Join Today

Join the Illuminate cult online today and get instant sum of 5 million
dollars with a free home any where you choose to live in the world and also
get 200,000 dollars monthly as a salary… If you are interested please
kindly fill the following information to this email below {
greatbrotherhoodilluminati666@gmail.com}

Sounds legit.

This started popping up in comments that were made to social media posts by news organizations, under a few different names, and so I dropped in on their profiles to see what their deal was. And it was the same thing, over and over. Post after post, going back months, all with the same text. Many of them contained random links to other content on the Web; anything from food blogs to racist screeds by open White supremacists. And a number of articles about the Illuminati; either purporting to explain some aspect of their ritualism, lists of their members in specific nations, supposed exposés of their worldwide leadership and, strangely, articles debunking the whole thing.

Every time I see a scam like this, I wonder who the intended mark is. Who sees an offer of membership from what is supposed to be the most secretive group in the world (how it maintains this status given that everyone seems to know about it is beyond me), promising instant wealth, and says to themselves: "Yeah, my ship has finally come in. I'll just send an e-mail to this random gmail account and the all-powerful rulers of the world will set me up for life. As soon as I give them my financial information.

I understand the whole point behind making these 419 scams so outlandish that anyone who genuinely pursues one will stick with it to the bitter end (and the complete draining of their finances), but it's difficult for me to fathom that anyone could be both that gullible and able to retain enough money to be worth fleecing. There can't be that many completely unintelligent lottery winners in the world.

But if this is coming from some benighted 3rd world backwater somewhere, perhaps $20 here or $50 is enough to keep them afloat (and pay for internet time) long enough that they can desperately fish for their next mark. Maybe they should just advertise the low, low cost of living, instead.

Unsupported

"How" the BBC would like to know, "Can [a] rapist win joint custody of victim's child?"

Said victim has a theory. “They (officials) never explained anything to me. I was receiving about $260 a month in food stamps for me and my son and health insurance for him. I guess they were trying to see how to get some of the money back.”

Or, to borrow a headline from an unrelated story I saw a couple of years ago "We are too broke to care about right and wrong."

When Sanilac County, Michigan, surveyed the mother, who had been receiving child support, they found that the child had a father: one Christopher Mirasolo. According to the mother's attorney, Mr. Mirasolo had abducted, held and raped the woman, her older sister and a friend in 2008, when the victim was 12 years old. That attack resulted in a pregnancy; DNA paternity testing shows that Mr. Mirasolo is the father of the now eight-year old child. On the basis of this, and after allegedy being told by an assistant prosecutor that the woman had consented to a continued relationship with the convicted rapist, despite her having moved to Florida, a circuit judge awarded joint custody to the man who was convicted of "attempted third-degree criminal sexual conduct" in the case and gave him her address in the bargain. And, according to her attorney, she's been ordered to return to Michigan to live or face contempt of court charges. And did I mention that Mr. Mirasolo was convicted again of sexually assaulting a minor a couple of years later?

This is, as the youngsters put it these days, "all sorts of fucked up."

But if we answer the BBC's question with the mother's theory, it all makes a certain amount of perverse sense. After all, he wasn't actually convicted of rape in the case - only "attempted third-degree criminal sexual conduct." (Although it seems to me that a pregnancy is pretty much dead certain proof that the "attempt" was successful...) And it will (supposedly) save the state money - after all they can always go after Mr. Mirasolo for the money. (Which I suspect will be a rousing success.) If that means forcing a woman into a relationship with the very stereotype of a sexual predator and forcing her to move halfway across the country to be close enough to him to share custody of the child, well, she's a sacrifice the county is willing to make.

And this is how civil societies end: With the understanding that the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few, or the one, and so a different few decide that this few or that one can be thrown under the bus because its in the best interests of everyone else. Now, I know that I'm relying a lot on the victim's attorney here, and that she's likely to be a highly biased narrators of what went on, but bear with me one more time. The attorney, in explaining how Mr. Mirasolo was sentenced to county jail rather than prison, notes: “She (client) and her family was told first-time sex offenders weren’t sent to prison because people come out worse after they go there.” But you can also imagine in a situation like this that judges of cash-strapped jurisdictions might avoid sending first-time offenders to prison to avoid damaging their employment prospects, and thus their ability to pay child support, later in life.

