Sweet, sweet schadenfreude
Karma's a bitch, ain't it your Lordship? Conrad Black has been convicted on three counts of mail fraud and one of obstruction of justice -- he's has appealed of course, but when the sentence is handed down in November Lord Black of Crossharbour is said to be looking a one to three years, though under the law he could get as many as 25 years. It couldn't happen to a nicer guy. Maybe we should all chip in and get him a present, you know, like a video , or something else he can really use:
Must read addendum!Dr. Dawg lays it all out in terms that even his Lordship would appreciate
Added bonus! The BBC reports that Lord Tubby could end up on the dole. How likely is it that Barbarella Amiel is already shopping for husband number five or at least a new sugar daddy? At her age, I guess that would be a new sugar great-granddaddy.
And if that isn't enough, Himself has been turfed out of the British Conservative Party and could lose his peerage.
Spitting right between their eyes
is what the Rude Pundit specializes in. His latest installment is fairly light on the rudeness, but heavy on the entirely justifiable outrage over the lying bags of dirt occupying the White House .
Meanwhile, on CNN just now I'm seeing a headline "Al-Quaida strongest since 9/11" so just what the weeping, jumping Jeebus on a on a pogo stick have the Republicans been doing for the last six years? I thought they got elected because they were going to be tough on terrorists, not just tough on anyone who questioned the actions of Bwana Dick Cheney. What ever happened to smoking them out? Personally I suspect Osama Bin Laden has by now shaved his beard and moved to Dallas to sell tract houses and take over the local chapter of Businessmen for Bush.
Supporting the troops...not
First they send them to a place they just shouldn't be on the basis of trumped up charges and outright lies. Then they don't provide enough body armor or armored vehicles. Then they screw over the returning wounded at Walter Reed. Now, Bush is screwing the veterans out of health care so he can cut taxes for Haliburton and Paris Hilton.
"I am Canadian"
Personally, I always thought pulling the sweater over the other guy's head was a cheap move eh, but this guy was clearly asking for it.
Get your smite on
Biblical video games, because you know you wanna see Jesus kick Satan's ass and if you get one more request for one more meeting at the office you're gonna stick your head in the paper-shredder
We interrupt our regularly scheduled programming
to bring you our suggestion for the new motto of the Canadian Cynic blog:
I was also touched to hear that her whole entire perspective on life has completely and forever changed in a totally serious kind of way that she really means! I don’t know about you but I find that the thoughtful words of contrition and the newfound maturity typically displayed by the recently incarcerated signal a profound desire to lead a more responsible life that will endure for decades to come. (The previous sentence is brought to you by sarcasm – Sarcasm: for those times when cynicism’s not quite enough, but hitting the person with a plank of some kind just isn’t possible!)"
An Inconvenient Arrest
Al Gore's son held over speeding, drugs charges.
From the "Liberal" New York Times
The son of former Vice President Al Gore was arrested yesterday on speeding and drug charges, and released from a California jail 12 hours later after his sister Sarah posted cash bail of $20,000.
Mr. Gore’s son, Al III, 24, was driving a blue Toyota Prius at a speed of about 100 miles per hour on the San Diego Freeway near the Crown Valley exit in Laguna Hills when he was pulled over by an Orange County sheriff’s deputy about 2:15 a.m., said a Sheriff’s Department spokesman, Jim Amormino.
The deputy smelled marijuana and searched the car, Mr. Amormino said. The deputy found less than an ounce of marijuana and prescription pills that included the narcotic Vicodin, the addictive sleep and anxiety aids Valium, Xanax and Soma, and the amphetamine Adderall. “He doesn’t have a prescription for any of these pills,” Mr. Amormino said, “and that’s what makes it illegal.”
With friends like these...
Another friendly fire death confirmed in Afghanistan. It's bad enough when Canadian soldiers are killed by the Taliban, but roughly ten percent of our losses to date have been to the United States military. I know that accidents happen, and that friendly fire deaths have occured in every war, but to lose a tenth of our dead to the people who asked us to go and help them out is unacceptable.
Update: I was having trouble getting this link to work in the comments, it is to a story about an earlier friendly fire incident that killed one Canadian soldier and wounded 30 others. Shooting first and asking questions later when your flying an A-10 against an enemy with no anti-aircraft capability strikes me as a fairly crappy way to fight a war.
"Shut up and stop trying to censor me!"
Censorship and free speech seems to be a slippery concept for some people. Bill O'Rielly's schtick is yelling at guests he disagrees with to shut up and having their microphones cut off, but when Media Matters reruns his racist hateful facist crapola and criticizes him for it, he accuses them of trying to censor him, calls them the worst people in the world, yadda, yadda, yadda.
I'm all for letting anyone say anything they want, but if the nazis want to march, they better be ready to be met by a massive countermarch. If Wingnuts want to talk trash on the radio they better be ready to be universally mocked.
