I ran into my mom this morning thanks to a trip to the supermarket. Turns out she’d just sent me an e-mail. This message read:

It turns out that Nubble has a couple weeks. She is taking meds that make her feel ok. She is tired because she is anemic, but she is not in pain. However, it will be in the next few weeks. Once she starts limping, or acting as if she’s in any pain at all, it will be the time.

In the meantime, she gets to eat like a pig and get all the loving she wants.

Nubble has been the luckiest dog ever to walk the Earth, so I will be taking comfort in what we’ve done for her, as well as what she’s done for me.

I get to visit with her tomorrow. The fact is, I can’t run her or even walk her anymore, and she’ll be dead within two weeks, barring a miracle. When I see her, she’ll be wagging her tail and probably doing the pseudo-crying thing she does upon greeting a few select people, which used to make me think she was kind of a ‘tard when in fact she is brilliant for a dog.

I fucking hate this.

D.C. Beltway sniper John Allen Muhammad is scheduled to be filled with a nice intravenous cocktail of thiopental sodium, pancuronium, and potassium before 9:00 tonight. Not a bad way to die, really: the first drug will knock him out so that he has no idea what’s happening, the second will paralyze every muscle in his body (including those used in breathing), and the third will make his heart come to a complete standstill. This is all assuming that enough thiopental is given to ensure that he won’t wake up to a terrifying voodoo-style paralysis for his or last 30 or so seconds of life. I assume that medical types are on top of this.

I used to think I was solid on my views concerning capital punishment. Now I’m not.

The orchestrated execution of people who commit heinous crimes rings with the echoes of cosmic justice. The families of victims get what they want, and a manifestly worthless person is taken out of the human equation.

Beyond that, I question the scheme. Is capital punishment supposed to be a deterrent? If not, these musings are moot and it all goes back to retribution, noted above. But it doesn’t take a criminologist to understand that people who commit crimes earning them a death sentence are not exactly considering the ramifications when they do it. They are often mentally retarded, and perhaps just as often are systematic psychopaths with their faculties otherwise intact. These are not people who give a fuck about the rule of law. They would do what they do even if fully aware of the fact that they would be burned at the stake.

If I were given the choice between lethal injection and 40 years in a buttfuck prison, it would be an easy call. From the punishment standpoint, dying is an easy way out. If making people pay, making them rightfully suffer, is the name of the game, then put them in a place like Angola or San Quentin, or the supermax ADX facility in Florence, Colorado. Everyone gets his share of fun and games there.

My home state of New Hampshire has not executed anyone in 80 years, but in December, Michael Briggs, who shot a cop, got the death penalty for his trouble. Public opinion polls suggest that people, at least around here, come out far more strongly in favor of capital punishment when the victim is a law-enforcement officer. Really, that shouldn’t have anything to do with it.

With the advent of DNA technology, a surprising number of “criminals” have been found innocent. Numerous ones have been death-row inmates.

I guess all I am trying to say here is that capital punishment accomplishes none of its assumed goals. Sociopaths and the otherwise deranged will go on killing en masse regardless of what awaits them. They either don’t have the capacity to understand the consequences or they don’t give a fuck. If killing these people makes society a simpler and happier place, great. I’m just not convinced that it does, and so I waver on the fence, with a strong leaning toward the abolition of capital punishment. Rotting in prison is a worse fate than dying straightaway.

I’ve mentioned this place at least once here lately, and will have to physically visit the place soon–but not until spring. It’s an unseasonable 62 degrees here and an equally unlikely 34 degrees on the summit of the mountain, which is less than 100 miles from here and regularly features sub-zero temps for half of the year and has experienced snow in every calendar month.

On April 12, 1934, during a freak storm, the weather observatory on the summit of Mount Washington recorded a gust of 231 miles per hour, still the world record for land-based locations (tornadoes and hurricanes in the sky don’t count). (The anenometer allegedly snapped in mid-gust, meaning that the actual wind speed was even higher, but I can’t verify this.) This is remarkable as much for the capricious nature of the mountain as it is for the blazing violence of something powerful enough to flip over a Greyhound bus as if it were nothing. One account of the days leading and into the day on which the record was set tells the story.

