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Passionate Apathy - by Francis

Dangerous Mouse

June 2nd 2007 23:03
Everyone was so surprised to find that Hamas had been doing what all political/religious groups have committed throughout history: Indoctrinating the young. Of course, in the case of Farfur the Friendly Vermin I guess a lot of people were genuinely surprised that anyone would knowingly risk the wrath of the Mouse's lawyers.

For me the punch line in the whole mess wasn't that a cute, cuddly children's television mascot was being used to teach hatred and intolerance- what isn't used to promote or justify hatred in the Middle East? My own personal risibles were tickled by the fact that Hamas isn't solely engaged against Israel/the West/Infidels/(Your Group Here), but they are also struggling against another political party, Fatah. (Not that I enjoy death and suffering for their own sake, but really, some of the half-assed excuses we half-evolved apes make up for murdering each other are so bizarre that one can't help but to laugh... or cry... or heavily self-medicate...)


Hamas and Fatah are handling their disagreements in the traditional Middle East manner, so no doubt some of the rugrats being brainwashed educated and enlightened by Hamas will be blowing themselves up to kill Fatah and their supporters... and anyone else who happened to go to the market that day...

Now before anyone starts I am NOT trying to imply that anyone in the Middle East has any sort of monopoly on this sort of bait-and-switchery. I've seen quite a number of radical Christian types here doing things that Jesus expressly condemned in that blog He used to do a couple of millennia ago. I just wonder how long it will take The Powers That Blind to ease the kiddies from targeting Israelis to being willing to kill their neighbors who just happen to be Fatah instead of Hamas.


F- A- Rrrrrr " 'R' we martyrs yet?"

F- U- Rrrrrr " 'U' 'R' going to burn, infidel!!"

M- O- U- S- Eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee eee!!!
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Deja Vu All Over Again

May 2nd 2007 23:26
There actually was some news this morning beyond the demonstrators demanding that immigration laws shouldn't apply to people entering the country. Israel's government issued a report on the debacle war between Israel and Lebanon last year.

In short: The war was a bad idea, poorly planned out and failed to reach the unobtainable goals. This is a very generous understatement: While the Israeli army tried to bomb Hezbollah out of Lebanon, the result of the war was that Hezbollah came out more respected and stronger than they were a year ago.

This is often the case with unwise and poorly-planned wars. Just because you bomb the living shit out of a country doesn't guarantee that the "collateral damage" will blame the folks you meant to bomb.

At least Israel stopped short of completely destroying the Lebanese government and armed forces. History (you know, that thing our so-called "leaders" tend to fail to learn anything from) has shown that when you do that, then all kinds of unsavory elements can creep in.

Still, Israel did enough damage to make Hezbollah a major political power in Lebanon for years to come. Sometimes it's comforting to realize that our own country doesn't have a monopoly on ass-backwards leadership.
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Manifest D'oh!

May 2nd 2007 00:18
After the tragedy at Virginia Tech, the news was full of (your punchline here!) Cho Seung-Hui's so-called "manifesto." We heard his words of alienation and anguish, and developed a much higher respect for all the grunge-rock garage-band wannabes who were much better poets. We saw him posing with his guns (and of course the inevitable arguments that gun laws and/or everyone packing heat could have prevented the massacre), and generally abusing his fifteen minutes of fame.

How many essays or poems of the victims were read on the news? The news channels were obsessed with Cho, not even considering that the far more mentally stable victims may have had even more worthwhile insights into life, the human condition and man's separation from his fellow man.

I don't doubt that Cho's rantings may even be valuable to students of abnormal psychology. I do doubt the "service" to the general public to repeatedly play up his pale rationalizations for mass murder. The fact that Cho wanted this crap to be broadcast should have been reason enough for cooler heads to keep it off the air... or at least to not give the psycho killer such over-the-top posthumous notoriety that he was gunning for.
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Imus Be Dreaming

April 11th 2007 23:34
Stop the presses!! A veritable army of media hounds have converged on the latest Story of the Day- that one story that dominates every newscast, that the whole industry is holding under a tunneling-electron microscope.

