Nerds. Nerds EVERYWHERE...

[sinister]

Why is "not all feminists" an acceptable response but any group they attack are monolithic entities no matter how loose (or even if they are) their affiliation is?

[Mykeru]

Why is "not all feminists" an acceptable response but any group they attack are monolithic entities no matter how loose (or even if they are) their affiliation is?

IOKWTDI

(It's Okay When They Do It. A general principle that covers a lot of ground.)

[didymos]

Why is "not all feminists" an acceptable response but any group they attack are monolithic entities no matter how loose (or even if they are) their affiliation is?

Punching Up. "Patriarchy" is also acceptable.

[Za-zen]

Hmmn:

You know, if I had any programming skill at all, I would create a 1st Person shooter entitled, mysteriously, "Shooting Girls in the Head" where the object is to, as you might have guessed, shoot girls in the head. There would be zombies, Nazis, Klansmen, Nazi zombie klansmen, but you wouldn't get any points for shooting them. Instead you would navigate around and, now get this, shoot girls in the head. "Girls" being a term for these day-glo haired, lip-pierced, hipster glasses-wearing chicks. Girls, women, anything wearing pink in a stroller.

The sheer outrage would not only make it a hit, but distract the SJWs from going after a game because some random female character's tits are too big.

Kickstarter, anyone?

Look it's like this. Snarky has blown her load. She has nothing left, that's it, kaput. So she's trying to make as much hay from this last regurgitation of the same fallacies as her previous crap. But I think that's the best she's got to support her flawed presupposition.

She doesn't want to fade into obscurity, (dogs gotta bark to get fed) so she'll start spouting more absurd nonsense about gaming, such as; devs should provide conflict resolution options in games instead of requiring the player to kill, as this perpetuates male culture.

Besides it all the most longlasting effect she'll have outside of indie sjw devs who make nothing games, is having a lookalike NPC in the next GTA instalment, which refuses to die when you unload your pump action into her face, and instead runs down the street screaming "rape!"

[austin]

Chill girl in the wild.

Can't find any confirmation of her JREF status, but she is retweeting blog posts by people swearing off TAM.

She appears to have been none the wiser pre firing, which supports the execution hypothesis.

http://i.imgur.com/hyQJzQ4.jpg

Essentially we're dealing with people who's self esteem is essentially driven by the need for other people to loose their jobs and have their careers damaged to justify their victimhood mentality. Pretty low stuff.

[austin]

Damn, fail to spell check, well anyway......

Essentially we're dealing with people who's self esteem is essentially driven by the need for other people to lose their jobs and have their careers damaged to justify their victimhood mentality. Pretty low stuff.

[Za-zen]

Damn, fail to spell check, well anyway......

Essentially we're dealing with people who's self esteem is essentially driven by the need for other people to lose their jobs and have their careers damaged to justify their victimhood mentality. Pretty low stuff.

Essentially Austin.

[Mykeru]

Damn, fail to spell check, well anyway......

Essentially we're dealing with people who's self esteem is essentially driven by the need for other people to lose their jobs and have their careers damaged to justify their victimhood mentality. Pretty low stuff.

Also, they specialize in jamming the Iron Fist of Social Justice into the softest target they can find.

Despite their wonderful opening foreplay, they never really made good on fucking me over. Which makes me sad that they don't want to play anymore.

http://petzter.com/wp-content/uploads/2 ... xcIZHH.png

[austin]

Damn, fail to spell check, well anyway......

Essentially we're dealing with people who's self esteem is essentially driven by the need for other people to lose their jobs and have their careers damaged to justify their victimhood mentality. Pretty low stuff.

Essentially Austin.

Rub. Rub. Rub. Kick em' when he's down.

[sinister]

Hmmn:

You know, if I had any programming skill at all, I would create a 1st Person shooter entitled, mysteriously, "Shooting Girls in the Head" where the object is to, as you might have guessed, shoot girls in the head. There would be zombies, Nazis, Klansmen, Nazi zombie klansmen, but you wouldn't get any points for shooting them. Instead you would navigate around and, now get this, shoot girls in the head. "Girls" being a term for these day-glo haired, lip-pierced, hipster glasses-wearing chicks. Girls, women, anything wearing pink in a stroller.

The sheer outrage would not only make it a hit, but distract the SJWs from going after a game because some random female character's tits are too big.

