It’s the “End” of the Iraq War

The President is delivering a speech later today to announce the supposed end of the Iraq war. But as far as I’ve gathered, there isn’t even a substantial change in our foreign policy inre: Iraq today. Or even yesterday, or the day before. There was an announcement made by MSNBC a week and a half ago where the last full US combat brigade left Iraq.

Random Notes On Lily Dale

There were a lot of details left out of my recent article on Lilydale which didn’t really fit into the story that well. We wanted to get to the punchline of having the medium identify Taibbi and Randi as spirits around me before boring people with too much of the minutiae, even if some of it was kind of funny/interesting.

Fuck Lily Dale

In the mid-19th century, three sisters from a sleepy upstate NY community managed to convince the world that they could communicate with the dead. Late in their lives, two of the Fox sisters demonstrated how they pulled off this fraud (one of them simply cracked the knuckle in her big toe). Unfortunately, their confession wasn’t enough to change the minds of true “spirit world” believers, and the legend continues to the present. So does the tradition of bilking the gullible.

Federal Appeals Court Loves Making Death Threats At Corporations

Hey, guess what everybody? It’s totally legal to make death threats to corporations now.

So there’s this guy from Arizona named Kurt William Havelock who was really mad at the Super Bowl. So, as one does in such situations, he decided to mail out a manifesto to media outlets detailing the reasons he has for shooting people at the 2008 Super Bowl in Glendale, AZ. From Wired’s Threat Level blog:

CERN Records Drops Newest Jam

CERN’s secret project of starting a record label under the guise of studying physics has taken another step towards the scientists’ domination of all genres of music. First they conquered hip hop, and then they branched out into ambient drones. Now they’re going old school with a choir:

A Tale Of Two Nontroversies

I really don’t like getting caught up in the faux-controversies like the two I’m about to get caught up in. The way I understand it, controversies are supposed to involve two opposing positions, both of which are intellectually defensible by well-informed adults. These do not qualify by that definition, but the hypocrisy is just so glaringly obvious that it really needs to be pointed out. Here’s what I’m talking about:

Best Korea’s Glorious Social Media Fails To Prevent Traitorous Imperialist Escape Plan

There’s this new study in Psychological Science I found via PhysOrg. Here is the press release for it, which is titled “People Who Cannot Escape a System Are Likely to Defend the Status Quo.” They had 28 Canadian women read about their country’s immigration policy. Half read about how it would soon become easier to relocate outside of Canada and half read about how it would soon become more difficult to leave.

Then they were asked about issues like gender inequality when it comes to wages, and the statistically significant trend was that the women who read the material about how it would soon become more difficult to leave Canada were more likely to defend lower wages for themselves. Here how University of Waterloo co-author of the study put it:

The 5 Worst Quacks Around Today

I’m going to have to limit this list to people who are currently practicing some form of quackery, because if I tried to make a historical list I’d feel compelled to handicap for that person’s period in history. So Isaac Newton, who was literally one of the smartest people ever, believed in alchemy. The great 17th century astronomer Johannes Kepler believed in astrology. Lots of the ancient Greek philosophers believed in demons. Demons that controlled their thoughts. Seriously.

But you’ve really got to cut those people some slack because of how primitive human understanding was in their times. If you’re living in a technologically advanced society today, as the five below are, you really have no excuse for that kind of ignorance. So to make it a level playing field, here are what I think are the worst purveyors of antiscientific pseudomedicine around today.

Kenya-Controlled US Supreme Court Rules Against Orly Taitz

Last September, federal judge Clay Land of Georgia ordered the dentist / birther / internet troll Orly Taitz pay a $20,000 fine for violating Rule 11 of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure. Taitz of course realized that Clay Land was a communist fascist Maoist Muslim Marxist traitor and appealed. This appeal was denied by another al Qaeda Nazi posing as a federal judge, and on it went like that until Taitz started trolling members of the Supreme Court on ChatRoulette.

On How We Could Find Alien Life

This past weekend was SETIcon, a convention set up by the scientists who search for evidence of intelligent life on other worlds via radio. And at that convention, Seth Shostak said that he thought the chances of finding such life are “pretty high.” And he’s basing that on the Drake Equation. But the problem with trying to calculate that kind of probability is that most of the factors involved can vary wildly, literally astronomically. So you end up with estimates that vary even more wildly. From Space.com: