Wednesday, March 30, 2005

The One Were We Try To Save Matt's Ass.

Matthew Yglesias admits he is a little nervous about participating in an upcoming National Press Club panel on blogging. We are here to tell young Matt that he should not be nervous. He should be afraid. Very, very afraid.

A lot of very respectable bloggers have already pointed out that the panel is not representative of real bloggers and that the bloggers in who have been invited to the panel have questionable credentials. Both points are valid, but miss the bigger picture.

We don't know any other way to say this Matt, but you are being set up.

Step one was to announce a panel on blogging with a list of guests sure to annoy the left side of the blogosphear. Step two was to sit back and wait for the outrage. They didn't have to wait long. Step three was to pick up the phone and call one of the bright, young, shining stars of blogtopia.
"We screwed up Matt! It would be a huge help if you could show up to balance our panel."
the voice on the phone probably said.

When Matt hemmed and hawed about the panel members and how the topic wasn't really his thing, I'm sure the voice on the phone said something like:
"Come on Matt, more media exposure is always a good thing. It might open some new doors for your career..."
It doesn't really matter what they said though, the point is Matt agreed to show up.

Please Matt, think it through. People have already pointed out that the other bloggers on the panel are only experts on one thing: anal sex. We would like to make the perfectly obvious point that you do not need two experts in anal sex and one naive young blogger (that's you Matt) to hold a panel on Blogging and Journalism. You only need two experts on anal sex and a naive young blogger if you are shooting movies Matt.

Movies with titles like :
The Revenge Of Jim/Jeff - Gannon Invades the Liberal Left

We are pretty sure you don't want that kind of media exposure Matt.

We all know Wonkette can be pretty funny Matt, but only when she's providing color commentary about how someone else's unsuspecting ass was subject to invasion by America's most famous blogging, gay, republican, man-whore's little soldier.

So before you take a drink from that special bottle of water they hand in the panel green room. Before you start to feel strangely woozy. Before your GHB addled brain is struggling to figure out why one of your fellow panel members is wearing nothing but combat boots and a jock strap, take a moment to think all this through.

And for god's sake, trust your instincts.

You can thank us later.

Monday, March 28, 2005

Florida soon to be Floriduuuu

No sooner do we call for nation wide testing of all state and local policy makers to make sure that they are truly stupid enough to really, really fuck up our future than we find out that Florida has already implemented just such a program for it's state legislators.

This brings us to our first ever Grinding Metal Labs contest:
Pick the state of Florida's new state motto!

Current entries are:
  1. Florida - It's the new stupid!

  2. Florida - We do our best to be petty, mean, and stupid but god still keeps smiting us with hurricanes every year.



If you are the lucky winner, Mad Science will preserve your living brain in liquid nitrogen until medical science reaches the point where your disembodied brain can be hooked to speakers and kept alive in a jar so that you can entertain future generations with your mirth.

Questioning Gravity

Via Chris Mooney I see that the people who miss the dark ages are at it again.
WICHITA – Propelled by a polished strategy crafted by activists on America's political right, a battle is intensifying across the nation over how students are taught about the origins of life. Policymakers in 19 states are weighing proposals that question the science of evolution.
The article goes on to say that :
Polls show that a large majority of Americans believe God alone created man or had a guiding hand. Advocates invoke the First Amendment and say the current campaigns are partly about respect for those beliefs.

"It's an academic freedom proposal. What we would like to foment is a civil discussion about science. That falls right down the middle of the fairway of American pluralism," said the Discovery Institute's Stephen C. Meyer, who believes evolution alone cannot explain life's unfurling. "We are interested in seeing that spread state by state across the country."

So basically policy makers in 19 states are working to undermine the teaching of the theory of evolution in high schools out of respect for academic freedom and the right to free speech.

It's about time.

Oddly enough, policy makers in exactly zero states are weighing proposals that question the science of gravity. It is this lack of resolve to question a theory like gravity that is really troubling to us here at Grinding Metal Labs. If we think back, what most of us remember about our high school physics class is a year spent trying to protect our delicate preconceived notions from a barrage of Newtonian madness. A year where our only hope of survival lie in the scribbling of bizarre alchemical formulas across every piece of paper put in front of as we repeatedly promised the hearts of your future offspring to the dark gods of "partial credit".

