There's ordinary gall, and there's symbolized by Barney the fucking Dinosaur gall.
Does anyone in the Ministry circle care about the shocking, *shocking* revelation that the comically bemuscled 45-year-olds who were breaking records were hormone junkies?
If so, why?
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This happened to one of my friends. You have to read it in her words, though, to really get the full gist of it.
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Here we see the secret heart of environmentalism.
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A threesome of former NJ cops were complaining that the recent Denzel Washington film American Gangster twisted history so that it appeared in the movie that all of their work in busting Frank Lucas was done by Assistant Prosecutor Richie Roberts. Roberts seems apologetic. But I don't know, or really care, which one of these four did the work of busting Lucas - or if it was the NY cops, FBI or Martians.
What amused me was the comment from the criminal himself:
Lucas, who spent time on the New York movie set last year, said his conviction came not from information gathered in the 1975 raid, but from investigations that followed it.
"I'm not going to credit them with getting me," said Lucas, who became an informant under Roberts' prodding.
"Those three cops couldn't catch a cold."
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I can only assume that because she's now a grandmother, she must need money to buy belly shirts and dance lessons for the little ones.
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For those of you who missed it today, Harry Potter scribe J.K. Rowling outed main character and dead guy Albus Dumbledore, saying "she always thought Dumbledore was gay."
Excuse me, what?
I don't particularly care that he is (well, okay, was - he's kicked the bucket) gay. What bugs me is that she wasn't willing to bring it up in a series that deals with ALL KINDS of adult themes like, um, murder, torture, evil, the inability of governments to effectively control their populace, abuse, etc. My question to Ms. Rowling is this: Why would you bring this up now after you've already written the books and made your zillions of dollars? It does NOTHING to improve (or detract) from the series. Unless her first draft of book 7 was written significantly differently with a working title of, say, Harry Potter and the Unsheathed Wand of Albus Dumbledore, there is no reason she couldn't have actually touched upon (no pun intended - well, hardly any) Dumbledore's sexuality WITHIN the pages of the books. I wonder how many teens dealing with their own sexuality might have felt more comfortable reading about a main character who went through similar trials. I mean, she's J.K.-fucking-Rowling. She outsells the Bible! Any editor who dares to question her will probably have to get his or her resume in order quickly. She could have put this little nugget INTO her book instead of waiting until after everything's done to out the character.
Oh, but wait - the book-buying public wouldn't accept that! A gay character? In today's modern world? *gasp* The scandal!
Never mind the fact that anyone narrow-minded enough to be unable to deal with a homosexual literary character probably wouldn't be able to deal with all the "evil magic" in the series in the first place.
Shame on you, J.K. Rowling, for being a coward.
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There is no form of life lower than the barracks thief.
Doesn't matter what it's for, how much money it was, or what the stolen item was; stealing from comrades who trust you with their lives is beyond the pale. If you are a barracks thief, you can only pray to someday be preferable company to an intestinal fluke. After, one would hope, you got the beatdown you richly deserved.
At least this one got nailed.
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What the crying hell is wrong with England?
A pregnant woman has been told that her baby will be taken from her at birth because she is deemed capable of “emotional abuse”, even though psychiatrists treating her say there is no evidence to suggest that she will harm her child in any way.
Social services’ recommendation that the baby should be taken from Fran Lyon, a 22-year-old charity worker who has five A-levels and a degree in neuroscience, was based in part on a letter from a paediatrician she has never met.
Hexham children’s services, part of Northumberland County Council, said the decision had been made because Miss Lyon was likely to suffer from Munchausen’s Syndrome by proxy, a condition unproven by science in which a mother will make up an illness in her child, or harm it, to draw attention to herself.
Under the plan, a doctor will hand the newborn to a social worker, provided there are no medical complications. Social services’ request for an emergency protection order - these are usually granted - will be heard in secret in the family court at Hexham magistrates on the same day.
From then on, anyone discussing the case, including Miss Lyon, will be deemed to be in contempt of the court.
And we’re all worried about al Qaeda. How droll.
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The New York Times has a remarkable story this week about a photo album that came out of Auschwitz, with an accompanying slideshow that's incredibly arresting. You see, rather than the usual deeply upsetting images of skeletonesque inmates suffering untold miseries, they're pictures of their captors and executioners at rest and play, frolicking, hanging out, mugging for the camera, generally behaving like any people taking a break from the rigors of a job well done would. Except that the same day the pictures were taken, these well-rested and attractive people committed incredibly depraved acts against other humans. In these images, even Dr. Joseph Mengele seems like a shrimpy nebbish, with barely a hint of the maggots roiling behind his smiling eyes.
There's one woman in the pictures, who appears a few times. She's clearly a camp administrator of some kind, and she's young, fresh, and pretty. She's clearly vivacious and strong-willed; it's easy to be attracted to this face from more than sixty years ago and imagine a friendship or a friendly beer. And then I realize that behind that smile and those pretty eyes is a mind completely and totally at ease with sorting families into keepers and corpses every single day, and I want to puke myself dry.
Thank the deity of your choice that such an artifact exists, and is in the hands of the National Holocaust Museum. For the danger, as we all know intellectually but tend to forget in our guts, is not from overt acts of monstrousness, but in the workaday -- yes -- banality of evil.
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But it doesn’t. From a WSJ email, dispatched this evening to my inbox, this story:
NEWS ALERT
from The Wall Street JournalSept. 17, 2007
William Lerach is set to plead guilty to one count of conspiracy in the criminal case involving the noted securities lawyer’s former firm, now called Milberg Weiss LLP. The plea agreement, which calls for a one to two year prison term, could be announced as soon as Tuesday.
I’m all for protecting the common man, the common investor, and I’m nothing if not both of those things. However, while Milberg Weiss (...Bershad Hynes & Lerach) LLP has always claimed that their seldom-seemly, and often seedy, pursuit of class action lawsuits, against any company whose stock price took a noteworthy downturn, was for the public good, I’ve never been able to agree.
Not in my stance as a champion of the unfettered right of public companies to run roughshod over their investors, either. Because I have no such stance. Instead, my dim view of him and all who practice his kind of law is justified by standard tactics he and his partners (current and former) have used in pursuit of specious claims. Think “greenmail”, ala Carl Icahn and Boone Pickens in the 1980s - make life tough enough for someone, even someone who’s got no basis for having to defend their actions, and they’ll pay you to go away.
As referred to in an Los Angeles Business Journal article of Sep 3, 2007, Lerach is an “economic terrorist”, and I don’t think that’s too tough a characterization of him. As the article says:
Lerach, of course, did not invent but did perfect the securities class action lawsuit. In that scheme, most any company that sustained a stock drop, even if it had nothing to do with anything of consequence, often found itself the recipient of allegations of fraud in a Lerach-engineered lawsuit. Likewise, companies that announced most anything negative could get the same kind of lawsuit – often within hours of the announcement.
Lerach then pounded the company, using the discovery process to find some little scrap somewhere in some underling’s file drawer that “proved” the company knew that bad news could develop.
In other words, this guy, and all lawyers like him, specialized in swooping in any time there was even a flimsy pretext for doing so. I mean, there’s no way a stock could drop without malfeasance and lying on the part of management, right?
Well, no - that’s wrong. But Lerach, et al, after having put their lawsuit’s stake in the ground, would then embark on forced discovery at their target companies, essentially fishing around for a reason to justify their lawsuit.
And one doesn’t have to be a big-business apologist to find that sort of thing to be outside the bounds of fair and reasonable play.
Over the years, I’ve been the recipient of at least 50 securities class action solicitations. I received one just the other day, ”In re CARDINAL HEALTH, INC. SECURITIES LITIGATION“. And while I almost never take the time to participate in these paper chases, I’ve always paid particular attention to any such action which has either “Lerach Coughlin Stoia Geller Rudman & Robbins LLP” or any of the many versions of “Milberg Weiss +/-Bershad +/-Hynes +/-Lerach LLP” listed as the attorneys looking out for my “best interests”.
Because they don’t, they haven’t, and investors are simply a raw material for them and their business process. And I throw their solicitations away as soon as possible, to avoid stinking the house up.
His former partner Bershad has already pled, and if the news report is correct, Lerach’s getting ready to do the same. It’s not the Christian thing to say, but I’m not much of a Christian anyway, so I’ll hope that Milberg, Weiss, and all the rest be following them to the pokey soon after.
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Thank Goodness that Patton put up that li'l thing about Romanian IRS scammers, because I was about to go nucular in an attempt to spark some posting around here.