Kickstarter, anyone?

Look it's like this. Snarky has blown her load. She has nothing left, that's it, kaput. So she's trying to make as much hay from this last regurgitation of the same fallacies as her previous crap. But I think that's the best she's got to support her flawed presupposition.

She doesn't want to fade into obscurity, (dogs gotta bark to get fed) so she'll start spouting more absurd nonsense about gaming, such as; devs should provide conflict resolution options in games instead of requiring the player to kill, as this perpetuates male culture.

Besides it all the most longlasting effect she'll have outside of indie sjw devs who make nothing games, is having a lookalike NPC in the next GTA instalment, which refuses to die when you unload your pump action into her face, and instead runs down the street screaming "rape!"

Oops, there's the mistake. Give them an inch...

[Matt Cavanaugh]

So uhm, didn't Mr. Cavanaugh say that he was having an affair with Jennifer Lawrence in his head hand?

NSFW, alleged leaked nudes of JL:

http://www.thesuperficial.com/photos/je ... e-naked-03

FTFY.

That link is dead. Does anyone have these alleged pix of The Goddess Jennifer?

[Za-zen]

So uhm, didn't Mr. Cavanaugh say that he was having an affair with Jennifer Lawrence in his head hand?

NSFW, alleged leaked nudes of JL:

http://www.thesuperficial.com/photos/je ... e-naked-03

FTFY.

That link is dead. Does anyone have these alleged pix of The Goddess Jennifer?

https://drive.google.com/folderview?id= ... sp=sharing

If you 500 it's because school is out, and you'll have to refresh

[Tony Parsehole]

So uhm, didn't Mr. Cavanaugh say that he was having an affair with Jennifer Lawrence in his head hand?

NSFW, alleged leaked nudes of JL:

http://www.thesuperficial.com/photos/je ... e-naked-03

FTFY.

That link is dead. Does anyone have these alleged pix of The Goddess Jennifer?

https://drive.google.com/folderview?id= ... sp=sharing

If you 500 it's because school is out, and you'll have to refresh

You win today's FUCKING LEGEND award.

[didymos]

You want Jennifer Lawrence nudes, fucking google it. Or go to 4-Chan.

[austin]

Another thing, hasn't PZ said multiple times that he's quit organized skepticism in over the top dramatic fashion, echoed by his followers. So why does he care about JREF?

Of course he's said multiple times that he doesn't really care what Thunderf00t says either, yet he can't help commenting about him from time to time when he wants to make a point at his expense.

Are we saying, nothing this guy ever says should be taken seriously?

[Mykeru]

Oops, there's the mistake. Give them an inch...

Leave P.Z. out of this.

[Tribble]

Um, actually, in many, many, many cases, that's exactly what you can do.

Oh yes you can. 2D4D is really good for that. So are Adam's apples and, in lots and lots of cases, general physique.

[Tribble]

Fuck em. Big tent skepticism gets smaller. Bet Radford's glad the JREF black balling efforts weren't carried out now .....


http://i.imgur.com/r7EV7Kz.jpg

Of course he's happy. Last time they had a blogging dust-up, years ago, she kicked his from here to next Tuesday.

[Za-zen]

I get the feeling we won't be hearing from Tony for a while.

[Matt Cavanaugh]

mikelf wrote:

You may be thinking of the Senate rules, where 60 vote requirement to invoke cloture and end debate. However, you will also see that the Dems never reached that level either in 2009-2011.

Just curious, mikelf -- where did you find this assertion?

Here you go. I had forgotten Specter had flipped.

Google, cute. Are you saying you believe everything you read on the internet?

1. The Right's fidelity to fact and truth is hardly exemplary.

So, two wrongs make a right?

2. Your assertion that single payer could have passed with the composition of the 111th Congress rests on the assumption that Democrats would have voted for it en toto. This ignores that the House vote for the ACA was by a narrow 219-212 majority, which included 34 Dems voting against. How many Blue Dogs do you suppose would have flipped in the House if single payer was the proposal? Perhaps you can enact the labor to find out.

I recommend Anthony Badger's FDR: The First Hundred Days for an idea of what a real leader can achieve.

It was never about obama facing opposition to universal healthcare, because obama never even tried to pass universal healthcare. The first thing he did in office was invite reps from the insurance industry to secret sessions at the White House, where the insurance industry told obama what they wanted in the law, down to specific word changes in other associated laws on the books. We're only just now discovering all the back-doors they installed.

