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Well if not, just go to verifiedfacts.org and let it generate a conspiracy for you like this one:

The Truth About ADHD and The EPA

A cure for ADHD has already been invented, but the EPA is keeping it under wraps.

In 2005, sailors on an oil tanker passed through the Bermuda Triangle on a routine voyage between the Gulf Coast and Africa. They never returned, but the last radio transmission, recorded by the NOAA and ham radio enthusiasts, was "S.O.S. - Bright Lights - the EPA and Google."

Local historians living near fracking sites have noticed strange connections between them and the EPA, stretching back to Obama's childhood years in Kenya.

In 1851, Civil War general Robert E. Lee reported a strange disturbance in the sky over the Potomac. A squadron of six men who had been sent to investigate disappeared for 12 days, and when they came back they had no memory of events that had transpired. Lee wrote in his diary, "Our inspection of the men turned up nothing, but their forearms were branded with a curious unknown symbol: 'Google'."

In a world full of lies and power-hungry megalomaniacs, we stand firm. Thousands are joining the movement. We demand justice.

Or go here if you want to generate your own theory MadLibs-style:

Posted by: Maetenloch at 05:51 PM | Comments (702)
Post contains 1192 words, total size 14 kb.

I'll put up the bracket winners tomorrow. Basketball tonight, Louisville and Michigan. Kind of a surprise those Meecheganers, huh?

BONUS POLITICAL PIC: Vladimir likes boobs. more...

Posted by: Dave in Texas at 05:29 PM | Comments (139)
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I didn't, and you'd think this would be a big f'n deal.

In spite of the Obama Administration's hostility to carbon-rich energy, private actors with private capital deployed on private (and state) land have launched a game-changing revolution in domestic oil and natural gas production.

A scarcely reported milestone conveys the magnitude of this turnaround in the global energy landscape.

The U.S. passed Saudi Arabia as the world's largest petroleum producer in November 2012, according to recently released data of the federal Energy Information Administration.

Over the last five years, domestic oil output has risen 40% and continually outpaces projections. Last year, domestic output increased by 800,000 barrels per day. This is the largest increase in annual production since the first oil well was drilled in 1859 in Pennsylvania.

Despite Obama shutting down production in the Gulf. Despite the EPA. Despite NY fiddle-farting around with permits for fracking.

On private lands, open to production, we are now pumping more oil out of the ground than the Saudis.

We still import, but one of the funny other unknown things is we import more from Canada than Saudi Arabia and have for years. While Obama and his EPA stall Keystone, the Eagle Ford field in south Texas has become the most productive oil and gas field in the world. In six years it grew from nothing to 375,000 barrels a day. $60 billion dollar a year impact to the Texas economy. 116,000 jobs (more than double the 48,000 in 2011).

And it's not just Texas. It's everywhere. In. The. United. States. of Holy-crap we got oil America.

Posted by: Dave in Texas at 04:40 PM | Comments (271)
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You may not recognize the name.

There's a reason for that. That was the plan.

Quite simply, Cindy Sheehan — slamming the “illegal and immoral” war for “oil” and comparing Bush to Hitler — was Christmas morning, every morning, for the Left.

Pat Smith, on the other hand, seeks answers surrounding the Benghazi attack. She is therefore no Christmas present – rather, she is an inconvenience that must be brushed under the rug. Unlike Sheehan, who was used as a pawn to further the Left’s narrative, Smith’s quest presents a danger to the Obama Administration’s record and image.

Make no mistake: had Benghazi occurred under a Republican administration, the media would fawn over Smith with even greater adoration than that bestowed upon Sheehan. No network, no microphone, and no camera would be closed to her. But, as Benghazi is a horrific failure on the part of President Obama and then-Secretary of State Clinton, the media has gladly employed its role as guardian of the administration (who needs the Praetorian Guard of yesteryear when we have MSNBC?), ignoring the story, ignoring Smith, even ignoring its own instinctive draw and duty to explore a story where, in stark contrast to SheehanÂ’s, enormous mysteries and questions loom.

Posted by: Ace at 03:50 PM | Comments (127)
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Lots of fighting about a comment that may or may not be fully reflective of someone's larger point, and some pushback, and a claim he didn't go far enough.

Posted by: Ace at 03:06 PM | Comments (184)
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Noooo.

