Okay.

Michelle Malkin changed my mind. I was wrong. Racial profiling is really great! It will totally stop terrorist attacks!

Not only does it really, really work...

Essentially, police were stopping more African-Americans than Caucasians but finding fewer criminals among the former. Why? Not because blacks commit proportionately fewer crimes than whites do (the data vary according to the type of crime and other factors) but because police were looking at the wrong factors when they stopped people, Harris says.

But really it's so obviously the only solution to the problem of terrorism, because there have never been white, female (no, not female, never female, terrorists are never white females,), Christian terrorists. No, they are all Arab and Muslim and male.

There are no crazy Christian groups causing havoc in the world today, let alone in the United States.

No, all terrorists hell-bent on destroying our government are Arab foreigners.

All of them.

(Whew. Thank the gods for Wikipedia!)

Reason 3,241 Why Racial Profiling is a Bad Idea

Because freaked-out white people can't tell their brown people apart.

LONDON - A Brazilian shot to death a day after botched bombings in London had walked casually onto a train before being gunned down by undercover officers, according to leaked footage that appeared to contradict earlier police reports that said the man disobeyed police orders.

...A man sitting opposite Menezes saw a man boarding and firing his first shot from a handgun at the Brazilian's head from 12 inches away, according to the report obtained by ITV.

The report also said that, while Menezes was shot eight times, three other bullets were fired but missed.

Emphasis mine.

Not that I can't say that after a terrorist attack by Norweigans, I wouldn't freak out when approached by, say, a Swede, but that's why I'm not an armed police officer.

Jeeze, they shot at him 11 times from 12 inches away! Even if he was guilty of something, in a free society under the rule of law the police do not shoot criminals in the face at point-blank range in front of the commuting public.

As I'm writing this I realize I honestly don't know if this is more of a case of racial profiling gone wrong or just fatally overzealous police work. I don't know which is worse. Would it be less offensive if they had peaceably arrested him (well, he wouldn't be dead so obviously that would be a better outcome...but it would still be offensive, I think...), or if an actually Arab guy had been shot at 11 times from 12 inches away?

I don't know. But either way it is fucked up and shouldn't have happened.

Somebody hire me.

Isn't there some sort of job out there I could get that didn't involve
typing all day?

Isn't there?

Party Pics!

So I finally uploaded the pictures from Timmy's Welcome Back Party. Take a look!

Support our Troops

By sending other people's children to save your own ass!

Over at This Modern World there are two excellent posts ("Support the Troops," and "From the Mailbag") about the hypocrisy of 'supporting the troops' as long as the troops are a faceless idealized mass comprised of no one you know.

The gall of this particular woman, speaking from within her flag-draped halls, drooling over the sight of a uniform, really gets to me.

It was a large home in a well-to-do suburb north of the city. Two American flags adorned the yard. The prospect's mom greeted him wearing an American flag T-shirt.

"I want you to know we support you," she gushed.

Rivera soon reached the limits of her support.

"Military service isn't for our son. It isn't for our kind of people," she told him.

Her kind of people? And exactly what kind of people are her kind of people?

As someone with a family member (my brother-in-law) in the army right now, and scheduled to go to Afghanistan sometime next year, this sort of thing really gets to me. When you see those be-magneted cars (and Tom is right on the money pointing out how insincerely impermanent a magnet is...)you have to wonder. How is that supporting the troops, and, say, Cindy Sheehan trying to get Bush to answer for his deliberate misdirection not supporting the troops?

How is putting a magnet on your car more supportive of the people being sent to die than demanding the government not send them to die for no good reason?

It seems to me the right in this country has a much harder time supporting the troops than the left. If you take supporting the troops to mean more than just saying that phrase. For instance, halfway through Fahrenheit 9/11 I was struck by the fact that this was the most 'pro-troop' piece of media I had seen since the war started.

