A tale of two scandals

Scandal #1: State governor turns out to be corrupt bastard. There's no evidence whatsoever that the incoming president was in on this corruption at all (the investigators specifically declare this when indicting the governor), but coming from the same state they obviously knew one another and had had some political contact in the past.

Scandal #2: A Senate report reveals that the outgoing presidential administration was involved at high levels authorizing torture of prisoners.

Which do you think the press would cover ad nauseum? Would it help to say that the president in scandal 1 is a democrat, and the president in scandal 2 was republican? That's right, of course they obsess over #1 and ignore #2. Actual high crimes and misdemeanors (R) are way less interesting than the possible whiff of unlikely but maybe outside chance at impropriety (D).

But here's my offer for the people who say it's all just "harsh interrogations:" Undergo a week of "harsh interrogation"... y'know, just like America did, stress positions, days spent naked in unvaryingly-brightly lit very cold rooms, with maybe dogs being brought in to snap at your genitals at unexpected intervals. And some of the old standbyes like gaggind and blindfolding rolled together with sexual humiliation, dessecration of one's holy books, 14 hours of interrogation, extended exhaustion. And maybe just a tad of good old fashioned waterboarding now and hten. If the brave patriot can get through this without breaking and admitting that htey are being tortured, we'd all agree to drop the point. I'd give them 3-4 days tops.

A meek proposal

It's a good thing there are God fearing Christian conservatives in the US or there wouldn't be a death penalty. But if there were more, then perhaps executions wouldn't be done by lethal injections or electric chairs. These methods, "humane" as the bleeding hearts call them, are nearly painless. What sort of punishment is that for the things criminals have done!

What happened to a good old fashioned crucifixion? If someone has gone and broken God's commandments, and murdered or stolen, or blasphemed, or borne false witness, then give them a nail in each hand and one through their feet, and let them meet their maker up on a cross, just as the bible describes. And if they've committed a particularly horrible crime, then I say jab them with something sharp while they're up there. You'd have to put it on a stick to reach, of course, but nothing modern engineers couldn't solve I'm sure. And just so they know they are being punished we should take a link of barbed wire from a prison wall, and form it into a little circuit - a prison wall in miniature if you will - and press that onto their brow.

If it's good enough for the bible, then it's good enough for America.

Advice to a friend who's going through hard times

Dude, there's only one person in the world who's even supposed to be perfect, and they killed him years ago.

We all have regrets. All of us. Time is an impatient medicine though. Peace my friend.

Things that aren't always as fun as they sound: Irony

sometimes irony comes in the flavor "tragic"

Humbug on Christmas exclusivity

Every so often I see people getting a bee in their bonnet that "Jesus is the reason for the season," who are trying to make Christmas the sole preserve of Christianity. So ok, they've got a strong point on first appearances with the name thing, but...

I celebrate Christmas, because I was raised celebrating it. You can't raise someone up their whole life to have an emotional resonance to something, and then suddenly demand they stop celebrating it because they are doing so with the wrong theology in mind. Especially not when you went and appropriated much of its imagery and tradition from other groups anyway to start with (hint, Christmas trees, caroling, feasting, party time with the family, mistletoe, December 25th, are all pagan innovations that Christmas merely appropriated along the way).

In short, I have no sympathy whatsoever for the argument that non-Christians shouldn't celebrate Christmas. In fact, such demands are downright Scrooge-ish, and being as Charles Dickens branded Christmas as the anti-miser holiday (no, that part isn't an ancient Christian tradition either), I say humbug to all who would want me to take my tree down. The irony is satisfying :)

pencil industry to disappear now pens invented

Far be it from me to rain on anyone else's Detroit bashing high, But Thomas Friedman's latest ode to the big 3's short sightedness contains the following silliness:

Our bailout of Detroit will be remembered as the equivalent of pouring billions of dollars of taxpayer money into the mail-order-catalogue business on the eve of the birth of eBay. It will be remembered as pouring billions of dollars into the CD music business on the eve of the birth of the iPod and iTunes. It will be remembered as pouring billions of dollars into a book-store chain on the eve of the birth of Amazon.com and the Kindle. It will be remembered as pouring billions of dollars into improving typewriters on the eve of the birth of the PC and the Internet.

I guess I'm pretty behind the times, but our house still gets quite a lot of mail-order catalogues, the world still seems pretty well populated with HMV's, and Barnes and Nobles hasn't exactly gone under either.

All of the industries he's mentioning are facing some new challenges, true... in fact, there are even better examples he could have picked, such as print newspapers vs. the internet... but even there, people used to predict that paper books would fall completely by the wayside once personal computers spread - remember the "paperless office"...

All in all this is a pretty horrendous case of pundit fallacy #642773: "Any sexier form of technology will inevitably entirely displace the older, less sexy form from the market."

If "great president" Ronald Reagan was Hollywoods gift to historical revisionism, what happens when still-alive conservative actors talk?

Some idiot is starting a new web site for all the poor conservatives in Hollywood, and is duly and amusingly mocked.

This reminds me of a clip I saw of John Voight leading some ra ra in the audience at a Sarah Palin rally. A reporter asked him about the bailouts or tax plans or some such, and he said words to the effect of "oh, I don't know about any of that stuff go ask one of the politicians. I'm just an actor." So... uh... if you don't know anything about what thse guys are promising to... you know, do... if they get elected, then why are you running around trying to gin up support for them?

Clearly being a Republican is basically a tribal thing for some of these people - it literally doesn't matter who is running or what they promise to do, but the Republicans are us, and us are the good guys, so goooo us! I mean, Republicans! Seriously, I think the Republican candidate could have been the slack-jawed son of a plutocrat, who was only running because he'd already run everything else he'd been handed into the ground, and he would still have vo... okay, bad example.