We’ve got our fair share of assholes in Michigan, some might argue I’m one of them, but at least I’m not guilty of spoiling Halloween for kids to promote my choice of political candidate:

A Grosse Pointe Farms woman has doled out political tricks by refusing Halloween treats to children whose parents support Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama.

Shirley Nagel passed out candy Friday — but only to those who shared her support for Republican presidential candidate John McCain and running mate Sarah Palin.

Fox 2 News says a sign posted outside Nagel’s house, about 12 miles west of Detroit, served notice to all trick-or-treaters. It read: “No handouts for Obama supporters, liars, tricksters or kids of supporters.“

Nagel tells WJBK-TV that “Obama’s scary.“ When asked about children who’d been turned away empty-handed and crying, she said: “Oh well. Everybody has a choice.“

And here’s the spot from FOX 2 News:

To put it bluntly, Shirley Nagel is a douche bag. To even think of asking kids what political stance their parents have before handing out candy is raising the art of douche baggery to new and unprecedented heights. What the fuck is wrong with her? Does she seriously think that by making their kids cry that suddenly Obama supporters will see the light and switch their votes to McCain? Someone get that woman a copy of How to Win Friends and Influence People stat!

Vote McCain or your kids will NEVER GET ANY HALLOWEEN CANDY AGAIN!

So I heard from my new friend again. She’s decided to take a new tact:

Glad to be of assistance. Someone needs to get your sorry ass through a day…considering you are much too inept to make it on your own. Only the most pathetic losers with no lives have blogs where they spend their entire day shitting on those who actually make something of their lives.
But please, by all means, fuck my memory straight in the ass b/c you can’t hurt me. I’m completely impervious to your ranting. However, I hope you will note this and it doesn’t even matter if you remember it, b/c when it happens, you will have full recall and that is all the gratification I need.
Some time down the road, in the not too distant future, my dear non-friend, you will be diagnosed with a terminal illness that will have no chance of recovery. You will find out that you have it when you go to the doctor after being sick for a very long time. It will start out as a cold and just never go away. After dealing with it for months you will notice you have lost a significant amount of weight and can’t hold down food. You’ll be shitting your brains out and puking your guts up. Wonderful description, eh? Sick of it all you will finally go to the doc and be told your diagnosis. Oh well…poor Les.
You will eventually, after a very long time of being miserably sick, die a rotting mess of a corpse. And very few, if any, will mourn your passing. This is not a voodoo curse. Laugh all you want, but I promise you it will happen exactly that way. And your atheist ass will be wondering as you lay in your bed waiting to die…“How could that bitch be so right?!“ Well, Les, I have a secret to tell you…I’m able to see the future sometimes. And I saw yours before I ever knew what an asshole you were. Sometimes I get a payback when I don’t even realize that one is deserved!
So, in a few years, when you’ve long forgotten my sweet little ass, you will suddenly remember me as you wait to die. And I will also have a sudden memory of your sorry ass and I’ll be grinning ear to ear when you take your last croak of a breath!
Paybacks are a bitch, but, hey, somebody needs to have something good come from this life.

Be seeing ya around, bud! 

I didn’t bother to clean up her formatting this time. As far as psychic predictions go this one is pretty weak. Here’s my reply:

What? You can’t even manage to name what horrible disease will be my undoing? Surely you can do better than that. I’d expect you’d at least be able to give a reasonable time frame rather than the astoundingly vague “sometime down the road, in the not too distant future” but “in a few years after I’ve forgotten you.“ No word on what hospital it’ll be? No word on what state I’m living in at the time? Some psychic you are. For the record I have little doubt that I’ll die within the next 40 years. Cancer runs in my family and few of us make it through our 70’s. It’s not anything I worry about as it’s knowledge I’ve lived with for a long time. Already I’ve made a better prediction than you have. But you go ahead and dream your little fantasy if it makes you feel better. This email just adds more fuel to the blog. At least you didn’t say you were going to pray for me like so many others. That at least makes you a refreshing change of pace. Les

Got the following email last night for no apparent reason:

From:
Subject: water powered car

I just have to say something here and you will most likely call it bullshit, but I know what I am saying is true. Back in 1979 a young man came to my door trying to get me to buy his plans for a carburetor that would guarantee me 400 miles to the gallon. He was going house to house in order to get enough orders to have the money to get his idea patented. I was 19 at the time and he was about 22, if I remember correctly.

