More from Donald Trump, pathological liar.

In an interview this week, Donald Trump said “I actually got lucky because I had a very high draft number. I’ll never forget, that was an amazing period of time in my life.”

I spent a few minutes on Wikipedia and knew he was lying.

Trump left school in 1968. The draft lottery started in December 1969. The reason I knew Trump was lying was because my brother, four years younger than Trump, graduated high school in 1968 and had no plans to go to college, and he was told to show up at the draft board within weeks of graduation.

Young people won't remember this, but back then, the draft board didn't play.


So after leaving school in 1968, Donald Trump must have been in the same boat as my brother. The good folks at The Smoking Gun did a lot more digging than I did, and Trump's lie is exposed. He got several student deferments and in July 1968, he was re-classified 1-A. By October 1968, more than a year before the lottery, he is 1-Y, a medical deferment.

I'm not trashing people who got medical deferments back then. My brother Michael got one because of an allergy to penicillin.

I'm trashing Trump because he is a miserable lying scumbag. He is now and he always has been.

Of all his accomplishments, only the list of women he has had sex with stands up to scrutiny. He has bagged some fabulous babes. Everything else, his alleged success as a student or businessman or anything else, is just another pack of lies.

This guy can't help but lie. If his mouth is open, he's lying. He lies while gargling, for pity's sake.

And what's worse, this is exactly the kind of sack of shit we can't get off the stage in this ridiculous age in which we live.

A few words (and some pictures) about objective reality.

A week ago Friday, the first film version of the 1957 Ayn Rand best-selling novel Atlas Shrugged opened in 300 theaters. The movie was made for $10 million and pulled in about $1.7 million in its first weekend.

People who love Rand allegedly love objective reality, even after all the cruel things objective reality has done to them. Here are some simple statements based on math.

$10 million is a tiny budget for a film these days and this movie is Atlas Shrugged Part 1. The filmmakers rushed the film into production because their rights were about to revert to Rand's estate, so they decided to make a trilogy and shoot the first third of the book. The second and third parts are not yet in production because they don't have the cash.

300 theaters is a very limited release and there's no way to massage these numbers into a positive thing. Sometimes a movie will get a prestige opening in Los Angeles and New York and then open wide across the country to great numbers. Clint Eastwood's Gran Torino opened in 6 theaters in December so it could be eligible for the Oscars, did land office business in those first few weeks ($45,000 per screen), then opened wide in January 2009 to be the #1 movie in America.

This will NOT be repeated by this film. Opening in 300 theaters in April is due to the movie having a weak company backing it and no stars in the cast. It averaged about $5,000 per screen, not awful per screen but definitely not special, and given there were only 300 screens, the net result is awful. The movie has to make six times its opening weekend numbers to make the initial investment back. That's not easy.

The producer postulated this week that is would be in 1,000 theaters this weekend, which is still a puny number compared to major film which open is 3,000 to 4,000 theaters. The weekend theater counts came out yesterday. Atlas Shrugged Part 1 (and probably part Omega as well) will be in 465 theaters.

Unless a right wing fatcat comes in and buys multiple boatloads of the DVD and gives them away, this turd is following a well understood pattern known as the downward spiral.

Enthusiasts of Rand are happy to tell you that Atlas Shrugged is still the #4 book on Amazon, and over the past fifty years has been second in popularity only to the Bible.

By the same argument, we can say that the New York Mets are the second best baseball team in New York over the past fifty years. Sometimes second place is a distant second place.



Cruel people on left wing websites are comparing Atlas Shrugged to another popular 20th Century book turned into a film by its zealous fans, Battlefield Earth.

This comparison is unfair. Battlefield Earth was one of the worst reviewed films of all time, but it did sell $20 million worth of tickets in 2000 in the U.S. and about $30 million worldwide. The newer movie would love to have those numbers.

Of course, Battlefield Earth was made for about $80 million, so it was a financial turkey as well as a critical disaster. So far, Atlas Shrugged has been panned by reviewers (2 good reviews out of the first 29 for 6%) and loved by audiences (85% favorable), but these are small audiences filled with cult members.

