The NFL All-Criminal Team

Now that's good blogging. From Ace.

Ollie and the Skyflower

Ollie and the Skyflower
Originally uploaded by Uncle Mikey.

My wife snapped a piece of a flowering plant off outside of the southernmost Threadgill's in Austin and stuck it in the ground in our back yard a couple of years ago. Now it's five feet tall, four feet across, and covered with sprays of small, sweetly fragrant white flowers. They're purple at Threadgill's, but the soil here is more limestoney so we get white ones. It's called a Skyflower and we love it.

Magically Delicious

As much I appreciate the zaniness at the Huffington Post, Huffington's Toast is much funnier and way more entertaining. Allah's involved, so you know it's good stuff.

6/11/05: Austin's World Naked Bike Ride

The horror. It's "a bike ride protesting oil dependency." And why naked?

Because we feel we are naked before the traffic owing to the drivers’ lack of respect and the apathy of our rulers. Thus we make it visible that our bodywork is fragile. Moreover, we show our body naturally, not feeling ashamed, toppling taboos regarding our physical appearance which are imposed by fashion and the greediness of the textile transnational industry. To sum up, we face urban traffic with our naked body on our bikes as the best way of defending our dignity and of living the social struggle.

So that's the BEST way. Gotcha.

Prepare to Be Enraged

Jeff Jarvis is mightily pissed, and so will you be when you read this. Ground Zero is being turned into a "Why They Hate Us Pavillion" and we're doing it voluntarily, and paying for it. Disgusting.

HiLArious

Lead to the funniest story of the day:

FASHIONABLE wristbands worn by pop stars, actors, top athletes and celebrities to publicise the Make Poverty History campaign are produced in appalling "slave labour" conditions, damning evidence has revealed.

What kind of a moron would believe wearing a wristband changes anything for anyone in any charitable or altruistic way? At least the LiveStrong bracelet money goes to charity. Idjits.

From American Digest.

Best Star Wars III:ROTS Review to Date

From James Lileks, the review I wish I had written. He's easier on it than I am, but it's very good. Neither of us complained enough about the battle with the Wookies, though: they dig trenches and then stand in front of them, with crossbows? Please.

Even Cooler

One of the best blog posts ever, Beautiful Atrocities' Root Causes of Terrorism Timeline. Too awesome for words.

Way Too Cool

Watch what Dave at Garfield Ridge has for us today. Good stuff.

Sally Quinn Drops a Daisy Cutter

Rogers Cadenhead posts a fine piece on Sally Quinn's revelation of alleged sexual assault by late Republican senator John Tower. Quinn writes that "Tower, who was a friend of my father, had attempted to sexually assault me when I was 18 and a college freshman. Embarrassed and ashamed, I had kept this story a closely guarded secret for years." Rogers digs deeper:

Tower, who died in a 1991 plane crash, had a reputation as a drunken womanizer that helped defeat his nomination by the first President Bush to be Defense Secretary -- the first Cabinet choice rejected by the Senate in 30 years.

Tower's never been accused of attempted rape before, based on my search of news accounts. When his treatment of women was scrutinized during the 1989 confirmation process, the public only heard about Benny Hill-style shenanigans like chasing a secretary around a desk. In 1998, Washington Times columnist Suzanne Fields even wrote that he was rejected "because he was seen putting a hand on the knee of a woman under the table at a restaurant."

And I love this bit:

The Senate has had its share of notorious horndogs in recent decades, including Bob Packwood, Strom Thurmond, Gary Hart, and Ted Kennedy. Tower once said of Thurmond, imagining his future funeral, "they'll have to beat his pecker down with a baseball bat to close the coffin lid."

I'm not a fan of decades-later revelations about improper behavior by dead people. Quinn may be entirely justified, but it's impossible to rebut such a claim now, and the ones who suffer are family members and friends, not the accused. And what does "attempted to sexually assault" mean, exactly? If what I gather from movies of the era is at all accurate, men of Tower's generation were a little more forceful about expressing their affections. That certainly doesn't make it OK to rape people, but misinterpreting sexual signals doesn't necessarily mean sexual assault. How many times have you seen a woman in a '40s, '50s or '60s film slap a man who tries to kiss her, only to melt into his arms seconds later when he forces her to do it anyway? Creepy as hell, but apparently common enough to make movies about it. Hell, even The Graduate communicated a clear message that if you just stalk your beloved long enough, she'll come around.

I never had a problem with Bill Clinton being a horndog, I just didn't like that he wasted our time, and especially his, with it. I would have been perfectly happy if he had brought in a sixpack of whores every Thursday and shipped them out Monday, I just didn't want to hear about him fondling civilians. JFK found a way to do it with class, why can't anyone else?

Whoa That's Nutty

I want to believe there's some method to this madness, but outside of making Hillary seem sane by comparison, I can't figure it out.

