Scottish Nous

Humiliating the Chinese State

How neat is this?  Stryde Hax has turned up some fairly persuasive evidence in favor of something everybody already knew, namely, that the Chinese State has been trying to cheat their way to gold at the 2008 Olympics by sending the young girls they kidnap to compete in competitions before they're sixteen years of age. And he did it by using a search engine.  One person using the internet in a very simple manner just managed to help humiliate an entire State.  Awesome!  One hopes that eventually, technological developments will make instant, fully encrypted communication between any two persons readily obtainable by the Chinese people.  That would go a long way towards helping them start a revolution and succesefully overthrow their current pathetic State.

Former Prisoner of War

The McCain campaign tries to work the phrase "former prisoner of war" into everything they say, and they try harder in direct proportion to the degree of irrelevance McCain's having been a prisoner of war bears on what they're saying.  Concerning the possible attempt at cheating (discussed below), McCain spokesfool Nicolle Wallace had this to say:

The insinuation from the Obama campaign that John McCain, a former prisoner of war, cheated is outrageous.

Because it is metaphysically impossible that a former prisoner of war ever cheat.  The sentence "A former prisoner of war cheated" (or the proposition expressed by that sentence) is analytically false, or false in virtue of meaning, or false in virtue of reference determiners.  It would be "outrageous" to asset it because the concept or property "being a prisoner of war" contains or entails the concept or property "being a non-cheater".  Right?

The Cone of Silence

McCain was outside the Cone of Silence. [Click the link.  You'll be glad you did.]  This has prompted some to propose that he cheated.  The cheating theory requires, however, that McCain have (i) lightning fast anticipatory rhetorical reflexes, (ii) a sharp memory suitable for retaining scripted answers to questions, and (iii) poor verbal stimuli processing.  Only (iii) is plausible.

The evidence cited in favor of the cheating theory consists of the following two interchanges, the first of which is between Warren and Obama:

[Warren:] Ok, let's go to education.  America right now ranks 19th in high school graduations, but we're first in incarcerations.

[Obama:] Not good.

[Warren:] Not good. Eighty percent of Americans recently poled said they believe in merit pay for teachers... I'm not asking, (1a) "Do you think all teachers should get a raise?"  [But rather] (2a) "Do you think better teachers should be paid better? [That] (3a) They should make more than poor teachers?"

Here I've inserted parenthetical numbering and elided words (in brackets).  When Warren and McCain got to this point in the debate, we got the following:

[Warren:] Let's talk about education.  America ranks 19th in high school graduations, but we're first in incarcerations.  Everybody says they want more accountability in schools.

[McCain:] Mmm-hm.

[Warren:] About 80% of America says they support merit pay for the best teachers.  Now I don't want to hear your stump speech on education... [cut off]

[McCain:] (1b) Yes, (2b) yes and (3b) find bad teachers another line of work!

[Warren:] We're gonna, we're going to end this... You're answering so quickly, you ought to play a game of poker.

(Again, parenthetical numbering inserted.)  Now on the cheating theory, McCain's answers (1b), (2b) and (3b) were prepared ahead of time in response to the putative questions (1a), (2a) and (3a) which Obama got.  But really, Obama did not get three questions.  He got only one (as the elided words I've provided make clear).  Thus if McCain overheard anything, he misheard it.  In short, if he cheated, he's a moron.  Still, I very much doubt that, even if if McCain did overhear the previous Warren-Obama interchange, he would be capable of memorizing an answer to those putative questions, even one as simple as "Yes, yes and find bad teachers another line of work!"  This because he wouldn't be able to hold (1a), (2a) and (3a) before his mind long enough to formulate answers to them.

Now suppose he didn't cheat.  Then McCain is still a moron.  As you can see from his interaction with Warren, he never received a question.  So his repeated expressions of affirmation are supposed to be affirmations of what?  Is he joking that his stump speech has zero content?  He is telling Warren he agrees with what Warren is presenting as a statement of fact, namely, that he agrees that 80% of Americans say they support merit pay?  He utterly failed to answer any question here, and for the reason that no question was ever asked. Congrats, moron! Worse still, the entire audience applauded.  What's wrong with the people who attend Rick Warren's church?

A Diseased Mind

Death By Tray

Obamessiah

From a chain letter circulating the internet:

According to The Book of Revelations the anti-christ will be a man, in his 40s, of MUSLIM descent, who will deceive the nations with persuasive language, and have a MASSIVE Christ-like appeal. The prophecy says that people will flock to him and he will promise false hope and world peace, and when he is in power, will destroy everything. Is it OBAMA??

