A-Holes of the Year

In no particular order of appeareance, Dr. sipmac will post a well-deserved scorn-a-thon of a few of the undisputed a-holes of this year. Without further ado:

Charlie Sheen: Anybody with a brain knows that this guy is playing himself in the critically-acclaimed, top-ten rated sitcom Two and a Half Men. The question is: When Charlie Harper will beat the hell out of Chels? Jeez, this is the guy that had every opportunity in his life to make ammends for every wrong decision made. Alcoholism, gambling, whoremongering were enough to sabotage his film career. Do you think "Hot Shots" was another step forward? Nope. Funny as it might be, he was already scrapping the bottom of the barrel. Then he replaces Marty McFly in Spin City and landed a little later into one of the most-watched sitcoms of the decade. Hey bad boy, do you think that kind of luck is never going to run out? Wanna risk it by beating your wife, you moron? Maybe you should ask--

Roman Polanski: Yeah, that dude. Oh, I managed to escape from the nazis and then Charlie Manson and his merry family, so I can do whatever I want and still play the victim, that includes raping a drunken 13 year old girl. Besides, I have a lot of powerful and beautiful friends to back me up whenever I want. Oops! Being caught and have to face extradition charges in Switzerland? No problemo, my friend. I can post bail and fight it in my cozy chateau! Now I can finish my movie at home! I told you, I can do whatever I want, not like that--

Phil Jones: The poster boy for scientific method and objectivity for this dying 2009. Between his lifetime accomplishments we can admire his destruction of "climate change" raw data, the redefinition of the peer review process, the persecution of dissenters and the burning of a good 20 million dollars in grants given to him and his pals, just to "hide the decline". A true deserving canditate of the ig-nobel prize! Speaking of the devil--

Al Gore: Making millions with the green scare is not enough, huh? You have to twist facts of your Academy Award prized docummentary, and then keep on having a straight face when Climategate hits you cold in the face and you have to cancel your highly expected appearance in Copenhagen. In the meanwhile, your book is still for sale, your monthly carbon footprint at home is STILL bigger than the average US home in a year, and you are getting fat. But you won the Nobel Prize! You have to be a schmuck like--

Sandra Bernhard/David Letterman: You have to have a special sense of comedy to wish a fellow woman to be raped when she enters Manhattan! You must be an upstanding comedian when you wish that woman's daughter to be "knocked up" by a baseball player! Just like you did with your female subordinates! Who said a politician's family is "off limits"? Sandra, who's morally reprehensible now? "Not me", says--

Tiger "Cheetah" Woods: A name has never been so revealing. In a few words, Mr. Woods carefully crafted a wholesome image for years. That made him make gazillions of dollars. From the very start, a few people knew he was a women-chaser. So was Babe Ruth. But he never try to hide who he was (and at least the press helped him). But Tiger... hey, it wasn't just golf, you were the spokesperson for Gillette, and they gave you a pile of money for that. You were asking for trouble, man. "¡You racist!", calls Dr. sipmac--

Barack Obama: Well in that case, I let one of your early supporters, Mr. David Michael Green, say it all in this link. A little taste of it:

Like any good progressive, I've gone from admiration to hope to disappointment to anger when it comes to this president. Now I'm fast getting to rage.

How much rage? I find myself thinking that the thing I want most from the 2010 elections is for his party to get absolutely clobbered, even if that means a repeat of 1994. And that what I most want from 2012 is for him to be utterly humiliated, even if that means President Palin at the helm. That much rage.

For all he knows--


Dr. sipmac has ranted

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• Charlie Sheen partied with porn stars in Las Vegas (ctv.ca)
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• Please Just Fire Charlie Sheen Already (popbytes.com)
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She-Wolf means classy, for once

Dear Gossip Journalist:

It is said that Colombian showbiz is too bland: not a serious scandal can be found here like in other latitudes (For that we would look into the political section of the newspapers). A little pot, a little coke, some cheating around, a blurry sex tape and that’s all. The lack of really explosive material doesn’t mean the Colombian gossip journalists are somewhat more considerate and caring than their peers around the globe. The paparazzi crowd is still a new thing; relatively speaking (the first time they worked effectively in the 90’s was when they caught Miguel Varoni cheating on his then wife, Patricia Ercole – Aura Cristina Geithner cried on TV), but the gossip columns distilled venom from the very beginning.

So, what to do when a big Colombian celebrity, with worldwide fame does not give an opportunity to embarrass herself? Act in a more wicked way with every single petty detail of her life.

