Monthly Archive

Heidi at ‘Euphoric Reality’ demonstrates the moral barrenness of the radical right as she attempts to justify the deaths of dozens of civilians in the Qana airstrike:

Call me a cold-hearted bitch, but I feel nothing. Why? ... Because the people are lying. Hezbollah is in and among the civilians of the area. The citizens know exactly who they are.

...

So, no. I really don’t feel bad. I possibly feel a twinge of sadness for those poor kids, who lost their lives because all the adults around them were Muslim morons, and no one could be bothered to safeguard their lives. But those poor kids never really had a chance in life anyway.

1. She knows the villagers were liars. How does she know? She just does! And because they were liars, they deserved to die. Even the children.
2. She knows the children’s lives would have been worthless. How does she know? She just does! She sees the future! Because one self-described cold-hearted bitch sitting safe in Texas has these amazing powers, she gets to decide that children half a world away deserved to die. Read the rest of this entry »

The far-right hysteric who calls himself ‘Ogre’ is once again engaging in his favorite tactic: lying outright. Citing a story in the Columbus Dispatch, he claims that the group Equality Ohio “oppose[s] free speech”.

How does Ogre arrive at this conclusion? Hard to tell. The only part of the Equality Ohio statement he quotes is the phrase “We call on Blackwell to retract his statement and apologize for his remarks”. There’s nothing in that statement that supports Ogre’s accusation that the group is opposed to free speech. They have expressed their dismay at comments made by a candidate for governor in Ohio, and have called on him to apologize. That’s it.

There is only one possible conclusion: Ogre has deliberately chosen to lie. Pretending that Equality Ohio has said something that they didn’t say is, frankly, a tacit admission that he cannot argue this matter on its merits. Somehow, given his past antics, this doesn’t surprise anyone — but it certainly hasn’t enhanced his already nonexistent credibility. (Neither, of course, does his naked bigotry — but that, also, isn’t a surprise.)

• Here (via Backup Brain) is a handy list of 50 Easy Questions to Ask Any Republican:

  6. When Dick Cheney and the oil company and energy executives met in private to plan America’s energy policy, how much of their goal was to benefit consumers?
  
  7. Do you believe in the President’s call for an Era of Personal Responsibility?
  
  8. Since Republicans control the White House, Senate and House of Representatives, how personally responsible are they for conditions in America today?
  
  ...
  
  16. Do you like the government collecting personal data on you without a warrant?
  
  17. How much money do you have in your bank account, stocks and investments?
  
  18. What’s your partner’s favorite sex position?
  
  19. If you have nothing to hide, why aren’t you answering?

• Marc Cooper asks hard questions about the current conflagration in the Middle East… questions many on the right would prefer were left unasked, one suspects:

  Warfare is not about keeping score, or getting even. It’s about the lives and deaths of real people. And thought it’s a cliche, most of them are just like me and you. War should never be a question of what is justified. But rather what is the minimum amount of violence absolutely necessary to achieve whatever that “just” goal might be. Does Hezbollah have a right to camp out in Lebanon and hurl missiles at Israel? Of course not. Hezbollah must be rolled back and disarmed, but not by flattening Lebanon and enflaming the entire Arab world.
  
  Likewise, one might ask: Do Israelis have the right to continue occupying Palestinian territory that — frankly — just doesn’t belong to them? Does Israel have the right to continue an occupation that deprives Palestinians of their sovereignty, their dignity and their equal rights? Of course not. A two-state solution must be reached and the Israeli domination of the Palestinians must come to an end, but not by supporting Palestinian suicide bombers nor any other atrocity committed against the Israeli civilian population.
  
  I’m sorry to be so blunt, but only a fool — yes, a fool — would watch unperturbed as match after match is tossed into the sea of gasoline that is the Middle East. If Israel’s retaliation, which now includes wholesale bombardment of Lebanese cities driving hundreds of thousands from their homes, morphs into a wide, regional war will anyone be consoled ten years from now by standing on the smoking ruins and simply saying, “Oh well, you know, the Hezbollah are the ones who started it.”

