Climate "scientists" LOVE pretending they can have it both ways

If it's warm out, it's climate change. If it's cold out, it's climate change.
~

add this to the list of things Bush has phokked up

It's no longer cool to look stupid.

[Reagan's] advisors proved so unable to get him to read his briefing materials that some of them began conveying the information in cartoon form... In this way, as in so many others, George W. Bush followed the Reagan script. In the 2000 campaign, he famously flubbed a quiz on world leaders and talked defiantly about “Grecians” and “nucular weapons.” He said he knew he was going to win when he read a New Yorker profile in which Al Gore cited the philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty.

But if Reagan burnished the anti-intellectual brand, Bush has now wrecked it. Sometime between the catastrophe in Iraq, the catastrophe in New Orleans and the catastrophe on Wall Street, Americans decided that people who didn’t know much about government weren’t likely to run it very well.

annudder nitpicking, America-hating, smarty-pants elitist mouths off in the New York Times (of course)

Obama and the War on Brainzzz

We can’t solve our educational challenges when, according to polls, Americans are approximately as likely to believe in flying saucers* as in evolution, and when one-fifth of Americans believe that the sun orbits the Earth.

Oooooh, listen everyone, Mister Science is talking!

* Was dat a swipe at Da Elf?

speaking of shockers -- who's hating America today?

The New York Times.

What had been a disdain for liberal intellectuals slipped into a disdain for the educated class as a whole...

The Republicans have alienated whole professions. Lawyers now donate to the Democratic Party over the Republican Party at 4-to-1 rates. With doctors, it’s 2-to-1. With tech executives, it’s 5-to-1. With investment bankers, it’s 2-to-1. It took talent for Republicans to lose the banking community.

Why does Neil Steinberg hate God? Oh wait, he's... never mind

Dumb isn't the answer - Nation is at crisis stage on multitude of issues that will get worse with time and will require intelligence -- not prayer -- to solve

Something to consider while you're fluttering your hands to heaven and declaring that dumb is now chic, that dumb is the new black.

Elections, Canada Style Eh? (cont'd)

From the Chronicle of Education and Pointy-Headed Intellectualism:

On Tuesday a new ad featured a puffin pooping on Mr. Dion's shoulder. Uproar over the ad forced Mr. Harper to apologize, saying the caricature was in poor taste. The offending droppings were soon dropped from the ad, although the puffin continues to fly past Mr. Dion. But the news media had already seized on the issue as a campaign goof.

Mr. Dion went on the offensive to counter the "prejudice that an intellectual is not a human being," pointing out that while he liked to read books and enjoyed the outdoors, he wasn't a wealthy man and shared the same concerns as other Canadians, including worrying about paying the bills at the end of the month. (Nice try, Poindexter... we ain't electorating nobody who reads books... Ed.)

"The attempt by the Tories to portray Mr. Dion as elitist ignores the fact that, like Mr. Obama, he comes from modest roots," said Errol P. Mendes, a law professor at the University of Ottawa and a commentator on North American elections. "It's sad that the right wing in both countries is trying to portray well-educated people as elitist."

The portrayal of professors as elite and effete is "as offensive as it is inaccurate," said Henry Mandelbaum, executive director of the Ontario Confederation of University Faculty Associations. Polls have shown that professors are highly respected by Canadians (NERDS! Ed.) and that academics are involved in their communities in every way, he said. "The notion of attacking professors as eggheads played well with Adlai Stevenson, but we've moved on from there."

Scum-Slimes tackles the tough questions (cont'd)

Page one, above the masthead:

WHAT A SPECTACLE
ALL EYES ON SARA PALIN'S UNIQUE GLASSES

Vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin made all kinds of political statements during her convention speech, but the fashion statement she made with her glasses is what intrigued eyewear professionals.

Italee Optics of Los Angeles has increased its imports of the frames in response to Palin's appearance, a company manager said.

"We were just talking about that,'" said Judy Sulier, an optician at Pinnacle Eye Group in Bedford Township, Ohio. "I was going to go online to pull it up and see what... (zzzzzzzzz... What? Oh... sorry Ed.)

Palin, the governor of Alaska, wears customized glasses and frames from Japanese designer Kazuo Kawasaki.

The high-end eyewear -- the prices start at $600 -- are frameless and allow the customer to choose from a nearly limitless variety of lens shapes.

Shop owner Georgeann Kohn in Toledo, Ohio, said she had received "just a couple inquiries" from... What what whaaaaaa? Back up a second there...

Start at $600? More than John Edwards's haircut? More than John McCain's phokking Salvatore Ferragamo 'Pregiato' Phokking Moccasins for phokk's sake? That's hockey mom folksy? My phokking @SS.

Top story on the SS website is far more hard-hitting:
Ten fittest, least fit presidents

The Sliming of Osama in Venn Diagram Format, If You're Having Trouble Visualizing It... I Mean Obama

I wonder where the "uppity" bubble should go.

News item: McCain unsure how many houses he owns

Not an elitist like Hussein over there though.

phokking scientists think they're so phokking smart

Science Idol: The Scientific Integrity Editorial Cartoon Contest
~

things that make you go HOLY PHOKKING S#I+ WE'RE SO PHOKKED

But we should be drilling offshore.

Mass Extinction Event On the Horizon?

Of course, since it's on NPR, it's a pile of liberal elitist pooh.

