perfidy

Throughout history, the hunt has traditionally been central to high culture. Hunting rights were reserved to the aristocracy, and poachers were punished viciously for the least infraction. Hunting was, among other things, a proxy for war training, a test of manhood, and a means of ridding the world of dangerous predators. In modern times, as our feeble replacement for warrior nobility has moved on to other pursuits – literary criticism, cultivating effete mannerisms, the collection of third world handicrafts, posturing “interest” in obscure causes – the hunt has declined in importance. Nowadays, hunting is largely the preserve of the descendents of those who were once hanged for snatching the King’s deer. The hunt has now become hunting. A blue collar pursuit, déclassé, and if noticed at all by the guardians of modern culture, regarded with little short of revulsion and nausea.

That this is emblematic of our decline as a civilization is clear. It is also clear that something must be done. In considering this matter, the ministers felt that in reviving the Hunt, we must attempt to recapture the best aspects of the Hunt of old. It must be a test of courage, man vs. the most dangerous of beasts. It must have an element of public service – we must, in killing, provide life and safety for the little people who are hungry and, indeed, at risk from the hunger of the wild. The Hunt must refine those skills most useful in war, so that we, and those who participate, will be better prepared for the coming apocalypse. Finally, it must offer up to heaven a sacrifice of blood, cruelty, torment and incense.

In pursuit of these aims, therefore, The Ministry of Minor Perfidy is now accepting reservations for the first annual Ministry Manatee Hunt and Barbecue.

The Manatee is renowned throughout the world for its cunning, viciousness and utter lethality. It is a known, historical fact that the first two Spanish expeditions to Florida were consumed to the last by the angry, territorial Manatee. Early settlers introduced the Alligator in the hopes of limiting, at least somewhat, the depredations of packs of hunting Manatees that once plagued that region. For several centuries, Spanish settlers lived in fear of the man-eating Manatee, slowly learning from the local aborigines (colloquially known as “Indians”) methods of avoiding the vacas del agua del asesino del pavor.

Manatees teach their young to hunt

It wasn’t until General Andrew Jackson was sent to the newly acquired Florida territory to deal with the Manatee menace (and, incidentally, put down the Seminole rebellion) that people could leave their homes in safety, and live without fear of continual harassment and death at the teeth and claws of hunting packs of Manatees. Jackson organized the largest Manatee Hunt in history: using 800 Federal troops and over a thousand Georgia Militia, along with locally conscripted “volunteers” he started in central Florida and swept outwards in a giant spiral, driving the Manatee before them. Great was the slaughter of Manatee on that day.

Since then, the Manatee have survived, much reduced in number and wary of man. Only occasionally do they stir from their watery lairs to snatch a small child or a careless senior citizen. Most of these attacks are ascribed to alligators, which no doubt strikes a dark chord of humor in the Manatee.

We will not be orchestrating a Hunt on the scale of General Jackson. There are simply not enough Manatees to make it feasible, and in addition, a close reading of Florida’s trespassing statutes suggests that it could expose the Ministry to significant legal risk. Instead, we envision a smaller, more convivial hunting party of 8-20 participants, and the Hunt will take place on private land, free from the interference of do-gooding environmentalists and nosey park rangers. The only remaining details to be hammered out are tactical.

There are several schools of thought on the best means to hunt the savage Manatee.

The Manatee, as is well known, fools its prey by taking on the appearance of a placid, slow moving blubbery creature. When the victim, convinced of the harmlessness of the Manatee, looks away, then it charges, lunging out of the water in a horrific display of razor sharp claws and bone-crushing teeth.

The full grown Manatee has several modes of attack at its disposal.

• The smooth, rubbery skin of the Manatee conceals muscles of surprising strength. The Manatee can literally leap from the water, landing on its target and crushing it instantly with its bulk.
• The Manatee’s jaws have a bite strength of almost a thousand pounds per square inch, stronger than the Mako shark. Its jaws can sever an arm or leg almost instantaneously, or pop a human skull like a watermelon at a Gallagher show.
• Concealed in the seemingly limp front flippers, the Manatee hides fourteen razor-sharp, five inch claws. These talons can eviscerate a man in a fraction of second.
• It is a little known fact that the Manatee, like the dolphin, can emit a high-pitched screetch that is capable of stunning, for a brief time, creatures up to man size. This attack works best in the water, as the air is a much less efficient medium for sound.

Since the Great Hunt almost two centuries ago, the Manatee has learned to be a solitary hunter, relying more on stealth and cunning than the cooperative hunting pack tactics of its glory days. The Manatee is now a solitary creature, reclusive and secretive, except when they put on displays to fool the weak minded.

The Manatee Prepares to Strike

With this in mind, we can determine the best means of attack. The traditional means, sanctified by time and papal decree, is to sneak up on the Manatee and kill him with a blow to the head with a blunt object, such as a tire iron. The Ministry reveres tradition of course, but this method appears to be a trifle inelegant. We will leave it on the table for discussion, however.

The second method is also time-tested, though of more recent provenance. This involves attacking the Manatee as it surfaces with a large power boat. The real skill involves hitting the Manatee with multiple passes, to create the figure-eight pattern that proves it was an intentional kill, and not the result of driving a boat while drunk. The Ministry does not approve of this method, as it is not sporting, manly, or fair.

The final method under discussion is the use of firearms. The Ministry has secured the use of number of a Browning M2 .50 Machine Gun, and proposes this as the means of choice for our Hunt. Given the relative ferocity of the Manatee, we feel that this weapon offers the best balance between risk and carnage for both the hunter and the Manatee. (Each hunter will be permitted a native bearer/loader.) After all, we do want to give the Manatee a fighting chance.

There will be a preparatory meeting a week before the expedition, when Ministry representatives and the participants can hash out the final details. Native bearer/loaders will also be assigned at this time, along with code names and individual itineraries. If you wish to travel to the hunt site with more than one other person, special dispensation must be obtained, as we do not wish to make local law enforcement officials at all suspicious.

I'm sure that people who invent new kinds of robots all have perfectly well-adjusted social lives, play some ball on the weekends, take the kids to the movies, get together with friends and cook up a big batch of corn smut chili. I'm sure that's the case.

I've heard of robots that learn, robots that walk, robots that build cars, Real Dolls, robots that turn into cars, robots that act as companions to lonely people, and even teledildonics. All very exciting developments in the world of technology, except for that one of those things is incurably foul.

And I'm sure that the minds that came up with the innovation of making robots with soft, human-like skin are perfectly together people with sane minds and clean habits who have never even heard of that one incurably foul thing and thought that it needed to be a robot.

I'm just saying. I don't know what's creepier; a killer robot that mimics a person, or the weird shit that lonely people in their basements are thinking right now.

I think I need to go take a walk. And a shower. And a brain enema.

Wait...not prone to seething rants and anger...? Well, I'm skeptical then of this quiz' accuracy. But since the code didn't need to be unfucked, I'm going with it.

From Thursday's Washington Post:

THE NEW SEASON TV Preview

Look Homely, Angel
ABC's 'Ugly Betty' Is Plainly Lovable

By Tom Shales
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, September 28, 2006; Page C01

"Ugly Betty" isn't just entertainment, it's therapy. Nirvana therapy. It's happiness in a tube, or rather The Tube. It's a pint of Ben & Jerry's with no fat or calories. It's tuning in to "The View" to discover they all have laryngitis. It's Florida without those disgusting bugs.
...

Mmmmkay... When I walked into the house Thursday evening, Ugly Betty was what the girls were watching. Aside from the fact that it was arguably too adult for my 11 year old to watch ("Too many icky parts!"), it was one of those painful 5 minute periods where I see a show and immediately tune it out as not worth any further attention. A total piece of crap, even before the girls had a chance to vote. Who gets off on watching the lead character be serially treated like crap by a bunch of hoes?

I had no idea, until they ladies stopped watching it, what the they were watching, and hadn't even heard of this new show, Ugly Betty. I thought, in the short time I saw it, that it was some spiced-up made-for-Disney movie, thus guaranteeing that it would be a one-time event in our house. It just had that look to it. Luckily, even though it was a series, not a movie, the girls were pretty merciless ("needlessly catty!", "deep, evil plot twist at the end!", "totally derivative of a bunch of earlier 'Girl Meets World' movies!"). It seems we won't be cursed, in my house, with its ongoing episodes between now and its cancellation.

So there's that.

But when I looked at what the WaPo section of my Google home page showed, I saw a story about a review of the series, excerpted above. I took a look, assuming that whomever reviewed it would have roughly the same views as those on the softer side of my house. Newp.

Gushing review. "...therapy", "Nirvana therapy", "happiness in a tube", "a pint of Ben & Jerry's with no fat or calories".

What the hell? Who could possibly think such a thing? And then I looked at the header over the review:

Well, never mind - that explains everything.

[wik] Hey, for all I know, he's otherwise a genius. (That is a "he", isn't it?) I'm only casting aspersions on this particular critique.

[alsø wik] Of course I can make such a catty swipe, because I'm perfect. Except for my yoooge head. He's apparently got more hair than I, but he also has more chins.

[alsø alsø wik] As la mia figlia would say "Woof!"

A good buddy of mine (who, it should be noted, would be amused and bemused if I were to say to him, "10-4, good buddy," for he is not the sort of person to whom such an address is naturally directed, but still believes himself so in his more delusional moments) has hatched a biennial tradition that I'm proud to be part of.

Two years ago, for reasons unknown, the phrase "chicken cheesecake" became current among my good buddy's crowd, mainly to refer to someone whose skirt (metaphorically speaking) was too long for them to successfully complete a manly task. A puss. A pansy. A milquetoast.

The phrase stuck around in my good buddy's head long enough for him to decide it'd be a great idea to actually make chicken cheesecake and have a bake-off.

Blech.

I came in last in that competition, because I chose poorly. I made a nice three-layered Italian-style ricotta cheesecake, the bottom layer flavored with sundried tomatoes and herbs (basil, thyme, oregano), the middle layer being diced sauteed chicken, and the top layer flavored with a basil and spinach pesto. It was a nice red-and-green cross section that actually looked appetizing on the plate. Tasted pretty good too. Unfortunately, Italian-style ricotta cheesecake has a grainy texture very different from the smooth cream cheese New York model, and that texture in a savory application with big flavors absolutely killed me.

The winner was some poor schlub who'd made a poundcake with cream cheese and a couple pureed chicken breasts whizzed into the eggs and milk; you couldn't taste no chicken in that! The runner up, my good buddy, made a yellow cake and festooned the top with shake and bake chicken strips. A cheesecake? Only in the broadest possible sense.

Clearly, I wuz robbed.

This year, the big event is a chili cookoff in which 40% of the score is original and creative use of ingredients. I feel pretty good about my chances; I've got one hell of a secret ingredient; corn smut.

Better known to the Azetcs and their Mexican descendents as "huitlacoche," corn smut is a grey-black fungus that infects ears of corn (maize), growing in and around kernels into distended blobby mutant shapes that look like a particularly malevolent cancer. I hear it tastes great; smoky, woody, sweet and corny.

And wouldn't you know, you can get it through Amazon.

My plan for Corn Smut Chili

1 lb stew beef
1 lb pork butt
1 lg onion, roasted
2 bell peppers, ditto
2 poblano peppers, ditto
much garlic
vegetable stock
beef stock
beer
1 28-oz can tomatoes
1-2 Tbsp chili powder
2 Tbsp cumin
1 Tbsp dry mexican oregano
2 tsp dry thyme
1 tsp dry epazote
1/2 tsp cinnamon
1/2 tsp cocoa
1/2 tsp allspice
1 tsp coriander
3 Tbsp chipotle peppers in adobo
3 cups roasted frozen corn
1 lb dry black beans, cooked
1 12 oz can pozole (lime-cured whole corn kernels)
2 7.6 oz cans huitlacoche
2 dashes liquid smoke

I may also try to find room for two cups of blueberries in there, because why the hell not? That all sort of depends how the master recipe comes out.

I plan to bribe the judge by serving the chili with a garnish of fresh pico de gallo with plenty of cilantro, a side of corn chips, and a tequila shooter in a hollowed-out lime that's been rimmed with salt.

