MaxRedline

"Homophobia" In The 1400s?

“Queens’ College, Cambridge,” two queens founded the college in the 1400s.

Then they founded a popular rock band, with a couple of other queens.

Slate: What Is Homophobia?

How about this: it's a stupid term, bandied about constantly by ignorant Leftists because they think it makes them sound intelligent.

Most people, contrary to the Lefty meme, aren't at all afraid of homosexuals. Thus, it is not possible for them to be "homophobic". It's possible that a small subset of individuals may, for whatever reason, fear homosexuals, but I've yet to encounter anyone from that category. Most people just don't give a rat's heinie about them - and it's precisely that lack of regard that gets Lefty panties in a twist. If you aren't actively approving of homosexual behavior, after all, then you must fear homosexuals. Um...no. 

"Don't care" is apparently not an option. You either support, or you fear. Baloney.

Sayonara, Hanky.

Henry Waxman 

Here's hoping he doesn't let the door hit him on the way out. California's Henry Waxman's retiring in order to spend more time examining his nostrils. Apparently, he's decided that spending forty years screwing things up in Congress is sufficient, and it's time to turn over the reins to some younger screwup.

He's got great nostrils.

Strangelove Wasn't Fiction

Although decried as communist propaganda at the time, the fact is that many of the aspects depicted in the film were uncannily accurate; Americans and others in charge of US nukes could, in fact, have initiated Mutual Assured Destruction at will.

Half a century after Kubrick’s mad general, Jack D. Ripper, launched a nuclear strike on the Soviets to defend the purity of “our precious bodily fluids” from Communist subversion, we now know that American officers did indeed have the ability to start a Third World War on their own.

And as depicted in the film, the Russians' secret "doomsday device", designed to destroy the world in the event of a sneak American attack, actually was constructed. Nobody knew it until after the fall of the Soviet Union. Kubrick was more dead-on than anybody realized.

Billing For Services Rendered

When "Industrial Music" (i.e., ear-splitting crap) band Skinny Puppy discovered that their product was being used in torture/interrogation sessions at Gitmo, their business manager billed the US government for each use of the band's material. They also named their latest album to reflect the use; they called it "Weapon". The band sucks, but their manager's brilliant.

Here We Go Again

Tax Court Judge Henry C. Breithaupt isn't exactly the sharpest tool in the shed, as he demonstrated yet again by tossing out a challenge to Porkland's so-called "arts tax" - initially passed and then subsequently transmogrified beyond all bounds of belief by Porkland City Council. Basically, the problem here is that the plaintiff has yet to have the case reviewed by a competent "judge" - not that anyone can say with certainty that any still exist in the state. After over three decades of corrupt Democrat rule, it would be surprising to find anyone with intelligence and integrity left in the state judicial system.

(D) NY Visits Leftist Clatsop County OR

Thank God for safe territory! Anyplace outside the Willy Valley or Clatsop County, and Ron Wyden would've been in enemy territory. And as an added plus, he got to see the Pacific coast, which is always kind of mysterious to those East Coast boys. It seems to have been a great visit; just feed the locals the usual line about what a "special place" it is, tell 'em he opposes any activities that might detract from its potential as an unofficial national park (anything that might produce a job, in other words), and he's home free.

The crowd of geriatric California transplants seemed thrilled with his performance in Astoria. And why wouldn't they be? They moved up here because it's cheaper to live in Clatsop County than in California, and they really don't want anything to do with job creation, because that would destroy the park-like vibe that they hope to enjoy for the remaining decade or so of their miserable lives. Ronnie gave 'em just what they wanted to hear.

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Arrows

A lot of our cherished scientific consensus owes its existence to the arrow. The arrow of temporal causality has long defined our impression of time, for example, while evolutionary thought has been dominated since its inception by the arrow of increasing complexity. And as it happens, there's an increasingly large pile of evidence indicating that the arrows underlying consensus in the various disciplines are...(ahem) wrong.

It's rather an odd state of affairs, in that the same scientists who argue for increasing complexity in evolution recognize full well that the natural state appears to be the opposite; that is, complex systems tend toward increasing entropy - not increasing organization. That should have been the first clue. But oppositional belief systems, irrational though they may be, don't die easily. Ultimately, an abundance of evidence has been required to move consensus into an uneasy realm: there is no arrow of evolutionary complexity; nature is in fact very messy. Complex systems are reinvented as needed, as are "simple systems".

And simple systems may actually be more complex than we, ourselves, are:

Amoebas are puny, stupid blobs, so scientists were surprised to learn that they contain 200 times more DNA than Einstein did. Made of just one cell, researchers assumed amoebas would be simpler than humans genetically. Plus, amoebas date back farther in time than humans, and simplicity is considered an attribute of primitive beings. It just didn’t make sense.

Unless, of course, we have it wrong; animals, it seems - and plants as well - began as complex systems. Right from the start.

“When I was younger, and we knew less, we thought that organisms gained genes over millions of years and that the earliest animals were genetically very simple,” says Bill Pearson, a computational biologist at the University of Virginia who developed some of the first techniques to compare protein sequences among organisms. “We think that less now,” he adds.

For over a century, the scientific consensus - the linear-arrow view of increasing complexity in evolution over time - was based upon observable morphological similarities. Of course, we didn't even develop germ theory until until the latter 19th century. Now we not only know about germs, but we find that many are beneficial. And we know that morphology can appear, disappear, and reappear - over and over again - in response to environmental pressures. Suddenly, it seems to make more sense to dispose of the morphological approach to classification, in favor of one based upon similarities in protein sequences. 

But does even that make any sense? After all, if morphological structures such as wings and muscles can appear, disappear, and then reappear, is there any valid reason to believe that the same would not apply to the underlying mechanisms essential to their expression? You may have always thought that you were special, and that you occupy a special niche atop the hierarchy of the organization of life. But you're not, and you probably don't.

