Quick Hitts

The White House claims that 640,329 jobs have been saved or created by the stimulus package.

I love the “saved or created” scam.  While it’s possible to count how many jobs were created, it’s impossible to calculate how many were saved.   This lets them pull any numbers they like out of their ass and brag about their success.  They’ve gone so far as to claim that the real number is a cool million when you count all the peripheral jobs, like servers in a fast food joint, that were saved.  Or created.

The math is pretty simple – do the gazintas and it comes out to $160,000 dollars per job created (or saved).  The White House claims that’s “calculator” abuse because, well, just because they said so, that’s why, so shut up already.  They claim the real cost is a mere $92,000 per job.  Again, just because.  But even if we go with that number, is this a good investment?  How many of those saved or created employees are earning anywhere near that much?

Meanwhile, the official unemployment numbers, which don’t count those whose benefits have run out or who have taken jobs that pay a fraction of their former salary, continue to creep up.  It’s now higher than it’s been in decades, and the average length of an unemployment is entering record setting territory.   (I’ve never gone this long between jobs.)

I’ll make you a deal, Obama.  Give me $160,000 – hell, give me $92,000, cut off my unemployment benefits, and I’ll spend it, saving (or creating) dozens of jobs.

The only thing more annoying than listening to old people bitch about how the past was so much better is catching yourself doing the same thing.  “Today’s music sucks and they don’t make movies like they used to and people are so much nastier now and kids dress like slobs and waaaaaa….

There are quite a few things that suck worse now than they did in the past, but nearly all of them are the fault of the government.  (The economy, reductions of freedoms and civil rights, more regulation, more deadly cops, etc.)  Nearly everything else has improved.  But our memories are selective.  We remember the good things from the past and forget the dreck.

If you doubt that, try this experiment.  Pick a year from your teens or twenties.  (If you’re in your teens or twenties this experiment won’t work.  Bookmark this page and come back in 2019.)  Google “Billboard Top 100 for {that year}.”  You’ll find great tunes you still listen to and others you remember fondly, but you’ll also be reminded of nauseatingly horrible crap you forgot about.

I just did it for 1972.  There’s some great stuff there:

American Pie – Don McClean
Nights in White Satin – Moody Blues
Lean on Me – Bill Withers  (I don’t think I’ve ever heard a bad version of that song.)
Long Cool Woman in a Black Dress – The Hollies
Pappa Was a Rolling Stone – The Temptations
Saturday in The Park – Chicago
Layla – Derek and the Domonos
Tumbling Dice – Rolling Stones
Dr. My Eyes – Jackson Brown
Rock and Roll Pt 2– Gary Glitter
Hold Your Head Up – Argent

This is just a sample; there’s other good music on the list.  But it also contains lots of nauseatingly bad crap.

Alone Again (Naturally) – Glibert O’Sulivan  (#3, no less)
A Horse With No Name – America  (Unfortunately, this still gets a lot of airplay, which runs counter to my point, but I can’t resist mentioning how badly it sucks.  You’re in the desert, schmuck, with nothing to do, and it’s your horse.  Just name the damn thing!  And whoever wrote “for there ain’t no one for to give you no pain” should have their poetic license revoked for life.)
Clair – Gilbert O’Sulivan again
Betcha By Golly Wow – The Styleistics
Daddy Don’t You Walk So Fast – Wayne Newton.  (Puke inducing.)
Precious and Few – Climax (Any song or product with the word “precious” in it is guaranteed to suck.)
I’d Love You To Want Me – Lobo
Go All The Way – The Raspberries

That’s also just a sample; there are quite a few other gag inducing tunes on the list.

I grew listening to The Who, The Beatles, The Stones, Jefferson Airplane, The Mama’s & The Papa’s, Simon & Garfunkel, Led Zeppelin and the like.   They’ve survived the test of time, and their music is still everywhere.   But there was an enormous amount of crap from then that’s rightly (and thankfully) forgotten.  A hundred years from now, when people are still listening to the great music from that era they’ll have no idea “Yummy Yummy Yummy I Got Love In My Tummy” and “We Joy, We Had Fun, We Had Seasons In The Sun” was somewhere in the mix.  You can also be certain that some old fart (who hasn’t been born yet) will be complaining that the music of his youth was so much better than the crap those damn kids are listening to now.

The link between cell phones and brain cancer has been studied and studied and studied to death, and the results are conclusive:  there is no correlation between the two.  Yet the WHO, a political organization posing as a health organization, is now claiming otherwise.

