Wednesday, August 27, 2008

Hillary disses Bill

I could only stand to listen to the first minute of Hillary Clinton's speech:
I am honored to be here tonight. I'm here tonight as a proud mother. As a proud Democrat. As a proud senator from New York. A proud American. And a proud supporter of Barack Obama.

My friends, it is time to take back the country we love.
The notable omission is that she failed to say that she was proud to be Bill Clinton's wife.

Bill Clinton is one of the most widely admired men in the world. He was the American President for eight years. Hillary was First Lady. She owes everything to him. Her whole campaign was based on a promise "to take back the country" to the time of her husband's presidency. Why is it that she can credit her daughter, but not her husband?

I think that she is creepy. She gives the impression of a coldly calculating feminist who will use her husband for whatever gain that she can get, but never credit him for anything.

I tuned in some Democrat pundits later, and all they could talk about was speculation about whether Hillary was sincere in her endorsement of Barack Obama. In other words, they were practicing mindreading. I prefer to pay attention to what she actually says.

Update: The next night Bill Clinton started his speech by saying that he is proud of Hillary. He is loyal to her, but she is not loyal to him. Biden also thanked his wife. Hillary is the oddball.

George writes:
You don't know what private agreeements Bill and Hillary have. Maybe Bill approved that speech.
Right. Not only that, I don't know what they were thinking. Politicians often say things that are at odd with their personal feelings. I am just commenting on what Bill and Hillary say publicly. Her public speech showed disloyalty to her husband.

Monday, August 25, 2008

Mindreading McCain

AP reports:
McCain not sure how many houses he and wife own
Thursday, Aug 21, 2008 - 10:58 AM
ASSOCIATED PRESS

WASHINGTON - Days after he cracked that being rich in the U.S. meant earning at least $5 million a year, Republican presidential candidate John McCain acknowledged that he wasn't sure how many houses he and his wealthy wife actually own.

"I think - I'll have my staff get to you," McCain responded to a question posed by Politico, according to a story Thursday on the publication's Web site. "It's condominiums where - I'll have them get to you."
It is funny how these political reporters claim to have mindreading capabilities. McCain dodged a question, and people somehow infer that McCain does not know the answer.

The most obvious interpretation is that McCain regarded the question as ambiguous because a condominium may or may not be considered a home. The second most obvious interpretation is that he did not want to waste valuable campaign time answering a lot of detailed questions about his wife's personal finances. It is more efficient to refer all of those questions to his staff.

Whoever wrote that AP story lacks critical thinking skills. Ditto for Barack Obama, who immediately ran a TV ad that falsely claimed:
How many houses does he own? John McCain says he can't even remember anymore.
No, McCain did not say that.

Update: I just watched McCain on the Tonight Show, and he dodged Jay Leno's question about how many houses he has. Will the mindreaders again say that McCain still doesn't know how many houses he owns? I think that Obama and the other mindreaders have a serious cognitive problem.

Friday, August 22, 2008

Finding Phelps' dad

Yahoo tracks down Phelps' dad:
During Michael Phelps' races, camera shots of his mother Debbie were a fixture on NBC. The network showed endless replays of her falling to her seat after that memorable 100 butterfly finish. ... Where was Dad?

It's been well-documented that Debbie and Fred Phelps divorced when Michael was 9.
The article goes on to take some cheap shots at his dad. The fact is that Phelps is a 23-year-old adult who makes $5M a year from endorsements. He paid for his mom's trip to Peking, but did not invite his dad. It appears that his mom used the family court to cut his dad out of his life.

I had the impression from the Olympics broadcast that Phelps swam for the Univ. of Michigan swim team. But while he took some Univ. of Michigan classes, he has dropped out of college and he never swam for the team.

There is a conspiracy theory about how he won one medal here.

Thursday, August 21, 2008

Men, Women and Speed

Some scientists are finally admitting the obvious:
Women are slower than men in running, in swimming, in cycling. Whether it is a 100-meter race on the track or a marathon, a 200-meter butterfly swim or a 10-kilometer marathon swim, the pattern holds.

