Werner's Rotten Pill: March 2012

Tuesday, March 27, 2012

From the subconscious of Paul Maršić: A Script for Al Pacino

This is a transcription of a dream I had early in the morning. As usual, night dreams and nightmares work prefect in your mind while sleeping, but turn out lame in daylight. Anyway, here it goes:

My subconscious casted Al Pacino, in the vein of major flop 88 Minutes, this time as Guy Random, a middle aged New Yorker on his way to recovery. Somehow he is held in high esteem by the NYPD, as they usually hire him as a special assistant to solve murder cases. Two police officers, suspiciously looking like Robert Goren and Olivia Benson from the Law and Order franchise, approach to Random and ask him to help them with a case: the gruesome of a skinned alive young woman. The sole smell of rancid meat makes Random sick and he pukes after watching the unskinned corpse.

Cut to a somewhat dystopian New York City, where its inhabitants are incredibly dumb and careless up to the point to even leave an infant unattended at the main entrance of the housing project where Guy Random lives with his grandma, “just to fetch something quickly upstairs”. The semi-detective finds some girls uploading explicit videos about their sexual lives to You Tube “just because that’s what girls are supposed to do.” Random is a helpful gentleman to those people, happy to have him as a neighbor just as his grandma is happy because of the thousand dollars he’s going to collect when he solves the murder case.

Another symptom of this “Clockwork Orange”-alike universe is the way Random has to endure and survive the very dumb but lethal practical jokes of this friend of him Richie Underwood, a real scumbag. Random is supposed to accept these reckless pranks as “tokens of friendship.”

More revolting murders occur and Guy Random becomes suspect number one by circumstantial evidence, although no victim is directly or indirectly related to him. The Goren and Benson lookalikes begin to put the pressure and distrust on him. Random shrugs all of this off since he has endured his entire life things like these.

Cut to the final scene, in which Guy Random by accident saves his grandma while attempting to enter into an abandoned warehouse in the Bronx, by sending her back home with the same taxi he came in. As he enters the warehouse he is attacked and tied and it is revealed that his friend Underwood is the culprit of the murders because he “envies his friend”, because “he could have been a bigger degenerate than him” but “despised the way he tried to make amends by working with the cops.” Besides, before he came clean, Random killed with the same debauchery Underwood’s favorite pet monkey. Because of all this, he decided to set him up, and kill detectives Goren and Benson by decapitating them in front of him and shows all the Polaroid pictures he has taken of all his crimes and proceeds to take photos of the severed heads.

While promising to “chase grandma and the taxi driver after he kills Random”, Underwood commits a small mistake that allows Random to free himself from his ties, and throw a knife that sticks into Underwood’s forehead and collapses.

Guy Random walks away and the camera zooms into the photos of the victims and slowly fades to black.

End. Credits.

Monday, March 26, 2012

What Captain Obvious could have learned from Superfreakonomics (by Levitt and Dubner)

The good thing about Levitt and Dubner is that they are willing to recognize their mistakes or misgivings and more willing to make amends; that’s why they issued a revisited an expanded edition of Freakonomics: they acknowledge a certain self-satisfaction that shouldn’t be in the book in the first place, since they admitted lack of rigor in vetting the sources of their investigation.

Anyway, if Freakonomics was a blast, Superfreakonomics can live it up to its predecessor. If you play enough with data, you can achieve true insights over certain topics overplayed by Captain Obvious a/k/a common knowledge, and even find easy solutions to big problems, real quick fixes that triumph the way simple solutions and quick fixes are held in disdain by common knowledge worshippers.

It’s incredible how many real-world problems this book tackles (and attempts to solve).

For example:

1) Pregnant women should be dispensed from fasting in any religion (p. 58) – It’s crystal clear why it should be that way, but in some cases devotion demands the opposite. And devotion afflicts unborn children of fasting women.
2) If doctors wash their hands after procedures, they can cut deadly disease contagion to a ninth of the current rate (p. 133-139) — even now (p. 205).
3) The American with Disabilities Act actually impedes people with disabilities to get more jobs, and the Endangered Species Act may be endangering even more the endangered species.
4) Safer cars promote more reckless driving (p. 242).
5) The bad news is that Levitt and Dubner assume anthropogenic climate change as a real thing — so real it could be called by its real name, i.e. geoengineering. If there’s real global warming, it could be reversed with a simple “chimney to the sky” (p. 200-201) pumping liquefied sulfur dioxide into the stratosphere. We could even have the global cooling the scientists predicted in the 70’s if we like it!
6) Kitty Genovese’s tragedy (p. 97) started a myth, and the press (NYT, p. 128) is responsible of perpetuating it by swallowing whole what the police told them.
7) “Doubling the amount of carbon dioxide while holding steady other inputs – water, nutrients and so forth – yields a 70 % increase in plant growth, an obvious boon to agricultural productivity” (p. 185).
8) A trash tax, i.e., an extra charge for excess garbage, can and will improve garbage related problems in a city (p. 139).
9) Providing the best and simplest solution to a problem could not make you beloved by Paul Erdős and the public but get you into a mental institution (p. 204).
10) Monkeys are people, too (p. 211).
11) There is a simple and elegant solution to hurricanes (p. 162).
12) Trying to achieve perfection may jeopardize what's already good.

