Stop comparing BP to Katrina and 9-11. This is getting tiresome, and its idiotic rhetoic coming from both the left, the right, and the media. These three disasters are unique. One was a terrorist act, one was the weather, and one was the result of gross negligence.
9-11 was caused by murdering jihadest terrorists bent on destroying not only Americans but anyone who doesn't follow their strict beliefs. It occured because the federal government failed to put the pieces together and see that such an incident was going to occur. The pieces were there but the CIA and the FBI did not communicate thus the puzzle was never put together. The BP oil spill had nothing to do with Jihad, was not an act of terror and its insulting to those who died on 9-11 to compare it to the BP oil spill.
Katrina was the weather. No one could have stopped it. However, we could have better mitigated before it by ensuring the integrity of the levees in a Cat 5 storm and we could have responded afterward better through FEMA. The key difference between Katrina and the BP oil spill is that the government does not have a federal agency with expertise in oil spills. We did however, have one to respond to Katrina (FEMA.)
The BP oil spill was caused because BP was too cheap to actually pay for good cement work. They ignored Haliburton's warnings when they were constructing the site and did not perform safety tests. Then after the spill, they kept underestimating the severity of the leak, which hampered clean up efforts. Most of the clean up is done by corporations with expertise in oilspill clean up. The government on the other hand has no such expertise and no agency to help out. There is little the government can do but pass legislation to regulate the oil industry so this doesn't happen again.
The BP oil spill's fault rests entirely on BP. Stop blaming Obama. Stop claiming that the government isn't doing enough. This is not something the government specializes in or had prepared for.
And for the love of all that is holy stop comparing this oil spill to events in the past to which it is NOTHING alike.
J Kuhl Signing Off
Monday, June 28, 2010
Tuesday, June 22, 2010
World of Warcraft and Human Nature
You may have noticed that there is a feed on this site that links the activity of my level 80 Paladin, Orissa, in the game World of Warcraft (WoW). I put that there because I wanted to see how it would work, which leads me to this post.
I've played this game since 2007 and Orissa has always been my main character (typically refered to as a 'main') and she has always been the character I use to participate in the hardest raids. There are several things about human nature that I've noticed while playing this game that I want to describe in this post, but first, some background information or my post won't make a lot of sense to people who have never played this game.
WoW is a Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game (MMORPG) made by Blizzard Entertainment. Massively meaning that it takes place in a fantasy world some 15 square miles (which is enormous for a virtual environment) and is broken into some 200 servers each with 5-20 thousand players (and usually 3-10k online at one time.) And I'm not even counting the Asian and European versions of this game. It is multiplayer. At end game, you either find yourself fighting other players, other real people spread across the US (since I have the North American version of WoW, I typically only meet other Americans, a few Canadians and the occasional Mexican) or you cooperate with them to defeat difficult bosses. Also, the economy is player driven, with an in-game auction house, where players trade with each other, using gold as a virtual currency. It is online, obviously. It is also role-playing (RP) in that you pick a class and a particular role to play in the game and its a game. Each of these roles has its own function in the game.
Orissa is a Level 80 Protection Paladin with a Retribution off spec, on the US-Ghostlands server, and an officer in the guild Tribute to Insanity. There are 80 levels of character advancement. Protection is her primary talent specialization, which defines her role as a tank and Retribution is her secondary and when activated, defines her role as melee dps. And a guild is basically a group of players who have come together under one name to work together. As an officer, I help make policy decisions and occasionally lead raids.
Raiding in Wrath of the Lich King, the second expansion of the game, is broken down into two levels: 10 man and 25 man. 10 man raids are for the smaller guilds (such as mine) and 25 man raids are for the larger guilds. 25 mans are typically a bit harder to succeed at, harder to organize and drop better loot. However, each raid can be run as a 10 man or a 25 man. The reason Blizzard designed the game this way was because they wanted people to see the raid content. Before Wrath and Burning Crusade came out, all the raids were 40 man raids and thus only the largest and most hardcore of guilds could get in. A grand total of 3% of the game's population saw the interior of the Naxxramas 40 man raid, which was, during Vanilla WoW, the last and the hardest raid. Now 40 mans are gone, and every raid in Wrath has a 10 and 25 man setting.