I was newly married and my new husband was an abuser - he was great until our wedding day - so I was too afraid to go ahead and buy his plans. But I did get his phone number b/c I was already thinking about getting divorced and thought I would buy them after I got divorced.

Several people in our neighborhood bought his plans and a couple of them actually followed through and it really did work. But that’s not why I’m writing to you. As I said, I kept the guys number and called him about a month later to get more info. His mom answered and was very distraught. She said he had been contacted by some men who represented “a big oil company” a few days after he had applied to get his idea patented. They showed up at their house and offered the young man 5 million dollars to sell his idea. He told them he’d have to think about it and spoke to his dad about it that night. His dad told him if they were offering that much that meant the boy could get much more if he just toughed it out and got the patent himself.

That’s when he started going door to door and his dad was also trying to get a loan for him. About a week after he had been at my house he went missing. He just flat out disappeared. And interestingly, those people never tried to contact him again as far as his parents knew. He was never found.

I experienced this myself so I know it is not a made up story. I believe the oil company had the boy killed b/c he was going to cost them a lot of money if his idea ever went anywhere. The two guys in our neighborhood never let anyone else know that they had his plans b/c they were too afraid after hearing the kid went missing.

There are a great many wonderful ideas that could have benefited the entire world that never became a reality b/c someone else wanted to keep it a secret. Greed is rampant everywhere. So don’t fool yourself into thinking that all things are a scam. Some are definitely not.

Most Sincerely,

Angel Ballard

“Be open to the changes life offers you ~ then embrace them with an open heart, mind and soul.“

It’s yet another variation on the miraculous carburetor myth only this time the author claims to have first hand experience with it.  The myth has been around for decades and sometimes the myth claims this wonderful device burns water and sometimes it’s just a very efficient carburetor.  There are still people out there that claim to sell devices to run your car on water today. I wonder why they haven’t been knocked off by the Big Evil Oil Companies yet? As an added bonus that last website also includes 9/11-Was-An-Inside-Job conspiracy and Free-Energy-Plans scams to go along with the Water-Powered-Car scam.

I wasn’t sure what Angel’s intent was in sending me the email. On the face of it she appeared to just be trying to tell me that I was too skeptical, but there was also the chance that she was fishing to see if I was interested in this miracle of hers. So I sent the following reply:

You’re right, Angel, your story is bullshit. If I had a dime for every time someone told me about a magical carburetor that got ridiculous mileage I’d be a rich man by now. So what’s your angle? Are you fishing to see if I’d profess an interest so you could claim to have one of these wonderful devices you’d be willing to sell me cheap? Or do you just like lying to random strangers? You’ll have to do better than that if you want any hope of keeping my interest. Les

It generated the following response:

Nope…no ulterior motive…you’re just a stupid, evil bastard with not one brain cell to piss on. Have a beautiful day fuckwad!

So she’s either an idiot or I didn’t take the bait. Or both. Hard to say either way.

Still, as I said in my last reply to her, it makes for a great entry in the Conversations with a Dumbass series.

Remember back at the end of September when I wrote about the mediums predicting aliens would land in Alabama today and help us “break away from the dark forces? Well the day is half over and I haven’t heard anything on the news yet. Man I hope they don’t stand us up like the last few times they told various psychics they were coming.

So far there’s no update on “Blossom Goodchild’s” blog other than a post on the 12th where she said she was going to remove all the negative comments from her site:

To remove (when time allows) all comments that do not come from LIGHT and LOVE. Which is what my blog is SUPPOSED to be about. Sadly, it has turned into a space that is packed full of religious arguments, deeply offensive swearing, bible fanatics claiming me to be the devil and much much more. I give thanks to those who are coming from the place in their heart that spreads only kindness and understanding.

