Orchestra of Bloggeral Madness

Litany of Sorrows

New Anime
So it wouldn't be fair to use the Hyper-Dramatic Anime/Videogame title scheme and have nothing about anime or videogames in this post, would it?

Hence I'll note, for my own uses, some of the spring anime premieres that Anime News Network is covering and which sound interesting.

First up is Soul Eater, the new project from Studio Bones, who did the fantastic Full Metal Alchemist and the dizzily beautiful Eureka 7. It's a dark comedic work that sounds like a cross between an action show and I Luv Halloween.

Then there's Kurenai, a low key drama with noir elements about a mysterious enforcer given the task of caring for, hiding, and ultimately protecting a privileged little girl from her powerful family.

Another one I want to see more of is Zettai Karen Children, which is apparently a Powerpuff Girls parody, intentionally or otherwise. It sounds delightfully deranged.

Also this year sees another Macross series, Macross Frontier, done by Satelite, who made the quite respectable Noein that I finished watching a couple weeks ago. They can certainly do action-drama, so I hold out hope that this won't suck.

I'm also interested in Code Geass, which is hitting its second season in Japan and I think comes out in the US soon. Apparently it's a hilarious combination of series drama, giant robots and hysterically over the top melodrama.

Finally there's Wagaya no Oinari-sama, a supernatural horror kind of show about a medieval Japanese fox deity who becomes the guardian of a dying shrine in the modern era. That definitely sounds like it has promise.

A couple of these shows, Zettai Karen Children and Kurenai, have gotten very good reviews on ANN, except for one out of the four reviewers, by the name of Casey Brienza. Quite frankly half the reason I want to watch ZKC is because this one person found it so offensive.

This Muscle Okama is presented as a gay man. He swishes, he talks in feminine language, he hits on Kouichi, he humps nude male statues. He also shoots bizarre psychic beams from his groin. At first I was amused by the ridiculousness, but it wore off quickly, and I can't remember the last time I've seen an anime series portray a minority group so offensively. No anime these days would represent even black people in so blatantly stereotypical a fashion.

Arguably worse, however, is Kaoru's apparent lesbianism and her characterization as a perverted old man. You know, I get that oogling boobs and butts can be an important part of the pleasure of these sorts of things. But showing a little girl doing it—as if that makes objectifying behavior somehow morally excusable? That's inexcusable in a way that no amount of cheerfully bobbing breasts alone will ever be.

Objectifying behavior? It's an ANIME CHARACTER. Not to mention a satirical one. How can you objectify AN OBJECT?

THe mind boggles. The Muscle Okama thing is harder to dismiss out of hand, but from the sound of it he might be a joke about bodybuilders and all the repressed homoeroticism in their industry rather than gay people in general. Talk to an actual bodybuilder about the subject sometime, it can be quite entertaining.

They also seem to be alone in disliking Kurenai. I'm beginning to wonder if they're my anti-reviewer of choice, that what they love is what I hate and vice versa.

Unfortunately, they like Macross Frontier a lot. That bodes ill for either my theory or the show.

Update: In a new addition to their review page they bash Saiyuki, a very meandering but still hilarious show.

It's official: they are the anti-me.

Source: Anime News Network (spring anime guide)

Tracking
Here's an ominous anime development for you. A tracking system for conventions was deployed to data-mine the attendees.

Anime Punch, which ran in Columbus, Ohio this past weekend, has become the first anime convention in North America to use radio-frequency identification (RFID) to capture data about attendance at events held throughout its three days. An index card with an RFID transponder was attached to the backs of badges for each of the convention's 1,337 paying attendees, as well as staffers and guests. Information about the location of each transponder, as well as the total number of transponders in certain rooms at any given time, was captured and stored on a central server. Attendees entering the convention's dealers' room had their badges scanned with a reader each time they walked into the room.

Apparently this has been done before at medical conferences and so forth.

In all seriousness it's really not ominous, but it is a bit annoying to be tracked wherever you go. Especially since it's mandatory. If I was going to a convention I knew would be doing this, I'd bring tinfoil to wrap around my card when I didn't need it. Thus I'd be 'off the grid' and all super-spooky.

Or something. I like screwing with data collection, what can I say. I filled out those 'what drugs do you take' surveys in high school with absurdly high and random amounts of drugs, at least the last one. I think I said I took a bunch of stimulants I'd never heard of 20-30 times a month.

I'm fairly sure you'd die if you did half the drugs I claimed to do.

Source: Anime News Network

Older Anime
Some older series I'm interested in to go with the new ones.

First, D.Gray Man, which is apparently about a guy with a cursed left eye that can fight demons and so forth. It's also a historical fantasy series.

I could use a dark historical fantasy series, but I'm interested in this as much for it being yet another show with a character whose left eye is cursed/magical/magically cursed/missing. I wonder if Japan has a thing, some cultural mythos, about left eyes.

*shrug*

Then there's Innocent Venus, a short series about life after the Apocalypse, with a mysterious conspiracy, blah blah. It could be fun.

Finally there's Kyo kara Maoh!, a show which has been compared to Saiyuki in that it has Shoujo art and Shonen sensibilities.

I liked that with Saiyuki, so I'm willing to give it another chance. Plus there are definitely points for a series whose gateway to another world is via the toilet. At least, the first time. (It seems that they use bodies of standing water or something to travel, which is both more classically mystical and boring).


Sources: Anime News Network
D.Gray Man
Innocent Venus
Kyo kara Maoh!

Spielbergian
So Spielberg's company Dreamworks is going to make a live action version of Ghost in the Shell, the classic anime cyber-surrealist-noir movie.

Variety reports that Universal and Sony also negotiated for the rights, which the Production I.G anime studio was pitching for the manga's original publisher Kodansha. What turned the dealmaking in DreamWorks' favor was co-founder Steven Spielberg's enthusiasm for the project. The entertainment trade newspaper quotes the acclaimed director and producer: "Ghost in the Shell is one of my favorite stories. It's a genre that has arrived, and we enthusiastically welcome it to DreamWorks."

It doesn't say whether he will be involved, though Avi Arad who used to work with Marvel and did work on both the great Spiderman and execrable X-Men movie franchises will produce.

This could go... oh face it, it's probably going to suck ass.

Source: Anime News Network

Onion Tastic
A couple of those great Onion graphics that all right-thinking people love.

First a comic on the Elliot Spitzer scandal and the 'Real Disgrace' involved.

Then a short but pity summary of the death of Charlton Heston.

Very Odd
Some brief odd news items from around the world.

First, in Russia they're cracking down on Madam Cleo types.

Russian deputies are to consider a law that would turn up the heat on advertising by witches and healers enjoying a meteoric growth in demand, the Gazeta daily reported on Friday.

The law, which is to have its first reading in parliament's lower chamber shortly, would allow only officially registered healers to advertise in newspapers, Gazeta reported.

The paper quoted one of the bill's authors, parliamentarian Vladimir Medinsky, as casting scorn on the colourful small advertisements that brim from the pages of Russia's popular press.

The bill's introduction argues that "citizens who believe in the adverts of magicians and witches often become the victims of commonplace fraud," the paper said.

So they'll only allow officially registered frauds to trick people into thinking magic crystals and curses work?

That's an improvement? I guess it might bring in tax revenue.

Source: Raw Story

Next up is some jerk who apparently likes to kill squirrels.

An animal protection group is investigating claims made by British band The Falls Mark E. Smith that he killed two endangered red squirrels and condones the deliberate running over of seagulls, it said Thursday.

The revered but unpredictable frontman of Manchester band The Fall said that he would not hesitate setting about a squirrel with a pair of hedge-clippers.

"Squirrels mean nothing to me. I killed a couple last weekend actually. They were eating my garden fence," Smith told Uncut magazine, although it was unclear whether he had confused the animal with their more prevalent American grey cousins.

The singer, whose group has gone through 50 different members and produced 27 albums in their career, also said he "wouldn't have a problem" with people purposefully driving over seagulls in their cars

He may have just killed American grey squirrels, which are something of a pest in the UK, but still not deserving of hedge clipper death.

The worst part for me is that this idiot, if he's telling the truth, killed squrrels for nothing. They don't eat 'fences', whether he means gnawing on wood or eating a hedge. I've never seen a squirrel eat anything but seeds and such. They're hardly a big nuisance.

Also, how would he catch one to kill it? They're wily.

Source: Raw Story

Hobbit
Finally, someone thought up the perfect descriptive term for Joe Lieberman.

Joe Lieberman, whom Chris Durang once called a "sanctimonious Hobbitt," had his ass kicked out of the Democratic party. He's a petty, bitter, nasty little man and he's backing John McCain because that represents his own personal political upside.

How apt! How true!

Thank you, Chris Durang. I shall use your epithet with gusto.

Source: Firedoglake

Ha-HAH
This is so great.

At 39 months in the doghouse, George W. Bush has surpassed Harry Truman's record as the postwar president to linger longest without majority public approval.

Bush hasn't received majority approval for his work in office in ABC News/Washington Post polls since Jan. 16, 2005 three years and three months ago. The previous record was Truman's during his last 38 months in office.

Most disliked president since they started keeping polls.

There's your legacy, W. Suck on it.

Source: Firedoglake

So Funny Can't Breathe
Alberto 'Fredo' Gonzales can't find work after his disastrous and hilarious tenure as Attorney General.

Man, it's sweet to see a jerk fall so far, so fast, so HARD.

WASHINGTON — Alberto R. Gonzales, like many others recently unemployed, has discovered how difficult it can be to find a new job. Mr. Gonzales, the former attorney general, who was forced to resign last year, has been unable to interest law firms in adding his name to their roster, Washington lawyers and his associates said in recent interviews.

...

The greatest impediment to Mr. Gonzales’s being offered the kind of high-salary job being snagged these days by lesser Justice Department officials, many lawyers agree, is his performance during his last few months in office. In that period, he was openly criticized by lawmakers for being untruthful in his sworn testimony. His conduct is being investigated by the Office of the Inspector General of the Justice Department, which could recommend actions from exonerating him to recommending criminal charges. Friends set up a fund to help pay his legal bills.

Shocking. Law firms don't want to hire a man facing serious criminal investigation, who also possesses a terrible track record at work.

Hahahahahhaha.....

Source: The New York Times

Nude
So a photographer auctioned off a nude portrait he did of France's first lady back when she was a fashion model for charity. The shot was originally done for Italian Vogue and thus Carla Bruni was hardly unaware that it might be used for commercial purposes one day.

Still, the charity in Cambodia turned down the large sum of cash on 'moral' grounds.

Beat Richner, a Swiss paediatrician who runs a children's medical care group, said he had turned down an offer of $91,000 (£46,000) - the sum paid in a Christie's auction last week for the 1993 picture of the Italian ex-model, now married to the French president Nicolas Sarkozy.

"My decision was taken out of respect for our patients and their mothers", he told Le Matin Dimanche. "Accepting money obtained from exploitation of the female body would be perceived as an insult".

In Cambodia "use of nudity is not understood in the way it is in the West", he added.

He would not allow the Kantha Bopha Children's Hospital Association "to be involved in the media exploitation of Madame Bruni".

"The idea behind this gift was to get publicity for the auction and the photographer", Mr Richner was also quoted as saying. "It was a way of using us".

Michel Comte, the Swiss photographer who took picture of the then Miss Bruniposing naked with her crossed hands acting as a fig leaf, was quoted in the Swiss press last month as saying he had thousands more images of her, some more risqué - taken over a ten-year period.

Of course he was doing it for publicity. That's often the case with charity work.

The fact of the matter us, this guy still turned down a ton of money for poor kids because he didn't like a nude photo.

I sincerely doubt the Cambodians closely follow French fashion, so the line about THE LOCALS is a bit much.

Once again, conservatism does not pay. But don't worry, the children will!

Source: The Telegraph

Tax Day Sale
Comedy Central is having a sale on Colbert and Daily Show merch. Considering that their clothing is normally obscenely pricey, this only brings it down to Sanity range, but still.

Source: Comedy Central

Wastes of Human Skin Around the World

Jerks!

Insanity, Utter
What in the world could motivate someone to say something like this, in public no less.

Some 1,000 people attended a memorial service at the Mercaz Harav rabbinical seminary Thursday, marking the one-month anniversary of the murderous attack which claimed the lives of eight young men.

Also attending the service were many prominent rabbis of the Religious Zionist Movement, who were not shy about expressing their rage against the government's policy.

Rabbi Yaakov Shapira, head of the Mercaz Harav yeshiva, chose to explain the attack by saying that "the Torah and the land of Israel are acquired only through agony."

Former Sephardi chief Rabbi Mordechai Eliyahu called on the government to decree that for every life lost in the attack another yeshiva and township will be formed.

"Even when we seek revenge, it is important to make one thing clear – the life of one yeshiva boy is worth more than the lives of 1,000 Arabs.

"The Talmud states that if gentiles rob Israel of silver they will pay it back in gold, and all that is taken will be paid back in folds, but in cases like these there is nothing to pay back, since as I said – the life of one yeshiva boy is worth more than the lives of 1,000 Arabs," added Rabbi Eliyahu.

A prominent religious leader said this. In a public gathering. And no one shouted him down.

Amazing. Thankfully there are moderate voices speaking out too, right?

Ramat Gan's chief rabbi, Yaacov Ariel, chose to deliver a more moderate message: "We do not seek vengeance, we seek retaliation. The terrorist's house should have been demolished immediately, regardless of the law. It should have been done because it was a matter of life and death – the deterrence could help save future lives."

"We are against killing innocent people or harming children," he added, "but once terrorists hide behind children, we have to strike back. The blood of those living in Sderot is worth just as much as the blood of those the terrorists hide behind."

He's referring to a vigilante mob that went to the house of the killer and tried to murder his entire family and raze his house to the ground.

That's the moderate position; kill a criminal's entire family. The hardline position is to kill a thousand innocent people of a 'lesser race' for every one you lose.

Once again, I state merely for the record: Israel is not our friend.

Individual Israelis? Of course. Israeli society as a whole? Never.

(The South is much the same way really)

Source: Ynet News

Security Guard
Now we move on to a more petty form of casual evil from our own Republican Party (also not our friends).

During a public appearance on Saturday, Rep. Patrick McHenry (R-NC) belittled a U.S. soldier in Iraq who was following orders and wouldn’t let McHenry go to the gym without the proper credentials. McHenry referred to the guard as a “two-bit security guard“:

We spent the night in the Green Zone, in the poolhouse of one of Saddam’s palaces. A little weird, I got to be honest with you. But I felt safe. And so in the morning, I got up early — not that I make this a great habit — but I went to the gym because I just couldn’t sleep and everything else. Well, sure enough, the guard wouldn’t let me in. Said I didn’t have the correct credentials.

It’s 5:00 in the morning. I haven’t had sleep. I was not very happy with this two-bit security guard. So you know, I said, “I want to see your supervisor.” Thirty minutes later, the supervisor wasn’t happy with me, they escort me back to my room. It happens. I guess I didn’t need to work out anyway.

How dare the lowly soldier question him, the Lord and Master of A North Carolina District? Doesn't he know how to treat his social betters? So what if Milord McHenry (R-Douchebagistan) didn't have his ID? Surely a servant should know the faces of all his masters!

But the GOP is the party of The Troops. Riiiiight.

Source: Think Progress

Lunatic Renders Satire Obsolete
Stephen Colbert probably thought that, when he started his comedic crusade against Bears, that he had found a bogeyman so comically absurd that no one could possibly take him seriously.

Alas, Glen Beck has found a new source of terror to wet himself about.

Last night on his CNN Headline News show, right-wing pundit Glenn Beck hosted global warming skeptic Sen. James Inhofe (R-OK). Beck allowed Inhofe to rant about how — with “all the liberals” running the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works — he was forced to sit through hearings on “that nice white fuzzy polar bear.”

Inhofe argued that the polar bear population isn’t endangered. “[I]f anything, it’s an overpopulation problem,” said Inhofe. Beck then jumped in and claimed that, in fact, the extinction of polar bears may be a good thing:

They eat people! For the love of Pete, they’re big, angry bears. They eat people. Not that I say we go out and kill all of them, but I mean, it doesn’t seem to be a problem here. Senator, I can’t take the — I can’t take the lies anymore.

There is currently an estimated 20,000-25,000 polar bears worldwide who are threatened with “losing their habitat and becoming extinct over the next 50 years” because of global warming and melting sea ice. The U.S. Geological Survey predicts that without action, “11 of the 19 subpopulations will be extinct by the middle of this century, with an additional three subpopulations vanishing shortly thereafter.”

On Wednesday, Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne skipped a Senate hearing on listing the polar bear as a threatened species. His agency missed a Jan. 9 deadline to decide on classifying the polar bear, in violation of the Endangered Species Act, according to Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-CA).

Inhofe is a famous loon on climate issues, but this bear thing is a new one for, well, everybody. Except Colbert, who is probably having a hard time dealing with the way he has to keep moving the Crazy Goalposts to stay ahead of the right wing.

Source: Think Progress

Mugabe
Ahh, a classic. The inept, bumbling, hyper-corrupt dictator offering to step down in exchange for immunity and getting to keep all his stolen stuff.

Robert Mugabe's aides have told Zimbabwe's opposition leaders that he is prepared to give up power in return for guarantees, including immunity from prosecution for past crimes.

But the aides have warned that if the Movement for Democratic Change does not agree then Mugabe is threatening to declare emergency rule and force another presidential election in 90 days, according to senior opposition sources.

Then of course there's the stick; if the oppo doesn't agree to his demands, he'll negate their election win and try to murder them all.

Really, if history's not cyclical, it certainly is repetitive.

Source: The Guardian

Huh?
Right wing commentator Hugh Hewitt, trying to find fault with a Hillary speech.

I played excerpts from Hillary's speech from today, in which she references "hurling" her "bookbag" across her room at college on hearing of the assassination of MLK, as well as wearing a black arm band in a protest march in Boston in the aftermath of the murder.

Listeners are e-mailing skepticism about their being bookbags and arm bands in 1968. I have no opinion, being 12 at the time. E-mail evidence to hugh@hughhewitt.com

Bookbags and arm bands? In 1968?

Why, they only had stone tablets and mammoth pelts in 1968! Clearly she's a liar!

If only there was a famous historial example of students and arm bands in the 1960s that could settle this difficult question for Mr. Hewitt. Oh, if only

MR. JUSTICE FORTAS delivered the opinion of the Court.

Petitioner John F. Tinker, 15 years old, and petitioner Christopher Eckhardt, 16 years old, attended high schools in Des Moines, Iowa. Petitioner Mary Beth Tinker, John's sister, was a 13-year-old student in junior high school.

In December 1965, a group of adults and students in Des Moines held a meeting at the Eckhardt home. The group determined to publicize their objections to the hostilities in Vietnam and their support for a truce by wearing black armbands during the holiday season and by fasting on December 16 and New Year's Eve. Petitioners and their parents had previously engaged in similar activities, and they decided to participate in the program.

