You read it right folks! Apparently gravity has some things wrong with it. When surfing the internet I came upon this wonderful gem: http://www.christianforums.com/t3070857-the-fallacies-of-gravity.html

Of note was this: number 3. on earth we see things that defy “gravity” on a daily basis. birds and airplanes for example. are you going to tell me that the gravity of the sun is strong enough to keep PLUTo in orbit but not an airplane or a little bird??????

It amazes me that some people can even think like this…or that they dont think at all. They even mess up a simple scientific fact like gravity. My sister understood gravity when she was 7 and its not like you dont learn this stuff in school. What could be going through these peoples heads to make them see gravity as a false concept? All this adds up to a new level of stupid. Thankefully there seem to be people on there who know what they are talking about. They gave Newtons formula and many other objects of proof that apply to gravity.

However what is also bothersome is that this goes on for 27 pages, 27 PAGES! How long should it take for a regular, clear thinking person to understand gravity? A few seconds as they can test it and see the results. Well it looks as though some people need 27 pages to get educated and to still not accept the fact of gravity. Its interesting to note that this same person or persons are the same ones (in some cases) who believe in god/Jesus and a savior just for them!

Hell hath no fury like a Pastor’s wife scorned:

Police say a church service had just begun when Estes pulled a gun on her husband, preacher Larry Estes, about 7 p.m. According to congregation members, she was upset over messages Larry Estes allegedly exchanged with a youth group member and she demanded he admit infidelity.

So much for turning the other cheek.

Looks like Mel Gibson’s drunken rant about Jews and how he owns Malibu is already having an impact. ABC just announced they’re canceling a planned miniseries about the Holocaust Mel’s production company was supposed to make for them:

The incident has raised questions about the future of projects Gibson and his Icon Productions company are working on, like the ABC television miniseries based on a memoir about a Dutch Jew during World War II, the newspaper said.

An ABC representative told the paper, without elaborating, it has been two years and the network still has not seen a script, so the project is being pulled.

Well, that was very politic of them. They’re not canceling it because Mel has revealed his bigotry towards Jews, but because they’ve not seen a script. Very nicely played, Sugartits.

It’s not that I’m at all surprised that a couple of male camp counselors at a Christian summer camp have been accused of “swinging naked from the rafters” and forcing 10 boys in their charge to play sexually explicit games such as “Naked Mafia” which reportedly involved “inappropriate touching.” It’s also not that I’m surprised the campers had “naked time” in the cabins. What surprises me about the Tribune Democrat news item about the incident is the way the executive director of the camp downplays the whole thing:

“They’re really some quality guys who made some very poor decisions, and unfortunately didn’t discern what was appropriate with regard to these 10 boys,” said Kent Biery, executive director at Summer’s Best Two Weeks.

“The bottom line is we can’t have that here,” he said.

“The purpose of Summer’s Best Two Weeks is to form young leaders who make good decisions. Unfortunately, in something like this, you convey something other than that goal. This will be addressed.”

I literally stared at those paragraphs and blinked for a couple of moments as my brain argued with itself over it. He couldn’t possibly be making an attempt at a “Oppsie! Our bad! It won’t happen again!” type of statement, could he? He’s not trying to play this off as a harmless summer camp prank, is he? He couldn’t possibly be that stupid, could he? And then I remembered:

Not stupid. Just reality immune like so many other True Believers™.

Found via my Pretend Internet Girlfriend.

It seems U.S. Sen. Conrad Burns of Montana wasn’t too happy with the efforts of the Augusta Hot Shots, firefighters who had come to battle the wildfires that were consuming a good portion of his state. Last Sunday while waiting at an airport he got into an “altercation” with the firefighters in which he accused them of doing a poor job of fighting the 92,000-acre blaze:

Rosenthal’s original report of the incident recounted how Burns pointed to a member of the Augusta Hot Shots crew across the airport waiting area and telling her:

“See that guy over there? He hasn’t done a God-damned thing. They sit around. I saw it up on the Wedge fire and in northwestern Montana some years ago. It’s wasteful. You probably paid that guy $10,000 to sit around. It’s gotta change.”

