- JohnClark
- Mar 24, 2005
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Well that's less than ideal
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Bubbacub posted:
Literally a Kelly.
terrible comic
Goddamn, he hits nearly all the conservative tropes relating to environmentalism/the left. Smelly hippies, burning flags, "hate freedom" (literally), crying statue of liberty, welfare queens. He missed a couple easy ones though, he should make the car a hybrid or a volt/leaf, and have one of the passengers lighting up a bong.
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Nov 8, 2011 17:18
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Apr 28, 2024 09:52
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- JohnClark
- Mar 24, 2005
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Well that's less than ideal
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Truly Bryce Harper is the first player in the history of baseball to think, "you know, I bet I could leg out a double on this hit".
Jesus loving christ, how desperate do you have to be to latch onto an ESPN webgem to bolster your political positions?
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Jun 16, 2012 01:22
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- JohnClark
- Mar 24, 2005
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Well that's less than ideal
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There's also a companion piece written by a conservative on liberals that borders on self-parody.
My faith in that particular ability has been completely obliterated. How on Earth was that article submitted with a straight face?
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May 16, 2013 04:25
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- JohnClark
- Mar 24, 2005
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Well that's less than ideal
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Fox business is always good for a laugh, especially when discussing global warming!
Steve Tobak posted:Inspector Clouseau: Does your dog bite?
Hotel Clerk: No.
Inspector Clouseau: [bowing down to pet the dog] Nice doggie.
[Dog barks and bites Clouseau in the hand]
Inspector Clouseau: I thought you said your dog did not bite!
Hotel Clerk: That is not my dog.
As kids, we all learned the old adage, “when you assume you make an rear end out of u and me.” Did any of us listen? Apparently not.
I don’t care if you’re a CEO, a Nobel Prize winning physicist, or the president of a sovereign nation, I guarantee you’ve made terrible decisions – some of them life-changing or even disastrous – based on misinformation, flawed assumptions, and faulty logic.
And I’d be willing to bet that’s the reason behind more financial bubbles, corporate disasters, personal tragedies, and dumb legislation than any other factor. It’s certainly behind all manner of dysfunctional leadership behavior, the dot-com bubble, and maybe even a war or two.
Not only that but the Web and social media have made the problem a thousand times worse. Now, information propagates all over the planet at Internet speed. From some unshaven moron at home in his pajamas to a billion people in milliseconds. And folks make all sorts of business and personal decisions based on it.
The only problem is that probably 99% of it is complete BS. It’s what we in the business like to call “content.”
Truth be told, this isn’t all about the Web. Flawed assumptions and faulty logic have always been the Achilles Heel of even the brightest human minds. Here are three quick examples I’m sure you’ll recognize:
The physicist. Albert Einstein, who famously said, “God doesn’t play dice with the world.” Oh yes he does, Albert. Even he admitted he was wrong, albeit after decades of denial and debate in the scientific community over quantum mechanics, which is now accepted by every physicist on Earth.
The president. George W. Bush took America to war with Iraq over Weapons of Mass Destruction that, to my knowledge, were never found. I’m not taking a position on whether that was right or wrong. I’m just saying it was a pretty big decision based on an assumption from limited data that apparently turned out to be erroneous.
The CEO. WorldCom CEO Bernie Ebbers, now serving 25 years in federal prison, promoted a best-case assumption for the continuous growth of the Internet as gospel. The so-called “big lie” was adopted by the telecom industry and Wall Street, fueling the dot-com bubble and costing investors trillions when it burst.
And that’s just the tip of the iceberg.
Here are some more recent examples of how the Internet and social media have compounded the problem and turned us all into propagators of flawed assumptions, misinformation, and faulty logic that affects each and every one of us:
Remember when Toyota recalled millions of vehicles and nearly suffered a brand meltdown over allegations that “sudden acceleration” caused dozens of accidents? None of that turned out to be true.
A U.S. Department of Transportation investigation showed that drivers were mistakenly flooring the accelerator instead of jamming on the breaks. But media hype and grandstanding politicians – always ready to capitalize on a crisis – propagated the erroneous assumption that the crashes were caused by automotive malfunction.
