Will anyone tell Santorum?

The right wing is finally beginning to realize that Stephen Colbert isn't one of them.

The comments in the original piece are amusing, in a mind-numbing sort of way:

The sad thing is I have several college educated liberal friends who think that the Daily Show is good for news. They think that it is REAL news with jokes. They dont realize that they make up most of this stuff out of whole cloth. This is what the left has to do, they have to make up news to keep their consitutents uninformed. The left fears the informed voter.

Yes, they make up the news. And doctor all the video clips they show along with it, I suppose.
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Define 'violence'

Former spy Alexander Litvinenko died recently of radiation poisoning from polonium 210. According to a friend, on his death-bed he accused Putin of involvement.

According to Yahoo! Alerts,

Russian President Vladimir Putin says the death of former Russian spy Alexander Litvinenko is a tragedy, but he sees no definitive proof it was a "violent death."

Um, no? He just stumbled across polonium-210 then, did he?:

One ton of uranium ore contains only about 100 micrograms (0.0001 grams) of polonium.

Due to its scarcity, polonium is usually produced by bombarding bismuth-209 with neutrons in a nuclear reactor. This forms bismuth-210, which has a half-life of 5 days. Bismuth-210 decays into polonium-210 through beta decay. Milligram amounts of polonium-210 have been produced by this method.

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Friday Dead Racist Blogging: Colored Edition

While I have been discussing coloreds all this time, in Friday Dead Racist Blogging thus far I have only discussed racism against blacks. I have in fact noticed a tendency to equate "racism" with "whites discriminating against blacks"; at least once I have read the phrase "the two races", as though no others existed. So today, I bring you Joseph Arthur Comte de Gobineau, a very influential dead racist, discussing the three—count them, three—races of the world:

I HAVE shown the unique place in the organic world occupied by the human species, the profound physical, as well as moral, differences separating it from all other kinds of living creatures. Considering it by itself, I have been able to distinguish, on physiological grounds alone, three great and clearly marked types, the black, the yellow, and the white. However uncertain the aims of physiology may be, however meagre its resources, however defective its methods, it can proceed thus far with absolute certainty.

The negroid variety is the lowest, and stands at the foot of the ladder. The animal character, that appears in the shape of the pelvis, is stamped on the negro from birth, and foreshadows his destiny. His intellect will always move within a very narrow circle. He is not however a mere brute, for behind his low receding brow, in the middle of his skull, we can see signs of a powerful energy, however crude its objects. If his mental faculties are dull or even non-existent, he often has an intensity of desire, and so of will, which may be called terrible. Many of his senses, especially taste and smell, are developed to an extent unknown to the other two senses.

The very strength of his sensations is the most striking proof of his inferiority. All food is good in his eyes, nothing disgusts or repels him. What he desires is to eat, to eat furiously, and to excess; no carrion is too revolting to be swallowed by him. It is the same with odours; his inordinate desires are satisfied with all, however coarse or even horrible. To these qualities may be added an instability and capriciousness of feeling, that cannot be tied down to any single object, and which, so far as he is concerned, do away with all distinctions of good and evil. We might even say that the violence with which he pursues the object that has aroused his senses and inflamed his desires is a guarantee of the desires being soon satisfied and the object forgotten. Finally, he is equally careless of his own life and that of others: he kills willingly, for the sake of killing; and this human machine, in whom it is so easy to arouse emotion, shows, in face of suffering, either a monstrous indifference or a cowardice that seeks a voluntary refuge in death.

The yellow race is the exact opposite of this type. The skull points forward, not backward. The forehead is wide and bony, often high and projecting. The shape of the face is triangular, the nose and chin showing none of the coarse protuberances that mark the negro. There is further a general proneness to obesity, which, though not confined to the yellow type, is found there more frequently than in the others. The yellow man has little physical energy, and is inclined to apathy; he commits none of the strange excesses so common among negroes. His desires are feeble, his will-power rather obstinate than violent; his longing for material pleasures, though constant, is kept within bounds. A rare glutton by nature, he shows far more discrimination in his choice of food. He tends to mediocrity in everything; he understands easily enough anything not too deep or sublime. He has a love of utility and a respect for order, and knows the value of a certain amount of freedom. He is practical, in the narrowest sense of the word. He does not dream or theorize; he invents little, but can appreciate and take over what is useful to him. His whole desire is to live in the easiest and most comfortable way possible. The yellow races are thus clearly superior to the black. Every founder of a civilization would wish the backbone of his society, his middle class, to consist of such men. But no civilized society could be created by them; they could not supply its nerve-force, or set in motion the springs of beauty and action.

We come now to the white peoples. These are gifted with reflective energy, or rather with an energetic intelligence. They have a feeling for utility, but in a sense far wider and higher, more courageous and ideal, than the yellow races; a perseverance that takes account of obstacles and ultimately finds a mean of overcoming them; a greater physical power, an extraordinary instinct for order, not merely as a guarantee of peace and tranquility, but as an indispensable means of self-preservation. At the same time, they have a remarkable, and even extreme, love of liberty, and are openly hostile to the formalism under which the Chinese are glad to vegetate, as well as to the strict despotism which is the only way of governing the negro.

