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June 23, 2011 by Kevin T. Keith

OK, not that I really care, but, honestly, I just don’t get any of this.

As you may recall, the vaunted fashion weirdo John Galliano was video-cammed in a French restaurant a few months ago, drunk off his ass, starting a nasty anti-Semitic argument with some other patrons, declaring “I love Hitler” and using a variety of slurs against their heritage, shoes, and eyebrows. (I am not making this up.) He was immediately canned by the clothing company that employed him, and of course issued the usual non-apology apologies.

However, this kind of thing is not just scandalous but illegal in France, which has kind of a touchy relationship with the issue of anti-Semitism and a lot of history to make up for. As in some other formerly Nazi-occupied countries, there are now laws prohibiting anti-Semitism or defamation of religious or ethnic heritage. So Galliano, already in disgrace, is now facing charges. He appeared in court the other day, apparently pretty shaken up, claiming he can’t remember anything about the incident because he was such a massive druggie at the time. But Galliano’s personal troubles are not what concerns me.

There are real free-speech issues involved in these anti-anti-Semitism laws (right-wing Dutch asshole Geert Wilders was acquited just yesterday on similar charges in that country, regarding his openly racist attacks on Muslims, and now all the wrong people are cheering his right to be a creep), but you can understand where they come from, and that’s also not the issue I wanted to raise.

My issue is this:

John Galliano, after dressing himself.

This guy is a fashion designer. Somebody who spent his entire working life in close contact with the entire elite fashion industry and presumably can wear pretty much anything that exists, got up that morning facing a court appearance on charges of being an entitled, anti-social deranged whackjob, and decided that the impression he wanted to make was by wearing shiny blue suit pants mis-matched to a black jacket with no shirt, a greasy-looking polka-dot cravat stretched down to his navel over his pasty thin bare chest, stringy middle-aged-pirate hair styled by Riff Raff, and three dead caterpillars glued to his lips. (The NY Times‘s Paris reporter described this, seriously, as “subdued”.) This guy gets to make decisions about what everyone else has to wear.

And this is the guy who was seen publicly abusing normal people for their choices in footwear. A guy whose facial hair makes it look like he was eating something sticky from a vacuum cleaner bag criticized someone else’s eyebrows. And was arrested only for using the word “Jew”.

I wish it to be known that I object to this. I object to the fact that the fashion industry contains people who look like this. It strikes me as dangerous. I object to the fact that an adult – however artistic and drug-addled – is allowed to dress this way. It sets a bad precedent for people who are equally feeble-minded but not rich. I object to the fact that, when he was charged with anti-Semitism while looking like this, he was not also charged with looking like this. Priorities, yes, but a crime is a crime. And I object to the fact that he is taken seriously as a person worth noticing, let alone taking advice on personal deportment from.

Posted in Culture, General, Humor, I do too have a life | 2 Comments »

The Stadium Collection

June 20, 2011 by tgirsch

UPDATED 6 July 2011: Corrected score for 1996 Packers-Eagles game, thanks to commenter W. Block, and added link to box score.

I’m a sports fan, and I “collect” stadiums (stadia?). Especially major league baseball, NFL football, and NHL hockey. My goal, before I die, is to see a baseball game in the home stadium of every MLB team. It would be an added bonus if I could do the NHL and NFL venues, but right now, I’m focusing primarily on baseball.

Problem is, I keep forgetting where I’ve been, and losing count. Therefore, mostly for my own reference (and because I expect few others to be interested), I’m posting a list of venues attended below the fold. I’ve ordered them in roughly the order in which I first visited them, to the best of my ability to recall.

However, if you have comments concerning favorite (or least favorite) venues, feel free to leave them.

Continue Reading »

Posted in I do too have a life, MLB/MiLB, NFL, NHL, Sports | 24 Comments »

Scientifically Documented! KTK is More Right Than Almost Everyone!

June 8, 2011 by Kevin T. Keith

So my test results came back.

This is from a pseudo-scientific survey attached to a site promoting the new book Annoying: The Science of What Bugs Us, by Palca & Lichtman. The test tells you how annoying you are. Which of course just means how much other people wish they could be like you.

Your Annoying Inventory Results

Picky: 99th %ile

Arrogant: 65th %ile

Irritating: 98th %ile

Overall score: 99th %ile

Norm estimate based on 2200 responses to a prior version of the Annoying Inventory.

I don’t know what happened with the “Arrogant” part; I may have to take it again.

Posted in Flame Bait, General, Humor, I do too have a life | 4 Comments »

The Media We Deserve

June 8, 2011 by Kevin T. Keith

The Raw Story posted the following headline, lede, and second graf today:

Texas police find children’s dismembered bodies in mass grave

HOUSTON, Texas — Texas police, acting on a tip-off, Tuesday found a mass grave containing “a lot of bodies,” including the corpses of children, US media reported.