The best parts of that film illustrated what's going on with the military in this country. The people who are the most screwed by the American way of life are the ones going to defend it, either out of a hope of making a difference (as the boy in the letter to Tom Tomorrow felt,) or because economic realities leave them little choice in terms of a career (as the kids of Flint, MI discovered in Fahrenheit 9/11).

They do it so the flag-wearing suburbanite women of the America can shoo away military recruiters while muttering 'not for my kind of people' under her breath.

Well, she's right. The military is not for coward, hypocrite assholes like her kind of people.

Support our troops

With hatred and homophobia!

A fringe Kansas church that claims Americans soldiers deserve to die in Iraq because the church was the target of a bombing attempt plans to demonstrate at the funeral of a Moorhead soldier.

Sgt. Bryan Opskar was killed on July 23 when a roadside bomb exploded. A military spokesman says the 32-year-old Marine was conducting combat operations near Ar Rutbah, Iraq.

Ten members of the Westboro Baptist Church (WBC) of Topeka, Kansas, plan to picket for 30 minutes before Opskar's funeral in Moorhead on Tuesday, said Shirley Phelps-Roper, church attorney and daughter of church minister Fred Phelps.

Fred Phelps...possibly the only person in America who's a bigger ass than Ann Coulter. I don't really even understand why they're protesting this person's funeral...they're not even gay.

It seems to me this is the natural conclusion of the whole 'Support the Troops' thing. Turn the 'troops' into one big idealized blob of freedom-spreading automatons and it's okay to use them as a platform to complain about slights against you, or to ignore the fact that they're going crazy and torturing people cooped up in a little jail or that they just wanted money for college and now they're fighting for their lives...and so forth.

Support the troops? How are you doing that, exactly, with those little yellow magnets on your giant gas guzzling SUV?

Via Sisyphus Shrugged.

RIP

HAVANA - Ibrahim Ferrer, a leading voice with the hugely popular Buena Vista Social Club of vintage Cuban performers, died Saturday, his representative in Cuba said. He was 78.

This guy was a serious badass. He even has a cool birth story.

Originally from Cuba's eastern city of Santiago, Ferrer was born on Feb. 20, 1927, during a dance at a social club after his mother unexpectedly went into labor.

Seriously. Born in a social club in Cuba in the twenties. What a great start to a great life.

Lookit me, I'm still alive!

The value of human life...

Last week, terrorist cowards set off 3 bombs in London, killing over 50 innocent people who committed the crime of going about their day. They did so in defiance of the teachings of their religion and against general human decency.

The worldwide response was (rightly) immediate shock, horror, and sympathy with the people of London.

Yesterday, a terrorist coward set off a suicide bomb south of Baghdad, killing over 98 people who were committing the crime of going about their day. The murderers did so in defiance of the teachings of their religion and general human decency.

The response? Well, unless I missed it, I don't think CNN made a flashy graphic or anything.

So it seems 100 Iraqi civillians are not worth as much as about half as many Londoners.

What is it about human nature that makes us value some lives more than others? I guess that's evolution, something about apes that share one group of genes stick together against apes with another group of genes. It is kind of sad that we still stick to this behaivor when the chips are down.

Well, anyway, here's my show of solidarity with the Iraqis that sufferred the same fate as the Londoners. Take it as you will.

Happy Birthday America

Such as it is.

Friday Cat Blogging

Ah, yes, I too have cute kitties.



Little Charlie takes a nap by the window. He's such a ham.



Excuse me, I have to dust off my Precious Moments figurines with an old tea cozy.

Holy Christ

Maybe I'm naive. But the stories of children aged 13 to 15 being detained in Guantanamo Bay to be horrifying.

Guantanamo officials released three Afghan boys ages 13 to 15 last year, but the transcripts of the hearings to determine whether prisoners were correctly classified as "enemy combatants" verify they weren't the only teenagers at the prison camp.