Rosenthal wrote in both versions: “I offered to the senator that our firefighters make around $8-$12 per hour and time-and-a-half for overtime. He seemed a little surprised that it wasn’t higher.”

Burns was surprised enough that he later released an apology for being such an asshat:

“In retrospect, I wish I had chosen my words more carefully,” Burns said in a prepared statement. “My criticism of the way in which the fire was handled should not have been directed at those who were working hard to put it out. Without a doubt firefighters do the hard, tough job of battling one of Mother Nature’s toughest beasts. I have nothing but admiration for them and the work they do.

“My frustration came from meeting with landowners who were critical of the way the fire was handled. Whatever the reason, I should have simply thanked those who worked hard to put out the fire.

“I have since addressed my concerns to the proper officials about the way in which fires are handled. Please accept my apology for any hard feelings that my comments may have caused. I have the utmost respect for the job firefighters have done in Montana.”

Don’t be surprised, Senator, if the next time your state is on fire the members of the Augusta Hotshots decide not to bother coming to help. It’s a long way to travel for $8 to $12 an hour plus a major helping of lack-of-gratitude for the effort.

You really have to wonder about some people:

About five passers-by witnessed the crime Tuesday evening in the Pleasantville Shopping Center parking lot, police said. They said they saw a young person stack the fries on the pavement, then join two others in the car as the seagulls began to swarm.

“It was kind of ugly, man, blood everywhere,” Wendell McNeal, a witness, told a Philadelphia TV station. Witnesses couldn’t give police detailed descriptions of the suspects, and no one recalled the car’s license plate. Police on Friday were awaiting surveillance camera tapes from nearby businesses, Ruiz said.

I’m no big fan of seagulls, but surely you can find better ways to spend your time than coming up with ways to run them over with your car. What the fuck is wrong with you people?

Between accusations of plagiarism and just generally being a mouthy dumbfuck several papers have decided to dump Coulter’s column from their opinion pages. The Editor & Publisher fills us in on the latest:

“Yes! Weekly”, which has carried the conservative firebrand since last August, announced the move after polling its readers, among other considerations. She will be replaced by another conservative, William F. Buckley.

This follows the pattern at the other papers that had dropped Coulter, where she was replaced by conservatives Michelle Malkin in one case, David Limbaugh in the other.

A fourth paper, the Shreveport (La.) Times, has said it is strongly considering dropping Coulter.

Not that Malkin or Limbaugh are huge improvements over Coulter, but it is nice to see that the worst of the lot getting the boot might be the start of a trend. One that we can hope gathers strength as time goes on.

No, not because the Bible is a myth—nobody cares if you’re lying to people about gods and angels—but because William Pierre Crotts and Thomas Dale Grabinski managed to cheat 11,000 investors across the country out of $585 million dollars over the course of several decades:

In a trial that lasted 10 months, prosecutors claimed that the executives were driven by shame to hide the foundation’s mounting investment losses, bilking investors who were recruited in Southern Baptist churches and by Bible-quoting salesmen who visited their homes. Investors were told their money would help Southern Baptist causes, such as building new churches, and were promised above-market returns.

Instead, prosecutors said Crotts and Grabinski had designed a Ponzi scheme in which new investors were needed to pay off the secret mounting debt. Donald Conrad, an Arizona assistant attorney general, characterized Crotts and Grabinski during closing arguments as business failures who defrauded investors in part to “feed their financial fantasies” that they were savvy businessmen.

One good delusion inspires another I suppose.

The defense argued that the foundation would’ve been fine if sales of securities hadn’t been halted by Arizona officials in 1999. The state’s officials, they claimed, just didn’t understand the foundation’s “complicated finances.” That’s not the bit that caught my attention, though. No, what caught my attention was the following comment by fellow True Believer™ James D. Porter, who is a friend of Crotts and believes him to be innocent:

“The truth is not determined by what this court said,” Porter said. “Righteous people have spent time in jail before.”

