Out Of Thin Air

Yes, he did. Micha_el S#vage, a near perfect fusion of backward thinking and angry, hate-filled rhetoric, says:

“You haven’t seen any of what’s coming in this country. You are going to see the wholesale replacement of competent white men, and I’m targeting exactly the group that’s gonna be thrown out of jobs in the government. And I’ll say it, and I’ll be the first to say it, and I may be not the only — the last to say it. I am telling you that there’s gonna be a wholesale firing of competent white men in the United States government up and down the line, in police departments, in fire departments. Everywhere in America, you’re going to see an exchange that you’ve never seen in history, and it’s not gonna be necessarily for the betterment of this country.”

“[W] hen you’re socially promoted, you wind up as president of the United States. If you’re socially promoted your whole life and nobody challenges you because you’re of the proper constitution and composition and you look exactly right and no one’s — everyone’s afraid to say a word to you, why, you then go to Harvard, you then go to the law review, you then get elected, you then get elected to the next level. This is what happens in a country that’s intimidated by its own policies and its own fears.”

Imagine being part of a political movement that includes spokespeople like Savage. You don’t have to, it actually exists.

Meanwhile, I’ll be on the lookout for the wholesale firing of white people, replaced by black puppets, and will alert you if that happens. But you might want to go on with other things for a long, long while.

The Onion on good Christians. Yes, I prefer not to live in a theocracy.

A prank at the Yale-Harvard football game. I’m not much for pranks. Or collegiate football games. Or football games. Or rivalries. Or colleges. But this was kind of funny.

Speaking of colleges, Tim Paw_lenty, Repub governor of Minnesota and possible future for a less ridiculous Republican party (one without religious extremism, Sarah Palin, the Idiocracy, faith-based strategies for ruling the world, rampant corruption, Herbert Hoover style economics, a dysfunctional lack of jobs for college graduates, no health care for tens of millions, no knowledge of or ability to use the Internet, hatemongering, fearmongering, massive income inequality, extreme inattention to detail, an assault on reason, lie after lie, utter neglect of public infrastructure, endless war, war for the sake of war, war for the sake of profiteering, war for the sake of settling grudges, war for the sake of getting back at Dad, war for the sake of being rich and having a toy army), has the idea that the future of colleges could be in online enrollment, saying that bringing students to campus is a waste of resources. I don’t disagree, though I foresee the further erosion of social capital as a result. But imagine how many people will be spared from the perils of socially-induced excessive drinking. They also won’t be subjected to school shooting massacres, which would be a better fit with Republican gun policy. It helps with the “so what?” question I have after college. I went to college thinking it would somehow help me get by financially, and also help me meet a life partner. Both ideas were erroneous, so I may as well have Internet commuted.

One idea that was in vogue at my college when I suffered through it was that, in the real world, the ability to give public talks was important to success. Actually, it was usually described in negative terms: if you don’t do it, you won’t get as far. Not speaking to groups will be a limiting factor, and what good student wants to be limited by faults of willpower? So, you should overcome your very sensible reserve about giving a talk to a bunch of people who don’t really want to be there listening, and that will prepare you for happiness. Naturally, professors think that way because they’re forced to do it all the time, but were, at least then, apparently oblivious to the irony that it is virtually impossible to get a job as a professor. So, I did it, going so far as to take a little speech-making class, which was kind of fun, but a relief when it was over. But fortunately, I haven’t had to give speeches in the years since. Also with that is the realization that, if you have to prostrate yourself to go far in life, you should give up trying to go far. Duh.

On the con side, I present this comment from the article:

I would like to think that someone like Pawlenty learned something from the election results and truly wanted to “modernize” the Republican party to make it more responsive to the needs of the american people..but if the on-line college program is his best example of how the Republicans will update and become “cool”, I am extremely doubtful about him and the GOP really “getting it” or “getting with it”. True we need to make education more affordable and accessible for all, but I can not imagine that doing all of your college work on-line could ever come close to providing students with a comprehensive and excellent educational experience that will enable our younger population to keep up the demands of working in a global economy.. or for that matter… make them more rounded, intellectually curious individuals able to determine when they are being fed bull by politicians, etc…