• Gotta love those Christians… they got rules for everything, even assaulting your own children (via BoingBoing):

  Parents are told that smacking can be a “10-to-15-minute process” and that if a child reacts angrily, such as by slamming doors or “pouting”, they should be smacked again.
  
  “Smacking is meant to drive the foolishness, the sinful manifestations, out of the child’s personality so that they do not become permanent fixtures,” [the ‘guide to smacking’] says.

  Cool. When I next encounter a foolish Christian, do I get to smack him around for 10 to 15 minutes… and beat him again when he dares to complain?

• Why do the small minds on the Right assume an air of moral superiority when it is so blatantly clear that they are moral cripples? Our good friend Justin H at RightontheRight.com tells us that because UN observers were not able to stop Hezbollah from firing missiles at Israel, it is perfectly all right to kill the observers:

  If UNIFIL had done their job, this conflict would never have been allowed to escalate, and Hezbollah would of never been allowed to mass this type of force. You have to realize, that if Hezbollah wasn’t firing at UNIFIL (and they weren’t), UNIFIL must of not been a threat to Hezbollah. That means they weren’t doing their jobs. Bombing an observation post may not of been the most tactful thing, but hey, even Reagan bombed the French Embassy when we went into Libya. Sometimes a message has to get across…

  What Justin is advocating, of course, is homicide as a form of communication. Golly, what a great concept! That’s the kind of morally corrupt thinking that got us into the mess we’re in now.

Hearken to me, all ye webmasters. I have a wondrous tale to tell.

Earlier today, ThinkingMeat.net went off the air for a while. Unbeknownst to me, the site had exceeded its bandwidth limit for the month. (Whoops!) I sent an email to my hosting company, TRKHosting.com, and it was answered promptly by Tom Koch, the proprietor. I’m used to that; I am firmly of the opinion that Tom has struck a deal with some dark power that enables him to answer emails almost before they are sent, and to go entirely without sleep.

What I was not expecting was that Tom would instantly increase my bandwidth limit to more than twice its original size! I thanked Tom most profusely and asked him what I owed him for this service. The answer: not a red cent. Tom informed me that “this change is permanent and won’t cost anything extra. As long as you stay a client that’s all I need”.

The only possible response, I think, is… “Holy crap!”. There is good service, there is great service, and there is service that astonishes. Tom Koch and TRKHosting have never once failed to deliver astonishing service, and I cannot recommend Tom’s firm highly enough for anyone who needs web hosting services. I’ve placed a link to Tom’s site in my sidebar, where it should have been long ago. Tom, you are a gentlemen, a scholar, and a true wonder. Thank you.

The Oxford English Dictionary defines ‘integrity’ as “soundness of moral principle; the character of uncorrupted virtue, esp. in relation to truth and fair dealing; uprightness, honesty, sincerity”. I’ve been looking for that quality in the recent actions of Jay “rope + tree + ACLU lawyer = pinata” Stephenson, and I’m damned if I can find it.

Jay has handed responsibility for monitoring the comments on his posts over to a character who calls himself ‘loboinok’. However, ‘lobo’ is apparently given free rein to delete comments based solely on his own whim. ‘lobo’ recently made the mistake of challenging me to demonstrate that the statement “all terrorists are Muslims” is false — and I did. This apparently angered ‘lobo’; how dare anyone use the facts against him? So he did what any small-minded bigot in his position would do — he deleted the comment in which I explained the facts to him, and set about trying to silence me. Read the rest of this entry »

Look at the evidence, and decide for yourself.

Jay “rope + tree + ACLU lawyer = pinata” Stephenson claims that veteran White House correspondent Helen Thomas "is entirely stupid" for questioning White House mouthpiece Tony Snow about a recent veto of a UN Security Council resolution.

Crooks and Liars has the transcript:

QUESTION: But wasn’t there a resolution?

SNOW: No.

QUESTION: At the U.N.?

