Good definition of a "Truther"

I liked this definition from UD of 9/11 truther:

A crazy person who believes the US government committed 9/11. Truthers get their inspiration from a moronic documentary called "Loose Change" which provides no facts whatsoever and has been thoroughly debunked. People who disagree with the truthers are repeatedly called government shills since truthers have no logical argument to counter the evidence.

Truther: 9/11 was an inside job!
Sane person: Prove it.
Truther: There was no plane at the Pentagon, only a missile!
Sane person: There's dozens of witnesses and plane debris was found all over the place.
Truther: ...Well the WTC was a controlled demolition!
Sane person: Why did both buildings collapse from the point of impact then? Pretty crazy the explosives were in the exact spot the plane hit and didn't explode upon impact.
Truther: ...You're just a government shill! Enjoy your FEMA camp when the NWO rolls around!

It's by a dude styling himself troofers be nuts. And guess what? Troofers do be nuts. I know a guy who is a religious Catholic, very active, and was only a little bit looney before about 2 years ago. Then he "saw the light" and now he sends me 9/11 Truther stuff from Alex Jones et al at least twice a week. I'm on his list; he sends this stuff to everyone with a BCC, so at least it's semi-professionally done. As a bonus, I also get the standard fear mongering about H1N1... don't ask. The few times I've responded I get an all caps response back about how I should be asking the Lord to open my eyes to the truth and other meaningless platitudes worthy of question beggars.

To make his emails even easier for me to discount, he uses 20 point Calibri font on all his emails as a baseline. Recently he has obviously desired to urgently increase the urgency of his urgent message, so he has cranked it up to 24 point URGENT CALIBRI BOLD. I remember thinking "Hey, here's a new phenomenon: bitmap inflation." I felt like replying to tell him that using these large fonts is sort of like the Federal Reserve devaluing our currency by the endless printing of fiat greenbacks, but as usual I chickened out. I tell myself it's out of politeness and respect. But I really think he is full-blown bonkers to be broadcasting all these inanities.

One time he included an exclamatory AMEN! inflated to 100 points of inch-high black caps. Believing my light-fingered toddlers had attacked my precious notebook again, I instinctively checked my stash of Sharpies. But momentarily I realized the pious graffito was emanating from my liquid crystal matrix, so it was only the electronic equivalent of Black Crayola on Post-it―or possibly a mixed media collage using cardboard, Elmer's glue and headline typeface incised from the Akron Beacon Journal.

I'm probably overreacting to this poor old chap—he's getting up there in years—but it's on my mind because he just sent me more links to Infowars and Prison Planet and ended with a strained segue to The Chastisement™ and a call to conversion. All of this with zero percent insincerity, I'm fairly sure. I've learned that it's no use telegraphing that I'm not interested in this stuff because I know he feels called by God to blast his message to the ends of the earth via SMTP. How would he answer the Lord on Judgement Day if he took the name of a "lost sheep" off his email list? Still the conspiracy stuff just makes my head itch and I can't help reacting to some degree.

Evil and Stupid Misconceptions, Right

William McGurn's piece in WSJ shows the grasping quality of the defenders of the health care bill. Unwilling to discuss details of the bill, they attack the unbelievers with accusations of evil, stupidity and misconceiving. First he deals with Harry Reid's latest "evil" remark:

We saw it again in 2002, when George W. Bush characterized North Korea, Iran and Saddam Hussein's Iraq as an "axis of evil." Tom Daschle, a Democrat and then Senate majority leader, warned that "we've got to be very careful with rhetoric of that kind"; former President Jimmy Carter called it "overly simplistic and counterproductive"; and comedian Will Ferrell parodied it on Saturday Night Live. Soon the phrase became acceptable only in the ironic sense—as in the Chris Fair cookbook titled "Cuisines of the Axis of Evil and Other Irritating States: A Dinner Party Approach to International Relations."

With all this history, you would think Harry Reid (D., Nev.) had ample warning. Nevertheless, the Senate majority leader invoked the e-word himself last week at an energy conference in Las Vegas, where he accused those protesting President Barack Obama's health-care proposals of being "evil mongers." So proud was he of this contribution to the American political lexicon that he repeated it to a reporter the next day and noted the phrase was "an original."

And then . . . nothing. No thundering rebuke from the New York Times. No outburst from Mr. Carter. In fact, it's hard not to notice that the good and gracious people who instinctively recoil at words like "evil" or "un-American" (the preferred term of Mr. Reid's counterpart in the House, Speaker Nancy Pelosi) have all been silent.

Yeah, well, Reid is a Democrat, so he has immunity. Next, he examines how Obama goes after the stupidity of a straw-woman he carries around to townhall meetings:

It's a point of view Mr. Obama inadvertently encourages when he indulges in, say, the trope about Medicare that has become a staple of his town halls. The president tells the crowd he's received a letter from a woman upset with his plans for health care. "She said, 'I don't want government-run health care. I don't want you meddling in the private market place. And keep your hands off my Medicare.'"

