perfidy

In which the Ministry rewards its loyal readers with a seat on the Group W Bench, next to the father-rapers and mother-stabbers:
For the week ending 29NOV04

Spotlight Thailand: This land, once known for exotic scents, fantastical landscapes, and an elaborate boy-buggering sex trade, can now add school burning as a claim to fame. Southern *ahem* "militants" are blamed for burning five schools, the latest in a series of attacks against institutions and officials. In recent days government ministers or police have been shot, shot at (and missed), or been the victim of a drive-by (by motorcycle. With an axe.) Although as a child I often wished for something catastrophic and permanent to reduce my school to ash, I never actually did it. Of course, it never occurred to me to cloak my sloth and boredom with a political struggle either.

Spotlight "Palestine": The Middle East Media Research Institute features ongoing monitoring and translation of Arabic television and other media. One recent piece featured an homage to what the Arab press calls "martyrdom operations" and I call "twisted fuckers who kill as many people as they can as they snuff themselves". One mother claims she is proud of her martyred son, a son who had everything but wanted no wife. He wanted to be dead, actually, more than he wanted a wife. It's a sick, sick world when blowing yourself up is really the best alternative for the gay youth of Palestine.

Spotlight Congo: Reports have surfaced of some 150 instances of sexual abuse by UN staff members and soldiers in Congo. Reuters had little details at the time of this report, but the words "pedophilia", "rape", and "prostitution" do appear in the same sentence. Thus far only a handful of UN staff have been suspended, while one French and two Tunisian soldiers have been sent home. Characteristic of most things the UN has ever attempted, a half-dozen or so UN officials voiced outrage while admitting their influence was limited, and the Secretary General himself declared that he would implement a new policy.

Spotlight San Diego: A pastor of an unspecified CA church used fear of the devil to lure gullible congregants into having sex with him. He basically had three pickup lines: the devil has already attacked them in some way, and the cure was sex with him; the devil will at some point attempt to harm them, and the prevention was sex with him; or, he threatens to kill you unless you have sex with him. Not sure which is creepier, the sick pastor or the freaky church chicks who fell for his lines. All examples of exemplary human behavior, I daresay.

Spotlight Pennsylvania: A PA woman surrendered to police after admitting she fatally shot her husband for threatening the family pets. She tried to cover her tracks by throwing him in the well and explaining his absence to a hunting trip but confessed to her daughter, who ultimately called police. Apparently there was an argument and a bit of a shoving match, itself more than enough for a Lifetime movie of the moment, but by then threatening the pets he got himself a trip to the coroner.

Spotlight Wiscahnsin: Truck driver and Hmong refugee Chai Vang went buck nutty in the WI woods, offing six hunters and wounding two others. The survivors' stories and Vang's agree as far as what brought them into contact in the first place, but start to diverge at the point where people start getting killed. Vang claims he was called ethnic slurs (I've never heard a Hmong joke in my life, or what I'd call a Hmong if I wanted to insult him...anyone know?) and shot at as he was told to vacate private property. One survivor says he started shooting for no reason. Personally, I'm leaning toward Vang's version. Not that I think it's OK, I just think it's more plausible that in the heat of a tense moment, scared and outnumbered, the guy opened up. Now if it were a white dude, I might believe he started blasting for no reason, same way we do schools, daycares, and company HR offices.

Loyal reader Othershoe shares this AP photo of a Mosul sniper in action with his nifty lens-cover. Nothing like a sniper with a sense of humor:

Click here.

Science for the everyman. Confronted about their methodology, these daring (not to say reckless) scientists had this to say:

Um, why didn't you guys do the test double-blind? Scienticians often are forced to take short-cuts to make giant king sized leaps of advancement in the field of boozahology. You'll also notice that the crackers weren't sterile, the glasses were barely clean, and there was a conspicuous lack of any saftey gear. 

Sometimes, you just have to stare down the barrel of progress and hope there's not one sitting in the chamber.

Hat tip: mapgirl.

Malian music legend Ali Farka Touré once said of his home, "For some people, Timbuktu is a place at the end of nowhere. But that's not true--I'm from Timbuktu, and I can tell you that it's right in the center of the world." Mr. Touré (I've met him, he's reserved, dignified and courteous, and possessed of a sober gravitas that makes it Mister Touré to you) might have been engaging in a little hyperbole since every thinking person knows that Boston is the Hub of the Universe, but a little hyperbole is more than forgivable in light of the long and rich history of the kingdoms of Mali.

Ali Farka Touré himself is a farmer and local (what... chief? mayor? paterfamilias?), who tends to his village first and his music second. In 1995, he begged off a US tour claiming that he could not leave his home because if he did, he risked losing his land in an armed skirmish. When in 1998, one of his US labels, Hannibal, wanted to record a new record with him Touré insisted the producers bring a mobile recording rig to his compound at Niafunké. The stunning resulting album, aptly titled Niafunké, was recorded whenever farm chores did not press and whenever the mood struck to pick up his guitar.

In 2000, Touré decided to come to the USA for one last tour before devoting all his time to a village irrigation project. I was lucky enough to see his New York date, August 8, 2000, and I can't ever forget it. A big man in person, on stage he looked ten feet tall, wielding his electric guitar like it was a toy and wrenching from it some of the most searing melodies I have ever heard. He was playful, switching between guitar and njerka (a small one-stringed fiddle) and stopping to explain to the New York audience what he was singing about in the eleven languages he writes in. About halfway through the show, he struck on the game of lifting his leg way up in the air and bringing it down onto the stage with a huge *boom*. His band worked the *boom* into the deep percolating groove they had built, and soon Touré was *boom*ing away, each one accented by a chord from his guitar that sounded like trees breaking in the wind. The entire night was unforgettable and absolutely one of a kind. Ali Farka Touré is often compared to John Lee Hooker, whose elemental blues sound seemed to emanate from some half-remembered Mali of the mind, but on that night Ali Farka Touré sounded like Timbuktu.

Before the show, I shared a cab with record producer and Hannibal label owner Joe Boyd, who asked me about African music and what I thought about it. I mentioned Ali Farka Touré, Johnny Clegg, Fela Kuti and a few others before bringing up Angelique Kidjo, who had just released her pop-inflected album Oremi the previous year. Boyd looked at me quizzically and said, "you like that? That speaks to you?" I admitted that it didn't really, it just sounded nice, and he told me that someday, smart kid that I was, I would figure it out, I would get it.

Later that night, I got it.

I bring all this up not because Ali Farka Touré has a new album out but because I was reminded of him and his effect on me today by another group drawing on West African traditions. Called "Fula Flute," after a particular style of flute playing native to the Fulani people of Guinea in which the player sings into the flute as he plays, they have been playing east coast dates over the past couple of years. (The group is composed of a Canadian, a jazz-trained New York bassist, several Malian griots (roughly, hereditary storytellers/bards/historians), and Bailo Bah, the Fuilani flutist.) Working on a smaller scale than the larger than life Ali Farka Touré, Fula Flute showcase a nearly-extinct and deeply enthralling folk tradition that (like so many nearly dead folk traditions), begs for a wider audience. I'm on their mailing list, and was notified today that they have a nifty video out in Quicktime which showcases both the Fula flute style and the rolling percussion typical of West African music. Good, interesting, unusual, and beautiful. They've got it.

[wik] The title of this post has changed. A scratched copy of White Lion's album "Pride" to the first person who can tell me what the new title refers to.

[alsø wik] Also posted to blogcritics.org

Our closest allies in the animal kingdom, the dolphins, were recently reported as having taken decisive action last month to protect a group of human tourists from the scourge of shark terrorism. Four New Zealanders swimming in the ocean near Whangarei on New Zealand's North Island when a pod of dolphins suddenly pushed the four swimmers together and began circling them.

At first the New Zealanders were concerned at this action, feeling perhaps that overzealous dolphin border police were concerned at some passport violation. But then swimmer Rob Howes saw the angry fin of a three meter long fundamentalist Great White terrorist shark, and understood the reason for the dolphins’ behavior.

"They had corralled us up to protect us," he said.

The dolphin counter-terror force circled the swimmers for another forty minutes before declaring the area secure and allowing the swimmers to return to shore. Dolphin sources report that an average of seven to ten humans are killed each year by shark terrorists. They urge caution when visiting the oceans because, “The oceans cover three fourths of the globe, and there are only so many dolphins. While we’ve had notable successes in curbing shark terrorist activity, the ocean remains a breeding ground for shark extremism.” A dolphin spokesman at their embassy at Sea world endorsed this webpage giving helpful tips to avoid becoming the victim of shark extremist violence.

While some have accused the dolphins of pursuing a imperialist policy in regard to counter-terror actions in shark national homelands, it is clear that the sacrifice of brave dolphins in the DDF and Dolphin constabulary are the reason that there are so few shark attacks on humans. Some dolphin supporters even believe that without the strong arm tactics of our dolphin allies, we would be facing the scourge of shark terrorism in the streets of our cities and towns.

Despite the shrill attacks of those who accuse the dolphins of being frontmen for human imperialism in the oceans, or the obstructionism of our so-called allies the orcas; we owe a debt of gratitude to our finned allies, for holding the line against fundamentalist terror in the oceans.

Loyal reader #0017 (EDog) notes that pizza delivery drivers in Detroit are trying to start a national union of pizza drivers, arguing "the large chains have been taking advantage of them for years."

Well, yeah. That's why a union won't fly. It's also why there's no union in the music industry or the temp agency world. Any job that requires marginal skills and draws on a mobile or unstable workforce can never unionize: there are literally hundreds of people who would gladly kill you for your shitty job.

But still, good luck guys. If you succeed, and my pizza is late, am I gonna have to file a grievance?

This week is a double issue of our review of exemplary behavior, in which the Ministry offers eleven stories of people who, by their very existence, prove that it is in fact possible to get pregnant via anal intercourse.

