Category: humour

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Excited Delirium and Other Scurrilous Syndromes of the Police State

Have you heard about the new medical condition that causes people in police custody to suddenly die? It’s called “excited delirium” and it is exacerbated by “multiple drug toxicity”. It also, don’t you know, actually gives people “super human” strength. I’ll bet you thought that only happened in comic books!

Now, if you had a number of men who were drunk or high, and loud and abrasive, or experienced a sudden influx of superhuman strength, there are many unfortunate things that could happen to them but one of the least likely– and veritably unknown before the use of the taser– is sudden death.

But if you had an equal number of men who were tasered repeatedly by the police, then thrown to the ground, hand-cuffed, and tasered again, we know you will likely have a few deaths. In those cases, we hereby declare that the deaths are caused by contagious “excited delirium” exacerbated by “multiple drug toxicity”. The superhuman strength is of no avail in these situations.

I’ll bet that right now, if you are a cop with a taser, you are making a point of memorizing the phrase: “excited delirium” and “multiple drug toxicity”.

Some day, those words might save your career.

And I’ll bet you didn’t know that “excited delirium” is not a real condition. It was invented by the taser industry to explain those inconvenient deaths of people being tasered.

*

Lest you think I am anti-cop… I’m not. I’m only against bad policing and police cover-ups.

I just saw a documentary on Frontline about a group of cops in New Orleans called to a bridge in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina because a man was seen with a gun. Now, first of all, this IS America: what’s the problem? Oh wait– he was a black man. Okay, so the cops pull up in a rented cube van, two in the front and about eight in the back where they couldn’t see what was happening. As they are pulling up– I’m not making this up– one of the cops in the front fires a warning shot. Seriously. A warning shot. The rest of the cops in the back think there is something happening so they quickly jump out of the truck and take positions and carefully assess the situation to try to determine where the shots are coming from, how many gunman are involved, if there are any civilians in the line of fire, and how best to ensure public safety in the face of the threat.

Hoo ha! Had you! Just kidding, of course.

Actually, they jumped out of the van, guns a’blazin’, and shot wildly in all directions. Eight people were hit, two of them fatally. Fortunately, no dangerous guns were found. At least, not on the civilians.

Well. Cops are under a lot of stress, you know, what with all the bizarre super humans with excited delirium going around. My theory is that these guys on the bridge were displaying symptoms of “prescient excited delirium with multiple inactivity inversion”.

[Update: 2011-08-05. Apparently, the five officers involved have been convicted of… well, did you think they would be convicted of murder? No. They were convicted of various civil rights offenses, and covering up the shooting. They still complain bitterly that even though Ronald Madison was running away from them at the moment he was shot, he still probably would have had a gun if he could have and would have turned around fired it at police if he had been what the New Orleans police thought he was…. wait–]

Some of these links will be dead by now.  Too bad.

 

What is “excited delirium”?

I googled it.  Here’s what I found

 (in wikipedia):  Excited delirium is a condition that manifests as a combination of delirium, psychomotor agitation, anxiety, hallucinations, speech disturbances, disorientation, violent and bizarre behavior, insensitivity to pain, elevated body temperature, and superhuman strength.[1][2] Excited delirium is sometimes called excited delirium syndrome if it results in sudden death (usually via cardiac or respiratory arrest), a relatively frequent outcome particularly associated with the use of physical control measures, including police restraint and tasers.[1][2]

Shockingly, African American men seem disproportionately disposed to affliction by this medical condition.

You should read that last line carefully: death is a frequent outcome   “particularly associated with the use of physical control measures…”

How wonderful to be a short-tempered cop and have a syndrome that can be applied to anyone with the indecency to die on you during a tasering.  How wonderful for a corporation to be able to invent and sell a syndrome to explain why people die when using your product.  (Yes, a victim is “using” the product manufactured by Taser International.)

And here’s the bottom line: neither the American Medical Association nor the American Psychological Association recognize “excited delirium” as a real medical or psychological condition.  The standard authority on mental illness, the DSM (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders) does not list it.   Let the lobbying begin…  What will it take?  A big fat donation to the right “charity”?  Future employment with lavish benefits to a current panel member?  Whatever… it’s not that hard to do.