Still, making a profit on that $10 million investment is looking harder and harder, because the split on ticket sales starts in the producers' favor on opening weekend and slowly shifts in the favor of the theater owners.


Since I brought up two movies based on books revered by two 20th Century cults, let's talk about a self-financed, low budget film based on the favorite book of a First Century Mediterranean resurrection cult.

I am of course talking about Mel Gibson's Passion of the Christ.

If we are talking numbers, this is clearly one of the great success stories in movie history. 15th on the all time list, 26th when adjusted for inflation, supporters of the First Century Mediterranean resurrection cult went to the theaters in droves to support this film in 2004.

But since then... crickets.

When I googled TV listings for Passion of the Christ, I got zilch. when I wrote that nobody shows it, my dear friend and fellow nerd Abu Scooter sent me an e-mail saying it is being shown on TV by the third rate Trinity Broadcasting Network, the dessicated corpse of what Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker left behind.

This is why I love nerds. We really are deep into a cult of information. Either get it right or shut the fuck up. We are honest not because God commands us, but because when we are wrong and someone else is right, we know we lose in our hearts and no god has to tell us that.

Given that it is shown such pathetically lowly status even on cable, it is fair to say Passion of the Christ not a beloved holiday classic. It may be that now Mel Gibson is thought of as a stupid, violent middle aged racist who follows his prick around all day and beats up women when they disobey his prick, not as many of the cultists are thinking his movie was a wonderful uplifting experience, but instead seeing it for what it is, torture porn.

Because it is torture porn, it's not going to do well on commercial TV. It's hard to sell auto insurance on a new cell provider right after a scene where a guy is flayed to within an inch of his life.

Trinity Broadcasting Network shows it. Do you know the channel number of TBN on your cable box? I didn't think so.

So if you want to make a lot of money with a movie that will be attended by members of a fanatical cult, here are some handy rules of thumb.

Jesus cult, you've got a chance.

Ayn Rand cult, L. Ron Hubbard cult... save your money.

J.K. Rowling cult, J.R.R. Tolkien cult... money in the bank.

And, oh yeah. They might have made money if somebody sang and cashed in on a short-lived 21st Century cult. If Ayn Rand met Hannah Montana or L. Ron Hubbard was sung by Justin Bieber, you might be able to make a dollar on that.

Ayn Rand: Idiot. Crackpot conspiracy theorist. Hypocrite. (Or Ayn Rand: perfect hero for the 21st Century right wing.)

I was going to write about Atlas Shrugged Part 1, the low budget attempt to turn the sprawling 1957 Ayn Rand novel so beloved by shitheads around the world that it still the #4 book on Amazon to this day into a watchable film. But doing a little research, I've decided to start with a post about Ms. Rand herself, a sick and stupid dwarf who has been turned into an Olympian god by minds even smaller than her own.

In 1974, 69 year old Ms. Rand was still a two pack a day smoker. She believed the medical consensus on cigarette smoking on lung cancer was a government conspiracy. The conspiracy, of course, was no such thing, and she had a cancerous lung that needed to be removed or she would die.

This fits the crowd that idolize her today to a tee. These idiots think that all the ways humans have changed the world cannot possibly have a global effect. It's all just a conspiracy, largely because if they really believed they had to change their ways, it would be an inconvenience, and these narcissists cannot be inconvenienced by the mob, the herd of moochers and parasites who obviously never get anything right.

Except, oh yeah, carcinogens and the basic physics of carbon in the atmosphere.

Other than that, they are always wrong.

Okay, she smoked for several decades, she got lung cancer. Maybe quitting when the evidence was in would have given her a few more healthy years, maybe not. She's not alone. Sir Ronald Fisher had a much better brain than Ms. Rand, but when it came to quitting smoking, he was just another fucking pinhead addict.

But according to Evva Joan Pryor of the Rand Institute, when the bills got too big to be paid even for a woman who had a massive perennial best-seller to her name, she went on the dole and took both Social Security and Medicare.

