If ABC Covered the Lincoln/Douglas Debates

Publius brings the funny:

LINCOLN: In my opinion, slavery will not cease, until a crisis shall have been reached and passed. “A house divided against itself cannot stand.” I believe this government cannot endure permanently half slave and half free.

STEPHANOPOULOS: Excuse me, did an Elijah H. Johnson attend your church?

LINCOLN: When I was a boy in Illinois forty years ago, yes. I think he was a deacon.

STEPHANOPOULOS: Are you aware that he regularly called Kentucky “a land of swine and whores”?

LINCOLN: Sounds right — his ex-wife was from Kentucky.

STEPHANOPOULOS: Why did you remain in the church after hearing those statements?

LINCOLN: I was eight.

DOUGLAS: This is an important question George — it’s an issue that certainly will be raised in the fall.

STEPHANOPOULOS: Do you denounce him?

LINCOLN: I’d like to get back to the divided house if I may.

STEPHANOPOULOS: Do you denounce and reject him?

LINCOLN: If it will make you shut up, yes, I denounce and reject him.

STEPHANOPOULOS: Do you denounce and reject him with sugar on top?

LINCOLN: Yes.

STEPHANOPOULOS: No takesies-backsies?

Read on….

Found at Boing Boing

Win Ben Stein’s Credibility

Cranky conservative curmudgeon Ben Stein’s (Bueller?) anti-Darwin film is getting slammed for some lapses of integrity. Surprise surprise.

Six Things in Expelled that Ben Stein Doesn’t Want You to Know…
…about intelligent design and evolution
1) Expelled quotes Charles Darwin selectively to connect his ideas to eugenics and the Holocaust.
When the film is building its case that Darwin and the theory of evolution bear some responsibility for the Holocaust, Ben Stein’s narration quotes from Darwin’s The Descent of Man thusly:

With savages, the weak in body or mind are soon eliminated. We civilized men, on the other hand, do our utmost to check the process of elimination. We build asylums for the imbecile, the maimed and the sick. Thus the weak members of civilized societies propagate their kind. No one who has attended to the breeding of domestic animals will doubt that this must be highly injurious to the race of man. Hardly anyone is so ignorant as to allow his worst animals to breed.

This is how the original passage in The Descent of Man reads (unquoted sections emphasized in italics):

With savages, the weak in body or mind are soon eliminated; and those that survive commonly exhibit a vigorous state of health. We civilized men, on the other hand, do our utmost to check the process of elimination. We build asylums for the imbecile, the maimed and the sick; we institute poor-laws; and our medical men exert their utmost skill to save the life of every one to the last moment. There is reason to believe that vaccination has preserved thousands, who from a weak constitution would formerly have succumbed to small-pox. Thus the weak members of civilized societies propagate their kind. No one who has attended to the breeding of domestic animals will doubt that this must be highly injurious to the race of man. It is surprising how soon a want of care, or care wrongly directed, leads to the degeneration of a domestic race; but excepting in the case of man himself, hardly anyone is so ignorant as to allow his worst animals to breed.

And much, much more.
Michael Moore was rightly called out for similar dishonest parts in his films, but this is definitely much more brazen.

UPDATE:
Pal Ninah sends us the following link:
Expelled Exposed

Them Librul’s Gonna Take Away My Guns…

There’s a lot of symptomatic nuttiness in this tale of yet another gun-nut nearly run amok.

MIAMI (AP) - A 20-year-old with a weapons cache that included four AK-47s was arrested after threatening over the Internet to undertake a Virginia Tech-style massacre, authorities said Thursday.

Oregon authorities learned of a March 25 Internet message allegedly posted by Calin Chi Wong in which he threatened to re-enact the Virginia Tech killings. Two days later, Homestead Police searched the home Wong shares with his parents and found the weapons in stacked on shelves in plain view, Detective Antonio Aquino said.

Wong had 13 firearms in all, more than 5,000 rounds of ammunition, some that could pierce armor, and 100 rounds in a feeding clip with bullets “meant to take down aircraft or military machinery,” Aquino said. He had hidden two AK-47s in his parents’ closet, and his parents said the guns did not belong to them, Aquino said.

But embedded in this story and it’s hopefully averted trauma is a dumb argument that keeps coming up:

Wong said the weapons were an investment.

“He says it’s a lucrative business,” Aquino said. “He said if Hillary Clinton wins she’ll put a ban on assault rifles, and these assault rifles will be worth more in value.”

Gun laws in this country have loopholes that you could fly a C-130 through. I remember when in my gun-nut youth how easy it was to buy even military-style weapons. And in Washington, there’s really nothing preventing (at least in the mid-eighties) me from selling handguns to anyone.
I personally am pretty pragmatic about the complete control of firearms; we’re way too much of a libertarian society in this regard for better or for worse. But to continually argue against any background check or regulation of any kind if foolish. Most anti-control arguments don’t hold much water. We are also safe from another invasion by the British. And as for unrestricted gun ownership being some kind of bulwark against tyranny, I’d channel Dr. Phil and ask “How’s that workin’ out for you?” Our government is being bought and sold by big corporations without firing a shot, but people are too busy playing Call To Duty to notice. If our government wanted to fend off a counter-insurgency of pissed off citizenry, they have weapons that could melt you in your shoes. I don’t think a Mossberg pump shotgun or any other permissible weapon would do much good. But people will vote for the biggest corporate whore because - ironically enough - the opposing party supposedly has a brand identity that is against gun ownership. I recently had a conversation with a young man who - even though he correctly identified the current administrations depredations on the Constitution - said he would vote for McCain simply because of the single issue of gun control - and the automatic association of Democrats with it.
So meanwhile, damaged individuals such as Mr. Chi Wong, Seung-Hui Cho, James Huberty, Charles Whitman can continue to pick people off.

