Sunday, August 31, 2008
Palin' in comparison
Okay, forget the pregnancy rumor - here is something that's much bigger and infinitely scarier about Sarah Palin. She is a dominionist linked to the fundamentalist terrorist group Joel's Army. Yikes! There is no way we can let this woman be an intermittent heartbeat away from the presidency. (HT: PZ)
Saturday, August 30, 2008
Mommy Dearest
The internet is buzzing with rumors that Sarah Palin's youngest, Downs syndrome child is actually her 16-year-old daughter's. See for example this page.
If it's true, I won't condemn the Palins for covering it up - but I will condemn Palin for spouting "family values" hypocrisy.
You can't make this stuff up...
John McCain announced his choice of Sarah Palin as running mate at - wait for it - the Nutter Center.
While most people are still saying, "Sarah Who?", her background is gradually being filled in - and the more we find out about her, the more she looks like a Stepford Wife who is totally out of her depth. Apart from the ethics scandals in which she's mired, Palin is the polar opposite of Hillary Clinton in every conceivable way - she's anti-choice (even when the woman's life is in danger), anti-gay, anti-environment and anti-science. The idea that she can woo Hillary supporters is laughable. And in view of McCain's advanced years and poor health, the very strong possibility that she would have to serve out most of his term is scary. As I said before, the whole stunt reeks of panic and desperation.
McCain is building himself a Bridge to Nowhere!
Friday, August 29, 2008
Hail Sarah
McCain's choice of unknown lightweight Sarah Palin as his running mate reeks of desperation and cynicism. It will backfire disastrously, if Angry Mouse is in any way representative of Hillary supporters.
Update: Now available on a T-shirt!
Meanwhile, Maha dishes the dirt on this woman who is literally in bed with Big Oil and whose previous leadership experience was as mayor of some village on the tundra. Even the Democrats have been unusually swift in pouncing on the hapless Palin.
I almost feel sorry for McCain. This is going to be a shambles!
Update: It seems Palin is also a cretinist. Stick a fork in her!
Obama knocks it out of the ballpark
I was without power last night because of a storm, so I'm only now seeing how the big speech went. All I can say is, wow. Barack Obama is the most charismatic and inspiring leader since JFK. John McCain is a lump of boiled lettuce in comparison.
My favorite part:
But I stand before you tonight because all across America something is stirring. What the nay-sayers don't understand is that this election has never been about me. It's been about you.Amen brother! Let the extreme right wallow in their mouth-foaming cult of Bush worship. Let them project onto us their propensity for mindless fawning adulation. The simple fact is that we support Obama because he gets it and the other side doesn't. The change he promises is the chance for us to be the change we want to see. He empowers while McCain does what rethugs always do - pander.
It's a total travesty that the opinion polls aren't 99 to 1 in Obama's favor. What's the matter with America? In my more paranoid moments I worry that the poll figures reported by the right-wing corporate media bear no relation to the actual results, and that we are being played for suckers, and fed a narrative that the race is razor-close so that the 'thugs can once again Diebold the election without anyone catching on. That's why we can't take a single vote for granted anywhere in the country - we must totally obliterate McCain at the ballot box.
And I just learned that McCain tried feebly to upstage Obama by announcing his running mate. It's Sarah Palin, the governor of Alaska. I don't know much about her - she seems to be an unknown lightweight who will be no match for Joe Biden - but I know all too much about the endemic sleaze and kleptocracy of Alaskan politics, the home of the Corrupt Bastards Club. The BBC reports:
Some commentators are calling Mr McCain's running mate decision the strangest since Dan Quayle, George Bush Senior's young and untested pick in 1988.In an even more desperate move, a McCain advisor unveiled his party's plan to deal with the crisis of lack of health insurance. Here's an actual quote:
It seems an audacious, perhaps slightly desperate, effort to bring youth and vigor to the Republican ticket...
The next president of the United States should sign an executive order requiring the Census Bureau to cease and desist from describing any American - even illegal aliens - as uninsured. Instead, the bureau should categorize people according to the likely source of payment should they need care. So, there you have it. Voila! Problem solved.Unreal. Bizarre. Indescribable. I look forward to McCain announcing that the mortgage crisis is over. Anyone who loses a home to foreclosure can move into one of McCain's homes, the ones he doesn't know he owns. Voila! Problem solved.
