You mean like Michael E Mann or David Suzuki?

From the files that remind us that a scientific background doesn't guarantee a rational political outlook, a look at how a Big Bang Theory actress who you don't want to bone gets everything about science wrong when it comes to health.

Canada Post is like the anti-NSA

I got a hilarious little bit of physical spam in the mail (we used to have a name for this junk, didn't we?), and thought I'd share it with you.

I got this letter to the Resident of my address. You get these all the time from Leon's, Telus, Cutco, The Chevy Farm, etc. etc. It's a basic staple, and speaking of basic staples those Grocery People are the worst at sending this crap out, aren't they?

Anyways, I am happy to pretend that Telus doesn't know who lives in my place, but is it a convenient fiction or a hilarious oversight that the goddamned Post Office sends something to "Resident?"

I mean seriously, you guys don't know who lives in my house? It's your job, that's entirely what you do!

Luke's Change

Since we're on a Star Wars bit this week, a hilarious take on the destruction of the Death Star.

My advice to the children of tomorrow

I'm going to go against the grain here and advise the next generation on some wisdom I've learned, of which a specific examples is currently going on behind me.

Don't become computer literate.

No, I'm serious. Don't. I know you'll hear a lot of nonsense about how computers are the future and computer knowledge will open up endless opportunities for you. This may be true, but dumb people who don't know a thing about technology besides "Flappy Birds is awesome" still exist, still will exist, and... here's the kicker:

The world will still have to accommodate them.

Since the world has to accommodate them, it will  simultaneously have to accommodate you if you chose to join their ranks (or more accurately, remain in them). The cost for you having no idea what this is all about is negligible. As a highly computer literate person I can tell you that sounds like bliss compared to listening to computer illiterate users (the group I suggest you be in) explaining their problems to the poor sap on the other end if the phone who knows what he's talking about (the cursed group I'm trapped in that I'm begging you to avoid).

If you know computers, hearing the unwashed masses try to explain things using nomenclature that they picked up I swear from Forrest Gump is like 10,000 nails on 10,000 chalkboards.

So put down that C++ manual and join a gym. If you're hot, I guarantee you there will always be people making sure your computers work just fine.

With math skills like these, I'm shocked the Edmonton Journal is in financial difficulties.

There will be new AGLC rules about casinos taking effect later this year:

Beginning April 1, the Alberta Gaming and Liquor Commission policy will allow casinos to keep games like poker and blackjack open for 17 consecutive hours, from 10 a.m. to 3 a.m.

Under the current policy, table games can only remain open for 14 consecutive hours between the 16-hour period of 10 a.m. and 2 a.m. The change will bring the commission’s policy in line with the existing operating hours for casino slot machines, AGLC spokeswoman Jody Korchinski said Tuesday.

This is, to be fair, a little confusing. Currently there is a sixteen-hour "window", but the casinos can only be open for 14 of those hours. They all pick noon-2am, of course. Who drinks enough to make the house any money at 10am?

Now, the window goes up to 17 hours, and the casino can run that entire time. This means that the blackjack table can be open for three extra hours. How does the Journal cover this fact?

EDMONTON - Some local community groups fear they’re being dealt a bad hand under a new policy that will let Alberta casinos keep table games open an extra hour

Uh, the difference between 17 and 14 is three hours, not one. The games will be open one hour later, but AGLC could have changed the window to 10pm-3pm and vastly reduced the time while still keeping them open later.

Bonus hilarity #1: Edmonton already has 24 hour poker, so there's another factual error in the Journal story.

Bonus hilarity #2: Read the complaints from the old people:

Many of the volunteers for Meals on Wheels Edmonton are seniors who might be unable or unwilling to stay at a casino past 3 a.m., said marketing manager Jane Voloboeva.

Now try to picture the last time you were in a casino at 2:30am (in any city). Who the hell did you see packed around those slot machines?

Bonus hilarity #3: When River Cree expands the hours of its table games in April as well, I'm sure that'll just be a totally weird coincidence unrelated to how the Indians are forced to follow provincial law.

"I noticed part of the plan allowed for a giant "Millenium Falcon-sized hole" right in the middle"

The architect of the exhaust ports on the Death Star speaks out.

But I have one response to all of you who blame me for the destruction of the Death Star:

Are you FUCKING serious???

