"More Brains!"

[elfs]

Creationists Win Big in Texas

We are now doomed. Creationists have successfully won a victory "over Darwinism," and have mandated the teaching of "weaknesses" in the theory of evolution. We've been over this before: the Discovery Institute's "weaknesses" amount to a marketing scandal: they're either deceits, deliberate misreadings, or outright distortions of the ongoing process of scientific discovery, and nothing in the current biological record indicates design or divine intervention.

Texas is one of the four biggest states in terms of textbook purchases. If they can force textbook manufacturers to water down the biological science standards or, worse, introduce their own fatuous claims into the record, our nation is all the worse for it.

Jenny McCarthy: The return of deadly diseases is necessary for my peace of mind.

Orac lovingly gives us another "The Stupid, It Burns" article in which Jenny McCarthy says that the vaccine regimen currently administered is "so unsafe" that she'd prefer children die of preventable diseases to... what?

The problem is that the evidence is clear: the vaccines she rails about do not cause autism. They aren't "unsafe." But she won't accept that.

That's why Jenny McCarthy has a body count.

Bill O'Reilly reaches for a bad analogy.

First, Vox Day reaches for a "If Hitler could get rid of unwanted populations in his country in four years, then so could George Bush!" analogy, and now Bill O'Reilly, who's always hated free speech (for anyone other than him) argues that the Internet allows the violent protestors in England to organize, and therefore it's the Internet's fault there are other crimes:

The Internet's driving this kind of stuff. Now they're coordinated by the internet, now they can talk to each other. It's like child molesters, you know? I mean, child molesters have always been around but now they got a place to go and gather and do their evil deeds.

Geez, guys, lighten up.

Newt Gingrich: "The media is always happy to cover the anarchic and violent left."

So the right-wing website Newbusters is all complaining because the press are giving the violent protests in England all this press. And he's right. We ought to be paying more attention to the violent protests on the right: the press ought to cover in detail every assault on a medical clinic that performs certain legal and necessary procedures. We ought to cover militias in detail. We ought to highlight the eliminationist rhetoric of idiots like Erick Erickson and Michelle Bachman (who recently called on her state's citizen to "arm themselves" for "when the time comes" to protest the Obama administration). But the press doesn't.

OneNews: "Sexting" is child porn. Kids ought to be branded for life for exploiting themselves!

So, this is something of an issue now. Teenage kids snapping nude photos of themselves and passing them around to other kids as an attention-getting ploy. Prosecutors around the country have decided that this perfectly understandable adolescent behavior (give hormone-riddled kids big bandwidth communication devices with cameras on them and you expect this not to happen!?) is "child pornography" and have been slapping 15 year olds with life sentences as "child sex predators" for "exploiting a minor," namely themselves. It's BS, and the ACLU has called BS on it.

And OneNewsNow is outraged that the ACLU is protecting these kids from overzealous prosecutions. There needs to be sanity in all of this, but ONN is not providing it.

Michelle Bachmann and Glenn Beck fight to keep the dollar as US Currency.

China, Russia, and a few other nations have floated the idea of creating an international reserve currency. Now, as I understand it, this would be more or less an accounting ploy using the IMF as the chief accountant, and the reserve would be backed by other hard assets, including national currencies, commodities, and gold. It looks to me like another layer of abstraction to give the wizards on various Wall Street clones around the world some more alchemical lead to play with, and it'll likely blow up the lab again.

Michelle Bachmann read about this plan, freaked out, and has gone on the Glenn Beck show to discuss her proposed constitutional amendment, with 31 co-signatories now (all Republicans, of course) that would mandate that the U.S. dollar remain the national currency of the U.S.

The woman is an absolute lunatic. There's no chance of the dollar not being the US currency. The reserve currency being discussed isn't even a national currency: it's a bookkeeping trick. But somehow, the bizarro-right will portray this, as they've tried to portray the non-existent push for a "new fairness doctrine," as something for people to be aware of, and then be afraid of, as a means of the current administration pushing us further and further towards one-world government.

Was the supposed "responsible Right" this unhinged before the Internet?

Why, oh, why can't we have a better press corp?

Comments

I call DIBS!!!

[pandakahn.livejournal.com]

Oh My God!

If no one else has claimed this can I?

I am going to call it PK's Law, or Panda's Rule of Negative Reflective Connection:

In any argument, if forms of communication have been used (such as the internet) by a group that is being demonized or portrayed in a negative manner, the person in opposition will state "pedophiles use that form of communication to plan and organize their illegal/immoral activities!" and imply that the group being demonized and/or portrayed in a negative manner is in some way the same as pedophiles.

I know, O'Reilly uses it a lot, but I am pretty sure he did not claim it, and I don't think any one else has, so....

Wow, my life could be complete. In the not to distant future people could be invoking my name and my law in the same manner they invoke Godwin's law and Nazi...

Mom would be so proud.


MPK

ps.

this is SOOO not tongue in cheek. I have dreamed of having one of the internet laws named after me since I ran across Godwin's Law some years ago.

[kengr]

Alas, due to the way the laws are written, sexting *is* child pornography. It involves making and distributing nude pics of folks under 18.

And that's all it takes under the law.

[(Anonymous)]

I'm no expert, but I don't think that's all it takes. Context matters; the 1977 Superman movie has a short shot of a frontally-naked toddler Clark Kent. American Beauty has a topless Thora Birch, who was 16 or 17 when the movie was filmed. Not to mention any number of documentaries I've seen that have naked kids in them, but are chock full of Socially Redeeming Value. Nudity does not equal pornography.

Hell, my own parents have pictures of me on Christmas morning when I was three, when I wanted to go around the house wearing nothing but my new toy fire helmet with a siren and light on top.

Number 127

[kengr]

Sorry, but anything involving sexual contact (they go into lots of detail about that in the law) or "lascivious exhibition" of the "genitals or genital area" qualifies.

[(Anonymous)]

Yeah, but that's different from just "nudity." :)

Number 127

[kengr]

It's wide open and anything that qualifies as "sexting" is virtually certain to qualify as something under the kiddie porn laws.

And with the way so many people over-react, simple nudity with genitals *visible* is enough to get you into a "must prove you are innocent" situation if the wrong person sees the pic.

Remember, they *have* been arresting people for innocent baby pics since at least the mid-80s. Most don't get convicted, but like an accusation of child abuse, it ruins their lives anyway.

[doodlesthegreat.livejournal.com]

I agree that Beck & Bachmann need to get on lithium pronto, but I've also noticed that the currency exchanges like Fourex are starting to push their products on the business channels. I'm calling it now: The next big bubble will be currency speculation.