(Dateline: London) The Ministry has been tracking the ups and downs of international relations for many, many years (we were in the tracking business long before the first Mongol horde came roaring down the steppes in a cloud of rancid horsefat and lethally sharp arrows and made it interesting for us), and we have found one thing to be incontrovertably true: nothing is more satisfying than an impotent hissy fit. From Sir Cletus Coke (created Baron of Upper Lower Nutsack in 1713 by Queen Anne) whose legendary vituperation in his dotage against the colonials did more than anything else to sour Benjamin Franklin forever on his now near-forgotten Nutsack Strategem for peace between Crown and Colonies in the tense days of 1775, to Dick Cheney's famous f-bomb on the floor of the US Congress, we at the Ministry have found that the the truth lies in the little things.

What truth can we glean from this? Merely that Canadian MP Carolyn Parrish is a petty harridan who has a grossly inflated sense of her own worth. In addition to making a "smoosh" video of herself stomping on a George W. Bush doll to her assurances that Americans are all "bastards," Parrish has done more to destroy US-Canadian relations than any force since the Half-Afternoon War of 1956. (In which four Quebecois farmers, drunk on Canadian Club, drove halfway to Burlington, VT with the intention of capturing the State capital and toppling the Green Mountain State from within. After engaging in light deer-rifle gunplay with certain Vermonters, it was expressed to them that the capital was in fact in Montpelier, forty miles away. As it was getting dark and they were low on supplies, the Canucks returned home shamefaced to the cold reaches of their homeland.)

Currently, MP Parrish is threating to ruin an upcoming speech by George W. to the Canadian Parliament.

Ms. Parrish said Wednesday she will not tone down her criticisms of U.S. President George W. Bush when he visits Ottawa this month, and Prime Minister Paul Martin's team can "go to hell" if they don't like it.

Ms. Parrish, an outspoken MP who has called Americans "bastards" and Mr. Bush "warlike," fired several broadsides at her own party leader, saying she won't cry if he loses the next election and is forced out of the leadership.

Most Liberals lined up yesterday to insist they would be on their best behaviour during the visit, and Ms. Parrish insisted that she would not heckle the President if he addresses Parliament. But as she prepared to meet Mr. Martin later Wednesday, she gave an interview saying she won't silence her criticism outside the Commons, or toe Mr. Martin's line.

"And if he wants to know why he can't control me, I have absolutely no loyalty to this team. None," she said in an interview with The Canadian Press. "After what they've put me through and lots of my colleagues, they can all go to hell. But he's not going to control me, so all he's going to do is end up looking weak."

Or, she is going to end up looking like an ass, but that doesn't seem to have been a deterrent thus far.

(Dateline: Moscow) Russia has made great strides of late in making a mockery of Western civilization's values, mores, and institutions. From banking to government powers, the Bear is leading the charge to wherever it's charging to; probably some sort of monstrous gulag.

Further progress was made recently when a Russian jury found a scientist guilty of spying for China, despite a) no spying was proven b) it's not clear that the information he sold to China was ever secret or classified but rather was public domain, and c) he had previously been acquitted of the same charges by another jury. But no worry! The train of justice rolls on!!

A jury in Siberia convicted a physicist today of spying for China, overturning a previous jury's acquittal after a closed trial that highlighted flaws in Russia's judicial system.

The jury rendered its verdict on the central espionage charge against the physicist, Valentin V. Danilov, even though the court's judges have yet to hold a hearing to decide whether the information he is accused of passing along is even secret, his lawyer said. That hearing is now scheduled for Nov. 10.

"This has no legal or logical justification," the lawyer, Yelena V. Yevlinova, said in a telephone interview from Krasnoyarsk, the regional capital in central Siberia where the trial was held.

Mr. Danilov, a researcher at Krasnoyarsk State University who was first charged in 2001, has acknowledged selling information about satellite technology to a Chinese company but argued that all of it was readily available from public sources.

Mr. Danilov was initially acquitted last December. His trial was the first of a recent flurry of espionage cases against scientists and researchers to be decided by a jury. Jury trials are still a relative novelty in Russia, having become an option for defendants in some serious cases only in 2002.

Although a new criminal code adopted that year was supposed to end double jeopardy except in extreme cases of judicial misconduct, prosecutors appealed his acquittal, citing "significant procedural violations" during his first trial. Among them was the fact that Mr. Danilov's lawyers discussed material in front of jurors that had not been accepted as evidence.

In June, the Supreme Court ordered a new trial, which began in September and was closed to the media and the public. Ms. Yevlinova said that the court's chief judge refused to let her present evidence showing that the information Mr. Danilov showed was not classified as secret. She said that, in effect, the jury's 12 members found that he signed a contract with the Chinese company, known as the Export and Import Company of Precise Machine Building.

"It is not clear what crime he was convicted of," she said.

Mr. Danilov, in a telephone interview, questioned the selection of the jury and the fact a list of the jurors was never published. He said he suspected they acted under pressure. "Not one of the jurors looked me in the face when the verdict was read," he said. "When someone does not look you in the eyes, it means that they have problems with their conscience."

Mr. Danilov's case - like the more prominent trial of Russia's richest man, Mikhail B. Khodorkovsky - has dashed the hopes of some that the legal reforms adopted in 2002 would give the judiciary greater independence. In practice, courts remain subject to the powerful influence of prosecutors and agencies like the Federal Security Service, the successor of the Soviet K.G.B.

(Dateline: Toronto) He was a quiet child, kind, courteous and willing to please. When he killed granny we thought the nightmare was over. And when he wrote "Kill all Women" on a blackboard, we're sure he's serious when he says it was just "art".

(Dateline: Orange County) Ahhh.. the OC. Home of comfortable conservatism, setting for inane teen drama television, and site of appalling abuses of power:

Many of you might not recognize the name Greg Haidl if you don’t happen to live in Southern California, but for Scott Peterson, Beretta, Courtney Love, and other high profile malcontents you would. Haidl, a corporately sponsored skateboarder, is the 19 year old son of wealthy Orange County Assistant Sheriff Don Haidl, and he is a piece of ... work shall we say. Greg and a couple of the OC’s finest took advantage of an opportunity to gangrape a 16 year old female classmate who had become very intoxicated. To add insult to injury (this is not a figure of speech in this case) these fine young men of the OC memorialized the events on videotape for their future enjoyment. Not content to merely film your standard every day gangrape, the boys decided to spice things up by inserting various foreign objects into the young lady while taking turns having their way with her. You may be assuming that these young cretins are at this time languishing in prison for their exertions, but you would be wrong, quite wrong indeed.

You see, Greg Haidl’s daddy is worth approximately $91Million give or take, and as I mentioned, he is a former Assistant Sheriff for the OC. Greg’s legal team was spared no expense as you might imagine, and if you combine that with a scenario tailor made for influence peddling of the worse sort, you get a hung jury and a mistrial.

Truly a model citizen, but lest you think California holds the monopoly on amoral teenaged suburban cretins, let's pay a visit to

(Dateline: Minnesoter) ... where we find three youths charged with beating another student with a baseball bat. The bright side? They were arguing about politics. The beatee held that "only fags would vote for Bush," and the beaters evidently took great exception to such sentiment. Sez Dakota County, MN, Attorney James Backstrom: "It's a good thing to see young people interested and excited about politics, [but] it's obviously very disturbing to see this kind of violence over it." Too true, counsel, and spoken like a true ambulance-chaser!

(Dateline: Oregon) But lest we think that America's youth are only concerned with gang rape and politics (similitudes at this point would be beyond tasteless), the Ministry offers assurances that some of them still like to film themselves beating someone to a pulp and sell the DVD in school complete with a pumpin' soundtrack. (Quick registration required in link; someone will pay for that inconvenience.) Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the Harvard Business School class of 2016!!

(Dateline: Georgia)Quick: what loves Justin Timberlake, is charged with twelve counts of attempted murder, and fits into a training bra?

Two seventh-grade girls were arrested on charges that they served poisoned cake at their middle school cafeteria to about a dozen students who became ill and had to be taken to the hospital.

Lawyers for the girls said the cake was a prank, and that they had no intention to harm anyone. Lab tests showed the icing on the cornbread cake contained an expired prescription drug, bleach, clay and tabasco sauce.

The Ministry is pleased to note that thanks to the feminist movement, Title IX, and the endless perversity of the human spirit, the girls are doing it for themselves for a change.

(Dateline: Tennessee) At the crossroads of Office Space and Butt Bandits III is this guy.

The owner of a shaved ice business was arrested after two employees claimed he spanked them for making mistakes at work. Paul Eugene Levengood, 57, was charged with two counts of sexual battery after the 19-year-old women complained.

One of the women told police that on her first day at the Tasty Flavors Sno Biz, Levengood made her sign a statement that said: "I give Gene permission to bust my behind any way he sees fit."

(Dateline: Washington) But sometimes sexual assault just isn't funny. Anthony Whitfield will be in prison for 137 years or until he dies of AIDS, whichever comes first, for knowingly having unprotected sex with 17 women after being diagnosed with HIV. Five of the women have in turn contracted the disease. A witness at his trial recalled that he once said "that if he had HIV, he would give it to as many people as he could."

(Dateline: New York) On the next Mythbusters: Do people really throw frozen turkeys through car
windshields? Yup. And if it puts someone in a coma, you get to do jail time, too!

(Dateline: Wisconsin) Incensed at other hunters who apparently told him to get the hell out of their deer blind, St. Paul MN resident Chai Vang shot and killed five people and wounded three more with a deer rifle on Sunday, sniping at his confronters and anyone else in sight from his perch in a tree in the wilds of Western Wisconsin.

Note that according to the news, the malefactor had "an assault-type weapon", the scourge of our times. A regular "defense-type weapon" would of course have killed no-one.

Sometimes the machinery of Determinist Darwinism (others call it "just desserts," "fate," or "gettin' what's coming to you") goes horribly awry. Vang was scheduled years ago to asphyxiate underneath the weight of a car he had jacked up with a couple beer bottles while he worked on the oil pan with an arc welder, but unfortunately for eight hunters in Wisconsin, he escaped unscathed from that meeting with mortality. Not to worry: his day too will come.

From the what-the-hell-were-they-thinking department: Two committee members just got the unlimited ability to look at anyone's tax return, through what GOP leaders are (probably truthfully) calling a screw-up.

Makes you wonder about the legislative process in general. What other little time bombs are waiting in these huge bills?

