Dwarf's penis gets stuck in vacuum cleaner

It's a rainy, dreary day here in Connecticut. It's a helluva lot worse in Mexico. Drop a shekel or three in a collection plate for Hurricane Dean relief.

Since it's a rainy day here, I'll leave you with some reading material.

Starving Gaza, by Chris Hedges, at Truthdig:

Gaza has become the Sarajevo of the Middle East. Israel, in an action similar to that of the Serbs in Bosnia, has surrounded and cut off nearly a million and a half Palestinians in the Gaza Strip since the Islamic militant group Hamas took control in June. Electric fences and watch towers manned by Israeli soldiers keep the Palestinians trapped inside the strip. The land and sea blockade, the halting of all but minimal humanitarian aid and the refusal to allow Gaza to receive financial support are crushing Gaza’s industry, farming and infrastructure.

See also:

Gaza's public employees getting paid on one condition: stay home

Genocide in Tranquil Kurdistan.

Scott Ritter: Calling Out Idiot America (an old article, but still interesting).

From Truthout comes:

Prelude to an Attack on Iran, originally published in Time Magazine.

And what do we do if just the opposite happens - a strike on Iran unifies Iranians behind the regime? An Administration official told me it's not even a consideration. "IRGC IED's are a casus belli for this administration. There will be an attack on Iran."

Survivors of Bombs Left to Die in Rubble.

British military sparks US fears of losing Basra:

Stephen Biddle, who sits on the Council on Foreign Relations and is a member of a group that advised the US commander in Iraq, General David Petraeus, told the The Sunday Times in London that coalition forces were no longer in control of the city.

"I regret to say that the Basra experience is set to become a major blunder in terms of military history," Mr Biddle was quoted as saying. "The insurgents are calling the shots … and in a worst-case scenario will chase us out of town."

Another senior US officer told The Sunday Telegraph: "The short version is that the Brits have lost Basra, if indeed they ever had it … They did not have enough troops there even before they started cutting back. The situation is beyond their control."

The officer warned of "a stink about this that will hang around the British military".

The old expression "lie down with dogs, wake up with fleas" comes to mind for some reason.

And the most important story of the day, from the bin of "you can't make this shit up":

Dwarf's penis gets stuck in vacuum cleaner.

It's all about freedom

Public service announcement: Gradatim Ferociter.

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Democrats eating their own will not help anyone: Ex-Dem. Party boss blasts Kerry in book. They need to come together with a cohesive strategy to fix the nightmare mess Bush has left this country in, instead of Monday-morning quarterbacking a campaign from three years ago. No one needs to read about Affleck and Paltrow making out a decade ago either.

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Extremism never works: Atheists challenge the religious right ~ and I'm all for that. But, as the article points out:

These offerings are so intolerant of religion of any kind - liberal, moderate, or fundamentalist - that some scientists and secularists have critiqued their peers for oversimplification and for a secular fundamentalism.

"They undermine their own case by writing in a language that suffers from many things they say are true of believers - intolerance, disrespect, extremism," says Alan Wolfe, a professor of religion at Boston College, who is a secularist and author of several books on American religious perspectives.

On the one hand you could say that Dawkins and Harris are only fighting fire with fire. But it will backfire on them. I think most people, theist or not, prefer a more moderate stance. Religious, dogmatic, people piss me off to no end, and I've ranted about it often enough. People of faith I can deal with because they usually have no agenda, no need to force me into their mold. The dogmatic atheists are no different from the fundamentalist religious - they are as determined to force the people to see the universe only from a rational point of view, just as the religious insist on the rest of us viewing the universe from a god-centered point of view. I, and I think many people, aren't going to listen to either side and will just be put off both messages.

Many nontheists don't share this militant perspective, but have decided that keeping silent in religious America no longer makes sense. They are astonished that a majority of Americans question evolution and support teaching intelligent design in the science classroom. They are distressed over polls that show that at least half of Americans are unwilling to vote for an atheist despite the Constitution's requirement that there be no religious test for public office. And they contend that in recent years, Congress has passed bills and the president has issued executive orders that have privileged religion in inappropriate and unconstitutional ways.

As a result, seven organizations of nontheists - including atheists, freethinkers, humanists, and agnostics - began the Secular Coalition for America (SCA), a lobby seeking to increase the visibility and respectability of nontheistic viewpoints in the United States.

Sadly SCA also stands for SCA, which is bound to confuse the hell out of everyone. Anyway, if they stick to their stance: "Still, the group makes clear on its website that while it promotes reason and science as the bases for policymaking, it also supports religious tolerance." they'll have my support.

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This is the internet as it is meant to be. How to go to M.I.T. for free.