The miserable, deservedly cancer-ridden, ugly hypocrite bitch.

Did you know that Paul Ryan, the asshole who is telling us with a straight face that Medicare has got to go, considers Ayn Rand to be his personal hero?

Yes, hypothetical question asker, I was aware of that.

By all I hold sacred, I hate these miserable cunts.

Here endeth the lesson.

The cruel, the stupid, the cruel and stupid. That's infotainment!

Let's agree on something. There are real problems in the world.

Let me put forward my view. TV isn't helping.

I don't watch Bill O'Reilly's show. I gave it a view for a few uninterrupted minutes on a YouTube clip once and I tuned in on during the Iranian protests when innocent bystander Neda Agha-Soltan was killed to see what the Fox News take was on the crisis.

From these unedited clips, my take on O'Reilly is that he's stunningly dim-witted, incompetent at his job and massively full of himself.

To make himself look better, he brings on guests like Ann Coulter, who has all his traits but perhaps a little more so. This week during a segment on the Japanese disaster, Ann came up with the remarkable statement that the modern scientific consensus is radiation is good for you.

As I said before, real problems in the world. TV isn't helping.

If I have any part of this wrong, please enlighten me.



And just to be fair and balanced, let me bring up The Ricky Gervais Show on HBO. Several years ago Gervais and his friend Steven Merchant started making podcasts that were incredibly successful, and last year they were turned into a cartoon show on HBO. The show has been picked up for a second season and when the first season DVDs appeared on Netflix, it had that sure sign of a hit, the VERY LONG WAIT label.

The show consists of Gervais and his friend Stephen Merchant mocking a not very bright man named Karl Pilkington.

It is the worst piece of shit I have seen in ages.

Gervais is allegedly on my team. He's an atheist, I'm an agnostic, yadda yadda yadda. I've laughed at some of his stuff, notably parts of The Invention Of Lying. I dislike embarrassment comedy, so I am not a fan of any version of The Office. But listening to these shows, you get to hear the real Ricky Gervais and he is a miserable excuse for a human being. Being trapped in an elevator with him would be as much torture as being locked in that same elevator with Coulter or O'Reilly.

If you get through to the end of one episode of this dreck, you are either a stronger person than I am or more sadistic. I'll let you decide which.

I had a similar experience with Kathy Griffin as an entertainer. I saw some of her performances, thought she was funny in a mean sort of way, laughed because I disliked her targets.

I then watched her reality show. She's mean to everybody.

I talked to a friend who dealt with Griffin professionally once and said it was an experience she will never repeat.

But let me repeat.

Real problems in the world. TV isn't helping.

I can give multiple examples to back up both these statements.

To quote my friend Victor Manjarrez, we don't deserve to survive as a species.

Demeaning and offensive. But not for the reasons you might think.

NBA commentator David Aldridge wrote on the CNN website that the weekend of the NBA All-Star game is known as "black Thanksgiving". Though CNN has taken it down, it has been posted in many places around the Internets, with lots of comments on websites from black folks who had never heard the phrase before.

Of course, it's demeaning and offensive, most especially since the NBA All-Star Game is often the same weekend the Daytona 500, the opening race of every NASCAR season.

Or as it is known in the former Confederate States of America...

Cracker Christmas.

Doubling down on teh stoopid.

Let's stipulate for argument's sake you say something stupid or offensive or just something you didn't want to say. If your momma raised you right, you then say something like "I was wrong" or "I'm sorry, I shouldn't have said that".

But if you were raised by wolves or you have some congenital problem that makes it impossible for you to admit error, you say something along the lines of "I meant to do that!" or "No, YOU'RE wrong!" or "Jeez, but you're sensitive and politically correct."

This is what the young people on the Internets call "doubling down".


A few weeks back, Bill O'Reilly thought he completely pwned an atheist by saying that no one could explain the tides, and therefore God must exist. Stephen Colbert did an amazing smackdown of this with the aid of astrophysicist Neil DeGrasse Tyson. In the Colbert bit, his crack staff found footage that shows O'Reilly has been using this argument for years and years.

