birther bait

oh no, he didn't ...

did the kenyan marxist muslim usurper just go there? just when we thought we'd already seen the last involuntary twitch from the nontroversy that just won't die?

via politico:

[NBC "nightly news" anchor brian] williams, sitting under a tent in a rain-soaked new orleans, where the first family commemorated the fifth anniversary of hurricane katrina, asked obama why so many people were uncertain about something so fundamental as his faith. "i can’t spend all of my time with my birth certificate plastered on my forehead," quipped obama, who took a deep breath to gather his thoughts when asked if the poll reflected his inability to communicate with voters.

cool!

for popcorn-loving birther-watchers, it's christmas in august as the switchboards light up at our favorite freedumb-loving wingnut watering hole:

1) "obama says he ignored beck rally":

why the psychopath reply?

spoken exactly as one would expect a demonic liar to answer.

always the arrogant, dishonest divisive tyrant. the proper response for a real president: "i can appreciate the hopes and prayers of these fine people. i want us all to find common ground in our love of america. with this shared bond, we will move forward into a bright future." this, or similar human sentiment, is utterly alien to the democrats and obama.

can he start by spending any time with his birth certificate plastered on his forehead? i'm not into that particular conspiracy, but i am very concerned that he refuses to show it at all. especially because it would do massive damage to the credibility of those who oppose him and use that particular argument. the fact that it has not been resolved and he's making jokes like that is insult to injury.

(i'm sure the usurper is deeply touched by your concern ...)

how about chuckles the mulllah explaining whose paying his legal bills for attorneys trying to keep his birth certificate hidden?

this is one narcissistic s.o.m. (son of a muslim). "to hell with what the people think. i don't understand why they don't still worship me."

yep - it really makes me want to see it now. perhaps it's really not about his birthplace, but the fact that it's been amended to show indonesian citizenship by virtue of his adoption, without him ever declaring u.s. citizenship at the legal age. the indonesian adoption would be a link to islam, since he had to be a muslim to go to school there. it's mindboggling that someone so anti-american in his upbringing could occupy the oval office.

2) "obama blasts lies, disinformation":

yeah because "666" is already plastered there.

for once, he tells the truth. he cannot show his birth certificate because he has none.

thanks, brian, for your brilliant follow-up questioning, like, "what birth certificate? they say you haven't shown it." what is this talking head being paid?

he does have a kenyan BC as the people in kenya have said. go home ZERO!

we'd like to believe him, but it's OK for mooselimbs to lie to infidels.

could you use a nailgun instead?

OBAMA WANTS to make this the focus instead of his disasterous presidency. i hope people will drop this soon and focus again on the pathetic job he's doing.

(hmmm — i find this one's lack of faith disturbing ...)

3) "barack obama will not be getting a birth certificate tattoo":

obama could end all of this and make so many critics look like fools easily. all he has to do is to release his actual birth certificate.

(but why spoil everyone's fun?)

i too wonder why he hasn't just made it up yet, faked it or something. i remember when all the moonbats were going on and on about george bush and the weapons of mass destruction. they blamed him over and over, nailing him to a cross. i used to point out "if george bush were half as evil as you people think he is, don't you think he would have faked the wmd?" well here we are, and obama still hasn't presented it.

(i haz a confuzed ... so does this mean the factcheck bc is legit?)

"the lady, she protest too much." (hamlet) the BC, if there is one, may say MUZZIE on it, his "father's" religion

i think the american people would be happy to know who his father was and that he was truly born in the states, i however think he is an imposter because he is not natural born, native born does nothing for me. i am a native born citizen, my parents were born in italy. i cannot be president of the united states. in fact down deep inside i feel a tremendous loyalty to italy in sports and politics. which is what i think the founders wanted to prevent.

(well, at least one of these pretend patriots is willing to admit to high treason!)

he is clearly losing his ability to maintain his composure. i think he knows it's over. one and done.

4) "I CAN'T SPEND ALL OF MY TIME WITH MY BIRTH CERTIFICATE PLASTERED ON MY FOREHEAD":

if he's actually talking to it then you can be assured that he is scarred to death about this issue. marxists use ridicule as a weapon and he's using it here to marginalize people who ask that this be demonstrated in accordance with the law.

all he had to do was show it during this interview.

produce a lefitimate one one time and the issue will disapear just as soon as you get on a plane to kenya!

(absulootly!)

this is backfiring on him big time. drudge has this on the front page and linked to politico/journ-o-listers which has over 1200 comments so far. the comments are running 99% against imam obama.

the fact that drudge is touching this at all tells you how far we've come. the word of mouth is revealing what no media entity would touch. he can't control us all.

nice straw man bam, just show the real long form once to a "credible" new source (not CNNABCNBCCBSMSNBC) and it will probably go away. unless of course it was typed with the same version of msword used to produce the TANG memos.

(if i were a betting man, i'd put my money on: "probably not" ...)

who wants to live forever?

while i for one have no hesitation in answering that question with an "ooh-ooh-ooooh! me, me, me! pick me!" and an enthusiasm that would embarrass arnold horshack, quite a number of people roll their eyes and "pshaw!" the very notion, as if their contemptuous dismissal of the question were based on principle rather than sour grapes. truthfully, as long as the fantasy lies far beyond the furthest demonstrated capabilities of our best doctors and scientists, it's a sane response. still, one need only pick up the news on any given day to conclude that the instinct for self-preservation handily trumps the instinct for sanity-preservation and i would even argue that the will to survive — or more fundamentally, resistance to entropy — is intrinsic to the very nature of life itself.

immortality through licensing: not everyone's first choice.curiously though, many of the same folks who look down their wrinkled nostrils at what appears to be a selfish and unseemly desire also fail to see the hypocrisy in adopting a religion, every example of which, without exception, dangles the promise of everlasting life as the ultimate door prize for membership. immortality of course resurfaces again and again as a favorite literary trope in science fiction and fantasy, and would merit inclusion among my "great fictions of science fiction" were even the most credulous trekwars fanboy actually taken in by any of sci-fi's most seductive claims. clearly, religion continues to win this contest.

why most popular conceptions of technology-conferred immortality remain so wanting was recently summarized by commenter cerberus at pz myers' science blog pharyngula, in a conversation originally catapulted from futurist ray kurzweil's claim that within ten years we could "reverse-engineer" the human brain, which would allow us, in myers' words, "to write software that simulates all the functions of the human brain":

creating a robotic brain to "download your consciousnes" into or the "i'll make a clone version of myself with all my memories" sci-fi fiction immortality ideas are kinda false immortalities. it's at best, assuming a complete successful procedure a process of ending one's consciousness so that a puppet version of yourself can emulate your life possibly for all eternity. great, but what does that do for [the] real you? real you is just as dead and gone and unable to be a part of and appreciate what your puppet is doing in its absence. i'm sure this has been repeatedly addressed in the various thread wars during my absence, but it seems kind of stupid. i'd love to extend lifespans, i'd love to live forever if that was possible, but as long as we're talking fantasies, asking for the power to fart sparkly flying unicorns seems less stupid than asking for a robot facsimile to live forever on your behalf. i mean, if you're going to be all cult about this, pick something that wouldn't be completely contrary to your intended desire if you got it.

the problem is that neither of these techniques provides any continuity between the real, original you — the unique, dynamic but amorphous energy pattern that emerges as a product of your brain activity — and whatever it is that will emerge from your shiny new robot body or your baby-fresh clone body, even if it seems identical. this is the component that must be bodily transferred (pun intended), and not merely copied or "downloaded", to its new host, in order for the real you to live past your expiration date. otherwise, if all you're accomplishing is creating a vanity being as a monument to yourself, there's still nothing more simple, more efficient, more tried and tested, more mundane and less controversial than finding a partner and just having a child.

