September 2006

Over at the oddly-named blog “Christ Matters”, Timmy aka ‘Highboy’ just told a whopper of a lie about a blogger named Steve Cohen:

Only a liberal would state that his family’s worth is less than that of terrorists and dress it up as something good and noble, and even an American value.

I challenged widdle Timmy to produce proof that Mr. Cohen had said such a thing. Widdle Timmy has, of course, failed utterly:

Absolutely: “Yes Tim, it’s true, my American values are more important to me than my life and it’s quite pathetic that you don’t hold yours in such esteem”

“I want my children to have all the rights and privileges that I have, and I may say, that is more important than any one person’s safety.”

Notice that neither of Mr. Cohen’s statements mentions terrorists. Neither statement mentions anyone’s “worth”. Mr. Cohen is discussing values and rights, not the relative “worth” of any particular people.

Widdle Timmy is like so many others of his kind: he is utterly incapable of constructing a rational, fact-based argument, and so chooses to fall back on lies that are ludicrously easy to expose.

Way to show Christian values, imbecile.

The great thing about the Internet is the endless entertainment it affords us. As a shining example, I give you Andrew ‘Dipshit’ Richardson.

In yet another tour-de-force of gormless burbling, Dipshit cheers the death of the right of habeas corpus and the dawning of the American Age of Torture:

This legislation, although flawed, gives the CIA and military interrogators the tools that they need in order to conduct affective interrogation of high profile detainees.

What is “affective interrogation”, dipshit? Jeee-ZUS, would you kindly learn the English language before you try to make an argument in it?

My disappointment is in the fact water boarding will no longer be permitted under the new guidelines.

Oh, NO! You mean brown people aren’t going to be tortured for your amusement and entertainment any more? Oh, the HORROR! You poor baby! Sit down, Dipshit, and I’ll get you a glass of water and a crying towel.

And by the way, Dipshit — where in these “guidelines” has waterboarding been explicitly prohibited?

But yet, we are forbidden to use this affective mode of pressured interrogation because a few uneducated individuals who have no idea what true torture is have labeled water boarding as torture.

You have no room to label other people as “uneducated”, Mr. “affective mode”. Good Christ, this is what happens when you let submorons near a keyboard… Read the rest of this entry »

Stirling Newberry describes exactly and accurately what has happened to the rule of law in the United States, and why:

A paranoid fear of “terrorism” has now joined this elect list of overriding mandates in American history. Americans have decided, by narrow but successive majorities, ratified by members of both parties repeatedly, that the stock market crash of 2000 and the attacks of 9/11 justify a complete dismantling of their structure of rights, and the absolute and permanent change in their status.

Since the Federal government already defines “terrorism” to include domestic acts of vandalism, and the NIE which has been partially declassified declares “leftists” and “anti-globalists” to be on the list of potential terrorists, this is not about catching the perpetrators of a series of terrorist attacks – embassy bombings, the attack on the USS Cole, 9/11, M-11 and 7/7 – but an unlimited and unchallengeable right to detain, try and punish anyone who is deemed to be “an unlawful combatant”.

This is not, in short a bureaucratic red tape cutting exercise, but, in essence, and Amendment to the Constitution that reads: “All other rights are superceded by the needs of the state, under the sole discretion of the executive.”

Go read the whole thing.

StopTheACLU.com has found another ill-informed mouth-breather to post lies at their site. This one calls himself “davef”, and he brays in a post entitled “ACLU renews attacks on SWIFT”:

If you remember SWIFT is NSA program to track financial exchanges to find links with terrorist funding. It is the same program that the New York Times leaked in late June.

The claim that the New York Times “leaked” the existence of this program was a lie back in June, and it’s still a lie today. The existence of the SWIFT program was not “leaked” by the Times, because it was already public knowledge.

• FACT: A UN report published in December 2002 stated:

  “The settlement of international transactions is usually handled through correspondent banking relationships or large-value message and payment systems, such as the SWIFT, Fedwire or CHIPS systems in the United States of America. Such international clearance centres are critical to processing international banking transactions and are rich with payment information. The United States has begun to apply new monitoring techniques to spot and verify suspicious transactions. The Group recommends the adoption of similar mechanisms by other countries.”

• FACT: An August 1998 Washington Post story entitled “Bin Laden’s Finances Are a Moving Target” revealed that:

  “The CIA and agents with Treasury’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network also will try to lay tripwires to find out when bin Laden moves funds by plugging into the computerized systems of bank transaction monitoring services — operated by the Federal Reserve and private organizations called SWIFT and CHIPS— that record the billions of dollars coursing through the global banking system daily.”

  The lying dimwits at StopTheACLU.com simply cannot get it through their useless skulls that repeating a lie does not magically transform it into the truth.

Jay “rope + tree + ACLU lawyer = pinata” Stephenson proves once again what kind of hypocritical moron he truly is. Commenting on a recent New York Times story about a group that has formed to protest the actions of the leadership of the ACLU, Jay says:

I really think the ACLU are entirely too corrupt to be saved. Whatever people within the organization that stand up on principle have had efforts to silence them or they have been voted out.

