Mike Huckabee: I Am Not Pro-Gay

Mike Huckabee has announced that he is not pro-gay, should anyone other than Ann Coulter have any doubts about that.

In other news, Superman has announced that he is not pro-Kryptonite and James T. Kirk has announced that he is not pro-Klingons.

Deflowerment For Money To Pay For Education

This news report is a natural follow up to the previous post on Etiquette For The Recently Deflowered Girl. The Telegraph reports that a twenty-two year old girl is auctioning off her virginity in order to pay for her education.  She came up with the idea after her twenty-three year old sister paid for her education by working as a prostitute for three weeks. She has received over 10,000 bids for up to $3.7 million.

She does find it surprising that men will pay so much saying, “It’s shocking that men will pay so much for someone’s virginity, which isn’t even prized so highly anymore.” What she might not realize is that the majority of bids are being placed under assumed names by Eliot Spitzer.

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Etiquette For The Recently Deflowered Girl

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The Recently Deflowered Girl is a parody of etiquette books written in 1965, and it probably seemed far more racy back then than it does today. Scans of the book were posted on LiveJournal but reportedly deleted due to heavy traffic. Fortunately Joey deVilla grabbed the images before it was taken down and has posted them here.  (Hat Tip to Jessica Palmer).

Traffic Remains Heavy–Cache Might Limit Viewing of New Material

Liberal Values continues to receive unusually heavy traffic from people who are interested in pictures of girls either rumored to be the girl friend of University of Florida quarterback Tim Tebow or who are built similar to the girl rumored to be his girl friend. As a consequence, it is necessary to increase use of the cache to prevent excessive demand on the server. (For those familiar with WordPress and Super Cache, the lock down mode is in use.)

The cache can limit the ability to view changes in the blog, such as recent comments and new posts. Under normal circumstances clicking on the comments for a post will refresh the cache, but with current settings for increased traffic this will not work as usual.

Those who want to be certain of seeing new posts as they are posted and who use a RSS reader might consider subscribing to the RSS feed as opposed to trying to read the posts on the site while increased use of the cache is in effect.

The Right Now Prefers Conspiracy Theorists at Pravda Over The Work of Scientists

I’ve often noted (such as here) the propensity of many right wing bloggers to accept and spread any story which casts doubt upon global warming, regardless of how weak the article is or how much it relies upon junk science. The mind set is that the more claims you have to back up your beliefs, regardless of how weak the evidence, you can claim some sort of victory.

John Quiggin examines such denialism, writing:

I’ll start with some facts that are, if not indisputable, at least sufficiently clear that I don’t intend to engage in dispute about them

(i) All major scientific organisations in the world[1] endorse, in broad terms, the analysis of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change which states that the world is getting warmer and that, with high (> 90 per cent) probability, this warming is predominantly due to human action

(ii) Most prominent politicians[2], thinktanks, activists, commentators and bloggers on the political right in Australia, the US and Canada (along with a large section in the UK) reject, or express doubts about, this analysis. The uniformity of views is particularly notable among conservative thinktanks.

Quiggin speculates on reasons for global warming denialism including influence from “powerful economic interests such as ExxonMobil” and “tribal dislike of environmentalists which translated easily to scientists as a group.” I believe the two strongest reasons are an understandable but misguided desire that the problem not exist to avoid the costs of responding and the matter in which this plays into conservative paranoia. Although the ideological battle with communism and socialism  is long over and current liberals are often stronger supporters of the free market system than conservatives, many conservatives still live with the mind set of an old Ayn Rand novel. They are easily susceptible to ridiculous arguments that the left desires to undermine the free market system and place all industry under government control, and that scientists have joined them in a plot to use global warming as an excuse.

The Daily Doubter points out the extents some on the right will go in accepting any report which might be used to cast doubt upon climate change.

Given PRAVDA‘s 80 year history as the official Soviet Communist propaganda outlet and the psuedo-conservative extreme dislike for all things communist, one might be inclined to think that such conservative” websites would be pretty skeptical about anything published under the name PRAVDA.

Unless, that is, Matt Drudge happens to link to an article up on PRAVDA claiming that anthropogenic global warming is bad science and that the Earth is in fact “on the brink” of an ice age. In which case you get sites like these eating it up without a critical thought. Newsbusters called it “a study … published by Pravda” and speculated that since cooling is on the way we need to start building more oil refineries and doing more off-shore drilling. Imagine that.

The post concludes by advising that it is far better to receive  “climate science info from, say, Discover or Scientific American or New Scientist as opposed to an on-line variant of a post-Soviet state tabloid.”

Yet another point made is that the author of the artile in Pravda is also a 9/11 conspiracy theorist. Tim Lambert notes that “this doesn’t bother NewsBusters’ Noel Shepherd one little bit

How delicious that an America-hating Truther who contributes to Pravda has a firmer grasp of  climatology than Nobel Laureate Al Gore, James Hansen, Gavin Schmidt, and most of the folks at the IPCC.

Yes, the right wing denialists don’t care at all why they quote as long as it supports their biases. The rest of us are far more likely to trust the work of scientists at the IPCC rather than a conspiracy theorist writing for Pravda.