Detroit: "Andrew Anthos, 72, was violently attacked while riding a city bus in Detroit on February 13 and is now paralyzed from the neck down, reports WDIV in Detroit. His family says the attack was a hate crime and that he was beaten after another male passenger asked him if he was gay. Anthos was riding the bus back to his home at Detroit's Windsor Tower apartments. According to his niece Athena Fedenis, the male passenger followed Anthos off the bus and beat him with a pipe in front of his apartment."
Boulder: "Police are investigating an assault that happened early Wednesday morning as a possible hate crime. … Police say they received a call from a 21-year-old woman who said she had been assaulted. … She told investigators two men she met on Pearl Street Mall made sexual comments to her... She says she rejected their comments, indicating to them she is gay. "It was at that point, when she told them that she was gay and not interested in their advances, that the assault occurred," said [Boulder Police Commander Greg Testa]. That is when the woman says one of the men punched her and kicked her after she fell. … The victim was transported to Boulder Community Hospital with severe injuries to her face. … The victim is a student at Naropa University, a fine arts school that advocates peace and kindness." (Via.)
This shit doesn't happen in a void. Like the sexualization and objectification of women in the media being psychologically damaging to girls, the constant drumbeat of negative stereotypes and exploitative hatred issued by the GOP and social/religious conservative leaders is dangerous for members of the LGBT community. And the hatemongers' faux-naïveté at the reality that you can't continually put a target on someone's back but expect no one to shoot at it is growing really goddamned old. The hate-the-gays schtick isn't just infuriating and spiteful and wrong; it's irresponsible. There's a paralyzed 72-year-old man and a severely injured 21-year-old woman this week because someone, somewhere, communicated to their attackers the message that gays are not equal, transmitted fear and hatred and claimed they were moral and good.
A Tale of Two Stories
The Broken Record of Wingnuttia
In his post noting that Instapundit hasn't uttered a peep regarding the horrific conditions at Walter Reed, Blue Texan points to this wonderful quote by Michelle Malkin, once she bothered discussing the story (I won't link to her; Blue Texan has one):
I do hope all the left-wingers who are now newly enraged by problems at the VA sustain their interest beyond the time frame in which these stories maximize embarrassment of their political opponents. Supporting the troops takes much more than exploiting their neglect.Yes, that's right. In reporting on Walter Reed, The Washington Post and "all the left-wingers" are "exploiting" the troops. It's all to humiliate Bush; it has nothing to do with concern for the troops.
You've really got to love Malkin.
No, wait, you don't.
News to be Used
Report says nuclear work ongoing in Iran: "Iran has expanded its uranium enrichment program instead of complying with a U.N. Security Council ultimatum to freeze it, the U.N. nuclear watchdog agency said Thursday in a finding that clears the way for harsher sanctions against Tehran. … The conclusion—while widely expected—was important because it could serve as the trigger for the council to start deliberating on new sanctions meant to punish Tehran for its intransigence over its nuclear program." All well and good. "Before the report was issued, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said the U.S. and its allies would use the Security Council and other 'available channels' to bring Tehran back to negotiations over its nuclear program." Ugh. Stomach churning.
But not to worry: "British Prime Minister Tony Blair said 'the only sensible way' to solve the crisis was to pursue political solutions, but that he could not 'absolutely predict every set of circumstances.' Still, 'I know of nobody in Washington that is planning military action on Iran,' Blair told BBC radio." He also added: "There is, as far as I know, no planning going on to make an attack on Iran and people are pursuing a diplomatic and political solution."
Sorry, isn't that basically the same lie used before the Iraq War, which was later exposed and undermined by the Downing Street Memos? Ugh squared.