Yes it was that bad and it always started with gravity; intractable word problems about falling weights and cannonballs and other such crap. But is there a significant value-add to be found in the so called scientific theory of gravity? Do high school students really need to learn all that math and all the mumbo jumbo about gravitational constants and mass just to remember that things fall down? Do they find any of it compelling? Is there a simpler theory of gravity that can serve us as well? Maybe something like :
God put things where he wants them.

Lets take a look at a typical word problem found in a typical high school physics textbook and use it to compare these two competing theories of gravity:
John is sitting in a tree with a his bowling ball reading his bible. Frank is under the tree reading Darwin's "The Origin of Species". If John is 5 meters above Frank what is the velocity of John's bowling ball when it strikes Frank's head?
If you want to be all rational about it and use the scientific theory of gravity you would have to do a lot of math:
Lets see, we can get time from the distance formula which is : distance = .5gt^2
where : distance = 5m and g = 9.8m/s^2
so : t = sqrt(5m/(.5 * 9.8m/s^2))
Doing a little math you get : t = 1.01 s
But we need velocity and thats given by : v = tg
Where : T = 1.01s and g = 9.8m/s^2
So : v = 1.01s * 9.8m/s^2
We find that the bowling ball strikes the unfortunate Darwinist's head at around 9.90 m/s.
That's a lot more math than your average Darwin averse policymakers or high school physics victim is going to be comfortable with. It also gives the answer in meters per second instead of a more Jesus friendly measure of velocity like "cubits per angle breath".

Now let's use our simplified theory of gravity to solve the same problem. It's simple:
John's richeous bowling ball strike the filthy Darwinist's head with the speed of nonbeliever head smiteingness regardless of the hight from which the bowling ball was dropped.

Much simpler. But are the results accurate?
In a word "Yes". Both theories accurately describe outcome of our little experiment :
Frank's head is mulch
Therefor there is no reason not to choose the simpler of the two theories.
Now I am sure that there is some jerk out there who will want to counter with something along the lines of
This is preposterous! You couldn't put a man on the moon using a "God puts things where he wants them" in place of the theory of gravity!

But that my friends is what we in the blogging biz call a "straw man". Putting a man on the moon is "rocket science" and we are not talking about "rocket science" here. We are talking about high school physics and there are no rockets in high school physics; just ball bearings, ramps, pulleys, and the occasional mouse-trap strapped to a skateboard.

Policy makers is 19 states are in the process of taking a bold step. They are committed to moving us away from a cold, calculating culture of reality and towards a warm, happy, culture of ignorance. They should be applauded for this but, at the same time, they should be chastised. Ignorance is not something you do half assed. No one wants their children to be half ignorant but, that is exactly the path we are on! Eliminating the teaching of the theory of evolution while continuing to allow teaching of theories like gravity will leave our children in a dangerous state of partial ignorance, unable to compete in the emerging market of global stupidity!

That is why we at Grinding Metal Labs are demanding the establishment of a Federal Stupidity Test for all state and local policy makers. We go out of our way to elect the truly stupid to important positions on our school boards and in our state legislatures so that they can destroy our children's future but, even with the help of hardworking engines of ignorance like the Discovery Institute our public policy makers are moving too slow. This is because years of freely available public school education has produced a generation of relatively unignorant adults poorly suited to guide us back to the comfortable darkness of the middle ages. For the sake of our children we need a federally mandated program to identify the truly ignorant among us and put them in charge of all policy making.

Friday, March 25, 2005

We Join the Big Fake Debate over Mrs Schiavo's Poor Dead Brain

We here at Grinding Metal Labs tried really hard to stay the hell away from the whole Schiavo fake debate thing. But the right-to-a-brain-dead-life crowd has brought so many fake experts in to lie about the state of Mrs. Schiavo's brain that even folks who generally lie for a living are starting to complain.

Unfortunately the right-to-live-and-die-in-a-republic crowd continues to believe this is a real debate over a real issue and they keep sending real, serious judges and doctors and other qualified heath professionals to make their boring relevant points.

It's a travesty. Everyone know you can't have a real fake debate about a fake issue unless both sides are willing to provide fake experts on the fake subject.

