higher, stronger, faster, prettier?

Synchro swimming, figure skating, artistic gymnatics --- While I would never deny that they require superb physical conditioning, incredible skill and stamina, anything that requires costumes, music and clown makeup is not a sport. If it was a sport, this two minutes of comic perfection would not be nearly as funny.

If Pakistan can do it...
As recently as two years ago, Pervez Musharraf was the absolute ruler of Pakistan, well except for those pesky tribal areas on the Afghan border that are ruled by who ever has the most guns in the neighborhood at the time, and the intelligence service that either runs or is run by the Taliban. After staging a military coup, Musharraf ruled Pakistan for seven years without any serious opposition outside the various militant groups who opposed his cooperation with the United States, which backed him no matter how many judges he sacked or mosques he blew up. He was a dictator and bastard, but he was their bastard.

Within the last 18 months Pakistan has seen the return of not one, but two exiled opposition leaders, the assasination of the leading opposition candidate and a general election. Musharraf was forced to step down as head of the army. Following an opposition victory at the polls, Musharraf was given an ultimatium this week - quit or face impeachment - and suddenly Pakistan is a democracy once again.

If Pakistan can get rid of a corrupt, human-rights abusing, illegitimate undemocratic leader whose national security apparatus answers to no one, why can't the United States?

Another good reason to love living in Japan

Now imagine the same thing in real life, with one important wardrobe change....

TOKYO (Reuters) - Japanese police have arrested a 20-year-old man who attacked and robbed two people after they stared at his Winnie-the-Pooh costume, officials said on Tuesday.
Masayuki Ishikawa was hanging out on a Tokyo street corner after midnight last month while wearing the cuddly costume, accompanied by two friends dressed as a mouse and a panther, when he took offence at being stared at, police said.
"It's uncommon to see people dressed up like this, so the victims were watching them. Then the perpetrator came up and said 'What are you staring at?'" a police spokesman said.
Ishikawa and his friends beat up the two victims and stole $160 from them, the spokesman said, adding the group had apparently donned the unusual garb because they had run out of clean clothes.

Where else could this possibly happen? (Okay maybe Orlando or Anaheim, but this had no connection to Disney) I can just picture the guy in the Winnie-the-Pooh suit going all Travis Bickle. Imagine the humiliation in going to the police station to report that you just had you ass kicked and wallet taken by this guy:

(actual police sketch of the assailant)

Thinking with the wrong head

First of all, I'm pissed at John Edwards for staying the race when he knew this was out there and could detonate at any moment. He was my first choice among the Democrats (not that I get a choice, not being one of teh chosen people and all) so finding out that if he had won the primaries the world would be looking at four years of John McCain, just because he couldn't keep it in his pants really rankles.

I agree it shouldn't matter to the rest of the world what anyone does with their naughty bits-- consenting adults and all that--but anyone running for public office in the Excited States knows damn well that what should matter has nothing to do with what will matter. It not as if sexual impropriety hasn't become a political issue before.

Second, yes Elizabeth Edwards is a smart, classy woman - but she still let her husband run for office knowing this scandal was out there waiting to erupt. That is poor judgement IMHO, but not so poor that I wouldn't like to see her take her husband's old Senate seat.

Third, this is getting very little press outside the U.S., because the rest of the world realizes that it DOESN'T MAKE ANY DIFFERENCE TO ANYTHING. Edwards is not the nominee, he is not going to be on the ticket, he holds no office and has no role in the Obama campaign. Trying to paint this as bad for Obama is like trying to Rush Limbagh's oxycontin addiction as bad for McCain. They're on the same side, but that's about it. So let's just leave these private citizens alone to deal with their private lives at this point, OK?

From a purely tactical point of view, with any luck the whole kerfuffle will draw attention to McCain's previous infidelities. Because if John Edward's affair disqualifies him from the presidency, so should McCain's past behavior.

Basically, I agree with what Chet says over at the Vanity Press and he puts it better than I will, so go read his posting.