I strongly recommend this book (and its antecessor). Duh, indeed.

Friday, March 16, 2012

Original Cartoon: One More GOP Debate!

With pride we present a brand new cartoon about the current GOP candidates, with a very familiar host, and a surprise stealth candidate. With some actual we want to reflect in the most accurate way possible the current state of affairs of the Republican Primary and the candidates Mitt Romney, Rick Santorum, Newt Gingrich and Sarah Palin (yes, Sarah Palin!). Without further ado:

Sunday, March 11, 2012

Derrick Bell shows that the hopeychangey thing is now for sure a rotten lie

Martin Luther King had a dream: that one day America would rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal." He also dreamt that one day on the red hills of Georgia, the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners would be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood.

Professor Derrick Bell doesn’t have dreams, at least not like Martin Luther King’s.

Obama asked while at Harvard Law School to "open your hearts and open your minds to the words of Professor Derrick Bell."

Professor Derrick Bell is perhaps the one of the biggest promoters of a nasty racialist legal theory called Critical Race Theory.

Critical Race Theory, ironically and in a very reminiscent of Marxism – Hegelian way, views the entire structure and superstructure of America as an inherently racist one, no matter the success of the civil rights struggle. Bell said to Rodney King (the one who was shockingly brutalized by the L.A. Police) that blacks and whites “would never get along.” Following this reasoning and in the professor own words, whites will be oppressors, even liberal whites. Blacks will always be victims; therefore they would always need special treatment, not real equality.

In a nutshell, this doctrine has a very defeatist view of blacks, as it perceives them as inherently incompetent. It is as racist as anything a klansman can spout.

This is the man and thus the doctrine, Barack Obama the Harvard law professor asked to embrace.

Therefore, there is no hope and change, no racial unifier president. According this worldview, there will be no real integration or reconciliation, only special entitlements and paradoxically, an imperceptible but permanent segregation between humans, because of permanent victim status of one group.

It’s more like MLK’s anti-dream. A nightmare. That’s the hopeychangey thing for you.

Friday, March 9, 2012

A trial that could excel in broadcasting Rush's victory

A New York Times reporter once estimated that Rush Limbaugh utters aprox. 10.000 words per broadcast. The entertainer admitted that everything he says goes unscripted — quite an achievement since not even his most bitter detractors can detect a single moment of hesitation in his monologues.

But spontaneity has a price when you go unscripted, and even scripted shows fall into traps. You just simple make a single mistake, and in the current political ambient, you will pay dearly for that. Democrats (and Barack Obama) cannot campaign this time trusting in their achievements, because there are none. The option is to go negative all the way. The whole debate about the free-contraception-provision in Obamacare was already way hotter than enough before The Sandra Fluke Affair. Limbaugh is confident now after a very messy maelstrom predictably capitalized by his enemies who rub their hands with joy every time America’s Anchorman loses a sponsor. He even hinted he did all this in purpose.

We’ll soon see if this is true. He even said in today’s show that democrats and liberals always overreach, and he might be right, because celebrity lawyer Gloria Allred, in a letter from yesterday and allegedly in the name of Women’s Equal Rights Legal Defense and Education Fund, asked Michael McAuliffe to probe whether El Rushbo had violated Section 836.04 of the Florida Statutes by calling Georgetown University law student Sandra Fluke two unpleasant names. McAuliffe is the Palm Beach County State Attorney.

“Dadelut, dadelut, dadelut!” might be Limbaugh’s words of choice for a lawsuit at this time, civil or penal. The liberal Democrat Party-Mainstream Media Complex went in an all-out war against Maha Rushie. They sense this time they can destroy the political commentator with the highest ratings in America. They want blood.

The initial backlash has being fading away because the monolithic response of the New Media and the conservative and libertarian pundits. The hemorrhage of sponsors has stopped and even there are some of them begging to come back. A brilliant point of the conservatives fighting back has been dragging into the arena the attitudes of liberal comedians-commentators like Bill Maher and David Letterman and their evil, sexist deeds. Maher felt the danger in this strategy and has already asked the Complex to stop.

And Limbaugh only has to stay quiet and let Allred do all the work until he has his day in court. A lot of people, even liberals would scream ”witch hunt” faster than a Fisker Karma breaks down. Imagine a man that can utter 10.000 words in three hours without a script telling his side of the story in front of national television, how the Democratic Party, the Mainstream Media and the liberal elite is eager to destroy him by any means necessary, even by using the judiciary as a weapon. No matter how the prosecutor would paint him as a devil, he only would come out as the underdog… and a martyr. This could change the very course of the presidential election.

Gloria Allred couldn’t make him a bigger favor.

Wednesday, March 7, 2012

Chameleonic, ideological mix: Orwell would have smiled

How do we define liberalism? It depends on the landscape. Without going further in analyzing tenets, here’s a small trip around the world and around political definitions/labels: American-style liberalism is called socialdemocratism in Europe. Of course, in America the term liberal has acquired such pejorative connotations that now the preferred word used by liberals to define themselves is "progressive." Just like The Finch and Hillary Clinton like to call themselves.

Politics are dynamic, say politicians that like to change denominations just like they change shirts. Nineteenth century liberalism corresponds to actual libertarianism, of course, and that libertarianism pales in comparison to what was experimented in the late decades of the 19th century. Modern libertarianism equals modern liberalism in Europe, i.e., the old laissez faire. Meanwhile, classical liberalism would be now (via Hayek and Mises) the backbone of what is now considered conservatism in America.

Radical in Europe and Argentina is not even half of what a radical in America is. For European socialdemocrats and amid the current crisis specially, anyone who claims to believe in the free market and small government is labeled a neoliberal (a pejorative word strong in Europe and Latin America), and if he/she is not in favor of the European Union, becomes an ultra-nationalist, and if he/she is not defending secularism at all costs, then he/she is an ultraconservative.

Keep in mind that nowadays by definition any conservative in is an ultraconservative. A neoconservative or neocon is a recovering liberal. A paleoconservative is what people in South America call a “godo.” For the socialdemocrats and progressives alike, all conservatives all the same: extremists. But not ironically for conservatives, the liberals, progressives and socialdemocrats are all leftists, and if we have to use the word, commies. And as long anybody is not showing pictures of Hitler and swastikas, or is brandishing a weapon to establish a communist revolution (note that the extremes are asymmetrical), all are considered "center-left" or "center-right," although more than an knowledgeable experts gets in the same bag both the Nazis and the Communists as Nazi is an abbreviation for national - socialism.

The political struggle is easier when we are the reasonable ones are and the others are the extremists.

Saturday, March 3, 2012

Demotivational Posters for early-March

Define the month of March 2012 with a bunch of demotivational posters, in the vein of the sipmac team. It’s time again for our traditional demotivational posters, March 2012 Edition!

Thanks to all those public figures that make my work a lot easier.

Friday, March 2, 2012

Alberto Giubilini and Francesca Minerva: To hell with Godwin's Law, they are Nazis

After yesterday’s post about the Giublini-Minerva Paper, I was reasonably invited to read it, because everybody knows newspapers are as unreliable as an automobile without brakes. So I read it, and now I can say that what is in it it’s even worse. They tried to sugarcoat hell and failed miserably. The dynamic duo Giublini-Minerva also wasn’t misquoted nor were their assertions taken out of context.

I was expecting a very difficult reading, i.e. something insidious, very difficult to comprehend but well based enough to make a rebuttal a very difficult job. On the contrary, it was a well-written paper (if you can stand boring-to-death political correctness writing style), with crystal-clear redaction (they can’t claim misinterpretations) and a very lame exposition of ideas that reeks not of facism but of Nazism, to hell with Godwin’s Law, because this time the argument suits completely. The only joke here is that they made themselves perfectly clear.

In Giubilini’s and Minerva’s brave new world, it is not enough to be a human, you have to be a person, or have the potential. Personhood cannot be granted by default (birthright is not an issue, otherwise I wouldn’t be writing), only on a case-per-case basis. Fortunately, science can decide – and will decide – if a newborn is a viable person. Through all the reading you can infer that, according to their logic babies are not an asset but a liability. The size of this liability increases with disease, until it becomes a burden to the mother or society. To be granted personhood, a baby must prove his/her affordability, i.e. his/her economic and social viability with science acting as the referee.

Paradoxically, according to the medical ethicists we have more “moral rights” for the non-existent “people of the future” than for sick fetuses and newborns. It is better to terminate the pregnancy than to give a baby in adoption because “of the mother who might suffer psychological distress from giving her child up for adoption.” Unsurprisingly, everything is working the way of abortionists (before and after birth) in the world of Giubilini and Minerva.

Giubilini and Minerva may call themselves medical ethicists and show the diplomas to prove it, but there’s little or no difference in what they expose and what eugenicists of the XIX and XX so eagerly exposed and practiced. Entire categories of human beings (Down syndrome kids, blacks, Jews) were considered then a burden that neither individuals nor society could carry, so that the logical, scientifically reason-bounded decision was to get rid of them. Syphilis “experiments” in Tuskegee, forced sterilizations in Sweden and yes indeed, concentration camps are the logical children of the policies of eugenics and un-personize human beings.

You can kill with ease when it’s not a human what you are killing. Ergo, you start dehumanizing fetuses and newborns (What’s next?). Ironically, animals have nowadays more successful and vocal advocates.

Tell me if there’s a difference between Giubilini and Minerva and nazi eugenicists.

Thursday, March 1, 2012

Original Cartoon: Joe Schmo meets Obama

Via Goanimate.com we are proud to present to you a new short political cartoon in which the denigrated (and deemed dumb by the left) Joe Schmo, a.k.a. Joe Sixpack, a.k.a. John Q. Public, meets Barack Obama. Hilarity and a hot contested debate about recession, government, stimulus, a cool trillion dollars, unemployment and another cool trillion ensues. Enjoy:

GoAnimate.com: Joe Schmo meets Obama by jokerizedpaul

Like it? Create your own at GoAnimate.com. It's free and fun!

Why so serious?

If Ms. Rapp would have being praying, it would have looked like her prayers were answered

“I love my son more than any person in the world and his life is of utmost value to me. I don't regret a single minute of this parenting journey, even though I wake up every morning with my heart breaking, feeling the impending dread of his imminent death. This is one set of absolute truths”.

Absolutely nobody will question Emily Rapp’s truths. Her baby son Ronan suffers a genetic disease called Tay-Sachs, and she undoubtedly suffers a gruesome ordeal, first by taking care of her son, and knowing he will die this same year. She says that although she went through all possible pregnancy tests, those test failed to detect the horrible malady that afflicts her son. Otherwise, she would have aborted her son.

End of story? No.

This extreme approach of a very extreme case was used by Ms. Rapp and Slate Magazine to contradict Rick Santorum’s perceived extreme assertion that “prenatal testing increases the number of abortions.” While this is completely true (severe handicaps are included in abortion laws), and prenatal test actually can determine the course of a pregnancy, keeping people in the dark is not an option. That would be extreme, indeed. For Santorum, there is not a fortunate choice of words to express this point of view.

Just a couple of days after Ms. Rapp’s testimony, we got news of the article entitled “After-birth abortion: Why should the baby live?” written by two Alberto Giubilini and Francesca Minerva, medical ethicists linked to Oxford University. The article was published in the Journal of Medical Ethics, and says newborn babies are not “actual persons” and do not have a “moral right to life”. The academics also argue that parents should be able to have their baby killed if it turns out to be disabled when it is born.

In the meanwhile Prof. Julian Savulescu, director of the Oxford Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics, denounces that Mr. Giubilini and Ms. Minerva have been the target of death threats by “fanatics opposed to the very values of a liberal society.”

Make no mistake: I condemn these threats. You might find Giubilini’s and Minerva’s assertion inhuman and despicable, but that doesn’t justify murder. On the other hand, this is the very slippery slope pro-lifers were denouncing for years: first, you have to accept that life doesn’t begin at conception (i.e. you become a human being after a few weeks — the same way a recently fertilized egg is not a chicken). Now, rather than being “actual persons”, newborns were “potential persons”, as the medical ethicists explained: “Both a fetus and a newborn certainly are human beings and potential persons, but neither is a ‘person’ in the sense of ‘subject of a moral right to life’.

The pro-lifers could say: add euthanasia and assisted suicide to all this, and the culture of death becomes full circle. And the next step in the slippery slope would non-productive members of society?

Be careful what you wish for…

Tuesday, March 27, 2012

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