Wrath of the Lich King, starts at Tier 7 (T7) for loot and goes up to T10 and raid progression looks like this:
Naxxramas (Naxx): 14 bosses, T7 (Naxx was brought back in Wrath as a 10/25 man and entry level raid)
Eye of Eternity (EoE): 1 boss, T7
Obsidian Sanctum (OS): 1 boss, T7
Ulduar (Uld): 14 bosses, T8
Trial of the Crusader (ToC): 7 bosses, T9
Onyxia's Lair (Ony): 1 boss, T9
Icecrown Citadel (ICC): 12 bosses, T10
Ruby Sanctum (RS): 1 boss, T10
Each raid with 1 boss takes about 45 minutes to an hour, ToC takes about 90-120 minutes, and the rest take 4-6 hours. However, you have one week, from Tuesday to Tuesday, to finish a raid and raids are usually scheduled by guilds and spread across a week. My guild will do about 2 hours of ICC on Tuesday, another 2 hours on Wednesday, and then finish it on Friday. Then we do it again, starting on Tuesdays. The reason for Tuesdays is that Blizzard takes down all the servers for a few hours each Tuesday for maintenance and they decided that was a good time to do raid resets as well.
I am going to focus on the 10 man versions of these raids as my guild does not have the people to field a 25 man. Each raid requires three arch-typical roles, which are Tank, Healer and DPS. There are 10 classes, all of them can perform DPS, 4 of which can be Tanks, 4 of which can be healers, 2 of which can be all three.
Each 10 man requires 2 tanks, 2-3 healers and 5-6 DPS. What are these roles? The Tank is the heavily defensive character who's job is to ensure that the boss hits him and not the other, more fragile classes. Orissa as I've said is a Tank. What she does is she gains threat on the boss (threat is a variable in the boss's AI; when a player does something, he gains threat and the person with the highest threat is the person the boss attacks) while using her abilities to reduce incoming damage (for example, keeping Holy Shield up, an ability that increases her chance to block by 30%.) DPS stands for Damage-Per-Second and indicates a player whose job it is to do as much damage as possible while avoiding taking damage as best as possible and the Healer is pretty self explanatory. This is a trinity, if you will. Tanks require healers to stay alive. Healers require tanks to stay alive. DPS is required as most bosses have some sort of mechanic that makes them impossible to kill if the fight goes on too long and thus high dps is needed to kill the boss in a certain time frame. A raid without one of these three roles will fail.
Thus we get into what I wanted to say about this game. Sometimes I wonder if WoW could be a college major with all the crap that goes on in the game, but I digress. The interesting fact about this game is how everyone in this game works together and knows each other but no one in this game really knows each other. Take, for example, the Guild Master (GM) of my guild, a man who plays a Priest named Angoth. I know a few things about him. He's married (to another player in the guild), was in the Navy in nuclear submarines, loves a good joke and is a pretty funny guy and a good GM. But I don't know his real name or what he looks like. All I know is the personality I see when he's online and when he's in Ventrilio (a voice-chat 3rd party program.) And this is true for every guildy. I know them by personality, by voice and by screenname, but I don't know what they don't reveal in Vent or in guild chat.
These are the people I work with and coordinate with however. Since most raids require a great deal of coordination in order to down a boss, it requires that I know how these people will play and how to communicate with them and yet it is difficult to learn anything about them through such an impersonal interface.
