Shirley Ghostman: psychic talent

excellent.

Auditions;


Vs the sceptics


thanks to boingboing for the link

Explaining Sarah Palin

Peter Watts, author of the excellent Blindsight, has a lengthy post 'Understanding Sarah Palin: Or, God Is In The Wattles' on the mystery of the religious right and their current poster girl Sarah Palin. It's very entertaining and thought provoking and well worth a read. some highlights;

Here's a question for you. Why hasn't natural selection driven the religious right to extinction?

[snip]

And yet, this obnoxious coterie of retards — people openly and explicitly contemptuous of "intellectuals" and "evilutionists" and, you know, anyone who actually spends their time learning stuff — they not only refuse to die, they appear to rule the world.

[snip]

Now let's go back a ways, to a Cornell Study from 1999 called "Unskilled and Unaware of It: How Difficulties in Recognizing One's Own Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self-Assessments". It's a depressing study, with depressing findings:

• People tend to overestimate their own smarts.
• Stupid people tend to overestimate their smarts more than the truly smart do.
• Smart people tend to assume that everyone else is as smart as they are; they honestly can't understand why dumber people just don't "get it", because it doesn't occur to them that those people actually are dumb.
• Stupid people, in contrast, tend to not only regard themselves as smarter than everyone else, they tend to regard truly smart people as especially stupid. This holds true even when these people are shown empirical proof that they are less competent than those they deride.

[snip]
This study found not only that religious communes last longer than secular ones, but that even among religious communes the ones that last longest are those with the most onerous, repressive, authoritarian rules.

A good definition

US Troops in US city streets?

A worrying report by Naomi Wolfe

"If the President directed the First Brigade to arrest Congress, what could stop him?"

"Nothing. Their only recourse is to cut off funding. The Congress would be at the mercy of military leaders to go to them and ask them not to obey illegal orders."

"But these orders are now legal?'"

"Correct."

"If the President directs the First Brigade to arrest a bunch of voters, what would stop him?"

"Nothing. It would end up in courts but the action would have been taken."

"If the President directs the First Brigade to kill civilians, what would stop him?"

"Nothing."

link

Mad Dog Palin

Via Mike's Weekly Skeptic Rant comes this essay by Matt Taibbi; its long but well worth reading;

[snip]
Here's the thing about Americans. You can send their kids off by the thousands to get their balls blown off in foreign lands for no reason at all, saddle them with billions in debt year after congressional year while they spend their winters cheerfully watching game shows and football, pull the rug out from under their mortgages, and leave them living off their credit cards and their Wal-Mart salaries while you move their jobs to China and Bangalore.

And none of it matters, so long as you remember a few months before Election Day to offer them a two-bit caricature culled from some cutting-room-floor episode of Roseanne as part of your presidential ticket. And if she's a good enough likeness of a loudmouthed middle-American archetype, as Sarah Palin is, John Q. Public will drop his giant-size bag of Doritos in gratitude, wipe the Sizzlin' Picante dust from his lips and rush to the booth to vote for her. Not because it makes sense, or because it has a chance of improving his life or anyone else's, but simply because it appeals to the low-humming narcissism that substitutes for his personality, because the image on TV reminds him of the mean, brainless slob he sees in the mirror every morning.

Sarah Palin is a symbol of everything that is wrong with the modern United States. As a representative of our political system, she's a new low in reptilian villainy, the ultimate cynical masterwork of puppeteers like Karl Rove. But more than that, she is a horrifying symbol of how little we ask for in return for the total surrender of our political power.

Not only is Sarah Palin a fraud, she's the tawdriest, most half-assed fraud imaginable, 20 floors below the lowest common denominator, a character too dumb even for daytime TV -and this country is going to eat her up, cheering her every step of the way. All because most Americans no longer have the energy to do anything but lie back and allow ourselves to be jacked off by the calculating thieves who run this grasping consumer paradise we call a nation.

[snip]

Bless'em

I can't say I'm surprises, what do you expect when you give the crooks who caused the mess free money?

Less than a week after the federal government offered an $85 billion bailout to insurance giant AIG, the company held a week-long retreat for its executives at the luxury St. Regis Resort in Monarch Beach, Calif., running up a tab of $440,000, Rep. Henry Waxman (D-Calif.) said today at the the opening of a House committee hearing about the near-failure of the insurance giant.

Showing a photograph of the resort, Waxman said the executives spent $200,000 for rooms, $150,000 for meals and $23,000 for the spa.

con't

thanks to SeeingTheForest

The self-doubting Nazis sketch

Over at Why, That's Delightful Graham Linehan has a go at a reporter over canned laughter. The central sketch being discussed is this one from Mitchell and Webb and is one of my favorites;

Pat Condell on Sharia 'law' in the west

This one was initially banned buy YouTube but thankfully that decision has been reversed.

Mark Steel on call centres

Always entertaining

If there is one aspect of modern society that sums up the relentless, tortuous contempt in which the mass of humanity is held by the thieving, sociopathic executives that rule our essential institutions, it's the call centre.

It now takes such an effort of will and determination to begin the four-hour task of contacting, for example, the gas board, that no matter how serious your problem, you try to put it off forever. So, even if your house explodes, you are likely to hover over the phone for a minute, then think, "Oh sod it, I'll just live in the rubble for a few days.

link

Say's it all really

The right's two-pronged religion of rage and self-pity

The Right in this country -- meaning the faction that followed George Bush for the last eight years -- long ago ceased being a movement of political ideas and is driven by two, and only two, extreme emotions: (1) intense, aggressive rage towards their revolving door of enemies, and (2) bottomless self-pity over how unfairly they're being treated. As their imminent defeat looks increasingly likely (potentially on a humiliating scale), these two impulses are in maximum overdrive, feeding off one another in endless self-perpetuation (the more they lose, the more victimized they feel, the more they rage against their enemies who oppress them, etc.).

The Right's rejection by the public can't possibly be due to anything they have done. It can only be due to some extremely vicious enemy that oppresses them uniquely and so very unfairly. For the moment, they're only losing because The Leftist Mainstream Media hates them and is deeply biased against them.

link

thanks to onegoodmove for the link

Kosher Phones etc

How stupid is this?
The amount of needless energy religion uses thinking up these hair brained rules _must_ contribute to global warming...

link