Author: Richard

“Palins Alaska” is a Reality Show. Apologize

I’m thinking of making this a regular feature. another one that comes to mind is Palins reality show. liberals mocked her for coming out with one and camp Palin called it a type of documentary and conservatives went all BOOYA in the libs face – except, then the show premiered… and its a friggin reality show. line for line. by definition in format, appearance and film structure: its a REALITY SHOW. Apologize.

Birth Certificate Apologies

Now that President Obama has released his birth certificate, I demand apologies from the people on both sides who spread lies, intentional or otherwise. APOLOGIZE…

FROM ANTI-BIRTHERS: You were wrong. The stock response to anyone who dared to mention the fact that the birth certificate had until now remained hidden, was a false claim that “he [President Obama] HAS [released it]”. Even when anti-birthers like myself would observe that the document released was in fact not a birth certificate and did not prove anything on this issue in the context of still mentioning that the conspiracy theory is ridiculous and wholly without merit – you people still smeared us as being birther-nuts and kept falsely saying the birth certificate was already released. You were wrong. It was just now released. Apologize. It is not okay to spread lies just because the other side is peddling a theory based on lies. You fight lies with TRUTH. not more lies. APOLOGIZE.

FROM BIRTHERS: You were wrong. I’m not going to waste time in dissecting exactly why it is insanely stupid to hold the belief that Barack Obama’s mother who was living in Hawaii whilst pregnant, flew via 1960s air travel all the way to Kenya to have her baby and for some reason have someone plant a false newspaper birth announcement back in her Hawaiian hometown newspaper (and for what gain or motive?). Instead lets just stick to the obvious: you said the birth certificate would show he was born in Africa. here it is… it doesn’t say that. You were wrong. APOLOGIZE.

Top birther Jerome Corsi’s book will be released on May 17, 2011 (this is not a joke):

You were wrong. You invested a lot of money into something you will not get back unless you continue to scam people with claims that “the book is more relevant now, than ever”. Don’t do that. Escape with a shred of dignity and admit you were wrong and eat the losses on the book.

APOLOGIZE….

Equally annoying are the people who drove this as a news story, almost entirely for partisan reasons. MSNBC covered it extensively with full segments, back to back while I never saw anything about it on Fox except in single question form by a host or comment by guest to dismiss how dumb it is. Still though, it wasn’t that big a deal in relation to everything else across the board anywhere. Contrary to the Presidents claim, the Birther controversy was 4% of newshole, not ‘dominant’ story.

An analysis of cable news coverage shows that 19 percent of the cable news airtime studied focused on the 2012 election last week. Mark Jurkowitz, Associate Director of PEJ, provides this breakdown of the coverage by cable network:

MSNBC
including “The Ed Show,” “Hardball,” “The Last Word,” and “The Rachel Maddow Show”

  • 28% of airtime studied was devoted to the 2012 election
  • 10% of airtime studied was devoted to Obama
  • A subset of that Obama airtime was coded “citizenship and religion rumors” to include “birther” coverage, which was 92% of the Obama coverage


Fox
including “Special Report w/Bret Baier,” “Fox Report w/Shepard Smith,” “The O’Reilly Factor,” “Hannity”

  • 16% of airtime studied was devoted to 2012 election
  • 5% of airtime studied was devoted to Obama
  • A subset of that Obama airtime was coded “citizenship and religion rumors” to include “birther” coverage, which was 8% of the Obama coverage


CNN
including “The Situation Room,” “John King, USA,” “In The Arena,” and “Anderson Cooper 360?

  • 11% of airtime studied was devoted to 2012 election
  • 5% of airtime studied was devoted to Obama
  • A subset of that Obama airtime was coded “citizenship and religion rumors” to include “birther” coverage, which was 100% of the Obama coverage.

Jurkowitz says MSNBC consistently devotes more of its airtime to politics, based on PEJ’s research, while CNN generally spends the least amount of time on politics of the three cable networks.

While MSNBC’s coverage may have been devoted to questioning or debunking the president’s citizenship issues, that network spent the most time discussing it.

