- Ezra Klein interviews a friend who went to fancy Harvard and then spent some time making barrels of money at Goldman Sachs. Watch as Ezra gets the inside scoop with hard-hitting questions like, “You went to Harvard. Then what happened?” [Ezra Klein]
- David Denby (lookalike?) is upset with Matt Yglesias and all his snarky partisan hate speech, because that snark stuff is mean and it’s ruining Our Conversation. [Matt Yglesias]
- Sarah Palin touches herself whenever she thinks about Glenn Beck’s big, hard & throbbing chalkboard. [Think Progress]
- Stephen Hawking wrote some calculus last night and concluded that when we do finally meet aliens they are going to slaughter the crap out of us and then silent-auction our organs on Craigslist, just like Christoper Columbus did with the Native Americans. [Daily Intel]
- Who actually believes every dollar not spent on Predator Drones could be used to feed poor people? Because that is some serious horseradish: those dollars are already appropriated for government Death Ray programs. [Weekly Standard]
RUMORS ON THE INTERNETS
April 26, 2010
You Know It’s Bad When Stephen Hawking Says It’s Bad
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{ 48 comments }
I think Steven Hawking has been watching too many re-runs of Independance Day.
I think Hawking’s fear of body snatchers began after he studied Glenn Beck.
Could be worse, Mr Hawking. It could be Vogons and their awful poetry.
Note the the Weakly Substandard. One US America dollar spent on Militaries R&D generates a mere ONE US America dollar return. One US America dollar spent on Civy St R&D generates some 3 to 4 US America dollar return. Why do you hate making money WS? Imagine how fucked things would be if the USAF got its way on the transistor and made it Top Secret? No Avatar. Our most advanced game would be Pong. And no intertubes porn. Aside from Avatar, I’d miss everything else.
Glenn Beck is changing our country all right. Father Coughlin would be envious.
Re: Harvard fetish. It’s the Blurst and the Brightest!
Palin just gets all hot and bothered thinking about being humiliated by writing lines on television wearing a bikini and a dunce cap: “I will not pretend to be politically relevant. I will not pretend to be politically relevant…”
Good to know that there are responsible news outlets like The Standard to remind us that nothing will ever change anywhere and that all munies allocated for defense spending can never be used for anything else.
it’s a cookbook!
Thank God for Glenn Beck saving this country from the liberal OLIGARHY.
Hey now, if the movies have taught me anything, it’s that incredibly advanced aliens will always be stupid and leave themselves open to stunning defeat by Deus Ex Machina, like not realizing the Earth’s surface is covered in water when it’s lethal to them (even water would be common on any livable planet with a temperature similar to ours), being strangely vulnerable to Earth viruses based on a completely different biology, or having advanced computers that are compatible with Apple laptops for some reason. We’ll be safe.
It takes a lot of gall to suggest that a military as large as the rest of the world’s combined is “badly under-resourced”, but Kagan manages it. He also doesn’t realize that we can’t just win wars automatically by shoveling money at them, or that besides winning and losing there’s the option of not getting in a war in the first place.
The ideological preconception that defense spending is both harmful to the economy and immoral led to one of the most immoral and indefensible political decisions of modern times—the decision to exclude the Defense Department from almost all of the vast stimulus package that washed over every other cabinet department at the start of this administration.
Fred Kagan’s right — those poor redheaded stepchildren over at DOD are barely scraping by on their paltry tens of billions for weapons programs that don’t work — like star wars, the V-22 Troop Killer Crash Machine, the F-35 Nobody Wants It fighter, etc. etc. Why we spend money on such nonsense as building roads and fixing schools is a complete mystery when we could be creating jobs by ordering more cluster bombs.
wheres that antique pic of denby?
Klaatu Barada Nickto
I hate to critisize Hawking but that was a pretty stupid thing to say for a smart guy. As others have said, he must have seen independence day for the first time recently.