I also believe that media outlets using the public airwaves have a responsibililty to present opposing views and give equal time in a fair way.
CC over at Canadian Cynic has been going around and around with a two of a group of total jackasses over his policy of removing people from his blogroll if they also blogroll the aforementioned jackasses. Which I think is reasonable -- If someone on my blogroll started blogrolling Stormfront or Free Republic (no way in hell am I linking to either one here, if you need to look at them, go find'em yourself) I'd drop them like a bad habit.
You have the right to post whatever you want on your blog, but I have the right to criticize you for it on my blog and even to come and criticize you for it on your blog comments. But once I've made my point in the comments, if I continue to be a boring pain in the ass, it is no longer valid criticism -- its trolling and i deserve whatever I get, whether it is countertrolls on my blog, being banned from your comments, being told to shut up and get lost etc etc.
I wouldn't deny racist fuckwits like RightGirl and Kathie Shaidle the right to say whatever hateful idiotic dumbass thing they want on their blogs, but they need to expect that they will be made turned into social pariahs, universally mocked and despised for it. Free speech has consequences, you are responsible for what you say, so if you say something stupid, expect an earful for it.
That is not censorship. Censorship is when the government comes along and makes you shut down your blog, or bans you from having a computer/printing press/radio station, or makes it illegal to mention certain things or talk to certain people. Media organizations self-censor every day. That's why you won't see the headline "President fucks up again" in the New York Times.
In Japan, as in Canada, there is no official government censorship. The government often doesn't release embarrassing information, even when requested, but more influential on media self-censorship is the chilling effect of the violent right wing extremists. Their intimidation, combined with a lack of testicular fortitude on the part of the media and a do-nothing attitude on the part of a sometimes sympathetic police force mean you will never see a Japanese newspaper write negative things about the imperial family, conservative politicians or the right-wing extremists. People have gotten killed for it and the mainstream media here is unwilling to take the chance. So there is no examination of the "Nanjing Massacre Incident" or the sexual enslavement of tens of thousands of women by the Japanese Military the possibly forcible recruitment of some women to serve as comfort women, most of whom volunteered
In North America the chill comes from fear of losing business. I have some personal experience with this: I was once fired from a small newspaper for publishing stories about a local politician and businessman who was also a major advertiser. (I sued the publisher, we settled and no, I won't elaborate.) This was not censorship, this was just cowardice on the part of the publisher.
Big companies that own media outlets don't like to see stories critical of them or their favorite politicians. Izzy Asper centralized editorial control of their papers at one point. Conrad Black simply cut half the editorial staff at his papers (thus scaring the hell out of the other half and making them afraid to offend the boss) as a 'money-saving measure' .It doesn't have to be heavy handed. Often it is simply a publisher or editor worrying about pissing the owner.
At one place I worked, the owner was well-known to be a tory, the local MP was a tory and a buffoon, but we shied away from reporting on his buffoonery because we knew it would lead us to grief with our boss, not for any specific act, but we knew how unpleasant she could make things for us.
Big media outlets know that if they self-censor too much, they cease to be interesting. If they slant the news too much, they lose credibility. Fox News has had a good run, but unless they start pandering to the left when the political pendulum swings the other way, or actually try to become a neutral news organization, they will be out of business. Democrats refusing to be interviewed and businesses refusing to advertise will hasten that process. Wingnuttery still abounds there, but as the conservative movement totters toward smoking ruin, their days are number. You can already see some of their pundits trying to distance themselves from Bush.
Bloggers refusing to link to, blogroll or read idiots will hasten the departure of the idiots from blogtopia or at least marginalize them and grind away the veneer of respectability some of them have acquired. Eventually that means if they want to have a conservative blogger on TV it won't be Canada's Lowest Common Denominatrix (nicknamed by Pretty Shaved Ape at Canadian Cynic) or the Bush worshipping dingbats from Powerline.
So let us rejoice in the chaotic nature of the blogosphere and speak our minds while remembering that in doing so we have a responsibility not to make stuff up, spread lies or generally behave like assholes. And we have a duty to fight irresponsible hate-mongering stupidity wherever it is on the political spectrum.
Mingle2 - Online Dating
How the other half "thinks"
A must read post on a dangerous religious fruitcake over at Recursivity: Kirk Durston: Apologist for Genocide
Mr. Durston says that genocide is ohkey-dokey as long as the little voice in his head he presumes to be god says it's all right. I expect Charlie Manson said the same thing.
(via Canadian Cynic)
Seal the border, part II
It isn't the heat, its the stupidity. Norbiz riffs on the results of this survey.
"6. Do you think Saddam Hussein’s regime in Iraq was directly involved in planning, financing, or carrying out the terrorist attacks of September 11th, 2001? 50% say "stop fucking asking that already," the other half is divided into "yes, I am dumber than fucking horseshit" (41%) and "[blank stare]" (9%). The number of shit-dumb Americans has increased by 5 percentage points over the last three years."