I'm sure McCain will apply similar ingenuity to other pressing problems. After all, his economic brain, Phil Gramm, has already diagnosed all of us as "whiners" who are in a "mental recession". Let's perform a lobotomy on the entire US population! Voila! Problem solved. With the added bonus that everyone will be a loyal republican from then on.
Really, folks, the election should be a formality. It should be like those communist elections where the winner gets 100% of the vote. The rethugs could not possibly be more clueless, more out to lunch, more apathetic to the tens of millions of people who are hurting because of the failed and disastrous policies of the past.
Oh, and I have to hand it to Billary. After their divisive and destructive campaign, they have redeemed themselves and gotten with the program. Hillary in particular has been incredibly classy and restored a great deal of the respect she lost in my eyes. All those bitter-end PUMAs had better wise up and become cougars, and support Barack Obama!
Onward to total victory in November!
Thursday, August 28, 2008
Tuesday, August 26, 2008
Who's your daddy?
John McCain's bizarre appearance with Hispanic gangsta rapper Daddy Yankee shows just how clueless and out to lunch he is. DY's lyrics certainly aren't family-values oriented. And of course there is the minor point that this campaign event was illegal under Arizona law.
Nedless to say there's no chance that the rabidly partisan Jan Brewer, who as Secretary of State is responsible for upholding election law in Arizona, will investigate, much less prosecute. This is after all the state where rethug senators cut off the mikes of their Democratic colleagues in the state senate, and are never held accountable for it. The whole state government is a giant joke where insane and corrupt rethugs act like little tinpot dictators.
That McCain, such a maverick!
Monday, August 25, 2008
McCain's World
In McCain's world, poor people make $4 million a year.
In McCain's world, people who pick lettuce earn $50 an hour.
McCain's World. You'll laugh! You'll cry! You'll hurl!
I wonder how long it'll last...
The Freedom From Religion Foundation is planning to put up five billboards in Phoenix with the caption "Imagine No Religion." Two of them will be pretty close to the state capitol, which will surely enrage the extreme-right neanderthals which infest that building. Already, a state senator is complaining: "The FFRF fails to acknowledge history, which recognized the strong Christian commitment of those who attended the Constitutional Convention." Sigh - the "Christian Nation" Big Lie yet again.
Another billboard will be pretty close to where I live. I'll have to take a photo before it gets defaced and/or burnt down.
Friday, August 22, 2008
Flakes and Nazis
Flake says Republican's neo-Nazi tie hurts GOP is the headline of an interesting story in today's Arizona Repulsive.
Three leading lights of the Arizona state Republican party, including Congressman Jeff Flake, are trying oust a minor functionary in Legislative District 18 because of his disturbing ties to the neo-Nazi movement. That distinct, in heavily Mormon and conservative Mesa, is the site of a bitter primary battle between hard-right nativist and bigot Russell Pearce and Flake's brother-in-law Kevin Gibbons, but "Flake said the District 18 campaign played no part in his decision to attack Ready," who has rallied with Pearce.
The odious Pearce has also in recent weeks been the target of a poison-pen pamphlet alleging that he physically attacked his wife. The man behind the attack: rethug dirty trickster Nathan Sproul, believed to be the mastermind behind the GOP's nationwide illegal campaign of voter suppression and election tampering in 2004. Even the Arizona Repulsive, which smirked and winked at the Swift-Boat attacks on John Kerry, can't stomach the latest sleaze - because it is directed at another Republican.
Considering how the GOP's approval rating is deservedly in the toilet, perhaps today's headline should read: "Neo-Nazi ties to GOP hurt neo-Nazis"?
Thursday, August 21, 2008
Powder to the people
John McCain's Denver area campaign office was evacuated today after a worker found an envelope containing white powder and a threatening letter.
Maybe the worker picked a letter out of the outgoing tray by mistake? Or perhaps someone inadvertently intercepted Junior's nose candy supply.
Home, home, home, home, home, home, home, home on the range...
