Is there some kind of intelligence test you have to fail to be on FOX?

Shorter Bill O'Reilly:
"Fucking magnets - how do they work?" (for the meme-challenged, go read this)

One of my father's favorite jokes goes something like this:

"The Thermos is one of the greatest inventions of modern man and also one of the world's great mysteries. It keeps hot things hot and cold things cold, but how does it know?"

To you and me and my dad - and anyone else who managed to pass science class in elementary school - this is a funny joke. I suspect it might be the kind of conundrum that would keep Bill O'Reilly up all night.

I know, I know - someone on FOX News saying something stupid is so rare it only happens on days that end in a 'Y' - but big bad Bill outdid himself this week, further proving that the Enlightenment of the 17th century hasn't quite caught on in some segments of North America.



Leaving aside O'Reilly's usual abrasiveness and tendency to ask a question and then refuse to allow the guest to answer it, and his boneheaded, reducto ad absurdum insistence on blaming the victims of every con artist in history, and his eagerness to take offense at a campaign by a group of atheists that is obviously intended to provoke controversy and encourage people to admit the emperor is stark naked, let's look at his oh-so-clever dismissal of atheism.

Quoth the Billo:

"I'll tell you why [religion is] not a scam. In my opinion -- alright? Tide goes in, tide goes out. Never a miscommunication. You can't explain that. You can't explain why the tide goes in."

 To quote a prominent political figure "Yes, we can" - I guess Bill's unfamiliar with the old adage that it is better to remain silent and be thought a fool, than to open your mouth and remove all doubt. This is shooting fish in a barrel with a grenade launcher. I can't believe I have to point this out, but we've known how and why tides work since Newton laid it all out in 1682. Maybe this a result of Bill's antipathy toward Islam - he just doesn't trust math because it is all done with arabic numerals - or maybe he thinks gravity, like evolution is just a theory. And yet, Billo makes an obscene amount of money talking on the TV and is considered by millions to be a smarter than those pinhead liberal eggheads.

Hat tip to the Booman Tribune . 


Tweet

And So It Begins . . . .

The organized lynching of truth-telling by way of FoxNoise, of course.

From The Guardian this morning:

A Fox News contributor and former state department adviser has accused WikiLeaks of conducting "political warfare against the US" and called for those behind the whistleblowing website to be declared "enemy combatants" so they can be subjected to "non-judicial actions".
_______________

Whiton ends with the following plea: "How much will our information-collection capabilities have to be diminished, and how many of our friends and collaborators around the world must die, (Ed: Never mind that there has been no evidence of that.) before President Obama and his friends on Capitol Hill start caring more about national security?"

Oh sure, call Julian Assange and his tribe of transparency troops "enemy combatants" so they can get the same kind of "deal" Omar Khadr got.

Compare the FoxNoise response with that of Britain's deputy prime minister, Nick Clegg, who backs an investigation into the torture allegations.

An ocean away and worlds apart . . . .

And speaking of FOX News...

As a little relief from the doom and gloom and hurricane news, A Bit of Fry & Laurie on how the world could be a better place....

Plus ca change, plus ca meme freakin' chose

Frank Capra was neither subtle nor wrong. The opening with the words being jackhammered off the cornerstone of the newspaper building tells you all you need to know. This movie was released in 1941 and aside from the old fashioned-telephones, men all wearing hats and the homeless not being as universally shunned as they are today, it could have come out last week.



Of course, if you replace the John Doe Clubs with the teabaggers and Gary Cooper with Glenn Beck you get the Bizarro World version in which a mean spirited demagogue encourages people to hate their neighbors and be just a little bit nastier to each other.

Need a Job? Here 'Ya Go . . . .

Times are tough all over, and folks are in need of gainful employment.

How 'bout a job with lots of pluses?:

Travel opportunities;

Paid benefits;

Stress reduction techniques;

Multiple skill categories.

What more could you ask for?





Well, maybe not having to support the military-industrial-congressional complex for one thing . . . .

(Cross-posted from Moved to Vancouver)