cheese it, the cops!

We have your motherfuckin record company surrounded. Put down the candy and let the little boy go.
--Dr. Dre

david horowitz is a bit of a bitter crank, but he always at least seemed kind of bright. but his "guide to the left" is incomprehensible. it includes zarqawi, khomeini, khalid shaik mohammed, mohammed atta, zacarias moussaoui, along with, you know, rob reiner, danny glover, susan sarandon. it must not be easy to be driven by extreme ideological commitments into a realm completely detached from reality. um: those folks are religious fundamentalists. they are reactionaries. they are far more similar to john ashcroft than rob reiner. it's like i put up a rogue's gathering of the american right and included not only, say, john gotti, but also the weather underground and huey newton. but perhaps horowitz is more to be pitied than censured: things have been so hard since the lobotomy.

flirting with disaster

i think i just saw bush, on msnbc, saying to a cute beligian tv interviewer, "you have great eyes." damn, man, he really does need europe. wonder who laura's out with.

again, my column this week (release, wed) will argue among other things that the proposed amendment to the virginia constitution explicitly protecting religious oppression is a good thing. this washpost editorial on  the matter is incoherent. they had better decide whether the thing is a mere restatement of what's already there, or a new state establishment of religion. i don't doubt that carrico has a fundamentalist agenda, but it is not embodied in the proposed amendment.

actually betterhumans.com is the most deeply pessimistic site ever in that it reveals how much we suck now, and how much we are aware of how much we suck now, and how we will grasp at anything that promises that we could transcend our fallen condition or "nature" in its entirety: cloning, plastic surgery, longevity devices. indeed, betterhumans.com promises what folks like augustine used to promise us, only realer. or maybe not. the single best way to make cash, or followers, or whatever you want: engage and promise to treat the sources of human self-loathing.

blood will tell

finally , the secret of eternal youth revealed.
hell would i be without mikey?
wait a second. betterhumans.com??? well i guess we can't get any worse. on the other hand, we can't  get any better, either.

wal-mart rules

here's a good story of republican efforts to stimulate the economy. wal-mart became the biggest corporation in the world by certain, um, labor practices. then of course it became a huge supporter of the republican party and conservative causes. then the labor department agreed to warn wal-mart in advance if it was going to be investigated. then the attorney general of new york, the redoubtable spitzer, in essence said: ok. forget the dept of labor: if you've got a complaint against wal-mart, bring it to me, and i won't notify them to shred the documents before i show up. then the labor dept launched an investigation of its own investigations. i assume that after that investigation, they will investigate the investigation of their investigation and so on, until their entire staff is thus occupied. this will in turn serve their purposes by making the department of labor unable to investigate anything but itself.

yo: thanks mike farrell

r.i.p. malcolm x, one of the greatest americans.

just teaching plato's republic again and am re-impressed by the insane horror: the lies, the eugenics, the infanticide of non-state-authorized offspring, the offhand remark that we might have to execute everyone over 15.

hunter and mike

mike farrell on hunter thompson:

Well, Cato, things are not going well. " We were just outside of Barstow when the drugs kicked in..." I read the whole thing in one sitting in the middle of a party in the corridor pigs' room in 1972, I think -- Rolling Stone. Kinda, sorta, shoulda changed my life..."What are you staring at? It's some type of electric snake. Well, shoot it. No, I want to study its habits..." "As your attorney, I advise you to start drinking heavily..."

I guess at some point, you stop studying the habits of the electric snake, and shoot yourself. Or not. But we, the rest, will always have Vegas.

Mike

i just posted this: bite the cobain stick .

ab: but isn't politics about selling your soul?
cs: dude. if politics was about selling your soul, the democrats would control both houses of congress and john kerry would be president.

i just posted a piece on authoritarian education.

intelligence failures

i live in the county (york, pa) where the debate about teaching intelligent design is taking place, and i've got 2 kids in a public high school. now as you may know i have argued that religious approaches to questions of origins should be discussed in science classes. but in terms of intelligent design as an empirical hypothesis, i just want to mention that the argument from design has been exploded as effectively as any idea in the history of philosophy . hume crushed it in a dozen different ways, each of which would have been sufficient. there are only a few ideas in the philosophy that i think have been refuted decisively. this is one. it would help if both sides of this particular creationism debate at least read dialogues concerning natural religion.