At a time when record numbers of Americans are losing the one and only roof over their heads, John McCain has so many homes, he's lost count. He could he been anything other than totally out of touch and wallowing in a warped world view?
And they call Barack Obama an elitist? Now that's rich!
Tuesday, August 19, 2008
Saddleback Mountain
What a love fest between John McCain and Rick "The Republican-Driven Life" Warren the other day.
Every one of Warren's questions was a softball explicitly designed to play to McCain's talking points and allow him to preach to the choir, and pander to beat the band. "Does evil exist, and if it does, do we ignore it, do we negotiate with it, do we contain it or do we defeat it.?" Come on! This is obviously a partisan dig at Obama for saying he would talk to leaders like Ahmedinejad - who is of course evil because he doesn't share our Judeo-Christian values. Funnily enough, even with the advantage of such loaded questions, McCain had to hear them in advance so that he could prepare glib answers, while Barack Obama had to think on his feet.
It was a huge mistake for Obama to take part in this charade. First, he legitimized the relentless onward march of religious-right theocracy as a megachurch Elmer Gantry appoints himself a presidential debate moderator and frames questions that amount to an explicit religious test for public office. Secondly, Obama is wasting his time trying to woo white fundamentalists. He should know that if Jesus Christ ran as the Democratic candidate, the religious right would be Swift-boating him as "Unfit for Salvation", a cut-and-run defeatist who said "Blessed are the peacemakers", a socialist who preached class warfare by denouncing the rich and greedy, and a man who tried to destroy family values by forgiving prostitutes.
The whole thing was a farce, and I'm disappointed with Obama for his naivete for walking into the belly of the beast.
Friday, August 15, 2008
Rethug motto: Block the Vote
The battle lines are drawn. Barack Obama's campaign will work to bring hundreds of thousands of new voters, particularly poor and minority voters, into the democratic process. The rethugs will fight tooth and nail to shut them out.
Voter suppression has always been a key tactic of the rethugs, because they do better when fewer people vote. Hence the constant squawking from the extreme right about "voter fraud", which they apparently define as voting while black. They also harbor the ludicrous notion that hordes of illegal immigrants are pouring across the border, risking death crossing the desert, and paying thousands of dollars to coyotes just so that they can sneak into a polling booth and vote Democratic. In truth, more voter fraud has been committed by Ann Coulter than illegal aliens.
I'm not saying the voting rules are never broken, but it is isolated and sporadic, and very often due to confusing and conflicting laws, or innocent mistakes, like when a Green Card holder goes to the DMV for a driver's licence, and gets registered to vote without his knowledge by an over-eager motor-voter worker. I worked as a voter assistance volunteer in the 2004 election, and the major problem I saw was people coming to the wrong precinct, because the polling place they were supposed to go to had been switched on them without notice. This was in a poor, largely black area of Phoenix, and it was inspiring to see people going to so much effort to vote on their lunch break, and heartbreaking when they had to go back to work without having the chance to vote. I spent most of the day shuttling voters in my car to the correct precinct and then back to work so they wouldn't lose their jobs for returning late.
In the past few elections, hundreds of thousands of US citizens have been illegally denied their right to vote, by blatantly racist and partisan voter roll purges and other dirty tricks, often carried out by Secretaries of State who were also Bush-Cheney campaign chairmen for their states. It happened in Florida, Ohio and many other states. And I would stake my life that it will happen on a vastly greater scale this November. The real problem is not voter fraud but election fraud - tampering with the vote using black box machines controlled by Republican partisans.
We need to win this election in a landslide, by a margin so large that the rethugs will not dare to Diebold the vote, because the discrepancy with exit polls won't pass the smell test even with our emasculated, rethug-whoring media. And after the last eight nightmare years of infinite corruption, sleaze and incompetence, a landslide should be a foregone conclusion. The polls are far closer than they should be, and I worry that if we factor in the Bradley effect, McCain could take the presidency. That is not only unacceptable but unthinkable!
Every vote counts! Not one single vote should be taken for granted. It's not enough to win, we need to absolutely crush and bury the bastards! To paraphrase Fleetwood Mac, let a landslide bring them down!
