Five Before Chaos

Interesting and unsurprising poll out of Texas. Apparently, there’s a whole lotta stupid down there:

Did humans live at the same time as the dinosaurs? Three in ten Texas voters agree with that statement; 41 percent disagree, and 30 percent don’t know.38 percent said human beings developed over millions of years with God guiding the process and another 12 percent said that development happened without God having any part of the process. Another 38 percent agreed with the statement “God created human beings pretty much in their present form about 10,000 years ago.

..and more of the typical religiously driven ignorance. What’s really scary is how much influence Texas has over the nation’s textbooks, but that’s another story.

Now,don’t take me pointing this out as some sort of defense of Democrats, but in this poll, the acceptance of stupid ideas are much more prevalent by Republicans:

Has life on earth always existed in its present form? Republicans are more likely to agree (29 percent) than Democrats (16 percent). They’re less likely to believe that life evolved over time with no guidance from God (8 percent to 24 percent). Democrats are slightly less inclined to believe in evolution with a “guiding hand from God” (50 percent to 55 percent).

Republicans are less likely to believe that humans developed from earlier species of animals; 26 percent agree, while 60 percent disagree. Among Democrats in the survey, 46 percent agree that humans evolved from earlier species; 42 percent disagree. Perry’s voters were most hostile to this premise — 67 percent disagree.

Everytime I think we’re moving towards a more sane, rational society (admiteddly, almost never), polls like this come out and completely put that notion to rest.

UPDATE- this nails it:

Teabagger favorite, Florida Senate candidate Marc Rubio, criticizing Obama on that stupid teleprompter thing again (seriously, not a word about Reagan using ‘em?)… while using a teleprompter.

We are a stupid, stupid country.

h/t to Balloon Juice(click for full size):

When exploring the sweaty crotch of exploitation/B-movie cinema, there’s one thing I’ve noticed. A crappy movie by an indie studio almost inevitably seems to be much more entertaining than a crappy movie by a major studio. For good examples, just go into the blaxplotiation genre. You have something gritty and harsh, like Black Shampoo or  Jack Hill’s Coffy, chock full of tits and brutal violence, and then you have Warner Bros. Black Sampson, or Cleopatra Jones, which have all of the conventions and clichés of the genre, without any of the grit (often with a PG rating, to boot). Also, the production values are often a bit too good to allow the sheer incompetence that often makes those movies so enjoyable (ahem… Al Adamson). I often find myself, when watching a big studio B-movie, incredibly bored.

Case in point: a week or two ago, Jen and I watched Race With the Devil. Now, when you see “Starring Peter Fonda and Loretta Swit”, one tends to think there may be some serious craptacular potential. But those hopes are quickly dashed  when you see “20th Century Fox presents…”, and the result is just crap. It also has Warren Oates, who’s awesome in everything, and even he can’t save it. It’s about two very boring couples who go on a trip together in their RV, when they accidentally see some girl murdered in a Satanic ritual, and then they themselves are seen. So they get chased across Texas, admittedly with nothing much happening to them, other than some chases by a bunch of ordinary hicks and some rattlesnakes being put in their RV.  Oh, and they get stared at menacingly quite a bit, too. It seems that just about everyone in central Texas, from the local sheriff to the construction road crews 300 miles away, are all in the same Satanic cult (well, that would explain a lot of the idiocy that comes out of Texas, I guess).

The role of the two wives is like a throwback to an earlier time, as they just sit there irritatingly and scream, waiting for the men to help them (and remember, a few years earlier, we have Pam Grier going out and talking out baddies with shotgun blasts, singlehandely). To make matters worse, in addition to the anemic pacing, the PG rating makes sure we won’t see anything too risqué. All I was hoping for was a glimpse of Loretta Swit’s boobies, but alas, all I got was her in a bathing suit, and more or less still as annoying as her character on M*A*S*H. Hell, the killers first discover them because she comes out of the RV late at night yelling “Frank? Frank!?”; I was almost expecting Larry Linville’s Frank Burns character to come weaseling in out of the darkness. And the ending sucked, too.

My blogroll’s quite anemic; I’ve been trying to keep it to places I read regularly or of close blog colleagues. Admittedly, I don’t go to the “Americans United for Separation of Church and State” too often. Ok, never. 