My world no longer makes sense

Please understand that among the two-legged lifeforms that populate the Earth, there are few I loathe more than Paris Hilton. She is a cringe-inducing, spoiled, dim-witted, wealthy skank who is famous for being a vapid, skanky, shallow, spoiled, materialistic media-whore. And she's a total skank. And dumb as a Prada bag of Louis Vuitton platinum, diamond-crusted hammers. And not especially good looking, even her porn isn't hot. And in addition to giving me hives, her television show epitomizes Everything That is Wrong with the Western World. And did I mention she's a total skank?

Well, that was what I used to think. Then John McCain used her in an campaign ad to try to hint that Obama was a lightweight - and I suppose he wanted us to think Obama was as dumb and skanky as Paris Hilton, or at least as big a media whore or something. Naturally Obama supporters either sputtered and fumed about how unfair the comparision was or laughed at the idea that this was the best the Republicans could do. The Skank Princess' mommy came out of the Hilton palace to say that she didn't think it was very nice of McCain to compare her darling daughter to that no-talent skanky nutbar Brittany Spears and I figured that was that, on to the next round of brainless negative campaign ads as the McCain campaign continues to clutch at straws.

But then I saw something that shattered all my preconceptions.

See more Paris Hilton videos at Funny or Die

Now, I doubt she had a hand in writing the script for this. For all I know she didn't even pick out the shoes she's wearing and I still think Paris is a skank, but I'm not so sure about the dumber than a designer bag of overpriced hammers part anymore. This is actually pretty clever.

What next? Will they let someone on American Idol that isn't a douchebag sing a song that doesn't suck? Will Jerry Bruckheimer start producing a film version "The Cherry Orchard"? Will Stephen Dion kick the living crap out of Jason Kenny and Stephen Harper in the lobby of the House of Commons? Will the temperature dip below 30 degrees in Tokyo this month? I'm so confused.......

I know the scenery in the prairies can get monotonous but...

"One moment, the quiet man near the back of the bus was minding his own business. The man believed to be in his 30's, hadn't talked to anyone around him, and seemed to pay no attention to the younger fellow sitting next to him, who was listening to music on headphones.

The next moment, witnesses said, the older man stood up, still quiet, and repeatedly stabbed and beheaded his seat-mate"

WTF??!?!!?

Update: Crazed killer makes court appearance and Greyhound cancels promotional campaign

Another Update: PETA shows class yet again

Shock first and ask questions later



Imagine you're a small town cop in the heartland of America. You're responding to a report about a teen walking on the expressway overpass - a driver was worried the kid might get hit by a car or something. You arrive to find the 16-year-old lying on the shoulder of the highway 30 feet below the overpass. Do you:


1. Call an ambulance
2. Render first aid
3. Order him to get up and taser him 19 times when he fails to comply because its hard to stand up with a broken spine.



Seriously, what kind of IQ/psychiatric screening process does one have to fail to be issued a taser as a cop these days? I'm sure the big strong cops with their nightsticks, pepper spray, heavy flashlights, pistols and body armor (and likely a trunk full of rifles and shotguns) were scared that the teenager might have been on drugs or something since he was raving incoherently- as you might if you fell off a bridge and broke your back - but surely it would have occurred to most people after the second or third jolt that something was amiss with the young miscreant



Click the link on the sidebar for a list of taser-related atrocities. And remember not to lose your temper in an airport, or question the authority of a campus cop, or fail to spring to attention when ordered to do so by someone in uniform, or be a loud drunk, or the wrong color.....



Hat tips to the General and Corrente and Pam's House Blend

A town called malice

Why is it that the Excited States is viewed by many reasonsable people in other civilized countries as a sort of open-air barrier-free lunatic asylum? Reason #472: Kennesaw, Georgia

Kennesaw is the sort of picturesque Old Southern town that doubtless considers itself the very embodiment of Traditional American Values. So much so that back in 1982, when those Yankee pinkos and sissies in Morton Grove, Illinois, decided to ban handguns from their town in an effort to cut down on violent crime, Kennesaw's city council took umbrage. Such umbrage that they decided to make it mandatory for each home to have a gun and ammunition.

