More Statistical Bullshit

Been hearing about this one for at least a week...

It's obviously the product of well-meaning but exceptionally moronic factoid chefs who continue to barrage us with crap like this because they don't understand the difference between correlation and causality. It's not going to make a lick of difference whether or not you sit in the same room as your kid when he eats his Spaghetti-Os - the only way you keep your kid from becoming the next Nikki Sixx is to actually give a shit. And giving a shit means more than eating dinner together six or seven times a week instead of two or not at all.

Giving a shit requires communication, discipline and love. You need to communicate to your kids that your expectation of them is that they don't fry their brains before they're old enough to fully understand why they need those brains. You need to lay down the law of the land - that not living up to the expectations with regard to drugs is unacceptable. And you need to show them that you love and support them.

But eating dinner with your kids is only correlated with drug-free households. It's not going to magically drug-proof your kid, unless you also do the things I've described above. Watching your kid while he munches his asparagus spears isn't going to magically transform Sid Vicious into the next centerfielder for the New York Yankees.

NDAs

I've just received what has to be my 86th Non Disclosure Agreement this month. Seems like anybody that wants to set up a meeting to discuss anything remotely important needs to have an NDA in place. My theory is that no one ever reads the damned things.

On one of their early tours, Van Halen inserted a contract rider into their agreements with concert venues that called for a certain quantity of M&Ms to be placed backstage for the band. The tricky thing was that all of the brown ones needed to be removed. David Lee Roth told an interviewer that the clause was put there just to be sure that the promoters were actually reading the riders.

See where I'm heading with this? Eric wants the clause to call for 27 pounds of shelled M&Ms in the case of any action brought against the company, bolstering his argument with the fact that M&Ms are much harder to peel than sort by color.

Malkin's Going Batshit Again

Link

So Michelle Malkin is worried about how a school district in Muskegon County, Michigan is putting on an anti-terrorism drill and simulating an attack by a fake terrorist organization known as Wackos Against Schools and Education. The folks who made up this fictitious organization described them as people who believe everybody should be home-schooled. Malkin gets her panties all in a bunch because she thinks this is an attempt "to enforce anti-homeschooling bigotry under the guise of preparing for terrorism."

And now, under the guise of preparing students for a violent terrorist attack, educators in one public school district are casting homeschoolers in the role of bomb-detonating militants.

If this gets Malkin's claws out, imagine how wiggy she'll get when she figures out that the guise of preparing people for terrorism is being used to...

• Deprive people of their civil liberties (Patriot Act)
• Invade nations that had nothing to do with the 9-11 attacks (Iraq)
• Keep people from criticizing the president, his administration and his policies ("Free Speech Zones")
• Detain people indefinitely without evidence or due process (Gitmo, etc.)
• Keep Americans living within a culture of fear (Tom Ridge and his color-coded weapons of mass distraction)
• Etc., etc. etc.
• Oh, yeah. There's that Cat Stevens thing too.

Michelle Malkin, if you think the use of terror drills to smear the home schooling movement is the best topic for a column in light of everything I've just described, we can't help you. Perhaps you could avail yourself of a home tutor?

Keeping The Country Safe From Uppity Folk Singers

What a great job we're doing keeping the skies safe!

First, we figure out that someone traveling on a London to Washington flight is on a "watch list" of people who the FBI think shouldn't have been on such a flight in the first place, so we divert the flight to Bangor, Maine. Then, we learn that the name on that list is Yusuf Islam, that of the entertainer known previously as Cat Stevens. Then we hold said folk singer and make plans to deport him back to London by tomorrow.

According to wire reports, Cat Stevens is on the watch list due to his support of Muslim charities - thus an association with groups believed to be aiding terror organizations. So he can't come into the United States, despite the fact that he was just here in May.

Anyone else find this just a bit ridiculous? I know Stevens said some nasty things about Salman Rushdie a while back, but didn't he also condemn the 9-11 attacks? Do we really think that diverting a flight and kicking a folk singer out of the country is aiding the War on Terrorism?

This whole thing is ridiculous for so many reasons:

1. Haven't we made it a point to make Muslims understand that our War on Terror is not a blanket war on Islam? What kind of a message does it send when we eject a peaceful folk singer from the country for supporting Muslim charities without making public any evidence that his charitable giving has anything to do with terrorism?
2. Come on. It's Cat fucking Stevens. It's not like he's carrying bricks of C4 in his guitar case. He's said no reasonable Muslim could support the 9-11 attacks. So why the heavy-handedness?
3. How the hell does someone who is on an FBI watch list make it on an inbound flight in the first place? We shouldn't be figuring this out after he's already aboard the aircraft and in the air. Watch lists don't do you much good if terrorists manage to get on airplanes and leave the ground.
4. How seriously are people going to take our anti-terror efforts if our people aren't seeing much on the news about catching actual terrorists, but hear plenty about how we forced a plane to land because a relatively harmless Muslim folk singer was on it?

Watch the mad scramble on the right-wing blogs to draw tenuous and unverifiable connections between Cat Stevens and terror groups. Here it comes.