SNOW: No. You know what you’ve done — I see — what happened was that there was conversation about, quote, a cease-fire that was picked up on some of the microphone when some colorful language made its way into the airwaves yesterday.(LAUGHTER)

And the president was continuing a conversation he had had earlier with Prime Minister Tony Blair about staging. Would we like a cease-fire? You bet. Absolutely. We would love to see a cease-fire. But the way you stage it is that you make sure that the people who started this fight, Hezbollah, take their responsibility.

QUESTION: There was no veto at the U.N.?

SNOW: No. There hasn’t been a resolution at the V.N. — the U.N., whatever it is. There haven’t been any…(LAUGHTER)

There hasn’t been.(LAUGHTER) I’ve been at (inaudible) in Germany too long. There has been no resolution at the U.N.

The United States used its veto power on Thursday to block a Security Council resolution that would accuse Israel of a “disproportionate use of force.”

John R. Bolton, the American ambassador, exercised the veto after failing in an effort to deny the resolution the nine votes needed for adoption.

The point, however, is that Thomas was right — there was indeed a veto. Tony Snow was lying — there was indeed a resolution. Read the rest of this entry »

Another right-wing blogger gets caught lying. The “Real Ugly American” pretends that a recent post by Kevin Drum at the Washington Monthly explains "Why the Left is Ignoring the War". One problem: Drum never claims to be explaining “why the left is ignoring the war”. In fact, the very first sentence of Drum’s post states:

Matt Yglesias suggests that I address the topic of why the liberal blogosphere doesn’t write very much about Israel-related subjects.

And lo and behold, Real Ugly is careful not to quote that first sentence — since doing so would clearly put the lie to the horseshit he’s trying to sell here. Drum isn’t discussing the question of whether left-wing blogs are discussing the current hot war in Lebanon. Drum does not even mention the war in his post. Read the rest of this entry »

• Human Rights Watch has published the findings of its Detainee Abuse and Accountability Project:

  In order to collect and analyze allegations of abuse of detainees in U.S. custody in Afghanistan, Iraq, and at the Guantánamo Bay detention facility, and to assess what actions, if any, the U.S. government has taken in response to credible allegations, the Center for Human Rights and Global Justice at NYU School of Law, Human Rights Watch and Human Rights First have jointly undertaken a Detainee Abuse and Accountability Project (DAA Project). The Project tracks abuse allegations and records investigations, disciplinary measures, or criminal prosecutions that are linked to them… Available evidence indicates that U.S. military and civilian agencies do not appear to have adequately investigated numerous cases of alleged torture and other mistreatment. Of the hundreds of allegations of abuse collected by the DAA Project, only about half appear to have been properly investigated. In numerous cases, military investigators appear to have closed investigations prematurely or to have delayed their resolution. In many cases, the military has simply failed to open investigations, even in cases where credible allegations have been made.

  via MetaFilter

• Is it even mathematically possible that the NSA’s illegal wiretaps can be effective at catching terrorists? Not according to an analysis by Professor Floyd Rudmin:

  To know if mass surveillance will work, Bayes’ theorem requires three estimations:

  1. The base-rate for terrorists, i.e. what proportion of the population are terrorists;
  2. The accuracy rate, i.e., the probability that real terrorists will be identified by NSA;
  3. The misidentification rate, i.e., the probability that innocent citizens will be misidentified by NSA as terrorists.

  No matter how sophisticated and super-duper are NSA’s methods for identifying terrorists, no matter how big and fast are NSA’s computers, NSA’s accuracy rate will never be 100% and their misidentification rate will never be 0%. That fact, plus the extremely low base-rate for terrorists, means it is logically impossible for mass surveillance to be an effective way to find terrorists.

• Charlotte Aldebron, at the tender age of 12, understood idolatry better than many adults when she wrote "What the American Flag Stands For":

  The American flag stands for the fact that cloth can be very important. It is against the law to let the flag touch the ground or to leave the flag flying when the weather is bad. The flag has to be treated with respect. You can tell just how important this cloth is because when you compare it to people, it gets much better treatment. Nobody cares if a homeless person touches the ground. A homeless person can lie all over the ground all night long without anyone picking him up, folding him neatly and sheltering him from the rain.
  