Still, I don’t feel college prepared me to participate in a global economy. If anything, it reinforced the notion I had already learned: trust in the hierarchy, believe in the hierarchy, do it’s bidding–a bidding completely unrelated to solving any of the world’s problems or advancing the interests of a political party that might actually do something to fix problems–and you will make out like those people you hear about, with happy homes, big groups of friends, and status (and wind up deeply, life-threateningly neurotic, but you don’t talk about that). Which turned out to be utterly false. It worked for that generation of professors who, after suffering a defeat of sorts in the 1960s, found some modest rewards working too hard in largely irrelevant academia. In actuality, for us students, learning to read, write, and type in elementary school were all the preparation needed to participate in a few unfulfilling jobs and watch a system of gross global injustice literally destroy the world environment while keeping a majority in poverty so that a few titans of capitalism could collect a super-majority of the spoils.

Meanwhile, consider this comment on Pawlenty, which points to my belief that there is no such thing as a legitimate conservative in a leadership position (anymore), they are irresponsible frauds who support a dysfunctional government (remember, Pawlenty is supposed to be a new type of GOPer):

Pawlenty was elected in Minnesota on a “no new taxes” pledge, vetoed light rail, and vetoed a comprehensive transportation bill (less than a year after the bridge fell) that was overridden with legislators from his party crossing over to vote with the Democrats. Two weeks ago, the people of Minnesota voted to raise their own taxes with more votes than Obama received. Pawlenty is an out-of-step, traditional conservative who just happens to be more polished and media-savvy than Pence. Yes, he’s young and funny, which is disarming. But your premise is completely wrong; he is not substantially different from the rest of the party. His agenda is set by the conservatives who back him.

Please study his record before you try describing who he is. His dissing of “drill baby drill” is a shot at his potential rival, Palin, and plays well in his home state which has no oil wells. Believe me, it is NOT a sign he is somehow not a conservative. It’s Same Old Coke, just poured into a different can.

Finally, after my dry indictment of all things that you have to get out of bed for in the morning, here is a decent page of library porn. It does not involve girls, but libraries, photos of large collections of books and the buildings that house them, which stir our imaginations, in much the way that collegiate buildings that Pawlenty think are a waste of money stir our desires to educate ourselves. I enjoy the photo of the one in Paris. Though none compare with the library sequence in the movie Seven.

Media Matters informs me that Newsweek is full of shit.

For evolutionary anthropology fans, here’s an interesting article from National Geographic about the disappearance of Neanderthals, who once enjoyed an exclusive realm in Eurasia, for about 200,000 years, before our Homo sapiens sapiens predecessors migrated north from Africa (we are all African). The split between neanderthals and homo sapiens occurred around 500,00 years ago. Says wikipedia, neanderthals are classified as a subspecies of homo sapiens (homo sapiens neanderthalis), or a separate species of the same genus (homo neanderthalis).

The article covers the DNA analysis and genome sequencing project on neanderthals, using highly preserved specimens from the femur bone of a 38,000-year-old male Neanderthal specimen from Vindija Cave in Croatia, and further study from the cannibalized specimens found in 1994 in the El Sidron cave in northern Spain. Many neanderthal specimens are damaged unwittingly by the archaeologists who found them–in a pre-DNA analysis world, their DNA tainted the samples. Now when new specimens are found, the process used for extraction is more comparable to a clean room used to build a hard drive in a computer.

The human genome and neanderthal genome, consisting of 3 billion base pairs, are nearly identical (99.5% similar, as opposed to 98.77% similarity to chimps, also close). Yet neanderthals were much more muscular and had substantially larger lungs, and required around 5000 calories of dietary intake per day, compared to our 1800-2200ish. Change a few (hundred million) base pairs, and the species changes.

The article concludes the reason for the Neanderthal extinction about 40,000 years ago was not for stark reasons such as the lack of language ability or the ability to shape tools or create art; instead, their biology required the consumption of mostly large animals, which prevented women and children from participating in acquiring plants and smaller game as was customary among homo sapiens. There was also the fact that the reproduction cycle for neanderthal began about four years earlier than for sapien. Neanderthals weren’t necessarily dumber–their brains were slightly larger than ours–just more slavish to their needs imposed by nature. The women and children hunted with the males for large beasts, which was labor intensive and dangerous. Many recovered specimens have fractured arm bones. In effect, homo sapiens were more diversified in their resource gathering because of their lower caloric needs, which allowed them more time to develop cultural skills apart from mere resource gathering.