Meanwhile, U.S. troops find chemicals in Iraq raid. They're just "propane tanks and ordinary chemicals," but cue the screeching nonetheless about WMDs having been found. Which is, in one sense, true, because of the way the chemicals are being used: "[A tip] led U.S. troops to a five separate buildings near Fallujah, where they found the munitions containing chemicals, three vehicle bombs being assembled, including a truck bomb, about 65 propane tanks and 'all kinds of ordinary chemicals,' [Maj. Gen. William Caldwell] said. He added that he believed the insurgents were going to try to mix the chemicals with explosives. The pickup truck carrying chlorine gas cylinders was blown up Wednesday, killing at least five people and sending more than 55 to hospitals gasping for breath and rubbing stinging eyes."
But, in another sense, it's not true, because those propane tanks and ordinary chemicals wouldn't have been used for this purpose if we hadn't invaded, and they most certainly aren't, by any stretch of the imagination, the sort of WMDs that could have endangered America and warranted a preemptive war.
Just fuck.
Happy Birthday…
…to Shark-fu, who's using her birthday for a good cause. Stop by, say hi, and help if you can.
Meow
Shaker Kevin pointed out in comments that "when the cat turns around to hug the spanker" in the video Spudsy posted below, it's eerily reminiscent of another image of a hapless, masochistic creature embracing its abusive master…
The main difference between these two cats
is that I'd vote for the one on the left.
There's GOLD in Them Thar Wingnuts!
Comedy gold, that is!
Because of Wikipedia's wicked (ha!) liberal, liberal, liberal bias, you know have an alternative... Conservapedia! "A conservative encyclopedia you can trust."
Trust to give you a headache, that is! Ba-Zing! Thank you! I'll be here all week!
Chet points out many examples of how silly this is, but the site is worth a little exploration, just for the yucks. Just to show you where their priorities lie, a quick look at their recent changes page shows quite a bit of activity on their Charles Darwin page.
All three paragraphs of it.
I enjoyed this completely baffling entry for Francis Bacon:
A scientist during the Age of Exploration who lived from 1561 to 1626 and promoted research based on experimentation. Bacon was, notoriously, a confirmed bachelor throughout his life. He was however, one of the strange bachelors. One who got married.
I also liked the entry on homosexuality:
Homosexuality is sexual attraction to a person of the same gender.
Biblical views on homosexuality:You shall not lie with a male as with a woman; such thing is an abomination. Leviticus 18:22
Wow... comprehensive.
Ha!
Giuliani To Run For President Of 9/11
NEW YORK—At a well-attended rally in front of his new Ground Zero headquarters Monday, former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani officially announced his plan to run for president of 9/11.Jebus bless The Onion.
"My fellow citizens of 9/11, today I will make you a promise," said Giuliani during his 18-minute announcement speech in front of a charred and torn American flag. "As president of 9/11, I will usher in a bold new 9/11 for all."
If elected, Giuliani would inherit the duties of current 9/11 President George W. Bush, including making grim facial expressions, seeing the world's conflicts in terms of good and evil, and carrying a bullhorn at all state functions.
"Let us all remember how we felt on that day, with the world watching our every move, waiting on our every word," said Giuliani, flanked by several firefighters, ex-New York Police Commissioner Bernard Kerik, and Judith Nathan, his third wife. "With a campaign built on traditional 9/11 values, and with the help of every citizen who believes in the 9/11 dream, I want to make 9/11 great again."
(Energy Dome tip to Steve.)
Huzzah
Retrofuck jackholes lose in South Dakota, even after they begrudgingly added exceptions for cases of rape and incest. Now SD can go back to being so willy-nilly abortion-crazy that its one clinic can keep flying in doctors from out of state.
And let us never forget that McCain was all for this shit.
Thursday Perverted Cat Blogging
(My cats used love being spanked. Your "wtf?" of the day. Energy Dome tip to Grendel for pointing out the video.)
Quote of the Day
...But he has been serious about is joining "my boys" in Iraq. After graduating from Royal Military Academy at Sandhurst, he insisted on getting the opportunity to serve his country.
"There's no way I'm going to put myself through Sandhurst and then sit on my arse back home while my boys are out fighting for their country," he said in an interview to mark his 21st birthday. "That may sound very patriotic, but it's true."
Prince Harry, on going to serve in Iraq.