Arizona Conservative Idiots of the Week: Jay Tibshraeny and Bob Blendu
Arizona Republicans are scum. Last month, Jack Harper amply demonstrated the truth of this assertion by flagrantly violating state senate rules of procedure, cutting off a Democrat's mike in mid-sentence and ignoring multiple calls of a point of order, then handing the floor to a fellow rethug crony. The purpose was to illegally force through a gay-bashing bill that the voters have already rejected.
The Democrat involved, openly gay Ken Cheuvront, filed an ethics complaint against Harper, an action which apparently drove the rethugs berserk with rage. "I won't let you speak, but how dare you accuse me of it!" The ethics committee turned the whole thing into an inquisition of Cheuvront himself, dismissing the original complaint out of hand. Zelph has the details. Zelph tells me that when it was all over, Harper smirkingly told Cheuvront: "I won't hold this against you." Translation: I'll get you, faggot, watch your back. What an asshole!
So this week's ACIOTW goes to ethics chairman Jay Tibshraeny and co-conspirator Bob Blendu, with a dishonorable mention to Jackass Harper.
Thursday, August 14, 2008
Consider the source
Mr. Swift-Boat Sewer Rat himself, the unspeakably despicable Jerome Corsi, has crawled back out from under his rock to launch the latest rethug sleaze attack on Barack Obama. The book has already been propelled to the best-selling spot by dint of bulk purchases and massive hyping by the extreme-right noise machine.
Who is Corsi? A racist, a known liar and a crackpot. This is something to keep in mind when you massive piles of the book at your local bookstore.
It's encouraging to see that Obama's campaign is fighting back, instead of naively imagining that they could appear presidential by not dignifying it with a response, like John Kerry tried in 2004. The reality is that the rethugs always fight dirty, always take the low road, always fling smears and lies because they have nothing positive to run on and are on the wrong side of every issue. We needn't stoop to their gutter level, but we must hit back - hard - and call their bullshit when we see it!
She's baaaaaack...
Oh gawd - why won't that bloody woman go away?
At best, this is pure pettiness and attention craving on Hillary Clinton's part, seeking to tarnish Barack Obama's well deserved victory. At worst, this could be a trojan horse to disrupt the convention and steal the nomination. In which case, we'd better get ready for a third Bush term.
Go away, Hillary! Just go away!
Wednesday, August 13, 2008
Bad will hunting
First there was the church shooting in Tennessee by a republican who spent all day listening to extreme-right hate radio and was riled up with rage and bloodlust against all liberals. Now there's been a shooting at the Democratic Party headquarters in Arkansas. Obviously it's open season on anyone perceived as a liberal, i.e. anyone not teetering on the extreme right-hand edge of the political spectrum.
For decades, the far-right christocorporate ruling elite has been saturating the airwaves with hate speech intended to brainwash the useful idiots with berserk mouth-foaming fury against their fellow Americans, thus ensuring a continuing monopoly on power by the wealthiest 1%. Anyone who denies there is a connection between this never-ending drumbeat of hatred and violence, and the current spate of shootings, is either a liar of a fool.
Tuesday, August 12, 2008
Crime and no punishment
There will be no prosecutions of the blatantly illegal politicization of the Department of Justice by Karl Rove's sleaze machine.
The revelation that the administration forged a letter to bolster the case for war against Iraq has been greeted by barely a yawn.
Nancy Pelosi and the other cowardly, craven surrendercrats have made it clear that upholding the Constitution and the law is "off the table." This is a ghastly mistake based on a timid and cynical, but mistaken, calculation of political self-interest. The Dems are putting their own careers ahead of the good of the country and our very system of representative government. In the process they've sat on the sidelines watching a total breakdown of that system and its replacement with absolute monarchy under a Boy King figurehead, with sinister megacorporate interests wielding all power with no transparency of accountability.
Even if Barack Obama is allowed to assume the presidency next January, without intervention by Diebold or some crazed liberal-hating "lone gunman", nothing will change if the corrupt criminal traitors of the Junior Junta get away with their crime spree. The precedent has been set that there are no consequences for criminal behavior and treason on a massive scale. Obama's administration will be paralyzed by massive rethug filibustering, obstruction and sabotage that will make their antics during the Clinton years look like a campfire rendition of Kumbaya. Five years from now, the criminals will be back in total power and will be looting the treasury and waging war in a manner even more berserk than they've done over the last eight years.