Just to get a view on how complicated a boss fight can get, lets look at one of the bosses for a moment. Mimiron is one good example. Mimiron is the 12th boss out of 14 in Ulduar. The raid does not actually fight Mimiron, but the inventions he controls. It is a four phase fight. First phase, Mimiron is in a battletank-like vehicle called Leviathan MKII. It requires that all the melee dps, including the tanks, keep an eye out for land mines and ensuring they have a path to run away from Leviathan. It requires that they keep an eye out for Shockblast and run away from Leviathan when this occurs. The healers must heal the tank through heavy damage from Leviathan, especially when he uses Plasma Punch. Then after Leviathan is defeated, it rolls away and Mimiron goes into an anti-personnel cannon, which then requires that players avoid the five-million damage instant death rockets, that they avoid the Laser Barrage that'll make about a 100 degree arc and instantly kill anyone hit by it. Then if they survive that, the third phase begins in which case a helicopter comes out, again, with Mimiron driving it. A ranged dps has to kite the head, while one tank has to pick up robots that spawn around the room and the other tank has to grab all the little bomb bots that the helicopter drops before they explode and kill the healers. Furthermore, DPS have to loot a magnetic core from dead robots to bring the helicopter down so they can do damage to it before it flies again. Once defeated, you enter phase 4, in which all three earlier vehicles, the Leviathan, the Anti-Personnel Cannon and the Aerial Command Unit, all come together as V-07-TR-0N, a big robot. With the exception of the little robots, everything in the previous phases, occurs again in this phase, all at one time and worst of all, each of the three components MUST die within 10 seconds of each other, or the surviving components will repair the dead one to full health and the raid will wipe (which is slang, meaning "everyone dies") because the berserk timer (which increases Mimiron's damage by 5000%) will be met. The hardmode (which leads to better loot) of this fight is everything I've mentioned, and fire. Lots and lots of fire.
Point being, it takes a lot of coordination, situational awareness and teamwork in order to down the more difficult bosses. Mimiron was, when Ulduar was the final raid in WoW, one of the hardest bosses in game. My guild would be in vent while raiding and we'd be warning each other when a rocket launches or when Mimiron was doing his shockblast or other abilities. Tanks would be calling out for stronger heals during Plasma Punch and DPS would be calling out when they needed to use the magnetic core to bring the Aerial Command Unit to the ground. Strategy would be discussed, failed attempts would be analyzed and we'd be constantly working out how to perform better next time so we can get a kill.
Its teamwork against a difficult objective, with strangers. People whom I've never met in real life, working together for a common goal. But as an officer, it is my job (if you will) to help keep all these people working together, and try to get the guild to fit their needs as best as possible.
And yet there is a serious darkside to this, one that is illustrated by WoW, but also very common on the internet wherever anyone can hide behind a shield of anonymity. On Trade Chat one morning, I was discussing something with another character in the game, when a third character popped up and called me things like 'baddie' and flamed me because I hadn't been past Professor Putricide (7th boss of 12 in ICC and more difficult that Mimiron) at the time. It was a display of immaturity and foolishness and he could get away with it easily because I don't know who he is. He'll suffer no real life repercussions for that, his real life reputation remains untouched and heck, he might be a nice guy in real life, so long as he has a reputation to maintain.
Which frightens me.
This isn't a problem unique with WoW, it is found on every on-line venue, from other multiplayer games to the Fark.com forums to 4chan (which is infamous for their internet hijinks and complete lack of manners, entirely because there is no accoutability.) It makes me wonder then, if people are only decent towards other people because they have a reputation to maintain. Is there any true honesty or is it all play acting? Remove our faces and our real names, and our true personalities emerge.
Not everyone acts like a jerk without a name and a face, but a large number do. And maybe they are just jerks. It is still however, a frightening concept to think that everything we do is simply an act to appease our fellow man.
"We haven't much time, friends! You're going to help me test out my latest and greatest creation. Now, before you change your minds, remember, that you kind of owe it to me after the mess you made with the XT-002!" -Mimiron at the start of Phase 1 (XT-002 is a huge robot and is the fourth boss in Ulduar)
J Kuhl Signing Off
I've played this game since 2007 and Orissa has always been my main character (typically refered to as a 'main') and she has always been the character I use to participate in the hardest raids. There are several things about human nature that I've noticed while playing this game that I want to describe in this post, but first, some background information or my post won't make a lot of sense to people who have never played this game.