Okay, stupidity over. Done and done!

Not so fast, my friend. Remember earlier when I spoke of people raised by wolves or congenitally incapable of admitting error? Bill O'Reilly is the grand marshal of that parade.

Now that someone explained gravity and the moon to Bill, his next inexplicable miracle no human can explain is "How did the moon get there?"

Here's the thing. We are all ignorant of something. You kind of expect this of people who got third rate educations, like Sean Hannity and Glenn Beck. But Bill O'Reilly graduated Harvard and he's still this Sofa King stupid.

Guys like this make it harder for me to type the sentence "I believe in education". It also makes me wonder exactly how many classes he slept through on his way to his high school and college diplomas.

Authority.

Bill O'Reilly had an atheist on his show last week. As you might expect, this was not to have an open and frank discussion between differing viewpoints, but instead a chance for Bill O'Reilly to have a chance to call someone he disagrees with a pinhead.

Here was Mr. O'Reilly's trump card for the existence of God.

O'REILLY: I'll tell you why [religion's] not a scam, in my opinion: tide goes in, tide goes out. Never a miscommunication. You can't explain that.

SILVERMAN: Tide goes in, tide goes out?

O'REILLY: See, the water, the tide comes in and it goes out, Mr. Silverman. It always comes in, and always goes out. You can't explain that.

And this is from a Harvard graduate. Where, if anywhere, can we even begin?


The math and physics for the explanation of the tides are about 300 years old now. It has to do with the gravitational pulls of both the moon and the sun on the earth. Newton did the math and he was really good at it, though he readily admitted he did not understand the causative agent of gravity.

Our best idea for the cause of gravity now is Einstein's idea that we live in a four dimensional universe, where time is the fourth dimension, and physical objects warp the spacetime around them. This idea is a mere 100 years old and the math of warped space is about 50 years older than that. It takes a lot more mathematical background to 'splain these things, both on the part of the speaker and the listener, but the tides, like the rainbow and the seasons and where babies come from, are among those wonders of the world about which science has a very good working knowledge.

Instead of using this incident as a chance to mock Bill O'Reilly's massive if not boundless ignorance, I would like to look at the topic of authority. O'Reilly wants to give the final authority to God, but his definition of the Almighty is honestly one of the worst possible. If God is the sum of all mysteries, then God would be numberless, possibly even infinite. The problem lies in the fact that people work hard to solve mysteries, and each new solution diminishes our view of God using this definition. It would also set the faithful against human progress, and sadly that has been the case for several millennia.

Religious authority is so much simpler than scientific authority. The ancient text is true because the ancient text vouches safe for its own infallibility. God said it, I believe it, that settles it.

Scientific authority is much cloudier. It is usually built on mathematical foundations, but it is constantly changing, sometimes by small increments, sometimes by revolutionary new ways of looking at problems. Any simplification of science, including what I write here, does a lot of hand waving over topics that are staggeringly complex, and to truly be a scientist is an initiation into a priesthood ever bit as arcane, if not more so, as any religious sect ever founded.

The sciences want change and speculation and refinement of ideas, but only such change that can carry its own weight. You could ask "What if the moon was made of green cheese?", but it's not really a question that moves things forward.

Religious authority changes as well, but sometimes in completely pointless directions. The idea of speaking in tongues, for example, comes from the story of Pentecost, where the disciples of Jesus, simple men who only spoke Hebrew or Aramaic, could somehow make themselves understood in the languages of foreigners nearby, like Egyptians and Romans and Greeks. Now, there are religious authorities who act as though any jibberish that comes out of their mouths is a sign of the Holy Spirit moving through them. This is movement, but not movement towards greater understanding.

