perfidy

For the week ending 8Nov04

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

For the week ending 31Oct04

Special Iraq-free edition! (the gnomes in our Baghdad bureau are spending a week decompressing on the Ministry's dime in a hotel in Beirut.)

Spotlight Missourah: High school student Brad Mathewson was recently sent home on two separate occasions for wearing a "gay pride" t-shirt to school. In the ACLU press release, Mathewson notes that the school administration asked him "to go home and change shirts because someone might be offended." Entertainingly, Mathewson's observation that what he found offensive were the anti-gay stickers plastered on cars in the school parking lot, on notebooks, and often on other students at the school, fell on deaf ears.

Remember kids: it's only hate if you don't yourself believe it. Hate the sin, not the sinner. They chose that life of high-school ostracism and misery. Perverts cause herpes. And more stuff like that if you need to feel better about your deep distaste for gays. It's not your hang-up, it's theirs.

Spotlight Missourah (again): Hey! Want a mentally challenged slave to do your laundry? Call these guys.

Two people have been charged with holding six mentally ill patients at group homes and making them work against their will, authorities said.

A man and a woman were arrested Tuesday under a federal law banning involuntary servitude after 20 FBI agents searched two group homes in Newton, Kansas.

The agents rescued four adults from one home and two from the other, FBI spokesman Jeff Lanza said. The identities of the two people who were arrested were not immediately released.

The six mentally ill individuals had lived in the homes for "a long period of time," Lanza said. It was not immediately clear what type of work they had been forced to perform.

The accused, I'm sure, would cite purely humanitarian reasons, arguing that washing windows for free builds character. Too bad there's no "'tard exception clause" in the Thirteenth Amendment.

Spotlight Florida: Vote early, vote often, vote with your car! Barry Seltzer of Sarasota, Florida, has some rage issues. While motoring along a busy street in Sarasota on October 27th, Mr. Seltzer happened to catch sight of shrill election-rigging harpy Katherine Harris and a knot of her supporters. What happened next is unclear. Witnesses say that Seltzer drove his Cadillac up onto the sidewalk and directly at Harris, possibly swerving to avoid her at the last moment. Seltzer, apparently trying for a first-ever gestalt of the Twinkie Defense and the First Amendment, argues "I intimidated them with my car... They were standing in the street... I was exercising my political expression!" The police naturally take a dim view of attempted vehicular homicide, and Mr. Seltzer is currently under arrest for same, a political prisoner and regrettable casualty of a system designed to disenfranchise the little guy and his Cadillac.

If the car don't hit, you must acquit.

Spotlight the Interweb: We're all pundits here, or at least fans of pundits. Why else would you be reading this here website? We are used to crafting biting commentary, sometimes rather heated, about whatever subject suits our fancy. Some of us (like us Perfidians) prefer a thin scrim of anonymity. The blog-o-sphere has seen its share of death threats (Emperor Misha), enraged denunciations (Eric Muller and the increasingly despicable Michelle Malkin), and just plain idiocy (everyone). But what happens when some specially-bred packet sniffing canine channeling data in some sub-sub-sub basement out in Reston happens to notice... you?

Livejournaler "anniej" was lucky enough to find out. In a post following one of the Parsdential Debates, "anniej" put up a post (since deleted) that in her own words "was a mock-prayer to God in response to Bush's comment that he could feel it every time Americans prayed for him. I jokingly prayed for an aneurysm, and invited the "prayers" of others." Little did anniej know that she was about to get a lesson in the pointy end of American Civics 101.

Stories have abounded this election season about the bubble of privacy around the President: protestors or gadflies channelled into "free speech" zones a quarter mile from rallies; Kerry t-shirt wearers being forcibly removed; people in queue to ask questions at Q&As being removed if their question is not a softball. Evidently the bubble is very large now, and transmissible over telephone lines. As anniej describes it,

At 9:45 last night, the Secret Service showed up on my mother's front door to talk to me about what I said about the President, as what I said could apparently be misconstrued as a threat to his life. After about ten minutes of talking to me and my family, they quickly came to the conclusion that I was not a threat to national security (mostly because we are the least threatening people in the entire world) and told me that they would not recommend that any further action be taken with my case. However, I do now have a file with the FBI that includes my photograph, my e-mail address, and the location of my LJ. This will follow me around for the rest of my life, regardless of the fact that the Secret Service knows that I am not a threat.