And even though some scientists once predicted that women would eventually close the gender gap in elite performances — it was proposed that all they needed was more experience, better training and stronger coaching — that idea is now largely discredited, at least for Olympic events. Researchers say there is no one physiological reason for the gap, although there is a common biological thread.

“To a large extent, it’s a matter of testosterone,” said Dr. Benjamin Levine, ...

The hormone affects everything from muscle size and strength to the size of the heart to the amount of oxygen-carrying blood cells in the body to the percentage of fat on an athlete’s body. Every one of those effects gives men a performance advantage.

Polygamy is the key to a long life

NewScientist reports:
Want to live a little longer? Get a second wife. New research suggests that men from polygamous cultures outlive those from monogamous ones.

After accounting for socioeconomic differences, men aged over 60 from 140 countries that practice polygamy to varying degrees lived on average 12% longer than men from 49 mostly monogamous nations, says Virpi Lummaa, an ecologist at the University of Sheffield, UK.

Lummaa presented her findings last week at the International Society for Behavioral Ecology’s annual meeting in Ithaca, New York.

Rather than a call to polygamy, the research might solve a long-standing puzzle in human biology: Why do men live so long?
It seems more likely to me that women marry healthy men who are likely to live a long time. A man with several wives only has those wives because they think he is healthy. The wives may not be making him live longer.

Wednesday, August 20, 2008

How to get annoying cell calls

My local county wants my cell telephone number for Reverse 911:
Examples of uses may be:

Request for community assistance in locating missing children
Evacuation notices due to emergency situations
Be-on-the-lookout notices for dangerous criminals in your area
I would like to hear about true emergencies, but I am disturbed that their first item on the list is to intervene in child custody disputes. We have Amber Alerts in this state, and they are nearly always just some disagreement between the parents about spending time with their kids, and not a real kidnapping. I would rather not have some county bureaucrat call me on my cell phone just to tell me about some minor parental dispute.

Tuesday, August 19, 2008

Illegal to refuse to inseminate lesbians

You would think that a physician has a right to refuse to inseminate a woman. Fatherless children cause many of America's problems, and yet courts are mandating more of them:
SAN FRANCISCO (AP) -- California's highest court on Monday barred doctors from invoking their religious beliefs as a reason to deny treatment to gays and lesbians, ruling that state law prohibiting sexual orientation discrimination extends to the medical profession.

Justice Joyce Kennard wrote that two Christian fertility doctors who refused to artificially inseminate a lesbian have neither a free speech right nor a religious exemption from the state's law, which "imposes on business establishments certain antidiscrimination obligations."

In the lawsuit that led to the ruling, Guadalupe Benitez, 36, of Oceanside said that the doctors treated her with fertility drugs and instructed her how to inseminate herself at home but told her their beliefs prevented them from inseminating her. One of the doctors referred her to another fertility specialist without moral objections, and Benitez has since given birth to three children.
I wonder whether she is even in this country legally, and whether welfare money is supporting these inseminations.

Feminist Columbia demonizes men

The NY Daily News reports:
Anti-feminist lawyer Roy Den Hollander sued Columbia University Monday, accusing it of turning feminism into the school's religion - and teaching that men are "the primary cause for most, if not all, the world's ills."

Hollander says Columbia discriminates against men by teaching a doctrine that scapegoats men for all of history's troubles.

In a suit filed in Manhattan Federal Court, he complains that the Ivy League school in Morningside Heights uses federal money to fund a "religionist belief system called feminism." The class-action suit argues that Columbia's women's studies program demonizes men and exalts women to justify discrimination against men based on collective guilt. ...

He refused to give his age, claiming it would hinder his chances of picking up younger women at city nightspots.
Funny. He has a point, but the court will not listen to him.