WoW is a Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game (MMORPG) made by Blizzard Entertainment. Massively meaning that it takes place in a fantasy world some 15 square miles (which is enormous for a virtual environment) and is broken into some 200 servers each with 5-20 thousand players (and usually 3-10k online at one time.) And I'm not even counting the Asian and European versions of this game. It is multiplayer. At end game, you either find yourself fighting other players, other real people spread across the US (since I have the North American version of WoW, I typically only meet other Americans, a few Canadians and the occasional Mexican) or you cooperate with them to defeat difficult bosses. Also, the economy is player driven, with an in-game auction house, where players trade with each other, using gold as a virtual currency. It is online, obviously. It is also role-playing (RP) in that you pick a class and a particular role to play in the game and its a game. Each of these roles has its own function in the game.
Orissa is a Level 80 Protection Paladin with a Retribution off spec, on the US-Ghostlands server, and an officer in the guild Tribute to Insanity. There are 80 levels of character advancement. Protection is her primary talent specialization, which defines her role as a tank and Retribution is her secondary and when activated, defines her role as melee dps. And a guild is basically a group of players who have come together under one name to work together. As an officer, I help make policy decisions and occasionally lead raids.
Raiding in Wrath of the Lich King, the second expansion of the game, is broken down into two levels: 10 man and 25 man. 10 man raids are for the smaller guilds (such as mine) and 25 man raids are for the larger guilds. 25 mans are typically a bit harder to succeed at, harder to organize and drop better loot. However, each raid can be run as a 10 man or a 25 man. The reason Blizzard designed the game this way was because they wanted people to see the raid content. Before Wrath and Burning Crusade came out, all the raids were 40 man raids and thus only the largest and most hardcore of guilds could get in. A grand total of 3% of the game's population saw the interior of the Naxxramas 40 man raid, which was, during Vanilla WoW, the last and the hardest raid. Now 40 mans are gone, and every raid in Wrath has a 10 and 25 man setting.
Wrath of the Lich King, starts at Tier 7 (T7) for loot and goes up to T10 and raid progression looks like this:
Naxxramas (Naxx): 14 bosses, T7 (Naxx was brought back in Wrath as a 10/25 man and entry level raid)
Eye of Eternity (EoE): 1 boss, T7
Obsidian Sanctum (OS): 1 boss, T7
Ulduar (Uld): 14 bosses, T8
Trial of the Crusader (ToC): 7 bosses, T9
Onyxia's Lair (Ony): 1 boss, T9
Icecrown Citadel (ICC): 12 bosses, T10
Ruby Sanctum (RS): 1 boss, T10
Each raid with 1 boss takes about 45 minutes to an hour, ToC takes about 90-120 minutes, and the rest take 4-6 hours. However, you have one week, from Tuesday to Tuesday, to finish a raid and raids are usually scheduled by guilds and spread across a week. My guild will do about 2 hours of ICC on Tuesday, another 2 hours on Wednesday, and then finish it on Friday. Then we do it again, starting on Tuesdays. The reason for Tuesdays is that Blizzard takes down all the servers for a few hours each Tuesday for maintenance and they decided that was a good time to do raid resets as well.
I am going to focus on the 10 man versions of these raids as my guild does not have the people to field a 25 man. Each raid requires three arch-typical roles, which are Tank, Healer and DPS. There are 10 classes, all of them can perform DPS, 4 of which can be Tanks, 4 of which can be healers, 2 of which can be all three.
Each 10 man requires 2 tanks, 2-3 healers and 5-6 DPS. What are these roles? The Tank is the heavily defensive character who's job is to ensure that the boss hits him and not the other, more fragile classes. Orissa as I've said is a Tank. What she does is she gains threat on the boss (threat is a variable in the boss's AI; when a player does something, he gains threat and the person with the highest threat is the person the boss attacks) while using her abilities to reduce incoming damage (for example, keeping Holy Shield up, an ability that increases her chance to block by 30%.) DPS stands for Damage-Per-Second and indicates a player whose job it is to do as much damage as possible while avoiding taking damage as best as possible and the Healer is pretty self explanatory. This is a trinity, if you will. Tanks require healers to stay alive. Healers require tanks to stay alive. DPS is required as most bosses have some sort of mechanic that makes them impossible to kill if the fight goes on too long and thus high dps is needed to kill the boss in a certain time frame. A raid without one of these three roles will fail.