  School children have to pledge loyalty to this piece of cloth every morning. No one has to pledge loyalty to justice and equality and human decency. No one has to promise that people will get a fair wage, or enough food to eat, or affordable medicine, or clean water, or air free of harmful chemicals. But we all have to promise to love a rectangle of red, white, and blue cloth.
  
  Betsy Ross would be quite surprised to see how successful her creation has become. But Thomas Jefferson would be disappointed to see how little of the flag’s real meaning remains.

  via Daily Kos

I received the following email today from Jay Stephenson at StoptheACLU.com:

Date: Mon, 10 Jul 2006 20:33:08 -0400
From: “John Stephenson” <stephensonmeister@gmail.com>
To: meatbrain@thinkingmeat.net
Subject: Invitation

I think you are complete ass. Your persistance is what impresses me. If you will accept, I would like to invite you to debate me on my radio show this Saturday. If it only resorts to name calling and lies from you, I won’t be interested. I want the debate to be civil. If you accept, let me know and I will give you the details on how.

Jay

Over at Cao’s Blog, Cao has decided that it’s time to crank up the hatemongering machine. In her post Moral People Must Learn How to Hate, Cao republishes an article by a rabbi (!) advocating hatred. One can only marvel at the spectacle of a Jew praising an emotion that led to the attempted extermination of European Jewry in the last century. On the other hand, it doesn’t surprise anyone to find Cao swooning at the thought of more hatred in the world.

So I decided to give her some truly virulent hatred to chew on. Read the rest of this entry »

Infamous net bigot Nedd Kareiva is getting a bit testy. Perhaps the attention he’s been getting for trying to interfere in a lawsuit in another state, a lawsuit to which Bigot Nedd is not a party in any way, is starting to get uncomfortable.

Some background: Bigot Nedd, a resident of Chicago, decided to inject himself into a lawsuit in Delaware by publishing the home address and phone number of the plaintiffs, a Jewish family. The family had already been forced to move once in the wake of harassment by the “Christians” in their community, so Bigot Nedd accompanied their address and phone number with oh-so-careful instructions to his legion of minions that the family not be harassed. Riiiiiight…

Yesterday, I emailed Bigot Nedd a few simple, civil questions about his brave intervention in a lawsuit filed hundreds of miles away:

From: “meatbrain@thinkingmeat.net” <meatbrain@thinkingmeat.net>
To: “Nedd Kareiva” <info@stoptheaclu.org>
Subject: Questions regarding your publication of the Dobrich family’s address and phone
Date: Sat, 8 Jul 2006 14:15:03 -0400
Sender: meatbrain@gmail.com

Mr. Kareiva:

1. When you posted the address and phone number of the Dobrich family, what effect did you hope that your action would have on their lawsuit?
2. You have stated that you are “pleased that [you] had an effect in this case”. What effect do you believe your publication of the Dobrich family’s address and phone number actually had?
3. How many phone calls did you hope the Dobrich family would receive?
4. How many personal visits to their home did you hope the Dobrich family would receive?
5. Why did you not publish the name and address of the second family involved in the lawsuit?
6. Have you written to the Dobrich family to protest the lawsuit?
7. Have you written to the Dobrich family to apologize for publicizing their address and phone number?
8. How do you reconcile your action, which clearly could expose the Dobrich family to possible further harassment, with the teachings of Christ?

Thank you for your time…

mb

In a post originally entitled "The KOS-sacks: Shit Sacks that Twist the Truth", Kender whines that Nedd Kareiva of StoptheACLU.org is getting a bad rap, just because he went and posted the home address and phone number of a Jewish family whose lawsuit against a school district Kareiva wants dropped:

So let them rant and lie and try to make this whole issue with Ned into a race based thing…

Oh, no, heaven forfend. The mere fact that the only family whose address Kareiva posted is Jewish can’t possibly be relevant, can it? It can’t possibly be motivated by race hatred, can it?