i'm a leg gorilla myself

these poor lassies were sexually harassed by koko the talking gorilla . actually, it may be that the koko case inspired the stunningly effective sex interrogation techniques pioneered at gitmo. they  figured: look, if tits can make a gorilla talk, imagine what they can do for a human being (if, that is, they consider their prisoners human beings). indeed this explains the jeff gannon approach to asking questions at the white house, only koko and the gitmo prosoners are heterosexuals, unlike anyone on the president's staff. but let me ask you this: was what koko did bestialism? again since the ape-handlers in question are presumably of the same species as the gitmo interrogators, the answer is yes.   

gay access

american coprophagia has been doing good work on the jeff gannon/guckert story. i admit that i'm maybe less freaked out than most lefty bloggers: he didn't hardly pretend not be a shill, did he? and ask me if i care whether some idiot has access to the white house press room.  anyway, i do like the "gay escort" angle. and if the question is: how does someone like this get access to the white house?, dude. gay male escorts have blanket access to all conservative institutions and events.

summers breeze

now whatever you think about the lawrence summers imbroglio - and i essentially agree with the washpost editorial (except that i'm maybe less impressed with the amazingness of saying stuff like this: free mind indeed) - you can't go around calling these ideas "fresh." please. where you from?

But he explained that on this occasion he would not discuss what the world ought to be like. Instead, he would seek to provoke fresh thinking on why it is as it is.

Mr. Summers offered three possible reasons for women's underrepresentation in top science faculties. The most important, he suggested, is that women on average (which doesn't mean all individual women) may be less willing than men are to work 80-hour weeks and make the family sacrifices that high-pressure occupations require. "That's not a judgment about how it should be," he reiterated, adding that new research "may prove my conjectures completely wrong."

Next, Mr. Summers suggested that fewer women than men are outstandingly good or outstandingly bad at math. If this is so, the average ability of men and women may be identical, but the pool of math geniuses from which top universities recruit is disproportionately male. Mr. Summers conceded he might be wrong on this point, adding that "I would far prefer to believe something else, because it would be easier to address what is surely a serious social problem if something else were true." But he cited research that led him to think that innate differences probably explained more than the third and most eagerly cited category of reason for women's underrepresentation: social and parental pressures that direct women away from sciences, coupled with workplace discrimination.

Study philosophy until you see in generals nothing but donkey drivers.
--Crates the Cynic (365? - 285? B.C.)

human rights and iraq

yo instapundit : i'm not saying that no one in the pro-war wing ever condemned saddam's abuses or held out hopes for democracy. but those ideas demonstrably did not justify the invasion of iraq. how do i know that? consider the response of the bush admin in all similar cases. sudan, for instance: infinitely the more acute human rights crisis. we did, we do, nothing. now we say we'll free everyone everywhere. only our interest is bizarrely selective and in the case of iraq, apparently perfectly arbitrary. the agenda mighta been this and mighta been that, but it obviously was not human rights.

here is an excellent source of basic info on negroponte's involvement with the honduran dictatorship and its death squads. as ambassador to mexico, btw, he helped coordinate attacks on the guerillas in chiapas. it appears that it has been his job for decades under rep admininstrations, to coordinate and supply repressive efforts of america's allies. some highlights out of honduras:

Negroponte supervised the creation in 1984 of the El Aguacate air base, where the US trained Nicaraguan Contras and which critics say was used as a secret detention and torture center during the 1980s. [11] (http://www.rtfcam.org/report/volume_19/No_4/article4.htm)

In August 2001, excavations at the base discovered 185 corpses, including two Americans, who are thought to have been killed and buried at the site. "[12] (http://sundial.ccs.yorku.ca/cgi-bin/wa?A2=ind0109&L=lacyork&F=&S=&P=1063)

Records also show that a special intelligence unit of the Honduran armed forces, Battalion 3-16, trained by the CIA and Argentine military, kidnapped, tortured and killed hundreds of people, including US missionaries. Critics charge that Negroponte knew about these human rights violations and yet continued to collaborate with the Honduran military while lying to Congress.