Thus we get into what I wanted to say about this game. Sometimes I wonder if WoW could be a college major with all the crap that goes on in the game, but I digress. The interesting fact about this game is how everyone in this game works together and knows each other but no one in this game really knows each other. Take, for example, the Guild Master (GM) of my guild, a man who plays a Priest named Angoth. I know a few things about him. He's married (to another player in the guild), was in the Navy in nuclear submarines, loves a good joke and is a pretty funny guy and a good GM. But I don't know his real name or what he looks like. All I know is the personality I see when he's online and when he's in Ventrilio (a voice-chat 3rd party program.) And this is true for every guildy. I know them by personality, by voice and by screenname, but I don't know what they don't reveal in Vent or in guild chat.
These are the people I work with and coordinate with however. Since most raids require a great deal of coordination in order to down a boss, it requires that I know how these people will play and how to communicate with them and yet it is difficult to learn anything about them through such an impersonal interface.
Just to get a view on how complicated a boss fight can get, lets look at one of the bosses for a moment. Mimiron is one good example. Mimiron is the 12th boss out of 14 in Ulduar. The raid does not actually fight Mimiron, but the inventions he controls. It is a four phase fight. First phase, Mimiron is in a battletank-like vehicle called Leviathan MKII. It requires that all the melee dps, including the tanks, keep an eye out for land mines and ensuring they have a path to run away from Leviathan. It requires that they keep an eye out for Shockblast and run away from Leviathan when this occurs. The healers must heal the tank through heavy damage from Leviathan, especially when he uses Plasma Punch. Then after Leviathan is defeated, it rolls away and Mimiron goes into an anti-personnel cannon, which then requires that players avoid the five-million damage instant death rockets, that they avoid the Laser Barrage that'll make about a 100 degree arc and instantly kill anyone hit by it. Then if they survive that, the third phase begins in which case a helicopter comes out, again, with Mimiron driving it. A ranged dps has to kite the head, while one tank has to pick up robots that spawn around the room and the other tank has to grab all the little bomb bots that the helicopter drops before they explode and kill the healers. Furthermore, DPS have to loot a magnetic core from dead robots to bring the helicopter down so they can do damage to it before it flies again. Once defeated, you enter phase 4, in which all three earlier vehicles, the Leviathan, the Anti-Personnel Cannon and the Aerial Command Unit, all come together as V-07-TR-0N, a big robot. With the exception of the little robots, everything in the previous phases, occurs again in this phase, all at one time and worst of all, each of the three components MUST die within 10 seconds of each other, or the surviving components will repair the dead one to full health and the raid will wipe (which is slang, meaning "everyone dies") because the berserk timer (which increases Mimiron's damage by 5000%) will be met. The hardmode (which leads to better loot) of this fight is everything I've mentioned, and fire. Lots and lots of fire.
Point being, it takes a lot of coordination, situational awareness and teamwork in order to down the more difficult bosses. Mimiron was, when Ulduar was the final raid in WoW, one of the hardest bosses in game. My guild would be in vent while raiding and we'd be warning each other when a rocket launches or when Mimiron was doing his shockblast or other abilities. Tanks would be calling out for stronger heals during Plasma Punch and DPS would be calling out when they needed to use the magnetic core to bring the Aerial Command Unit to the ground. Strategy would be discussed, failed attempts would be analyzed and we'd be constantly working out how to perform better next time so we can get a kill.
Its teamwork against a difficult objective, with strangers. People whom I've never met in real life, working together for a common goal. But as an officer, it is my job (if you will) to help keep all these people working together, and try to get the guild to fit their needs as best as possible.