Namely, I was going to challenge my fellow ministers to kick this off the front page as quickly as humanly possible:
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In my time, I've seen examples of just about every scam possible via the Internet. It takes a lot any more to even get my attention as I'm one-button flushing my spam folders.
However, when someone goes above and beyond the call of scum-baggish presumption in reader/recipient stupidity, I think it deserves to be highlighted. I'm a "giver" that way.
Below, in its exact form, including the badly mangled HTML formatting, but minus the actual link to the scamster's site, the silliest and least plausible piece of spam I think I've received in at least a couple days:
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After the last annual calculations of your fiscal activity we have determined that you are eligible to receive a tax refund of $93.60.
Please submit the tax refund request and allow us 6-9 days in order to process it. A refund can be delayed for a variety of reasons. For example submitting invalid records or applying after the deadline. To access your tax refund online, please click here Regards, Internal Revenue Service |
|||
| © Copyright 2007, Internal Revenue Service U.S.A. All rights reserved.. |
Of course, I almost fell for it, because:
It occurs to me that if we didn't have Russian, Romanian, and Slobovian hackers, we'd have to invent them, for our own amusement.
[wik] It further occurs to me that, in order to avoid appearing churlish, I should point out that if someone wants my $93.60 refund, let me know, and I'll pass along the link.
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...I can get away with fakeblogging. Like this:
I can't figure out how this entry was tagged in today's WSJ Best of the Web Today as one of the Bottom Stories of the Day:
"Marshalltown Police: Woman Stole Toilet Paper From Courthouse; Police Chief Says Butts Caught in Act"
Oh, wait - never mind, I get it. Subtle, that Taranto. Very subtle.
Please also note, B, that this entry is very conservative in its use of category tags, so there's that.
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Via CNN: Congressman indicted in global corruption case
Story Highlights
- William Jefferson faces 16 charges of bribery, obstruction, racketeering
- Louisiana Democrat's schemes reached across Atlantic, prosecutors say
- Investigators found $90,000 in Jefferson's home freezer
- Search of Capitol Hill office prompted constitutional questions
I hope that the long time between the refrigerator raid and the indictment helped the Feds guarantee this smug, smarmy, thieving fuck does hard time for the rest of his life.
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Patton has accused me of being overly concerned about wasting a scarce natural resource. The category tag. In this, of course, he is completely wrong. Naturally, I could have argued that over-categorizing a post dilutes the utility of tags. And I would have been right. But that wasn't the point. I was attacking him on aesthetic grounds, and just to stick a stick in his eye.
Just to prove that I am not some sort of homo-tree-hugging-enviro-commie, this post, which really is about everything, is tagged with every category we have. And, when I have a free moment, I'll add some new categories, and add them to this post.
So there.
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What do these two suits have in common?
"Couple sue Wal-Mart over slip in vomit"
(AP/Nashville Tennessean)
and
"ACLU: Boeing offshoot helped CIA"
(AP/Houston Chronicle) Simple:
Only one of them, however, appears to have been categorized by the Associated Press as an "Odd Story". So let's look at that one first:
Couple sue Wal-Mart over slip in vomit DAVENPORT, Iowa (AP) -- A woman's fall in a puddle of vomit has resulted in a lawsuit against Wal-Mart. June Medema, slipped in the vomit at a Davenport Wal-Mart on June 13, 2005, according to the lawsuit, filed by Medema and her husband, James, in Scott County District Court earlier this month.
Medema claims that she was seriously injured in the fall.
The lawsuit alleges that Wal-Mart's negligence led to Medema's fall, but it does not specifically say how the store was negligent.
John Simley, a Wal-Mart spokesman, decline comment saying he hadn't seen the lawsuit.
The lawsuit claims that Medema suffered serious neck and upper back injuries in the fall and has undergone several surgeries and is unable to work.
It's a mercifully short story, so it's included here in its entirety. All you need to know is in that third paragraph - "...but it does not specifically say how the store was negligent." In order to prove negligence, of course, the Medemas will have to prove that Wal-Mart knew the vomit was puddled on the floor. Which will be rather difficult - if they didn't see it, why should Wal-Mart have done so?
As to the second story, I can completely understand the ACLU going after a Boeing subsidiary - They can't sue the US government or the CIA on a classified matter, so they simply picked someone else in the transaction chain to sue.
