"Thus I refute Chomsky."

I just wanted to write that headline. Props to Dr. Johnson. It's not actually me refuting Chomsky, and no-one, at this point, is entirely certain that there is a refutation going on. But this article from the New Yorker, referenced in Jerry Pournelle's mail, seems to point that way.

“When I went back and read the stuff Sapir wrote in the twenties, I just realized, hey, this really is a tradition that we lost,” Everett said. “People believe they’ve actually studied a language when they have given it a Chomskyan formalism. And you may have given us absolutely no insight whatsoever into that language as a separate language.”

Everett began to question the first principle of Chomskyan linguistics: that infants could not learn language if the principles of grammar had not been pre-installed in the brain. Babies are bathed in language from the moment they acquire the capacity to hear in the womb, Everett reasoned, and parents and caregivers expend great energy teaching children how to say words and assemble them into sentences—a process that lasts years. Was it really true that language, as Chomsky asserted, simply “grows like any other body organ”? Everett did not deny the existence of a biological endowment for language—humans couldn’t talk if they did not possess the requisite neurological architecture to do so. But, convinced that culture plays a far greater role than Chomsky’s theory accounted for, he decided that he needed to “take a radical reëxamination of my whole approach to the problem.”

It would be such fun to learn that Chomsky, revered as a scientist of linguistics in Academe, and as a sage of politics by the Left, had been wrong in both places! That his linguistics was really, from the article, "something that looks like science." As opposed to being actually, you know, science. The Ptolomaic epicycles looked like science, once. But if indeed there is a natural language, spoken by actual human beings, that does not conform to Chomsky's theories of "deep structure," then might not that invalidate all his other pronouncements? Ah, the weeping in Bezerkeley. Though it's certainly possible to be right about one thing, and wrong about another.

Still, this tribe may be evidence that Sapir and Whorf (and Jack Vance) had something going on. I guess where I'm going with this is that I'm looking to be able to say, "Noam Chomsky, you nut! You had people fooled for a while, thinking you were a smart guy! You fooled people into thinking you were a genius of linguistics, and bootstrapped that reputation into people thinking you were a deep thinker in other fields! But we're on to you now."

There's another whole post in the Pirahã attitude toward time. If I have time, I'll get to it. If thinking about that post comes back into experience.

Generic radio

Adrian the clever, contrarian Canadian leads the way to Musicovery. What? It's like a radio, only on the Internet, and it takes requests, only in very general terms, only. Pretty cool! If you don't care which piece you are listening to, but can specify what kind of music you would like to hear, well then, Musicovery.com is just the place for you. [Edited to repair lapse of memory.]

View from the fort

There now, that's something more pleasant to have at the top.

Ted Kennedy sings, in Spanish

Oh, the panderage! I wish I had not listened to this. But I want to be able to find it again. "I thank you for your soul, and your heart." They look so tasty!

More at the link.

Update, Feb 22 2008: This post has been receiving an inordinate amount of hits in the last couple of days. I finally figured out why; he's done it again. The same song, at an Obama rally. Well, all right, here it is, with live video this time:

Far be it from me to discourage anyone seeking a new career in music. I can let others do that. Simon, what did you think?

Where to get your elven cloak

That would be right here, at Stansborough Fibres Ltd. NZ$ 860 ≈ US$ 660. Blessing of Galadriel, invisibility, leaf-wrapped lembas not included.

Comment from a contrarian Canadian in Cambridge on the preceding

I do love to alliterate. A low taste, I know, but mine own.

So there's more on this with the vegetables and the Sopranos at a blog that is new to me, found through a backlink at Althouse on one of those mentioned in the previous post: David Chase (spoilers ahead), on the actual Sopranos episode; Blogging as Performance Art, on the Althouse miniseries described below. Adrian is the blogger's name, as the alliteration advances, and he also has the good taste to link to a Megan McArdle post that I also hold in high esteem, in The Essence of Conservative Thought. Go there for the link, it's a good 'un. As is the rest of The Misfit, which goes on the link list now.

His post on health care, Talk is Cheap, with its link to 45 million myths: Better Canada's frayed health care system than unbridled U.S. capitalism that leaves millions with no safety net, right? Well, take a closer look, by Norma Kozhaya, is something else that I should mention here. With the new Michael Moore movie coming out, and all.

