I did an interview for the Prince fan site Housequake.com. It was pretty fun and I’d like to thank Jose for setting it up.
I mention in it that I have a great groove that is perfect for Prince. I just need him to write a hit on top of it. Prince, if you are reading this, email me. 😉
So DarkSyde interviewed Brent Rasmussen and it contains the following:
DS: Then you must be a card carrying member of the so-called Godless liberal left, yes?
Brent: Hardly. I’m pretty conservative. I was a conservative, registered Republican for the largest part of my voting life. I recently changed to “independent”. I consider myself a “little “l” libertarian.
Brent, I am calling you out. You are not a conservative. I’ve read your blog for a year or so and I’ve nary seen you post anything I would consider remotely conservative.
Now I’m going to anticipate your responses, ’cause you’ll probably never respond anyway.
1. You are a fiscal conservative. Yeah, me to. But I’m a raging liberal. Yes, although the phrase does include the word “conservative”, I think that is a misnomer. I’ve written on this extensively elsewhere but suffice to say, being wise and prudent fiscally is not a trait unique to either the Right or the Left.
2. You prefer less government intervention and regulation. Yeah, me to, and I’m a raging liberal. We absolutely do need some government intervention and regulation. If you are a law and order sort, or believe that food at restaurants should be safe and insider trading monitored, then the whole notion of government intervention and regulation is a debate of degree. Liberals do not prefer more and in many cases prefer less government interference than conservatives.
3. I know you are cool with same-sex couples and such. I suspect you are pro-choice. You probably think that the government should uphold international law and be concerned about the human rights complications of globalization. I know you are a champion of the separation of church and state and you probably think it is a protected free-speech act to burn a flag. I suspect you do not approve of blind ignorance to the mounting evidence for global warming.
I’m sorry to blow your cover, bud, but you are a liberal. That is not a dirty word.
I despise negativity. I like to be realistic and pragmatic and all that stuff, but having a positive attitude is something that is absolutely required, IMHO.
You guys get me when I am pissed off, a lot of the times. That tends to get me inspired to write. I am really not a pissy person at all. Although who among us is not grumpy sometimes?
When it comes to work and family and friendship and all of that, positivity is the only way to go.
It seems in the blogsphere that people tend to be extremely hard on each other (me included, of course). It can be emotionally taxing when people beat on you and the overall harshness of the debate can be a bit much at times. Lord knows I can dish it out and, for the most part, I think, take it. Text, even with liberally sprinkled smilies, just can’t communicate good natured ribbing very well. Attempts to be polite (as I learned) can be taken as condescension. All in all it seems sometimes that all of our guns have hair triggers, ready to rip new assholes.
No real point here. I do try to be positive and conciliatory on my blog at times, but mostly I write when I get annoyed. So that is a selection effect.
<blockquote…the creationist camp thinks the rhetoric of loud poseurs ignorant of biology, like Ann Coulter, constitute “facts,” while the serious research of thousands of biologists, of which they have no knowledge, is not only a matter of mere opinion, but is false. It’s not just backwards, it’s insanely backwards.
Yes. Insane is the term you are looking for. I beat and beat and beat this dead horse, as does PZ and the whole free-thinking gang and it just seems to make the creationists close their eyes and ears even more.
THIS IS SCIENCE. ANY ARGUMENT MADE AGAINST EVOLUTION NEEDS TO BE WELL-RESEARCHED, PEER-REVIEWED AND PUBLISHED! Op-ed pieces or bullshit like Coulter’s book do not qualify. Do the science or shut the fuck up.
These idiots SO want to believe that God waved a magic wand that they will reject the hundreds of thousands of papers written by PhD’s over the last century that clearly and thoroughly support evolution.
Disclaimer: I am not calling religious people idiots. I am calling creationists idiots and I’m calling people colossal idiots that think that a century of good science is a war against God by a bunch of godless liberals. This debate has nothing to do with God. It’s a debate about science. If you have an alternative scientific theory, publish it. These weak, redundant and unsupported jabs at evolution are desperately lame.
Rocketboom loses its famous face
I find this amusing. Rocketboom is big. They are on the cusp. They are like a band that just got a huge record deal and then breaks up before they make the record. It is dumb and dumber in vlogdom.
This relates to the overall odd thing about the blogsphere: most people do not have a business attitude when they start these endeavors. They just sort of fall into it. Being a partner in a business is hard. It takes more loyalty than a marriage. It takes a stubborn commitment to each other. It takes a lot of trust, too. It also takes money and a realistic view of how to sustain and grow the business.
I’m sure Amanda and Andrew will do fine. But it just illustrates the dangers of starting a business without thinking about it as a business. As the stakes go up, the cracks begin to show.
Am I the only one that noticed that Apple’s Spotlight desktop search is a complete piece of shit? Here are my complaints:
1. It starts searching as you type. Sounds like a feature, right? No…just type ‘a’ and before you can type the second letter it is strenously searching for every goddamn file that has an ‘a’ in it. This wouldn’t be so bad except…
2. It is a major fucking resource hog. Once I typed ‘a’ as described above I get the spinning rainbox cursor of death as it maxes out CPU, disk and memory searching for every goddamn file that has an ‘a’ in it. Please, oh please, let me finish typing what I want you to search for before you start searching for it.