I'm guessing the 22% who thought the Amazon was located in Africa or the 3% who thought it was in North America, make up the bulk of the 26% of the people who still back Bush.
"We didn't do it, nobody saw us, and when we apologized for it, we didn't really mean it"
Some days I think I either need to get a new job, have my conscience sugically removed or simply have my jaw wired shut.
Get facts straight on comfort women
The Yomiuri Shimbun
The U.S. House of Representatives Foreign Affairs Committee has adopted a resolution demanding an apology from Japan over the so-called comfort women. But the resolution was produced based on an erroneous perception of the facts.
The Japanese government should try to unravel the U.S. side's misinterpretation of history in order to remove a source of future trouble, while in the meantime working to block passage of the resolution by the full House of Representatives.
The resolution calls for the government to accept historical responsibility and apologize for "its Imperial Armed Forces' coercion of young women into sexual slavery." It describes "the comfort women system" as "one of the largest cases of human trafficking in the 20th century."
The resolution was made without verifying the facts and smacks of cheap rhetoric. It makes us doubt the intelligence of U.S. lawmakers.
Prime Minister Shinzo Abe expressed "sympathy from the bottom of my heart" and said he "felt sorry" during his meetings with U.S. President George W. Bush and congressional leaders during his visit to Washington in April. The prime minister also said that the 20th century was a century of human rights violations and Japan was not totally blameless.
Abe's remarks did not postpone adoption of the resolution by the lower house committee.
The resolution is merely one of many adopted at the U.S. Congress. It does not have any legal binding force. Thus, some observers say Japan does not have to take it seriously.
===
Govt must dispute false charges
But this is the wrong conclusion to draw. If Japan refrains from making counterarguments, this erroneous historical view will become accepted as established fact.
Before World War II, there were many women who were put to work as comfort women against their will by parents and brokers. But this does not mean the Japanese military coerced the women.
In past studies, no evidence has been found showing "coercive recruitment of comfort women by military personnel or government officials." The government explicitly presented this observation in March in response to a question by an opposition lawmaker.
On what is the resolution based? Reportedly the 1993 statement by then Chief Cabinet Secretary Yohei Kono played a significant part.
The statement said that Japanese military and officials were "directly or indirectly involved in...the transfer of comfort women." Such wording apparently led to the misapprehension that there was coercive recruitment.
===
Kono apology politically driven
The 1993 statement was motivated by a political desire to deflect pressure from South Korea on the comfort women issue. And it has helped broaden the misunderstanding.
Apparently out of diplomatic consideration, Abe has said he stands by the Kono statement. But as long as the prime minister takes this position, the misunderstanding of coercive recruitment will never disappear. If the statement is found to be erroneous, it should be rewritten without hesitation.
In March, Foreign Minister Taro Aso referred to the lobbying in support of the resolution as an "operation to estrange Japan and the United States." Anti-Japan forces in the United States linked with Chinese and South Koreans have exercised their influence behind the scenes on behalf of the resolution.
If the matter is left unaddressed, further demands for apologies will be repeated. The government must methodically elucidate the historical truths involved in the issue.
(From The Yomiuri Shimbun, June 28, 2007)
If anyone is looking for me, I'll be in the shower for a few days
What Digby Said
Sometimes you read about stuff that really pisses you off - Bwana Dick Cheney claiming to be a fourth branch of government, Supreme Court decisions that err on the side of wealthy corporations and and bullshit front groups for political parties to wage dishonest character assassination campaigns - stuff you really want to blog about. Then you look around the internet and realize that it has http://digbysblog.blogspot.com/2007/06/no-more-questions-for-you-by-digby.html. To borrow a phrase that has swept the intertubes What Digby Said...
Dubya: Still more popular than genital warts! (barely)
The latest Newsweek poll shows George W. Bush's is NOT the most unpopular president in U.S. --he is three whole percentage points more popular than Richard Nixon during Watergate.
Only 26 percent of Americans, just over one in four, approve of the job the 43rd president is doing; while, a record 65 percent disapprove, including nearly a third of Republicans...In fact, the only president in the last 35 years to score lower than Bush is Richard Nixon. Nixon’s approval rating tumbled to 23 percent in January 1974, seven months before his resignation over the botched Watergate break-in.
The war in Iraq continues to drag Bush down. A record 73 percent of Americans disapprove of the job Bush has done handling Iraq. Despite “the surge” in U.S. forces into Baghdad and Iraq’s western Anbar province, a record-low 23 percent of Americans approve of the president’s actions in Iraq, down 5 points since the
end of March.