however ... since we're already vacationing here on futurist fantasy island with a white-suited ray kurzweil, where we already have his schematics for building an entire artificial brain right in front of us, it's suddenly possible to provide the continuity we need in order to engineer our transference into everlasting life. the means is in fact quite simple: by replacing the brain, in a series of discrete, stepwise procedures, with kurzweil's robot circuitry, we can preserve the continuity of consciousness by progressively swapping out sections of the original organic substrate (ie, the gray matter) with new artificial upgrades until we've completely replaced it, right from under the still actively running pattern! by conducting each procedure without rendering the subject unconscious for even a moment, but instead continuously maintaining communication with and monitoring feedback from the subject and assessing our progress after each procedure, we can assure ourselves that the same person who laid down on our operating table is the same person getting back up.

let's say that kurzweil's brain can be broken down into 100 discrete modules, and let's say that the first step is replacing the area that processes smell. so we open up our patient, reroute her smell center to the new robot smell module, turn it on, then shut down the corresponding area of her gray matter, excise it, and pop the module into place, all the while maintaining a continuous stream of realtime communication with her. now, if we were to end the operation right here with just this one module, with our patient's brain now 1% artificial and sporting a new (and perhaps even improved) smell center, no one would credibly question whether she was in fact still the same person who woke up that morning instead of some soulless android changeling. she'd certainly be no more android than anyone else who's ever received any other kind of artificial limb or organ.

and if we fast-forward to the end of the hundredth and final procedure, in which, let's say, we've replaced her libido, making her brain now 100% artificial, could anyone credibly argue that this individual was not the same person who successfully emerged from the 99th procedure, and who successfully emerged from the 98 procedures before it? it would be very difficult to make that argument without being able to pinpoint any moment or period when our patient, or more precisely, when her uninterrupted brain pattern changed in such a way that would no longer allow us to still call it "the real her". it is precisely because that pattern was not allowed to be interrupted that "the real her" was preserved as we built its new chassis under it. so, in geekspeak, instead of attempting to "download" our nebulous and intangible consciousness into a new machine, we've merely installed a live upgrade or "sidegrade" of its existing hardware and firmware as a series of modular patches, without turning off or rebooting the system. voilà — immortality v1.0! or at the very least a new lease on life until her android body is finished, but considering what we've already accomplished, the rest is just child's play.

---

afterword: of course, immortality does become somewhat problematic in about five billion years from now, when our friend the sun finally implodes. we'd most certainly want a ticket out of town, preferably on a ship capable of faster-than-light travel (not bloody likely) with lots of dvds on board for the tens — perhaps hundreds — of thousands of years ahead of us in the tractless void before we arrive anywhere interesting. of course, we need not be awake for the whole adventure: i know my android body will definitely have a "sleep" mode installed.

not worth rescuing (revised)

sometime during the last half century, blacks pulled off a most amazing trick: they kidnapped a word. they kidnapped it from the white majority that had been using it to demean and oppress them.

there are two parts to this trick that make it so amazing. first, the word's ongoing captivity has served to extend its natural lifespan and potency far beyond that of its increasingly quaint contemporaries. second, blacks have convinced whites that what they've taken from them is something of real value, something that they need to take back.

most offensive words have only a limited shelf-life. whatever signifigance that originally makes them offensive is usually bound up in the zeitgeist of the period in which they are born. eventually, after the passing of enough generations, whatever context that gave them life and power becomes drained by everyday usage and is lost to those who grow up never having personally felt their emotional sting. the surest sign that an offensive term has hit its expiration date is the lifting of any bans on its public usage. after the word "bitch" became allowable on public airwaves, it has since become so flaccid (despite an initial period of titillation) that the slang term "bee-yatch" was squeezed from it in a naked but ultimately futile attempt to milk new life from it.

