What if Jack Chick were possessed by the spirit of H.P. Lovecraft?

I want to print a stack of these up to leave by the door to swap for copies of The Watchtower. They might make a nifty companion piece to the Gideon Bible you find in your hotel room too!
(a wave of the tentacle to PZ Myers at the fabulous Pharyngula)

Today in failure

Let's see, today we have Border fail, which sounds like a bit like Boehner fail, which was about energy, which lead us to this Nomenclature fail . Also, we have a comprehension fail in the War on Some People Use Some Kinds of Drugs, a Prime Ministerial denial fail and an anti-veil fail.

Bonus fail: Congresswoman Michele Bachmann-Turner-Overstatement (R-Failure), claims the passage of the climate bill = Mao's Cultural Revolution x (Stalin's forced famine in the Ukraine+Robspierre's Reign of Terror) to the power of N (N=South African Apartheid x Napoleon)

RIP the king of not-pop

Sky Saxon, lead singer of seminal garage rock band The Seeds died yesterday. He was a lot cooler than Michael Jackson, though to the best of my knowledge never dated Emmanual Lewis or a chimpanze.

Breaking News!

I hope the Old Perfessor and Treason-In-Defense-Of-Slavery Yankee and the gang at the Corner all have good alibis.

From the dept. of what took you so long?

Hal Turner has been an odious little pustule of hate for many years now, but you can't arrest someone for that. You can arrest them for publically calling for someone to murder a federal judge though, and today Turner got popped for exactly that. And before any free speech absolutists start in with the "I disagree with what he says, but I'll defend to the death his right to say it" stuff, let me point out that Turner didn't merely shout "fire" in a crowded theatre, he stood out front and begged people to set fire to the theatre. Inciting violence or making threats is not an excercise of free speech, it is illegal.

Off-duty, but "on the job"

Yet another thug in uniform gets treated with kid gloves for an offense that would have gotten a civilian tasered, beaten and jailed for a least a year. If it hadn't been for the video of the drunken 250 pound off-duty cop beating up the 110 pound bartender, the cop probably wouldn't have even gotten probation.

I have the best readers

sent by reader and artist extraordinaire Theo Nelson, who does this twice a year (!!!), which makes me very happy.

An auspicious, if circular, debut on the blogroll

Please give a warm Woodshed welcome Our Man in Abiko, newly-added to the blogroll. He made the Woodshed his blog of the week with a sterling recommendation last week and just today, beat us to the post on our own tweeted observations. Also, he shares our disdain of the species Expaticus Onannicus Nipponica better known by its common name of Gaijin Wanker - the sort of expats that have become so culturally acclimatized that they have become more Japanese than the Japanese.
A beer-oriented meet-up may become necessary at some point.

The Devil canot abide to be mocked

Poor Dick Cheney, we can't be told what he had to say about outing CIA secret agent Valerie Plame after her husband contradicted the White House because someone might make fun of him.

Awwwwww, poor Dick.

Mind you, it isn't Cheney making this argument, it's Barack Obama's Justice Department. Meet the new boss...

Tip O' the Fez to No Blood for Hubris (see blogroll)

Militiacious damage

Yeah, because ideas like this have worked so well elsewhere in the world where there have been disputes between ethnic groups. I used to work in Caledonia and relations betweent the town and the reserve have never been great. Fletcher's Fusiliers are not going to help matters. I'm not sure what the solution to the problem in Caledonia is, but I know having a bunch of intolerant race-baiting running around playing vigilante and claiming to be a militia is not it. And if you doubt that is what this is really all about, just read what is being said by the knuckle-dragging mouthbreathers in the comments at the linked article.

Second thoughts on Iran

Having followed the Twitter frenzy over events in Iran and having read whatever else I could find (I would especially reccommend a few of the first hand accounts posted at Juan Cole's joint) I find I am leaning toward calling "Bullshit" on the widespread idea (which I initially bought into) that the Iranian Revolution is being driven by Twitter and social networking sites.
The case against the Twitter being a big deal for the Iranians is laid out in great detail and much more cogently over at Open Anthropology, but the main points are that very few Iranians actually use Twitter, the overwhelming majority of the the tweets being posted are repeats and copies of non-information and messages of support ( ie "support the Iranian Revolution by turning your profile picture green" "Change your location in Twitter to Tehran to make it harder for the Iranian censors to find Iranians twittering" "We are with you" "Freedom for Iran" etc etc etc) and warnings NOT to post info identifying Iranian dissidents and the same half dozen links to articles by journalists on the ground in Tehran. What little information there is to be found on Twitter is highly suspect, and much of it appears to be disinformation circulated to serve U.S. and Israeli interests -- claims that the government has imported thousands of Hezbollah and Hamas goons to violently suppress the demonstrations, for example, intended to drive a wedge between Iranians and the terrorist groups their government has supported (the Iranian government has no need to import goons, they have plenty on hand already). Much has been made of the U.S. State Department asking Twitter not to shut down for scheduled maintence as it had intended to do earlier in the week for a few hours, claiming that Twitter is an important communcations tools in Iran. It is an important communications tool, but for the Americans, not for the Iranians.