“April 10. A perfect day. Cloudless and calm. Hazy. Sun dogs at 5:30 p – a refraction phenomenon of no special importance.” – Log Book entry, Sal Pagliuca

April 11: “The meteorological notes for today do not say much. They only show a falling pressure, normal temperature, generally in ‘rough frost forming’ clouds, and rapidly increasing wind. Yes, rapidly increasing to values never dreamed before.” – Log Book entry, Sal Pagliuca

April12: “There was no doubt this morning that a super-hurricane, Mt. Washington style, was in full development.” — Log Book entry, Sal Pagliuca

As the day wore on, winds grew stronger and stronger. Frequent values of 220 mph were recorded between Noon and 1:00 pm, with occasional gusts of 229 mph. Then, at 1:21 pm … the extreme value of 231 mph out of the southeast was recorded. This would prove to be the highest natural surface wind velocity ever officially recorded by means of an anemometer, anywhere in the world.

“‘Will they believe it?’ was our first thought. I felt then the full responsibility of that startling measurement. Was my timing correct? Was the method OK? Was the calibration curve right? Was the stopwatch accurate?” – Log Book entry, Sal Pagliuca

I believe it. Every time I have climbed that mountain, be it in a car or on foot, conditions at the base (Pinkham Notch in Gorham, elevation approximately 1,800 feet) have been startlingly different than those on top. You can start a hike thinking that the windbreaker you’ve packed is useless and be begging for a parka once you pass the Alpine Garden. The place is simply not to be fucked with.

What I can’t believe is that someone has driven a car up the 7.6-mile auto road in six minutes, forty-four seconds. Someone else has been clocked at 113 miles an hour in the course of heading up. If you knew what this road looked like, with its various obligatory swerves and its average grade of 11.5 percent, along with the threat of zooming into the Great Gulf, you wouldn’t believe it either. I can only conclude that people who take part in the Hillclimb Auto Race are out of their fucking minds, the kind of people who put workaday adrenalin junkies to shame and probably steam through tollbooths at 80 MPH just to see if they can toss their required three quarters into the basket without a pause and with virtually no lateral clearance.

OneNewsNow.com, in decrying the idea of affordable healthcare for all Americans, is claiming that the House’s vote favoring H.R. 3962 is “monstrous” and “a defiance of the will of the American people.” They base this on the fact that some polls have supposedly demonstrated that a majority of Americans oppose this administration’s ideas about such reform. But since they never cite their sources, I don’t know where they get their numbers. One recent Gallup Poll survey suggests that the current plan versus some hypothetical alternative plan (or the status quo) runs about 50/50 among the voting populace.

Regardless, the worth of the supposed, and generally misrepresented, “will of the people” is grossly overstated by shitblogs like this one. Keep in mind that if it were strictly up to popular vote, creationism would likely supplant evolution in schools and avowed adherence to Christianity (something I could never successfully fake) would be mandatory in much of the U.S. We live in a country of fuckheads. People on the whole don’t read anything meaningful, don’t think outside of the gut reactions they have to their cable programs of choice, and think that the ability to understand the themes in a supermarket flyer constitutes the strength to be a literary critic. What the majority somehow thinks about any topic of choice should factor into the political process as strongly as what a Red Sox fan’s ideas concerning the fate of the Yankees in the World Series do.

But if one gives credence to this “will” in one area, he must give it in others. Therefore, since favorable opinion of Obama’s performance now outpaces his poor ratings by a factor of 54 percent to 41, his endlessly whining and dissembling opponents need to shut the hell up and respect the will of real Americans everywhere.

John Boehner is a shameless liar who deserves as much access to higher office as Carrot Top. He says people want a “common-sense approach to health care reform,” an appropriately vacuous and substance-devoid statement from someone whose job description is “fuck whatever the Democrats do.” He’s too stupid to be at all convincing in his deliveries to the press, but in that area has lots of good company.