I know a lot of people are experiencing outrage fatigue after Junior's long record of jaw-dropping corruption and venality, and feel it's too late to impeach him - we just have to hang on somehow until the bastard finally drags his ass out of the White House. But I disagree because, firstly, there is a hell of a lot of damage he can still do before January, and secondly, the cancer of Bushism will keep on metastasizing in the body politic unless and until it is decisively cut out once and for all.
Friday, August 8, 2008
Housekeeping announcement
After holding out for as long as possible, I am finally climbing on board the social networking bandwagon. From now on, at the bottom of each post there will be a link that says "DiggMyFace" (assuming you are at my website rather than in an (assuming you are at my website rather than in an RSS reader or an aggregator site) reader or an aggregator site). Click on it and a window pops up to allow you to bookmark your post on your favorite social networking sites. If there's a site you want added to the list, let me know. My address is on this page.
Georgia on my mind
It looks like war, or at least large scale military violence, is breaking out in the former USSR, involving Russia, Georgia and various Muslim separatist groups. I can predict John McCain's response: he will issue a press statement calling for peace, and vowing to fly to Atlanta to meet with the leaders.
Thursday, August 7, 2008
F@$# it! We'll do it live!
Can you believe Bill O'Felafel is setting himself up as a role model for children?
You might be a Christian fundamentalist if...
(NMMNG welcomes this guest post from Greyhound1405)
You might be a Christian fundamentalist if:
- You complain when Christians aren't allowed to practice their religion in other countries. Yet you go berserk, for example, when someone tries to set up a Mosque in your neighbourhood, complaining about the Moslem call to prayer from minarets. Yet we all have to tolerate your Church Bells, Christmas Carol singing in the streets. Also door to door and on-street proselytizing, trying to convert already happy people from their current religion, or the even happier non-religious and atheists to join your Church. We don't need your self-opinionated, patronising, religious education on myths, or want to catch your diseased, archaic delusions. Why can't you leave us all alone and mind your own business? We are happy enough without listening to your drivel, your fear and guilt mongering and downright lies!
- Your face turns purple when you hear of the "atrocities" attributed to Allah. But you don't even flinch when hearing about how your "loving" God, Jehovah slaughtered all the babies of Egypt in Exodus and ordered the elimination of entire ethnic groups in Joshua including women, children, and trees! The Old Testament is liberally littered with such "(UN) Godly" barbarism. You can keep all your cruel God(s), Judaism, Christianity and Islam.
- You call Jesus Christ the "Prince of Peace", ignoring where He commands people to take up arms. Luke 22:36-37
- You don't object when current Political or Religious leaders say "God told them" to wage war against Muslim Nations. Sounds just like the "holy Wars" of the past. They too were about taking people, land and possessions, under the pretext of converting the ignorant infidel. It's about oil this time. At least your Christian Slavery is mostly outlawed now, except for you, a paying slave to your Church! Nowadays people who say that "God told them" to commit a murder or other heinous crime, are usually locked up in an insane asylum for their own protection and the public's safety too. Why then should today's Religious or Political Leaders be exempted and treated any differently?
- You call your Bible "Holy" yet it contains filth, sexism, oppression, slavery, mayhem, murder, wars and division of peoples. What's holy about that? This negative immoral message far out-weighs the so called "Good News".
- You believe that Religion in general and Christianity in particular, is the only way for people to behave morally. Kept under control by an all-seeing, vengeful God. 2,000 years of Christianity and the world is still cruel & selfish! Study your Bible and see why. Also, most atheists are moral without the need for a God. The Golden Rule of, behaving to others as we would like to be treated by them, predates both Judaism and Christianity by thousands of years.
- You vigorously deny the existence of thousands of gods claimed by religions of others, but feel outraged when someone denies the existence of your Christian God(s). Whether they be Atheist or of another "Faith" or Religion.