From the best-bands-ever department, the UK's Feeder is sort of becoming my favorite brit-guitar rock band. Like maybe ever? Yeah, ever. Until something better comes along. Grant Nicholas first caught my attention on Junkie XL's latest, on a track called "Broken". Great stuff, so I checked out where he came from and bought Comfort in Sound, Feeder's latest. What shines through every Feeder song are beautiful melodies, against a pretty hard (and perfectly sparse) background.

Moving backwards in time, I picked up Polythene, Feeder's brilliant 1997 debut. Why have I not heard of this band? Every track on Polythene works perfectly. Favorites include "Crash" and "Radiation".

Guess I'm stuck in a dream
Surrounded by coloured leaves on the ground,
As I stare at the trees,
I see one fall down on my hand.
As i start to explore,
I can't ignore a man,
He turn his head around,
His face was all worn by the sun.

I'm going out for a while,
So i can get high with my friends,
I will,
I'm going out for a while,
Don't wait up cause i won't be home,
Today.

Drifting down the road,
Losing myself in a dream,
Feel my hands getting cold,
Sat in a boat on a lake...

You know, now that I read them, the lyrics are pretty damn depressing a lot of the time. Trust me on this: You'll never notice while you're listening, 'cause you'll be too busy singing along in the car, like an idiot. Yeah, you.

Feeder's middle two CDs were never released in America, so I hit Amazon to get'em, and got'em for $15 each from prompt, item-as-described auction zealots. Echo Park is the one I'm not quite into yet, but the fans out there assure me I will be, by the reviews. Yesterday came too soon has the same brilliance as Polythene and Comfort...

Crossing bridges over water
A new reflection creeping in
Got your head so full of traffic
The love pollution's setting in

Does anybody know how well one could live on a salary of say, 75,000 euro in Dublin?

Deserts are often boring. Tastes: vanilla, chocolate, berry. Textures: cake, mousse, ice cream. This is a fairly limited palate. One day in the middle of a field in Deleware, I was in an iron chef cooking contest and came up with something different:

Apples a la Buckethead

This is a simple recipe, and takes only minutes to prepare.

Ingredients:

• Two apples
• Olive oil
• Brown Sugar
• Cinnamon
• Finely diced hot pepper

Wedge and core the apples. Drizzle a couple tablespoons of olive oil (regular vegtetable oil will work in a pinch) into a skillet over medium to medium high heat. Throw in the apples, sprinkle a few pinches of brown sugar and a teaspoon of cinnamon over them. Add as much of the hot peppers as you dare. Cook for three to four minutes, stirring frequently. Serve by itself or over vanilla ice cream.

This desert is utterly simple to make, yet doesn't taste like any other desert I've had. The spice is mellowed a bit by the sweetness of the apples, and the combination is divine. For a twist, substitute pears for apples.

The Ministry is pleased to find five of its pet recipes included in the 14th edition of Carnival of the Recipes. There's some really good sounding stuff over there, and not all of it is ours. Check it out!

Well, it's blogging about tards. They aren't really up to blogging themselves. Cruel, to be sure; but as one who once took care of the little buggers, it's also ripping funny.

This is a beautiful idea, so long as we don't let it get into the hands of the robots. Then, it's a very, very bad idea.

I've been reading Our Oldest Enemy, the history of America's not so cuddly relationship with France over the last three hundred years. It's a fascinating story; full of tales of French massacres of colonial Americans, brushes with full scale war in the time after Independence and during the Civil War, and general French contempt for all things American.

But the best bit so far (I'm up to the Cold War now) is this:

In retrospect, the most effective strategy for thwarting a Communist takeover of Vietnam would have been for France to accept some version of Roosevelt's trusteeship plan. [Which would have led to Vietnamese independence -.ed] But French pride made this impossible and only energized Ho's movement, which merged its Communist ideology with the powerful patriotism of the Vietnamese people. "The biggest Vietminh appeal," said one State Department official "is land, education, and a chance to shoot Frenchmen. It is difficult to match that platform."

Still is today.

More than just an ok-to-decent Rolling Stones album, it's the focus of this blogcritics master post dedicated to dissecting the outcome of everyone's favorite day of electoral reckoning.

Some real good stuff in there.

Given that Mrs. Buckethead is in search of recipes that will comport with the South Beach diet, and given that I'm a habitual busybody, here is another recipe suitable for the Buckethead Family Lifestyle that is good enough for my family just to call...

“The Fish”

¼ cup molasses
¼ cup soy sauce
1 tablespoon dark sesame oil
3 tablespoons sherry that you yourself would drink
2 cloves garlic, minced
2 teaspoons wasabi powder (optional but niiiice)
Juice of half a lemon, if you feel like it. Not essential.
A nice cut of salmon, arctic char, or steelhead trout. Something orange, at any rate. (Char is lighter than the other two, and a prime choice at all times if you can find it).

Cut fish into serving-size pieces, rinse under cold water, and pat dry with paper towels.

In a sturdy zipper bag, combine ingredients for marinade (everything but the fish) and shake to combine. Add fish to container and refrigerate, turning every ½ hour, for 1-3 hours.

Fire up the George Foreman or the broiler. Remove fish from bag, let excess marinade run off, and cook until done but still moist. If using the broiler, begin with the skin side down and turn when the skin puffs. I like mine a little underdone; your mileage may vary. (Fish is done when the interior is no longer translucent; it is overdone when it flakes easily with a fork.) Eat and enjoy.

Suggested sides: rice pilaf (maybe, say, with olive oil and pine nuts, or done Afghan style with cardamon and cloves), and fresh spinach sautéed with garlic and fresh ginger and finished with soy sauce and sesame oil.

Notes: given the high proportion of sugar in the marinade, this recipe tends to result in a lot of burned marinade on the cooking surface. If using broiler, be absolutely sure to place on tinfoil for easy cleanup. Honey may be substituted for some or all of the molasses if desired, as may good Grade B maple syurp (the dark stuff. With flavor), though probably some molasses should stay with the maple.

I'm lucky enough to live in a corner of New England where you can buy fresh cuts of fish literally right off the damn boat. As such, Goodwyfe Johno and I eat a lot of seafood. I got this recipe off a retired Italian Gloucesterman who used to work a swordboat and now drives for UPS. And yes, he did know the dudes from The Perfect Storm.

St. Peter’s Italian Cod

1 lb. cod fillet (regular or “captain’s cut”), 1 inch thick or more.
1/3 cup good olive oil
1 cup good breadcrumbs
2 tsp dried oregano
1 tsp dried basil
½ tsp dried marjoram
3 Tbsp finely grated very good Parmesan. Do NOT use that cardboard shit in the cardboard can.
2 tsp finely grated and chopped lemon zest
2-3 garlic cloved, chopped
Salt
Pepper

Preheat oven to 450.

In a bowl, combine breadcrumbs, herbs, parmesan, lemon zest, garlic, salt and pepper and stir well to mix completely. Turn out onto a plate.

Place olive oil in a soup plate or shallow bowl.

Rinse fish under cold water and pat dry. Cut into 3 or 4 equal pieces of equal thickness. If the little end piece is thin, fold the very end over to make it like the others.

Roll each piece of fish in olive oil and dredge well in breadcrumb mixture. Place in oiled baking dish, making sure to keep each piece at least ½ from its neighbor.

Bake at 450 for 10-12 minutes. If fish is still well underdone, return to oven for 2 more minutes. Remove before it flakes easily—this means it is overdone. Let sit 3 minutes to allow for carryover cooking, and serve with lemon wedges. Good with maybe some green beans or broccoli and some boiled potatoes with parsley and butter. Also good with a site of spaghetti. Or gnocchi, but let's not get crazy here.

Notes: Serves 2, unless one of the 2 is a hulking 6’3’’ Buckethead. In that case, up the fish to 1 ½ lbs or even a little more, especially if little Sir John Christian of the Increasingly Sophisticated Palate will be dining.

You can of course use whatever white fish you want: cod, haddock, ocean catfish, dogfish, as long as it's fishsticky fish and not steaky fish.

This looks like a really fun paper airplane.

The Ministry hereby announces the following changes to the blogroll:

1. Mike Patton of Opinion8 has been summarily promoted to crony status.
2. The main blog roll has been limited to 25 blogs. Any surplus blogs have been moved to a new category.
3. That new category is "The Ministry Legion of Merit." This blogroll is not size constrained, so that the Ministry's innate goodness and generosity can now be allowed to shine forth in its full glory and radiance. The legion of merit blogroll can be found on the left sidebar, a little further down from the main blogroll.

Thank you for your cooperation.

Via Andrew Sullivan, a great story about what happened in Sand Springs, Oklahoma when the execrable Fred Phelps came to visit. The story is a follow-on to a series the Washington Post ran a few weeks ago on being gay in America that featured an extended piece on Sand Springs resident Michael Shackleford. Shackleford is a teenager and high school student who recently came out of the closet, and the Post described Michael's efforts to cope with being out in a small, conservative, and conservatively religious town, as well as his mother's struggle with her own feelings against homosexuality.

As a result of the articles on Shackleford, Phelps and his crew of troglodytes decided to come to Sand Springs to protest the relative mildness of the town's feelings toward gays as revealed in the Post series-- the homophobia many residents do exhibit is especially mild compared to Phelps' plan to kill all gays for God. What happened next is a testament to the complexity of our nation's culture and people and a refutation of the red/blue state poison being sold to us daily.

At least this spammer is upfront about what he's doing:

A plethora of quick hits:

• Check out implosionworld.com, "the explosive demolition industry's worldwide source for news and information on building implosions, blowdowns and all other types of structural blasting projects." You can watch video of stuff asploding, which I think we can all agree is pretty freaking sweet.
• In a giant "suck it" to common sense, health, and all that is good and holy, the Hardees' chain of fast-food restaurants ("Hardees: Not Quite Huddle House, and Proud Of It!") now offers a 1400-calorie, 107-gram of fat concoction they call the "Thickburger." With fries and coke, that calorie count comes to 2,300. Gaaah! I am deeply reluctant to assign moral weight to eating choices (apart from cannibalism and other special cases). I have blogged before about my feelings on the assignment of the language of sin and transgression to food (sinfully delicious!). 
  