I mean, do you understand the point of exhaust ports? Do you know HOW MUCH EXHAUST is created by this MOON-SIZED battle station? There were hundreds of floors on that thing. It housed a laser capable of instantly blowing up planets. It needs a LOT of ventilation - the fact that I was able to keep those exhaust ports to the size of a womp rat should earn me some credit.

Now - let's talk a little about what happened at the Battle of Yavin IV. Some farmboy nobody flies down trench, shoots some bombs out of his X-wing straight ahead, the bombs take a 90 DEGREE TURN and then they go EXACTLY down the tiny exhaust porn, go down miles and miles of insanely narrow pipe and hit the Death Star's core, blowing it up.

Notice anything weird there?

First off, 'exhaust' doesn't mean shit gets SUCKED DOWN. It means shit gets PUSHED UP. That's what it is - it's expelling gas. Outward. As in, not in a direction that would suck down a bomb. If anything, i tshould have pushed the bombs UP.

So how'd the bomb take a right angle turn down it? Hmmmm I dunno OH THAT'S RIGHT WE LIVE IN A GALAXY WITH MAGIC SPACE WIZARDS.

Of course, I can't go without earning some cred' here and noticing that they put up a picture of one of those white British baddies from A New Hope, when we learned in Attack of the Clones that the Death Star was built/designed by giant bugs mainly so George Lucas could smack down Kevin Smith.

You can't defend science from Mark Steyn by telling the truth

Since this is a story about Michael E Mann, the lying coward who makes up data and runs around pretending to be a scientist, it's good practice to take a screenshot, lest his livescience.com buddies decide to adopt a few of the ugly idiot's more egregious tactics.
(click to enlarge)

Philip Bump tells lies about James Taranto and rape

When this story first broke, I was pretty sure that it wasn't true.

Call me relieved but not surprised to learn I was right. Again.

So will you apologize, Philip Bump? How about you Shelby Knox?

It's Probably Nothing

(with apologies of course to Small Dead Animals)

A records storage facility in Argentina burned to the ground, killing nine people and destroying unique paper records of numerous organizations and agencies. Iron Mountain has had fires before, but none this extensive, and despite state of the art fire suppression technology.

Possibly unrelated, Argentina's Central Bank is currently under extensive investigation for fraud, embezzlement, and insider trading.

Definitely unrelated, the records of that same agency were stored in the facility.

Whites had a lot to be proud of once upon a time

Kathy Shaidle examines the UFC Michelle Ould scandal. For those hoping for her to "tut tut" alongside, I'm sorry you've never met her.

Not long ago, average Joes could enjoy a reprieve from “sensitivity training” and political correctness by tuning in to macho, old-school professional sports or even newfangled, slightly dubious ones such as wrestling or MMA.

So much for that. NFL players now wear pink during Breast Cancer Awareness Month. The moral panic regarding brain injuries and player suicides might even kill off football altogether in some not-so-distant future.

Back in the UFC, a German fighter was kicked out for having “racist” friends, while another white player was denounced for wearing a Japanese “rising sun” symbol—by a Korean, who says that for his people, that’s the equivalent of a swastika. And that dude calls himself “the Korean Zombie,” and his symbol is a creepy cartoon of, well, a Korean zombie (killed by Japs?), but whatever.

This story was from November of last year, making the foreshadowing to the "homos hit the big leagues" story all the more prescient.

CTS goes CIS

As Kathy Shaidle notes, it's a crazy week for trannies for some reason.

Eye Crazy has uncovered a plot in Toronto to use English classes to try and steer children towards "genderless" thinking, in order to soften them up to the "cis-queer-trans" faggy bullshit.

Meanwhile, it's hard to take better advice than this old gem a reader dug up for me.

@lansy61

Okay, fine, apparently you never got past third grade (is this why numbers bigger than random numbers on the side of the road scare and confuse you?) so I'll explain this.

In the past, the movement of the solar disk across the sky was believed to be a chariot slowly moving across the (flat, originally, but that's another story) earth. I said "Zeus' chariot" because Zeus was the most famous Greek God, just so I didn't lose you again like I did when I asked you what speed you'd drive it if these signs all mysteriously vanished one day. The correct answer to the owner of the chariot moving across the sky was Helios, the sun-god. Now we know that the whole chariot story isn't true, subsequent study and observation has shown that the sun is itself a large sphere, a nuclear furnace in space, so far away that despite its size it only subtends a small angle of our sky. Subtend means cover.

The reason I mentioned this, of course, was that you decided to brag about how many sunrises you'd seen, which was a reference to my earlier comment that your newfound knowledge of the significance of "85" in talking about how fast people drive made you incapable of trying to reference it to drive at any larger point (of which you have none). You may have seen a lot of sunrises, but you didn't understand them because you thought Zeus (or Helios if you've accepted the transition here) was driving a chariot. Likewise, that you reacted with confused shock about the concept of the 85th percentile was that even this most basic bit of knowledge was out of your grasp. Being the generous person everybody knows I am, I helped you out a bit here.

There are limits to any sainthood, of course, and mine generally had to end there. After all, you can't even grasp that when I give you this common challenge that you're being asked to stop parroting nonsense and actually think:

Can we change all the speed limits within 3 miles of your house to 5 km/hr? You would never exceed that, correct?

You never did answer, because I don't think you're capable of it. All you're able to do is look at what the government tells you is the speed for you to drive, and drive it. If they did change the limits around your house (and I do mean your house, specifically, I want it so wherever you move the limits around you are always 5km/hr) you'd drive that new slow speed, you'd take 3 hours to get from Rexall Place to Polland Meadows Park and you'd never question or complain about this travesty except to freak out if somebody drove 6km/hr and "risk killing you with "excessive" speed.

Forget that as I continued to give you examples (such memorable and heartwarming examples like example 1,example 2,example 3,and of course who can forget example 4) of roads with speed limits set ridiculously low which nobody generally follows (that's where my 85th percentile talk came from, if you remember), you were so mind-numbingly retarded that you thought I was somehow playing a game where I was guessing which roads you drive on the most. You never did say which roads you drove, what speed you would drive on them if I covered up all the speed limit signs, nor why you thought that just magically the number a pencil-pushing rights-imposing city bureaucrat was always the exact right speed for that particular section of road. That you apparently never ever ever drive less than the limit also indicates you're completely mental on the subject of driving. The speed limit on Whyte Avenue is 50 km/hr. Yes yes, I know this is another of those roads you "never drive" but please please please just this once try to grasp the actual topic of discussion. The speed limit on Whyte Avenue is 50 km/hr. If you drive this speed on Whyte Avenue you will kill somebody. Nobody ever goes 50 on Whyte. Maybe at 5am on a Tuesday morning when there was a long weekend the weekend before, you'll find the car and foot traffic light enough that you can cruise in the 48 range, but I highly doubt it. Yes yes yes, the sign says that but you'll just have to ignore it and judge the proper speed you want to drive based on all the factors around you. I know it will be hard, but I have faith.

And here's the genius bit.

Once you do that, you'll start realizing that you can do this all the time. The Henday limit says 100 but it's a warm day, the road is dry, and there isn't much traffic (and the traffic that is there is cruising around the 130 mark)? Yes, you can let the needle climb. Climb! Past 101. Past 102. Past 103. Let it climb even higher and higher. Let it sail up to 115, and feel the liberation within you as you come to realize that the number on the roadside is, as I said many many times, mostly random and all bullshit.

As you come to realize this, you'll start to notice some things. You'll start to notice how many other people, despite a legislative imperative to do otherwise, keep driving faster than the stupid sign on the side of the road. You'll start to wonder how much faster people would drive, using their rational judgement as surely as you did when you saw "115" on your speedometer for the first time, if there was no asshole useless cops like your cowardly buddy Brandan Power trying to round up tax dollars to support his desire to rule over the populace. You'd maybe actually read the links I posted you, like what really happens when the speed limit signs disappear. And maybe you'd watch this damning video, where I proved my comment to you that "a world where that silly limit is followed would be total gridlock".



In short, you'd stop being a shrill for the nanny state, freaking out when you saw other citizens ignoring outdated and undesirable regal proclamations about what we should do to "behave" on the roadways. You'd grow as a person. You'd come to see speeders not as a menace, but national benefactors (again, consult the video if this confuses you. This is a world full of yous, and it does not look like a fun place to live). In time, a Greek God, the number 85, a simple thought experiment, and the exercise of your rational brain could lead you on the path to enlightenment.