UPDATE: Texas officials say no bodies found at home of alleged ‘mass grave’

Yeah, that’s some ace reportin’, alright.

It gets better: the entire incident, including a stakeout, search warrant, and physical entry of the property by masses of Texas police backed by state troopers, was prompted by phone calls from a “psychic”.

The thing is, we can’t just blame this on Texas anymore. Used to was, Texas crazy conveniently excused all the stupidity in America – in a country this size, there have to be a fair number of people at the bottom of the barrel, and Texas was a good place to put them. (The same day the state police were kicking in somebody’s door because Madame LaLoony told them to, the governor of Texas was proclaiming an official directive for everybody in the state to pretend to talk to an invisible magician in the sky. Progress in Texas: the psychic wasn’t tried for being a witch.) But today, everybody is this stupid. The entire Republican party leadership officially endorses (in various combinations) theocracy, creationism, personhood for zygotes/embryos/fetuses/corporations, mandatory Christianity, prohibition of non-Christianity, delusional medicine, delusional economics, prayer therapy, and pretty much any backward irrationality you can think of that’s compatible with their religion. And the general public buys this: half of them vote Republican, and the rest think this is normal.

Notice to all: God told my psychic to tell me to tell you that you’re all fuckin’ morons.

Posted in Church & State, Conservative Bullshit Debunked, Culture, General, Media, News & Current Events, Politics, Religion, Science, Things That Suck | 2 Comments »

LarryE Speak!

June 3, 2011 by tgirsch

You listen!

Posted in Bloggin, Media | 2 Comments »

Who’s Crazy Now?

May 21, 2011 by Kevin T. Keith

So God failed to Rapture anybody today … again. But you’ll be glad to know that groups of believers in different end-times-judgment prophecies are rushing to comfort the believers in this weekend’s end-times-judgment prophecy that all will be well if they simply adopt that other prophecy now that their own has failed. That’s progress, Christian-style.

[L]ocal churchgoers say they will set up encampments outside the headquarters of Mr. Camping, the self-proclaimed biblical soothsayer who has prophesied the end of the world on Saturday, with an eye toward consoling the disappointed.

In a state where fringe leaders like the Rev. Jim Jones and fringe groups the Heaven’s Gate cult have often found followers, and whose beliefs ended in mass suicide, not everyone is laughing about the prediction.

“They are going to be reeling,” said Pastor Jacob Denys of Calvary Bible Church in nearby Milpitas, so he and about 20 volunteers planned to spend Saturday outside Mr. Camping’s compound to let “them to know that God still loves them.”

I suspect these Rapture morons are going to be “reeling”. Not only is their God a washout and their prophet an idiot, but the entire world is laughing at them. But here’s the thing about that: in order to be “reeling” at what has happened to them, they have to have some sense of what it is that has happened. And yes, it’s kind of hard to miss this message: they said the world was going to end and it didn’t. Not much subtlety there. So presumably they now know that their beliefs were false. Some of them are going to have a hard time dealing with that, but however they do, they will not be able to avoid the necessity of coming to terms with it.

In other words, it’s virtually certain that their beliefs have changed. They’ve learned something from this. This puts them in stark contrast with all the mainstream Christians who are rushing to assure them that nothing has changed. Because those Christians didn’t put their beliefs to an empirical test, and don’t seem to care about the literally scores of times before today that other Christians have done so and were wrong, they have learned nothing. This event has made no impression on them other than to confirm them in their conviction of their own superior untested knowledge, as compared to the virtually identical knowledge of their co-religionists which fails when it is tested. As usual, then, the more impervious to rational analysis that Christian beliefs are, the more strongly Christians believe them. The ones who put their beliefs to the test and were wrong have changed their minds; the ones who hold exactly the same beliefs but won’t state them precisely are convinced that they have a right to propound those beliefs to others. And the reaction of the Christians who flee from the test of factuality, to those who tried and failed it, is to encourage them to simply retain their old beliefs but recast them in terms that can’t be subjected to rational test.

As I noted in my previous post, these apocalyptic whackos are clearly nuts, but at least they stood by what they believed and are now (as it appears) dealing with the consequences – precisely what mainstream Christians refuse to do. Mainstream Christianity is – by deliberate design – less rational than the craziest religious extremism currently in the news.

Posted in Conservative Bullshit Debunked, Culture, General, News & Current Events, Religion | Comments Off

Degrees of Crazy (Small σ)

May 20, 2011 by Kevin T. Keith

Just an observation:

Obviously the end-times whackos proclaiming that God is going to destroy the earth this weekend because of some crazed interpretation of an equally-crazed prophecy from their Bible are ludicrous. They deserve all the ridicule they are reaping, and all that is to come when their prophecy fails. But their beliefs are almost exactly identical to the beliefs of millions of “ordinary” fundamentalists who also expect the “Rapture” to suck them up to heaven because they’re so special, while God smites the rest of us because we’re not; the only difference being that they named a particular date for it to occur. And further, while (as many people don’t realize) the “Rapture” is actually a minority belief among mainstream Christians*, it too is merely an overly-literal version of the general expectation of pie in the sky by and by for “the elect”, and pitchforks and sulfur for everyone not like them, that defines the religion.