Donald Trumps reaction was to tell everyone “you’re welcome”, taking full credit for the release. This is…valid. His headline making on the issue indeed is probably what changed it from a useful tool for the Administration to use to make Republicans look like crazy morons into an actual detriment that they needed to clean up before it made them look worse. Still though: he has to cop to the fact that his hunch was wrong, his “research project in Hawaii” never actually existed, and just on the plain old facts, he lost on this. Admit it already…

Research Saves

Not a hard choice. The rat is cute and that is it’s entire worth to the world. The girl has more to offer, even if you don’t believe in an inherent or divinely given worth to humans.

It’s not all lab rats of course. There is testing on beagles and chimps and other mammals. But if it saves human lives, there is no argument.

You want passion and truth? Okay. Teller and I would personally kill EVERY chimp in the world, with our bare hands, to save ONE street junkie…with AIDS.

-Penn Jillette

Fox Morning Show pranks co-host with iPad licking app

On the surface, this is an amusing April Fools gag on a Fox morning news show in San Diego with a cute reaction and blah blah blah – but my deeper interest is how awesome and casual Fox morning shows in San Diego are. We have Good Day LA I guess, which has the same light and bouncy air to it but still – I was more impressed by the anchor smoothly sniffing his phone and saying “ya dude” than with the actual content. An extra nice touch: The Fox 5 logo turning into Fox 69 during the segment.

 

Billions of Bugs travel above the clouds

From NPR:

Step outside on a clear day this summer and look up. What do you see? Blue. And maybe a plane or a bird up there, but otherwise … nothing. Or so you think. It turns out that right above you, totally invisible, is an enormous herd of animal life. There are so many creatures up there, they are so busy, so athletic, so tiny, that we had to fly up and give you a peek.

When British scientist Jason Chapman told us (listen to the radio piece or watch our video) there are 3 billion insects passing over your head in a summer month, he was talking about his survey in Great Britain. Closer to the equator, he says, the numbers should rise. He wouldn’t be surprised, for example, that in the sky over Houston or New Orleans there could be 6 billion critters passing overhead in a month.

“Beginning in 1926, Tanglefoot-coated slides were affixed to airplanes to collect insects, with famed aviator Charles Lindbergh contributing to the data-collection effort by carrying sticky glass slides on his 1933 flight crossing the Atlantic at 2,460 to 5,410 feet and over Greenland at 7,870 to 12,135 feet.”
Illustration of termite flying in the sky.
Benjamin Arthur/NPR

Now 12,000 feet is pretty high, but the all-time champ is, of all things, a termite!

In Berenbaum’s article, she mentions a 1961 study by J.L. Gressit in which an insect trap was placed on a Super-Constellation airplane. That plane flew 116,684 miles sampling the air, catching whatever was up there, and, Berenbaum says, “the trap managed to capture a single termite at 19,000 feet.” That’s the record.

You wonder how a little critter can survive the wind, the cold, the absence of company. “Wind dispersal at great heights can be rough on insects,” Berenbaum writes. And yet they are very tough. Of 1,610 insects captured by another team of scientists led by L.R. Taylor in 1960, 97 percent were alive and undamaged, 2 percent were alive and damaged, and 1 percent were dead. The flying corpse was, it turns out, a rarity.

Punky Brewster, all grow’d up

Punky Brewster was an 80s show about a little orphan girl with a dog who gets adopted by a stuffy old man because she melts his heart. Yes, it was the 80s version of Annie. The girl who played Punky’s name is Solei Moonfry (pronounced So-lay) who now has a Ustream account and does stuff on it. Below is the first part of the first episode of Punky Brewster for reference:

Watch Solei “go there”:

Trump on Presidential Policy

I am urprised he came out against same sex marriage with such a weak response. he’s still formulating an opinion on abortion (or rather “why” he’s prolife and what he’d do about it) but thinks its gonna go down fine with a “meh i just dong…*cringes* feeeeeel good about it” on this issue? disappointing. he could be an interesting voice if he was better managed (along with some of the others who have no shot at the actual nom).

Japanese Looting

I was originally going to post a snarky paragraph about how I was “watching the looter footage from Japan” on here and Twitter as a satiric riff on how bad our culture sucks in comparison but Ashley from MissAshleyPants.com already said it in plainspeak and it’s more effective:

Amazing how the Japanese people would sooner starve, thirst, and ultimately die proudly; rather than resort to looting/committing violent acts for food & luxuries alike as NOLA residents did in Katrina. No wonder other countries look down on us.

Classy…

Geez…

Another reason I like Japan is represented in this Ven Diagram: