Professor-rat's Blurty
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Tuesday, May 6th, 2008
| Time |
Event |
| 2:55p |
Fainting couch
Consenting adult furniture shock
THE woman at the centre of the seat-sniffing scandal involving West Australian Opposition Leader Troy Buswell says he writhed in mock sexual pleasure during the incident.
The woman, who remains unnamed, told The West Australian newspaper Mr Buswell sniffed her chair twice within 10 minutes, while groaning and making "sexually satisfying noises".
Mr Buswell has admitted sniffing the seat of the Liberal female staff member in an office at Perth's Parliament House in October 2005.
He yesterday survived a Liberal party room move to dump him in the wake of the scandal.
The woman was today reported by The West Australian as saying that Mr Buswell placed a chair on his head twice within 10 minutes, sniffing it before writhing in mock sexual ecstasy.
"We finished the meeting (with a constituent), I walked the bloke downstairs and out of parliament, and when I got back I walked into the room to pick up my notepad from the desk and Buswell started grabbing the chairs going 'aahww, which one did you sit in? I'll be able to tell'," she said.
"And then he picked them up and started sniffing them and groaning and making sexually satisfying noises. I went, 'you're sick, knock it off', and grabbed my staff and walked out, but he didn't pay attention to a word I said."
The woman said she was standing with colleagues about 10 minutes later when one of them knocked on Mr Buswell's door to ask one of his staff to lunch.
"Buswell opened the door really wide, grabbed a chair and started sniffing it, lifted it above his head sniffing it and breathing in, going 'aaww yeah'," the woman said.
"It was awful. My colleagues, the four men I worked with, were just stunned into silence." | | 3:17p |
Dirty Sanchez
MORE NAMES....Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, who was put in charge of Iraq shortly after the invasion, told us last year that Iraq has been a giant clusterfuck run by incompetents and that he'd soon be naming names. This weekend, in Time magazine, he started naming a few (Rumsfeld, Rice, Tenet, Powell, Cheney, Bush, etc.). Today, in the New York Daily News, he names another one: Rudy Giuliani's mobbed-up pal and former police chief Bernie Kerik, who was inexplicably put in charge of training the Iraqi police in May 2003:
"I would be hard-pressed to identify a major national-level success that his organization accomplished in that time," Sanchez told The News...."His whole contribution was a waste of time and effort."
....Sanchez said Kerik focused more on "conducting raids and liberating prostitutes" than training the Iraqis.
"They'd get tips and they'd go and actually raid a whorehouse," Sanchez told The News. "Their focus becomes trying to do tactical police operations in the city of Baghdad, when in fact there is a much greater mission that they should be doing, which is training the police."
Sweet. Via TPMMuckraker.
—Kevin Drum
Donald Bumguard call yr agent | | 3:32p |
Nixon as Lady Mao
Psychologist Ellen Ladowsky elaborates on the Hillary Bosnia Fantasy @Huffpo:
There are two possibilities: Hillary may be a pathological liar. Or, more persuasive to me, Hillary believed what she was saying and her description of her Bosnia trip was a true representation of her psychic reality and not external reality. In her internal world, Hillary may feel as though she's always being shot at by sniper fire and that she's heroically managed to stay alive.
This theory makes sense of Hillary's recklessness. It didn't feel reckless to Hillary to repeat this lie over and over again, and she paid no heed to those who contradicted her, because in her mind, she was telling the truth. Only when confronted with undeniable evidence of external reality — actual footage from her Bosnia trip - did she admit (possibly to herself as well as the public) that her version of events was not true.
It also explains Hillary's reaction when exposed. She was angry because she was forced to abandon her psychic reality for external reality. For her, this was tantamount to giving up the truth in exchange for mere facts. .... [snip]
While most of her explanations have made no sense, when Hillary told Leno that she'd had "a lapse", she was right on. She'd had an actual lapse in mental functioning. | | 3:37p |
The National Council of The Race
Cinco de Mayo
By November I don't know why either Sen. Clinton or Sen. Obama should not have been asked to repudiate the support of an organization self-described as "The National Council of The Race".
