Sadly, No!

Over at everyone’s favorite clearinghouse for wingnut excellence, Melana Zyla Vickers writes:

“Hundreds…faced detention, torture or ill-treatment, and up to three year’s imprisonment in appalling conditions. Prisoners reportedly died from malnutrition in labor camps … and in detention centers, which were severely overcrowded. … About 70 had been executed in public in January after being forcibly repatriated.”

Pretty horrible stuff. Too bad it’s nowhere near the top of Amnesty International‘s new annual report. Why isn’t it? Because it’s not about the 480-odd detainees in Guantanamo Bay or about the U.S. military, but rather about a Communist country, North Korea.

You know to expect lots of wingnutty goodness based on the fact that ZV links not to AI’s report (available here), but instead to AI’s site. Given her dubious quoting skills, that seems to have been a wise decision. Consider for example the line: “About 70 had been executed in public in January after being forcibly repatriated” which leads her to write: Read the rest of this entry »

A lot of people were killed:

But they’ll celebrate, as I do, the Greatest Generation. The one that interned Japanese, nuked Hiroshima and Nagasaki (toddlers are dead, people), firebombed Dresden and Tokyo, invented the flamethrower, Napalm, White Phosphorous, and various and sundry other horrific ways to kill people.

We correctly laud these things as having been necessary in order to protect our United States, but, the fact is, each of these killled many civilians. And we sanctioned it, and have accepted it for decades.

Yes, let us praise the internment of the Japanese and the killing of countless civilians — no regrets Jeans, it’s what all the cool conservatives are wearing nowadays.

We’ve heard from a couple of people about our feed no longer updating in Bloglines. This should be ok now, Captain .htaccess has come to our rescue.

Lileks has been reading The Da Vinci Code. The result is much as you’d expect: straw manufacturing, witless sarcasm, wankery, unintended irony. It’s typical Lileks, and starts in the typical way.

There’s the veneer of good ol’ Midwestern suburban manners, very aww-shucksy. Yet something’s too pinched about it, and as is par for the Bleat course, after some references to the kids and a bit of wistful, nostalgic study over a pop-culture relic of better days — back when whitebread was whitebread and the broads knew their place and the style was so atomic baby — Ol’ Jimbo gets down to business, which means that passive becomes aggressive and the okey-dopey Fred Rogers of Minnesota tears at his cardigan, bites the cork off a bottle of rot-gut and focuses his rage on those fucking hippies:

Read the rest of this entry »

I’m just going to briefly sum up the latest, here. And rumor has it that Retardo is coming back all pumped and mean from one of his mysterious sojourns, still wearing one of Josh Trevino’s incisors on his bola tie from the last little scrap he had.

From Patrick Bell, who was on a crime spree of outing anonymous bloggers last week:

Perspective

My trip was most refreshing, and I’ve come back with what I think is a fresh perspective. I must admit, Seattle wears on a person — and so does spending too much time sparring with Leftist attack blogs.

My last edition of “Leftist of the Week”, which featured “Clif” from “Outsidethetent.com” may have gone too far, as perhaps did my comments on his blog. Attacking someone on the web (whether outing them, or excoriating them with snarky ad hominem attacks) is not only distasteful, it is also a complete waste of time.

Such behavior only breeds more contempt and distrust along the political spectrum. I have come to the supreme realization that some blogs are entirely focused on wasting people’s time, and destroying reputations by any means possible; that is not what we want to accomplish with this blog.

Grudge over; everyone wins. Yay!

However, it’s a bit like playing whack-a-mole over here, because some punk-ass outed Theristes, who’s the guy at BlogIntegrity who was following the Bell story. Next, everybody’s pal Jeff Goldstein chimes in with a bwaa-ha-haa, and as usual things go completely off the rails with people threatening Theristes, his wife NY Mary, and their children.

Now, if we’re a blog ‘entirely focused on wasting people’s time, and destroying reputations by any means possible,’ it’s high time to live up to some kind of standard.

Please check out this BlogIntegrity post if you haven’t already. That post got someone outed and had their children threatened. [UPDATE: The story’s more complex than this; more later.] The sound you hear is sawing and hammering in the basement, as we work on what to do next.

