This light therapy is total ripoff.

I'm Sorry... An apology to Karzai and Afghanistan. more...

Posted by: Ace at 11:09 AM | Comments (155)
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Ash Jogalekar (himself a scientist) reports at his website on a scientific editorial, "The Nonsense of Biofuels", written by Hartmut Michel, who won the Nobel Prize for his own research into biophysics. The gist of Michel's editorial (which is not accessible, Jogalekar's link notwithstanding) is that there just isn't enough efficiency in biophysical processes. Open it up for an extended quote from Jogalekar's post. more...

Posted by: Open Blogger at 10:44 AM | Comments (109)
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These stupid knotheads can't even do condescending racialist solidarity La Raza messaging right.

In Time's defense, I can see why they thought a half-white, half-Chinese guy who has never called himself Latino (he wasn't even asked by Time, he says) was Latino. He's one of those guys with a deceptive name -- his name is Alezeda Trujillo Rojas, so one can understand why Time thought he was Hispanic.

Wait, I'm just getting word that that's not his name.

His name is actually... Michael Schennum.

No, seriously, that's his name.

Time

Look, just vote for Obama, minorities. Who the hell can keep all of you straight. Obama will give you blah blah blah or whatever it is on your racial agenda.

Via @drewmtips. Drew's making the point on Twitter that Time's catching hell for not observing the "not one drop" policy. That is, any taint of white blood now makes you, well, tainted.

But as far as I can gather, this guy has... no Latin blood, and doesn't claim to be Latin. And is named Michael Shennum.

So what's he doing in Time's La Raza issue?

Time's just stupid, is all.

Posted by: Ace at 10:14 AM | Comments (114)
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Okay. I suppose they had to issue this, given that some people don't know "chink" is a slur for Chinese.

But this reads like an SNL sketch. Imagine this as a sketch on SNL -- some reporters sternly warning you away from certain offensive jokes. Then repeating each joke. While insisting it's not funny.

That would be a funny sketch.

It's a funny document.

I'm not saying slurs are funny. If I heard any of these jokes, told as jokes, I'd roll my eyes. Kind of ba-dum-dum.

The medium is the message. Here, with the Asian-American Journalists Association listing every single dumb Asian joke you can think of, old, musty, kinda-racist humor is suddenly sneakily funny.

Here is the document. Tell me you don't feel like you're being punked.

DANGER ZONES

...

DRIVING: This is part of the sport of basketball, but resist the temptation to refer to an "Asian who knows how to drive."

EYE SHAPE: This is irrelevant. Do not make such references if discussing Lin's vision.

...

MARTIAL ARTS: You're writing about a basketball player. Don't conflate his skills with judo, karate, tae kwon do, etc. Do not refer to Lin as "Grasshopper" or similar names associated with martial-arts stereotypes.

"ME LOVE YOU LIN TIME": Avoid. This is a lazy pun on the athlete's name and alludes to the broken English of a Hollywood caricature from the 1980s.

What about:

CONFUCIUS: Avoid "Confucius say, 'nothin' but net.'"

I made that last one up but the rest are real.

Specifics

Comedy is built on the specific. Avoid specifics if you want to avoid a comedy vibe.

Posted by: Ace at 09:41 AM | Comments (269)
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Estimates in quotes.

I don't believe they were estimates. They were a sales device.

As when a shifty contractor gives you a completely fake number but won't guarantee it. The number is just there to get him the job. Later he'll start escalating it.

It was a lie from the start.

Medical costs for enrollees in the health-care lawÂ’s high-risk insurance pools are expected to more than double initial predictions, the Obama administration said Thursday in a report on the new program.

The health-care law set aside $5 billion for a Pre-Existing Condition Insurance Plan, meant to provide health insurance to those who had been declined coverage by private carriers. Since its launch last summer, nearly 50,000 Americans have enrolled in the program.

...

Those who have enrolled in the program are projected to have significantly higher medical costs than the government initially expected. Each participant is expected to average $28,994 in medical costs in 2012, according to the report, more than double what government-contracted actuaries predicted in November 2010. Then, the analysts expected that the program would cost $13,026 per enrollee.

The costs also are significantly higher than those of similar high-risk pools that many states have operated for decades. States spent an average of $12,471 on enrollees in 2008, according to the National Association of State Comprehensive Health Insurance Plans.

"Estimates"

Earlier estimates about what would or would not be taking place in your mouth must now be adjusted due to the unexpected contingency that I felt like nutting.

Via Hot Air.

Posted by: Ace at 09:09 AM | Comments (124)
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I heard about this on Adam Carolla (the Schmoes Know show, 2/16/12, at 42:50 and running for about six minutes).

He makes all the obvious points. Peta's big tactic is to claim they want to run an ad at the Superbowl. The ad (as he envisions it) involves a bunch of supermodels milking cows, and then milking each other's actual human breasts.

Then the network hosting the Superbowl says "We're not running that" and Peta makes that the news, shouting "What? You won't run an ad of women milking each other? Censorship!" And they get press for an ad they never intended to run at all.

Meanwhile, did they have the $30 million to run the ad? What would they do if the network said "Yes"? They'd just walk away meekly.

So anyway, Content Warning. The campaign is for an imaginary syndrome called "Boyfriend Went Vegan and Knocked The Bottom out of me." The claim made is that if a guy goes vegan -- begins eating estrogen-generating soy and shit -- he'll suddenly be a sexual superman who "knocks the bottom" out of his girlfriend.

more...

