Anyone with any sort of passing knowledge economics should be able to understand that natural selection was just demonstrated to be a real force again.

Also: Six Things in Expelled That Ben Stein Doesn’t Want You to Know, Why do people laugh at creationists? (part 22), et cetera and so on and forth and how the fuck does someone who wrote speeches for Nixon! ever get anything but a pitchfork in the belly? Oh, yes, I’ve been informed he’ll be getting plenty of them in the afterlife. Something to do with God disliking Jews for denying Jesus was His Son, IIRC.

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This fellow was displaying for his reflection in the window all day. Drove the cat half crazy.

The yellow on his cap is really a phenomenal chroma. Pure #FF7 throughout a large part of it according to the eyedropper in Fireworks. You can see the other colors—especially the firey orange that pops from certain angles—in the video below.

Golden-crowned kinglet displaying

There is apparently a Denial of Service attack going on against Sedition·com right now, coming from 160.83.72.211 which is owned by Deutsche-Bank.

So either–

• Somebody’s individual computer is hacked
• Somebody set up a horribly bad personal script/client to read from the site and it’s making 20+ connections at a time through plain old incompetence
• Somebuddies ther jus hates us, Precious, and wants us not having Interweb

Man, and to think I was about to do a piece on how fucked up it is that mowing down Germans in video games is still considered high sport.

Update, 17^th – BlogBridge is the client to blame and has, today alone, made 11,000 requests and counting. That’s one request every 4.6 seconds. Imagine if just 10 people subscribed to the site that way. Ah, but you can’t really blame them. They’re Java hackers. If it were up to me, they’d get special parking privileges. Fair’s fair.

Bible is America's favorite book: poll

NEW YORK (Reuters Life!) – When it comes to literary pursuits in the United States most people agree on at least one thing — the most popular book is the Bible, according to a new survey.

When it comes to conversational pass-times in the United States most people agree on at least one thing — lying about your reading material impresses chicks.

In Searching for New Job, Gonzales Sees No Takers

You know why that is? In the private sector shit-for-brains losers whose legal theory is ridiculous at best and a war crime at worst are a huge liability. Close enough for government work only works against juries because they don’t get convened against the Federal government.

Al needs to discover the secret that 1,000,000 half-rate, evil mother fuckers like him already know. Universities will tenure anyone with a résumé longer than the prize dick on their board of regents. The UC system is waiting for you, my evil coyote. Maybe John Yoo can give you a reference. I think he also grew up a short fat kid and shares a certain love of getting back at the world.

Study: Dyslexia differs by language

Do you know why? Because the only thing Noam Chomsky ever actually did to earn himself a tenured position at the top of his field was plain, old fashioned wrong. All it actually takes to demonstrate this is a parrot and a feral child but I’m glad the National Academy of Sciences is catching up with me. Been lonely.

I’m sure Chomsky’s a genius at other stuff though. Like explaining why 1,000,000 dead Iraqis weigh so much more than 75,000,000 dead Chinese. It’s a good riddle.

Kurt Vonnegut died one year ago today. I waited a year for some people I like.

The importance of final words. In one of the last interviews he gave he said–

They say, you know, about evolution, it surely happened because their fossil record shows that. But look, my body and your body are miracles of design. Scientists are pretending they have the answer as how we got this way when natural selection couldn’t possibly have produced such machines. KV interviewed by Steve Inskeep for Morning Edition

It doesn’t take genius or a profound understanding of the world to declare something an impenetratable mystery. The exact opposite is true. His are the words of a small, frightened mind which derives solace from making sure others are stupid with awe for whatever brand of superstitious, anti-knowledge tripe one ingests as intellectual comfort food. The predictability with which this behavior emerges from a certain type of mind as it nears its appointment in Damascus is sad and revolting. What better proof that one knows oneself to be a failure than to insist upon the divine from death’s portico. To encourage others to agreement. If one can convince them, one might be able to convince oneself.

See also: Kurt Vonnegut on Darwinism and Losing His Mind.

My new favorite album doesn’t exist. From my maritime shipping consultant I discover the delightful formula for making album covers posited by theoretical drink mixer Fish-Fish McCarlsteinfreud.