[wik] I won! Oh yes, I won. And this may have been the best pot of chili I have ever made. With or without the corn smut (which did add some very welcome flavor nuances just as I'd hoped) this is a dynamite recipe.

Virgin Galactic unveiled a mockup of the interior of their upcoming sub-orbital craft, the SpaceShipTwo being designed as we speak by visioary aerospace genius but terrible nomenclator Burt Rutan. This is sweet. Eight people on a ballistic shot, several minutes of weightlessness for $200k. Test flights are scheduled to begin in the spring of 2008, with commercial flights beginning in 2009. What's that, ten years for a small company to go from drawing board to successful prototype to commercial full rate production? NASA should be hiring these people. And, Brickmuppet should be buying me dinner soon.

While enjoying a midnight snifter of umbilical blood and Asbach- a drink called the “Baby Hitler”, customary among Perfidians- I settled into my favorite wing-backed chair and, once satisfied my back was against the wall and there were still two exits from the room, I allowed myself to relax.

My mind was pleased with the state of things: perpetual war; incurable pestilence; rampant poverty; and irredeemable sloth and corruption are all fundamental aspects of modern Man. Across the Multiverse, even, Light has been retreating before Dark for millennia. Good is out across the infinite Cosmos; Evil is cool, and Chaos is the new/old/new black. It is in those circumstances that the Ministry thrives. And so I was, by conscious reckoning anyway, content.

But as the coal-fired hemoglobin started to pull me under, my unconscious offered a disturbing realization: soon, very soon, there will be no new frontiers to conquer, no more people or species to corrupt. Possibly even before the Third Millennium of the Son, all will be dark. Evil will reign, but over what?

Startled, I jerked from my semi-dream so suddenly that the vivid images and impending dread drained from my mind like water. It was only with a bit of reflection, and a couple more drinks, that I was able even to recall even as much as I have. One detail, though, was burned into my conscious and needed no further prompting to retain. A vision as clear as the sun I so loathe.

It was a marquee.

And the marquee proclaimed: “The Ministry of Minor Perfidy: The Movie”.

And it was clear then that film was the last frontier for evil to continue to spawn. Even after the final curtain for homo sapiens- as our civilization evaporates into supernova, or dread demon Thaoekilikhan devours us all feet first- there will be entertainment lawyers, studio executives, and armies of hacks still surviving, somewhere, like roaches. And like roaches, they will do what comes naturally to them: making entertainment so bad it perpetuates the cause of pure evil everywhere.

The Ministry needs to make a movie. The first biopic about a blog. There is no script yet, but that’s rarely stopped filmmakers before. I do have some ideas about casting though:

JohnO: Toss-up between Steve Buscemi or Charlie Sheen.

Buckethead: I’m leaning toward Lawrence Fishburne.

Patton: Maybe Billy Crudup; maybe Billy Bob Thornton. Definitely someone named “Billy”.

Ross: Jet Li.

Me: Could go Carlos Mencia; if unavailable, get Lee Van Cleef back from the dead.

Without putting too fine a point on it, yes.

For reasons that seemed appropriate at the time, my wife's online shopping excursion led her into one of the darker and stranger corners of the interweb. She returned, scarred and weary, bearing this. Mother Earth Shopping is offering for sale, The Scythe Book, 2nd ed. At first, I am intrigued. Scythes, you say? Until I read the blurb:

Instead of trying to find time to workout at the local gym, this book tells how you can get a healthful workout while silently mowing your property using a scythe.

Get in shape while (silently) looking like bathouse, squirrelbait crazy. If I tried to mow my lawn with a scythe, I'd likely be arrested before I finished the front. I wonder, if Mother Jones started to offer books together as packages like Amazon, what they would mate up with this gem? How to make you own very large black cloak from pocket lint? Death and You, Mythology and Holistic Home Gardening? For every one indisputably cool thing that Mother Earth might have, there are a thousand of these boners.

This will make some in the national security apparat have a quiet, secretive coniption fit. Void Communications has designed itself a brand new, totally secure, self erasing communications system - one that will allow any two people to have a secure conversation that leaves no trace whatsoever of its existence.

Key to Void's Web-based VaporStream service is the fact that at no time does the body of the message and the header information appear together, thus leaving no record of the interaction on any computer or server. The message cannot be forwarded, edited, printed or saved, and, once it's been read, it disappears; nothing is cached anywhere. No attachments allowed.

Responding to questions about the service's utility for terrorists and other malcontents, DEMO Executive Producer Chris Shipley said,

"Good guys need confidentiality, too."

While this has geek credibility, is certainly an impressive display of cleverness, and no doubt lots of powerful people with guns will be very pissed off - it's kinda pointless, considering that maintaining any sort of anonymity or privacy in the coming age will be nigh on to impossible without extreme measures that will be indistinguishable from paranoia, or dropping off the grid entirely. Neither course will be conducive to living a normal life, or getting dates, and therefore will be rarely followed.

Another post long delayed is an update to my post on the laws of civilized warfare. Or as Ken McLeod would have it, “Civilised Warfare.” Shortly after writing my piece, I was cruising around my internet neighborhood, and dropped in on the Maximum Leader. He had posted a link to an editorial by one Sam Harris in the LA Times. Mr. Harris is a liberal, and recently the author of a book that slams religion. All of them. (At least he is even-handed in his contempt. Like the saying goes, you’re not a bigot if you hate everyone.) Normally I avoid reading the LA Times, so I would likely have missed this article if not for the intervention of our Dear Leader.

Now, one would expect that a liberal religion hater would also hold a typical package of left-leaning beliefs. You would be wrong. The whole article is worth reading, and you should be reading Naked Villainy on general principles. But one bit bore directly on my post of last week.

In their analyses of U.S. and Israeli foreign policy, liberals can be relied on to overlook the most basic moral distinctions. For instance, they ignore the fact that Muslims intentionally murder noncombatants, while we and the Israelis (as a rule) seek to avoid doing so. Muslims routinely use human shields, and this accounts for much of the collateral damage we and the Israelis cause; the political discourse throughout much of the Muslim world, especially with respect to Jews, is explicitly and unabashedly genocidal.

Given these distinctions, there is no question that the Israelis now hold the moral high ground in their conflict with Hamas and Hezbollah. And yet liberals in the United States and Europe often speak as though the truth were otherwise.

We are entering an age of unchecked nuclear proliferation and, it seems likely, nuclear terrorism. There is, therefore, no future in which aspiring martyrs will make good neighbors for us. Unless liberals realize that there are tens of millions of people in the Muslim world who are far scarier than Dick Cheney, they will be unable to protect civilization from its genuine enemies.

This summary is, tragically, far better written than my own. But it again hits the point that unless we are to completely discard any sort of moral viewpoint of human action in the world, we have no choice but to view some people, groups, and actions as inherently better than others. (The alternative is to view the world through a lens of expediency, which is what McLeod seems to suggest, despite his claims of compassion.)

Tolerance, compassion and fairness are virtues. What liberals so often fail to realize is that they are far from the only virtues. When we look out at the world we must make judgments, we must discriminate between the good and the bad. If we lack the courage and confidence to look at someone and say, “That’s wrong” we have no compass for guiding our own actions in the world.

I meant to respond to this a while ago, but several factors have delayed my response. (For those who are interested, they are, in order: laziness, work, children, getting ip banned from my own domain, and preparing the Epic New Jersey Post.) But late is often better than never.

So, Ken over at Brickmuppet blog now believes that he'll be buying me dinner soon. We made a bet some time ago that commercial manned spacecraft would be orbiting the Earth before NASA pulled its collective head out of it's many-orificed nether regions. He has changed his tune thanks to the announcement last week that Bigelow Aerospace will be orbiting a full-size habitat before decades' end, and is working to ink three separate deals with Lockmart, Kistler and SpaceX to provide manrated launchers to move passengers to his new orbital hotel. (Do you think it'll have hourly rates?)

As Ken notes, this is big. It does in fact solve the chicken-egg problem of having a destination to which manned, commercial launchers can fly to. I would add that it is ironic that NASA's nearly complete ISS notably did not solve this problem. There is a space station in orbit as we speak, but it isn't a destination. Remember the hissy fit NASA threw when the Russkies were about to launch the first space tourist? They don't want grubby tourists stinking up their pristine space station. No matter how much they may be forced by higher powers to encourage private space, they are at heart against the development of commercial space endeavors.

By spreading out the love on the launch contracts, Bigelow is (hopefully) preventing a commercial launch monopoly. I really didn't consider that to be a problem, considering the sheer numbers of .com billionaires in the game, but still good news.

One of the biggest things that will fall out of space development of this kind is that it levels the playing field to a large degree. "God created man, but Colt made them equal." When space is no longer the domain of the super, or near-super powers, things will change to a very large degree, and quickly.
The national security implications of commercial space are enormous. The fantastic capabilities of the NRO's marvelous spy satellites are, in effect, a kludge, because we couldn't put observers in orbit. Two intelligence specialists in a Bigalow-style inflatable habitat in a low altitude polar orbit would have very nearly all the capabilities of a modern spy satellite.

Further, the iron laws of orbital mechanics mean that if you are in space, you have a signicant energy advantage over those still on the ground. The old rods from god concept takes on a new level of danger when anyone can send a payload up into orbit. It's a lot easier to put together something like that than a nuke. I'm not saying Al Quaida is going to do it, but other nations, using space technology developed here, could.

Another thing that occurred to me while reading Ken's post. Often, space enthusiasts have pointed to other transportation technologies in an effort to explain why space travel hasn't taken off in the way that they hoped. The Wright Brothers first flew in 1903, but it was decades before commercial aviation was big business, for example.

But what if we imagine that Great Britain, locked in a cold war with a newly formed Germany in the late nineteenth century, started an air race? Some German engineer makes an airplane on a government contract (since the German military planners realized that competing with the Royal Navy was nothing but foolhardiness), and it's clearly designed as a weapon. The British race to come up with one of their own. And so on, through the 1880s and 1890s, aviation is developed at great government expense. Airplanes are large, sophisticated devices requiring the most advanced machining and precision manufacture. Mechanical computers are devised to calculate the fluid dynamics needed to optimize the designs.

By the turn of the century, there is in both nations a thriving industry of airplane manufacturers making airplanes to government specifications. What is the future of aviation in this world? Aviation was brought into existence far in advance of it's "natural" time, and its development is forced down odd paths by the requirements of international rivalry and bureaucracy. How long before a commercial aviation industry can take off, when everyone knows that airplanes are huge bombers that can only be built with the resources of one of the great powers?

I think that's some of what happened in our past, with space. Technology was probably ready for reasonable commerical space development by at least 1980, but investors and high tech industry had been conditioned by the exigencies of the space race to feel that it was inherently out of their reach. Also, government agencies jealous of their perogatives both on the civilian and defense sides – actively prevented commercial development.

And Ken, I think I want Indian cuisine.