Hillary Clinton's plan was to introduce a steady stream of small reforms, to avoid logjam opposition, eventually ending up with full SPUHC. She had the goodwill in Congress and the leadership skills to have made it work. Government-provided healthcare would also have not faced the protracted constitutional challenges that obamacare did.

[Tribble]

You know, when you're in a internet arm flapping contest where Breitbart is the voice of reason, you're truly fucked:

http://www.breitbart.com/Breitbart-Lond ... stry-Apart

Yeah. It's really strange, isn't it? It's like we just got transported to the Mirror-Mirror Universe and Bad Spock will show up sometime soon...

http://coursesite.uhcl.edu/HSH/Whitec/x ... Mirror.jpg

[Sulman]

page 10 if you want to laugh. Or cry. http://www.gnome.org/wp-content/uploads ... t-2013.pdf

[Crabman]

Fuck em. Big tent skepticism gets smaller. Bet Radford's glad the JREF black balling efforts weren't carried out now .....


http://i.imgur.com/r7EV7Kz.jpg

Of course he's happy. Last time they had a blogging dust-up, years ago, she kicked his from here to next Tuesday.

Of course PZ and his horde would be celebrating a woman and a gay man being pushed out of JREF. They're for diversity after all.

Wait, what?

[austin]

Another thing, hasn't PZ said multiple times that he's quit organized skepticism in over the top dramatic fashion, echoed by his followers. So why does he care about JREF?

Of course he's said multiple times that he doesn't really care what Thunderf00t says either, yet he can't help commenting about him from time to time when he wants to make a point at his expense.

Are we saying, nothing this guy ever says should be taken seriously?

See what I mean, just now PZ posts another Sarkeesian is right and Thuderf00t is an asshole, analysis piece. Seriously this defense of Sarkeesian by SJWs is very reminiscent of right wingers defense of Sarah Palin. Can't you at least find an articulate spokesperson for your nonsense.

[Matt Cavanaugh]

Recall the 60 majority didn't occur till much later because it took forever for Al Franken to be declared the winner in Minnesota which caused a lot of delays too. Can't blame that on Obama.

Bullshit. Scrounging up enough ''misplaced' ballots to hand Franken the win & finally seat him (July 7) caused no delays whatsoever. For obama "began holding private meetings with health industry executives at the White House a few weeks after he took office"
http://www.truth-out.org/archive/item/8 ... -on-reform

The entire 1,600 page bill was completed and ready to go to Congress by April. It made it through committee in July, and was passed by the end of the year, a very rapid turn-around for the US Congress.


Another thing -- why does po' widdle obama need a super-majority to get legislation passed? Other presidents seem to do just fine without it. What is it about obama that causes so many people to make so many excuses for him?

[Matt Cavanaugh]

This seems circular.

Love means never having to make sense.

[sinister]

This "hatred of women" bullshit is getting out of hand.

[Mykeru]

Another thing -- why does po' widdle obama need a super-majority to get legislation passed? Other presidents seem to do just fine without it. What is it about obama that causes so many people to make so many excuses for him?

I have no idea.

http://www.nationalmemo.com/wp-content/ ... edcruz.jpg

http://nationalreport.net/wp-content/up ... onnell.jpg

http://abcnews.go.com/images/Politics/g ... _wblog.jpg

The obstructionist Republicans who opposed healthcare -- and everything else up to and including a functional government itself -- seem to have nothing but the best interests of the country at heart.

[windy]

You know, if I had any programming skill at all, I would create a 1st Person shooter entitled, mysteriously, "Shooting Girls in the Head" where the object is to, as you might have guessed, shoot girls in the head. There would be zombies, Nazis, Klansmen, Nazi zombie klansmen, but you wouldn't get any points for shooting them. Instead you would navigate around and, now get this, shoot girls in the head. "Girls" being a term for these day-glo haired, lip-pierced, hipster glasses-wearing chicks. Girls, women, anything wearing pink in a stroller.

The sheer outrage would not only make it a hit, but distract the SJWs from going after a game because some random female character's tits are too big.

Kickstarter, anyone?

"May I ask why you felt little Tiffany deserved to die?"

[youtube]K3hAVT2sDqQ[/youtube]

[Gefan]

http://i.imgur.com/r7EV7Kz.jpg

That's not "hope", Peez. Smell it.

