Ha!

(courtesy of Rense.com)
Oh, and speaking of the f*ckers...

Stop hiring columnists, Bush orders Cabinet

WASHINGTON -- President Bush on Wednesday ordered his Cabinet secretaries not to hire columnists to promote their agendas after disclosure that a second writer was paid to tout an administration initiative. The president said he expects his agency heads will "make sure that that practice doesn't go forward." "All our Cabinet secretaries must realize that we will not be paying commentators to advance our agenda. Our agenda ought to be able to stand on its own two feet," Bush said at a news conference. Bush's remarks came a day after syndicated columnist Maggie Gallagher apologized to readers for not disclosing a $21,500 contract with the Health and Human Services Department to help create materials for a $300 million initiative to encourage marriage. Bush also said the White House had been unaware that the Education Department paid commentator and columnist Armstrong Williams $240,000 to plug its policies, particularly the No Child Left Behind Act. That contract came to light two weeks ago. ...

Comment: "Unaware" or "unaware we'd get caught"? Whatever, nothing surprises me anymore. Either way, his cabinet is filled with people who do think such tactics are appropriate. But I will not be too naive - "ministries of propaganda" (or the equivelent thereof) are as old as statecraft itself.

Huh! Interesting that is...

Official Mossad Seal/Logo
(courtesy of CNN.com)

(English transliteration of Hebrew)
Top: "kee betachbulot ta'ase lecha milchama"
Bottom: "Ha'Mossad Le'modiein"

(English trasnlation)
Top: "By way of deception thou shalt do war"
Bottom: "The institute for the collection of Information"

(note: If anyone out there can read Hebrew, I'd appreciate it if they could post a comment confirming or denying this translation)

Saved by pee power!

Man peed way out of avalanche

A Slovak man trapped in his car under an avalanche freed himself by drinking 60 bottles of beer and urinating on the snow to melt it. Rescue teams found Richard Kral drunk and staggering along a mountain path four days after his Audi car was buried in the Slovak Tatra mountains.

A case that raises some interesting questions...

The Art of Seeing Without Sight

...Meanwhile, the man at the centre of all this attention, a blind painter, cracks jokes that keep everyone tittering. The painter is Esref Armagan. And he is here in Boston to see if a peek inside his brain can explain how a man who has never seen can paint pictures that the sighted easily recognise - and even admire. He paints houses and mountains and lakes and faces and butterflies, but he's never seen any of these things. He depicts colour, shadow and perspective, but it is not clear how he could have witnessed these things either. How does he do it?

Today's ramblings...

While I toiled at work this last evening (night shift...blech), I was able to get some "thinkin'" in, and formulated a few cognent thoughts.

- Just as they say there is very little that separates us from the great apes (some would be so bold as to say we really ought to be categorized as a species of "great ape" as well, though we don't normally speak of ourselves this way), there is even less which separates "normal" folks like you or me from the most depraved, cruel humans to have ever walked the face of the earth. We are all very capable of unspeakable horror if we just "go with it" under the "right" circumstances.

- Every civilization/community to some degree has it's share of "sacred cows", and they are without exception even sillier and more irrational than the phenomenon of "sacred cows" in India (the mythos surrounding the cow in India relating to it's importance as a work animal, a source of fertilizer for crops, and a wide assortment of dairy foods.)

Some background on Bush's recent inaugeral address

A little background on the Zionist-"Neo-Con" agenda, and specifically, President Bush's recent inaugeral address...

An Israeli Fanatic Is 'Bush's Brain' - By Michael Collins Piper
(Author of Final Judgment and The High Priests of War)

A Pet-Peeve of mine...

A pet-peeve of mine is the concoction of inherently meaningless, but usefully misdirecting terminology. Such terms are often coined by an interested party as a way of "passive-aggressively" malign and insult those who they do not approve of, without having to bother with whole tedious (and terribly meaningful) process of actually demonstrating why the group(s)/person(s) they're out to smear are just so bad to begin with. If successful, these words (or they can be older words/terms used in a new way) become a sort of thought virus, which most people will receive uncritically.