Piers Morgan and Lawrence O'Donnell both claimed that this member of the gay rights movement (who we know must be telling the truth, because he's gay) is a dirty liar. So I guess that makes them h8rz, no?

Incidentally, if Lawrence O'Donnell and Piers Morgan really wanted to advance the debate, and really wanted to help out gays, then this sort of an interview -- a nice one, in which a son talks about the differences of opinion he's having with his dad, and yet they still love and respect each other -- would have been helpful to that end.

But that's not the end they're chasing. They're looking for Contempt Porn and ratings.

more...

Posted by: Ace at 02:17 PM | Comments (300)
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A joke, but true in some ways, apparently, as he later clarified that there was "SOME truth behind it, but I'm not saying what was true and what wasn't."

"Confession Bear" is an internet meme where you post a picture of a bear and some kind of confession. Whether or not this is a real confession to murder is unknown. It's either an attention-getting stunt (does anyone remember the days when we used to seek attention from real people in real life...?) or a very ill-advised case of over-sharing.

Eh. It seems kind of odd to me that someone would post this sort of thing for either purpose -- to garner attention, or to actually confess to murder online -- but we are now living in that age.

I didn't see Madonna's Truth or Dare movie. I swear upon Dick Cheney's shotgun, I did not. But I did see one clip, or rather I read about it. At one point Warren Beatty (Madonna's then-paramour) was annoyed that Madonna was inviting her film crew to film scenes of them together. Not sex scenes, but, you know, real life stuff, just normal give-and-take. Stuff that most people don't really think of as good for public consumption.

Beatty asked Madonna something along the lines of, "Do you think that if it's not being filmed, then it didn't happen?" I don't know Madonna's answer but I have a vague memory that she vaguely answered, but coyly suggested the answer was Yes-- if I don't have an audience, then it's not really happening.

This is the sort of mentality we see an awful lot of on the internet. Madonna wasn't the only person with this complex, of course. But she was one of the few people deemed worthy of Constantly Being on Television and in the Tabloids to make it clear that she did take that kind of position on fame.

20 years later and we now have the technology to "broadcast," after a fashion, all the details of our lives. And some people, like Madonna, can't resist.

I used to analogize blogging -- or more broadly, seeking internet-based attention -- to videogames. The exact same principles were involved -- garnering "experience points" (hits), milestones and upgraded weapons and armor (links from major sites). We even had a level system -- the Bear Laid Truth's old ecosystem and ranking of blogs.

And like a videogame, you sort of got the same sense of progress without actual real-life progress. It was sort of fun and exciting... the way a video game is fun and exciting. And trivial.

Eh, these kids these days. They'll never understand. They weren't there at The Beginning, man.

No but seriously, any diversion can become an addiction if it's good at supplanting real-world needs. Stuff like "companionship" and "achievement."

A diversion that allows one to escape thinking about one's own failings is pretty intoxicating. I think we have a generation of younger people sort of addicted to this particular drug (or this Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game, to go back to the original metaphor).

And because it's a new social phenomenon, society hasn't yet built up the Code of Mores and Warnings about it, like it's done with sex or drugs or booze. We don't really have Cautionary Tales or Morality Plays to warn people about it. There aren't any Grimm's Fairly Tales about The Little Girl Who Constantly Put Pictures of Herself Drunk Online.

I suppose we're starting to see some Cautionary Tales, though.

Notoriety and Reality TV: I'm actually (I hate to admit this) a [recovering] reality tv watcher [one day at a time, one day at a time], and I've been saying for some time that no matter what the supposed prize is any reality tv show, the real challenge, given that you've already signed up for this horror show, is to escape with your dignity intact.

That's the real "win." Leaving with your dignity intact (if a bit battered). Lose the contest but leave without too much embarrassment? Congratulations, you won the real game.

I think that principle applies to the online world, too. One can become pretty well-known overnight simply by embarrassing oneself in a big enough, link-whoring sort of way. But that's not really winning; winning is coming out of it at least looking kinda-sorta acceptable for decent society.

"Hacks of the Human Mind:" Flatbush Joe broadens the point and discusses how technology is giving us the power to tickle the Reward Centers of our brain without actually achieving the sorts of things that the Reward Centers were supposed to reward us for.

Video games are achievement porn for men.

