From Pine View Farm

Barnum was right.

A German court has ordered a self-proclaimed witch to refund a disappointed client her hefty fee for a spell that failed to win back the woman’s partner.

The Munich administrative court said Monday it ruled that the witch must pay back the $1,275 on the grounds she offered a service that was “objectively completely impossible.”

After her boyfriend left her in 2003, the client consulted the witch on a spell that would bring him back.

Dick Polman on the racist Republican ad in Tennessee:

He’s (Ken Mehlman’s–ed.) technically right about the campaign finance laws, which limit how much the national parties can directly spend on individual campaigns – but which permit the parties to spend with unfettered abandon if they set up “independent” committees that operate without any oversight from the party overlords.

But here’s the key point: Mehlman hired the person who in turn hired the person who produced the “independent” Tennessee ad. So even though Mehlman may have been officially in the dark about this specific ad, it strains credulity to believe that he didn’t know what kind of ad his “independent” ad producer would create. Especially since this ad producer would not have been hired in the first place, to act “independently” and provide Mehlman with official deniability, unless he had been sanctioned by top GOP officials.

’nuff said. But I’m not stopping without saying too much.

The issue here is not whether Ken Mehlman or any of his colleagues are bigots. Rather, the issue is that they are willing to harness bigotry to their cause. And, clearly, they are.

While wrapping themselves in virtue.

A sheet, dammit, is a sheet. Whether it comes from Target, Walmart, or Bloomingdale’s. It does not make for attractive wearing apparel.

Hypocrisy.

There’s plenty of it to go around, of course.

But those who would wrap themselves in virtue should be careful to wear clean undies.

Click the pic:

What is it?

And it’s online, here.

With thanks to the Quotemaster.

From the Quotes of the Day (a litle while ago–I’m catching up):

For a long time it puzzled me how something so expensive, so
leading edge, could be so useless, and then it occurred to me
that a computer is a stupid machine with the ability to do
incredibly smart things, while computer programmers are smart
people with the ability to do incredibly stupid things. They
are, in short, a perfect match.
– Bill Bryson, Notes from a Big Country

The question of whether a computer can think is no more
interesting than the question of whether a submarine can swim.
– Edsger Dijkstra

I have a theory about the human mind. A brain is a lot like a
computer. It will only take so many facts, and then it will
go into overload and blow up.
– Erma Louise Bombeck, 1927 – 1996

Computers are like Old Testament gods; lots of rules and no mercy.
– Joseph Campbell

A computer lets you make more mistakes faster than any
invention in human history – with the possible exceptions of
handguns and tequila.
– Mitch Ratliffe

The computer is a moron.
– Peter F. Drucker

. . . rock.

This week, I have received two chain letters.

Letters.

Not emails. Real physical letters with, like, stamps and postmarks and return addresses and stuff.

They are going here:

CRIMINAL INVESTIGATIONS SERVICE CENTER
ATTN: MAIL FRAUD
222 S. RIVERSIDE PLAZA STE 1250
CHICAGO IL 60606-6100

Someone is going to be very surprised . . . .

and it ain’t a-gonna be me.

(Public service announcement: You can forward the electronic kind to uce@ftc.gov. Don’t expect a reply, but they all go in the hopper.)

Good news:

An Australian firm and its director have been fined a total of A$5.5m (£2.2m) after it was held responsible for sending out more than 230 million spam emails, 75 million of which were successfully delivered, during a two year spamming blitz.

Wayne Mansfield, and his company Clarity1, of Perth in Western Australia, fell foul of the Spam Act 2003, which came into effect in April 2004. The court action stems from an April 2006 raid of Clarity1’s offices during which investigators seized computer equipment.

Trinity Church re-introduces change-ringing:

Change-ringing bells rotate a full 360 degrees as they are rung and produce a shimmering, cascading sound quality in a complex, inexhaustible combination of changing tonal patterns. They are uniquely beautiful and require extensive training to ring. In preparation for the installation of the bells, the Trinity steeple will be appropriately reinforced with a new interior. Scaffolding is being erected as the work proceeds. The new bells, which range in weight from a few hundred pounds to over a ton, are currently being cast at the Taylor Foundry in the UK.

I have never heard change-ringing, but I first heard of it here, in one of the best mystery stories ever written.

Now that I have contacts in New York, I will make plans to hear the bells.

Is its own reward:

Critics have accused (U. S. Envoy Alberto) Fernandez of not standing up for America in his comments aired last weekend by Al-Jazeera television, in which he said Washington had displayed “arrogance” and “stupidity” in Iraq.

Fernandez issued a written apology the day after the Oct. 21 broadcast, saying he “seriously misspoke.” State Department spokesman Sean McCormack said Fernandez was still on the job and the matter was closed.

It’s not fun. It’s not funny. It’s just cruel.

Here.

Words fail me.

And now a word about values.

Values are not what you say.

Values are what you do.

What the hell kind of values mock the sick? (Or send people to die for a lie, or loot the treasury to make the rich richer and the poor poorer. And so on. Pardon me. I have to go throw up.)

Yeah. Right.

Trudy Rubin:

Recently I got a disturbing e-mail from a friend in Baghdad who wrote: “I’m leaving Iraq for good, leaving all my life behind, my memories and friends, leaving the way I’m used to living and heading for the unknown. Why am I leaving? You know better than many why.”

I do know why, and it raises troubling questions about what we Americans owe the Iraqi people. What is our moral responsibility as it becomes clear that our bungled occupation has sunk Iraq into chaos – and that the country is approaching all-out civil war?

My friend, call him George, is an Iraqi Christian, a middle-aged engineer who became a fixer for foreign journalists. He was my first Iraqi translator, and I was his first client. He called me “teach,” but he taught me more than I taught him.