This in turn fed a theme I have mentioned on this site in the past: homo sapiens were “freed up” to be more cooperative owing to biology, allowing for larger interconnected societies that could better withstand the strains of climate pressure. The climate became volatile about 40,000 years ago–cold for a decade, hot for another–and this strained the neanderthal disadvantage to the breaking point.

The Sapiens who co-existed with Neanderthals were the Cro-Magnon. The term “Cro-Magnon” does not describe a biological classification; the term is more regional and temporal, though there were distinguishing physical traits. Most scientific literature simply calls them “early modern humans.” They too had slightly larger brains than we do. The theories of what caused the Neanderthal line to die out are summed, of course, at wikipedia. Most of these ideas are discussed in the National Geographic article, which suggests that interactions between the two were not peaceable but mostly non-existent.

It used to be PCs with recovery partitions would have a statement like “Press [key] for recovery options…” that would flash during the BIOS or perhaps just after. But the new Dells do not seem to. The answer is press F8 as though you were loading safe mode, and then your first option is “startup repair.” Standard for Vista, but when you choose it on a Dell, you see a new option at the bottom, something like “Restore factory Dell image.”

I find it interesting to note that southern Colorado was the site of volcanic activity on a scale that far exceeds anything seen in the time of modern civilization. About 70 million years ago, the Rocky Mountains 2 formed (long before that were the ancestral rockies).  About 40 million years ago, several volcanoes came to life south of here (the right wing part of the state, ha ha). Here’s the wiki entry on it.

I lost some time on this one. You exit a file, and you want to return to the line you were on. In short, add the following autocommand to .vimrc:

:au BufReadPost * if line(”‘\”") > 1 && line(”‘\”") <= line(”$”) | exe “normal! g’\”" | endif

Described here in the vim documentation.

On some systems, you can use vi and vim interchangeably, both meaning vim.

http://www.nytimes-se.com/

A girl wears a pro-McCain t-shirt at her liberal middle school–boy, talk about an immature environment–in order to teach them about being more tolerant. People called her stupid, and a few said she should be killed. I have a feeling though, if she wore an Obama t-shirt in a conservative middle school, she would have been violently abused and probably sent home. Funny how she didn’t try that experiment. That tells you everything you need to know right there, and shows her “experiment” is inherently misleading. If anything, it proves that liberals are more tolerant than conservatives, even of ideas that directly contradict their own. Not to mention, these are kids.

And I’m not fooled. Conservative bullies have been spouting this non-sense for years: liberals are tolerant of everyone except conservatives–meanwhile, conservatives themselves use intolerance as an effective means to win elections and intimidate regular people, while praying on the guilt of the other side to fool them into being neutral about everything.

Meanwhile, we are living with the economic consequences of conservative deregulation. First a liquidity crisis, then a housing bubble caused in part by unregulated subprime loans, next a recession, and now, Soros tells us, the unregulated hedge funds are about to shed 50 to 75 percent of their value, possibly causing a worldwide depression.

Keep in mind this follows an election in which the other side implied our candidate was a terrorist and a communist. Really? A terrorist? Isn’t that, I don’t know, extremely dishonest and misleading and an invitation to violence against him?

I like how this “terrorist” connection was never explained. Like, what are we supposed to infer from this “troubling” association? Why not follow up with a point here? Because any point made about this association would be easily refuted. Better just to try and create a cloud of doubt in a weak-minded person’s brain.

“The long war on Christianity in America continues today on the floor of the House of Representatives and continues unabated with aid and comfort to those who would eradicate any vestige of our Christian heritage being supplied by the usual suspects, the Democrats.”

— Rep. John Hostettler, (R-IN)

“Yes, the long war on Christianity. I pray that one day we may live in an America where Christians can worship freely! In broad daylight! Openly wearing the symbols of their religion…. perhaps around their necks? And maybe — dare I dream it? — maybe one day there can be an openly Christian President. Or, perhaps, 43 of them. Consecutively.”

— Jon Stewart