Monthly Archives: January 2010

The Watering Hole: January 16 – Urban Myths

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Myth: Eating carrots will improve your eyesight.
Actuality: Just one of many urban myths on health – This tale may have started during World War II, when British intelligence spread a rumor that their pilots had remarkable night vision because they ate lots of carrots. They didn’t want the Germans to know they were using radar.
Carrots — and many other vegetables high in vitamin A – do help maintain healthy eyesight, but eating more than the recommended daily allowance won’t improve vision beyond a basic threshold. Now if they only could train cats to operate fighter planes…

This is our open thread. Please feel free to offer your own comments on any topic.

Stewart to Robertson: ‘Shut your pie hole, old man’

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From Raw Story:

Some conservatives have been politicizing the earthquake in Haiti and Thursday Jon Stewart took notice. “At times like these I guess the only thing you can say that whenever something this horrific happens everyone comes together. Almost everyone,” said Stewart.

Rush Limbaugh was one of the first conservatives to politicize the disaster. “This plays right into Obama’s hands,” Limbaugh said on his radio program Wednesday. “Humanitarian, compassate. They’ll use to this burnish their, shall we say, credibility with the black community, both light skinned and dark skinned black community in this country. it’s made to order for them.”

Stewart frowned at Limbaugh’s remarks. “I think I know the cause of your heart trouble: you don’t have one,” said Stewart.

Jon Stewart goes on to take issue with the insanely insensitive remarks by nutjob Pat Robertson:

But Limbaugh wasn’t the only conservative voice spouting unfortunate comments. “I guess Rush Limbaugh is not the one you turn to in times of crisis. In times like these, you turn to men of god,” Stewart said, introducing a clip of Pat Robertson.

Robertson attempted to explain the cause of Haiti’s troubles on his show, “The 700 Club,” Wednesday. “Something happened a long time ago in Haiti and people might want to talk about it. They got together and swore a pact to the devil. They said we’ll serve you if you get us free to the prince. True story but ever since they’ve been cursed by one thing after the other,” concluded Robertson.

“Shut your pie hole, old man,” exclaimed Stewart. “Out of all the things that you could draw on from your religion to bring comfort to a devastated people and region — look how big your book is,” Stewart said as he displayed a Bible to his audience.

“The lord is close to the broken hearted. He rescues those who are crushed in spirit. Fear thou not for I am with thee. Be not dismayed for I am thy god,” Stewart read from the Holy Book.

“But you decided to go with tough titties, devil folk,” joked Stewart.

“Have you read this book?” The Comedy Central host continued to read passages from the Bible. “From the depths of the earth you will again bring me up. Though the mountains be shaken and the hills be removed yet my unfailing love for you will not be shaken nor my covenant of peace be removed from the lord who has compassion on you.”

“I mean, that almost sounds like it’s about a fucking earthquake,” exclaimed Stewart.

“You got all this and you went with an urban legend about a deal with the devil. None of this would have happened if those people hadn’t drank all those pop rocks and coke,” the comedian concluded.

I just have to throw this in there.. I find it odd that Pat Robertson thinks he can speak on behalf of the devil.. Does that mean he has a personal relationship with the devil? That he has personal conversations with him that makes it possible for him to speak on his behalf..? (Robertson: “And so the devil said, ‘OK, it’s a deal’…)

Rachel Maddow touched on Pat Robertson’s non-apologetic response to the firestorm caused by his words:

Following the reading of yesterday’s statement put out by CBN, Rachel says this:

“So in other words, the defense of Pat Robertson’s claim that Haiti suffered this earthquake because it’s cursed is a Christian Broadcasting (CBN) statement that Haiti really IS cursed. Also, he’s clarified that the earthquake wasn’t God’s wrath, it was the wrath of the devil which the Haitian people brought upon themselves, which means that everything you thought about Pat Robertson when you first heard these comments from him, feel free to keep thinking them. He meant it..”

Yeah, that made the previous remarks by Robertson sound better..

Don’t even get me started on Rush Limbaugh and his really stupid words…

The Watering Hole: January 15 — Bear in there!

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I helped my eldest memorize this poem, written by Shel Silverstein, for a first grade English assignment.  We had so much fun with it, and to this day we can recite it at the drop of a hat.

Of course, now we have our own polar bear…whenever he’s not hibernating.  :-)

This is the daily open thread — you know what to do…

Palin on Beck….Beck on Palin?

