For When the Thought Police Decide to Come for You... And They Will

They came first for the robots,
and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a robot...

On April 18th the sleepy college town of Kutztown, PA, became the setting for a heated clash between religious fundamentalism and modernity.

A religious group that staged a protest at Kutztown University today drew hundreds of angry students after members of the group told them they would burn in hell if they were gay, Jewish or Catholic.

Campus police led several of protesters away in hand-cuffs and led the rest off campus after as many as 300 students gathered around the group, according to witnesses.

Campus officials said there may have been arrests because the group had not gotten permission to be on campus. The protest took place on the Day of Silence, an annual event held to bring attention to bullying, harassment and discrimination of gays and lesbians in schools.

One of those arrested was college student and robot rights activist Charles Kline.

On April 18th, I was arrested. This normally wouldn’t be big news, but the situation arround which I was arrested brings up serious questions. I was arrested at Kutztown University, where I am a student, because I decided to try to liven the mood after the Life and Liberty Ministries began to upset students. They came on campus with signs that featured aborted fetuses, lists of people who will be going to hell, and catchy phrases such as “JESUS OR HELL”. I have friends who are gay, and these people who came onto Kutztown University’s campus without permission or prior notice were upsetting students all over campus.

I decided not to simply let them upset people, so I went to the bookstore and purchased a posterboard and sharpie marker and made my own sign. It said “Equal Rights for Robots”, a saying I thought no one would be able to take the wrong way. The protesters had been on campus for about two hours at this time, and the whole time the police were protecting them from the students. To my knowledge, the protesters at this time had not been asked to leave. With my sign in hand, I walked out and waved my sign in the air.

...

I was charged with Disorderly Conduct with intent to “alarm or annoy” and in the citation it says I was “warned repeatedly” to stop. Neither is true, and when I pointed this out to the officer who wrote it out for me he said something along the lines of I don’t care and made a comment along the lines of tell it to the judge. I plead not guilty and face a three hundred dollar fine or up to 90 days in jail if found guilty.

I have no love for religious intolerance, nor am I a fan of robots. They terrorize the elderly and eat their medicine. They're made of metal and they're strong. But can we truly call ourselves free if we are unable to express such diverse viewpoints without fear of persecution?

"If liberty means anything at all it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear."
-- George Orwell, Preface to Animal Farm (1946)

"The sound of tireless voices is the price we pay for the right to hear the music of our own opinions."
-- Adlai E. Stevenson

And now a word from Old Glory Insurance...

How Does A Blonde Rob A Bank?

Buy at AllPosters.com

I'm pretty sure there's at least one dumb blonde joke in this, but I'll leave it alone.

Johnston said the idea of robbing a bank began as a joke.

"I mean, it's crossed a lot of people's minds, from what I've heard," she said.

But things did not go as expected. The two never got wigs as they had earlier planned. And after getting lost on the way to the bank, they initially went to the wrong bank branch.

"We took a wrong turn somewhere, ended up going to a completely different Bank of America," Johnston said.

She said they called their teller contact and went to his branch without worrying about how the robbery would unfold. "We had an inside man," she said.

As the teller gave them the money, the cash nearly got away from them, too.

"He started throwing it and it was like going everywhere," Johnston said.

...

"Some of the stuff we did was pretty ignorant," she said.

Sometimes they just write themselves.

They Stuff Kittens in Jars Too!

My husband periodically emails me articles from the Onion without link or attribution. Sometimes I get as far as two paragraphs in before I realize they are satire. The Onion is incredibly clever and I can see how one might be snookered for a minute or two. But this guy is an idiot.

It's the stuff of webby fantasy and urban legend: a reader who takes an Onion story seriously. Last week, a speedy and vicious blogosphere watched its collective wet dream made real when "Pete," proprietor of antiabortion blog March Together for Life, posted "Murder Without Conscience," a furious excoriation of a 7-year-old fake column in the Onion titled "I'm Totally Psyched About This Abortion!" [Ed. Note: The original "Murder Without Conscience" entry has been altered since its publication and now includes some graphic images.]

