Looks like the new Big Government, Big Journalism, Big Hollywood, Big Peace, Breitbart TV site is up and running.

Posted by: rdbrewer at 06:30 PM | Comments (266)
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Common False Knowledge

"It isn't so much that liberals are ignorant. It's just that they know so many things that aren't so."

-- Ronald Reagan

And it's not just liberals - a lot of what we were taught, what we read, and things that we know aren't true either. Anything "too good to check" is exactly the thing you should go verify.

Here Christoper Taylor has collected some interesting commonly known 'facts' that  aren't.

• Kennedy didn't win the race based on his performance at the televised debate with Nixon, he only got a 2% bump in the polls, which is within the margin of error.


• Johnson probably never said "If I've lost Cronkite, I've lost America;" he wasn't even watching the news when Walter Cronkite treacherously declared the Vietnam war (despite all evidence to the contrary) to have been lost. Johnson continued to be upbeat about the war and condemned people who called for withdrawal.


• For that matter, the Tet Offensive was a disastrous, ghastly defeat for the North Vietnamese Army Viet Cong, which in effect ceased to exist after it because the US military totally obliterated them, reversing their temporary gains in a matter of days.


• Following the Watergate scandal, there was supposedly a doubling of journalism students, making reporters hot for the first time in history... except that never happened. There was a very slight gain, but the doubling had already taken place.


• Michael Moore's entire movie Roger And Me was based on his not being able to get into talk to the president of GM... but he did, but just didn't bother showing that in the film, since it would ruin his entire thesis.


• 30% of women's visits to emergency rooms do not come from domestic abuse


• There is no rise in domestic violence on Superbowl Sunday.


• Sacco and Vanzetti were guilty.


• Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were guilty.


• Alger Hiss was guilty.

Posted by: Maetenloch at 05:51 PM | Comments (555)
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Morons will be gathering in L.A. to raise a glass to Andrew Breitbart this evening.

For those of us unable to meet up in person ...

Image by BigFurHat at iOwnTheWorld. For any guys (and gals) that want shirts, follow the link. Net proceeds will be sent to the Breitbart family.

Let's all raise a glass to the memory of the one and only Andrew Breitbart at 8pm Eastern. more...

Posted by: andy at 02:55 PM | Comments (333)
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(This all went down March 3rd, Saturday)

Sandra Fluke acknowledges a TV interview with Jake Tapper. (9:47 pst)

Thank you to @jaketapper @ABCWorldNews for giving me a chance to speak. (interview) #WeWillNotBeSilenced

funny, @jaketapper often responds to me. (13:52)

@AceofSpadesHQ if you have issues with her testimony, take them up with her. if you have issues with what Rush said, take it up with him. (14:04)

@jaketapper gee, Jake, I just wish there was someone being paid by a media organization who just interviewed her who had a chance to ask!! (14:04)

@AceofSpadesHQ @jaketapper I think he just asked you to do his job for him. (14:0

.@jaketapper to @AceofSpadesHQ: "if Fluke's lying her ass off, take it up with her. Don't look at me I'm just a journalist interviewing her" (14:20)

I mean @sandrafluke is not an expert on anything, and her statistics are preposterous. Just let it slide? @AceofSpadesHQ @jaketapper (14:52)

If only there were some profession whose primary goal is to investigate and confirm claims made in a public policy debate. @jaketapper (14:1

My gripe is not that Tapper didn't ask questions - but that he said it wasn't his job to ask questions. My conclusion is... He CAN'T question her. Otherwise he'd get the Limbaugh treatment!

This is a black day for American Journalism.

_{^{Also, I tweet at @ComradeArthur}}

Posted by: Open Blogger at 11:55 AM | Comments (271)
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G'morning from sunny California! I don't have anything like the thoughtful book threads that Monty does, but I spotted this interesting piece in the Financial Times this morning and it seems to be right up our alley:

Show me the money

By John Lanchester
The author of a bestseller on the economic crisis asks why the literary world is wary of finance

[...]

You can assemble an entire canon of the greatest English language poets from men who had lengthy professional careers in the world of money and administration, from Geoffrey Chaucer (customs) to Edmund Spenser (government and administration) to John Milton (ditto) all the way through to TS Eliot (banking and publishing) and Stevens – and this entire pantheon barely touches on the world of work and money. If it seems unreasonable to expect poets to write about practical matters, well, it can be done: bear in mind that Virgil’s Georgics had the explicit ambition of being a guide to farming, as well as an account of the pastoral year – an ambition picked up by Ted Hughes in Moortown Diary poems.