The principals of the Des Moines schools became aware of the plan to wear armbands. On December 14, 1965, they met and adopted a policy that any student wearing an armband to school would be asked to remove it, and if he refused he would be suspended until he returned without the armband. Petitioners were aware of the regulation that the school authorities adopted.

On December 16, Mary Beth and Christopher wore black armbands to their schools. John Tinker wore his armband the next day. They were all sent home and suspended from school until they would come back without their armbands. They did not return to school until after the planned period for wearing armbands had expired--that is, until after New Year's Day.

That's right! It's Tinker v. Des Moines School District, the landmark 1969 case which strongly held that students in public school do in fact have political rights!

First Amendment rights, applied in light of the special characteristics of the school environment, are available to teachers and students. It can hardly be argued that either students or teachers shed their constitutional rights to freedom of speech or expression at the schoolhouse gate.

One of the most important legal decisions in the modern era! One of the most famous court cases of the decade!

Ahh, right wingers. So astoundingly ignorant.

Moron.

Sources: Instaputz
Boston College (though you can get the Tinker ruling about ten million places, it was just the first Google hit)

Saudi Idiots
So the Saudis are looking to murder a Canadian kid.

A Saudi Arabian court convicted a 17-year-old Canadian for involvement in the murder of a classmate and sentenced him on Saturday to a year in prison and 200 lashes, his father and lawyer said.

The boy's older brother, Mohammed Kohail, was already convicted on March 4 in the murder, and sentenced to death by beheading, along with a third man, a Jordanian.

Canada has said it would seek clemency for Mohammad, 23.

Mohammad and his younger brother, Sultan Kohail, 17, were detained in January 2007 after a school yard brawl resulted in the death of another student from internal injuries.

According to one of the defense lawyers, Mohammad had gone to the school to pick up his brother when a group of young men started harassing the younger boy. A scuffle ensued during which a Syrian classmate, Munther al-Haraki, died.

Sultan was sentenced to a year in prison and to 200 lashes, both the boy's father, Ali Kohail, and lawyer, Saleh al-Ghamdi, told The Associated Press.

...

Saudi Arabia follows a strict interpretation of Islam under which people convicted of murder, drug trafficking, rape and armed robbery can be executed, usually with a sword. So far this year, 36 people have been executed in the kingdom.

Canada abolished the death penalty in 1976.

Canada did, but not us!

The United States and Saudi Arabia really do have something in common!

Seriously, a bunch of kids get in a fight, one dies. You want to kill someone for that? For what is obviously some sort of manslaughter?

Prison term I can understand, but death by beheading? Are they insane?

Oh wait. It's Saudi Arabia. Of course they are.

Source: Raw Story

Gag Rule
Disgusting.

A prominent public health school has restored the word "abortion" as an acceptable search term on a reproductive health Web site funded by a federal agency that restricts references to abortions.

The move by the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health follows criticism from some health advocates and librarians that the restriction amounted to censorship.

The restriction on the POPLINE Web site — "population information online" — had been put in place after inquiries by the United States Agency for International Development, which funds the site, according to a statement from Dr. Michael J. Klag, the dean of the Bloomberg school.

USAID denies funding to non-governmental organizations that perform or actively promote abortion as a methods of family planning in other nations. The policy was started under President Ronald Reagan and was revived when President Bush took office in 2001.

This is what's known as the 'Global Gag Rule', that is to say, if you even mention that abortions exist, you can't get money to help people. Aid agencies in Africa and so forth are required to deceive and mislead their female patients, if necessary allow them to suffer and die from pregnancies rather than get abortions.

That's the compassion in compassionate conservatism. Now it hits Americans too. Sigh.

Source: Raw Story

France Has Them Too

Vandals desecrated 148 Muslim graves in France's biggest war cemetery, hanging a pig's head from one tombstone and daubing slogans insulting France's Muslim justice minister, officials said Sunday.

President Nicolas Sarkozy expressed "profound outrage" at the "sordid" attack on the Muslim quarter of the Notre Dame de Lorette cemetery, near the northern town of Arras on Saturday night. He vowed that those responsible would be punished.

The cemetery is France's biggest military graveyards and commemorates tens of thousands of victims of a series of long and bloody battles for control of northern France at the start of World War I.

The attack came almost exactly a year after a similar incident in which neo-Nazi vandals scrawled swastikas on 52 of the cemetery's Muslim graves.

...

Prior to 2007, there were four incidents involving the desecration of Muslim graves in northern and eastern France in 2004, and one in 2003.

There have also been several attacks on Jewish graves in cemeteries across France in recent years.

Just goes to show that wherever you have xenophobic conservative politics, you get mind-numbing crime. France has had a really bad run of arch-conservative Muslim bashing in recent years, and here you see the end result.

Source: Raw Story

Hitchens
Legendary drunkard and all around jerk Christopher Hitchens was on MSNBC the other day, which can only mean the bars were closed. He made a fool of himself as usual.

Summary: On MSNBC's Tim Russert, responding to Christopher Hitchens, Andrew Sullivan said, "And now you've made me forget my second point," to which Hitchens replied, "Oh, well, don't be such a lesbian. Get on with it."

I'm not even sure what's going on here. Andrew Sullivan is a well known and somewhat idiotic gay conservative. Is Hitchens insulting him for being gay? Confused about his gender? Does he think lesbians have conversational trouble?

Seriously. He's so wasted he isn't even making sense in his offensive comments.

Source: Think Progress

El Presidente Doesn't Just Outsource Our Jobs

The CIA secretly transported at least 14 war on terror detainees to Jordan between 2001 and 2004, making it the top "rendition" destination at that time, Human Rights Watch said Tuesday.

"While a handful of countries received persons rendered by the United States during this period, no other country is believed to have held as many as Jordan," the rights group said in a statement.

The prisoners were interrogated and tortured by Jordan's General Intelligence Department, according to a new Human Rights Watch report that documents eight previously unknown cases of rendition.

...

The report includes an excerpt of a note handwritten by a rendered prisoner while in Jordanian custody in late 2002. The prisoner is now at the US war on terror prison camp at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

Ali al-Hajj al-Sharqawi wrote that GID interrogators beat him "in a way that does not know any limits."

"They threatened me with electricity, with snakes and dogs .... [They said] we'll make you see death .... They threatened to rape me," the note said.

A common torture method was falaqa, by which prisoners are given extended beatings on the bottoms of their feet.

"Just about everyone at GID was beaten with sticks," a Jordanian former prisoner told Human Rights Watch. "People were beaten on their feet. They did it in the basement."

"Outsourcing torture is not only wrong, it's illegal," Mariner said. "And the US can't say it doesn't torture if it sends people to countries that do."

So naive. Of course it can! And will! Even with St. John McCain, himself a torture survivor! American hypocrisy (the Republicans call it 'American Exceptionalism') knows no earthly bounds!

Source: Raw Story

Mukasey is a LIAR
Well, either that, or the Bush administration actually did cover up the WTC attacks.

I just received the following statement from the Vice Chairman of the 9/11 Commission, Rep. Lee Hamilton, in response to my inquiries last week (and numerous follow-up inquiries from readers here) about Attorney General Michael Mukasey's claims about the 9/11 attack and, specifically, about Mukasey's story that there was a pre-9/11 telephone call from an "Afghan safe house" into the U.S. that the Bush administration failed to intercept or investigate:
I am unfamiliar with the telephone call that Attorney General Mukasey cited in his appearance in San Francisco on March 27. The 9/11 Commission did not receive any information pertaining to its occurrence.

...

In light of Hamilton's amazing comment, could journalists possibly now report on this story? One of two things is true about Mukasey's extraordinary claim about how and why the 9/11 attacks occurred. Either:

(1) The Bush administration concealed this obviously vital episode from the 9/11 Commission and from everyone else, until Mukasey tearfully trotted it out last week; or,

(2) Mukasey, the nation's highest law enforcement officer, made this story up in order to scare and manipulate Americans into believing that FISA and other surveillance safeguards caused the 9/11 attacks and therefore the Government should be given more unchecked spying powers.

It's binary, folks. Either Mukasey was lying, or Bush actually did cover up the true origins of the Buildings Go Boom day attacks.

We live in an unprecedented era for jerks.

Source: Glenn Greenwald

George Will
A man who just doesn't care about a few dead union workers.

Yesterday George Bush signed a "fast track" bill that allows him to force a vote within 90 days with no amendments from Congress on the Columbia Free Trade Agreement. George Will is visibly aroused at the sight, and takes the opportunity to have a swing at both Obama and unions:

Nevertheless, U.S. unions oppose the agreement, probably to preserve the moral clarity of their monomania: Damn the details, full speed ahead in opposing more free-trade agreements, anywhere, anytime. Colombia, America's best South American ally, shares a border with America's most aggressive South American enemy, Hugo Chávez's Venezuela.

Colombia's president, Álvaro Uribe, has made stunning progress against the drug cartels, right-wing militias and FARC, the 9,000-man Marxist terrorist group that is financed by drug smuggling and kidnapping. But Obama, nimble at the art of enveloping the courtship of interest groups in clouds of high-mindedness, says Colombia has not done enough to protect its trade unionists.

Colombia's unions, however, document that the number of murders of their members has sharply declined. Edward Schumacher-Matos, visiting professor of Latin American studies at Harvard, notes that "it was far safer to be in a union than to be an ordinary citizen in Colombia last year": The murder rate of unionists was less than one-eighth the murder rate of Colombians generally.

Meanwhile, the facts on the ground seem to be a bit different.

Colombia is the most dangerous country in the world for trade unionists, according to Escuela Nacional Sindical (ENS), a highly regarded labor institute based in Medellin, Colombia. Two thousand, two hundred and sixty two union officers and rank-and-file members have been brutally and systematically murdered since 1991. More than 400 trade unionists have been murdered since President Uribe took office in 2002, including forty in 2007 for exercising their fundamental right to form unions for a better life. In those cases where the perpetrator is known, government-supported paramilitary organizations or the armed forces or police are most often responsible.

That's right, only a few hundred dead unionists under the benevolent Uribe.

That's all.

And that's fine with George Will!

Source: Firedoglake

Gene Weingarten
Gene Weingarten won a Pulitzer for his odious article about how ignorant the working man is.

_ Feature writing, for Gene Weingarten's story on world-class violinist Joshua Bell, who, in an experiment, played beautiful music in a subway station just to see who commuters would react;

On its surface, Weingarten's story is designed to make you feel wistful about the sad state of humanity. That's the goal, to confuse the issue, to write a seemingly banal but harmless lamentation about modernity.

But a closer look reveals yet another elitist jerk. Weingarten staged his 'experiment' at a busy subway stop during rush hour. He then castigates all the people on the way to work who don't stop, miss their trains, arrive late at their jobs and possibly get fired, for not appreciating the music he considers important.

He just assumes that everyone has the liberty to waste the day away on leisure. He also assumes that his taste in leisure and culture is definitive.

And the Pulitzer people just signed off on it. Reprehensible.

You'll note he didn't try his experiment outside an investment bank, or a fancy restaurant. No no; he knows that the upper classes have respect for culture. He has to see what the lowly, common man thinks.

I'll tell you what they might be thinking. They might think that a guy who judges them so harshly for having work and lives is a colossal asshole.

Source: Raw Story

Chris Matthews
Well, the loudmouthed jerk who made his bones on the Lewinsky scandal, well-known egotist and misogynist Chris Matthews, has a big feature biographical piece in the upcoming NYT magazine. A couple of highlights:

"People are a little impressed with themselves," Griffin went on to say, continuing his commentary about the scene. "It's a bit of an echo chamber." Matthews is central to that echo chamber -- at the Ritz, as in the 2008 presidential campaign. He is, in a sense, the carnival barker at the center of it, spewing tiny pellets of chewed nuts across the table while comparing Obama to Mozart and Clinton to Salieri. At one point, Mat-thews suddenly became hypnotized by a TV over the bar set to a rebroadcast of "Hardball." "Hey, there I am -- it's me," he said, staring at himself on the screen. "It's me."

...

"Did you get a load of Lou Rawls's wife?" Matthews said as he left the spin room. Apparently the Rev. Jesse Jackson was introducing the widow of the R&B singer at the media center. "She was an absolute knockout," Matthews declared. It's a common Matthews designation. The actress Kerry Washington was also a "total knockout," according to Matthews, who by 1 a.m. had repaired to the bar of the Cleveland Ritz-Carlton. He was sipping a Diet Coke and holding court for a cluster of network and political types, as well as for a procession of random glad-handers that included, wouldn't you know it, Kerry Washington herself. Washington played Ray Charles's wife in the movie "Ray" and Kay Amin in the "Last King of Scotland." She is a big Obama supporter and was in town for the debate; more to the point, she said she likes "Hard-ball." Matthews grabbed her hand, and Phil Griffin, the head of MSNBC who was seated across the table, vowed to get her on the show.

"I know why he wants you on," Matthews said to Washington while looking at Griffin. At which point Matthews did something he rarely does. He paused. He seemed actually to be considering what he was about to say. He might even have been editing himself, which is anything but a natural act for him. He was grimacing. I imagined a little superego hamster racing against a speeding treadmill inside Matthews's skull, until the superego hamster was overrun and the pause ended.

"He wants you on because you're beautiful," Matthews said. "And because you're black." He handed Washington a business card and told her to call anytime "if you ever want to hang out with Chris Matthews."

This is a man who was apparently only drinking DIET COKE. He's fascinated, Narcissus style, with his own reflection and strutting around like a horny dog, but he's only on DIET COKE.

God I'd hate to see him drunk.

Source: Media Bistro

You Can't Spell Lieberman Without 'Lie'
So Holy Joe Lieberman was losing the Democratic primary badly against Ned Lamont. As a last ditch measure on the day of the primary his website went down and he accused Lamont's web people of attacking and compromising it. Lamont's team said that was crap. The FBI investigated and never released the results. Now they have:

One of the stranger episodes of the Lieberman-Lamont primary in 2006 was the Lieberman campaign's charge that supporters of his rival (whose web guy, Tim Tagaris, is above) "attacked" Lieberman's website.

Anyway, the FBI has finally gotten to the bottom of it, in case you were wondering. The verdict: Not guilty.

So the FBI found out that Lamont didn't do it, and then they refused to say who did.

So who was to blame?

A federal investigation has concluded that U.S. Sen. Joseph Lieberman's 2006 re-election campaign was to blame for the crash of its Web site the day before Connecticut's heated Aug. 8 Democratic primary.

The FBI office in New Haven found no evidence supporting the Lieberman campaign's allegations that supporters of primary challenger Ned Lamont of Greenwich were to blame for the Web site crash.

Lieberman, who was fighting for his political life against the anti-Iraq war candidate Lamont, implied that joe2006.com was hacked by Lamont supporters.

"The server that hosted the joe2006.com Web site failed because it was overutilized and misconfigured. There was no evidence of (an) attack," according to the e-mail.

A program that could have detected a legitimate attack was improperly configured, the e-mail states.

"New Haven will be administratively closing this investigation," it concluded.

The e-mail, dated Oct. 25, 2006, was included in a technical packet of information recently sent to The Advocate in response to requests under the Freedom of Information Act filed in late 2006 with the offices of state Attorney General Richard Blumenthal and U.S. Attorney Kevin O'Connor.

The Advocate filed the requests after Blumenthal and O'Connor closed the case but declined to divulge details. They stated only that they found no evidence that Lamont supporters were to blame.

...

"Our Web site consultant assured us in the strongest terms possible that we had been attacked," former Lieberman campaign spokesman Dan Gerstein said in December 2006.

According to the FBI memo, the site crashed because Lieberman officials continually exceeded a configured limit of 100 e-mails per hour the night before the primary.

"The system administrator misinterpreted the root cause," the memo stated. "The system administrator finally declared the server was being attacked and the Lieberman campaign accused the Ned Lamont campaign. The news reported this on Aug. 8, 2006, causing additional Web traffic to visit the site.

"The additional Web traffic then overwhelmed the Web server. . . . Web traffic pattern analysis reports and Web logging that was available did not demonstrate traffic that was indicative of a denial of service attack."

That's right, Holy Joe! He blamed others for his own campaign mistakes, slandered Ned Lamont, and the FBI got in the tank for him!

Then fought tooth and nail to prevent it getting out in court!

Source: The Politico
The Stamford Advocate

Random News

Oddities

Crossover
So there was recently a crossover between Sally Forth and Pearls Before Swine, where Ted Forth sneaks away from his wife at a hotel to find a prostitute.

Apparently this was an out of the blue idea from the PBS guy and the Sally Forth guy was so amused he tied his comic into what was otherwise solely a gag strip making fun of it.

Nifty.

Sources: Francesco Explains It All
The Comics Curmudgeon

Art Show
A series of photos from an art show featuring reimagined Saturday Morning cartoon characters. I liked this Blip from Space Ghost a lot, but there are some awesome Herculoids in there too.

Source: Flickr

Annoy the Cops
Not the smartest game, but they do have it coming.

WAUSAU, Wis. (AP) -- Cars lining the street. A house full of young people. A keg and drinking games inside. Police thought they had an underage boozing party on their hands.

But though they made dozens of teens take breath tests, none tested positive for alcohol. That's because the keg contained root beer.

The party was held by a high school student who wanted to show that teens don't always drink alcohol at their parties. It has gained fame on YouTube.com.

Dustin Zebro, 18, said he staged the party after friends at D.C. Everest High School got suspended from sports because of pictures showing them drinking from red cups.

The root-beer kegger was "to kind of make fun of the school," he said. "They assumed there was beer in the cups. We just wanted to have some root beer in red cups and just make it look like a party, but there actually wasn't any alcohol."

Zebro purchased a quarter-barrel of 1919 Classic American Draft Root Beer, and by 10 p.m. Saturday, the scene outside his rural Wausau home had all the makings of a teen drinking party - cars, noise and kids.

Kronenwetter Police Chief Daniel Joling said an officer was dispatched to the home March 1 on a complaint of cars blocking the road.

Juveniles began coming out of the house after the officer used his squad car's loudspeaker to warn that cars would soon be towed, Officer Jason Rasmussen wrote in his report.

Nearly 90 breath tests were done, and officers even searched locked rooms for hiding teens.

"It was a tremendous waste of time and manpower, but we still had a job to do, and our officers did it," Joling said. "If one kid had come there, even hadn't drank there, but had come there and had been drinking and had left and crashed and burned, then what would the sentiment be? Why didn't the police check everybody out?"

Dangerous, and I don't approve of the noisy party part, but still. Cops do have it coming. Ever since the Fourth Amendment went out the window and we lost our right to privacy, I think it's been an Us vs. Them thing. This is a good legal way to fight back against overzealous enforcement practices; flood the enforcers with false positives.

