Category: humour

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Mr. Lee Raymond’s Compensation

Lee R. Raymond is the most amazing executive in the history of the world. My only question is, why is he only receiving $400 million for his astounding labours, over an entire year.

Mr. Raymond is not like you or I. We look around and see things that need to be done and think of ways to do them. Mr. Raymond reaches into the heavens and touches the very source and fount of intelligence and channels the electrical vibrations of cosmic flatulence into the daily policy and managerial requirements of Exxon Corporation, with the result that Exxon, in a year of radically accelerating crude oil prices, recorded record profits.

America, behold your god. George W. Bush– bow your head!

So why only $400 million for a man who is surely smarter than the lawyers who sued the tobacco industry (more on lawyers)for $17 billion and then demanded, as payment for their diligence, $25 billion. Now those are lawyers!

Mr. Raymond is not only responsible for Exxon’s record profits– he is the creator of oil itself. It is only through his perplexing divinity that rotting deciduous trunks mutate into liquid energy, that we may then pour into our SUVs and incinerate. Compared to him, those trivial accountants and managers and derrick supervisors who toil into the night are mere gnats with the souls of pygmy gnats, and the minds of buffoon gnats. Turn away from Mr. Raymond, when he walks by, you worms. Prostrate yourselves and beg him, with all your soul, to accept $1 billion, for anything less than that is unworthy of such exquisite astuteness: this man sold oil at a time of rising prices.

Somewhere in Africa, perhaps, lives a humble old man who sits before his kerosene lamp tonight, and gazes up to the stars in the heavens above him, and is amazed that such a being could even exist that could burn up more energy in one second of urban traffic constriction, than he could burn in a hundred million life-times with his puny light.

May his face gaze upon us from the ether now that he has retired to ascend into the heavens.

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Yoo hoo– America? Your constitution is being abrogated. Do you care?

Probably not. No, don’t get up from Survivor or American Idol. Take your popcorn and your super-sized cola back to your couch. Relax. You are white and middle class and… well, . You have nothing to fear. The man on trial is dark-skinned. Like that man they shot after he fled that plane in Miami.

Mr. Salim Ahmed Hamid–he’s Yemeni– used to drive Mr. Bin Laden’s car. That’s right. And America caught him somewhere– in Afghanistan, I believe. Certainly not in Iraq– you know– that country that didn’t have any connection to Mr. Bin Laden? Salim Ahmed Hamad is on trial. Well, no he isn’t. Well, yes he is.

Okay, so Mr. Hamad used to drive Mr. Bin Laden’s car and he was his body guard. So that’s a crime, right? Right– this was after Mr. Bin Laden was no longer a friend of ours. That’s right.

So it appears that Mr. Hamad might not have actually broken any laws in America, or overseas, actually, but damnit– that’s no excuse for letting a known chauffeur to a terrorist former tool of U.S. foreign policy go free. We’ll try him anyway. Mr. Bush can just appoint a bunch of men– make them military men– and we’ll just hold a “trial”. After all, Mr. Bush was elected, so it’s not as if he were unaccountable.

Mr. Hamad’s lawyer thinks he should be entitled to a fair trial, due process, and all that crap. You’d almost think he was white or spoke without an accent. Is the ad almost over? So the Supreme Court is trying to decide whether or not the President could just appoint anybody he feels like appointing to hold a trial or something like it and pass a sentence or just shoot the bastard, without damned interference from those pointy-headed justices or congressmen or anybody else.

Lucky for Mr. Bush, the Republican appointees, including Mr. Thomas– who was so impressed with the arguments of Mr. Bush’s lawyer representative, Solicitor General Paul D. Clement, that he didn’t feel the need to ask a single question– are all on his side. Well, Mr. Roberts and Mr. Alito certainly are, but Mr. Roberts can’t vote on this one because, as a Federal Appeals Court justice, he already voted in favor of Mr. Bush’s position. He might at least have asked a question or two. I think Mr. Thomas did at least ask for a new crayon after a rapid-fire exchange of barbs between Mr. Clement and Justice Souter.

