Freedom or Employment. Choose

[Originally posted on goofyblog 4.23.07]

The Imus affair is a slippery slope. If you don’t like what someone says or something you see, change the channel. Censorship from the left is still just censorship.

The hyprocrisy of getting a man fired over his speech is highlighted in an article by Ted Rall (via smirking chimp):

Talk radio host Don Imus’ April 4 reference to female members of the Rutgers University basketball team as “nappy-headed hos” prompted calls for his ousting by an ad hoc alliance of politically correct liberals and opportunistic conservatives (Imus, a political liberal, had been on the right’s hit list).

As Josh Silver, writing for the center-left Huffington Post, summarized the let-them-rant-in-the-streets argument: “For those who feel that the firing of Imus has been an affront to First Amendment free speech protections, consider this: Imus still is still a free person. He can start a blog.”

“Mel Gibson can still say whatever he wants,” a reader wrote to the New York Times. “So can Don Imus, Rush Limbaugh and Ann Coulter. That personal consequences may follow free speech (like losing your job or learning not to say vicious things) doesn’t violate the Constitution.”

In other words, your boss should be able to fire you if you say something he deems “vicious”–criticizing the president, say.

Behold the Gospel of the Economic Censors! The First Amendment remains in full force for them–at full pay–but scaled back for those they don’t like. Snoop Dogg and his fellow gangsta rappers should be free to peddle their smut on CD-Rs on Harlem sidewalks, they say–but not to have it distributed and sold in stores. You know, where most people buy music.

Moving Images

[Originally posted on goofyblog 4.20.07]

This 8-minute animation from Dutch artist Michael Dudok De Wit, called Father and Daughter, is so well done. I was moved by the story itself, but the artistry of the telling and drawing of it is beautiful.

The Massacre from Afar

[Originally posted on goofyblog 4.19.07]

La Journada, Mexico

This is an alarming tendency that must cause the authorities in that country to reflect: what has occurred that things should have come to this?

Filmmaker Michael Moore has no doubt: the school massacres are due to the pathology of violence and fear that prevails in the country, which has the highest rate of gun killings in the world and where there number of firearms exceeds that of voters or television sets.

El Pais, Spain

In the U.S., gun control measures are systematically challenged by an abusive interpretation of The Second Amendment - which was written before there was a National Army or National Guard.

O Povo, Brazil

Without a source of internal strength, without an anchor that can keep them on the ground and in good condition - like beings trapped in a trans-historical dimension and deemed expendable by others - people end up losing any reference to their humanity. Once in a while they explode in destructive and murderous fury, going against everything and everyone, randomly identifying them as the executioners of their misfortune.

This is a phenomenon more and more present in post-industrial society, and it’s an unequivocal sign of the imbalance and severe illness that affects our hedonistic civilization.

JongAng Daily, South Korea

The most effective hands to heal the terrible wounds of this crime will be of Koreans living in the United States. Koreans should show their strong willingness to share the sorrow, take emotional responsibility and heal the wounds together with the Americans. They should offer prayers, plan memorials and scholarship projects, and take measures to prevent this from ever happening again. They should roll up their sleeves to volunteer in the region where they live.

If both governments and Korean-Americans share their thoughts and wisdom, then the 33 fallen flowers will serve as a precious tribute to improved mutual relations.

Khaleej Times, United Arab Emirates

In many respects, America is currently in the best of positions. Its people are among the best cared for in the world by virtue of the affluence and systems that support life in that nation. Yet, without doubt, something is ailing that society at its very core, symptoms of which are evident in cases like the Virginia one.

Whether this has something to do with the overall weakening of its value system or America’s pre-occupation with the affairs in the rest of the world leaving it little time to care for its own affairs, is simply a matter of conjecture.

Le Monde, France

The slaughter at Virginia Tech University forces American society to once again confront itself, its violence, the gun fetishism that preoccupies part of the population and the dissoluteness of young people subject to the dual-tyranny of abundance and competition.

SpeigelOnLine, Germany

Across the continent on Tuesday, European media rubber-neck at Monday’s massacre in the United States. Most seem to agree about one thing: The shooting at Virginia Tech is the result of America’s woeful lack of serious gun control laws. In the strongest editorialized image of the day, German cable news broadcaster NTV flashed an image of the former head of the National Rifle Association, the US gun lobby: In other words, blame rifle-wielding Charlton Heston for the 33 dead.