The exception might be YouTube, to which dissidents have been posting cell phone videos of clashes with the government forces. These serve as an important record and rallying point for the Iranian people. And ten minutes of video says a lot more than 140 characters of text can.

Clearly there is more going on here than is evident at first glance. Much of the public communication we are seeing is part of a propaganda effort intended to manipulate events and public perceptions, some of it is counter-insurgency work by the Iranian government, some of it is political posturing for domestic consumption by US political factions on both sides of the fence. Remember that a few months ago, many of the same conservatives now cheering for the Iranian Revolution were calling for bombing Tehran -- some were even hoping the previous administration would start a war with them before handing over the reins to Obama, who they now insist must "do something" or he will have "abandoned" the Iranians who wanted "freedom."

I had a slight disagreement, more of an exchange of snark really, with Laurence Simon aka Crap Mariner (of 100 Word Stories fame) about what Obama should do and he mentioned smuggling satellite phones and uplinks into the country to help dissidents get the word out to the rest of the world. Given statements like this, I'm not so sure he cares that deeply about helping the Iranians so much as complaining about Obama. A few things about the smuggling idea: 1)The Iranians don't really lack high tech gear, nor do they really care what the rest of the world thinks for the most part 2) Who's to say the United States isn't doing exactly that right now? If they were, they would hardly be advertising the fact since it would play into the government's efforts to portray the opposition as tools of the West and 3)anyone caught with such equipment would probably be executed as a spy.

I think all Obama can and should do openly is to condemn any and all violence and call for the two sides in Iran to work things out peacefully without outside interference. He could also denounce the violations of human rights going on in the country, but given that he wants to reestablish diplomatic ties or at least hold direct talks with whoever eventually becomes president, he may have to hold back and let others (like the Twitternauts) send that message.

The more I learn and the more I think about it, I don't think there is a revolution going on in Iran. There is political and civil unrest to be sure, but at the end of the day, even if the protestors get what they want, the country will still be a conservative, authoritarian fundementalist Muslim theocracy. If the opposition wins out, the people in power might be slightly less unreasonable and the control of the mullahs may slacken ever so slightly - both good things - but I the pro- and anti-government demonstrators both chant "God is Great" at their rallies and will be back to chanting "Death to the Jews, Death to America" in six months. The current struggle might in fact be serving to help the government purge the real revolutionaries who want true change by drawing them out into the open while at the same time allowing the population to blow off some of the social pressure built up by 30 years of repression without any real changes being made.

It may be that sometime in the future Iranians will look back at all the green profile pictures on Twitter and and find a softer spot in their hearts for America, but I think it is more likely that most will see it as another attempt by "the Great Satan" to interfere in their nation's politics. Internet users are a small minority in Iran and those using Twitter an even smaller minority among them. Those people are more likely already interested in Western ideas and culture and in favor of real change in their country. Twitter activists in the West appears to be preaching to the converted and possibly even endangering those whose cause they claim to champion.

Happy Bloomsday

105 years ago today.....

"STATELY, PLUMP BUCK MULLIGAN CAME FROM THE STAIRHEAD, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed. A yellow dressing gown, ungirdled, was sustained gently-behind him by the mild morning air. He held the bowl aloft and intoned..."

Wiki has a decent capsule study of the whole thing.

Tune into Radio Woodshed starting a noon EDT to hear the whole novel read aloud, unabridged, all 27+ hours of it.

And if you think Ulysses was hard to read or listen to, imagine writing a 265,000-word novel with a vocabulary of about 30,000 words that all takes place in a single day - it only took

Joyce seven years to write it, but has taken most people much more time to read and develop an understanding of it.

Culture, beeyoches, come get some!

The revolution may not be televised

but it sure as hell is being tweeted. I am ashamed to admit that my initial kneejerk reaction to seeing the first messages on Twitter about the rioting following the election results announcements in Iran was that it would be really easy for the CIA to put a half a dozen people in a room full of computer gear and convince people that a revolution was starting halfway around the world, simply by having them work the social media sites and blocking media transmissions from the country in question and blaming the local government. Clearly, I have see "Wag the Dog" far too many times.
I am most emphatically not saying this is what happened in Iran. I think these pictures pretty much prove that this is no CIA smoke and mirrors show. I'm not sure what anyone outside Iran can do, in fact I think any outside interference at this point is going to allow the government to frame the whole thing as the work of Western-funded agitators, so I guess we are stuck cheering from the sidelines for the time being.
I don't think the challenger, former President Mir Hossain Mousavi, is any kind of combination of Martin Luther King, Mahatma Gandhi, Jesus, Elvis and Abe Lincoln - in fact I suspect he's probably a fundamentalist bastard. However, I think he is a bit less of a fundamentalist bastard and definitely less of an authoritarian whackjob than the incumbent, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
Even small change is better than no change, so viva la revolution!