And yet there is a serious darkside to this, one that is illustrated by WoW, but also very common on the internet wherever anyone can hide behind a shield of anonymity. On Trade Chat one morning, I was discussing something with another character in the game, when a third character popped up and called me things like 'baddie' and flamed me because I hadn't been past Professor Putricide (7th boss of 12 in ICC and more difficult that Mimiron) at the time. It was a display of immaturity and foolishness and he could get away with it easily because I don't know who he is. He'll suffer no real life repercussions for that, his real life reputation remains untouched and heck, he might be a nice guy in real life, so long as he has a reputation to maintain.
Which frightens me.
This isn't a problem unique with WoW, it is found on every on-line venue, from other multiplayer games to the Fark.com forums to 4chan (which is infamous for their internet hijinks and complete lack of manners, entirely because there is no accoutability.) It makes me wonder then, if people are only decent towards other people because they have a reputation to maintain. Is there any true honesty or is it all play acting? Remove our faces and our real names, and our true personalities emerge.
Not everyone acts like a jerk without a name and a face, but a large number do. And maybe they are just jerks. It is still however, a frightening concept to think that everything we do is simply an act to appease our fellow man.
"We haven't much time, friends! You're going to help me test out my latest and greatest creation. Now, before you change your minds, remember, that you kind of owe it to me after the mess you made with the XT-002!" -Mimiron at the start of Phase 1 (XT-002 is a huge robot and is the fourth boss in Ulduar)
J Kuhl Signing Off
Monday, June 07, 2010
So I Took a Gander at Conservapedia . . .
For anyone who doesn't know, Conservatives have claimed that Wikipedia has a well known liberal bias (Conservapedia) and in response, rather than making an objective and unbiased wiki, made Conservapedia.
This leads to the creation of the most ridiculous, and biased wiki on the net.
Just look at some of this:
On Liberals: "A liberal (also leftist) is someone who rejects logical and biblical standards, often for self-centered reasons. There are no coherent liberal standards; often a liberal is merely someone who craves attention, and who uses many words to say nothing" (Conservapedia)
Because we all know that biblical standards lead to logical standards right? Heck no. Biblical standards lead to idiots like Fred Phelps spreading hate, or creationists spreading lies. Biblical standards do not lead to logic, but science and logic does. And what do they always claim goes against the bible? Science, with its liberal logic and liberal facts.
On Obama: "Barack Hussein Obama II (birth name Barry Soetoro, allegedly born in Honolulu August 4, 1961 . . ."
I chuckled at the word "allegedly." Allegedly, this entry was written by a frothing Birther tea party activist.
"As President, Obama approved offshore oil drilling including the Gulf of Mexico"
Sure, before the oil spill, the Conservatives were like "DRILL DRILL DRILL" and now that its over, they act like they never supported it and that Obama was an evil guy who hates the environment and allowed the BP spill to happen.
Whaaaat? O.o
"Obama depends completely on reading from teleprompters when he talks, even in an elementary school"
As did most other presidents, including the Most Holy Republican Messiah, Ronald Reagan.
Woops, the one below is George H. Bush, but that's alright.
And I'll throw in George Bush for giggles:
"However, it is also true that Barack Obama is an evolutionist. Barack Obama told the York Daily Record that "I believe in evolution..."."
I freaking hope so
On Evolution:"The fossil record is often used as evidence in the creation versus evolution controversy. The fossil record does not support the theory of evolution and is one of the flaws in the theory of evolution."
What? Oh you mean all those transitional fossils we have? These facts must have a liberal bias.
"There seems to be a backlash against the strong-arm tactics that have been used in recent years to censor and intimidate scientists, teachers, and students who raise criticisms of Darwin.”"
As opposed to the Creationist lies that are used to try to wedge intelligent design into a biology class?
And one more thing about Evolution. On their page on Barack Obama, I guess they think he's a social darwinist since they have a little paragraph on that. And next to that paragraph, a picture of Charles Darwin, who never ever argued for social darwinism . . .
I don't want to turn this post into another Evolution vsDeluded Fantasyland Beliefs Creationism post however, so I'll move on.
I just don't get why, if Wikipedia has such a liberal bias, they make a wiki with such a conservative bias? How about making a wiki with no bias?
What a bunch of garbage anyways
J Kuhl Signing Off
This leads to the creation of the most ridiculous, and biased wiki on the net.