[long list of advice, whys and wherefores redacted]

Now, at this juncture, I am not planning on making any kind of formal complaint with the A.C.L.U., as some on my friendslist have suggested. I did not feel that my civil rights were violated by the visit, and I did not feel intimidated by the Secret Service agents. I have, however, contacted an attorney simply because I want to ensure that my rights are protected in the future, and because the Secret Service were less than clear about what exactly can be construed as a threat and what would be done with my FBI file and any medical records they requested. I am not making any efforts to contact the media, and I doubt that I will in the future.

HOWEVER.

I want people to be aware that what they say on their LJ can cause problems for them in RL, because I love all of you and I don't wish what happened to me on you. You are more than welcome to discuss this post in your journal, and you are more than welcome to link to it from your journal. If you want to post this in a community, go for it. Hell, if you want to put me on fandom_wank, it's probably not a bad idea. The wankers would have a FIELD DAY with this. I know I would. Please, feel free to make an example out of me. So share this with your friends. Tell them what can happen. It's beneficial to all of us to know that this can happen, and hopefully, it'll prevent something like this from happening again.

Now, with all that said, I really, REALLY need some goddamn porn today. GAAAAAH.

Thattagirl. Look at some weeners and forget about the government.

Loyal readers may well now be asking "where's the exemplary human behavior here?" I answer: when the Secret Service, whose solemn and sworn duty is protecting the President's life, make housecalls based on prayers they read on the internet, it's time to dial it back a bit. Don't they know there's a war on?

Spotlight Taiwan A discussion over weapons purchases in the Taiwanese Parliament last week spilled over into cartoonish violence when a food fight broke out among the legislators.

Opposition lawmaker Chu Fong-chi stood up and began shouting at ruling party lawmakers when she appeared to duck to avoid being hit by an object. She picked up a lunch box and flung it across the room at legislator Chen Chong-yi of the ruling Democratic Progressive Party.

Chen grabbed a lunch box and tossed it back at Chu, who had what appeared to be food stains down the back of her blouse. "My whole body smells like a lunch box!" she shrieked to TV cameras covering the melee.

The food fight, which lasted just minutes, left tabletops, chairs and the floor littered with rice and chunks of hard-boiled eggs.

Although every governing body from the town council of Possum Holler, Kentucky up to the secret cabal of plutocrats who comprise the Bavarian Illuminati is at any given moment no more than a thrown sandwich away from a food fight, actually throwing food is, shall we say, a little on the nose.

Spotlight Vietnam: Vietnamese government official Luong Quoc Dung is on trial for raping a thirteen year old girl to rid himself of bad luck.

Ugh. Moving on...

Spotlight Pitcairn Island In what must be some sort of record, half the male population of this tiny Pacific island nation were recently convicted of raping more than half the female population. In total, six men-- including the mayor (who leads the nation in both the political sense and the "sick bastard who raped the most girls" sense)-- were convicted of more than fifty sex abuse charges over the past 40 years, with some victims as young as five years old. In a cruel twist, many of the victims have come forward in defense of the convicted men, arguing that the island's well-being will suffer for half the men being in prison.

Interesting fact: Pitcairn Island is populated entirely by descendents of mutineers from the HMS Bounty.

Spotlight Wisconsin: Woman digs up boyfriend's remains; drinks his beer. Karen Stolzmann was arrested this week for the decade-old crime of graverobbing. When her boyfriend, Michael Hendrickson, killed himself in 1992, his ashes were buried with a beer and a pack of cigarettes. He had been in the ground less than a month when authorities noticed the grave had been disturbed and the urn and beer were missing.

Call me crazy, but that gives me a great idea for an ad campaign: "What would YOU do for a Michelob?"

It just is. Hot dogs are bad enough without being shaped like intelligent sea life.

Thanks to Loyal Reader #0017, EDog, who now has a website all his own. Says EDog, "Please visit it so my counter goes above ten."

For the Week Ending 25Oct04:

Spotlight Iraq: Since this feature began, Iraq has been a bottomless well of exemplary human behavior. This week is no different. Savages kidnapped Margaret Hassan, head of CARE International's Iraq operations. Hassan is part Iraqi herself, and has spent much of the last 30 years working in the country to help (according to the CARE homepage) "the world's poorest communities solve their most threatening problems." But Hassan is only the highest-profile prisoner this week. Three Macedonian contractors captured in August were beheaded. Perhaps the head chopping, self-imagined footsoldiers for Allah might be counted among the most threatening problems in Iraq?

