perfidy

[note: headline edited to moderate tone] This is not so good, I think.

The Catholic Church is telling people in countries stricken by Aids not to use condoms because they have tiny holes in them through which the HIV virus can pass - potentially exposing thousands of people to risk.

The church is making the claims across four continents despite a widespread scientific consensus that condoms are impermeable to the HIV virus.

This is simply untrue. Moreover, since some African nations are facing HIV infection rates of 20% and more, this is a mindblowingly inhumane position to take. Y'know, there is such a thing as being blinded by one's convictions.

The Drug Tsarina, who is apparently John Walters, is advocating pee-testing of schoolchildren.

This despite bucketloads of evidence that pee testing has no (or even a negative) result in cutting drug use in schools. Y'know, there's such a thing as being blinded by one's convictions.

Thanks to Reason for the pointer.

Those crazy jokers at PETA sent a fax to Roy whatsisface the gay tiger man, y'know, the man in the hospital for near-beheading-by-tiger, which read in part, "neener, neener, neener!"

Actually, it didn't, but almost. From the New York Newsday tabloid-type article:

"Perhaps Friday's frightening incident will make you realize that a brightly lit stage with pounding music and a screaming audience is not the natural habitat for tigers, lions, or any other exotic animals," PETA Vice President Dan Mathews wrote.

"The only natural thing that happened on that stage was that this majestic animal lashed out against a captor who was beating him with a microphone because he wouldn't do a trick," Mathews continued. "No matter how much you say that you love the wild animals whom you have confined continents away from their natural homes, you are still the men who have subjugated their wills and natures to further your own careers."

The pain of letting PETA down hurts Roy worse than his near-fatal neck wounds, I betcha anything.

Regardless of what you might think about the ethics of training animals to perform as Sigfried and Roy do, most reasonable people will agree with me that PETA has chosen to take the crude, wilfully sanctimonious approach to making their point. As usual.

From the greatest website in Christendom, McSweeney's Internet Tendency:

A N   O P E N   L E T T E R
T O   C H I C A G O
P U B L I C   L I B R A R Y
D E S K   V A N D A L S .
 

BY HOLLY GRIGALUNAS

Dear Vandals,

I write in regard to your collective graffiti displayed on a study carrel — just east of the map collection and through the foreign books — in the Harold Washington branch of the Chicago Public Library. While your detailed Asian fetishes and sketches of generously-endowed hermaphrodites kept me distracted from my primary reading materials for quite some time, I thought you may benefit from a few tips that may better convey your sentiments.

Choose your writing instrument carefully. Markers and Wite-Out will do. Avoid pencil; it rubs off far too easily — "CASTRATE ALL…" what? Your ideal method may be to etch directly into the wood, perhaps with a paperclip or very sturdy ballpoint pen. Along with imbuing a rustic, almost old-timey, timbre to your voice, it may avoid any further confusion over which ethnic group gives the best head.

Secondly, bear in mind that a good majority of people are right-handed, causing most graffiti to become clotted up on the right-hand sides of desks. Writing on the left-hand side will not only set your message apart, but will add a pleasing, feng-shui effect to your canvas. Basically, if you truly want to stress that Scotty does, in fact, take it up the ass —  think left.

Finally, take heed when responding to your fellow vandals' messages. Imagine your fellow vandal has inscribed a bawdy and entirely incorrect statement in pencil, perhaps about his abnormal penis length and the amount of attractive young women who, just last night, took pleasure in every last inch. You must be ambiguous and glib in your response in the event that the initial point of contention rubs off on someone's sweaty forearm, or is lost forever in the terry recesses of the night janitor's rag. Nothing is more bewildering than a "YEAH AFTER YOU PAY THEM CAUSE YOU CAN'T GET ANY FOR FREE," accompanied by a lonesome arrow. A simple "fuck off" or "your mamma is gay" should suffice wonderfully as both a dissenting response and an independent assault.

I do hope you consider these suggestions, not only for the sake of clarity and cohesiveness, but for your own readers' faith in you and your vast affection for young pussy. 