Link from Instapundit, who I haven't been reading much lately because I'm lazy and can't get excited about hard news lately. Plus I'm pretty busy, so I spend most of my time on the internet looking at gossip and trash. That makes sense, right? Look at me, I'm crazier than Howard Dean.

Rock On Rock

Rock On 9
Originally uploaded by Uncle Mikey.

From Double Viking, a neat site by Bill Dan about rock balancing. Very cool.

Amen, Brother pt. 2

Gerard at American Digest is right: lots of good Christian sentiment in news about the War on Terror. But not much for our guys, or our holy book, or even Christianity in general. Oh well.

Oh, THAT Liberal Media

Disgusting.

The Least You Can Do on the 61st Anniversary of D-Day

Into the Jaws of Death.jpg
Originally uploaded by Uncle Mikey.

Is read this, an excerpt from S.L.A. Marshall's "First Wave at Omaha Beach" in the November 1960 edition of The Atlantic (subscription/registration required). It's horrifying, heartbreaking and your duty as a citizen of the world.

Then check out this site, a collection of D-Day memories by the BBC. An excellent source of first-person stuff.

And take a look at this Civil Defense manual from WWII, posted by Lileks. Soldiers weren't the only ones who gave to the war effort.

Finally, take a look at what our current crop of heroes is doing in their spare time. They're right, their voices are the only ones not being heard on the War on Terrorism. And that's a terrible thing.

Revenge of the Shite

I saw Star Wars III:ROTS last week, and at first I thought it was pretty decent. The dialogue sucks, as just about everyone else has pointed out, and everything happens too fast to be believable. But at least it wasn't full of muppets or Jar-Jar Binkses, and it is pretty tragic. So I told myself it was worth the time and money.

But last night I saw Hero with Jet Li, and it was so much more interesting, more beautiful, and above all more believable (even though people could fly and do amazing ninja tricks), that it makes SW seem like a high school production with great CGI. I'm kind of embarrassed for George Lucas, who has once again squandered a fantastic opportunity for writing and acting talent, and doesn't seem to care.

I'm thinking of watching Hero again tonight, that's how much I liked it. Lucas, you're an idiot.

UPDATE, FIVE MINUTES LATER: I can't believe I forgot the parts I hated the most: why do they insist on having giant battle cruisers get ten feet apart before they shoot laser beams at each other? That first space battle was idiotic and totally unrealistic. And what's with all the punching and kicking the Jedi do, or even swordfighting? They can just knock each other around with mind power, why not do that? I hate all the punching and kicking in Star Wars, the Matrix, and everywhere else there are better alternatives. It's stupid.

I know, I know. It looks cool. But it ruins the movie for me, just as fighting huge space battles close enough to a planet that its gravity is a factor does, or big fiery explosions in a vacuum. None of it makes a bit of sense.

There is No God

Because if there were, he/she/it wouldn't allow this.

From Double Viking.

Sunny Smile

Sunny smile
Originally uploaded by hailun.

I use Flickr as a free picture host, and on Flickr you can see a lot of other people's pictures. One of my favorite photo artists is a young woman from Montreal named Hailun, or maybe Helen, as some of her commenters call her that. Or maybe Helen is the Canada-ized version of Hailun. Either way, she takes unbelievably beautiful pictures, which can be seen here.

I hope she doesn't mind me posting this pic, I probably should have asked permission. It was hard to choose just one from her gorgeous portfolio, but I especially liked this one.

Hailun, you are one artistic chick. Keep 'em coming.

Amnesty International: What a Poobasket

Varifrank gives us some perspective on where the US stands in terms of prison cruelty compared to other nations. A good read.

And on the topic of gulags, he makes the distinction between reality and the ravings of Amnesty International employees clear. Is there any doubt about the difference between the real Gulag system and what is going on at Guantanamo?

If so, here's John Podhoretz (registration required, I've reprinted most of it but if you want the rest use bugmenot.com) on some differences between the two:

So let's do a few comparisons between Gitmo and the Gulag — the network of Soviet prison camps set up by Stalin in the 1920s.

Number of prisoners at Gitmo: approximately 600.

Number of prisoners in the Gulag: as many as 25 million, according to the peerless Gulag historian Anne Applebaum.

Number of camps at Gitmo: 1

Number of camps in the Gulag: At least 476, according to Applebaum.

Political purpose of Gulag: The suppression of internal dissent inside a totalitarian state.

Political purpose of Gitmo: The suppression of an international terrorist group that had attacked the United States, killing 3,000 people while attempting to decapitate the national government through the hijack of airplanes.

Financial purpose of Gulag: Providing totalitarian economy with millions of slave laborers.

Financial purpose of Gitmo: None.

Seizure of Gulag prisoners: From apartments, homes, street corners inside the Soviet Union.

Seizure of Gitmo prisoners: From battlefield sites in Afghanistan in the midst of war.