BWAHAHAHAHAHAHA! Jay Stephenson is notorious for silencing anyone who dares criticize him in the comments on his site. Disagree with Jay, and the comment gets deleted—poof! Jay Stephenson is utterly incapable of taking part in an open and honest discussion. He doesn’t even try.

Jay, get off your damn high horse and learn to discuss your views, instead of trying to silence people who disagree with you. Then and only then will you have earned the right to criticize anyone else for doing what you yourself have long been doing on a daily basis.

Just answer one question, Jay: If it is wrong to silence others, why do you do it?

UPDATE 09/26 10:10 PM: This is Jay’s hard-hitting response, which he emailed to me (he still lacks the balls the conduct a discussion in public):

Date: Tue, 26 Sep 2006 21:44:39
From: “John Stephenson”
To: meatbrain@thinkingmeat.net
Subject: Re: Jay Stephenson: idiot hypocrite

You are not a very nice person.

Well, boo freaking hoo, little man. Do you need a tissue? You made a complete ass of yourself by howling about other people allegedly doing something that we know you do all the time. Take care of that nasty-looking beam in your own eye, bubba, before you start screeching about the mote in your neighbor’s eye.

UPDATE 09/27 07:50 AM: YESSSSSSS! Jay never fails to cooperate with any attempt to illustrate how craven and intellectually bankrupt he truly is. I left comments at his site yesterday, and today Jay has deleted them — thus proving my point about his cowardice and hypocrisy.

Thanks, Jay!

I have officially renamed renowned net-liar Andrew ‘Gribbit’ Richardson. He is now to be referred to as ‘Gribbit the Dipshit’, and I’ll explain why.

In his latest puddle of mental vomit, Gribbit the Dipshit burbles as follows:

FORMER President William Jefferson Clinton once wagged his finger to the entire press corps over the Monica Lewinsky affair, “I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Miss Lewinsky.” Remember? Well, he’s finger wagging again. This time over the ineptitude of his ineffective attempts to stop Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda.

Dipshit seems to be awful eager to call Clinton “inept” and “ineffective”. He has apparently chosen to disregard the fact that when it comes to catching Osama bin Laden, George W. Bush has deliberately given up the chase: Read the rest of this entry »

Heidi Thiess, gullible racist, applauds a recent outbreak of vigilante violence in Houston.

Laws don’t matter to Heidi. Standards of civilized behavior don’t matter to Heidi. All that matters to Heidi is that when someone is merely suspected of a crime, they can freely assaulted by anyone — no trial necessary. See, it’s OK to throw the rules out the window when Heidi is upset about something. She’s just that important.

Gads… Heidi and her kind are exactly what is most wrong with this country: self-centered, self-righteous, and ignorant beyond words. God save us from the Heidi Thiesses of this world.

The Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science has been started to combat what its founder, Richard Dawkins, sees as a societal backlash against (you guessed it) reason and science:

The enlightenment is under threat. So is reason. So is truth. So is science, especially in the schools of America. I am one of those scientists who feels that it is no longer enough just to get on and do science. We have to devote a significant proportion of our time and resources to defending it from deliberate attack from organized ignorance. We even have to go out on the attack ourselves, for the sake of reason and sanity. But it must be a positive attack, for science and reason have so much to give. They are not just useful, they enrich our lives in the same kind of way as the arts do. Promoting science as poetry was one of the things that Carl Sagan did so well, and I aspire to continue his tradition.

Dawkins is doing good work here, fighting the forces of ignorance, bigotry, and dogmatism. Visit the site, donate if you can, and join the battle.

[Via Pharyngula]

Those brave commentators and bloggers of the radical right who say that we have to employ torture to protect the American people are absolutely correct. Other nations use this technique, and it is clearly effective:

Four of the foreign health workers told Human Rights Watch that [Libyan] interrogators subjected them to electric shocks, beatings to the body with cables and wooden sticks, and beatings on the soles of their feet, in order to extract their confessions. In May, Human Rights Watch interviewed the foreign health workers in Tripoli’s Jadida prison.

“I confessed during torture with electricity. They put small wires on my toes and on my thumbs. Sometimes they put one on my thumb and another on either my tongue, neck or ear,” Valentina Siropulo, one of the Bulgarian defendants, told Human Rights Watch. “They had two kinds of machines, one with a crank and one with buttons.”

Another Bulgarian defendant, Kristiana Valceva, said interrogators used a small machine with cables and a handle that produced electricity.

“During the shocks and torture they asked me where the AIDS came from and what is your role,” she told Human Rights Watch. She said that Libyan interrogators subjected her to electric shocks on her breasts and genitals.

“My confession was all in Arabic without translation,” she said. “We were ready to sign anything just to stop the torture.”

The Libyans, the North Koreans, the regime of former Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein — all knew clearly the value of torture for extracting intelligence or confessions, and all used it to do what had to be done in the defense of their homelands. Congress should stop dithering and give President Bush what he needs to protect our precious, innocent children from the ravening monsters that threaten our lives, our homes, and our very way of life. Future generations will fall to their knees in gratitude for the bravery and foresight of George W. Bush and his administration, and for the President’s tireless efforts to viciously protect and preserve the very soul and essence of what America stands for.

[Opprobrious hat tip to Respectful Insolence]