Spotlight South Carolina: A Rock Hill, SC policeman used his taser to subdue a 75 year old woman who...ahem..."assaulted" him. The woman refused to leave a nursing home after visiting hours and became argumentative when told to leave. The cop claims the woman swung at him, despite her having "arthritis and six broken ribs". Tasering ensued, although why he couldn't have just picked her up and tucked her under his arm I'm not sure about.

I might have wished for a taser once or twice when I foolishly put myself between an elderly phalanx of walkers, canes, and Rascals and the 3-for-a-dollar cucumber bin at my grocery store. Warm cookie and macrame cozy grandma disappears; coldly shrewd and implacable ancient evil takes her place. But I manage to get myself out of their way without actually having to, you know, electrocute anyone. Sheesh.

Spotlight Pennsylvania: A man shooting at a mouse in his home shot his girlfriend instead.

One more time: A man shooting at a mouse...in his home...shot his girlfriend instead.

So. His first instinct wasn't to buy some traps, or get a fucking cat, but to take out his .22 and start shooting. As far as I'm concerned, she got what she deserved by being so stupid as to hang around someone so improbably stupid. Too bad the mouse didn't skitter across his forehead when he was shooting. We would've owed him and all mousekind a great debt by helping eradicate this contamination of the human genepool.

Spotlight Massachussesss: Boston is aswarm with historical places. The city is aware of its history and that history's greater relationship to the national imagination. Boston and environs have pioneered living responsibly within important historical spaces in the evolving cityscape. And most importantly, Boston has mastered marketing history to make money from tourists. So it was just true to form that after a historic win in a historic game, the Land of Bean and Cod had itself a good, olde tyme riot.

Lots of property damage, your basic flipped and burned cars, busted windows aplenty. Not a few busted noses. And one death: an undergraduate killed by a policeman firing a munition marketed as "non-lethal". Since the victim is non-alive, and will ever remain so, I urge Boston PD to reconsider non-lethal ammunition's place in the force and treat it henceforward as lethal. Because it quite obviously can be.

Meanwhile, at the University of Massachuessesss-Amherst, local police had their own riots to contend with. There were at least 29 arrests immediately following the game, relating primarily to destruction of property, assault, and....oh yes, hurling beer cans of flaming liquid at cops. Several thousand dollars will be spent to repair windows and replace furniture.

The leaders of tomorrow. Today.

Ministry safety tip: Kids, rioting can be a blast. You can break stuff and steal things, maybe even bust a head or two, all in good fun. You even get plausible deniability to the cops by being a nameless face in a crowd. For precisely the same reason, you get to sound like a big man because you can say you were wherever you need to say you were to sound interesting to chicks. And best of all, you don't even have to be a malefactor- just being there is enough to claim anything for any audience. But when you see a line of riot police with shields, faceplates, and mounted cavalry on the march, go home. Come down off the telephone pole and go the hell home.

Q: How many George Bushes does it take to change a lightbulb?

A: There's nothing wrong with the lightbulb, and the- and the American people agree with me on that. Why would it need changing?

Q: How many John Kerreys does it take to change a lightbulb?

A: Five. Three! Three. Five. Vietnam?

Q: How many Bush diehards does it take to change a lightbulb?

A: You heard the man. Why do you hate our freedom?

Q: How many Kerry diehards does it take to change a lightbulb?

A: Halliburton.

Plagiarizing senator Joe Biden, (D-Deleware) today said that President Bush is "brain dead." While discussing prescription drug policy quite often sets my blood to boiling, and I have nearly come to blows with those who disagree with my estimate of the damage that socialist health care policy is causing to working class Americans; I have rarely had cause to call my opponents brain dead. I would likely be even more careful about casting such aspersions had I, like the good senator, a long history of passing the ideas of others off as my own.

spotlight Ohio: Woman trades naked pix of young daughter for NFL tickets. (And a jersey. Don't forget the jersey!). Link goes to partial transcript of IM conversation. I especially love this part here:

Lustyliss429: how much can i trust u...
Buckin4God2: very
Lustylis429: are you sure
Buckin4God2: can you send it please
Buckin4God2: yes
Buckin4God2: can u send it
Lustylis429: ur not an undercover cop r u ... lol
Buckin4God2: no

Well, that settles that! It's on the internet... what's not to trust? On the other hand, the parts where mom says how cute her 4-year old daughter thinks Buckin4God2 is are sick and disgusting and if there's a hell anywhere she's gonna.... oh, right. She already lives in Toledo.