My fellow Americans, consider for a moment that in a case before the Supreme Court which many people consider to be one of the most pivotal in decades in terms of its impact on executive power and judicial process, Justice Clarence Thomas asked not a single question. He wasn’t even curious. He didn’t know what the hell Souter was all holy and loud about. Shut up Ginzburg! Kennedy, what the hell are you whining about? Is it dinner time yet?

Some brilliant artist out there should create a giant painting, a Guernica of American civil justice, called “Thoughts Entering the Head of Clarence Thomas as the Solicitor General Offered to Relieve the Court of Habeas Corpus”. I’m not an artist but there is such a desperate need for this art work that I might just make an attempt at it myself.

Justice Scalia shouted, why are we even hearing this dispute? If the President wants to arrest people and jail them, hell, he doesn’t need our permission. But before Clement could leave, Mr. Kennedy grabbed him by the collar.

Commercial over? Go back to your tv. Hey, it’s Natalie Holloway that they’re putting on trial…. Ha ha! Just kidding. What do you think this guy’s chances are?

On Osama Bin Laden’s Former Chauffeur

Imagine, if you will, an entire Supreme Court made up of Justice Clarence Thomas’s. This court would plow through a hundred cases in a month– not a single question would be asked of the lawyers arguing the cases! Whatever the government asks for, it receives. Whatever a defense lawyer asks for is denied. Criminals would not have been arrested if they had not been doing something wrong. If your creek is poisoned, move to another creek. If you think the government has secret information about you, tell us what it is and we’ll find out if it was wrong for them to obtain it. It is possible that your gender had nothing to do with your chances of being sexually harassed by your white male middle-class boss.

Life is simple and sweet.

Clarence Thomas’ thoughts on due process must be somewhere down here.

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Kissing Cousin

When I was about seven years old, about 43 years ago, my mother took me to her nation of birth, Holland, for a visit. It was around Christmas time, celebrated earlier in Holland than in Canada, and at one of the family gatherings I was persuaded to dance with my cousin, Willy. I think we were urged to kiss by my other cousins, so as we danced in circles around the small living room floor, we kissed several times, on the lips. My uncle Wim filmed the occasion with an 8mm camera and he pans left to show the bemused faces of my older cousins and the other adults laughing.

I met Willy again in 1977 while I was traveling through Europe as a temporary college drop-out. I traveled to the small town of Roekanje where she lived and she and her sister Nelltje took me on a long walk on a cold, cloudy afternoon and chatted uneasily. There was a bit of a cultural divide. I felt like part of a generation of rebellious teenagers who were out to remake the world. I think I was bit full of myself– I was immersing myself in sophisticated European culture, after all. Didn’t my cousin find that admirable?

Willy struck me as aloof, as if she weren’t interested or concerned. I didn’t feel that we connected, really. I have never seen her since.

Like me, she is now married.

There must have been music playing while we danced– the old 8mm cameras didn’t capture sound, of course. Pity.

My uncle Wim bought me a beautiful M.A.Rklin train set for Christmas, which I still have, in a box in my basement.

The image is a little jarring to me, but I remember that I always liked girls, even when I was very young, even Dutch cousins. Here I am above with my Uncle Wim’s binoculars, looking at the harbour in Rotterdam. My uncle never married. On this occasion, he took his sister and nephew and niece on an outing. I remember it fondly, though I also remember Holland as being mostly cloudy and wet and cold.  Well, it was early December.

For my mother, at about the age of 42 or so, it must have been some trip. She had immigrated to Canada with my dad in 1951, with five children. They had three more in Canada. It was hard to make a living, to pay the bills and put food on the table and keep eight children under 10 years old from harm. So here she is in Holland with just her youngest, visiting her brother, to whom I believe she was closest in her family, enjoying what must have been a respite.

Copyright © 2006 Bill Van Dyk All rights reserved. February 27, 2006

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Free Speech in Austria: David Irving

I was perplexed to read that historian David Irving was just sentenced to three years in prison in Austria for denying the holocaust. Even as I read the headline of the article at the CBC online, I expected to read in absentia. But there he is, wearing handcuffs, being hauled away to prison. In fact, he even sounded contrite, apparently. Because if he hadn’t he might have gotten 10 years instead of 3.

