Nobody's Business

Freeze Frame

Not far from Milwaukee, a TV van loaded with pricey broadcast equipment sustained a quarter million dollars' worth of damage the other day.

The WDJT-TV (Channel 58) van that was swamped in a channel of Big Muskego Lake after crashing through thin ice was pulled out this afternoon, police said. Cables from the truck pulled the live transmitting van to shore after crews cleared ice, creating a path for the successful and smooth dredging, according to Police Sgt. Craig Moser.

The punchline:

The station had been preparing a segment on snowmobiles and ice safety when the accident occurred.

The Fat Police Takes Away British Kids

Two months ago, I wrote about Britons being hauled into court on animal-abuse charges — for having pets that the authorities deemed too fat. I concluded, "The first child-abuse lawsuit against parents for having a fat child is surely just around the corner."

You know where this is going, don't you? Actually, I was naively behind the curve; such cases are not unheard of in the U.K., and they're getting more numerous.

Reports the London Times:

Dr Russell Viner, a consultant paediatrician at Great Ormond Street and University College London hospitals, said: "In my practice, I can think of about 10 or 15 cases in which child protection action has been taken because of obesity. We now constantly get letters from social workers about child protection due to childhood obesity." ... Dr Alyson Hall, consultant child psychiatrist at the Emmanuel Miller Centre for Families and Children in east London, said that in some cases children were put into foster care to ensure their safety. ...

Tam Fry, chairman of the Child Growth Foundation, a charity that fights childhood obesity, agreed. "[Having obese kids] should be a punishable offence," he said. "Very obese children are taking up NHS resources that should be used for legitimate purposes. Parents have got to be held accountable for overfeeding their children or letting their children become fat without taking action."

And adults who overeat? They can be taken away, too, without their consent, without notice, without recourse. It's for their own good, you see. Under Britain's Mental Health Act, obese Brits may be carted off to an asylum and locked up until they mend their wicked ways. Just ask Chris Leppard.

Students Get Drunk on Their Own Goodness

Ah, the fresh thinking of America's youth — the can-do spirit of their unabashed idealism, their bright-eyed determination to make the world a better place. It's enough to make your eyes water — and your stomach sink.

A group of Eastern Iowa students want legislators to crack down on underage drinking. They feel beer keg registration could help keep alcohol away from teens. "I just think it's important for us to really stand up and say, 'Hey, there are those of us that aren't drinking. We don't want this to be happening. We want people to be held accountable," Monticello High School senior Angel Farris said.

The proposed bill would force businesses to place a tracking number on every keg they sell. Adults would sign a form linking them to that tracking number. Then, if police bust a party with underage drinking, they'll know who bought the keg.

Oooh, swell idea, guys. But why stop there? Alcohol isn't predominantly poured from kegs, you know. How about a state registry for cans of beer? For quarts of gin? For bottles of wine? For home beer-brewing kits?

Shouldn't we also start a registry for suspicious purchases of certain agricultural products? After all, anyone who buys five pounds of grapes or a ten-pound sack of grain could well intend to make his own wine, or a big batch of bathtub hooch.

And what of customers who buy more than one bottle of cough syrup at a time? Or who visit the crafts store and purchase a plus-size jar of glue for their big 'scrapbooking project'?

Are we just going to let all those people make chumps out of us? Are we going to allow them to corrupt a whole generation of teenagers? Or are we going to hold those potential evildoers, you know, accountable?

Count Me Out

In an excerpt from a recent book by Henryk M. Broder, Hurray, We're Capitulating!, the German author asks some excellent questions of those in the West who insist that Islam deserves our blind respect, our unconditional support, and our eager partnership. One such enthusiastic respect-giver is Horst-Eberhard Richter.

"The West should desist from engaging in all provocations that produce feelings of debasement and humiliation," says psychoanalyst Horst-Eberhard Richter. "We should show greater respect for the cultural identity of Muslim countries. ... For Muslims, it is important to be recognized and respected as equals." In Richter's view, what the Muslims need is "a partnership of equals."