spotlight Baltimore: Last night during the Ravens - Saints game of American Football, the candid microphones captured Raven Ray Lewis-- who didn't kill two people, advising teammate Jamal Lewis-- who is about to plead guilty for conspiracy to traffic cocaine and some other skeezy drug stuff-- how best to deal with the pressure of being on trial for something horrible. The big difference is that Ray L. didn't kill two guys, and Jamal L. is a dirtbag who definitely did have a bunch of cocaine to sell. But whatever. This NFL-par behavior is not really the "exemplary human" part. The "exemplary human behavior" has been demonstrated by the NFL itself, who have seen fit to augment Lewis' expected jail time with a draconian punishment of its own-- a 2 to 4 game suspension. Is that the going price for a felony these days in football? Crime does pay!!!

Everyone knows that the new DVD version of the original Star Wars Trilogy will be released this coming Tuesday. Like all the other hapless suckers, I have already reserved a copy. However, there has been some impressive investigative reporting digging into the changes that Lucas has made to the films for the new edition. Here are some screenshots of a few of those changes:

We all figured that Lucas would take advantage of advances in CGI to clan up some of the special effects from the original films. Some of the shots of monsters and creatures were especially bothersome. Here are a couple impressive updates:

Some of the more controversial changes involve beloved characters. Lucas shows some questionable judgment in replacing them with CGI "improvements":

The change that convinced me that Lucas is smoking the crack, though, is this alteration to the battle scene on the ice moon of Hoth:

If you haven't already ordered your copy, better start planning to stake out a place in line at Best Buy. These babies are gonna go fast.

Watch and laugh.

Courtesy of Spoons

Via Cold Fury, this gem from an unlikely source - Something Awful:

Anti-Republican protestors - I cringe whenever hearing that the Republicans are planning some upcoming meeting, convention, or fundraiser to earn more money for the "Buy Jesus Christ a New Diamond Beard Foundation," not because I hate Republicans, but because I hate anti-Republican protestors even more. These loudmouthed, braindead raving cliches make me want to start voting Republican just to spite them, but naturally I avoid doing so because that would only ensure four more years of unwashed horse-like creatures parading down busy intersections while waving "BU$H IS EVIL" signs they drew with their parents' Magic Markers. The general idea here seems to be that if you are too fucking stupid to intelligently explain your position on a few political issues because you often break down into tears when losing arguments to eight-year olds regarding the quality of Willie Wonkie candy in the Hy-Vee parking lot, you can compensate for your lack of debate skills by being as loud and belligerent as possible. I mean, hell, that tactic works all the time, doesn't it? Do you know how many women have been converted to the ranks of Christianity thanks to the ceaseless efforts of the anti-abortion lobby and their rock-solid tactic of "standing outside abortion clinics in the middle of the rain and shrieking like the Pod People from 'Invasion of the Body Snatchers' whenever they spot a pregnant woman walking within a 20-mile radius of the clinic? I'm guessing somewhere between nine and ten hundred million billion thousand. Maybe even more if you count fat women as two people each. The insane liberals, despite how much they claim to loathe insane conservatives, seem to have absolutely no qualms with adopting their awesome policy of forming large groups waving crudely misspelled signs, stomping around public places to disrupt the daily routines of normal non-insane folks, and screaming at everybody they see with the ultimate goal of annoying them into submitting to their wills. If people have to choose between George Bush and a crowd of furious bicyclists whose biggest claim to fame is that one of their blogs was mentioned in passing by Al Franken on that one AM radio station nobody turns on because it's about as exciting as listening to NPR at 50% speed, they'll either choose George Bush or they'll choose to look away when the riot police start caving in skulls with their nightclubs.

 

Wow! Suddenly I hate George Bush and think America is just like Nazi Germany, all thanks to a fucking posterboard sign held by some fat unemployed shithead! The power of advertising in action!

Here's a newsflash you guys and gals who believe George Bush is going to physically break into your bathroom and steal the awesome weed you have hidden in that prescription gout medication bottle next to the Drano: most people might actually listen to you if you present your facts clearly and act confident enough in what you believe in to know that these facts will speak for themselves. Most people will NOT listen to you if you're stomping around and blocking traffic while shouting tremendously catchy slogans like "two, four, six, eight, George Bush is a fucking liar and is Hitler and Satan and fuck you George Bush you cocksucking father of whores." Whenever chucklefucks like you begin blocking up traffic and causing me to be delayed, my first two priorities instantly switch to running you down with my car and voting Republican across the boards, not necessarily in that order.