  But these reasoned and moderate thoughts can't stop my gorge from rising even thinking about 2/3 pound of grade-Z beef cooked to death and slathered in imitation mayonnaise. So we're clear: 2/3 pound of good quality chopped steak formed into a patty and served with as much real-deal mayo as you want: fine. Ridiculous, but fine. Hardees: an affront to everything I stand for. Not that it means anything, but I generally consume in the neighborhood of 1800 calories a day, and I'm a highly active male on a weight-training and running regimen. That 107 grams of fat plus the fat in the fries? That's me in a week. Gaah. I'm not claiming moral superiority here-- eat what the hell you want, but I'm just wondering. The Thickburger meal: disgusting monstrosity, or disgusting eat-for-two-days-for-$7 bargain?
  
  The best part? They offer a low-carb version.

• Loyal Reader #0017, EDog, is writing a novel this month as part of NaNoWriMo. Read it here. I've started it: fun! Sample graf:

  The bartender took a mug and went to an honest-to-God wooden keg sitting on the wall and filled it with the blackest beer Liza had ever seen. An odor reminiscent of fine coffee filled the air for a moment, and Liza's nostrils flared with the sharp scent. The barkeep swept a wand across the top of the mug, cutting the foam from the top. Then, almost in slow motion, he slid the mug down a well-polished groove in the bar. Liza watched the mug's progress, as if it were suddenly the most important event she had ever witnessed. The man reached out his hand and caught the mug just before it vanished off the edge of the bar into darkness. In a moment, another mug came sailing back up the path again, but this one was empty. The bartender caught it with practiced ease and took it back to the chipped ceramic sink where he began to flush it with great quantities of hot water.

Sez Patton, in the comments to this Buckethead post in which he offers an ancestral food-sacrament to all of us, "I read all the way down to the end presuming I'd see a Johno byline." Heh. Yeah, in the guns/butter debate, I'm a butter kinda guy. Given that I'm a man of hifalutin tastes who likes talking about food only slightly less than I like eating it, and that only slightly less than cooking it, it's a little wierd I have never thought to presume that anyone else in the world would give a crap about my recipes. Well, thanks to Patton and Buckethead, that's changing.

In keeping with my status as an at-home vegetarian, I specialize in recipes that don't include meat and that don't make you miss it. Some of them (Buffalo tofu) sound unspeakably gross but are actually bery, bery good, and some of them are legitimately tasty no matter how you look at it.

Recently, I've been making this soup every couple of weeks. It's spicy, rich, makes for a great quick meal with a grilled cheese, and best of all manages to come thisclose to tasting like real Indian food made by real people named Jagdish. Enjoy!

THE FILTHY IMPERIALIST’S CARROT SOUP

1 ½ pounds carrots, peeled and sliced
4 Tbsp butter
½ cup Basmati or Jasmine rice, rinsed
1 fresh thai red or cayenne pepper (or less; taste for spiciness), seeded and chopped, or 1/4-1/2 tsp red pepper flakes to taste
1 tsp dried thyme
2 tsp sugar
salt
pepper
1 Tbsp grated fresh ginger. Absolutely do not use powdered ginger.
1 tsp cumin seeds (or more), or, if you must, 1 1/2 tsp very fresh powdered cumin.
5 cups broth (I use vegetable stock, but unsalted chicken stock will do too, you filthy murtherer)
8 oz (1 cup) light coconut milk or 6 oz regular fatty coconut milk (more to taste)
Scant 1/4 cup finely chopped cilantro
optional- 1 tsp non-McCormick’s curry powder, pref. vindaloo.

Over medium-high heat, cook carrots, rice, peppers (if using fresh) and sugar in the butter, stirring often, until carrots begin to soften a bit, about 10 minutes. Avoid excessive browning. Add ginger, thyme, pepper flakes (if using) cumin seeds and salt and cook three minutes more. Add the stock, bring to a boil, and reduce heat to simmer for ½ hour. Remove soup from heat and let cool for five minutes. Puree by any means necessary: I like a stick blender and if doing a hifalutin meal would use the Foley’s food mill for the very height of smoothness, but your experience may vary. Strain if desired through a fine-mesh strainer. Return to pot. Add cilantro and coconut milk. If using optional curry powder, heat a little butter in a pan and cook curry for 30 seconds over low heat, stirring, then add to soup. Taste for salt, body, and subtil coconuttiness, and adjust seasonings.Serve with homemade (homemade!) croutons.

This would go very well as a soup course before a nice roast pork loin larded with garlic and rubbed with olive oil, dry mustard and rosemary, plus maybe some root veggies roasted with thyme, oil, sea salt and pepper, and steamed broccoli finished in a sauté pan with a sauce made with shallot, Dijon mustard and white wine with a squeeze of lemon juice and a little lemon zest and finished with a knob of butter.

[wik] Note: correction above-- original called for too much hot pepper. That has now been corrected. The soup should be spicy, piquant even, but not vicious. No "ring of fire" should ensue the next day.

You will notice that the blogroll to your left - no, your other left, and down a little bit - has been expanded. Over the last several weeks, my blog reading habits have undergone a slow but inexorable change. With the absence of Steven den Beste's truly incomparable weblog (in prolixity, if nothing else) I have found that I now have time to read many, many more blogs.

By and large, the blogs added are precisely those blogs that I am irritated that I have to dig into my bookmarks for, rather than just click to from the Perfidious homepage. This may seem a selfish motive, but I choose to view it as a heartfelt judgment and appreciation of the quality and irresistible appeal of these fine blogs. The following links each point to what I feel is a singularly fine example of what these blogs have to offer to you, the blogreading public.

• Wizbang offers insightful political commentary, trenchant humor, and posts by Jay Tea. Also boobies! Wizbang has brought us the Carnival of the Vanities, an excellent caption contest, and just recently the neologism "wizbanging." I'd been reading Wizbang semi-regularly, but their coverage of the memogate hooforah roped me in. As an exemplar, here is this excellent takedown of the feared but nor dreaded parasite interwebus asshatus.
• Q and O is a relatively new blog that has become disgustingly successful. I hate them for their success, but I admire what they write. Questions and Observations regularly produces Belmont Club quality posts on a wide range of topics. Earlier, I linked to a post by contributor Dale Franks on Roe v. Wade, and here is another post by co-blogger McQ on rapprochement with France.
• So comrade, what sort of revanchist counterrevolutionary wrecking have you plotted today? If you are falling behind your five year plan's quotas, don't lie to the apparatchiki from the central committee, just steal from the Politburo Diktat. Clenched fist salute to der Commisar!
• Protein Wisdom doesn't just want you to vote, it tells you why. And also explains the Second World War. Now that's wisdom.
• "Every normal man must be tempted at times to spit upon his hands, hoist the black flag, and begin slitting throats." A wonderful quote from H. L. Mencken, and a reasonably apt description of Ace's blogging ethos. He once complimented us on our site design, but has rudely failed to link to us since. Here he slaps Chris Matthews around.
• The Command Post is simply a wonderful resource for breaking news, provided by some of your favorite bloggers. This was a terrible oversight, now corrected. No need to provide a specific link, just go and bask in the warm sunlight of countless bits of interweb goodness.

We have developed an ethos of exclusivity here at the Ministry, which for no other reason but laziness has compelled us to maintain a relatively small blogroll. Were we to throw hallowed tradition to the wind and start adding blogs willy-nilly, these fine blogs would no doubt be on that roll of honor. In no particular order:

• The Jawa Report ***Must Credit Rusty Shackleford!***
• BeldarBlog He's pretty good, for a lawyer.
• Captain's Quarters Excellent!
• The Llamabutchers I absolutely, absolutely love the name of this blog. Though I still don't get why they hate Tibetan Buddhists.
• The 'Dredge Report Now with a new name and a spiffy site redesign.
• Oldsmoblogger And yes, he apparently is slow and in the way.
• The Idea Shop Where the dismal science gets groovy.
• Naked Villainy The Maximum Leader stole our whole minister thingy, but I love him anyway
• Transterrestrial Musings Great space stuff, and good commentary on events of the day.

[wik] I wasn't kidding about laziness. Doing one of these posts is very time consuming.

[alsø wik] I'm also not kidding about the other blogs. If I didn't feel compelled to keep the blogroll relatively small, I'd have certainly added them. 

This is one of the more thoughtful bits on Roe v. Wade I've ever run across. This part amused me greatly:

For the record, I’m with Justice Ginsburg on this one: I think ROE was wrongly decided. Indeed, I’m not entirely convinced that the court was right in GRISWOLD. It’s one thing to say that laws against contraception or abortion are foolish and unwise. It’s quite another entirely to say they’re unconstitutional. I mean, look, the state of Texas has a law--and it is still enforced--that says owning 5 marital aids is perfectly legal, but owning 6 is a felony. Stupid? You bet. Constitutional? You bet. And, really, I’ve never come across any situations in which more than 4 were ever needed anyway.

And as an added bonus, this:

And just look what ROE’s done to the process of judicial nominations. It’s the 800 pound gorilla of the judiciary. Jeez, it’s getting to the point where selecting judges is gonna be have to done like picking jurors: You can only get a seat if you’ve never read ROE, never written a Law Review article on the right to privacy, never given a speech about it, never had any friends or family members who’ve eve had abortions, etc., etc. And that’s how you end up with David Souter on the court. If we got rid of ROE entirely we’d have to go back to picking judges on the basis of, I dunno, intellect or experience and stuff.

Thanks to Rocket Jones for the tip.

Or not really. Bush's cabinet has seen less turnover over his first term than any administration in recent memory. The only major shift was in Treasury a while back, when O'Neil was shown the door for not being on board with White House policy. So far, six cabinet secretaries have resigned, two more are expected, and two replacements have been named. Most notably, bete noire of the left John Ashcroft and darling of the left Colin Powell are leaving. In both cases, Bush has nominated White House insiders to fill those positions, and when Homeland Security secretary Tom Ridge resigns, that will likely be the cases as well. Bush appears to be doing what anyone would have expected of him – nominating people of proven loyalty to important positions.

A couple things have interested me about the nominations we know about so far. In both cases, Bush is nominating minorities to high government positions – Gonzales for AG and Rice for state. Yet aside from scant reference to “first Hispanic AG” and “First Black Woman Secretary of State” I haven’t seen much cheering from the usual suspects about the significance of these appointments in regard to race/gender issues. Perhaps the fact that they are conservative Hispanics and Black Women negates the achievement.

Gonzales will face some flack for writing the memorandum defending the exclusion of detainees from the Geneva convention. While this position is legally defensible, I have in the past argued that it was a bad idea. Aside from that issue, I think that Gonzales should offer no more offense than any other Republican nominee. For one thing, he is not a fundamentalist Pentecostal Christian, a belief that seems to make all liberals quake in fear. Why this should be so is beyond my powers to comprehend. The religious right certainly differs from the left in their conception of the good society. But they are not engaged in some desperate conspiracy to strip all the freedoms the left holds dear and put hippies in camps. That’s me, not them. But in any event, Gonzales isn’t one, so that should make many people happy.

Condoleeza Rice will be officially nominated for Secretary of State early this afternoon. In many respects, she is an obvious choice for the President. She is loyal, agrees with him on foreign policy, and will likely act to reign in the careerist diplomats at State. She will be a competent representative of American interests – rather than the representative of foreign interests to the administration. Appointing Rice to State signals that there will be no real change in the thrust of American policy – not that anyone expected that there would be.

Some might argue that Rice is unsuitable because of the faulty intelligence that led Bush to move on Iraq. But I think that this really isn’t a criticism of Rice, but rather of the intelligence services themselves, which brings us to the CIA. Jon Henke of [url= QandO]http://www.qando.net/details.aspx?Entry=429]QandO[/url][/url] gathered up some reactions on the left to the craziness at CIA. And gently pointed out to them that the same thing has happened before. It’s been a long time since the CIA has been shaken up, and recent performance (for oh, say, the last four years) has been subpar at best. What was once admiringly called the Silent Service has since become a loudspeaker service, with every CIA agent with an ax to grind running to the Washington Post. Disagreeing with the president is one thing. Actively undermining a sitting president is unacceptable. Hopefully Porter Goss can begin the process of reforming the CIA, so that it can once more provide useful intelligence to the executive. (An important first step would be beefing up the operations side of the house – human intelligence efforts have been haphazard and pathetic ever since the Church commission gutted the CIA back in the seventies. Indications are that this will be on Goss’ agenda.)

All in all, nothing about Bush’s new nominees is earth-shattering, controversial or a sign of the apocalypse. I think Goss has the potential to be an outstanding DCI, and Rice may well be an excellent Secretary of State. Gonzales will do a decent job at Justice, but will not attract the hatred that Ashcroft did. We’ll have to see what other people are nominated, but I expect that there will be at least one democrat in the mix. So far, so good.

CBS has fired the producer guilty for interrupting CSI with news of Arafat's death. Apparently interrupting a hit show with (true) information is a far greater sin than, say, pushing a bogus story about the President's guard service. But at least we know they're serious about keeping the news department a tight ship.

Let the healing commence.

I think I'm going to try this. Of all the techniques I've ever heard of to deal with my "issue" - this is the best. Procrastinate yourself into productivity! Of course, blogging about it is probably not the best way to start. Maybe I'll clean my office so I can get a clean start.

The ACLU is suing Boston's Logan Airport over what it dubs "behavioral profiling." Basically, if the cops at Logan think you look crooked, they get to stop you.

In November 2002, [Logan] began the nation's first ''behavioral recognition program,'' in which police stop and question passengers with odd or suspicious behavior.

''This program is another unfortunate example of the extent to which we are being asked to surrender basic freedoms in the name of security,'' said John Reinstein, legal director of the ACLU of Massachusetts. ''This allows the police to stop anyone, any time, for any reason.''

Is the ACLU out of its tree? The suit was brought on behalf of a guy who, though he was treated rudely, was let go without incident. Moreover, do we really want to prohibit our airport screener-people from stopping the sketchy?

... then again...

Let's be honest. Apart from the obvious shortcomings and frivolity of this suit, will searching the nervous gain us much? From what I understand, your average suicidal fanatic exhibits great calm as they commit mass slaughter. Just a thought.

What the hell, ACLU?

Jeremy Blachman of Crescat Sententia has done a horrible, wonderful thing: taken samplings of recent Lexis/Nexis headlines about the Boston Red Sox Base Ball Squadron and Palestinian Ghoul Yasser Arafat and swapped key words. To wit:

"Successors jostle for position as Red Sox cling to life"
"Red Sox alive but condition is 'very complex', say French"
"Arafat has little hope of returning to the Bronx"
"Red Sox death to be announced Tuesday"
"Arafat beats long odds; Mo's blown save gives him life"
"Israel says it is preparing for rise in violence after Red Sox death"
"Red Sox condition still a mystery as Palestinian leaders head to Paris"
"Arafat fans destined to suffer"
"Red Sox linger"
"Fenway to rescue; Arafat hopes old ballpark can save him"
"With Red Sox between life and death, minds turn to 'day after'"
"Arafat hopes to 'shock the world'"
"Rivals on Red Sox death watch"
"Not in danger -- Officials deny Red Sox are dying"
"Ortiz 12th inning homer keeps Arafat's hopes alive"
"Aides want Red Sox dead, wife says"
"Arafat hopes for 'monster' comeback"

Does it make me a bad person if I think this brings the funny?

When the robots come we can expect life on Earth to change for the worse. For the much worse.

But fear not. The Ministry is looking out for you and your best interests in the fight against the encroaching robot forces. Roombas and smart refrigerators are only the beginning! Eventually the giant fighting space robots will come, and then the days of humanity will be numbered. (If I sound somewhat apocalyptic, it is for a reason. Also, I had a bad tuna salad for dinner and was up half the night yawning in Technicolor and hallucinating in Cinemascope. Canned tuna is teh gay.)

Anyway... where was I?... Fear not! Thanks to the Russians there's now a way off this thing, or at least there will be if their experimental solar sail tests well next year. Sure, a solar sail won't be much good against a nuclear pulse drive which the robots are likely to use in pursuit of our colony ships, but in the long run the sustained acceleration of solar sails should outpace brute-force means-- assuming the robot pursuit ships some day run out of feul.

The Ministry lauds the Russians for their enterprising work in giving humankind an out, should the time come to take it.

Today marks the 229th birthday of the US Marine Corps.

Serving Marines and former Marines gather on this day to raise a hot toddy to toast the Corps. Even veterans of long ago wars and disconnected from fellow comrades might hoist a drink on this day, even by themselves. See some pics from Iraq of the USMC celebration here. They don't get the rum there, but they do get the pleasure of the Black Watch Regiment's company.

I could riff on the capabilities of Marine units, the deeply ingrained sense of Corps history and honor, and the very real bonds between Marine veterans of all ages and conflicts. But I won't, because I wasn't one and am therefore not fit to tell the tale.

I will simply sum it up thus: chicks dig them, men want to be them, and hippies are scared of them. High praise all 'round.

Happy Birthday, Marine Corps. May your next year be as full of ass-kicking as your last.

Q: Match the following counterfactual statement with the appropriate picture below:

"“The objective of securing the safety of Americans from crime and terror has been achieved...”

A:

B:

C:

D:

You want the truth!? Well... here.

For the week ending 8Nov04

Spotlight Thailand: Another week, another lost head. This time, assed-up radicals in Thailand took the head of a village official in revenge for several Muslims killed in protests last week. That there might be a connection between previous similar rioting, attempts to seize police weapons earlier in the month, and a harsh backlash by Thai police and soldiery was lost on the vengeance-seekers.

Spotlight Die Nederlaender: Dutch filmmaker Theo Van Gogh was brutally killed in broad daylight in Amsterdam. The killing was done to exact revenge on Van Gogh for a film of his that is hrashly critical of certain aspects of Islam. Surprisingly enough, the perpetrators of the crime (admitted radical Muslims) did NOT- I repeat, NOT- cut his head off. But they DID leave a couple knives in the bullet-ridden body, one of which pinned a note of Koranic verse to the dead man's chest. What's Arabic for, "blugh"?

Spotlight Taiwan: It's well established that previous attempts to convert lions to Christianity in public arena-type settings have met with consistent, and gory, failure. An intrepid zealot in Taipei, however, thought he'd take animal proselytization into the Third Millenium. His modern take on the issue did yield some benefit, as instead of being torn to pieces he was merely mauled about the arms and legs, so the Church is voicing cautious optimism. The lions in question refused comment.

Spotlight New Jersey: A Jersey Air National Guard pilot on a night training flight put 25 rounds of 20mm training ammo into an elementary school three and a half miles from the range. First, more training appears to be needed. Second, was it really an accident, or evidence of the Air Force's new anti-school munition? If the latter, double extra training is needed as the rounds barely penetrated the roof.

Spotlight Virginia: George Mason University's Associate Director of Equity and Diversity Services is a pervert. Not only did he have an ongoing relationship with a boy (which started when the boy was 16), the guy made child porn vids of his other liasons and later tried to leverage the vids for extortion money. He was arrested after being found unconscious in a DC motel. Some Mason students report that they would be "uneasy about approaching his office if they needed help with sexual harassment issues."

Spotlight Tejas: A 17-year-old boy from Mexico, staying with relatives in Texas, killed one cousin (age 10), slashed three other cousins AND their mother, then fled. Two of the victims remain in critical condition. Police said "some of the victims looked like they were trying to find places to hide" from the rampaging kid. And what was the cause of this gruesome display? The family accused the boy of using drugs. DARE- to keep kids from knifing their entire family.

Spotlight Freedom Hating Northeast: Johno submits that nothing's funnier than combining jokes about secession with jokes about illegal settlements and security fences in the context of Red Sox Nation!! Sneering liberal condescention, Sneering Northeast provincialism, and sneering equal-oppo Antisemitism and Antipalestinian derision... that's some kinda trifecta.

[JARRING CHORD] [The door flies open and Cardinal Ximinez of Spain [Palin] enters, flanked by two junior cardinals. Cardinal Biggles [Jones] has goggles pushed over his forehead. Cardinal Fang [Gilliam] is just Cardinal Fang]

Ximinez: NOBODY expects the Spanish Inquisition! Our chief weapon is surprise...surprise and fear...fear and surprise....