"We believe strongly that education can be best advanced when knowledge is shared openly and freely," says Anne Margulies, executive director of the OCW program at MIT. "MIT is using the power of the Internet to give away all of the educational materials created here."

OCW

death by dogma

Daniel Ellsberg: Time to Drive Out the Bush Regime

We are in a crisis right now. It’s known to us, more than it was known to almost anyone outside the White House in 1969. A genuine crisis. We are looking at a very high likelihood, I believe, as I read the Seymour Hersh articles about a new war, a new attack on Iran which could involve nuclear weapons— it has been explicitly described as having the possibility of the use of nuclear weapons. The president, Rice, Rumsfeld—they have all been asked specifically: Do we rule out nuclear weapons? They answer, “All options are on the table, nothing is ruled out.” And Hersh reveals that plans have been made for the use of nuclear weapons. This would be a new war in addition then to Iraq, quite possibly much, much worse than Iraq in all of its consequences. This is too crazy to imagine with any other administration. If Hersh were giving those stories about some other administration, whether it’s George Bush
Sr. or Gore or whoever it might be, I would say “impossible.” The costs of this are too obvious, too horrific, they couldn’t really mean that. You can’t say that about this administration, [though] many people do. The ones who say that it’s too crazy even for these guys I think they are on the wrong foot. It’s not too crazy for these guys. The people who did get us into Iraq are—according to Hersh—on the same kind of “reasoning,” prepared to do that to Iran.

US Holds AP photographer in Iraq for 5 months

"We want the rule of law to prevail. He either needs to be charged or released. Indefinite detention is not acceptable," said Tom Curley, AP's president and chief executive officer. "We've come to the conclusion that this is unacceptable under Iraqi law, or Geneva Conventions, or any military procedure." Hussein is one of an estimated 14,000 people detained by the U.S. military worldwide — 13,000 of them in Iraq. They are held in limbo where few are ever charged with a specific crime or given a chance before any court or tribunal to argue for their freedom.

Hm. Surprised he hasn't been shipped off to Guantanamo. It's an interesting story and gives insight into how media organizations work.


The Longer the War, the Larger the Lies by Frank Rich:

You'd think that after having been caught concocting the scenario that took the nation to war in Iraq, the White House would mind the facts now. But this administration understands our culture all too well. This is a country where a cable news network (MSNBC) offers in-depth journalism about one of its anchors (Tucker Carlson) losing a prime-time dance contest and where conspiracy nuts have created a cottage industry of books and DVD's by arguing that hijacked jets did not cause 9/11 and that the 9/11 commission was a cover-up.

(The fictionalized "Path to 9/11," supposedly based on the commission's report, only advanced the nuts' case.) If you're a White House stuck in a quagmire in an election year, what's the percentage in starting to tell the truth now? It's better to game the system.

The untruths are flying so fast that untangling them can be a full-time job. Maybe that's why I am beginning to find Dick Cheney almost refreshing. As we saw on "Meet the Press" last Sunday, these days he helpfully signals when he's about to lie. One dead giveaway is the word context, as in "the context in which I made that statement last year." The vice president invoked "context" to try to explain away both his bogus predictions: that Americans would be greeted as liberators in Iraq and that the insurgency (some 15 months ago) was in its "last throes."

Spy Agencies Outsourcing to fill key jobs

Sometimes you laugh, sometimes you cry, at the sheer stupidity of humanity. Who the fuck thought the above was a good idea?

Largely because of the demands of the war on terrorism and the drawn-out conflict in Iraq, U.S. spy agencies have turned to unprecedented numbers of outside contractors to perform jobs once the domain of government-employed analysts and secret agents.

In one well-known case, David A. Passaro was hired as a contractor with the CIA's paramilitary service even though he had a record of abusive behavior and had been fired by a Connecticut police department. Passaro was convicted of felony assault earlier this year in federal court in North Carolina for his role in the beating of a detainee who died in Afghanistan in 2003. U.S. intelligence officials said that Passaro's case was an aberration and that security problems had not been more frequent among contractors than among career officers.

Uh huh. Right.

A review of the practice has been ordered.

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Pope remarks worry Christians in Mideast

"We are afraid," said Sonia Kobatazi, a Christian Lebanese, after Sunday morning Mass at the Maronite Christian St. George Cathedral in Beirut, Lebanon, where about a dozen policemen carrying automatic weapons stood guard outside.

They should be worried. When I read the text of the speech last week I couldn't help but roll my eyes and shake my head. What the Pope said isn't that bad - but after the controversy which exploded over a cartoon earlier this year, you'd think someone would say... "um, maybe this speech isn't such a great idea right now...". The Islamic world is an angry, pain-filled, place; any criticism is going to come across as a huge slap in the face.