(Although given that this case is making international headlines, it's hard to imagine Mr. Mirasolo staying gainfully employed long enough to come up with bus fare, let alone child support payments. And in that sense, Mr. Mirasolo might end up serving yet more time behind bars; this time for failure to pay court-ordered support payments.)

The issue isn't that the result of this case is, on its face, terrible. One could (perhaps with a bit of effort and a lot of alcohol) imagine that a reconciliation between victim and rapist had taken place, and she had consented to allow the father shared custody, and he had pledged to support the child financially. Stranger things have happened, and people believe much less plausible scenarios on a daily basis. But the victim's attorney's (admittedly biased) understanding of the case points to this being driven by something other than an act of forgiveness, as the victim herself suspects. And perhaps that's because the alternative, simply denying benefits, is unpalatable. Whether that's because it means letting Mr. Mirasolo off the hook for something that non-criminal fathers have to contend with, or it simply leaves a blameless child out in the cold is a matter of speculation, but this case points to a potential gap in Michigan law, one that doesn't allow the state to hold fathers accountable for the welfare of their children without allowing even the most reprehensible of them to involve themselves in their children's lives. And while there are many reasonable rationales for such a law, this is perhaps the problem with attempting to legislate everything. If “trying to see how to get some of the money back,” means trampling on a woman who, by age 24, will have a child who is half her age something really needs to change. And sure, the assistant prosecutor and the judge are not the people who put the rules that they operate under into place. But it is an abdication of perception to ignore an outcome in which no-one comes out looking good, because it's easier to do that than to say: "Hey, does this look broken to you?"

I know a decent number of people who describe themselves as anarchists, and these are the sorts of situations that become ammunition for them, because it's difficult to look at a legal system that produces this sort of outcome and say that it just kind of has to be that way. This sort of thing happens because not looking the other way has costs. Costs that it's perhaps too easy to convince oneself aren't really all that bad (mainly because they always seem to happen to other people). But avoiding looking at, and understanding the costs doesn't make them go away.

Strings

At a press conference from the scene, Virginia governor and Democrat Terry McAuliffe was the first to raise the spectre of gun control. "There are too many guns on the street," he said, before remarking that it wasn't the day for that debate. "If it's not the day for it why are you bringing it up?" replied a reporter.
Virginia shooting raises spectre, but not likelihood, of gun control

This, perhaps, is illustrative of the problem that we have with the "gun control debate" here in the United States. The focus appears to be more on being seen to be on the same side of the issue as particular constituent groups than it is on advancing any particular policies. Perhaps because the general consensus is that the status quo will remain inviolate, at least for the foreseeable future, posturing and virtue-signalling are the only remaining avenues for action. Just as it's conventional wisdom that Republican lawmakers have the National Rifle Association and firearms manufacturers pulling their strings, that same convention holds that Democratic lawmakers are beholden to the more activist wings of their voter base. Why being responsive to voters (regardless of whether one thinks those voters are wrongheaded, un-American or spot on) should be considered as bad as being dictated to by a trade organization is a mystery to me, but I suppose that few have ever decried American politics for an over-reliance on rationality.

In any event, both sides of the debate see the "thought leaders" and legislators on the other side as captured, and doing what cynical others bid them to do.

Puppetry

And the other point I would make - and my oldest son is a police officer, not a detective. The point he makes - and I agree with him - is, this area has pretty strong gun control laws, had no impact whatsoever on this gentleman. The reality is the only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun because in my opinion, gun control laws simply limit citizens, limit law-abiding citizens.
Paul Mitchell - (R - Michigan)
Freshman Lawmakers React To Virginia Shooting

On the one hand, you have to give the Republicans credit for their message discipline. But on the other, sometimes, you'd think that someone would say: "Maybe this isn't a good time for this particular talking point." Most people in the country are familiar enough with the partisan positions on this issue to understand that a shooting, even one of other members of Congress, is unlikely to change their stance on gun control. But this seemed sort of shoehorned into the conversation - no mention of gun control had been made, and so as much as I dislike partisan sniping around the topic, Representative Val Demings' (D - Florida) comment that Mr. Mitchell was parroting an NRA statement rang true. Even though Mr. Mitchell attributed the sentiment to a police officer son, it came across as if Wayne LaPierre had put a hand up his butt to make him talk.

