Mark Twain (or was it Benjamin Disraeli?) famously said, "There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics".
This is the quintessence of statistics-as-lie.
Four out of 5 U.S. adults struggle with joblessness, near-poverty or reliance on welfare for at least parts of their lives, a sign of deteriorating economic security and an elusive American dream.
Four out of five...struggle...with joblessness, near-poverty or reliance on welfare for...wait for it...
at least parts of their lives.
Wow! That sounds really terrible. Foreboding even. But it's bullshit. Total and complete bullshit.
See, this pasture-pies-masquerading-as-science study includes people like me, who 30+ years ago was a struggling 23-year-old newly married guy, living in a crappy part of Sacramento (on the edge of Oak Park, a notorious crime-ridden part of town), making under $10K per year. At that time in my life, it's safe to say that I was living in "near-poverty". But is my situation in 1982 really "a sign of deteriorating economic security and an elusive American dream"? No more so than my economic situation now is a sign that Obamanomics lifted me from poverty to prosperity.
I'm not sure whom I'm more disgusted with: the quacks who published this study, or USA Today for giving it credence.
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Hearken back to April 2008, when the State of Text staged an over-the-top paramilitary raid on the Yearning For Zion (YFZ) ranch and kidnapped the children of FLDS church members. I made multiple blog posts regarding this atrocity. In those posts, I called into question the actions of Texas law enforcement, which I (correctly) labeled as police-state brutality and wrong on all fronts. As a result, I was labeled pro-FLDS and an apologist for their practices.
I wonder what I'll be labeled now.
It seems that the persecuted have become the persecutors. This story, which I'll summarize in the interest of brevity since the pertinent facts are spread throughout it, merits condemnation for those practitioners of the FLDS faith who were involved.
An individual in Colorado City, AZ, a former FLDS member and frequent critic of the sect, has for some time been receiving "gifts" of dead cats on his property. According to the story, the dead cats are supposed to be an intimidation tactic by FLDS members against said individual.
The latest incident, however, didn't involve a dead cat, but rather a live cat half-buried in concrete on his property. The animal was in incredible agony. After it was rescued, it was taken to a vet, but it died of its injuries in spite of efforts to save it.
You can tell a lot about a person by their treatment of animals. I'm no fan of cats, since they tend to make me stop breathing, but I would in no way ever condone subjecting a cat to the agony this animal endured. Only a monster would do such a thing. Or a sociopath. Either way, there's no denying that the persons involved here are evil to their core.
The FLDS church needs to "get it" here.
If you condone intimidation of critics and torture of animals, you are no better than the mouth-breathers over at FLDS Texas who fanned the flames of persecution against you in the aftermath of the YFZ raid.
Do the right thing. Identify the persons involved so they can stand before the law. Show everyone that you're not "those people" that the mouth-breathers accuse you of being.
xfloggingkylex's reaction to the linked story was, "Fuck the FLDS!". Mine will be the same if you don't make this right.
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I've spent years trying to figure out why people fail to understand how governments have been systematically tearing down the foundations of individual liberties. Now I know.
Read more at
The Tizona Group.
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I've been hearing for 8 years about how important it is for me to hold my nose and vote for the assclown with the 'R' after his name, if for no other reason than to assure that the Supreme Court isn't taken over by "dangerous" Liberal elements. My principled stand has been that voting for anyone whom you truly believe to be a bad choice is worse than not voting at all. What was needed was a test case to show I was right.
Today I was proved right.
Republican George W. Bush -- for whom I was told to hold my nose, shut up, and vote -- appointed alleged "conservative" John Roberts as Chief Justice of the Supreme Court during his reign of error. And it was Chief Justice Roberts who cast the deciding vote that made the Constitutional horror show that is Obamacare the law of the land.
Do not EVER again tell me to vote for a candidate who doesn't reflect my vision of what this country should be "to protect the country from a Liberal Supreme Court" -- or for any other reason, for that matter. In fact, do yourself a favor and stop voting entirely. All you do by voting is to lend legitimacy to the charade.
A government that can force you to buy health care is a government that can force you to do anything. We have officially passed from citizens to serfs. We have no one to blame but ourselves.
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I don't follow all that many people on Twitter, mostly friends and my favorite bloggers. One of the people I follow is
IowaHawk, a blogger I heard about from Toes.