Not to worry though, those weapons are in good hands:

Dent "Wildman" Myers, 76, styles himself as a keeper of the flame when it comes to Kennesaw's gun ordinance. His downtown shop contains a cornucopia of artifacts, including old uniforms and dozens of flags of the Confederacy that fought the Union in part in defense of slavery in the Civil War. At the back is a Ku Klux Klan outfit with a noose and a hood.

There also are posters praising defenders of the white race, White Power CDs and a sign that reads: "No Dogs Allowed, No Negroes, No Mexicans." Someone had crossed out the first part of the sign and added "Dogs Allowed."

Myers said he wanted to protect the values that made the town and the South distinct from other parts of the United States.

"They destroyed anything historic and replaced it with the PC (politically correct) stuff. It's become a cookie cutter town," Myers said, his hands resting lightly on two .45-caliber guns at his hips. He said he considered his guns to be tools, much like a rake or a shovel.

Hell, yes! Those shooting irons absolutely are tools, just like a rake or a shovel. All tools have a purpose. You use a shovel to dig holes, a rake to break up and smooth soil or gather fallen leaves and you use guns to kill people. They are just tools, just like Mr. Myers. And thanks to the recent Supreme Court ruling on the Washington D.C. handgun ban, even places like Morton Grove are going to have more tool than they want.
And speaking of tools, the Ole Perfessor has also muddied the waters, fortunately Paul Helmke at the Brady Project unmuddies them.

Civil Cold War turning hot?

The recent shooting in a Tennessee Unitarian-Universalist Church is a tragic event and as distasteful as it is to use a tragedy to make a political point, there is no escaping the facts in this case:

Knoxville Police Department Officer Steve Still requested the search warrant after interviewing Adkisson. who was subdued by several church members after firing three rounds from a 12-gauge shotgun into the congregation.

Adkisson targeted the church, Still wrote in the document obtained by WBIR-TV, Channel 10, "because of its liberal teachings and his belief that all liberals should be killed because they were ruining the country, and that he felt that the Democrats had tied his country's hands in the war on terror and they had ruined every institution in America with the aid of media outlets."

Adkisson told Still that "he could not get to the leaders of the liberal movement that he would then target those that had voted them in to office."...Inside the house, officers found "Liberalism is a Mental Health Disorder" by radio talk show host Michael Savage, "Let Freedom Ring" by talk show host Sean Hannity, and "The
O'Reilly Factor," by television talk show host Bill O'Reilly.

It was a politically driven murder, in that the man who committed the crime specifically targeted the church and its congregation because of their politics. I wonder why.


"My only regret with Timothy McVeigh is he did not go to the New York Times Building."
-Ann Coulter, August 26, 2002

"I'd hang every lawyer that went down to Guantanamo"
-Michael Savage, June 19, 2008

"In this recurring nightmare of a presidency, we have a national debate about whether he "did it," even though all sentient people know he did. Otherwise there would be debates only about whether to impeach or assassinate. "
-Ann Coulter, High Crimes and Misdemeanors: The Case Against Bill Clinton, 1998

The definitive list is here (Special thanks to David Neiwert, who has been shining a light on this kind of rhetoric for years)

I'm not saying that everyone who reads a book by Sean Hannity is a potential mass murderer or that watching Bill O'Reilly leads ignorant alcoholics to try to gun down liberals any more than video games cause school shootings. What I am saying is that the constant eliminationist rhetoric of the right does push some people in that direction. I'm not advocating censorship, I'm advocating responsible speech. I love passionate invective as much as the next guy, but when you start seriously advocating killing people on a radio broadcast or a television show, you've crossed a very serious threshold and ought to be held responsible in a court of law.

Throw the bum out

Williams Lake B.C. Mayor Scott Nelson has decided that enough is enough. He has convinced the local RCMP detachment to arrest a local panhandler and wants the man banned from town for five years. I suppose with oil prices what they are, it was too expensive for the Mayor to heat up the tar to go with the feathers himself. In the linked story, the panhandler Robert Inglis is described as aggressive, and as having "problems" - a little reading between the lines in the various news stories and looking at Inglis' history (he's already been banned from nearby Prince George for two years in the hope that he would return to Williams Lake) leads one to believe that his guy, like many homeless panhandlers, needs some psychological/psychiatric help. This looks like a mental health problem, not a criminal justice problem. I'm sure he's very scary and verbally abusive and I don't doubt for a second that he is a blight on beautiful downtown Williams Lake, but this isn't the 13th century and you can't just form a mob and chase the hunchback out of the village. Inglis likely need to be committed and treated. Chasing him out of town just makes him someone else's problem.


