Nobody's Business

Big Bad Bible Ban Another Manufactured Hoax

It began with this fairly unremarkable news:

Military personnel threw away, and ultimately burned, confiscated Bibles that were printed in the two most common Afghan languages amid concern they would be used to try to convert Afghans, a Defense Department spokesman said Tuesday. The unsolicited Bibles sent by a church in the United States were confiscated about a year ago at Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan because military rules forbid troops of any religion from proselytizing while deployed there.

Then Bob Livingston, former Louisiana Representative and Republican family man cum serial adulterer, saw the perfect opportunity to make religious hay out of the situation. Here's an action alert Livingston sent out by e-mail:

The Obama Administration's military spokesman just acknowledged seizing and burning the privately owned Bibles of American soldiers serving in Afghanistan [emphasis mine]. When Al-Jazeera television showed a VIDEO of our troops with Christian Bibles, Muslim extremists and American atheists complained. In response, U.S. military spokesman Maj. Jennifer Willis told Reuters reporters, "I can now confirm that the Bibles shown on Al Jazeera's clip were, in fact, collected by the chaplains and later destroyed."

Her careful words "later" and "now" indicate the Bibles were destroyed this month, not last year, because of the recently publicized video. Why is the Obama Administration now forcing atheistic silence on our troops, in violation of their private rights?

Pedantic P.S.: "Sign petition and WE WILL FAX all 435 members of Congress," Livingston urges. Maybe he could also pass the hat around for fourth-grade tuition and learn a few basics about the U.S. government. Between the House and the Senate, Congress has 535 members.

You Don't Say

One critic's assessment of mainstream porn:

It's nasty, misogynistic, anatomically improbable, hideously normative of deviance ..., narrow-minded, narratively impoverished and unspeakably dull.

That you, Andrea Dworkin? Or you, James Dobson?

Actually, it's Michael Bywater in the New Humanist, the magazine for freethinkers.

Grown Men and Their Diminutives

Having visited online photography forums for years, I've seen scores of Hasselblad aficionados refer to their cameras as "Hassies."

Other photographers swear by their "Olys" or their "Bronnies" (Olympus and Bronica cameras).

Hey, whatever floats their boaties. They can call their gear "babycakes" or "snookums" for all I care, and spoon it nightly.

Just thought I'd point out that to some of us with a well-developed gag reflex, this inclination is unfortunate, roughly on a par with a grown man referring to his ride as his Bimmer or, in at least one case, his Bimmy (I needed ear bleach after that one).

Anyway, don't mind me. To each his binkie, blankie, or Hassie.

Half of U.K. Parliament to Be Kicked Out

What do you call 325 cheating, money-grubbing politicians whose careers are doomed?

A good start.

At least half of the House of Commons' 646 MPs will be swept away at the general election, as voters take revenge on the political classes for the expenses scandal. The departure of 325 members of parliament as a result of forced resignations, retirement and defeat at the polls would represent the biggest clear-out of parliament since 1945. As many as 30 will be forced to resign directly because of the expenses scandal, while whips expect more than 200 to quit because they are unable to cope with continued public anger. Up to 90 MPs will be voted out in the election.

Some are not ready to take their lumps, and are now appealing to the populace with a half-vomitous, half-comical kind of emotional blackmail.

Conservative legislator Nadine Dorries claimed there could be potential suicides among members of Parliament. "I think people are seriously beginning to crack," she told BBC Radio. "There is real serious concern that this has gotten to the point now which is almost unbearable for any human being to deal with."

The scandal's fallout is also beginning to spread to the European Parliament.

Good times.

Hell Freezes Over

The New York Times Magazine, in a piece about gay marriage, says something complimentary about libertarians (which might be a first since John Tierney ruled the paper's op-ed page). I've been looking at the skies, scanning for flying hogs.

This is the final paragraph from Matt Bai's article:

When historians look back on the culture clashes of the 1990s, perhaps the closest thing they will find to a political trendsetter is an oddball like Jesse Ventura, who embodied the enlightened libertarianism that would ultimately enable many Americans to accept a once unthinkable idea. History will record that neither then nor later was there a national party he could call his own.