Most people in the United States are far too weak-minded to contribute in a positive way to the political process as it stands and should be thanking the Christ Jesus for the fact that America freely allows functional illiterates and Elmer Fudd clones to vote on anything. But thanks to the wonders of our version of democracy, they are treated as equals and are therefore misled into thinking that the shit they have to say has more merit than that of a gopher on Ecstasy. It’s fun to watch them get mad, but irksome from the standpoint of realizing how mentally crippled the average hominid really is.

That wingnut bloggers are credulous tools who propagate lies throughout the Web as if this gives them orgasms is no secret. But on the heels of pointing out that Sarah Palin knows that her base is one huge, thrumming hive of intellectual desolation, it’s worth wasting the short time needed to point out the one guy who consistently embodies every trait of “conservative” “bloggers” out there.

So I again refer to Gribbit, who, in just the first paragraph of this post, commits an improbable number of errors in addition to resorting to insults and slurs that would embarrass a sentient person. He writes:

Democrats who were holding out against SanFran Nan’s 1900+ page, $1 Trillion+ government takeover of health care got a key concession from the Speaker and her band of uber-leftists in the House when it was permitted for an amendment to the Death Care bill to be offered. The amendment addressed a key point of contention between pro-life Democrats and the leftists who are currently running the Party’s Caucus in the House. The Stupak Amendment, named for Rep. Bart Stupak of the Democratic People’s Republic of Michigan, removed federal funding of abortions from the Death Care bill gaining Pelosi the much needed 25 votes necessary for the bill to pass.

So in order, there’s an unsupported assumption (i.e., that the number of Democrats who changed their minds a a result of the added language was critical), a shitty nickname (“SanFran Nan”), a lie (that the bill is somehow owned by Pelosi), a lie and a gratuitous capital letter wrapped into one (“$1 Trillion+”), breathless hyperbole (“government takeover of health care”), another uncreative label (“the Speaker and her band of uber-leftists”), a rejection of the political process (“an amendment was allowed to be added”), unabashed ignorance of what the bill contains “Death Care bill”), a false dichotomy (“pro-lfe” =/= “leftist”), another silly label (“People’s Republic of Michigan”), an outright lie (see below), and finally, an obvious falsehood (that the bill would not have passed without the added language and that 25 Democrats switched sides owing to its inclusion; perhaps other Dems upset by the amendment went the other way).

The bill never contained anything about “federal funding of abortions.” Pro-lifers have claimed all along that it allowed for the possibility, but that was a creative interpretation of the passages in question, and one could have just as easily claimed (and still can) that it allows for the possibility of eight-graders performing neurosurgery, because it does not say outright that they cannot. The “concession” Gribbit mentions was nothing more than a “sigh, okay, dipshits, we’ll say it flat out if it’ll shut you up.” Gribbit is too much of a blinkered coward to address this directly and instead hides behind his comments-only-for-wingnuts policies and his failed IP bans, but he invariably sees the things I write about him and the comments people make about him, and at some dim level understands that he has nothing accurate or useful to say.

The amendment passed 240-194. There weere 64 Democrats among those 240, leaving 176 Republicans. There are presently 177 Republicans in the House. so, since one member was absent, the reponse to the amendment among Democrats was overwhelmingly negative–either 193-64 or 194-64. Ironically, then, the amendment may actually help Republicans gain enough votes to tip the scales in their favor once this bill hits the Senate floor.

It’s tempting to view sites like this as parodies of other, genuine End Times sites, but this one must be the real deal. The giveaways: The endless amount of material on the home page (no parodist would make such an effort), the circa-1994 design format, and the color scheme.

