Our Wacky World—9/17/2014

Spam O' the Week: "What a Drug Mall Was Meant to Be"

Headline O' the Week: "Teenage reveller dies after being electrocuted while URINATING on lamp-post"

Home is where the penis is:

"While His [god's] penis is on loan you must admit that it is sort of just hanging out there very lonely as if it needed a home, sort of like a man wondering the streets looking for a house to live in. Knowing that His penis would need a home, God created a woman to be your wife and when you marry her and look down you will notice that your wife is shaped differently than you and makes a very nice home."

Love, Joy, Feminism


The selfish evangelical:

“So, I want you to know this morning: Just do good for your own self. Do good because God wants you to be happy... When you come to church, when you worship Him, you’re not doing it for God really. You’re doing it for yourself, because that’s what makes God happy. Amen?”

Dispatches From The Culture Wars

"Los Angeles Unified school police officials said Tuesday that the department will relinquish some of the military weaponry it acquired through a federal program… The Los Angeles School Police Department, which serves the nation's second-largest school system, will return three grenade launchers but intends to keep 61 rifles and a Mine Resistant Ambush Protected armored vehicle it received through the program."

LA Times

Here's a textbook takedown of some brand new kook no one's ever heard of—a real pleasure to read:

"Jarimba has no medical or scientific training. His epiphany was a combination of two observations: he noticed that a man’s sideburns were asymmetrical and his hair coarser on one side, and he watched a film clip about a fetus. He thought: adults are not symmetrical, and when a mother lies on one side, that puts asymmetrical pressure on the fetus’ body. Eureka! He concluded that the mother’s sleeping position must cause physical deformation, organ deformation and malfunction, and various ailments.

"He himself had 52 years of low back pain, foot pain, and overall body discomfort. All of these vanished after he put an insert in his shoe. He has plenty of patient testimonials. Back pain relieved. Back surgery avoided. More energy. Better sleep, more mentally focused, no headaches, no longer get sick. Alternating sleep sides during pregnancy produced a happy baby who doesn’t spit up and sleeps through the night. He apparently doesn’t understand that the plural of “anecdote” is not “evidence.”"

Science Based Medicine


Mystery solved:

"When I was a kid, one of the coolest mysteries going was the moving stones of Racetrack Playa. This is a dry lake bed in Death Valley, California, where large rocks are embedded in the dried mud. However, many of the rocks have clearly been moving; there are long tracks behind them in the caked, baked mud pushed up like rails along the tracks’ sides. What could be moving these stones? No one knew. They would sit for years, then suddenly be found to have moved many meters."

Bad Astronomy

The natural way to quit smoking…tobacco:

"...a small number of longtime smokers who had failed many attempts to drop the habit did so after a carefully controlled and monitored use of psilocybin—the active hallucinogenic agent in so-called 'magic mushrooms'"

JHU


Here's a point that cannot be made often enough:

"...we’ve heard a number of prominent people (from Michael Shermer to Neil DeGrasse Tyson) say that there’s no real difference between the political parties when it comes to science denial. According to this argument, there is bad thinking and “woo” on both sides of the political spectrum.

"...nearly all conservative politicians in the modern GOP must at least pay lip service to a litany of dogmas, from lowering taxes, cutting spending on the poor, and boosting military spending, to opposing abortions, birth control, and stem-cell research, to homophobia—and, in this last few years, they must also toe the line with denying global climate change, and throw at least a bone to creationism."

I don't vote for the Democrats, I vote against the Republicans, which Clark Howard calls "tactical voting". If you piss your vote away on the Libertarian party you're a part of the fucking problem. It's sad that intelligent people like Tyson gloss over this. As for Shermer he's a libertarian (Clark Howard is too but seems slightly less up there).

Speaking of Shermer, he's been feeling some heat in recent years—I wonder why?

“Shermer has been a bad boy on occasion — I do know that,” Randi told me. “I have told him that if I get many more complaints from people I have reason to believe, that I am going to have to limit his attendance at the conference."

Buzzfeed

Those remarks have led to attacks on Randi. And today this turned up:

"One of the people who has written a letter to the judge in Dinesh D’Souza’s criminal case asking for a lenient sentence is none other than Michael Shermer. If he really means what he says in that letter, it may be time to stop referring to him as a skeptic."

Dispatches From The Culture Wars

No wonder Phil Plait bailed from the Skeptics Society. What little he told me makes more sense all the time.

The hi-tech way to cheat at cards:

"...police arrested a gambler in Hanoi in 2006 for possessing playing cards marked with radioactive materials. The gambler admitted that his child's hair fell out soon after he brought the cards into their home."

Thanhnien News

As Detroit spirals down the toilet, in Flint, Michigan, officials mull a plan to distribute a Scientology tract:

"The idea that a police officer will hand a copy of this book to a drug dealer and he will suddenly realize that killing and promiscuity is wrong seems less than likely."

Turley's Blog

Our Wacky World—8/20/2014

Spam of the week: "Be a lethal weapon in the bedroom"

More fake bomb detectors, more convictions, more deaths. Long-suffering readers will recall this earlier post on the long-running topic.

Don't get me started on this clusterfuck

'...the fastest rebuttal I give when I run into one of these [chemtrails] nuts is: “Do you even understand the first thing about our atmosphere? Anything released at 30,000 feet will blow for miles away from where you see it, and has virtually no chance of settling straight down onto the people below, and be so diluted it would have no measurable amount of the chemical by the time it lands. That’s why crop-dusting planes must fly barely 30 feet off the ground"'

Skeptic Blog


There's a homeopathic cure for ebola!:

"During the Spanish influenza epidemic of 1918, eighty percent of the people treated with allopathic drugs died. Eighty percent of the people who took homeopathic remedies, mostly Crolatus horridus, survived. We are once again faced with a virus that is poised sweep our country."