The Onion is a satirical newspaper founded in 1988 by University of Wisconsin students and is these days published weekly from New York. The piece that inspired Pete's July 6 extended smack-down was a 1999 Op-Ed by fictional columnist "Caroline Weber." Pete did not realize that the Onion traffics in satire, and that the piece was a send-up of the notion that pro-choice activists are actually "pro-abortion." Weber's outrageous claims that she "seriously cannot wait for all the hemorrhaging and the uterine contractions" and that "this abortion is going to be so amazing" did not tip off Pete. In an utterly unironic retort, he cited lines like, "It wasn't until now that I was lucky enough to be pregnant with a child I had no means to support," and "I just know it's going to be the best non-anesthetized invasive uterine surgery ever!" to illustrate his disgust with the author.

Spoken like a person without a womb. But Pete explains that he was confused by the piece because it was such an excellent example of art imitating life.

Four days after his initial Onion entry, Pete posted a follow-up, acknowledging that he now understood that the piece had been a joke. "Needless to say, a few people wanted to let me know that I was a dolt for thinking that her article was real," Pete wrote. "As a matter of fact, call me a dolt, because in the beginning I really did think it was real. Why? Because I meet women like her in the field all the time.

Sure you do, Pete. The world is just full of women who love having invasive surgery, on their most intimate parts, without anesthetic. I know I do. Pap smears and root canals are fun, but nothing beats having your insides sucked out through vacuum tube. Oh, and Pete... let me help you out. I'm being facetious... oh, just look it up.

Some years ago I got an email from a friend about the horrors of the "Bonsai Kitty" market. My friend was a passionate defender of animal rights and was horrified to learn that a site was marketing cats that had been grown and fed since kittenhood in jars in order to attain the desirable, dwarfed distortion that characterizes bonsai trees. (The site is long gone but some of it remains in Google cache.) I looked at the site, pronounced it hilarious, and emailed her back. Um, this is satire, I told her. She was unconvinced, remaining as credulous as Steve Martin watching nefarious, Mexican cat jugglers in the "The Jerk," until I pointed out that there was no actual ordering information on the site; only a link that promised an order form would be forthcoming. She finally conceded that it was probably a hoax, but that it wasn't funny and made a mockery of the very serious problem of animal cruelty. It should come as no great surprise that we are no longer friends. The humorless, as a species, are a particular challenge for me.

Pete, the anti-abortion fanatic, offers a novel explanation for his inability to process irony.

The funniest thing about the whole ordeal, said Pete, is that "I come from Germany -- a German economy, a German culture, German friends. And Germans have no humor."

Very good. I'll be sure not to mention the war.

Hell's Grannies

This is a frightened city. Over these houses,
over these streets hangs a pall of fear.
Fear of a new kind of violence which is
terrorizing the city. Yes, gangs of old ladies
attacking defenceless fit young men.
-- Monty Python's Flying Circus

Well now I've seen everything. Two elderly women have been charged with running life insurance scams on homeless men and running them down with their cars. That's right. Grannies are rolling bums for money. From Time:

In a shocking, real-life update of Arsenic and Old Lace, two elderly women were arrested last week in Los Angeles for taking out life insurance policies on homeless men and then bumping them off. Literally. The two victims were killed in hit-and-run accidents after Olga Rutterschmidt, 73, and her friend Helen Golay, 75, allegedly took out at least 19 life insurance policies in the men's names. The women had collected more than $2 million before they were arraigned last week on eight counts of federal mail fraud. With the investigation still ongoing, police say they expect the suspects will also be charged with murder or with conspiracy to murder.

According to prosecutors, the women obtained life insurance policies for the homeless men through several companies, including Mutual of Omaha and Monumental Life. After the men had signed the policies, authorities allege the women provided the transients with food and shelter for a little over two years before mowing them down to collect the payments. The waiting period appears to stem from California insurance law that allows companies to contest new policies only within two years of issuing them.