3. It is a major fucking resource hog. Thought I said that already? Well this time I’m talking about the major CPU load it creates as it indexes hard drives. For example, plug in a 10000 gigabyte hard drive and Spotlight will start to index it for you, eating every possible shred of resource it can get its hands on. Have you dolts at Apple ever heard of `nice`? You should fucking nice those sorts of commands to zero priority. It is completely wrong to make me sit and wait for an hour while you index every fucking disk you can get your hands on. nice the shit, bitches! Not that hard.
4. This is a fun one: if you search by Kind->Others it builds a list of every possible kind of application for you. The problem is, it takes 5 minutes for it to do this. Even if your choice is in the list, it is impossible to choose because it keeps redrawing the dropdown menu, resetting it back at the top. So you scroll down, it scolls back up for you every 1 second or so. Did anyone at Apple ever try to use this feature before they released it?
As my friends and co-workers know, I am a huge fan of Apple. You would see about 10000 times more of these bitches if I was using Windows often. (Windows is beyond lame in almost every imaginable way. I know because I have two Windows boxes, too, that I use for astronomy.) Apple does drop balls, too, though, and Spotlight is a miserable failure.
Dear Steve Jobs, please fire every dolt on the Spotlight team and put someone with half a brain on that project. Desktop search IS very important, way too important to fuck up as bad as you guys have fucked it up.
This article, Astrology – The Left’s Creationism?, has a title that says it all. Utter inane nonsense.
First of all, while the Left certainly has people who believe in astrology and creationism, they don’t want it taught in school. They have minds capable of separating civic matters from spiritual ones. I treat Christians, Jews, Muslims and astrologers in the exact same way: I tolerate them and ask that they tolerate me. I think their beliefs are ridiculous and they probably think the same of mine.
Second, those that DO defend science, such as myself and others he mentions, all completely and entirely, across the board, denounce astrology as non-scientific nonsense. No one on the side of sciences takes it easy on astrology. No one. None, zero, zip, nada, nil. Very idiotic to suggest otherwise.
Finally, I would not consider someone who believed in astrology to be any less qualified for a job than someone who believed in God. I don’t agree with either of them but I respect their personal beliefs.
Nice try. Or not.
That insane liberal, Byron Dorgan of North Dakota, introduced a bill intended to prevent waste and fraud by contractors to the US Military. Said Dorgan:
“I think when you are at war, when a massive quantity of money is being pushed out the door, that we ought to decide to get tough on those who would be engaged in war profiteering,” said Dorgan in fighting for his amendment last week. “I dare say that never in the history of this country has so much money been wasted so quickly. And, yes, there is fraud involved, there is abuse involved, and it is the case that there is a dramatic amount of taxpayers’ money that is now being wasted.”
Now I know how Republicans like to pretend they are fiscally conservative (which is a complete fucking lie). If we temporarily give them the benefit of the doubt, wouldn’t you think that they would support a bill intended to save taxpayers money?
How silly of you to think these fuckwits would be rational. No, they tabled the bill, “effectively rejecting the amendment. Every single Senate Republican voted against the measure to make the contracting process honest and impose penalties on those who break the law.”
They voted against a bill to make sure that contractors are honest and don’t break the law!
Even if you are uncomfortable with the Democrats, they are fucking geniuses compared to the completely asinine, fucked up and retarded GOP.
We all pretty much know that if you ride a bike without a helmet and get in an accident, you are pretty much going to die. Here is a statistic that backs that up quite convincingly.
I don’t really care if you die because of choices you make but the public safety interest here is pretty obvious: you brain-dead, quadriplegic and dead motorcyclists cost the system a lot of money.
The quote at the end of this article, though, is amazing in its stupidity:
But Merritt Island motorcyclist and helmet law opponent Dave Carroll said the helmet law debate is misguided.
“What causes most of the crashes is cars,” he said. “Usually, it’s the car driver turning left at an intersection and causing an accident because they didn’t see us coming.”
OK, Dave, if what you say is true then it is even more important that you guys where helmets. Saying the above in an argument against helmet laws is idiotic. I think we should work to prevent cars from causing these accidents, no question about it, but they will continue to happen and you guys are going to continue to hit your head so hard you die. Wise up, dudes. Yes, helmets suck, but so does being dead.
PZ Myers at Pharyngula has issued a challenge. I’d like to try to extend it as far and wide as possible. The challenge is simple: find ONE FUCKING PARAGRAPH in Ann “Controversy Whore” Coulter’s Godless book, in chapters 8 through 11, which is accurate. ONE ACCURATE PARAGRAPH in any of those 4 chapters of Ann Coulter’s ridiculous drivel. If you find one, send it to PZ.
I dissected Coulter in my very first podcast. What is clear is that she is a moron, a self-serving controversy whore, a traitor, a theocrat and an incredibly tacky and unlikable person. Thus, a very appropriate spokesperson for the Right Wing.
lolife 
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