Somewhat of a semantic and pop-culture derail, but I have long had a problem with the phrase "conspiracy theory" used simply as a catch-all pejorative. The negativity around the phrase often acts in discussion like a magic bullet, or like a red herring for those who would rather not sift through the sometimes detailed complexities and contradictions of specific evidence on a given topic.

The phrase is too often used as a simple way to attempt to dismiss... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by ornate insect at 5:01 PM on October 5, 2008

The public fascination with Simpson continues to baffle me.
posted to MetaFilter by davidmsc at 11:22 PM on October 3, 2008

konolia, yes, just by virtue of the fact you guys can't stop talking her.
posted to MetaTalk by Brandon Blatcher at 6:33 AM on October 4, 2008

Sorry for the self-link, but I work at a gallery that represents U-Ram Choe. This page has some more pictures and video, if you're interested. Unfortunately, we're not having a new show with him until next year at the earliest, but I do get to sit underneath one of his sculptures at the front desk!
posted to MetaFilter by quatsch at 3:01 PM on October 3, 2008

I had this weird dream where Palin shows up for the debate drunk and starts asking Biden things like "do you want to fuck me? John wants to fuck me." And it went downhill from there. Biden just looks slightly appalled.

My fantasy world is much more lively than the real world.
posted to MetaFilter by maxwelton at 4:26 PM on October 1, 2008

Where: Somewhere in Pakistan high in the Hindu Kush. Deep in a cave.

When: 6.5 minutes after Plain/Biden Debate.

BIN LADEN: (Talking on phone in front of TV)
Hey, hey, hey! Yeah. It's me. YEAH. I just watched it. The boys and me in the cave here were in stitches. STITCHES! YEAH! Oh my Allah, praise be to him, that was so fucking awesome. That Palin chick thought Damascus was a WWF wrestler! Oh. Allah. So many good quotes in there.... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by tkchrist at 12:54 PM on October 2, 2008

This thread is nothing without cash gambling.

I'll book.

2:1 - Palin holds up her index finger woodenly while speaking.
3:1 - Biden barely restrains smirking.
4:1 - Populist pandering (either candidate)
5:1 - Palin starts five sentences, finishes none.
6:1 - Fightin' Blue Hens reference used for first time in the history of US political debates.
7:1 - Sweet Alaskan... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Marisa Stole the Precious Thing at 4:47 AM on October 2, 2008

Chris Matthews was just freaking out on MSNBC over her comment about expanding the powers of the VP. I was in the car when she said it, and I could hear the guy in the car next to me scream "OH MY GOD, YOU DUMBSHIT FASCIST!" when she started in.
posted to MetaFilter by scody at 7:40 PM on October 2, 2008

Kind of a ChickenSoupForTheSoulFilter post

There seems to be a meme starting up that anything that doesn't present humanity as doomed, irremediably fucked up, etc. is "glurge" and should be kept off MeFi. I would like to stomp this meme with hobnailed boots and dump it in the sewer where it will be happy. Anybody got any hobnailed boots I can borrow?

and a bit on the short side considering the... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by languagehat at 7:56 AM on October 2, 2008

I am thrilled people are having this conversation here - thanks everyone.

To shed some light on why I used the songs I did, here's a little essay I wrote last night. Sorry it's kinda long:

'Why I can't "just swap out" the Annette Hanshaw songs in "Sita Sings the Blues":

The songs themselves inspired the film. There would be no film without those songs. Until I heard them, the Ramayana was just another... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by ninapaley at 8:07 AM on September 30, 2008

Could a typical U.S. Senator, armed only with talking points, (say, six or eight words long) be trained to consistently "win" debates with a grizzly bear? Assume no element of surprise.
posted to MetaFilter by box at 5:10 AM on September 29, 2008

in immediate risk of a depression look pretty goddamn fucking ridiculous.

Do you know what caused the Great Depression? Too-low interest rates that fueled a credit-based economic boom that expanded the money supply in the twenties. Sound familiar?

Interest rates hit a low in mid to late 2005. 2005 marks the peak of the housing boom, i.e. the mortgage-based economic boom that inflated the money supply. But you want to know... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Pastabagel at 10:59 PM on September 24, 2008

Oh, man. I am coming back to recommend that anyone who hasn't seen it watch the Youtube video of Obama in Virginia yesterday (thoughtfully found and posted above by synaesthetichaze.

I asked if someone could find it because the buzz was that it was amazing. I'd watched the NC rally earlier in the day, and it was pretty solid stuff. But they had problems streaming the Virginia rally because of weather (supposedly, a lot of people couldn't get it or got it... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by fourcheesemac at 6:41 PM on September 28, 2008

"This isn't about law enforcement. We don't capture people because they've broken laws.
We capture people and imprison them in time of war because we think they will try to kill our men, or aid in the process of killing our men. Fighting against us in war doesn't violate any law, but we can't let them go free either."

