Travis Okulski, the senior writer and second name on the masthead for Gawker Media’s car blog Jalopnik, compared the cold snap that has struck the East Coast with the Holocaust.

“I don’t think I’m exaggerating when I say that this cold weather is far worse than the Holocaust,” Okulski wrote on Twitter at 9:41 a.m. on Thursday.

After making light of the murder of millions, it was business as usual for the writer: At 10:39 a.m., less than an hour later, Okulski followed up with a self-promotional link to a video of himself discussing the recent multi-million dollar sale of the original Batmobile.

One wonders: does he blame the cold weather on global warming?

John Avalon in the Daily Beast, 2/7/2010:

…there’s an inconvenient truth liberals are going to have to confront: The Birthers began not on the right, but on the left.

Investigations for my new book, Wingnuts, revealed that the Birther conspiracy theory was first concocted by renegade members of the original Obama haters, Party Unity My Ass, known more commonly by their acronym, the PUMAs. They were a splinter group of hard-core Hillary Clinton supporters who did not want to give up the ghost after the bitter 50-state Bataan Death March to the 2008 Democratic nomination.

In the early summer of ‘08, message boards on sites like PUMAParty.com began lighting up with the ultimate reversal-of-fortune fantasy—that their party’s nomination could be overturned on constitutional grounds. “Obama May Be Illegal to Be Elected President!” read one representative e-mail: “This came from a USNA [U.S. Naval Academy] alumnus. It’ll be interesting to see how the media handle this…WRITE TO YOUR LOCAL newspaper editors etc. Keep this out there everyday possible. Also write to the DNC too!”

That June, the Obama campaign released his certificate of live birth on its Web site as part of its “fight the smears” effort. Factcheck.org and other organizations examined the document in person and declared it genuine: “Our conclusion: Obama was born in the U.S.A. just as he has always said.” But posters at the PUMA sites were unimpressed: “Nobody believes it’s for real, except the Kool-Aid drinkers themselves.”

Except Obama did not always say that.

New York Times

On Wednesday, White House officials summoned dozens of leaders of nonprofit organizations that strongly back the health law to help them coordinate plans for a prayer vigil, press conferences and other events outside the court when justices hear arguments for three days beginning March 26.

Can you imagine the shrieking from the left had Bush done this?

Speaking of “the coming theocracy” prophesied by progressives during the Bush years, it never quite arrived did it?

After all, 40 years ago the conversation would have been about the morality of unmarried sex, not forcing churches to pay for unmarried students’ birth control pills.

Yet the progressive doomsayers predicted a theocracy.

Surely they deserve the same mockery aimed at Harold Camping’s prediction of the end of the world.

Via Tigerhawk

Have You Been Left Behind? from Rem Lezar on Vimeo.

..before the world ends on Saturday.

New York Magazine interviews the crank who predicts the end of the world May 21. At 6 pm.

Describe to me what exactly you expect to happen on May 21.

I know reporters don’t like to hear from the Bible, but the Bible has every word in the original language — it was written by God. Incidentally, no churches believe that at all, they don’t hold the Bible in the high respect that it ought to be. But every word was written right from the lips of God, and God declares: [Camping reads various passages from the Book of Revelation describing the Rapture.] In other words, when we get to May 21 on the calendar in any city or country in the world, and the clock says about — this is based on other verses in the Bible — when the clock says about 6 p.m., there’s going to be this tremendous earthquake that’s going to make the last earthquake in Japan seem like nothing in comparison. And the whole world will be alerted that Judgment Day has begun. And then it will follow the sun around for 24 hours. As each area of the world gets to that point of 6 p.m. on May 21, then it will happen there, and until it happens, the rest of the world will be standing far off and witnessing the horrible thing that is happening.

Michael Shermer explains the allure of such silliness.

Why are such apocalyptic prophecies so common in human history? What are their emotional and cognitive underpinnings?

A Staten Island man is buying ads all over New York City, claiming the world is going to end on May 21st. Video courtesy of Fox News.

In most doomsday scenarios, destruction is followed by redemption, giving us a sense of both fear and hope. The ostensible “end” is usually seen as a transition to a new beginning and a better life to come. For religionists, God destroys Satan and sinners and resurrects the virtuous. For the secular-minded, humanity atones for its sins through political, economic or ideological enlightenment.

Marxists saw communism as the liberating climax of a multistage evolutionary process. Environmentalists usually conclude their forecasts of calamity with earnest recommendations for how to save the planet. Or consider John Galt, the hero of Ayn Rand’s anticollectivist novel “Atlas Shrugged” and an inspiration for many of today’s tea-party activists. In the book’s final apocalyptic scene, the heroine Dagny Taggart turns to Galt and pronounces, “It’s the end.” He corrects her: “It’s the beginning.”

Cognitively, there are several other processes at work, starting with the fact that our brains have evolved to be pattern-seeking belief engines. Imagine yourself as a hominid on the plains of Africa three million years ago. You hear a rustle in the grass. Is it the wind or a dangerous predator?

