• British police force distributes an informational postcard, then issues a public apology for not having consulted its own "diversity adviser" first. The problem? The card features a picture of a puppy, and dogs are unclean under Islam.
(What freaks me out is that British cops apparently still use rotary-dial phones. I guess most of the police budget goes to this hi-tech horseshite.)
• 'Magic mushrooms' help soothe fears and anxieties, and promote feelings of awe, spirituality, and wellbeing for more than a year after you partake, says a new study by a Johns Hopkins professor and colleagues, published in The Journal of Psychopharmacology.
Ah, but why would you allow the use of shrooms if you can just arrest people and lock them up instead?
• Christopher Hitchens gets waterboarded. "I don't want to tell you how little time I lasted."
• Indiana legislators want to force everyone who sells "explicit material" to register with the state and pay a $250 fee. No reason — just because they can. Because they think it's fun to clasp thumbscrews on people who are 'immoral' enough to sell Playboy, or butt plugs, or romance novels with descriptions of heaving bosoms and thrusting manhoods. That's the bad news. The good news: U.S. District Judge Sarah Evans Barker swiftly nixed the initiative:
The imposition of such an exorbitant fee is itself a punitive measure collected as a condition to the pursuit of activities whose enjoyment is guaranteed by the First Amendment.
Good on her. Good on all of us.
• I think the most recent story to bring tears to my eyes was last month's profile of hostage Ingrid Betancourt in the Wall Street Journal. Betancourt is the French-Colombian intellectual and politician who was abducted by the Marxism-inspired thugs of FARC in 2002. At the time, her two children, Lorenzo and Melanie, were 13 and 16 years old. As she endured brutal treatment at the hands of her captors, who ferried Betancourt, a hepatitis sufferer, from one jungle hideout to the next, she conjured images of Lorenzo and Melanie in her mind, trying to hold on.
On their birthdays, she makes them a makeshift cake from the day's ration of rice and beans, and sings "Happy Birthday" to them. "For years I couldn't think about them because of the terrible pain that their absence produced in me," she wrote in her letter last year. "Today I can hear them and feel more joy than pain. I look for them in my memories and I nourish myself in the images I guard in my memory of each of their different ages."
Today, after six years, four months, and nine days, Ingrid Betancourt is a free woman again, and about to be reunited with her family.
Godspeed, Ma'am.
By my count, Hitchens lasted 17 seconds. Since one of the "captors" mentioned something like "15 on, 15 off", they were probably about to stop for a 15 second break when he dropped the noisemakers that signaled him reaching his limit.
Posted by: Rimfax | Thursday, July 03, 2008 at 04:42 PM