Years, ago, back when I used to post a long, multi-topic update 4 or 5 days a week, occasionally ran a feature called "Flux says no." As best I recall, it generally involved a quick comment on some new item about which I was especially dubious. I'm not going to resurrect that feature at this point, but for some reason I happened to see several news items today to which, "no." seemed the best reply. So here they are.
If you're going to smuggle some underaged party girl sluts you knew in high school into your army barracks, where you will ply them with booze and drugs while you and a few of your buddies can bang them eight ways from Sunday... do try
not to actually kill them with alcohol poisoning. It makes the clean up, not to mention repeat visits, problematic.
ORT LEWIS, Wash. – A 16-year-old girl was found dead and another teenage girl was discovered unconscious in a barracks on this Army base south of Tacoma, the Army said Monday.
In a statement issued about 36 hours after base emergency personnel responded to a 911 call early Sunday morning, Fort Lewis spokesman Joe Piek said a Madigan Army Medical Center doctor declared one girl dead at the scene. The second teen was taken to Madigan for emergency medical care and was reported in stable condition Monday.
...The Army is investigating what the girls were doing in the barracks and whether drugs or alcohol were involved, he said. The presence of the two civilian girls "in the barracks at 3:30 a.m. is likely a violation of any of the units' barracks visitation policies," he said.
I like the closing quote there. Yes, I think we can safely assume that two comatose, alcohol and semen-soaked 16 y/o girls in an all-male military barracks at 4am is "likely a violation" of the visitation policies. I don't ordinarily associate dry wit and ironic understatement with military mouthpieces, but I might have to rethink that prejudice.
Elsewhere, we find
a man who was not content to let drugs and alcohol do his dirty work for him. Not when he had religious/cultural guidance, and a big, sharp knife.
NEW YORK (Reuters) – The founder of a U.S. Muslim television network has been arrested and charged with murdering his wife by beheading her, the network's Web site and local media reported.
Muzzammil Hassan, founder and CEO of Buffalo, N.Y.-based Bridges TV which launched in 2004 with a mission to show Muslims in a more positive light, was charged after reporting the death of his wife, Aasiya Hassan, 37, on Thursday night.
After Hassan, 44, told police his wife was at the Bridges TV offices, in the village of Orchard Park, they found her body there, beheaded, The Buffalo News reported.
Authorities said Aasiya Hassan, with whom Hassan had two children, had recently filed for divorce and had an order of protection mandating that he leave their home as of February 6.
I don't have an irony-o-meter, but if I did I'm pretty sure this case would break it. Yes, he launched an entire TV network in 2004, its "mission to show Muslims in a more positive light." A necessary task, since the popular perception in the US of Muslims in the US is that they are violent, backwards, medieval-minded religious fanatics who tend to behead people in their power. Oops.
It's a shame, since that perception is created by sensationalistic news coverage of the violence and terror perpetrated by a minuscule fraction of Islam's adherents worldwide. A number that you wouldn't expect to include American television entrepreneurs, but there you have it.
Knowing nothing about this case other what's in the news article, I'll speculate anyway. The guy seems to have been very Westernized and he was not a religious fanatic. I don't think we can blame the murder on the (unreformed) Bronze Age ethics that animates the writing in the Koran and the Hadith. True, we hear about "honor killings" by Muslims all the time, but this wasn't a daughter being murdered for dating or apostasy. This was a controlling, violent husband killing his wife during a nasty divorce; that happens all the time to people of all, and even no, religion.
So he lost his temper and killed her, probably not even with a machete, or an axe, or whatever he used to sever her cranium. It was only afterwards, while sitting over her cooling corpse and contemplating how it had come to this; how he'd let jealousy and stupidity destroy his life and his family and his career, that he thought about beheading. He'd surely seen plenty of videos of it, and it's in the news all the time; news his network reported on. And he got to thinking, and madness took hold.
On the other hand, I could be completely wrong and the manual guillotine was the execution method. In that case I'd still think he was just another impotent ex-husband who couldn't get over his wife wanting to leave him; he just chose a technique with an unfortunate cultural connection, given his TV network's mission statement.
Speaking of asshole ex-husbands, these two articles made up the scariest and most surprising back to back links I've seen this year. You will legitimately gasp at
news item #2.
Here's #1, with a very short summary of events. Skim that and then click link #2 before you read lower, or you'll spoil the shock.
Nutshell version of story #1: Wife shot her husband with one of his own guns. Husband was, by all accounts, a complete asshole. Abusive to his wife, nasty to everyone else, a neo-Nazi (literally), liar about his business life, obviously deeply insecure, as evidenced by his gun collection, his Hitler worship, and his habit of swaggering around the house in a leather trenchcoat. It would be pathetic, if not for the death and human misery inherent in the tale.
Story #2 comes a couple of months later, and it discusses what the cops, and then the FBI, found when they were searching the house as part of their murder investigation.
BELFAST, Maine — James G. Cummings, who police say was shot to death by his wife two months ago, allegedly had a cache of radioactive materials in his home suitable for building a “dirty bomb.”
...The report posted on the WikiLeaks Web site states that “On 9 December 2008, radiological dispersal device components and literature, and radioactive materials, were discovered at the Maine residence of an identified deceased [person] James Cummings.”
It says that four 1-gallon containers of 35 percent hydrogen peroxide, uranium, thorium, lithium metal, thermite, aluminum powder, beryllium, boron, black iron oxide and magnesium ribbon were found in the home.
Also found was literature on how to build “dirty bombs” and information about cesium-137, strontium-90 and cobalt-60, radioactive materials. The FBI report also stated there was evidence linking James Cummings to white supremacist groups.
Well. Then.
I first read this a couple of days ago, and I'm still coming up a bit short as I grasp for a witty retort. I'm prepared to read about white supremacists hording guns and terrorizing their wives and daughters... but building dirty bombs in the basement? That's a bit more than you expect to stumble over in a bougie suburb in Bangor, Maine.
If you must have a laugh, look at the comments. The first dozen are the expected, "Holy shit!?" type remarks, and then "greyhawk1" shows up and launches into a pre-packaged diatribe about how Obama is going to use this as an excuse to "tik-r-gunnnnnsssssss!" And how the real dangers are the sleeper cells of communists and Muslims and Latino gangs and other left wing terrorists all across the US. And how the FBI shouldn't waste time investigating this lone kook. Really, I'm not caricaturing his remarks at all. If anything, I'm downplaying the paranoia animating them. Scroll down and see for yourself.
This one is unrelated to greyhawk1's diatribe, except ideologically. If you follow the US news at all, you must have seen all of the debate and struggle over the first stage of the anti-recession efforts. Obama pushed hard to get an economic recovery act through, and it passed, but only because the Democratic party enjoyed huge gains in the House and Senate during the past two elections, thanks to all of George Bush's fine work in the White House. Republican opposition to Obama's plan was fierce and nearly unanimous; it didn't matter in the House since the Democrats hold more than 60% of the seats, but in the Senate there are just 58 reliable Democratic votes, so enough apparently concessions (tax cuts, primarily) had to be put into the plan to get a few Republicans to vote for it. (The way that all bills must now get 60% of the vote to pass, since anything less than that = an essentially-unbreakable filabuster is a ridiculous state of affairs, but is a topic for another post. And another blogger, most likely.)
That the Republicans opposed Obama's plan isn't surprising or unusual; they are the opposition party, after all, in America's woefully-unrepresentative two-party system. I didn't like that the Democrats rolled over and let Dubya and the Republicans do whatever they wanted during his first six years, so I can't very well deny the Republicans some credit for serving their nominal electoral role. Besides, I like most of Obama's policies, but I'm not an economist, so I don't really have an opinion on the various bailout plans and recession counter-measures. It's clear
we're in dire straits, and I think that something should be done, so I know enough to disregard those (primarily on the Right) who say that nothing is wrong, or that more tax cuts are the solution, since they say that about every economic situation, boom or bust. Only having one answer, whatever the situation, is the same as having no answer.
The worst comments and opposition though, have come from those on the right who have suddenly rediscovered their core principles of thrift and saving and limiting government spending, now that there's a president spending money on something other than foreign wars and corporate welfare. If only we could encapsulate Republican fiscal policy, and reflect upon their audacity in making their current complaints, in one simple chart? Oh wait, I guess we can.
Ford did economic damage, Carter largely reversed it, though he failed to cure the oil price spike recession of the early 80s, which helped to get Reagan elected. And that's when the real ideological economic meddling began. Reagan's men saw where it was leading after his first term and they behaved like adults, exercising fiscal prudence and slowing spending while raising some taxes during his second term. Bush the 1st returned to the irresponsible "free lunch" approach of constant deficit spending and tax cuts for the rich, and the resultant economic slump propelled Clinton "It's the economy, stupid!" into office. His policies concentrated benefits on the lower and middle classes and you can see the Mt. Everest-like results. And then peace and prosperity created complacency, the media hated Gore, he ran a horrible campaign, and we got Dubya. Who immediately put the usual modern day Republican voodoo economic policies in. With predictable results. And note that the chart is only up through 2004, before Bush's mad spending really began setting records for deficit and economic collapse.
Can Obama reverse this trend? Before it's too late(r)? I have no idea. Opinions differ on what should be done, which is to be expected. The arguments I object to are from long-serving Republicans who suddenly oppose spending and want to cut the debt. Republicans who enthusiastically voted for every Bush-era policy that created the mess we're in now. We've been doing what they wanted. Their (disastrous) efforts created one of the largest sudden shifts in political power in American history, over the last 2 years. They fucked up so badly that a vaguely-liberal black man named "Hussein" got elected president. Kthx. Shut up for a while, now.
Finally, to go out on a laugh I checked out Hanzis Matter yesterday for the first time in months, and
the top post had me laughing and wincing at the same time. Of course most of the symbols are errors, and the whole thing has no meaning; it's just random words. That's kind of sad, but really, is anyone who would get something so huge, ugly, and tasteless on their back going to be concerned with the characters being drawn correctly, or actually meaning anything?
It's clever in a way; tattoo naysayers always try out that tired old "It'll look terrible when you're old and wrinkled." This guy, and others like him, are negating that problem by getting tattoos that look horrible now. Honestly, time, wrinkles, and gravity can only improve this homage to a bathroom stall in a seedy gas station.
To all of you, Flux says no.
Labels: economics, military, religion, tattoos