Military funds mind-reading science

AP reports:
LOS ANGELES - Here's a mind-bending idea: The U.S. military is paying scientists to study ways to read people's thoughts. The hope is that the research could someday lead to a gadget capable of translating the thoughts of soldiers who suffered brain injuries in combat or even stroke patients in hospitals.

But the research also raises concerns that such mind-reading technology could be used to interrogate the enemy.
Concerns? I would be concerned if the military was funding research without looking at the obvious military applications.

The article says, "They're still in the proof of principle stage". Mindreading is still science fiction.

Monday, August 18, 2008

Fattest children to be taken away from their parents

UK news:
Dangerously overweight children will have to be taken from their parents and put into care because of Britain's worsening "obesity epidemic", council leaders have warned.

One million children will be clinically obese within four years on current trends, storing up future problems from heart disease, strokes, high blood pressure and diabetes.
There is a long list of other problems that will result from a million kids being taken from their parents.

These health problems occur in adults, so why don't they go after the fat adults instead? Perhaps they could start by cutting off welfare benefits to fat people.

Update: As British official denied this, the newspapers have reported that it is already happening.

Saturday, August 16, 2008

Jesus convicted of murder in Idaho

AP reports:
BOISE, Idaho (AP) — The crime was meticulously planned, the killer choreographing every step from his surveillance of the doomed family to the videotaped torture of one of his youngest victims.

Yet something as simple as a locked back door, or fiercer family dogs, might have turned Joseph Edward Duncan III away.

Duncan's federal sentencing hearing opened Wednesday with U.S. Attorney Thomas Moss outlining how the convicted pedophile terrorized the Groene family, all because he wanted to "live out his fantasy" and exact revenge on society for perceived wrongs.
This story is filled with weird and creep stuff. Have you ever wondered whether it would any good to lock the back door? Surely a rapist-kidnapper-child-molester-murderer would just break the lock or the window, and not be deterred by a simple door lock. But in this case:
"He made a decision: `If that back door is locked, I'm going to abort,'" Moss said Duncan later told police.

When he turned the handle, it opened. Then the terror began.

The dogs scurried away when they saw Duncan's gun, Moss said. Duncan bound the family, took the youngest children outside and beat the others to death.

Then he drove away with Dylan and Shasta, making sure they knew he had killed their relatives as he headed into the Montana wilderness.
Have you ever heard of guard dogs who were intimidated by a gun? Maybe in Idaho, where everybody has dogs and guns, the guns understand what guns can do.

Not that Duncan would hurt a dog. He liked to kill people, but not dogs:
Duncan had researched police investigation procedures and took steps to avoid getting caught, Moss told jurors. He bought too-large tennis shoes at a thrift store so no bloody footprints would lead police to him. He wiped down shotgun shells before loading them so there'd be no fingerprints. He loaded the first shot with BB pellets because he thought he'd have to shoot the family dogs and didn't necessarily want to kill them.
Duncan also refused a lawyer and insisted that the court record be accurate:
Duncan, who is representing himself, told the jury Wednesday that most of what Moss said was fair and accurate "up to the point of what occurred at the campground."

He said he would testify so he could try to "clarify things."
Perhaps most bizarre is the courtroom sketch above that makes Duncan look like Jesus. Is this some kind of sick joke?

Why US gymnasts wore red

I wondered why the USA girls gymnast team wore red just like the Chinese team, until this explained it:
With a delightfully simple but beautifully crafted experiment, Norbert Hagemann at the University of Munster found that refs have a tendency to award more points to red-garbed competitiors.

Friday, August 15, 2008

Obama is probably not the Antichrist

The Wash. Post reports:
The debate over the debate has gotten so intense that Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins, the authors of the "Left Behind" series, issued a statement clarifying that Obama is likely not the Antichrist in the Book of Revelation. "I've gotten a lot of questions the last few weeks asking if Obama is the Antichrist," Jenkins told Christian Newswire. "I tell everyone that I don't think the Antichrist will come out of politics, especially American politics."
That should reassure voters. Also:
"I can see by the language he uses why people think he could be the antichrist," adds LaHaye, "but from my reading of scripture, he doesn't meet the criteria. There is no indication in the Bible that the antichrist will be an American."
I cannot argue with that last sentence. But I am wondering if there is any indication in the Bible that Obama should be considered an American. He was born to a Kenyan father in Hawaii, and grew up in Indonesia. Yes, Hawaii is now an American state, but it only became a state long after the Bible was written.

