Whiskey Fire

Do Not Look under the Powdered Wig to Find the Slavery

The best thing about being a Progressive, of course, is being Totally in Charge of Everything. Remember how we took over the media and education? Good times. And our March of Triumph continues!

While alarm bells are loudly ringing over the Common Core, a much quieter, yet potentially devastating, coup is underway, enabling the progressives to subvert secondary education. In classic leftist fashion, the vehicle chosen to propagandize our youth into seeing America as a fundamentally racist, unworthy, and unfair society in need of “fundamental transformation” revolves around a wealthy non-profit organization that enjoys a near-monopoly on a prestige-generating market niche.

Curses, they are onto us.

The Heartland Institute alerts us to what’s going on, as the College Board Advanced Placement Examination is being turned into a vehicle to denigrate American History.

Right.

And the evils thus perpetrated?

The new Framework inculcates a consistently negative view of American culture. For example, the units on colonial America stress the development of a “rigid racial hierarchy” and a “strong belief in British racial and cultural superiority.” The Framework ignores the United States’ founding principles and their influence in inspiring the spread of democracy and galvanizing the movement to abolish slavery.

Because, you see --

Actually, I give up. That last sentence right there, well...

Can I just say, "fuck, that's a hell of a wacky way of introducing Gettysburg?"

We Have Come to Drag Days

Nate Silver's new web-site is a web-site on the Internet. Besides that, it often combines inane Buzz-feedy clickbait ("The Beatles Aren't Bigger Than Jesus (Or Even Moses) at the Movies") with regression analysis. Perhaps there is an untapped market for painstakingly statistically valid online quizzes that can tell you What Twilight Character You Are to a fare-the-well, but, you know, shoot me.

What gets me about Silver Unchained is that the thing he got famous for is something that's very simple and not hard to understand. That is, aggregate polling from many sources is more likely to be correct than outliers. And you don't need to do the math to grasp why that's so.

It's really not that big a deal and also not something that only he thought of. He just happened to be the one who got famous. This is not a dis. Good for him. In this weirdo age, anyone who manages to get empirical reality acknowledged as a data point deserves a huzzah. I am not at all joking or snarking.

But then again, jumping forward, his whole "fox/hedgehog" thing is weird, in that he seems to believe that nobody has heard of it before, but then, well, everyone... has? 

The obvious hedgehog here is Silver, in love with statistics, who pens an entire manifesto about the flaws of mainstream journalism that doesn't even rise to the analytical level of vulgar materialism.

Apart from providing a better guide than you'd expect from your average bookie, Silver's site is shite.

One Obvious Way to Prove Conservatives Are Idiots

John Hawkins of Townhall and Right Wing News is wormy, sweaty, and gross, even by the lax standards of Greater Wingnuttia. Glancing at any of his moronic listicles is the intellectual equivalent of nibbling at a Cheez Doodle stuffed with hot fresh maggots.

Ordinarily we ignore him, but this is transcendently dopey in an old-school way. It's like burping up a sausage stuffed with Kim du Toit. Title:

5 Ways America Is Creating a Generation of Wimps

YES. Bring the crazy!

It opens auspiciously:

Americans rode in wagon trains across this country, tossed the Brits’ tea in the Boston Harbor, outfought the superpower of the 18th century to get our freedom, pounded the Indians, Mexicans, and Spanish into the ground to fulfill our Manifest Destiny and then for an encore, we saved the planet in WWI, WWII, and the Cold War.

The contempt for chronology here is remarkable, though not as conspicuous as how the whole thing is a giant middle finger intended to communicate that anyone who knows anything at all about history besides AMERICA ROCKS is at least half a fag. The Indian and Mexican-smashing stuff is obvious "real racist" clickbait, and the claims about the WWs are at best puzzling; what I enjoy the most though is the phrase "in the Boston Harbor." THE Boston Harbor. Not just ANY Boston Harbor. This is work of someone completely not giving a shit.

Further shits not given:

Our pioneer-pilgrim, hard-fighting, gold-mining, wagon-training, gun-fighting ancestors were so hard, Kid Rock's American Bad Ass should have played when they walked into a room. We conquered a continent, built the Hoover Dam, went to the moon, and not only did our Olympic athletes refuse to dip our flag to Hitler during the 1936 Olympics, we made the most evil man who ever lived kill himself in fear before we could get to him.

We? My ancestors never trained wagons to do anything in particular, for openers. But I did have a great-uncle who liked to punch pistols, so I guess he was "gun-fighting." And maybe "we" did "conquer a continent," except for possibly Canada... wait, are black people even "we" Americans? Were they the reason we have to share the continent with the Canucks? Whatever could have preoccupied them in the 19th century that they didn't help us grab the whole continent? Weird!

This is all insane.

"We" didn't dip the flag because "we" thought "we" included, you know, Jews. Because "we" didn't. Also, Hitler was scared shitless by the Soviets, not us. The Hoover Dam, going to the moon? BIG GOVERNMENT, BABY.

And anyone who finds affirmation of their badassery in the music of Kid Rock is, by definition, not a badass.