Just look at some of this:
On Liberals: "A liberal (also leftist) is someone who rejects logical and biblical standards, often for self-centered reasons. There are no coherent liberal standards; often a liberal is merely someone who craves attention, and who uses many words to say nothing" (Conservapedia)
Because we all know that biblical standards lead to logical standards right? Heck no. Biblical standards lead to idiots like Fred Phelps spreading hate, or creationists spreading lies. Biblical standards do not lead to logic, but science and logic does. And what do they always claim goes against the bible? Science, with its liberal logic and liberal facts.
On Obama: "Barack Hussein Obama II (birth name Barry Soetoro, allegedly born in Honolulu August 4, 1961 . . ."
I chuckled at the word "allegedly." Allegedly, this entry was written by a frothing Birther tea party activist.
"As President, Obama approved offshore oil drilling including the Gulf of Mexico"
Sure, before the oil spill, the Conservatives were like "DRILL DRILL DRILL" and now that its over, they act like they never supported it and that Obama was an evil guy who hates the environment and allowed the BP spill to happen.
Whaaaat? O.o
"Obama depends completely on reading from teleprompters when he talks, even in an elementary school"
As did most other presidents, including the Most Holy Republican Messiah, Ronald Reagan.
Woops, the one below is George H. Bush, but that's alright.
And I'll throw in George Bush for giggles:
"However, it is also true that Barack Obama is an evolutionist. Barack Obama told the York Daily Record that "I believe in evolution..."."
I freaking hope so
On Evolution:"The fossil record is often used as evidence in the creation versus evolution controversy. The fossil record does not support the theory of evolution and is one of the flaws in the theory of evolution."
What? Oh you mean all those transitional fossils we have? These facts must have a liberal bias.
"There seems to be a backlash against the strong-arm tactics that have been used in recent years to censor and intimidate scientists, teachers, and students who raise criticisms of Darwin.”"
As opposed to the Creationist lies that are used to try to wedge intelligent design into a biology class?
And one more thing about Evolution. On their page on Barack Obama, I guess they think he's a social darwinist since they have a little paragraph on that. And next to that paragraph, a picture of Charles Darwin, who never ever argued for social darwinism . . .
I don't want to turn this post into another Evolution vs
I just don't get why, if Wikipedia has such a liberal bias, they make a wiki with such a conservative bias? How about making a wiki with no bias?
What a bunch of garbage anyways
J Kuhl Signing Off
Thursday, June 03, 2010
Oh Boy, Mrs. Palin Does It Again
According to talking head (because that's all she is now) Sarah Palin, the off shore drilling oil spill isn't BP's fault, but the fault of, get this, environmentalists. She argues that if the environmentalists had let us drill in ANWR, we wouldn't need to drill in the Gulf and thus this disaster would have never taken place.
Its just jaw dropping how . . . I hate to say this, but how stupid this is. If environmentalists had their way, we wouldn't even be drilling in the gulf. We'd be using alternative energies now (which we have the technology) and no longer dependent on foreign oil or offshore oil. Its stupid to blame environmentalists on a disaster caused by corporate greed and lax regulations.
I really hope that the Republicans run Sarah Palin in 2012, that'll be the comedic event of the century.
Further more, not only is it a stupid argument, but also a lie. Here are several clips where Palin advocates offshore drilling, and calls it safe.
Please, someone, make her go away. She's not only an embarrassment to republicans but to Americans in general. I mean, does she even realize that she's become such a laughing stock?
Drill baby drill.
J Kuhl Signing Off
Its just jaw dropping how . . . I hate to say this, but how stupid this is. If environmentalists had their way, we wouldn't even be drilling in the gulf. We'd be using alternative energies now (which we have the technology) and no longer dependent on foreign oil or offshore oil. Its stupid to blame environmentalists on a disaster caused by corporate greed and lax regulations.
I really hope that the Republicans run Sarah Palin in 2012, that'll be the comedic event of the century.
Further more, not only is it a stupid argument, but also a lie. Here are several clips where Palin advocates offshore drilling, and calls it safe.