TimesOnLine, London

Perhaps of all the elements of American exceptionalism – those factors, positive or negative, that make the US such a different country, politically, socially, culturally, from the rest of the civilised world – it is the gun culture that foreigners find so hard to understand.

The country’s religiosity, so at odds with the rest of the developed world these days; its economic system which seems to tolerate vast disparities of income; even all those strange sports Americans enjoy – all of these can at least be understood by the rest of us, even if not shared.

The Daily Telegraph, Australia

Well, Virginia is not only the land of the free, and the birthplace of Washington and of Lee; it’s the place also of the freely available gun. In Virginia, you can buy a handgun any time you want.

Now, in our country, most of us take a different view. We’re not happy about our record - still intact, courtesy of the Port Arthur massacre - for having the greatest number of shooting deaths in a single incident.

Yesterday’s should remind us of an undeniable truth - there is no “right'’ to carry weapons. Those who make the tired argument that “it’s people not guns'’ who kill others, should wake up.

Toronto Sun, Canada

But as shocking as yesterday’s tragedy is, the list of those that preceded is perhaps more shocking. Incidents occur with such terrifying regularity it’s almost like a war — more than three dozen serious school shooting incidents in the last three decades.

There will be talk in the coming days about gun control, but that hasn’t protected us in Canada. [W]e have seen our share of tragic school shootings.

It doesn’t seem to matter if it’s an upscale community in Colorado, a rural Amish community in Pennsylvania, a downtown neighbourhood of Montreal — nobody is immune.

It’s high time we committed ourselves to finding some [answers].

Text Someone, Kill a Bee Colony

[Originally posted on goofyblog 4.18.07]

If crazed university gun men aren’t enough to make your day, how about mass starvation?

The world’s bee colonies are dying mysteriously, and a study from Landau University suggests that mobile phones may be to blame. The colonies are subject to “Colony Collapse Disorder,” and the disorder accounts for the death of anywhere from 50-70 percent of bee colonies. Since bees pollinate most crops, flowers and fruiting trees, the end of bees is seriously bad news for the world’s food supply.

The alarm was first sounded last autumn, but has now hit half of all American states. The West Coast is thought to have lost 60 per cent of its commercial bee population, with 70 per cent missing on the East Coast.

CCD has since spread to Germany, Switzerland, Spain, Portugal, Italy and Greece. And last week John Chapple, one of London’s biggest bee-keepers, announced that 23 of his 40 hives have been abruptly abandoned.

It’s been long understood that bees respond to electromagnetic radiation. Dr Jochen Kuhn at Germany’s Landau University has shown that bees don’t return to their hives when cellphones are present. The study doesn’t prove that cellphones are responsible for CCD, but it does provide evidence that mobile phones are implicated in the death of hives.

The implications of the spread are alarming. Most of the world’s crops depend on pollination by bees. Albert Einstein once said that if the bees disappeared, “man would have only four years of life left”.

From boing boing.

Real Reason We’re in Iraq

[Originally posted on goofyblog 4.18.07]

Susie Bright has an interesting take on the scandal surrounding Paul Wolfowitz’s promotion and salary increase of his lover and unearths some info I wasn’t aware of.

The appointment of George Bush’s leading hawk as head of the World Bank was heading for a crisis over his relationship with a senior British employee.

Influential members of staff at the international organisation have complained to its board that Paul Wolfowitz, a married father of three, is so besotted with Oxford-educated Shaha Riza he cannot be impartial.

Extraordinarily, they claim she played a key role in pushing the 61-year-old Pentagon official into the Iraq War. And the row comes amid claims that Wolfowitz’s wife Clare once warned George Bush of the threat to national security any infidelity by her husband could cause.

A British citizen - at 51, eight years younger than Wolfowitz’s wife - Ms Riza grew up in Saudi Arabia and was passionately committed to democratising the Middle East when she allegedly began to date Wolfowitz.

After they moved to America, Shaha worked for the Iraq Foundation, set up by expatriates to overthrow Saddam Hussein after the first Gulf War. She subsequently joined the National Endowment for Democracy, created by President Ronald Reagan to promote American ideals.

Bulent Riza said Shaha started to “talk to Paul” about reforming the Middle East. And New Yorker magazine’s respected commentator Paul Boyer observed that a senior World Bank official “named Shaha Ali Riza” was an “influence”.

From Hullabaloo (April 2005)

And even though staff complained then, it didn’t change anything. So, the pen is mightier than the sword?

The World Bank is staffed by a well-paid, highly educated secretariat, the vast majority of whom are non-Americans. … Nearly 90 percent of the staff opposed Wolfowitz’s nomination. A day after the banks directors confirmed his appointment, Bank Swirled, a satirical magazine produced by bank employees, reported that a moving crew had delivered some personal items to his new office, including a 1768 map of Iraq, with hundreds of red X’s denoting WMD’s, hundreds of black X’s denoting ‘Oil Well$,’ and one blue X denoting a ‘decent sushi restaurant’.

The zine is as good as The Onion in it’s way and worth a look see (latest issue here).

It may have sounded goofy when it first came out in 2005, but now that he’s had to apologize for the girlfriend fiasco, evidently it was all too true: we went into Iraq as part of a top-bottom love triangle between Wolfie, his mistress and her ex-husband! And I thought Condie was butch!

As Susie says:

So World Bank Prez Paul Wolfowitz’s siphoning of $100,000’s to tip his demanding dominatrix mistress has backfired. This wasn’t the spanking he had in mind.

Woe is he! The whole bank staff booed him when Wolfie tried to “explain,” and you can hardly blame them.

The hubris of Bush’s unpopular appointee provides the “sexy” reason the Bank’s Board can use to force his removal, since apparently ruining the world on the whim of one’s own conceits is not cause for dismissal.

“His womanising has come home to roost,” a Washington insider said.

Born to Shop

[Originally posted on goofyblog 4.17.07]

Miss Cellania is re-running her Mars and Venus series from 2005. The map above reminds me of myself and every girlfriend I’ve ever had.

A few excerpts of her Introduction to the series, available here:

*Relationships:*

Women: When a relationship ends, a woman will cry and pour her heart out to her girlfriends, and she will write a poem titled “All Men Are Idiots”. Then she will get on with her life.

Men: A man has a little more trouble letting go. Six months after the break-up, at 3:00 a.m. on a Saturday night, he will call and say,”I just wanted to let you know you ruined my life, and I’ll never forgive you, and I hate you, and you’re a total floozy. But I want you to know that there’s always a chance for us.” This is known as the “I Hate You / I Love You” drunken phone call, that 99% of all men have made at least once. There are community colleges that offer courses to help men get over this need.

*Sex:*

Women: They prefer 30-40 minutes of foreplay.

Men: They prefer 30-40 seconds of foreplay. Men consider driving back to her place part of the foreplay.

*Mirrors:*

Men: Men are vain and will check themselves out in a mirror.

Women: They are ridiculous; they will check out their reflections in any shiny surface: mirrors, spoons, store windows, bald guys’ heads.

Hasn’t Left Her Flat in 3 Years

[Originally posted on goofyblog 4.17.07]

You have to check this out! They’re not half bad actually and the some of the cuts are funny. From Miss Cellania.

The average age of The Zimmers is 78. Lead singer Alf Carrera is 90 years old. Other band members are 99 and 100 years old! The single will be released on May 14th. Visit The Zimmers’ Myspace page.

What Price Surge?

[Originally posted on goofyblog 4.15.07]

From the New York Times, April 2nd:

The most powerful Shiite cleric in Iraq has rejected an American-backed proposal to allow thousands of former members of Saddam Hussein’s Baath Party to return to government service, an aide to the cleric said Monday.

The rejection by the cleric, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, appears certain to fuel hostility between the majority Shiites and the former ruling Sunni Arabs, since many Sunni Arabs say they were unfairly purged from the government in the clampdown on the Baath Party.

The Americans say a partial reversal of the de-Baathification process, which began in 2003, is one of the most crucial steps the Iraqi government can take in wooing back disaffected Sunni Arabs and draining the Sunni-led insurgency of its zealotry. The White House has repeatedly told the Iraqi government that the process must be changed.

Cenk Uyger has written an article about this development. In the Iraqi world, it’s the turning point for the American experiment in Iraq. Let’s just break down the article into an easy-to-read schedule of developments, as follows:

1. Sunnis denied government jobs by Shiite Ayotollah; have no incentive to join in legitimizing the government; fight back against a government that excludes them

2. Insurgency grows and“surge” fails to stem growing insurgency
-either-2a. U.S. begins withdrawal; is replaced by Shiite militias

-or-

2a. “Stay the course”

2b. Shiite militias become impatient with lack of progress; begin attacking Sunnis

2c. U.S. engages Shiite militias in battle

3. U.S. is now in the middle of a Civil War, fighting both sides

-either-

3a. We hastily withdraw

-or-

3a. Our military experience heavy losses

4. We withdraw