The gap in the canon of fiction is even more conspicuous. Novels, as Iris Murdoch once observed, “are full of stuff”. She meant stuff as in things, objects, places, but also in the sense of information, events, coming and going. The “stuff” in novels touches on every aspect of the world and people’s lives. That’s what makes it so remarkable just how little there is in the novel about the world of money. Take Jane Austen. Her work is astonishingly fresh in almost every respect, and its psychological insights are as applicable to the early 21st century as they were to the early 19th. Part of what is so bracingly contemporary about her is her complete lack of self-deception about the importance of money to her characters’ lives, especially their love lives. But there’s nothing about money in and of itself; nothing about how this central aspect of the world actually works.

It's long, but worth the read.

Posted by: Gabriel Malor at 09:37 AM | Comments (228)
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Don't have to add much to this.

Here's a fun e-voting story. Wash DC offcials double-dog-dared hackers to subvert their e-voting system. Gave them a 3 week window.

The team also managed to guess the login details for the terminal server used by the voting system. This wasn't exactly difficult, since the user name and password were both "admin".

...

Finally, they inserted the word "owned" onto the final signoff screen of the voting page, and set up the University of Michigan football fight song to play after 15 seconds.

It took two days before the authorities discovered they'd been pwned, and they were only alerted to that fact when another tester told them the system was secure, but that they should lose the music on the sign-off screen, as it was rather annoying.

Posted by: Open Blogger at 08:57 AM | Comments (154)
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This video has generated some strong pro and con reactions among Ace and the cob loggers as well as in the conservative Twittersphere.

I was wondering what the Moron Horde thought of it.

Watch, vote and discuss in the comments Breitbarts.

Posted by: andy at 06:42 AM | Comments (402)
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This guy kind of liked you people. Or so I hear.

(h/t @StarChamberMaid)

(and, yes, that's the HQ he's reading on his iPad)

Posted by: andy at 03:43 AM | Comments (230)
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You know, it would be nice if we could move the political conversation from birth control and social BS to things that most of us actually care about. You know, stuff like this. 30 Stupid Things The Government Is Spending Money On.

#2 The Obama administration plans to spend between 16 and 20 million dollars helping students from Indonesia get masterÂ’s degrees.

#3 If you can believe it, the U.S. government has spent $175,587 “to determine if cocaine makes Japanese quail engage in sexually risky behavior”.

#6 The Department of Health and Human Services plans to spend $500 million on a program that will, among other things, seek to solve the problem of 5-year-old children that “can’t sit still” in a kindergarten classroom.

Posted by: CDR M at 05:33 PM | Comments (797)
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Fortunately for me (and unfortunately for all you haters in the sticks), it isn't SMOD.

No, the giant rock coming is part of an incredible addition to LACMA (The Los Angeles County Museum of Art), Levitated Mass:

Michael Heizer and his $120,000 subject of an unwritten work by Edgar Allen Poe

The official story is this will be the latest addition of work to LACMA.

Truth be told, this is going to be our new mayor. No, make that overlord. We need something all-powerful and crushing to overtake all the egos in city hall.

He Who Will Reign Over All, being transported by his servants

From the LACMA website:

Levitated Mass is an artwork by Michael Heizer comprised of a 456-foot-long concrete-lined slot constructed on
LACMAÂ’s campus, upon and at the center of which is placed a 340-ton granite megalith. As visitors walk along the
slot, it gradually descends to fifteen feet deep, running underneath the megalith before ascending back up.

Site-specific art with minimalist roots is generally frowned upon by those not in love with modern art, and that is a shame. There is something that good minimalism, particularly that in the "earth art" vein, can accomplish- a unification and assertion of natural forces. Not a one-ness with nature, but a humbling sense of the massiveness of it. But also an abstraction of the real into the theoretical. I will be the first in line to experience this work when it opens, scheduled for the late spring-early summer.

I am not going into detail about the work yet, since obviously I have not seen it. Rest assured I will comment once I have, barring a massive earthquake striking the Southland at the very unfortunate moment of me walking under it.

The process of moving such a massive rock has become its own event in SoCal:

more...

Posted by: CAC at 02:32 PM | Comments (236)
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