I'm Starting To Get Turned Off To Facebook

This isn't exactly my experience on Facebook - my experience is of "friends" wearing blinders to such a point they want to immediately "de-friend" if you disagree with them on anything. Today, it was a black gay guy who decided that - because he's reading a new book on Malcolm X (the one that claims Malcolm X was gay) - Donald Trump is a "Klansman" for demanding to see Obama's birth certificate.

Seriously.

Now his other friends are writing in, telling him to choose his friends more carefully - I'm a whackjob! There was also the former Punk, who is now a NewAger, and has decided our 20 year friendship is worth abandoning since I informed her there's no such thing as a "chakra". She not only de-friended me but closed off her personal email. Yeah, there's a reason I got away from these people.

What do you think? Is Facebook "all that" for you? Had any weird experiences? Is it worth it?

Hat Tip: iOwnTheWorld

"The Secret" Is They Keep Getting Away With It

The president appropriately returned to the country's #1 snake oil salesman to diss "sideshows and carnival barkers":

President Obama told Oprah Winfrey on Wednesday that he was driven to release his long-form birth certificate so that the nation could move on and focus on a "serious conversation" about solving its problems.

Obama, joined by his wife, discussed the issue at Winfrey's Chicago studios hours after he took to the White House briefing room to chide the "sideshows and carnival barkers" propagating conspiracies about his roots.

Obama birth certificate: Oprah asks, 'Why did you wait so long?'

So, after announcing "We do not have time for this kind of silliness", he goes on the NewAge program that lavishly promotes every fraudulent product, quack doctor, and faith healer in the country?

Folks, you just can't make this stuff up. And, for some reason, journalists can't skeptically report on it either,...

Anything - ANYTHING - To Make Voters Forget What An Awful President Obama Is (And How Badly Democrats Have Governed From Day One)

WASHINGTON – It's the conspiracy theory that won't go away. And it's forcing Republican officials and presidential contenders to pick sides: Do they think Barack Obama was born outside the United States and disqualified to be president?

As the Republican candidates tiptoe through the minefield, Democrats are watching. They hope the debate will fire up their liberal base and perhaps tie the eventual GOP nominee to fringe beliefs that swing voters will reject.

The 'Birther' controversy on the GOP side.

If voters allow Barack Obama four more years - for any reason - they've openly declared themselves suicidal.

ABC News' George Stephanopoulos Goes Insane

We already knew, as a high-ranking member of Billary's administration, that George Stephanopoulos was a Democrat partisan, but the way this man - who covered for Hillary during her "psychic" period - shifts his interview with Michele Bachmann to Obama's religion and Birtherism is both hilarious and scary silly. Then, after Bachmann tries to keep the conversation on issues of substance, he shifts again to something even more outrageous - whether Bachmann is "a fan" of the NewAge performance artist Lady GaGa! (He must have thought he was talking to Ann Althouse!)

If this isn't a clear example of the frivolousness - and NewAge biases - of our leading media figures, then we don't know what is:

George Stephanopoulos needs to get a grip before he drifts from reality for good.

Hat Tip: Hot Air

Why Are We Like We Are? Say it: You Don't Know (And Your Kids Are Just As Clueless)

If anyone needed an argument for why we desperately need to start teaching critical thinking in American schools, we think we've found it:

Many of the students graduated without knowing how to sift fact from opinion, make a clear written argument or objectively review conflicting reports of a situation or event, according to New York University sociologist Richard Arum, lead author of the study. The students, for example, couldn’t determine the cause of an increase in neighborhood crime or how best to respond without being swayed by emotional testimony and political spin…

This would be devasating to read if we didn't see the election of Barack Obama, where a man (brought to us by Oprah fucking Winfrey) who never clearly showed the country his birth certificate, his college transcripts - Hell, we couldn't even get a look at his medical records! - was swept into office by many young first-time voters, with no clue what kind of socialist loser they were unleashing on the country.

It is a cultural imperative that this situation change.

We have to equip these kids in how to think, not just respond, otherwise they'll be suckers - for politicians and fraud - for the rest of their lives.

And - after our decades-long experience with the Baby Boomer's stupidity - America's certainly seen more-than-enough of that.

And So It Goes (Will They Ever Stop?)

"The high-profile resurgence of the Birther claims on cable television provoked much self-satisfaction from liberals as the latest evidence of the influence of wingnuts on conservative politics.

But there's an inconvenient truth liberals are going to have to confront: The Birthers began not on the right, but on the left."

-- John Avlon, author of Wingnuts: How the Lunatic Fringe Is Hijacking America, making sure that liberals get all the credit they deserve - they also started the 9/11 Truther movement, y'know - before they start scurring away from all they've achieved, working as The Daily Beast.

It's Like That Song That Goes, "If I Was a Boy,..." (Kinda, But Not Quite: That's One Stupid Song)

"Opinion polls suggest every third Republican can be described as a birther. For example, 39 percent,...want more coverage of the issue. Curiously, so do 14 percent of Democrats,...28 percent think Obama was born overseas, and 30 percent do not know. Does that make them birther agnostics?

Needless to say, everyone from Jon Stewart to the New York Times and Huffington Post to Ben Smith have had a ball deriding the stupidity and the extremism of a large section of the conservative movement.

Many on the conservative side have responded to this by suggesting that the Democrats should not throw stones in glass madhouses because the party of hope, change, and audacity has got its own crazy uncle in the basement in the form of 42.6 percent of Democratic voters who do not believe in the official version of events connected with 9/11. These people have become known as 'truthers.'

But there’s something in this mutual 'yo mama' mud-slinging ('Your people are crazy.' 'My people? What about your people?') that does strike me as rather odd, and that’s the assumption of moral equivalence — as if all eccentricities, idiocies, and conspiracy theories were inherently equal. But this is clearly not so. Let us briefly recap:

The birthers believe that Barack Obama lied about the place of his birth so that he could become the president of the United States.

The truthers believe that George W. Bush murdered (by commission or omission) 3,000 of his fellow Americans and caused two trillion dollars worth of immediate economic damage to his country in order to launch two wars that have killed hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians, drained another trillion dollars from the Treasury, and provided an excuse to destroy the Constitution and turn America into a police state.

Um, OK.

To put it in fairytale terms (the next closest thing to a conspiracy theory), we are taking here about Pinocchio versus Lord Voldemort on steroids and the stimulus package.

Or to return to uncles once again, it’s the difference between an uncle who wears his underwear on his head and an uncle who sexually molests 6-year-old girls, strangles them, and then buries their bodies in his backyard.

Everything in life, including craziness, is a matter of degrees. That’s why we should be wary of an automatic resort to moral and other equivalence as a debating tactic. To do so risks conceding far too much for the momentary comfort of mental egalitarianism. No country on earth is perfect, true, but the United States has been a hell of a lot better in all respects than the Soviet Union. Democracy (or capitalism) might be the worst system ever invented, as Churchill reminded us, except for all the others. All conspiracy theories are deluded, but not all of them are equally contemptible and dangerous.

The belief that NASA faked the moon landing gave us a few laughs; the belief that the Elders of Zion were conspiring against civilization gave us the Holocaust.

The truth, more often than not, tends to be quite prosaic. On August 4, 1961, Barack Obama was born at Kapi’olani Maternity & Gynecological Hospital in Honolulu, Hawaii, of an American mother and a Kenyan father. On September 11, 2001, nineteen al-Qaeda operatives, without prior knowledge by any government (bar that of Afghanistan), used four airplanes as flying bombs against targets in New York and Washington, D.C.

The polls tell us that many, too many, on both sides of politics think otherwise. Personally, however, I would be much more concerned if large sections of my party’s base believed a president to be a mass murderer rather than a con artist. All men might be created equal, but how they choose to pursue their inalienable right to craziness separates the harmlessly eccentric from the dangerously deluded."

-- Arthur Chrenkoff, noticing one of the biggest differences between NewAge liberal, and those notoriously-Christian conservative, crazies - the liberals are "contemptible and dangerous" - which the mainstream media misses (and dismisses) every day, since they're card-carrying members, and not a part of Pajamas Media.

Club Bad: Cameras Ready - Prepare To Flash

"To the media,...[Van Jones] only advocated race war, 9/11 trutherism,...and communism for the United States. Now, that birth certificate stuff ... that's evil, racist and unhinged."

-- Dan Riehl, clearing up the question of who the "kooks" are out there - and making me feel better already - because (despite my weakness for pictures of Hitler) I put a little effort towards adhering to a Riehl World View.

From Secrets To Socialism To A Shit-Eating Grin

"Let’s address [the birther's] motives for a moment. Are some of those demanding the full state records engaged in a futile quest to prove Obama is not a U.S. citizen? Are they on what the editors call 'the hunt for a magic bullet that will make all the unpleasant complications of [Obama’s] election and presidency disappear'? Sure they are. But not everyone who wants to see the full state records falls into that category. I, for one, have very different reasons for being curious.

WHO IS THIS GUY?

Before January 20 of this year, Barack Obama had a negligible public record. He burst onto the national scene what seemed like five minutes before his election to the presidency: a first-term U.S. senator who actually served less than four years in that post — after a short time as a state legislator, some shadowy years as a 'community organizer,' and scholastic terms at Occidental, Columbia, and Harvard that remain shrouded in mystery. The primary qualification supporters offered for Obama’s candidacy was his compelling life story, as packaged in 850 pages’ worth of the not one but two autobiographies this seemingly unaccomplished candidate had written by the age of 45.

There may be perfectly benign answers to all of this. But the real question is: Why don’t the media — the watchdog legions who trekked to Sarah Palin’s Alaska hometown to scour for every kernel of gossip, and who were so desperate for Bush dirt that they ran with palpably forged military records — want to dig into Obama’s background? 



Who cares that Hawaii’s full state records would doubtless confirm what we already know about Obama’s birthplace? They would also reveal interesting facts about Obama’s life: the delivering doctor, how his parents described themselves, which of them provided the pertinent information, etc. Wasn’t the press once in the business of interesting — and even not-so-interesting — news? 



And why would Obama not welcome Hawaii’s release of any record in its possession about the facts and circumstances of his birth? Isn’t that kind of weird? It would, after all, make the whole issue go away and, if there’s nothing there, make those who’ve obsessed over it look like fools. Why should I need any better reason to be curious than Obama’s odd resistance to so obvious a resolution?"

Andrew C. McCarthy, asking many of the same questions I do - not about Obama's birth, but about his entire emergence as a political figure - with the help of America's mainstream journalists, which doesn't exactly include The National Review

"You may have heard of the lunatic fringe contingent that thinks that Barack Obama is not a natural-born citizen of the United States and thus not eligible to be President of the United States according to the Constitution. They're incredible cranks, cooking up all manner of dire conspiracy theories about a doctored birth certificate and birth documents, all full of dark plotting, aided and abetted, of course, by the 'liberal' press."

Orac - my favorite increasingly idiotic scientist - who thinks the label "liberal" (when referring to the American press) is so off-the-mark he must put it in quotes, on Respectful Insolence

"The preponderance of journalists are Democrats.  And socialism, with its idyllic, 'progressive' programs, has formed an increasingly important role in Democratic policies. Who wants to investigate a possible dark side of your own party’s plank?

We’ll get to that.  First—why are most journalists Democrats?

Unsurprisingly, self-selection plays an important role in choosing a job.  People choosing to do work related to prisons, for example, commonly show quite different characteristics than those who volunteer for work in helping disadvantaged youths.  Academicians have very different characteristics than CEOs—or politicians, for that matter.  

Harry Stein, former ethics editor of Esquire, once said: 'Journalism, like social work, tends to attract individuals with a keen interest in bettering the world.' In other words, journalists self-select based on a desire to help others. Socialism, with its 'spread the wealth' mentality intended to help society’s underdogs, sounds ideal.

Most journalists take a number of psychology, sociology, political science, and humanities courses during their early years in college.  Unfortunately, these courses have long served as ideological training programs—ignoring biological sources of self-serving, corrupt, and criminal behavior for a number of reasons, including lack of scientific training; postmodern, antiscience bias; and well-intentioned, facts-be-damned desire to have their students view the world from an egalitarian perspective.  Instead, these disciplines ram home the idea that troubled behavior can be fixed through expensive socialist programs that, coincidentally, provide employment opportunities for graduates of the social sciences. Modern neuroscience is showing how flawed many of these policies have been—structural differences in the brains of psychopaths, for example, help explain why remedial programs simply helped them become better at conning people. 

Academics in the social sciences tend to give short shrift to the dramatic failures and corruption within US educational system or unions. (Think here of the Detroit Public School system, or the National Education Association, whose former officers have written: “The NEA has been the single biggest obstacle to education reform in this country. We know because we worked for the NEA.”)  Instead, because of their ideological biases, professors often emphasize that corporations are the bad guys, while unions and the government—at least the type of government that supports higher paychecks for social science professors and jobs for their students—are good.  This type of teaching makes the Democratic Party and its increasingly socialist ideals seem naturally desirable, and criticism about how those ideals will supposedly be met less likely. (How many social scientists predicted that the billions spent on busing and the Projects would worsen the situations they were meant to solve, as ultimately happened?)  It’s no wonder that journalists enter the profession as Democrats, then keep their beliefs intact through all-too-common tendencies to conform. "

-- Barbara Oakley, telling us why much of today's journalistic community cannot be trusted - and with lots more supporting links in the original article - from Psychology Today.

Who's Really Telling The Truth? Me - A Black Man - These Three Liberals, Or Your Own Lying Eyes?

"There are kooky conspiracy theorists who just can't accept that they lost and we now have a black man as the President of the United States,...."

-- Orac - that fucking genius from Respectful Insolence - throwing his own racism around, and calling it (what else?) Respectful Insolence.

"The driving force behind the town hall mobs is probably the same cultural and racial anxiety that’s behind the 'birther' movement, which denies Mr. Obama’s citizenship."

-- Paul Krugman - that fucking genius from The New York Times - "probably" throwing his own racism around, in (where else?) The New York Times.

"Superimpose that idea, through the Joker’s makeup, onto Obama’s face, and you have subtly coded, highly effective racial and political argument."

-- Philip Kennicott - that fucking genius from The Washington Post - forcefully throwing his own racism (and stupidity) around, in (where else?) The Washington Post.

Hat Tip: Cato@Liberty

UPDATE: THE Jammie Wearing Fool adds Andrew Sullivan to the kooky racial hate list with this comment:

"We have a guy here who still believes Trig Palin is not Sarah Palin's son, yet has a field day with the kook Birthers. While I agree with Sullivan the Birthers are cranks, he goes off the rails by implying it's some racist conspiracy against Barack Obama.

Memo to Andy: Get over your own paranoid obsessions before opining on those of others. It might add a bit of credibility to your argument."

Oh, man, you gotta love it.

The King Of All Hippies & The Modern NewAge

"Born in 1934 to a 16-year-old prostitute, Manson appeared as 'No Name Maddox' on his birth certificate. A miserable childhood was punctuated by humiliations such as when an uncle dragged him to church in a dress 'to learn to fight and be a man'.

At 13 he was the youngest ever inmate of Indiana County Jail. He became a career jailbird, with each release followed by arrest for offences ranging from car theft to rape. Bright as a button, he read voraciously in prison, hoovering up titbits of philosophy, religion and mumbo-jumbo that he would later regurgitate in the guise of a guru."

-- Damian Corless, telling us gorgeous bits about Good Time Charlie's early years (which fit perfectly into the NewAge hippie template) you know, the part no one talks about - as they continue to sell NewAge beliefs everywhere - except, occasionally, in The Independent.