Since the rest of the reality based community continues to treat this like a real debate where real facts matter , we here at Grinding Metal Labs are now forced to wade into the fray with our own fake medical expert held high; hoping against hope that we can restore some balance to the big fat fake debate about the state Terri Schiavo's poor dead brain.

So we present Grinding Metal Labs own fake medical expert: Dr. Leonard "Bones" McCoy of the Starship Enterprise *:

Kirk : Bones! What's ... wrong ... with her?
McCoy : She's brain dead Jim!
Kirk : Good god Bones you have to ... do ... something ... for her!
McCoy : Dammit Jim I'm a doctor not a miracle worker. Medical Science can't cure a dead brain.
Kirk : But ... Bones, what about ... Spock's Brain? You ... fixed ... that.
McCoy : That was different Jim. Spock's brain wasn't dead in that episode. All I had to do was put it back in his head.
Kirk : Wait! Bones ... what about ... Captain Pike? His brain was ... dead but ... we got him that ... cool chair and ... then the Talosians...
McCoy : God Dammit Jim! Pike's brain wasn't dead. His body was. That's point of the damned episode.
Kirk : I'm ... not ... following you ... Bones.
McCoy : (sigh) Spock took over the Enterprise and took Pike back to the Talosians because it was the only way to free Pike's brain from the cage that his body had become. Get it? Body? Cage? Just like the name of the fucking episode!
Kirk : But ... But Bones ... we're talking about ... a ... culture of ... life ... if we can't save ... Terri ... the what ... happens ...to the ... helpless ... victims of ... abortion?
McCoy : I have no idea what your talking about Jim. What the hell does a brain dead woman have to do with abortion?
Kirk : But Bones ... she's a woman and ... we're on a ... strange new world ... and ...
McCoy : Oh please god no! Jim please tell me that you did not have sex with this woman. She's in a persistent vegetative state for gods sakes!
Kirk : .... uhhhhhhh ...
McCoy : You are such a fucking moron Jim.
Kirk : No ... Bones, wait. What if ... she's not ... really ... brain dead? What if ... they just ... didn't ... use the right ... test? What if they ... didn't ... test her ... with this balloon?
McCoy : Jim, when I called you a fucking moron I had no idea how much I was insulting the actual fucking morons of the universe...
Kirk : Terri ... Look ... at ... the ... balloon ...
McCoy : ... because even a moron's has a measurable IQ ...
Kirk : Bones! Did ... you see ...it? She ... looked at ... the ... balloon! Goood Terri Goood.
McCoy : God Dammit Jim I've run every test know to medical science. Do you think I just wave the fucking triquarter around for fun? Look. Look right hear on the tiny little screen. What does it say?"
Kirk : B ... b ... b brain Dead ... But ... Bones ... The balloon ...
McCoy : That's it. I can't take this any more. I quit! Fuck the five year mission ... I'm going back to M-113! Being eaten by a salt monster is more dignified that this!

* Unfortunately Dr McCoy is contractually obliged to appear accompanied by Captain Kirk. We are sorry for any confusion that Kirk brings to the debate.

Tuesday, March 08, 2005

I would like to thank the acadamy and all the little people who I crushed to get here...

I did my first stint as a guest blogger over at Humid Cedar's today.

It was fun. Big thanks to Humid Cedar for letting me do it.

If you're all very, very lucky, I might start blogging each weeks Ultimate Fighter episode. If your lucky.

Freedom is on the ... Ohhh Cookies!

For weeks, freedom was on the march in Lebanon as 10s of thousands on people took to the streets to demonstrate against the Syrian backed government.

But then the Hezbollah held their yearly Support Your Local Terrorist bake sale and freedom had to stop marching on account of there suddenly being way more people looking to buy Hezbollah's famous "Terror Cookies" than there were people in line for the "Freedom Fries".

Hezbollah's leader, Sheik Hassan Nasrallah, attributed the bake sale's freedom crushing success to his mother's secret "Terror Cookie" recipe.

"It's no surprise at all. People love mom's Terror cookies. We can't bake enough
of them!" the sheik said proudly.