A quick read of the Mayor's bio and some council minutes just furthers my impression that Mayor Nelson is the kind of civic-booster-chamber-of-commerce-small-businessman-big-fish-in a-small-pond that plagues local government everywhere, until their wish comes true and they get a seat in the provincial legislature or parliament where they are a plague on the province or nation. He doesn't like having bums in town and after 14 years on the council figures he's just the kind of guy to run this undesirable out of town, so he can get back to privatizing the local water system, sucking up to timber companies and "creating a positive investment climate to enhance and expand our business community. "


He certainly looks the type:

Frankly, I'd say 14 years is long enough and the people of Williams Lake out to follow the mayor's advice and throw the authoritarian, babbling bourgeois Babbittish bum out

Inkstained Wretches

With his crabby "You goddamn kids stay off my lawn" tone that suggests he is probably wearing an onion on his belt (a yellow one, you can't get the white ones on account of the war) Grandpa Simpson Richard Cohen comes across as a bit of a knob in his diatribe against those crazy kids and their crazy tattoos, but after seeing this, I'm not so sure he isn't on to something.
JimDandy Goodness offers its own take along with some awesome ink

And speaking of "knowing what they know"...

A brief round-up of the dimmer side of the blogosphere, just 'cause I'm feeling testy today:

When cracker-assed cracker politicians blog.

Michael Savage: Hateful crackpot or just an ignorant dick?

Another reason Bill O'Reilly can just frickin' bite me.



And finally, if it's a day with a "Y" in it, there must be some Blogging Tory saying something stupid:

Shorter Strong Conservative: Shriek! The press are covering Obama's trip to Afghanistan and Iraq. No fair, they didn't cover John McCain's trips (like this, this, and even this).

McCain's been to Iraq eight times, you'd think by now he'd know where it is.

Logic, the Blogging Tories and Omar Khadr

(expanded and revised from yesterday's intitial draft)

A busy weekend this side of the pond and I was at a bit of a loss for material for a blog post --once again it is JimDandy to the rescue as David lights the fuse on the bomb of Teh Stoopid that is the Blogging Tories and their maximum supremo numero uno Stephen Taylor.

Taylor says:

As a conservative, I have for the most part found intellectual solace in logic on
issue tracks where my bleeding-heart friends usually hug the emotional left
rail. The broad-arching free markets help rise more people out of poverty than
knee-jerk social and emotional reaction to give hand-outs to sustain a
substandard of living is but one example where cold right-wing logic is a better
and more constructive end that short-sighted albeit well-meaning emotionalism. I
have always believed that right-wingers act upon what they know to be true,
whereas left-wingers act upon what they feel to be true.

Logical?

The conservative movement?

Surely, you jest!

We are talking here about the same people whose shrieking hysteria about gay marriage is based on nothing any more well-considered than "My pastor said teh gays make baby Jebus cry," a deepseated prejudice that "homos are icky" and that if two lesbians want their relationship legally recognized by the state and a wedding at the Unitarian Church, it somehow means that their own marital bliss is endangered and that the Catholic Church will be forced to host gay weddings resembling drag queen festivals.

The same people who think that their religious tomfoolery belongs in biology classes.

The same people who think that just because a handful of cranks and crackpots publish some crap on a blog or self-publish a book denying global warming, their arguments are of equal weight to those made by the overwhelming majority of scientists in peer-reviewed journals.

Need I go on?

These paragons of logic are the same people who want to cut taxes while the country is involved in a costly war with no real end in sight and while the government still has a massive debt to pay off.

These are the guys who, in every election, tell a few gory anecdotes to scare the rubes and promise "to get tough on crime and fight the rising tide of lawlessness" despite the fact that the crime rate has gone down more or less continuously since the 1970s.