You'd think church leaders would be a little more cognizant of that than I am. Hopefully the Vatican will cancel the Holy Father's visit to Turkey. If some nut kills him, the radical right wing of the Catholic faith will launch a crusade of their own. They might even be joined by the radical right wing of the rest of Christianity.

Suggestion: Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa maybe called for right now.

See also: ‘God’s Rottweiler’ Barks by Sam Harris.


Have you seen ads for Jesus Camp online? Sadly (because I'm still boycotting ABC/Disney) ABC News has one of the better reviews of the movie, via Raw Story: Film Shows Youths Training to Fight for Jesus, by Dan Harris.

Speaking in tongues, weeping for salvation, praying for an end to abortion and worshipping a picture of President Bush -- these are some of the activities at Pastor Becky Fischer's Bible camp in North Dakota, "Kids on Fire," subject of the provocative new documentary, "Jesus Camp."

I think I see a problem here. I mean Hellooooo...

(2) I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery; (3) you shall have no other gods before me. (4) You shall not make for yourself an idol, whether in the form of anything that is in heaven above, or that is on the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth. (5) You shall not bow down to them or worship them; for I the Lord your God am a jealous God, punishing children for the iniquity of parents, to the third and the fourth generation of those who reject me, (6) but showing steadfast love to the thousandth generation of those who love me and keep my commandments.

From the Bible according to Wiki.

"We're kinda being trained to be warriors," said another, "only in a funner way."

And didn't Jesus say:

"You have heard that it was said, 'An eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth.' But I tell you, do not resist an evil person. If someone strikes you on the right cheek, turn to him the other also. And if someone wants to sue you and take your tunic, let him have your cloak as well. If someone forces you to go one mile, go with him two miles. Give to the one who asks you, and do not turn away from the one who wants to borrow from you." (Matthew 5:38-42, NIV)"

Also

A parallel version is offered in the Sermon on the Plain in the Gospel of Luke:

"But I say unto you which hear, Love your enemies, do good to them which hate you,"

"Bless them that curse you, and pray for them which despitefully use you. And unto him that smiteth thee on the one cheek offer also the other; and him that taketh away thy cloke forbid not to take thy coat also. Give to every man that asketh of thee; and of him that taketh away thy goods ask them not again. And as ye would that men should do to you, do ye also to them likewise." (Luke 6:28-31. King James Version)

Also from Wiki.

Another reivew is available via Rotton Tomatoes, Jesus Camp 9/10:

Anyhow, this is a must see for anyone brought up in a religious environment or anybody that is a thinking voter in the US. Perhaps you'll want to align yourself with these people...I don't. When it comes to faith, for me, I consider it a very personal thing and however I choose to connect with God is probably just fine with him. The evangelicals can continue speaking in fake tongues and indoctrinating generations to vote Republican because Jesus was Republican...yeah right. My review, along with any others that think this group a bit crazy, will be disimissed by evangelicals because...well, consider the source. There's no way that a movie reviewer that openly admits being a Christian but disagrees with them could be a Christian of any substance. I'm not terribly concerned about what they're doing at their camps or in their church services...they can worship the best way they see fit. But they don't agree with the way I conduct my day to day business, and are willing to change government to make changes to the way you and I worship, think, and what we're allowed to see/hear...and they're succeeding. Like I said... disturbing.

Onward, Christian soldiers, marching as to war,
with the cross of Jesus going on before.
Christ, the royal Master, leads against the foe;
forward into battle see his banners go!

Refrain:

Onward, Christian soldiers, marching as to war,
with the cross of Jesus going on before.

At the sign of triumph Satan's host doth flee;
on then, Christian soldiers, on to victory!
Hell's foundations quiver at the shout of praise;
brothers, lift your voices, loud your anthems raise.

(Refrain)

Like a mighty army moves the church of God;
brothers, we are treading where the saints have trod.
We are not divided, all one body we,
one in hope and doctrine, one in charity.

(Refrain)

Crowns and thrones may perish, kingdoms rise and wane,
but the church of Jesus constant will remain.
Gates of hell can never gainst that church prevail;
we have Christ's own promise, and that cannot fail.

(Refrain)

Onward then, ye people, join our happy throng,
blend with ours your voices in the triumph song.
Glory, laud, and honor unto Christ the King,
this through countless ages men and angels sing.

(Refrain)


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Remembering Ann Richards by Molly Ivins.


White Buffalo

"The birth of a white male buffalo means men need to take responsibility for their families and the future of the tribe," Hand said.


I hope Studio 60 lives up to it's hype. I'll be watching at 10 tonight.