Aah, New Jersey. The moment you all (and especially Bram) have been waiting for. The Ministry has spared no expense that we wouldn't normally spare to bring you this very special edition of alternate state mottoes. Our tireless and unsleeping servitors have scoured the interweb and the dark and loathsome recesses of their own minds for slogans for your reading enjoyment. New Jersey? Why not:

• Kiss Her Where It Smells
• The Oil and Petrochemical State
• You Want A Motto? I Got Your Fuckin’ Motto Right Here!
• Come for the beaches. Stay for the gambling, crack and hookers.
• What smell?
• Home of Jimmy Hoffa's grave... somewhere.
• Hey, Quit Laughing!!
• All those chemical waste sites and Trump's Taj Mahal, too!
• You have the right to remain silent, You have the right to an attorney...
• Tell 'em Guido sent ya
• Renaming it New Jersey didn’t improve things much
• Not as quaint and charming as Old Jersey
• The Suburb of not one, but two! pestilential urban shitheaps
• The smell that grows on you
• Land-filled with pride
• Aaay! How U Doin'?
• The Cancer Capital of The World
• We'll Show You What Exit
• Where nobody leaves
• The Funtime Family State for Families!
• Frightening Sky Country
• Ad Astra Per Hoboken
• The Hobo State
• I’m tired of living and scared of dying
• The Too-Easy-To-Mock State
• We Are Defensive About Our Faults
• We are a byword for corruption
• A toxic miasmatic wasteland
• We don’t trust you to pump gas
• It's Jersey: "Got a problem with that?"
• The New New Jersey: "Now with 10% less toxic waste!"
• We'll look the other way
• The Hindenburg was just the beginning ...
• All the charm of Detroit. All the culture of Phoenix
• Please lie down with your hands behind your head
• Our police force looks forward to meeting you
• Rated safer than Lebanon
• Come smell for yourself
• Nearly Good Enough
• A Deathtrap, A Suicide Rap - Get Out While You're Young
• The Fist of the Mid-Atlantic
• Sure, our governor may have given his unqualified gay lover a high-salaried position instead of looking out for homeland security, but ... uh, I forgot where I was going with this.
• New Jersey - Bend over and smile
• We’ll take the tollbooths down as soon as the Turnpike and Parkway are paid for
• Come for the taxes, stay for the corruption.
• Our sales tax may be the highest in the country but our property taxes are the highest in the country … wait a minute
• A wholly owned subsidiary of the New Jersey State Employees Union
• 2nd Amendment? Never heard of it.
• Just imagine Massachusetts without referendums or Republican Governors
• At least we aren’t New York
• Our state song, “Born to Run,” is about escaping from the New Jersey
• Pennsylvania – the promised land
• Will the last one out of Jersey please turn off the lights?
• If you try really hard, you can say Garden State without laughing
• So progressive we elected the first gay prostitute governor
• Toll Booth Capital of the United States of America
• The Corruption State.
• The Toll Booth State
• The Aggressively Industrial State
• The Mosquito State
• New Sicily
• The Knobbed Whelk State
• Liberty and Prosperity, so we can give it to the immigrants
• Proud home of our nation’s greatest political thinkers, Aaron Burr and Susan Sarandon
• The Sopranos State
• We are so gay
• Be sure to pick up a complimentary chemical drum on your way out
• Yo, Joisey: "Politicos and wiseguys, bada-bing!"
• New Jersey: " 'cause New York sucks."
• Laugh it up, we got more money than your state
• Shoot squealers, not bears
• New Jersey: Where the Martians Landed
• Most of Our Elected Officials Have Not Been Indicted
• Just Passing Through
• Welcome to New Jersey: Now Get the Hell Out of the Way!
• It Glows In The Dark!
• The 55 Gal. Drum State
• Sure It's Toxic - But We Love It!
• What A Difference A State Makes
• Only The Strong Survive: New Jersey
• Where The Weak are Killed and Eaten
• Edison electrocuted cats here so you could have light, asshole
• Your convenient cheap shot when you can’t think of anything really interesting to say
• New Jersey's Got It, We Just Don't Know What To Do With It!
• New Jersey-Guess Which Lanes Are EZPass Today?
• What The Hell Was I Thinking?
• Where 70% of the women are ugly, and those that aren't are stuck-up
• New Jersey, Not New York
• New Jersey, home of Giants Stadium
• Yeh, I Wanna Move too
• Just another state, really
• Welcome to New Jersey, Where There's a Rainbow in Every Puddle!
• New Jersey: Keeping New Yorkers out of PA since 1776
• Underdog Lady Lives Here
• Our State Capitol is the Most Geographically Centered
• The light at the end of the Tunnel
• Do not pass Go. Do not collect $200.
• Your friendly neighborhood toxic waste dump
• The Asshole of America
• What the fuck YOU lookin' at?
• Leave All Your "Problems" in New Jersey. My Cousin Knows a Guy.
• Great View of Lady Liberty's Backside
• Come for the Calzones, Stay for the Wutter
• NEW Jersey? What happened to the old one?
• You Could Always Be Somewhere Better Than This
• Jersey - it don't suck
• I love the smell of sewage in the morning!
• Home of the Teamsters!
• We Run the Cement Business in This Town!
• I Love the Smell of the East River in the Morning!
• New Jersey... the origin of "Planet of the Apes"
• New Jersey and You - Who Farted?
• There is no such thing as the Mafia
• Your New York City Trip Bathroom Break
• What Exit?
• Industrial Chemical Processing Capital of the Fuckin’ World
• You'll Never Think Once About it
• Your Philadelphia and New York City Suburb
• Ya, We'll Pump Your Gas. Nudge, Nudge
• What Exit? Nudge, Nudge
• Just hold your nose and keep driving
• Yeah, it always smells like this
• Several of our politicians are not corrupt
• three rights are a left
• The Jug-Handle State
• Jersey. It's not the asshole of the country, but you can see it from here
• No Left Turns
• Abandon hope, all ye who enter here
• Now Entering New Jersey - Consider That Your Last Warning
• No, you suck
• Please do not make any sudden arm movements
• Now with more 73% more hobos
• Bigger and with considerably more attractive cows than Old Jersey
• Smell it again for the first time
• New Jersey - like California, but without the sun, usable beaches, and warmth
• New Jersey is for Dirty Sluts!
• We got rid of our environment years ago, and we've never been happier.
• English is our fifth language
• Be a millionaire and still live like a pauper
• Welcome to Mecca West
• The place to raise a glowing family
• Still better than West Virginia
• Even if you have three nipples, you'll feel normal here
• Please don't associate us with Philly
• Hey You stupid New York fuck get outta the left freakin lane
• Bad voters, good pasta.
• Where it's OK to drive 80 on the Parkway as long as you’re not a minority
• So our governor was a Gay idiot, but at least we wasn’t Hillary Clinton
• Giving Gas-Pumping foreigners the chance to do something other then blowing people up
• Where people live who don't want to pay $1.5 million for a 350 square foot apartment, roaches included
• Only the strong survive
• We'll Fuckin kill you
• New Jersey: We'll Win You Over (ed: That one cost $260,000
• Get Away, Without Going Far Away
• Born to Fun
• Bada Bing! Choose New Jersey
• New Jersey: Come Glow With Us
• Everything is cool, really. Just don't drink the water in Ocean County.
• The authority on government corruption
• The Diner and Mall capital of the world
• A nice place if you have money.
• Less traffic than LA.
• The Statue of Liberty is OURS
• The largest chemical producer in the United States
• Home of the nation’s oldest beer brewery
• We'll make you into a man, or kill you
• Nothing is illegal here as long as you don't get caught
• The home of pork roll
• The opposite of Texas
• The only state with it's own version of the devil
• Where counties are considered metropolitan areas
• Because Jack Nicholson, Bruce Springsteen, Alan Ginsberg, Alexander Hamilton, Grover Cleveland, Woodrow Wilson, Walt Whitman, Jerry Lewis, Bruce Willis, Caesar Romero, Ice-T, Danny DeVito, Joe Pesci, Joe Piscopo, Paul Simon, John Travolta, Dave Thomas, Ray Liotta, and Frank Sinatra make up for Bon Jovi, Tom Cruise, Robert Blake, Meryl Streep, and Sebastian Bach.
• Better than lots of other states
• Explore our exits, Nudge, Nudge
• We’ll tax the crap out of you
• We’ll crap the tax out of you
• Expect delays
• We’ll look the other way
• Big Hair, Big Fun
• Come develop our open space
• Got traffic?
• At least we’re not Ohio
• Hurry, we’re almost full
• Smell the unexpected
• Slogan? We don't need no stinkin' slogan!
• New Jersey!
• Home Is Where You Spend As Little Time As Possible
• The 4th maybe 5th place I want to be at any one time!
• Yes, you've sunk that low
• You Can't See It While You're Sleeping!
• Thanks to low expectations, you won't be disappointed
• Home of the discount latte
• Inferiority complex ‘r us
• No, you really don't get used to the smell.
• Making the best of it since 1650
• So ashamed our state university is called Rutgers
• uh... i love new jersey?
• If you don’t like it, leave, no one will know
• New Jersey Invented Leaving
• New Jersey Is Where My Mom Lives
• New Jersey Gave Me Acne
• Better than Delaware, at least a little
• So hated. So over populated. Go figure.
• Not Dense, Just Densely Populated
• A 55-Gallon Drum of Fun
• I Can't Believe I'm IN New Jersey
• When You Crave Real Supermarkets, We're The One!
• It was this or Staten Island
• Face It, You Used to Dump Shit On It Too.
• Go Ahead and Slime It, It's Expensive Enough Already
• At least we don't have a view of New Jersey
• What happens in Jersey, stays buried in Jersey.
• Come for the cancer stay for the chemo
• Spineless, soulless, flavorless, limp, disingenuous, castrated, censored, and pureed.
• Edited for television.
• If you can’t make it there, you’ll move over here
• The Big Lemon
• Yes it’s the Fuckin Garden State
• The rest of the country, go fuck yourselves
• There’s a reason the PA border says, “Welcome to America”
• We got Springsteen, uh, and, uh Springsteen
• The weird smell state
• Even NJ’s most famous son sang, New York, New York
• We spent $260,000 on our slogan
• Not as bad as you think
• Where the Rottweilers Run Scared
• We Have an Exit for You
• Pay to Play: Reap the Benefits
• Welcome to New Jersey: Don't Worry, We Hate You, Too
• New Jersey: Hurricane-Free Since 1944
• The Garden of Eden, without all that good stuff.
• Where Kevin Smith used to live.
• Only half the state smells funky!
• The only state named after a kind of cow
• Everywhere you didn't want to be
• Please ignore our plague-infested lab rats
• Vacation in New Jersey: Savor the Irony.
• Visit Newark: Just don't stop
• New Jersey, New Schmersey
• Jeerzy: The Angry Statesman
• New Jersey. It’s not what you expect from New Jersey
• Up Yours! Love, New Jersey
• New Jersey: We're not so good with slogans
• The Lame State Slogan State
• At least we’re not Ne… fuck.

At least not permanently. According to the WSJ, in a story last week, "Soccer Star Zidane May Have Lost His Head, But(t) It Hasn't Hurt Him".

Good for him.

Rash actions in the heat of the moment, particularly during a sporting event, seem easy to forgive. Exceptions, of course, exist - think Woody Hayes' attack on Clemson's Charlie Bauman in the 1978 Gator Bowl. Quite an embarrassment, and one he never really lived down. It differs both because he wasn't a contestant, and because it was clearly a childish hissy-fit, unlike Zinedine Zidane's head butt of Marco Materazzi, who, let's be serious, probably earned it.

Seeing the story, however, reminded me of an idiotic picture that circulated shortly thereafter. Just because it was idiotic doesn't mean it wasn't funny, however, and the WSJ story provided a cheap excuse to post it, so I will:

(Note: That's an animated picture, and I got tired of watching it move on our page, so click to see it in its native, full motion, form. It's far less funny if the animation is disabled in your browser, to the point of "not at all funny")

Speaking only for myself, this comes as a total shock. So much so that I'm not sure I know who I am any more.

(Article text included here simply to avoid risk of link rot)

Paris Hilton: I'm not that smart

By BECI WOOD
September 22, 2006

IN probably the least shocking celebrity statement of the decade, Paris Hilton has admitted that she’s "not like that smart". The confession was made when the star helped police officers with an investigation into a burglary at the house of Hollywood porn baron Joe Francis.

When cops asked her what she knew, the socialite said: "I'm not that smart... I don’t remember... I forget stuff all the time." The man in question, Darnell Riley, admitted the offence earlier this year and was sentenced to nearly 11 years in prison. On the tape Paris also told cops that an anonymous man had called her to try and extort money for the return of 'private tapes' stolen from her house.

"They were trying to sell it to a newspaper or something," she explained. "So if you pay somebody, then you're gonna be paying for the rest of your life."

"My dad always taught me. They'll keep the tape anyway."

From the left sidebar of a Reuters story entitled "Court says $32,000 is too much to fondle bosom", this picture:

Subtitled thusly:

A bra designed by actress Jennifer Aniston is shown at Sotheby's auction house in New York, April 8, 2003. A fee of 25,500 euros ($32,000) is way too much for a woman to charge a man for fondling her bosom, a Finnish district court ruled.

I can see why someone, even at a supposedly serious news organization would think about putting that picture of a Jennifer Aniston-designed bra into the sidebar of a story such as that mentioned above. I remember my high-school days, when such a juxtaposition would be considered not only snidely funny, but mandatory.