Let’s take a look at the actual study.  Oh, wait, we can’t.  It hasn’t been published yet.  The WHO is engaging in “Science by Press Conference,” where researchers make bold proclamations about their findings long before their results are published.  Quite often the actual results are far less impressive than the original claims, but by the time the study is published the press has lost interest and the public is left with an erroneous impression they assume is fact.

We can piece together some information from the press releases.  It appears this was done via survey, one of the least reliable ways of collecting information.  Quick, how much did you use your cell phone in 2003?  If someone asks this question you’re going to guess, just like everyone else.  Someone with brain cancer who believes there’s a connection is likely to guess much higher than the average interviewee.  This is called recall bias, and makes survey based studies very unreliable.

The head of the study, Dr. Elisabeth Cardis, said, “In the absence of definitive results and in the light of a number of studies which, though limited, suggest a possible effect of radiofrequency radiation, precautions are important.”  (Emphases added.) Ah, so they don’t have any definitive results.  Big surprise.  No wonder they’re resorting to Science By Press Conference.

While searching for more information on this I came across another study making similar claims.

“I went into this really dubious that anything was going on,” Joel Moskowitz  of the University of California, Berkeley, School of Public Health, told the Los Angeles Times. “Overall, you find no difference. But when you start teasing the studies apart and doing these subgroup analyses, you do find there is reason to be concerned.” Moskowitz is one of the coauthors of the new study; the lead author is Seung-Kwon Myung of South Korea’s National Cancer Center.  (source: Microwave News)

So there’s no increase in tumors until you start “teasing” the numbers.  You have to massage them and fondle them and caress them and seduce them into rolling over and putting out the data you want.

This was a meta-analysis, which should set of any smartenized person’s bullshit meter.  Meta-analysis consists of cherry picking studies, dumping the data into a blender, setting the speed to “bullshit” and extracting any numbers you like.

Their study provides a perfect example.  They start with 465 articles and cherry pick 23 studies, but were still unable to extract any scary numbers.  Their odds ratio was .98.  (1.0 signifies no effect.) But then they cherry picked it even more, down to 13 studies, and were able to concoct an 18% risk.

There are two major problems with that number.  First, the 1.18 odds ratio had a confidence interval of 1.04 to 1.34.  That means the real number can be somewhere between 4% and 34%.  If the lower bound of the CI was 1.0 or lower, (0%) the number would statically insignificant.  Therefore, even with all their data diddling they came up with a number that was just barely statically significant.

The second problem is that any Odds Ratio or Relative Risk of less than 2.0 is highly suspect.  Epidemiology is a very crude science.   There are a myriad of problems associated with reducing human behavior to numbers and every study suffers from them to some degree.  Because of this real epidemiologists are very suspicious of ORs or RRs of less than 2.0, and RRs in the teens or twenties are just too small for epidemiology to measure accurately.  It’s like trying to measure millimeters with a yardstick – the tool is just too crude to do the job.

Lastly, we need to consider the honesty of the WHO.  They have a long history of fudging data.

Their rating of health care in various countries, which put the US in 26th place, was a prime example.  Most people just accepted the numbers without looking at how they were concocted.  Half of the criteria rated a country on how thoroughly their health care was socialized.  The “study” was then touted as proof that socialized medicine is superior.  Cute.

And then there’s their infamous second hand smoke study.  When their well done study showed no increase in lung cancer from SHS they tried to bury it, and would have succeeded if not for the hounding of the British press.   They finally acquiesced with a press release that lied about their findings in the title, while admitting the facts later in the article.

A little while later they issued a new study that proclaimed SHS was deadly.  It was, not surprisingly, a meta analysis.

This will, of course, be a boon to scum-sucking bottom feeders, and will give hypochondriacs something more to worry and bitch about.  But smartenized people will continue to use their cell phones without the least bit of worry.  As an added bonus people stupid enough to believe this may be afraid to answer your call, thus saving you from wasting time talking to them.

I love this guy. After you’ve watched this video, check out the others in his series.

It starts with an eight year old assassinating the president of the United States.  Then 7 men are kidnapped from various places in the country and brought to a secret underground facility.  They discover they all have the same name, and the same face.

Then it gets weird.

J. C. Hutchen’s 7th Son was the first podicobook I got hooked on.  It’s full of complex characters and a twisty, unpredictable plot.  There was too much story to fit in one novel – this is the first in a trilogy.  It’s a great read.  Check it out.

I’ve never paid full price for a computer game.  I’m one of the guys who waits until a game has been out for a while and is available for half price or less. Still, I’m one of your customers who buys instead of bootlegs, and I have several suggestions for removing some of the suck you’ve engineered into your games.