Facebook is relationship porn for women. Same with celebrity gossip. They are all hacks of the human mind.

Our brains are built to live in small hunter-gatherer tribes. Some evolutionary change since farming. But our underlying hardware is still mostly for hunter-gatherer small tribes.

The male brain is especially designed to try and find some skill the tribe values and get good at it. People complimenting us on the mastery of that skill makes us feel good. Our brain gives us reward signals.

Video games hijack that the exact same way porn hijacks our mating behaviors.

Our brain rewards us for seeing naked chicks. Cause 10,000 years ago the only way you saw a naked chick was a prelude to bonking. Brain is telling you, way to go, attaboy, keep up the good work.

Brain has trouble adapting to work where you can see a thousand hot chick cooches while sitting alone, unshowered in your studio apartment eating two-day old pizza.

Same with video games. If you got all the positive feedback a video game gives you -- achievement points, xp, etc, etc -- if you got all that in real life from real people then that must mean you are really awesome at something people care about it.

Video games give us all Tiger Woods, Tom Brady, and Kobe levels of ass-kissing praise -- but without actually accomplishing anything.

That fucks with the human brain.

Celebrity gossip just tricks our minds into thinking we are close friends of the alpha dude and alpha chick. They are sharing their secrets with us, you only do that with close friends. Alphas are the ones in charge of food distribution. Really important to be friends with the tribe leaders if the hunt comes up short or winter is bad. Somebody's gonna starve -- but not you cause you are a secret confidant of tribe leader Brad Pitt and Beyonce.

Modern media is mostly a giant brain-hack, mind-fuck.

Well now you've ruined my week, Dick.

I've never really understood FaceBook, but guessing, and looking at it through the prism of the "hack" Flatbush Joe suggests: Maybe we all learned the Friend Game as children, as part of the normal socialization subroutine of human development. But when you get older -- and I just mean mid-20's older -- you find that you don't have to engage that learning very often.* You have a corps of friends already, and you don't really have to make new ones. (You do have to deal with colleagues and acquaintances but that's not the same as making friends; your boss demands you work with those people. It's not a "win" if your work-partner says "Good morning" to you.

So maybe FaceBook is a way of activating those Social Reward Centers that most people use less and less by the time they're 25.

* Note: No, I'm not saying "people don't make friends past 23." I just mean past that age, you're rarely put into a Sink or Swim Friend-Making Challenge as you were when you entered middle school. Those times were both exciting and terrifying, because it actually was a challenge, and there really were winners and losers in the Friend Game.

That competition aspect of Social Behavior tends be less important as one ages (and other competitions become more important).

So maybe we're still wired to do that and FaceBook gives us a manner of doing it that tends not exist in real life...? I mean here the friend-collecting aspect of it, not the Filling in Already-Made Friends on various comings and goings.

Posted by: Ace at 12:37 PM | Comments (429)
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What difference does it make to Obama's poll numbers.

Via the Center for Security Policy, 700 Special Ops veterans sent a letter to Congress today calling on Congress to establish a select committee to investigate the Benghazi cover-up. “The SOF 700 letter was organized at the initiative of Lieutenant General William G. “Jerry” Boykin USA (Ret.) by Special Operations Speaks (SOS),” Frank Gaffney writes. “This not-for-profit organization was established by special operation veterans in 2012 to illuminate the failed operational security environment of the Obama Administration and to restore accountability in government. These veterans have put their lives on the line for our country. The signers are determined to ensure than no one else needlessly loses theirs by establishing – and learning from – the lessons of the Benghazigate scandal.”

Posted by: Ace at 11:37 AM | Comments (287)
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Pardon the vague headline -- I can't tell from this article if the company in question is a licensee of Colt, or a branch of Colt, or some sort of corporate entity affiliated with Colt.

Point is, whatever they are, they make AR-15s under the Colt name. And they're moving to Texas.

The move by Colt Competition into Breckenridge comes as the CEO of Colt Manufacturing in Connecticut has said there will soon be few good answers to keep his company in the state. Connecticut passed some of the nationÂ’s most restrictive gun laws this week.

It also comes weeks after Governor Rick Perry reportedly sent letters to gun companies, encouraging them to move to Texas. Perry sent a message on Twitter to Colorado company Magpul as recently as March 21, saying “Come on Down to Texas.” The Governor’s office did not confirm Friday if it had sent a recruitment letter to Colt Competition.