TRULY guys … I had manifested a beautiful world to live in surrounded by those who come only from LOVE in their heart. My soul has been battered and bruised to find hatred and malice inside the hearts of so many. And to those who feel the need to go on and on arguing and sending such negativity to the world I have this to say in all LOVE … … get yourselves a life! A life that makes YOU happy what ever form that may take for CLEARLY, many of you are deeply wounded and hurt.

She’s gotta be taking it from both barrels with not only skeptics giving her a hard time, but the Bible fanatics at is as well. Still I’ll be interested to see what she has to say about the (lack of) events today when she finally gets around to writing about it. Meanwhile it’s hard to say whether or not Mike Quinsey has written anything new as the website he posts to is pretty much impossible to navigate. 

Still I suppose it’s possible that aliens could land before the day is out so keep an eye out. That goes double for all you folks in Alabama.

Michigan has its fair share of crazy people. Take for example this guy:

FERNDALE, Mich.—Ferndale police said an adult education student tossed liquid on a teacher because he believed she was a witch who needed to be purified.

Police said 20-year-old Darin Najor of Ferndale threatened the teacher last month at Taft Education Center a day after confronting her about Arthur Miller’s “The Crucible,“ which focuses on the Salem Witch Trials.

Detective Ken Denmark told The Daily Tribune of Royal Oak that Najor says he was trying to purify the teacher with holy water. Denmark said Najor also had a lighter and wanted to, in his words, “burn the witch.“

Is it wrong that the first thing that comes to my mind is the witch trial from Monty Python and the Holy Grail?

Peasant 1: A witch! We have found a witch! Can we burn her? Belvedere: How do you know that she is a witch? Peasant 2: Because she looks like one! Witch: I am not a witch! I am not a witch! They dressed me up like this, and this is not my nose it is a false one! [Belvedere pulls off the false nose and opens his helmet] Peasant 1: Well, we did do the nose. And the hat. Peasant 2: She has a wart. Belvedere: Why do you think that she is a witch? Peasant 2: Well, she turned me into a newt. [Belvedere gives him a disbelieving look] Belvedere: A newt? [Silence] Peasant 2: Well I got better. Peasant 3: Burn her anyway!

This is Compassionate Conservatism in action: State Rep. John LaBruzzo, a Republican, has come up with a fool proof plan to fight poverty. He feels the problem is that poor people are having more kids than rich people. So he wants to offer poor people $1,000 to be sterilized so they won’t increase the population of poor people and he wants to include financial incentives for rich people to have more kids so there’s more rich people.

LaBruzzo: Sterilization plan fights poverty- NOLA.com

LaBruzzo said he worries that people receiving government aid such as food stamps and publicly subsidized housing are reproducing at a faster rate than more affluent, better-educated people who presumably pay more tax revenue to the government. He said he is gathering statistics now.

“What I’m really studying is any and all possibilities that we can reduce the number of people that are going from generational welfare to generational welfare,“ he said.

He said his program would be voluntary. It could involve tubal ligation, encouraging other forms of birth control or, to avoid charges of gender discrimination, vasectomies for men.

It also could include tax incentives for college-educated, higher-income people to have more children, he said.

[...]  LaBruzzo said he opposes abortion and paying people to have abortions. He described a sterilization program as providing poor people with better opportunities to avoid welfare, because they would have fewer children to feed and clothe.

He acknowledged his idea might be a difficult sell politically.

“I don’t know if it’s a viable option,“ LaBruzzo said. “Of course people are going to get excited about it. Maybe we’ll start a debate on it.“

Well you’ve certainly managed to do that much. Critics of the plan are already calling it “racist, sexist, unethical and immoral” which is why it’ll probably appeal to a lot of other Republicans, but so far it’s just an idea he’s kicking around. His first plan was to pay poor people to be shot in the head, on a purely voluntary basis of course, but the cost of ammunition was so high that it seemed impractical given the current state of the economy. That and there were surprisingly few poor people who were desperate enough for the money to allow themselves to be shot. Encouraging them to get sterilized seemed a little easier to pull off in comparison.