In other words, the only difference between the nuts preparing for the end this weekend and the nuts preparing for the end at an unspecified date is that this week’s nuts were prepared to put their beliefs in empirically testable form. And they’ll be wrong, of course, but so will the others. The mainstreamers, however, will be able to retain their smug certainty in exactly the same crazy beliefs simply because they refuse to state test conditions under which those beliefs could be seen to be right or wrong. Or, to put that another way: mainstream Christians are less rational than the craziest people in the country right now.

* There are also bizarrely complicated in-fights over whether Jesus is going to save all the fundies and smite all the rest, or smite all the rest and then save all the fundies, as well as over exactly how long the smiting will go on, so not all Rapturizers have identical beliefs, but they’re equally crazy.

Posted in Conservative Bullshit Debunked, Culture, General, Media, News & Current Events, Read Your Bible, Religion, Science | 2 Comments »

Newt: Heaving Bosom Edition

May 18, 2011 by Kevin T. Keith

Jesus Christ . . . The Huffington Post asked Newt Gingrich’s press flack Rick Tyler for a quote about Newt’s campaign meltdown. This is what they got back:

The literati sent out their minions to do their bidding. Washington cannot tolerate threats from outsiders who might disrupt their comfortable world.

The firefight started when the cowardly sensed weakness. They fired timidly at first, then the sheep not wanting to be dropped from the establishment’s cocktail party invite list unloaded their entire clip, firing without taking aim their distortions and falsehoods. Now they are left exposed by their bylines and handles.

But surely they had killed him off. This is the way it always worked. A lesser person could not have survived the first few minutes of the onslaught. But out of the billowing smoke and dust of tweets and trivia emerged Gingrich, once again ready to lead those who won’t be intimated by the political elite and are ready to take on the challenges America faces.

Do these people listen to themselves?

Leaving entirely aside the notion of Newt Gingrich – as clubbed-up a Republican as you can find anywhere in the land and, oh, by the way, the former Speaker of the House – taking his stance as a “Washington outsider” against “the establishment” and “the political elite” . . . leaving entirely aside the notion of a desperately insecure but nonetheless PhDed former professor and published (lousy) author railing against “the literati” . . . WTF is “the billowing smoke and dust of tweets”? Getting criticized on Twitter is like storming the beach on D-Day, is it, wanker? (Compare this to Ben Stein’s analogy of the arrest of Dominique Strauss-Kahn to the guillotining of the nobility during the French Revolution. You really can’t embarrass these people, can you?)

More than that, though, is the weirdly dirty-feeling bromance-novel quality of the text. I can’t help feeling that if he had gone on for just one more paragraph, it would have included the phrase “sinewy thighs”.

Posted in Conservative Bullshit Debunked, Culture, Gender Issues, General, Media, News & Current Events, Politics | 1 Comment »

Ben Stein: Former Hack, now Class-War Misogynist Hack

May 17, 2011 by Kevin T. Keith

Holy shit. The ludicrous Ben Stein goes completely off the rails with this loathsome commentary on the IMF rape case. Stein is a jackass of the first water, and given to weird conspiracy theories (global warming, evolution theory, and the welfare state are all secret movements designed to undermine freedom), but he likes to position himself as a simply a mild-mannered economic crank (“Beuller? Bueller? Buy mortgage-backed securities!”). It’s only a matter of time, though, for any conservative before classism and misogyny break through the surface (presumably nobody told him the woman in this case is an African Muslim – I guess he’ll need to post a followup).

The idiocy below starts out stupid and just gets gradually more offensive sentence by sentence. By the end it is almost the ugliest and nastiest thing I have yet seen posted about this case. My only hope is that this is the piece that finally takes Stein off the map as a supposed “reasonable conservative”. At his best he was a David Brooks dunderhead; today he exposes himself as an Ann Coulter psychotic, and he ought to be remembered as such. Continue Reading »

Posted in Conservative Bullshit Debunked, Culture, Economics, Gender Issues, General, Legal Issues, News & Current Events, Politics, Things That Suck, Uncategorized | 6 Comments »

Johnny Tremain Mnemonic

May 4, 2011 by Kevin T. Keith

Matt Yglesias has a post up of a bunch of kids on Twitter asking “Who’s Osama bin Laden?” Hard to know if they’re all serious, but at any rate, one of the commenters asks the question “”what’s the earliest national/international huge deal you can remember?”. That’s a good question, if a harsh one: it both dates you and calls out how much of history, and our lives, is defined by iconic moments.

Continue Reading »

Posted in Culture, General, News & Current Events, Politics, Things That Suck | 16 Comments »

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