These sensible and reasonable people are the ones who seem to see Islamofascistcommie terrorists under the bed and are suspicious of anyone slightly brownish.

The same chuckleheaded Leave-It-to-Beaver wannabes that think because their next door neighbor eats curry or pad Thai instead of pot roast on Sunday, and the bank teller has an unfamiliar accent, that multiculturalism is ruining the country.

The conservatives in Canada, as in most countries are all about emotions: Fear of the new and foreign and grief for the old and familiar.

To parse Taylor's egregious overstatements more closely, let us look at this gem:

"The broad-arching free markets help rise more people out of poverty than knee-jerk social and emotional reaction to give hand-outs to sustain a substandard of living is but one example where cold right-wing logic is a better and more constructive end that short-sighted albeit well-meaning emotionalism. "

Yes, because as we all know providing people who have no food and no money with the means to stay alive is really just cruel. Those knee-jerk social and emotional reactionaries at Unicef and the World Food Program are just prolonging misery in the third world. Don't those starving kids know that big corporations have every right to own the DNA patterns of corn seed? Don't those people with AIDS in Africa know that drug companies need to make a bigger profit than last year and can't just sell drugs at slightly above cost to the needy? Better to let them starve, sicken and die and be done with it and let the magic hand of the market take care of things. You know, the same markets that kept coal miners on starvation wages until they died of black lung in North America before they were unionized and the evil well-meaning emotionalist do-gooders managed to get things like child-labor and workplace-safety laws passed.

Conservatives who seem to think the Adam Smith's Wealth of Nation is the first and last word on the beauty of laissez-faire capitalism would do well to remember that before he wrote it, Smith authored The Theory of Moral Sentiments. While Smith was a dour, persnickity Scots academic who prized independence, prudence and propriety, and by today's standards a bit of a prude, his theory of morals was based on sympathy and benevolence was ranked among the most valued virtues.

Logic?

You keep using this word, Stephen. I don't think it means what you think it means.

Stephen's original post deals with how Omar Khadr, the notorious teenage threat to western civilization who has now spent a third of his life in Guantanamo Bay must not be allowed back into the country. About how the Prime Minister should not intervene and bring him back to Canada, because he faces very serious charges and we just don't repatriate Canadians who fall afoul of the law in foreign countries.

Taylor:
"But, let’s go to first principles. Omar Khadr doesn’t himself deserve to be released
from jihadi limbo at Gitmo and tried before an American court."

How about the first principle of "innocent until proven guilty" or the right to habeas corpus and a timely trial?

However, as individuals who are defending a society based upon key values such as due process, presumption of innocence, and the rule of law, we deserve it.

And so does young Mr. Khadr. We all deserve due procress - equality in the eyes of the law and all that, you know. Small problem though, Stephen, due process should have kicked in when he was captured as a child of 15 five years ago, but the United States government decided that the Geneva Convention was "quaint" and just didn't apply to them and that they could just make up the rules as they went along.

Khadr is accused of throwing a grenade in a firefight in Afghanistan that killed an American soldier. While it is all a bit murky whether he actually did so, I would expect anyone big enough to heft a grenade or a rifle could probably be reasonably expected to do so if the place they were staying, which is alleged to be an Al-Qaida base, was suddenly overrun by foreign troops. The American soldiers in question were, after all, shooting at Khadr. I think self-defense could certainly be argued as could his being a valid, if underage, prisoner of war. If killing enemy combatants on the battlefield is murder, he could be judge guilty of that, but I think calling it a war crime is stretching the definition a bit.

Khadr’s present threat does not manifest itself in his illiberal hatred of our culture,
it rests instead in the extent to which we are to make our own values malleable in order rationalize our understandable but illogical emotion.

Good grief, I agree with Stephen Taylor -- somebody mark the day on the calendar. The blind squirrel has found a nut - those who give up liberty for security get and deserve neither. But then, as if to prove himself blind, he bring the whole thing back and dumps it in the lap of the "Eeeeevul Libruls"

There is inconsistency on the Liberal side too, of course. Khadr was captured,
interrogated and held under approval from the previous Liberal administrations.
For them to demand his return, shows intellectual dishonesty and absurd
emotionalism.