Well, when I pointed out that for all his bloviating, Kender hadn’t cited a single verifiable lie in his post, he came back with this wonderfully erudite response:

You are another cowardly spick of gelatinous slime…

What was that word Kender used? Read the rest of this entry »

What do you do if you’re a right-wing thug and you want to get a Jewish family to drop a lawsuit against a school district that practices blatant religious discrimination?

You publish their address and phone number on the Internet, of course. This makes it so much easier for your fellow faceless thugs to find and harass the family.

Such is the logic of Nedd Kareiva of StoptheACLU.org [no linky love here for the thug]. The Dobrich family is the target of anti-Semitic slurs and harassment by the good Christian people of the Indian River School District in Delaware. Kareiva lives in Chicago, so going to the Dobrich’s house to personally scream obscenities at them was a little impractical for him. He did the next best thing… he made certain anyone who wants to harass the family will have no trouble finding them.

Mike the Mad Biologist has a pithy comment on Kareiva and his fellow mouth-breathers:

Think about what Karieva said. He sees absolutely nothing wrong with laying the groundwork that led to an American family fleeing their home because of their religious beliefs. It’s Bosnia on the Delmarva.

And note that I said American. We’ll hear some — or maybe much — bloviating from the Right that will refer to the Dobrich family as Jewish, not American. That’s intentional. If they’re Jews, then they’re the other. Maybe they sort of had it coming. Don’t let them play that game: Americans were forced to flee their home by other Americans as a result of religious persecution.

The usual crew of right-wing hatemongers have lined up in support of Kareiva the bigot. First in line is Kareiva’s lapdog, Jay “rope + tree + ACLU lawyer = pinata” Stephenson. Stephenson claims that Kareiva is being "smeared" by those who are reporting his actions. How, exactly, is Kareiva being smeared? Kareiva himself says he is "pleased that we had an effect in this case". Note this carefully: Kareiva is admitting that his actions helped intimidate the Dobriches. Read the rest of this entry »

• The ultraright bloggers scream over and over that Islam is hellbent on the destruction of Western civilization and values. How, then, can they explain the existence of very real efforts, from within the faith, to change how Islam is interpreted and practiced? These efforts are discussed in the article Islam’s reformers?

  In Britain and the US, we have seen the emergence of a number of Islamic “rationalists” who are building a case for Muslim societies to change from within, and for Muslim minorities in western countries to change how they think of themselves in relation to wider society. They include the British-Pakistani writer and thinker Ziauddin Sardar, the philosophers Tariq Ramadan (Swiss-Egyptian) and AbdolKarim Soroush (Iranian). From the US, change is being advocated by the evangelist Hamza Yusuf Hanson, who regards himself as more traditionalist than reformer.

• Larry Johnson puts the threat of terrorism into perspective, comparing it to the threats we faced during the Cold War:

  While terrorism from radical Islamic extremism is a threat we must take seriously, we are kidding ourselves to place it on par with the military and nuclear threat we faced during the Cold War with the Soviet Union…
  
  In retrospect, Bush and his allies are right about one thing—the threat of terrorism from Islamic extremists is unprecedented. However, it is unprecedented in the sense that we have allowed our fear of the unknown to justify torture, illegal detention, a clamp down on civil liberties, and ignoring international accords, like the Geneva Convention.
  
  Should we ignore terrorism? No. We do face a serious threat from radical Islamists. They are a fervent and uncompromising lot. Fortunately, they are not ubiquitous nor do they represent a majority opinion among Muslims around the world. While jihadist radicals have flocked to Iraq (and been killed and captured with regularity) they have had limited success gaining traction and sustaining operations around the world.

