April 30, 2003
Scientology Idiots Harassing Search Engines
This article on ScientologyWatch details the latest orgy of idiocy, a plan to flood search engines with the typical nearly identical complaints from dimwit cultists. The purpose is to get them to remove links critical of Scientology from search results on the basis that they are "hate sites."
Since this argument does not even work with actual hate sites, it is unlikely to meet with much success, but it certainly speaks to the the cult's continued antipathy to freedom of speech and democratic values.
Rumsfeld Caught Dealing With Enemies Again
Fortune.com - Magazine - Rummy's North Korea Connection
Richard Behar, perhaps better-known to some readers for his famous Time magazine article "Scientology: The Thriving Cult of Greed and Power," has outed Donald Rumsfeld as having been on the board of directors of a company which received a $200 million contract to deliver two light-water nuclear reactors to Pyongyang as part of a deal essentially bribing the North Koreans to stop their nuclear weapons program.
Considering that Rummy was also directly involved with selling chemical weapons components to Iraq, one wonders why this guy is a Defense Secretary. The only real experience he has with national security is endangering it with collossally stupid dealings with our enemies.
Freedom Dubya Style
Today, our troops gave Iraqis a taste of "freedom" Dubya style, by shooting 13 protesters dead.
No further comment necessary.
April 28, 2003
Little Girl Fights Python to Save Kitten
[the girlie blog archives] april 2003 has a headline too adorable to skip. How can you beat a story with a little girl, a python and a kitten.
Additionally, I was in desperate need for something to scroll that disturbing picture of Richard Perle off the front page (scroll down to see what I mean) and test my ongoing problems with the calendar in the third column. (If you look over and it isn't there or is only partly there, that's what I'm talking about.)
April 27, 2003
Shades of Clinton
Did The Republican Party Take Chinese Money? @ OliverWillis.Com
If this is true, it would turn out to be an astounding bit of hypocrisy, considering the right-wing howls of outrage when Clinton was accused of doing the same. Here's a typical example of those howls of outrage.
Perle Slips His Leash Again
This nasty image has been uploaded mainly to test the thumbnail feature of MovableType, and also to illustrate the sheer malevolence and Strangelovian weirdness that radiates from this bizarre face. Come to think of it, I've decided to update it again, partly to test putting text between images without tables and partly because as the picture to the right shows, he actually does look like a white trash version of Dr. Strangelove, even to the point of having some of his gestures. I am tempted to photoshop that black glove onto Perle. His crazed rhetoric also isn't too far from Strangelove's, either.
This story from The Scotsman more or less speaks for itself. America couldn't have a worse ambassador than this blustering buffoon. (Except, I suppose, for Dubya himself.)
Canadian Newspaper Scoops CIA
The Toronto Star reports finding documents linking Bin Laden and Iraq.
Adding a touch of bitter piquancy to what must be otherwise a sweet treat for the Bush Administration, the Canadian paper found it in documents passed over carelessly by the CIA, as reported yesterday in the same newspaper, but politely left out of today's.
The gist of the document remains the same: an envoy of Osama bin Laden spent 16 days as a guest of the government of Iraq in March of 1998, five months prior to the two bomb attacks on African embassies which made bin Laden a wanted man. Whether the contacts led to anything remains to be seen, but it is difficult to imagine entirely innocent contacts with Osama bin Laden.
April 26, 2003
Dark Passage
Dark Passage is a site devoted to exploration of abandoned buildings or structures, with a particular focus on insane asylums. One of my favorites is this rail tunnel in Providence, Rhode Island, which passes directly under the (former) funeral parlor in which H. P. Lovecraft's funeral services transpired.
Media Resorts to Cannibalism After Ratings Crash
Apparently set off by Ted Turner's graceless and ham-handed description of Rupert Murdoch as a "warmonger," media outlets across the world are now bemoaning the state of each other's pathetic "news" coverage during the war in Iraq.
While the sentiment concerning Murdoch may be valid, Turner denouncing Murdoch is as morally uplifting as Stalinists denouncing Nazis. CNN raked in the bucks with similarly fake war coverage from their "embedded" "journalists," (about whom and their counterparts the "unilaterals" who are otherwise known as "real journalists" see many of the entries on the blog of Kady O'Malley).
This set off a minor epidemic of similar outbursts from other media outlets. The BBC has attacked American television and Ashleigh Banfield of NBC has stated the media "filtered realities."
This would be rather more edifying if it were the penitential sackcloth and ashes wailing it should be, as every major Western media outlet (even to some extent the BBC) failed to do their jobs of reporting the truth during the entirety of the war, presenting instead jingoistic power fantasies to stoke the war machine. About the only major American TV journalist with nothing to apologize for is Peter Arnett, and come to think of it, he's from New Zealand. And fired. An honest journalist being so rare, though, he is unlikely ever in his life to have trouble finding employment.
Despite the near-universal failure of the news media to act as anything but mindless cheerleaders and stoke the fires of fascism, every media outlet seems to have nothing but harsh words for every other media outlet but themselves. I don't want to hear mutual recriminations and accusations. The only thing that could make this failure any less galling is even one heartfelt apology.
I don't expect one, though.
Anonymous Blogging
invisiblog.com (beta) - anonymous weblog publishing seems to offer a cryptographically secure and pseudonymous means of publishing information to the web, which has the added advantage of submission to sites such as weblogs.com and blo.gs, as well as the Google exposure of any other blog.
This could be the killer app of remailers. This simple, step-by-step instruction manual explains the technology, although if you're actually planning on using it, you might want to use a secure proxy to visit the site.
April 25, 2003
A Proud McCarthyite Grunts His Stuff
This site, proudly entitled Celiberal - The Blacklist, without a trace of irony describes itself as a list of celebrities to boycott.
I think it could just as easily be a list of celebrities to support, and the only idiot here is the author. I'm surprised he didn't have a portrait of McCarthy at the top.
April 24, 2003
No Comment
SANTORUM: [. . .] That's not to pick on homosexuality. It's not, you know, man on child, man on dog, or whatever the case may be. It is one thing. And when you destroy that you have a dramatic impact on the quality --
AP: I'm sorry, I didn't think I was going to talk about "man on dog" with a United States senator, it's sort of freaking me out.
April 23, 2003
Psycho Prosecutor Tries to Prosecute Breast-Feeding Picture as Kiddy Porn
Proving again that a grand jury will indict a ham sandwich, the Dallas Observer reports this bizarre story about a couple from Peru indicted for "sexual performance on a child," largely because of photos of the child breast-feeding.
The bizarre indictment reads: "to wit; actual lewd exhibition of...a portion of the female breast below the top of the areola, and the said defendant did and then employ, authorize and induce Rodrigo Fernandez, a child younger than 18 years of age, to engage in said sexual conduct and sexual performance."
What is the most perverse and disgusting thing in this case is that anyone could possibly view breast-feeding as a "sex act." If anyone needs to be locked up as a dangerous pervert in this case, it's the prosecutor. While the charges were dropped, Child "Protective" Services continues to hold the children, even though the lawyer appointed to represent them is of the opinion they should be released to their parents.
I'd like to blame the demented John Ashcroft for this, but it's strictly local, and the perpetrators in this case are the imbeciles on the grand jury and the prosecutor, Bill Hill, who only dropped charges after being humiliated in the Dallas Observer for his insanity in attempting to prosecute such bogus charges.
April 15, 2003
Nit-picking
"Nits breed lice." This subject came up one night when I was chatting with Kady about the children of 9/11 architect Khalid Sheikh Mohammed being held by the CIA and, as it turns out, used as pawns to get their father to talk. (An earlier and incidental discussion had focused on his startling resemblance to porn star Ron Jeremy.)
In any case, the nits and lice came up in reference to Khalid's kids. I commented that this phrase was used as justification for murdering Indian children, while Kady thought it was used by angry slaves killing the children of slave-owners. We promptly went to Google to resolve the issue, since after all, Google knows everything. Kady promptly found the quote attributed to John Brown, meanwhile, I found it attributed to a Col. John Chivington at the massacre of Cheyenne and Arapahoe women and children at Sand Creek in 1864. This site elaborates on the Chivington story. We could probably have dropped the issue right here and then, and it might have been the best choice, but then Mirele popped in with another attribution, this to "Missouri militiamen Gov. Lilburne Bogg's 'extermination order' against the Mormons," this occurrence dated October 30, 1838, located at Haun's Mill, and adding "Little shoots make big trees" to "Nits make lice."