However, based on the fact that neither Ms. Aniston nor her objectively ugly creation actually has anything to do with the story, I fail to see why someone at a supposedly serious news organization would actually do so, even in a story section entitled "Oddly Enough".

Discuss.

GeekLethal reminded me to do something with a pic I'd had cluttering up my file system.

Make your own demotivational posters here.

For those lucky souls who know nothing about the current options backdating scandal, please skip to the next post, because I'm not willing to bore you with the details.

I am, however, willing to bore you with this:

This morning's WSJ contains an article entitled "Cablevision Gave Backdated Grant To Dead Official"

Cablevision awarded options to a vice chairman after his 1999 death but backdated them to make it appear they were awarded when he was still alive. Cablevision restated its results as an options probe escalated.

I'm trying to picture the response from the PR person at Cablevision. Something like, say, 'Oh, don't worry - they were way out of the money, since we didn't figure he'd complain' or 'We spoke with his lawyer and were informed "No, no, 'e's uh,...he's resting."'

Yes, this scandal has officially become Pythonesque.

Clearly, posts based on the contents of one or more of the roughly 200 non-SPAM email messages I get per day are easy. Why, they practically write themselves!

But that's not the point. The point is to give me a jumping off point to opine about one thing or another, and Steve Elliot, of Grassfire.org, has done just that. I have no idea how I ended up on their mailing list - I'm not aware of anything they've had to say (at least in the periodic "Please sign this petition!" emails I've gotten from them) that I think is worthy of even clicking the link to go to their site. That, plus internet petitions are generally tools for twits. This latest, however, coerced me to action.

That action? To ridicule the silliness of the Grassfire.org actions, if not their intentions. Actually, come to think of it, I'm ridiculing their intentions, too. Here's an excerpted version of their 'plaint for this week:

If you didn't see Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez call President Bush "the devil" during his U.N. speech, go here and see for yourself: redacted

Thanks, Steve - I didn't see it, but I read about it, and have no need to go watch Chavez make an ass of himself on tape delay. Continuing:

Here is what Chavez said:

"Yesterday, the devil [President Bush] came here. Right here. Right here. And it smells of sulfur still today, this table that I am now standing in front of."
--Hugo Chavez

Then Chavez made the sign of the cross as if praying to God for deliverance from the "devil" (President Bush)! This was one of the worst mockeries of a U.S. President ON OUR OWN SOIL by a foreign leader in history!

Did you know this fascist thug also own (sic) Citgo oil company and is making untold millions on Citgo profits to undermine our President and the troops?

Chavez is using OUR MONEY to attack and undermine our President and our nation!

In response to this outrage, thousands of citizens are sending Chavez a message by joining the Citgo boycott. Go here to send Chavez a message: (also redacted) We want to rally 100,000 signers in the next 7 days and deliver these petitions to the main distributors of Citgo Gas, including 7-Eleven.

Thanks for your immediate action!

Steve Elliott, President
Grassfire.org Alliance

So, if I read him correctly, Hugo Chavez "own" Citgo Oil? Technically, as well as factually, no, he doesn't. He controls it, as part of his country's nationalized OPEC member, Petróleos de Venezuela SA, and controls it quite poorly, on reflection. So any damage "needed" to Citgo, he seems clearly able to inflict on his own without the help of me or any of my more gullible co-mailinglist-members.

And, about those gullible souls who might "Take ... immediate action!" because of Chavez's actions "ON OUR OWN SOIL!" and what he does to us with "OUR MONEY!" (yeah, I added a couple exclamation points, but only because Steve must have forgotten these guaranteed-to-enflame necessities from the toolbox of all rabble-rousers), I hope there are few, not because I wish Elliott or Grassfire any particular harm, but because this is a meaningless gesture, designed to enflame the rubes among us and generate funds for Grassfire, nothing more.

I consider it no different than the several-per-week pretend-solicitations of my opinion or involvement in some God-forsaken pretend-grown-up activity put together by the Republican Party. And, lest Ross get all chubby, the DNC is no different, and no more intelligent in its pretense to actually give a shit what any of its Middle America adherents think, only about the money they can milch (or would that be "mulct"?) for the latest cause du jour.

Puh-leeze. If you don't want to buy Citgo gas, go buy some other gas. But don't pretend Chavez's distributors will give a fat rat's ass about some Intertube-circulated pseudo-petition expressing the nation's indignation about the way he acted at the U.N. toward GW Bush.

Here's a couple clues for those who might think Elliott has a point: Bush almost certainly doesn't care about Chavez's opinion of him, and less so about any words he might use to enunciate it. Including this nugget, from a NY Times story on the matter:

[Chavez] brandished a copy of Noam Chomsky's "Hegemony or Survival: America's Quest for Global Dominance" and recommended it to members of the General Assembly to read. Later, he told a news conference that one of his greatest regrets was not getting to meet Mr. Chomsky before he died. (Mr. Chomsky, 77, is still alive.)

I mean, "everyone" knows Bush is dumb as a bag of hair, right? But even Bush knows Mr. Chomsky is still alive.

Furthermore, he made this speech at the United Nations General Assembly, and nobody who's got a lick of sense actually believes the General Assembly is worth the powder it would take to blow it to hell. The UN does such a poor job at most of what it does that the few good things it does are lost in the backwash. So who cares where he made this inane statement?

Elliott does, or claims to. Whatever nit-wits sign his petition do, or claim to. I do not.

[wik] No, I don't know why I turned into the hyphenation queen for this post. It's just how it came out.

[alsø wik] Odd, this entire embargo thing must not be working out. I got a follow-on from Steve today (9/26/2006) informing me that:

In the next seven days, I want to deliver 50,000 petitions
to 7-Eleven which distributes Citgo gas at thousands of
locations. Please help.

No offense, but tough shit, snookums - boycotts of volatile commodity items seldom make sense, and seldom achieve the desired effect. I hope that the shortfall in signatures is because most of his recipients realize this. Otherwise, it means the internet is broken, and that would suck. Too bad about the inability to meet the reduced and extended expectations. And, yes, I've unsubscribed from his mailing list.

I'm not sure what's going on. Either New York slide-trumpet player and bandleader Steve Bernstein is getting better, or I'm coming around (maybe both). Bernstein, who with his band Sex Mob have been making reasonably amusing and background-filling albums for the better part of a decade, never really clicked with me. His music seemed so insubstantial, so resolutely finger-poppin' hey-daddy ironically-detached aren't-we-cool hipsterish, that I never gave it much of a chance.

In retrospect, I think that's a shame. Because behind the wide-lapel cheapo porno shtick he's peddled is a bandleader whose guiding purpose in life is to make music for people to have a good time by.

That skill of making good-time music doesn't seem to get a whole lot of respect. All the music critics swoon over Brian Wilson's brain-fractured experimentation, and ignore the sweet and fun stuff. They flip out over the far-out stylings on Smile, but what about "Surf City?" "Surf City" is a perfect song, a summer song, a song about good times and scantily clad ladies cavorting on a white sand beach. No respect for "Surf City."

All the nerds (all the world!) swoon over Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band for some silly-ass reason, and while they acknowledge that the early stuff sure is some crack songwriting, the concensus seems to be that drugs and four hundred hours of studio time somehow trump, you know, attention to extraneous cruft like melody and lyrics. A song like "A Day in the Life" demands to be appreciated, like it was hanging in some museum, but there ain't a damn song in the world that sums up the innocence of young love more than "I Want To Hold Your Hand."

And, okay, yes, over the years I have spent a lot of time talking up music that's more intellectually rewarding than aesthetically pleasing, I won't deny it. How could I deny it? Y'all got Google. And yes, I haven't always cared for Sex Mob. I always thought they were more gimmicky and clever than actually good. And I stand by that assessment.

But recently, Steve Bernstein's been on a hell of a tear. He recently turned up on drummer Bobby Previte's outstanding Coalition of the Willing project, a Bitches Brew for the new millennium that cuts an atmosphere of Miles-esque darkness with generous slices of rock, thrilling improvisation, and twisty, funky soloing from Bernstein.

And now, his new project, the Millennium Territory Orchestra is a bold yet frivilous tribute to a gone and nearly forgotten era in American popular music.

In the 1920s and 1930s, 'territory' bands plied circuits all around the country. Minneapolis bands would play from Madison to Kansas City. Cleveland bands would range from Detroit to Pittsburgh to Yellow Springs, bringing that era's freewheeling proto-swing sound to dancehalls, honky tonks, and bars. Many if not most of these bands vanished without a trace, remembered only in faded photo albums and in stories swapped in nursing homes around the country. Few made recordings, and those who did released three-minute 78s to a market that was not yet national, that did not yet have any mechanism for preserving their work. Little wonder, then, that not many people remember a genre that's not quite Dixieland (tied to New Orleans, a city very good at remembering) and not quite swing (whose rise coincided with the rise of radio).

Forty years later, groups like the territory bands would be playing psychedelic lunk-rock and being collected in lavish four-disc box sets with hundred-page booklets chronicling the history of every one of them in loving detail. But for the territory bands there were no box sets, there was no national FM radio network. There were just dance floors, open roads, and the occasional chicken dinner.

Steve Bernstein recently came across some recordings from this great lost era in American music, and heard something he liked. "I was getting really fascinated with this music and wondering what would happen if you played this music live again. Because any version of this musc we have is like a three-minute bad recording. We know what it looks like, because ther's all these great pictures of guys in tuxedoes holding their instruments. But it's almost like there's more pictures of the music then there are recorded documents of the music. I wanted to bring this music back to life."

In 1999, Bernstein first brought together a group of New York's finest improvisers to play some of this music. Since then, he's been periodically soaking in it, so much so that on Volume 1, the first album by the Millennial Territory Orchestra, he can graft the sound and style of the territory bands, with their hotchachacha big lapel black bottom crawling style, to both original compositions and modern adaptations of Stevie Wonder's "Signed, Sealed, Delivered" and Prince's "Darling Nikki" without batting an eye.

Volume 1 is a great party record, a serious slab of frivilous good time music, full of hot jazz, nasty soloing, and juke-joint funk replete with banjo and saxophone that somehow captures the atmosphere of a long gone era without sounding like a mere tribute. It helps that all nine players in the ensemble contribute exuberant solos as well as loose and crafty ensemble playing, strutting their stuff like a Dixieland band while coming together like a big swing group. From the light and carefree cover of "Pennies from Heaven" to the deconstructed crawl of "Darling Nikki," the band capture the vibe and sound of Kansas City 1933 while retaining the snap and polish of New York 2006.

Steve Bernstein's music might not be monuments for future generations of critics to fawn over, but that's really, really OK. I haven't listened to either of Radiohead's past two albums, because I just don't have the patience for that much artsy-fartsy seriousness from what is basically rock and roll music, the same genre that gave us "Louie, Louie" and The Bloodhound Gang. Steve Bernstein and the Millennial Territory Orchestra throw a hell of a party; what else do you need?

Fresh from my inbox to your screen, Kinky's campaign answers questions related to his scuffle with the interestingly-monikered and intellectually challenged Senfronia Puff-n-Stuff:

Kinky Friedman Campaign Statement

Friends and neighbors,

While Rick Perry was cheerleading in college and Chris Bell was being potty trained, Kinky Friedman was picketing segregated restaurants in Austin to integrate them. Now that Kinky’s in second place and a serious threat to the two-party system, Perry and Bell have paid political assassins to dig back as far as 30 years through fictional books, comedy shows and song lyrics, desperately seeking to paint Kinky as a racist.

Republicans and Democrats have created an entire industry -- called Opposition Research -- whose sole purpose is to tarnish and destroy people’s reputations. This is why regular citizens don't run for office. If you do, and you start to threaten the system as Kinky has, you’re going to be attacked.

Kinky has overcome all of the obstacles placed before him -- getting on the ballot, raising millions of dollars, building the largest grassroots network Texas has ever seen, and breaking 20% in the polls months ago. He's a serious threat to the establishment, and when you threaten the political establishment, they use the money generated from their formidable fundraising machines to pay for "dirty tricks" tactics to manipulate the press.

It's a slimy industry that exists for the sole purpose of destroying people and -- like cockroaches -- scurries for the shadows whenever a light is shined on it.

