Pastor Rick Warren’s selection for the Inaugural Invocation makes him fair game for ridicule. From The Purpose-driven Life:
… Noah had never seen rain, because prior to the Flood, God irrigated the earth from the ground up.
Right. There’s no such thing as physics. Evaporation and condensation are just theories. Water molecules do whatever God tells them to do. Teach the controversy!
Mark Bauerlein thinks that young Americans are the dumbest generation ever, and he blames it all on the internet. Specifically, he thinks teenagers are using the internet to communicate with other teenagers, as opposed to learning something.
I suspect that every generation thinks the next generation is a bunch of idiots, and blames it on something recent. The internet, television, rock and roll, comic books… the technology changes but the story remains the same.
Phil Gramm’s recent remark:
“This is a mental recession. We may have a recession; we haven’t had one yet… We have sort of become a nation of whiners.”
is the perfect bookend to Obama’s comment:
“You go into these small towns … and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate and they have not. And it’s not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.”
And wasn’t the reaction just too perfect? A nation of whiners bitterly whining about being called a nation of whiners.
The common element is dissatisfaction, the motive force of modern civilization. Obama and McCain both want us to be dissatisfied, in different ways, dissatisfied enough to vote. The media want us to be dissatisfied enough to watch endless coverage of this, the most important election since the beginning of time.
Of course, the problems never get solved, there’s always someone pointing out the urgency of change, and every election is the most important election since the beginning of time.
T. Boone Pickens is putting together a movement… buying TV ads… building a web site… without ever actually saying what he wants. So what does T. Boone want? A little help from the taxpayer, suggests a Wall Street Journal article. Pickens has gone into the wind power business. There are lots of places to put up windmills from Texas up through North Dakota. The problem is that to sell the electricity, you need transmission lines. Big, ugly, high-voltage power lines going through somebody’s back yard.
Washington has to act, Mr. Pickens said, by tackling prickly questions like eminent domain and right-of-way across big swathes of federal land.
Or perhaps more plainly in this editorial:
The government must mandate the formation of wind and solar transmission corridors, and renew the subsidies for economic and alternative energy development in areas where the wind and sun are abundant.
“Subsidy” means moving money from the taxpayers’ pockets to Mr. Pickens’ pockets.
While we’re on the subject of T. Boone Pickens, you might be interested in Wikipedia’s article on Pickens’ involvement with the Swift Boat smear campaign in the 2004 election.
The BBC reports that “Martian soil could support life”.
“It is the type of soil you would probably have in your back yard - you know, alkaline. You might be able to grow asparagus in it really well.”
There are a number of problems with this.
First, Mars doesn’t have soil. Mars has dirt. If you don’t know the difference, ask a gardener.
Second, you don’t need soil to grow plants. You don’t even need dirt. You can grow plants hydroponically on any number of substrates.
Third, there’s no news here. We have rocks from the Moon. We even have a few Mars rocks from Antarctica. Rocks are rocks. It’s not like we thought Mars might be made out of red cheese.
The morning paper had another of those full-page ads. You know, the ones that look like newspaper articles but have “advertisement” in tiny print somewhere on the page. According to the Cool Surge website:
The Cool Surge eco-friendly air cooler is a work of engineering genius from the China coast so advanced that no windows, vents or freon are required. It is as easy to use as a baby’s vaporizer and even includes the four hour extra cooling power of the glacier ice blocks. It uses the same electricity as a 60 watt light bulb, yet it blasts out ice cooled air. The hi-efficiency motor cools the air around the unit up to ten degrees so you’ll instantly feel cool and refreshed. The 3 cooling levels and auto shut off function put all the comfort controls right at your finger tips. It’s so impressive that it even comes with a full year Money Back Guarantee.
A 60-watt ventless air conditioner? Yeah, right. It’s a fan that blows air over “glacier ice blocks” which you have to freeze in your freezer. The freezer uses all the electricity, not the fan. And since the whole system (fan + refrigerator) is ventless, it makes your house WARMER, not cooler. That is, the fan blows cool air in your face, while your refrigerator makes the kitchen warmer. On average, the house gets warmer.
The Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life finds that 21% of atheists believe in God. According to the Washington Post:
A belief in God or a higher spirit is pervasive. Even Americans who describe themselves as atheist or agnostic have a robust sense of a higher power: Twenty-one percent of those who describe themselves as atheists expressed a belief in God or a universal spirit, and more than half of those who call themselves agnostic expressed a similar conviction.
What’s really going on here? Pew is interviewing people who aren’t very smart. These are people who don’t understand the questions but answer anyway, or who label themselves without understanding what the labels mean. People who aren’t qualified to have opinions on whether it’s raining, much less the Big Questions.
Remember, their votes count just as much as yours..
Obama’s decision to renege on his promise to accept public financing seems to have triggered a number of editorials. US News & World Report calls him a “serial flip-flopper” and notes:
Change we can believe in? No, change we can count on, because as soon as he takes a position, we can count on the fact he’s going to change it in front of the next audience.
It’s official. Obama is just another weaselly politician. He may be the most talented weaselly politician in a generation, but you still can’t believe anything he says.
I thought this was a sick joke, playing on the tendency of small children to put objects in their mouths. Does the back of the box have diagrams of the Pediatric Heimlich Maneuver?
Maybe not. The Kelloggs web site lists the product.
Wonkette accuses Cindy McCain of stealing recipes, one for oatmeal butterscotch cookies in particular.
I don’t know which is more pathetic, Cindy McCain pretending to be an apron-wearing, cookie-baking homemaker, or the self-appointed Recipe Police googling everybody’s recipes to detect plagiarism.