But the White House cannot pin his rating on the war alone. Bush scores record or near record lows on every major issue: from the economy (34 percent approve, 60 percent disapprove) to health care (28 percent approve, 61 percent disapprove) to immigration (23 percent approve, 63 percent disapprove). And—in the worst news, perhaps, for the crowded field of Republicans hoping to succeed Bush in 2008—50 percent of Americans disapprove of the president’s handling of terrorism and homeland security. Only 43 percent approve, on an issue that has been the GOP’s trump card in national elections since 9/11.
If there is any good news for Bush and the Republicans in the latest NEWSWEEK Poll, it’s that the Democratic-led Congress fares even worse than the president.Only 25 percent of Americans approve of the job Congress is doing.
CBS News/New York Times Poll. May 18-23, 1,125 adults nationwide. MoE 3%."Is your opinion of Dick Cheney favorable, not favorable, undecided, or haven't you heard enough about Dick Cheney yet to have an opinion?"(cross-posted at The Galloping Beaver)
Favorable 13%
NotFavorable 39%
Undecided 23%
Haven'tHeard 24%
Refused 1%
The not-so friendly skies
How long will have to wait for the federal government to start putting peace activists and opposition MPs on the new no-fly list, just like their American counterparts?
Barry Prentice, the director of the Transport Institute at the University of Manitoba in Winnipeg (quoted in the linked article) has it right:
"We're having a no-fly list because they have a no-fly list.… They want us to have one and we want to open trade with the U.S., so we're getting one."
Prentice said the Canadian government should limit the size of its no-fly list and make sure the number of names doesn't get into the thousands.
"Let's limit it to the size of a hockey team and let's kept it public," he said. "I just think this is overboard."
Ice cold assassin a cool read
Kevin Wood / Daily Yomiuri Staff Writer
Requiem for an Assassin
By Barry Eisler
Putnam, 368 pp, 24.95 dollars
The professional criminal planning one last job before retirement is a pop culture staple, as is the retired or reformed gunman being forced back into action to save a friend. Former Tokyo and Osaka resident and former CIA spook Barry Eisler uses these archetypal premises as the jumping-off point in his latest and possibly last novel featuring Japanese-American assassin-for-hire John Rain.
Like all genre fiction, the espionage thriller has its conventions, certain things the author is expected to provide. High-tech gadgets? Check. Cool, ruthless hero? Check. Exotic international settings? Check. Wisecracking sidekick? Check. Double-crossing villain? Check.
In lesser hands, Requiem for an Assassin could have been a standard-issue, cookie-cutter spy thriller of the sort that clog the shelves of airport bookshops around the world. But John Rain is not a standard-issue protagonist and Eisler, for all his respect for the convention of the genre, does not write cookie-cutter novels.
Rain is a thinking man's James Bond. While Bond's penchant for high living, beautiful women, gourmet food and flashy cars make him the most conspicuous secret agent ever, Eisler's Rain strives to keep a low profile, presenting the face of an anonymous salaryman or Japanese tourist to the world. He specializes in murders that look like accidents and is a study in emotional detachment, tradecraft and paranoia. He is constantly scanning the room for possible tails, wary of cameras, never sitting with his back to a door or going anywhere without an escape route and cover story. But is it paranoia when they really are out to get you?
In this case the "they" is Jim Hilger, a rogue Central Intelligence Agency contractor who, while still bearing a grudge against Rain for foiling one of his operations in the previous book in the series, nonetheless finds himself in need of the Japanese-American hit man's particular expertise. In order to persuade Rain, now living in semiretirement in Paris, to cooperate, Hilger and his henchmen abduct Dox, Rain's partner and one of his only friends. In order to free his comrade-in-arms, Rain must commit three murders for Hilger. Needless to say, tables get turned, plots get twisted and the body count mounts before the good guys save the world.
The Tokyo setting that figured so prominently in the earliest books of series has been replaced here with Saigon, Amsterdam, Singapore, Silicon Valley and New York, though Rain does make a brief stopover in his old hometown to recommend a few local eateries.
In addition to the emphasis on professional spycraft, Eisler has done his technical homework on all the hardware, but in the main avoids the common action novel trap of turning his books into catalogues of weapons and gear from Spies-R-Us.
What sets Rain apart is Eisler's ability as a writer to get inside the psychology of the character's almost split personality. Rain is surprisingly human and self-aware for an action hero.
In action, Rain is a cold-blooded, remorseless machine that kills without warning or emotion. But when the job is done, he hurts. Rain is a killer with a conscience and he worries about the emotional and spiritual price he has paid for all the deaths he's caused, while at the same time realizing that if his conscience causes him to hesitate at the wrong time, it could cost him his own life.
Rain recognizes the sociopath inside himself and worries that with each job, he is coming closer to turning into "the iceman" for good. It is this depth that makes the character, and by extension the book, believable and what sets Eisler head and shoulders above the pack of run-of-the-mill thriller writers.
(Jun. 16, 2007)
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