Freedom Highway

This happened in January, in Missouri.

A neo-Nazi group has joined the state's "Adopt-A-Highway" volunteer litter pickup program, taking advantage of a free speech court fight won four years ago by the Ku Klux Klan. The Springfield unit of the National Socialist Movement has committed to cleaning up trash along a half-mile section of Highway 160 near the Springfield city limits.

Neither lawmakers nor bureaucrats fought to keep the brownshirts from adopting a stretch of highway and putting up their promotional sign. Which is exactly as it should be. People with ugly little minds have as much right to speak them — and to pick up fast-food wrappers — as anybody else.

But the other day, one legislator did manage to get the last laugh. Most excellent pwnage:

Rep. Sara Lampe, D-Springfield, got an amendment added to a transportation bill to rename a portion of West Bypass from Farm Road 142 to West Sunshine [the part serviced by the White Power folks] the "Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel Memorial Highway." Heschel marched with Martin Luther King Jr. at the Selma, Ala., Civil Rights march in 1965.

Awesome.

In lieu of sending a Halmark card, I'm dedicating this YouTube video to Lampe. It features the cool illustrations of Anthony DiFatta, set to my favorite song by the North Mississippi Allstars — Freedom Highway.



[miter tip: Popehat]

Weekend Kid Blogging

When it's still too chilly to go swimming outside, building an impromptu little water park in the kitchen sink turns out to be no impediment to true happiness.

Chinese Humpty Dumpty Really Was Pushed

File under 'Helping Hand.'

Chen Fuchao, a man heavily in debt, had been contemplating suicide on a bridge in southern China for hours when a passer-by came up, shook his hand — and pushed him off the ledge. Chen fell 26 feet (8 meters) onto a partially inflated emergency air cushion laid out by authorities and survived, suffering spine and elbow injuries, the official Xinhua News Agency said Saturday.

The passer-by, 66-year-old Lai Jiansheng, had been fed up with what he called Chen's "selfish activity," Xinhua said. Traffic around the Haizhu bridge in the city of Guangzhou had been backed up for five hours and police had cordoned off the area. "I pushed him off because jumpers like Chen are very selfish. Their action violates a lot of public interest," Lai was quoted as saying.

Funniest Story You'll Read All Day

Trust me.

Atheists "Not Fully Human," Catholic Childfuckers A-OK

It's been quite a month for the Catholic Church in the United Kingdom.

First, Cardinal Cormac Murphy O'Connor thoughtfully unveiled his take on agnostics and atheists: they're "not fully human," His Eminence intoned. Watch:

To make sure the message would be crystal clear, he then clarified, a few days later, that "lack of belief" is truly "the greatest of evils."

Ah. Right. Greater, one surmises, than starving a one-year-old boy to death for not saying "amen" after his meal; greater also than priests teaming up with fascist dictators and preaching mayhem and bloodshed, causing the violent deaths of untold thousands; greater, certainly, than members of the clergy forcibly ramming their blessed cocks up the rectums of underage altar boys, with centuries-long impunity no less.

May was off to a fine start.

Then, a couple of days ago, a long-awaited report on child abuse in the Irish Catholic Church came out, nine years in the making.

A nine-year inquiry into child abuse by Ireland's Catholic religious orders showed a system that shielded child-molesters from justice and trapped generations of Ireland's poorest children in misery from the 1930s to the 1990s. Irish President Mary McAleese on Thursday denounced what she called an "atrocious betrayal of love" by Catholic clergy toward these children.

And what did the Church say in response? This: Archbishop Vincent Nichols, the spiritual leader of more than four million Catholics in England and Wales, commended the bravery of Irish members of the clergy who eventually acknowledged their guilt.

Not making that up. Here's the London Times' religion correspondent on the matter:

Archbishop Nichols praised the courage of those priests in the wake of the Irish child abuse scandal who had owned up to the abuse — even though none actually have. Instead, and quite incredibly, they managed to secure protection from the Government against their identities actually being known — even the dead ones. [emphasis added]

The Catholic Church, steeped though it is in Latin, still does not know how and when to properly utter the words mea maxima culpa. Its morality is as irreparably tattered as its credibility.

Doubt it? See also this.