Friday, March 04, 2005

Raving Fuck-tard Awards : HumidCedar Zero - Tom Delay One Bazillion

Our good friend HumidCedar suggests in the comments that he is "the perfect candidate" for a prestigious Raving Fuck-tard award. We here at Grinding Metal Labs would happily present HumidCedar with a Raving Fuck-tard were it not for the many, many technical violations that stand in his was.

Of all the reasons why we can not, at this time, legitimately award a Raving Fuck-tard to HumidCedar, the most notable is that we have known HumidCedar since we were 10 and we can honestly say that he has never in his life been a "dishonest boil on the backside of the public debate".

Tom Delay (via The Poor Man), on the other hand, receives for one bazillion (that's a one followed by six more zeros than actually exist, for any math illiterates out there) for Raving Fuck-tardssaying this :
"I hope the Supreme Court will finally read the Constitution and see there's no such thing, or no mention, of separation of church and state in the Constitution,"
Please note that we are not giving Mr. Delay all these Raving Fuck-tards because he likes to insist in public that there is no such thing as the first amendment; that's just Tom being Tom after all.

We are giving Mr. Delay a bazillion Raving Fuck-tard awards because Tom Delay telling anyone that they need to educate themselves about the actual workings of our republic is like my dog telling me that I need to learn some more Perl. And that's just to much for anyone to take.

Nothing To See Here - Move Along

I have to apologies to all the poor saps out there diligently googling for information about crappy Lee Majors TV shows and non Butt-Monkey related info about Stephen J. Hadley only stumble onto my wonky analysis of our new National Security Advisor's past performance. Sometimes google just steers you horribly horribly wrong.

The One Where I Give Fox New Credit for Journalistic Restraint...

In the comments the Notorious MJT fills in all the missing detail about the whole Fox-New-statutory-rape-hot-blond-in-bikini-MadScience-falls-off-exercise-bike story.

While it could be said that Notorious MJT knows far to many details about hot female teachers who have been caught having sex with their male students, we here at Grinding Metal Labs are going to let it pass with just a simple
"Dude, you know way to much about hot female teachers who have been caught having sex with their male students!"
because this post isn't really about deciding weather my good friend Notorious MJT is a bit of a perv or not. It's about me sucking it up and giving credit where credit is due and today, sadly, the credit goes to Fox News.

As Notorious MJT explains in the comments :
Apparently, the picture of the hot blond on the motorcycle was a photo of one of the teachers they were discusssing. Pamela Rogers Turner, 27 years old, accused of having sex with 13 year old "star-athlete" student, back in her college days was named Miss Monday Nitro on a 1997 World Championship Wrestling television show. (This gets better all the time, doesn't it?)
To which I say :
Wow, A school district hired Miss Monday Night Nitro 1997. No offense to the fans of fake wrestling or anything, but that sounds a little trashy. Since the proxy here at work blocks my access to the NitroGirls home page I might even go so far as call it "slutty".
If I'm willing to call the pinup girls of fake wrestling "slutty" and say that maybe the school district should to hire a better class of bikini models to educate our children, then you know that Brit Hume was prepared to go on the air and say :
"Tonight on Fox News we take a fair and balance look as why democrats in the Department of Education are forcing school districts across the county to hire whores. More at 9:00."
But despite all Brit's begging and pleading, the producers at fox canned that story and settled for randomly displaying graphics of a bikini clad Miss Monday Nite Nitro 1997 each time the covered the Hot-Female-Teachers-Who-Have-Sex-With-Their-Male-Students story.

Given that it's Fox News we are talking about, I call that an extraordinary display of Journalistic restraint and I applaud them for it. All you people in hell
should now form one line to the left to pick up your ice cubes.

Surprisingly, I Remain the Only One on the Internet to Ever Call Stephen J Hadley a Butt-Monkey!

At least according to Google. I am so proud but, at the same time, disappointed.

I'm proud because a google ranking like this show that I am operating on the bleeding edge of our political discourse. Swept up in the dishonesty fueled madness of our widening gyre, circling with those lost falcons of the crumbling American dream and calling, calling out that I have seen the morning-star on the horizon and that by it's pale light a rough beast is slouching toward that Bethlehem where the last of our better angels huddle so unprepared...

It makes me feel like my hero, Hunter S. Thompson, only less stoned.