The latest political assassination attempt takes completely out of context a controversial word that Kinky was using in a 1980 stand-up performance to lampoon racists. Playing a character on stage, Kinky was exposing bigotry through comedy and satire.

It’s pathetic that the major-party candidates have sunk to this -- trying to paint Kinky as a racist when, in fact, he was poking fun at racists. Shame on the press for being complicit. Rather than confront our opponents on their tactics and get the full story, they are allowing industries like opposition research to exist and operate outside the understanding of most voters.

-The Kinky Friedman Campaign for Governor

Hmmph. That'll show 'em. Why the hell not?

There is a new drink product out, and it has a provocative name. So provocative, that the usual suspects have their panties in a twist. The drink is an energy drink with the compelling name of "Cocaine." For your reference, I include a pic of the drink can in question:

It contains no actual cocaine, so we aren't seeing the rebirth of the original, original Coke. Instead, it contains merely a shitload of caffiene. The only drink that is, pound per pound, more caffiene laden is espresso. And espresso doesn't normally come in large cans. 280mg of caffiene is quite a jolt, and the maker claims that you can get this magical jolt of energy without the twitchiness and sugar crash that normally accompanies energy drinks. So far, so good. But wait:

But David Raynes, of the UK National Drug Prevention Alliance, said: "It is people exploiting drugs. It is a pretty cynical tactic exploiting illegal drugs for their own benefit." Mr Raynes added: "The fact is that subliminally, it is making the image of drug use cool and that's what kids what to be, cool...

"Kids will be drinking Cocaine and will inevitably link the two. The drink is relatively innocuous, but they will be linking it with cocaine use and the market, which is far from innocuous."

To the extent that drug use isn't already considered "cool" among the youth of this nation, I'm sure that this drink will push them all over the brink. Elementary school kids will be shooting up on the swings and slides of our playgrounds. Youngsters will be smoking crack at Chuck E. Cheese's. Armageddon will be nigh, thanks to the mildly ironic name of this perfidious energy drink.

Once again, some people need to take a stress tab, so that we can talk about this reasonably. I find it increasingly hard (aside from the explosions, of course) to distinguish any difference in tone between these health nazi pc types and the Islamic fundamentalists who get their panties in a twist when the Pope mentions that, maybe, sometimes, Islam and violence have lived on the same street.

What is it with these people. Words are magical. We can, through their magic, assign meanings to things, and then arrange those things in pleasing, orderly or useful arrangements. But they are not magical in the well, magical sense. They do not bind or control us. If I, or some punk kid, or even my three year old son see the word "Cocaine" on a can of soda, he, me or they are not magically compelled, geased, to go buy some Bolivian Party Powder. Nor are Muslims magically compelled by the law of similarity to riot in the street because some Pope somewhere says the words "Islam" and "Violence" in the same sentence. (Not that you'd be odd for suspecting that, really.)

Some time ago, a friend of mine sent me a link to an essay by science fiction writer Ken McLeod.

The Palestinians launch rockets at the Israelis, killing civilians. The Israelis drop bombs on the Lebanese, killing civilians. Iraqis plant bombs in roadways, killing American Soldiers. We attack Iraqi cities, killing insurgents. Al Qaeda kills 3000 Americans with hijacked airplanes; we kill Al Qaeda wherever we find them.

There is, when laid out in that fashion, a symmetry to these acts of violence. Tit for tat violence in an unending cycle. A cycle of violence. (I have a mental picture of what a bicycle of violence looks like, but that is beside the point.) A while back, a friend of mine sent me an essay by Scottish science fiction writer and communist Ken McLeod. It is entitled, "Against Civilized Warfare." Like many a product of a bright and well-read mind, it is well-written, includes facts, is compelling on the surface and utterly wrong.

Go take a read.

McLeod makes the argument that

Nothing has done more to corrupt humanity than the attempt to civilise warfare. Just War Theory is an utter perversion of the moral sense, a doctrine of literally mediaeval barbarism, invented by clerics to regulate wars between Christian kings. Its finest moral discrimination to date is that it's legitimate to kill a munitions worker on his way to work, but a crime to kill him on his way home.

Well, that's an interesting premise. It is the job of science fiction writers to challenge assumptions, and maybe that one is, actually a real boner of an assumption. I thought to myself, "Hey, maybe he's got something there." After all, Just War Theory gave the high sign to unrestricted strategic bombing in the big one, and most current research leads one to believe that it was strategically dubious at best.

Just War Theory and the architects of the British and American strategic bombing campaigns held that killing enemy civilians who worked in vital war industries was a valid exercise of military force. The lamentable lack of accuracy of the state of the art in bombing technology meant that attacks were of necessity bloody – we had to drop a lot of bombs to be assured of killing the target. We were attacking our enemies' capacity to wage industrial war. Collateral damage was regrettable, but justified.

However, German war production increased over the period of the most intense Allied bombardment, and there is no evidence that German civilian morale was lowered as a result of the bombing. In fact, it may have stiffened enemy resolve – much as the Blitz stiffened British morale earlier. Attacking enemy productive capacity and "breaking the enemies' will" are usually cited as the primary strategic justifications for the bombing campaign. And if neither of those desired results ever actually, you know, happened – then what you have is the unjustified slaughter of hundreds of thousands of innocent German and Japanese civilians.

Just War Theory takes a hit on that one. Let's read on.

It tells us that to aim a bomb at an enemy soldier and kill a hundred civilians is - if the necessity is there – legitimate collateral damage, but to deliberately aim one bullet at one enemy civilian is murder. In its pedantic, casuistic jesuitry it still stinks of the cringing, quibbling fusspots who invented it, and retains too its usefulness to a useless and barbaric ruling class. It does nothing whatsoever to restrain their behaviour. Its only function is to befuddle those who oppose, protest and fight them. It justifies every horrific, predictable consequence of imperialist assault as an unintended consequence, and condemns every horrific, predictable consequence of resistance to that assault as an intended consequence. Their violence against civilians is mass murder, ours is collateral damage.

Subtract the cant, and you have the argument that civilized warfare is morally and ethically empty, does nothing to restrain violence or evil, and in fact confuses those who would argue against it. Further, it creates a false separation between acts of violence committed by opposing sides in a conflict.

He goes on, using as an example the recent unpleasantness between Hezbollah and Israel. His conclusion, to deny Israel's claim of justification. This is not in itself surprising. He continues,

The doctrine itself is false. Its preaching should be regarded as a crime against humanity. We are responsible for the foreseeable consequences of our willful acts. These include the consequences of restraint, of pity, of not hurting the enemy in any way you can. They also include the consequences of attempting to make war an accepted part of civilised life, which is to institutionalise war and thus to perpetuate it.

War is not civilized, but a regression to the state of nature, and in the state of nature there is no sin. In the state of nature there are, however, necessary and unnecessary evils, and in that respect we still have to make judgements. 'All things are lawful unto me, but all things are not expedient.'

Now this is an odd thing to say. But we'll get to that in a minute. McLeod, throughout this piece, denies that intent is a factor in weighing moral justifications for violence. If I understand him right, the Israeli F-16 dropping a precision munitions on a target is no wronger, (or at least no righter) than a Hezbollah cell launching a rocket at Israel.

But intent is central, not just to Western conceptions of just war and the rules of war, but to our entire legal system. In law, we recognize that there is a real moral difference between someone who loses control of a car and kills a college coed on the sidewalk, and someone who uses a car to purposely run over and kill, say, and ex-girlfriend named Margaret. The end result in both cases is the same – a dead young woman. The means, in both cases, is the same – a vehicle striking and killing.

But most people would agree instantly that the cases are separate in nature. One is murder, and reprehensible. The other is negligence or incompetence, and is tragic but not criminal. We know that there is a distinction between accident and will.

This is the heart of the moral equivalence argument. You tally up the dead bodies, and whoever killed more is more to blame, if anyone is. It ducks the question of intent, as does McLeod. Strangely, when the number of US casualties inevitably crosses the number killed in the 9/11 attacks, some will find that occasion to castigate the West, and America, for its evil throughout the world, as if the crossing of the two numbers has some mystical significance.

But that is entirely wrong.

I have never made the argument that war, in itself is a good thing. Sometimes, though, it is the least bad thing. And whether a war is justifiable centers clearly on questions of intent. Both at the national level, and on the level of the individual soldier.

McLeod ended his piece with an appeal to protest against the Israeli actions in Lebanon. But if we examine the intent of the two parties, we find similar results as with our parable of the cars. Hezbollah did not just magically cause the death of x number of civilians in Northern Israel, nor did the Israelis do likewise in Southern Lebanon.

Hezbollah launched rockets at civilian targets in Israel. Happily, these attacks were not as successful as the attackers hoped, thanks to the inaccuracies of the rockets. Yet, they caused many civilian casualties. The intent, so far as I can determine, was to cause grievous harm to innocent civilians in order to provoke the Israeli government and army into conflict, and the ultimate aim is the total elimination of Israel, and I presume all Jews everywhere.

After many of these attacks, Israel struck back. They mounted air assaults on known and suspected Hezbollah positions in order, primarily, to end the rocket attacks on their own civilians. Lebanese civilians died in these attacks. But the fact that the Israelis were trying very hard not to kill them is significant – if the laws of war were no hindrance on Israel's actions in this conflict, then surely the IDF could have caused much more fearful destruction than they did. But those laws are a restraint on Israel.

Even more significant is the Hezbollah practice of locating its depots, command centers, and rocket launchers in the midst of as many civilians as possible. One would think that they are inviting civilian casualties on their own side purely for the propaganda value those images have in the Western press.

For me, at least, there is a clear moral difference in the conduct of these two forces. But still, I pondered. War is not after all, murder writ large. Or at least, not exactly. The laws of civilized warfare – where they are observed - are a restraint on the western powers. They do reduce, if not eliminate, the horror and injustice (on the local scale) of war. They limit the conduct of our military, and the Israelis, and the Brits, and so on. So much so, that groups like Hezbollah and the Iraqis during the invasion could count on it to such an extent that it informed their tactics. That’s why they use civilians, women and children as shields because they know that we will do everything in our power not to kill them. If war is in fact, “not civilized, but a regression to the state of nature, and in the state of nature there is no sin. In the state of nature there are, however, necessary and unnecessary evils, and in that respect we still have to make judgements. 'All things are lawful unto me, but all things are not expedient.'” then we would make the expedient judgment and lay waste to everything around those we wish to kill, having no qualms about any ‘collateral damage’ – the death of innocent civilians.

We would use the most horrific weapons, fuel air explosives, gas, nukes, whatever, so long as we achieved our objectives. Whenever there was a roadside bomb, we’d line the streets with the dead as a warning. Terror is a valuable weapon, but one that we, thankfully, do not use. The rules of engagement for our forces, and indeed for the Israelis, give the lie to McLeod’s view.

We are responsible for the foreseeable consequences of our actions. We know that we will kill the innocent, and in the past we have killed great numbers of them. Nevertheless, in the case of that McLeod cites, as well as others too numerous to name, so is the other side responsible for the foreseeable consequences of their actions. To be sure, “Now look what you made me do” is a weak moral argument. But, and this is an important but, self defense is recognized as a valid exercise of violence in the personal world, and is equally valid in the larger world. If you are attacked, you have a right to self defense. Hezbollah attacked Israel, specifically targeting civilians. Then, they hid amongst the civilians of Lebanon.

If you poke a tiger and then hide behind a mother and her children and the tiger kills the children to get to you, not all the blame, not even most of the blame, lies with the tiger.

McLeod says, “They also include the consequences of attempting to make war an accepted part of civilised life, which is to institutionalise war and thus to perpetuate it.” This is also wrong. The attempt, going back to the 1500s and earlier, to institutionalize war was not to perpetuate it. It was an attempt to control, to limit, to ameliorate its effects. To civilize it, to the extent that it could be civilized. It was stepping back from barbarity, from the war of all against all. It is analogous to the Capitalism, another thing that McLeod no doubt hates, where another dark side of human nature, greed, is civilized to the greatest extent possible.