Related post here.
(Yes, he's still going, even with the British troop cuts.)
Intolerant of Tolerance
Utah Legislators: We'll get you queers—and your little allies, too!
I honestly cannot even put into words how deeply offensive it is to every last angle of my sensibilities that there are people who want to ban any expression of unity among LGBT and straight students.
I hope those kneejerk nutwit bigotrons know all they're doing is creating the next generation of people like me. And you know what that means.
More feminazi cooters to spread the
radical gay agenda all across the land!
Rockin' Out Loud: Matt Taibbi
Thwack!
"Now, after she shaved her head in a bizarre episode that culminates a months-long saga of controversial behavior, it's the question being asked by her fans, her foes and the general public: What was she thinking?"—"Bald and Broken: Inside Britney's Shaved Head," Sheila Marikar, ABC.com, Feb. 19Pow!
What was she thinking? How about nothing? How about who gives a shit? How's that for an answer, Sheila Marikar of ABC news, you pinhead?
On the same day that Britney was shaving her head, a guy I know who works in the office of Senator Bernie Sanders sent me an email. He was trying very hard to get news organizations interested in some research his office had done about George Bush's proposed 2008 budget… It would be hard to imagine a document that more clearly articulates the priorities of our current political elite.Bam!
Not only does it make many of Bush's tax cuts permanent, but it envisions a complete repeal of the Estate Tax, which mainly affects only those who are in the top two-tenths of the top one percent of the richest people in this country.Boom!
…Sanders's office came up with some interesting numbers here. If the Estate Tax were to be repealed completely, the estimated savings to just one family—the Walton family, the heirs to the Wal-Mart fortune—would be about $32.7 billion dollars over the next ten years.
The proposed reductions to Medicaid over the same time frame? $28 billion.
Or how about this: if the Estate Tax goes, the heirs to the Mars candy corporation—some of the world's evilest scumbags, incidentally, routinely ripped by human rights organizations for trafficking in child labor to work cocoa farms in places like Cote D'Ivoire—if the estate tax goes, those assholes will receive about $11.7 billion in tax breaks. That's more than three times the amount Bush wants to cut from the VA budget ($3.4 billion) over the same time period.
That's not only bad government, it's bad capitalism. It makes legalized bribery and political connections more important factors than performance and competition in the corporate marketplace. Beyond that, it's just plain fucking offensive to ordinary people. It's one thing to complain about paying taxes when those taxes are buying a bag of groceries once a month for some struggling single mom in eastern Kentucky. But when your taxes are buying a yacht for some asshole who hires African eight year-olds to pick cocoa beans for two cents an hour ... I sure don't remember reading an excuse for that anywhere in the Federalist Papers.Wow. Read the whole thing.
Colossus
Following the frilled shark and the goblin shark, another deep-sea creature has been caught, this time a colossal squid off the coast of New Zealand.
A fishing crew has caught a colossal squid that could weigh a half-ton and prove to be the biggest specimen ever landed, a fisheries official said Thursday.It's not totally unusual—unlike the frilled and goblin sharks—for the colossal squid to come so close to the surface, but one was only filmed for the first time last September, and the one just caught could exceed the next largest specimen ever found by as much as 330 pounds.
The squid, weighing an estimated 990 lbs and about 39 feet long, took two hours to land in Antarctic waters, New Zealand Fisheries Minister Jim Anderton said.
The fishermen were catching Patagonian toothfish, sold under the name Chilean sea bass, south of New Zealand "and the squid was eating a hooked toothfish when it was hauled from the deep," Anderton said.
… Colossal squid, known by the scientific name Mesonychoteuthis hamiltoni, are estimated to grow up to 46 feet long and have long been one of the most mysterious creatures of the deep ocean.
…Colossal squid can descend to 6,500 feet and are extremely active, aggressive hunters, he said.
The frozen squid will be transported to New Zealand's national museum, Te Papa, in the capital, Wellington, to be preserved for scientific study.