Burger ban is weighed in San Jose

The Si Valley paper reports:
Three San Jose City Council members Thursday proposed a one-year citywide moratorium on new fast-food restaurants, arguing that the prolific eateries are fattening people - especially kids - with unhealthy fare.

The proposal is similar to a moratorium the Los Angeles City Council approved last month for south Los Angeles. The San Jose proposal also calls for an indefinite ban on new fast-food restaurants within 1,000 feet of schools.

"Obesity is a huge problem within our society and among children," said Councilwoman Nora Campos, who was joined by councilmen Forrest Williams and Kansen Chu. ...

The San Jose proposal does not yet define "fast-food" restaurants and instead asks the city attorney to come up with language. Reed said that may prove difficult.

"Nobody has any idea what fast food is and how you define it," Reed said. "Are we going to ban the taquerias? Chinese food places?"

Los Angeles decided on certain characteristics: "a limited menu, items prepared in advance or prepared or heated quickly, no table orders and food served in disposable wrapping or containers."
Note that the definition does not involve whether the food is healthy or fattening.

Thursday, August 14, 2008

Internet sting nabs teacher

The San Jose paper reports:
Police arrested a San Jose high school teacher Tuesday afternoon on suspicion he tried to arrange a meeting with a teenage girl he'd met on the Internet.

The 13-year-old girl was actually a Santa Cruz police detective. ...

"The entire conversation and the entire desires were initiated by Mr. Barany," Santa Cruz police spokesman Zach Friend said. "It was very transparent that it was a 13-year-old girl and it was very transparent that he was engaging in this conversation to at some point engage in a lewd act with her." ...

Friend pointed out that no actual children were involved in the investigation. He also said Barany did not have a history of similar crimes.
I am all in favor of nabbing child sex predators, but I really don't see how it could have been "transparent that it was a 13-year-old girl" when no such girl was involved.

Tuesday, August 12, 2008

Groom Arrested for Getting Too Close to Bride

Fox News reports:
BATAVIA, N.Y. — A New York state man has been arrested for getting too close to his bride on their wedding day.

Timothy Cole quarreled with a wedding guest at a party Friday after wedding his ex-wife in Batavia, police said.

Officers knew the 45-year-old Cole from previous arrests and realized his bride had an order of protection against him. Cole was charged with first-degree criminal contempt, a felony, and ordered jailed without bail.
These orders ought to be abolished.

Monday, August 11, 2008

More lesbian divorce

The Fresno paper reports:
A same-sex couple who were married in Fresno County on June 27 -- just 10 days after county clerks in California started issuing marriage licenses for gay and lesbian couples -- has filed for divorce.

The couple, Theresa Ramirez and Adelita Guajardo, are among more than 100 same-sex couples who applied for a marriage license in the county since June.

Three days after their marriage, Ramirez filed for divorce, court records show. The court petition says there were "irreconcilable differences" between her and Guajardo. ...

Same-sex couples, Fletcher said, may have lived in a "siege mentality" prior to the California Supreme Court ruling in May legalizing same-sex marriage.

"In a way, gays and lesbians had a common enemy in the form of the state and society," Fletcher said. "People who have common enemies tend to stick together."

But once same-sex marriages were legalized, he said, "it's no longer you and me against the world -- it's you and me against each other."
I guess all the gays and lesbians will be fighting each other now.