You're wrong from first principles.
Combating terrorism is about law enforcement. It has nothing to do with war.... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Smedleyman at 9:01 PM on September 27, 2008

To people saying McCain won regardless of truth and content because his soundbites score points or whatever:

MediaCurves: Independents say Obama won 61% - 39%

CBS: Uncommitted voters say Obama won 40% - 22% (with the other 38% saying it was a tie)

FiveThirtyEight is also claiming that Obama won in a CNN poll, a Luntz focus group, and a GQR focus group, but hasn't provided links yet.... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Flunkie at 8:50 PM on September 26, 2008

I HAZ A BRACELET
posted to MetaFilter by The Whelk at 7:01 PM on September 26, 2008

This is what I've been telling people for awhile now, so it's nice to finally have some sort of empirical data to back it up.

The person who really nailed this was James D. Fearon, Dept. of Political Science, Stanford University, who specializes in studying the statistics of civil wars, and who has done extensive research on them. His testimony, given at a House of Representatives meeting in early Oct. '06, was/is particularly accurate. He also wrote a full paper on this... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by markkraft at 5:40 AM on September 24, 2008

Values like treating people right. Values like 'remembering where you came from.'

I remember where I came from. I grew up outside Clifton, Virginia (pop. 85). As a kid I spent the summers on my grandparents' farm outside Mountain Grove, Missouri (pop. 4,574), where my dad was from (mom's from Harville, Missouri, which is so small it doesn't rate a Wikipedia page). I went to college in Fairfax, Virginia (pop. 22,407), then I lived in Chapel Hill, North... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by kirkaracha at 6:44 PM on September 17, 2008

A few things about the rape kit story, which damn well should be the undoing of Sarah Palin. I'm amazed this hasn't had more press. It's everything that's evil about her and what she stands for.

You will hear often that Alaska has the highest rate of forcible rape in the US, but you will almost never hear why.

There is one and only one reason for that is the very high population of Native people, long regarded as fair game for rapists and... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by fourcheesemac at 5:44 AM on September 19, 2008

But Iran doesn't give a crap about the WTO, economic investments and normal diplomatic relations.

It only cares about wiping Israel off the map.

Also, they wear bones in their noses and call airplanes BIG SILVER SKY BIRD.
posted to MetaFilter by Lentrohamsanin at 1:39 PM on September 19, 2008

Matt Taibbi -- in the print edition of Rolling Stone (haven't seen this online) comes up with a beautiful zinger about Sarah Palin:

She appeared to be completely without shame and utterly full of shit, awing a room full of hardened reporters with her sickly-sweet line about the high-school-flame-turned-hubby who "five children later," is "still my guy." It was like watching Gidget address the Reichstag.
posted to MetaFilter by fourcheesemac at 11:31 AM on September 22, 2008

Funny how the Oklahoma City bombing and the Texas cyanide gas plot are missing from that list.
posted to MetaFilter by UrineSoakedRube at 2:31 PM on September 23, 2008

Artw I hope your wife does email back.

Well, she went with...

It is true that male muslim extremists brought all of these atrocities on innocents and that is condemnable beyond words. May God protect us from such evil.

Yes, Barack Obama has brown skin. But Barack Obama has never been a muslim - and in fact was raise by a white kansas woman and her parents in Kansas and Hawaii. He met his... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Artw at 7:44 PM on September 23, 2008

I enjoy this stuff (lousy at it tho). When I was in collich I took a course in Chaucer and we had to learn to speak middle English a bit. And I’m getting tested in this professors office on it (speaking it) and I’m thinking (fresh out of the military) I can drive, fly, jump, shoot, I’ve been places this guy’s never even heard of, been in charge of multimillion dollar operations with lives at stake - why the hell do I have to learn middle English from some cowtown professor when it can’t... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Smedleyman at 12:11 PM on September 23, 2008

@la morte - agreed, HDR doesn't have to look like this - I've been doing HDR for a few months now, and aiming for subtlety while still getting results that exceed the dynamic range of any single exposure I can capture. Here are three examples that I could not have achieved without HDR: 1, 2, 3

Some of the photos presented in the FPP are sorta interesting to me if you look at them as stylized artwork instead of a straightforward photographic record - others are just... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by kcds at 2:36 PM on September 22, 2008

benzenedream writes "Silly scientists. That would be because he's possessed by a Legion of Neocons and Rovians."

But seriously, you're probably right.