Respectfully,
Holly Grigalunas
Chicago, IL

Andrew Sullivan's reader email of the day:

"Maybe I am just getting older and don't get it or it could be the fact that I grew up in a small Midwestern burg and understand how hopeless my friends and family are who stayed there. Either way these people are jerk-offs. Two things came to mind when I read this. The first is these people would get their asses kicked if they threw a half-full can of beer at someone at a party. Not just because of the action, but because it is a waste of beer. Secondly, these "hipsters" would not last five minutes in any of the number of small towns in this country where this kind of culture really thrives. Any real goat roper who grew up drinking Pabst will tell you it is skunk beer and small town people know this. The only way to make it better is to add salt to it, I mean how wrong is that? My point is rural Americans don't need condescending pricks in New York to tell them they are cool. We already knew it and embraced it years ago."

Fucking A! That whole dipshit trucker-hat and Midwest chic thing (which, by the way, has been covered in the Times and is therefore officially over) really pissed this Ohio boy off. Whenever I see an "ironic" trucker hat around town, my arm automatically does this sort of Dr. Strangelove jerk, and I must physically restrain myself from knocking the ironic hat off the dimwit's head in a decidedly un-ironic, looking-to-kick-ass fashion.

The one silver lining is that, as of a couple years ago, one could step into Welcome To The Johnsons on the Lower East Side and get hosed on PBR for under $20. The same could also be said of Joe's Bar on E. 6th, but Joe's doesn't have tabletop Ms. Pac Man, and the bathroom door doesn't actually close.

Also, we prefer the term "briar hopper."
Original post is here, excerpted:

I went to my first white-trash theme party three years ago. I felt cool because John Bartlett was throwing it. We had corn-dogs and twinkies and malt liquor and wore half-mesh ball-caps. Maybe the "bear" trend is also a throw-back to '70s white trash culture. Ditto South Park Republicans, where the politics of the Red Zone has become the politics of the Blue-Red Set. Is all this hopelessly condescending? Maybe. But part of the refreshing nature of these trends is exactly their unconcern with whether they're forms of condescension or not, or even whether they're ironic or not. They're just cool and insensitive. It took only one generation of political correctness to fuse the two. As Rolling Stone editor, Joe Levy, puts it, "If you have a bohemian neighborhood full of people drinking bad beer and wearing ugly T-shirts and trucker hats and dressing the exact same way as Justin Timberlake, it's real and it's ironic, and it's cool and it's uncool at the same time." Exactly.

The french author of the book that claimed that no plane ever hit the pentagon has produced a deck of cards intended to mock the deck that the US military produced to aid in the hunt for the top leaders of the Baathist regime in Iraq.

Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld is the ace of spades, and President Bush is the king of diamonds. Thierry Meyssan, the man behind the French deck, said, "We thought this card game would allow us to ... explain why we consider the government of George Bush a threat to international security."

Words fail me.

Barbra Streisand says she finds listening to her own songs is so boring that it was one of the reasons she gave up public performing three years ago.

Well, that makes two of us.

The eeeevil landlords at New York University might be shutting down the Bottom Line, one of THE most hallowed stages in the history of rock, folk, blues, and American music of all stripes. In the wake of September 2001, business fell way off and the Bottom Line got behind on their rent with NYU, the owners of that property as well as most of the rest of lower Manhattan. Here's the statement from the Bottom Line:

The problem is as follows: Even before the terrorist attacks on the World Trader Center, the nation was already feeling the downturn in the economy. Our business, along with so many other small businesses, has not been able to recover since the tragedy of September 11th. Attendance to shows has declined. In addition, our customers are feeling economic stress, our bills have been multiplying, and we have found ourselves substantially behind in our rent. Our landlord, New York University, has started eviction proceedings. During our negotiations with New York University to resolve this situation, the Bottom Line has presented several different proposals to pay our past due rent, while at the same time keeping current with a new, higher rent proposed by NYU. Unfortunately, NYU has not been open to negotiating a long-term solution to our mutual problem. We want to pay off our debt to NYU, but to do so we need to remain in business. To stay in business, we need a promise from NYU that, if we pay off the rental arrears, they won't evict the Bottom Line.

