Posts by R A Hurley
Last ←Newer Page 1 2 3 4 5 Older→ First
-
Speaking of threads, has anyone here ever worn a hand-knitted jumper with a keyboard design on it? Anyone?
actually yes!! i had one as a kid... my grandmother knitted it for me, "because you like music, dear"... it got stolen soon afterward, but i still think of it fondly...
-
but, more relevantly, that Time article is fascinating... it's either some sort of elaborate hoax, or a gold standard example of condescension and mean-spiritedness...
... the average person listening to just one pop song on the radio will have a hard time hearing Auto-Tune's impact; it's effectively deceptive. But when track after track has perfect pitch, the songs are harder to differentiate from one another--which explains why pop is in a pretty serious lull at the moment.
a great example of an attempt to make the personal dislikes of a few people somehow empirically plausible...
-
re: Sacha's Blue Monday embed
takes me back to the days when synths and drum machines were the undertakers of popular culture... ahhh, good times... i remember my Dad used to work himself into quite a state over my adolescent record collection... he still won't listen to anything that doesn't have a blues riff buried under there somewhere... autotune would probably convince him his mid-80s apocalyptic musings on Duran Duran had been borne out entirely...
-
No one wants me to embed Frampton Comes Alive up in here, do they? DO THEY?
go on....... embed the Frampton!... Frampton haters (including myself) can step off... nobody's going to force them to click that link... hell, i'd embed it myself, but things like that have got to come from the HEART, y'know?...
-
hey... i thought it was witty! i wouldn't say i LOL'd... but that's only because my cat is asleep on my lap...
in fact, your quip reminded me of an American acquaintance who said to me back in 2007: "man, the Dems could run Peter Gabriel on a 'Shock The Monkey' platform next year and STILL win"...
-
Batman is a Republican?
oh man... the eight year old inside me just choked out his final breath and passed on...
-
also... i think the greatest gift the GOP could give Obama's re-election campaign in 2012 would be running Palin against him... i can't picture what she could possibly learn in the next four years that would obviate the shortcomings she has shown in this election cycle... i've never been there, but surely America doesn't have THAT many short-sighted rednecks?
in a nutshell... i think the odds on Palin getting the nomination in 2012 are slim to non-existent... Huckabee has a better chance... but i can totally see Obama thrashing him in 2012 as well... in fact, i'll go out on a limb right now and say that if a Republican takes the White House in 2012, it'll be someone we've yet to hear of...
-
i see the point of the Salon piece you link to, Russell... but i also wonder if it doesn't add to what seems to me to be a growing sense that Obama is going to be not merely a better president than Dubya, but an epochal president... i worry that expectations for the man are rising to the point where he can never live up to them, regardless of his merit as a president...
i mean, it's one thing to say he's the better candidate for president... that much is quite plainly obvious... but it is quite another to suggest that his election will bring an era of political satire to a close...
as Jon Stewart (your hero and mine) said at one point about a particular Bush-ism (the details of which escape me at the moment)... "we don't need your charity"...
-
Wow, that's mind-blowingly dishonest on her part. Confusing the actions of a population of teenagers with the population at large is such a basic error that I cannot believe that it is anything other than a wilful distortion on her part.
More grounds for a complaint to the press council?
-
Wow, she just keeps on abusing statistics doesn't she?
This quote comes directly from the article:
"Here's a disturbing fact: in 2003 four of every five pregnant Asian women aborted their babies"
Fortunately Statistics New Zealand keeps records of both live births and abortions and provides these counts (note counts, not projections) by ethnicity
This page here contains a record of live births by ethnicity from 1996 to 2004 (see chapter 2 spreadsheet 2.2) . There are 5285 live Asian briths recorded against the year 2003.
This page here contains a record of induced abortions by ethnicity (see table 7 on the attached spreadsheet) . There are 3502 Asian women who had abortions recorded in the year 2003.
This puts the rate of abortion per pregnancy at (very) roughly 40% Bearing in mind that still births and spontaneous abortions have not been included in the count of pregnancies and that the count of abortions will include some in which the baby is already dead or which will demonstrably endanger the life of the mother.
Deborah's 4 of every 5 gives us 80% which is demonstrably false.
Where on earth is DC getting her statistics from?
I'm sure the "research" in the rest of her article is every bit as thorough.
(Keith feel free to use this stuff however you see fit, the statistics took all of 20 minutes to pull together)