Interestingly enough, even the most damaging charge Amnesty International levels against the United States and its conduct at Gitmo — that our government has been guilty of "entrenching the practice of arbitrary and indefinite detention in violation of international law" — bears no relation to the way things worked when it came to the Gulag. Soviet prisoners were charged, tried and convicted in courts of law according to the Soviet legal code.

For this reason, Gulag prisoners like Vladimir Bukovsky and Anatoly Shcharansky (later Natan Sharansky) were able to gum up the Soviet legal works by using the letter of Soviet law against their captors and tormentors.

The problem with the Gulag wasn't that the letter of the law wasn't followed — that the prisoners were given "arbitrary and indefinite" sentences. It's that the charges were trumped up and confessions were coerced.

The situation at Gitmo is entirely different. No one argues that, at the very least, the vast majority of those imprisoned there were, in fact, al Qaeda personnel. The problem, according to those who scream about the unfairness at Gitmo, is that the prisoners aren't being treated as lawful combatants under the terms of the Geneva Convention or as prisoners of war.

They have been handled under special terms because they are stateless — because they granted their allegiance not to a country but to a terrorist group and because their nations of origin wouldn't have wanted them back, would have killed them if they had been returned there or would have foolishly released them to foment further terrorist activity.

The people who work at Amnesty International surely know something of the history of the Gulag. After all, the group was founded in part to serve as a watchdog of Communist human-rights abuse. They surely know that even though they might consider the American camp at Guantanamo Bay a terrible violation of human rights, it is a speck on a speck of a mote of dust compared to the Everest of horror that was the Soviet Gulag.

On the other hand, maybe not. Maybe the people who work at Amnesty International really do think that the imprisonment of 600 certain or suspected terrorists is tantamount to the imprisonment of 25 million slaves.

The case of Amnesty International proves that well-meaning people can make morality their life's work and still be little more than moral idiots.

On the contrary, well-meaning people are often the most dangerous and burdensome among us. There's nothing worse than a crusader with too little information.

I'm As Happy As a Little Girl

Anni's got a secret
Originally uploaded by Uncle Mikey.

That I'm going to see Star Wars III: Revenge of the Sith today, in less than an hour. I didn't realize it, but I've been waiting for this movie for almost 30 years. My buddy Shay J. saw it last week and is going with me, I imagine I'll see it in the theater a couple of times at least. Rock on Darth Pissy!

On this Date, 33 Years Ago

Pejman was born.

Good Advice

James Lileks' Bleat is always good, but today's has something great. His daughter's school is having a party, and he joins a conversation with fellow parents:

One mom was talking about trying to get a niece to attend the U of W at Madison. What field of study? I inquired. Journalism.

Oh. Hmm. Well – what sort? Print? You know, I’d advise against it. Better to take English classes, learn how to write, then write a lot. It’s not a profession that requires four years of college, let alone a master’s degree.

They looked at me with a certain amount of amused confusion, so I said, apologetically, that was I was actually in the business, and degrees mattered less than clips and skill. J-school taught you how to teach J-school. How to go to think tanks and peer down your nose at the messy scrum of daily papers. Not to say it was a waste of time, heavens no. But journalism per se can be mastered quite quickly, and if it can’t, you don’t have it. If you regard “journalism” to mean “colorful writing that yearns to be recognized by awards committees for its sensitive yet tough portrayal of the life of a 14 year old meth addict,” then English is still the way to go. I look back at the classic papers of the 30s in this town, and marvel; the authors weren’t college men, I suspect, but had the requisite instincts and judgments to make the front page irresistible. You can hone judgment, but you can’t teach instinct. The first question in any J-school application ought to be “do you want to change the world?” And anyone who answers yes gets kindly turned away. Your job is to describe the way the world changes. Not pretend you’re there to nudge it along towards utopia.

If only that last part was enforced we'd be served far better by our news media. Wanting to change the world is exactly what's wrong with the American, and international, press.

Best Blog Post Title Ever

IN THE FUTURE, EVERYONE WILL BE HITLER FOR 15 MINUTES

And it's an excellent post, too, as are all Beautiful Atrocities posts even though I'm not always interested in international pop stars or Libyan creepy weirdos.

Slippery Slope

Gerard at American Digest is on the edge of disaster. Glad to hear he's OK; at least it's not fire this time.

Star Wars Fever

I'm going to see Star Wars ROTS tomorrow, and I'm like way excited and stuff. Especially after reading a couple of reviews, one from Emerald Bile here and another that Brian from Peeve Farm found here, which is hilarious even though it's full of spoilers.

My friend Shay J. saw it last week and is going with me to see it again, either because it's so good or because he's a Star Wars freak. Since he has one of those fancy new lightsabers that make cool noises, it's probably the latter, but it might just be both. As long as there are no muppets, I'll be happy.