The rest of the piece is similar yahoo jingo gibberish, summed up in this gem:

How did the toughest, most independent society since Sparta turn into a wuss factory full of people who've never had an adventure in their life outside of a video game?

All Hawkins knows about "Sparta" is from unwatchable but popular cinematic fascism.

And we'd all enjoy hearing about John Hawkins's "adventures." I would, certainly. (Not even a need for a joke here. Sometimes, the premise suffices.)

The point, though, is not the overwhelming idiocy, but that Hawkins is completely correct that there is a market for this batty shite. One of his commenters:

SINCE WE HAVE TRANNIES IN THE MILITARY..PUTIN is BUILDING BASES IN SOUTH AMERICA!! we can't have this in the military.(He is doing it because he isn't afraid of OBAMA, this didn't happen under Bush)
The early American revolution had this problem,,, and kicked them out, or they wouldn't have won the War for Independence

America cannot survive right-wing conservatism. Which is to say, America cannot survive. Find the stray apostrophe in Hawkins' Townhall bio: that apostrophe is like a dagger of frozen pee in Madison's eye.

God Hates Dead Trolls

The universe of trolldom has just lost a consummate master of the art: Fred Phelps. The guy trolled the fucking Supreme Court!

Acting like the biggest asshole in the country made him famous. You have to respect that.

And let's remember that his genius lay in the decision to picket military funerals. That's what put him over the top. Schmucky homophobes, you can find them anywhere. But going after dead soldiers -- brilliant.

That was a man who intimately understood the theatre of trollery. Fred Phelps, the Bard of Bigotry.

 

 

Coming into Town with the Giggling

The things you find in Townhall rummage...

The Power of the Gay Female Republican of Faith

 Well, I'm hooked! What a headline!

As an LGBT person of faith who believes in liberty and individualism, I can say that the tale that Democrats hold the key to happiness for LGBT people is hogwash; liberals want LGBT people to wave the rainbow flag but only if they tone down the red band of color that stands atop the flag.

Whut?

Oddly, many of the LGBT folks I know are, like, also liberals. We're kind of a coalition of folks with shared values? It's weird to think that the reason, well, say, gays, blacks, Jews, Latinos, tend to vote Democratic is because of some sort of Protocols of the Elders of Clinton type of shit. Everyone's smart enough to vote their own self-interests, which is, like, kind of the point of democracy...

But then.

LGBT Republicans of faith have a unique opportunity to expose the fanciful fallacy that tethers too many people to the left – that LGBT people must be Democrats and that people of faith cannot be proudly LGBT – and offer the Republican Party a chance to undermine the Democratic narrative and to connect two constituencies that will lead to GOP wins throughout the country.

Approximately nobody Over Here believes that gay people can't have religion. Dowhatchalike.

Why though are you supporting a party that says you're not allowed to marry someone you love? And is full of all kinds of unreconstructed bigots who hate you?

I'm fascinated!

Similarly, LGBT Republicans need to expose the inaccuracy of the liberal claim that the LGBT community is “overwhelmingly” Democrat. According to a Gallup poll conducted in 2012, one in four LGBT people consider themselves to be conservative or very conservative, and a deeper look into these numbers reveals that the demographic breakdown of LGBT voter preferences is similar to that of the overall population.

One in four people in an overall population self-identifying as imbeciles is actually not all that bad. You could probably get that percentage for "I'd stab out my eye with a fork because Jesus."

But... why? Why on earth would you be proud to belong to a party that explicitly would deny you the freedom to have recognized as valid your union with the person you love?

By living openly and honestly, LGBT Republicans – especially LGBT Republicans of faith – have a powerful chance to counter the left’s messaging and provide the Republican Party with an important opportunity to better position itself as the Party of individualism and inclusion, with a message that will lead to electoral victory.

Or not.

Brilliant, though!

(Whistles)

I mean, run on that in the South.

Or in, say, New York.

I encourage this strategy not at all because I enjoy the comedy of obviously disatrous political messaging. It's the merits.

Clearly.

Ripples In The Fabric Of Space-Time

Carmi's Thematic Photographic 286 is Technological. I'm not including any of my own pictures for this one because the science news is more spectacular than anything I could come up with. Here are the SPT and BICEP-2 telescopes in Antarctica:


Detection of Waves in Space Buttresses Landmark Theory of Big Bang

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. — One night late in 1979, an itinerant young physicist named Alan Guth, with a new son and a year’s appointment at Stanford, stayed up late with his notebook and equations, venturing far beyond the world of known physics.

He was trying to understand why there was no trace of some exotic particles that should have been created in the Big Bang. Instead he discovered what might have made the universe bang to begin with. A potential hitch in the presumed course of cosmic evolution could have infused space itself with a special energy that exerted a repulsive force, causing the universe to swell faster than the speed of light for a prodigiously violent instant.
...
On Monday, Dr. Guth’s starship came in. Radio astronomers reported that they had seen the beginning of the Big Bang, and that his hypothesis, known undramatically as inflation, looked right.