Yes! It’s the old “persecuted Christian” meme raising its ugly head yet again! Ain’t faith a grand thing? It allows you to still believe in your friends after they’ve defrauded you of your investment money.

This is a new twist. Seems an American born journalist who now resides in Belfast believes herself to be a direct descendant of Jesus Christ and Mary Magdalene and she’s written a book titled The Expected One that she initially had to self publish because no publisher was taking her seriously, but after the success of The Da Vinci Code has suddenly attracted a lot of interest:

Kathleen McGowan has received a seven-figure advance for her novel, “The Expected One,” said the Sunday Times of London.

The book will be published in New York on Tuesday. It has earned $2 million from the sale of foreign rights and will appear in Britain on Aug. 7.

Interestingly enough when challenged to prove her divine lineage McGowan refused:

When asked to produce ancient family documents that she claims to have uncovered in France, she said she had been “asked not to talk about what I’ve seen.”

How convenient. It would be amazingly cynical of me to imply that Ms. McGowan is a fruit bat who’s managed to find a way to make money off of her delusion, but then I’ve never claimed not to be a cynic.

SEB’s favorite creationist wacko, “Dr.” Kent Hovind, was arrested yesterday on 58 charges including “income tax evasion, making threats against investigators and filing false complaints against Internal Revenue Service agents.”

U.S. Magistrate Judge Miles Davis handed down the indictment against Kent Hovind, who operated a creationist theme park Dinosaur Adventure Land, off Old Palafox Road.

Hovind’s wife, Jo Hovind, was also indicted on 44 of the counts and appeared in court alongside her husband.

Nothing like a bit of good news first thing in the morning to help offset your own tribulations. Hopefully we’ll see the good “Dr.” do some time behind bars.

Why does this not surprise me at all?

President Bush’s most senior aides—the ones who hold the coveted title of “assistant to the president”—recently received a $4,200 cost-of-living bump-up in compensation and now earn a top pay rate of $165,200, according to an internal White House list of staff salaries. The list was compiled by the administration for the year that ended June 30 and is displayed both alphabetically, and by dollar ranking, below. Those at the bottom of the White House staff pay scale—the folks answering phones and responding to the president’s mail, for example—remain stuck at last year’s pay floor of $30,000, according to a year-to-year comparison of White House data obtained by National Journal.

If you’re already making good money then Bush will happily give you more, but if you’re on the bottom of the pay scale then you can just suck it.

Link via AMERICABlog.

A Michigan man by the name of Stephen Humphrey managed to rip his wife’s arm off with his pickup truck over the weekend and the news has been all over the story since. Seems this guy and his wife were having a fight when he pulled over in a huff and told her to get the hell out of his truck. She did so and then reached back in through the window to retrieve her cellphone at which point her husband stomped on the gas to take off and her arm got tangled up in the passenger seatbelt. She was dragged for a distance until her feet got caught underneath the rear tire and her arm was ripped off between the shoulder and the elbow. Not being a complete dumbass, Humphrey turned around and collected his wife and rushed her to the hospital for treatment and tried to tell police that it wasn’t his fault. His story was that he stopped to let her relieve herself while he drove down the road for no apparent reason and turned around only to find her lying in the ditch minus her arm when he came back. He said another car had hit her and took off.

So that’s pretty stupid and all, but not as stupid as what his defense lawyer is claiming:

“I’m saying he’s a hero,” John Gonta, Humphrey’s lawyer, said Thursday. “He made sure his wife survived. Whatever happened before that, I don’t know, but I’m glad he took her to the hospital.”

While I agree that it’s a good thing he didn’t just leave her in the ditch to bleed to death, I find describing him as a hero as being a gross misuse of the word and a rather stunningly transparent attempt to paint his client in the best possible light. Humphrey at least has the (rather poor) excuse of being drunk and angry for his stupidity, but his lawyer looks like an even bigger idiot for making such a ridiculous claim about his client.

Oddly enough the police have been unable to locate the poor woman’s arm or, for that matter, precisely where the incident took place. Meanwhile Humphrey has been charged with third-offense drunken driving causing serious injury and operating a vehicle with a suspended license also causing serious injury and could face up to five years in prison as a result.