The Obama administration and congressional Democrats teamed up to sell the American public on the idea that ObamaCare would reduce skyrocketing healthcare costs. That little bit of misinformation, propagated all over the airwaves and Internet, was apparently based on some ridiculous assumptions that had no chance of being true. And yet, it worked. The bill passed. And now, we’re all stuck with it.
Perhaps the most devastating affect of the Internet Age is that it routinely propagates bad science. In case you didn’t know, the scientific method is how civilization has advanced the state of science and technology for centuries by making assumptions and either disproving or upholding them over numerous experimental trials.
Without the scientific method and its rigid adherence to logic and deductive reasoning, we would all still be living in the Dark Ages. Well, guess what? That’s the direction we’re now heading in. Every day I come across supposedly factual articles in reputable publications that propagate bad science.
I was just reading an about research suggesting that effective leaders had similar activity in certain regions of the brain. It goes on to suggest that neurofeedback could be used to train people to be better leaders. Funny thing is, it’s just as likely that the cause and effect are reversed: that the brain activity is the result, not the cause, of leadership activities. In which case the conclusions are bogus.
A couple of years ago, Time Warner’s Health.com published an article listing 10 careers that are “more depression-prone than others.” The article, which quoted all sorts of mental health professionals discussing how jobs contribute to depression, went viral and was picked up by many major news outlets.
But here’s the thing. The article was based on the National Survey on Drug Use and Health, a questionnaire that, in addition to dozens of questions about drug and alcohol use, asked people if they’d had instances of depression in the past year and what they did for a living. There’s simply no scientific or causal link between the two. And it’s probably more likely that depressed people self-medicated and ended up in crappy jobs than that the jobs caused depression.
The coupe de grace in this category is of course global warming, manmade climate change, or whatever Al Gore is calling it these days. In this case, all the civilized nations of the world got together and legislated how billions of people will live from now on based entirely on an unproven assumption.
I get emails like this one all the time: “So you think that 97% of climate scientists who believe that climate change is real and that we are the reason are wrong?”
Funny thing is, science isn’t about “belief” -- at least it didn’t used to be. If it were, we’d all be living like the Flintstones. And that 97, 98, or 99 percent number you see quoted all over the Internet is simply false. According to my research, scientists seem to be split about 50-50 on the question.
And yet, we’re all supposed to buy electric cars that we have to plug in.
Look, f the leaders of the world think everyone should change their lives based on an assumption, then they’re just trying to make an rear end out of u and me. And if scientists no longer use the scientific method, then Dark Ages, here we come. And that conclusion is based on good, solid logic. Yaba-daba-doo.
Steve Tobak is a Silicon Valley-based strategy consultant and former senior executive of the technology industry.
He's soooo close to getting the point, and then at the very end he drives right off a cliff.
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Jun 2, 2013 22:04
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- JohnClark
- Mar 24, 2005
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Well that's less than ideal
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I only have a couple hardcore conservatives on my facebook feed, but every now and then they drop a bomb like this one about the recent filibuster in the Texas senate:
crazy blogger posted:An Open Letter to Wendy Davis
Posted on June 29, 2013 by TheMattWalshBlog
Dear Senator Wendy Davis,
Congrats! I know this is a bit belated, but I wanted to write a message of salutations and congratulations after that abortion rights filibuster you pulled off in the Texas senate this past week. The media tells me it was “historic” and “game changing” and “epic,” and I know it must have been because they only use those terms to describe, like, ten or twenty different events every day.
What a heroic performance it was. You were like Joan of Arc, Mother Teresa and Harriet Tubman, all rolled into one. Except they stood for courage, righteousness, truth, peace, and love, while you stood for the billion dollar abortion industry. They protected and defended life, while you protected and defended your right to destroy life. They faced grave danger, you face the adulation, admiration and campaign donations of the media, Hollywood, the president, pop culture, the abortion lobby and millions of Americans. The parallels are striking.
