"A lot of people claimed that the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth were lying. But none of their claims were ever disproved, and T. Boone Pickens still has his million bucks."
"Charles attracts women by displaying a certain vulnerability - something of a little boy lost. It's real, not phoney. But he gets bored with a woman the moment he realises he has total control over her. It is not a pretty characteristic, but there it is. I'm sure it goes back to his childhood when his mother ran off with another man. He loves the chase of women, and seducing them, but he can be ruthless with them."
"There's a strange cloud that's settled over our modern society. It's a pervasive sort of bland contempt for an ingenious collection of lenses and mirrors that can reveal a giant ball of hydrogen, helium, methane and ammonia, billions of miles away, surrounded by untold millions of ice fragments in delicate orbit, yet one which will ascribe to the most banal unknown, a life-changing, quit-your-insurance-job-and-live-in-a-tree status.-- Bill Whittle, proving (not surprisingly) there may be intelligent life out there - and (surprisingly) some people, who may wear tuxedos, are waaay ahead of me - on the brilliant EjectEjectEject.com.For our entire history, right up until a hundred years ago, the idea of flying carpets and magic lanterns held people's imaginations in thrall. Now that we have everyday miracles like jet aircraft and electric lights, all some people want is to return to a time when the belief in magic was common, but the everyday blessings of magic - telephones, computers, antibiotics - didn't exist. Back in the anti-nuclear 80's lots of folks drove around with SPLIT WOOD NOT ATOMS bumper stickers, and I often asked myself, how much wood have these people actually split? I've done an hour in my 20's and I thought I was going to die.
It's sad, frankly - at least to people like me. I find it terribly, tragically sad that the more successful and comfortable we become, the more people pine for a time when none of these everyday miracles existed. Outdoor bathrooms on January nights and miserable coal stoves that need to be tended hourly just to heat a pathetic half-gallon of tepid water need to be experienced to be believed - and not just in a 24 hour adventure, but continuously. Death, hunger, cold, disease, infant mortality - we have fought them tooth and nail for millennia, for what? Apparently in order to so insulate people that they can long for "ancient wisdom," return to the "holistic tribal remedies" of the past, and hold up the most primitive and achingly poor cultures on earth as being the sole repository of "authenticity," while scorning every advance that they take completely for granted.
Magical thinking is everywhere today, and it is growing. It threatens the foundations of reason, individualism, science and objectivity that have delivered this success so well and for so long. It is dangerous. If we are to continue to thrive and progress, then we need to sharpen some sticks and drive a stake through the heart of this monster, and right quick.
I'll use the term "Magical Thinking" as a pretty big umbrella to cover a whole host of creeping intellectual chicanery: superstition, wishful thinking, pseudoscience, unsubstantiated claims, assertion, mysticism and anti-science.
Like so many of our other destructive tendencies, this whole mess really started in the latter part of the 1960's."
Courtesy of a commenter on [Michelle] Malkin's blog:
"AUSTELL, Ga. -- A teenager was decapitated by a roller coaster after he hopped a pair of fences and entered a restricted area Saturday at Six Flags Over Georgia, authorities said.
"In his long-running fever dream about America and its abundant pathologies, the bald man, with the tumbler of whiskey and head full of Schedule 1 narcotics, captured not only a mood — your government is not your friend — but many realities of civic life, most notably that if candidates were willing to do what it takes to get elected, they would probably arrive in office corrupted beyond hope."
"Mr. Obama is a Christian, not a Muslim. Hussein is a family name inherited from a Kenyan father he barely knew, who was born a Muslim and died an atheist."-- Jodi Kantor, in an article about all the kids (like those above) who have informally taken Barack Obama's middle name - "Hussein" - as their own, in the New York Times
"...Nobody joins a cult. You join a self-help group, a religious movement, a political organization.
Today’s candidates are running enthusiastically for national preacher—and much else besides.
In the revival tent atmosphere of Barack Obama’s campaign, the preferred hosanna of hope is “Yes we can!” We can, the Democratic front-runner promises, not only create “a new kind of politics” but “transform this country,” “change the world,” and even “create a Kingdom right here on earth.” With the presidency, all things are possible.
In The Road to Serfdom, economist and political philosopher F.A. Hayek chastised the “socialists of all parties” for their belief that “it is not the system we need fear, but the danger it might be run by bad men.” Today’s “presidentialists of all parties”—a phrase that describes the overwhelming majority of American voters—suffer from a similar delusion. Our system, with its unhealthy, unconstitutional concentration of power, feeds on the atavistic tendency to see the chief magistrate as our national father or mother, responsible for our economic well-being, our physical safety, and even our sense of belonging. Relimiting the presidency depends on freeing ourselves from a mind-set one century in the making. One hopes that it won’t take another Watergate and Vietnam for us to break loose from the spellbinding cult of the presidency.
All these photos (and the video below) were taken from a kinda-scary blog, called "Is Barack Obama The Messiah?", which has to seen to be believed: it documents all the people who are regarding Barack as Jesus or some shit. 
It's truly amazing that no one - especially Barack Obama himself - is making an effort to stop this fanaticism. It doesn't speak well of him, journalism, our educational system, or the country, that it's gone on this long - or that it's happening at all: I mean, after almost two years of speeches, the man still hasn't even defined what he stands for yet. That's not politics:
I told you I was going to follow the case of Tricia Walsh-Smith, the YouTube Divorce Lady who portrayed herself as a peace-loving innocent betrayed - here's an update on all we've learned since then:
