God Awful Things

Over at The New Scientist, they’ve got a nice little article about then things humans do that we don’t really understand why we do it.

1. Blushing: Even Darwin struggled to explain why we would evolve a response that lets others know that we have cheated or lied.

I think this is easy, blushing was developed to aid in our bullshit detection.. only it’s nature working against you.. Speaking of, I want to see The Invention of Lying.

2. Laughter: The discovery that laughter is more often produced at banal comments than jokes prompts the question, why did it evolve?

I have a friend who laughs at everything.. Whenever he’s around I feel like someone should give me a microphone because I am the most awesome stand-up ever.

and so on and so forth.. it’s pretty brief but a good read.. but I wanted to mention this last one.

8. Superstition: Many of us have superstitions – odd, reassuring habits that make no rational sense – but there may be an underlying reason for such behaviour.

This is my segue into the next subject.  Orly Taitz is batshit insane. No if you don’t know who she is, you should be patting yourself on the back and not read any further.  If you do know, that that sadly means you know about the “birthers”.  I’ve never really understood conspiracy theorists, a friend of mine sometimes talks about 9/11 and I’m not sure whether he thinks there is any truth to them being shot down rather than crashing or whatever, but I think he does believe it some.. which is more bullshit.

Esquire Magazine followed some birthers around in a two part series.  It’s really a shame that the media focuses primarily on just the “birth certificate” issue they’ve fabricated, cos the other bat shit insane ideas are even more laughable.

[Taitz] marched her troops straight over to the secretary of state’s office and did the exact same presentation all over again. Then she headed to the FBI to do it a third time. And the whole time, she never stopped talking:

Goldman Sachs runs the treasury.

Obama is a puppet.

There’s a cemetery somewhere in Arizona where they just dug 30,000 fresh graves, which wait now for the revolution.

Baxter International — a major Obama contributor — developed a vaccine for bird flu that actually kills people.

It’s pretty amazing really.. I mean, maybe they’re making an unintentionally good argument for “death panels”.