perfidy

I love Ohio. From WKYC-TV in Cleveland, comes this heartwarmer.

OHIO TURNPIKE -- A woman who claims she was breast-feeding while driving on the turnpike, has plead not guilty to multiple charges.
The Ohio highway patrol received a call that 29-year old Catherine Donkers, was driving with an infant in her lap.
A trooper tried to pull her over, but she ignored him and then exited the turnpike.
"The stop didn't occur until she exited at the 187th and then became caught up in the toll booth and that's where the officer was able to approach the car and talk to the driver," said Ohio Highway Patrol Officer, Lt. Chris Butts.
The trooper discovered the Michigan woman didn't have a license.
She's been charged with not having an operators' license, obstructing official business, and child endangering.

For those of you who know Ohio, Exit 187 on the Ohio Turnpike is Streetsboro. That's Johnny's neck of the woods.

The Guardian has an interesting editorial today about the non-looting of the National Museum in Baghdad and the willingness of many people in the press and public to a) believe the worst and b)believe the worst of Americans. See it here. It's an odd piece for the Guardian to run. Why? See this:

So, there's the picture: 100,000-plus priceless items looted either under the very noses of the Yanks, or by the Yanks themselves. And the only problem with it is that it's nonsense. It isn't true. It's made up. It's bollocks.

Best line of all: "These days - you cannot say anything too bad about the Yanks and not be believed. "

Thanks to fark.com for the link. I get my news from Fark!

Via Dave Barry, you CANNOT TELL ME that there are worse drivers than Boston drivers. You CANNOT.

Is it just me, or does Lyndon LaRouche remind anybody else of Jack Chick?

Folks, Lyndon LaRouche has entered the 2004 Presidential Race. Woo-HOO!!

Recently I have sighted numerous flocks of LaRouche supporters around Boston, waving pamphlets and shouting about Gauss' First Theorem, dead babies, and the price of oil. It's all very touching. I love a good clown-show.

A side note. Every supporter of Old Man LaRouche I've ever seen is from the same demographic: middle-aged, white-haired white guys with bellies, pocket protectors, and a chilly relationship with personal sanitiation. If that's not an advertisement for your candidate, I don't know WHAT is! Now... if only Howard Dean would staff his campaign teams with bikini models, he'd have this thing all sewn up by September!

[moreover] Check out Lyndon's website for his latest batch of crazy.

Mmmmmm... that's good crazy!

Crackheads

And hopefully the fucktards at Cox Communications will actually have made the leap to competence and delivered the cable modem they should have left in my office when they ran the cable. "We can't promise to have it there by this evening. But we have scheduled a service call for tomorrow between 8:00 and 1:00. You'll definitely have it by tomorrow." Jeebus. I should have had it Wednesday, jackass. Three years of excellent service from DirecTV made me forget the thumb-fingered, stumbling fuckwittery of the cable industry.

Bumfights.com is either the worst thing, or the greatest thing I have seen this week. Everytime I get revved on American exceptionalism, something like this comes along to remind me of the parallels between us and the Roman Republic in the first century BC.

Just look at this.

For your information, as of about five minutes ago we moved to code orange. I discovered this when I found that one of the exits from my building was blocked, forcing me (and any terrorists) to walk an extra 20 yards to get a soda from the nice Eretrian vendor lady on the corner.

God knows, with my luck, I'd end up with degenerate mouth-breathing hellspawn like this one:

"Kelley Marie Ferguson never wanted to take a stupid cruise. A week at sea with her parents? Away from her boyfriend? How boring. As soon as the ship set sail, she felt trapped and miserable.

Then she had an idea.

Ship stewards found the poorly worded notes in two bathrooms. One threatened to "kill all Americanos abord" if the ocean liner made its scheduled stop in Hawaii. "Give this warning to El Capt ion to save all lives," another said. "Do take this serious he sent me from far away land for mission I will complete if port on American soil."

It was only a prank. But it has become another parable of life in a time of terrorist fear."

Rather than return to land, Kelley's notes created a panic and resulted in a $300,000, 100-person total search of the ship. All crew and guests were interrogated at length.

Unsurprisingly, the 20-year-old is now in prison. The best part? Tired of ongoing antics like this one, mom refused to post bail (haw)!

"She promises not to do it again -- but yeah, right," her mother, Debra Ferguson, a nurse, told the Los Angeles Times earlier this month. She said the family felt terrible that so many vacationers on board the cruise ship had been frightened and delayed. She also called her daughter a "brat."

And of course, there's more..."Ferguson had another surprise for them when she pleaded guilty. She said she was pregnant."

That's right. NEVER having kids.