The white races are, further, distinguished by an extraordinary attachment to life. They know better how to use it, and so, as it would seem, set a greater price on it; both in their own persons and those of others, they are more sparing of life. When they are cruel, they are very conscious of their cruelty; it is very doubtful whether such a consciousness exists in the negro. At the same time, they have discovered reasons why they should surrender this busy life of theirs, that is so precious to them. The principal motive is honour, which under various names has played an enormous part in the ideas of the race from the beginning. I need hardly add that the word honour, together with all the civilizing influences connoted by it, is unknown to both the yellow and the black man.

On the other hand, the immense superiority of the white peoples in the whole field of the intellect is balanced by an inferiority in the intensity of their sensations. In the world of the senses, the white man is far less gifted than the others, and so is less tempted and less absorbed by considerations of the body, although in physical structure he is far the most vigorous.

Such are the three constituent elements of the human race.

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"Damn you, harlot! Science and I know what we're doing!"

Morton thought he could discern "the osseous framework of the famous upswept buttocks of the "Hottentot Venus" and hoped he might have an opportunity "to examine this structure more carefully, and report the facts to the Society."

In other words, he was looking for a grant to go trollin' for booty.

Now that's science.
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Rotten pears

If you grew up around my step-father, you'll probably have heard that some study showed that people can affect the output of a pseudo-random number generator with their thoughts.

I recently learned about what I believe was the group he was talking about: PEAR, the Princeton Engineering Anomaly Research Center.

As might be expected, their work is a lot of hooey. They basically admit that all their data is statistically insignificant, then cull it to create specific subsets that show "interesting" results.
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Science shows the way!

What's more dangerous than Giant Killer Bees from Mars?

Robotic Killer Bees from Israel

Israel is using nanotechnology to try to create a robot no bigger than a hornet that would be able to chase, photograph and kill its targets, according to an Israeli newspaper.

The flying robot, nicknamed the "bionic hornet," would be able to navigate its way down narrow alleyways to target otherwise unreachable enemies such as rocket launchers, the daily Yedioth Ahronoth said on Friday.

I suppose if Uncle Frank's proposal ever got off the ground, we'd have Giant Robotic Killer Bees Sent to Mars by a Jew, which would clearly combine the most vicious talents of the other bees.
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Sexual hypocrisy isn't limited to closeted Republicans

In 1895, the constitutional convention of South Carolina included as a delegate Robert Smalls, a black man who had been a state Representative and Senator, as well as a federal Representative during Reconstruction. During the convention they considered a portion of law reading "The marriage of white persons with a Negro or a mulatto, or person who shall have one-eighth or more of Negro blood, shall be unlawful and void." Mr. Smalls proposed an amendment that would make illegal not only interracial marriages, but also interracial cohabitation, by appending to the above sentence the phrase "and any white person who lives and cohabits with a Negro, mulatto, or person who shall have one-eighth or more of Negro blood, shall be disqualified from holding any office of emolument or trust in this State, and the offspring of any such living or cohabiting shall bear the name of the father, and shall be entitled to inherit and acquire property the same as if they were legitimate."

He then gave a speech to the delegates, wherein he said:

If a Negro should improperly approach a white woman, his body would be hanging on the nearest tree filled with air holes before daylight the next morning--and perhaps properly so. If the same rule were applied on the other side, and white men who insulted or debauched Negro women were treated likewise, this Convention would have to be adjourned sine die for lack of a quorum.

Hee hee.
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"Do they contain real girl scouts?"

I'm not sure this article could be given a better title: Sausages affected by draconian trade laws

A SPICY sausage known as the Welsh Dragon will have to be renamed after trading standards’ officers warned the manufacturers that they could face prosecution because it does not contain dragon.

The sausages will now have to be labelled Welsh Dragon Pork Sausages to avoid any confusion among customers.

Now we know the real reason that Congress renamed their food to "Freedom Fries"--there weren't any real French in them.
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Someone needs a history lesson.

Via Atrios, I find this perfect example of zombie racism:

For years, it was an open secret at North Dallas' Preston Hollow Elementary School: Even though the school was overwhelmingly Hispanic and black, white parents could get their children into all-white classes. And once placed, the students would have little interaction with the rest of the students.

The result, a federal judge has ruled, was that principal Teresa Parker "was, in effect, operating, at taxpayer's expense, a private school for Anglo children within a public school that was predominantly minority."

...

The judge also had sharp words for the district's attorneys, who argued that segregation would cause no harm to the minority students because their teachers used the same curriculum as those teaching white students.

"The court is baffled that in this day and age, that [DISD relied] on what is, essentially, a 'separate but equal' argument," the judge wrote.

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*drools*

Well, now I'm even happier that I made that Google Books downloader.

[Edit] Hrm. Some of the scans of Google Books are fairly poor... but I've found a better source.

So now I have to modify my downloader to work with this other site, as well. Sigh.
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