But I'm disappointed because I started this blog in the hope of playing the role of meme slayer. Yes I had hoped that I could harness the awesome power of the six people who read this blog and turn that power into a mighty engine of meme crushing destruction. But clearly I have failed here because I remain, after five months, the only person on the internet who has ever called Stephen J. Hadley a Butt-Monkey!

For this I have no one to blame but you, the reader. Would it have killed any of you to occasionally wander by the office water cooler and whisper into a few co-workers ears
"Dude, Stephen J. Hadley, butt-monkey. Think about it."?
Is a brief scholarly article ,published in a wonky influential political journal, explaining the colossal butt-monkeyness of our national security adviser to much too ask? Are a few letters to the editor out of the question here? Come on people.
Where is the love,
Where is the love,
Where is the love?

Tuesday, March 01, 2005

Screw The Koufaxes. We Give Our Own Awards.

As some of you may have heard, I nominated this blog for a prestigious Koufax award only to have my hopes and dreams cruelly crushed when I was informed that there was no Koufax for "Best New Blog With a Readership of Less Than 6".

So fuck'em. I'm starting my own awards. Today Grinding-Metal Labs is proud to present the first of the its prestigious Raving Fuck-tard awards.

I'm sure some of you out there are already saying to yourselves:
"Wow! A Raving Fuck-tard. That does sound prestigious. I wounder what I have to do to be considered for such an honor?
Well, it's not as easy as you might think.

First off you need to actually say something so stupid that it proves beyond a shadow of a doubt that you are a Raving Fuck-tard. Since there is no shortage of that going around, your outburst of fuck-tardedness also needs to make the judge want to hit you for being a poisonous and dishonest boil on the backside of the public debate.

Since that criteria alone would leave me far to busy handing out idiot awards, you also need to have made your outburst of stupidity in a major media outlet or in a forum that has been recognized by a major media outlet as something like ... say Blog of the Fucking Year.

Now some of you out there are probably already thinking :
"Cool! All I have to do is win Time's Blog of the year award and then call Jimmy Carter a traitor and I can win me a prestigious Raving Fuck-tard award.
But you would be wrong. If the staff here at Grinding-Metal Labs had to give an award to each and every one trick pony media player who makes a living calling everyone to the left of Mussolini a "traitorous bastards only slightly less deserving of mercy then the Nazis", then we would simply never have time to do anything else.

So to earn a prestigious Raving Fuck-tard award you must do more than just vilify librals; you must show a shameless willingness to front for the truly stupid. Needless to say that is just what our first Raving Fuck-tard award winner Hindrocket has done by posting this.

The post is about some talk radio show that ask people to comment on that Texas Tech biology prof who has a policy of only writing letters of recommendations for good students, who the prof knows, and who have not utterly and completely missed the fucking point of their biology education. To put put it as the well meaning prof does :
If you set up an appointment to discuss the writing of a letter of recommendation, I will ask you: "How do you account for the scientific origin of the human species?" If you will not give a scientific answer to this question, then you should not seek my recommendation.


One of the shows guests, Professor Volokh of the Volokh Conspiracy, weighed in with an analysis that was stupid, but not nearly stupid enough for Hindrocket. To quote Hindrocket:
Professor Volokh seemed to assume that someone who doesn't believe in evolution is a harmless crank, who should not on that account be barred from pursuing a career in, say, medicine.
Let me start off by saying that no one believes in a scientific theory and no one disbelieves a scientific theory. You argree or you disagree with theories. You believe at a more basic level. You believe that there is an undetectable, all seeing all, knowing god or you don't. You believe that the world around you can be understood through the rigorous application of the scientific method or you don't. You believe in what there is no ability to test. Where observation is impossible you rely on faith. We can not test the existance of a god any more than we can test that the world we experience is the world that actualy exists. Most of us take it on faith that there is a god and that what we experience is an acurate representation of our enviroment. And that's just fine. What's not fine is acting like you can believe or not believe in a particular scientific theory. That's just crap. Theories, even historic ones like Darwinisum, are constructed based on rigourus observation and test. They have shown a predictive value and have withstood the test of time and may, may minds. You are, of course, free to disagree with any scientific theory you like so long as you have a scientific reason for your disagreement. If, on the other hand, if you have a non-rational reason for disagreeing with a scientific theory, like "the bible says god created the world in six days" then you need to accept the fact that you are not participating in a scientific debate on this subject. Your free to crib from Corenthians and lob the standard "we see through a glass darkly" grenades but, if your going to be honest, that applies to your ideas as much as it does to the ideas you are trying to argue against and you should really just shut the fuck up because everyone who does real science already understands that we all look through tinted lenses.