I often rant about the stupidity of Republicans when it comes to issues of global warming, but I would be seriously remiss if I didn’t point out when Democrats are stupid about it as well. There’s been a lot of news lately on Rep. Nancy Pelosi’s potential conflict of interest in regards to her position as Speaker of the House and the fact that she’s investing in a company that just so happens to be involved in an area of energy production that she’s been promoting in her clean energy policies. Legal experts seem to think that she’s not yet crossed the line into true conflict of interest territory, but that hasn’t stopped her critics from jumping all over her for it.

During a recent interview with Tom Brokaw she was asked about the investment and it was during her attempt to defend it that she made a pretty stupid statement (emphasis mine):

MR. BROKAW:  Oh, it’s what, between 100 and $200,000.

REP. PELOSI:  No, no, it was between 50 and $100,000, and it’s part of an, you know, entrepreneurial package.  This is the package we sign up for, this is what they invest in.  But that’s not the point.  I’m, I’m, I’m investing in something I believe in.  I believe in natural gas as a clean, cheap alternative to fossil fuels.

Nancy, natural gas

is

a fossil fuel. True as it may be that a transition away from fossil fuels may benefit from a move towards the use of natural gas while we further develop the true alternative energies, that doesn’t make saying it isn’t a fossil fuel true. I suppose I’m picking nits here, but I’d feel a lot more confident in our leader’s ability to come up with a reasonable and achievable alternative energy plan if they actually know what is and isn’t a fossil fuel.

As exciting as the prospect of the first black man to be elected President is, it would be a mistake to think it’s a sign that violent racism is dead. Proof of that comes in a news report about four bigots who were arrested in Denver. They’re being investigated under suspicion of planning to shoot Obama:

Maass reported earlier Monday that one of the suspects told authorities they were “going to shoot Obama from a high vantage point using a ... rifle ... sighted at 750 yards.“

Law enforcement sources told Maass that one of the suspects “was directly asked if they had come to Denver to kill Obama. He responded in the affirmative.“

The story began emerging Sunday morning when Aurora police arrested Tharin Gartrell, 28. He was driving a rented pickup truck in an erratic manner, according to sources.

Sources told CBS4 police found two high-powered, scoped rifles in the car along with camouflage clothing, walkie-talkies, wigs, a bulletproof vest, a spotting scope, licenses in the names of other people and 44 grams of methamphetamine. One of the rifles is listed as stolen from Kansas.

[...] Nathan Johnson, 32, an associate of Gartrell and Adolph, was also arrested Sunday morning. He told authorities that the two men had “planned to kill Barack Obama at his acceptance speech.“

“He don’t belong in political office. Blacks don’t belong in political office. He ought to be shot,“ Johnson told Maass.

“Do you think they were really plotting to kill Obama?“ Maass asked.

“I don’t want to say yes. I don’t want to say no,“ he said.

The mugshots of two of the suspects (above left) don’t do anything to dispel the “redneck idiot bigot” stereotype at all. Nathan Johnson in particular, on the right in that pic, looks like the result of too much inbreeding. The good news is these yahoos are off the street and any threat they may have posed appears to be over and done.

The next question is: Is there anyone else out there with similar goals?

WARNING! THE FOLLOWING VIDEO HAS BEEN DETERMINED TO BE A HAZARD TO YOUR I.Q. BY THE U.S. SURGEON GENERAL. LONG TERM EXPOSURE TO STUPIDITY OF THIS MAGNITUDE CAN RESULT IN PERMANENT BRAIN DAMAGE AND A TENDENCY TO VOTE REPUBLICAN. FOR YOUR OWN PROTECTION IT IS RECOMMENDED THAT YOU VIEW THIS VIDEO IN SMALL CHUNKS INTERSPERSED WITH SEVERAL LENGTHY BREAKS TO ALLOW YOUR SYNAPSES TIME TO RECOVER. PERHAPS YOU SHOULD KEEP A COPY OF CARL SAGAN’S DEMON HAUNTED WORLD OR SOME OTHER FORM OF INTELLECTUALLY UPLIFTING READING MATERIAL ON HAND TO HELP COUNTER THE STUNNING LACK OF INTELLIGENCE FOUND IN THE FOLLOWING VIDEO CLIP.

YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED:

The stupid! IT BURNS!

Found via God is for Suckers.

How do you define chutzpah? Here’s a perfect example:

PHILADELPHIA - The parents charged in the starvation death of their bedridden daughter have sued the city, alleging that dangerous and reckless actions by several municipal employees and contract workers contributed to the girl’s death.

The lawsuit outraged prosecutors, who have charged Andrea Kelly, 39, with murder in the death of 14-year-old Danieal Kelly, who had cerebral palsy and died two years ago from malnutrition and maggot-infested bedsores.

[...] The wrongful death suit, filed earlier this month, seeks reimbursement for medical bills, funeral costs and other expenses.

Lawyers said they filed the suit to protect the interests of the victim’s siblings.

“The parents are not seeking any money from this,“ attorney Brian Mildenberg said. “The potential beneficiaries are the brothers and sisters and the parents, but the parents may be disqualified by a conviction or a civil finding of abandonment.“

Prosecutors were angered.

“I think it’s an obscenity. I cannot imagine that people in that situation who did what they did to their own daughter are attempting to profit from it,“ Assistant District Attorney Ed McCann, head of the city’s homicide unit, told the Philadelphia Daily News.

The sad part is that they may have a valid complaint as two city caseworkers assigned to the family have been fired and criminally charged as a result of the death. The news item itself is very short so it’s hard to discern much about it, but it appears that simple apathy instead of religious delusion was responsible for a child’s death this time around.

In yet another example of why science literacy is important we’re proud to present to you: Dumbass woman who thinks there’s something wrong with her water because she can see a rainbow in the spray from her sprinkler…

The video was created last summer and is painful to listen to as the woman says things like “this cannot be natural” and “its time we asked what the hel is going on.“

Found via Skepchick.org.

This is just a weird story all the way around. Edward “Eddie” Davidson is consider one of the “Spam Kings” and he was finally brought up on charges, convicted, and sentenced to 21 months (less than two years) in jail and ordered to pay $714,139 in restitution to the IRS (compare that to the estimated $3.5 million he earned between 2003 and 2006). Apparently that was too hard a punishment for Mr. Davidson as he managed to plan an escape with the help of his wife which then took a deadly turn:

A teenage girl was shot in the neck and a baby was found unhurt in a car seat inside the vehicle where the three bodies were found, Arapahoe County undersheriff Mark Campbell said. The relationship between the girl, baby and the escaped convict wasn’t immediately clear.

The bodies of “Spam King” Edward “Eddie” Davidson, his wife, and 3-year-old daughter were found in an SUV parked in a farmhouse driveway in a rural part of Bennett, about 25 miles east of Denver. Authorities said Davidson was the apparent gunman.

“What a nightmare, and such a coward,“ U.S. Attorney Troy Eid said. “Davidson imposed the ‘death penalty’ on family members for his own crime.“

It just doesn’t make any sense at all. The jail time was trivial and it was in a minor security prison, the restitution doesn’t come close to what he supposedly earned from his spamming activities, and he reportedly had cash stashed away in other accounts. Cool your jets for a few months, get our early on good behavior, and start investing some of that cash. Why the hell did he feel the need to shoot anybody?

I guess being the Spam King makes you a little nuts.

The Wall Street Journal has always been a conservative rag and I expected to get even more so once it was bought out by Rupert Murdoch, but I didn’t expect him to start hiring editorial writers that are smoking crack:

There seems to me no question that the Batman film “The Dark Knight,“ currently breaking every box office record in history, is at some level a paean of praise to the fortitude and moral courage that has been shown by George W. Bush in this time of terror and war. Like W, Batman is vilified and despised for confronting terrorists in the only terms they understand. Like W, Batman sometimes has to push the boundaries of civil rights to deal with an emergency, certain that he will re-establish those boundaries when the emergency is past.