Republicans tend to use the idea of "with a gun" as a stand-in for "ready, willing and able to commit violence." And these really aren't the same concept. And even though they should have an understanding of what the genuine conflation of the two should look like, they speak as though they don't, and the simple presence of more guns in the hands of "good guys" (because, you know, you can tell them on sight) is going to solve a much deeper problem.

Imagined

Anyone paying even a modicum of attention to the American political scene could tell you what the reaction would have been.

"Disgusting but not surprising. This is the left today. They consider this acceptable. Imagine a conservative did this to Obama as POTUS?"

Okay. Sure. I'll imagine it. After all, the script is so well-worn that it doesn't need much actual imagining. "Conservative" reaction would be split (although "fragmented" is likely a better term), with some people denouncing it as somewhere between shameful and criminal, while others cited free speech the lack of a distinct threat. There would likely be as many opinions as there are Conservatives. Meanwhile, "Liberal" America would appear to have fallen into apoplexy, due to a rush of attention-seeking virtue signalling, in the form of breathless punditry about racism and hyper-partisanship. Although there would of course, also be a split there, as Liberals are about as monolithic and group-thinking as Conservatives are. In the end, the reactions of the political class would be mainly determined by the opinions of their constituencies. Congressional districts where the President was unpopular enough that people would vocally stand up to defend someone calling for his beheading would have to be more supportive of the image, and where he was popular, less so. The one constant would likely be political triangulation with an eye towards how much fundraising could be wrung out of it, on both sides.

OMG! Did you see what some random Conservative celebrity thinks about President Obama! Only a check to our fundraising arm will stop the hate from destroying the country!

Some Liberals I saw on TV are again seeking to stifle the free speech of Americans who criticize Obama! Only your donation stands between freedom and perpetual Socialist tyranny!

Because no controversy that can be used as a fundraiser would ever be allowed to go to waste.

There would, of course, be an outpouring of outrage and counter-outrage (with the requisite ironic lamenting of how easily people became outraged), based on the loudest and most unapologetic voices on both sides. Liberal pundits would decry the disrespect of it all, and seek to call out the Right for their perversity, which would set off a scramble by Conservatives for equivalent examples to demonstrate the perversity, and thus hypocrisy of the Left. Which would, in turn, lead to replies of "Well, that was different." The end result being yet another rehash of the Catalogs of Sins that both sides have compiled, going back to the Civil War, if not farther, as each tribe looks to justify a position of writing the other off.

The news cycle, endlessly seeking juicy conflicts to fill air time, would be hurriedly finding anyone even marginally well known to book onto shows to offer uninformed and partisan opinions on why one side or the other is heralding the end of the world. If they uttered a sound bite that set off secondary coffeepot conflagrations, and thus even higher ratings, so much the better. Meanwhile, a few hundred thousand potential news stories that don't involve the political pratfalls of the clueless would be ignored, by the media establishment and the public alike. (And bonus points if some tragedy were to befall a marginalized person, so that their community could loudly bemoan the lack of front-page coverage.) Cue the hand wringing over how the media's obsession with meaningless controversy was yet again destroying democracy.

Any corporations that the perpetrator was associated with would started judging whether or not they needed to cut ties to limit the public relations hits to their branding efforts. At the same time, corporations with no prior associated would started sizing up the situation to determine if it bringing them on-board would help them grab a few points of market share in their targeted demographics.

And, of course, on both sides of the political spectrum, those less invested in the tribalism of it all would simply shrug their shoulders and go on with their lives, either out of active disinterest or out of having bigger fish to fry. In the end, the single biggest difference is that President Obama would have likely taken it in stride.

Did I miss anything?