Or it could show that new information has come to light regarding the fact that the boy was being tortured, that the previous governments had no reason to think he would be held indefinitely, or simply that they are willing to admit that they made a mistake and would like to see it corrected. But of course admitting mistakes is not something neocons are really able to do for some reason.

Khadr should not be returned to Canada, as we do not simply return Canadian citizens to Canada when they run afoul of the law in the United States. However, to
complete this logical loop, Khadr must face the law in an American court. With both US Presidential candidates calling for the closure of Guantanamo, Prime Minister Harper would be wise to call for Khadr to face American due process.

Yes, it would be wise for the Prime Minister to call for Khadr to face due process, if such a thing existed instead of the current kangaroo court system faced by Gitmo inmates. And we regularly bring Canadians imprisoned in foreign countries back to Canada.

Some background on the "due process" and this case can be found here. There is plenty to digest, but in terms of the system faced, this bit is enlightening:

The Supreme Court heard on March 28, 2006, a challenge to George W. Bush's power to create military commissions to put Guantanamo prisoners on trial for war crimes (cf. the profile of Salim Ahmed Hamdan in "related cases"). On June 29, 2006, the Supreme Court ruled that the US President exceeded his authority in establishing the military commissions at Guantánamo Bay. The Court also ruled that the commissions violated U.S. military law and the Geneva Conventions.

A controversial new bill was passed by the US Senate and the House of
Representatives in late September 2006.

The Military Commissions Act, which is heavily criticised by human rights organisations- allows terror suspects to be tried by military tribunals rather
than civilian courts- gives defendants a legal right to see evidence and a (limited) right to counsel- forbids "serious" breaches of the Geneva Conventions, such as torture, in the course of interrogation procedures- gives the president the authority to "interpret the meaning and application of the Geneva Conventions"- allows for hearsay evidence in trials of terror suspects.

Furthermore, the new legislation prohibits any person from invoking the Geneva Conventions or their protocols as a source of rights in any action in any US court.
The new bill entered into force following signature by the President in October 2006.

So given the cold, hard facts in the cases, namely that due process as it is understood by reasonable people anywhere in the western democracies will not be visited upon the unfortunate Mr.Khadr, and given that he says we all deserve due process etcetera, Stephen chooses to jump off the bridge of logic into the river of fear and concludes that we don't dare bring one our own citizens home to face due process, but that we should abandon them to a kangaroo court system in a country that has repudiated the rule of law and its own adherence to international treaties and acceptable conduct. A country that tortured Khadr while he was still a child and continues to hold hundreds without charge and dubious recourse to the courts. Interesting choice.

Logic?

You keep using this word, Stephen. I don't think it means what you think it means.

What I'm doing this weekend

and you should be too, is going to the Netroots Nation conference in Austin, Texas with all the other liberal bloggers. But since I can't get to Texas, I'll be attending in Second Life. Where we will be streaming all the panels and avoiding the Texas heat. In fact, I will be screening some movies in Second Life as part of the festivities. On Thursday night, I'll be showing The Corporation and on Sunday night to help folks wind down, Duck Soup. All at the fabulous Marxist-Lennonist Party Headquarters, The Red Zeppelin. And did I mention that it is all totally FREE! And that we are all young, thin and good-looking in Second Life? Really, what the hell are you waiting for?

"Epsilons don’t really mind being Epsilons”

It seems that not only is John Derbyshire intent on challenging Doug Feith for the title of "Stupidest Fucking Guy on the Planet," he wants your kids to be in contention for the prize too.

Commenting on Barack Obama's sensible, reasonable suggestion that America's children should study a second language, preferably Spanish since there so many Spanish-speaker in or coming to America, the Derb riffs thusly:

Obama's idiotic suggestion that all our kids should learn Spanish is, amongst other things (this is multi-dimensional stupidity) an illustration of educational  romanticism run amok. The cold fact is that absent exceptional circumstances — the most common of which is, total immersion at a receptive age — not many human beings can learn another language. Oh, you can learn enough to  stumble along and get by on a trip abroad, but if you can attain fluency in a language not your own, without those exceptional circumstances, you are an unusually smart and gifted person. (For my own sad track record, see here.)