Reaching back across 13.8 billion years to the first sliver of cosmic time with telescopes at the South Pole, a team of astronomers led by John M. Kovac of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics detected ripples in the fabric of space-time — so-called gravitational waves — the signature of a universe being wrenched violently apart when it was roughly a trillionth of a trillionth of a trillionth of a second old. They are the long-sought smoking-gun evidence of inflation, proof, Dr. Kovac and his colleagues say, that Dr. Guth was correct.

If the above article isn't clear, I'm sure this one will straighten everybody out.


Posted by ifthethunderdontgetya™³²®© and cross-posted at my place. Mouse over pics for captions, and click them for larger versions.
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A Burp in the Street

We recently broke the news that Guinness will not be sponsoring this year's St Patick's Day NYC Parade because of the organisers' silly "no gays" policy.

I don't recall anyone ever trying to defend the No Gays in Our Parade position, as it is so obviously stupid... oh wait, hello there, Kathryn Jean Lopez.

A friend e-mailed me this morning from Savannah, Ga., where a local news station was airing St. Patrick’s Day Mass live from a local church. There is the green-cladded-ness to this day but there is also the Christian cross and the real point of the shamrock – teaching about the Trinity. The religious aspect of the day can get lost in the blarney, but this morning at St. Patrick’s Cathedral, it was the occasion of a rare Lenten “Gloria.”

These are words that have been generated. You can't deny that. These are words that exist and have been assembled, perhaps by some Higher Power.

Yep.

These other words have also been assembled by Kathryn Jean Lopez!

But one only needs to reach for a Guinness to be reminded we’re living in 2014 and this all seems a bit foreign to a secularized world where mandated tolerance is not green in its tyrannical slouch.

This is a wonderful sentence, to be cherished. Perhaps it means something.

But then we get to the crux of the biscuit:

This year, Guinness is boycotting New York’s St. Patrick’s Day parade — withdrawing its sponsorship – because, not for the first time, the parade organizers have refused to permit gay groups to march with banners. Rather than respecting the parade’s history and tradition – rooted as it is in Catholic New York culture – the parade is being denounced as “anti-LGBT.”

Point the first. It's a fucking parade. 

Point the second. Lopez is bitching about Guinness being unsympathetic to "Catholic culture"...? Gosh.

Point the third:

The St. Patrick’s Day parade isn’t looking to make political statements.

Uh, yes it is? It always has?

Challenging Official NYC Irishness is worth doing.

Being "Irish" doesn't mean "conforming to the vision of 'Irishness' put forward by the idiot fossils who run the NYC parade."

Next year I want Chris O' Dowd as Grand Marshall. Oh wait. He isn't Irish. What does he know about being Irish?

And again, point the first: it's a fucking parade.

The Shaming of the Goons

The organizers of the NYC St. Patrick's Day parade have long been assholes, so this is a Good Thing.

Guinness Beer has pulled their sponsorship for the New York City St. Patrick’s Day Parade due to the parade’s rule that members of the LGBT community cannot march openly.

“Guinness has a strong history of supporting diversity and being an advocate for equality for all. We were hopeful that the policy of exclusion would be reversed for this year’s parade. As this has not come to pass, Guinness has withdrawn its participation. We will continue to work with community leaders to ensure that future parades have an inclusionary policy,” Guinness said in a statement Sunday.

Stonewall Inn, which previously planned to stop selling Guinness because of their sponsorship confirmed Sunday they will continue to sell the beer.

I was going to keep drinking Guinness either way, full disclosure.

A List Mofo Me

I have been Officially Recognized for Excellence in Tweeting.

Huzzah.

One supposes.

Dipshits of Gor

Perhaps you have long wondered how 21st century right-wing cretins might re-imagine popular cartoons of the 1970s.

Wonder no more! Well, actually, wonder a lot...

Kyle Smith at the NY Post has an interesting article on the emasculation of men in our society:

“Free to Be . . . You and Me” was a piece of Ms. Foundation-produced feminist propaganda disguised as entertainment for children that first appeared on ABC 40 years ago this week, on March 11, 1974. It drew big ratings, leading to platinum status for an associated album, a best-selling book, and many repeat airings of the show....

The climactic close to “It’s All Right to Cry” is a montage of real people (the vast majority male) shedding tears. Lads, open the waterworks! To women of today who are wondering why men must act like little boys, this is as good a moment as any to pinpoint as the start of the epidemic.

Well, sure. This "epidemic." Take it away, InstaMissus.

This continues today with the PC trend of sports, particularly football, and men being told that only the emotions of girls are acceptable unless they themselves actually act like one and then they are mocked by other men and women for their weakness. It’s confusing and disturbing that men are so emasculated on one hand and on the other, are supposed to “act like men” when convenient for women and society.

One is grateful for the good Dr. Helen's barely rudimentary acquantance with the English language, as it allows us to charitably consider her merely a shit-for-brains clod, as opposed to an actively malignant gender-baiting wingnut welfare slurper. Ain't we sweet.

I have vague recollections of the teevee thing referenced; and indeed I suppose I was in precisely this targeted demographic for the show. I was about five or six when apparently I was "emasculated" by badly produced Rosie Grier bits.

Fortunately this was all counterbalanced later on and at the time by, well, evey other pop cultural thing.

At any rate one hopes the Gor Travel Bureau has a halfway decent copyeditor on retainer.