NEW YORK — A Boeing Co. subsidiary that may have provided secret CIA flight services was sued Wednesday by the American Civil Liberties Union on behalf of three terrorism suspects who claim they were tortured by the U.S. government. The lawsuit charges that flight services provided by Jeppesen Dataplan Inc. enabled the clandestine transportation of the suspects to secret overseas locations, where they were tortured and subjected to other "forms of cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment."
The ACLU, of course, has been known to provide valuable legal services. They've also been known to tilt at windmills in pursuit of an agenda that tends to be decidedly leftist. Not "liberal" - leftist. As I said, I can understand their grasping at straws to find someone to sue, because money-grubbers have to go where the money is, even if they expect to get no money out of the matter.
I just can't understand why they think their suit will survive a summary judgment request. Jeppesen Dataplan didn't man the flight, didn't own the plane, and didn't load or unload alleged passengers from the alleged extraordinary alleged rendition alleged mission. Jeppesen provides flight planning services. Logistics.
Undaunted by this bit of reality, the ACLU soldiers on:
The ACLU said the company "either knew or reasonably should have known" that they were facilitating the torture of terrorism suspects by providing flight services for the CIA.
That's one of the ten most absurd things I've read in the last 48 hours. Having been on flights which used the services of flight planning companies like Jeppesen, and having occasionally been with the pilot when he was planning the flight, I'm comfortable asserting that in no case did a flight services vendor demand to know, let alone show even the slightest interest in, what the purpose of the flight was. Which is just as well - it would have been none of their business, and they'd have been told as much.
It occurs to me that there are two other things these two suits have in common - they're both weakly disguised fundraising attempts, and neither one will be successful at anything other than garnering publicity for its plaintiff.
Also posted at issuesblog.com
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Old story - ancient, in fact. Didn't this come out last week some time? The week before? Whatever.
What makes it new again, at least for me, is the commentary in today's hometown Houston Chronicle by the Miami Herald's Leonard Pitts, Jr.:
Somewhere, the gods are amused.
Sharpton is not. He has pronounced himself torn by conflicting emotion: humiliation, anger, pride and, above all, shock.
The reaction from Thurmond's family, meanwhile, has been characterized by that curious shrug of shoulders, that ambivalence and eagerness to change the subject, one often finds in white people when slavery gets personal.
"I don't feel one way or the other," Thurmond's 74-year-old niece, Doris Strom Costner, told the Washington Post.
"I have no comment," Paul Thurmond, the senator's youngest son, told the New York Daily News.
Somewhere, all the other the race-baiters like Al "Tawana Brawley" Sharpton are also amused.
Anyway, Pitts seems surprised to find that Thurmond's descendants don't feel personally responsible, or even embarrassed, by the actions of people whose lives predate their own by 100 years or more. Imagine that! What the hell's wrong with those people?
Sharpton feels humiliation (as though Thurmond had owned him?), anger (for what, I don't know), pride, and shock. Those last two, I can understand - it's not often that a demagogue of his stature is handed an issue, on a silver platter, that his mouth-breathing fellow travelers in the "professional outrage for shake-downs, fun, and profit" community, if nobody else, can take seriously and run with. So he's equally shocked and proud.
Normally, you see, such agitators have to incite or invent their own, well, agita.
Pitts continues:
Of course, by this point, maybe he has stopped listening. Maybe you have, too. Mention of that 350 years tends to have that effect.Hence the ambivalence — "nervous chuckles," reported the Orlando Sentinel of a visit to Thurmond's hometown — that greeted last week's news in some quarters. Small wonder. It removed the shield of abstract. It put a face on the thing. And the danger is that if we can imagine that face, we can imagine others.
Condoleezza Rice purchased as breeding stock.
Oprah Winfrey raped on a nightly basis.
Will Smith, his back split open by a whip.
Sen. Barack Obama living with the same rights under the law, the same expectation of dignity, as a horse or a chair.
We spend a lot of time running from this. But we never escape.
Lost on Pitts is the utter absurdity, in today's world or any world that's existed in the past 50 years, for ANY of the things he lists as bogeymen to actually occur. So we're "running from" putative, but completely imaginary, future shit that would never, ever occur anywhere but in the fevered brains of those who can't bear to see the racial divide bridged.
And if Pitts, Sharpton, Jesse Jackson, and the myriad others who make all or part of their livings being the agents for the perpetually aggrieved have their way, damned straight, we'll never escape.