• Does she come from that dreadful region full of riffraff and not the capital city? Somehow a type of a hick? Then mock her and imply by that her imagined shortcomings, even if they are stereotypes bordering on hate speech. After all, people there and in the capital city still don’t know what hate speech is. You can call it gossip.
• When she left the country did she lose her accent? Tell then she sold out to the Argentineans. Hey, most
  
  
  
  of us do not know it, but it is relative easy for natives of that region to lose their particular accent (even if they do not want it) once they travel outside the country for a long time.
  
• Did she build a school for the poor children of her city? Is she an advocate for education? Point out she isn’t cool enough give a free concert in Cuba.
• Did she go to Oxford to give a lecture about education? Remain silent about it then!
• Is her last CD named Loba/She-Wolf? We hit the jackpot! Loba means a lowbrow woman. She was asking for it. Really.

There’s no way to avoid it. You can’t please everybody, and there are newspapers and magazines to be sold, websites (ahem) to be filled with any kind of mindless drivel and so are the TV channels and radio stations. Otherwise, how would they eat without reporting anything newsworthy?

Sip doesn’t approve or agree with everything Shakira, but he knows when unfair is unfair. Tearing her to shreds makes you maybe make a living, but it does not amuse me. For instance, there are still witnesses that can recall a young Dr. sipmac proclaiming that the girl singing Magia was going to be great. What does suppose to mean? Sip followed her career closely, and thinks this time her newest album is a pretty good one. It was a stroke of genius to bring back unexpectedly the funk/disco into the mainstream with She-Wolf. For this time Loba/She-Wolf means classy.

That said, dear Gossip Journalist, you can go on with your mockery again. Ah, Dr. sipmac does not know Shakira personally, nor he receives any kind of compensation from her.

Very truly yours,

Dr. sipmac

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Soap Opera values lurking in the real world

First, Dr. sipmac will give you three true recollections about soap operas that he has witnessed throughout the years:

• When he was a child, Dr. sipmac was watching on TV a very popular and convoluted melodrama, practically on the edge of his seat. Her mother passed by, took a look, and coldly dismissed the production by saying that real life was even more tortuous than a TV show.
• Years later, sip was listening to the radio. It was the prime time in the morning. For sure millions were listening in the whole country. A major Latin American female TV star was being interviewed live and she couldn’t recall in which soap opera did something. “Never mind”, she said coolly without bothering about it anymore at all, “all soap operas are the same”.
• A few years later a renowned Venezuelan script writer, bitterly disappointed by the flop of his latest work, stated on a variety show that there were only two types of soap operas: those based on Cinderella, and those based on the Count of Monte Cristo.

At least all of them were sincere. In the meanwhile, Dr. sipmac still can’t figure out how to blend these facts, neither how to develop them properly, but he’ll give it a try. Has melodrama really something to do with real life? Is it a somewhat idealistic but simplified version of the existence or the true mirror of it?

Everybody knows how TV shapes the trends and the behavior of the population. Particularly, sip knows exactly when a kid (specially a little girl) has been watching too many dramas: the gestures and the language are ridiculously grandiloquent, and they really do not match those of a normal child. Imposture, ersatz language and personality like that is not exclusive of the children: I recall reading Three Trapped Tigers (written by Guillermo Cabrera Infante), a very (apparently) disjointed recollection of the pre-revolutionary Havana nights. To someone familiar with the current trends, the books look on first sight like a compilation of internet jokes. One has to read several times to find the connections between chapters. Dr. sipmac makes the digression because he remembers a female character blending in the middle of an argument two cultures: she was walking away from her mother, and she hears a slur, then she turns back like Bette Davis… and start talking like in a radio drama. Golden Age of Hollywood meets Golden Age of Cuban Radio. Mere fiction? In real life, an old and dear neighbor learned to use the word “infamy” against sip’s granny thanks to “The Indomitable” a 70’s Venezuelan drama.

You could argue successfully it is not only the soap operas the only media artifacts that produce such unnatural behavior in people. Just almost everything, not just visual mediums only, but also printed matter, too. Then Dr. sipmac would have to point a finger to the soap operas, specially the way are made today. In a whole, Dr. sipmac feels the melodrama formula is a straitjacket conspiring to maintain certain mental climate that keeps the Latin American countries locked in the third world. Why? First, it is pure business without social responsibility (Remember, give the people what they want). Second, if there are only two types of soap operas; those based on Cinderella, and those based on the Count of Monte Cristo, which are the messages that are constantly put into the collective mind? Glad you asked. Forget that fairy tale about virtue and goodness triumphing over vice and evil, chapter after chapter people learn that:

• The only way to escape poverty for women is marring a rich fella, by any means necessary (Cinderella).
• There are no reliable institutions. There is no justice. The only way to get it is taking it by own hands (The Count).