but in a feat drawing the envy of professional outrage manufacturers and propagandists everywhere, blacks have locked the n-word away in a kind of linguistic cryogenic freezer, safe for blacks' own endless private indulgence, whose continued undisguised flaunting of their hostage has now driven self-annointed self-help counselor and moralist dr. laura to commit professional suicide.

black guys use it all the time. turn on HBO and listen to a black comic, and all you hear is n****, n*****, n*****. i don't get it. if anybody without enough melanin says it, it's a horrible thing. but when black people say it, it's affectionate. it's very confusing.

their exclusive use of n-word is one of the few possessions that blacks have that whites don't, but most whites fail to realize that its enjoyment comes not from being able to say it, but from being able to watch the veins jealously swell up in the foreheads of racists and race-baiters as the word gets stuck in their throats, trapped there because the consequences of freeing it have become so personally damaging. comedian elon james white conveniently enumerates for us all the different types of outrage he feels free to unleash upon a white person unwise enough to utter the word:

listen, i'm not saying that white people can't say the word "ni**er", okay? what i am saying is that if you say it, i can also hate you, okay? i can mock you; i can not buy your product; i can ask for your firing; i can write letters, march, chain myself to shit. i can do that, okay? but you, you can totally say the word "ni**er". go for it!

to many whites, but especially to shock-jocks and professional rabble-rousers like dr. laura, rush limbaugh, andrew breitbart and sarah palin, being deprived of the use of one more insult is "very confusing" and simply too unfair and blacks are being too oversensitive about their attempts to use it.

well, duh!

of course it's unfair! slavery was unfair. segregation was unfair. redlining was unfair. what happened to shirley sherrod and especially what happened to her father was unfair. that's the whole point! so get used to it, guys!

besides, do whites really want to go to the mat over the right to demean their former chattel? it's just not a fight they're going to win, not when it's being fought for by paid and pampered blowhards, cranks and cynics.

still, there are two ways the n-word will die the natural death it is certainly long due. option one: when blacks release their hostage and no longer exact a price from whites for daring to use it, which, considering its continued effectiveness, as dr. laura can surely attest to, is not bloody likely to happen in this lifetime.

realistically then, this leaves us in the present with only option two: when whites let go of their n-word envy and realize that this is one hostage that's not worth rescuing. it seems most whites already have.

---

addendum: like every white person before her who grossly miscalculated that they could juggle the n-bomb without detonating it, dr. laura and her supporters want to turn her darwin-award-worthy implosion into an heroic constitutional auto-da-fé:

... my contract is up for my radio show at the end of the year and i have made the decision not to do radio anymore. the reason is: i want to regain my first amendment rights. i want to be able to say what's on my mind, and in my heart, what i think is helpful and useful without somebody getting angry, some special interest group deciding this is a time to silence a voice of dissent, and attack affiliates and attack sponsors. i'm sort of done with that. i'm not retiring. i'm not quitting. i feel energized actually, stronger and freer to say the things that i believe need to be said for people in this country.

i'm not sure which document she's referring to, but the first amendment of the united states' constitution protects her freedom to speak or write from infringements by the government.

so, if president obama had picked up the phone and said to attorney general holder:

yo, eric ... i'm sick of this dr. laura bee-yatch getting all up in my peeps' grills with her shizz. man, she took it to goddam eleven this time. even clarence's gotta get behind us on this one. put the word out: her hole is closed — today.

... well, then she'd have something to complain about.

but the first amendment does not protect you from public criticism. it does not protect you from your listeners, your sponsors, your owners or your neighbors. and it certainly does not protect you from your own big mouth.

so if dr. laura thinks she can find a venue somewhere on this planet where she can spew her special brand of wisdom "without somebody getting angry" (translation: without someone cutting off her income stream), well then, good luck to the lady. wherever that is, i'm sure it's pretty crowded there already.

quote of the day

hacker masato nakatsuji after his arrest, charged with unleashing the destructive "octopus virus", which replaces all of its victims' files with cartoon images of cephalopods:

i wanted to see how much my computer programming skills had improved since the last time i was arrested.