What we were saying the other day about percentiles

I've been having a lovely time the last few days, thank you. Between the thunderstorms and the birdwatching. Watching Mike across the street running with the lawnmower to beat the thunderstorm. (There was a special on sentence fragments at the deli, I stocked up, I might use up a few of these run-ons too, they seem to be getting stale, I'd better use them now, they might go off.) But Internet-wise, the most fun has been over at Professor Althouse's site. She kicked it off with a post about the new Hillary Clinton campaign video, which is "a take on the last scene of 'The Sopranos.'" Onion rings! Carrot sticks! Freudian interpretation! Whoopee! (Not for Bill.) In keeping with the link dump spirit of this place, I'll list the posts so far:

The new Hillary Clinton video is a take on the last scene of "The Sopranos."
Let's take a closer look at Bill's carrot and Hillary's onion ring.
Ah, a nice, refreshing, troll-diluting...
For some, onion rings. Others do better with the calamari.
"Get away, Onions."
Let's think more deeply about the meaning of carrots.
Think of a vegetable, lonely at home....
"Democrats always know how to implode, how to be ambiguous, how to waver, how not to be authentic."
"I fear the best I can do is to say that I'm rather sorry to have engaged her at all."
Friday pop quiz: Explain this.

My word, I had not realized there were so many. And all this interspersed with other posts, some on serious topics. If, O best beloved, you should choose to read all of these, with the comments, you had better set aside some time for it. Probably over a thousand comments on this extended thread, and that number is unlikely to grow smaller. And most of them just the worst kind of trash. What, you say, is the worst kind of trash? That would be the kind of trash that takes up your time and distracts from the discussion that could be underway if there wasn't ALL THIS SENSELESS SHOUTING GOING ON! Which economists refer to as an opportunity cost. Which rhymes with "opportunity lost." Which is what an opportunity cost costs you.

But to get back to the percentiles: The trolls on this [extended] thread seem to fall into a couple of main groups. 1) the ones who just don't get it, and are resentful about that. Explaining a joke is tedious; explaining it over and over again, to people whose self-esteem is now invested in the idea that it was a lousy joke and that not getting it shows superiority, must require the patience of a teacher, or the subtlety of an artist or a lawyer. [Gosh—who does that profile resemble?] 2) the ones who are just making noise to keep other people from saying anything sensible. You know what I mean: you're trying to talk about business or love or politics, and every time you get a sentence out, your pesky brother interrupts, just to get attention. A classic trolling tactic, uncoupling the cars of the collective train of thought. (Luckyoldson makes a short, senseless, often obscene response to every post by anyone else. A variation is used on political websites by posters who put up long screeds about nothing in particular just to shut down the conversation. I am thinking of "Muslim Unity" at Wizbang!, but it's not an uncommon tactic. "Flood the zone" kind of thing. "Cyrus Pinkerton," not present on these threads, does a lot of this chez Althouse. I suspect that "Cyrus" is a sock puppet of Amanda Marcotte; maybe he/she/they are on vacation this week? Both Lucky and Cyrus have empty blogs that could have hundreds of posts if they had redirected the writing impulse that way, instead of scrawling on someone else's pages.) So what we have is a few people trying to conduct a conversation about a witty observation on current events, while some others, resentful of their incomprehension and too proud to admit it, are banging on pots and pans. Outside the window of a person with degrees in both art and law. Their mothers told them, "Do not meddle in the affairs of artists, for they are subtle, and lawyers are subtle also, and a lawyer who is also an artist, hoo-boy, watch out." But did they listen?

This is a preserv'd specimen of the loneliness of the high percentile. What universities are good for. Why people join Mensa, if they can find a local chapter that has not been taken over by bureaucrats and lingo-slingers. Why Steven den Beste shut down the forum at USS Clueless. Why I said the other day that spending time in conversation with people who are smarter than oneself is a good thing. Did I say that? I meant to. But one has to listen.

I would like to think that Prof. Althouse is cultivating a troll garden, for fun. I hope she is having fun, anyway. My own patience would be sorely tried.

It might be worth noting that (as far as I can recall) not even the worst of the trolls has tried to defend Céline Dion. Some things … maybe she's better en français.

Update: A troll has left a dropping in the comments, which we may examine. Observe the characteristics: anonymity; hostility; willful ignorance; arrogance; irrelevance; confusion of humorous sarcasm with plain viciousness. Trolls often, erroneously and characteristically, imagine that they are funny. I wonder if they also think that they are good-looking. That would be more irrelevance.

