Birthers and Death Panels Are Pissing Me Off

Lately I've been extremely angry about the continued claims that Obama wasn't born in Hawaii and that any of the proposed health care reform bills contain the concept of "death panels". I stopped to ask myself why these particular idiocies should be aggravating me more than ones in the past and believe I have the answer: because they are so demonstrably ridiculous. Anyone with even a modicum of intellectually ability or honesty can rule them both out definitively in the space of about ten minutes. That leaves me with the inescapable conclusion that people pushing these views are either too stupid and arrogant to realize they are hopelessly incompetent and should keep their mouths shut, or are intentionally trying to spread misinformation to stop any potential improvement in our mediocre social systems. Both of those possibilities are worth getting angry about.

Anecdotal News Stories Are a Waste of Time

You know how news stories often lay out the experiences of a single individual, family, or small company in an attempt to put a human face on larger events? Yeah, well, I hate that. It's dull, and adds no useful information. In fact it does the opposite by ignoring meaningful statistics in favor of anecdotal evidence. Oh, and did I mention it's dull? So dull. To paraphrase Stalin, a single hardship is anecdotal, a million hardships is a statistic. Sorry, couldn't resist.