Might become a TV show. Hard to believe that just a twitter feed can do so much. I love the internet.
Clarification: I’m not saying this will be a good show; it will probably suck. But it’s a chance that wouldn’t have existed ten years ago. We’d just get some old hackneyed tripe that would suck.
Is the pro-torture, kill-em-all! Right ever right? The subway bomber has now confessed, is cooperating with authorities, providing intelligence and will probably soon be rotting in jail for the rest of his life. All this was accomplished without torture and with respecting his human rights. And in a tiny fraction of the time we’ve been holding KSM at Gitmo.
Damn it feels good when I’m right. Damn, it feels good when America does what it should have been doing all along. America, fuck yeah!
I find Ask Men’s 99 Most Desirable Women to be interesting, beyond my general XY-generated interest in the opposite gender. I’m not surprised by how often “desirable” means “being under 25 with a fashionable figure”. What I am surprised by is how ugly a lot of these women are. Thanks to airbrushing, surgery or makeup, many of them have facial features that are almost alien. It’s kind of creepy, actually. Megan Fox is, in many ways, the paradigm of the type. Great figure but an unattractive face (and tiny brain and bad personality to boot).
The older women in the sample far outshine their younger counterparts. Heidi Klum, with 36 years and four kids, looks better than almost all of them (and she seems to actually have something behind her eyes). Monica Bellucci, at 45, puts the 20-year-olds to shame (and can also act and speak four languages).
Smart is sexy too. Natalie Portman is better looking than just about all the “models”. She’s also a talented actress and a Harvard grad. The same, to a lesser degree, could be said of Anne Hathaway, Erin Andrews, Erin Burnett and a dozen other women on the list. In fact, I would go so far as to say that if you broke them into groups by intelligence, the smarter women would be more attractive than the dumber ones — or at least less alien-looking. If you broke them up by profession, the models would be the most fake-looking (and to my eyes, the least attractive). Think of Portman on one end and Kim Kardashian on the other. No question which is smarter and which is more attractive.
(Interestingly, there is a porn star on the list — Sasha Grey. But Grey is an atypical porn star — slender but not anorexic, unaltered surgically and rumored to be intelligent. She certainly held her own acting in Steven Soderbergh’s latest mainstream film. More from Beradinelli here.)
I don’t think you’ll find a more perfect series of links to show why I left the “Right”, even though my political philosophy was and remains staunchly conservative/libertarian. All five deal with false memes — lies — that the Right is using to promote an agenda of anti-intellectualism, torture and bad climate skepticism that is anathema to everything I believe in.
Sarah Palin isn’t just ignorant; she’s proud of being ignorant. Her cluelessness is seen as proof of how much of an “outsider” she is and how good she would be as the conservative leader or, God forbid, President.
But that’s just nonsense. Guys like Reagan and Goldwater were outsiders, they were not ignorant. Reagan was intensely intellectually curious. Goldwater was so forthright about issues, he got massacred in the election. Even Gingrich, when he first came about, was all about ideas. Palin is none of that. She is pure resentment against a perceived “other”.
Then you have the pants-shitting terror — or pretense thereof for political purposes — that leads people to declare terror suspects to be unpersons. No conservative should believe any human being to be an unperson, to have no rights. Rights may be restricted or conditional, but they always exist. Abducting people, imprisoning them without trial and torturing them is against everything conservatives supposedly believe in — specifically the universality of our divinely given rights and the need to restrain government. How can you possibly say you triumph the individual over the state when you embrace the greatest subjugation to which a state can subject the individual — imprisonment and torture with trial?
And finally, I can understand — I support — skepticism about hysterical environmental claims. I especially support opposition to collectivist solutions to them. But that has now morphed from Good Climate Skepticism to Bad Climate Skepticism — a mix of conspiracy mongering, anti-science, witch-hunting and quote-mining. A conservative approach would say, “Maybe AGW isn’t real. But if it is … we need to do something about it.” A conservative would do what I do every time a Right Wing blog links up to some article that “disproves” global warming — look into it and see what it actually says.
Until these things are purged from the Right Wing, I will remain outside. This is simply not what I signed on for.
My faith, according to Beliefnet?
1. Reform Judaism (100%)
2. Unitarian Universalism (93%)
3. Liberal Quakers (91%)
4. Mainline to Liberal Christian Protestants (80%)
5. Baha’i Faith (79%)
I’m Conservative Judaism, but that doesn’t show up on their quiz. Orthodox Judaism shows us #8. I’d say this was reasonably accurate.
Haunting aerial photos captured the 9/11 attack. Seeing them brought back the feelings of that awful morning. I can still remember thinking that the second tower wasn’t going to collapse because it had been hit too high.
A study claims that poor people are less well-rested than rich people and women are less well-rested than men. Now with a claim like that, you expect huge differences, right?
The percentages of those who are not well rested are 29% vs. 35% for rich against poor and 33% vs. 26% for women vs. men. Call me crazy, but these sound small. That’s one in 16 extra poor people and one in 14 women. The only group that shows anything remotely interesting in seniors, who are at 19% poorly rested. Even that’s not a HUGE difference.
The result for the poor, of course, prompts the usual wringing of hands about the poor are up worrying all night. Maybe. But the poor have higher rates of alcoholism, drug abuse, smoking and obesity — all of which negatively impact restfulness. I would suspect this is a larger factor than any mental issues.
Allow me to rewrite the analysis for Gallup:
A well-being survey shows that about a third of Americans claim they are not well-rested. There were slight upticks for the rates of being well-rested for those with higher incomes, for men, for people without children and especially for seniors.
Social scientists. I swear.
New link on the side to Lenore Skenazy’s great Free Range KIds blog. She’s the woman who let her 9-year-old ride the New York Subway and is wonderful for a sensible approach to kid safety, both against panic and for smart steps. Worth a read.
I sometimes use this space as a scratch pad for points I can mention elsewhere. WordPress’s search function is so easy that it makes it possible for me to dig up just about any post I’ve written.
Here’s one I’ll be referencing for a while: a little background on Lord Monckton, one of the chief climate “bad skeptics”.
(I’m now using “bad skeptics” in place of “denialists” to reference people who use debunked or unscientific arguments against global warming. This is as opposed to “good skeptics” like Ron Bailey, Bjorn Lonborg and Pat Michaels, who use appropriate scientific skepticism.)
He theorizes that NASA crashed its own satellite, promotes a quack cure for everything from the flu to HIV and compares Obama to Hitler.
Monckton is not just some random guy I’m picking on. He is cited constantly by “bad skeptics” as their warrior priest in opposing the onslaught of environmentalism.
In other news, I’ll link to Penn State’s evaluation of Climategate but will refrain from comment on a fellow faculty member.