A recent essay on the Huffington Post by a follower of Kabbalah spoke of bringing science and faith closer together, a worthwhile goal. Sadly, this benighted soul made logical arguments that assumed the measurements of longevity reported in the Old Testament as established scientific facts. Science fully accepts that some things in the past were not as they are now, but people living past 900 years old, which are the numbers bandied about for Adam and Methuselah and a few others, asks us to overturn dozens of things we know very well about the nature of biology and physics and chemistry. When it comes to longevity, we live in the true age of wonders, and the stories that say otherwise deserve the exact same credit we give to the stories of Achilles' invulnerability.


As I write this, an Arizona congresswoman lies in a hospital after a gunshot wound, victim of a madman who does not accept the authority of people to disagree with him on matters of politics. Others in the crowd, including a federal judge, are dead. The Tea Party thought their signs that read "We came unarmed... this time!" were the height of wit and cleverness, but those of us who disagreed with their goals saw something darker.

I wish we could make the stupid people shut up, but we can't. Democracy means the mean and mediocre and even murderous have the right to be heard just much as do you and I. And if only for a short time, the murderous will get the entire world for their audience.

It will not improve, because whether they are Christians or Hindus or Muslims or Jews, they think they have the true authority.

Or like the madman who made the news yesterday in Arizona, there is no authority greater than a loaded gun and a person willing to use it.

Larry King, meet Big Ugly Stick. Big Ugly Stick, Larry King.

I've been doing what I can to stay positive on this blog. I get enough negativity and snarkiness on The Other Blog, thanks very much, and since the Other Blog is about gossip magazines, the negativity and snarkiness are intrinsic. Here, I try to talk about stuff I like.

Today, I take The Big Ugly Stick out of its case, do a few stretching exercises and take some well place whacks at the corpse of the career of Larry King.

As much as I believe in education, it can't be denied that you can rise to the very top here in the United States being dumb as a post, untalented and completely unprepared. Take a look at this picture from a 2001 Inaugural party, nicked from a slideshow over at Talking Points Memo.

From left to right: Larry King, Ricky Martin, George W. Bush, Jessica Simpson and Andrew Lloyd Webber.

If I asked you for 800 pounds of no talent or brains and you didn't send me those five, I'd probably ask you to try again. In fairness, Martin and Simpson are at least easy on the eyes.

I used to think Ronald Reagan was the worst thing that happened to American education in the past 50 years, since it showed you could rise to the very top with no preparation or intellectual curiosity. Larry King might have been worse. However you want to rank those two, we have a herd of people we have let into the national conversation every bit as stupid as King and Reagan, due in no small measure to how far those two lowered the bar. Bush is clearly duller than Reagan, and he looks like Bertrand Russell compared to Sarah Palin. Who knows what flatworm we will get that will limbo under her standard of mental competence.

Without any political bias against him, I loathe him with an intensity I usually reserve for people like Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld. He cannot leave the stage a moment too soon, but in truth, the damage is already done.

Don't say nothin' bad about my baby.

Have you ever heard of drunk dialing? Of course, you have. Have you any first hand experience with drunk dialing? If you can answer in the negative, you are a more evolved human being than I am.

Here's an excellent rule of thumb with drunk dialing. If you get the answering machine, Odin, Krishna and the Li'l Baby Jesus are trying to tell you to HANG THE FUCK UP!!!!!

Cute li'l Ginny Thomas, a mere child of 53 years old, has had no one to instruct her in the proper ettiquette of drunk dialing, so she gets into the Drunk Dialing Hall of Fame on her very first try. If we are to believe a voicemail, she called Anita Hill, the woman who said her husband was a creepy scumbag and probably shouldn't get a job for life on the Supreme Court, and told Ms. Hill that it would be a good thing if she admitted she was wrong and apologized after all this time. She even told Ms. Hill that she "should pray on it."

Ginny has no idea how creepy that sounds to sane people, having so little personal contact with them. She works at The Heritage Foundation and before that for the Chamber of Commerce.

Stunningly, Ms. Hill decided that no conversation with Odin, Krishna or the Li'l Baby Jesus was necessary and that no apology would be forthcoming.

Ms. Thomas married Clarence in 1987, an innocent child who had only seen 30 summers, so she clearly did not know the ways of the world. Hon, here's a clue. Clarence had been around the block a few times before he got wind of your fat ass.