Now, I'll admit that my own track record is not much better than Derbyshire's. I failed to learn French in high school and university, where I also failed to learn Spanish. In over a decade in Japan, I still only speak enough to order dinner, give the cab driver directions and get my face slapped - though can understand a good deal more.  I do however know that the reason for this is mostly laziness and lack of effort on my part- how do I know this? Because virtually everyone I know well in Tokyo speaks at least two languages better than I do. All the people in my office, all my expat friends and their bilingual spouses, all the people I met in Hong Kong who speak three languages before finishing their coffee in the morning, to say nothing of all the English speaking Quebecois and French speaking Montreal Anglo's I've met -- they didn't all grow up in a multilingual environment, certainly my wife and the hundreds of advanced Japanese speakers of English I've met didn't. They learned the language the hard way, they studied it as adults. 

My wife aside (and presumably Derb's aside since he married a Chinese woman who obviously has infinite patience) they can't all be exceptional, nor can the entire populations of China, India, Africa and Europe, most of whom speak more than one language. Derb even manages to undermine his own argument

The pointlessness of foreign-language learning is obscured for English-speakers by all those foreigners we meet who have good English. (Scandinavians are especially humiliating in this regard.) We should remember, though, that (a) the foreigners we meet are mostly smart upper-middle-class types who travel a lot (try finding an English-speaker on a Paris street), and (b) the whole world is bathed in English, so that if you are born in, say, Finland, and want to do anything with your life more ambitious than running an autobody shop in Ylikiiminki, you can't help but learn some English, and (c) for teenagers the world over, English is cool.

We will leave the obvious arrogance in stating that doing anything more interesting than running a body shop in Ylikiiminki requires English (if this is the case, it is only because Americans refuse to learn other languages) and grant him the point that English is the most prevalent language on the Internet and in international business, while pointing out that it is not the only language and that lots of people make a good living as translators and interpreters because of that. The world is bathed in English because of the preponderance of American pop-culture overseas -- those same Holllywood movies and rock songs that Derb and his fellow are convinced are created by multiculturist terrorist-sympathizing commies out in California. That is what makes English "cool" to teenagers. 

In addition to all those Europeans, Africans and Asians, what about other countries in Derb's backyard? According to the most recent Canadian census (as summarized in this Wikipedia entry) while Canada is officially a bilingual nation, only 17.5 percent of us speak both language well enough to be considered bilingual, though 35 percent speak a language in addition to  French or English. Damn that multiculturalism, eh Derb? How dare all those immigrants remember their native languages, keep using them and teach them to their kids? How dare they not abandon the poetry of cursing in Chinese or German or Russian, the passion of arguing in Italian or Spanish or making love in French? How dare they not abandon the buffet that you can't get into for a bland plate of good old American without any regional dialects or diction? Those people over in the corner that are whispering in foreigner are talking about you Derb, and they aren't saying anything nice.

But that's not all! Nosiree Bob! Not content to try to put the kibosh on kids learning to speak foreign, Derb would like to make sure almost every child is left behind!

Obama suffers from the fallacy — extremely common among high-IQ lefties — that everyone else is just as smart as he is, or could easily be made so with a few educational reforms. In fact, below some cutoff point, which I'd guess at around minus one standard deviation in IQ (that would encompass sixteen percent of the population), education beyond the three R's is a waste of time, and foreign-language instruction a total waste of time.

While it's nice of Derb to admit that Obama is a smart guy - he did teach constitutional law at a college level after all - I am a little concerned that he doesn't think people need an education beyond how to read the instructions on the condom box or work the ATM. Yeah, and at what age do we decide that little Johnny, Janey,  Juan, Lateesha, Ngyen or Fritz isn't among your 16 percent Derb? 18? 13? 5? or do they need to be born into a nice white middle class family in a good school district to go learn more than the three R's?