Limit the Opening Credits and Ads

The first time I load the game I watch those cinematic openings you spent so much time developing.  Then I watch the ads for the seven different development companies that had their fingers in the pie. Then I never want to see them again. I don’t want to keep hitting the space bar or escape key to get past each one, and I get really annoyed when you don’t even allow that. I want to play your game, not watch your spinning zooming logos.

The same goes for cut scenes during missions. The Grand Theft Auto series lets me space bar past the  scenes at the beginning of a mission, but the ones during the mission can’t be bypassed. It takes me several tries to get past some of the more complex missions, and I don’t want to have to watch those cut scenes over and over and over again. You’re supposed to be entertaining me, not annoying me.

Let Me Save Whenever I Want

GTA doesn’t let you save during a mission. Some missions are long and complex, and require a long setup before I get to the actual shooting. It’s bad enough that I’ve got to drive three miles, buy a new shirt, then drive another three miles to get to the action, but when I’ve got to do that over and over and over I’m cursing you out for your lousy game design.

I’m currently trying to beat the “Deconstruction For Beginners” mission in GTA 4. First I’ve got to drive to Playboy’s place and pick him up. No problem, but then I’ve got to drive and drive and drive and drive to get to the site. Then we take a sloooooow lift to the top of a twenty story building, where I snipe some bad guys. Then I get to take the same slow lift down. Then, finally, I get to the real action. I’ve yet to make it through that mission, and when I fail I’ve got to go through all that crap again. It’s stupid and frustrating and annoying and unnecessary. It sucks. At the very least I should be able to save at the end of that boring ride down the lift. But no, you’ve got to punish me by forcing me to go through all that boring crap over and over again.

And when I save, let me name the save file however I want, instead of forcing me to save it under the name of the last mission, or in the case of other games, the location or level.

The Diablo series is even worse, not allowing saves when and where you want. If I stock up on supplies and lose a boss fight I get to spend a half hour re-gathering supplies and weapons to have another shot at it. I figured out how to get around it by copying the save files to a temporary directory, then restoring them and re-loading the game, but that shouldn’t be necessary. Let me save before I go into the cave or the chamber or wherever instead of punishing my failure with boredom.

Allow Different Levels of Cheats

Some games allow a god mode, and nothing else. God mode is boring. Let me select a little cheat if I just need a little help, like restoring my health but staying vulnerable to enemy fire.

Starcraft, which does everything right, is a good example. I can cheat a little by adding a small amount of gas or minerals to my resource stash, or, with a different cheat, I can bank a massive amount.

Provide a Way Around Impossible Missions

In GTA San Andreas one mission, late in the game,  requires you to prove yourself worthy of hiring a getaway man by racing him. He gets a sports car, you get a clunky sedan, and during the race the cops show up and smash into you, while leaving him alone. (If you try parking a better car near the club where the race starts, the game removes it.) I must have tried that mission two dozen times, and with three or four different approaches, before giving up on the game. I’d already got my $9.95’s worth of fun out of it, but it would have been nice to finish. At the very least provide a way to bypass missions you just can’t get through, perhaps by paying a hefty fee to a NPC.

Stay True To The Game

When I buy a shooter, I want to play a shooter. If I wanted to play Pacman or Donkey Kong I would have bought Packman or Donkey Kong.

The otherwise excellent Max Payne games featured 3d dream mazes Max had to traverse to continue the game. They were wispy threads set in space, and required jumping from level to level (with no margin for error) to continue the game. Miss by a little and you fall into infinity and die.  It was stupid and had nothing to do with the game.

Half-Life 2 was even worse. Having read the games accolades for years I was happy to see it in the cheepie bins a couple of years ago. I started the game, sat through the unnecessarily long, un-bypassable intro, and got into the action, but before I could get far I was presented with a series of boxes I had to hop around on to get to the next level. Because this was first person perspective I couldn’t see where I was going and the slightest miscalculation resulted in me falling to my death. I tried it for an hour, cursed the developers, uninstalled the game and vowed to never, ever buy anything by Valve again.

Speed Up Loading

I’m talking to you, Biohazard developers. It not only takes half of forever to load the game, but once it’s running it takes just as long to load a saved game. That’s sloppy programming and there’s no excuse for it. Learn your craft.  Perhaps you should talk to Starcraft programmers.  The game loads in seconds, and so do saved games.

Fix Your Bugs

This is another one for you, Rockstar.

GTA San Andreas had been out for years when I found it in the cheepie bins. Halfway through the game I ran into a bug where one of the NPCs runs into a parked vehicle and, for some reason, it kills him, turning the mission into a failure. Run the mission again, and it usually happens again. A bit of searching revealed this had been a bug for a long time, and you never fixed it. That’s pathetic.