This is awful. I don't know the whole story, because I no longer have business with the Bottom Line's owners, but regardless of the details it would be an enormous tragedy if this venue were to close. There are few enough good places to see music in New York while actually sitting down without the Bottom Line going the way of the dodo. Co-owner Allan Pepper might be an abrasive curmudgeon, but he's a lovable, ethical, and hard-working abrasive curmudgeon who has spent the last thirty years dedicating his life to the betterment of humanity through transcendentally great music. That should count for something, but of course it won't.

<CelebrityAppeal value="Suzanne Somers">

The Bottom Line's website (linked above) has details on how you can help, or at least show support for, this pillar of American popular music. West 4th Street used to be the center of the universe, as far as folk music goes, and the Bottom Line is one of the last vestiges of that world.

Just last night I was in a conversation about Boston, and how much less interesting Kenmore Square looks now that they gentrified the Rathskellar out of existence and moved the Disney Store in. Change in and of itself is not bad, but it sure does hurt if you care.

</CelebrityAppeal>

[moreover] The way the Bowery's looking these days (that is, less full of homeless people, syringes, and gunk-- all charming), I wouldn't be surprised if CBGB gets the boot someday soon in favor of a Starbucks or a Body Shop.

I can't let others get screedy for me by proxy. Click the "more" link for some screedy goodness from John Cole.

If I ever up and accidentally screw a couple million people out of a couple of billion dollars and perhaps cause a crisis in the market and perhaps send nervous jitters through an already skittish economy, I hope the Justice department is this easy on me:

Merrill Lynch & Company, in an agreement with prosecutors that let it avoid criminal charges over its role in the Enron debacle, promised today not to engage in business deals — even ones that appear legal — that it believes might be used to mislead investors about a company's financial condition.

The Wall Street firm also agreed to allow the government to monitor portions of its business for the next 18 months.

You got that? Their deal is, as punishment for helping to f--k over millions of people- they promise not to f--k anyone over in the future- at least for the next 18 months while people are watching them.

Justice is blind, deaf, and dumb. Meanwhile, Tommy Chong is going to jail for selling bongs on the internet. My head hurts.

For the record, GOP- this is how you drive people like me away from the party, you pompous, moralizing, a-holes. I also might point out that Tommy Chong's business employed 25 people- which, if I am to believe the employment numbers I read about every few weeks, means that the Bush administration is about three million, three hundred thousand TWENTY-FIVE jobs behind Cheech and Chong in the job creation category.

Priorities, Bush. Priorities. And pedants- spare me the exact number of jobs lost during the last four years and why we can't blame them all on Bush- I know my numbers are wrong, but I am venting. You get the damned point.

Back in my halcyon grad-school days, I used to think Ted Rall was a pretty nifty cartoonist. Sure, he was a hard-lefty, but he scored a lot of really excellent points off the American Right, especially their gibbering and howling in the run-up to the Kangaroo Impeachment of President Billy Nutsack. Moreover, I lived in Amherst MA, where my stolid Centrism played like John Birch in some places. So, I read him, I liked him, I didn't always think he made sense. 

But no more. Over the last couple years, I've watched Ted Rall sink deep, deep into moral equivalency and come out the other side into crazyland. 

In this post, Michael Totten lovingly and thorougly fisks a Ted Rall column that among other things asserts " the more we tell ourselves that the Iraqi resistance is a bunch of evil freedom-haters, the deeper we'll sink into this quagmire," and elsewhere calls the same Ba'ath resistance "patriots."

If you read that carefully, you see that Ted Rall really is calling those crazy Ba'ath truckbombing rapist warlord shitwads "morally good freedom-loving patriots." Also, apparently the Iraqi police-trainees who were killed last week, the ones who are helping to establish a homegrown Iraqi social order that is not based on rape, terror, and disappearances, are "[c]ops, who work for a foreign army of occupation [and therefore] are not innocent. They are collaborators. Traitors. They had it coming."

Let me get this straight.

The remnants of a brutally repressive regime, who have taken to killing innocent people and are dedicated to fomenting chaos, starvation, poverty, and martial law in their own country so that they may return to their former positions as local warlords, are freedom loving patriots. Okay, sure, whatever.

And The Iraqi citizens training as police officers, who are working to dig their country and people out of the Saddam Hussein Memorial Thirty-Year Shit-Trench are traitors who had it coming. Got it. Great.