One such word is "cult"; as in "didja hear, Bobby joined a cult." The use of the term "cult" in this way as far as I can tell is relatively new, and has undergone a few stages of evolution; it's current form seems to be the result of the explosion of "new", "non-traditional" religions in the west during the 1960's. Strictly speaking, all religions are "cults". The word "cult" comes from the Latin cultus which simply means "worship." This is why to this day, scholarly types will often confuse their lay readers by employing this term to describe what most of us would consider (so called) "normal", mainstream religions (or as will often happen, official documents of the Roman Catholic Church will refer to the "cult" surrounding the saints or the Blessed Virgin, etc.)

Now, some may argue that "words evolve" and that what is meant by a "cult" is legitimate - that it refers to fanatical, "dangerous", relatively unpopular, and/or marginal religions. Well, beside the fact that most people do not have a clear understanding of just what exactly this "new version" of the term really means, there are some outspoken people with an incredibly broad definition of "cult" in the sense I've just described. If you go do a search on the internet, you'll come up with results including websites by Fundamentalist Evangelicals claiming that religions as popular and diverse as Islam and Catholicism are "cults." In other words, suddenly anyone (or anything) who does not think "like me" becomes "a cult" and by this dismissive, is to be viewed as dangerous.

The problem with all of this, is that the term really does a disservice on a few levels.

1) It can simply be a cover for blind prejudice and bigotry; "I don't like 'em - they talk weird, act funny...I smell satan"...all of course without feeling the need to demonstrate a credible rationale for this disdain.

2) In more mainstream circles (outside of Fundie-Protestant myopia), the term cult is not simply a disservice to the prejujudgement it results in toward "minority religions", but is also a social disservice in that it effectively absolves so called "normal" or "mainstream" religions.

Regarding the second point, I think that the way the word "cult" is thrown around, is in part a strange symptom of our society's irrational assumption of the basic goodness of unbrideled "religious pluralism" and an even more newly accepted "cultural/ideological egalitarianism". Given that ideas have consequences, and the old tried and true canons of logic (such as the principle of non-contradiction), obviously there are "bad ideas" and these "bad ideas" have "bad consequences. Or there can be ideas which benefit some, but harm others. My point is that just because something is "popular" and "religious", does not make it benign, let alone good.

Related to one of yesterday's posts

I was just reading an interview with "Family Guy" creator Seth McFarlane at the online parody "news" site, The Onion (thanks Serge).

In the interview, Seth discusses the controversy behind the "infamous" When you wish upon a Weinstein episode which originally never made it to air, but was available on the DVD box set (though it was recently broadcast by FOX, but in a strategically edited form - if you've seen both versions and were paying close attention, you'll know what I'm talking about). In the episode, Peter wants his son (Chris) to convert to Judaism so that he will grow up to be financially successful; a premise for a cartoon that was as provocative as it was hilarious.

The episode proved to be so "controversial" as far as the heads in the FOX television network were concerned, that it did not make it to air during the show's original run (and as I mentioned earlier, the version which they eventually aired was not entirely in tact either.) Why the controversy? Because it might be offensive to Jewish viewers.

While I can understand this as being possible given that there world is filled with over-sensitive people (though really it's Peter and the gang that come off as morons; the writers were sufficiently apologetic enough and positive in their portrayal of Judaism and Jews themselves, to make it hard to understand just what was really so damned "offensive" about the episode), I found it odd how this episode never made it to air, but one I personally thought pushed things a little too far regarding Peter's "traditional Roman Catholic" father, did make it to air with no fanfare or surrounding controversy. Seth McFarlane (a self admittedly non-religious man) himself expresses puzzlement over this very thing, and cites the exact same example (refering to it as the "Pope" episode, since "the Pope" does appear in it...though the Pope in the episode comes off as a caricture of Pope John XXIII, rather than one of the living Pope, John Paul II).

SM: Absolutely. It was made out to be much worse than it was. It wasn't really the episode itself, it was the political battle that took place at Fox. There were two groups of people. There were the people who were saying "Absolutely no way," and people who were saying, "No, no, this is great." It went so far as us getting letters from rabbis who we had sent the episode to saying, "Yes, it's a little on the edge, but he learns the right lesson in the end, it's probably okay." We would send those letters to Fox. It became this battle of wills between the two sides. It really was an issue. Eventually, the naysayers won out. But that's the absurd thing. You look at an episode like the one with the pope, which skirts much closer to the line of being offensive to Catholics than the Weinstein episode does to Jews.