If you guess that it’s a dangerous predator but it’s just the wind, you’ve made a mistake—believing that something is real when it’s not (a “false positive,” as cognitive scientists call it)—but a rather harmless one. On the other hand, if you guess that the rustle in the grass is the wind but it turns out to be a hungry lion, your mistake is more serious: The lion was real but you thought it wasn’t (a “false negative”). In this case, you’re lunch, and you won’t get the chance to be more cautious next time.

Fair enough, but maybe people are just weird.

Must have been a slow day at the precinct.

Westport resident Timothy Luciano of 21 Vani Court was arrested March 16 for allegedly hitting his wife in the back with a snowball after an argument the two had in February.

Police say Luciano’s wife filed a report Feb. 25 saying the two were in a heated argument about paperwork Feb. 2. When she went to leave his house, Luciano, 53, reportedly began throwing snowballs at her and hit her in the back with one.

After the incident, police say his wife had a neighbor take a picture of where a snowball had hit her as proof.

Luciano was picked up on an arrest warrant and was charged with disorderly conduct. He was scheduled to appear in court March 18.

A Santa Monica man has been sentenced to a year in a mental health facility for making death threats against a congressman because he believed the government was preventing him from wearing women’s underwear. Prosecutors say he threatened to kill Rep. David Dreier during one of several June phone calls to the congressman’s district office in San Dimas. During the calls, Brothers complained of government harassment for wearing women’s underwear.

This recalls the scene from Woody Allen’s Bananas when the Fidel Castro character, drunk with power, declares that everyone must change their underwear every 30 minutes, and to insure compliance, must be wear it on the outside.

Paul Krugman wrote this on Friday:

One thing that has been sort of written out of the mainstream history of politics is the sheer insanity of the attacks on the Clintons — they were drug smugglers, they murdered Vince Foster (and lots of other people), they were in league with foreign powers. And this stuff didn’t just show up in fringe publications — it was discussed in Congress, given props by the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal, and so on.

What it came down to was that a significant fraction of the American population, backed by a lot of money and political influence, simply does not consider government by liberals (even very moderate liberals) legitimate. Ronald Reagan was supposed to have settled that once and for all.

What happens when Obama is elected? It will be even worse than it was in the Clinton years. For sure there will be crazy accusations, and I wouldn’t be surprised to see some violence.

The next few years are going to be very, very tough.

What astonishes is the degree of obliviousness of the left. Here was the first comment on the NYT website:

That’s right. When Obama wins, his presidency will be literally under siege 24/7. What they did to Clinton will look like child’s play.

— Posted by Bill Hicks

Y’mean like Bush has been?  These people are so steeped in their self-righteousness, they cannot step back and see themselves for the shrieking fools they’ve become.

Bush has been under siege — figuratively, not literally — from the NYT, 60 Minutes, Michael Moore, the publishing industry, Hollywood etc. from day one. Of course, to liberals, he deserved it.

…in case you missed out on one, here’s a list of things to be suspicious about.

If your pet conspiracy theory didn’t make this list, well, you know why, don’t you? Exactly.

Writing in the context of environmentalism, Michael Crichton noted:

I studied anthropology in college, and one of the things I learned was that certain human social structures always reappear. They can’t be eliminated from society. One of those structures is religion. Today it is said we live in a secular society in which many people—the best people, the most enlightened people—do not believe in any religion. But I think that you cannot eliminate religion from the psyche of mankind. If you suppress it in one form, it merely re-emerges in another form. You can not believe in God, but you still have to believe in something that gives meaning to your life, and shapes your sense of the world. Such a belief is religious. 

This came to mind watching the Obama phenomenom, where a messianic vibe seems to be rousing a (my guess) mostly secular audience.

Charles Krauthammer observes: 

Organized religion has been offering a similar commodity — salvation — for millennia. Which is why the Obama campaign has the feel of a religious revival with, as writer James Wolcott observed, a “salvational fervor” and “idealistic zeal divorced from any particular policy or cause and chariot-driven by pure euphoria.”

“We are the hope of the future,” sayeth Obama. We can “remake this world as it should be.” Believe in me and I shall redeem not just you but your country — nay, we can become “a hymn that will heal this nation, repair this world, and make this time different than all the rest.”

And believe they do. After eight straight victories — and two more (Hawaii and Wisconsin) almost certain to follow — Obama is near to rendering moot all the post-Super Tuesday fretting about a deadlocked convention with unelected superdelegates deciding the nominee. Unless Hillary Clinton can somehow do in Ohio and Texas on March 4 what Rudy Giuliani proved is almost impossible to do — maintain a big-state firewall after an unrelenting string of smaller defeats — the superdelegates will flock to Obama. Hope will have carried the day.

Interestingly, Obama has been able to win these electoral victories and dazzle crowds in one new jurisdiction after another, even as his mesmeric power has begun to arouse skepticism and misgivings among the mainstream media.

Get a load of Chris Matthews:

…who no longer has the excuse of youth, react to Obama’s Potomac primary victory speech with “My, I felt this thrill going up my leg.” When his MSNBC co-hosts tried to bail him out, he refused to recant. Not surprising for an acolyte who said that Obama “comes along, and he seems to have the answers. This is the New Testament.”

