Category Archives: Satire
The Fake Black NAACP Leader
Somehow, this story reminds me of my old satire about Trent Lott:
In a prelude to his upcoming appearance on BET, he appeared at a sparsely-attended press conference outside his local office, resplendent in a colorful daishiki, with his formerly shellacked hair frizzing freely in a three-foot diameter “afro-style” hairdo.
“As you all know, Bill Clinton was the first black president. Well, I’m the first black Senate Majority Leader. It’s truly a proud day for the Republican Party and the African-American community.”
“I know that many of you will be surprised to learn that I was ‘passing’ all of these years. It was a deep, dark family secret.”
“My great-great grandmother was a house nigra on a plantation outside of Biloxi. My great-grandfather was a mullatto, my grandmother was a quadroon, and my mother was an octaroon, which makes me a hexidecaroon. As all of you from hereabouts know, just a touch of one hair of the tarbrush means that I can never be truly white.”
I guess life imitates art, or something.
[Update a while later]
A lot more links: “She’s trans-black. Don’t shame her.”
In Defense Of Fareed Zakaria
This is cruel. Funny, but cruel. And well deserved.
Star Trek Heresy
Matthew Continetti does not love Spock.
Last week, I tweeted that I was going to write a post about how Obama is not Spock like, but to the degrees that he is, I agree that it’s Spock’s most annoying traits.
[Afternoon update]
The gauntlet has been thrown:
Continetti just glosses over the sacrifice at the Battle of the Mutara Nebula, I assume because he knows it demolishes his case. What about the personal loss at the betrayal of Valeris? What about the hurtful but necessary decision — directly enforced by Spock — to let Edith Keeler die? How I hated him for that! But look, who among us wouldn’t let Hitler dominate the world in exchange for a lifetime of sweet sweet loving from young Joan Collins? Anyone? No one? Just me?
Heh.
A Mission For SLS
Paul Spudis has a modest proposal for ARM.
But George Turner beat him to it.
Thoughts On Reviewing Movies You Haven’t Seen
Sonny Bunch has a book review.
How deliciously cruel.
The Next Apology
In light of his previous speech, I expect that Obama will attempt to appease the comet for this morning’s attack on our European allies’ spacecraft.
The New Consensus Study
Our search resulted in 487,629 papers that mentioned “evolution” or “natural selection” in the abstract. However 451,412 of those could not definitively be placed into one of our seven position-defining categories*, no matter how hard we tried with our group of 20 reviewers. [The consensus view among us is that these reviewers are completely independent and objective; their common participation at our web site devoted to presenting pro-selection arguments, but nothing to the contrary, is just not relevant in this case.**]
Of the remaining 36,217 papers, 35,167 (97.1%) supported the consensus position that over half of the observed evolution over the twentieth century is due to natural selection. The fact that only 126 of these 35,167 papers were actually focused on critically evaluating the topic at hand, i.e. the different possible mechanistic explanations of observed evolutionary change and/or speciation (e.g. random drift, founder and other stochastic events, mutation rate variation, instantaneous genetic barriers, etc), is an irrelevant point, a complete red herring. We can reasonably assume that in at least the majority of 50% of the time, none of these 35,167 authors would indicate agreement with a position that they themselves had not carefully investigated, without having more than half of a predominantly pretty good reason for so doing***. It’s just not really half as difficult as people make it out to be when you boil it down. As we have now done. For you.
In conclusion, there is very clearly a very strong consensus as to the influence of natural selection on evolution during the twentieth century and this consensus has been increasing as the evidence increases. It is important that policy makers realize this and take action. Please pick this up and disseminate it widely so everybody knows about it; everyone else is, so you will be part of the consensus effort if you do. Thank you.
Heh.
Dissing The Moon
The sad thing about this article at The Onion is that it could almost be true.
Pledge Today
[Early afternoon update]
In case you don’t understand the importance of this charity, you need to read about the struggles of Hillary.