A real doctor talking about excited delirium.

If you want to believe the police on this one, that is certainly your privilege. IF you want to believe the police would not lie about the actions of the victim, or the necessity for force, or the prudent application of the taser…. I have two words for you:

Robert Dziekanski

In my humble opinion, “excited delirium” is the product of a rather distasteful collaboration between police officers and medical examiners to cover up instances of excessive force used by the police causing death.

More of Bill’s hysterical over-reactions to the use of tasers:

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George Carlin’s Wheezy Tribute

Okay, there is one thing– Stewart’s disingenuousness about the bleep. There is another, and this one really makes my blood boil.

Who the hell does the government think it is, telling me that I am not allowed to hear certain words?

The government hides behind a fig leaf or two: it will claim it never “censors”. No, it doesn’t. It merely fines violators after the fact. It asks you to simultaneous believe that the government is effective at enforcing the law, because of the fine, and that the government is ineffective at controlling free speech (because the fine is levied after the offense, it has no deterrent effect.) That’s obviously a load of hogwash and they know it.

So the networks self-censor. So a tribute to George Carlin, who became famous because he had the moral courage– yes, it was– the audacity, and the intelligence, to tell us what the seven words were, that you couldn’t say on television– so this tribute proceeds with a nod to his most famous joke, and they bleep out the words.

What was the joke? The joke, unintentionally, was on the mediocre minds who conceived of the idea of celebrating a man– now safely dead– who had nothing but contempt for their kind of minds when he was alive. The kind of minds who go, well, that’s very funny, but of course, we can’t actually say those words aloud. Then what’s funny about it? What’s funny about it is that mediocre, constricted, terminally repressed minds like yours can’t envisage a world in which people have the courage to believe anything in the first place (that isn’t first homogenized and castrated and presented to them on a platter), and, secondly, in which some kind of “authority” isn’t going around telling you what you are or are not allowed to hear.

Michelle Shocked — I just found out she is now an enthusiastic member of a Pentecostal church.

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Leadership Training

Bill’s 21 Irrefutable Rules about Leadership Trainers:

Nobody who is really busy doing real productive work has time to indulge in this kind of narcissism that they call “leadership training”.

Amazingly, the rules of leadership invariably serve the interests of the people who make the rules, and the people who sell leadership training.

Almost all people famous for leadership training never led a single real organization in their lives. All of them lead organizations dedicated to making them rich by selling “leadership” training.

If you really believe you need leadership training, you can’t be helped by leadership training.

You send your staff to take leadership training because you know that none of them will ever hold any authority over you.

There is not a single thing you would learn at a leadership training seminar that would have prevented you from investing in credit default swaps.

If you are selling leadership training to an audience of people who will never be effective leaders because they believe you can improve their leadership skills, you probably know exactly what you are doing– especially when you offer them more of your tapes, books, and CD’s. And they all automatically buy them.

Leadership training is easy because no one can ever really disprove any of the bland observations you make. For that same reason, leadership training is worthless because no one can ever prove it works.

I hear you: you are a weak leader who now believes he is a strong leader because he watched 9 hours of leadership training videos. No, you are not. You are a weak leader who will need to hire a consultant the minute you are confronted with a real problem because you still are not a real leader.

What is leadership? Sounds noble, doesn’t it? What if they called the workshop: “how to boss people around”? Not quite as glamorous, right? But at one level, leadership is all about bossing people around and the trouble with this world is too many people who love to boss people around think they are leaders.

 

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Two Submarines Bumping Into Each Other: Excuse Me Excusez-Moi

“It is MOD policy not to comment on submarine operational matters, but we can confirm that the U.K.’s deterrent capability has remained unaffected at all times and that there has been no compromise to nuclear safety,” a ministry spokesman said. NY Times (Feb 15, 2009)

So two subs, one British, one French, collided in the mid-Atlantic, and we are supposed to be relieved that U.K.’s “deterrent capability” remained unaffected. Which of course makes you wonder, who exactly is an imminent threat to the U.K.? Who is threatening to launch their nuclear missiles (that is what a “deterrent” is for) at London and Liverpool? Why is Britain spending so much money to keep these floating doomsday devices out there?

But the most interesting thing is this. Think about it: these two subs are absolutely loaded with the most sophisticated, powerful technologies available to mankind. We have spared no expense to provide them with every tool imaginable to ensure that they can reliably murder millions of their people if someone dares to murder millions of our people. Their crews have been trained by our most experienced, wisest, and ingenious scientists and leaders.

And they couldn’t keep from running into each other on the open seas.

And they are supposed to have “fail-safe” systems in place to keep the bombs from going off by mistake. But all their resources couldn’t keep them from running into each other.

The subs look very solemn. They are huge and weighty and black. They are coated with materials to hide them from sonar. They are powered by nuclear reactors. They can go under the arctic ice. The men on them wear uniforms on land and salute each other reverently when passing. For all the costumes and show, they are like little tin soldiers marching back and forth, back and forth, under the delusion that they keep the sun shining and the stars from falling with their little ministrations.

Obama’s Helicopters

Apparently, Obama has inherited some kind of project to replace the aging presidential helicopters, those old Sikorskys, with something new and more powerful. How powerful? About $11.2 Billion powerful.

The program was initiated by the Bush Administration after 9/11, and it should symbolize to all of us everything that is wrong and stupid about government today. Firstly, $11.2 Billion dollars is too much to protect anybody, even Obama. Yes, I am a fan of Obama, but that doesn’t mean I believe he is some kind of divinity who is so valuable and so important that we must spend an infinite amount of money to keep him safe. In fact, there is only one word for the idea of spending $11.2 billion on presidential helicopters: obscene. It is obscene in every respect, in the idiotic belief that technology can make us invulnerable, in the deeply offensive idea that the President is so phenomenally amazing and important and irreplaceable that we cannot countenance the slightest hint of a threat to his continued existence, in the way government functionaries behave as if they live on some magical planet with infinite money to spend on toys and gizmos and uniforms and parades.

The truth is that if Obama died tomorrow, the sky would not fall, the economy would not falter worse than it already has (while the previous administration was all safe and sound) and life would go on much the same as it has before.

As far as I am concerned, Obama should take public transit. Better yet: one secret service agent should drive him to the airport in a Prius. Another one should follow behind on a moped, in case anything happens.

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Surge and Purge

Contrary to general belief–can I shock you?–the “surge” is not a “success”.

It has achieved the political goal of short-term reductions in the numbers of casualties. It hasn’t moved us one iota closer to a stable Iraq.

The supposedly left-wing media swallowed this one hook, line, and sinker. What has happened, in a nutshell, is this: local U.S. commanders have negotiated a sort of power-sharing arrangement with some of the powerful Sunni militias who were leading the attacks against troops and civilians in Baghdad. In exchange for local control, road blocks, and, apparently, considerable cash– and continued possession of their weapons and territories–, they have implemented a truce. One of the reasons President Maliki would like to see U.S. troops leave is so he can go into these enclaves and rout his political opponents for good so he can consolidate real power in his Shiite government. He doesn’t have real power over these militias. Does anyone other a few diligent journalists know about this in America?

Some of the Sunni groups were fighting both Al Qaeda and the Americans. Some analysts believe they have negotiated a temporary truce of convenience in order to focus on their Iraqi opponents. The idea that this is a step towards a stable, pluralistic democracy is rather naive. It looks more like Lebanon or Egypt or Syria.

The idea that the U.S. is fighting for democracy and freedom, and for a free pluralistic society in Iraq that will resemble…. well…. who? Nobody. Because such a state cannot exist in a nation in which the majority of citizens believe that Allah should govern and infidels should be killed. The only way such a state can evolve into a progressive, liberal western-style democracy, is through progressive secularization. We need to give them high-definition TV’s and Walmarts. We need to convince them that American Idol is satisfying entertainment, and that Paris Hilton really is important, and that Cadillac’s really do cause women to have orgasms. We need to convince them that you can feel quite spiritual by being anti-abortion and opposed to sex education and homosexuals without having to sacrifice the even the smallest material comfort.

Call me crazy but I stand by something I said years ago:  Iran will be the first true Islamic democracy in the Middle East.

I found this after I had written this rant.  It’s a rarity– a media outlet that questions the claims McCain and Bush are making about the success of the surge.  Here’s another.