Ah, good old Weekly Standard. Sure, it’s nice that defense spending pays for fancy whorebbyists and peeled grapes–AMERICAN grapes, mind you–but the important thing is that it pays for more Arabs to be made dead. See? Everyone wins!
[re=564137]mustardman[/re]: He watched the wrong movie. Everyone knows that Tommy Lee Jones and Will Smith protect us from the bad aliens.
I’m sure the aliens will be here to serve man.
Glen Beck at the blackboard looks like John (“A Beautiful Mind”) Nash off his meds:
http://billsmovieemporium.files.wordpress.com/2009/01/russell-crowe-a-beautiful-mind-c10102591.jpeg?w=385&h=477
PS: “But when the military—badly under-resourced for nearly two decades by both Democratic and Republican administrations…” Under-resourced compared to what? The day I see some other country’s army zipping around with laser jetpacks and cybernetic exoskeletons I’ll start worrying about our military’s meager resources. Until then, not so much.
I am a bit more optimistic than Hawking; I think that our new interstellar overlords will choose to keep us as pets. We will get to eat nutrient-rich kibble purchased in 20-lb. bags and will be taken to the park every few days to socialize with the other humans. Our triclopic owners will discuss the advantages of this or that breed (RACISTS!) while we frolic and, I dunno, hump each other. Then it’s back to the protein farm or whatever for an evening chasing balls around.
Kinda like life now, I guess.
[re=564145]SmutBoffin[/re]: That’s not quite right; responsible aliens always spay and neuter their pets. Sadly for us.
[re=564153]JMP[/re]: Just convince them you are good breeding stock. You get to keep your fertile bits, then.
[re=564145]SmutBoffin[/re]: I see I’m not the only one who had to read “The White Mountains” in grade school.
Kagan is 100% right. Money spent on defense goes back into the economy, unlike Obama’s “fill a cruise ship with gold bullion and scuttle it 0ver the Mariana Trench” program. That money just goes to the bottom of the ocean.
[re=564153]JMP[/re]: I see. The intergalactic “Bob Barker parasite” has taken hold of the aliens, too.
[re=564158]edgydrifter[/re]: I do not know of this book; Googling…
So we can look forward to Glenn Beck writing for the Weekly Standard?
It’s time to fight the aliens in space, so we don’t have to fight them here.
“they are going to slaughter the crap out of us and then silent-auction our organs on Craigslist”
Wouldn’t you?
When the aliens arrive, let’s send James Dobson up to preach the saving power of Cheeses to them. I figure, we get rid of Dobson, AND drive the aliens insane all in one swoop.
And here I thought that government-funded jobs were not “real jobs.”
Stephen Hawking is worried about an Alien Invasion.
And you people make fun of the poor citizens of Arizona.
Go figure.
[Maybe Hawking could get a Warp Drive installed on his wheelchair. That way he'd have a better chance of getting out of the range of those gangbaggers' guns?]
[re=564137]mustardman[/re]: An equally dumb guy, Jared Diamond, wrote the same thing in “The Third Chimpanezee,” back in 1991 (reissued 2004). But Diamond is just as stupid as Hawking, e.g., Professor of Geography and Physiology at UCLA; best known for award-winning popular science books (“The Third Chimpanzee”; “Guns, Germs, and Steel”; and “Collapse.”)
Oh, speaking of scientific/intellectual credentials, Mustardman: What’s your major?
Hawking: I imagine they might exist in massive ships, having used up all the resources from their home planet. Such advanced aliens would perhaps become nomads, looking to conquer and colonize whatever planets they can reach.
And such beings might regard us as food, blah blah. This is the stock theme of 63% of all sci fi movies. When is Hawking going to stop watching “V” remakes, and get back to bluffing his way in cosmology?
[re=564120]ManchuCandidate[/re]: There is a theory which states that if ever anyone discovers exactly what the Universe is for and why it is here, it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable.
There is another theory which states that this has already happened.
