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Anatomy of an Asshole: or, "Hi! I'm Jay Bybee!"

This pretty much speaks for itself. What a dick.

I Can Deal With This

Apparently...

I write like
Johathan Swift

I Write Like by Mémoires, Mac journal software. Analyze your writing!

I have to disagree, but I'm flattered.

Tah Tha Wahndaaah! Tah Tha Wahlls! Spaghatta Nadle Rahks!

Hyperbole and a Half is the awesomest.

Pfffffffff. Sweep, sweep. Cough.

There still a blog in here?

Casey Luskin: "Nazi Evolutionists Compared Me to a Holocaust Denier! WAAAH!"

Haven't spent many bits on the Discovery Institute's ferocious attack squirrel, Casey Luskin, but I'm feeling lazy today, and he's pitching softballs in a ridiculous opinion piece in the Washington Examiner, so why not?

Anyone familiar with Luskin and the Discotards has heard the scientists who teach/research evolutionary theory compared to the Nazis, to Soviet and Chinese communists, the Khmer Rouge, bathroom mildew, and anything else negative under the sun. so when one reads this:

In his new book, “The Greatest Show on Earth,” biologist Richard Dawkins brands those who doubt Charles Darwin’s ideas on evolution as “history deniers,” even stooping to compare them to “Holocaust deniers.”

One thinks this:


Casey, you are a pathetic, lying, hypocritical, empty-headed weasel. After you personally, and IDiots generally, have spent years and endless bytes claiming that ET was responsible for the Holocaust, you whine because your childish rejection of sound science is accurately likened to Holocaust deniers' rejection of documented history?

Asshat.

OMFG: and I Thought the Anti-Gay Marriage Crowd was Behind the Times

Loving v Virginia was 42 years ago. Now this.

Twitter Lands G20 Protestor in Jail, Earns Him a Raid on His Home

One of the topics de jour is a raid that occurred in Queens over the weekend involving the home of a G20 protester. The NYT reports the Elliot and Elena Madison's home was raided following his arrest Sept 24th in Pittsburgh. He and an associate were discovered to be monitoring police and EMS communications and disseminating the information on their movements to protesters. They were arrested (on what sound like shaky grounds), posted bail, and were released. Then last Saturday, the FBI descended on the Madisons' home and spent 16 hours tossing it.

What did they discover? Some goggles and gas masks, dark clothing (ooh, sinister!), leftist literature and posters, and a picture of Vladamir Lenin.

According to the New York Post, they found the following:

Assistant US Attorney Andrew Goldsmith argued that some of the items raised alarm, including a pound of liquid mercury in the house, alongside "books about poisons" and a microscope.

The feds also found metal triangles that are used to puncture tires and two boxes of ammunition.

All of this information is presented in such a way as to make Madison appear menacing. Liquid mercury! Poison! Lenin! Bulletts! OMFG a terrorist!!!!one11!

But take a moment to think about the contents of your house, and how someone might portray them in order to cast you in a negative light. In mine, they might find the following "damning" evidence:

• -4 firearms
• -ammunition
• 2 hunting knives that they could probably get away with calling "daggers" before the press.
• various chemicals, in the form of cleaning supplies, that they could contend could be used to make home-made explosives or chemical weapons. And books on chemistry
• winter hats that could be described as "masks"
• flasks and test tubes (from an old chemistry set, used for various craftsy-type stuff)
• small, sharp metal tools for everything from cleaning guns to tying trout flies to fixing watches, which could probably be spun as tire-puncturing tools or even bomb-making tools.
• a copy of The Communist Manifesto (also Mein Kampf, the Qu'ran, several Bibles, the Necronomicon, the Book of Mormon, and whatever the Hari Krishnas hand out at the airport: I forget the title)
• a book on farming techniques that could be spun as a "survivalist guide"
• a small amount of liquid mercury, gleaned from a couple of broken thermometers when I was in high school and kept as a toy.

And this is just off of the top of my head (I shudder to think what they could do with an examination of my computers: I think I had a soft copy of The Anarchist's Cookbook at one time. I'll bet forensic examiners could restore it).

Looking at what they found at Madison's home, it all looks pretty tame. Gas masks and goggles? Considering the glee with which police toss tear gas around when they encounter left-wing protesters, that doesn't surprise me at all. "Metal triangles"? They're obviously implying that these are caltrops, but who knows: they could be bits of sheet metal from a construction project (edit: they apparently were, indeed, caltrops. But those still aren't illegal to posess). A microscope? Puhleeze. The mercury could just be for amusement, as is my own; "books on poisons" is so vague as to be meaningless (they could say that of my Audubon Field Guide to Wild Mushrooms), and I think you'd find ammunition in a great many homes across this country.

Finally, a bit of a disclosure: I know Elliot Madison. He was my room-mate years ago, and he's about as menacing as Elmo from Sesame Street. At worst, he's guilty of having really dorky stuff in his house (lord knows he did back then). But the authorities and the sensationalist media want a scary story, so they present the data in such a way as to villianize an essentially harmless man.

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Edit: Madison and his lawyer were interviewed for Democracy Now.

Look Up. Really. Astronomy is Wonderful.

Been away for a while. I'm thinking I need to tone it down a bit and get a damn hobby.

Just bought this sparkly new toy. I'm going up north to spend some time enjoying the fall colors, and will hopefully put it to use.

I love Autumn. The smells, the crisp air, the leaves crunching underfoot... I think this time is the main reason I could never move down south. I like winter, but I could never live without autumn.

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and yes, I know that autumn doesn't necessarily have anything to do with astronomy: it's just that both topics tend to be on my mind this time of year.

Introducing the Revelatorium: the Time Cube guy has some competition!

Whew. Check this out.

Gene Ray better step up the crazy: Cliff Livingstone is at his heels.

August Matthew Stucky Award: Steven Anderson

This was pretty much inevitable, really. Steven Anderson, pastor of Faithful Word Baptist Church and the personal pastor of our award's namesake, recently gave a charming sermon subtly titled "Why I Hate Barak Obama". It should really have been titled "Why (faggots are evil) I (really hate fags) hate (fags: they're trying to rape me in my sleep) Barack (Sadddam Al Qaida Muslim Atheist Communist Fascist Fag-Lover) Obama (Oooh! I really feel dirty saying that name!)". It's a textbook example of paranoid uber-christian delusion. An example of his "teaching":

How are they multiplying? Do you not see that they're multiplying? Are you that blind? Have you noticed that there's more than there were last year and the year before, and the year before that? How are they multiplying? They're reproducing right? No, here's a biology lesson: they're not reproducers, they're recruiters! And you know who they're after? Your children. Remember you dropped off your kids last week? That's who they're after. You drop them off at some daycare, you drop them off at some school somewhere, you don't know where they're at. I'll tell you where they're at: they're being recruited by the sodomites. They're being molested by the sodomites... Because each sodomite recruits far more than one other sodomite because his whole life is about recruiting other sodomites, his whole life is about violating and hurting people and molesting 'em.

Sounds like sodomites are an awful lot like christian ministers.

Can We Just Stop Having These Stupid Town Hall Meetings?

I just about fell over backwards when I watched this. An Israeli man is talking to reporters about Israel's national health care system, and some vile harridan starts yelling "Heil Hitler".

This is the face we're showing the world. My God.

I'm opposed, for the most part, to nationalized health care: but at this point, I'd kind of like to see the Dems just push it through just to stick a great big thumb in the collective eye of the people at these "meetings".

Kiva Microlending is Awesome. Do it.

I can't stress it enough.

DO IT.

Take Back the Beep! Pass it on!

I hate having to wait through cell companies' canned voice mail instructions: there should be an easy, standard way to bypass them, but there isn't because those seconds we burn having to listen to the make oodles of money for the carriers. Never thought about doing anything about it, though, until I read this.

Forward it everywhere!

NY Air Force 1 Flyover - Col. Scott Turner is STILL an Idiot

Looks like it's time for me to pop out of my gopher hole: my absolute fave pilot and government official is back in the news.

So This week's Friday dump was documents concerning the dumbest thing one hopes the Obama administration will ever do.

One hopes. But it is government, after all.

How the flying-for-god-sake-jesus-h-christ-in-a-chicken-basket-FUCK does this moron still have a job?!

This is the document he signed to authorize the flight.

Here are a bunch of pretty pictures that don't show you the panicking citizens evacuating their homes and offices because they thought they were being attacked.

I haven't gone through all of the documents yet: more on this later. But Damn:

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Edit: Oh, and incidentally, why in the shiny, new, transparent, open Obama administration was it necessary for someone to file an FOIA request to get the data on this incident?

Why Must Religious Morality Always Be Negative?

Over at Paryngula, PZ takes Minnisota columnist Katherine Kersten to task for a pretty batty rant about New Atheism, or atheism, or materialism, or something. It changes. She trots out a many of the tired old gambits many on the religious right have been riding to death for years (If there's no god, how come there's altruism? How can we believe that life has value if there's no afterlife?), puts a bow on them, and sets them out there as if she came up with some fresh new line of reasoning. Our Squid Overlord fisks her better than I ever could, but a thought occurred to me as I read her article which kind of struck a chord: perhaps because I'm a recovering Catholic.

Why the growing audience for notions like these? Religion poses a serious challenge to our cherished idea of personal autonomy. Unlike our forebears, we define freedom as the right to live as we choose -- to "be ourselves" -- unconstrained by social norms or a morally grounded sense of guilt or shame.

It says a lot about the religiously devout that when they speak about morality, it is almost always about constraint and control, about shame, fear and guilt. That's a pretty sad way to live your life. They can't be moral on the grounds of love? Of concern or empathy? They can't do the right thing out of simple kindness?

Why is it that they feel incapable of behaving themselves if they're not constantly beaten over the head with accusations of fault and dire warnings of eternal torment?

So I'm apparently a "Bo"

Ben Loves Babies is not pleased with me:

Is this blog a Bo?

http://www.landoverbaptist.org/2009/january/boslaw.html

I really can't tell. Like most atheists, this blog is vulgar and low-brow, and demonstrates no critical thinking abilities whatsoever. It results to name-calling ("assholery"? Are we 12?) instead of intelligent discussion.

Ben, let me clue ya in to a thing or two.

1) This blog is not "an atheist", nor is it's author (not yet, anyway: but people like you are pushing me there).

2) There are circumstances under which name calling is entirely appropriate. Scott Roeder's crime is one such circumstance (as is any circumstance in which a Stucky is given out: you have to be a gigantic douche bag to even be considered).

3) Landover Baptist Church is a spoof. It's making fun of you, and "Bo's" law is a reference to Poe's Law (Landover's website itself is a Poe), of which you are obviously blissfully ignorant (big surprise there).

As for my blog's popularity (or lack thereof), I really couldn't care less: it's just a place for me to vent (hence it's "low, vulgar" nature)

But thanks for playing.

June 2009 Matthew Stucky Award: Scott Roeder

Well, that didn't take long.

Asshole.

Maddow and Isikoff on Obama Recalcitrance on Prosecutions of Bush Officials

I think I'll let this stand on its own: very informative. One comment I'd like to make, however: when have Beck, O'Reilly, Limbaugh, or any of that crowd been so honestly, frankly critical of anyone on the right?

OK, Science Can Stop Now: There's Nothing More to Accomplish

Now that we have achieved glow-in-the-dark monkeys.

HT: Drug Monkey