Not that it's anything new, but as I hurtle on into my future as a professional curmudgeon, college kids are really starting to bug me. Don't get me wrong - by and large, they're a great bunch, all shiny-eyed and eager. I especially love the way each new generation rediscovers nifty funtime ideas like Marxism, Eco-Feminism, and Not Bathing and latches on to them like they were their own. 

But I worry. I'm a partial alum of the University of Massachusetts (in that I got my Masters' there), where they just had that ridiculous flap over changing mascots from the evil, bad, gendered and violent Minutemen to the gentle, majestic Gray Wolves (see previous posts). That incident is part of a grand tradition of colleges and universities trying too hard to protect the student body from opinions that may be alien or offensive to them. That's a huge mistake.

The Boston Phoenix, which I pick up from time to time when we're low on cat litter at home, had a decent article this week on this topic. You can read it here. The article argues there is a single

. . . assumption underlying most speech codes: namely, that there is a serious conflict between civil rights and civil liberties, and that members of diverse groups will never have full civil rights to an equal education without muzzling ideas that might make the campus feel less welcoming. 

This "civil rights vs. civil liberties" paradigm rests on the belief that when a person feels discomfort as a result of exposure to racist, sexist, homophobic, or other unpleasant words and ideas, such discomfort is, in and of itself, a civil-rights injury equivalent to being turned away from the lunch counter for being black, denied a job for being a woman, or beaten up for being gay. In this view, emotional discomfort is the essential element of a civil-rights injury. Thus, students have a right not to be offended or hurt by exposure to ideas that could diminish their feelings of self-esteem; they are - as a matter of civil rights - entitled to a comfortable and "safe" emotional environment free of such ideas. 

This bizarre and dangerous expansion of commonly accepted notions of civil rights distorts the debate over free speech on campus. What is at stake here is not, properly speaking, a conflict between civil rights and civil liberties: rather, it is a question of whether protection from emotional discomfort deserves independent status as a "right"  and, if so, whether it is a fundamental right that should compete with or (as has happened at Shippensburg and the vast majority of colleges and universities today) supersede a university's core intellectual mission. When college administrators say that students are entitled to a "safe" environment, they mean something very different from what people in the world outside the ivy walls mean by "safe." Indeed, for at least two decades now, it has been permissible to say things in Harvard Square that would be punishable if said in Harvard Yard. . . .

I'm not yet thirty, and I already feel like I don't understand what kids these days are about. I worry that we are raising a crop of college students who will finish their education without ever having to question or defend their basic assumptions about life. Isn't debate, and the interplay between conflicting points of view, an integral part of education? If so, the current crop American college students run the risk of ending up less educated than any students in recent history. How do you know you hate Republicans, if you've never met one, much less debated them? There is nothing worse than untested beliefs, and nothing more obnoxious and arrogant than a college student who has never had to defend themselves. Except the Norwegians. 

N.B.: Critical Mass (linked in my blogroll to the left) is a great clearinghouse for issues of this kind.

According to CNN.com, a lawsuit against Kraft Foods for devilishly marketing Oreo cookies containing trans fats has been dropped, article here. Good grief. The helmet advocates nearly went off the deep end with this one. People who previously thought that mass produced cookies, fast food, or any food high in saturated fats are healthy, and are now shocked, shocked to find that they are not, are definitely fooling themselves. If you want healthy foods, eat a fucking vegetable. It's the green stuff available at your local grocer; either fresh, canned or frozen. I like fresh asparagus the best. Give it a try. Maybe you'll like it too.

It's also called personal responsibility, people. Start taking some. I think that Stephen Joseph, who brought the suit, had his helmet on a little too tight and it cut off the flow of blood to his brain.

Those IRA dudes are totally screwed. Seriously. As are, I'm sure, several highly placed members of the British intelligence community.

DUBLIN (Reuters) - The unmasking of a British double-agent who penetrated to the heart of the IRA guerrilla army in Northern Ireland has given rare insight into the twisted and murky world of high-stakes espionage. The agent known by the codename "Stakeknife" was paid $128,900 a year by Britain and is suspected of killing 40 people in operations authorized by his handlers to protect his identity. With his name printed in at least four newspapers during the weekend, the blow to future undercover operations is massive, said former British SAS soldier and author Andy McNab. . . .The existence of a highly placed British mole within the IRA has long been suspected, but at the weekend he was identified in British and Irish media as Alfredo Scappaticci.

Holy crow! This is as bad as/much worse than the whole "FBI/Whitey Bulger let-the-innocent-die-it's-ok" flapdoodle of recent years.

[cue finger-wagging] Speaking of revising stories, here's a story about why I'm not a professional card-carrying historian. 