- You laugh at Hindu beliefs that deify humans and animals, and Greek claims about gods sleeping with women. But you have no problem believing that the Holy Spirit impregnated (read - raped a married woman) a "virgin" - Mary, who then gave birth to a man-god, who got killed, came back to life and then ascended into the sky. Which are actually all ideas copied from other, even older, religions (maybe to gain some credibility from them)! Your Christian holy days have mostly borrowed pagan dates and even make use of some of their pagan festivals and ceremonies!
- You laugh at polytheistic (many Gods) religions, but you have no problem believing in a Triune God (Father, Son and Holy Spirit [Ghost]). The first verse of Hebrew Bible says GODS (Elohim) created heaven and Earth.
- You consider a single prayer that was 'answered' during your life time as a high success rate. You consider that to be evidence that prayer works. And you think that the remaining 99.99% failure rate of unanswered prayers was simply the will of God. Mathematical Probability would provide the same odds and success/failure rate!
- You constantly challenge the work of respected scientists who established the age of the Earth as millions if not billions of years old through sound scientific, replicable practices, but have no problem believing the word of ancient Bronze Age Jewish tribesman and later clever, curious clerics, who think it's only numerous Biblical generations old. The 7 day creation of Genesis, then the fictional Adam, Moses through to Jesus, plus the 2,000 years since Christ.
- You feel insulted and "dehumanized" when scientists say that people evolved from other life forms out of necessity for survival, but you have no problem with the Biblical claim that humans were created straight from dirt.
- You believe followers of every other (or even no) religion will spend an eternity in a Hell of suffering for not accepting Jesus, but still consider your religion the most just, tolerant, loving and understanding.
- You believe you must be born again, because of the sins of Adam & Eve. Too crazy & immoral to merit response.
- You believe ancient, old debunked myths, like the Devil and Witchcraft are still relevant today and will therefore avoid Harry Potter movies amongst other things, just to be safe. The Devil is in the mind of those who dwell on it, YOU!
- You feel that while modern science, history, geology, biology, and physics have failed to convince you otherwise, some idiot rolling around on the floor speaking in "tongues" may be all the evidence you need to "prove" Christianity.
- You think it quite reasonable that a man (Noah) could horde 2 or 7 of every animal on the planet, put them all in a boat, and have enough food to keep them alive for 40 days, Let alone cleaning the muck out.
- You are arrogant and vain enough to think the Earth and its (human) inhabitants are the centre of and the only (human) life in the entire universe, despite it being statistically impossible. God is only interested in you.
- You dismiss the scientifically proven explanation of any event because you don't understand it, or it conflicts with Biblical myths, but are happy to just say "God did it" without any tangible proof.
- You think AIDS is God's punishment for homosexuality, which you see as a reversible choice instead of genetic.
- You think earthquakes, floods and other of nature's catastrophes are God's punishing a disobedient people.
- You think a warm fluffy feeling is proof of God. The self-same feeling one can get from Love, friends, beautiful music, art and Natures scenes. Of course you believe Nature is God's handiwork, so round we go in circles again.
- You deplore homosexuality, but will vigorously defend your own Pastor if and when he is caught playing with choirboys. Or he will be quietly moved on to another Parish (In the hopes he will reform)!?
- You know less than your atheist and agnostic friends do about the Bible, Christianity, and the history of your Churches - but still call yourself a Christian. If you are ever allowed to read the whole Bible with an intelligent, rational, critical eye, you will be in for a lot of shocks. Your Pastor will not be able to explain the violence and inconsistencies!
- You and your Church think anyone with an enquiring, rational, open mind has been influenced by your Devil.
- Your church is one of thousands of denominations or sects. If Christianities message is so pure and simple, why so many variable beliefs and Bibles within Christianity? So which Church and which of many Bibles holds the "Truth"?
- You think your Church is the only one practicing "true" Christianity, whilst all the others are headed for hell. Protestants hate Catholics, Baptists hate Presbyterians, and Jehovah's Witnesses hate you all. And that is before you begin hating other religions - the "deluded Muslims", Buddhists, Hindus, Taoists etc. Not to mention the Atheists!