Please, someone, make her go away. She's not only an embarrassment to republicans but to Americans in general. I mean, does she even realize that she's become such a laughing stock?
Drill baby drill.
J Kuhl Signing Off
Why We Make Fun of Muslims
Draw Mohammed Day was a few weeks ago, but it brought up an interesting controversy amongst those of us here in Western civilization as to why we simply don't respect the wishes of the muslims and not depict Mohammed in drawings.
The answer is simple: To make a point and that point is, death threats and violence will not intimidate us. If we were to simply stop drawing pictures and cartoons, they'd realize that their violent protesting causes us to react in their favor and they'll do it more. And it leads to a slippery slope. If we give in to their demands and stop drawing pictures, then they'll get violent when we offend them in some other way. And this can continue until in our fear of retribution or fear of offense, we inadvertently strip away the right to freedom of speech.
No.
The more they protest, the more violence and hate they spew, the more we will lampoon their backwards religion and the more silly pictures of Mohammed we'll draw. Is it childish? Perhaps, but consider this: When a child starts screaming in a grocery store because his mother didn't buy him cookies, is she going to buy him cookies? Of course not! She'll tell him to shut up and threaten him with more punishment if he doesn't behave. Its the same concept here. Rather than rewarding their bad behavior, we punish them by continuing to do that which they are throwing a tantrum about.
Ironically, if they want us to stop drawing pictures of Mohammed, if they want us to stop making fun of their religion, then they need to stop reacting so violently to criticism.
Furthermore, this simply goes to illustrate how ridiculous Islam is. Violence over a cartoon? Over a drawing of Mohammed? Banning Facebook and Youtube because these sites were used to dare to criticize Islam? Islam isn't special. Islam, like any other religion, has NO right to try to squash freedom of speech. If they don't like it, tough. No religion is immune to criticism. No religion may deny free speech.
So lets continue to lampoon Islam until they figure it out. Lets teach them how to be adults. If they want us to stop treating them like kids, if they want us to take them seriously, maybe they should learn to be adults and learn to be civil. Maybe once they realize that violence is not the answer to the world's problems, the negative attention directed to Islam would turn elsewhere.
I don't see this happening any time soon though.
J Kuhl Signing Off
The answer is simple: To make a point and that point is, death threats and violence will not intimidate us. If we were to simply stop drawing pictures and cartoons, they'd realize that their violent protesting causes us to react in their favor and they'll do it more. And it leads to a slippery slope. If we give in to their demands and stop drawing pictures, then they'll get violent when we offend them in some other way. And this can continue until in our fear of retribution or fear of offense, we inadvertently strip away the right to freedom of speech.
No.
The more they protest, the more violence and hate they spew, the more we will lampoon their backwards religion and the more silly pictures of Mohammed we'll draw. Is it childish? Perhaps, but consider this: When a child starts screaming in a grocery store because his mother didn't buy him cookies, is she going to buy him cookies? Of course not! She'll tell him to shut up and threaten him with more punishment if he doesn't behave. Its the same concept here. Rather than rewarding their bad behavior, we punish them by continuing to do that which they are throwing a tantrum about.
Ironically, if they want us to stop drawing pictures of Mohammed, if they want us to stop making fun of their religion, then they need to stop reacting so violently to criticism.
Furthermore, this simply goes to illustrate how ridiculous Islam is. Violence over a cartoon? Over a drawing of Mohammed? Banning Facebook and Youtube because these sites were used to dare to criticize Islam? Islam isn't special. Islam, like any other religion, has NO right to try to squash freedom of speech. If they don't like it, tough. No religion is immune to criticism. No religion may deny free speech.
So lets continue to lampoon Islam until they figure it out. Lets teach them how to be adults. If they want us to stop treating them like kids, if they want us to take them seriously, maybe they should learn to be adults and learn to be civil. Maybe once they realize that violence is not the answer to the world's problems, the negative attention directed to Islam would turn elsewhere.
I don't see this happening any time soon though.
J Kuhl Signing Off
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