[austin]

Recall the 60 majority didn't occur till much later because it took forever for Al Franken to be declared the winner in Minnesota which caused a lot of delays too. Can't blame that on Obama.

Bullshit. Scrounging up enough ''misplaced' ballots to hand Franken the win & finally seat him (July 7) caused no delays whatsoever. For obama "began holding private meetings with health industry executives at the White House a few weeks after he took office"
http://www.truth-out.org/archive/item/8 ... -on-reform

The entire 1,600 page bill was completed and ready to go to Congress by April. It made it through committee in July, and was passed by the end of the year, a very rapid turn-around for the US Congress.


Another thing -- why does po' widdle obama need a super-majority to get legislation passed? Other presidents seem to do just fine without it. What is it about obama that causes so many people to make so many excuses for him?

For clarification, what do you think should have happened. Obviously single payer or medicare for all would be better. Or anything like what the majority of industrialized nations have which have by and large lower health care costs and better care (See the good article by TR Reid about other countries - http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/co ... 01778.html). Can't you admit on balance Obamacare is better that what we had before, however imperfect and a suck up to the insurance industry. Health care costs ~17% of GDP up from ~2% in 1960. Single payer or something else in this climate was not going to happen this time around. Too many Max Baucus types to deal with. If we hadn't done something, the whole thing would have gone belly up very soon and eventually bankrupt the economy as a whole. Hopefully something akin to single payer will happen. I have conservative doctor friend, who says that the only long term fix for health care is single payer.

My preference, if I could do anything I wanted would be something like the Japanese system where they essentially have a complete free market system with one caveat. The government yearly mandates the maximum one can charge for any given procedure. Results you pay 10-20 dollars per day for a hospital bed on average and less than $100 per MRI scan versus $1,500 in the US. They profit by giving great service and by volume, and they ain't having problems staying in business. I know it ain't gonna happen in the US.

The US system is a giant racket where everyone, doctors, HMOs, device makers, third party service providers, hospitals, insurance companies scam the system to maximize profits whenever and however they can, because there is no incentive to do otherwise. It is a dirty little secret that everybody knows, but it is convenient to just blame insurance companies.

[sinister]

These are good people guys! They want only good things!

[Matt Cavanaugh]

If you go through Obama's career, you'll find, from his earliest days in the Illinois legislature till this very day he has been a bag of hot air that gives pretty speeches for the Democratic Plebs while he protects corporate interests. I think the only reason he's not a Republican is because he was from Chicago and it's pretty much political suicide being a Republican in a Democratic city/state.
...

Obama is no 'liberal.' He's more of a moderate Republican than anything. Somewhat more conservative than Eisenhower or Nixon I think.

No one was allowed to look into obama's past, as that was declared "racist." But he's a grifter with a shady past, who morphed his persona (& changed his name) many times to fit whatever con he was playing at the time.

It was he, when he was pushing his first memoirs, who first spread the story that he'd been born in Kenya. For a while he was a protege of Khalidi and openly pro-PLO. His "community organizing" consisted of the venerable city politics practice of encouraging the dead to turn out on election day. Then he was the attorney for a notorious slum lord in Chicago (who gave obama an illegal kickback when the obama's bought their mansion half-price) while pretending to be the champion of the down-trodden.

obama has used chicanery &/or election fraud in every single one of his successful campaigns. (In the only honest campaign he ran, he was clobbered by powerhouse, Bobby Rush.) He has carefully avoided creating a record on issues. In the Illinois senate, he voted "present" a record 129 times. Perhaps his biggest selling point in 2008 (other than his skin) was that, even though he wasn't in the US senate in 2003, he swore he would have voted against the war in Iraq. (Even though there are videos of him at the time supporting the war.) obama famously described himself as "a blank screen on which people project their hopes & dreams."

tl;dr: a mendacious, corrupt, graft-seeking pol from the most politically corrupt city in the country. This is what you get when you don't vett your candidates, but instead vote according to your SJ hard-on.

[Gefan]

This seems circular.

From this tweet I derive only that Suey Park is in pain.

[another lurker]

@Matt

Interesting about Obama.

I believe it.

[Mykeru]

http://i.imgur.com/r7EV7Kz.jpg

That's not "hope", Peez. Smell it.