Personally, these teapot tempests don't really seem to serve any other purpose than to allow people to grandstand about how righteous their tribe is, and how perverse the other tribe is. And that might be compelling to fellow tribes-people, but of little interest to the non-tribal. Kathy Griffin's art piece it no more likely to sway my opinion of the Left of center people I know then Ted Nugent referring to President Obama as a "subhuman mongrel" swayed my opinion of the Right of center people I know.

To take Donald Trump Jr's lament that "the Left today" considers what Griffin did any more or less acceptable than anyone else is to not have any friends or acquaintances on the Left. Which in the end, I suppose, may be the point. That the only interaction that the Republican and Democratic tribes should have with one another is forcing the other to surrender.

I See Your Idiocy and Raise You...

I have to admit that I have both dread and giddy anticipation of someone attempting to go over the top of this lot.

Here I Am...

Clowns to the left of me:

A new matchmaking service is being developed for Americans “to find the ideal Canadian partner to save them from the unfathomable horror of a Trump presidency.” That’s according to the website for a company called Maple Match.
Does the US election make you want to flee to Canada? Try Maple Match.

Jokers to the right:

Steve Inskeep: What war do you mean?
Jimmy Arno: The war that's going to take place when Hillary Clinton's elected - if that happens.
Inskeep: What sort of a war would that be?
Dami Arno: Your patriots...
J. Arno: Your patriots are going to overthrow the government.
Divided States: Georgia Auto Mechanic Ties Racial Tensions To Obama

Flying While Visible

The woman wasn’t really sick at all! Instead this quick-thinking traveler had Seen Something, and so she had Said Something.
Ivy League economist ethnically profiled, interrogated for doing math on American Airlines flight

The whole point behind an ethos of "see something/say something" is that a terrorist could literally be anywhere, and that anything out of the ordinary could be the clue needed to prevent the next attack, which could come at literally any time. And that's how: "This not-quite -White-enough guy is doing something that I don't understand, and he doesn't want to talk to me" comes to equal "suspected of terrorism." I've lived in places where, by that logic, you couldn't cross the street without becoming a suspect.

It's easy to point and laugh at whomever this woman was, but in the end, the story really isn't about her, despite the Washington Post's desire to make a laughingstock of her. It's about the fact that we're running around too busy being afraid of terrorism (and terrorists) to have a workable understanding of what the risks actually are, and therefore what we (as the public) should be doing.

In the end terrorism isn't much of a threat to us, as members of the general public. As much as groups like al Queda and Islamic State are portrayed as willing to stop at nothing to exterminate us all, the fact of the matter is that Mara Salvatrucha likely has been doing a much better job of prematurely ending the lives of Americans than either of those groups have. The destruction of the World Trade Center was splashy and attention grabbing, but it was a singular event, that would be hard to repeat in any event. Gang warfare, on the other hand grimly marches on. It's just that it marches on in neighborhoods that most national politicians will never visit or rely on for votes.

It's more likely that we'd save many more lives if some amount of the money we spend fighting the War on Terror (and the War on Drugs, for that matter) were applied to simply making driving safer. But the fact of the matter is that most of us don't hold the tens of thousands of fatalities that occur on our roads and highways every year as a problem that government should be fixing - even though it likely has at least some ability to do so. But people in government understand that if a bomb goes off in an airplane and terrorists turn out to be the culprit, heads are going to roll, in much the same way that people expect that there's a government policy that will keep their children away from drugs.

And here we are, because of it.

Vortex

There is something in the more liberal, secular population of the United States that seeks out and responds to that thing in the more conservative, religious population of the United States that seeks out and responds to perceived slights against conservative ideals and religiosity. The latest example of this are the 2015 Starbucks Holiday cups, which are basically plain red cups with a Starbucks logo on them. A small handful of apparently hitherto unknown people took to Breitbart and Twitter to express their outrage grandstand in the name of religion. Hoping that the ceasefire in the always-good-for-some-pageviews "War On Christmas" had broken down, media outlets rushed to report the "story" that Christians were, once again, decrying the removal of "Christ" from "Christmas." Or, to be perhaps more accurate, expressing upset that a large corporation wasn't openly supporting and parroting their values and worldview. The teapot having been stirred, the tempest wasn't far behind, with people expressing outrage over the fact that people were expressing outrage over the fact that people were expressing outrage at the plain Starbucks cups.