[cue bug-eyed ranting]According to the Chronicle of Higher Education, (via Volokh) the AHA will no longer investigate claims of plagiarism or other professional misconduct by historians, citing an inability to bring sanctions against offenders. 

Thanks, guys! You're already a bunch of bedwetting little pansies, and now you've admitted it. Well, acceptance is the first step toward healing. Why not just disband, now that you've proven you have no power to police the mores of the profession? Ohhhhh right the American Historical Review. Because that's such an excellent publication. Y' know? I'm an historian. That's my training, and part of how I identify myself. It's not a very encouraging sign when I cannot stand to read through even a single issue of a leading journal in my chosen field. Well, it's still better than the Journal of American History. Every quarter that bumwipe features stuff like "The New England Bean Farming Community, 1790-1820: Capitalist Hell or Proto-Marxist Paradise?" or "Roundtable: Interrogating The American Family-- Four Centuries Of Unrelenting Patriarchy" or "Rethinking Marx: How the Revolution Can Still Happen If We Wish Really Hard"

(I'm making these up - barely.) 
 

Being that I am someday going to warrant a multi-volume biography (if Franklin Pierce rates 620 pages, I'm gonna be good for at least a thousand), I really should retrieve all the tapes I yammered about below and set about preservating (preservating?) these vital records of the early 1980's. 
 

From the NYT via talkleft:

The Alabama House voted against a bill Tuesday that would have removed a ban on sexual devices, such as vibrators, from the state's obscenity law. .... A federal district judge in Birmingham has twice ruled that the ban is unconstitutional. The first ruling was overturned by the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals and the second ruling has been appealed to the appeals court.

....The sponsor of the bill, Rep. John Rogers, D-Birmingham, said because of the court ruling, the obscenity law is unenforceable as long as it contains the ban on sex toys....With little serious discussion, the House voted 37-28 to leave the sex toys ban in state law, leaving Rogers standing at the microphone shaking his head.
"What you just did is make our obscenity law illegal. You voted for obscenity,'' Rogers shouted at lawmakers.

G'hyuk!

[update] Eugene Volokh thinks I and others are being to hard on the Alabama Legislature, pointing out that the Federal court decision only invalidated the sex toy section of the law, explicitly leaving the rest alone. Though Mr. Volokh may be correct, as usual, I stand by my derisive g'hyuk! analysis as the Alabama legislature has nevertheless voted to ban sex toys. How silly, I say!

On occasion, our troops may pause to wonder, "Who were those guys we just killed?" To help in that query, I'm starting a new feature where my crack research staff find all the important information you need to know about America's enemies. Our first subject: the Iraqi Republican Guard

FUN FACTS ABOUT THE IRAQI REPUBLICAN GUARD:

* The Republican Guard are so well trained, that, in a one-on-one fight with U.S. ground troops, they can last into the tens of seconds.

* The Republican Guard is supported by tanks and other hardware that, according to U.S. military experts, are fun to blow up.

* The Republican Guard are dangerous if encountered by civilians. If you see a Republican Guard, do not run; this only provokes him. Instead, stand your ground and wave your arms in the air while yelling to scare him away.

* In a fight between the Republican Guard and Aquaman, the Republican Guard would win... unless Aquaman could somehow trick them into following him into the sea.

* The Republican Guard's only natural predator is the camel. It will spit in the eyes of a Republican Guard to blind him and then swallow him whole. The shark would be another natural predator… if only Aquaman were somehow able to trick the Republican Guard into following him into the sea.

* Though many Republican Guards dress up in burkas in the privacy of their own tents, that doesn't make them gay.

* The Republican Guard were a replacement for the less successful Iraqi Democrat Guard, who would try to whine and tax their enemies into submission. Eventually Saddam became too annoyed with them and had them executed.

From IMAO

Apparently, this is not the first time Hitchens has had a run in with the police.

Hitchens' run-ins with the law have not been restricted to Sparta city limits. In May 2002, he was arrested for drunkenly singing 1930s union songs while driving a stolen riding lawnmower through the streets of Boston, where he was attending an international women's-rights conference. Hitchens accused police of "atavistic, morally reprehensible Stalinist scare tactics" before being bailed out by conference organizers the following morning.

Sounds like something A few people I know could do.

is interesting. In the latter part of the article, Goldblatt talks about his comment on America being the most benevolent world power in history. Apparently, this got a lot of people exercised. I had a similar (though smaller scale) experience. On another website, the Cocula Muffin Research Kitchen, I posted a poll asking, "what is the most ruthless empire in history?" I included "American Global Hegemony as an option. As of today, it has 21% of the vote. For quite some time, that number was closer to 50. I find this rather amazing, just as Goldblatt did, and for the same reasons.

I'm going to write a looong essay on exactly why I hate Oliver Stone.