Opportunism without law and order. Anarchy. Does not Latin America look like this? And Latin America is the kingdom of soap operas, isn’t it? Ever wonder how values are communicated in a society? Please, Dr. sipmac knows he is discovering nothing knew. But maybe you didn’t thought about this in a while.

But make no mistake: Dr. sipmac sounds pretty much like a leftist when he blames soup operas for brainwashing the people, but he wouldn’t forbid them if it were in his power. He believes it is a personal choice (for adults) to decide what to watch and thanks to the internet, when. For the children, you just have to watch the South Park movie.

Dr. sipmac has ranted.

FULL DISCLOSURE: The last soap opera Dr. sipmac watched willingly, was the original Ugly Betty. He quitted by the time she was celebrating her birthday. It took a whole week to celebrate a lousy birthday that wasn’t vital to the central plot! Puh-leeze!

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An open letter to a Philosopher

This is the third installment in a series about Climategate. Dr. sipmac is afraid it is not the last of it, because he is following closely the evolution of this scandal. He feels this is too important to be nonchalantly ignored, so he will risk the being labeled as obsessed and/or repetitive. Always referring to himself in the third person (true to his Internet persona), without further ado presents:

Dear Mr. X:

It is not imperative to use your name in this open letter; Dr. sipmac only mentioned your credentials to state that your opinion on the matters that I will develop in this letter is qualified (To be frank, way more qualified than Dr. sipmac’s). Dr. sipmac read this morning your e-mail answering to the report sent to you by him yesterday. It was penned by Christopher Monckton of Brenchley on behalf of the Science & Public Policy Institute and its called “Caught Green Handed”. It is easily available online. Even not knowing if you could read the entire report, it was a jaw-dropping surprise for me that your only response was “I would be good to know who ordered or produced this version”.

The surprise originates from the recognizable points of your body of work and your areas of expertise that appear in the report and you didn’t at least acknowledge, probably in fear that doing so, you will have to admit that the anthropogenic/manmade global warming theory (MGW) that is being spread worldwide is bogus.

Dr. sipmac knows that feeling. MGW is so entrenched in the collective mind of the public opinion that dissenters from that theory are easily dismissed with a wave of the hand in the best-case scenario, or treated as outright kooks in the worst. These dissenters and skeptics are called “deniers”, as in “holocaust deniers”, which gives a pretty good idea about how the debate is framed. But wait! There is no debate! The science is settled, said Al Gore. But sticking rigorously to the well – known facts, you can still draw solid, undisputable conclusions. These facts are:

• Somebody hacked a batch of e-mails and files belonging to the Climate Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia in the UK. The CRU is reputedly one of the leading institutions in the climate change research field. Its papers feed the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), a UN-based agency that publishes special reports relevant to the implementation of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), an international treaty that acknowledges the possibility of harmful climate change; implementation of the UNFCCC led eventually to the Kyoto Protocol.
• These e-mails and files were leaked (presumably by the same whistleblower) to the BBC a month ago, and the BBC did absolutely nothing to investigate the matters involved in them.
• These e-mail and files then were posted on the internet, where they spread like a wildfire.
• Phil Jones, the director of the CRU, and a few of the involved, reluctantly accepted the authenticity of the leaked/hacked information.
• The contents of the leaked/hacked information are so damaging, that the only defense of the involved is that the crucial statements found in them are taken out of context, that the language the scientists use is incomprehensible to the laymen; i.e. the messages don’t mean what they mean. These messages unequivocally are about:

- The systematic suppression/doctoring of information that contradicted the theory of MGW. What about falseability?

- The direct manipulation of the resources used to evaluate the variations in global climate.

- The use of spurious means of research.

- The bullying and ousting of qualified skeptics and dissenters of MGW, resisting all the way to debate with the critics.

- The successful attempt to make of the peer-review process a travesty.

• Don’t forget that the result of this process is fed to the IPCC, and it is used for decision-making that affects the entire global economy and population. This is what the Copenhagen meeting is about: setting an agency with enough power to force countries to “go green” in order to save the planet and mankind. Not that it is bad per se, but please, not this way.

It is not an easy job to become a MGW-skeptic these days, risking to lose the respect of the others, but with these facts, you can infer without hesitation that there is no real scientific process in the MGW warming research at least (witness Karl Popper), ergo, there’s no real science to the MGW theory, ergo, it can’t not be affirmed there is MGW, even GW properly. As Dr. sipmac said in a previous post, “Dr. sipmac is willing to accept there could be a global warming caused by CO2 emissions, even a manmade global warming… but stop offering the people to drink of the same old kool-aid. Gimme some truth”. Gimme some real science, he would add.

Very truly yours,

Dr. sipmac

P.S.: The Science & Public Policy Institute is behind the report. Respectfully Dr. sipmac invites you to google the rest.

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