The law under which Irving was convicted is not about preventing another holocaust. It’s about preventing anyone from thinking that the Austrians would approve of another holocaust. The Austrians are so against holocausts, you see, that they have made it illegal to even discuss whether there has ever already been one. There has. We insist.

I wonder if there is a similar law against denying incest. After all, surely there is incest, so it should be illegal to deny it. Otherwise, people might begin to think that the Austrians secretly approve of incest. What about the shape of the globe? Should it be legal for people to think the Austrians think there is any controversy about the earth not being flat, or about the fact that it revolves around the sun instead of vice versa?

Is this idea of outlawing stupidity going to catch on any time soon? I’m not sure if the U.S. is ready to make it illegal to believe in evolution or to believe in intelligent design. It would put a lot of peoples’ minds to rest if they would just make it illegal to think wrongly about it, either way.

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Alito’s Joke

The Judicial Committee Hearings on Judge Alito are the funniest in years. The Democrats ask him what his view on abortion is and he says he has no views and even if he did, it would be unethical for the Senate to approve of a candidate to the Supreme Court who could actually explain what he thinks about the law.

The Republicans crawl on the floor and kiss his wounded knee. His wife bursts into tears and flees the room. Oh, those nasty, nasty, vicious, oppressing, liberals!

George Bush admits that he nominated a man with no views at all. He would like Alito to approach each case that comes before the Supreme Court the way a good chef approaches brain surgery.

Is anybody really confused? The Bush Administration knows that it could never nominate the candidate it really wants– James Dobson– to the Supreme Court, so they find a low-profile candidate and tell him to hide his views and then try to pass him off as a moderate and attack the Democrats for being obstructionist and for supporting “activist” judges.

It’s not an activist judge that locks up people without trial? Or has evidence destroyed so DNA testing can’t prove innocent people have been executed?

If abortion ever comes before the Supreme Court, Justice Alito promises to approach the issue with an open mind. I repeat: with an open mind. George Bush did not put him on the Supreme Court to please the Christian Right. How could he have, when clearly Alito has no beliefs about the issue of abortion. None at all. If you have a book on abortion that you could send him, he would appreciate it, because he has never, ever given the slightest thought to the issue of abortion. In fact, if you could send him a doctor who could, in plain English, explain to Judge Alito what abortion is, that would be wonderful and he would be ever so grateful.

I can just imagine him jumping out of his chair after a presentation, “by golly– I was wrong! I think a woman does have the right to terminate a pregnancy.”

That, at least, is the possibility he asks us to imagine. Is this a lie? Would Jesus lie?

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Samuel Alito’s Personal Views

I don’t give heed to my personal views. I interpret the law,” he has said. Washington Post, January 9, 2006

I’m sure conservatives must believe that liberals do the same thing, but, in the debate about Judge Alito, I have to highlight the determination of conservatives to associate their issues with motherhood and apple pie values to sell them to a majority of Americans who probably don’t really share their views.

Do most Americans want to roll back “one man, one vote”? Alito does. He voted against a ruling that prohibited states from awarding congressional delegates on the basis of radically unequally populated districts. So they would map a huge proportion of blacks into one large district and give them one delegate, and then map white neighborhoods into numerous districts, giving them many delegates. Alito did not see a problem.

His defenders could probably rightly argue that the founders of the nation did not intend “one man, one vote”. That is surely true, because the founders of the nation did not expect negro slaves to be voting at all, ever. Is that what Americans want? But that’s what conservatives are really talking about when they claim that they only want “strict constructionists” on the Supreme Court. Why is this idea so holy? Do people seriously believe that humankind hasn’t made any progress since 1776?

Think about it– conservatives want a country that is guided, in law, by the intentions and ideals of rich white men who lived in the 18th century in New England. That’s democracy?

Did the writers of the constitution intend for women to vote? Did they intend for corporations to be held liable for deaths and injuries caused by pollution or defective gas tanks? Did they ever imagine, in their wildest dreams, that any business or organization would ever not have the right to fire homosexuals?

My second gripe about the conservative defense of Alito is this “personal” business. Alito claims that he would never allow his personal views to affect his rulings. He asks us to believe that the Bush administration should really have no reason to prefer him, over, say, Laurence Tribe. Or he wants us to believe that Tribe’s personal views will affect his interpretation of the constitution, but Alito’s will not. What a glorious ego! Is he any good– ask him. Conservatives don’t have an ideology: they make perfect sense. It’s those liberals who hold extremist, radical views.

It would be a great service to all of mankind, and to the cause of truth in general, if everyone would just get over this issue and proclaim, loudly from every rooftop, “of course my personal views will affect my judicial actions– that’s what they’re there for”. Because this is pure bullshit. What planet do these conservatives come from? They ask us to believe that all of Alito’s previous positions and policies were all based solely on his amazing and transcendent affinity with the pure law, up there in the heavens, and have never once been sullied with human feelings or passions or preferences. The fact that all of his previous rulings and positions– every single one of them– supported conservative ideology is pure coincidence.

Conservatives seem to believe that it is a transcendent, eternal truth that homosexuality is a willful act of social defiance. It is a transcendent, eternal truth that women’s work is not as valuable as a man’s work. It is a transcendent, eternal truth that black children and white children should not share a classroom.

And somehow they believe that it is judicial “activism” to read, into the constitution, the right of the government to regulate the activities of a woman’s womb.

This would be a joke if this myth were not so insistently parroted by everyone on the right now as they form a magical choir, uniformly singing the praises of “Alito, Alito.” Roll back judicial activism! Rosa Parks– get back to the back of the bus!

And the reason they rejected Harriet Maier so vehemently? Not for her ideology or personal views, surely– which were suspect on abortion or women’s rights. No, no, no– we don’t judge nominees by their “personal views”, no, no, no.

It’s because she didn’t have that mystical, pure affinity with divine law. Or maybe because she was a broad– I don’t know.

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“Constructionist” Judges

Some opponents of our permissive abortion laws like to point to “activist” judges who read “new” rights into the constitution, and thereby helped cause the moral decline of America.

I just realized that one problem with this argument is that abortion was not illegal in 1776. It wasn’t. Britain passed some of first anti-abortion laws in 1803, and the U.S. followed, but abortion was a widespread practice of midwives and doctors until the late 19th century, when, as part of a backlash against suffrage, and partly as a humanitarian movement, it was steadily restricted.

Let’s hold the word “widespread” with caution: nobody can know with certainty just how common the practice was.  But we do know the other thing: it was not in any criminal code anywhere until after the Constitution was written.

So if a nominee to the Supreme Court was determined to divest the court of rulings that were not faithful to the vision of constitutional government held by the founding fathers, he might just come to the conclusion that, as in 1776, the state has no business intruding into women’s bodies.

[added May 2008] I suppose Mr. Alito or Mr. Roberts or– God help us– Clarence Thomas– might respond that advances in science and medicine since 1776 have enlarged our understanding of life inside the womb and so on, and therefore justifies a more restrictive ruling on the issue. Well, well, well– isn’t that exactly the argument of those non strict contructionalist judges who believe the Constitution is a living document that needs to be understood in the light of history and science. Maybe, given today’s realities, the 2nd amendment doesn’t make any sense any more.

And maybe now I understand why the Supreme Court hasn’t done anything to stop the use of torture by the U.S. government: in 1776, Trial by Ordeal was not so far removed from normal judicial practice.

[2022-05]

The argument here stands in need of clarification and refinement.  The Supreme Court in Roe vs Wade ruled that no state may infringe upon a right of “privacy” that it held was implicit in the Constitution.  In 2022, the Supreme Court seems ready to say it was incorrect about that: there is no implicit right to privacy.  That’s the actual Constitutional issue.   It’s just clear that many evangelical Christians are under the mistaken belief that abortion was not legal in “the good old days”, before the nation was swept by a tide of immorality and sensualism, drug use, long-haired hippies, and Al Gore.

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Sinful Pat Robertson

You may have noticed that little storm God sent to Louisiana and Mississippi. The message is clear. God is angry. He wants to punish someone for the grievous sin of blaspheming his holy name. That someone is Pat Robertson.

Just a few weeks ago, Pat Robertson called for the assassination of Hugo Chavez, the president of Venezuela. Then he lied about calling for the assassination of Hugo Chavez and accused the mainstream media of taking him out of context and misquoting him.

But now it’s clear that Pat Robertson was the one who sinned. He advocated murder, which, according to the bible, is the same as actually committing the murder himself. Then he accused others of sin to cover up his own sin. So God sent Katrina to teach him a lesson.

Now, you may have noticed that Katrina didn’t actually do any harm to Pat Robertson but it did do a great deal of harm to a lot of innocent people in New Orleans and Biloxi and Mobile, and so on.

But that’s the way it is with God’s wrath. As Jerry Falwell pointed out, 9/11 was punishment for America’s acceptance and tolerance of homosexuals. It didn’t matter if none of the people in those buildings were actual homosexuals, just as it didn’t matter that none of the people in New Orleans waiting in their attics in water up to their collar-bones was actually Pat Robertson.

If you believe that sort of thing.

You are not sure if God really sent Katrina to punish Pat Robertson? How would you know if I was wrong? You would pray about it, right, and God would tell you?

What if God told you that Katrina was punishment for New Orleans’ tradition of drunkenness and debauchery? What if God told me that it was punishment for Pat Robertson’s militancy? How do we know which is the real message from the real God?

Actually, maybe it’s not as hard as it looks. Just read the bible, especially the gospels. Then try to imagine that God would get more angry at a lot of poor black people who have been beat up and abused most of their lives than he would at a rich and powerful white preacher who, confronted with the problem of dwindling supplies of oil for America’s lavish lifestyle, advocates political assassination over conservation.  And confronted with the problems of racism and poverty and inequality, he would advocate reduced taxes for the rich?

Try to imagine Christ saying, “blessed are those who give tax deductions to investors and shareholders, and who reduce the liability of manufacturers for defects in their products, and whosoever provideth grants and incentives to profitable companies that they might exploit disasters for their own gain…”

You see?  God sent Katrina to punish Pat Robertson.  I prayed about it and it’s true.

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The Dubious Conviction of Scott Peterson: God Help You Behave “Appropriately” if Your Wife Ever Disappears

I have long believed that police often make up their minds about a suspect before really analyzing any evidence or logic, and that “police procedure” thereafter often consists of rounding up the evidence need to convict, rather than the evidence that shows who the guilty party is. That is why in so many cases– sometimes I think it must be nearly all of them– there is a jailhouse snitch.

I cannot believe than any judge nowadays even allows testimony from a jailhouse snitch. But then– I’m insane.

So in the May 23, 2005 issue of “People Magazine”, we have an exclusive inside story on how the prosecutors “got” Scott Peterson. You may have already noticed that they don’t talk in terms of “discovering the truth” or “finding the evidence” or “proof”. No. They got him.

It is rarely quite this transparent. Prosecutor Rick Distaso admitted– without shame– that he had a “gut feeling” right at the start. Okay– he thinks that’s because he’s got great intuition. How about if we call it prejudice instead? You can call it whatever you want, but what we have, right up front, is a prosecutor admitting that he made up his mind about the case immediately and thereafter was primarily interested in proving his “intuition” correct.

Not to mention that… well, for heaven’s sake– he had a “gut feelings” that the husband might be involved? Have you ever not had that feeling when encountering the homicide of a young wife?

