to keep 'under God' in the Pledge. She said that 'our representatives have spoken again and again, and if these people don't like it, they don't have to live here.' (Same could be said for all those Christians who oppose abortion and gay marriage?)"
Newshounds

Because "our representatives" always do what we want them to. And they believe that they're winning when they're losing. Take Rand Paul for instance:
“Does anybody remember Charlie Sheen when he was kind of going crazy…And he was going around, jumping around saying ‘Winning, winning, we’re winning,’" Paul said. "Well I kind of feel like that, we are winning. And I’m not on any drugs.”
Yeah, his terminal disconnect with reality comes naturally. (NBC)

"Is there a blow torch under North America that causes rare, but deadly, earthquakes? Some geologists think they might have found the buried track of just such a hotspot from Missouri to Virginia."
Discovery

Tuesday, September 3, 2013

Our Wacky World—9/3/2013

Detroit has run out of paper—good luck getting a birth or death certificate

Nope, Einstein did not say that.

Do you have your homeopathic first aid kit? I'm sure it works great for anaphylactic shock.

How about a school lockdown toilet? A school district in California just bought 1800.


I can't make this shit up:
"More Louisiana Republicans Blame President Obama For Hurricane Katrina Response Than Bush"
Think Progress

Click to read about this bullshit
"Documents released Monday by the Texas Department of Public Safety’s provided no new evidence that officers found one jar of urine and 18 containers of feces at the Capitol before a July 12 debate on a controversial abortion bill."
Texas Tribune


PeTA FAIL:
"Findings published by the Study for Future Families showed that eating poultry during pregnancy may lead to smaller penis size in male infants. Looking at dairy products, eggs, fish, fruit, bird meat, potatoes, tomatoes, vegetables, and red meat, researchers found the most significant link between chicken consumption and decreased penis size because of a chemical compound found in the meat. Furthermore, evidence indicates that heterosexual women’s sexual satisfaction depends in part on their partner’s penis size."
Note that a homeopathic preparation of this "chemical" would make your penis bigger—if homeopathy actually worked.

Land of a MIllion Gods

If you have to ask...you're running out of topics for your TV show
"Since I began blogging in 2007, I’ve been told that I’m a racist, sexist, fascist, communist, woman-hater, man-hater, liar with no conscience, a scam artist, a sexless virgin, a misogynistic player, and too young to know anything about anything. Strangely, I’ve never been accused of being any of these things in my personal life."
Mark Manson


Self-styled child development expert Jenny McCarthy is a smoker and she hasn't quit yet:
"I also could not escape the irony of the woman who rails against 'toxins' in vaccines and described her struggles trying to stop smoking when she was pregnant now shilling for a device designed to be used to inhale a toxic substance (nicotine) into one’s lungs. On the other hand, she has in the past raved about how she absolutely 'loves' Botox; so maybe it’s not so difficult to understand."
Science-based Medicine

Botox is "natural," just like arsenic and strychnine.

"In the 1970s, reports Darling-Hammond, Finland’s student achievement was low. But in the decades since, they have steadily upgraded their education system until now they’ve reached the top. What’s more, they took what was once a wide achievement gap between rich and poor, and reduced it until it’s now smaller than in nearly all other wealthy nations. Here’s how..."
Skepticblog

"In what will surely go down in history as one the greatest architectural blunders, the town of Benidorm in Alicante, Spain, had almost completed its 47-story skyscraper when it realized it excluded plans for elevator shafts."
Daily News


Great headline:
"Women who fear being forced to marry abroad told to hide spoon in underwear"
Guardian
 
"The FBI has now gotten involved into the false lien filing business and considers the massive filings as a type of 'paper terrorism'. This is one of the few times lately that I agree with the FBI."
Turley's blog


Howard Kurtz is settling into his new Fox News gig:
"Asked why she believed Kurtz would write such a column, Quinn said she did not know, other than he could not find anything else to write about."
Crooks & Liars

"Parents in Tennessee came to court to deal with a dispute over the last name to be used for their 7-month-old son. However, Child Support Magistrate Lu Ann Ballew ordered the first name to be changed because the parents had named the boy 'Messiah.' Ballew admits that she has never ordered a first name change (particularly when both parents were in agreement with the name) but that messiah is a name earned by one person and 'that one person is Jesus Christ.'"
Turley's blog

"Top copyright troll Prenda Law has been caught red-handed seeding torrenting sites with pornographic films in an effort to drum up business for its copyright lawyers."
The Register