You would think that with the number of such prophecies that have come and gone without incident that these nuts would get a clue and quit predicting specific dates on which the Rapture will occur. If had believed since 1986 that if I drove a car on the first day of every month, I would get in a fatal crash, I would ultimately have cede the belief, as would even the dimmest of halfwits. But then again if you embrace something as crazy as eschatology in the first place and see the Book of Revelation as a compelling analysis, you’re not the world’s most preeminent logician

Facebook is a great place for someone like Palin, as she can pretend she isn’t widely viewed as something between a laughingstock and a menace by seeing that she has nearly a million “fans.” Unfortunately this doesn’t dilute her grating ignorance, and in fact only encourages it.

She has these things to say about the House passing “Obamacare” on Saturday. Since many of you are wise to lack Facebook accounts, I’ll post the whole thing in its entirety. Read the rest of this entry »

It’s as though Christian “news” sites are engaged in a perpetual contest to see which one of them can produce the most inane poll question.

Take this one, for example.

How should Christians respond to lawmakers who support healthcare reform which includes abortion funding? (See related article)

1. Complain about them to other people
2. Contact the lawmakers to express your concerns
3. Remember their names when you vote in 2010

Leave aside the fact that no one is presently supporting such a thing, although I, despite not being a lawmaker, would gladly support the public funding of forced abortions for the lepers behind sites like those created by the AFA and other stupid people who insist on getting knocked up with the intent of churning out one more wall-eyed, flat-faced, mentally defective affront to the mammalian world. These are just useless questions. #1 is a given–Christians always complain about shit. It’s virtually their job. So thrilled are they by the very notion of bitching for its own sake that they donate money to outfits whose entire sad act consists of airing grievances founded on lies, all with the intent of parting morons from their money. #2 is a wash, since no one who frequents sites boasting polls like this one is resourceful or sensible enough to actually become involved in civic affairs in a meaningful way. #3 is also a wash because people with the intracranial extravagance of cuddlefish won’t remember their own names in 2010, let alone those of these rat bastards intent on hoodwinking American taxpayers via the healthcare reform business.

Ardent pro-lifers are liars by trade. They intentionally mislead people with their punctured-foetus photos aimed at portraying late-term abortions as a frequent occurrence. They make up numbers on the spot while pretending that what organizations like the CDC have to say on such matters is driven by conspiracies. The National Right To Life couldn’t generate an honest press release if you paid them to try. These people, as a group, are hysterical, meddlesome, and uneducated cross-waving fuckabouts, although few of them are as insanely out-of-control of this bitter and schizotypal cretin, who calls herself “an advocate for the rights of all women” even as she rambles on incoherently about “Feminazis” and “pro-abort feminists.” I guess the only rights she feels women should have are the ones she approved of. Pro-lifers know in their hypocritical hearts that their campaign is destined for failure, now and in the future.

Speaking of categorically failed goals, I’ll never quite get my mind around the idea that a bunch of functional illiterates with a blog genuinely thing that they can “Stop the ACLU.” That’s not what they’re interested in anyway–they’re driven only by the aim of railing about anything they see as a liberal cause, lying, and putting their room-temperature IQs on display with every misinformed shitburst. I bet none of them even knows why he is compelled to complain in the manner he does. All of them seem to have been raised in hillbilly households by inbred Jesus-freak parents whose only success was producing offspring with a number of chromosomes somewhere in the ballpark of appropriate. The stupid on that site almost burns.

Anyway, I voted for #1 just so I could see the results, and the results are wonky. Supposedly, at this point 8097 people have voted, and none of them have chosen the answer I did, even though I just did. 63% favor #3 and 36% like #2.

So it turns out that disgraced former Miss California Carrie Prejean, an outspoken opponent to Prop 8, is not quite the pure Christian lady she has pretended to be.

Look, I’m all for people filming themselves masturbating or whatever it was Prejean was doing to cause this mess, if that’s your thing. But this is a self-promoting Christian who constantly propounded her alleged faith while railing against the moral transgressions of others. And sure, she was basically just a stupid kid at the time she made her comments, although that is probably both condescending and giving her an unfair pass. But who makes a sex tape starring only himself or herself? I mean, if I were ever moved to do such a thing, I would have to have at least one other person in the video to offset the raw damage viewing just me playing with myself would do to someone’s eyes. Even given the case of a co-conspirator, I would balk at watching the output. Fuck, I don’t need to watch that.