We won't even go into the philosophical arguments in favor of learning for its own sake, how the pursuit of knowledge is the highest calling of mankind, beauty is truth and truth, beauty yadda, yadda, yadda. We won't bother to speculate at length how a magazine like National Review that fancies itself THE bastion of conservative intellectual thought could employ someone so profoundly anti-intellectual (my guess: "he wore a clean suit to the interview and had that dah-ling British accent") or how the recent crop of writers there seem to think a classical allusion means quoting from the first three Star Wars movies. Nope, we will pursue none of this at length. 

We will simply wonder aloud why he wants to deny anyone not in his mythical 16 percent the chance to learn about music, art, science, history, literature, higher math and philosophy? Could it be that his extended education include the reading of Brave New World?

And a massive tip of the hat to David over at JimDandyGoodness for braving the stupid to come up with this gem 

A shining city on a hill
Where if someone in authority doesn't like the way you look, you can disappear. Civil rights? Buddy, you ain't got no civil rights. In fact, according to our records, you don't even exist.
Italy in the 1930's? Germany in the 1940's? Argentina in the 1970's? ---Nope, the United States of America, now.
"But wait," you say "this only applies to suspected terrorists, you know--bad guys."
"Yeah" says I, "and who knows how one might becomes suspected of being a bad guy?"

This just in: Satire still dead

Obviously some stereotypes have roots in imagination and legend, others walk among us.
"Blessed are the (Colt) Peacemakers"

(hat tip to Tbogg)



and special thanks to Frank Frink for the video

A new spiritual leader of the moment

Half-staff? I got your half-staff right here!

They say it is wrong to speak ill of the dead and that if you can't say something nice you shouldn't say anything at all ( or alternatively, you should go and sit next to Dorothy Parker). Like many others, I was torn this week when Sen. Jesse Helms shuffled off this mortal coil. Should I pile on the facts about how he was one of the most noxious racists of the twentieth century? How he conspired to keep the United Nations from running family planning programs in the third world by blocking the United States from paying over a billion dollars in UN dues? How as head of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee he kept the U.S. out of the World Criminal Court and the Kyoto Protocol, blocked ratification of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty and other arms control treaties?  How he blocked access to and information about abortion worldwide?  How he helped the spread of AIDS? How he managed to make things worse in Cuba by trying to force other nations to boycott the benighted island through his "Helm-Burton Act"?  Should I point out that he was the main supporter of  Central American death squad czar Roberto d'Aubuisson ?

Should I take the low road, like Tbogg? Or the high road like Clif?

Then David from over at JimDandy Goodness pointed out this story to me. 

"I don't see how anybody could celebrate his career," the 51-year-old said in an interview, noting Helms opposition tothe 1964 Civil Rights Act and the filibuster to stall the effort to make Martin Luther King Jr.'s birthday a national holiday. "Everything he did was such a disservice to this state"

Eason, who had worked for 29 years at the Department of Agriculture, requested the option to retire Monday after his superiors overruled his decision and ordered the flags be lowered. Eason wrote an e-mail tothe governor and other supervisors saying he could not in good conscience honor Helms.

This man, L.F. Eason III is no shrill liberal blogger or ideologue, he's just a guy who was willing to chuck his nearly 30-year career rather than honor an evil man. Call him inflexible, call him unreasonable if you will --We here at the woodshed call him our Spiritual Leader of the Moment.

"I've suffered for my music and now it's your turn"

Not my best performance ever, but I don't like to do more than one take. Stop me before I sing again America - impeach, indict and imprison these people and I'll promise not to do this again.

It's only torture when they do it

Can we call it torture now?

From The New York Times:

China inspired interrogations at Guantanamo

WASHINGTON — The military trainers who came to Guantánamo Bay in December 2002 based an entire interrogation class on a chart showing the effects of “coercive management techniques” for possible use on prisoners, including “sleep deprivation,” “prolonged constraint,” and “exposure.”
What the trainers did not say, and may not have known, was that their chart had been copied verbatim from a 1957 Air Force study of Chinese Communist techniques used during the Korean War to obtain confessions, many of them false, from American prisoners.