Source: Raw Story

Snicker
Right-wingers are just terrible at art of any sort. I can't reach any other conclusion.

Anti-Islam MP Geert Wilders, whose controversial film Fitna finally hit the web yesterday, has made himself even more unpopular - it appears he forgot to secure copyright on footage used in the movie.

Danish newspaper cartoonist Kurt Westergaard, whose depiction of the Prophet Mohammed with a bomb in his turban sparked violent protests in 2006, complained on Dutch TV that Wilders used his work without permission, "so it is simply a case of violation of copyright rules".

Earlier this month Westergaard defended Wilders and argued that the Dutch MP should show his film despite government warnings. On behalf of Westergaard, the Danish Union of Journalists says it will now sue Wilders for copyright infringement.

Also, Dutch director Rob Muntz was also surprised to see a clip of an interview he conducted with Theo van Gogh, the Dutch filmmaker who was stabbed and shot dead in Amsterdam. Muntz says he never gave permission, and will seek legal advice too.

Wilders also mistakenly used a photo of Dutch-Moroccan rapper Salah Edin instead of Mohammed Bouyeri, Theo van Gogh’s murderer. Edin, perhaps unsurprisingly, is also suing.

Hilarious!

Seriously though, this is why you didn't need to ban the movie, Dutch authorities. In the marketplace of ideas, conservative thought always ends up in the bargain bin.

Source: The Register

Comcasticness
So Comcast has been, it turns out, scamming its viewers on HD broadcasts by secretly pruning the signals. You get the resolution, but it's all distorted and blocky and ugly.

This so they can add more HD channels at a lower cost. Sort of counterproductive, to my mind, if the ones you have suck ass.

This is the way Comcast operates though. And now, I don't say that just because our cable is out at the moment.

Source: AVS Forum

Speaking of Terrible Service
Best Buy!

A Best Buy store in New Jersey foiled one man's treasonous plot to subvert a troubled US economy by discouraging the purchase of an overpriced headset.

According to a report from The Consumerist, the prominent electronics merchant summoned police on a shopper identified as "Alex" because he shared an unfavorable impression of a Jawbone headset to customer considering the product.

Alex told the man browsing Best Buy's mobile section about his personal dissatisfaction with the quality of the Bluetooth headset and noted the retailer marked up the price by $30 compared to his local Verizon store.

A savvy sales associate reportedly overheard Alex's attempted disruption of commerce and promptly informed the nearest authority figure, store's manager, Tom.

Alex was approached by the manager and asked to leave the store. He steadfastly refused — unaware or even perhaps unconcerned that his words wounded Lady Liberty and the national economy she depends upon.

According to Alex, the manager rebutted his insistence that he did nothing wrong by claiming his requested evacuation was "policy." Tom then walked away and instructed an associate to summon the police.

Startled by the rapidly intensifying predicament, Alex attempted to call Best Buy's customer support phone number. He was put on hold.

Two police officers arrived on the scene, accompanied by four Best Buy security clerks to send the subversive customer on his way. Alex was escorted out before he could reach a customer service rep on his phone.

Best Buy of course claims this isn't their policy. But hiring morons apparently is.

Source: The Register

Tower of Babel
A crazy Saudi billionaire is planning to make the world's tallest building.

Tallest by a LOT.

On a clear day, the view from the top will take in the Middle East, North Africa and the Indian Ocean - providing you've a head for heights.

Plans for a mile-high tower in the Saudi Arabian desert have been unveiled by the billionaire owner of London's Savoy Hotel.

At 5,250ft, the £5billion project, masterminded by two British engineering consultancies, will be twice as high as its nearest rivals, skyscrapers under construction in Dubai and Kuwait, and almost seven times as high as the Canary Wharf tower in London's Docklands.

...

It is being planned for a new city near the Red Sea port of Jeddah. Behind the scheme is 51-year-old Prince al-Walid bin Talal, who bought the Savoy for £1.25billion in 2005.

The plan gives the Middle East a clear lead over Asian countries and the U.S., who have vied in the past to construct the world's tallest buildings.

None of the other skyscrapers under construction, including New York's Freedom Tower on the World Trade Centre site, will exceed 2,296ft.

The whole scheme is insane. The plan is for it to be so tall that helicopters have to be used to take workers up and down for the day and haul supplies. The temperature extremes at the top will apparently be crazy.

Still, gutsy. Nice to see Saudi money being used for something constructive, no pun intended.

Source: The Daily Mail

St. John McCain and Letterman
So St. John McCain appeared on Letterman to counter the jokes about how old he is.

Some of his digs, no doubt written by Letterman's talented staff, were pretty funny, but this last one...

Then the Arizona Senator gets in the final zinger: "And you look like the guy who enjoys getting into a hot tub and watching his swim trunks inflate."

What the hell is THAT supposed to mean?

Source: Raw Story

Catalog of Unfit Toys
Hilarious.

Source: Catalog of Unfit Toys

Not a Joke
T-Mobile sent a nastygram to the tech website engadget demanding that they stop using the color magenta, as T-Mobile does in their own logo.

They think they can own a color now.

This has of course led to a number of websites going magenta in response.

Source: Engadget

Random and Disturbing News

Disturbing and Disgusting

Dolphin Raid
Here's a story that's so grotesque and seemingly far-fetched that it's hard to believe.

For the first time ever, graphic feature-length footage of the annual slaughter of some 2,500 dolphins in Taiji, Wakayama Prefecture, has been captured during a unique yearlong covert operation.

The secret filming by members of the U.S. conservation group Oceanic Preservation Society (OPS) — equipped with state-of-the-art technology and financed to the tune of $5 million by Netscape founder Jim Clark — is being turned into a major documentary feature film destined for worldwide release this summer (although distribution in Japan is at present not certain).

The story of how this film of the barbaric killing and subsequent butchering of dolphins was made — together with the resulting sale of their meat that massively exceeds Japanese and international limits for mercury content — is told here, exclusively, for the first time anywhere in print.

That's right; an eco-group with big money backing staged what can only be described as a Black Op to get extensive documentary evidence of a secretive dolphin slaughter in Japan.

Just the still photographs are horrifying. But quite frankly, to me, the sheer scale of this operation is more interesting than the abject cruelty.

I mean, we live in a world chock full of abject cruelty.

The footage of the annual seven-month dolphin "drive fisheries" (as they are known in Japan), and of the brutal practices involved in them — as well as the complicity in the killings by various dolphin trainers and officials from Taiji Whale Museum — is sure to shock the world. But whether Japanese people themselves will be able to see the film and arrive at their own conclusions is still by no means certain.

The annual dolphin slaughter at Taiji, a town with a population of some 3,500 in the beautiful Yoshino Kumano Kokuritsu Koen national park, follows a regular pattern.

First, hunter boats from the Taiji Isana Union (numbering at most 13 skiffs, with two crewmen each) head out to sea and surround pods of dolphins or pilot whales (which are actually large dolphins). Then they drive them into a "capture cove" by banging on long metal bell-ended poles placed in the water to disrupt the dolphins' sonar, causing them to become completely disorientated and panic.

After these animals have spent a night supposedly relaxing in the netted-off capture cove (in an attempt by the whalers to make their meat more tender), they are driven to the neighboring "killing cove." There, behind huge blue tarps strung across the cove to keep prying eyes away — in much the same way that Japanese police cordon off crime scenes — the dolphins meet their gruesome predawn end.

Terry Pratchett says something about the nature of evil in Carpe Jugulum, I forget the exact quote, but the sentiment was that the worst sort of evil isn't the kind that goes on in the dead of night, but the sort that plods methodically, dispassionately forward in grey, daylight monotony. In the book he's referencing, amongst other things, the Nazis, but the analogy holds here too. Truly nasty, inhuman behavior reaches its apex not with the lunatic carving up prostitutes, but with the commandant running the camps, or here, the whalers mutilating semi-sentient creatures to make toxic food.

From their base in Boulder, Colorado, the OPS group made six trips to Wakayama Prefecture, where they were constantly followed by local police and stalked and harassed by Taiji "whalers." Despite this, their mission was successful. Their high-tech film gear was covertly inserted in the "killing cove" and extracted 16 times thanks to the efforts of the film's assistant director, Charles Hambleton, and three members of the OPS team. Their hidden, high-definition (HD) cameras successfully recorded the horror that unfolded behind Taiji's blue tarps. And what they saw was beyond their belief.

Captured dolphins were filmed writhing in pain as Taiji whalers speared them repeatedly or cracked their spines with spiked weapons. Stricken dolphins are also shown thrashing about wildly, blood pouring from their wounds until they finally succumbed. Meanwhile, a number of dolphin trainers and officials from the Taiji Whale Museum are shown cooperating in the slaughter — some even laughing — as the killing cove's bloodied, ruby-red water swept round into the adjacent capture cove.

But perhaps the most iconic scene is one in which a baby dolphin leaps to its death on the rocks after its mother is killed. This really was a surreal and incredibly sad sight to see.

Surreal doesn't begin to describe it.

The lengths they had to go to in order to produce the documentary are equally surreal, to my mind.

With funding from billionaire conservationist Clark, the team was able to use the most sophisticated equipment money could buy. Among their weapons of choice were a battery of HD cameras. Some of those cameras were encased in fake rocks sculpted out of high-density foam by movie-model makers with Kerner Optical (formerly George "Star Wars" Lucas' Industrial Light and Magic Shop). These disguised cameras were strat- egically positioned inside the killing cove.