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Newsflash: Tim Hardaway Wants Only Straight Men to See His Penis
In case you've missed it, there is a minor brouhaha due to Tim Hardaway's comments yesterday:
"You know, I hate gay people, so I let it be known. I don't like gay people and I don't like to be around gay people. I am homophobic. I don't like it. It shouldn't be in the world or in the United States.''
This chain of events was triggered by a new book by John Amaechi, a former NBA center, including his disclosure that he is gay. Big whoop. So no, he's not the bad guy here. Dan LeBatard, the Florida ESPN radio host who provided Hardaway with the shovel he used to dig this hole, is also exempt from condemnation, due to the fact he just asked a simple question about current events, one of which was Amaechi's disclosure (audio available via the Deadspin link above). Totally above board, in my opinion.
With the exception of the San Francisco press (just an AP story, really), I've not seen much coverage of the story, and even then, it seems relegated to the sports section. ESPN radio, however, has seemingly been 50% devoted to Hardaway's gaffe ever since last evening.
Much of that ESPN radio commentary I've heard seems to indicate that people think Hardaway's wrong for feeling the way he does. I disagree - while his feelings on the matter are inflammatory and unfortunate, they're his feelings, not those of the radio callers (notorious retards, the lot of them), and he's entitled to them, however odious.
They'd have been far less odious if he'd simply said he was uncomfortable with the prospect of gay teammates. If I gave a shit about Tim Hardaway (I don't), I'd certainly say that he should have learned to exercise the governor on his cake-hole, since not every thought that runs across one's brainpan needs to be aired, on the radio or otherwise.
A bit late for that admonition, I'm afraid.
Discomfort at being put on the spot (tough crap, Tim - you're a big-time former ath-a-lete, and LeBatard was completely fair) might have caused him to amplify his rhetoric, resulting in the inflammation of sports-talk-radio listeners' sensibilities.
Having written an over-the-top headline or two myself, I should really give the Deadspin blog a bit of slack, but their article's title misses the point: Tim Hardaway is entitled to some opinion, if not some control, of who should see his penis. I guess so, anyway, though I've never really given it a lot of thought. And there are a lot of polite ways to make such a statement. Claiming to hate an entire group of people you've never met based on something you find distasteful but which they've not done to you, around you, or to anyone you know, is prima facie evidence of stupidity. Such extreme thinking has never been acceptable, but while it has been accepted the past, it's not now, and even Hardaway should have known this.
Have we, as a society, forgotten how to apologize? Tim Hardaway is way beyond any ability to retract his statement - it was pretty unequivocal. He did have the option to say something like "What a stupid I am!" (channelling Roberto DiVicenzo), and to apologize not for his views, but for his intemperance at expressing them in a public forum where people would then point at him and laugh. What did he say, instead? An attempt at the classic misdirection play:
Hardaway issued a statement Wednesday night to Local 10 saying: "There are more important things to worry about than my comments. We should be more concerned about President (George) Bush and all the people dying in Iraq."
Niiice. Real nice. That should calm things right down, moron. I'd almost prefer that he take the same approach all the other glitterati have after recent similar missteps. He could just check himself into the Betty Ford Clinic, under the delusion that they can cure "stupid" there.
[wik] Perhaps Amaechi's revelation has been improperly analyzed?
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To the little shit who stole my credit card number:
You should have gone for the big bucks while you could, you unimaginative mouthbreather. $11.99 to Paypal? $100 to DirectTV? One... fercryin... dollar to YahooWallet? Skype?!? Too bad I check my balances every couple days, and here you thought you'd nickel and dime me along to finance your crabbed little scriptkiddie lifestyle. You Skype-using unclefucker. Chances are slim that our paths will ever cross, but if they do, you better pray it's a day on which I'm suffering an excess of mercy.
That is all.
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No less august an institution than the Smithsonian has recklessly and without evidence declared me, and by extension the entire ministry, to be SPAM LIKE CONTENT. This is, apparently, a total and permanent judgment, if I am interpreting their missive correctly:
Technical details of permanent failure:
PERM_FAILURE: SMTP Error (state 12): 550 Error: SPAM LIKE CONTENT
Needless to say, I disagree violently with this assessment. Hell, I never send an email to more than five recipients. And it's never about penis enlargement. Okay, very rarely about penis enlargement. But never about Viagra. Even I have standards. Low standards, to be sure. But they are standards.
I think I'll have to write a letter.
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