I mean, of course John McCain is depressed. At one time, he belived in things. In Straight Talk, in standing up to his own party when he thought it was wrong, that Jerry Falwell and James Dobsons were power-hungry hypocrites, that one could be honorable and a... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by orthogonality at 7:07 PM on September 21, 2008

I thought NAKED short selling was already illegal just the SEC doesn't do shit about it. Besides it's not THAT big of a phenomena and not the problem with our current mess. Which was a result of these ridiculously risky CDO's being rated high by the same people selling them.

I tell you I got a FREEPER so flummoxed yesterday. I have lots of GOP faithful friends. Most who have any sort of principle left the fold right after Iraq turned into a complete shit fest. But... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by tkchrist at 2:27 PM on September 18, 2008

What a coincidence! I've been working on a website called ConfirmationBiasBuddy, which allows you to blame anyone's bad behavior on some cockamamie reason that sounds just plausible enough to allow the user to feel smugly superior.
posted to MetaFilter by Miko at 7:50 PM on September 17, 2008

Terrierman is not so enamored with Shaun Ellis
posted to MetaFilter by hindmost at 2:50 PM on September 17, 2008

Privatize the profit, socialize the loss.

Beyond capitalism and socialism, this is more like economic fascism, the way failing corporations are intertwining with government to become an indistinguishable entity. You can't fire the board of a government, when your "vote" for either party results in the same damn corporatist policies.
posted to MetaFilter by Blazecock Pileon at 10:29 PM on September 16, 2008

That "stop blogging" story gets better when you realize the woman who was finger-wagged, Sherry Whitstine, is apparently a fundamentalist conservative. She writes as Syrin at her blog. It's full of fun:

You have 60 Days to know something about this woamn sarah palin. Why are most of the Christian so called conservative talking heads so easily deceived? I and many others in Wasilla have tried to reveal the true nature of Palin's creditibility. In my... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by mediareport at 7:58 AM on September 14, 2008

Everyone Chill the Fuck Out.
posted to MetaFilter by dhartung at 9:53 PM on September 12, 2008

But then, OODA, Observe Orient Decide Act, seems grossly simplistic. Where in this outline is Boyd's idea "acting quickly to outthink and outmaneuver rivals -- will, Boyd wrote, "make us appear ambiguous, [and] thereby generate confusion and disorder."?

It's not in the OODA loop itself, but in the interaction between two (or more) OODA loops. The idea is to Act while your opponent is still in one of the earlier stages... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by vorfeed at 11:39 AM on September 11, 2008

psmealey's got it. I was a Hillary supporter. A hardcore, house-divided against my boyfriend (we cancelled each other's primary votes out) Hillary supporter. Someone who once got into a fistfight with her best friend's brother over the Carter/Reagan election -- in kindergarten. As recently as the DNC, I was sulkily snarking at the screen any time the Obamaniacs came on. I was itching for a floorfight. PUMAtastical.

What changed?... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by bitter-girl.com at 8:33 AM on September 3, 2008

(Actually, this reminded me of a funny story he told me a few years back. The Times' editors actually had a conference call that lasted several minutes over how they would refer to Meat Loaf in an entertainment article. The argument was essentially over whether or not "Meat Loaf" was the full formal name, or if "Loaf" was technically the surname of his stage name, ergo the requirement to refer to him as "Mr. Loaf" in the copy.

They did... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by XQUZYPHYR at 10:48 AM on September 3, 2008

This really inspires me to donate to Obama, too. We can't have this in the White House. Bush II is bad enough, Palin looks even worse, if such a thing is possible.


I've been on MetaFilter for about six years now, and I've written a lot of comments in political threads, so without trying to sound pretentious I think there's a lot of people who have a general understanding of where I stand on politics and campaigns. And I only mention... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by XQUZYPHYR at 5:36 AM on September 4, 2008

Then how come you aren't a single issue voter on the war?

Because Iraqi's aren't white. Because most Iraqi's aren't Christian.

Collateral Damage. Yes "collateral". We never anticipate killing women and children when dropping cluster bombs, 2000lb GBU-27 bombs, lobbing Tomahawk cruise missiles, or bombarding towns, villages and cities with artillery.

We dropped 54.6 tons of bombs in... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by tkchrist at 12:50 PM on September 4, 2008

Jesus H. Christ. You know what I'm sick of?

Let's clear some myths up.

First. There is no "conservative voice" in this thread. Okay. I doubt very much the person(s) in question, who by name call them selves conservative, could articulate what Conservative Political Philosophy is without looking it up. And if they did and had any shred of intellectual honest they would see precious little of that philosophy at work in the Bush... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by tkchrist at 8:42 PM on September 6, 2008

Look, folks, age nonwithstanding, I think McCain has enough good years left in him.