He misspelled "dope".

[sinister]

HomerEscapingIntoBush.gif

Well that escalated quickly.

[Mykeru]

@Matt

Interesting about Obama.

I believe it.

Oh yes. I agree that Obama is a backroom dealing Goldman-Sachs kind of guy.

But the antidote isn't "more scumbags".

[austin]

tl;dr: a mendacious, corrupt, graft-seeking pol from the most politically corrupt city in the country. This is what you get when you don't vett your candidates, but instead vote according to your SJ hard-on.

We could have elected this guy instead last time (http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/ne ... l-20120829), a bonafide embodiment of Gordon Gekko instead, I guess. It sucks, but that is reality.

[Guest]

What supermajority? A supermajority is defined as 2/3. Here is the breakdown of party affiliation of the 111th Congress

US House: 257 D, 178 R
US Senate: 57 D, 41 R, 2 I (caucusing with D)

Neither chamber was at or above supermajority level.

You may be thinking of the Senate rules, where 60 vote requirement to invoke cloture and end debate. However, you will also see that the Dems never reached that level either in 2009-2011.

I'm using the term as the Democrats themselves used it at the time.

Remember that Arlen Spector caucused with the Democrats, bringing the total to 60 for a few months (until Scott Brown was seated after the special election in Massachusetts). It was during that window that obamacare was rushed through. (When fellow Democrats complained they had no time to review the 1,600 bill, Nancy "botox poisoning" Pelosi announced, "you have to pass it to see what's in it.") Universal, single-payer healthcare, what the overwhelming majority of Americans wanted, could easily have been passed instead.

NB: Strongly liberal Massachusetts, which had been suffering for years under the nearly identical Romneycare, sent Brown, a Republican, to the Senate based on his expressed promise to block obamacare.

This is completely false. Brown was sent because Martha Coakley was a terrible candidate. She had the most money and was able to beat the other Dems, but in a general elections(when people actually pay attention), she lost. Because she was terrible. I am not going to say that Obamacare was not a factor, but it wasn't THE factor.

[Matt Cavanaugh]

We have to take money out of politics or this will never change.

That is our only hope. A constitutional amendment is the only path.

The ballot-access restrictions imposed on third-party candidates is also a major problem. In every state, Dems and Gops collude to make it easy for Dems & Gops to run, but nearly impossible for anyone else.

Even within their parties, reformers are quashed. In 2012 in Massachusetts, Marisa DeFranco ran against Elizabeth Warren, YA corporate whore anointed by the national Dem hierarchy. Even though DeFranco garnered more than enough signatures to run in the primary, the state Dems found a way to cancel the primary for the first time in the forty years that open primaries had been held.

NB: DeFranco is now running for Congress against another corrupt party hack, and is receiving similar treatment. Many Pitters will appreciate her true liberal, no-nonsense positions. Check them out.

[Southern]

This seems circular.

From this tweet I derive only that Suey Park is in pain.

It's all part of Clarence's nagging plan, I see. First you break them, then you fuck them. Bravo, sir.

[Mykeru]

tl;dr: a mendacious, corrupt, graft-seeking pol from the most politically corrupt city in the country. This is what you get when you don't vett your candidates, but instead vote according to your SJ hard-on.

[youtube]TCm9788Tb5g[/youtube]

[youtube]l8Cq28zbcXA[/youtube]

Apparently, who is better at golf is important to some people.

[windy]

At least someone has a complaint about DJ besides the usual "he's against women and feminism", although that's hinted at in the post as well.

http://skepchick.se/2014/09/02/d-j-grot ... with-jref/

D.J Grothe is no longer with JREF. For many of us who have some insight from behind the scenes, this is a good, even great thing.

Last year D.J, who was booked as a speaker at the European Skeptics Congress in Stockholm, simply didn’t show up. The group that organized the congress were quite surprised, since he hadn’t contacted us for a cancellation. They managed, at the last minute, to throw in another speaker to take his place.

When I got in contact with him, he sounded quite surprised and claimed that he absolutely had cancelled recently. I then asked him to let us know who he had communicated with, and he promised to do so. He didn’t, however, and when I kept asking him for it he kept telling me that he would get back to me about this when he was by his computer. He never did. He also promised the Swedish Skeptics to pay us the money for the hotel room, but never did. Both of these facts I double checked a while ago with the current board.

