"Let me ask you a question," he said. "Why do alcoholics give birth to alcoholics? Why do the fatherless give birth to the fatherless?" He paused. "There are some people out there who will tell you it's genetics. It's in our genes, they say. Well, I tell you, it's not genetics. It's a generational curse!"

Fortenberry then started in on a rant against science and against scientific explanations for cycles of sin. "Take homosexuals," he said. "Every single homosexual is a sexual-abuse victim. They are not born. They are created — by pedophiles."

The crowd swallowed that one whole. One thing about this world: Once a preacher says it, it's true. No one is going to look up anything the preacher says, cross-check his facts, raise an eyebrow at something that might sound a little off. Some weeks later, I would be at a Sunday service in which Pastor John Hagee himself would assert that the Bible predicts that Jesus Christ is going to return to Earth bearing a "rod of iron" to discipline the ACLU. It goes without saying that the ACLU was not mentioned in the passage in Ezekiel he was citing — but the audience ate it up anyway. When they're away from the cameras, the preachers feel even less obligated to shackle themselves to facts of any kind. That's because they know that their audience doesn't give a shit. So long as you're telling them what they want to hear, there's no danger; your crowd will angrily dismiss any alternative explanations anyway as demonic subversion.

A team of twenty of the world's leading scientists wouldn't be able to convince so much as one person in this crowd that homosexuals are not created by pedophiles.

STEPHANOPOULOS: Can you name one economist, a credible economist who supports the [gas tax] suspension?

CLINTON: Well, you know, George, I think we've been for the last seven years seeing a tremendous amount of government power and elite opinion basically behind policies that haven't worked well for the middle class and hard-working Americans. From the moment I started this campaign, I've said that I am absolutely determined that we're going to reverse the trends that have been going on in our government and in our political system, because what I have seen is that the rich have gotten richer. A vast majority -- I think something like 90 percent -- of the wealth gains over the last seven years have gone to the top 10 percent of wage earners in America.

STEPHANOPOULOS: But can you name an economist who thinks this makes sense?

CLINTON: Well, I'll tell you what, I'm not going to put my lot in with economists.

Let’s say the U.S. adopts a Great Britain policy on collecting DNA–basically a move toward, at some point in the future, having DNA on file for everyone in the country. Well now the 1 in 1.1 million odds against the suspect in the L.A. Times case are being run against a database of 380 million people. The numbers say that you’re going to pull up about 345 matches in the U.S. alone. In the California case, the database is obviously much smaller than the entire U.S. population, and only one of those 345 people showed up from the 330,000-person FBI DNA database–the (admittedly unsympathetic) subject of the article. But any of the other 344 potential matches in the U.S. (or the 2,200 matches worldwide) could have committed the crime. They just weren’t in the database.

So, you know, on one hand "there were once nation-states," but now there are "dynamos like India and China," which are, what, anarchoprimitive agricollectives? The idea that some sort of stateless transnational borderless economic singularity is swiftly ripping away borders like stagehands rip up gaff tape on load-out is plain kooky. I am of course for the free movement of labor and capital. Call me the next time you hit Charles de Gaulle, or Beijing Capital International Airport for that fucking matter, without a passport. I'm just saying.

Police in southern China have discovered a factory manufacturing Free Tibet flags, media reports say.

The factory in Guangdong had been completing overseas orders for the flag of the Tibetan government-in-exile.

Workers said they thought they were just making colourful flags and did not realise their meaning.

But then some of them saw TV images of protesters holding the emblem and they alerted the authorities, according to Hong Kong's Ming Pao newspaper.

1. Globalization commands a lot of power;
   
2. You can find irony anywhere if you know where to look, and;
   
3. Propaganda permeates the civilized mind in ways outsiders can't comprehend. The police didn't uproot this factory in an undercover sting - workers voluntarily turned themselves and their employer in. Tibet never did anything to harm these guys, but they so thoroughly believe the Chinese government's gospel of Tibet As Guerilla Radical that they went out of their way to make the State's job easier. Fortunately, in the free and enlightened West we don't have that problem.

[B]lacks accounted for 66 percent of those killed by New York City police between 2000 and 2007 (New York is a perennial leader in police fatalities, averaging 12 a year over those years). And while the violent crime rate plunged to historically low levels in that time period, the number of people killed by police has not budged—indeed, the number of cop bullets fired has skyrocketed. And it's happened with impunity. Out of 88 fatal shootings, including at least 12 in which victims were unarmed, in only one instance was an officer convicted of criminal wrongdoing.

There is Shadow and there is Substance, and this is the root of all things. Of Substance, there is only Amber, the real city, upon the real Earth, which contains everything. Of Shadow, there is an infinitude of things. Every possibility exists somewhere as a Shadow of the real. [...]

If one is a prince or princess of the blood, then one may walk, crossing through Shadows, forcing one's environment to change as one passes, until it is finally in precisely the shape one desires it, and there stop.

On the October 3, 2006 edition of Jimmy Kimmel Live, [Dax] Shepard declared that he is a Libertarian and opposed the War in Iraq.

New couple Kristen Bell and Dax Shepard ring in the new year together, sharing a passionate kiss on the beach in Miami, Florida on Tuesday.

[Philippe] Sands reports that the military commissions act of 2006 may increase the likelihood of a future foreign war-crimes prosecution for those in the torture chain-of-command. Sands glosses a European prosecutor saying that "it would make it much easier for investigators outside the U.S. to argue that possible war crimes would never be addressed in their home country."

So I'm hoping that those of us who'd like to see almost the entire top ranks of the Bush administration brought up on charges somewhere, ideally at Nuremberg or The Hague but at the very least in front of a US federal court, on war crimes and crimes against humanity charges, not just liberal activists but some very serious and non-partisan constitutional scholars, I'm hoping that we manage to keep the pressure on [Ashcroft] about this.

[Curtis] LeMay said if we lost the war that we would have all been prosecuted as war criminals. And I think he's right. He, and I'd say I, were behaving as war criminals. LeMay recognized that what he was doing would be thought immoral if his side has lost. But what makes it immoral if you lose and not immoral if you win?

Colby: Have you eaten six hot dogs?
Me: In my lifetime, or ...
Colby: For the contest. If you eat six hot dogs in 90 minutes you get your picture on the wall.
Me: I think I'd like the five years that'll take off my life, so ... no.
RJ: You could just wait until winter then go into hibernation.
Jason: We should enter a grizzly bear in the contest. Man, that'd be awesome.
Me: 'Um, excuse me sir, I hate to be rude but my manager's making me ask. You're not, um, a bear, are you?'
Bear: GRROOOOOAAR!
Me: 'Right, right, okay.'