The United States has, as a nation, spent nearly the entirely of its existence pushing one group of people to the margins of society for the benefit of the mainstream. This is more or less common knowledge - it's difficult to get though most American schools without learning this, despite the fact that teaching it is mildly controversial in some circles. Due in large part to their own aggressive gatekeeping, there is a segment of the American Christian community that believes that the increasing secularization of the country means that they are next in line to be the Oppressed Minority™, and that they are standing against a hypocritical majority that believes in a self-serving view of tolerance and acceptance that conspicuously excludes them. (Bear in mind, however, that they are not the only group that understands themselves to have the crosshairs on their foreheads. The line to be the next, or the one remaining, group in the United States that it's okay to discriminate against is a long one.) Falling back on that age-old canard of "if people are opposed to what you're doing, you must be doing it right," this mostly (but not exclusively) Evangelical group is constantly on the lookout for persecutory behavior trivial slights from only who can be (im)plausibly cast as "anti-Christian."

Again, to be fair, this isn't simply this self-selected group of religious conservatives who see otherwise random events as being directed at themselves - I recently read a piece in which American's suspicions of Big Pharma and the medical establishment were recast as trivializing/ignoring mental illness.

It's just that this particular bit of Christian paranoia has its own name - the badly mislabeled "War on Christmas," and so media outlets are always ready to pick up on it. It's pretty much a guarantee of at least a couple of overblown headlines (and the page-clicks that come with them) every year. And there are people in secular America who are ready to pounce on this annual holiday whine whenever someone decants a glass or two. So here we are, with a storm of silliness at the point where it's generated enough energy that it can, for the time being, anyway, feed on itself.

Part of this, admittedly, is that the bars for "outrage" and "controversy" have been lowered. The War on Christmas has gone from trope to shopworn cliché by this point. While it's possible that it gains traction again this year, I wouldn't bet on it. Yet, let what seems like fewer than a half-dozen people take to the internet with a new round of complaining, and you wind up with "Starbucks' Plain Red Holiday Cups Are Causing Outrage Among Christians" and "Starbucks' plain red holiday cups stir up controversy" for headlines. And the response to those headlines, rather than reading the articles to find out what's really going on, is: "Members of the majority religious group are 'outraged' that they can't force companies to bow to their outdated beliefs?! Must. Denounce. Now." And you quickly end up with what is honestly little more than a hail Mary pass for pageviews turning into an expanding swirl of people pointing fingers at one another.

Best. Study. Ever.

From the moment I saw the title, I knew this one would be good:

The Darwin Awards: sex differences in idiotic behaviour

Although, one has to admit, conventional wisdom is right on the mark here.

Sex differences in risk seeking behaviour, emergency hospital admissions, and mortality are well documented. However, little is known about sex differences in idiotic risk taking behaviour. This paper reviews the data on winners of the Darwin Award over a 20 year period (1995-2014). Winners of the Darwin Award must eliminate themselves from the gene pool in such an idiotic manner that their action ensures one less idiot will survive. This paper reports a marked sex difference in Darwin Award winners: males are significantly more likely to receive the award than females (P less than 0.0001). We discuss some of the reasons for this difference.

You just have to love science sometimes.

Seems Legit...

Sometimes, you just can't make this stuff up.

Here's the gist - a Saudi self-help author says that in order to protect women from the corruption of the world outside the walls of their homes, that men should commit sexual assault on women who work outside of their homes, in order to convince them that the outside world is so unsafe that they should remain indoors. Forever. Because, supposedly, even without this guy telling men that it's okay to molest women when they are out of doors, men simply can't help molesting women when they are out of doors.