If you haven't seen McCain's latest attempt to mobilize the crackpot fringe, check out his new political ad, The One, which portrays Obama as the antichrist.  From the comments thread at Beliefnet:

I'm not offended by the ad. Being a person of the Christian faith, I have to admit that I have seen some qualifying qualities in this man that makes his being the antichrist a "possibility". I think people are spending waaaayyy too much time thinking about that, though. If Obama turns out to be a regular guy, and this is most likely, then the people who have been running around and sounding this alarm are going to feel embarrassed, and in the long run it's just going to create a mockery of the whole subject that will only do harm to the message when the real deal comes along.

Do I believe Obama is the antichrist? I give it a very strong maybe. What will I do about it? Nothing, and that's what everybody else should be doing. This may surprise you, but it really doesn't even matter whether Obama is the/an antichrist, or not. When this prophesied leader does make his appearance, the primary responsibility of the Christian community will be to concentrate on spreading the good news of Jesus Christ and monitoring our own spiritual health. It's that relationship with Jesus that will keep peope from taking the mark, not by having a Salem Witch Trial-like process where people start finger pointing.

In defense of the religious commentors posting on Beliefnet, most of them seem pretty reasonable.  This remark isn't representative, and I can't imagine that most ordinary, reasonable Christians will find McCain's attempt to portray Obama as a minion of Satan remotely plausible.  When you're campaign is floundering so badly you have to start running ads the subtext of which is (literally) that your opponent worships the devil, you're in trouble. [via Majikthise]

McCain's Lies: Part II

Here, you can watch McCain fail to remember a question two seconds after it was asked, and in the process of bumbling over an answer to that question when it was reasked, claim that he fought "for the recognition of Dr. Martin Luther King's birthday in [his] state..."  This is a borderline misrepresentation, so I'll present the facts and let you decide.  McCain, in fact, voted against making MLK's birthday a federal holiday (and thus a holiday in his state) in 1983.  Watch here:

Of course, stories like this always a little more complicated than they seem.  So here's McCain saying he didn't know anything about who Dr. Martin Luther King was when he voted (at the age of 47) against making his birthday a federal holiday in 1983 (a fact which reinforces my claim that he is a mental midget):

What McCain wants to do here is claim that he wasn't always an ignorant buffoon.  He finally learned a little about the history of the civil rights movement, you see.  And after getting edumacated, he put up his "fight" to have MLK day recognized as a holiday.

After voting in 1983, allegedly out of massive ignorance, with 90 losing members of the House of Representatives (against 338 others), McCain "fought" to have MLK day recognized as a holiday in his home state only (presumably by expressing that he was in favor of having it recognized).  He didn't vote for it, of course, since he didn't have any say in such matters.  And he didn't fight hard enough to get the Arizona legislature to recognize it.  Instead, a governor instituted the holiday by executive order.  (If there was already a federal holiday, you may be wondering why this was necessary.  As it turns out, many states were not recognizing the federal holiday.)

But four years later, the holiday was repealed by the newly elected (and divinely inspired) Governor Evan Mecham. What did McCain have to say about it? According to Sam Stein:

McCain said he thought Mecham was correct in his decision. [link]

So in 1983, McCain was against making MLK's birthday a holiday in his state.  And then in 1987, McCain said that Mecham did the right think by taking MLK's birthday off the Arizona books as a holiday.  In 1989, McCain was back in favor of a state holiday in Arizona (he did get a former president to appeal to Arizonans to acknowledge a holiday), but he was still opposed to the existing federal holiday.  So if McCain did "fight" for a state holiday, he has also "fought" against it (at the time he claims he was "fighting" for it).  And furthermore, he fought against the federal version of the holiday quite extensively.

You decide if this counts as a lie.  In any case, it's nice to know that McCain votes with the minority on issues he professes to be utterly clueless about.

McCain's Lies: Part I

It is well-known amongst most educated and politically savvy individuals that McCain does very few things better than he lies.  He lies his ass off, he lies his ass off almost every day, and then he lies his ass off some more.  This wouldn't be such a problem if McCain wasn't a stupid idiot who appears to be developing Alzheimer's disease.  But since he is a stupid idiot with massive memory loss, he can't remember what he lies about.  And then there's the problem that he can't remember there's this thing called the internet. [video of McCain professing computer illiteracy]  This means you can watch him lie his ass off.

We'll kick this series off with an old one.  Here's McCain (i) lying about how safe the streets in Baghdad are, and (ii) lying about lying about how safe the streets in Baghdad are: