Jon Stewart

... is the highlight of my day. Is that sad? Some people look forward to seeing their family, or friends, or having a drink at the pub after work. The only brightspot in the majority of my days is to sit and watch an angry little man eviscerate smaller, angrier little men with his verbal prose.

And I just realized the this man is probably much smarter than me. It sounds arrogant, but I don't see that often. He truly is a man of great vision, clarity, and elegant speech (and childish pranks and giggling, but hey, no one is perfect). I watch him wishing that Man of the Year was real, because I know that unlike Robin Williams, Jon Stewart would do that right thing and not pussy out towards the end.

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Also, I saw the new Republican slogan on there tonight. The Change You Deserve. And its true. America, being a hopeless cesspool of ignorance, relgious ignorance, and a morass of political inequality, I think that when, not if but when, the Republicans win the election, Mcainb will give you all the change you deserve. By driving America straight into the ground where it can rot in peace and stop bothering the rest of us.

Hehe

Via Bad Astronomy

15-Year-Old Defeats Science

Yep. Its true. Go see for yourself.

"I don't remember how old I was when I started getting into global warming," Kristen says. "In middle school I remember everyone was like: 'Global warming! The world is going to end!' Stuff like that ... so I never really believed in it."

Wow. She actually had us on the ropes when she was, what, 12 or 13? Impressive.

On the March afternoon I visited, there was still snow on the ground in Maine, and Kristen padded around the house wearing green furry slippers.

Ooo, sounds chilly and not warm at all! A mortal wound!

Her Web site includes charts of temperature records, El Nino indexes, isotope measurements. Skeptics loved it: A 15-year-old attacking the mainstream scientific view.

Of course the Climate-Change deniers loved it. Free Publicity without actually having to produce any credible evidence - Every Deniers wetdream! What that, she got this bit wrong? Oh well, she's onlt 15. I assure you that our models and theories are bulletproof, even if they are alternately vigoursly torn to shreds or ignored by mainstream science.

So it came as somewhat of a surprise when Chrissy piped up to say she disagreed with Kristen on climate change.

"I think it's partly because of humans," she says. Asked why she believes that she says she doesn't know. Kristen chimes in: "She just believes what everyone else is making her believe."

It's probably fair to say that most people — even those who have strong opinions about global warming — couldn't make a strong scientific argument for why they believe what they believe.

Agreed. 'Chrissy' and people like her are idiots, even if they do provide some support for the Climate Change movement. Which is why most people should keep their mouths shut about science that it takes years of education and experience to understand. Listen to the experts for once. Believe me, they know what they are talking about.

I get a serious Ben-Stein-of-Climate-Change vibe from this young women. Lets hope we don't hear of any poorly made nazi-made-global-warming shockumentaries anytime soon.

Carnival of the Godless

The New CotG is up, over at Life Before Death. No fanacy gimmicks or frills this time around, just a sampling of each article. A few stand-outs this time around, particularly Greta's.

The little blurb that Felicia used for Greta's post tweaked my brain a little.

“If there is no God and no soul, and everything we are is comprised of physical things and the relationships between physical things… then when you change those physical things, the self changes as well."

Since we are, obviously, just physical things, we don't really have free will of any kind, do we? Essentially, we are all just enormously complex chemical reactions. And chemical reactions, no matter how complex, are predictable. So, in actual fact, we, as in our 'selves' are actually just byproducts of a system seeking to 'balance the equation'. We are an intermediary on the way to universal stability, that being the future (Depressing) state where everything in the universe is a few degrees above absolute zero and there are no stars left anywhere in the sky.

The fact of the matter is, we know how the end of the equation looks, and we have a fairly good idea of the beginning. Both of those thing indicate that the middle part, the intermediary, us, are part of the calculation, and thus have an inherently predictable outcome.

Sorry about that. I just felt an inexplicable urge to type nonsense, then share it with a small number of people over the internet. Sorry.

At least I didn't also ramble about the equally scary idea that after we hit the Singularity, will the Machines be able to predict us? (Will they eventually have the capacity to know what we are going to do, based on the data that they can collect through observational data? I shudder to think! Damn, I'm doing it again...)

Blah blah blah. Picture!

:0

So frightfully true... I really, really hate my dreams.

The cake.

It's A Lie.