This is one of the things that has always struck me as odd about this particular worldview of conservative Islam. In the modern United States, making the claim that the sight of a fully-clothed (or even half-naked, for that matter) woman completely short-circuits you sense of self-control would earn you a label of weak-willed in the extreme or an unscrupulous liar. Even suggesting that women take modest precautions against sexual assault can lead to criticism for absolving men of an absolute responsibility to respect women. For most conservative Moslems, however, "keep your hands to yourself" is viewed as unreasonable to the point of bordering on the impossible.

It's a strange dynamic that reminds me of what I've heard about the United States of the past, up to the 1940s or 50s, when, apparently, being anything less than absolutely modestly dressed was considered nearly an open invitation to a sexual assault. As long as the assailant was of the proper ethnicity and social class. Poor and African-American men faced a sentence of death in the court of public opinion for even being accused of whistling at a woman that a wealthy White man could likely have his way with. And given the fact that reporting being raped is considered a grave dishonor in parts of the Moslem world, I wonder if I'm not looking into a funhouse mirror that's reflecting a warped image of the past back at me. Are the wives of the wealthy and respected off-limits to public humiliation in the name of preserving modesty and religious observance, and are the poor and marginalized expected to exhibit much higher levels of self-control that their social "betters?"

Oddly, perhaps, I think that it would be a hopeful sign if that's the case, because that opens the door to the possibility that Islam, like Christianity, will evolve to a place where majority opinion considers Dawood's suggestion as bizarre and reprehensible as much of the West does. While it's important to keep in mind that there are reactionary Christian elements that would support a similar policy here in the United States, they're considered marginal at best - mainstream thought sees them as hopelessly backwards, even as people complain about Western "Rape Culture." While it will be a shame if Islamic thought, rather than learning from the mistakes of others, has to muddle through such openly self-serving hypocrisy on the path to enlightenment, if this is what it takes, we should hope that they at least get there quickly.

Everybody Run

Well, it's happened again. Someone pulled the Dihydrogen Monoxide hoax and a bunch of people were sucked in. It's just that this time, there were nearly felony charges leveled. Now, I'm not going to get up on my high horse about scientific or mathematical literacy or anything like that. I'm old now, and so I've become okay with the fact that many people are completely unaware of the fact that you can actually refer to water in any number of ways other than just calling it "water." If you'd mentioned "Dihydrogen Monoxide" to me a month before I'd first heard of this rather long-running hoax, I likely would have had no idea what you were talking about, so I sympathize.

The problem here is the propensity to panic in the face of an unfamiliar and (albeit intentionally) scary-sounding name. Especially given that many people have, at their disposal, a quick means of looking things up. And, of course, it was April Fools day. Skepticism of anything that sounded the least bit off should have been at an all-time high - especially when morning show disk-jockeys are concerned.

Children of the Web

I don't have children. Mainly because I have little to no patience with childishness. So I have a certain level of sympathy for people who do have children. Especially Mr. and Mrs. Douglas, who are now likely wishing that they'd brought home a puppy, instead.

When I was a teenager, the idea that we were all effectively brain-damaged hadn't really caught on yet. So there was less overall tolerance for outright stupidity. While this didn't prevent us from pulling some remarkably stupid stunts back when I was in high school, we at least had the good sense to not engage in acts of senseless public idiocy.

But even for those people who did do random moronic things, and wound up being called out for it, they could always rely on the fact that public had a short collective memory. While your friends and rivals from school might never let you live things down, as long as the police weren't involved - and sometimes, even when they were - it would all fade into the background noise that makes up the overwhelming majority of history, and you could go on about your life as normal.

Miss Douglas, on the other hand, is going to learn the hard way that the Internet never forgets. And she's also going to learn how much it's going to take to get the Internet to forgive. While it's unlikely that the Secret Service investigation will wind up with her going to jail (after all, she didn't say that she planned to do the deed...) escaping this is going to be tall order. While I expect that eventually, "kids will be kids" will re-assert itself, and youthful indiscretions will once again sting only temporarily, that time may come too late for one Ohio teenager.

Is It The Shoes?