What the fuck, please? I mean, you can argue about how full the glass is. We can, and will, argue as to whether the Iraqi libervasion was justified, for years to come. But that doesn't change certain things they in most places call "facts." Fact: The libervasion happened. We broke the eggs and killed a bunch of people. Now the US can a) bug out and leave the mess they created to fix itself however it will, or b) stick around and try to keep things afloat.

Fact: There is plenty of room to argue about how best to handle the occupation. The President may, or may not, have the right strategery. I'm betting towards "not," personally. But this argument does not negate the fact of the invasion, option b).

Fact: By any moral code accepted by a large number of average people in the Western world, there is a difference between blowing yourself up along with a number of other people, and training a police force to make sure that kind of thing doesn't happen.

Fact: Moral equivalence is fine as a mind-exercise. Moral equivalence is even fine as a tool for living, as long as it is one of many designed to make a person well-rounded. However, moral equivalence is a hell of a stupid way to live. Hence the term, "Fisking."

I'm horrified that certain elements of the American Left, a group who on the whole are perfectly reasonable patriotic people who just happen to see things differently than most of the blog world, have come to the conclusion that American action is always wrong, resistance to power is always right no matter what the flavor, and that training local police forces in Iraq so that US soldiers may cede authority to them is equivalent to flying a loaded jetliner into a building full of people.

It goes without saying (or at least it should), but Iraqi police recruits are as much traitors to their country as the Democratic Party is to our own, with no respect to Ann Coulter, Michael Savage, or any of the rest of the creeps who are Ted's peers on the other side.

Gives the rest of us a real bad name, it does, and it makes me wanna punch them in the neck.

Please read the fisking, and watch Michael crush a vestige of my slightly-more-liberal past like a bug. It's kind of sad. I really used to like that shitwad.

Over at Oliver Kamm's excellent blog, I found a delightful attack on Noam Chomsky. Here is a choice excerpt:

If Chomsky's normative judgements are perverse, his empirical ones are - I search for the most neutral word I can find in the circumstances - ahistorical. He asserts, for example:

Kennedy invaded Cuba and then launched Operation Mongoose leading right to the missile crisis which practically destroyed the world.

...This type of thing is typical of Chomsky's work. To those who are unfamiliar with history, Chomsky's political writings might seem a rational and informed case. Yet when you strip away the invective you're left with little but heroic assumption, tendentious assertion, egregious omission and even outright fabrication. Unfortunately, historical literacy is an increasingly scarce condition, and Chomsky has managed to build a large constituency on the strength of it among those of college age.

The whole article, indeed the whole blog is informative and well written. Joe Bob says, "Check it out!"

The latest "Know Thy Enemy" installment is up on IMAO, and today the focus is Hamas. Among the many facts we learn are these jems:

• Hamas won't rest until the Jews are pushed out into the sea. That will significantly improve the GDP of the sea.
• Hamas is a big part of the "cycle of violence". They blow up innocent men, women, and children, and then Israel is like, "Hey, don't do that." And thus the cycle of violence continues.
• If you see a Hamas member, shout, "Hey! Look! It's a Jew!" Maybe he'll set himself off early. Dumbass.
• Contrary to popular belief, Hamas has nothing to do with ham. Actually, if you throw hams at them, they'll get angry.
• I don't like to loosely throw around charges of anti-Semitism, but I don't think Hamas members like Jews.

Frank even thinks Aquaman can beat Hamas.

Reuters is reporting that U.S. District Judge Robert Sweet has bounced the plaintiff's revised attempt to sue McDonald's for poisoning the wells and making Bic Macs from the blood of... I mean, sue for using misleading advertising to lure children into eating unhealthy foods that make them fat.

I don't know about you, but there was never any doubt in my mind what those fries and burgers were doing to me. Even after they switched to vegetable oil. McDonald's? Unhealthy? Retards. How could you appear in public, with your face hanging out, and claim that you were duped by the fiendish ad campaigns of a fast food restaurant? I would die of shame if I ever signed onto that lawsuit.

Thank God the judge has some connection to reality. We need more judges like that, and less assholes trying to game the system for easy money. 
 