Kerry got a major political endorsement today, check it out. Hat tip, Common Sense and Wonder.

In light of my earlier post, this insightful article seemed worthy of mention.

Thanks to loyal minion #0004, Ming-Syu, for this glimpse of a cuckolded future.

This is from a couple days ago, but I always enjoy a good Michael Moore bitchslap. Better than average banner image, as an added bonus.

My favorite aunt and my mom went to see the film last weekend. My dear mother is liberal, and my aunt very liberal. Neither were terribly impressed with the quality of the reasoning in this little bit of black propaganda. Yet fatso is staring at me from the cover of two major magazines in the supermarket. I should be so lucky.

From his (former) campaign site...here's what Jack Ryan has to say about "family breakdowns":

I believe that marriage can only be defined as that union between one man and one woman. I am opposed to same-sex marriages, civil unions, and registries.

I believe that we are all equal before God and should be before the law. Homosexuals deserve the same constitutional protections, safeguards, and human dignity as every American, but they should not be entitled to special rights based on their sexual behavior.

The breakdown of the family over the past 35 years is one of the root causes of some of our society’s most intractable social problems-criminal activity, illegitimacy, and the cyclical nature of poverty.

As an elected leader, my interest will be in promoting laws and educating people about the fundamental importance of the traditional family unit as the nucleus of our society.

In the wake of the recent Massachusetts State Supreme Court ruling that has spawned similar lawsuits in other states, it seems likely that defending traditional marriage and codifying that defense will be required at the federal level. As such, as a United States Senator, I would support legislation such as Senator Bill Frist’s Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA), provided the language remains clear in the defining of traditional marriage and protecting the traditional family unit.

I can't quite remember where it is in the Bible, but there's gotta be some traditional justification in there somewhere for asking your wife to have sex in club.

Schadenfreude, oh schadenfreude.

Christopher Hitchens flays, dices, and juliennes Michael Moore's new propaganda flick. In related news, the New York Times Review of Books crucifies Bill Clinton's tell little memoir.

If you click here you will see a nude photo of former Treasury Secretary Robert Reich holding a basket containing leaf lettuce and an artfully placed baguette.

Consider this fair warning.

Thanks ever so much to Jeff of Protein Wisdom for making my day complete.

I like to make fun of Detroit. As an Ohioan from outside Akron with a soft spot for Pittsburgh, part of it is a friendly rust-belt rivalry. Hey, Motor City! Look at us! Our economies aren't tanking! Neener, neener, neener!

But the rest of it is that Detroit is the armpit of America, and they can't even be relaxed about it. Jimmy Kimmel's show has been pulled off the air in the Detroit area (not that anybody would notice) because during halftime at at Lakers-Pistons playoffs game, he said "They're going to burn the city of Detroit down if the Pistons win, and it's not worth it."

Why is everyone so damn sensitive? I'd tell Detroit to buy a helmet, but I think it might be too late. Brain damage is permanent.

Tacitus has this story down so I won't add anything. The short version is this; some DoD lawyers wrote up a brief arguing that the President can do anything he wants, including order torture and indemnify subordinates from swinging if caught allowing torture. One part reads, "In order to respect the president's inherent constitutional authority to manage a military campaign ... (the prohibition against torture) must be construed as inapplicable to interrogations undertaken pursuant to his commander-in chief authority." In other words, if we aren't getting good information playing by the rules, well... the President can say there are no rules!

The NY Times has more.

The memo, prepared for Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, also said that any executive branch officials, including those in the military, could be immune from domestic and international prohibitions against torture for a variety of reasons.

"One reason, the lawyers said, would be if military personnel believed that they were acting on orders from superiors "except where the conduct goes so far as to be patently unlawful. "[my emphasis]

Didn't work sixty years ago. Won't work now. But rest easy! "'The April document was about interrogation techniques and procedures,' said Lawrence Di Rita, the Pentagon's chief spokesman. 'It was not a legal analysis.'"

"Not a legal analysis," my shiny metal ass.

I'm not saying the President has sanctioned torture. But some pointyheaded wonks somewhere in the Pentagon were told to start with the assumption that "authority to set aside the laws is 'inherent in the president'" and work backward from there.

Take it tacitus:

Two possibilities present themselves: either the finest legal minds in the Department of Defense are terrible scholars (hardly an impossibility), or they were presented with a conclusion and told to construct reasoning from which it derives. My guess is the latter. You don't typically see this sort of thing emanating from the American legal profession absent strong compulsion to produce it..

Yeesh.