Heading south to see the parents, so don’t expect much in the next week, other than postings about Mexican food, beaches and cheap beer. I will be chiming in on the next day or two about our own Vermont nutters, so stay tuned. In the meantime, go educate yourself at the Museum of Uncut Funk. There will be a test.

I live for this shit. Seriously. I don’ t know how I only managed to find out about this a few days ago, but last year, a blaxploitation spoof came out, Scott Sanders’ Black Dynamite, starring Michael Jai White. If you know and love these films like I do, you have to check this out, as it has just about every convention and cliche from the films, and it’s funnier than hell, too. It’s a lot funnier than that Wayans Brothers spoof, I’m Gonna Git You, Sucka. No review… just see it, already.

A Louisiana sheriff has begun training 200 local volunteers in basic hand-to-hand combat techniques as part of Project Exodus aimed at protecting the northwestern corner of the state from the danger of terrorists, the Shreveport Times reports.

Reporter Drew Pierson writes that Bossier Parish Sheriff Larry Deen’s policing plan involves “a mostly white group of ex-police volunteers and a .50-caliber machine gun” and was inspired in part from the Book of Exodus in the Bible.

It must make the fine citizens of northwestern Louisiana know that when the jihadists all parachute into their corner of the state (undoubtedly a prime target of interest to Al Qaeda), a bunch of old farts with big guns will keep the area safe and free to do something else as equally stupid. It’s like Red Dawn II, except with old people and Arabs instead of teens and Soviets. Wolverines!

…a state senator from Southern California was arrested for allegedly driving drunk after leaving Faces, a gay nightclub in midtown Sacramento, early Wednesday morning.

A Republican, no surprise there. Of course, what makes it funny, awesome, great, etc.:

Ashburn served six years as a state Assemblyman before being elected to the State Senate. According to Project Vote Smart, Ashburn’s voting record shows he has voted against every gay rights measure in the State Senate since taking office including Recognizing Out-Of-State Same-Sex Marriages”, Harvey Milk Day and Expanding Anti-Discrimination Laws.

The day they get Mitch McConnell and Lindsey Graham will be a great day, indeed.

The theory suggests that more intelligent people are more likely than less intelligent people to adopt evolutionarily novel preferences and values, but intelligence does not correlate with preferences and values that are old enough to have been shaped by evolution over millions of years.”

“Evolutionarily novel” preferences and values are those that humans are not biologically designed to have and our ancestors probably did not possess. Some examples:

“General intelligence, the ability to think and reason, endowed our ancestors with advantages in solving evolutionarily novel problems for which they did not have innate solutions,” says Satoshi Kanazawa, an evolutionary psychologist at the London School of Economics and Political Science. “As a result, more intelligent people are more likely to recognize and understand such novel entities and situations than less intelligent people, and some of these entities and situations are preferences, values, and lifestyles.”

So what does this mean?

In the current study, Kanazawa argues that humans are evolutionarily designed to be conservative, caring mostly about their family and friends, and being liberal, caring about an indefinite number of genetically unrelated strangers they never meet or interact with, is evolutionarily novel. So more intelligent children may be more likely to grow up to be liberals…

“Humans are evolutionarily designed to be paranoid, and they believe in God because they are paranoid,” says Kanazawa. This innate bias toward paranoia served humans well when self-preservation and protection of their families and clans depended on extreme vigilance to all potential dangers. “So, more intelligent children are more likely to grow up to go against their natural evolutionary tendency to believe in God, and they become atheists.”

Now if someone could just come up with a theory to explain teabaggers and the Vermont secession movement, that’d be real progress.

Actually, no, as they’re just fucking crazy.

UPDATE: PZ sez this guy’s a hack, writes for Psychology Today.

RepTomPrice: Takeaway from summit so far–Dems push govt takeover of HC! Bureaucrats deciding coverage, everyone forced to buy it, cant keep what you have

See, the prez, to his credit, explained quite clearly why this is anything but true. But facts don’t matter when you’re catering to idiots who walk around with teabags tied to their hats. Good thing the GOP put on those jumbo clown shoes before they showed up.

UPDATE: Rep. Mike Spence is the king of stupid. Twitter is the perfect medium for him:

Boehner brings the Dems’ massive gov’t takeover of #hc to the summit for all Americans to see

I said yesterday that this #summit looked like a
taxpayer funded media event, looks like I was right

Pence doesn’t like the fact that all the typical GOP talking points that work with the teabaggers don’t look so hot when they’re easily smacked down. The GOP doesn’t do too well in a reality-based format.