So Hindrocket is an ass for propagating the "poor poor shat upon people who don't belive in evolution" meme as if such people deserve some sort of rationality hall pass so they can practice in the field of medicine and still expouse an non-rational disagreement with an important theory that impacts their field. Fucker.

Anyhoo, Hindrocket seems to be trying to say that Professor Volokh does not think that people who want to practice medicine (a science) should be penalized for being unable to answer a pretty simple scientific question (the origin of the human species). Had Hindrocket's post stopped right here, I would have considered this stupidity enough to jointly award Hindrocket and Prof Volokh the first ever Raving Fuck-tard award.

Yes, Prof Volokh could have had a Raving Fuck-tard award of his very own, but Hindrocket went on and really uped the ante:
My own view is different. I think that Darwin's theory of macroevolution is plainly wrong, on strictly scientific grounds. So to bar a student from progressing in his career because he refuses to sign on to what is, in my view, a rather obvious fraud, which cannot withstand the mildest scrutiny, is really an outrage. It is no different from the practice in Soviet Russia of promoting only biologists who believed (or pretended to believe) in the theories of Lamarck, who argued that acquired traits could be inherited. But Darwinism is the official religion of the biological (and more generally, the scientific) establishment, and as such is rigorously enforced.
Please note that Hindrocket gives absolutly no evidence to support his "Darwin's theory of macroevolution is plainly wrong, on strictly scientific grounds" statement. He just says that's what he thinks. If I were being a stickler for details I would say that in real science, people who show up without thier bibliography and a compelling data set are generaly eaten alive. But according to Hindrocket, theres no such thing as real science any more since the scientist are busy promoting the new religion of Darwinisum. With all the scientist busy lighting candles and trying on their new robes, wing-nut bloggers with no scientific credentials have had to step in and start handling the science. If I'm reading Hindrocket correctly, the new wing-nut science has streamed-line the scientific method down to "I said it on my blog so its true!" which should make all the people over at the Discovery Institute happy.

Let me just stop here for a minuet and say "I am so fucking annoyed." But this isn't about me, it's about recognising Hindrocket as the raving fuck-tard he is, so back to the show...

So the next logical question for Hindrocket is :
"why are all these scientist and other commie types promoting the new religion of Darwinism? What do they hope to gain?"
Hindrocket is happy to tell us that :
...discrimination against Christians, observant Jews and conservatives is much more prevalent in our society than race or sex discrimination...
Yes folks that's right, the scientist are all busy being The Man. And what does The Man do? The Man keeps the brothers down! By "brothers" Hindrocket mean Christians, observant Jews, and wing-nuts with law degrees. Apparently you can't sing the blues until you're a been a wing-nut lawyer with a lilly white ass who's written for the The National Review like Hindrocket has.

So what's a brother like Hindrocket got to do when he can't take The Man keeping him down anymore? We all know there's only one thing a brother can do in that situation : rise up and smash the machine!

But how do you smash a Juggernaut like Darwinism? By quoting Popper of course :
Karl Popper argued long ago that Darwin's theory of evolution was never a matter of science; it was always about faith.
Oh. Wait, that's not actually a quote. Is it? Well I'm sure Hindrocket would have quoted Popper if Popper had actually said anything like that but since Popper was such a a-hole, Hindrocket had to go and make something up that sounded good. But that's ok because it's the new wing-nut science and Hindrocket wrote it in the "Blog of the Fucking Year".

So, for misrepresenting science, misrepresenting the hard working men and women who practice science on a daily basis, misrepresenting the scientific communities consensus on Darwinism without any data to back his ass up, lying, playing the victim, blaming liberals, and just being an idiot we proudly present Hindrocket of Power Line with the first ever Raving Fuck-tard award.