Human nature is. It’s the stuff we have to work with. To our shame, it includes things like greed, hatred, rage, violence, bigotry, and communism. However, we are more civilized than those who came before us – thanks in large part to the efforts of those who incrementally made some things, some actions, morally unacceptable. The rules of civilized warfare mean that we – when we do go to war – are not unprincipled savages who kill without compunction. Unlike most of those we fight now, or for that matter communists throughout history.

The Post has a follow-up to their article on George Allen's pseudo-Jewishness.

At the table in Palos Verdes, Calif., Allen's mother, who is 83, said she told her son the truth: That she had been raised as a Jew in Tunisia before moving to the United States. She said that she and the senator's father, famed former Redskins coach George Allen, had wanted to protect their children from living with the fear that she had experienced during World War II. Her father, Felix Lumbroso, was imprisoned by the Nazis during the German occupation of Tunis.

"What they put my father through. I always was fearful," Etty Allen said in a telephone interview. "I didn't want my children to have to go through that fear all the time. When I told Georgie, I said, 'Now you don't love me anymore.' He said, 'Mom, I respect you more than ever.' "

I can't help but wonder exactly why Etty Allen was worried that "Georgie" wouldn't love her any more? I mean, a mother usually knows her child pretty well. And she was worried.

Let's also point out that it is quite clear that Allen flat-out lied about it when asked by a reporter. Good thing he wasn't under oath, huh? No double standard, right? Anybody recall George Allen's position on the Clinton/Lewinsky crap?

See Allah, Via Ace.

The entire matter may not be as cut and dried as some of my colleagues believe.

That said, coercively interrogating the wrong guy due to bad Canadian intelligence and embarrassing American operational standards is inexcusable. So is anything to do with Syria's government.

But it might be time to dispense with fiction that the sole value of coercive interrogation is that "...someone being tortured will say whatever they can to get it to stop."

Sometimes, perhaps many or most times, there's more to be gained than false confessions.

It's probably just me, but when I see a story headline like "CBC head quits after defecation, bestiality remarks", it's like I'm at a train wreck, or, for that matter, stuck in Houston traffic near an accident - I have to at least have a look. (Except for that last bit - I'm actually one of an apparently small number of Houston drivers who can ignore any accident that's not blocking the freeway, the better to avoid, well, blocking the freeway.)

At least that story's subject can easily be inferred from the title - the head cheese at the Canadian Broadcasting Corp. had a failure of editorial control, logorrhea, if you like, about a couple subjects, and got turfed for the indiscretion. Whatever works for the Canadian government, who had "lost confidence" in him.

The really difficult ones, I think are like this: "Dry as a dead dingo's donger", from the September 2, 2006 issue of The Economist.

Sadly, that one's behind the subscriber's-only part of the site, so it's not directly available to non-subscribers. (See note at end of entry, below)

My precognitive abilities fail on such a headline, starting with the fact that there are two words in the title itself that I had to look up. First, I didn't really know what a "dingo" is. I presumed it's the Australian version of a prairie rat. Until I saw that headline, I honestly didn't care. But by now, Wikipedia to the rescue, and I've looked it up. Pfft! Turns out it's just a wild dog. Next time I hear someone holler "Dingo took my baby!", I'll be somewhat more skeptical. Although, come to think of it, for a dingo to take someone's baby, it would seem necessary that a dingo be bigger than the prairie rat of my fevered imagination. So please forget that I mentioned the rat.

Second, what the hell is a "donger", I said to myself? I guessed it could have been some abstract, made-up name to play the foil in an odd humor piece, from the movie Sixteen Candles. Nahh, too simple. Other sites who've used that phrase long before September 2006 provided no further information on the matter, and, like the Economist, appear to have used it for its headline value, without informing me what, praytell, a donger actually was. Same deal with another site, talking about the return of American Idol, back in 2005. But the only reason for the use of the phrase in that context, according to the site's author, was, and I quote:

*did a search for "dry as a" and this was the funniest

Perhaps that's what drove the Economist's headline writer.

But I still hungered to know how I was supposed to process the word "donger", and so far, almost all I'd seen other than the aforementioned sites was a host of others referring to people (unfortunately, I presumed) named Donger. Or the Doneger Group, an outfit who really might reconsider their choice of search engine optimization service providers, unless I could come to the conclusion that there's nothing even remotely off-putting about this "donger" which can apparently be found attached to dead "dingoes". How many things could possibly fit such a set of criteria?

And things weren't looking good - I found a site defining "Dinker Donger", and it fit my preconception of the intended meaning. But remember - I had a preconception of what a dingo was, too, so I was willing to ignore that one, since it was a compound phrase, and might be inapplicable as a result. And I continued my search.

Since I was already at the Urban Dictionary site, a site that's clearly almost as authoritative as Wikipedia itself (and that's saying something!), I just used their search function to see if the word could be found, in isolation.

Turns out, it could. And it further turns out that while I suck at identifying common names for Cannis lupus dingo, my initial Spidey-sense that the Economist was having a funny on its readers was correct.

Oh, and according to that eminent authority, the Urban Dictionary, there are several other possible interpretations of the phrase "a dead dingo's donger", given that "dingo" (6th and 7th definitions) isn't always a "mythical (?) dog-like creature of Australia" (1st definition).

Who knew?

The Economist article, by the way, while listed at their site as unavailable to non-subscribers, has already been poached by a free site (though for all I know, they got reprint permission), and synopsified by another. So you can view the cut of its intended jib at either of those two places, if you don't subscribe to the Economist.

I'd have been more forthcoming about the article itself if its contents had had even the slightest thing to do with this post, but they don't, so I wasn't. However, it's an interesting article about an impending environmental crisis in Australia.

Not to repeat myself, but who knew?

[wik] After a casual re-read of this post, to check for typos, it occurred to me I'd missed one other possible interpretation for the CBC head's "retirement". It's the sort of thing James Taranto would have a field day with, if he wrote about articles on defecation and bestiality.

One could, if one didn't read the article, get the impression he was kicked to the curb (or do they spell it "kerb" in the Great White North, like the Brits do?) for having taken a shit (or do they refer to it as "leaving a shit" in the Great White North, like George Carlin used to?) right before launching into an extended dissertation about bestiality. Which might have been even funnier, come to think of it.

Today, the mockery of states continues with the first of far too damn many states beginning with the word "New." This is evidence, I believe, of a serious and startling lack of creativity on the part of our forebears. Couldn't they have done better than naming a state after some pox-ridden, benighted and impoverished British locality where people spoke funny and ate odd cheeses? Apparently, no. Nevertheless, here is the state of New Hampshire.

• The Switzerland of New England; cold, ambivalent and tied to Nazi gold
• Live Free or DIE!
• Like Old Hampshire, only newer
• Taxing out-of-staters since 1804
• We're Just Like Vermont, But Smaller and Cozier
• Yes, it's on the map ... somewhere
• Your Primary Choice
• Rocky soil and stony hearts
• Just Leave Us The Hell Alone
• The Other White Meat
• Mmmm… Maple
• You can’t get there from here
• The State Liquor Store State
• Proud Home of Mary Morse Baker Eddy, Sarah Josepha Buell Hale, Thaddeus Sobieski Coulincourt Lowe and other people with two many fucking names
• Mother of tiny, insignificant rivers
• Drive-thru booze!
• Live Free or I won't like you anymore
• Go away, Masshole
• About as exciting as Vermont
• The White Mountain State. Okay, the White Hill State
• The Spotted Newt State
• At least we’re not Vermont
• President Coolidge should have been born here
• The Little Wooden Statue of a Crusty Sailor State
• White Mountains Are Better Than Green
• Here We Cease Our Motion
• Look out for other states (cough… Vermont) masquerading as glorious New Hampshire
• You’d think libertarians would be welcome here. And you’d be wrong.
• We had very little to do with the Revolution
• Ignore those copycat Vermonter scum
• Live Free or Get Very, Very Sick
• The Florida of Canada
• We hate Vermont

[wik] Bonus slogans!

• Taxes, we don't need no stinking taxes!
• Top destination for refugees from Massachusetts
• The pinko-free New England state
• Come for the tax-breaks, stay for the guns

Here's a little something the TSA might find useful.

To review, the bomb:

A bomb:

Today, discover where you are on the normal-autistic spectrum. Are you a candidate for Asperger's syndrome? Do you bang your head on the wall a lot? Find out what it all means!

For the purposes of full disclosure, here are my official, scientific results:

Your Aspie score: 78 of 200
Your neurotypical (non-autistic) score: 138 of 200
You are very likely neurotypical

There's been a lot of reports lately about replacements for the venerable, if disappointing, battery. Battery technology has been around for centuries - milennia if you believe the Bagdad Battery is really a battery - but has always suffered from several key flaws as a store of energy. One, it's not a very dense store of energy. Two, it usually contains noxious, acidic, toxic (or all of the above) substances. They're heavy, and often fragile. And they have a goofy name. Several avenues have been investigated - fuel cells, capacitors, and now micro-miniaturized gas turbines. Fuel cells are nifty, I guess. The capacitor idea being developed at MIT has some cool nanotechnology. But this new idea from MIT just has cool written all over its tiny, silicon body.

A gas turbine has several essential components. A compressor, a combustion chamber, and a turbine to generate electricity. Gas turbines have been used for decades, but they range from table top to ship power plant in size. Until now, no one has come close to developing one that is smaller than a quarter. Using the same techniques as chip manufacturers, the researchers at MIT have created the components of their turbine on silicon wafers. Six of these wafers are stacked and bonded together to form a complete engine.

he MIT team has now used this process to make all the components needed for their engine, and each part works. Inside a tiny combustion chamber, fuel and air quickly mix and burn at the melting point of steel. Turbine blades, made of low-defect, high-strength microfabricated materials, spin at 20,000 revolutions per second -- 100 times faster than those in jet engines. A mini-generator produces 10 watts of power. A little compressor raises the pressure of air in preparation for combustion. And cooling (always a challenge in hot microdevices) appears manageable by sending the compression air around the outside of the combustor.

All of the components work, but the team has yet to get it all to work at once. They hope to have a working prototype in operation by Christmas.

If successful, this would be fantastically cool, and useful. If one of these babies can in fact run for ten times as long as a battery of the same weight, that's a major improvement. But the real improvement would lie in the refueling. If these turbines can be refueled rather than recharged, well instead of having to replace whole batteries, a small can of JP5 could recharge anything that runs on electricity. A major drawback of batteries is the lack of interchangeability. My cell phone, iPod, laptop, flashlight, radio controlled car, and wireless mouse all take different types of batteries. If a can of jet fuel looking just like a can of zippo lighter fluid could recharge any battery no matter the size, then you've got a real weight savings. In the military, this would eliminate a severe logistical problem for combat troops. For the average joe, it would be convenient as well, if not a matter of life or death.

Convenience, power, flammable substances, and tiny fan blades whirring at 20,000 rpm. What's not to like?

The other George, fool! :)

Speaking with The Times-Dispatch, Allen said the disclosure is "just an interesting nuance to my background." He added, "I still had a ham sandwich for lunch. And my mother made great pork chops."

Everybody repeat after George: I am not a Jew!

Remember the whole "macaca" thing? Turns out that macaca is common slang for n---g-er in French/Northern Africa(Wiktionary). Turns out that Allen's mother is from Tunisia.

Maybe his cradle songs were a little different. Maybe when he said it was a "made-up word" he wasn't being entirely truthful.

Maybe, just maybe, this guy is exactly what he appears to be. Which to me is a very stupid version of Cartman.

Found this fantastic graphic, courtesy of the NO Times-Picayune. It challenges a lot of "common wisdom" about the flooding, with a very clear depiction of how and why flooding occurred. I was curious about the effects of Mr. GO (the Mississippi River Gulf Outlet) on New Orleans during Katrina. Mr. GO is a 70-mile canal dug from the gulf straight through the wetlands to New Orleans' inner harbor, creating a kind of "express highway" for storm surge. It and the other artificial constructs (canals and levees) are the real reason that Katrina had the devastating effect on New Orleans that it did. Each mile of wetlands reduces storm surge by approximately 1 foot, according to what I've read. Wetlands could have reduced away five, ten, or fifteen feet of storm surge if they had been present. By eliminating hundreds of square miles of wetlands over the past 70 years (and even farther back on a more limited scale) the "protection" of New Orleans has resulted in its inevitable destruction. If you watch the graphic, pay close attention to the locations of the levee breaks. The river didn't flood its banks, and neither did the lakes. The breaches occurred at points along the artificial canals.