The story today (and tomorrow, and tomorrow...) is that a radio shock jock actually said something stupid and offensive. And in other breaking news, the Sun is hot


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Dumbed to Repeat It

April 10th 2007 23:27
President Bush has been giving speeches in which he tries a different tactic to excuse his Iraq fiasco: He pointed out how after World War II we kept troops in Germany and Japan, and look! Now those former enemies are friendly allies and trading partners and so forth.

Of course, fifty years ago Germany and Japan were both eager to get their economy rebuilt- there was no civil war, and no 'insurgents' destroying the rebuilding efforts. It also helped that the Administration of long past actually had a plan for what to do after the war (Google "Marshall Plan


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The Naked, Smoking Gun

April 5th 2007 23:36
Hirings and firings go on all the time in any large company. When eight U.S. Attorneys were let go by the Justice Department, there was no reason to expect anything untoward there- except, of course, the e-mails that were saved detailing how the White House wanted to get rid of them for political, rather than professional, reasons.

The one question not even Congress has yet brought up is that why are the top people at the Justice Department so insanely incompetent/clueless? Do they truly have no concept of what "evidence" is? "Yeah, lets keep these e-mails that show the attorneys were fired for being insufficiently Republican- no way they can come around and bite us..."
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Tug of War

April 3rd 2007 23:46
President Bush is still trying to get used to the fact that his old lapdog Congress has been voted out. The new Congress is blowing his mind with their new-fangled "checks and balances" on his Presidential powers. The latest audacity is that they want to actually attach accountability for the war funds they're still approving.

Bush has of course already promised to veto any bill that doesn't give him his way all the way. This morning on CNN I saw him castigating Congress, talking about how the troops will suffer if they don't get funded. Now while the President has every right to veto legislation Karl Rove he doesn't like, he's getting too weaselly in blaming Congress: They did send him a war-spending bill, but Bush vetoed it


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How Green?

March 13th 2007 23:46
The Free Market is the holy grail of conservatives, the one magic bullet that will cure all ills. The free market will get manufacturers to keep dioxin out of our drinking water, will get big business to treat their employees fairly and humanely, and will even prevent price-gouging by suppliers. Odd, then, that conservatives are so adamant in demanding that the free market should never ever EVER be applied to the one arena where it's most likely to do some good.

Growing marijuana is no difficulty- even stoners can manage that level of effort (Okay, so keeping one's weed patch hidden is the real trick!). Cocaine has to be refined from the raw coca leaves, but the cost of doing that is nowhere remotely near the insane markup the blow gets when it hits our streets and high schools. The same goes for all illegal drugs; the cost is orders of magnitude higher than the actual production would require


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Let's Do the Time Warp Again!!

March 12th 2007 23:31
Once upon a time, Congress was in session. They evidently had a lot of time on their hands back then, too, because they came up with this insane idea that everyone should reset all their clocks twice a year. Ironically, they got the idea from Ben Franklin, arguably the most intelligent person ever associated with the Federal Government.

Okay, so there was a sort of logic to it: A century ago a largish fraction of the population worked on farms, and the shift was supposed to let people work in the daylight- though farmers ploughing their fields and watching the back ends of their pack animals probably didn't appreciate the clearer view they got in the morning Sun


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The Second Law

March 11th 2007 01:00
The idea of getting something for nothing has always fascinated mankind. The dream of 100% profit has inspired stories in every culture- as well as the current U.S. Federal budget. In the real world, though, there's a little detail called the Second Law of Thermodynamics. Depending on the context it's usually translated into English as "There ain't no such thing as a free lunch," or "Things fall apart; the center cannot hold."

President Bush went to Brazil to sign a deal on ethanol production. Ethanol is one of the alternatives to petroleum-based fuels that our so-called "leaders" started looking at merely three-plus decades after the Oil Embargo of the 70's demonstrated how fragile that rung of our economy was. As a fuel, ethanol has enormous potential


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