What's worse than drunk dialing? Ex-girlfriends, bitch. Here's another lesson most folks learn before they hit menopause.

Anita Hill would have stayed a dim memory from the early 90's, a trivia answer slightly better known than the name of The Tick's sidekick (Arthur), not as well known as the big hit for Bell Biv Devoe (Poison). Since Ginny had to proclaim her husband was not a creepy, porn addicted lover of the big bazooms and Anita Hill a jealous lying harpy, one of Clarence Thomas' ex-girlfriends who did NOT testify in front of the Senate thought this would be as good a time as any to tell her side of the story.

Her side: Years ago, Clarence Thomas was a creepy, porn addicted lover of the big bazooms.

Gentle readers, if you are new to the world of drunk dialing, let this be a lesson to you. As bad as it can be if the person you are trying to reach in your diminished state picks up, it's about a jillion times worse of you leave a voice message.

Glad to be of assistance with the 'splainin'.

Fires need oxygen.

There's an age old saying in the newspaper business. If it bleeds, it leads. That sensational aspect of the news hasn't changed a tick as TV and the Internet have eclipsed the print media, and in many ways, it probably shouldn't. I was watching TV on Thursday night when the scrolling bulletin announced the fire in San Bruno. It certainly counts as local news and it certainly was a big damn deal. If we aren't lucky, it could happen anywhere there are natural gas lines. I was watching the ball game on NBC and the local affiliate broke in with a picture-in-picture of the flames as seen from far away with a row of trees in the foreground completely dwarfed by the fire as it raged in the first few minutes. Newspaper reports estimated the fireball as being 1,000 feet high. That sounds about right.

There's no point in saying that thousands of people survived the fire in San Bruno. It was felt over several city blocks, but the real headline is that four people died. It was a major disaster and it was man made. It definitely counts as local news and it isn't surprising that it also made the national news.


And then there's this guy. Fred Phelps and his Westboro Baptist Church clowns have set the standard for small cults grabbing national headlines by being outrageous, so it was only a matter of time until an even smaller clown college grabbed the front pages and the 24 hour news cable outlets by the short hairs are dragged them around for a few days.

I mean, look at the sign. Is that professional work? Not even close. Were the jackals of the press dumbfounded because this guy correctly spelled "International"? Was it 9/11 that shrunk their brains to the size of their shriveled gonads? Whatever it was, the fire of this guy's ego was fueled by the oxygen of media coverage, and even when some people in the media complained about giving this guy the time of day, still the 24 hour cable news feeds couldn't look away.

Completely pathetic.


I'll admit, the Tea Party movement is news for the same "If it bleeds, it leads" logic. What's the interest in incumbents winning? No, incumbents getting knocked out in primaries is news, and the media is jumping on the story of the fight to see who will drive the bus to Crazy Town.

We have some serious deep fried idiots now running for statewide offices all around this great county of ours, but the two main candidates for Crazy Bus Driver are not on the ballot anywhere yet, Sarah Palin and Newt Gingrich. For my money, Gingrich is much scarier than Palin because she is so dim and so venal that I can't believe she'll get off the money tit to get into the real rough and tumble of years of campaign politics. Gingrich has shown he is willing to go for the long haul, and instead of being stupid, he has not one single conviction in his pudgy 67 year old body.

Palin says stupid things and doesn't even attempt to take them to a logical conclusion. Expecting her to do so would be the same as expecting a dog to learn algebra. Gingrich believes he has taken the temperature of his audience and he wants to raise it a few degrees until the fever burns people's brain cells. Does he disagree with Obama? Of course. But he goes so far as to stipulate Obama must be insane to have his world view. He looks to be attempting dog whistle politics in saying Obama's world view is that of his absent father, both Kenyan and anti-Colonial. But dog whistle is supposed to breeze past your political opponents and only be heard by the like minded. There's no whistle here. It's pure contra bassoon and everybody gets what he is trying to say.