Another update, much later: Blogger backlinks are busted, it seems; so here's the backlink for this post: "I would like to think that Prof. Althouse is cultivating a troll garden, for fun."

Harry Reid speaks, Marlo Lewis fisks

Apparently there is an energy bill in the Senate. Better they spend their time with anything besides the zombie of an immigration bill, which is reported to be rising from the dead. But the stuff that Harry Reid will say! Marlo Lewis chews it up it a bite at a time at Planet Gore. Here's just a little bit, to wet your whistle, or whet your appetite:

Reid: No reasonable person continues to doubt that global warming is real and that humans are in large part responsible. But it took President Bush six-and-a-half years to even utter the words global warming.

Bush used the words “global warming” in June 2001, during the very speech in which he explained his reasons for keeping America out of the Kyoto Protocol.

Reid: The best scientists in the world are telling us we only have 10 to 15 years to begin to dramatically reduce carbon emissions. That means starting now, not 2012 or later as the President suggests, but right now.

Doomsday predictions enjoy a long history of failure.

Reid: Countries across the globe have shown that they’re up to the challenge.

Kyoto-constrained Europe’s CO₂ emissions are rising faster than ours; so are Japan’s.

Reid: Major corporations here in America are signing on, as are many state governments. They are facing reality and finding creative ways to turn it into opportunity. Science has been ignored on the federal level for too long. But that time is over.

As CEI President Fred Smith explained in congressional testimony, the companies “signing on” to Kyoto-style controls are either rent-seekers—businesses scheming to profit from market-rigging regulations—or firms that fear they will be “on the menu” if they are not “at the table.”

Reid could have run the speech past a staffer or two for a little bit of fact-checking. Of course, had he done that, there would not have been much left of it. Good work, Marlo Lewis!

A two-fer at PJ Media today

or maybe a four-fer, depending on how you count it. Roger Simon interviews Mark Steyn, for one. Steyn comments on the crappiness of American newspapers, journalism school, the general uselessness thereof, and how modern J-School grads are utterly out of touch with the reality on which they are supposed to be reporting, as a consequence of having been to J-School. Which seems kind of upside-down.

Then a three-parter from Oleg Atbashian, previously identified here as the creator of "The People's Cube," on the question of (I paraphrase) "What the HELL is the matter with the media, including the papers run by all the J-School grads, and particularly with Hollywood!?" Otherwise known as "Our Degenerating Media." Part 1. Part 2. Part 3. My personal favorite newspaperman, H.L. Mencken, never went to J-School, so he wrote it the way he saw it.

Further wonders of modern science

Start with a thoughtless headline on a NY Times story about mutant whippets, add Making Light's commenters, get the laugh out loud Internet winner of the day.

Hitchens on Paris

He takes the unusual step of writing about her current difficulties with humanity and compassion. However, the piece is more about the coverage, and those of us whose attention is drawn, and those doing the attention-drawing:

The supposedly "broad-minded" culture turns out to be as prurient and salacious as the elders in The Scarlet Letter. Hilton is legally an adult but the treatment she is receiving stinks—indeed it reeks—of whatever horrible, buried, vicarious impulse underlies kiddie porn and child abuse.

[…] Lynching parties used to be fiestas, as we have no right to forget, and the ugly coincidence of sexual nastiness—obscenity is the right name for it—and vengefulness is what seems to lend the savor to the Saturnalia. There must be more than one "gossip" writer who has already rehearsed for the day that Paris Hilton takes a despairing overdose. And what a glorious day of wall-to-wall coverage that will be!

A relief from, and contrast to, the pervasive Dr. Phil/Oprah/Springer vampirism.

KGB Psyops from the horse's mouth

Glenn Reynolds links to this at PJ Media.

"Former KGB agent and Soviet defector Yuri Bezmenov explains how the KGB worked from within American universities to demoralize our society in a generation."

The manufacturing of "useful idiots:" a first-hand explanation of how and why they did it, which helps to explain why so many otherwise fine, nice, pleasant, even smart people seem so resistant to logic and even to facts, should those things contradict their negative views of "the power structure" or "bourgeois Amerika." Willi Münzenberg's old weapons of the Cold War are still working.

Here's a blogpost about Bezmenov and the documentary this clip is excerpted from, with links to other clips:

In 1984 G. Edward Griffin released a documentary titled Soviet subversion of the free press, a conversation with Yuri Bezmenov and through the magic of YouTube, snippets of that documentary are available on the web today. Now, as far as I can tell, G. Edward Griffin is a little bit odd. He's championed some questionable cancer cures and written books about monetary conspiracies and all sorts of odd stuff (there's a page about him here: G. Edward Griffin Totally Explained, but really, it doesn't do all that much explaining). Still, you can't deny the video and he lets Bezmenov rant in his own words.