David Burge is hilarious. Mostly, he's hilarious because he's got a sniper's talent for hitting at the very essence of an issue. A great example is this tweet from yesterday.
As one of those falling into that category, I must say: guilty as charged.
For years I've said that the official motto of the state of Maryland should be, "If you can imagine it, we can tax it". Maryland has been a one-party state practically non-stop since Reconstruction. And it shows. Maryland Donkeys put the "tard" in "libtard".
Not content with chasing off most of the state's millionaires by
raising their taxes in 2008, Governor Martin O'Malley (known as "owe Malley" around these parts) and the one-party drones in the legislature apparently want to
chase off the rest of the tax base as well.
Insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result. Maryland is nuts.
Expect to hear that I've moved to Virginia sometime in the near future.
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Outsourcing. It's a dirty word for most of us. In my line of work, computer programming, it's a dirty word on the highest level. Face it, if you don't have special skills or qualifications, you face the risk of having your job outsourced.
But it's not just that. It's calling customer support for your laptop and getting a man named "Peggy" on the phone, speaking the worst kind of broken English, and providing no help whatsoever.
The other day I was driving to work and heard a commercial that made me do a double-take. I had to hear the commercial a second time to make sure that I heard it right. I had heard it right.
There is a company called Surrogacy Abroad (website
here) that offers surrogate mother services in...wait for it...
INDIA.
Surrogacy in India has become an increasingly popular alternative for Americans. The laws for surrogacy in India favor the intended parents more than the other countries. The cost for surrogacy in India is roughly a third of what it costs in the U.S. Also, the range of treatment options available is broad and at the forefront of art technology. Surrogacy in India offers a unique opportunity for discretion, which would be difficult to achieve in the U.S.
Wait, what?
Has outsourcing reached the level of
reductio ad absurdum? We're outsourcing....
childbirth?!?!?
Beam me up, Scotty. There is no intelligent life on this planet.
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Occupy….Frederick?!?!?
How do “Frederick, MD” and “Occupy” end up in the same sentence? Behold, Occupy Frederick!
Read more at
The Tizona Group.
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It was going to be a game that came down to turnovers. That was supposed to favor the 49ers, who finished the season an astounding +28 on turnovers. Of course, that was before Ted Ginn was declared unable to play because of a bum knee. It was yesterday that we all learned just how valuable Ted Ginn really is to the 49ers.
He was replaced by Kyle Williams. Kyle MF'ing Williams.
It seemed as if old Kyle thought he was playing in some meaningless pickup game instead of for a chance to play in the Super Bowl. He carelessly bobbled a pitch early in the game, fortunate to fall on his own fumble. He dove (DOVE!!!!!) to catch one punt, coming up with it, but risking a costly turnover with really nothing to gain from it.
And then he got down to seriously screwing the pooch.
A poor punt by the Giants resulted in a ground ball bouncing along the sideline. Even a fan like me knows what the punt returner is supposed to do in that situation - yell out the signal for blockers to get as far away from the ball as possible and then do likewise.
Oh, but not Kyle MF'ing Williams. No, he ran alongside the bouncing ball like a retarded dog chasing a stick. The ball grazed his knee and was recovered by the Giants. It's bad enough that the asshat broke a cardinal rule of punt returns by placing himself in the path of an erratically bouncing football. It's what he did after the ball grazed him that made this heartsick Vulture lose his marbles. He made no effort to chase down the ball. Rather, he play acted that the ball hadn't touched him, and acted all aggrieved when the referee confirmed the call on the field, that the ball had touched him and was Giants' ball.
A handful of plays later, a Giants touchdown gave them the lead.
The Niners moved down the field and tied the game at 17, where it remained at the end of the 4th quarter.
Overtime.
Overtime looked just like the final minutes of the 4th quarter. The 49ers couldn't mount any offense. The Giants were being dominated by the 49ers defense.
Enter Kyle MF'ing Williams.
The Giants punted after yet another 3-and-out. Williams fielded the punt cleanly, took a few steps while holding the ball like a loaf of bread, and was promptly stripped of the ball.
The Giants were in field goal position at that point, but they ran a few plays to set up a closer field goal, which they made to win the game 20-17.