Hero my ass.

ABC President of Advertising Sales Mike Shaw isn’t happy that DVR owners are able to fast forward past commercials and he’s been holding talks with various manufacturers about them including a feature in the future that would disable the fast forward function:

“I would love it if the MSOs, during the deployment of the new DVRs they’re putting out there, would disable the fast-forward [button],” Shaw said.

While MSOs risk losing some of their DVR customers if fast-forwarding were blocked, Shaw said the cable operators—who are beefing up their own local ad sales operations—“are in the same business we’re in.” “They’ve got to sell ads too,” he said. “So if everybody’s skipping everybody’s ads, that’s not a long-term business model for them either.”

That’s not surprising considering his job, but his explanation as to why he thinks there won’t be a backlash from DVR owners is enough to make one wonder what he’s smoking.

Shaw also threw cold water on the idea that neutering the fast-forward option would result in a consumer backlash. He suggested that consumers prefer DVRs for their ability to facilitate on-demand viewing and not ad-zapping—and consumers might warm to the idea that anytime viewing brings with it a tradeoff in the form of unavoidable commercial viewing.

“I’m not so sure that the whole issue really is one of commercial avoidance,” Shaw said. “It really is a matter of convenience—so you don’t miss your favorite show. And quite frankly, we’re just training a new generation of viewers to skip commercials because they can. I’m not sure that the driving reason to get a DVR in the first place is just to skip commercials. I don’t fundamentally believe that. People can understand in order to have convenience and on-demand (options), that you can’t skip commercials.”

Perhaps Mr. Shaw would do well to consider some of the polling on why people buy DVRs that’s been done. Terry Heaton points out one such poll that shows skipping commercials is the second most popular benefit of owning a DVR by 62% of respondents. Additionally “watch their program faster by eliminating commericals” was the fourth benefit cited by 55% of respondents. Terry further comments with:

What Mr. Shaw doesn’t want to accept is that time is the new currency and that his industry has done this to themselves. One-third of prime-time viewing is now devoted to marketing, and this revolt against that is driven by a very real need for people to manage a decreasing amount of leisure time.

The 30-second ad model is broken, folks, and we need creative thinking to find ways to overcome it—not crap like this from network executives. The horse has left the barn, and it ain’t comin’ back. Why can’t we bring ourselves to accept that?

My wife wasn’t real thrilled when I signed up for Wide Open West’s DVR offering back when we were still living in Canton, but she grew to appreciate it a bit more once she got used to being able to skip commercials with it. She’ll still occasionally mentions to me that she wishes she could skip commercials on the Charter service her parents have, usually right after a string of ads she finds highly annoying.

Link found via AdJab.

Well, that certainly is one way to get out of going to jail:

In a statement, spokeswoman Kelly Kimberly said, “The Lays have a very large family with whom they need to communicate, and out of respect for the family we will release further details at a later time.”

A spokeswoman for Aspen Valley Hospital confirmed that Lay arrived at the hospital at 1:41 a.m. MT and was pronounced dead at 3:11 a.m. MT.

CNN affiliate KPRC in Houston said Lay was admitted to the hospital with a massive coronary.

In a statement, the Pitkin County Sheriff’s office said a coroner’s autopsy is pending and autopsy results will be available later this week.

Well at least this means we won’t have to put up with various jail house interviews with Barbara Walters over the coming years or Dateline stories on how he’d be putting his life back together once he got out. Yeah I know we still have to put up with that crap from Skilling, but at least the agony is cut in half now.

...David Thompson has given me a whole new thing to worry about.

Either that, or I’m chuckling at his fantastic complaints to a North Carolina City Council.

You know what’s sad, David?
- That you have 15 minutes of fame coming and you waste it like this.

Local lunatic David Thompson complains to Charlotte, NC city council during a community access forum, which is conveniently captured on tape and broadcast live on the local community access channel. There aren’t enough tags to cover his rant against ice in the arena, rogue helicopter pilots, and “terrorist pussies”.