GTA IV loves to lock up too. After an hour or two of play, while driving, the thing crashes so badly it requires a hard reboot. This happens about half the time I play it. I’m not running anything fancy, just good old XP with all the patches and updates and plenty of memory (3 gigs). The game has been out long enough that you should have fixed it by now, but considering your pathetic response to the San Andreas bug I’m not holding my breath.

Developers and designers, there’s no excuse for most of these failings. They’re obvious and unnecessary. Fix them and I’ll be far more likely to keep buying your stuff. Keep up the crap and I’ll spend my game money on your competitors.

More of your favorite feature, folks. . .

A Missouri High School band designed t-shirts that showed the evolution of man and the evolution of band instruments.  A few days after they were distributed the school received complaints from concerned parents, who were not atheists, who claimed the shirts violated the school’s mandate to stay neutral where religion was concerned.  Mouth-breather Sherry Melby, a teacher in the district, said “I don’t think evolution should be associated with our school.”  The idiots who ran the school acquiesced and had the kids turn in the shirts.

Bill Donahue, of the Catholic League, is trying to get Penn & Teller’s “Bullshit!” canceled because they had the audacity to go after the Vatican.

The guy who hijacked a Mexican Jet was not an atheist.  He did it on 9/9/09, because if you turn those numbers upside down, he says, they become 666.  Well, 6606, actually.  He’s not a mathematician either.

In France Muslim women are fighting for the “right” to wear “Burkinis” in public swimming pools.  Atheists are willing to wear the normal required swim ware.   Note: the woman in the picture is a Muslim, not a giant Smurf.

Not an Atheist Tattoo

Are you better off with an atheist bus driver, or a religious one?  Ask Ed Rivera, who has cerebral palsy.  He was left on a freezing bus for 17 hours because the driver didn’t want to be late for church.

An Australian, who is not an atheist, is convinced Jesus and Mary have appeared in his Lava lamp.

In Texas a teacher was suspended not only for being an atheist, but also one of them there scary Liberals.

Smart people, which includes atheists, know that homosexuality and pedophilia are two very different things.  Most pedophiles, even those who go after young boys, are heterosexual in their adult relationships.  However, the Catholic Church, which is still coddling pedophiles and abrogating their responsibility in thousands of child rape cases, has officially stated that their pedophile priests aren’t really pedophiles.  They’re gay.

Donna Ryder, a former Jehovah’s Witness, has revealed her role in hiding kids from health and social welfare authorities.  Aided by the church, kids that could have been saved with a blood transfusion were shuttled around the country until they died.  The kids would have been far better off with atheist parents.

In Wisconsin Dale and Leilani Neumann murdered their child via religious nuttery.  Their 11 year old daughter had an easily treatable form of diabetes, but these obtuse assholes tried to cure her with prayer instead.

In court the unrepentant father said “I am guilty of trusting my Lord’s wisdom completely. . . . Guilty of asking for heavenly intervention. Guilty of following Jesus Christ when the whole world does not understand. Guilty of obeying my God.  No, moron, you are guilty of murder.  You could have been charged with second degree homicide.  At the very least you should have been convicted of criminally negligent homicide, and spent a very long time in jail.

Instead the judge gave each of them the pathetic sentence of six months in jail each and ten years probation.  And if that sentence wasn’t enough to prove his court doesn’t give a rat’s ass about kids, he’s having them serve the sentence a month at a time, one month at a time, over six years He’s staggering the sentence to make it easier for them to take care of their other kids.

Yes, you read that right.  They’re keeping their other kids.  They murdered their child but the judge is letting them keep their kids, because they murdered her in the name of God.

Despite numerous stories about religious parents directly causing their kids death, atheist parents are having trouble adopting.  A couple who were trying to adopt kids had to jump through hoops because they were atheists.  They did.  At the last moment Superior Court Judge William Camarata ordered them to send their kid back to the adoption agency, declaring she had the right be raised by superstitious assholes like him.   They are waiting the results of an appeal.

Having trouble selling your house?  Just bury a statue of Joseph in the front yard.  Preferably near the mailbox, and upside down, because, well, just because.  You can buy special Joseph Statues specifically designed for the purpose.  Unfortunately, it doesn’t work for atheists.

In many primitive countries voters dip an index finger in ink after voting, which prevents them from voting twice.  In Afghanistan the Taliban likes to chop those fingers off.  Afghanistan also has a law allowing a husband to starve his wife to death if she refuses to have sex with him.  Praise be to Allah, the merciful.

In Florida anti-choice non-atheists are trying to ban not only abortion, but birth control pills.  They are serious about the command “be fruitful and fill the earth.”  Every square inch if it, evidently.  When Jesus returns he’ll be happy he knows that walking on water trick.