"S. Dakota Slaps Up Its Women "

S. Dakota Slaps Up Its Women / Another state you should never visit passes an appalling abortion ban, because they hate you:

"Your state, apparently run be pallid sexless demagogic men who think they know something of God and morality but know only ignominy and the smell of sulfur and death in their nightmares, thinks you are irresponsible dumb-ass meat, unable to handle your own decisions, your own body, your sex. Your state's leaders and your Republican governor, Mike Rounds, wish to treat you like meaningless, voiceless chattel. Get out now. You already know why.

For everyone else reading this, here is the nauseating news: South Dakota, in case you missed it amid the reports of increasingly violent civil war in Iraq, the Dubai ports fiasco and Bush's record-low approval ratings across the board, has just passed a sweeping anti-abortion measure that completely bans the procedure in almost all cases -- including rape, including incest, including if you were, for some ungodly reason, accidentally knocked up by South Dakota neocon anti-choicers like Republican and bill sponsor Rep. Roger W. Hunt, these baggy slabs of pallid manhood who wouldn't know true female sexual pleasure from a hole in a mattress. Or is that being too kind?

...Here's a fascinating aspect: Most women are stunned by this news. Most women not living in one of the few remaining prehistoric red states cannot believe their ears, eyes, souls. I've told a number of my youngish female friends of this hideous development and they all respond the same way: stunned silence, then "You can't be serious," then this ashen "Oh my God" feeling of utter horror, followed by, "Does anyone else know this? Why isn't this making bigger headlines? Where the hell is Oprah?" Etc.

See, modern women under 40, they simply don't accept it. They have no conception of a world in which they don't have complete control over their flesh, their reproductive rights, their sexuality. For most women of this generation, reproductive choice is simply a fundamental, incontrovertible human right, obvious and ironclad and indisputable, and so to hear that it's being deeply threatened in this back-ass BushCo world is so foreign, so surreal, it induces an immediate cringing recoil, like watching Tom Cruise stick his tongue in Katie Holmes' face, like watching flies feed, like seeing Dick Cheney naked. It simply does not compute. "

R-E-S-P-E-C-T

There's nothing quite like 2 fifteen year old white girls from the Netherlands lip synching Aretha Franklin.

[Pretty funny tho']

This week in the Republican Agenda

d r i f t g l a s s: Embracing Your Inner "Poon Nazi":

"This is a week that has produced, in quick succession, a bill to all-but-ban the right to choose in the People’s Republic of Mississippi, a Republican Supreme Court that has ruled that anti-choice mobs have the right to terrorize women and girls when they visit their doctors, and the revelation of a mash note from Sam Ailto’s to wingnut Mullah James Dobson that made Harriet Myers' paean to her Big Swingin’ Dick of a President look positively…actuarial…by comparison.

So if anyone had any doubt about who really runs the Republican Party, put them to bed without supper.

The Confederate Right has always been led by weak, flaccid, little men who cower behind John Law and Judge Lynch and beg them to protect their inadequate manhood and freeze-dried egos from the predations of vibrators, strong women and every Black Man who every lived. They have had a hard-on for re-institutionalizing the Divine Right of White Men to treat woman and brown people as chattel since the traitor army of GOP v 1.0 surrendered at Appomattox"

Nicely said

No Touch Monkey!:

"I'm a people person. The skulls I keep on my mantle are nothing but a tribute to the love and adoration I have for them."

I agree

The Dilbert Blog: Penn and Teller:

"Over the years I have developed a seemingly reliable set of filters for deciding who to believe. For example, I distrust all science that is produced by people with an economic interest in the result. I know I’m in the minority on that view, so there’s no need to tell me again."

I do not contradict myself.

Okay, I do.

You Are 76% Open Minded

You are so open minded that your brain may have fallen out! Well, not really. But you may be confused on where you stand. You don't have a judgemental bone in your body, and you're very accepting. You enjoy the best of every life philosophy, even if you sometimes contradict yourself.

How Open Minded Are You?

Communist China is Awesome

These guys are funny.

Comic Book-y Goodness

Greg Rucka writing the Question. If I wasn't already sold, I would be now.


Comic Book Resources - CBR News - The Comic Wire:

"After the INFINITE CRISIS and before One Year Later, the DCU spent a year without Superman, Batman and Wonder Woman. A year in which those heroes were needed more than ever as the fate of the world hung in the balance. Who stood up in their absence? And who sat out?

The story of DC's most eventful year ever can now be told as four of the hottest writers in comics — Grant Morrison, Geoff Johns, Greg Rucka, Mark Waid — deliver an unprecedented weekly tale of death, danger, romance, intergalactic terror and the never-ending, universal meaning of heroism.

...

52: A year without Superman; a year without Batman; a year without Wonder Woman...but not a year without heroes."

BBC NEWS corrects its dumbness.

BBC NEWS | Programmes | Newsnight | A bit of BitTorrent bother:

"First though, an apology. File sharing is not theft. It has never been theft. Anyone who says it is theft is wrong and has unthinkingly absorbed too many Recording Industry Association of America press releases. We know that script line was wrong. It was a mistake. We're very, very sorry.

If copyright infringement was theft then I'd be in jail every time I accidentally used football pix on Newsnight without putting 'Pictures from Sky Sport' in the top left corner of the screen. And I'm not. So it isn't. So you can stop telling us if you like. We hear you.

Now we've got that out the way, let us ask you a question. Why is it that every time the media starts to talk about the internet they feel compelled to bang on about paedophiles and terrorists and generally come over like a cross between Joe McCarthy and the Childcatcher from Chitty Chitty Bang Bang?

Well here's one answer - it sells copy. Another answer is that we're totally scared of new media, because new media is railways and we're canals, and you all just know how that's going to end.

So we seek to equate the internet with all bad things to scare you off it. At some corporate freudian level, there's some truth to that accusation."

"Simply because a person is given a badge, a gun, and the authority to enforce the law by the state does not make that person a moral agent."

Who Polices the Police? by Aaron Ginn:

"I have a cousin who works for the Mesa, Arizona Police Department. In October of 2002, Dan Lovelace, an officer who works for the Chandler, Arizona Police Department gunned down a woman who attempted to pass a fake prescription at a local Walgreens. Lovelace claimed the woman attempted to run him down as she sped away from the scene, and he shot her in self-defense. Forensic and eyewitness evidence contradicted his testimony. Despite this, Lovelace was acquitted of all charges against him.

At the time, I asked my cousin what he thought of the verdict. He simply stated that he would never question a fellow officer in the line of duty. 'And besides, she was a felon. A drughead,' he exclaimed. In his view, an officer should never be questioned. His (or her) authority is absolute out in the field. From what I’ve been able to discern, this attitude is systemic in police officers. The force is a fraternity. They stick together and watch each others’ backs.

I recalled this exchange in light of an undercover investigation conducted by a Miami local news crew that aired last month in which an investigator attempted to perform a seemingly simple task: to obtain a form to file a complaint against a police officer. The investigator went to 38 separate departments in South Florida in an attempt to obtain such a form. He walked out of 35 of them empty-handed. But the worst part of the story was the reactions he received from several officers when he asked for the form. Some of the reactions included asking for his personal information in a threatening manner, threatened citations, lewd comments about his wife, asking if he was on medications, etc. One officer went so far as to chase the man out of the office and down the street, at one point putting his hand on his gun in a threatening manner."

Choose Your Own Adventure! Via: Something Awful

Something Awful:

"When you were younger, you loved those Choose Your Own Adventure books. Yeah, I know you did. I did, too."

I love Grant Morrison

In a manly, healthy way, of course.

Welcome To Dynamic Forces:

"These days, I get up, check e-mails, and scan my three or four favourite websites to see if there’s any good gossip. Then I work out in the gym, just like my hero, big Bruce Wayne, go running up ’n’ down the hill in all weathers, meditate, have breakfast and read the tabloids. After that, I mess around and do biz with Kristan, or we go for lunch or whatever. All the while I’m organising plots and solving story problems in my head.

Finally, I get to work in the afternoon and I write. I build up a good head of creative steam in the early evening, which is when I tend to do my best work, then I carry on into the night and the wee small hours of morning if need be, pausing only for food, or to watch a top notch DVD, or Celebrity Big Brother (deceased). I like to be surrounded by the sounds of nature while I work, which means birds, waves, trees, and pop music. Currently I’m listening to Ladytron, The Go! Team, Brian Jonestown Massacre, Lady Sov, The Like, sandpipers, owls, redwoods, oriental spruces, rain, and frame-rattling winds, over and over again. But mostly I’m inspired by the Arctic Monkeys, and the songs thereof. Fresh-faced 19 year old lads who know the score. Now That’s What I Call Music!

That’s the typical DAY. Other days are different.

...I was inspired as a teenager by the ‘Chaos Magic’ current and, after some early successes, I got seriously into the possibilities of what I was playing with and spent pretty much every day from 1981 to 2001, experimenting very successfully with magical techniques from a multitude of different traditions, until, finally I gained enough personal experience and practical know-how to develop my own style, which I called Pop Mag!c. THE INVISIBLES comic remains the central grimoire of Pop Mag!c for the time being, at least until I finish the Pop Mag!c manual.

Following my initiation into a state of consciousness which some magicians describe as ‘Crossing The Abyss’, I now ‘practise’ something I like to call Blank Magic, which I relate to the Buddhist concept of Shunyata, or Emptiness – an idea explored at length in THE FILTH, the bible of Transcendental Materialism. I still perform rituals, make spells, and summon angels, gods and demons regularly as well.

As for the second part of your question – the stories in ALL STAR SUPERMAN can be clearly seen as hymns to Apollonian solar energies and are part of a wider solar cycle of rituals I’ve been performing for the last two years. Frank Quitely and I are downloading Superman qualities if you like, summoning Superman into visible appearance. Why, you may ask, would we summon a sun god into our lives in the form of a cartoon strongman ?

Well, O my brothers, serious contemplation of Superman, daily meditation on his attributes, and, of course, reading his incredible new adventures in ALL STAR SUPERMAN will ACTUALLY make you a more rational, attractive, and positive person! And don’t forget, these qualities may actually become fashionable as we approach the end of a difficult decade and crawl out of that nasty little year Saturn-Pluto alignment that started in 2001."

