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[Burrito Al Pastor]

He said he wasn't making a derogatory comment, and used a slang word used when he was growing up.

This is awesome. It's like somebody explained cultural relativism to him, and he didn't understand it, and he tried to use it anyways.

[Brentai]

No, you know what?  That argument is 100% valid.  He was totally speaking in the "jive" of upper-middle class suburban whites in 1960whatever.  Totally honest mistake.

So apologize for it.

Bill, you should have at least mumbled an embarrassed "Oh, I'm sorry" when she reacted like that.  You didn't then, and now you're making a huge fucking deal about how you're never going to.  I would expect more politeness from the Grand Dragon of the Klu Klux Klan than that.  I'm sure even he has enough basic human decency to not insult a mother's dead son, intentionally or not.  Unless the mother was black of course.

Point being, the issue here is not about what Bill James thinks of those homos or whether or not he meant to be insulting.  The issue here is whether or not Bill James is too socially retarded to be let out in public.

[Catloaf]

Y'know what's also a slang term for a different group of people?  "Nigger."   By his logic it's completely okay to use this word now.

[Mongrel]

Yo, what's up, my honkies?

[Büge]

since when do you qualify as black hi

[Brentai]

Someone stole the Arbeit Macht Frie sign from Auschwitz.

[Thad]

Which reminds me... Weathergate: I'm foaming at the goddamned mouth over that one. How about you guys?

Fuck those people.  You're going to deliberately change numbers because they conflict with your hypothesis, and put fucking "scientist" on your business card?

I haven't gone through all of the e-mails, but what are you talking about? Are you talking about "Mike's Nature Trick" and all that?

Sorry for the late reply.

Nah, goes a bit beyond just the "apply a trick" comment.  Via CBS:

As the leaked messages, and especially the HARRY_READ_ME.txt file, found their way around technical circles, two things happened: first, programmers unaffiliated with East Anglia started taking a close look at the quality of the CRU's code, and second, they began to feel sympathetic for anyone who had to spend three years (including working weekends) trying to make sense of code that appeared to be undocumented and buggy, while representing the core of CRU's climate model.

One programmer highlighted the error of relying on computer code that, if it generates an error message, continues as if nothing untoward ever occurred. Another debugged the code by pointing out why the output of a calculation that should always generate a positive number was incorrectly generating a negative one. A third concluded: "I feel for this guy. He's obviously spent years trying to get data from undocumented and completely messy sources."

Programmer-written comments inserted into CRU's Fortran code have drawn fire as well. The file briffa_sep98_d.pro says: "Apply a VERY ARTIFICAL correction for decline!!" and "APPLY ARTIFICIAL CORRECTION." Another, quantify_tsdcal.pro, says: "Low pass filtering at century and longer time scales never gets rid of the trend - so eventually I start to scale down the 120-yr low pass time series to mimic the effect of removing/adding longer time scales!"

(A reluctant hat tip to the odious Megan McArdle at The Atlantic.)

I realize that curve corrections and buggy code are common things, but this looks to me like a clear case of people futzing with the data until it gave them the results they expected.  "VERY ARTIFICIAL", all caps, is a pretty clear indication that the programmer knew what he was doing.

If they were using poor software and it was modeling the data incorrectly, they should have thrown it out, not run the results through an arbitrary formula to get what they wanted.

[Brentai]

The program was 100% conforming to its written requirements though.

[The Artist Formerly Known As Yoji]

So, has anyone else heard of this one? Where that undercover DC cop basically massacred people for a snowball fight?

I know it's generally a bad idea to act even abstractly threatening to a US cop, but DANG, YO.

[Misha]

to be fair, it's not like it was "just" a snowball fight. This was dozens of people interfering with traffic at a major street during a snowstorm. 

[Mongrel]

The reference to 9/11 in the article reminds me of a quip from a good friend I haven't spoken to in a while "It's a well known fact that the American sense of humour was actually kept in a vault in the basement of the World Trade Centre".

[SCD]

to be fair, it's not like it was "just" a snowball fight. This was dozens of people interfering with traffic at a major street during a snowstorm. 

And to be fair, it is DC.  The place is murky in more than one way and PSTD is a bitch.

[François]

a good friend I haven't spoken to in a while

that's quite a roundabout way to tell me to play more tf2

[Mongrel]

a good friend I haven't spoken to in a while

that's quite a roundabout way to tell me to play more tf2

Wait... was that you?

I actually thought it was a different friend who'd said that.

 

EDIT: BUT YOU SHOULD PLAY MORE TF2. 

[Transportation]

So,
Israel has admitted pathologists harvested organs from dead Palestinians, and others, without the consent of their families – a practice it said ended in the 1990s.

Channel 2 TV reported that in the 1990s, specialists at Abu Kabir harvested skin, corneas, heart valves and bones from the bodies of Israeli soldiers, Israeli citizens, Palestinians and foreign workers, often without permission from relatives.

Really? Maybe they should decorate their Christmas trees with arab baby blood and poison Polish wells while we're confirming stereotypes and conspiracy theories. Do they have committee for determining how to best piss off the international community?

[SCD]

Not surprised on that one - these guys would do anything to survive, especially back in the 70's and 80's when they did have some fun shows.  I'm interesting in knowing why they stopped it when they did.  Was it because they knew the Ruskies were no longer supplying arms to the Egyptians and Syrians while the Jordanians had enough with the Palestinian intifada or was it something else?

Also, if you wonder why I'm calm on this one, think Black September or Hama.  Human atrocity for the explicit purpose of ensuring the continuity of the state was the order of the day for all the players involved.  Still is.

[Mongrel]

... there's a joke about soap and lampshades in there, if anyone wants to make it.

I think what will cause the most outrage likely to actually achieve anything is the fact that they were doing it to their own citizens too.

Also: This is just one of the many ever-changing faces of no-holds-barred war, folks. Get used to seeing this in any future ground-down ugly conflict where one or both sides has modern medical capabilities.

[Catloaf]

Maybe they should decorate their Christmas trees with arab baby blood and poison Polish wells while we're confirming stereotypes and conspiracy theories. Do they have committee for determining how to best piss off the international community?

Maybe they should decorate their Christmas trees with arab baby blood and poison Polish wells while we're confirming stereotypes and conspiracy theories.

Maybe they should decorate their Christmas trees with arab baby blood

Christmas trees

 
Blood isn't used for decoration, it's used for arcane acts against the goyum.  And besides, blood from any sort of unbaptized goy works.  Ram's blood is used for decoration.

[sei]

No, it signals the crazy ghosty mans to go kill someone else's first born.

[François]

"It's a well known fact that the American sense of humour was actually kept in a vault in the basement of the World Trade Centre".

Oh wow. I was just catching up with Hark! A vagrant (like I really need to link that), and followed a link to this interview with Orson Welles and H.G. Wells where they're talking about the War of the Worlds event. It's all interesting, but from 3:40 to 4:10...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nUdghSMTXsU