Well, add McCain to the list of people to ask. He'll be speaking at the July convention of the National Council of La Raza in San Diego, which he describes as "part of his commitment to talking with all Americans during this presidential campaign," except that La Raza doesn't have any actual members or represent anyone. McCain has also used Cinco de Mayo to launch his Spanish-language site, where you can revel in his trademark "hablando claro." | | 3:45p |
Buggery in the Galapagos
Wrong Target [John Derbyshire]
A reader:
John,
I think you and other conservative critics of Ben Stein's movie are overlooking a significant part of the damage this film is doing: it diverts attention away from the areas of the academy, such as English, Poli Sci, Sociology, gender studies, black studies, etc. that really have become real cesspools of leftist dogma and actually are dire need of reform.
Conservatives who care about higher education ought to be scrutinizing the pseudo-scholars in these disciplines and leaving the real scholars in the natural sciences alone. Ben Stein is diverting resources away from where they could actually be doing some good.
Worse, the fact that conservatives are attacking the natural sciences makes them less credible when they call for reform in the humanities and social sciences. Efforts to promote Intelligent Design are being used as an argument against the Academic Bill of Rights in Florida, for example.
The damage Ben Stein is doing to efforts to reform the academy is incalculable and perhaps the worst effect of his movie.
I agree. Part of the anger that I, and a lot of other science-literate conservatives, feel towards Stein arises from his joining in the creationists' attempts to breach an academic barrier we've put our faith in, perhaps complacently. While every kind of lunacy has run rampant through our Humanities departments this past couple of decades, we've taken consolation in the fact that science and math departments have been able to go quietly about their work without any of the lunacy really affecting them. You can have Gay Legal Studies or Latina History, but Feminist Differential Geometry is much harder to get started. Being firmly in touch with empirical reality, or in the case of math with rigorous proof procedures, the sciences can't easily be disturbed by politicized crackpottery.
Stein's movie is an open assault on that barrier, an attempt to bring over what Roger Kimball calls "experiments against reality" from the Humanities departments into the sciences. It is not a coincidence that the current strain of creationism exemplified by Expelled gives off a strong whiff of postmodernism: ruthless power-holders imposing their own version of reality, etc. "When the religious Right adopts the epistemology of the multicultural Left — that truth is relative — there goes the Enlightenment …" That's a surviving fragment from Noam Scheiber's piece on this in The Australian a couple of years ago, the piece itself apparently no longer available. | | 3:48p |
The small mammals are revolting
"While Japan gets ready to become the world's most robot-friendly nation, the United States is more interested in helping integrate robots into rodent society. Hence the creation of robo-squirrel Rocky at Hampshire College in Massachusetts (pictured @google), where researchers are studying whether the robot's squirrelly ways will allow it to mingle with the fully-biological, acorn-chomping natives.
Apparently things are working out pretty well — Rocky can make the proper noises to communicate, and knows how to warn other squirrels with special shakes of his tail. Once we can create a Rocky who has the capabilities of Big Dog, the autonomous robot who can recover his balance after being kicked around by humans, we may have to worry less about whether it will join the squirrels and more about whether the squirrels will join it. A mechasquirrel may be just what rodent culture needs to have its revolution and overthrow the grain-hoarding humans."
NO MORE MICE HOLODOMORS! | | 3:52p |
Tortured for his beliefs
Self-tortured in Liddy's case
McCain's Bill Ayers? [Ramesh Ponnuru]
"Can a presidential candidate justify a long and friendly relationship with someone who, back in the 1970s, extolled violence and committed crimes in the name of a radical ideology—and who has never shown remorse or admitted error?" asks Steve Chapman. He's talking about McCain's relationship with G. Gordon Liddy.
Maybe Liddy could go around schools with his lighter trick...and it is always refreshing to see a volunteer to go under the proverbial bus. |
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