Also included in the formidable lineup of high-tech gear for this covert operation were standard-size HD cameras, $50,000 military-grade HD forward-looking infrared (FLIR) P-645 thermal cameras (to detect anyone the whalers had on lookout); hydrophones and HD underwater cameras (to record the dolphins' underwater throes); unmanned gyro-stabilized helicopters; a number of "shotgun" microphones disguised as tree branches; walkie-talkies; and a host of ancillary equipment.

The mission objective was to produce a well-balanced, full-length documentary feature for general worldwide release encompassing all facets of the Taiji dolphin cull and its health risks.

"We succeeded," Psihoyos said, "but we also came back with an epic horror film resembling a Steven King novel more than a documentary."

...

To make this possible, OPS called on Mandy-Rae Cruickshank, a seven-time world free-diving champion, and her famed coach and husband, Kirk Krack, to plant the devices. (Cruikshank recently broke her own world record by free-diving down to 88 meters and back in 2 min. 48 sec.) Both eagerly accepted the risky challenge.

"Good to go Mandy," crackled through the two-way. It was 3 a.m. The OPS support group on land had just completed a thermal-imaging sweep of the capture and killing coves. No security was detected. As the OPS van dropped the two off above the holding cove's small beach, and sped away, the free-diving pair, clad in wet suits, entered the water. The moon was full, helping them to see obstacles.

"Tensions were high . . . we had to get around a barbed-wire fence and hike down over some boulders to get into the water," Mandy said. "Then we swam around to the killing cove. It was about 40 feet (12 meters) deep. We had an underwater camera and hydrophone, and we used a flashlight to get a reference point so we knew where to retrieve them from after we made a reconnaissance, but we had to turn it on and off quickly to escape detection. Then Kirk and I put down the devices fairly easily."

...

Meanwhile, Psihoyos' team was embedded in their camera blinds on overlooking hillsides, sometimes for as long as 17 hours a day. Dressed in full camouflage gear and wearing face paint, they looked like military sniper teams. Black masking tape covered reflective surfaces on their cameras to avoid detection. For over 3 1/2 weeks, the OPS team survived on a daily ration of 3 hours' sleep. When filming from the camera blinds, they subsisted on energy bars and water. Whaler security men, always wary of outsiders monitoring their hunts, constantly scanned the high terrain, the bushes and undergrowth surrounding the two coves, their flashlights searching for intruders.

Psihoyos recounted his attempt in setting up the initial camera blind in a spot overlooking the killing cove.

"It was a moonless night and I had a full-size def (HD) camera in tow with a large tripod. I scaled a cliff and descended on a rope and perched on a shelf as big as an average office desk — but at a slope of about 30 degrees.

"I braced my feet against a small tree and didn't move them for the next 15 1/2 hours," he said, adding, "the lagoon was filled with pilot whales — they made a protective circle around their young. I shot frantic clips from my unstable perch as I saw whales killed and dragged away."

The whole thing is worth a read. These people put our National Intelligence to shame, that's for sure.

Source: The Japan Times

White Stickers
This is a combination of truly sad/pathetic and hilarious.

Two narcotics officers were demoted from an elite strike force and suspended without pay because of racially offensive stickers found inside a police department locker.


Police Commissioner Charles H. Ramsey this week punished officers Scott Schweizer and Eric Dial, transferring the pair out of the Narcotics Strike Force to routine patrol in districts where they started as rookies. The officers were also each suspended for 20 days without pay and prohibited from using vacation days toward the unpaid leave.

Two racist stickers were found inside Schweizer's locker. One sticker read: "White Power." The other depicted a cartoon of a man, half as an officer in uniform and half as a Klansman, with the words "Blue By Day — White By Night."

...

An Internal Affairs Bureau investigation concluded that Dial created the stickers and put them on Schweizer's locker in the narcotics strike force headquarters in the city's Bridesburg section, Ramsey said.

White Power... stickers?

Excuse me?

Is this what the white supremacist movement is reduced to? STICKERS?

That's progress.

Source: Raw Story

Wowser
This was sort of inevitable.

North Dakota State University is investigating the NDSU Saddle and Sirloin Club and sorority Alpha Gamma Delta after a racially charged performance at the Mr. NDSU Pageant. The performance featured a student in black face depicting presidential candidate Barack Obama receiving a lap dance while two students dressed as cowboys mimicked anal sex in the background. The Saddle and Sirloin Club, a club for students at the Fargo campus interested in animal agriculture, performed the lip-synching number in front of an audience of 500 people.

...

A pageant contestant from Saddle and Sirloin dressed as the woman from the popular Internet video "I Got a Crush on Obama" and performed for another student who was wearing dark makeup and an afro wig.

In the background, two male students dressed as cowboys simulated anal sex while holding an Obama sign that one student ripped at the conclusion of the 30-second performance.

Wow. Blackface, Obama with strippers... this is some classy school they've got in North Dakota, huh?

Source: Minnesota Monitor

Bowling for Morons
This is just surreal.

Summary: On Morning Joe, Joe Scarborough and Willie Geist repeatedly mocked Sen. Barack Obama's bowling performance -- which Scarborough called "dainty" -- at a campaign stop in Pennsylvania. Deriding Obama's score, Scarborough said: "You know Willie, the thing is, Americans want their president, if it's a man, to be a real man." He added, "You get 150, you're a man, or a good woman," to which Geist replied, "Out of my president, I want a 150, at least." After guest Harold Ford Jr. said that Obama's bowling showed a "humble" and "human" side to him, Scarborough replied, "A very human side? A prissy side."

It's also what you'd expect when you hire a former Republican congressman as a TV host. The stupid, it burns!

Seriously, what possible relevance does the bowling performance of a Presidential candidate have? Obama is apparently not much of a bowler, let alone a regular one. But even if he was, and sucked, who cares?

Is bowling a major component of Presidential work these days?

Give me a break. Yet again, Republicans try to feminize the Democratic candidate (or hyper-masculinize Clinton), playing the gender bashing card in a sad, outmoded attempt to sway the white male bigot vote.

Are we really supposed to believe St. John McCain, 72, is a star athlete? Even ignoring the damage to his arms from the POW camp, I mean, he's a decrepit mummy.

Source: Media Matters

Basketball?
Fresh from bashing Obama because he's bad at bowling (and thus a woman), MSNBC had another host, Chris Matthews, go on the air to state that Obama was bound to be good at basketball because he's black.

Summary: On Hardball, discussing Sen. Barack Obama's bowling performance at a campaign stop, Chris Matthews said to MSNBC political analyst Michelle Bernard, "You know, Michelle -- and this gets very ethnic, but the fact that he's good at basketball doesn't surprise anybody, but the fact that he's that terrible at bowling does make you wonder." While showing the video of Obama's bowling, Matthews asserted, "[I]t isn't the most macho form there."

Wow.

Just... wow.

Source: Media Matters

Lou Dobbs!
So Lou Dobbs got sick of, err, being told not to be a racist by uppity blacks.

Racial healer Lou Dobbs explains how he's sick of "cotton pickin'" black leaders telling him how he can and can't talk about race (he catches himself at the last minute -- sorta) ...

What is WRONG with Cable News these days?

Source: Talking Points Memo

Third Graders?!
Third Graders!

WAYCROSS, GA -- It's the type of news you don't expect to hear coming out of an elementary school. Nine third grade students suspended at Center Elementary in Waycross for an alleged plot to attack their teacher.

"This plot was uncovered at the point that something dangerous was brought to the school," says Lt. Dwayne Caswell with Waycross Police.

Police say the students were hatching a plan to harm their teacher Friday morning. They even brought items from home to carry out the plan.

"They had a broken steak knife, a crystal paper weight, toy handcuffs, several items and tape and stuff," says Lt. Caswell.

THIRD GRADERS?!

Also, before people get all upset about the 'degeneration of modern culture', it's worth noting that child soldiers and killers and what not are hardly an uncommon phenomenon or confined to the West. It's also worth noting that the kids had a mix of weapons and, err, toys.

Yeah.

Source: First Coast News

Circus Slaves
Now this is just bizarre stuff.

ROME (Reuters) - Police rescued two teenage Bulgarian sisters from a circus in southern Italy which forced one of them to swim with flesh-eating piranhas for the amusement of guests, police said.

While the 19-year-old sister swam in a transparent tank, the younger, 16-year-old was forced into a container where the circus staff tossed snakes at her. She was injured by one of the snakes, police said.

Police arrested three Italians who ran the circus south of Naples, in Salerno province, accusing them of forcing the sisters to live in virtual slavery.

The women were paid 100 euros ($155.8) per week and lived in a trailer that had previously been used to transport animals, they said.

I would ask how people could watch that, but honestly, circus performers often do some pretty bizarre or dangerous things. At the Dark Carnival we saw a guy (a highly paid professional there of his own free will, of course) put his face in a pile of broken glass and have an audience woman stand on the back of his head. Well, step on it at least.

Still, you'd at least worry about the poor snakes, right?

Source: Reuters

Various

Eccentricity

Werewolf Book
I have no idea why this caught my eye, but it did, so I'll file it here for the time being.

A book about werewolves or something. I forget how I got here.

Source: Amazon.com (Sharp Teeth)

Pretty Good

OKLAHOMA CITY - Four months after he was declared brain dead and doctors were about to remove his organs for transplant, Zach Dunlap says he feels "pretty good."

Dunlap was pronounced dead Nov. 19 at United Regional Healthcare System in Wichita Falls, Texas, after he was injured in an all-terrain vehicle accident. His family approved having his organs harvested.