[Double-update: Well. Goldstein, signator of the right-blogosphere’s famous Online Integrity Pledge, just outed Theristes and his wife as well, in his comments.

Okay, that’s it. I’ve had it.

Until [redacted] and [redacted] of [redacted] College in [redacted] prove that one of my commenters made this comment about their kid—or else explain to their own commenters that coming over here and trying to tar my site with this offense is very bad form and will no longer be tolerated—[redacted and redacted of redacted in redacted] can kiss my ass. From the annex where they teach [etc].

Say, Retardo… What do we have going on tonight? I’m checking the schedule board, and it just keeps blinking ‘Goldstein’ in huge digi-green letters…

It takes a lot for me to call someone a hero.  When I was 9, my hero was Pee Wee Herman, and let’s just say that didn’t turn out so good.  My subsequent hero selections, including O.J. Simpson, Barry Bonds and Bill O’Reilly, all turned out to be somewhat disappointing as well.  So you can understand why I’m so reluctant to label anyone “heroic” in this deeply cynical age: at best, I’ll be painfully disillusioned, and at worst, I’ll be bombarded with lurid tales of Middle Eastern foods.

That said, I think it’s time to crank up the ol’ Bette Midler record, because this guy will go down as the greatest hero in the history of the universe:

A south Toledo man is using a replica of the Statue of Liberty to let the world know his thoughts on illegal immigration.  Art Bollinger says he got this idea from an e-mail he received, and decided to duplicate the picture.

From the front, you can see the Statue of Liberty.  From behind, it shows Lady Liberty’s behind, in a thong bikini.  The nearby sign says “Kiss my American Ass.”

Read the rest of this entry »

Very stupid, if they believe crap like this:

Despite media coverage purporting to show that escalating violence in Iraq has the country spiraling out of control, civilian death statistics complied by Rep. Steve King, R-IA, indicate that Iraq actually has a lower civilian violent death rate than Washington, D.C.

Note how he’s comparing the city of Washington D.C. to the entire country of Iraq.  Not Baghdad, not Tikrit, not Fallujah, but the entire fucking country of Iraq.

I think this handy-dandy diagram capably illustrates King’s methodology:

Read the rest of this entry »

(Still testing video-embed capabilities in WordPress.)

Here, hopefully, is Robert Newman’s one-man show, ‘History of Oil,’ live at Hoxton Hall Theatre, London:

Update: And also, you ought not to miss this: http://writhesafely.wordpress.com/2006/05/28/one-foot-in-the-grave/

Mr. Smith celebrates gets ready for Memorial Day by reaching for a bottle of Colt 45:

Liberal fashion fascists have been trying to have their way with us all our lives. During school days, they arrogated to themselves the power to declare themselves “in” and all the rest of us to be “out” kids.

This kid’s got issues — good news, everyone!

The day the New York Times handed down a diktat via its “style” book that the word “normal” was officially “out” of the American language, it was obvious that the abnormal “in” crowd was up to something. And that was before Clinton established his “don’t ask, don’t tell” legacy. Stroke of the pen – law of the land. Cool.

This isn’t going to get any better. Bonus points to Mr. Smith for working in a mention of The Clenis®.

It’s impossible not to notice the full court press that the DEMs have put behind making “google” a verb in popular parlance. They own the stock, profit from the company and hope to misguide the whole world into using a search engine that only finds what DEMs wish them to see.

Don’t worry, Mr. Smith, Google can still find you!

Google me once, shame on you. But don’t imagine that in this real information age, the world “out” here is full of A**[h]OL[es].

Code that, da Vinci.

That Colt 45 is some good shit. So wank the rant of man.

Star Parker, no stranger to Sadly, No! readers, is in fine form today:

Gay agenda means less freedom for all

Giddy up!

Philosophers of science point out that there is nothing we can prove. We can only disprove things. The only thing that it takes to disprove something is to find one incident where the theory doesn’t work.

We have, for instance, a law of gravity. However, if we find one morning, while someone is eating their bowl of cheerios, that their spoon jumps out of their hand and flies up to the ceiling, we kiss goodbye to our law of gravity. [Italics added.]

Star, there are no Cheerios. Furthermore, Kaye Grogan called, she wants, her commas, back. Read the rest of this entry »