Just One More Thing

Okay, Tater Lady is ridiculous. She's an inane dipshit on cursory analysis, medium analysis, and deep-tissue scanning with a goddamned tricorder.

Potatoes are not magic. They are starch. They are delicious fried, baked, or mashed. They can be a part of every single meal.

They are the roots of a plant related to the deadly nightshade plant.

Which, incidentally, is why that green fry you occasionally get at McDonald's tastes so nasty. It has a higher level of toxic nightshade chemicals called glycoalkaloids. Don't worry; the green fry won't kill you. It's just enough of the glycoalkaloids to taste like shit.

Yes, your honor, I am a piece of shit.

Anyway, if potatoes could cure the common cold, Big Pharma would have isolated the active compounds, slapped them in a pill, and patented that shit decades ago. Martin Shkreli would be raising the price of potato-based meds by 2500% and then smirking like a prick when he got called out on it.

So Tater Lady is laughable.

But why is she laughable?

Turns out that, even in our short history, we already wrote about this syndrome.

Tater Tall Tales

Oh for fuck's sake.

Visual representation of underfunding science education here, folks

This came across our newsfeed, and this is the type of bullshit we can't stand.

So I saw an article about putting potatoes in the babies [sic] sock [sic] when they're sick [soc?]. So [baby] had a little cold and i [sic] put potatoes in his socks last night around 8-9pm. [editor's note - this process took an hour?] He didn't cough through the night...nose isn't running...isn't as congested and he slept for 12 hours. [Praise the mothafuckin' Lord emoji]

We were going to comment on how absolutely un-fucking-reasonable this person was and how over 117,000 brainless Facebookian morons immediately took it as gospel truth, but...

Wait.

How did this procedure come to be? Obviously this is Bullshit Bin fodder, and we could tear it apart, but...

Colloquial Meaninglessness

We were tweeting at Sarah Palin today (okay, we were poking fun at Sarah Palin today on Twitter) and this exchange resulted when someone claimed he hated Barack Obama.

No actually I take it back I don't hate him I hate his beliefs about how to govern a country clearly socialism does not work.

— scott (@scmcarp) December 28, 2017

Now, scott here has said something dumb. And not just because it's a run on sentence. And not just because Obama is not and was not a socialist.

No, it's because scott thinks he is saying something that has meaning but he absolutely isn't.

The FDA Steps It Up

It's 3d6 of bullshit damage.

Homeopathy is magic.

Like, seriously. The tenets on which this "medical" "modality" are based are straight-up prescientific grimoire shit. The basic foundation, "like cures like," is the kind of nonsense thinking behind voodoo dolls: something that is like a thing is the thing itself, therefore it can affect the thing. (Or something.)

With voodoo dolls, the idea is to poke the doll and thus cause pain to the person. In homeopathy, the idea is that if you have insomnia, you need caffeine. Because it causes wakefulness, therefore it can also cure it.

Yes, seriously.

But see, you have to dilute it in water by approximately 100,000x (also seriously) while simultaneously shaking it in just the right way and beating the solution against just the right kind of horsehide (also also seriously) to make it work. By the time you're done, the water "remembers" the effect of the magical substance you put in it, even though it's diluted to the point where there's not even a single molecule of it left.

See? Fucking magic. And, well, every single well designed scientific trial of homeopathy has shown that, surprise surprise, it does absolutely fucking nothing.

And yet the FDA treats homeopathic "remedies" as legit medications. Until, hopefully, now.

Things We Find Funny #1

Poor Butt.

"I Don't Know" is A OK

New information is an excellent thing. Jumping to conclusions about new information for shitty reasons is a non, non, non-excellent thing.

Recently, The New York Times exposed the U.S. Department of Defense's Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program; a shadowy scheme managed deep inside The Pentagon with an acronym that doubles as the answer to "What does an Applebee's server exclaim when the white trash family leaves?"

A...A TIP?

Many Thanks

Spoiler Alert, all the people who aren't reading this blog!

A Little Knowledge...

This picture of noted awesome guitarist Tom Morello made the front page on Imgur recently, presumably because, like its subject, it is awesome.

Why is on the back of his guitar, though?

For those of you unfamiliar with Tom "Meat Swinger" Morello (that was his nickname during his brief tenure as a male stripper) (no, we are not joking), he was/is the guitarist for Rage Against the Machine, and he is an absolute beast. While he was earning that honors poli-sci degree from Harvard, he was also practicing the guitar for 8 hours a day, inventing new ways to make sound come out of the thing. Between his wah-wah pedal and Zach de la Rocha's amazing vocals, Rage became one of the most unique musical acts to come out of the 90s. Even if you don't 100% agree with their politics (and we don't), nothing makes you more ready to start a mass revolt than RatM.