And the back cover with song list.

Any designer who cares should treat this as an exercise to be completed once a month. We’ll see if I care.

[Image links go to the image sources.]

…yesterday he sighed and said, “Aw, I wish I was famous like you.”

Getting him a little red electric guitar today. Oh, yeah.

It’s legal for me, in most of the US, to pay 10 girls to fuck each other with Dale Chihuly’s entire fall exhibition, and fuck the ever living feces out of some poor 10" peckered freak’s Viagra saturated corpus. As long as I film it for distribution and make sure to make copies of it available for sale. Then it’s called pornography and it’s entirely legal, almost, everywhere in the US.

It’s illegal for me, almost, everywhere in the US to pay a woman, or a man for that matter, $200 for 30 minutes worth of service. I know you can’t do that kind of work all day but that does net you over a half million dollars a year at that rate and while most of the prostitutes out there don’t clear that, some do, and most make much more than they would in futile and socially sterile battles with Word docs and Xerox collating functions.

I can pay people to have sex as long as I’m not one of them. I dare add there isn’t a porn producer in America who doesn’t get comped plenty. The hypocrisy of the American public is so chillingly cognitive dissonant that it would make ears bleed if synesthesia were applied.

I further dare add that a statistically significant number of marriages would dissolve instantly were the cash flow to suddenly go dry. But they’re not whores! They truly care about their clients husbands. The mortgage crisis will be bringing ’em out of the woodwork. If I were single, I’d be looking forward to the blooming buyers’ market.

These are a skosh sloppier visually than I’d like but if I don’t post them now I never will. The goal is to cuddle the drop caps but not too closely. Click for the PDF it produces.

And the raw LaTeX

… [read more]

I want my hour back, you fucking prick.

Juan “in a million” Cole—now I’m guilty of vile debasements, but it was worth it—often gets the goods and does nice reporting. Why I tune in. But Christ!–

I want to say something about Barack Hussein Obama’s name. It is a name to be proud of. It is an American name. It is a blessed name. It is a heroic name, as heroic and American in its own way as the name of General Omar Nelson Bradley or the name of Benjamin Franklin. And denigrating that name is a form of racial and religious bigotry of the most vile and debased sort. It is a prejudice against names deriving from Semitic languages! Barack Hussein Obama, Omar Bradley, Benjamin Franklin and other Semitically Named American Heroes

In just one paragraph, so much untreated sewage.

American names look like Sacagawea, Goyaałé, Thašųka Witko, and sometimes things like Free Dominguez and Moon Unit Zappa. Barack Hussein Obama is a Muslim + Kenyan name. You don’t have to pretend it’s American to treat it like any other name. Things are not rendered better or more acceptable just because of that ever more slippery adjective. Getting on the contrary bandwagon is why Bush has power. You, Juan Cole, are building up the power of the next version of George Bush.

Names cannot be heroic. What horrible treatment of language. How many orphans did his name pull from a burning bus? His name is blesséd? Who the fuck blessed him? God? Or do you think he is blessed because he was lucky enough to be born on US soil instead of Kenyan dirt?

Being proud of a name you were given is the same thing as being proud of your kidneys or toenails. Pride in something you didn’t do is the real root of all Evil. Let’s say for example pride in your race. Oh, you disagree. Well, all right. I’ll give white pride a try. I mean we won’t be a majority much longer so I guess it’s my last chance to follow your advice.

Making fun of names is not the most vile and debased denigration. On the contrary, it’s the most obvious and childish. And like many things obvious and childish, it can be a lot of fun. Anyone who thinks Mssr Cole has a point needs to realize that if you ever in your life made fun of anyone named Danny, Mike, Abe, Sarah, Ruth, Hannah, or half the names in Christendom, you too are a filthy anti-semite!¹

I’d also ask, if Ron Paul’s a liberal in disguise, why on your site are all your graphics in blue and his in red? Oh, well, Texas usually gets what Texas deserves. Down the hatch.

If you have a use for that image, it’s all yours: Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License.

Speaking of anagrams… anyone for perched sin?