Or you can keep saying "go away" and fall into meaningless babble about "u drive 2 fast u $$$ the penalty b4 u risk my lyfe". Your call.

A man goes to a men's prison and everybody pretends not to know why

Inexplicably, it became "news" today when Avery Edison, a man who in 2009 decided he wanted to chop his nuts off, was detained at Toronto's Pearson International Airport for visa irregularities.

The visa details are pretty dull, really. Apparently when Edison was last in Canada to visit his girlfriend he overstayed his visit and was flagged. This is impressive, really, nobody had been under the impression that Canada Customs and Revenue Agency had any capability or inkling to round up people who don't follow the rules of their visas. Jason Kenny, we thank you, we suppose.

The real stinker is that Edison, who also by the way wants to chop his dick off, wants to be a woman. Like he really really really wants to be a woman (but a lesbo, apparently, since he's still dating a chick). As a result, he's a little squirrelly whenever somebody makes the "mistake" of referring to him as a man, which he quite obviously is. Being British, naturally the UK has offered the weirdo a passport with the word "female" on it. I wonder if they let you make up a place of birth and a height too. So the customs agents, dealing with an admitted immigration violator who totally has a Y chromosome hanging around that he doesn't talk to anymore, didn't end up showing "significant training" in how to refer to a lunatic.

Things really got fun when it came time to incarcerate Mr. Edison, who let's please remember is 100% male (though not, one supposes, "100% man"). Where do you send men who get detained at Pearson Airport and need to have a hearing with CCRA? Well, the correct answer is Maplehurst Correctional Complex. So that's where they sent him. Now all hell has broken out, with Romy Sugden (who, at least in the newspaper accounts, is Edison's girlfriend, though with the nature of this story and the way the press tries to cover up the truth about these people there's no way to confirm that) trying to speak out about Edison's treatment.

Again, that treatment was that Edison, a man, went to a man's prison. Why shouldn't Edison go to a man's prison? Edison thinks he's a woman, says tranny-loving lawyer Kyle Kirkup, who is upset that in the Canadian penal system, along with objective scientific fact, "it doesn’t matter about gender identity or gender expression, it’s just a very simplistic ‘what’s going on with the genitals.’". Well, and the DNA, but Kirkup's merely a lawyer and we know that profession has pretty much never heard of the magic building blocks of life that effectively tell you what something is.

So Edison wants to be a woman. I suppose if instead Edison was trying to get his legs chopped off because he thought he was a tree, Kirkup would demand that prison officials release him into a forest.

She’s living her life as a woman but prison officials and probably inmates are referring to her as a man and that’s really problematic,” said Kirkup. “This creates a whole series of problems where the prison is working to tell her she’s a gender that she’s not.”

Uh, Kyle, the only person here who's telling Edison that he's a gender other than his own (male, though lousy at it) is you. Edison, of course, has a whole troop of "rah rah you are what you think you are" nonsense followers who parrot this line.

I'm confident that none of them ever have or ever will complain that Harper or the U.S. Republicans are "anti-science". Because they're spending every day spitting in its face.

Update, 8:39pm: As expected, the tranny lovers online have decided that I'm a "phobe" of all sorts of things that don't actually exist. Also, a reminder that I'm not scared of faggots. But then, for those who think a boy who grows up and decides he's a woman doesn't have a penis anymore just because he thinks it's not there, expecting them to understand that words mean things is probably too much to ask. Meanwhile they literally think that shouting a lie over and over again makes it the truth. I'm guessing "1984" isn't on a lot of tranny reading lists. That they're all yellow-bellied cowards is probably not a coincidence. Meanwhile, it's hilarious to be called "narrow minded" and -- get this -- anti-science, just for knowing what DNA is and throwing incontrovertible scientific fact in their faces.

But getting back to penises that aren't really there, you aren't going to believe what this guy Avery Edison did after he decided that he was going to pretend to be a woman: I guess since he hasn't lost his dick yet, it's a female dick, and therefore lezbos shouldn't feel weird about getting this dick (the male member) put inside their pussy (the female member). That Edison and his tranny friends have to twist logic and reason and language around on it's head sixteen ways from Sunday to pass this crap off is probably the real reason Edison calls himself a comedian.