Posted by: Ace at 08:33 AM | Comments (191)
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"There is one God, and Mohammad is his prophet." -- official new case law in Pennsylvania.

The judge ruled that the guy wearing the costume was legally guilty of "harassment," and therefore incapable of being assaulted, as a legal matter.

The case went to trial, and as circumstances would dictate, Judge Mark Martin is also a Muslim. What transpired next was surreal. The Judge not only ruled in favor of the defendant, but called Mr. Perce a name and told him that if he were in a Muslim country, heÂ’d be put to death. Judge MartinÂ’s comments included,

“Having had the benefit of having spent over 2 and a half years in predominantly Muslim countries I think I know a little bit about the faith of Islam. In fact I have a copy of the Koran here and I challenge you sir to show me where it says in the Koran that Mohammad arose and walked among the dead. I think you misinterpreted things. Before you start mocking someone else’s religion you may want to find out a little bit more about it it makes you look like a dufus and Mr. (Defendant) is correct. In many Arabic speaking countries something like this is definitely against the law there. In their society in fact it can be punishable by death and it frequently is in their society.

Judge Martin then offered a lesson in Islam, stating,

“Islam is not just a religion, it’s their culture, their culture. It’s their very essence their very being. They pray five times a day towards Mecca to be a good Muslim, before you die you have to make a pilgrimage to Mecca unless you are otherwise told you can not because you are too ill too elderly, whatever but you must make the attempt. Their greetings wa-laikum as-Salâm (is answered by voice) may god be with you. Whenever, it’s very common when speaking to each other it’s very common for them to say uh this will happen it’s it they are so immersed in it.

Judge Martin further complicates the issue by not only abrogating the First Amendment, but completely misunderstanding it when he said,

“Then what you have done is you have completely trashed their essence, their being. They find it very very very offensive. I’m a Muslim, I find it offensive. But you have that right, but you’re way outside your boundaries or first amendment rights. This is what, and I said I spent about 7 and a half years living in other countries. when we go to other countries it’s not uncommon for people to refer to us as ugly Americans this is why we are referred to as ugly Americans, because we are so concerned about our own rights we don’t care about other people’s rights as long as we get our say but we don’t care about the other people’s say”

Video report at the link.

Posted by: Ace at 08:16 AM | Comments (231)
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You know, those lamps that are supposed to mimic sunlight?

I've had one for two days now. It's too early for me to make any conclusions about it. It could be all placebo effect.

But... working.

Is it just a placebo? Let me know.

Posted by: Ace at 07:48 AM | Comments (238)
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Of course you know if someone on the right similarly maligned someone's religion, they'd just skate with a bullshit apology in which the main point seems to be self-praise ("I'm willing" to do that -- because I'm just so awesome).

Thanks to @ben_howe.

Posted by: Ace at 07:19 AM | Comments (162)
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In about 2008, the general public started to figure out that the giant ball of nuclear fire in the sky might be related to temperatures here on Earth. As one of our commenters put it:

If only there were some . . . natural explanation for falling and rising temperatures.

Such a hypothetical source of warming would have to be massive, however. On the order of magnitude of our own Sun.

Belief in anthropogenic global warming has plummeted since 2008. But the UN's IPCC, the papal imprimatur for warming alarmists and the excuse for and driver of many anti-prosperity government environmental programs, has continued to ignore the effect of the Sun on climate.

Alec Rawls looked at the draft of the IPCC's next report and sent the following guest post. /Gabe

Anti-science: draft IPCC report inverts the scientific method

Guest post by Alec Rawls

In 2008, Canadian climatologist Tim Ball had this to say about the previous years IPCC report (AR4):

…they studiously avoided any discussion of the clear relationship between sunspot activity and temperature. They claimed there was no mechanism to explain the correlation so it could not be included, but that is incorrect. A very valid mechanism known as the Cosmic Theory (Svensmark and Calder, “The Chilling Stars”) has been in the literature with increasing detail since 1991.

Now the first draft of AR5 is doing the same thing. The supposed lack of a good enough theory of the mechanism by which solar magnetic activity could be driving climate is used as an excuse for omitting the by now massive evidence that there is SOME mechanism by which solar activity IS driving global temperature.

Over the last 10 years, literally dozens of very careful empirical studies have found a high degree of correlation, in the range of .5 to .8, between solar activity and various temperature proxies going back many thousands of years. That is, solar activity "explains," in the statistical sense, about half of all past temperature change, yet this mountain of evidence only rates one oblique sentence in AR5, noting three papers (author and year) that found some kind of correlations between solar activity and climate, but they aren't going to tell you what.

No mention that strong correlations have been found, no hint of the range and repetition of the findings. The EVIDENCE for a solar climate driver has been excised because the IPCC authors don't like the theories that account for it. In a precise inversion of the scientific method, theory is being used to jettison evidence. It is not science. It is anti-science. As I put it in my submitted "expert review":

Imagine a pre-Newtonian “scientist” predicting that a rock released into the air will waft away on the breeze on the grounds that we understand the force that the breeze imparts on the rock but we have no good theory of the mechanism by which heavy objects are pulled to the ground. We should therefore ignore the overwhelming evidence that there is some mechanism that pulls heavy objects to the ground, and until such time as we can identify the mechanism, proceed as if no such mechanism exists. This is what the IPCC is actually doing with the solar-climate evidence. Y’all aren’t scientists. You are actual, definitional, anti-scientists.

Full review here.

Posted by: Gabriel Malor at 03:27 AM | Comments (413)
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