He has also made a DVD that says we are in the final struggle with Islam. Again, a twice divorced man who converts to Catholicism shows that principles are for "the little people", but he takes the deeply stupid and unprofitable idea of a holy war and tries to turn it into a campaign centerpiece.

Obviously, he is burning, as is Sarah Palin. But a quick look at the early polls tell us that the vast majority of Republicans aren't buying it. The early leaders in the polls are Mitt Romney and Mike Huckabee, and Wriggly Newt and Twitter Twit Sarah are trailing badly. I think the Republican voters are starting to think about who can actually win an election, and if there are a few spectacular crashes by the craziest of the Tea Party crowd in November, there is some small chance the press will stop giving these bomb throwers the oxygen they need.

Anyone get a mars hoax e-mail?

I used to be an e-mail forwarder, but well... the nineties are over, right? I was wandering around the Internets today and I stumbled on this e-mail story that none of my friends who still forward e-mails sent to me. This is a good thing because I would have a hard time staying polite at something with this level of Rock F*#king Stupidity.

There is an e-mail that says Mars will look as large as the Moon some time in August. Tell your friends, tell your children and grandchildren, tattoo the dog, burn an offering and give it to the gods, big big party and you are all invited.

Of course it isn't true, not even close. The math is easy. The radius of Mars is about twice the radius of the Moon, which means if they were the same distance away from the earth, Mars would look to be four times the surface area because the area is proportional to the square of the radius. If Mars was twice as far away, then the two would look to be the same size.

Mars isn't twice as far away as the moon, it's much, much farther away even at its closest. The Moon is about a quarter million miles away. At its closest, Mars is about 60 million miles away. So even when Mars is really close, the Moon is more than 200 times closer.

If someone sends this to you, you have my permission to call bullshit on it. This e-mail has been sent every August for the past six or seven years and scientists are trying to get the word out. It's not working very well. We have these small weak levees of education trying to hold back an angry and rising sea of stupidity.

The offending image

I'm on Facebook. I don't like the website much, but I like keeping up with friends. If it were a real place, it would be like some crap mall food court that was the only place everyone could agree to hang out.

The people supporting Proposition 19, the California initiative that would de-criminalize marijuana and let cities decide if they wanted to allow stores to sell it legally and be taxed, had an ad on Facebook and it was getting all those things you want for an ad on a website, like click throughs and "like" votes and fans. But Facebook has decided that a picture of a marijuana leaf is a forbidden image and the ads have been pulled down. You can read more at this link on the Huffington Post.

I am in favor of the initiative and will do what I can to support it. Besides putting this picture on my humble blog, I will post it to Facebook and ask all my friends who have an interest in passing Prop. 19 to do the same.

Thank you for your kind attention.

Taking a break from whining to do a little chiding.

Sarah Palin tried her hand at word coinage on Twitter this weekend, asking "peaceful Muslims" to 'refudiate' the mosque that is being planned to be built two blocks away from the ruins of the World Trade Center. She then compared herself and George W. Bush (coiner of 'misunderestimate') to Shakespeare, who coined many words in English, such as turning the noun assassin into the verb assassinate.

Ah, where to begin?

First: Two blocks from the WTC is too close? What, no mosques on the entire island? Give me a break.

Second: I know it's too much to expect Americans to think about other cultures and try to compare them to our own, but this would be similar to asking "peaceful Christians" never to build a church within walking distance of where the KKK burned a cross.

Third: Shakespeare you ain't, toots. There is a fine distinction between refute (to prove incorrect) and repudiate (to refuse to accept), and just because your clumsy thumbs and the clumsy brain to which they are attached think you did something clever doesn't make it so. Take the word of people who do not have your level of stupidity that if the word is used in the future, it will be used to remind people that you are a lunkhead.

For example, Dizzy Dean decided the past tense of slide should be "slud". No one uses the word in that way except as a reminder that Dean and English grammar were not the best of friends.