The Left gets it right on Woody Allen: now if they can apply it to the rest of us

The recent "open letter" to legendary film director Woody Allen by Mia Farrow's daughter Eliza Malone Dylan has ignited controversy about whether or not the Hollywood Left is protecting one of their own, and whether they should be.

Specifically, Eliza makes this claim:

For as long as I could remember, my father had been doing things to me that I didn’t like. I didn’t like how often he would take me away from my mom, siblings and friends to be alone with him. I didn’t like it when he would stick his thumb in my mouth. I didn’t like it when I had to get in bed with him under the sheets when he was in his underwear. I didn’t like it when he would place his head in my naked lap and breathe in and breathe out. I would hide under beds or lock myself in the bathroom to avoid these encounters, but he always found me. These things happened so often, so routinely, so skillfully hidden from a mother that would have protected me had she known, that I thought it was normal. I thought this was how fathers doted on their daughters. But what he did to me in the attic felt different. I couldn’t keep the secret anymore.

So what did Woody Allen do? Eliza says:

He told me to lay on my stomach and play with my brother’s electric train set. Then he sexually assaulted me. He talked to me while he did it, whispering that I was a good girl, that this was our secret, promising that we’d go to Paris and I’d be a star in his movies.

The problem, of course, is that this is not a new allegation. In 1992, Mia made the same accusations of Woody Allen. Here's a timeline of the events, though it misses a few key details (more on that later). The key note is that the "Paris to act in movies" is mentioned in the 1992 media reports, not the trains. Was that always there and left out of reports? Or was it a later fabrication? Eliza Farrow seems to think the bit about the trains was the major element that stuck out in her mind in 2014, but was this one of the parts of the story that kept changing, causing the investigating team of doctors to suspect her of lying? Was the train bit a rehearsed element? Trained and experienced investigators look for this kind of thing, which they surely could at least find reason to believe in a personal interview. Can you or I tell a lie in a New York Times article? The paper has, shall I say, a history of containing some extraordinary stories that turn out not to be true.

The timeline later mentioned "Connecticut state’s attorney Frank S. Maco announced that while he found “probable cause” to prosecute Allen, he was dropping the case". What The Wrap leaves out, is that Maco was later disciplined for the 'probable cause' bit. Meanwhile, while the Farrows were (mostly) attacking Woody Allen for the past two weeks, The Daily Beast posted this gentle assault on the Farrows by a Woody Allen biographer, who while he didn't say that Woody was innocent (he even said he believes Eliza Farrow is honest in her story) did point out that the attacks on him aren't being based on a lot of facts (starting with "his daughter" Soon-Yi). It's a devastating attack on the accusations, which may explain why clueless left-wing feminists like Meghan Murphy are so mad about it (deciding just to call it an "old boys club" spiel without pointing out any of the inconvenient truths the article presents).

This is where I have to break with a lot of the conservatives who've been speaking on this issue. Twitchy has been on this a lot, as you might suspect, not liking Barbara Walters "creepily" defending Woody Allen on TV, positively hating Stephen King picking up on the same idea that the Guardian noticed about the open letter in the NYT, and being uncomfortable when FOX News host James Rosen didn't immediately sign up for the lynch mob. Twitchy is seeing this as just another Roman Polanski situation, where the Hollywood Left bands around its own and isn't worried how many abused children are spit out in it's wake.

But the one thing I think you'll see if you start reading some of the links that I've posted above is that this case is nowhere near as clear cut as the Roman Polanski case [for one thing, along with her sexual assaulting brother, Mia Farrow is still best buds with Roman Polanski! -ed], where the guy plead guilty and then fled the US rather than serve time. Common Twitchy target Whoopi Goldberg infamously defended Polanski by saying it "wasn't rape-rape", which was her ignorant way of trying to differentiate consensual sex with a minor from forcible sex with an unwilling partner (which itself is different from sexually molesting a 7-year old as Eliza Farrow says happened to her). The law already recognizes these, and can even consider them differing cases with differing degrees of seriousness...just ask Eric Tillman. Polanski was guilty, nobody doubts this. Whoopi may not think what he did was serious (it is, one may note, not much different mathematically than Woody Allen getting sexually involved with a 19 year old), but the US court system does. Polanski is supposed to be in jail. The events of 1992 led to the United States justice system deciding that Woody Allen wasn't supposed to be in jail. It caused him several custody issues (for semi-obvious reasons, even the suspicion of sexual impropriety will spook a judge from awarding custody, even if he doesn't have evidence to throw the guy in the clink), yes, but the learned opinion of law enforcement is that Dylan Farrow is lying.