Friday, August 08, 2008

The Human Element

The Dow Chemical company has been running TV image ads for years on the human element. About a month ago, they were rescripted with this (audio here):
We have only to look into each other's eyes to see the story of our planet. A few simple truths -- the way hydrogen bonds with oxygen, the cadence and order of things -- have lived there from the beginning. But if we move a little to the left, change perspective, and consider the notion of adding the human element to the periodic table of the elements, we see the world for the first time. And it is world which responds to touch. We worked the new chemistry element by element, and in turn we learn the secret to a better life; the story of a planet where chemistry embraces humanity.
At first I thought that it was some sort of left-wing Obama propaganda.

Apparently people must have complained, because Dow Chemical has dropped "move a little to the left" from the script. It still shows a dark-skinned person turning a huge mask to the left, but leaves in a gap in the audio at that point. It also omits the line about seeing the world for the first time, and responding to touch.

I am really surprised that no one has commented on this. The ads are very well done, but I can do without the leftist propaganda.

Dow Chemical is also running a similar ad that says this:
For as long as there was memory, the world was seen as man against the elements. That carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen are the very same elements from which we are made. They are the bond btween us all. And when our view of the world includes the human element, chemistry is suddenly found on the same page with humanity, and climate change relinquishes to change more fundamental.
It still sounds like leftist propaganda to me.

All Americans could be getting fat

Research news:
NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - If the trends of the past three decades continue, it's possible that every American adult could be overweight 40 years from now, a government-funded study projects.

The figure might sound alarming, or impossible, but researchers say that even if the actual rate never reaches the 100-percent mark, any upward movement is worrying; two-thirds of the population is already overweight. ...

Already, she and her colleagues point out, some groups of U.S. adults have extremely high rates of overweight and obesity; among African- American women, for instance, 78 percent are currently overweight or obese.

The new projections, published in the journal Obesity, are based on government survey data collected between the 1970s and 2004.

If the trends of those years continue, the researchers estimate that 86 percent of American adults will be overweight by 2030, with an obesity rate of 51 percent. By 2048, all U.S. adults could be at least mildly overweight.

Weight problems will be most acute among African-Americans and Mexican- Americans, the study projects. All black women could be overweight by 2034, according to the researchers, as could more than 90 percent of Mexican-American men.
This could spell the end of our civilization.

Wednesday, August 06, 2008

Watch out for lesbian assumptions

The Santa Cruz Sentinel newspaper reports:
SANTA CRUZ - In the days prior to her suicide, late-UC Santa Cruz Chancellor Denice Denton was making plans to move to Texas where her mother and three siblings live.

Denton also hadn't lived with her partner, Gretchen Kalonji, since the couple moved from Washington state to Santa Cruz in 2005 and their relationship was "tumultuous," according to Denton's mother, Carolyn Mabee.

Mabee, the executor of Denton's estate, made the statements in court documents filed last week in preparation for a hearing Monday about the $2.25 million lawsuit Kalonji filed against the estate in January 2007.

Denton left nothing to Kalonji, who was her partner for more than a decade, according to legal documents.

Kalonji has stated in court documents that she did her best to support Denton in the months leading up to her suicide. Denton died after she jumped from Kalonji's high-rise San Francisco condo on June 24, 2006. ...

Kalonji, who was hired by the UC Office of the President when Denton was named chancellor, claims the couple had made oral agreements to care for the other should something happen to one of them, however, Denton's will, signed in 1985 before she met Kalonji, left most of her assets to her three siblings.

"Assuming such agreement or agreements existed, neither Denice nor Kalonji did anything to implement it or them," Mabee stated in a court document signed July 23. "Kalonji never made Denice the beneficiary of any life insurance or retirements benefits, nor made her the beneficiary of any will or trust."

According to Kalonji, it was assumed the women would care for one another. ...

The couple did not register as domestic partners when they moved to California.
Denton got UCSC to give Kalonji a cushy $200k job. That should be enough for her. They did not even live together or have sexual relations. Kalonji's claim has no merit, but Denton's estate will have to pay $250k to fight the case in court. UCSC never should have had an affirmative action program for crazy lesbians in the first place.