Our two weapons are fear and surprise...and ruthless efficiency....

Our *three* weapons are fear, surprise, and ruthless efficiency...and an almost fanatical devotion to the Pope....

Our *four*...no...

*Amongst* our weapons.... Amongst our weaponry...are such elements as fear, surprise....

I'll come in again.

[The Inquisition exits]

Chapman: I didn't expect a kind of Spanish Inquisition.

[JARRING CHORD]

[The cardinals burst in]

Ximinez: NOBODY expects the Spanish Inquisition! Amongst our weaponry are such diverse elements as: fear, surprise, ruthless efficiency, an almost fanatical devotion to the Pope, and nice red uniforms - Oh damn!

[To Cardinal Biggles] I can't say it - you'll have to say it.

Biggles: What?

Ximinez: You'll have to say the bit about 'Our chief weapons are ...'

Biggles: [rather horrified]: I couldn't do that...

The Maximum Leader has discovered that, like me, he is in fact the Spanish Inquisition.

This will come in handy when the Republican party starts calling for volunteers to staff the new fundamentalist inquisition here in America. I wonder if they will give us jackboots? Jackboots are sexy. Chicks dig the jackboots.

Find out what Monty Python character you are here at quizilla. Thanks to Robert the Lamabutcher. No wait, llamabuthcher. I mean llamabutcher. Anyway, this guy, of whom I have no reason to suspect a deep and abiding hatred for lamas. Isn't the Dalai Lama cute?

A Harvard study finds that the root cause of terrorism is not poverty, but oppression.

A John F. Kennedy School of Government researcher has cast doubt on the widely held belief that terrorism stems from poverty, finding instead that terrorist violence is related to a nation's level of political freedom.

Associate Professor of Public Policy Alberto Abadie examined data on terrorism and variables such as wealth, political freedom, geography, and ethnic fractionalization for nations that have been targets of terrorist attacks.

Before analyzing the data, Abadie believed it was a reasonable assumption that terrorism has its roots in poverty, especially since studies have linked civil war to economic factors. However, once the data was corrected for the influence of other factors studied, Abadie said he found no significant relationship between a nation's wealth and the level of terrorism it experiences.

"In the past, we heard people refer to the strong link between terrorism and poverty, but in fact when you look at the data, it's not there. This is true not only for events of international terrorism, as previous studies have shown, but perhaps more surprisingly also for the overall level of terrorism, both of domestic and of foreign origin," Abadie said.

Instead, Abadie detected a peculiar relationship between the levels of political freedom a nation affords and the severity of terrorism. Though terrorism declined among nations with high levels of political freedom, it was the intermediate nations that seemed most vulnerable.

Maybe our chimpanzee in chief wasn't blowing smoke up our collective ass when he insisted that the spread of freedom will make us safer.

Via the glass-lined tanks of old Jesse Walker, Virginia Postrel, tenders some very fine advice. Don't confuse "51%" with "98%."

My last post for the near future (?). Big changes, very busy, much to do, much to do...

Slate's got a little guide and questionnaire regarding potential Canadian residents. See how you fit in!

Remember, pot's legal! ;)

It's a few days after the election, and I've had time to calm down. I'm sorry Buckethead's offended by what I wrote. I regret the tone of the piece, but it accurately reflects what I was feeling at the time. I am bitterly disappointed. I'll try to be as clear as possible as to why.

Based on my examination of the issues in this campaign and the track records of the candidates, I felt that Kerry represented the best choice. The policy documents on his web site contained solid ideas to address a number of problems in the country, and were for the most part in line with my own ideas to repair the situation.

Fundamentally, you can vote your heart, or you can vote your head. Sometimes, when you're lucky, you get to vote both.

I am essentially a two-issue person: I am concerned with the financial structure and mechanisms of the federal government, and with war. As readers here know, I know a reasonable amount about the first, and little about the second.
No credible support of Bush's first term financial policy exists. A good number of the expert, fiscally conservative Republicans publicly departed the party over this issue. The only economists left on the supply-side bandwagon are spending what remains of their credibility at a tremendous rate. I have pleaded, time and again, for any substantive discourse on this topic. What I unfailingly receive are declarations that "taxes are lower", or some such. On who? By how much? And at what cost? A one-dimensional analysis of Bush's two tax cuts yields the not-quite-astonishing fact that a lot of people paid slightly less in tax, and a very few people paid a lot less in tax.

If I offered to pay you $300 now on the condition that I also get to put $2000 on your credit card balance (and I get the cash), would you take the deal? No rational person would.

This administration (and rose-glassed Republicans) have argued that "deficits don't matter". Deficits do matter, when the difference between deficit growth and economic growth becomes too great. There are numerous examples throughout the world (and in American history) of what happens when governments go bankrupt.

This administration has the worst record on spending in modern times. They increased discretionary spending at a record 7% per year, and that does not include huge expenditures on the military, primarily due to Iraq, which will inflate the true deficit by hundreds of billions more.

Republicans defend Bush's policies with two arguments: First, tax cuts for the wealthy will lead to economic growth, which will make up for the spending. The second is "numbers don't matter".

I have repeatedly addressed the first, here on Perfidy. I have done so with facts, and with numbers, and with references. In return I have seen nothing other than a repetition of supply-side mantras, usually prefixed by "everybody knows that...". Well, it just ain't so. Supply-side economists are the laughingstock of the profession for a very simple reason: The predictive quality of their models hovers around zero. When you put forward a theory that theory will make predictions, based on observations and actions, of outcomes. The relatively tame predictions of the supply-side economists have suffered greatly at the hands of reality. The outlandish claims and predictions of the political class with respect to the same ideas have no identifiable relationship to reality.

The "numbers don't matter" argument is unnerving, to say the least. If numbers don't matter, why bother altering the taxes at all? Hell, why bother paying taxes at all? Why don't we just drive the deficit up into the stratosphere? Economic growth will take of it, right?

It is very rare to encounter someone of either party that believes that we can run a federal government without any taxation at all, if the government is to continue performing its current set of functions. So the numbers do matter after all, and we are in agreement. What we're really arguing are where the lines are. What constitutes acceptable taxation, spending, and deficit? The deficit-as-percentage-of-GDP argument simply does not hold; by that measure we are a year or two away from record debt. A continuation of Bush's massive spending increases guarantees that it will occur. Further tax cuts will exacerbate the problem.

But this isn't really a place where I'm going to argue the numbers because I've done it before. And from what I can see, speaking to my Republican friends, you're not interested. I am perplexed as to the source of your continued support for supply-side fiscal policy, tilted towards the very wealthy. I wish it were otherwise.

The war in Iraq is an extraordinarily complex creature. Let me simplify to this: Polls have found that 75% of registered Republicans believed, in the runup to the election, that Saddam Hussein was responsible at least in part, for 9/11. It follows that if you believe that, a war in Iraq makes sense. Amongst the other 25%, the prevailing attitude seems to be that although the public reasoning given for the war was proven wrong, there were other perfectly good reasons for the war. I place value on the public statements of a politician, in the political process; I hold them to those statements. If we do not, where is the incentive to govern in the light?

The best available information on the Iraq-9/11 link at this time was and is the report of the 9/11 commission, which dimissed the possibility. The Bush Administration did not take the country to war directly on the issue of Saddam's role in 9/11. That role was continuously intimated, though -- and a trusting GOP party base took their leader's subtext at face value. The claimed direct support for the war was weapons of mass destruction.

I was a fence-sitter on the decision to go to war. The public evidence simply did not support war on the WMD issue. But...there was the President and his top advisors on television, advocating forcefully for war, and using phrases like "we know he has them". In a democracy you need to put some trust in elected leaders, and that led me to assume that Bush must have been in possession of evidence that had to stay secret. It was the only thing that made sense at the time -- intelligence must have shown proof positive that there some incredibly bad things going on there, and it was time to go in.

What we know now is that no such hard evidence ever existed, or was ever presented to the President. What weak evidence remained has since been demolished by internal collapse, or by the reality of what we have found in the country, now that we "own" it.

The President gambled that he would find WMD in Iraq. If we assume that he placed faith in his top advisors and only they were in possession of the details that would have led to a different decision, we must conclude that the President has a poor ability to pick solid people for his team. A lot of liberals (come on, let's admit it) have accused the President of being a liar. I do not. I feel utterly comfortable with calling him a gambler, though.

On the financial issue, the President engaged a tax cut policy with no likely positive outcome for anyone other than the wealthiest citizens in the country. The tax cut did come with serious, destructive side effects; these risks were well-known, in advance.

So on the two issues that matter the most to me, this President engaged policy that came with massive, dangerous, and well-known risks. He did so to achieve a very limited up-side outcome; to achieve even that limited outcome required dozens of known problems to break in the President's favor. They did not.

We can argue all day long about Iraq and whether long-term success is possible there. What we should not be arguing about is this: The outcome in Iraq is not what the President and his core team expected. As combat opened in Iraq, the working plan, authorized by the President, was to have force levels drawn down to below 60,000 troops within 90 days.

I will not make the argument that the outcome on tax cuts was not what the President expected, because I do not believe the President expected anything remotely resembling the outlandish claims of various GOP politicians to come true.

Let me return to the disappointment of democrats, and to the disappointment of this liberal. Bush's victory has been a bitter pill. Why? Based on my view of policies and supporting evidence, it reveals a fundamental flaw in this democracy's ability to make rational decisions. On the two issues I have highlighted here, I simply cannot find any rational, factual support for his decisions, now or at the time he made them. And that, friends, is disappointing as hell.

Most liberals looked at this election with hope and faith. They were not looking at their party, and they were not looking at their candidate when they felt these things. They were looking at their entire system of government. Surely now, in the face of such poor decision-making, such obvious division, such disparity between predicated and actual outcomes, the rationality of democracy would exert itself. We were confident that enough Republican moderates (and I consider Mr. and Mrs. Buckethead to be two of them) would look at the same facts, the same speeches, and come to something close to the same conclusions. All across the country, the serious, moderate Republican columnists (who also appeal to moderate Democrats) made substantial criticisms of the Bush administration, and many of them publicy declared their intention to vote for Kerry, based on Bush's performance.