As family members were paying their last respects, he moved his foot and hand. He reacted to a pocketknife scraped across his foot and to pressure applied under a fingernail. After 48 days in the hospital, he was allowed to return home, where he continues to work on his
recovery.

This is a weird story, because they did a brain scan and he had no blood flow up there.

So, huh. Spontaneous brain recovery. We should experiment on this guy, find out what the mechanism is.

Ethically of course. But maybe he has a mutant gene we could utilize.

Source: AZ Central

Saddam Insane
So it turns out that Saddam never did try to kill Bush's dad. That was, err, a lie, to make the Kuwaitis look good.

Now skepticism is newly enveloping allegations of an Iraqi plot to assassinate former President George H.W. Bush during a trip to Kuwait in 1993. Newsweek's Michael Isikoff reports that the same Pentagon report that has essentially disproved an Iraq-al Qaeda link also calls into question the 1993 plot that spurred former President Bill Clinton to launch a Tomahawk cruise-missle strike against Saddam's Iraqi Intelligence Service (IIS). Isikoff writes:

The review, conducted for the Pentagon's Joint Forces Command, combed through 600,000 pages of Iraqi intelligence documents seized after the fall of Baghdad, as well as thousands of hours of audio- and videotapes of Saddam's conversations with his ministers and top aides. The study found that the IIS kept remarkably detailed records of virtually every operation it planned, including plots to assassinate Iraqi exiles and to supply explosives and booby-trapped suitcases to Iraqi embassies. But the Pentagon researchers found no documents that referred to a plan to kill Bush. The absence was conspicuous because researchers, aware of its potential significance, were looking for such evidence. "It was surprising," said one source familiar with the preparation of the report (who under Pentagon ground rules was not permitted to speak on the record). Given how much the Iraqis did document, "you would have thought there would have been some veiled reference to something about [the plot]."

...

On May 27, 1993, the Boston Globe obtained a CIA report that questioned Kuwait's claims of the Iraqi plot to assassinate Bush (via Nexis):
A classified US intelligence analysis has concluded that Kuwait may have "cooked the books" on an alleged plot to assassinate former President Bush while he was in Kuwait last month. [...] At least one administration official has expressed the fear that President Clinton, under heavy criticism for his indecision over issues like Bosnia, may be tempted to hit at Iraq to prove his willingness to undertake resolute action. The report notes that some of the evidence definitely points to Iraqi involvement. The explosive devices captured by the Kuwaitis, for example, match those used by Iraqi intelligence in other terrorist operations. But the report says it was unable to corroborate the Kuwaiti assertion that the plot was aimed at Bush.

In November 1993, the New Yorker's tenacious investigative reporter Seymour Hersh reported, "[M]y own investigations have uncovered circumstantial evidence, at least as compelling as the [Clinton] Administration's, that suggests that the American government's case against Iraq—as it has been outlined in public, anyway—is seriously flawed."

This is why Seymour Hersh should be taken seriously. He's an amazing reporter.

Source: Raw Story

Capitol Police
The stalwart Capitol police, famous for not giving breathalyzer tests to drunk congresspeople who hit objects with their cars, have also failed to find a bomb that a crazy man brought with him in his car when he went to, err, thin the herd at the Supreme Court. With a sword and a shotgun.

Authorities revealed Tuesday that a man carrying a loaded shotgun was arrested in January near the U.S. Capitol, and explosives left in his truck nearby went undetected for three weeks.


According to an indictment filed in District of Columbia Superior Court, Michael Gorbey, 38, of Rapidan, Va., faces charges of planning to set off a bomb. He also is accused of making or transporting an explosive device with the intent of using it against people or property and multiple firearms charges.

Gorbey allegedly tried to manufacture a "weapon of mass destruction, that is, an explosive device capable of causing multiple deaths or serious bodily injuries to multiple persons, or massive destruction of property," according to the indictment.

He was arrested Jan. 18 for carrying the shotgun and a sword outside the Capitol. Gorbey told police he was headed to an appointment at the Supreme Court. No one was injured in the incident, which caused gridlock for hours on Capitol Hill.

U.S. Capitol Police discovered the explosive device three weeks later when they returned with a search warrant to check the truck, which was in a government parking lot.

Morons.

Source: Raw Story

Scary
So a transgender woman (undergoing procedures to be more like a man), has decided to have a child.

This is a bit odd, but didn't make a huge impression on me when I read the story.

My subconscious, however, always eager to find new sources of terror, gave me a nightmare where I was pregnant.

Uggh. Gods.

Source: The Daily Telegraph

Revoltin' Development
It's a bad pun, because, well, you'll see.

Apparently the Department of Transportation is running a 1 billion dollar lottery that will be divided up amongst the worst traffic hells in the country.

This has led Miami to worsen its traffic intentionally to try and get the gold. Perverse incentives, anyone?

(See, this is a revolting situation about urban development, and... yeah)

Sources: Tom Morris
Urbanplanet.org

Dumbest Game Ideas
A list of 30 questionable game ideas, or in some cases, game marketing.

I love the game where you kill mutated, fireball spitting camels.

Source: Crave at CNET

Nazi Loot
Stephen Colbert may be on the trail of Nazi Gold, but a London museum has struck Nazi Painting.

Britain's National Gallery announced Thursday that new research has disclosed that a painting in its collection, "Cupid Complaining to Venus," by the German Renaissance artist Lucas Cranach the Elder, was once part of Hitler's private collection.

"We've never had anything like this before," said museum spokesman Thomas Almeroth-Williams. "It's incredibly rare."

I have to say, what an awesome name. 'Cranach'. The Elder no less, which strongly implies that it was passed on.

Basically, Hitler got this painting through as yet undetermined means, and it was 'given' to a war correspondent, who brought it back to the US, then sold it, and thus it ended up back in the art world.

What an odd story.

CRANACH!!!

Source: The Washington Post

Dr. Pepper and Axl Rose
So the Dr. Pepper people have made an offer to Axl Rose: release his vaporware album 'Chinese Democracy' in 08, and everyone in America gets a free can of Dr. Pepper.

"Tired of a world in which Americans idolize wannabe singers and musicals about high schoolers pass as rock 'n roll music, Dr Pepper is encouraging (ok, begging) Axl Rose to finally release his 17-year-in-the-making belabored masterpiece, Chinese Democracy, in 2008," it said in a release on Wednesday.

"In an unprecedented show of solidarity with Axl, everyone in America, except estranged G N'R guitarists Slash and Buckethead, will receive a free can of Dr Pepper if the album ships some time -- anytime! -- in 2008."

Ok, almost everyone.

Apparently Rose didn't know this was in the works.

So... yeah. I have no clue what this is about. Maybe they're betting he won't get it out, and thus it's totally free PR.

Source: Raw Story

Headspace
A new book by a Reg correspondent is out, talking about the emerging use and abuse of sniffer police dogs in the good old UK.

Interesting topic, though the excerpt makes it sound as much about her as about the issue.

Source: The Register

Ammo
So the US awarded a 200+ million dollar defense contract to supply ammunition to Afghan soldiers to some guy operating, essentially, out of his garage.

Big surprise, he screwed it up.

A defense contractor reportedly led by a 22-year-old has been suspended from doing business with the US government for allegedly supplying Afghan security forces with old Chinese-made munitions, officials said Thursday.

...

Using Chinese-made ammunition violated the terms of the contract, the notice of suspension said.

In January, investigators inspected munitions stored at a bunker in Afghanistan and found that 14 of 15 containers of 7.62-caliber ammunition supplied by AEY Inc. were manufactured in China, the army memo said.

...

Diveroli, it said, was 19 years old when he became president of AEY Inc in 2005 and began bidding on an array US government munition contracts.

The army placed orders for more than 223 million dollars worth of munitions with AEY between March and December of 2007.

The Times said that since winning the contract in January 2007, the company has provided ammunition that is more than 40 years old and in decomposing packaging.

Ahh, the Pentagon. Just when they thought the super expensive wrench and toilet seat scandals of the 90s were behind them, they handed a few hundred million bucks to a con artist.

Idiots.

Source: Raw Story

Postal
I had no idea this sort of thing actually happens.

HIGHLAND, Ind. (AP) -- A 77-year-old woman used her car to drive off a large dog that was attacking a mail carrier, saving the woman from more bite wounds.

Joan Michniewicz was backing out of her driveway when she heard Danielle Lawrence, 28, scream on Monday afternoon. Michniewicz drove at the mixed-breed dog and then yelled for Lawrence to jump in her car.

"I'm so lucky," said Lawrence, who has been on the job less than two months. "If she hadn't come, I would have been tore up worse than I was."

Lawrence suffered several bite wounds before Michniewicz arrived. The dog had pushed open a backyard gate and attacked her while she was walking up to a mailbox.

Ok, so I suppose that's a bit of an exaggeration. Still, considering the stereotype, how often do you really hear about mail carriers and dogs?

Source: The Associated Press

Various News, Including Evil Tom Morris

Odd

The Evil Empire
So my friend Tom is up to no good, forging an evil radio empire.

After 10 years of uncertainty and hard work, "the time has come," said former Radiate FM General Manager Brennan Forsyth.

Radiate FM, the FIU student radio station, installed its translator on top of the Marine Biology building and began transmitting through its new signal, 96.9 FM on Feb. 28.

...

The translator, which sits 40 feet above the Marine Biology building, will broadcast within a 10 to 15 mile radius of BBC. Penton and the station's student engineer, Tom Morris, spent four days on top of the roof of the building, working in the rain and cold last week, and finished the transmitter on Feb. 28.