I am eagerly awaiting the response from OneNewsNow.com, which will surely condemn this event. Or ignore it altogether, as these useless hypocrites always do.

The idiot quotient in this country is beyond my toleration or understanding. This story merely illustrates the obvious–that people who bitch about government-sponsored healthcare are the least qualified to speak on this matter, or about anything. It only figures that uberclown Michele Bachmann was somehow involved.

[A] man standing just beyond the TV cameras apparently suffered a heart attack 20 minutes after event began. Medical personnel from the Capitol physician’s office — an entity that could, quite accurately, be labeled government-run health care — rushed over, attaching electrodes to his chest and giving him oxygen and an IV drip.

This turned into an unwanted visual for the speakers, as a D.C. ambulance and firetruck, lights flashing, pulled in just behind the lawmakers. A path was made through the media section, and the patient, attended to by about 10 government medical personnel, was being wheeled away on a stretcher just as House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-Ohio) stepped to the microphone. “Join us in defeating Pelosi care!” he exhorted. A few members stole a glance at the stretcher.

Fucking idiots. This country stands little chance.

Every time I think I’ve had my lifetime fill of tearing into deluded would-be advocates for the Christ Jesus, I find something else on the Internet that seems degrees worse than anything I have derided previously, and I just have to load this interface and start screwing with the material in question. I’m no different than when I tell people I watch very little TV, right before I spend seven hours watching Tim and Eric’s Awesome Show, Great Job! online.

Owing indirectly to some recent activity on Dispatches From the Culture Wars, always a great source of insightful commentary assuming you’re not overly sensitive to exposure to the Grand Overwhelming Stupid, I unearthed this stunningly bad treatise challenging evolution. It was written in 2007 but was published to “Way of Life Literature” a few months ago. Mind you, the rant I am hopefully almost halfway through is even more pointless than most anti-creationist rants, because the author of the piece in question, David Menton (who somehow earned a Ph.D. in cell bio from Brown way back when), is a shill for Answers in Genesis and has been exposed as a flagrant liar and an idiot on more than one occasion. Still, the fact that the bright lights behind “Way of Life Literature” actually find Menton more compelling than damning is instructive in its own right, so here I am.

The opening paragraph of “THE EVOLUTION DATING GAME” reads as follows:

Much of the controversy between evolutionists and creationists concerns the age of the earth and its fossils. Evolution, depending as it does on pure chance, requires an immense amount of time to stumble upon anything remotely approaching the complexity we see in even the simplest living things. For over 200 years, geologists have attempted to devise methods for determining the age of the earth that would be consistent with evolutionary dogma. At the time Darwin’s Origin of Species was published [1859], the earth was “scientifically” determined to be 100 million years old. By 1932, it was found to be 1.6 billion years old. In 1947, geologists firmly established that the earth was 3.4 billion years old. Finally, in 1976, they discovered that the earth is “really” 4.6 billion years old. These dates indicate that for 100 years the age of the earth doubled every 20 years. If this trend were to continue, the earth would be 700 thousand-trillion-trillion years old by the year 4000 AD. This “prediction,” however, is based on selected data and certain assumptions that might not be true. As we will see, selected data and unprovable assumptions are a problem with all methods for determining the age of the earth, as well as for dating its fossils and rocks. It has all become something of a “dating game” in which only the evolutionarily-correct are allowed to play.

There are so many fuck-ups in just this one passage–and the essay in its entirety is quite long–that describing them will probably cost me a half an hour, possibly more. When I first read it, I was nearly blinded by the force of its thrumming incompetence. But I have since recovered and am prepared to address specifics.

First of all, evolutionary biologists don’t give a fuck how old the earth is (or if they do it doesn’t relate to their work). Evolution, broadly speaking, does not depend on “pure chance,” but even if it did, this would not necessitate “an immense amount of time to stumble upon anything remotely approaching the complexity we see in even the simplest living things”–not that biologists disagree anyway; of course some of the changes to organisms that have transpired over millions of years take, well, millions of fucking years. This is precisely why certain things that seem improbable to the parochial human mind can occur; our brains simply are not equipped to account for time scales hundreds, thousands, or millions of times longer than our own lifespans.