You know, if I'm honest, I don't really care all that much about space travel. On the other hand, every time I see something from the bottom of the sea, I go completely geek-happy for hours reading everything I can about it. I'd chuck the space program for a comprehensive deep sea program in a heartbeat.
WTF?
Nigerian Presidential Advisor Professor Friday Okonofua: Same-sex relationships make you "retarded". I'm having a hard time trying to make a joke ridiculing this patent lunacy that doesn't inadvertently denigrate mentally challenged people in the process, so I'm not going to make one at all. Just wev.
Meanwhile, in my own backyard, the principal of a Fort Wayne-area high school flipped his shit over a student paper editorial because it exposed the students to "inappropriate material." You can read the full text of the editorial here, including its ragingly controversial content like "I can only imagine how hard it would be to come out as homosexual in today's society. I think it is so wrong to look down on those people, or to make fun of them, just because they have a different sexuality than you. There is nothing wrong with them or their brain; they're just different than you." and "According to pflagupstatesc.org, every day 13 Americans from the ages of 15-24 commit suicide, and homosexual youths make up 30% of the completed suicides. I don't understand why we would put so much pressure on those people, that they would feel that they have to end their lives because of their sexuality. Would it be so hard to just accept them as human beings who have feelings just like everyone else? Being homosexual doesn't make a person inhuman, it makes them just a little bit different than the rest of the world." Indiana: Hotbed of high school student radicalism.
"But we were wrong."
Top Gear is a long-running British television show in which its presenters talk about cars and do silly challenges, like racing in unusual vehicles or competing to buy the best car for the least money, etc. Recently, they did a few shows in America. In one episode, two of them each had a used car and they were going to try to see who could sell theirs for more. The segment was to be filmed in New Orleans—but when they got there and saw how devastated the area was, the plan quickly changed.
"A year had passed since Katrina had blown through, and we sort of
assumed that after 12 months the wealthiest nation on earth would
have fixed it. But we were wrong."
The hat tip goes to Mike the Mad Biologist, whose first commenter says, "Isn't it great that a car show from a foreign country can provide a harder-hitting commentary on this than any of the news shows in this one." Wretched.
Question of the Day
Who, in your naturally humble opinion, is the greatest singer who's ever lived?
This isn't, by the way, necessarily a question about objective ability, although it may be for some people, depending on why one appreciates singers. What I'm really asking is who's your very favorite, the one without whose music your life would simply not be the same?
In case there's actually someone left who doesn't know what my answer to this question is, it's revealed below the fold.
"She might just be the bravest Iraqi woman ever."—continued
By way of follow-up to the story of an Iraqi woman who was allegedly gang-raped, about which I wrote yesterday, River has the details of Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki's reaction. Basically: "Al Maliki is claiming the rape allegations are all lies. Apparently, his people simply asked the officers if they raped Sabrine Al Janabi and they said no. I'm so glad that's been cleared up. … Maliki did not only turn the woman into a liar, he is rewarding the officers she accused. … It was less than 14 hours between Sabrine's claims and Maliki's rewarding the people she accused. In 14 hours, Maliki not only established their innocence, but turned them into his own personal heroes."
As River points out, it's madness to think that any Iraqi woman would "publicly, falsely claim she was raped" under the current circumstances. Meanwhile, reports yesterday said that an initial hospital report on what was presumably a rape kit done at a US military hospital in the Green Zone "confirmed what she had said." But today, "Al-Maliki's office released what it said was a medical report indicating no signs of rape. The grainy document was marked as page two of three and did not have the name of the patients or any of her personal details." Al-Maliki also fired Ahmed Abdul-Ghafour al-Samaraie, "a top Sunni official who had called for an international investigation into the rape allegations," though Al-Samaraie disputes "al-Maliki's right to fire him, arguing that only Iraq's Presidential Council—which comprises President Jalal Talabani and his two deputies—has that authority."
So, it's basically a giant mess which has now disintegrated into more Sunni v. Shiite bickering and recriminations, and lost in the middle is a woman who has not recanted her accusation and has a medical report saying she was raped, but has nonetheless been deemed a liar and a fraud by her government, without so much as the most cursory investigation.
