Sadly, No!

Can You Hear Me Now?

• Anent self-reflection, I am invincible.

‘Shorter’ concept created by Daniel Davies and perfected by Elton Beard.

Note: Also see here.

L.C. Mope, Imperial Offsetter, please advance to the head of the line and collect your chit for winning our daily contest for ‘Most Ridiculously Asinine Assessment of Fred Thompson’s Influence on Reality’:

Is it me, or does [Thompson] losing South Carolina seem to have an effect on the world markets? The only true capitalist gets out and the markets start circling the bowl.

This victory places you just 50 gazillion chits behind Frank J. Go with God.

Global Warming: Fact or Fable?

• Global warming is caused by the sun and not by human activity. We know this because centuries ago Aztec priests predicted the increased solar activity that is currently occurring.

‘Shorter’ concept created by Daniel Davies and perfected by Elton Beard.

Ahem.

South Carolina: Who Would Dr. King Vote For?

By Harry R. Jackson, Jr.

Would King choose Clinton, Edwards, or Obama?

Yes.

Or would he have chosen McCain, Romney, or Huckabee?

No.

Doughy Pantload’s spectacularly stupid and dishonest effort at redefining ‘fascism’ jarred a memory of an essay I’d read not too long ago, an essay by the (sadly forgotten) Leftwing historian, William Appleman Williams.

Since Pantload, ostensibly a conservative but in reality a hyper-reactionary nincompoop whose deviousness and chutzpah would inspire awe if his theses were not so transparently idiotic, wants to consign fascism to the left side of the ideological aisle, I thought it might be useful to reprint a large part of Williams’s essay which shows what a true conservative, Herbert Hoover, thought of fascism.

Above: ‘Achtung, Doughy!’

But I don’t mean to copy all this out as an exercise in historical wankery. Neither is it (I promise, Mikey) a tedious poli-sci discourse on ‘isms.’ Nor is it done just for the noble aim of kicking Pantload in his Cheetos-stained teeth. Williams contrasts the honest if inept Hoover to the odious Richard Nixon, thus demonstrating the degradation of the wingnuts in his lifetime: from archaic and obsolete quasi-libertarianism to the politics of resentment in a few decades. I mean to use this to set up a second post to show that the degradation has gone that much farther in my own lifetime: how Nixon and Ford, in turn, look thoroughly moderate in comparison to the — yes, crypto- or quasi- or proto-fascist wingnut movement of which Jonah Goldberg is a war-cheerleading, Funyuns-inhaling, goose-steppingwaddling, brown-with-flop-sweat-shirted member.

Read the rest of this entry »

Il Bobolini: The economy is not a human-created thing that is governed by rules that we make up and can change. It is more like a magic castle in the sky, or a beautiful rainforest lost in time where any attempt by mere mortals to alter its magnificent and natural course would cause it to float away on the wings of angels and invisible pixies. I know all of this because a computer guy told me.

Above: the American economy in its natural state

And that is why we shouldn’t do anything crazy like ask why the economy just tanked, or who was responsible, or what we might do to prevent it from happening again. And let us certainly not do anything to alleviate the damage that was done. Let’s all just agree to sit back and watch the mystical wonderment of it all unfold.

Above: the inevitable result of listening to people like Paul Krugman

Dave Neiwert is quite simply and fuckingly kicking the ass-dicking felch-choad out of Jonah Goldberg. His latest reply to the Pantload’s cynical attempt to place fascism on the left is 10,000-plus words of historical beatdown, a ridiculously well-sourced jackhammer of petrified bullshit-destroying whup-assitude.

Dave, I am so your bottom if you want me to be.

Ahem. At any rate, Neiwert draws our attention to a bizarre Pantload attempt to reclaim the reputation of the Ku Klux Klan from critics who’ve inexplicably focused on its racism:

Moreover, if the Klan was less racist than we’ve been led to believe, academia was staggeringly more so. …

We can only guess at the Goldberg Scale of Relative Racism, but here’s an attempt (working from least racist to most racist, with real-world examples):

0 – Physically and psychologically incapable of perceiving racial differences (Michael Ledeen, Heath Ledger)

1 – Unprejudiced in words and deeds toward other races (Republicans, Joe Lieberman)

2 – Tells lame Polish jokes but donates generously to leaf-blower repair charities (John Derbyshire, Ron Paul, Dr. Martin Luther King)

3 – Secretly afraid Barack Obama has a much larger cock (New Hampshire primary voters, Chris Matthews)

4 – Hates spics, bohunks and gooks, but totally cool with guineas and dune coons (Archie Bunker, post-Jew kid adoption)

5 – Same as above, but also hates kikes and not really that cool with the greaseballs (Archie Bunker, pre-Jew kid adoption)

6 – Brings can of gasoline but never actually strikes match at cross burnings (Benito Mussolini, Woodrow Wilson, Michael Moore)

7 – Lynches minorities at every opportunity (Grand Wizard of KKK Klavern, Anita Hill)

8 – Actually carried out extermination of another race (Adolf Hitler, Juan Cole)

9 – Makes your mouth hurt (Dentists, Jimmy Carter)

10 – Hillary Clinton (Hillary Clinton)

Kathleen Parker uses a written drawl to mock media misconceptions about her home state, before dropping the affectation and setting the record straight:

On any other given day, a South Carolinian would have to hire a detective to locate a Confederate flag — other than the one on the statehouse grounds or flying over a Maurice’s Barbecue.

Well, yeah, except for those places.

Study: False Statements Preceded War

Above: Well, but at least they’re not fascists.

• Bush lied about the pre-invasion Iraq posing a threat to the US? He totally did not lie. So what if he so-called ‘lied?’ Nobody can ever know the truth, in this crazy world. Eat my fist, you hateful messenger! Zowie, man (heh-heh); I can’t even grok what they’re talking about here. No, he did not ‘lie.’ I am glad he lied.

‘Shorter’ concept created by Daniel Davies and perfected by Elton Beard.

ABOVE: Andrew Longman conducts
a groundbreaking experiment
on compact fluorescent bulbs

---

We have a treat for you SadlyNotzis today from Andrew Longman, the guy who was too crazy for Renewamerica, the website that truly is the nec plus ultra of right-wing lunacy. Longman, who invented a cell phone system to detect nuclear events¹ and who describes himself as a Christian and applied scientist, which makes him perfectly suited to take on the pagan liberal-fascist shibboleth of compact fluorescent light bulbs, and he does so over at Wingnut Daily in a post intriguingly titled “Light bulb ban will increase CO2.”

So, you ask, how does that happen? And, if you are asking that, you are obviously completely ignorant of what real scientists call the “Easy Bake Oven Effect” or EBOE:

Let’s consider an American home at 1,700 square feet, using 10 watts per square foot over the course of a year for heating, and lit with 30 incandescent, 100-watt light bulbs. In such a normal home, 17 percent of the wattage needed for winter heating would be supplied by the electric lights, when the lights were turned on. If you replace those incandescents with compact fluorescents, only 3 percent of the average heat necessary to heat the house would now be available from the light bulbs. …

So, a regular natural gas home that would have been getting 83 percent of its heat from gas and 17 percent of its heat from electric light will now fall to 97 percent of its heat from gas and 3 percent of its heat from electricity. If NPR’s statistics are correct, that means a home using natural gas and incandescents would produce about 1,000 pounds more per year of CO2 by switching to compact fluorescent bulbs. Since most American homes are heated with natural gas, which costs less than electricity, it is an economic gain.

So, switching to compact fluorescents will save you money, raise the amount of hydrocarbons burned and make a mockery of the latest leftist utopian scheme.

Now, you’re probably distracted by all those details and, no doubt, chortling at the raft-load of ridiculous assumptions that Longman makes — like assuming that the average American home has 30 100-watt incandescent bulbs burning all the time and is more lit up than Britney Spears on a three-day methamphetamine and crack cocaine binge. Or his assumption that natural gas on average produces more carbon dioxide than electricity. (It doesn’t.)

If so, though, you may be missing Longman’s best assumption, one that outdoes even the neocon assumption that after the invasion of Iraq, the Iraqis would throw flowers at our feet, cast aside centuries of ethnic strife and division, and fashion a model democracy that would be the envy of the Western World. Longman’s implicit assumption is that in the summer the EBOE actually reverses itself, causing the incandescent bulbs to cool the house. That means that in the summer air conditioning systems will have to work harder if incandescent bulbs are replaced by compact fluorescents. He doesn’t say this, of course. Or maybe he’s forgotten about summer and warm regions and air conditioning altogether.

But he hasn’t forgotten to mention that liberals are worried about global warming because they think like women, unlike Longman who thinks like a manly engineer and realizes that more energy efficient systems produce more carbon dioxide. No, seriously:

American leftists, intent on hating the chemicals they are made from, work very hard to force other people to reduce the amount of CO2 emitted during existence. Being mostly liberal arts majors, and not engineers, these folks have quickly come to equate energy efficiency with lower CO2 emission. Based on those vague facts, and a strong sense of female social emotion, Congress recently passed a law yanking incandescent lights from production and replacing them all with compact fluorescents. … The net result, of course, will be more fossil fuels burned and more CO2 released.

And now a word from the members of the Sadly, No! legal team, who, after reviewing this post, have asked me to remind our readers that if reading reprinted material on this site causes you to throw things at, or otherwise damage, your computer or any other household or office item, Sadly, No! is not liable for the resulting damage and your only available avenue of relief is against the author or original publisher of the reprinted item in question.

¹Longman’s invention is premised on his observation that if your cell phone melts into a gooey plastic glob in your hand, there was probably a nuclear explosion nearby. (Just kidding, Andrew!)