But we still haven’t been invaded by the British and no stinkin librul wimmen’s gonna get mah gun!

I Can’t Think of a More Fitting Legacy

Forget about the George W. Bush Presidential Library (900 copies of My Pet Goat). I think this is one memorial we can all safely get behind.

The Presidential Memorial Commission is proposing an ordinance initiative for the November 2008 San Francisco ballot, to rename the Oceanside Wastewater Treatment Facility the George W Bush Sewage Plant. We believe this is a appropriate and enduring legacy, for no other president in modern American history has accomplished so much in such a short time. If you would like to help collect signatures, host meetups and parties, or otherwise spread the word about this grassroots movement, join our Meetup group.

1967 Article on the Hazards of a National Database

Here’s a fascinating article from The Atlantic, circa 1967, on the hazards of a national database:

I can’t tell you how excited I was when I found this magazine on eBay. I thought that the author was this Arthur Miller. An article about the personal privacy threats inherent in massive government databases, written by the author of the Crucible sounded amazing. It turns out that the author was actually this Arthur Miller, and I don’t think anyone could have done a better job.

This is the most amazingly prescient article I’ve ever read. When people write about the future they are usually wrong. When people write about the future of computers, they are usually even more wrong. This article got everything right. If you changed the tense and a few bits of jargon, then handed to me and told me it was written by the EFF, I’d believe it.

Just to give you an idea of how right he was on even the basic computer stuff, here’s the second paragraph of the article. Keep in mind that this is what desktop computers looked like in 1967.

“The modern computer is more than a sophisticated indexing or adding machine, or a miniaturized library; it is the keystone for a new communications medium whose capacities and implications we are only beginning to realize. In the foreseeable future, computer systems will be tied together by television, satellites, and lasers, and we will move large quantities of information over vast distances in imperceptible units of time.”

Forty-one years ago Arthur R. Miller laid out all of the privacy threats that we face now. The power that credit reporting databases have over us. The illegal government use of our financial and phone records. The attempt to build a master database tying all of these together. The fact that the government might consider you a threat if you so much as sent a Christmas card to someone the government has on a watch list. It’s all here. He basically predicted and laid out all of the arguments against the Total Information Awareness program and the current NSA programs that have been so much in the news.

Read whole article
Found at Boing Boing

Mr. Chardman’s Happytime Adventure Hour

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Another Radio/Volunteer Marathon Weekend

Holy crap, am I tired!
I wrapped up my busier-than-usual work week with a double - make that triple - duty volunteer gig down at KBOO: I dropped in for my routine community calendar production gig at 5pm; got done with that in time for some pledge drive phone bank work and just had time to run through the music library to pick out some music for my show that went from 12AM to 3AM. When I got off after 3, I reasoned that it was probably too snowy at my house and I was tired as hell, so I checked into a flea-bag motel and crashed long enough to get up and do my volunteer gig at FVTV. So I never really got any decent shut-eye ’till I got home around 5:30 in the afternoon.
Why couldn’t I have been doing this crap when I was in my twenties or thirties, when I had a little more energy? Oh yeah. I was raising small children.
It’s amazing, though.
When you’re doing creative things, an incredible amount of energy is available.
I had a lot of fun doing the show. Got a lot of enthusiastic response from callers. I didn’t plan any of it; I simply grabbed CDs that looked interesting. I originally planned on doing a show that more or less was like usual host Daniel’s music, but was too pressed for time to plan anything. I managed to get it audio archived, but lost the last hour due to a technical glitch at home.
I will make it and a half-assed playlist up shortly.

This story sucks

I woke up this morning with the intention of making a pilgramage to Fry’s to get some gear. I called (or tried to) to make sure they had it before making the trip. No response. It slowly dawned on me that it might be Easter.
So I’m gonna vacuum today, in honor of Jesus.
I hate vacuuming, but hate a dirty floor, more.
There’s something about all that stuff on the floor that makes it hard for me to relax and I need to relax today.
I don’t think I’ve ever bought a new vacuum cleaner in my life. I’m pretty sure my first couple of vacuum cleaners were hand-me-downs from friends or relatives. For the last couple of years, they’ve been from garage sales or thrift stores. They last four or five runs through the house before I have to replace or repair some part to get them huffing and wheezing again. Often the motor gives out, filling the house with foul-smelling smoke.
I once made the mistake of buying a really nice, newer model at a garage sale that the lady told me was just used in a ‘dog room’. I thought I could exorcise the smell before using it, but it was futile.

I’ve become pretty skillful at shopping for decent used ones.
I fire them up in the thrift store and listen to them run for a bit. Pick up a few dust bunnies off the linoleum. It’s getting harder to find a vacuum that doesn’t have that dog-ass smell nowadays.

Once, one smelled so bad that I fled the store. As I was driving away, I saw lots of people leaving holding their noses or sneezing.
True story.

Post-Radio hangover

I’m sitting here at 1:15PM, having just woken up and am drinking some strong coffee.
Did my solo radio gig last night.
Everything went well.
Even though I’m tired as hell and feel like a zombie, I’m still kinda high and buzzy.
Will post highlights later.

Because Sometimes Role Play Can Be Creepy…

And I don’t mean in the Gestapo officer and the naughty milk maid way:

Not safe for work at all and perhaps not safe for home unless you wear headphones.

Thanks, JH!