Each year that the river's sediment has been prevented from being spread out over the flood plain (a natural result of flooding) the land has declined. The sediment has actually ended up out in the gulf, wasted, because the "bird's foot" extension of the Mississippi into the Gulf extends out to the edge of the continental shelf. The bottom line is that the continued survival of the landmass depends on consistent flooding by the river so that that replacement land is created at (or above) the rate at which the soil is removed (into the Gulf).

Enough with the science already. Since I'm writing this post, everyone must be curious as how to how this means Republicans suck. To be fair, it's not just the GOP -- it's been a number of governments not paying attention to the problem. First, the fix.

The fix is an engineering program that uses the Mississippi river like a muddy garden hose, moving it around and "spraying" the delta with the sediment, replenishing over many years what has been taken away. There's universal agreement on both sides of the political aisle that this is the best and only long term solution. The problem is the cost, which prior to Katrina was considered to be absolutely prohibitive.

The price tag was $14 billion, in 2000. The current price tag from Katrina's damage is at $100 billion and climbing. Way back in 2000-2001 politicians of all stripes and bents came together in recognition of the long term problem and solution, and went with their proposals to the federal government. Bush struck nearly the entire program from the budget, replacing it with a single $250 million allocation for further "study". Decades of study had already been done, and the enormously difficult work of pulling together many parts of the political spectrum too. All of this was tossed away like garbage by a President that treats science like an unwanted stepchild.

Around the same time, Bush's "Iraq Recovery Fund" proposed over $100 million in spending to replenish wetlands in Iraq. Congress struck that provision from the package, but it gives you an understanding of the priorities at the time.

$14 billion is what this nation spends every six weeks in Iraq. Iraq is costing this country a sum of money (say a minimum of $500 billion) that could have cured cancer, or introduced a hydrogen infrastructure to the entire continent, or compensated the victims of Katrina many times over. That's what you've given away.

Sure, hindsight is 20-20. And yes, previous governments could have done something about this, and didn't. But Bush was the one who rejected the "real solution" when it was finally put in front of a national politician. And he is the one who presided over emergency mangement so incompetent that people were dying while standing on the interstate after waiting for five days in the sun for a bus to arrive.

Bush wants to talk about anything but New Orleans and Katrina in this election cycle. The same goes for the GOP as a whole. During Katrina, we found out exactly how the Bush administration would react if disaster struck a major American city: They would fuck it up beyond belief, and the well-connected would make money from it.

New Orleans and the disaster's management is the Bush Presidency in a microcosm. Incompetent from top to bottom, winking at corruption, ignorant of science, lacking the common sense necessary to compensate for lack of knowledge, and above all, utterly lacking in compassion for hardship, heartache, death and destruction their policies cause.

Could Bush have prevented Katrina? Of course not. But he could have begun the process, and if the post-hurricane disaster had had anything resembling leadership much suffering would have been prevented.

We have heard hundreds, if not thousands of evocations of Saddam Hussein's evil gassing of his own people, which killed perhaps 5,000 of them in an afternoon. Where does this adminstration note that its policies and activities have resulted in or contributed to the deaths of at least 30,000 Iraqi citizens?

No remorse. No explanations. No admissions of error. In general, no information is provided by this administration other than jingoistic rhetoric directed at staying the course.

You are not safer with these people in charge, or with anyone they've trained or groomed.

In honor of the International Talk Like a Pirate Day, we give you the find your pirate name quiz. My pirate gnomen is bland, but acceptable:

Black John Read

Like anyone confronted with the harshness of robbery on the high seas, you can be pessimistic at times. Even through many pirates have a reputation for not being the brightest souls on earth, you defy the stereotypes. You've got taste and education. Arr!

Canadians are widely seen as the closest thing to being American, world-wide. So what's up with the US government torturing Canadians? Should the Canadian government begin torturing US citizens? As a Canadian living here in the US, I am hopeful that black-masked thugs will not show up in the middle of the night, slap my fiance to the floor, and extradite me to a secret CIA prison in Syria, where I can be tortured into saying just about anything. It won't be hard; I won't last.

As a "guest" of the CIA, Maher Arar confessed, under torture, to having attended weapons training in Afghanistan and being an al-Qaeda member. We know now that he's never been to Afghanistan (or anywhere near it). So good job there on the "interrogation" -- what we've shown is that someone being tortured will say whatever they can to get it to stop.

This guy is a regular guy. He's an engineer who was doing nothing but minding his own business.

If you support Bush's policies in this area, your positions are fairly limited:

• This was wrong and it shouldn't have happened, but you can't make an omelette without breaking eggs. Nobody was supposed to know.
• This was wrong, it shouldn't have happened, and it's illegal. Someone should be held responsible.
• This was OK because he was a foreigner. Americans don't have anything to worry about.
• This was OK because he was of middle eastern descent. Normal Americans don't have anything to worry about.
• We're in a war and we don't have to explain shit to any other stupid country.

I've left this article plural deliberately. This is the one guy that we know about. Are there others? How many other Canadian citizens has the US government abducted? And where are they?

What's the official position of the US government on compensation for Arar?

The Ministry is recognized the world over for its incisive writing, penetrating insights, and giant fighting robots. And Zombies. Until recently however, this recognition was sadly awardless. That changed forever on the morning of September 12th, when the Ministry received its first ever award.

There was great rejoicing in the Ministry Catastratorium and Piano Bar when, a week later, we discovered that we had won. By Ministry decree, all of the code whittling gnomes, the kobolds in the url mines, various minions, factotums and other oppressed functionaries were granted an unprecedented five minute holiday in recognition of their unstinting (and until now, completely unrewarded) efforts in making the Ministry the blog juggernaut that it is. Of course, it was not merely the little people who found joy in this glorious moment. Minister Johno was in such great shock that he put his beer yeast in the bread dough, and swallowed a saffron-jelly glazed, garlic and truffle stuffed peahen ($139.99/lb.) whole. Ross, overcome with glee, almost posted. Geeklethal nearly caused the death of several small children when, in an excess of bile, he aimed his rifle skyward and fired off a clip. Minister Patton very nearly smiled. And Minister Buckethead had to be revived with smelling salts and a warm mug of cocoa.

We shall treasure this award forever. Or at least until someone else is nice to us. Until then, we bask in the warm glow of the words of Enchiridon:

it's an above average blog

The Pope said something the other day, and pissed off a lot of Islamic nutbags. Lucky for him, he appears only to have pissed off the ones he was actually referring to - the irony-challenged ones who think the answer to any such perceived sleight merits a murder threat or a bombing. BFD - I have nothing else to add to the matter that's not already been said by others.

However, I thought I'd bring to your attention, in case you hadn't seen it, a snippet from Scott Adams' blog, entitled "Pope Stirs Up P o o p", that got a chuckle out of me:

...I love the fact that the Vatican’s official position is that Muslims should be treated with “esteem.” According to my dictionary, esteem is a very weasely word. It can mean “high regard,” and that’s a nice compliment. But it can also mean “the regard in which one is held” which is a broad concept encompassing everything from “really groovy” to “bearded turds.”

My hope, I guess, would be that Benedict XVI meant the latter interpretation, not the former, but as a long-lapsed Catholic, my vote on such matters no longer counts.

The sickest celebration in our civilization has just begun, an annual get-down so intense, so loud, so full of people, fluids, and animatronic lions, one must surely weep or, if you're not the weepin' kind, urinate. New Year's Eve in Time's Square, your wanna-be Animal House frat brothers, and surely your jerkoff cousins' lame parties are all eye candy by comparison.

It's September, people. September in Bavaria.

And that means Oktoberfest.

Oktober-fucking-fest.

At no time is the scent of beer stronger than the Munich autumn. The fest beer flows like water...who am I kidding?...it flows better than water. The Theresienwiese will be thronged with visitors, so many that they will quaff 1/3 of the annual production of Munich's six big brewers. There are also plenty of other brews from around Germany (myself, I'll take a nice Werner hefe-weissen wherever I can find one, although those are better with food, I find, and not conducive to the burly 1-liter mugs ubiquitous under the fest tents). Plenty of spirits are readily available of course, as are carnival rides for the kiddies. As are adults who went on those rides after they washed down their 4th stein of lager with a nice smooth Ratzeputz shot and end up vomiting in shady corners, contributing their own personal and intimate colors and bits of stomach lining to the already festive blues, whites, and yellows of the tents.

Ah...Oktoberfest. Ahhhhktoberfest.

I am not there, so I am wrong.

But at the very least, maybe I can talk Lady Lethal into a dirndl. She'd make St. Pauli's girl look like a tired Bremen sea-hag.

To be honest, I didn't even know she was here.

If Google happens to be broken and you're curious (Google's already got 30 hits for that quote), I'll make the topic even more obvious with another:

If I was her adviser, I would tell her to go kick all the ladies' tails around for about four years and if she wants to try again when she's 20, 21 and grown up more, and maybe a better player, come on back.

(emphasis mine) Not a good week for the girl who claims to want to beat the men at the mens' game. I wonder how much of this silliness is driven by her sponsors?

So, there I was - sitting in my home office, taking care of a few things that need to be taken care of, and listening to the radio broadcast of the Sunday night NFL game between Dallas & Washington.

Having given the 7 point spread and chosen Dallas in the pool I've joined, and with Dallas in control, but not running away with it, I've been paying a bit more attention to the action than I otherwise would.

Including, apparently, the commercials. I just heard one for a company/product called "See More Bucks". I'm guessing it was a locally broadcast commercial, though with AM radio shows, it's hard to predict what sort of marketing you'll be exposed to. Anyhow, hearing the word "Bucks" must have piqued my interest, thinking they were talking about the Ohio State Buckeyes. And as I listened, I found it had nothing to do with OSU football.

Seems they were offering a product that, if sprinkled on the foliage near one's "deer blind" (whatever - I'm not a deer hunter, so if I fuck up the special verbiage of the brotherhood, please forgive me), causes the bucks to just hang out and gnosh until you get a chance to put a slug between their eyes.

Again, I'm forced to say "whatever...". Perhaps that's normal in deer hunting, but it brought a memory of a friend from my youth, Jimmy, who fished in Southern Ohio and regularly took his houseboat out on one of the large man-made lakes of the area. His first action was to ensure the beer was cold. Next, he took a bushel basket of ears of corn and scattered it in the water around the boat. Several beers later, he'd drop a line in the water, and pull out fish as fast as he could cast.

I wonder how that's different than using "foliage perfume" from a company called See More Bucks. Oh, and Jimmy used to call it "chumming".

Doesn't seem very sporting, but I'm not that type of sportsman, so I could be wrong.

[wik] Oh, and when Jimmy got into the second six pack, he might occasionally stop casting, and just grab his net before dropping a few lit M-80s into the water. Even I know that's not sporting.

For your Sunday reading pleasure, we bring you a plethora of mildly to seriously derisive mottoes for the State of Nevada. Enjoy!

• Two words: Celine Fucking Dion
• Tip #1: Whores, then gambling
• We are to the United States what Mariah Carey is to music
• And to think, we used to be part of Utah
• We’ve been nuked more than 464 times as much as Japan
• More fun than Sodom, less disease than Gomorrah
• Topless and Poker!
• Prostitutes and Poker!
• Hookers and Poker!
• Drugs and Poker!
• Ho's, Drugs and Poker!
• Poker and Poker!
• Poker, Canasta and Poker!
• We’ve got Vegas and normal people.
• Tip #2: Nickel Slots = Free Beer
• Nevada, where you can pay for sex and not get arrested!
• Come for the tasteless glitz, stay for the soulless debauchery
• More weirdos than Alaska (warmer too)
• Location, Location, Location!
• Tastes Great, Less Filling
• 3:5 you'll leave broke
• The pointy state
• We purely love your lack of knowledge of the laws of probability
• Waiting for California to Fall Into the Ocean
• Home of the Bambi Hunters
• Our strippers are almost as good as Canada’s
• The New Jersey of the West
• You Bet!
• Tip #3: Yes, Siegfried and Roy are really gay
• Big Dams, Big Losers
• Atlantic City? Where’s that?
• Our pyramid is so much more durable and classy than the original
• We put roller coasters on the tops of buildings. Because we can!
• The wedding and divorce capital of the world. We’ve got you covered.
• Babylon Mystery, Mother of Harlots and all these abominations of the earth

[wik] With a little help from Blackfive

[alsø wik] Bonus slogans!