The idea that geologists are in bed with biologists is ludicrous enough. But when Menton says that this has been going on for over 200 years, it kinds of screws with his credibility. Charles Darwin was born in 2009 1809, and it took him a while to inspire that which bitter Jesus fans would later call “evolutionary dogma.” To complain that people were championing evolution in the early 1800′s is akin to bitching about the treatment of text-messaging and Internet porn during World War I. It really is just that stupid. Also, creationists have an extremely difficult time correctly identifying the book they so often like to complain about. It’s On The Origin Of Species. It’s not that hard to get right. When a layperson leaves out the first few words, it’s one thing, but when someone purporting to be an informed critic fucks this up, it’s quite another. And it’s revealing–David Menton is a cognitive cripple.

There’s also Menton’s worse-than-fuzzy math. The reliability of his sources aside, the fact that the estimated age of the earth has changed over time is not a detriment to science, but a credit to the willingness of scientists to refine their claims based on new findings. When he blabbers, “if this trend were to continue, the earth would be 700 thousand-trillion-trillion years old by the year 4000 AD,” he’s not only making a ruin of basic arithmetic, but is also ignoring the factor of convergence. Just look at the fact that the claimed age of the planet has remained static over the past two-plus decades. And what Menton calls a “prediction” is anything but what real scientists actually predict. You won’t find any earth scientists who think that the age of the earth is going to skyrocket exponentially or without bound. That’s just bullshit that exists only in Menton’s mind.

Of course, clowns like this guy cannot avoid blaming widespread conspiracies for the various failures of their various claims. The phrase “only the evolutionarily-correct are allowed to play” marks its originator as both an imbecile and a whiner, which is never a useful combination. If anyone could produce a meaningful, reasoned rebuttal to evolution, it would have already happened. It would also have made someone rich. Instead, the world is stained by functionally retarded people like Menton, whose only argument here is that dating rocks and fossils is an imperfect process. No shit! Who knew?

Menton goes on to gurgle about “radiocarbon dating” as if this is something geologists rely on in order to figure out how old the planet is. Of course carbon decay isn’t a means of figuring shit like this out. I can’t believe this warbling shitbird has a Ph.D. in anything. He expects people to just overlook the fact that “radiocarbon” and “radioisotope” are not synonyms, apparently. The entire midsection of his shitburst is neatly and methodically refuted here. The idea that circular reasoning is involved in any way is something only an unmitigated fucktard would claim, which is why it makes sense that Menton is claiming it.

Menton’s final paragraph is at least as bad as his first:

As far as the plausibility of evolution is concerned, it really doesn’t make any difference if the earth is 10 billion years old or 10 thousand years old. Indeed, if the whole of evolution were reduced to nothing more than the chance production of a single copy of any one biologically useful protein, there would be insufficient time and material in the known universe to make this even remotely likely. Time by itself simply does not make the hopeless evolutionary scenario of chance and natural selection more reasonable. Imagine if a child were to claim that he alone could build a Boeing 747 airplane from the raw material in 10 seconds, and another were to claim he could do it in 10 days. Would we consider the latter less foolish than the former, simply because he proposed spending nearly a million times more time at the task? Our Creator tells us that “the fool has said in his heart, there is no God.”

Actually, for a score of obvious reasons, it does make a difference. Just not to idiots like David Menton. It’s funny that he terms something understood by virtually all working biologists as not remotely likely. Sure, assfuck, you’re the go-to guy when it comes to knowing this stuff, and an unimpeachable source of information.

I’m imagining a child claiming he could build a 747 in ten seconds, and I am not impressed. The parallels between this scenario and evolution are nonexistent. But fuckheads thrive on dishonesty, which is why this fellow is unfailingly dishonest.