That’s why I’m writing to say “job well done.” In the midst of literally no adversity, you rose up and voiced an opinion that was sure to make you popular amongst the most powerful people in the country. How did you ever muster the courage? And let us not forget the content of your profoundly important message: That abortion clinics should not be regulated and the health and safety of its patients should not be ensured! Amen! Huzzah! So a few women die here and there due to extreme negligence and profit driven exploitation, big deal. We care about your reproductive rights, not your right to not be mutilated, injured, infected, or killed by quacks who flunked out of all legitimate medical fields and decided to perform abortions instead. This bill would have brought abortion enterprises up to snuff with every other facet of the medical industry, and required clinics to match the same standards that all other outpatient medical facilities are forced to adhere to — and that is just unacceptable. Certainly an orthodontist or a podiatrist must meet many health, safety and disclosure standards, that’s just logical. But an abortion clinic? Come on. Remember, Gosnell was unfairly and unjustly persecuted for killing hundreds of infants and at least two women, along with running a grotesquely unsanitary facility where patients were operated on with dirty medical tools and given lethal doses of drugs by untrained and unlicensed 15 year olds, while the body parts of dead babies piled up in the refrigerator and women sat on blood stained couches before being ushered into the bathroom to give birth into toilets, like these are “crimes” or something. This was all made possible for thirty years because of a total lack of regulatory oversight. Everyone in government was either too ideologically invested in abortion, or too afraid of the people who are, to do anything about these so called “horrific atrocities.” And that’s how it should be. Now, reports have circulated about Gosnell-ish clinics all across the country, including one right down there in Houston, and so we MUST make sure that there are NO laws or policies enforcing any standards of safety, hygiene and general human decency on abortion clinics — that is a burden they simply can’t be saddled with.
I mean, when women-haters babble on about imposing basic health and safety codes on abortion clinics, it makes me almost as mad as when they insist that the clinics should be forced to offer ultrasounds to their patients. What barbarians! Why should an abortion facility be required to provide information to women before taking their money and killing their kid? Ignorance and darkness, that’s the only proper environment in which to run a reputable abortion business. Again, literally all other medical fields are required by law to offer all available information to patients before performing surgical procedures, but abortionists must stay exempt from this otherwise reasonable policy!
Oh, but I mustn’t forget the most important message in your filibuster: Unborn children are expendable pieces of insignificant trash and we must never hinder society’s ability to exterminate as many of them as possible! Hell, they aren’t even “children,” they’re fetuses. Which means “offspring” in Latin, so it’s, like, totally a different thing. Hey, how did you explain to your own child that she was utterly worthless while she was in your womb? That must have been a really special moment when you had that talk with her. I know anytime my children point to a woman’s pregnant tummy and say “Look daddy, she has a baby,” I’ll make sure to correct them. “No, honey, she has a parasite that she can, and probably should, have extracted and thrown in the garbage.” The Texas bill would outlaw abortions after 20 weeks. At 20 weeks, the fetus has things like a brain, a nervous system, a heart, lungs, fingers, toes, the ability to hear his mother’s voice, the ability to dream, the ability to feel pain. But anyone who wants to protect these indisputably human creatures and stop them from being brutally butchered is clearly driven by a hatred for women or poor people or minorities or something! (Even though females, blacks, and the poor are exactly the demographics most often killed through abortions, but we are more focused on protecting their sex habits, not their very existence). During your filibuster you said, while arguing for the violent destruction of fully formed children, that you are speaking for those who have been “silenced.” Then, a crowd of fans erupted in uproarious applause. What a moment that was — a crowd of people stomping their feet and screaming for baby killing. How inspiring. It was like a scene from the Walking Dead, and I mean that in a good way, of course.
One more thing: You keep making the point that men have no right to have an opinion about abortion, and they certainly ought to have no say in whether their children live or die. Thanks for this. Please, keep trying to drive that wedge between men and women and men and their children. If there’s one thing our society needs to do, it’s stop men from caring about their families. There is just TOO much paternal involvement in society and it’s really becoming a problem. I mean, what good is it to simply turn women against their own children if we aren’t also turning them against their husbands, and disconnecting their husbands from their children? Let the message ring out: Men shouldn’t give a crap about kids! Hooray! Freedom!
Anyway, well Governor Perry will be reintroducing the bill you derailed. Stupid son of a gun just won’t get off his “we shouldn’t murder sentient human children” bandwagon. I hope you stand again and do whatever you can to stop him. Congratulations. If you are successful, more children will die as a direct result of your actions. You must be so proud.
Sincerely,
Matt Walsh
You can practically taste his fury at the fact that this woman and her ilk have defeated him. The tone is so condescending and dismissive you would think he had actually won. Also, assuming he's a Republican party supporter generally, his reference to people dying because of insufficient government regulation and to RICK loving PERRY'S overwhelming respect for life is the very definition of  .