- Your Preacher encourages you not to rationalise, think or doubt, but accept everything he or the Bible says as being true. That's called keeping you in ignorance. We would still be living in the dark ages if we had all done that. Along with the inquisition, its theft of property and its torture and murder at the stake for the millions who dared to question the priesthood. Both Roman Catholic and the Protestant Churches are equally guilty of such base cruelty.
- You share common points of view with the same types of people who thought the Earth was flat and the centre of the Universe. It took science to prove otherwise, but you must still accept the myths and fairy stories with faith, or incur the wrath of your Church and/or your enraged, jealous, possessive, merciless (Loving!?) God, Jehovah.
- You find it difficult or even impossible to accept ways of science and its conclusions only because they conflict with the Bible. A Bible full of errors and contradictions, whichever of the many "Holey" Bibles you choose to pick up?
- You believe that the Bible is the word of God or at least inspired by Him, incapable of error. It is a motley collection from different writers, written after the event, recopied over the centuries, with mistakes. Purposely doctored to fit current beliefs of the day, bits or whole books left out, bits or whole books put in. Yet even now you claim the Bible is still inerrant!? I sincerely hope it does contain mistakes, because I couldn't worship such a God as Jehovah as he is portrayed in your "Holy" Bible. Who incidentally is every bit as evil (if not more so) as your "so called" Devil.
Wednesday, August 6, 2008
McCain campaign still breaking the law?
This is very suspicious. Dozens of low-income people who have never registered to vote and are apathetic about politics are suddenly making the maximum legal donation to the McCain campaign. The money is flowing through a McCain operative and oil trader named Harry Sargeant. "Both Sargeant and the donors were vague when asked to explain how Sargeant persuaded them to give away so much money."
It doesn't take a Beltway insider to come up with the most likely explanation: Sargeant is using ordinary people to launder money from the fat cats, no doubt for a few extra dollars under the table. I'm glad the Washington Post is publicizing this, but will it be investigated officially? Of course not - every nook and cranny of the federal government has been corrupted by Karl Rove's sleaze machine. Hence the FEC's inexplicable apathy in the face of McCain's already blatant violation of campaign finance law.
I guess this is what McCain means when he claims to be a maverick - he's a criminal, plain and simple.
Day of Infamy
Sixty-three years ago today, the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima. Also on this day, seven years ago, a bombshell was dropped in the lap of George Bush Junior. It was an urgent presidential briefing entitled "Bin Laden Determined to Attack in US." Junior refused to interrupt his vacation to read it.
The rest is history...
Tuesday, August 5, 2008
"Go f@$# yourself, McCain!"
It looks like Cheney the Dick will not be attending the Republican convention next month. It is virtually unprecedented for a sitting VP to skip his party's convention, and a measure of both Cheney's negligible approval rating and the disorganization and consternation of the rethugs as they try to distance themselves from him. (Meanwhile, the Democrats are gleefully linking possible McCain VP picks to Cheney at a website called The Next Cheney.)
Maybe they're afraid Cheney will shoot someone in the face?
Monday, August 4, 2008
Outsourcing the Chinese Room
Kevin Kelly cites some ongoing research at Google as a disproof of Searle's concept of the Chinese Room. It is nothing of the sort, though it is interesting in its own right.
John Searle, a great iconoclast in the philosophy of the mind, came up with the Chinese Room concept as an argument against mechanistic, AI-influenced explanations of consciousness. The idea is to imagine that you are trapped in a room and pieces of paper come in through a slot. The paper contains what are to you meaningless squiggles, but your job is to look up the squiggles in a table and determine what the output should be, then write it on a piece of paper and hand it out another slot. Unknown to you, the squiggles are Chinese characters and you are answering questions in Chinese. You may even be participating in a Chinese-language Turing test.
Searle asked: how can the system as a whole be said to understand Chinese, if no part of it, including you, understands that language? Does the Turing test, therefore, really detect intelligence? Contrary to Kelly's understanding, Searle did not claim a Chinese Room could not be built, just that it did not correspond to our understanding of what it is to comprehend Chinese.
I've always felt that the Chinese Room was a bit of a red herring. After all, the guy inside is redundant. He could be replaced with an optical scanner to read the input and a computer to look it up in the table and print the output. The actual "understanding" of Chinese resides in the lookup table, assuming it would be feasible to construct it.