Do read the rest, it's worth the click. The blogger, Rob Hafernik, talks about the documentary and also about an issue of Look magazine from 1967 that was a glowing account of the USSR and its glorious potential. That sounds a lot like those articles by Walter Duranty that the NY Times ran in the early 1930's, described in the Weekly Standard and Wikipedia, which brought the Times a Pulitzer, but which historians have concluded were pure propaganda. There is also a book about Duranty, Stalin's Apologist. (Those three are just from the first page of Google results.)

The YouTube user who uploaded these Bezmenov clips seems to be a Nazi sympathizer. I didn't like looking at his other clips, so didn't look at many, but that was the impression I got, from their content and from his descriptions. But the Devil can quote Scripture, as they say, and after the abrogation of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, even a real Nazi would have little love for Russians. Which make it a bit less likely that these are some sort of double-fake.

Click the label "psyops" for more on Münzenberg and meme-war.

Update: Youtube has, as far as I can tell, removed everything from the user mentioned above. I have changed the link to one that still works; the better audio, and Portuguese subtitles! are just gravy.

Another update: Yaakov Ben Moshe has posted a couple more Bezmenov clips. Ted Kennedy appears at 6:26 in the second one.

When LOLCats don't quite satisfy

Then u can has something a little deeper. Philolsophers!


One more, to carry on with the critters theme:


Lest this get completely out of hand, I'll just link to a couple more that I think are highlights, and, y'know, relatively comprehensible: the gestalt-shifting lolduckrabbit, and the Athenian philosophers with their invisible basketballs.

Thanks to Ann Althouse, who has interesting comments, Jeremy Bentham in the cupboard (or Auto-Icon, if you must), and links to "No soap, radio." Definitely worthwhile if you enjoy jokes like

"How many surrealists does it take to screw in a lightbulb?"
"Fish."

LOL!

Buffalo, lions, a crocodile

Another for the critter fans. Megan, or Jane, has good comments, so go there to watch it. Ah, Nature, red in tooth and claw.

Leadership

An update to Reid says we have lost. So who won? from April. John Weidner has this image:


which says plenty all by itself.

Black and purple frog

All right you critter lovers. I know who you are. Here's a critter for you:

Shiny!

The Realist archive on the web

Not safe for anyone. But essential. Jesse Walker, at Hit & Run:

In 1958 Paul Krassner set out to create a Mad magazine for adults. He was well-qualified for the task, being both a former Mad contributor and, in fact if not always in spirit, an adult. The result was The Realist, a journal whose great innovation was to refuse to label which articles were journalism and which were satire, and sometimes to add just enough truth to a piece of fiction that readers would be left completely befuddled as to what, if anything, they should believe. Some call it a prelude to the underground press. I call it a prelude to the Internet.

Here it is: The Realist.

Pournelle on what to do about warming

Dr. Pournelle has a letter from someone who thinks that a couple of minutes with Google has led him to The Truth. Oh dear. From his reply:

My point, which I repeatedly make, is that until we know what the hell is going on, it is absurd to spend the money we could be spending to find out what is happening on "remedies" when we don't understand the problem. We spend what money we do get for research on computer models instead of better data. We ought to be taking more deep sea probes, launching satellites whose purpose is to get accurate temperature data at all levels of the atmosphere (it varies a lot) as well as ground and sea surface; get temperatures both in and outside of cities, upwind and down; measuring total glacier gains and losses (some glaciers are gaining); and so forth. We ought to know more about clouds. I don't claim to be the world's expert on what we ought to be doing to find out what is happening. I do claim to be enough of an old Operations Research guy to know that if you don't know what's happening, you're better off spending money to find out what's going on than you are in trying to fix something you don't understand.

Simple Bayesian analysis: if there are two possible trends, and dealing with each is expensive, and what you must do is pretty well determined by which trend is going to happen, you are better off spending money to reduce the uncertainty and pay the penalty for starting later on the right track than you are to start investing in remedies that may be for the wrong coming disaster. I could show you mathematically, but I am sure you can see the point.

Much more at the link.