Get it? The applause tells us the audience does: How dumb can this woman be?

Gibbs hits it from the misconception angle:

It's much the same with White House spokesman Robert Gibbs. In his press briefings, Mr. Gibbs seems to suggest that all hard questions about health care are based on "misconceptions." Really?

Is the Congressional Budget Office's finding that the House plan would significantly raise health-care costs a "misconception"? Was it a "misconception" that the now-abandoned section covering end-of-life issues had an in-built conflict of interest between lowering costs and providing care for the elderly? And is it a "misconception" that Mr. Obama's ultimate goal is a single-payer system, when Americans can watch him on earlier videos saying as much?

Read the whole thing, it's funny yet revealing. He points out that everyone in DC is asking "what went wrong with the administration's sales pitch" without suspecting that it might be substance. He's right; they're trying to sell Americans a shit sandwich for a trillion dollars. If we don't want to buy it, they'll try to ram it down our throats.

Obama Revisionism

Here's a thorough fisking of some good ol' par-for-the-course Obama revisionism. It's written by Frank J. Tipler, Professor of Mathematical Physics at Tulane University.

In his speech to the Muslim world in Cairo, President Barack Obama claimed: “As a student of history, I also know civilization’s debt to Islam. It was Islam — at places like Al-Azhar University — that carried the light of learning through so many centuries, paving the way for Europe’s Renaissance and Enlightenment. It was innovation in Muslim communities that developed the order of algebra; our magnetic compass and tools of navigation; our mastery of pens and printing.”

Obama is not much of a “student of history” if he believes this. Almost every advance he attributes to the Muslims was due to someone else.

The non-Muslim Chinese invented the magnetic compass and printing (Gutenberg invented not printing, but movable type). The non-Muslim Hindu Indians invented algebra and the decimal numbering system. The non-Muslim European Christians invented the university.

I can’t address advances in medicine, but I have studied the history of astronomy and physics. The Muslims contributed nothing.

This stuff is important to point out because it's political pandering on the President's part, and there are still people who think somehow Obama is beyond politics and politcal calculations. Obama is not an idiot, but he certainly knows how to leverage the idiocy of the general populace. Check this out from page 2 of Tipler's article:

The reason Muslims never developed fundamental physics is because the leading Muslim theologians declared the idea of fixed physical laws to be heretical. The Qur’an (verse 6:64) states: “The Jews have said, ‘God’s hand is fettered.’ Fettered are their hands, and they are cursed for what they have said. Nay, but His hands are outspread; He expends how He will.” The standard Muslim interpretation of this passage has been that there cannot be unchanging physical laws because Allah may change the laws at any moment. In 1982, the Institute for Policy Studies in Islamabad, Pakistan, criticized a chemistry textbook by saying: “There is latent poison present in the subheading Energy Causes Changes because it gives the impression that energy is the true cause rather than Allah. Similarly it is unIslamic to teach that mixing hydrogen and oxygen automatically produces water. The Islamic way is this: when atoms of hydrogen approach atoms of oxygen, then by the Will of Allah water is produced.” The implication is clear: next week, Allah may change his mind about water being a compound of hydrogen and oxygen. With this sort of worldview, how could one possibly be a scientist?

The cosmology of the Qur’an is obviously geocentric, and as a consequence, Al-Azhar University, which Obama singles out for praise in his speech, still teaches Ptolemaic astronomy.

There was one truly great “Muslim” physicist, the Nobel Prize winning Pakistani, Mohammed Abdus Salam. I put “Muslim” in quotes, because Salam belonged to the Ahmadi sect of Islam, a sect that accepts modern science. But in 1974, the Pakistani parliament declared the Ahmadi sect heretical, and its members are currently being persecuted in Pakistan. Contemporary Muslim historians generally do not list Salam as an important Muslim scientist. Had he remained in Pakistan, he quite possibly would have been killed.

So some Catholics told Galileo to shut up over 300 years ago and we're still hearing about how unscientific Christianity is. Meanwhile the Muslim's produce one serious scientist in modern times and they disown him, persecute his sect and drive him from his homeland out of fear for his life. Now that's enlightened.

In spouting all this garbage, we're coddling Muslim's by inflating their self-esteem, just like we do with underperforming kids in public schools. This is merely going to perpetuate their envy and disappointment. In effect, here's what Obama's message should sound like: "Continue to be angry and envious of others and please keep festering in your persecution complex. Be proud of your great contributions to the world such as female genital mutilation, fashionable explosive vests and hatred of the Jews, and the fact that we use a few of your words in our language." We need a guy with an Obama voice to do speech impersonations, but I'm not holding my breath for the show-business honeymoon with this guy ending soon.