Although the U.S. government blacked out most ages from the documents, some remained, including the story of an 18-year-old who said he had been at Guantanamo for two years.

Seriously, do these kids sound like threats to America?

"My infant cousin was born. We had a party. We were playing the drums. We were having fun. When they came they broke the tapes, they broke the drums, they took me to jail, they beat me with a cable then they put salt in it — my wounds," he told the tribunal.

In many parts of Afghanistan, the Taliban regime prohibited music and dancing, imposing a strict form of Islam. They also forced children into religious schools to study the Quran.

Another young prisoner accused of links to an al-Qaida explosives cell said the Taliban came to his village and forced people to work or undergo training.

"At that time I had no beard or facial hair. They told me I was too young to go to war," the detainee testified. "They wanted to train me and then work with them."

The Taliban sent him to a technical school where he received two days of training, but he said "When I returned home after the second day, my mother told me not to go back to the Taliban school because I had no father or older brothers."

The prisoner said he hid from the Taliban each day so he didn't have to go to school. The Taliban stopped looking for him after the Sept. 11 terror attacks, but he was then captured by the Americans, who he claimed abused him.

In the United States, children aged 13 to 15 are not allowed to get a job at McDonalds. In Afghanistan, they are beaten until they join the army, then they are beaten when captured by Americans.

Maybe a crap girly director will make a reactionary schlock-fest movie called Thirteen: Afghanistan.

I'll give you three guesses...

So here's a story that would have astonished me three or four years ago.

BOSTON - On April 25, Gregory Despres arrived at the U.S.-Canadian border crossing at Calais, Maine, carrying a homemade sword, a hatchet, a knife, brass knuckles and a chain saw stained with what appeared to be blood. U.S. customs agents confiscated the weapons and fingerprinted Despres. Then they let him into the United States.

The following day, a gruesome scene was discovered in Despres' hometown of Minto, New Brunswick: The decapitated body of a 74-year-old country musician named Frederick Fulton was found on Fulton's kitchen floor. His head was in a pillowcase under a kitchen table. His common-law wife was discovered stabbed to death in a bedroom.

...At a time when the United States is tightening its borders, how could a man toting what appeared to be a bloody chain saw be allowed into the country?

Because his name wasn't Ahmed Hussein?

Just a guess.

Let me tell you two stories.

One man tries to cross the US-Canadian border (into Canada, I might add) after a family vacation. He hasn't done anything suspicious on the flight, and is not carrying anything dangerous or illegal. He has committed the crime of knowing someone who may or may not be a terrorist back in 1997. He is sent to Syria to be systematically tortured for months.

Another man attempts to cross the US-Canadian border, into the US, covered in blood and carrying several blood-covered weapons. He has just brutally murdered an old man and his wife. He is sent along his way.

Jeeze.

Don't get me wrong, I don't doubt that if this guy were say, a black guy in a nice car drenched in blood and carrying a chain saw driving around in LA his story might have had a different outcome as well.

I just don't buy the reason given by U.S. Customs and Border Protection, honestly.

Bill Anthony, a spokesman for U.S. Customs and Border Protection, said the Canada-born Despres could not be detained because he is a naturalized U.S. citizen and was not wanted on any criminal charges on the day in question.

Anthony said Despres was questioned for two hours before he was released. During that time, he said, customs agents employed "every conceivable method" to check for warrants or see if Despres had broken any laws in trying to re-enter the country.

"Nobody asked us to detain him," Anthony said. "Being bizarre is not a reason to keep somebody out of this country or lock them up. ... We are governed by laws and regulations, and he did not violate any regulations."

What regulation did Maher Arar violate?

How well do you know all of your acquaintances? Can you be so sure that the brother of someone you know casually, maybe who did a favor for you and witnessed the signing of your lease when you were in a pinch, isn't a wanted terrorist? Should you do an in-depth background check on everyone you know?

Sigh. I am depressed.

So I've been too depressed to blog lately...

There, I said it.