Immigration irrationality, continued

The bill has failed, for now. It does not have a stake through its heart yet. What is it about the concept of "illegal" that is so hard for some legislators to understand? You'd almost think there was something hidden about their motivations, the way they keep conflating illegal entry with legal immigration. There, now that it's stated that way, I see that even the expression "illegal immigration" is a conflation, designed to confuse the issue.

Freeman Hunt has an aphorism that could be more widely circulated:

Solving the illegal immigration problem by legalizing illegal immigrants is a little like solving a crime wave by legalizing robbery.

Not just a little like, a whole lot like. And: Michelle Malkin foams at the mouth while discussing the "effete conservative elites." No, really!

Update: a little more from Michelle Malkin on sanctuary vs. sovereignty.

John Edwards clarifies the distinction between liberals and everybody else

In one minute. Patterico has video, and excellent comments.

Update: Some Edwards snarkery at Hit & Run. Comments not safe for children.

Faustfeathers

Found by a slightly circuitous path from a comment on Making Light, John Kessel's hilarious Christopher Marlowe meets the Marx Brothers Faustfeathers. The poster for a live production can be seen on the author's homepage. Now, this is a show I would like to see!

Willi Munzenberg and the genesis of Amnesty International

Charles at Little Green Footballs links to an article about the origin of Amnesty International, by one who was there. Willi Munzenberg features prominently.

Münzenberg perceived, almost intuitively, that societies experiencing the warm secular embrace of industrial modernity were afflicted by a critical depletion of that moral justification which is “one of our deepest needs, one of our most powerful and essential human drives, ignored at our cost and peril”.²⁴ Lacking any formal knowledge of theology, history or sociology, he understood in practice the importance of “righteousness” in human life. Correctly perceiving the dearth of this definitive ingredient among the middle and upper strata of Western European society, he deployed his formidable propaganda machine to the task of producing a sufficiency of convincing, immaculate and soul-enhancing righteous causes to fill the vacuum.

Münzenberg correctly guessed that once a suitable cause had been hammered onto the public consciousness, it would not be difficult to lure his “innocents”—earlier and more brutally dubbed “useful idiots” by Lenin—to contribute their names, prestige and funds to well-organised “innocents’ clubs” manipulated into delivering the desired result by strategically placed activists, preferably not members of the Communist Party. Those invited to join and ostensibly to lead these organisations were invariably well-intentioned, socially respectable personages eager to play a constructive role in the struggle for social justice while satisfying their need for personal moral justification and “who had no idea that their consciences were being orchestrated by operatives of Stalin’s government”.²⁵

Although probably making old-fashioned communists squirm with the placing of non-party members in the vanguard of policy, this approach proved very successful for raising funds and marshalling international support for the Spanish republic. Münzenberg’s propaganda machine portrayed the war as a Manichaean confrontation between the forces of good and evil; between Franco’s obscurantist fascist terror supported by Moorish, German and Italian mercenaries and levies and an enlightened, virtuous and democratic republic defended by idealistic young heroes from every corner of the globe. He convinced the rest of the world that the republic was a social democratic paradise where torture, arbitrary arrests and executions had been banned forever and which was now struggling to defend freedom, democracy, common decency and justice for the people of Spain.

The international campaign succeeded—Stalin’s reservations notwithstanding—mainly because it was carried forward on the shoulders of large numbers of non-party “fellow travellers” and “opinion makers”, journalists, artists, commentators, priests, ministers, academics and actors glad to be invited to stand up and be counted on the side of the Spanish republic.


WITH HINDSIGHT one can now see that the ease with which Alec Digges, an experienced and disciplined member of the Communist Party, was prepared in 1954 to discuss with us the possible creation of Amnesty International, meant either that the idea was very much his own, or that he was simply adding “prisoners of conscience” to Münzenberg’s pre-war repertoire of deserving causes. Did Alec and Willi ever meet? As far as it is known Münzenberg did not go to Spain during the civil war. I did not ask about this because I only learned about Münzenberg’s existence recently, twenty years after Alec’s death. It is not possible to rule out a meeting in 1938, when Alec travelled to Spain via the Brigade’s recruiting office in Paris, but it does seem unlikely that Münzenberg would have discussed such policy matters with the young volunteer.

Munzenberg was previously mentioned here back in February. Maybe I should make a label out of this, from that post: "The amount of 'conventional wisdom' that started out as enemy psyops is amazing." Venona, anyone?

More and more "Deniers"

Laurence Solomon's "Deniers" series at the National Post is up to 20 instalments. The latest:

They call this a consensus?