In May 1982, a nun, Sister Laetitia Bordes, who had worked for ten years in El Salvador, went on a fact-finding delegation to Honduras to investigate the whereabouts of thirty Salvadoran nuns and women of faith who fled to Honduras in 1981 after Archbishop Oscar Romero's assassination. Negroponte claimed the embassy knew nothing.

But in a 1996 interview with the Baltimore Sun, Binns, said that a group of Salvadorans, among whom were the women Bordes had been looking for, were captured on April 22, 1981, and savagely tortured by the DNI, the Honduran Secret Police, and then later thrown out of helicopters alive.

In early 1984, two American mercenaries, Thomas Posey and Dana Parker, contacted Negroponte, stating they wanted to supply arms to the Contras after the U.S. Congress had banned further military aid. Documents show that Negroponte brought the two with a contact in the Honduran armed forces.

my new column

for creators is up .

suicide me

i've figured out this mysterious thing about how anti-depressants cause suicide. it ain't bio-chemical. it's just that, when they tell you that you need anti-depressants, they're telling you you're depressed. now that's depressing, even moreso because the solution is that you need to be fixed with a pill. depression is bad. but depression about the fact that you are depressed is an infinite vortex of hellfire. now on the other hand maybe you weren't depressed and have been misdiagnosed. still, the claim that you are depressed makes you unhappy, and you eat the cobain stick. all of this is tripled because - because you are on anti-depressants - you expect your depression to lift, but - because you are on anti-depressants (see above) - you're all bummed out. this makes it appear that there's no solution, and so you hit the marilyn highway.

even a cursory examination of john negroponte's resume is disturbing, or rather just a trifle nauseating. i'd like to know what role he played, for example, in the ollie-north illegal resupply of the contras through, among other sources, drug sales to american cities and arms sales to the iranian revolution. beyond that, he has a hand in everything that might make you queasy: from henry kissinger's delightful forays into vietnam and chile to the our miserable present moment.

my column

for next week is going to be about two stories: a proposed constitutional amendment in virginia, declaring that "the people's right to pray and to recognize their religious beliefs, heritage, and traditions on public property, including public schools, shall not be infringed"; and a proposed law in pennsylvania requiring schoolchildren to recite the pledge of allegiance or sing the national anthem (note lyric in the star spangled banner: "this be our motto: in god is our trust"). my argument is that anyone who values religious freedom or the ideas about it of the founders should endorse the virginia and oppose the pa legislation. in my view that is the only consistent position, and both sides of this debate are more concerned to control other people's religious behavior or lack thereof than to maintain a consistent advocacy of religious freedom.

sometimes

god uses people . sometimes people use god .

ritter and al-jazeera

michelle malkin, reporterette and others are ridiculing both scott ritter and al-jazeera for his contribution to it. this seems a bit much. i guess that they are pissed off because they were oh so wrong about iraq every which way and scott ritter was right. so anyway, maybe the idea is that reporting things accurately is tantamount to treason. al-jazeera has been more accurate on civilian casualties, american abuse of prisoners, and many other stories than many american news outlets, to say nothing of the official spokesliars of the dod etc. the deeply sad fact is that as a matter of fact, as "treason" is defined by these vicious chumps, the truth is indeed treason.

tsunami bomb

Sting (like Madonna and many Indonesians, he seems to have only one name), had gone for a swim around the island, the same route I took when I was caught up in the tsunami.

damn it . all god had to do was hold off a few short weeks and he coulda got sting. or maybe it was like the double-bomb effect: devastate a region by tsunami, which attracts celebrities. then unleash the real disaster. the devastation of the tsunami was, i found, ultimately compatible with my faith. but its failures of devastation have sent me back to  atheist hell .

there are better and worse reasons for shooting someone.

i am a big fan of abstinence-only education, and applaud the white house and hhs for pointing out that sex is for fags. (yo: thanks, adam)

hall of fame

hoist an extreme beer to brian mitchell , the great kick returner/running back who retired officially today as a washington redskin. rarely has a man played so hard and talked so well. second to jerry rice in all-purpose yards in nfl history. i recall a game against philly when they injured most of our team, including our first 3 quarterbacks. mitchell finished the game in the fog at qb and played beautifully. for heaven's sake put him in the hall of fame.