Does achieving such equality mean that we should set up separate sections for women on buses, as is the custom in Saudi Arabia? Should the marrying age for girls be reduced to 12, as is the case in Iran? And should death by stoning be our punishment for adultery, as Shariah law demands? What else could the West do to show its respect for the cultural identity of Islamic countries? Would it be sufficient to allow Horst-Eberhard Richter to decide whether, for example, a wet T-shirt contest in a German city rises to a level of criminal provocation that could cause the Muslim faithful in Hyderabad to feel debased and humiliated?

The discussion over which provocations we should put an end to so that they do not feel upset inexorably leads to the realm of the absurd. Should devout Jews be entitled to demand that non-Jews give up pork? And should they have the power to impose sanctions if their demands are not met? Can a Hindu in India run amok because the Dutch do not view cows as sacred beings?

Funny thing is, Hindus don't. Jews don't. And Broder might have added that, of course, Christians don't start violent worldwide hissy fits either when someone kicks a Bible or makes a Jesus joke.

We all know whose religious fervor is quick to turn to outrage, mayhem and bloodshed. We all know who angrily insists upon perpetual religious and cultural accommodations from non-believers. We all know who demands to be treated with more understanding and deference than any other religious group under the sun, or else. We all know which deists are waging a global censorship campaign against films they find unsavory, books they consider blasphemous, cartoons they deem insulting, and plays and music they abhor — with their weapons of choice, intimidation and actual murder, cloaked in the double mantel of righteous retribution and quasi-virtuous victimhood.

We all know this. And still, for every Broder, there are ten Richters, insisting that all will be right with the world if we just treat religious extortionists as equals, and that we'll do just fine if only we bend and bow to people for whom any criticism of their faith is a personal insult that must be outlawed and avenged.

Count me out.

More Peacenik Surveillance

Remember the octogenarian letter-writer whose remark about Saddam Hussein's execution — "I still believe they hanged the wrong man" — earned him a visit from the Secret Service?

He's just one of thousands of ordinary Bush critics who've come under the government's scrutiny lately. The Department of Defense is keeping tabs on as many of them as it wants, newly released documents reveal.

The internal Defense Department documents show it is monitoring the activities of a wide swath of peace groups, including Veterans for Peace, Iraq Veterans Against the War, Military Families Speak Out, Code Pink, the American Friends Service Committee, the War Resisters League, and the umbrella group United for Peace and Justice.

Oh sure, now that the ACLU's lawyers have pried the files in question from the DoD's grip and everything's out in the open, it was all just a little mistake, says the Pentagon. Shouldn't have happened. Move along, nothing to see here.

Consider the response from one of the officials involved, who seems badly in need of a spine transplant.

In response to the documents' release, Pentagon officials said the material on antiwar groups should not have been collected. "I don't want it, we shouldn't have had it, not interested in it," Daniel Baur, the acting director of the Defense Department's counterintelligence field activity unit, told the New York Times. "I don't want to deal with it."

And that's sort of the problem, isn't it? "I don't want to deal with it" is hardly the language citizens expect from a dutiful civil servant. It is the brusque vernacular of a boss talking to a subordinate. It is emphatically not an apology, not an acceptance of responsibility, not a show of accountability, and not an acknowledgment that in a war on terror, it's almost criminally asinine to treat Veterans for Peace as the equivalent of an al Qaeda cell.

Once again, the people charged with defending and upholding the highest law of the land appear the least likely to have actually studied and absorbed it.

Why is that?

Scotland Spies With Its Little Eyes...

... something that's ... well, something that provokes a good belly laugh.

What do authorities do if irked motorists repeatedly vandalize speed and red-light cameras? Train automatic cameras on the automatic cameras, of course.

Ah yes, this is after all the same country that fines people whose car has been broken into. This addition to the law-enforcement repertoire officially vaunts Scotland to the status of irony-free zone.

Burden of Proof

In Victoria, Australia, the state's Legal Aid's Child Support Service wanted to get in touch with a deadbeat dad named Tyler Holden. So the agency's lawyer sent nastygrams to all the T. Holdens he could locate — five, as it turned out — with demands that they either confess to fathering the child in question or pay $550 for a paternity DNA test.