[re=564226]Neilist[/re]: Well, I don’t know about that guy, but I was a Poli Sci major, which makes me qualified to spot when people are talking out of their asses about things they know fuck all about. And I’ll be damned if that isn’t one of Professor Hawking’s favortie things to do when not solving the whole goddamned universe.
OK, I’m going to take the gutsy step of coming out of the closet and letting you all know that I do, in fact, believe in UFOs. I may not have ever been taken up and probed, hard and deep, by an alien, personally, but all the circumstantial evidence points to their existence. Come on.
It is incredibly arrogant of us to think that any self-respecting alien would even WANT to visit earth. Not with the triple-breasted whore of Eroticon Six just a scant 630 light years away.
[re=564230]Aurelio[/re]: I believe in his cosmology. He just sounds ridiculous when he talks about anything else.
[re=564287]TGY[/re]:
I agree. Regarding his ideas about alien life, one can only conclude that Hawking doesn’t have a leg to stand on.
To not think that there are not other life forms inhabiting the Universe, is intellectually dishonest.
But I question their intellectual capabilities when it seems like the only humans that they have contact with are the pickup driving, teefless, rednecks on their way back to the trailer park from a Wal-Mart shopping spree.
Or maybe, we should be thanking the inbreds for keeping the rest of the human race safe. The Alien research has led them to believe that the Earth has no intelligent life forms, so they ignore us in their search for other lifeforms to enslave and/or consume.
[re=564137]mustardman[/re]: [re=564235]Snarkalicious[/re]: I think it was Hawking’s interns and grad students playing a trick on him – they hacked his puter and spewed all this shit! Couldn’t you see him trying to push the ESC button – his left eye was giving it hell!! He was so pissed off, he was drooling – more than usual.
[re=564382]GOPCrusher[/re]: They’re probably just smart enough to target only people nobody will take seriously anyway. Spooky!
Now, we’ve got wignuts attacking Hawking’s statement – because they don’t like his suggestion that genocide was bad for the Native Americans: http://astuteblogger.blogspot.com/2010/04/stephen-hawking-idiot.html (warning: not safe for sanity, also ALL CAPS).
[re=564382]GOPCrusher[/re]: Considering the sheer size, there’s got to be other intelligent life in the universe; although there is the theory that we haven’t detected any definitive signs may be because all civilizations tend to blow themselves up once they reach the capacity to do so.
There is still the Wow! signal ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wow!_signal ), which Hawking mentioned in the same show, and for which no one’s found a good natural explanation.
What does Stephen care if aliens are hostile? He’s never going to have sex with them.
I was looking through an old SPY magazine the other night and saw something about David Denby. Could that be the genesis of his snarkiness about snark? I’ll dig it back out and send it to you, and you will ignore it.
[re=564469]DC Hates Me[/re]: Maybe, maybe not; from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amyotrophic_lateral_sclerosis
“Sensory nerves and the autonomic nervous system, which controls functions like sweating, generally remain functional.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autonomic_nervous_system
“The ANS affects heart rate, digestion, respiration rate, salivation, perspiration, diameter of the pupils, micturition (urination), and sexual arousal.”
[re=564235]Snarkalicious[/re]: Check out Diamond’s book (Third Chimpanezee). He spends a (short) chapter on it.
The argument, briefly stated, is that evolutionary forces seem to mandate that, when a “superior” species meets an “inferior” that competes for the same ecological niche, the inferior species always loses.
It’s not a conclusive argument. But even though “the race isn’t always to the swift, or the contest to the strong . . . ,” that’s the way the Smart Money bets.
In contrast, Mustardman bet the bank on the Neanderthals. And the dodo. And the roc. And the North American giant sloth. And the passenger pigeon. And the . . . .
The problem with Matt Yglesias’s snark isn’t that he does too much of it, it’s that it’s often impolitic and nasty. He’s tone deaf, and writes without thinking — a bad combination if there ever was one.
We’ve begun a blog to heap (playful) ridicule upon him, and hope to catalog his transgressions therein. Down with Yglesias!
-The Ydiot
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