I write programs every day which encapsulate a little piece of my intelligence and knowledge about a particular problem. I don't make the mistake of thinking that they understand the problem themselves. They are just blindly following a sequence of instructions I laid down.
Can a sufficiently complex and powerful computer program ever be self-aware? We can never know for sure, but I would guess no, at least not in the sense in which humans are self-aware. I wonder if we can ever really comprehend non-human ways of being self-aware. In the animal kingdom there are many more senses in use than the five ones familiar to us. Some animals navigate by sonar, or sense electrical or magnetic fields, or see polarized light and so on. We can only imagine such senses by analogy. Perhaps in future we can alter our bodies to acquire new senses, but would they have to be translated into other senses before we can perceive them - for example, a tickling feeling in response to magnetic variations, or will we ever be able to tinker with the brain enough to create whole new senses?
Note also that intelligence need not imply self-awareness - see Peter Watts' novel Blindsight for an example of aliens that are intelligent but not self-aware. I can certainly conceive of a computer that is artificially intelligent but not self-aware. How far are we from having such a computer in reality? It seems to me that we can't have artificial intelligence without artificial stupidity, i.e. we must give the computer the freedom to make occasional mistakes - otherwise it can never innovate. Standard computer architectures are not well suited for this and can only simulate AI by brute force. Perhaps instead of thinking of the computer as a brain, we should think of it as a neuron, and the internet as the brain?
If you've read this far, thanks for indulging me in my philosophical ramblings. Be seeing you!
What he said
James F. Elliot:
The whole of McCain's argument about Iraq is "I don't give a fig about what the American people want, I'm smarter than all of them on this." For a campaign trying to make their opponent into the arrogant one, this is just about the worst angle one could take: "I'm right and the majority of Americans are idiots."
Wal-Mart to employees: "Don't vote for Obama"
This is not only disgusting but illegal.
"The meeting leader said, 'I am not telling you how to vote, but if the Democrats win, this bill will pass and you won't have a vote on whether you want a union,'" said a Wal-Mart customer-service supervisor from Missouri. "I am not a stupid person. They were telling me how to vote," she said.Wal-Mart should be investigated and punished with hefty fines. This cannot be allowed to stand!
Friday, August 1, 2008
Anthrax for the memories
The apparent suicide of Bruce E. Ivins belatedly brings the post-9/11 anthrax attacks out of the memory hole. In many ways, this was an even more terrifying incident than 9/11 itself, as it felt like terrorism could reach into every nook and cranny of the country without warning.
Strangely, ever since then the mindless chant from the Greek chorus of the extreme Bush-worshipping right has been that "there hasn't been a terrorist attack since 9/11," and this is all down to Junior's resolute leadership and what not. Never mind that the crime was never solved - people just forgot it had even occurred.
It's also strange that the targets of the attacks were Democratic congressmen and media figures - real and perceived liberals. And even stranger that the anthrax used in the attack was extremely sophisticated and probably beyond any capabilities Saddam ever had.
I've made it clear in several previous posts that I don't think 9/11 was an inside job. I wouldn't put anything past the neonazi-cons, but the conspiracy theories require hundreds of ordinary Americans, military and civilians, to participate actively and knowingly in an act of mass slaughter of their fellow citizens. I don't buy it.
On the other hand there is considerable evidence that many powerful people knew in advance that something major was going to happen on 9/11 - including Condoleezza Rice, John Ashcroft, Mossad, and whoever made a fortune on airline put options.
It's not too far fetched to suggest that the power elite learned about 9/11 some time in advance, but chose to let it happen as it would be very convenient for their warmongering agenda in Iraq. And maybe they decided to put the icing on the cake by following up with a biological weapons attack designed to panic the entire country and leave no-one feeling safe. We'll never know, now that the chief suspect is conveniently dead.
McCain: Married to the Mob
If John McCain wants to fight a negative campaign, he'd better be careful. He has many, many more skeletons in his closet than Barack Obama. Read this article about his ties to organized crime, via his pill-popping barbie doll wife.