Bloody Unions

There are certain individuals who used to be with the union who have since chosen to go it alone. This despite the fact that without the union some of them would very likely have been let go after six months and replaced  with another temp. There are others who quit who felt that certain work habits of their fellow union members reflected poorly on them, while forgetting why they joined the union in the first place. All of them ask the same question: "What have the unions ever done for us?"

(a hearty tip of the hardhat to fellow Prog Blogger Matthais in Marburg )

More right-wing murder

I can't wait to hear Bill O'Reilly and Lou Dobbs explain how these three murderous Minutemen were actually secret left-wing  socialist Islamohomofacists.

TUCSON, AZ - Three people have been arrested in connection with last months deadly double homicide in Arivaca that left a nine-year-old and her father dead. One of the people arrested for the homicide is the National Executive Director of the Minuteman American Defense group (M.A.D.), a group known for patrolling the border, and is dedicated to "Defending America's Borders" according to their website -http://minutemenamericandefense.org/

Jason Eugene Bush, 38, Shawna Forde, 42 and Albert Robert Gaxiola, 43, were all taken into custody and charged in connection with the murders of 29-year-old Raul Flores and 8-year-old Brisenia Flores. Both were killed during an alleged home invasion.

According to the news report, the police say the three broke into the home of the Flores family in the hopes of robbing Mr. Flores, who was rumored to be a drug dealer. Bush is said to have been the triggerman, shooting the father, mother and daughter at the instructions of Forde.

"If you look at her history closely, and you know what we know, she is at best a pyschopath," says Sheriff Dupnik referring to Forde during a press conference Friday.

Forde's organization is not directly connected to the more commonly known minutemen organization, Minutemen Civil Defense Corps or the Minutemen project run by Chris Simcox and James Gilchrist.

Seriously, whatever happened to those camps the wingnuts were so worried about? If only Barack Obama was doing as they feared and taking their guns away, because this shit is getting way out of hand.

You can't come home again

I don't think Thomas Wolfe meant that phrase to be taken as literally as it seems to be interpreted by Stephen Harper's minions in the foreign affairs ministry. Check out Canada's scofflaw government in action. Apparently obeying court orders is just for the little people, not for the proto-facists of the Stephen Harper regime. Keep digging that legal hole boys, because the more bullshit like this that you pull, the bigger the award is going to be in the lawsuit you will inevitably lose. Sadly, it will be the Canadian taxpayer that will be picking up the tab when you do get sued.

OTTAWA – A Montreal man stranded at the Canadian embassy in Sudan for more than a year did not board a flight home today that had been paid for by his supporters.

The Canadian government did not issue the emergency passport Abousfian Abdelrazik would have needed to catch his flight to Abu Dhabi for the first leg of a journey home to Montreal.

"It was booked. It was confirmed. It was paid. Everything was a go, but he needs that travel document," said his Ottawa-based lawyer, Yavar Hameed.

Hameed said he has not yet been able to speak with his client but assumes he remains at the embassy in Khartoum.

Federal Court Justice Russel Zinn ordered the Conservative government on June 4 to ensure Abdelrazik returns home within 30 days.

He ruled the Sudanese-born man has a Charter right to re-enter his "country of citizenship by choice".

Zinn ordered authorities to immediately issue an emergency passport and arrange transportation from Khartoum to Montreal if Abdelrazik could not afford to do so himself.

My disgust for the government in this case knows no bounds. I'd like to see them all trade places with Abdelrazik. I wonder if they will even let me back in when I decide to return home.

Way to defuse the situation

Sure the OPP could have waited a few hours, but then no one would have gotten arrested or injured, and how much fun would that have been?

The prostesters are being portrayed as a minority among Tyendinaga Mohawk Reserve residents and that may well be the case as the Tyendinaga has never been as politically active as the Mohawks at Cornwall, whom the protesters were  acting in support of as they protest the arming of border services personnel on their land.  Gee, I wonder why they wouldn't want the border services people armed?

Nice to see that sensible and cool heads are prevailing, NOT! .

There's always room for Jello

Possibly the strangest use of bandwidth I've seen in a while, but oddly comforting and smile inducing, at least until Bill Cosby comes and chases us out of the tree.

My workplace is doomed

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c
End Times
thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes Political Humor Newt Gingrich Unedited Interview

Greatest music video evah!

I'm not sure what music these young ladies are dancing too, and frankly, I don't really care. At least they don't look like some plastic surgeon's frankenstien monster. And Brook Benton is a God.