Finally succumbing after a brave battle with insanity, someone at Addidas came up with what I can only describe as a crime against footwear - the "JS Roundhouse Mids." Because these shoes were supposedly "so hot you lock your kicks to your ankles," they were slated to come with (and I kid you not) "prison orange shackles to wrap around your ankles," connected to the shoes by just as garishly prison orange plastic chains. I can only imagine that the members of the focus group that Addidas convinced to give them the thumbs up on these are now in rehab. And the shoes themselves will likely never hit the stores, given the reaction on Addidas' Facebook page.

But there is also this:

"The attempt to commercialize and make popular more than 200 years of human degradation, where blacks were considered three-fifths human by our Constitution is offensive, appalling and insensitive. Removing the chains from our ankles and placing them on our shoes is no progress.
...
These slave shoes are odious and we as a people should be called to resent and resist them."
Reverend Jesse Jackson

I hadn't realized that the good Reverend had taken up drinking.

But in all seriousness, it is this sort of knee-jerk outrage, designed to root out and react to racism under every rock and plant, that is among the worst enemies of the American Black community. Yes, there are racists in the world, but there are also just plain idiots and assholes. Being unwilling to make that disctiction is not helpful. Back in the late 1980s Reverend Jacskon run for President of the United States of America. It was, of course, an effort doomed from the start, in no small part because of the toxic baggage of racial animosity that the Reverend Jackson brought along during his "run" for the presidency. Reverend Jackson personifies the school of thought that sees anything short of the complete eradication of racism as no progress, and anything that can be considered even tangentially related to the history of Blacks in America to be the direct result of someone's ideas on race. But this outlook has become less and less credible as time goes on. Leaving aside the sheer ridiculousness of equating a dubious design in footwear to the practice of slavery in the United States, this constant hammering on the idea that a vast conspiracy of racists schemes to return the world to a social structure that passed more than a century ago simply drives a wedge between groups to no real advantage. And to the degree that minority groups are often thought of as having "leaders" prominent members of the community who seem to have taken leave of their senses tend to cast a negative light on entire communities. While the Reverend Jackson was certainly a force to reckoned with during the days of the civil rights movement, he now seems like a doddering old man, a respected Wolf-hunter in his day, who has taken to crying "Wolf," simply so that we won't forget what the word sounds like, or that he once challenged the animals on a regular basis. But we don't need the ghosts of the past kept alive simply for their own sake. We need people who will focus on the real problems that still exist, and offer workable solutions.

While racism still exists in the world at large, and the United States, sometimes, stupid is simply stupid. It's worthwhile for us to recognize that, and call out people who don't, rather than perpetuate a conflict that could be put mostly to bed.

The Plan

Westboro Baptist Church is at it. Again.

I'm starting to come to the conclusion that these guys are really Deep-Cover Peaceniks. Their grand plan is to bring Christians, Moslems, Atheists, Jews, Shinto, Satanists, Zoroastrians, Wiccans, and pretty much any one else who can hold a bat together in what will turn out to be the final act of violence on Earth, before everyone realizes that they have a lot in common, go off to have a few dozen beers and sing cheesy drinking songs.

Now, were it up to me, I'd look for a way to bring humanity together that wouldn't result in being brutally beaten to death, but sometimes, taking one for the team means going all the way.

But It Says So Right Here

"Based on something he read online, an Oklahoma state senator has introduced a bill..."

And it just goes downhill from there.

Personally, I suspect that this guy is actually super-deep cover; perhaps a gerbil or a cabbage masquerading as a human. Or maybe this is simply a particularly convoluted scheme by Plankton to get his hands on the Krabby Patty formula. It's hard to believe that one could get into high school, let alone a legislature, without having figured out that you shouldn't take at face value everything you read on the internet, especially those things that push your emotional buttons. To borrow a phrase, if your immediate reaction is "Must. Denounce. Now," that's the time when getting an independent verification of the facts is most important. After all, it's the people who you're convinced would never lead you astray who you're most likely to allow to lead you astray.

Before I Kill You, Mr. Chavez

This is awesome. President Hugo Chavez, while "thinking out loud," speculated that the United States had developed a secret technology that it was using to give Leftist South American leaders cancer. No, really. The BBC (and Chinese state television) says so.