My series set out to profile the dissenters -- those who deny that the science is settled on climate change -- and to have their views heard. To demonstrate that dissent is credible, I chose high-ranking scientists at the world's premier scientific establishments. I considered stopping after writing six profiles, thinking I had made my point, but continued the series due to feedback from readers. I next planned to stop writing after 10 profiles, then 12, but the feedback increased. Now, after profiling more than 20 deniers, I do not know when I will stop -- the list of distinguished scientists who question the IPCC grows daily, as does the number of emails I receive, many from scientists who express gratitude for my series.

Somewhere along the way, I stopped believing that a scientific consensus exists on climate change. Certainly there is no consensus at the very top echelons of scientists -- the ranks from which I have been drawing my subjects -- and certainly there is no consensus among astrophysicists and other solar scientists, several of whom I have profiled. If anything, the majority view among these subsets of the scientific community may run in the opposite direction. Not only do most of my interviewees either discount or disparage the conventional wisdom as represented by the IPCC, many say their peers generally consider it to have little or no credibility. In one case, a top scientist told me that, to his knowledge, no respected scientist in his field accepts the IPCC position.

Much more at the link. About 20 articles, actually.

Another Gore campaign event

This one disguised as a book-signing, thoroughly described by Webutante at PJ Media. I don't know who's selling the T-shirts or I would link. [See below for update.] They are deep green. The high-contrast iconic art on solid color stylistically resembles that seen on the standard model Che T-shirt. There can be no significance to this. No crossover appeal type of thing. Nope.

Update: Ann Althouse links to a USA Today article that seems to be a description of the same event: Gore: I'm not good at modern politics. The Althouse post is hilarious in itself and has some funny stuff in comments as well.

There's a funny little reverse spin (joke if you read the Althouse link) to some of this. Since politics is the art of getting people to do what you want them to, if you're not good at being persuasive, maybe the next political step is to admit that you're not capable of that and persuade them to line up behind you anyway. Something of a false modesty shuck, like comedians who get a laugh out of the fact that their last joke wasn't funny. Johnny Carson was a master at that, but was also very funny most of the time. Letterman, who is very seldom funny, has made it an autonomic reflex, and made a career out of it. (The word "funny" is used far too many times in this post. I know. I'm sorry.)

Update: The T-shirts are by designer Marc Jacobs. Don't bother looking for them on marcjacobs.com; the site is so trendy, 100% Flash and javascript, that it's hard to navigate at all, but these shirts (and bags, and "trucker caps"!) were a limited edition, evidently no longer available. But when they were available, they came in three different flavors, the olive, illustrated above; the red,

and the white.
It's looking more like a revival meeting all the time! All day singing, and dinner on the ground. Watermelons for dessert. Toss in a little of that good old hellfire to keep the crowd warmed up. That "Give 'em Hell" could not possibly be a Truman reference (wink, wink, nudge nudge). None of Al's fans remembers Truman; it's difficult to think of anyone less similar to Truman than Gore.

Save us, Reverend Al! TruthDig cites The Nation by way of HuffPo; Melinda E thinks that nothing could be cooler. The limited edition issue of these serves to further point up the elitist nature of the modern Democratic party. Only those who happened to be shopping at Marc Jacobs stores at just the right time will be able to have one [Ebay! don't forget Ebay!], and only the wealthy elites shop at Marc Jacobs stores. Or else, Marc Jacobs just didn't want to make up a lot of them without testing the water first. I wonder if they will reappear?

Update to the update: I may have misunderestimated Marc Jacobs's sense of humor, on display in his Sept 10 New York show.

Don Surber boils it all down

Here it is, in bite-size chunks. Just the facts, ma'am.

Your car is not silver; it’s gray.

Your spouse’s car is not champagne; it’s beige.

Global warming isn’t science; it’s paganism.

Drug companies aren’t the enemy; bacteria are.

Food stamps are a subsidy, not a ration.

No one questions your patriotism; it’s your sanity we wonder about.

We can deport 12 million people; it’s the will that’s lacking.

Polar bears aren’t endangered; they’re thriving.

More at the link.

The terrible secret of wi-fi

is revealed! OMG! Andrea, thank you for alerting the world to this grave danger. I shall pass the message along by fwd-ing it to everyone in my address book.

No, I won't. But the other thing I saw in the email yesterday, about cell phones and ear cancer, or was it brain cancer, that's getting passed on, for sure!