Wow... that just trips gaily off the tongue.

I see that Reuters is reporting that the Government has revised the rules governing what patients may be turned away by hospital emergency rooms, making it easier for hospitals to deny care.

The idea is that many poor people, who don't have insurance, are using the Emergency Room as a primary-care facility, and these rule changes are meant to fix that loophole.

Well, thanks. On the face of it, that's fine and dandy, but it totally fails to address the underlying problem-- that there are as many as forty million people in the USA who don't have insurance and therefore need to rely on emergency medicine.

The problems with this?

• Emergency room visits are damn expensive. This is part of the larger economic trap that poor people get into where they cannot afford high monthly payments on furniture, COBRA, or car insurance, for example, and then get bit in the ass when disaster strikes. I've been in this position, and it's really, really easy to get sucked into a debt spiral as catastrophe costs mount.
• It's really hard to get good baseline health care if you only go to the hospital when you're sick. That means that the 40 million uninsured Americans are not getting the yearly physicals, breast exams, prostate exams, mole checks, and so forth that lawmakers take for granted.
• Clearly, emergency rooms are not the place for primary care, but in the absence of any other reasonable, affordable choice, . . . ?

Basically, I think a baseline national health care program is a pretty great idea. I'm not looking for a full-blown endless-referral system, but just some broken-bone and checkup system that gives economically marginal citizens a chance to stay both economically and physically healthy.

Dean in '04!

[moreover] Politicians and policymakers always seem to forget that most Americans don't have much in the way of "fuck-you" money, as we used to call it in the entertainment biz. That is, savings socked away that can get you through a few months without a job, or cover a disaster. A lot of conservative social policy seems predicated on the existence of such "fuck-you" funds, and it just ain't there. Therefore, economists and politicians tend to wildly overestimate the ability of people to move out of depressed regions or search for a new job if their current one doesn't pay well enough. Just my two cents.

Hey, get a new T-Shirt.

Geek Lethal responds to my Ehrenreich thinkery:

"Personally, I found her thesis, that it sucks to be poor, not particularly revealing or challenging. What I found interesting was that so many people didn't know that already, and therefore had to buy her book to find that out."

Fucken-A.
 

Can you say..... Mmmmmmmmartyr?

Pursuant to a recent thread on this very website, here's an article from the Boston Globe about how budget constraints are hindering Boston public school students' access to things like books, sports, or gifted & talented programs.

That's the problem with money and education. More money doesn't make schools better, but money sure makes them worse.

And just wait 'til NEXT year, when No Child Left Behind kicks in and the Division of Enforced Mediocrity of the Department of Ed. knocks out the federal funding to Boston's notoriously ailing public schools. Ya can't leave kids behind if the bus never goes anywhere.

Via GeekPress I find this post, which raises a really damn good question.

Ya know, with all the bombings and destruction in Iraq, especially with the attacks on the infrastructure, like the oil lines, the electricity, the water...

Where the fuck are the human shields? I thought they went there to make sure this kinda crap didn't happen. Where are the granola eating turdburgers who went bravely to pre-war Iraq and placed their bodies in harm's way so that a stray incoming round would hit them, rather than the baby milk factory?

I guess they just up and left, when they all survived the war. They need to turn right around, get their collective asses back, because someone's blowing up the water pipes and people are going thirsty. The infrastructure of Iraq is being destroyed! It's killing the chilllllllldren! Hundreds of thousands of innocents are at risk! DOn't you CARE about the suffering of the Iraqi people rom indiscriminant bombing and ruthless attacks? Come back! You are needed!

Bah.

The real reason is, of course, that they stand a greater risk of getting whacked by some crazed thug than getting hit by US military fire....but they knew that going in, didn't they?

Bam! Pow! Zing!

Yeah, where the hell are all those goody-two-shoes human shields? Are they still there? Have they buggered off before they could actually do some GOOD? I tell ya... sometimes it's hard to stay a ditherer.

Exhibit A: The US Army is seriously considering doubling up tours of duty for soldiers stationed in Iraq.

Exhibit B: Rumsfeld: Army has troops in Iraq in numbers "appropriate at the present time for the tasks that [it] has".

Oooh!! A paradox!