And this ties into another popular scientific consensus: that humans are so important, so world-shatteringly amazing, that their daily activities over the past century have given them the capacity to actually alter planetary climate in some significant manner. This is the height of egocentrism, yet such unwarranted self-aggrandizement is routinely accepted as some sort of fact. Billion-dollar "environmeddlist groups" are now embedded in the fabric of our society, as evidenced by "Oregon Environmental Council" "fears" that classifying hydropower as a renewable energy source will "stifle carbon reduction efforts" in the state.

Today, we have an entirely new class of parasites whose entire lifestyle is dependent upon scaring others into believing in the incredible power of humans to remake the entire planetary biosphere. And not only do the parasites depend upon achieving success in this endeavor in order to maintain the lifestyle to which they aspire, the only logical step is to persuade these same individuals to turn over all decision making powers to the people who know best how to "Save The Planet". They get money, bling, and power - all by scaring people.

People really need to dial it down, and to begin to realize just how little is really known, and how insignificant humans are in planetary terms. We were told that we knew all about evolution - but the scientific concensus was completely wrong.

So what else didn't we know?

Well, we know that time is an arrow of linear causality; the past leads to the present, which leads to the future. Nobody can know what the future will bring, and the future cannot in any way influence either the present or the past. Right?

Yeah, about that....

“The answer to the question, ‘Could the world be such that we do have a limited amount of control over the past,’ ” Price says, “is yes.” What’s more, Price and others argue that the evidence for such control has been staring at us for more than half a century.

Price’s collaborator, theoretical physicist Ken Wharton of San José State University, argues that retrocausality is a natural way to understand a process known as frustrated spontaneous emission. An atom that normally emits light will cease emitting when its surroundings become incapable of absorbing that light. Thus one event (emission) depends on something that does or doesn’t happen in the future (absorption). “That’s one of the examples of a particle probing the future and seeing what’s there, and then making a decision based on it, and just not decaying,” Wharton says. “It’s hard to understand in a causal model.”

So to sum it all up, it's been recently discovered that the scientific consensus on evolution was wrong, and has been wrong for well over a century. Even the longer-term consensus regarding the "arrow of time" doesn't stand up to scrutiny under certain conditions, so it's likely in need of refinement.

Yet you are supposed to believe that a scientific consensus has been established over the past two decades in regard to planetary climate, that the consensus is that humans are so important that they can significantly impact planetary climate (and quickly), and that it is therefore imperative that you submit to directives issued by people who are smarter than you, and who understand the importance to the planet of your immediate and unquestioning compliance. Because, consensus.

Please empty your wallet on the table.

It's how they make their money, why they can take those trips to the Bahamas, and how they can wangle that coveted invite to Mooch's latest party.

The "Anti-Science" Right

Barack Obama signing the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act at the White House 

Yeah, about that...the Leftists from Barky on down are all on the same page, yammering about "income inequality" and the destruction of the American Dream by greedy capitalist pigs.

Throughout his presidency, Barack Obama has stressed his commitment to data-driven decision-making, not ideology. Similarly, progressives like Krugman have stressed their scientific bona fides, as against the "anti-science" right.

As usual, they've been lying all along; they're driven not by data, but purely by ideology, as their ramming through of Obamacare demonstrates conclusively. And the same is true of their yammering about "income inequality" today. Because if they bothered to look at the data, they'd be forced to admit that "income equality" has little to do with holding down poorer Americans; it's almost entirely down to the policies that they've enacted over the past five decades or so.

What are the factors preventing poor children from getting ahead? An important new Harvard study that looks at the best community data on mobility in America – released this past weekend – suggests a cause that progressives may find discomforting, especially if they are interested in reviving the American Dream for the 21st century.

Uh-oh; here comes trouble: the top predictor for failure is...wait for it...being raised in a single-parent household. Remember when the Left was puking all over Dan Quayle for having the idiotic audacity to claim that television's "Murphy Brown"'s decision to have a kid on her own was a bad thing? Oh, the hooting and hollering went on for years!

And yet...he was right. The evidence is stronger than any supposed "proof" of Mann-made global warming: single-parent families result in dramatically lower rates of upward mobility, and it is entirely on the Left - with their policies encouraging married people to split up and their spittle directed at the Dan Quayles of the country, who dare to suggest that single-parent families aren't anything to be proud of - that has produced this unassailable demographic truth. Moreover, they're doubling down on the strategy with Obamacare, which is actually designed to save couples money if they divorce.

In fact, there are four strong predictors for failure - all of which have been enthusiastically supported by Leftists for years - before we ever get to the fifth predictor, which is by far the weakest. That, of course, would be the one thing that they're yammering about: income inequality. Yet fixing any or all of the prior indicators renders the dreaded "income inequality" issue moot.

But they don't wanna talk about that.

 

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ZT In SLC

When I was a kid, we packed our own lunches to school. Apparently, nobody knows how to do that any more.

Up to 40 kids at Uintah Elementary in Salt Lake City picked up their lunches Tuesday, then watched as the meals were taken and thrown away because of outstanding balances on their accounts — a move that shocked and angered parents.

Well alrighty then; if you're supposed to pay for your kid's school lunch, you need to keep current on the bill - or at least make arrangements. But on the other hand, it's a bit over the top to strong-arm the kids and throw away their lunches over something that's obviously not their fault; this idiocy's right up there with expelling a kid for chewing his sandwich into a shape that may (or may not) resemble a gun.

Someone (or someones) clearly need to lose employment over this; they're obviously overpaid morons. But naturally, down in the comments following the story, somebody has to make it all about Republicans. It's not that such folks want to be stupid, they just cain't hep theyselfs.

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