So here's the breakdown. The 49ers defense allowed 10 points in the first half, but didn't allow a drive of over 30 yards or allow the Giants to cross midfield from the 3rd quarter through overtime.
The Giants only two scoring chances in the second half and overtime were gifts courtesy of Kyle MF'ing Williams. Those two scoring chances resulted in 10 points, and victory for Big Blue.
The final score of that game should have been 17-10 or perhaps even 14-10. The Giants rightly should have been shut out in the second half. The 49ers should be the team headed to Indianapolis for the Super Bowl.
But that isn't how it turned out. Thanks almost entirely to Kyle MF'ing Williams, it's the Giants, not the 49ers, who will represent the NFC in the Super Bowl.
Thanks a buttload, Kyle. You single-handedly destroyed your team's dream season.
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If you get your news from any American paper that subscribes to the Associated Press feed (such as the Washington Post), you might be thinking right about now that the Team Elephant presidential primaries have resolved into a two-man race: "front runner" Mitt "Presidential Hair" Romney, and Rick "Bomb the shit out of Iran!" Santorum.
Just one problem: it's a complete lie.
Read more at
The Tizona Group.
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PayPal? Or PayBully? Click
here to read more.
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It’s bad enough that Abraham Lincoln is revered in this country, notwithstanding the Constitutional wreckage his presidency left behind. But most Americans – including, until yesterday, me – aren’t aware that another Constitution-wrecker is being given special posthumous honors on an annual basis.
Read more at
The Tizona Group.
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I've had an interesting run with the old laptop over the past month or so. First the hard drive became corrupted. Rather than buy a new laptop and incur that expense, I decided to install a new solid-state hard drive.
The new drive is awesome. REALLY awesome. Breathtakingly fast.
However, because my OEM install for Windows Vista was so old, there were literally hundreds of updates that had to be applied post-install. Okay, not an issue, right? Wrong! One of the updates kept breaking Vista and throwing a blue screen of death on boot up.
Again, undaunted I was. I purchased an OEM copy of Windows 7 64-bit to install on the old laptop. Everything was ducky. The software installed, outstanding updates applied quickly, and I was ready to rock and roll.
Or so I thought.
I began to notice that my wireless connection would drop at random intervals. Oh sure, it's easy enough to fix using the troubleshooter's drop-and-reset functionality. But not having a reliable wireless connection makes large downloads an adventure, and makes maintaining a consistent system backup (you know, like the one that saved my bacon when the hard drive became corrupted) impossible.
I made the rounds all over the Interwebs and discovered that I wasn't alone. No, far from it. It turns out that literally hundreds of Windows 7 users have had this issue, and Microsoft refuses to acknowledge that it's their problem. They blame the ISPs, the routers, the router firmware, the wireless cards, the wireless drivers...everything except the position of the moon and the stars. But they will not acknowledge that their operating system might have anything to do with it.
Listen up, Redmond! It
IS your operating system that is causing the issue. There are too many people from too many walks of life with too much prior OS experience having the exact same problem regardless of laptop manufacturer, router manufacturer, wireless card make and model, or ISP. In my home alone the following operating systems are actively running without any wireless connectivity issues:
Windows XP
Windows Vista
Ubuntu (Linux)
Mac OS X
iOS 4 (iPhone and iPad)
Android (3 different phones running Gingerbread, Honeycomb, AND Ice Cream Sandwich)
The driver software on my laptop is current. The router firmware is current. The ISP is a national carrier.
My sons and I have over 50 years of experience with computers between us, including 10+ years building custom PCs. I think we know what we're doing here. I think we know how to diagnose and troubleshoot.
The problem is Windows 7, Redmond! Fix the problem. Now. Because you're making Linux look like a more attractive solution with every dropped connection.
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While the sheeple pretend to live in the freest nation on the face of the Earth, the police state expands.
TSSA - coming to a highway near you.
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Nobody knows anything. Certainly not me. Who could have predicted that the 49ers would be 5-1 going into their bye week? Who could have predicted that they would knock off one of the last unbeaten teams on the road with a 4th quarter comeback on a 4th down play?
I said before the season started that the 49ers would go 5-11. I couldn't have been more wrong. The 49ers are the second-best team in the NFC and getting better as the season progresses.
The so-called experts at ESPN picked the Niners to finish 3rd in the West. So did I. Nobody knows anything.