I have a whole new respect for Paris Hilton

brain-dead Cub fan knows all, reveals some

Way too much time on your hands

Thank God I had to go back to work this afternoon, you guys citing PECOTA and all the other stuff have way too much time on your hands..It doesnt take a numbers genuis to tell you the Cubs always suck against a pitcher they never faced, that is mental, got a theory to figure that out ?..How many times have we seen the Cubs roll , only to take a team , a triple A team in the Pirates kick their butts ? As I have said many times before, nice to see Theriot and DeRosa sit, Sotto needs some more time off as well..
. . .
Eat your numbers. They beat the Brewers because they scored runs...

War Isn't News

"If I were to watch the news that you hear here in the United States, I would just blow my brains out because it would drive me nuts."
-- Lara Logan, chief foreign correspondent for CBS News

Why does Lara hate free markets? The media give the people what they want, and war is really depressing. (And the people are pretty stupid.)

At last, our dream of a Nation free of annoying, pointy-headed elitists is within our ham-fisted reach

America’s human capital is tested

A startling and profoundly important fact about the US economy has received surprisingly little attention. The educational quality of the country’s workers is starting to decline – not just relatively (because other countries are catching up and moving ahead) but also, for the first time, in absolute terms. Over the coming years, baby-boomers departing from the labour force will have better educational qualifications than the younger workers replacing them.

the elitist menace among us

we don't want nobody nobody sent (cont'd), or, since when is the Wall Street Journal wid da tarrists?

Mister Maverick, Meet Da Machine
By THOMAS FRANK

...True, there is a clique of professors in Hyde Park who are "alien" to working-class interests, as I know from having lived there for 15 years. Those professors are conservatives, however: members of the University of Chicago's law and economics departments who have given that institution much of its world-wide fame.

Their hostility to the working class is not to be doubted. They have dreamed up ways to get the New Deal ruled unconstitutional. They have railed against labor unions and higher minimum wages while cheering lustily for Nafta and grotesque pay inequality. At this very moment, in that diabolical neighborhood of Hyde Park, the university is setting up a lavishly funded Milton Friedman Institute in order to better worship the greatest free-market evangelist of them all. (Fittingly, it will occupy what used to be the Chicago Theological Seminary.)

But these professors get a pass when Hyde Park's "academic world" comes under fire. These are intellectuals conservatives love; indeed, if the GOP ever was the "party of ideas," as many insist, those ideas pretty much came from Hyde Park.

What the culture warriors mean is something much cruder: that the neighborhood of Hyde Park (1) harbors a lot of academic types and (2) has a very liberal political tradition. Stereotype, meet cliché: Professors plus liberalism equals "elitism."

Maybe it will work. But first our Republican friends should know something about the company they are keeping as they line up with the neighborhood's detractors.

The distinguishing characteristic of Hyde Park's political history – the feature that sets it apart from every other neighborhood in the city – is its longstanding defiance of the Chicago machine.

Over the years, the neighborhood stubbornly insisted on sending a series of independents and clean-government types to be its representatives in Congress and on the City Council. They have included alderman Leon Despres, who fought the machine for years; mayor Harold Washington, who finally beat the machine; and Sen. Paul Douglas, whose endless battles against corruption won him the appellation – yes – "maverick."

The machine hated them right back. It gerrymandered Hyde Park to dilute the neighborhood's vote; it routinely shut off Mr. Despres's microphone when he spoke in the City Council. Abner Mikva, whom Hyde Park sent to Congress in the 1970s (he is now an informal adviser to Mr. Obama), later wrote of his own introduction to the Chicago machine when he tried to volunteer in 1948:

"'Who sent you?' the committeeman said. I said, 'Nobody.' He said, 'We don't want nobody nobody sent. . . . Where are you from, anyway?' I said, 'University of Chicago.' He said, 'We don't want nobody from the University of Chicago in this organization.'"

And now, 60 years later, comes John McCain to embrace the same noble sentiment. Apparently he has seen a glimmer of promise in that stale hate and is ready to pick up where the machine left off. Some maverick.

Then again, why shouldn't he? His party embodies the motto of Chicago politics – "Where's mine?" – even better than the machine's patronage army did 50 years ago.

Wanting to be sure, I contacted the McCain campaign with an email query addressed to two officers, which unfortunately bounced back. But I also emailed Mark Salter, the candidate's right-hand man. Mr. Salter replied in under a minute, both to the others I had addressed and, considerately, to me as well: "Do not respond," he ordered.

But I will respond anyway. Here is my advice to Mr. Salter, as he travels about burnishing his boss's image as a "maverick" who is unafraid to talk to the press. If you're going to drum up some Chicago-style hate, you need to learn some authentic Chicagoese. Next time you brush off a reporter, do it right. Repeat after me: "We don't want nobody nobody sent."

on the other hand, listening to the Bush administration does cast a reasonable doubt on evolution

U.S. Experts Bemoan Nation's Loss of Stature in the World of Science

Speaking at a science summit that opens this week's first World Science Festival, the expert panel of scientists, and audience members, agreed that the United States is losing stature because of a perceived high-level disdain for science. They cited U.S. officials and others questioning scientific evidence of climate change, the reluctance to federally fund stem cell research, and some U.S. officials casting doubt on evolution as examples that have damaged America's international standing.