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Jul 2, 2013 04:55
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Apr 28, 2024 09:52
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- JohnClark
- Mar 24, 2005
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Well that's less than ideal
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So the WSJ and the Heritage Foundation have blessed us with their latest list of which countries are the most economically "free" around the world.
Terry Miller posted:World economic freedom has reached record levels, according to the 2014 Index of Economic Freedom, released Tuesday by the Heritage Foundation and The Wall Street Journal. But after seven straight years of decline, the U.S. has dropped out of the top 10 most economically free countries.
For 20 years, the index has measured a nation's commitment to free enterprise on a scale of 0 to 100 by evaluating 10 categories, including fiscal soundness, government size and property rights. These commitments have powerful effects: Countries achieving higher levels of economic freedom consistently and measurably outperform others in economic growth, long-term prosperity and social progress. Botswana, for example, has made gains through low tax rates and political stability.
Those losing freedom, on the other hand, risk economic stagnation, high unemployment and deteriorating social conditions. For instance, heavy-handed government intervention in Brazil's economy continues to limit mobility and fuel a sense of injustice.
It's not hard to see why the U.S. is losing ground. Even marginal tax rates exceeding 43% cannot finance runaway government spending, which has caused the national debt to skyrocket. The Obama administration continues to shackle entire sectors of the economy with regulation, including health care, finance and energy. The intervention impedes both personal freedom and national prosperity.
But as the U.S. economy languishes, many countries are leaping ahead, thanks to policies that enhance economic freedom—the same ones that made the U.S. economy the most powerful in the world. Governments in 114 countries have taken steps in the past year to increase the economic freedom of their citizens. Forty-three countries, from every part of the world, have now reached their highest economic freedom ranking in the index's history.
Hong Kong continues to dominate the list, followed by Singapore, Australia, Switzerland, New Zealand and Canada. These are the only countries to earn the index's "economically free" designation. Mauritius earned top honors among African countries and Chile excelled in Latin America. Despite the turmoil in the Middle East, several Gulf states, led by Bahrain, earned designation as "mostly free."
A realignment is under way in Europe, according to the index's findings. Eighteen European nations, including Germany, Sweden, Georgia and Poland, have reached new highs in economic freedom. By contrast, five others—Greece, Italy, France, Cyprus and the United Kingdom—registered scores lower than they received when the index started two decades ago.
The most improved players are in Eastern Europe, including Estonia, Lithuania and the Czech Republic. These countries have gained the most economic freedom over the past two decades. And it's no surprise: Those who have lived under communism have no trouble recognizing the benefits of a free-market system. But countries that have experimented with milder forms of socialism, such as Sweden, Denmark and Canada, also have made impressive moves toward greater economic freedom, with gains near 10 points or higher on the index scale. Sweden, for instance, is now ranked 20th out of 178 countries, up from 34th out of 140 countries in 1996.
The U.S. and the U.K, historically champions of free enterprise, have suffered the most pronounced declines. Both countries now fall in the "mostly free" category. Some of the worst performers are in Latin America, particularly Venezuela, Argentina, Ecuador and Bolivia. All are governed by crony-populist regimes pushing policies that have made property rights less secure, spending unsustainable and inflation evermore threatening.
Despite financial crises and recessions, the global economy has expanded by nearly 70% in 20 years, to $54 trillion in 2012 from $32 trillion in 1993. Hundreds of millions of people have left grinding poverty behind as their economies have become freer. But it is an appalling, avoidable human tragedy how many of the world's peoples remain unfree—and poor.
The record of increasing economic freedom elsewhere makes it inexcusable that a country like the U.S. continues to pursue policies antithetical to its own growth, while wielding its influence to encourage other countries to chart the same disastrous course. The 2014 Index of Economic Freedom documents a world-wide race to enhance economic opportunity through greater freedom—and this year's index demonstrates that the U.S. needs a drastic change in direction.
Given the fact that the countries that are ahead of us all have universal health care (even tiny Mauritius) and some of them even provide free college (even tiny Mauritius), I guess the point of this article is to argue in favor of those things?
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Jan 14, 2014 18:22
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Nov 8, 2011 17:18