"We braved quite a wind chill up there. It was absolutely freezing by South Florida standards, anyone from up north would have laughed at us," Morris said.

...

Morris, who was heavily involved with installing the translator, is already looking to the future and even thinking about expanding the station more.

"If the FCC opened up translator applications again, I would love to get a translator up on the Pines Center," Morris said. If there's free spot on the dial, I'll do it."

From its inception 21 years ago, Morris' ambitious dream may not seem that far-fetched.

"Two years ago, we didn't even hear our radio station on either campus; now you can pick it up as far as the Key Largo," Jaross said.

We must stop this cancerous spread before it reaches actual civilization.

Tom Morris must DIE

Source: The Beacon (FIU Newspaper) Also, the URL for this site is WAY TOO LONG.

The Doors... Sorta
Actually a terrifying cover of Riders on the Storm. A very unfortunate cover.

Source: I Am TRex

Latin
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum sonatur.

"Whatever is said in Latin, sounds profound."

Source: The BBC (Other phrases available at this site too)

5 Dollar Gas
Granted, it's an anomaly. As yet.

James Willman seems to be a nice enough guy: polite, good-humored and hard-working, pumping gas seven days a week at the Amerigo Gas Station in the tiny Big Sur town of Gorda, about 35 miles north of Cambria.

But at least once a day, Willman said, someone pulls in and starts cursing him.

“They say all kinds of stuff—‘You ought to be shot,’ or ‘Where’s your mask?’ ” Willman said. “I’m like, ‘Hey, I just work here.’ ”

The reason for consumer hostility is that the station is serving up what might be the costliest gas in the land.

This week, as crude oil flirted with $110 a barrel and gasoline prices surged nationwide, a gallon of regular at Amerigo was going for $5.20.

See this is a tiny town with a tiny gas station that has to run a diesel generator all day for power, so they gouge. Party because they have to, partly because, well, they can.

It's the American way.

Source: San Luis Obispo County

Spidey in the Attic
Cool picture.

Turnip Bomb
I swear, Indiana exists as a cautionary tale.

Terror came to Fort Wayne, Indiana, late last week as a suspicious package arrived at the offices of a local law firm in a move that seemed to presage a deadly bomb outrage slaughter campaign.

After a tense operation by robot and human bomb-disposal operatives, however, it was discovered that the infernal device was in fact - in the judgement of the local bomb squad - a potentially exploding turnip.

The threatening vegetable was despatched in a "bluish gift bag" contained within a box slightly smaller than a baseball, according to Fort Wayne Journal-Gazette reporter Abby Slutsky.

...

"I'm now on constant alert against this and other rooted vegetables," said Fort Wayne lawyer Mark GiaQuinta, to whom the package was addressed.

He theorised that the explosive-esque yet nourishing gift had been sent to him by a disgruntled individual against whom GiaQuinta had acted in court. This person, described by the attorney as "volatile", had perhaps been trying to send the message "you can't get blood from a turnip".

The man thinks he's funny, but he called in the bomb squad because someone left him a gift.

He's a serious paranoid whacko.

Source: The Register

Speaking of Bombs
Here's a nifty page on the disarming of a bomb in the Falklands via the awesome sounding 'Double Baldrick' manuever.

Source: South Atlatic Remote Territories Media Association

Get Bent
This lady needs psychological help, badly.

ASHLAND, Ky. (WSAZ) -- A mother says the straws she bought for her three-year-old daughter were shaped like a male sex organ.

Andrea Bailey says she went shopping at the Ashland Wal-Mart on Thursday, February 28th, and bought a package of fun straws for her three 3-year-old daughter, Ashlynn.

Bailey says Ashlynn came in and used one shaped like a heart. A couple others in the package, though, were shaped like something different.

“There are two of them that are shaped like the male private area,” said Bailey. “I called Wal-Mart and they very rude with me about it. They acted like I was lying, like I was making it all up. You know, I would never make something up like that, especially about my little girl. But, that's just how they treated me and it’s just not right.”

Ahh, conservative, paranoid scolds.

Is there nothing they cannot ruin?

This woman probably gets upset at missiles, speedboats and launches of the space shuttle too.

Whaaaaaacko.

Source: WSAZ.com (check it out for yourself if you like)

Swastika Update
So once again, we have a controversy over a building whose wings form a swastika from the air.

Sigh.

DECATUR, Ala. (AP) -- From the ground, the Wesley Acres Methodist retirement home looks like any other building. But fly over in an airplane, and the outline is unmistakable: It's one big swastika.

Prompted by complaints from a Jewish activist, the agency that owns the government-funded building is planning to alter its shape to disguise the Nazi symbol. The move comes just a few years after a $1 million design modification meant to quiet similar complaints from a U.S. senator.

Naturally, the shape of the building is the sole, overriding concern here.

"The difficulty is there are a limited number of options for fixing a building that has been there for some time," said Mike Giles, counsel for the Methodist Homes Corp. of Alabama and Northwest Florida. "We have to come up with a way to fix an appearance that we want solved and not hurt our residents."

Wesley Acres provides government-subsidized housing for 117 low-income people ages 62 and above. Most have no reason to suspect their hallways take on a sinister shape.

The one-story building, designed in the mid-1970s and completed in 1980, underwent a $1 million alteration in 2001 with funding from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development following complaints by Democratic Sen. Howell Heflin, who has since died. But the addition of two wings did little to hide the offensive shape, and in some ways accentuates it.

Options for the new renovations include the addition of covered porches or other outdoor areas.

The latest push to rid the landscape of the broken cross shape follows complaints from Avrahaum Segol, the same Israeli-American researcher who last fall helped publicize a swastika-shaped barracks at Naval Base Coronado in San Diego. The Navy said it would spend about $600,000 to alter the building, which opened in the 1960s, but the work has not yet been done.

It's the same guy? The same guy made the complaints?

Is this all he does?

The latest push to rid the landscape of the broken cross shape follows complaints from Avrahaum Segol, the same Israeli-American researcher who last fall helped publicize a swastika-shaped barracks at Naval Base Coronado in San Diego. The Navy said it would spend about $600,000 to alter the building, which opened in the 1960s, but the work has not yet been done.

Segol calls the Alabama retirement home a "sister swastika" to the building in California and says they were both part of a tangled, government-funded conspiracy to honor Nazis.

Segol claims the swastika shape of Wesley Acres in Decatur pays homage to the German scientists who came to nearby Huntsville after World War II and designed the rockets that put Americans on the moon.

Methodist Homes' Giles said Segol's conspiracy claims are ridiculous. The building was originally designed to be much larger, he said, and cutbacks resulted in a shape that resembled the four-armed swastika used as the symbol of German Nazis during World War II.

"It was certainly not intentional," Giles said.

IT IS! IT'S ALL HE DOES! He looks for reasons to get upset from Google Earth!

The shape of the retirement center is evident in satellite photos available on the Internet. But it is located in a residential section in a city with few tall buildings, and many in Decatur have no idea Wesley Acres resembles a swastika.

Giles said any changes to the building must be relatively inexpensive since the agency lacks money for an elaborate solution. Planners are considering modifications, he said, "so that from the air it takes your eye away from what was originally there."

Yes, the low-income housing people have to spend money that would otherwise be available to shelter poor old folks to install shrubbery because some idiot with a computer and time on his hands is all atwitter.

I hate conspiracy theorists.

Source: The Associated Press

So a Woman With a Grenade Walks Into a Police Station..
At least it wasn't in Indiana.

CORPUS CHRISTI, Texas (AP) - The police department was briefly evacuated after a woman decided she should bring in a hand grenade she found.

The unidentified woman handed it to an officer Thursday after finding it while cleaning out a relative's belongings. The officer immediately took it outside the building and police cleared the building until the bomb squad took it away and detonated it about an hour later.

The grenade appeared to be live.

"When we countercharged it, it went boom," bomb squad supervisor Lt. James Brandon told the Corpus Christi Caller-Times.

Source: My Way News

I Hate Schools
They always have to make themselves look dumb.

A 15-year-old girl who stopped an out-of-control school bus she was riding on was handed a Saturday detention instead because she was skipping school.

Marina High School student Amanda Rouse was on a bus with 40 elementary school students Wednesday morning when the driver fell out of her seat after a turn and hit her head.

Rouse jumped up and applied the brakes, bringing the bus to a halt after striking two parked cars. No one was injured.

She said had asked the bus driver for a ride because she felt sick at school.

Of course, idiots like this don't help matters.

"She is in trouble with school because she made the wrong decision," said Rouse's grandmother, Sally Correll. "But I can't help but believe that she was where God wanted her to be."

Yes, God wanted her to play hooky to avoid an accident.

Why didn't he just make the bus driver better at their job?

Source: AZ Central

See My Vest
Well, ok, not mine.

Not yet.

A vest that enables video gamers to feel the impact when their characters are shot in-game is raising fears that young people are being desensitized to violence.

The 3rdSpace gaming vest, invented by a Seattle surgeon, includes eight air pistons over vital spots and may be the most sophisticated offering yet in a series of such devices that have been intended to enhance the sensory experience of gaming.

Gamers' reactions have ranged from mildly interested to highly enthusiastic, but anti-gun campaigners in Britain, where the device has recently become available, are alarmed. One activist told Channel 4 News that people keep asking her "Why are our kids out in the street killing each other on a weekly basis?" and warned that it's because "We feed them a diet of violence."

Please...please shut the hell up.

It.

Is.

A.

Toy.

You.

Whackjob.

I do sort of wonder about the long-term health effects of having air pistons hitting you in the chest though.

Source: Raw Story