This goes beyond the 2nd Amendment. Texas is attracting companies because it's offering economic freedom. And it goes beyond that, too: This is about a fundamental dispute about whether our government exists to serve us and get out of the way of our own initiative, or whether government exists to instruct us and limit us as if we were schoolchildren in their care, permitted only to do the things the agreed to by a consensus of ill-educated moral scolds.

It's also about pluralism vs. monoculture. Liberal Connecticut would certainly like to imagine itself as the pluralistic society, and Texas as the monoculture, but in fact that's backwards. As Connecticut (and the various other former democracies of the east) claim that a "social consensus" has now been reached, politically, on a great many "issues" previously not thought to be political in nature at all, in more and more establishes an Official State Position on every question a Free Man might have, with those disagreeing with the party orthodoxy punished, or at least burdened, by official state sanction.

Meanwhile, Texas permits people to be as largely free.

Which means they're free to be weird. I don't mean this word as negatively as it's usually used. I use "weird" to mean any position that deviates from the widely-agreed to provincial orthodoxy. I'm sure gun manufacturers and gun owners and gun enthusiasts appear plenty weird to the Neo-Liberal majority of soft-thinking Connecticutans.

One question that's never gone away in all of history is what does society do about those who disagree with the prevailing social mores? Does it allow such "weirdoes" to go about their business without interference, or does it bring the various powers of the majority consensus -- social disapproval, formal laws burdening or prohibiting dissident conduct and opinions -- to push the dissenters towards the majority line?

One thing that annoys me about capital-L libertarians: They continue talking up the threat to Dissidents being equal from both political poles, without ever noticing that the threats from the Right are largely defanged due to judicial law-making (taking many rightist threats to liberty off the Constitutional table entirely) or due to simple political unpopularity of them.

Meanwhile, the Left's assault on liberty is growing and fully sanctioned by the state. It's an ascending star (a dark star, mind you), not a fading one.

The parties are not "equal" when it comes to threats to liberty. There are those on the right who have strong Nannying tendencies, but they could not muster the political support for their Nannyist tendencies, nor could those tendencies survive scrutiny by the US courts, which are ever-vigilant against threats to liberty which come from the right (and hardly mindful at all of those which come from the left-- ObamaCare's a tax, remember?).

When liberals feel oppressed by laws pushed by the right, they get them overturned by the courts. In some cases, they actually garner the public support enough to end such laws by actual democratic action.

And when conservatives feel oppressed by liberty-restricting laws from the left?

Our only realistic alternative seems to be to physically relocate ourselves to a more-free jurisdiction.

Posted by: Ace at 10:29 AM | Comments (3)
Post contains 690 words, total size 4 kb.

Pardon the vague headline -- I can't tell from this article if the company in question is a licensee of Colt, or a branch of Colt, or some sort of corporate entity affiliated with Colt.

Point is, whatever they are, they make AR-15s under the Colt name. And they're moving to Texas.

The move by Colt Competition into Breckenridge comes as the CEO of Colt Manufacturing in Connecticut has said there will soon be few good answers to keep his company in the state. Connecticut passed some of the nationÂ’s most restrictive gun laws this week.

It also comes weeks after Governor Rick Perry reportedly sent letters to gun companies, encouraging them to move to Texas. Perry sent a message on Twitter to Colorado company Magpul as recently as March 21, saying “Come on Down to Texas.” The Governor’s office did not confirm Friday if it had sent a recruitment letter to Colt Competition.

This goes beyond the 2nd Amendment. Texas is attracting companies because it's offering economic freedom. And it goes beyond that, too: This is about a fundamental dispute about whether our government exists to serve us and get out of the way of our exercise of our own free initiative, or whether government exists to instruct us and limit us as if we were schoolchildren in their care, permitted only to do the things the agreed to by a consensus of ill-educated moral scolds.

It's also about pluralism vs. monoculture. Liberal Connecticut would certainly like to imagine itself as the pluralistic society, and Texas as the monoculture, but in fact that's backwards. As Connecticut (and the various other former democracies of the east) claim that a "social consensus" has now been reached, politically, on a great many "issues" previously not thought to be political in nature at all, and more and more establishes an Official State Position on every question a Free Man might have, with those disagreeing with the party orthodoxy punished, or at least burdened, by official state sanction.