That it's two years past its failure rating notwithstanding, my water heater might have good years left in it too. Or it might fail, at any time. But if my water heater fails, it doesn't get replaced by a mysterious black box that I'm not allowed to ask questions about.

I wish McCain the best of health and hope he has many good years ahead of... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by cortex at 12:38 PM on September 7, 2008

As the Daily Show pointed out, parts of McCain's acceptance speech are almost word-for-word with Bush's acceptance speech in 2000. And I was struck by how young Bush looked in 2000; the office really ages you.

There are two things to look at when looking at a candidate-does he or she share my core values?

Is honesty one of your core values? Isn't "thou shalt not lie" one of the commandments? Because both McCain and... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by kirkaracha at 1:57 PM on September 7, 2008

Look, no matter who grabs the brass ring in November, the world won't come to an end. I have lived too long and seen too many elections and survived too many Presidents of varying calibers...we will be all right.

Your comment made me cry .... Because, you see, I don't think we will be. Here, in my own life, I don't think we will be. We just can't stand four (or eight) more years of this.

Between the two of us, my husband and... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by anastasiav at 10:14 PM on September 9, 2008

Dependence is caused by the drug itself, not failings in people's character or genetics. Which is very good news for "addicts": all they need to do to stop the addiction is stop taking the drug.

Um, no. People get very confused about "dependence" and addiction because the misguided researchers who wrote the DSM decided that addiction was a stigmatized word and it would be nicer to call the problem "substance... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Maias at 3:11 PM on September 9, 2008

Obama today made it quite clear that his muslim faith should not be questioned. George S. made a feeble attempt to correct him but to see it live on TV was a gem. Without a telepropter, Mr. B. Hussen Obama struggles.

But he can only flip flop on issues and talk long and articulate about nothing for so long before it becomes obvious his only agenda is a CFR one of dissolving the United States no matter the promises. He can only promise so... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by stavrosthewonderchicken at 6:20 PM on September 7, 2008

she talked publicly at a council meeting and privately with the head librarian about how to remove books, but never went through with it.

Matt, you're missing a big part of the story. Palin did indeed send a letter of termination to the librarian, as well as the police chief, leading local residents to threaten a recall campaign soon after her election. Andrew Sullivan posted excerpts from the relevant 1997 Anchorage Daily News... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by mediareport at 6:30 PM on September 6, 2008

WHY DO YOU MOCK US?!?!?

* FREE THE IMG TAG *
posted to MetaTalk by blue_beetle at 9:57 AM on September 6, 2008

"'I know the hunt is on; they're pulling out all the stops,' said a Defense Department official with knowledge of the situation who asked not to be named. 'They are leaving no stone unturned. They want to find bin Laden before the president leaves office and ensure that al Qaeda will not attack the U.S. during the upcoming elections.'...

Uh, yeah.

I guess that means Bush is an Obama fan, since Charlie Black said a... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by delmoi at 11:17 PM on September 5, 2008

Did they mention that John McCain was a POW? Tortured, as a POW. He was shot down, and was a POW - did you know that? Have I mentioned that he was a POW?

I found this anecdote somewhere:

So the other day I was talking to this woman that works with my dad. I'm 19 so she was asking me if I was excited for the first presidential election I get to vote in and things like that. It was a nice little chat until she asked me who I... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by martinrebas at 3:45 PM on September 5, 2008

Five days away from the ones you love is far too long. Hello, everyone from the wasteland that was, until recently, my beautiful home. Despite what you’re NOT reading in the news, Louisiana is far from “okay.” Yes, New Orleans dodged another cannonball, but tonight, over one million Louisiana residents are sleeping for a fifth night with no electricity.

Today, the smart ones cleaned out their fridge and threw away hundreds of dollars of unfrozen and room temperature... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by ColdChef at 8:30 PM on September 4, 2008

Ignoring your totally gross metaphor... many people have thanked konolia for her contributions in that thread. I feel like that thread has had a lot of useful back and forth discussion among many sets of people with differening opinions.

konolia always has the option to dial back her rhetoric [as does everyone here] and not claim to speak for god/republicans/southerners/anti-obama people/pro-lifers and at least sometimes chooses not to. My personal opinion is that... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by jessamyn at 10:48 AM on September 4, 2008

More than the pharmaceutical industry, the nutritional supplement people are the ones who piss me off. No regulation, no checks, minimal safety controls. The people pushing fish oil are worse than the ones pushing SSRIs. At least we know what SSRIs do, their side effects, etc.

Beyond that, I think the big thing is the direct to consumer marketing. I don't know how that got started, but it worries me. The medications need to be developed, yes, but trying to sell them... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Hactar at 5:41 PM on September 2, 2008