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Torture

“The fact that an act is undertaken to prevent a threatened terrorist attack, rather than for the purpose of humiliation or abuse, would be relevant to a reasonable observer in measuring the outrageousness of the act,” said Brian A. Benczkowski, a deputy assistant attorney general, in the letter, which had not previously been made public.
NY Times, April 27, 2008

This is the Bush Administration at it’s most astonishingly acute. This is from a letter drafted by the Attorney-General’s office to the intelligence services to enlighten them as to how they may torture.

Or was it drafted by the Arch-Bishop of Seville in 1300 to enlighten the Jesuits as to how much torture could be applied to a heretic? Let’s paraphrase: “the fact that an act is undertaken to prevent the spread of heresy rather than for the purpose of humiliation or abuse…” Or if Marxist guerrillas in Guatemala in the 1970’s had captured a suspected CIA mole: “the fact that an act is undertaken to prevent the oppression of the proletariat and exploitation of the working classes…”

Are there any government or military or paramilitary entities out there who only torture for the purpose of humiliation or abuse? Stop that right now– you are violating international law! But if you have some purpose, divine or otherwise, in mind, well, we do it, so why shouldn’t you?

We had formerly thought that such people were monsters of depravity, bereft of all that makes us human and civilized. They used to be our enemies. But now, they are merely like us, as long as their first reason is not “humiliation or abuse”. As long as they do not, as they approach their helpless victims with a tong, or electrodes, or a barrel of water, tell them, “and now I will inflict terrible suffering on you for the sole purpose of humiliation and abuse! Once I have humiliated and abused you, I will stop!

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The Pure John McCain

“The McCain aides said the senator sided with Ms. Iseman’s clients
only when their positions hewed to his principles.”
New York Times, February 20, 2008

I like John McCain. The more people like Sean Hannity, Rush Limbaugh, and Anne Coulter rave against him, the more I like him. Well, I think I like him. He appears to be a “straight-shooter”, and fairly honest guy who speaks his mind– or used to, before he got into the thick of the campaign and decided to suck up to the Moral Majority. He’s a maverick. Well, maybe he is. Maybe he’ll turn back into a maverick after he is elected, which he won’t be.

Remember we’re talking politicians here.  Everything positive about John McCain is a “relative” positive– for a politician, he’s relatively honest.

McCain’s wife invested heavily in some properties, back in the early 1990’s, on the advice of a man named Keating, who, it turns out, was playing fast and loose with the deposits of customers of a Savings and Loan, which went bankrupt, costing the government billions of dollars in bail outs, for a system that was predicated on the idea that the government wouldn’t provide expensive bail-outs if it failed. McCain received big donations from Keating. He then lobbied extensively against more stringent government oversight of Savings and Loans. The kind of oversight that might have prevented Keating from recklessly gambling his depositors money on ill-conceived investments.

McCain’s career was almost ruined by the scandal. But he survived and he became a bit of a crusader against the corrupting influence of money on politics, and joined with Democrat Russ Feingold, the only Senator to vote against the Patriot Act, to push through campaign finance reform which, as it turns out, didn’t quite have the impact we all hoped and was later rescinded.

McCain was tortured by the communist North Vietnamese. Inexplicably, he has been opposed to the Bush administration’s advocacy of the use of torture against alleged enemies of the state. Torture is useful in extracting information which can be used to justify the use of torture. The information doesn’t have to be true. That is the secret charm of torture. If you don’t get it– I am being very sarcastic.

The Christian Right supports Bush, the Torture President– you can’t get a more profound indictment of established religion than that.

McCain voted against Bush’s tax cuts to the rich in the “mistaken” belief that adults pay their bills. He is now a convert to the cause of borrowing from your children to pay for wars against countries that had nothing to do with 9/11. By all means, cut taxes to the rich, so that the wars that protect the oil that keeps America’s stock market humming can be fought and paid for by the poor.

McCain rather stunningly allowed his own son to serve in Iraq. McCain, even more stunningly, actually even fought in one those wars the Republican’s were so high on, and the Democrats, treasonously, are not.

Where did he get the chutzpah? Did he check with his party establishment first to see if it was a good idea to actually risk your own life to preserve all those patriotic values that sound so rich and compelling at those parades and speeches? Did he ask Bush? Cheney? Rumsveld? Wolfowitz? Perle? Come on– Rice? How about Romney? Huckabee? Thompson? No?  Any one of them could have told you how to be a chicken-hawk.

Anyway– John McCain has a friend named Vicki Iseman. Vicki Iseman, who is 40, apparently, has been spending a lot of time with Senator McCain, flying to Florida and back in private jets, hanging around campaign headquarters, annoying McCain’s campaign staff… They talked to her and they talked to him. This is unseemly, they said.

So what’s the problem? Is there something in the air? Yes– it seems that Ms. Iseman is… a lobbyist. It seems that Mr. McCain had written a few letters to the FCC on behalf of some of her cable tv clients. And thus the response at the beginning of this page: “The McCain aides said the senator sided with Ms. Iseman’s clients only when their positions hewed to his principles.”

Well, isn’t that just classic! I assume that he also only accepted campaign favors or donations when their positions “hewed” closely to his own principles.

It should be noted that some of McCain’s campaign staffers are also former lobbyists. Okay– if you hang around long enough, eventually I might find you a real job. Some of them went into lobbying after working for him, which, in my opinion, should be illegal for at least five years. Some of them came to work for him after lobbying him. (But then– what’s Bush going to do until 2013?)

McCain won’t be President. He’s too old. He’s a bit reckless. He won’t invite Rush Limbaugh to the inaugural ball. Is he having an affair with Ms. Iseman? The fig leaf in this story– for the Times– is the lobbying angle. The salacious overtones will be gobbled up by McCain’s sharpest critics on the right.

Does Hillary want to make this a campaign issue?

And why, really, did he chose Sarah Palin as his running mate?

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Dexter

I just happened to catch part of a new TV series tonight– “Dexter”. As far as I can tell, this is a new low or high in television drama: Dexter is a heroic serial killer splatter-analyst who only tortures and murders “deserving” victims. And there it was– in the first episode I watched– Dexter duct-taping a slime-ball to a table in some remote location and perusing his collection of knives and then asking the victim if he was guilty. The victim tried to be evasive– for a second or two– but a quick jab in the head clarified his position and he confessed. He did it. Yes, he offed the girl. Now kill me please.

Dexter does not fly. He does not have x-ray vision. He can’t transport himself from one location to another in the flick of an eye. He can’t bend steel rods with his bare hands. If he did those things, the show would be a fantasy instead, and many people would not watch because they would find the premise silly. I think. But these same people see a man taped to a table being threatened with a knife and somehow believe that he would confess to a heinous crime right away because… because why? Because he believes the man wearing the saran wrap on his face is going to let him go if he only tells the truth?

No wonder over 30% of the population supports George Bush and Dick Cheney. Bush and Cheney are right. If you catch an Islamic fundamentalist and torture him, he will tell you the truth. He won’t make anything up. And it’s enjoyable to inflict unspeakable suffering on deserving individuals, regardless of whether we have an investigation and trial first.

Do most Americans believe this scene? Do they actually believe that torture makes people tell the truth, as opposed to what they think their torturers want to hear so that they will stop the torture?

The CIA doesn’t even do us the courtesy of demanding new information to prove that that the adduced evidence has any kind of validity. They supply the names. “Is Ahmed Mohammed from Egypt a terrorist?” “No? Yes? Which is it you want me to say?” “Whatever is the truth Hamdi.” “Yes, he is a terrorist.” “Are you telling the truth?” “Yes, yes, please don’t hurt me.” “Okay. Thank you. Call the White House and tell them we kept America safe for another day.”

Dexter’s adoptive father knew that he had problems. But Dexter’s problems aren’t the result of an addiction to porn– James Dobson didn’t consult on this series, though he should have (to make it even more stupid)– but the result of some kind of mysterious abuse he suffered before his wise adoptive father steered him towards a constructive expression of his dark impulses: there are evil people out there… people deserving of your deviant attentions…. So Dexter resolves to join the police force so he can find out who, exactly, out there, is “deserving”. And no one is more deserving in Bush’s American than the mythical serial killer — who everybody knows dun it– who gets off on a technicality. Hell, why doesn’t Dexter just off all the lawyers, and the ACLU, and journalists, and environmentalists… and get it over with? Because, in this tract of American entertainment, I’ll bet you Dexter is an environmentalist– but not one of those extremist tree-huggers! He believes in clean coal, and planting grass on those open pit mines once we’ve extracted all the carbon.

All this beauteous dismemberment and sadism, and the concomitant warnings about “adult” content… and Dexter, it turns out, like Bush, is hilariously chaste. No sex education here! Dexter is dating a lovely blonde mother of two– after all, sooner or later someone Dexter personally cares about will have to be imperiled– it’s as inevitable as Dr. House himself becoming sick– but he doesn’t want to have sex with her. Alleluia. At last a program with some family values. At last something James Dobson can approve of for white middle America to watch in between spankings!

Go Dexter Go!

I say it’s peculiar that after all of the reversals of verdicts due to DNA testing in the past few years, television audiences are still so eager to believe that it’s easy to identify who the real murderer is and the TV hero– serial killer or not– never makes a mistake when he goes out there and exercises a little vigilante justice on our behalf.

And America never tires of enjoying the carnage as long as the fig leaf of just desserts is employed correctly. I am not a monster just because I enjoyed the scene in which he butchers a man because the man deserved it. I am not a bad person just because I tuned to this station to watch this show because I couldn’t wait to see some kind of sadistic violence… no no– not me.

This is why audiences have the perversity of Dexter backwards. Dexter is not really a serial killer who conceals his true nature behind the façade of a police man.

In fact, behind the façade of a serial killer, what we really have a is a policeman.

And that is why Dexter may well be the sickest, most obscene program ever broadcast on television. It seriously invites the viewer to enjoy fantasies of dismemberment and torture and inflicting unspeakable pain on human beings under the fig leaf of retributive justice. If you had any shred of belief left in the basic decency of human beings, pray that this show gets cancelled because too few people watch it.

I’m being coy here– okay. I said that Bush and Cheney believe that an Al Qaeda operative would not make things up under torture. But that’s ridiculous. Of course he would, and I have to theorize that most people involved, the torturers, the authorizers of torture, and the monsters in the Bush Administration, and maybe even the victims themselves, all understand that it doesn’t matter if they make things up– all the better. Name names. Tell us what they “did”. They will be arrested, which constitutes proof that the torture worked. They will be tortured and asked if what the first torture victims said was true. Of course it was. Torture works. Lives have been saved. Americans can rest easy tonight in their trailer parks and school gyms and gated communities: Bush and Cheney have preserved your way of life. And it only took a little torture.

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100 Reasons Why Life is Still Worth Living in No Particular Order

1 Tom Waits
2 Carey Mulligan in “An Education”.
3 the possibility of someone smart being elected president in 2008
4 Studio 60
5 Bon Ivor’s “Flume”
6 Nikon Digital SLR cameras
7 fried eggs on Saturday morning
8 movie:  Pan’s Labyrinth
9 ratchet sets
10 rechargeable battery powered drills
11 the stick shift standard transmission
12 the satisfying resolute click of a key being pressed on a 15-year-old Northgate computer keyboard, or an IBM model “M”.
13 the original Minolta 70-210mm f2.8 lens
14 curried chicken
15 the Wendy’s spicy chicken sandwich
16 Linux
17 Jennifer Connelly in “Once Upon a Time in America”.
18 Peter Sellers, especially in “Dr. Strangelove”
19 Ingmar Bergman
20 Hockley Valley, Ontario, in the fall
21 blizzards with clingy snow
22 driving through Hastings, Ontario
23 Algonquin Park
24 Bob Dylan
25 Apple pie a la mode
25 Tiger ice cream
26 The film “Rashomon”
27 community theatre
28 Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall
29 PBS’s Frontlilne
30 High Definition and Surround Sound
31 peaches
32 strawberries
33 Keira Knightly not getting breast implants.
34 Director Werner Herzog
35 Jon Krakauer
36 Ozu’s films
37 Greta Gerwig
38 Charlie Chaplin
39 Buster Keaton
40 Pierre Trudeau
41 ice bergs
42 the Jetcycle, only available in Newfoundland
43 Stanley Kubrick
44 shelties
45 the drive from Banff to Jasper
46 E.B. White
47 Larry Marshall as Simon Zealotes in “Jesus Christ Superstar”
48 Jules et Jim
49 Jean Seberg, especially in “Breathless”
50 MySQL databases: efficient, stable, and free
51 Arcade Fire
52 Lea Seydoux
53 Wes Anderson
54 balsamic vinegar salad dressing
55 Lightwave 3D
56 the Minolta 50 mm f1.7 lens, on a Sony Nex 7 camera
57 The Sony VX-2000, in it’s day, a terrific video camera
58 the Sony minidisc, in it’s day, a terrific audio recorder and I’ll be damned if I can believe how long it would run on that tiny little battery.
59 blueberries
60 the massive, belching, bleeping, monstrous “Big-Boy” UP 4023, 4-8-8-4 ALCO Steam Locomotive, or this one, a similar model.
61 The 1987 Toyota 4Runner with the standard stick shift, before they ruined it by making it bigger and bigger.
62 PBS News Hour
63 West Wing, especially the first 4 seasons written by Aaron Sorkin
64 Alice Munro’s short stories, especially “Who do you Think you are?”
65 oral sex
66 the bikini
67 San Francisco
68 The Musee Mecanique in San Francisco
69 Robert Duvall
70 Rutger Hauer as the dying android in “Blade Runner”, and his beautiful final speech: “I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe…”
71 “Anchorage”, the song by Michelle Shocked
72 “Silence is Golden”, weirdly beautiful, by the Tremeloes
73 Bob Dylan doing “Just Like a Woman” in an Italian accent at Maple Leaf Gardens in Toronto in February 1974, with the Band.
74 The Band, especially “Stage Fright”. and “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down”, and “Cripple Creek”: if there’s one thing in the whole wide world/I sure do like to see/It’s when that love of mine dips her donut in my tea”.
75 The guy who gave Bob Kelly a job after the scandalous reckless prosecution of the Little Rascals Day Care case in North Carolina.
76 Judy Collins doing “Someday Soon”.
77 Keith Richard still being alive
78 Ofra Bikel, documentary film-maker
79 The Roches singing the Hallelujah Chorus on PBS.
80 The Roches singing “The Hammond Song”
81 The Poppy Family– Susan Jacks– singing “A Different Drum”
82 MOMA (New York City)
83 Bach’s Brandenburg Concertos
84 The movie “Wings of Desire” by Wim Wenders
85 The Neuschwanstein Castle in Germany
86 Wenceslaus Square, Prague, and that crazy clock
87 The movie “Amadeus”
88 Dawson City, Yukon, Canada.
89 battery powered drills
90 Tombstone Park, Yukon, Canada
91 the drive from Banff to Jasper, Alberta, Canada.
92 wooden toboggans
93 The Shaw Festival production of “Lady Windemere’s Fan”: the most nearly perfect play I have ever seen.
94 “Our Town” by Thorton Wilder
95 “Girl From the North Country”, the musical.
96 Drones
97 Zebs’ General Store, North Conway, New Hampshire
98 Fall in New Hampshire, especially near Lincoln and Mount Washington: the leaves!
99 Bernie Sanders
100 Fresh cut French fries

 

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Torturing the Pharisees and Scribes

Church Groups Getting Ready for the Election:

Evangelical Christians in the United States, by an overwhelming margin, support George W. Bush and Dick Cheney in this election which means they support their policies which include torture.  They can’t hide from this: evangelical Christians support the use of torture to deal with terrorism.

I think every conservative, evangelical, Hillary-bashing congregation should dedicate at least one Sunday this fall to an in depth discussion of how Jesus would torture the Pharisees if he really, really needed some information from them. Suppose they were holding Mary and Peter hostage somewhere.  Or or the Holy Grail.

So, how would Jesus torture?  Cattle prods? Water-boarding? Sleep-deprivation and beatings? What would Jesus do? The results could be collected into a position paper and presented to George Bush at one of those frequent prayer breakfasts or other meetings

Conservatives love emergencies. That’s when they get to take control. If you let them. They thrive on fear– because they assume that others are prepared to do to us what they are prepared to do to others.

The question Al Qaeda has to ask itself is, “where is America’s oil”.

The answer: right below your feet.