Meanwhile, Texas permits people to be as largely free.

Which means they're free to be weird. I don't mean this word as negatively as it's usually used. I use "weird" to mean any position that deviates from the widely-agreed to provincial orthodoxy. I'm sure gun manufacturers and gun owners and gun enthusiasts appear plenty weird to the Neo-Liberal majority of soft-thinking Connecticutans.

One question that's never gone away in all of history is what does society do about those who disagree with the prevailing social mores? Does it allow such "weirdoes" to go about their business without interference, or does it bring the various powers of the majority consensus -- social disapproval, formal laws burdening or prohibiting dissident conduct and opinions -- to push the dissenters towards the majority line?

One thing that annoys me about capital-L libertarians: They continue talking up the threat to Dissidents being equal from both political poles, without ever noticing that the threats from the Right are largely defanged due to judicial law-making (taking many rightist threats to liberty off the Constitutional table entirely) or due to simple political unpopularity of them.

Meanwhile, the Left's assault on liberty is growing and fully sanctioned by the state. It's an ascending star (a dark star, mind you), not a fading one.

The parties are not "equal" when it comes to threats to liberty. There are those on the right who have strong Nannying tendencies, but they could not muster the political support for their Nannyist tendencies, nor could those tendencies survive scrutiny by the US courts, which are ever-vigilant against threats to liberty which come from the right (and hardly mindful at all of those which come from the left-- ObamaCare's a tax, remember?).

When liberals feel oppressed by laws pushed by the right, they get them overturned by the courts. In some cases, they actually garner the public support enough to end such laws by actual democratic action.

And when conservatives feel oppressed by liberty-restricting laws from the left?

Our only realistic alternative seems to be to physically relocate ourselves to a more-free jurisdiction.

The Magnetic Attraction of the Future: supercore references Heinlein's gonzo-libertarian moon colony:

8 Can we colonize Luna already?

I was having trouble expressing what I was trying to express, but this helps me get there. The appeal of Texas, to me, isn't that it's Southern. I'm a Northern Yankee. Southern culture is alien to me.

But what Texas (and other forward-thinking states) are doing is implementing a culture of The Future, as opposed to the decaying states' culture of the Past.

The future is always exciting.

But in Connecticut, as in many of the big liberal states, the year is always 1974.

I don't want to live in 1974 forever. It was bad enough the first time.

The pull of the future is hard to resist. And I'm getting that Future Gravity vibe from Texas.

Meanwhile, There's California: California used to occupy an outsized place in the collective imagination as being a the State of the Future.

No one believes that anymore. California's growing more dystopian. No one ever has anything good to say about California politics or society, the things man makes. It's always about the weather.

There are Numbers and Logic and then there is the Imagination and the Heart. I think many of the former States of the Future (California most of all) have been coasting on a 30-year-old reputation of which it is simply no longer deserving. The Numbers and Logic have been against California for a while, but it's continued to exist as the State of the Future in the imagination and in the heart. That's the place where it really counts.

I see that changing. (Why? Because it just changed in me. Hey, we're all solipsistic, at least a little bit.)

Mike the Moose on The Past:

You know I've lived here in Cali, most of my life. I've watched it over the decades of that life piss away the residual prosperity it had from the gold industry, and the oil industry, and in my lifetime the computation Industry. Every cent of the money from three of the most significant economic booms this nation has ever seen....gone.

You imagine an America without conservative states as a boon, because of the fading glory of now progressive strongholds make them look good on paper today. Like Havisham still dressed in the nuptial gown, staring at a rotted feast and disintegrating linens, you imagine the celebration is still real the party still going on, because the house hasn't fallen down yet, because the decayed vestiges still in form resemble the glory of yesteryear close enough that you can imagine the greatness of the fading moment in the sun. But progressive states are the run down and crumbling mansions of greatness long past. Rotted out by progressivism, just waiting to collapse of their own accord.

Exactly the sort of vibe I'm getting. You can't live long on reputation alone. You do have to periodically innovate and adapt.

I'm not seeing that in the decaying states. They continue partying like it's 1974.

Posted by: Ace at 10:29 AM | Comments (505)
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