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The things we suffer through for our Zoosters…

At 2:18.

Beck: Who’s your favorite founder?

Palin: You know.. well.. all of them!…

Beck: Bull crap.. Who’s your favorite?

Palin: …because they came collectively together with so much diverse…so much diverse opinion and much diversity in terms of belief, but collectively they came together to form this union. No, and they were led by, of course, George Washington. So he’s got to rise to the top. Washington was the consummate statesman. He served, he turned power to the people. He didn’t want to be a king. He returned power to the people. Then he went back to Mount Vernon. He went back to his farm. He was almost reluctant to serve as president too and that’s who you need to find to serve in government, in a bureaucracy — those who you know will serve for the right reasons because they’re reluctant to get out there and seek a limelight and seek power. They’re doing it for the people, that was George Washington.

*facepalm*

Exactly what she said to Katie Couric about what newspapers she reads, “All of them!”

Founding Fathers, girl!  Come on! Thomas Jefferson!  Ben Franklin!  James Madison!

No, of course, she can’t come up with anyone, and during a long pause scrambles for the name of the first president, who is, of course, a Founding Father, I’ll give her that, and proceeds to give the grade school answer.

A grade school answer, I might add, that she could stretch to its very limits in order to equate herself with George Washington — he did his bit for the country, and then went home to his farm:  Palin did her bit for Alaska, and then quit to make millions giving dumb speeches.

Yeah, I can see the resemblance….uh huh.

Don’t get me started on the “He returned power to the people” bullshit, I’ve got homework to do.

RIP Miep Gies

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Miep Gies defied the Nazis in WWII Amsterdam in order to hide the Frank family and several others in the attic of an office building.  She succeeded in doing this for 25 months, before all were arrested.

Gies preserved Anne Frank’s papers that were found in the attic, hoping to give to Anne after the war, but instead she gave them to Anne’s father, Otto, the only survivor of the Frank family.

Rest in Peace.

UPDATE:  Here’s an excellent series about Miep Gies.

The Watering Hole: January 12 – The Royal Aeronautical Society

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In 1866, Britain founded the The Royal Aeronautical Society which is the probably the oldest surviving organization advocating all aspects of flight from balloons to space probes and vehicles. One of its most cherished memoirs was the first example of powered flight by John Stringfellow in 1848, a few years before the Wrights. It was unmanned, but it actually  flew and used airfoil wings, a rudder and ailerons. It was powered by a steam engine weighing about 6 1/2 pounds.

This is our open thread. Please feel free to offer your own comments on any topic.

Steps

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Cross-posted from Hoodathunk’s blog Story Time, Steps is a thoughtful follow-up to his recent post, What Made America Famous (which includes Harry Chapin’s great song of the same title).

It’s time to see what America is made of…will we accept the needed 12-step program to recovery?  Or as Lynyrd Skynyrd would say, “Gimme three steps toward the door?”

What life is all about…steps.  They come in all sizes, from baby to giant and they can go up or down.  Generally speaking, they are how things get done.  You don’t dump a bunch ingredients in a bowl and suddenly have cookies.  And you don’t make or break a country in one fell swoop.  Americans have something of a tradition for being impatient, even arrogant enough to think that steps don’t always apply to them but it isn’t true.  We are where we are today because we have been slowly led in a series of steps to the point where we have been desensitized to the actual steps of change.

Our education system has been tinkered with to the point where we are no longer producing individuals capable of cognitive thinking.  Our economic system has been stripped of needed regulation that once existed.  Environmental policies have been

removed to allow profits, undoing years of real progress in making our country a place heading towards a sustainable ecosystem while business could still function.  Our moral/ethical values have been undermined with a continuous barrage of incidents of increasingly bad behavior promoted as entertainment.  And our political system has just flat out gone into the toilet.  Bribery has morphed into a practice that actually defines how our Congress works.  And the cherry on the sundae is that racism and bigotry still exists to a greater degree than any thinking American believed.

We have a pretty ugly and bleak picture for where America is today.  We are no longer in even the top ten for standard of living and we only have ourselves to blame.  Along about 1980, America started to drink.  We imbibed the heady brew of exceptionalism.  We started on a course of consumerism that quickly turned into a binge.  In the 90’s we had a bit of a respite but it disappeared when we had a President who told us in response to the first major foreign terrorist attack on our country…go shopping.  He and his compatriots handed over the keys to the liquor store while they stood back and raked in the profits. Continue reading →