Nevertheless, I added one worth checking out, The Poor Man Institute. As I was reading it, it almost felt like a funnier version of FBC, yet another leftie unburdened by political correctness. The post that made me realize it had to be on the blogroll?

Q: Why are liberals so condescending?

A: Because conservatives are fucking retards.

…or Swedish, Slovak, Hindi, or quite a few other flavors, thanks to those little flags in the right sidebar. Now one can ask, “Keď sa David Broder nie je idiot?”

Please, this guy must be getting pretty old, right now. How much longer is he gonna stick around and torture us with this crap? The de facto guru of “Washington villager conventional wisdom footsie” knocks this one out of the park in terms of sheer vacuousness:

The snows that obliterated Washington in the past week interfered with many scheduled meetings, but they did not prevent the delivery of one important political message: Take Sarah Palin seriously…

This was not the first time that Palin has impressed me…

Blessed with an enthusiastic audience of conservative activists, Palin used the Tea Party gathering and coverage on the cable networks to display the full repertoire she possesses, touching on national security, economics, fiscal and social policy, and every other area where she could draw a contrast with Barack Obama and point up what Republicans see as vulnerabilities in Washington…

Methinks Broder would also be “impressed” by a shiny new penny dangling on a string, or perhaps a July 4th sparkler, given the bar he’s set here. Funny how he failed to notice how those things in Caribou Barbie’s “full repertoire” are all things she doesn’t have a fucking clue about, even with crib notes.

Sweet merciful crap. He’s like that neighbor you used to live next to who would stop you on the porch and talk about just about everything he doesn’t have a friggin’ clue about.

… of America is a Stupid, Stupid Country (no, it’s nothing about the teabagging convention), exhibit #2857629 by Jacob Weisberg at Slate, Down With the People:

At the root of this kind of self-contradiction is our historical, nationally characterological ambivalence about government. We want Washington and the states to fix all of our problems now. At the same time, we want government to shrink, spend less, and reduce our taxes. We dislike government in the abstract: According to CNN, 67 percent of people favor balancing the budget even when the country is in a recession or a war, which is madness. But we love government in the particular: Even larger majorities oppose the kind of spending cuts that would reduce projected deficits, let alone eliminate them. Nearly half the public wants to cancel the Obama stimulus, and a strong majority doesn’t want another round of it. But 80-plus percent of people want to extend unemployment benefits and to spend more money on roads and bridges. There’s another term for that stuff: more stimulus spending.

The usual way to describe such inconsistent demands from voters is to say that the public is an angry, populist, tea-partying mood. But a lot more people are watching American Idol than are watching Glenn Beck, and our collective illogic is mostly negligent rather than militant. The more compelling explanation is that the American public lives in Candyland, where government can tackle the big problems and get out of the way at the same time.

Indeed.

… in which we learn the real motivations behind the military’s lame-brained Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell policy, courtesy of Republican nutter congressdouche Duncan Hunter:

And I think the folks who have been in the military that have been in these very close situations with each other, there has to be a special bond there. And I think that bond is broken if you open up the military to transgenders, to hermaphrodites, to gays and lesbians.

Methinks that Hunter’s still struggling with some thoughts he might have had while looking at all those wee-wees in the shower while in the Marines. Either that, or he has a vagina.

Ok, file this under “so-fucking-bad-it’s-genius”. Schlockmeister Al Adamson gave us this followup to his bike flick “Satan’s Sadists”, and this one is truly mind-boggling. Me and Jen watched it a few weeks ago, and had a blast. Barely cohesive “plot”, things that happen for no apparent reason, a Charles Manson-like guru who lives in his “commune” (which consists of one shack next to a restaurant and about five people), who kills people who find the bales of pot he has in his shack, just about every guy is a rapist, and just about every cliche about the 60’s counterculture is in here, in highly exaggerateed stereotypes.

And note in the trailer, the guy who gets “raped” by the women (“These sex or-gees is unnatural!”)is none other than Broadsides‘ Michael Colby, albeit a bit chunkier. Classic, gotta get it. You’ll puke laughing!:

Adamson’s original biker flick, Satan’s Sadists, not nearly as incompetent, but crappy, nonetheless. It killed West Side Story’s Russ Tamblyn’s career, that’s for sure.

Director Al Adamson, who married Regina Carrol (the “freak-out girl”) was later found murdered, buried under the concrete and tile-covered whirlpool bath in his newly remodeled bathroom. His contractor did it.