[sorry everybody, I think that last bit is shocking so I redacted it out. Before you read it, everybody who's a shrill feminist should sit down, you're about to be hearing something you won't like. Third Edge of the Sword can't be held responsible for the consequences. I'll give you a bit of scrolling whitespace to help relax you. -ed]

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The learned opinion of law enforcement is that Dylan Farrow is lying. The victim isn't telling you the truth.

Robert Weide thinks she's told a lie so often she believes it herself. The police believed that Mia had coached her into her story (the suspicious rehearsed quality referred to in that article we discussed). Barbara Walters believes this. Stephen King believes this. James Rosen was fearful this may be true. The thing to remember is that this sort of thing does actually happen. Rape accusations can be made without a rape taking place. The crying victim telling you the horrible story is saying things that aren't true. Even the CBC buys into this. It's still hard to get over. When looking at a creepy unwashed guy with a moustache and a small vulnerable child, the human instinct is to pick the latter as believable and not the former. When one person is a thin waif of a girl who tells you that she turned to depression and self-mutilation, and the other is an old man who has been known to fool around with girls much much younger than himself (and also put such desires on celluloid), it's easy to say that the former is the one to be trusted. It's the same factor that is probably causing a lot of Woody Allen's left-wing Hollywood friends to stick by him. For people like Barbara Walters, he's the trustworthy one.

In the end though, professional criminal investigators doing their jobs all said Woody Allen is highly likely to be innocent in this matter. The one person involved who said otherwise was censured by his colleagues for saying it without just cause. The balance of probabilities, let alone the reasonable doubt standard, is soundly in Woody Allen's favour. And for that, we should thank Barbara Walters, Stephen King, Alec Baldwin, and the rest of the Hollywood Left for accepting this. Now that they agree a rape accusation can be false, maybe they can apply it to students at Duke University, Bush appointees to the Supreme Court, or Desert Storm soldiers having a meeting in Las Vegas. Maybe they can apply it to a rash of other men who, like Woody Allen, have been accused of brutal things against their children in order to win petty custody battles. Maybe the notion that every victim is a white-clad angel whose story cannot be questioned will finally be abandoned, and justice rather than witch hunts can be the order of the day.

This is an important battle, and like it or not it can't be won with the Hollywood Left on the wrong side. Woody Allen may be guilty, but even if he is, it's too late to convict him in court, and it's far too risky to convict him in the rough and tumble world of public opinion. If this is going to be a moment to make the world a better place, let it be the watershed moment where the mainstream left ditched the feminist nonsense that every alleged rape victim is actually a rape victim, so that the guilty could be punished but the innocent not left with their lives destroyed (and their DNA in a government database) for the rest of their lives. We should be thanking them and congratulating them on getting it right for a change.

Then see if Mia and company can maybe ask why Roman Polanski hasn't been dealt with, or whether we should deal with a woman who would dare ruin her ex's life -- and her child's -- by concocting a story like this.

Only slightly more testosterone than the Veruca Salt version

Yes, this is a thing. What's next, Britney Spears singing "I'm Afraid of Britney Spears"?

The Death of Philip Seymour Hoffman

Wall Street Journal is reporting that the veteran actor was found dead this morning, and apparently he was known to hit the blow and that's likely the cause of his demise.

I never saw his Oscar winning film Capote. In fact, I'm hard pressed to think if I've ever watched a movie with him in it.

My one brush with him was 5 weeks ago, when we both watched the Knicks get humiliated on Christmas Day by Oklahoma City.

Update, 12:03pm: I guess I did see him as the bartender in the atrocious Ricky Gervacis vehicle The Invention of Lying, and in Twister. I guess he was in Scent of a Woman and The Talented Mr. Ripley too? I don't remember him in the former, and can't say I remember even watching the latter.