We were waiting, held breath, for the relief that would come as the elections would yield a basic assurance that most of us saw the same facts and reasoned the same way.

It has been devastating to watch "liberal" goals be discarded, one after the other, by this Administration. I refuse to call them conservative, because they are not. At least, they are not conservative in any positive sense I care to associate with the word.

We really care about the environment; Bush threw Kyoto and the EPA in the trash and never came up with an alternative. We care about equality; Bush voters believe that racial equality and the equality of homosexuals are disjoint issues. We believe that the best foreign policy and outcome comes from cooperation and trust; Bush has alienated virtually the entire world with a bullying attitude, squandered lives and vast resources on a pointless exercise of cultural engineering. We care deeply about freedom; Bush's embrace of religion and his integration of it into the secular decision making process and apparatus scares us, because the past and the present show us where highly public religion leads. We care about the fiscal stability of our government; Bush has recklessly gone where no budget has gone before, while inexplicably proclaiming that he has done the opposite. We think that the future our children will inherit will involve the environment, religion, equality, globalization and fiscal stability; Bush has jeopardized virtually all of it, for no discernible reason.

Nowhere in Buckethead's missive has he put forward reasons for a Bush vote. In the absence of such I can only speculate, and my honest speculation goes something like this:

1. Terrorism is the greatest problem facing the country. Bush is "better on terror", because he will take the fight to the enemy and prevent future disasters; Kerry would focus more at home, and with him as President there will be a higher probability of a terrorist attack.

2. Fighting Arabs/Iraqis in Baghdad is better than fighting them here.

2. "Activist" judges are destroying the American Way of Life. Tolerating certain behaviors is fine; giving deviants official recognition is unacceptable. Kerry would force homosexuality into everyday lives, and homosexuals would "take control".

3. Higher medical costs are due to a tort system out of control. Bush would reign in medical malpractice; Kerry would make the problem worse because of "trial lawyer support", or socialize medicine in some way, which would mean a drastic reduction in service and availability.

4. Tax cuts for the wealthy help the economy, spur job growth, and "raise all boats"; Kerry would roll back the tax cut and choke off the economy.

5. A "liberal elite" has dominated the political scene. This liberal elite "despises" regular Americans and is trying to socially engineer the country . George Bush brings regular-guy, common sense to the job; Kerry is a card-carrying member of the liberal elite.

6. The "liberal media" lies about almost everything. George Bush can be trusted to tell the truth.

7. Republicans run a tight ship; Democrats would tax and spend.

8. Bush has had four years experience in the job, in tough times. Kerry has no experience as a leader.

9. A President with solid "moral values", and public Christianity is the best measure of this; a vote for Kerry is a vote for immorality.

10. Environmental science is bogus, and full of crazy predictions from liberal scientists who just want to make money. George Bush is right to roll back environmental controls, Kerry would wreck the economy with regulations to protect us from problems that don't really exist.

Am I somewhere close to correct with this? These particular ten points strike me as rationally demonstrable to be false; that argument is not relevant at this time.

I think Dan Drezner put it best, when he declared his intention, as a lifelong Republican, to vote for Kerry. He said that he just couldn't understand Bush's decision-making process, and while he disagreed with some of John Kerry's policies, he could understand how he made them.

We are dismayed because we do not understand how George Bush and his administration make decisions. We despair when a majority in this country support something we do not understand, and offer no additional reasoning for that support. We despair when, as in this year of issues that seemed dramatically simplified and obvious, far more so than in decades past, that our policies and beliefs are so mercilessly discarded by the tyranny of a majority that is actively hostile towards the personal freedom, collective responsibility and tolerance that we cherish. We are additionally left with the ugly aftertaste of intolerance, knowing that intolerance for sexual preference tipped the balance in this election.

You claim the existence of a massed heartland of reasoned conservatism. I have perhaps claimed something similar, a wide bastion of reasoned liberalism.

I despair because neither exists. I do not understand how this electorate makes decisions. Countless conversations with dozens of Republicans have come to naught; careful shared discussion of facts and policy which often led to fragile consensus on courses of action are discarded in a matter of seconds before a raised fist of misdirected anger, as tribal urges render that discourse meaningless, powerless in a new tangled context of emotion-driven, faith-driven political power.

Have I not been open to other views? I believe that I have been. I have admitted when I have been wrong, and if I have been demanding in the nature of discourse, it has not been to create a separate standard for myself.

I find it telling that in years of discussions on recent Republican policy with dozens of those on the other side, none has ever sought to convince me of their correctness; it was for me to be informed of that correctness. Perhaps I am not worth the investment. More likely, it is that some form of faith lies at the heart of these policies, and my good friends have simply been humoring me, knowing that unless that faith was present in me, no conversion could take place.

A missionary spends years in the field; good, enjoyable years of toil bringing truth, a desire to help, and the will to leave the world a better place than he found it. If his works are "writ in water" and without effect, does he not doubt? When does a man decide to turn inward, and for what reason?

I claim a right to decide it, when and where I choose.

President Bush was reelected last Tuesday, and by a large margin. Not a landslide, but a three and a half million vote lead is not squeaking by, either. As a conservative and a republican (not the same thing, by the way) I was relieved and pleased that my candidate had won the election. I went to bed when it became clear that it was over, and was up in time to see Kerry's gracious concession speech. The talking heads began their usual dissection of the results, and wondered what it meant for the losing side. All seemed well with the world, and I made a conscious decision not to post any gloating remarks here at perfidy, lest I seem to be, well, gloating.

I might not have bothered. My small gloats would have been entirely lost in a sea of ridiculous whining and moaning from the left. Leaving aside the moonbats at the Democratic Underground, and the covers of leftist British newspapers, there has been an awful lot of crying. But along with the crying has come loads of insults directed at the winner, and those who supported him.

In Slate, Jane Smiley has some not very smiley things to say about the 51% of the electorate that voted for Bush:

Why Americans Hate Democrats - A Dialogue

The unteachable ignorance of the red states

The reason the Democrats have lost five of the last seven presidential elections is simple: A generation ago, the big capitalists, who have no morals, as we know, decided to make use of the religious right in their class war against the middle class and against the regulations that were protecting those whom they considered to be their rightful prey - workers and consumers. The architects of this strategy knew perfectly well that they were exploiting, among other unsavory qualities, a long American habit of virulent racism, but they did it anyway, and we see the outcome now - Cheney is the capitalist arm and Bush is the religious arm. They know no boundaries or rules. They are predatory and resentful, amoral, avaricious, and arrogant. Lots of Americans like and admire them because lots of Americans, even those who don't share those same qualities, don't know which end is up. Can the Democrats appeal to such voters? Do they want to? The Republicans have sold their souls for power. Must everyone?

Progressives have only one course of action now: React quickly to every outrage - red state types love to cheat and intimidate, so we have to assume the worst and call them on it every time. We have to give them more to think about than they can handle - to always appeal to reason and common sense, and the law, even when they can't understand it and don't respond. They cannot be allowed to keep any secrets. Tens of millions of people didn't vote—they are watching, too, and have to be shown that we are ready and willing to fight, and that the battle is worth fighting. And in addition, we have to remember that threats to democracy from the right always collapse. Whatever their short-term appeal, they are borne of hubris and hatred, and will destroy their purveyors in the end.

Ironically, she implies that Democrats aren't Americans. This is one of the more sensible responses to Kerry's loss that I found.

Over at Q and O, Jon collects some responses from the left:

TBOGG:

James Wolcott nails it with a sledgehammer:

"Good, Go Ahead, America, Choke on Your Own Vomit, You Deserve to Die."

AMERICAN STREET:

Osama Wins!!

VARIOUS COMMENTERS AT ATRIOS:

I hope the people who voted for Bush get eight legs, ten arms and brain tumors.

...

The rest of the world should know that we ... will never succomb to the relentless efforts of right-wing extremists who seek to turn the United States of America into a replica of the Third Reich.

...

welcome back to 1923

...

What we have been doing isn't working, it's time for a new plan. I bet the Jews and Germans thought they could ride Hitler out, too. You see where that got them.

...

...Chimpy McCokespoon...

...

[Ohio] is just as full of morons as any other, except more so. Fucking ruined my life and my body - hope to be able to kill a few of them before I leave...

...

We are on the path to becoming a fascist state--only revolution or a violent coup will stop it.

As a conservative, it would be easy to take offense at all of this - and there is plenty more out there. I can personally vouch for the fact that had Kerry won, I would not be reacting in this peculiar manner. There seems to be a common feeling among right wing bloggers that the reactions of the left seem a little too much, a little over the top in both vituperativeness and whining tone. Patton over at opinion8 shared a similar thought via email, and Michelle Catalano has an interesting story to tell over at a small victory.

Why all of this rage, angst and fear over Bush's victory? Let's leave that for a moment, and move a little closer to home. I can easily dismiss the ravings of other bloggers, because they're likely talking out of their ass just as I often do here. But intelligent people that I personally know, have met face to face and who know me are guilty of the same rhetoric that I cited above. Yesterday, Mrs. Buckethead's band was in the studio working on their new, full length album. One would think that this would be a happy time for the band, but the news of Bush's victory weighed heavy on their minds. You see, everyone in the band save my wife is a liberal. Oh, to be sure, the bass player votes Republican just to spite an old girlfriend, and GuitarPicker is a longtime commenter here at Perfidy and has many libertarian leanings. But the band is in fact reliably liberal.

After her experience yesterday, my wife was loathe to return to the studio today. Nearly everyone in the band had said something grossly offensive to conservatives, completely unwilling to remember or recognize that my wife the conservative was in the room. One of the other singers made a comment along the lines of, "How could so many people be so stupid and vote for that idiot?" My wife gently pointed out, "I am not an idiot and I voted for him." The response was classic - "Oh, we don't mean you!" This pattern is classic bigoted behavior. Bigot: "All x are filthy, stupid mouthbreathers." Interlocutor: "What about this x?" Bigot: "Oh, that one's different. It's all the rest of them that I'm talking about."