Feel the freedom spread.
Eliminationism: It Isn't Just for Races Anymore
(If you haven't read David Neiwert's excellent ten part series on eliminationism, I highly recommend checking it out.)
Here's the thing.
This:
MILWAUKEE, Wisconsin (CNN) -- All Nathan Moore says he wanted to do was smoke pot and get drunk with his friends....is not a "game." It's not "joking around." I find it hard to believe that this could possibly be a "primal urge."
Killing Rex Baum was never part of the plan that day in 2004.
"It all started off as a game," Moore said.
The 15-year-old and his friends were taunting the homeless man -- throwing sticks and leaves -- after having a couple of beers with him.
No big deal, Moore says, but he's sorry for what came next.
It was a mistake, he said, a sudden primal surge that made him and his friends Luis Oyola, 16, and 17-year-old Andrew Ihrcke begin punching and kicking Baum.
"Luis says 'I'm gonna go hit him,' We're all laughing, thought he was joking around,'" but he wasn't, Moore concedes. "We just all started hitting him."
They hurled anything they could find -- rocks, bricks, even Baum's barbecue grill -- and pounded the 49-year-old with a pipe and with the baseball bat he kept at his campsite for protection.
Ihrcke smeared his own feces on Baum's face before cutting him with a knife "to see if he was alive," Moore said.
After destroying Baum's camp, the boys left the homeless man -- head wedged in his own grill -- under a piece of plastic where they hoped the "animals would eat" him.
Then, Moore says, they took off to grab a bite at McDonald's.
"Sport killing" is a nice little buzzword, but let's call this what it is. Murder.
This is what happens when people are dehumanized. This is the result of eliminationist rhetoric becoming part of pop culture, a "joke" to be laughed off. This is what happens when it's considered perfectly acceptable to think of a group of human beings as sub-human, as we've noted before. Notice the similarity between the "joke" in the Rachel Moran story, and what happened here. This definitely smacks of luring someone into a beating; they asked him to buy them beer, they invited him to join them, and then they beat him to death. One would think that the other two teens would object when their friend first hit Baum with a bat, especially if they thought he was "just joking." But why not join in, if it's just a fucking bum?
One of them smeared Baum's face with his own shit after killing him. This isn't a "game." This isn't "mob mentality."
They bragged about it around town. Police picked them up and they described what happened.So the obvious response is to brag about your "victory." Need I mention that bragging is a good sign that you knew exactly what you were doing? I'm also irked by the obvious dog whistle attempt at a plea of innocence: it was the video games. I'm sorry, but this doesn't appear to me to be "the video game made me do it," it sounds a little more like "I am incapable of seeing 'lessers' as human; their life means no more to me than a mess of pixels and polygons."
Ihrcke told police that killing "the bum" reminded him of playing a violent video game, a police report shows.
All three teens pleaded no contest to first degree reckless homicide charges and went to prison.
Moore recently turned 18 at Columbia Correctional Institution in Portage, Wisconsin, where he is serving a 15 year sentence.
"When [the beating] stops, you say, 'What did we just do?'" he told CNN. "There's no rational explanation."
If you watch the video of one of the convicted killers, he appears rather resigned to his fate. There's talk of "the alcohol," and "the pot" as possible "reasons" for what they did, but they're rather half-hearted attempts at excuses. But what I don't see is remorse. He says he's sorry, and yes, I believe he is sorry, in a way. The cynical part of me thinks he's more sorry for his current imprisoned situation than he is sorry for what he has done. I don't know the guy; I can't say what he's feeling. But he doesn't appear to feel anything other than "sorry."
He says he's "sorry for what happened" as if he's talking about a dog he accidentally ran over with his car.
Ignoring and dehumanizing the homeless is what leads to hunting them for sport.
Not to mention linking to a voyeuristic video of two teens beating a homeless man with bats within your story. Way to go, CNN.