But I am not against coinages when they help the language. A golfing partner of mine, it could have been my dad or one of his buddies, I'm not sure, came up with the word scalvage, a cross between scavenge and salvage. In golf, if you hit three sub-standard shots and end up on the green of a par 4 hole some 40 feet from the pin, you are in trouble. If you then sink the 40 foot putt, which is not an easy job for all you non-golfers out there, you have salvaged par.

This weekend at the British Open, Colin Montgomerie sunk a difficult 25 foot putt to make a double bogey. In the vernacular of my old foursome, Monty scalvaged double bogey, saving something he would usually rather throw away.

It's been twenty years since I first heard the word "scalvage" and I still think it's the best neologism (new word coining) to which I have ever been witness.

Politics makes me crazy sometimes.

Maybe I should amend the title. Politics makes me crazy most of the time.

I don't care for Meg Whitman, but she has a compelling story that might connect with the voters. She created and ran eBay, which is a real success story, unlike senate candidate Carly Fiorina, who ran multiple existing high tech firms right into the ground. Whitman still has to win the Republican primary next month, but she looks like the favorite to be the GOP standard bearer for governor of California. If you've heard her radio ads, you know she's against welfare. She's also in favor of getting rid of a tax on stock market speculation, though she doesn't tout that as loudly.

Yes, that's the problem with California today. We give too much money to poor people and take too much money away from rich people.

But instead of a discussion of where she stands on the issues, one of Whitman's big problems connecting with some voters on the right because she's a Satanist.

How do we know this? Here's a link to Chris Kelly's piece on the Huffington Post, but the basics are that she worked for Procter & Gamble and the Satanist rumors are still alive, though they have been debunked since I was a teen, that eBay lets people auction Satanist paraphernalia, and she is connected to Hasbro and they sell Ouija boards.

Here's another problem for Meg in 21st Century America. She's a female candidate and she's not pretty enough. Of course, she will likely have the good fortune of running against Jerry Brown, and he looks like the Cryptkeeper's scarier brother now.


Okay, that's California, where our candidates tend to be from the corporate whore wing of the Republican Party and not the "Jesus Gonna Be Here" wing. In Alabama, an underhanded attack ad against gubernatorial candidate Bradley Byrne alleges that he believes that some parts of the Bible are true and some parts (gasp!)... aren't!

Yes, Mr. Byrne is being accused of believing in natural selection and evolution. Mr. Byrne has issued a press release denying the scurrilous accusation. Heck, he's on the State Board of Education and has a long record of standing by the 100% reliability of the superstitions promulgated by desert addled, pig ignorant dirt farmers from 5,000 years ago. You can read more over at Talking Points Memo.

Seriously. The problems we face as a society are real. Arguing about Ouija boards and talking snakes with legs isn't helping.

Why does Barack Obama hate Andy and Opie?

You may have already heard this. The Obama administration wants to ban Americans from fishing.

What a totalitarian Marxist thing to do! Victoria Jackson was right all along!

Except... the actual story is no such thing.

There's a task force looking into fishing rights in the Great Lakes. Like any task force, it eventually has to publish something, so now it has suspended public comment so it can get down to writing the report. Over on ESPNOutdoors, Robert Montgomery wrote a column with this gem of a lede.

The Obama administration has ended public input for a federal strategy that could prohibit U.S. citizens from fishing some of the nation's oceans, coastal areas, Great Lakes, and even inland waters.

Soon enough, the Drudge Report picked up on this nonsense and it spread all around the right wing side of the funny little series of tubes. Did anyone on that side check the facts? Aw hellz no, as we say in Oaktown. "Fact checking" means talking to libruls, and you know how libruls lie.

'Cos their morans, don'tcha know?

The main thrust of restrictions planned are to make sure commercial fisherman don't over fish an area. The companies gripe when this happens, but it really is a necessity, because different species have been hunted out of regions, even hunted to extinction. This is just standard planning for the future and all governments, left, right and center, do this sort of stuff.

But try telling that to a torqued wingnut in full fear mode.

And these are the people now telling us that climate change isn't sound science. These people couldn't find Occam's Razor with both hands, a flashlight and a working GPS.