Light Party

Your small town needs way more policing:

"The same insurance company canceled its coverage this year for Oakley, a village in Saginaw County, after the police chief there brought in 100 unpaid and uncertified auxiliary officers, some from as far away as metro Detroit, to patrol a town of 290."

Detroit Free Press


Also in Detroit, what happened when the bankrupt city switched to cheap batteries for their parking meters to save money? They lost millions:

"At 8 volts, they stop working. So while the savings with the less-expensive battery might sparkle on a spreadsheet, it’s less practical when repair crews have to actually go out and replace them …"

Detroit News

Gun rights for the blind—hell yeah:

"Do you think because they're blind that they're going to start shooting in every direction and kill everyone? Fact is that it's been proven that people that lack vision have an increased awareness of their hearing and spatial surroundings."

Crooks & Liars

"The Public Prosecutor's Office in the Brazilian state of São Paulo is investigating why women are being asked to either submit to gynecological tests or, in some cases, prove their virginity in order to apply for state jobs."

Huffington Post

Another school system decides to buy gadgetry so they can give up making decisions:

Beginning this school year, Dubuque, Iowa public school students in middle and high school are to be required to wear heart rate monitors to determine their activity levels in gym class. “It will be a large portion of their grade, because we want to grade them on what they’re actually doing in our class,” Hawkins said. “It really takes the opinion out of things. You know it’s not really ‘I think your kid is doing this and this in class.’”

Turley's Blog

OTOH, the gym teacher who hated me gave me a failing grade for not being able to do a cartwheel. I guess it was a bad judgement call.

Our Wacky World—7/30/2014

"George Harrison Memorial Tree killed...by beetles"

He's BACK:

"Although he's not a hired security officer, George Zimmerman has been 'patrolling' outside a Volusia County gun shop after it was recently robbed, according to the store owner."

Click Orlando


Even more reassuring:

"Open Carry Advocate Wants To Fight Police Brutality By Threatening Cops With Guns"

Crooks & Liars

Meanwhile, in Georgia, they now have open carry everywhere--what could possibly go wrong?:

"On the first day of the new Georgia Safe Carry Protection Act, a misunderstanding between two armed men in a convenience store Tuesday led to a drawn firearm and a man’s arrest."

They did make it to 3:00 PM. (Valdosta Daily Times)

Meanwhile, in Florida, they keep gun owners safe from nosey doctors:

"A responsible state would pass and enforce gun safety laws to keep firearms away from children. But Florida did the opposite: The state passed a law gagging doctors from asking patients about guns, effectively preventing doctors from sharing safety tips to keep those guns out of children’s hands."

Slate

"Millennials don't want to change things, apparently – they want everyone to get along. The report observes '[m]any specifically identified LGBTQ rights as their primary reason for being liberal'; and '[o]ften, they decided they were liberals because they really didn’t like conservatives.'"

Guardian

"The defense attorney says that Assistant Commonwealth’s Attorney Claiborne Richardson told her that her client must either plead guilty or police would obtain another search warrant “for pictures of his erect penis.” If that is the case, this is even more serious since it sounds like this abusive warrant was used to try to pressure a plea."

Turley's Blog

'"Yes, I was using drugs that night, but I was in complete control… I cut [my penis] off because that was the root of all my problems. My solution to the problem was the realization that sex is for mortals, and I am a god. ...Those kinds of activities got me into trouble, and I came here to be a god."'

CNN


First it was the pap smear. Then the mammogram. Now it's…

"Proponents of yearly pelvic exams may say that they compel women to seek counsel from their doctors and receive vital information about their own health. (They also, of course, bolster gynecologists' job security.) But it's becoming clear that this line of thinking is self-defeating: There’s no reason for women to report to their doctors every year if they can’t even trust what they’re being told."

Slate

It sounds as if women have to put up with a lot of shit; who would have thought?:

'A well-known male facilitator of equality in the workplace seminars always begins by asking his mix-gendered groups to please make a list of what they do in a typical day to stay safe and to write until the timer goes off. He reports that – always – the women immediately begin to scribble furiously, “park under a light,” “hold my keys in my hand so I can get into the car quickly,” and so on, and that they write right up until the timer goes off. The men, on the other hand, sit there looking bewildered.'

Scholars and Rogues

Oh no, it's the old "Hitler banned guns" canard:

"Does the fact that Nazis forced Jews into horrendous ghettos indict urban planning? Should we eliminate all police officers because the Nazis used police officers to oppress and kill the Jews? What about public works — Hitler loved public works projects? Of course not. These are merely implements that can be used for good or ill, much as gun advocates like to argue about guns themselves. If guns don’t kill people, then neither does gun control cause genocide..."

Salon

Along similar lines, a fake news article fools the TeaPees once again:

"ARE YOU F——-g KIDDING ME !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! On the 4th !!!!! He’s going to a mosque of the religion that killed almost 3,000 Americans !!!!!!!! OMG, Beyond insane & cruel !!!"

Let's see, what religion was it that supported sending thousands of Americans to their deaths in Iraq?(FTB)


Faith Healing Chicanery 101 as told by an ex-evangelical fraud (excellent article):

"There were a number of methods used to fake a demonic possession of a house. The simplest trick was having a pocket full of pebbles and occasionally throwing one at a random object. There was little chance of getting caught because there were plenty of distractions taking place, especially since everyone was kept busy praying. After we were done exorcising a room, we devised a great excuse for one of us to hang back for a while so we could clean up the pebbles."

Skeptic

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