This could of course be just misunderstandings and innocent mistakes, but that seemed less likely when I started to hear a bunch of similar stories from other people and organizations – D.J. not showing up, not keeping promises and not paying people money. The biggest problem was not him being a no-show and not paying for a hotel room, the biggest problem was that the boss of JREF seemed to be lying to us and that this appeared to be a pattern.

The scary part is that two other people, independent of each other, were in contact with me with the intent to write a story about the pattern of all his bad behavior, but couldn’t because people didn’t dare to go on the record with the crappy thing he’s done. People were scared to ruin their careers or get into legal problems.

That's where they lost me. "Ruin their careers" for criticising a no-show speaker??

[JacquesCuze]

So this is from something that refers to itself as Kelsey McKinney at VOX

http://i.imgur.com/oJIt8t3.jpg

Is Kelsey a POE? Does Kelsey really think that "J. Matthew" is serious here?

Well PeeZus sure thinks Kelsey McKinney thinks J. Matthew is serious, and none of the few commenters so far act with any degree of skepticism.

https://archive.today/3STFx
http://i.imgur.com/JKNXZJo.jpg

Me, moronic as usual, thinks Matthew was being sarcastic.

I

[katamari Damassi]

At least someone has a complaint about DJ besides the usual "he's against women and feminism", although that's hinted at in the post as well.

http://skepchick.se/2014/09/02/d-j-grot ... with-jref/

D.J Grothe is no longer with JREF. For many of us who have some insight from behind the scenes, this is a good, even great thing.

Last year D.J, who was booked as a speaker at the European Skeptics Congress in Stockholm, simply didn’t show up. The group that organized the congress were quite surprised, since he hadn’t contacted us for a cancellation. They managed, at the last minute, to throw in another speaker to take his place.

When I got in contact with him, he sounded quite surprised and claimed that he absolutely had cancelled recently. I then asked him to let us know who he had communicated with, and he promised to do so. He didn’t, however, and when I kept asking him for it he kept telling me that he would get back to me about this when he was by his computer. He never did. He also promised the Swedish Skeptics to pay us the money for the hotel room, but never did. Both of these facts I double checked a while ago with the current board.

This could of course be just misunderstandings and innocent mistakes, but that seemed less likely when I started to hear a bunch of similar stories from other people and organizations – D.J. not showing up, not keeping promises and not paying people money. The biggest problem was not him being a no-show and not paying for a hotel room, the biggest problem was that the boss of JREF seemed to be lying to us and that this appeared to be a pattern.

The scary part is that two other people, independent of each other, were in contact with me with the intent to write a story about the pattern of all his bad behavior, but couldn’t because people didn’t dare to go on the record with the crappy thing he’s done. People were scared to ruin their careers or get into legal problems.

That's where they lost me. "Ruin their careers" for criticising a no-show speaker??

Putting out the smears to impede future employment opportunities. It's Svanlike.

[sinister]

Well the stupid on the gamergate tag is nearly immeasurable. Seriously, journalists keep writing utter bullshit, the when it's pointed out, they are being harassed. Wtf is even going on in their heads? Do they honestly believe those SJWs are going to be a strong enough income generators to offset the ostracized core gamers? Who do these people think are buying games?

[Garlix]

If you go through Obama's career, you'll find, from his earliest days in the Illinois legislature till this very day he has been a bag of hot air that gives pretty speeches for the Democratic Plebs while he protects corporate interests. I think the only reason he's not a Republican is because he was from Chicago and it's pretty much political suicide being a Republican in a Democratic city/state.
...

Obama is no 'liberal.' He's more of a moderate Republican than anything. Somewhat more conservative than Eisenhower or Nixon I think.

No one was allowed to look into obama's past, as that was declared "racist." But he's a grifter with a shady past, who morphed his persona (& changed his name) many times to fit whatever con he was playing at the time.

