An eye-opening retrospective look at “Bush’s War” over the past 5 years:

You can even watch it online - I think it’s worth the time just to listen to it.

There is a smallish Creationist movie coming out called “Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed“, which by all accounts I can find is a thinly veiled propaganda piece that deliberately misled the scientists it interviewed, creates straw man arguments which it burns down with glee, and distorts history on a level rarely seen outside of George W. Bush’s administration.

… I guess you can see what I think of the film and it’s subject matter.

Anyway, a funny thing happened at a screening of the film last night. PZ Meyers, one of the scientists “interviewed” for the movie, was not allowed to enter the theater:

Well, I tried … but I was Expelled! It was kind of weird — I was standing in line, hadn’t even gotten to the point where I had to sign in and show ID, and a policeman pulled me out of line and told me I could not go in. I asked why, of course, and he said that a producer of the film had specifically instructed him that I was not to be allowed to attend. The officer also told me that if I tried to go in, I would be arrested. I assured him that I wasn’t going to cause any trouble.

You gotta laugh, though, because PZ was just one of a large group of scientists who were invited to the screening (including Richard Dawkins, a rather famous anti-creationist scientist) and all of these other people were able to get in just fine.

If it wasn’t a private screening I would be up-in-arms over a police officer preventing a person from entering a theater because of their beliefs. But since it is well within the law for them to dictate who attends their private gatherings I can only laugh and wonder: was it a brilliant publicity stunt, or petty and hypocritical?

Given the film producer’s history, I am assuming it was the latter.

You can read more from PZ about last night’s incident.

Can you find what’s wrong with this screen grab that Fox “News” displayed during the NV primaries:

I’m not a statistician, but two things jumped out at me immediately:

• Less than 1% of the results have been reported, but Fox has already projected a winner (note the check next to Romney).
• The actual third place candidate, Ron Paul, is only shown on the small list at the bottom. Paul has almost twice as many votes as Huckabee - why isn’t he pictured in one of the top slots?

I know all news sources have some bias in their reporting, but Fox “News” is disgraceful. When this flashed by on the screen most people probably didn’t have time to actually read the information, assuming they cared that much. Pretty pictures tell a pretty story… it’s a shame that this picture is a pretty lie.

Please, please remember this the next time you are watching a Fox “News” program: the vast majority of what they spew is heavily biased and, as is the case here, intentionally misleading.

I fear that Sherri Shephard, a co-host on The View, has once again shown that there is no limit to her own stupidity. My brain nearly exploded after seeing the following clip from yesterday’s show:

Did you hear what she said? Shepherd just attempted to assert that Christians existed in classical Greece, and that the Greeks threw them to the lions. When confronted on this point, she further claimed that “Jesus came first” (before Greeks and Romans) and stated “I don’t think anything predated Christians”.*

This wasn’t the first time Sherri has been so ridiculously inane: a few months ago she said that she wasn’t sure if the world was flat or not. I’ll give you a second to process that one. Sherri isn’t sure… if the world… is flat. Holy f*ckbuckets, Batman.

How do people like this exist, much less appear on broadcast television? Never before has this speech from Billy Madison been more relevant.

Sherri is so willfully ignorant it’s painful. I would feel sorry for her if she wasn’t so damn sure of her own infallibility.

via Huffington Post

If there is one thing that history will judge our generation on it is how we address (or don’t address) global climate change. Please, watch this video:

We only get to play this game once. Think it won’t happen? Maybe. How lucky do you feel?

On a side note, it makes me want to pull my eardrums through my nose when people say they don’t “believe” in human-caused global climate change. You can argue about the validity of the facts, you can cite studies that have found counter evidence, but for Christ sake don’t bring belief into the equation. Your personal beliefs might mean the world to you, but if they don’t hold up under the harsh sun of reality then they mean jack squat to the rest of us.

Here’s Colbert detailing how Bush is trying to be the “Alpha Dog” of climate change. To quote Bush:

By setting this goal we commit ourselves to doing something about it. By next summer we will convene a meeting of heads of state to finalize the goal.

So his “action” is to wait a year before meeting to decide what a more distant future action should be? Bush is going to go down in history as the most inept President our nation has ever seen - mark my words.

In case you haven’t heard yet, Verizon customer service representatives can’t do basic math. This one guy moved to Canada and selected a plan that was quoted to cost “0.002 cents/kilobyte”. But when the bill came he was being charged 0.002 dollars/kilobyte.

Seems like a simple problem, right? Wrong. Evidently Verizon employees and managers have no idea that “0.002 cents” is DIFFERENT than “0.002 dollars”. Here’s a short clip [40sec] from one of his phone calls to customer service:

Caller: Do you recognize that there’s a difference between 1 dollar and 1 cent?
Verizon manager: Definitely.
Caller: Do you recognize that there’s a difference between 0.5 dollar and 0.5 cent?
Verizon manager: Definitely.
Caller: Then, do you therefore recognize that there is a difference between 0.002 dollars and 0.002 cents?
Verizon manager: [pause] No.

Classic. What’s incredible is that EVERYONE he talked to didn’t understand the difference. He even walks them through all of the math at a simple 2nd grade level and still couldn’t get them to understand. You can listen to the entire 27 minute long exchange and judge for yourself - it’s a little bit scary how inept most people seem to be at math.

You can see the original post here.

It doesn’t matter if you live in New York City or Humptulips, WA - chances are your local action eyewitness late-breaking chopper doppler news station sucks. Here’s proof you’re not alone:

• The obligatory flasher - Classic example of what the local news usually captures: local people doing stupid things just to get on the news.
• Investigative piece on dangerous “leet” speak - Honestly, can anyone take these people seriously? It’s like listening to cave men who are warning us about the dangers of using fire to cook: they only grasp the very basics and thus make the false assumption that everything unfamiliar must also be incredibly dangerous.
• Snake in a car - Like all bad news stories this sounds excellent, but turns out to be an unconfirmed story with no useful information.
• British news bloopers - Why can’t we be more like the Brits?

At least local news is usually harmless. I can’t say the same about Fox “news”, which evidently supports racial profiling. Scary, scary stuff.

Until recently the conflict in Darfur has gone largely unnoticed, both here in the US and in the broader international community. The Darfur Wall is an attempt to bring more attention (and funds) to groups that are trying to help people in this region.

An estimated 400,000 people have already died. Compare this to the estimated 50,000 dead in Iraq and you begin to get a sense of just how blind our media has been to this genocide.

There are thousands of wonderful Bushisms out there. Today I present exhibit #394: February 30th. Yes, this is real: you can see the Whitehouse transcript here.

Individually these Bushisms are funny slips of the tongue, something that even the brightest individuals among us would make. But when viewed together, in such large quantities, they indicate (at least to me) a troubling lack of care/proficiency in assembling one’s thoughts in a meaningful and logical manner.

Don’t forget to vote tomorrow!

(via OneGoodMove)