No doubt, that singer would be shocked to hear her pronouncements classed as bigotry. She is a liberal, from a long and distinguished line of liberals, and nothing she says could ever be bigotry. She is careful to excise all racist, classist, sizeist, and genderist concepts from thought and speech. But, damn, those conservatives are baby-eating, rapist, warmongering idiots. Other members of the band had similar thoughts to offer my gentle conservative wife. The usual gamut of base canards was offered - Bush is stupid, the fundamentalist Christians are going to put us in camps, and of course, OIL! The banjo player had shaved his head and vowed never to cut until a democrat was once again in the white house, and we are free of the abomination that is George W. Bush. (Saving grace - apparently he looks like much less of a dirty hippy than previously. I hope he ends his days an old man, never having cut his hair.)

Mrs. Buckethead is not political in the sense that I am. While her conservatism is likely stronger than mine, she does not enjoy political argument and finds political discussion rather beside the point. She'd much rather play music. So, being subjected to this from her friends and bandmates is painful on at least a couple levels. One, she is being insulted by friends who in the depth of their pain over Kerry's loss, seem unable to realize that they are saying rather hurtful things. Two, she doesn't like to talk about these things - and therefore has never developed the snappy comebacks and putdowns that characterize modern political argument. She doesn't want to appear a poor winner, despite the fact that that means that these ungracious slobs can continue being tragically poor losers.

And here, on this very website, my friend Ross has given into the temptation to view Bush's victory as apocalypse. Despite the fact that the previous four years have failed to see the arrival of apocalypse; the determined chicken littles on the left - just like the preachers in the nineteenth century who constantly were calibrating the date of the arrival of the end times - must postpone the immanentizing of the eschaton. Here's a sample of what Ross thinks about Bush's reelection:

But Bush represents the certainty of an economic death spiral, the affirmation of xenophobia (and just about every other phobia, including homo-), and the sunsetting of liberty. He's got a four year track record to prove it. At least with Kerry there was a chance for fiscal discipline and for cooperation on the international level; no such chance exists now.

We're really entering a new era, now. If you're a smart, wealth-producing, socially liberal, fiscally conservative person, you need to start thinking about protecting yourself and your family from this lunacy, and you need to start doing it right now. The bible-wielding welfare-staters are coming for us. They want to spend our tax dollars on things we don't agree about, like stupid wars. They want to force everyone to hate gays. They want to take away a woman's right to choose. They do not believe the environment should be protected. They want to swagger around the playground, declaring that the opinions of those who live elsewhere in the world don't matter. They talk financial discipline, but implement the largest discretionary spending increases in modern times. They hand huge breaks to the buddies of the people in charge of their "party", and they hand the bill to us, and to the next generation. 

So how do you protect yourself and your family against this lunacy? I don't know yet. I'm trying to figure it out. I'm not sure it's possible; at least, not in America.

So there you have it! Now that the benighted majority has consigned us to another four years in hell, what can we be certain of? The economy will go into a death spiral - despite the stock market rally that is still ongoing, and the new positive job numbers that just came out. We know that our leadership hates all the wogs. Despite the fact that we were once all wogs ourselves, and that same leadership has committed this nation to the expenditure of blood and treasure in an attempt to bring freedom to those same brown skinned folk. Also, the administration and all its followers are afraid of everything, including gays. Well, that's obvious, isn't it? Without fear, the hate core of the right could never create the fear based police state that Ross figures is right around the corner. Liberty, well that's right out the window. (Except the liberty to own guns. The left never did support the complete bill of rights.) We'll start more stupid wars, which will make the rest of the world hate us even more, and that will destroy the environment, and we'll all either freeze to death or broil, depending on what the global warming activists are predicting today. And don't forget the swaggering. The villain must swagger, because otherwise we won't know he's evil. That's important, because unless a villain swaggers, you never have the satisfying denouement.

I think Ross has his hate labels confused though, given that the bible thumpers rarely if ever support the welfare state - though they are famous for their charity. They'll be coming for you, though. Probably to give you a homemade pie or something, but they'll be coming nevertheless. Ross, at least you are a Canadian; you can run to the Canadian embassy when the jackbooted thugs start roaming the streets. I guess the rest of us are stuck here to face the worst.

I cannot express in words the extent to which this kind of thinking both bores and offends me. Every time a Republican wins national office, the litany of despair begins anew. In situations like 2000, the litany is embellished with whining over stolen elections. Always it's dark conspiracies and the end times drawing nigh. Only two liberals of my personal acquaintance have resisted the temptation to parade this thinking in front of me or my wife: Johno and Mapgirl. (And with my hair trigger set, I came close to accusing Johno of it - sorry, dude) I understand the disappointment, but seriously liberals, believe me when I say that:

• The fifty-nine million of your fellow citizens (a majority, btw) who voted for Bush are not idiots, at least no more so than a normal bell curve would indicate.
• Neither are they evil, fascist, or baby-eating.
• Liberals will not be put in camps.
• We have just as strong, if not stronger, feelings for liberty than you. If by some strange cosmic irony, someone does start a police state in the next four years, I assure that we'll be fighting it too, and we're a hell of a lot better armed.
• The economy will not suffer a melt down.
• Rationalizing the tax code and reforming social security are not bad ideas. Further, they are not sneaky attempts to create a police state or some other nonsense. See above.
• If the rest of the world hates us, 1) that's not new and 2) It doesn't mean we're wrong.
• The end times are not nigh.

Make the attempt to be a gracious loser, for lose in fact you did. Last Tuesday, Bush became the first candidate since 1988 to receive a clear majority of the vote. His party increased its strength in both houses of Congress. Deal with it, accept it in you hearts, and get on with your life. Cease and desist referring to me and others who supported the president as idiots, morons and worse. The world will not come to an end.

Sez Dean Esmay, the funny thing about the press and Bush is " the fact that so many in the mainstream press keep talking about Bush as this "hard right wing" guy may have some perverse consequences."

This is an idea with some merit. I know from experience that what people think of you can be very liberating in just this way.

Can any of my readers tell me something about Belgian beer?

I'm a big beer guy. Hell, I'm a big rot guy in general. I want nothing in this world more than a big house with a big basement where I can brew the beer, keep the sourdough starter, pickle the homegrown vegetables, keep the sauerkraut crock, ferment the wine, and age the cheese. If it can rot and taste delicious, I'm a maniac for it (except nuoc mam and related putrid-fish sauce-type affairs. I need to work on that).

Which brings me to Belgian beer. Having never visited the land of paperwork and hovercraft, I've never tasted a Belgian beer in its natural habitat. All the Bb's I can find in the USA, from the decently reputed Duvel up to the made-by-blind-monks-in-secret $10/bottle treasures, as well as Belgian-style dark American made beers, taste funny to me. I don't think it's a function of the spicing (I can tell my coriander from my nutmeg from my burnt barley) or of the yeasting, but of the malting. All Belgian beers I've tried, apart from the light summer wheat stuff, are incredibly malty, almost syrupy. This is kind of gross and throws the whole flavor profile out of balance, unless I'm trying to taste for the wrong things.

The question is this: are imported Belgians just not good examples of the genre, much like Guinness in those old-style squat bottles tastes horrid next to even a widget can of the same stuff, or do I just not get Belgian beer?

I think this means something-- I'm just not sure what.

My former classmate and history heavyweight Brdgt attributes the similiarities to historical attitudes toward race. I'm not so sure. Although as an historian of racial identity in the USA I am convinced that almost everything in American history can be related, albeit tangentially, to race, I am inclined to read this map differently. I see a map describing the boundary between a tightly federal America and America's last frontier where the states-rights people live. Naturally, 'states rights' is code for slavery when we're talking about 1860-odd, but that's not the only thing going on.

Interesting.

[wik] Good discussion in the comments. I should clarify. Please read the last sentence of the original post in the following spirit, which is as I intended it: Naturally, 'states rights' is code for slavery when we're talking about 1860-odd [but it is devoid of that meaning today when uttered by serious people], but [that historical reading of the top map is] not the only [one, or even the interesting one].

To turn one of the Ministry's pet slogans on its head, we Ministers may be vile and vicious, but fate is downright cruel.

Let's everyone wish Elizabeth Edwards a speedy recovery from breast cancer, with which she was diagnosed on Wednesday, the day the two Johns' Presidential bid gave up the ghost.

Indeed, they live next door.

This noxious red state/blue state bullshit is poisoning the country. The press and punditry, in search of a quick and easy way to nutshell our convictions, sell papers, grab eyeballs, and dumb down reality to a level their fumbling little minds can handle have made this idea into received truth: Liberals live in Blue States, conservatives live in Red States, and never the twain shall meet. In fact, when the twain do meet, it's usually some cardigan-wearing Yuppie spilling his white wine and running right out of his boat shoes as he flees in terror from a band of unshaven, camo'd Good Ol' Boys shootin' at him with squirrel guns out of the back of a giant pickup truck.

Moreover, as anyone can clearly see, the Republicans are by far the majority party, as clearly demonstrated by a glance at the Big Electoral Map of Unquestioned Assumptions Presented As Pure-D Truth And Don't You Forget It.

Right?

Let's go to the maps!
Here's a by-county winner-take-all look at the nation on Tuesday. Pretty clear, huh? The US of A is Bush Country!

For those of us who live in blue states, this map is telling us to feel like we're being backed into a corner! The entire country hates gays and loves freedom, which we hate.

But what's that directly below the Red-Blue map? That is a map of population density in the USA. In-teresting. Bush country is largely devoid of populace, though parts are teeming with cattle. Is it possible that perhaps the Red-Blue split is nothing more than the old urban-rural thing dressed up in spiffy new colorful clothes? No! No way! That would render it almost meaningless!

Finally, here's a map with Tuesday's by-county voting results, shaded red-to-blue depending on which candidate carried the county, and by how much. 100% BusHitler = Red. 100% that Liberal Fakey Fake Flip Flopping Frenchy = Blue. A 51-49 victory lands right in the middle between blue and red.

Well shit. What's right in the middle between blue and red??

The United States of America!

(special thanks to Crooked Timber for letting me steal the maps they found.)

[wik] Finally... here's the same view of the country from the 2000 election, missing parts of New England thanks to data porting issues and with one county in the west partially green (implying a strong showing in the area for Kodos).

[alsø wik] Why, oh why, do I hate our freedom?