It was he, when he was pushing his first memoirs, who first spread the story that he'd been born in Kenya. For a while he was a protege of Khalidi and openly pro-PLO. His "community organizing" consisted of the venerable city politics practice of encouraging the dead to turn out on election day. Then he was the attorney for a notorious slum lord in Chicago (who gave obama an illegal kickback when the obama's bought their mansion half-price) while pretending to be the champion of the down-trodden.

obama has used chicanery &/or election fraud in every single one of his successful campaigns. (In the only honest campaign he ran, he was clobbered by powerhouse, Bobby Rush.) He has carefully avoided creating a record on issues. In the Illinois senate, he voted "present" a record 129 times. Perhaps his biggest selling point in 2008 (other than his skin) was that, even though he wasn't in the US senate in 2003, he swore he would have voted against the war in Iraq. (Even though there are videos of him at the time supporting the war.) obama famously described himself as "a blank screen on which people project their hopes & dreams."

tl;dr: a mendacious, corrupt, graft-seeking pol from the most politically corrupt city in the country. This is what you get when you don't vett your candidates, but instead vote according to your SJ hard-on.

Yes, but which of Shakespeare's plays did he write? :bjarte:

[Garlix]

Didn't Parody Accountant hint at something weird about DJ Groethe at some point?

[Steersman]

tl;dr: a mendacious, corrupt, graft-seeking pol from the most politically corrupt city in the country. This is what you get when you don't vett your candidates, but instead vote according to your SJ hard-on.

[.youtube]TCm9788Tb5g[/youtube]
[.youtube]l8Cq28zbcXA[/youtube]
Apparently, who is better at golf is important to some people.

Indeed. The conspicuous consumption of the leisure class. I remember seeing the opening statements of George Bush at a talk he was giving (?), in one of Michael Moore’s documentaries I think, wherein he said (more or less), referring to his audience, “My kind of people: the haves, and the have-mores”.

Something seriously rotten in Denmark methinks. So much so that Maggie McNeill (The Honest Courtesan) thinks – with no small amount of justification, although I suggested that her conclusion and solution is impractical at best – that America, in particular, is a “degenerate empire”, and that the entire system needs to be “burned to the ground”.

[Matt Cavanaugh]

Strongly liberal Massachusetts, which had been suffering for years under the nearly identical Romneycare, sent Brown, a Republican, to the Senate based on his expressed promise to block obamacare.

This is completely false. Brown was sent because Martha Coakley was a terrible candidate. She had the most money and was able to beat the other Dems, but in a general elections(when people actually pay attention), she lost. Because she was terrible. I am not going to say that Obamacare was not a factor, but it wasn't THE factor.

How can it be "completely false" but also "a factor"?

'Coakley lost because she was a bad candidate' is yet another revisionist history meme disseminated to obsure the widespread, deep disgust of obamacare among moderates & liberals.

Yes, Coakley was a bad candidate. But she was excellent at back-room maneuvering, and that's normally all it takes to get elected in Massachusetts. As a shoo-in, actual campaigning in the general election is normally superfluous. Coakley was but the latest in a long line of non-entities nominated by the state Dem machine.

The critical difference was obamacare. Brown ran as the "41st vote against obamacare". He was the first Gop elected to the senate from MA in 36 years. In exit polls, around half of Brown voters named opposition to obamacare as their biggest motivator -- but most of those wanted universal healthcare.

I still have family and friends in Massachusetts. They all dislike romneycare. For many families & individuals, romneycare (like obamacare) simply imposes an onerous, extra financial burden while providing the same, or usually worse, health insurance. And, like obamacare, it provides insurance, not health care. Which is why obama's minitru refers to "health reform."

[deLurch]

WTF is she talking about? Does she really think any of the women who had their nudes leaked will really have their careers ruined? Hell, the only reason any of the Kardashians have a career is because of Kim's sex tape.

Yeah, I am expecting career bumps for all the women involved. Shitty thing to happen to them, but there is that silver lining.

[AndrewV69]

You know, when you're in a internet arm flapping contest where Breitbart is the voice of reason, you're truly fucked:

http://www.breitbart.com/Breitbart-Lond ... stry-Apart

You should tweet that on twatter with a #GamerGate.

[JacquesCuze]

Oh, two comments laurentweppes at 10 and doublereeds at 13 did state it was sarcasm.

[deLurch]

CFI, for comparison (though CFI & JREF have quite different activities):

Total revenue:
5,242,304 (2009)
4,821,829 (2010)
5,255,211 (2011)
4,538,237 (2012)
5,603,722 (2013)

Revenue less expenses:
-37,437 (2009)
-55,956 (2010)
745,386 (2011)
-523,030 (2012)
336,897 (2013)

Net assets or fund balances:
372,780 (2009)
489,322 (2010)
1,109,622 (2011)
543,537 (2012)
971,741 (2013)

http://www.centerforinquiry.net/uploads ... losure.pdf

http://www.centerforinquiry.net/uploads ... 12-990.pdf

http://www.centerforinquiry.net/uploads ... ORM990.pdf

(2013 was the year of WiS2, for whatever effect that may have had.)