The prosecutors observed that his phone call home from his fishing trip on the day Laci disappeared was unduly friendly and affectionate. That led them to suspect he murdered his wife. I can’t even imagine what they might have imagined he’d done if his phone call had been distant and matter-of-fact! Or what if he had called up and screamed, “you bitch– you forgot to pack my lunch! I hate you! When I get home, I’m gonna kill you!” Would the police now be saying, he almost threw us off with that phone call. What murderer calls up his wife and leaves a threat on her answering machine? Fortunately, we saw through that clever ruse…

What sealed it, of course, in a case utterly devoid of any physical evidence or proof, was the affair Scott was having with Amber Frey, who called the police when she saw Scott’s face on TV in connection with the disappearance of the wife she didn’t know he had. “It was the moment the cops were waiting for” reports People magazine, a little breathlessly. Again, I guess I’m the crazy one in the room.  You’ve never heard of men cheating on their wives before?  Did they all kill their wives?

Peterson went on TV and was interviewed by Diane Sawyer. It was clear to the police that he had lied to them, or he lied to Diane Sawyer, and an entire nation of vidiots who were just waiting with baited breath for the Michael Jackson story to break.  He denied that he was cheating on his wife.

That makes him stupid and irrational, but it still didn’t prove anything.

Laci’s body washed up on the shore of San Francisco Bay on April 13. Police made much of the fact that this was the same body of water in which Scott Peterson went fishing. Imagine that. He actually went fishing in the nearest body of water.

The prosecution produced a pair of pliers that had a single hair in it that “might” have been Laci’s.

The prosecution implied that a life insurance policy that was two years old had been taken out just days before Laci’s disappearance.

Prosecutors admitted that they could barely keep from crying when Laci’s mother read an impact statement in court. But Scott did not react appropriately. The prosecution seems only dimly aware of the possibility that Scott Peterson might be a simple adulterer. By their logic, he was either a faithful husband or a murderer. He could not plausibly be an unfaithful husband whose wife was murdered by somebody else.

Now someone will try to tell me that all of this does not prove that he didn’t do it. Of course not. But nobody has any obligation to prove that he didn’t do it.

Considering the prosecution’s theory of how Scott Peterson allegedly killed his wife, it seems rather stunning that the evidence is so thin. Did he have a different boat that they didn’t know about? Did he perform a singularly magical act of sanitation afterwards, removing every trace, every hair, every drop of blood from his car and boat after murdering her and driving her 90 miles and putting her into a boat and navigating out into San Francisco Bay and dropping her body off?

Blink!

Your intuition is not always right.

Listen to you!

“An innocent man does not behave the way Scott did…” From a review of “Presumed Guilty…” on Amazon.com.

You are a liar and a scoundrel and you should never, ever be entrusted with any role whatsoever in the administration of justice anywhere on this earth. [2011-12-24]

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Arresting George W. Bush

I know what you’re thinking: you can’t arrest the President of the United States!

Here’s my idea. I want to set up a camp on Manitoulin Island (that’s up there north of Tobermory, if you didn’t know where it was) with a bunch of cages and holding cells and guard dogs. Then I’ll get a couple of friends and go down to the White House and arrest George Bush and Tom Delay and John Ashcroft and Condoleeza Rice, and take them there and lock them all up.

If the Secret Service tries to stop us, we’ll inform them that George Bush is a threat to peace and good order and commerce and must be locked up.

If they ask what proof we have, we’ll tell them that we don’t need any proof. Do they really expect us to wait around for Bush to commit a nefarious act before locking him up? Not in today’s post-0303 world. I mean, March, 2003, the date of the invasion of Iraq.

If he wants to call his lawyer, we’ll inform him that, sorry, he doesn’t get access to a lawyer until we’re good and ready to let him have access to a lawyer.

If he says, what about my rights, we’ll laugh our heads off. Your what? Hoo haw! It’s all right for those pansy liberals like Ted Kennedy and John McCain to talk about rights– but we’re in a war. This is a war on our nation and our values. It is a war on common sense and good taste and my personal happiness. If I sit around and wait for pansy legislatures to provide me with the correct legal frame-work and documentation in order to proceed with arresting the most dangerous man in world…

And after they admit that we are fully vetted legally, and we get them up to Manitoulin Island and into the compound…. we bring out the water-boarding equipment and cattle prods and electrodes.

Honestly– I just want to hear what they have to say.