The blindingly obvious. To everybody except the Rah-Rah White House Cheerleaders.

On The Media-- AIN'T GONNA COVER WAR NO MORE:

"BOB GARFIELD: When you read criticism of the press in general, that it is somehow so fixated on bad news that it doesn't report the good, that it's essentially suppressing the good news out of Iraq, what do you all say to one another? How do you react?

FARNAZ FASSIHI: I can just say that if there were five car bombs going off in New York and 50 people kidnapped a day, I'm sure that metro reporters would be writing those stories and not talking about the school that was painted."

Loyal Republicans - One Perspective

d r i f t g l a s s: The Alexander Butterfield Moment:

"Now you have unimpeachable proof that when Dubya saw hammer coming down on the conspicuously black and conspicuously poor City of New Orleans -- and when he was told in no uncertain terms, days in advance, what kind of Hell on Earth was heading our way, he did what any good Klansman would do.

Turned his back, went on vacation, knocked back a few, and lied about it later.

Knowing that you Loyal Republicans would have his back if it ever got out.

Knowing that you Loyal Republicans already didn’t give a shit about the fact that this is the most deeply paranoid, deeply secretive Administration memory.

Knowing that you Loyal Republicans already didn’t give a shit that they classify the paper trail behind every fucking crime they commit – from Cheney and his fellow plutocrats carving up the oil market and calling it “energy policy”, to hiding behind the secrecy clause of the FISA law to keep the few Senators who knew the truth quiet, to how many meetings the President was at with Jack Abramoff -- behind the wall of national security or “We don’t talk about…” and then scream traitor whenever someone dares to ask why they keep breaking the law.

Knowing that you Loyal Republicans already don’t give a shit that these are people that would use a Marine Honor Guard to bury and protect every steaming pile of VP droppings each time Dick Cheney takes a fresh dump on the Constitution…and yet without batting an eye will leak national security secrets like an 90-year-old condom whenever it suits their partisan agenda.

Knowing that you Loyal Republicans don’t give a shit about torture or murder, or the lies that landed us in Iraq or the lies that keep us there.

So knowing that you Loyal Republicans despise every part of this country that doesn’t have your stink on it, and you Loyal Republicans couldn’t give a damn if Dubya killed a billion ay-rabs as long as it kept the prices at the pump"

The Dilbert Blog: Am I a Libertarian?

The Dilbert Blog: Am I a Libertarian?:

"Frankly, I’m suspicious of anyone who has a strong opinion on a complicated issue. But when it comes to social questions, those are usually simple. I take sides with whatever viewpoint is good for me personally."

My favorite JET Journal/Blog/Thingee: "I Am a Japanese School Teacher"

Wherein he manages to sum up the essential feelings towards the "too cool - pants around my knees cause I think I'm Jay-Z - can't be bothered to ever do any work or be respectful at all - sannensei boys which grow like weeds...

"Outpost Nine :: Editorials :: I Am a Japanese School Teacher:

"Being a bastard sannensei boy, he wouldn't know English even if English were to somehow personify itself, and then run up and kick him in the nuts."

If you follow the link you also get a marvelous tale of how one pervy kid worked his favorite porn stars into an English skit. I kid you not.

Japan is something else...

Fantastic MMA Inspiration HL

Japanese Matrix Ping Pong

This is awesome

Sociopathic inablity to recognize that which didn't fit their preconceptions.

But of course, they never could have known.

Idiots.

KR Washington Bureau | 02/28/2006 | Intelligence agencies warned about growing local insurgency in late 2003:

"U.S. intelligence agencies repeatedly warned the White House beginning more than two years ago that the insurgency in Iraq had deep local roots, was likely to worsen and could lead to civil war, according to former senior intelligence officials who helped craft the reports.

Among the warnings, Knight Ridder has learned, was a major study, called a National Intelligence Estimate, completed in October 2003 that concluded that the insurgency was fueled by local conditions - not foreign terrorists- and drew strength from deep grievances, including the presence of U.S. troops.

The existence of the top-secret document, which was the subject of a bitter three-month debate among U.S. intelligence agencies, has not been previously disclosed to a wide public audience.

The reports received a cool reception from Bush administration policymakers at the White House and the office of Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, according to the former officials, who discussed them publicly for the first time.

Robert Hutchings, the chairman of the National Intelligence Council from 2003 to 2005, said the October 2003 study was part of a "steady stream" of dozens of intelligence reports warning Bush and his top lieutenants that the insurgency was intensifying and expanding.

"Frankly, senior officials simply weren't ready to pay attention to analysis that didn't conform to their own optimistic scenarios," Hutchings said in a telephone interview. "

So I wonder if this makes Republicans think that 72% of troops are French-loving, enemy-sympathizin' surrender monkeys?

...since I'm not quite sure how the Conservative mindset works.

Zogby International:

"An overwhelming majority of 72% of American troops serving in Iraq think the U.S. should exit the country within the next year, and nearly one in four say the troops should leave immediately, a new Le Moyne College/Zogby International survey shows."