What's great about this is that the United States has, in the mind of Hugo Chavez, completely crossed the line into cartoon villainy. We have super-advanced super-secret technology (check!), are implacably evil (check!) but can't seem to figure out how to do in the opposition (and check!). The only thing that's missing is the call from the Oval Office to gloat over how this evil plan is so utterly foolproof that soon the entire world will bow down before us! Haha! Haha! Bwahahahahahahahahaha! (Ahem... er, sorry.) After all, if we could secretly target world leaders for cancer, one would think that we'd come up with something that metastasized rapidly, and was more or less inoperable by the time you actually realized it was there. Or do the Scott Evil thing and just have someone shoot him. It's not like Chavez doesn't have other enemies or even criminals in Venezuela.

In a way, though, I'm kind of hoping that he's right. Not only would it be awesome to see President Obama kicking back with a monocle in one eye and stroking his white cat, but I've always wanted to sign up to be a henchman.

Open Letter

Look lady, I know that you were very disappointed, and likely insulted, that the 1930’s book on birds that's been in your family since your grandfather's time (or since you jacked it from the library as a kid) didn't fetch a better offer than 25¢ from the buy counter at Half-Price Books. Unless the book was a lot more beaten up than it appeared, the offer of a quarter seemed really low to me, too.

BUT - That wasn't the fault of the guy at the checkout counter and your passive-aggressive messing with him simply made you look like an idiotic twit. He was confused and uncomfortable, the rest of us were bewildered and you seeming happy to have made someone who hadn't done you any harm squirm left a foul taste in everyone's mouths. You could have just expressed your disappointment, politely and plainly. Or you could have been really smart and taken the book to a professional who specializes in rare books and gotten it appraised instead of bringing it to a used-book chain.

The real world isn't like an episode of "Raid the Attic To Sell Off Your Grandparents' Stuff and Get Rich Quick." On TV, they select the people who they show, and weed out the people who aren't sitting on something that turns out to be worth a small fortune and/or who just wouldn't make good television. (Don't wait by the phone. The call's not coming.) If you actually knew enough to be able to accurately appraise the value of your book, you also would have known that the people most likely to buy it wouldn't randomly wander into a used bookstore in a half-empty strip mall looking for one. Nor are they likely to pay top dollar for a book that some random choad offers up on E-Bay. And even if they would, E-Bay would want a cut to be the middleman, so you wouldn't see all of the money in any event.

I know that it's ego-boosting to be mean to people in service professions. It gives you a feeling of being superior to your fellow human beings that you use to salve the bruises that you sustained when people who think that they're such hot stuff put you down. And I know that you don't care that the people in line behind you thought that you were little more than a mean-spirited wench with remarkably poor social skills. When confronted with not getting something you thought you were entitled to, you set out to hate on a fellow American who was doing nothing other than what he was being paid to do and wasn't a party to your hurt and embarrassment. I've long been of the opinion that we don't need terrorists - they're amateurs compared to the spite that we have for each other. And who do we have here? Why, it's Exhibit A.

Okay, I've railed on long enough, and in doing so proved that it actually is possible to waste part of the Internet. So I'm going to wrap up with the first thought that crossed my mind once I actually figured out just what the Hell your issue was.

Grow up. We have enough problems as it is.

Conspiracy Theory

I think that I've decided that Herman Cain is actually a deep-cover tolerance operative, whose goal is to demonstrate that Americans won't let you anywhere near the White House if you're running for Religious Bigot-in-Chief.

That's my story, and I'm sticking to it.

Free Country

Over on the Marketplace web site, they have a video made from a woman's angry voicemail to a theater. She was upset after being thrown out for texting during the movie, in violation of the theater's posted rules. The theater then used her voicemail in the audio track for their new no texting warning.

One of the mantras the woman fell back on was "it's a free country." Didn't they retire that when we went to Junior High School? It was annoying enough to hear "it's a free country" when we were eight. Uttering it as an adult whenever confronted with a restriction that one doesn't like should be punishable for a public flogging. (I'll volunteer, to save taxpayer dollars. No need to hire a flogger. On second thought, who am I to deny someone gainful employment during bad economic times?)