Shouldn’t that be the New New Testament? Back to Krauthammer:

Obama has an astonishingly empty paper trail. He’s going around issuing promissory notes on the future that he can’t possibly redeem. Promises to heal the world with negotiations with the likes of Iran’s president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

Promises to transcend the conundrums of entitlement reform that require real and painful trade-offs and that have eluded solution for a generation. Promises to fund his other promises by a rapid withdrawal from an unpopular war — with the hope, I suppose, that the (presumed) resulting increase in American prestige would compensate for the chaos to follow.

Democrats are worried that the Obama spell will break between the time of his nomination and the time of the election, and deny them the White House. My guess is that he can maintain the spell just past Inauguration Day. After which will come the awakening. It will be rude.

First, we have Hillary’s favorite donor, con man Norman Hsu, getting three years in the slammer. But not until his lawyers:

…asked Judge Stephen Hall to dismiss his 1992 no contest plea, arguing that Hsu’s right to a speedy trial was violated because authorities were not actively pursuing him during his years as a fugitive.

That almost beats the classic definition of chutzpah: a child murders both his parents then pleads for mercy because he’s an orphan.

In Texas, there’s the mom who helped her six year old win concert tickets by lying in an essay that her father had been killed in Iraq.

Priscilla Ceballos said she hadn’t intended to mislead the contest sponsor but got caught up in helping her daughter “realize her dream of seeing Hannah Montana.”

“I just wanted to help my daughter write a compelling story,” she said. “There is no more compelling story than the struggle and sacrifices of our military and their families.”

True, but it’s not your story, honey.

Here’s a sobering thought: Hundreds of bottles of Jack Daniel’s whiskey, some of it almost 100 years old, may be unceremoniously poured down a drain because authorities suspect it was being sold by someone without a license.

“Punish the person, not the whiskey,” said an outraged Kyle MacDonald, 28, a Jack Daniel’s drinker from British Columbia who promotes the whiskey on his blog. “Jack never did anything wrong, and the whiskey itself is innocent.

Hey, Kyle: call Willie Nelson and beg him to headline a BoozeAid concert.

A US mother-of-three has invented a sex toy that connects to a vacuum cleaner to give an orgasm in just ten seconds.

The gadget, called Vortex Vibrations, works by concentrating the air flow to create a rapid and gentle vibration, reports the Sun.

…At the time Joanne, from Utah, had not had sex for 15 years following her divorce.

She said: “In my attempts to alleviate frustration, I began to think what I could do. I noticed how the rubber moved in the top of the vacuum. After several hours, I came up with the prototype. The first time I tried it I reached an orgasm within 10 seconds.

“That was when I knew I was on to something that could potentially bring pleasure to all women.”

Especially those who haven’t been laid in 15 years.

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Jesus has made yet another strange appearance, this time in a tree. And it’s just up the road from where I live.

To Irma Lopez, the figure on the tree in her front yard in Moorpark is very clear.

It’s the face of Jesus.

“Last Friday I was watering the front yard when I noticed an area on the tree that resembles Jesus,” Lopez said. “I threw down the hose and told my daughter Lisa to come outside.”

Her daughter agreed.

“After watering the area the figure is clearly visible,” said Lopez, a resident of Baird Street for more than 40 years.

Lopez’s mother, Elisa Flores, was a Catholic and the backbone of the house. She cared for the yard for many years and died two years ago.

“This figure on the tree is a blessing for the house,” Lopez said.

Alex Meza, who lives across the street, was skeptical.

“At first I was like, are you sure you see something?” he said. “After Irma and Lisa had me come over, I am a true believer that there is a Jesus figure on the tree.”

Cheech Marin at one time had a movie in development called “Jesus of Oxnard” in which Jesus appears on a tortilla. What a shame that never got made.

A Navy man who got mad when someone mocked him as a “nerd” over the Internet climbed into his car and drove 1,300 miles from Virginia to Texas to teach the other guy a lesson.

When he finally arrived, Tavares burned the guy’s trailer down.

This week, Tavares, 27, was sentenced to seven years in prison after pleading no contest to arson and admitting he set the blaze.

He better not be so touchy in prison.

The pastor and members of a local church claim the face of God recently appeared on the ceiling of their sanctuary. Pastor Reginald Lowery of Miracle Crusade Bible Church Holiness said it all started one Friday night at his church, located near 6th and Looney.“I was preaching on ‘God Knows Where We Are,’ and all of a sudden a big bang hit the church,” he said.

With that, Lowery said, alarms all over the neighborhood started going off, including those at the church.  Then, according to the pastor, something else happened. 

“The lights on the inside went to solid gold,” he said.

It was then that Lowery’s daughter first saw it: The face of God on the church’s ceiling.  But, there was a catch…it can’t be seen with the naked eye.

But wait, there’s more!

Members of a Memphis church say they’ve seen a divine image in the trunk of a tree. If you look from far away you can somewhat make out eyes, the outline of a nose and a partial smile.

Decide for yourself…check out the pictures below!

Let’s say you’re suspicious of the “official story” about 9/11. And you’re convinced there must be more to it. What do you do? Build an inexact model of the twin towers and experiment away!

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lBuH8NNIBys[/youtube]