Well, while Seth might be puzzeled, I'm not, not in the least. Though on the whole Christians get it the worst in Holyweird, to some degree everyone is open to contemptuous parody when it's convienient...save for the Jew, in particular when a big part of what is being parodied his is identity as a Jew. Once again, I feel compelled to repeat that Marlon Brando was right. You can have the pervert priest, the obnoxiously hypocritical (and imbecillic) southern preacher, the buffoon pakistani convienience store owner, the irrational Arab fanatic...but not a negative identifiably Jewish character, and certainly not one where part of the jabbing is directed at their identity as a Jew, Jewish culture, Jewish religion, etc.

One for the smoking nazis...

Michigan company fires 4 employees for refusing smoking test

I'm not here to defend smoking. Yes, it can be an obnoxious habit, and as a habit (if it's not simply something one does in moderation, perhaps socially like with a tumbler of whiskey) it's not good for you.

However, how far is this really going to go? Couldn't the same logic applied to over-zealous anti-smoking activism be applied to any number of things most of us commonly indulge in? Things like red meat, too much sugar, too many trans fats, too much processed food, etc. etc.?

I'm just waiting for a generation of fat bastards to start suing McDonalds for their clogged arteries ("they hooked me as a child with their psychologically manipulative advertising").

Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ snubbed by Oscars

Oscar snubs Michael Moore, Mel Gibson

Not surprisingly, Mel Gibson's modern day masterpiece The Passion of the Christ was snubbed by the Academy - it didn't receive a single major nomination, despite the fact that (apart from any moral/spiritual value one will find in the film) it was an incredible excercise in letting the moving picture tell a story, with no real dependence upon dialogue for plot exposition (note: I've watched the DVD sans subtitles, and if anything it fares better)

Of course like anything pertaining to the RSPs ("Red Sea Pedestrians"), the reason for the snub will undoubtedly go unspoken but quite obvious to anyone at all observant of the realities of modern America. Good golly, (indirectly) even Ben Stein has the gumption to tell you just why Holyweird/Hollywood would never give so much as a nod to Mel's film...

Do Jews Run Hollywood? - you bet they do, and what of it?
by Ben Stein

Unfortunately (as much as I happen to like Ben Stein), I cannot agree with Mr.Stein's basic conclusion, that Jewish ownership of Hollywood (and newsmedia in general) is ultimatly an indifferent, benign thing.

Marlon Brando

Though he was practically crucified for saying as much (probably because he himself isn't "kosher"), the late Marlon Brando spoke truthfully (and far more kindly than he was ever given credit) during his "infamous" Larry King interview when he said...

"Hollywood is run by Jews; it is owned by Jews--and they should have a greater sensitivity about the issue of people who are suffering. Because...we have seen...the greaseball, we've seen the Chink, we've seen the slit-eyed dangerous Jap, we have seen the wily Filipino, we've seen everything but we never saw the kike. Because they knew perfectly well, that that is where you draw the [line]."

Interesting new VW "Ad"

(thanks rense.com)

Who made VW suicide-bomber ad? - Professional 'viral commercial' spreads like wildfire on Internet

(excerpt)
Volkswagen and its advertising agency DDB London insist they had nothing to do with a professionally made commercial making rounds on the Internet that features a suicide car-bomber whose attack is stymied when he blows himself up while his VW Polo remains intact.

However, industry analysts are raising doubts about VW's denial.

(you can download the "offending" ad by clicking here)

Ouch!

(from the "It's funny 'cause it's true" file)

Why White Men
Prefer Asian Women by Fred Reed

Of course I agree with the author that what he is saying is a generalization, and there are most certainly glaring exceptions. However, speaking as a Canadian I think he is being a little too easy on Canadian women.

For more anti-feminist, male angst, I'd suggest checking out Dr.Henry Makow's often "contraversial" (to say the least!) website...

www.savethemales.ca - don't say I didn't warn you!

Johnny Carson dead, 79

Late night show icon Johnny Carson, 79, has died


It seems like all of the big "icons" of my childhood are dying off. Oh well, such is the way of things.