So what's a fan to do? I'll tell you what - ENJOY IT!!!!! The 49ers have been bad for 8 years. Now they're pretty good, maybe borderline great. Enjoy it. Bask in it. Love every minute of it. This is the stuff we took for granted for 17 years of nearly unbroken excellence. I'll never take it for granted again.
For once I'm glad I was wrong about something. Go Niners!
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In
my last post, I wrote about my dread about bad law resulting from a knee-jerk reaction to the Casey Anthony verdict.
I hate being right.
Michelle Crowder of Durant, Oklahoma is calling for Caylee's Law, a piece of legislation that would make it a felony for a parent to fail to report a missing child to law enforcement. And people are listening. Important people.
[...]
This won't help Caylee directly. But it will help America's kids.
It will help the quarter of gay teens who are kicked out of their homes by their parents simply for admitting they love someone of the same gender, kids whose parents leave them to rot on the sidewalks. As it stands, parents CAN kick their kids out, and with rules that don't require they report them missing, abdicating their duties to love and protect their children isn't a felony.
[...]
Caylee's Law, or whatever you call it, would help us make sense of how a system will punish a parent with child abuse charges for leaving children unattended for a long period of time (and rightly so!) but let a parent skate for not reporting a child missing. It can't be one but not the other, America. That's why we need a law.
Did I not tell you? Yet another law "for the children". Ye gods!
But the law of unintended consequences always rides shotgun with these kind of emotion-laded knee-jerk laws. Exhibit A: your 16-year-old daughter runs away with a musician after trying to poison you for the insurance money. You want
this back in your life? You figure, "Eh, goodbye and good riddance." But if you don't report your daughter missing and take her back with open arms when she is returned by the cops, you're guilty of child abuse. Of course, if you
do take her back, you'd better sleep with one eye open.....but I digress.
And where did this statistic about one quarter of gay teens being kicked out of their homes come from? Sounds fishy to me. I'd wager they're including "boy toys" who ran off with an older man who promised them goodies in exchange for butt sex in that obviously embellished tally. But that "leaving them to rot on the sidewalks" line? Priceless.
Emotions and law make bad bedfellows. But politicians pandering for your vote don't care. They'll pass whatever ridiculous law you tell them you want.
And you wonder why you are less free every day.....
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A Leopard cannot change his spots. Nor a libtard his libtardedness.
Governor Jerry Brown of Kahleefornia must have felt that he hadn't left enough wreckage his first stint as Governer (1975-1983), during which he earned the moniker "Governor Moonbeam" as a result of his wacky libtard ways. Apparently he learned absolutely nothing in the ensuing 28 years, because he's still finding new and inventive ways to ruin the Golden State.
On an unrelated note, I've decided to stay on Blogger. The post editor for Wordpress stinks. It ate my first draft of the Jerry Brown post. That makes me...searching for words here...a little bent.
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Weiner pulls out.
The schadenfreude has been beyond blissful. A creepy libtard is caught flashing his namesake. Caught lying about it. Accused of asking a former prØn star to lie for him.
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Those who can, do.
Those who can't, schedule meetings.
- Vulture
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Welcome to
Amerika!
Americans break into two roughly evenly matched camps on the question of whether the government should enact heavy taxes on the rich to redistribute wealth in the U.S. Forty-seven percent believe the government should redistribute wealth in this way, while 49% disagree, similar to views Gallup found four years ago.
Republicans and Democrats have sharply different reactions to the government's taking such an active role in equalizing economic outcomes. Seven in 10 Democrats believe the government should levy taxes on the rich to redistribute wealth, while an equal proportion of Republicans believe it should not. The slight majority of independents oppose this policy.
I'm not at all surprised that 70% of Donkeys support wealth redistribution. I wish I could say that I'm surprised that 30% of Elephants support wealth redistribution...but I'm not. See McCain, John.
Of particular interest is the way men and women view wealth redistribution. Only 42% of men, regardless of political party, approve of it, while 52% of women think it's just ducky.
That any American citizen finds wealth redistribution acceptable saddens me. It is yet another example of how the public schools have failed us. Stealing from the productive does NOT end poverty. It just spreads it.
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Some guys just never learn. Sean Salisbury. Brett Favre. And now aptly-named Congress-critter Anthony “wanna see my” Weiner.
Read the complete post
here.
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