• Your ignorance of probability means no state income taxes for us
• Holy fucking shit it's hot!

Allegedly, the past several years have seen great advances in the ability to correctly identify junk e-mail. In fact, I'm one of the people who would make this allegation, since I almost never see actual spam in my inbox any more, and I'm not aware of having lost any legitimate mail as a result of measures currently in place.

However, there's an odd side effect of the increasing power to automatically flush spam. Sometimes, the email message obfuscation used by the dung-brained losers who send such messages causes them to get past my spam protection. When they do, these days, they seem to result in largely unintelligible gibberish. To wit:

According to the most recent news,
they verbalized that most American's
are really moved in maintaning their wad
That is why they uncovered last night this place

http://www.*********.org/aj/
They hit upon it after happening around the net.
The things of the net.

looked on and listened in artificial a sort of
"You see," I lizard smell
noticed Monkey King among their other

letitia watson

I've redacted the name of some dumb-ass web site from the message above and will be reporting it to one of the central repositories of other such dumb-ass websites, the better to ensure that, no matter what form of Ebonics future authors of such crap use, the presence of that website address alone is enough to get the message shit-listed.

But here's the thing - if I were to suffer a momentary lapse of IQ and decided to pay close attention to my spam, looking for ways to radically improve my life, it's not crystal clear to me what part of my life letitia (not his real name) is offering to help me with.

An infinite number of monkeys in front of an infinite number of keyboards, indeed.

[wik] Someone beat me to the punch in reporting these assholes. I'm OK with that, and it's why I almost never see spam these days.

It was only a rumor. A legend.

Spanish cured ham so silky, so toothsome as to practically defy description. And one terrible side effect of our nation's rules and import barriers was that the Food and Drug Administration prohibited its import. Like many raw-milk French cheeses, the unfettered and wild processes of bacteria, enzymes, and sheer time presented a horrible spectre of infestation to the crabbed pencil pushers who thronged its halls.

Like, come on! The whole point of curing meat or milk is to render it impervious to rot or infestation. Why the hell can't it come into the country? It's only been three thousand years since mankind perfected the process!! Am I to believe that a raw-milk Camembert is, on the face of it, more harmful to the good of America than Mohammed Fucking Atta? Who they let in the country?? JESUS CHRIST!!!!

Shit.

Where was I?

Right. So there's this ham they make in Spain, from pigs from Castille that are fattened on acorns and whose loin is rubbed with a combination of herbs and spiced before being painstakingly cured with great love and care in the gentle Spanish breezes. Salt and bacteria do their thing. The enzymes in the cells of the loin of pork do their thing. The spectacular alchemy of man and nature coalesce in a transcendent display of pinnacle of the art of charcuterie. And you couldn't usedta get it here.

But not no more. It's here. Yesterday when I bought some it was $99.95 a pound. Today it's $199.95. A pound.

Some dudes eat a pounda steak as an appetizer.

So I bought some. I'm a big fan of European cured meats. There's this French stuff they make out of pork that sort of smells like a urinal but tastes like God himself came down and put the taste of manna on your tongue. The Poles make dry kielbasas that don't so much fill the stomach as feed the soul (many props to Mrs. GeekLethal!). And I'm the kind of asshole who, when staring face to face with a piece of a dead animal that has been through a process and a series of trade barriers that renders it as costly and valuable as good-ass weed, I have to try some.

I say again: I like meat that smells like bum piss. That's some amazing stuff. Silky, smooth, sweet, salty, subtle, astonishingly good. That stuff is about $15 a pound. Is meat that today goes for ten times that price ten times as good? Can anything that eventually becomes shit possibly be worth that much money?

I'll tell you.

I bought twelve paper-thin and translucent slices of fine Spanish ham. Just north of one ounce for $7. Took it home. Laid it out on a plate. Absorbed its aroma. Savored its flavor. I ate twelve paper-thin slices of fine Spanish ham all on their lonesome, and I'll tell you.

Ehh, it's pretty good.

Ministry readers are familiar with our ongoing concern for surviving the onslaught of any number of real or ethereal enemies: the robots, the zombies, the aliens, the Dark Ones, the Atlanteans- the list is long and dread. Those readers also understand that we are, to put a fine sharp point on things, concerned with our survival.

But we recognize that in order to rule the stooped, half-mad survivors of the smoldering afterworld, there will have to be stooped, half-mad survivors. With that in mind, we do have to maintain some concern over the wellbeing of the balance of our species, and it is in that spirit that I share this link and discussion with you now.

Slate has some thoughts regarding a short-term, family-scale survival kit. Alot of the products make sense- particularly regarding the storage, transportation, and treatment of water. The collapsible water cans are a great idea. Also, anything that can function without a wall socket or batteries, like hand-crank flashlights and radios would be terrific.

A couple things though have been overlooked. A decent multitool, for example. A small portable Gerber or Leatherman ought to be handy anyway, in your usual life, and one certainly belongs in a survival kit. And they don't break the bank, either- I got a good Gerber for like $50, but it pays to shop around. Other tools should be included as well, like a decent knife. Sharp things have been fundamental to the success of the human species thus far; why would it not be so after the Poppyclips?

Another item that's overlooked in these discussions is dry bags. That is, nylon (or other non-naturally occurring material) duffel-type bags. I think people tend to underestimate how fast water can fuck up everything, even just being in the rain for a couple hours. You can buy these in any camping supply store or online, and they're not expensive, either. They come in all sizes, so can keep food, documents, or delicate equipment dry, besides clothes or blankets. When empty of course they can wad up to nothing, so there's no space constraint. More of these is better, I feel.

And it goes without saying that no survival plan is complete without considering personal safety. It is surely inadvisable to keep loaded firearms in a duffel bag in your closet with your hazmat suit and respirator, but that doesn't mean you ought to eschew them entirely. Seriously, what in your personal life experience with other homo sapiens leads you to conclude that, in the absence of governmental authority -even if only briefly- people would not hesitate to take from you what they need to live another day? Are you willing to put your own survival- and we are talking survival here, not comfort and convenience-in the hands of strangers? For your family's sake, I hope not.

All of these things though are only things. Valuable and important things, but tangible objects. People also need intangibles, like a plan for how to get to where they feel safe, or training to build a fire, erect a shelter, apply first aid, or use a weapon.

Apply these ideas to your actual survival plan, and you will be in a much better position to be ruled by us later.

Amusing.

This advice comes too late for me, but maybe some pour soul can be saved from the fires of perdition.

Hadn't seen coverage of this elsewhere, but Stars and Stripes is reporting that a female USAF officer reported missing, then abducted, last week has been found and is on her way back to the Land of the Round Doorknob.

Major Jill Metzger was in Kyrgyzstan, with her unit nearing the end of its tour, when she was taken from a shopping mall in Bishkek. The article states that Major Metzger escaped her captors and was subsequently found by police, but is otherwise lean on detail. Well, it's enough to know that they didn't have her long.

I like to think though that her being a competetive marathon runner was helpful in her escape:

"Achmed! She's making a break for it! Drop the hookah! After her!"

500 meters later:

"Achmed! She's...getting...away...gasp...Quickly!"

Two kilometers later:

"Achmed...gasp...we...wheeze...will...speak...of...this...to...no one...gasp...*hurl*"

...just by their faded Dream Theater t-shirt.

Dr. David Thorpe at Something Awful unveils his Your Band Sucks Aptitude Test.

I was already hemorrhaging points by the time I had to admit former affiliation with a semi-metal act. I knew the final result wasn't going to be good, but never reached it thanks to this question:

27. I tend to dress:

a. In a zoot suit (-15)
b. In leather and safety pins (-5)
c. In tight jeans, Chuck Taylors, a faded t-shirt and a half gallon of hair-shellac (-10)
d. Like a normal human being (Automatic fail)

Mmmmm, the familiar kiss of failure.

I checked the answer key at the end anyway, and found I was well within the "play air guitar forever" category. Which is really not so far off the mark.
It was plain as the moles on Lemmy's face that my band sucked; I knew it, but did it anyway to alleviate my stifling boredom. But this quiz might be very helpful to those who are not well-adjusted enough to notice the level of their own suck. By taking it, and applying the result, they might save the rest of us minutes of face-pinching displeasure the first time we hear their noise and, grimacing, turn their shit off.

This could leave a mark:

AUSTIN - A Houston-area lawmaker said Tuesday that she is "vehemently insulted" by independent gubernatorial candidate Kinky Friedman's derogatory comments about Hurricane Katrina evacuees.

Friedman last week attributed a spike in Houston's crime rate to the "crackheads and thugs" who evacuated New Orleans.

I haven't a clue how "She" could both be offended by his comments and simultaneously be an elected representative from Houston, since Kinky wasn't talking about Houstonians with funny names, but instead was speaking of Katrina evacuees, but "She" continues:

"He has demonstrated a total lack of human sensitivity," said state Rep. Senfronia Thompson, D-Houston. "The people of Katrina have lost everything and are suffering not only from the loss of loved ones, but the trauma of the event itself. What has precipitated from this tragedy is behavior that results from a disastrous event."

Damn - is it just me, or did Senfronia just say that, yeah, the Katrina evacuees laid waste to large parts of Houston, but that it's OK, because it was to be expected under the circumstances? Ouch. And that will leave a mark, but probably not on Kinky Friedman.

Sadly, it probably won't leave a mark on Senfronia, either, because Houston proper has a wicked habit of electing maundering assholes to minor functionary legislative positions. (See "Sheila Jackson Lee", though, to be fair, the tony suburb of Sugarland hasn't covered itself in electoral glory either, and the city does sometimes do right, such as with Mayor Bill White and Judge Bill Eckels, true studs, both)

After all, something more than 20% of the year's homicides (through Aug 26) in Houston have involved Katrina evacuees (though that includes both perps and victims). Kinky appears, as always, to just be saying what everyone can see with their own damned eyes.

Stretching fair use to its limits, just in case that link up top goes stale, I have to also include the following excerpts:

"Kinky Friedman has called himself a 'compassionate redneck,' " said Thompson, chairwoman of the Texas Legislative Black Caucus. "He would do well henceforth to highlight his compassion while de-emphasizing his redneck tendencies."

Yeah, there's that. But it's not like the governor in Texas actually has to do much of anything. Honest. And this:

Friedman earlier this week also said that we would not pander to different ethnic groups while campaigning for governor.

"I don't eat tamales in the barrio, I don't eat fried chicken in the ghetto, I don't eat bagels with the Jews for breakfast," said Friedman, who is Jewish. "That to me is true racism."

Tell it, brother! I continue to particularly like the cut of the man's jib.

He's #2 in "the polls" so far, but he's both still pretty far behind our current pretty-boy Governor, Rick Perry, and damned by the press to defeat because of his proclivity for action and fun, rather than the slog of executive life.

All that said, if I have to waste a vote in the race for Governor of Texas (a presumption I'm not willing yet to stipulate), I'm happy to waste it on a guy who knows that the job is virtually all public relations and bully-pulpit, and who also knows that in Texas, it's generally defensible to just speak your mind, particularly as long as you're stating the bald-faced obvious.

Fans of the late conservationist, wildlife expert and tv personality Steve Irwin have, it seems, been visiting their grief and anger on innocent stingrays. Ten or more stingrays have been found dead and mutilated on the beaches of Australia. Another two have had their tails removed. Naturally, this is exactly what Steve would have wanted. Now, I am normally reasonably callous when it comes to the death of innocent and helpless critters. Often, they are tasty. Other animals find them tasty. That's life. But for some fuckwit to torture and kill an animal just because one of its brethren accidently killed his favorite tv star is totally beyond the pale. Get a grip, losers. Instead of hunting down a graceful, beautiful and largely harmless creature, find a safer outlet for your destuctive urges. Like, maybe, this.