It gets better: One of the T. Holdens was three years old back when the baby was born.

Watch those toddlers — they're capable of anything.

Bush's Shut-Up Brigade

The U.S. Secret Service, brave and effective as ever, pounced on an 81-year-old Pennsylvanian late last week for having had the temerity to write to a local newspaper; in his published letter, Dan Tilli had referred to the execution of Saddam Hussein and concluded that "I still believe they hanged the wrong man."

Two dark-suited agents arrived at his door, asked to be let in, and interrogated the octogenarian would-be assassin for almost an hour. Apparently they deemed Tilli's bit of hyperbole a credible threat to the president. In fairness, when he told them he'd never been to Washington D.C. ("I don't even know how to get there, Atlantic City is the only place I go"), it began to dawn on the agents that maybe Tilli wasn't the second coming of John Wilkes Booth after all.

Still, they searched his closets for weapons and snapped pictures of him for their files. Then they retreated, secure in the knowledge that they'd done their bit to weed out dangerous terrorists (who, as we all know, have a habit of announcing their intentions in letters to the editor).

When prodded by reporters, an agency spokesman stated that "the Secret Service has a great respect for an individual's freedom of speech." This is no doubt so, seeing as the Secret Service enthusiastically sets up free speech zones wherever POTUS travels (albeit it far from the president's route and often conveniently located next to a dumpster and/or behind chain-link fences).

Anyway, the big picture is that the Secret Service is completely committed to citizens' freedom of expression, and that's fantastic to know. Consider what just happened to Dan Tilli: you wouldn't want that kind of incident to have a chilling effect or anything, would you?

Extra: Shopkeeper Thwarts Young Criminal!

Two years ago, in an effort to keep out young louts and loiterers, British shops started a strict no-hoodies policy. I first wrote about it here (with lots of picture goodness).

The other day, it was for Jay Cowper to find out just how strict that policy is. Apparently seen as a potential troublemaker, young Mr. Cowper was told by a shopkeeper to either remove his hood or vacate the premises. He politely bid his adieus. Actually, more likely, he managed to utter a 'bye-bye' with a wave of his tiny hand, before waddling off with Grandpa.

Jay, you see, is two years old.

Murder in Turkey, or the Tears of a Hypocrite

They killed Hrant Dink. Apparently because the editor and commentator steadfastly claimed that almost a century ago, Turkish forces carried out a genocide against the Armenian population, an assassin shot him in the head in Istanbul yesterday, in broad daylight.

Dink's murder was probably intended to serve two purposes: to eliminate a gadfly, and to send a message to others that if they speak out, they're next. Regrettably, such intimidation often works like a charm.

Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan says he won't let that happen, stating that the brutal execution was an "open and heinous provocation" that ought to be repulsive to all Turks.

He's right.

So now Mr. Erdogan should put his lira where his mouth is. It might behoove him, for starters, to wipe the incendiary law off the books that has made Dink and others, such as Nobel Prize winner Orhan Pamuk and noted novelist Elif Shafak, the frequent target of zealous prosecutors and hatemongering ultra-nationalists alike.

What are these writers guilty of? The country's legal authorities charge that they've "insulted Turkishness."

Yep, as ridiculous as it sounds, that's a grave legal offense in Turkey, punishable by up to three years in prison.

Interestingly, by most accounts, Mr. Erdogan isn't the least bit concerned about that vile, cretinous law. In fact, the prime minister is perfectly happy to sic his prosecutors on his domestic and foreign critics, including the cartoonist Musa Kart and the artist Michael Dickinson. Oh, he also wants insulting Islam to be a crime.

So which future Turkey does Mr. Erdogan favor? A modern republic where writers and artists enjoy a modicum of protection from the powers that be? Or a quasi-theocracy that, by insisting that criticism of the state or the Muslim faith cannot be tolerated, tacitly encourages violent extremists to kill dissidents?

Mr. Erdogan wants his cake and eat it too. The West should do what it reasonably can to deny him his hypocritical feast.