As if the John Brown attribution weren't enough, the same quote was also attributed to Nat Turner some time in 1831 during a slave revolt. The quote here is "Kill them all. Nits breed lice." The same quote makes it into William Styron's novel Confessions of Nat Turner. While the other quotes seem at least somewhat plausible, the use of it by abolitionists, even particularly murderous ones like John Brown, reeks of propaganda. In fact, one begins to suspect that this particular phrase was merely put into the mouths of people the historian found distasteful. It seems unlikely all these different people said these things, and the one common thread that passes through all these anecdotes is that none of them are in surviving sources. All of them are hearsay.
This thread continues as one traces the phrase back and forth in history, through other anecdotes of varying levels of worth. Another Indian-hater, George Wines, picks up the slur in 1847, while it jumps a century forward to be blamed on the Nazis by Eleanor Ayers. Rounding out the Indian thread, "one Martin Angel" is credited with it in August of 1853.
Going back further in history, the already notorious Oliver Cromwell is accused of using the phrase to justify killing Irish children. Consistently, this attribution is based on no solid evidence, although indisputable contemporaneous sources such as Cromwell's own report to Parliament certainly adequately show his bloodthirstiness. Another enemy of the Irish accused of this phrase is the dreadfully-named Sir Charles Coote, 2nd Bart. This site, with no particular evidence, claims that Coote the First is "among the first to use the term 'nits will become lice' in excusing the murder of children (in Wicklow)." If it were true, it likely would be the case. The date attributed to the quote is 1601. This site cites "the old English historian, Dr Nalson" as attributing the phrase to unnamed English soldiers in 1642. Yet another attribution is to a German soldier in the Mexican war, called to task for murdering a family of Mexicans, including children, saying "By dams don't nits made fleas." Finally, this site appears to have taken the nits thread a little way but not followed it out to the end.
Now we get to where I come to the point, if there is one. At first, I had only found the attribution of the phrase to abolitionists ridiculous and out of place, but the nature of all the attributions seems to lead to one conclusion. The phrase itself is a slur, and there's no credible evidence for the vast majority of these allegations. While I could go to even more effort to track down the provenance of each and every allegation, my conclusion is that there is simply no way this phrase has been uttered by every person to whom it has been attributed. Further, every allegation at least seems to me to be from a secondary source rather than an eyewitness, and some seem to add the quote without providing any source at all. My view of this quote is this: nobody ever said it, or no more than one or two people. Like Samuel L. Jackson's Biblical quote in Pulp Fiction, it just sounded like some cold-blooded shit to say before murdering children, so it was put in their mouths. Additionally, the people in question are all unquestionably child-killers, so it was unlikely anyone would step forward to defend their reputation. Only upon compiling the full list of occurrences of this quote, and I'm sure there are others I've missed, does the extreme unlikeliness of all of them being true become obvious.
I suppose the nutshell version of this is simply don't believe everything you read.
April 07, 2003
Lisa McPherson Civil Case Moves Ahead
lisamcpherson.com reports that the Florida Second District Court of Appeal and Judge W. Douglas Baird have made major rulings in favor of the McPherson Estate. Baird has ruled denying motions attempting to disqualify Estate counsel Kennan Dandar, and the 2DCA denied Scientology's appeal of Schaeffer's ruling in the gargantuan motion to disqualify Dandar of last summer.
I expect that Judge Schaeffer will set a trial date shortly and that Scientology will appeal. I also expect that the ruling of the 2DCA will appear shortly on the opinions portion of their website.
April 04, 2003
War Profiteer Perle Vomits on Canada
Despicable war profiteer Richard Perle, unsatisfied with the other scandals he's caused with his criminal behavior, goes to Canada to make sure there's nobody on the face of the Earth who hasn't been spat on by the Bush administration.
What has America done to deserve this walking pile of toxic waste as an ambassador of evil? When the phrase "Ugly American" was coined, the coiner must have been looking at a picture of Perle, who is as revoltingly ugly as he should be.
April 03, 2003
Bribery pays off again
As if all the other indignities heaped upon this poor nation by the criminal Bush junta hasn't been bad enough, now he has appointed a Moon cultist to be a trade representative. To other countries. That's what Bush wants our national image to be across the world, a glassy-eyed cultist selling flowers in an airport.
Moonie World has more details. I suppose simply being crazed, murderous thugs wasn't bad enough.
Oh, the bribery thing. The Bush Klan and the Moon cult go back a long way. Robert Parry has detailed the extensive connections between these two nests of crooks.