• The Army has published an updated edition of its counterinsurgency manual [PDF]:

  A counterinsurgency campaign is, as described in this manual, a mix of offensive, defensive, and stability operations, conducted along multiple lines of operation. It requires Soldiers and Marines to employ a mix of both familiar combat tasks and skills more often associated with nonmilitary agencies, with the balance between them varying depending on the local situation. This is not easy. Leaders at all levels must adjust their approach constantly, ensuring that their elements are ready each day to be greeted with a handshake or a hand grenade, to take on missions only infrequently practiced until recent years at our combat training centers, to be nation builders as well as warriors, to help re-establish institutions and local security forces, to assist in the rebuilding of infrastructure and basic services, and to facilitate the establishment of local governance and the rule of law. The list of such tasks is a long one and involves extensive coordination and cooperation with a myriad of intergovernmental, indigenous, and international agencies. Indeed, the responsibilities of leaders in a counterinsurgency campaign are daunting – and the discussions in this manual endeavor to alert them to the challenges of such campaigns and to suggest general approaches for grappling with those challenges.
  
  Conducting a successful counterinsurgency campaign thus requires a flexible, adaptive force led by agile, well-informed, culturally astute leaders. It is our hope that this manual provides the necessary guidelines to succeed in such a campaign, in operations that, inevitably, are exceedingly difficult and complex. Our Soldiers and Marines deserve nothing less.

• By way of BoingBoing, and just for my buddy BD, here’s some Japanese footage of the extremely rare Indonesian coelacanth, a species of fish thought to have gone extinct millions of years ago:
  
  

Poor Woody over at GM’s Corner has gone and done it again: He’s embarrassed himself in public with his abject ignorance of the facts. This time he is pimping an opinion piece by Richard Lindzen, a global warming skeptic.

The problem is that Lindzen’s article has already been taken apart — for instance, by Judd Legum at ThinkProgress. (Hat tip to Deltoid.)

Here is Lindzen’s only substantive response:

More recently, a study in the journal Science by the social scientist Nancy [sic — Naomi] Oreskes claimed that a search of the ISI Web of Knowledge Database for the years 1993 to 2003 under the key words “global climate change” produced 928 articles, all of whose abstracts supported what she referred to as the consensus view. A British social scientist, Benny Peiser, checked her procedure and found that only 913 of the 928 articles had abstracts at all, and that only 13 of the remaining 913 explicitly endorsed the so-called consensus view. Several actually opposed it.

Peiser’s work – and Lindzen’s reliance on it — is an embarrassment. Here’s why:

1. Peizer misunderstands the point of Oreskes study. The point was not that every article about climate change explicitly endorsed the IPCC conclusions. The point is that if there was real uncertainty there would be "substantive disagreement in the scientific community" that would be reflected in peer reviewed literature. There wasn’t.

2. Peiser didn’t find any peer reviewed studies that oppose the scientific consensus. Peiser claimed that 34 papers “reject or doubt” the consensus view. Tim Lambert got Peiser to send him the abstracts of those 34 papers. The vast majority of these papers express no doubt whatsoever about the consensus view. Only one paper, by the Association of Petroleum Geologists, cited by Peiser actually rejects the consensus view and it "does not appear to have been peer reviewed outside that Association."

Peiser has admitted that his work included errors.

Woody’s been caught relying on a claim that has already been proven incorrect. Furthermore, said claim is based on a study whose author has already admitted mistakes. Dear me, how embarrassing. Read the rest of this entry »

Cao has found the motherlode, an endless supply of free material for her blog: She just makes crap up as she needs it.

She’s currently on some hopelessly ignorant rant comparing the National Council of Churches to Nazi collaborators. It really doesn’t matter what that’s all about. What’s revealing is her attempt to smear the NCC by telling a ridiculous lie about one of their sources of funding:

The funding of these leftist causes is not surprising; and the fact that Soros had some experience in Nazi Germany, the black market, etc., and profitted during those dark times in Nazi germany should also give a person pause.

Now… aside from the fact that this is a pathetically obvious use of the guilt by association fallacy, is Cao’s accusation against financier George Soros even true? Read the rest of this entry »