I am just going to focus on revenues. The donation amounts seem to jump up & down every other year. It appears that they did receive a bump in 2013. But only about $350k higher than the every odd year amount.

[Garlix]

So this is from something that refers to itself as Kelsey McKinney at VOX

http://i.imgur.com/oJIt8t3.jpg

Is Kelsey a POE? Does Kelsey really think that "J. Matthew" is serious here?

His/her/its actual Twitter account:

https://twitter.com/JohnnyMPozzi

I'm not sure what to think. I guess it's a corollary to Poe's law: " it is difficult or impossible to tell the difference between an expression of sincere unhinged Fedoraism and a parody of unhinged Fedoraism".

[dogen]

Except for ductwork, for which it's not UL listed. Aluminum tape should be used instead.

I like your Chekhov's Banana.

I love aluminum tape. It's so much better for practically everything with the only place I use duct tape is wrapping flexible CSST gas tubing to prevent chaffing of the exterior vinyl coating.

I've read a number of reports suggesting CSST is a safety hazard in areas prone to electrical storms. When I installed a new water heater, I used Flash Shield instead and bonded the fuck out of it. What are your thoughts?

[deLurch]

Interesting point for consideration. I mainly get the educational aspect - through social media and my rss feed getting stories and info. How effective that is, and what else is being done...Hmm. I wonder if they have anything like a year-in-review accomplishments. IF they are mainly educational, then distribution and encouragement of skepticism and critical thinking would be key, and I'm not sure how to measure that. It does point out that they may not be that relevant in the wider world and merely hold a place of prominence among skeptics. :think:

I think what people love most is when a prominent charming intelligent figure is brought into the news cycle to publicly debunk these charlatans. James Randi used to do this, and I understand why he can't do it full bore like he used to. Neil Degrass Tyson would be another excellent example of the type of personality that could do this. But he is more focused on science education, and I wouldn't want him to do anything else.

Perhaps JREF is winding down from their James Randi years and excepting that they won't always have a person of Randi's stature to do the high profile debunking. And instead they are going to focus on the long hard steady work of educating people in schools.

Penn & Teller do a good job. But they tend to be more abrasive & a tad bit... not fit for public consumption. They do well in their own show. So they are never really going to be called in for news interviews.

Maybe they need to find another good magician who has the public presentation skills and can show he audience a bit of wow. Johnny Carson is probably the person who really did the most to raise the profile of James Randi as a credible debunker.

[deLurch]

Here is an interesting bit from Peezus' post on JREF
JREF Revenue: 2011: $1.56M, 2012: $1.29M, 2013: $887.5K.
They’re down to 60% of their 2011 revenue. That’s a good reason to change directions."

I can't help wondering how much of that effect is Peezus himself and his tribe of assholes constantly inveighing against JREF and skepticism in general, and trying to scare women away from going to TAM.

You can't spend money you don't have. The axe had to come down somewhere.

You asked in another post about 2007-2009. Here's a link to the 2007 form 990; I can't find a direct link to the others (only info-for-pay from Foundation Center and Guidestar)

http://990s.foundationcenter.org/990_pd ... 12_990.pdf

JREF's total revenue line, 2007, from form 990: $831,099

Interesting. While trying to search around for the information, I read that revenues doubled during Phil Plait(sp?)'s term. So it could be something about how he managed, or if he was just lucky who was responsible for soliciting donations was extremely competent, or there was something significant that occurred that brought them a lot of publicity. But it looks like their donation levels are back down to their 2007 level.

[Matt Cavanaugh]

The suggestion that by putting up an image of my general location might invite something-or-other-horrible from random internet peopleâ„¢ raises the question:

banana IMG_1415.JPG

Is that a banana in my Pelican case or am I just happy to see them?

Oh, Lord won't you buy me an S.I.G. Sauer?
My friends all have Glocks; I need more firepower.

Oh, Lord won't you buy me a telescopic sight?
My picatinny's barren, I just can't see right.

Oh, lord won't you buy me a day at the range?
I want to hit my target for once for a change.