And like W, Batman understands that there is no moral equivalence between a free society—in which people sometimes make the wrong choices—and a criminal sect bent on destruction. The former must be cherished even in its moments of folly; the latter must be hounded to the gates of Hell.

“The Dark Knight,“ then, is a conservative movie about the war on terror. And like another such film, last year’s “300,“ “The Dark Knight” is making a fortune depicting the values and necessities that the Bush administration cannot seem to articulate for beans.

Give me a fucking break. Not being content with ruining every geek’s image of Batman by putting President Bush behind the mask, our esteemed author even manages to work in a Jesus reference:

Doing what’s right is hard, and speaking the truth is dangerous. Many have been abhorred for it, some killed, one crucified.

Because, you see, sometimes you gotta do wrong to protect what’s right. At least that what he appears to be saying:

The true complexity arises when we must defend these values in a world that does not universally embrace them—when we reach the place where we must be intolerant in order to defend tolerance, or unkind in order to defend kindness, or hateful in order to defend what we love.

When heroes arise who take on those difficult duties themselves, it is tempting for the rest of us to turn our backs on them, to vilify them in order to protect our own appearance of righteousness. We prosecute and execrate the violent soldier or the cruel interrogator in order to parade ourselves as paragons of the peaceful values they preserve. As Gary Oldman’s Commissioner Gordon says of the hated and hunted Batman, “He has to run away—because we have to chase him.“

That’s real moral complexity. And when our artistic community is ready to show that sometimes men must kill in order to preserve life; that sometimes they must violate their values in order to maintain those values; and that while movie stars may strut in the bright light of our adulation for pretending to be heroes, true heroes often must slink in the shadows, slump-shouldered and despised—then and only then will we be able to pay President Bush his due and make good and true films about the war on terror.

So it’s not that we want to lock all you furriners up indefinitely and torture you—we honestly hate having to do that—but we’re at that place where such actions are necessary in order to preserve your freedom and not torture you in the future. Or something. It’s hard to tell because I don’t smoke crack myself.

In what is yet another example of the sort of thing I wouldn’t have thought people would have to be told not to do comes the following news story out of West Virginia:

The West Virginia Poison Center reports that so far this year four people have been treated for drinking the refillable liquid that fuels the tropical-themed torches, popular as patio décor and a favorite for backyard parties.

The yellowish oil frequently is left sitting out and mistaken for a beverage, said Dr. Elizabeth Scharman, director of the poison center.

“People were at a picnic and thought it was apple juice and swallowed it,“ Scharman said of one call the center received this year.

Folks, don’t drink the Tiki Torch fuel. It’ll make you sick and ruin your BBQ. Granted a couple of these incidents were children who probably don’t know any better, though I don’t recall my parents ever having to teach me not to drink the stuff, but if they’re sufficiently young then I can understand. I don’t understand the adults who are doing this.

And while you’re at it, don’t drink the fluid in those damn glow sticks either. Apparently a shit load of you people have been doing that as well:

[M]ore than 193 people in the state—many of them children—reported ingesting glow products, the liquid used to light children’s toys and the necklaces and bracelets that are sold at many fairs, festivals and fireworks displays.

That number rose from 143 glow-related calls in 2006, according to data from the poison center’s annual reports.

[...] “They used to be novelty items,“ she said. “Now you can go into any store around the holidays and buy them.“

Many makers of glow products say the materials are non-toxic. Typically, they are made from a combination of hydrogen peroxide, a dye and various chemicals that cause the glow.

The West Virginia Poison Center receives most of its calls about glow products from worried parents whose toddlers have chewed through the plastic and ingested the liquid inside.

Even some pet owners have called the poison center after animals turned the glow sticks or jewelry into chew toys.

Which reminds us to remind you not to give glow sticks to toddlers or your pets. Fortunately for the clueless people who are drinking their glow sticks the amount of fluid involved probably means they won’t die from it, but it will burn your mouth and hopefully teach you to be careful of what you put into it.

Seriously, 193 people in West Virginia alone tried to drink those things? Makes some of the jokes about that state seem a little more believable…