George lived in Amariyah, a Sunni neighborhood from which Shiite families have been expelled. Most shops closed after three supermarkets were bombed. George’s wife stopped attending church after a series of attacks on Christians and was afraid to go out without veiling. George had to keep his work secret lest he be killed.

But the final blow came when he returned home one evening and saw a wounded man lying on the sidewalk in a pool of blood and trying to wave down help. George – like everyone else – was too scared to stop, lest he be shot for helping the victim. As he hesitated, a white Volkswagen pulled up, and a gunman fired three more bullets into the man, then sped off.

Democracy on the march, no doubt. The benefits of staying the course.

Oh, I forgot. No one ever said that.

The National Republican Party shows its true colors. Dick Polman:

I have long wondered how the Republicans would behave if it became apparent, during the final sprint to election day, that they were truly in danger of losing the House or Senate or both. To borrow a cat analogy, if the Republicans felt cornered, how viciously would they bare their claws?

Well, now we know. Just take a look at what’s happening these days in Tennessee. Basically, they’re suggesting that the black Democratic senatorial candidate should be defeated because he might be attractive to white women.

They have certainly put a lot of miles between themselves and the “party that freed the slaves.”

From yesterday’s local rag. Jerry Dorchuck, quoted in this excerpt of Tom Ferrick’s column, runs a company that does automated telephone campaign calls:

The not-so-benign use of robo-calls is in doing anonymous hit pieces on candidates. Unlike TV and bulk mailings, campaigns are not required to list the sponsor of the call in non-federal races. Besides, there’s been a profusion of soft-money groups, who do robo-call campaigns. You know, a smear piece on Candidate A done by the Committee for Truth, Justice and the American Way. Say who?

You have no idea who’s paying the bill or where these things emanate from.

It can get rough. Dorchuck told me he has turned down business where a candidate’s campaign wanted calls made to voters between 2 a.m. and 4 a.m. – and have the message tout his opponent.

I will be that there is somewhere someone who took that job.

The funeral directors were in town this week. Apparently, their convention is a grave undertaking.

Interestingly, their business is also adjusting to the American growth rate:

. . . We’re too fat – that is, “heavy-set,” in funereal parlance.

“To accommodate the increased size of Americans, we offer Dimensions caskets,” said Kurt Soffer, a Utah funeral director. They’re up to 16 inches wider inside than standard.

People in the industry are actually injuring their backs more frequently with increasingly heavier clients.

Another difficulty with corpulent corpses: During viewings, it’s hard to keep the hands of fat people lying in their coffins from flopping from their stomachs to their sides, funeral directors said.

In many cases, the hands are sewn together. To avoid the big needles and the mess, Milwaukee funeral director Bernard Yonke invented a wristband that uses Velcro to keep hands in place.

“I had to do something,” Yonke said. “I had people over 300 pounds and I just couldn’t keep their hands up.”

I guess the old 6×3 pine box is moving towards 6×6.

. . . we have to be confident that George W. Bush is so competent, all-knowing, and inherently just that we can just trust him. If he says someone is an enemy combatant, then he or she is. No need to check with a judge about why he or she is being held. And then Bush can have the suspect tortured to make him confess, and can convict him on the basis of the coerced confession, all in secret.

Competent (WMDs), all-knowning (Al Qaeda Determined To Attack in US), trustworthy.

We have sold our birthright to fear itself.

About the Torture Act. Well said, by the persons we once accused of oppresssing us.

Well, we have home-grown oppressors now.

It is the most un-American piece of legislation passed since the so-called “Patriot” Act. But it is a “vital tool” in the war on terror, the President insisted, using his stock slogan for all of the administration’s various assaults upon proper judicial process and civil liberties. Massive electronic dragnets and wiretaps are a “vital tool”. Warrantless searches are a “vital tool”. Holding thousands of prisoners in an extra-judicial limbo is a “vital tool”.

And here we have another, rubber-stamped by a spineless Republican Congress. “With the bill I’m about to sign, the men our intelligence officials believe orchestrated the murder of nearly 3,000 innocent people will face justice,” the President gushed as he prepared to make the legislation law.

Headline:

Teen’s Tongue Piercing Linked to Pain

Aside: The mouth is hardly a sterile environment.

Nuts and bolts.

A Little Rock man whose SUV was cut off in traffic was arrested after he allegedly shot at a motorist with a crossbow following a brief chase. “It was a drive-by crossbow shooting,” said Steve Gilgenbach, a pitcher for the University of Arkansas at Little Rock baseball team who said he was the man’s intended target. “I’ve never been shot at by a crossbow before.”

(snip)

Gilgenbach acknowledged cutting in front of Dierks on Interstate 630 in midtown Little Rock.

“I was merging on the highway and I had to get in, so I cut the guy off,” Gilgenbach said. “He started following me, cursing at me and yelling for me to pull over.”

Atrios

With a tip to Susie.

One hopes that Susie is not right, but one of the worst things the current Federal Administration has done is to make Susie’s scenario conceivable.

They have destroyed, through their complete lack of personal integrity, whatever trustworthiness the government had on January 20, 2001.

Addendum:

Booman Tribune has another equally disgusting theory.

Again, the sad thing is that the antics of the Bushies make this sort of thing plausible, frighteningly so.

It is a measure of their perfidy that sane people might believe these theories, advance them, and get a hearing.

The damage their lies have done to our polity is immeasurable.

He expects to be redeployed in January.

Back to Iraq.

Mission fucking accomplished my ass.

His life and the lives of his compatriots, upholding their oaths to the Constitution of the United States of America, mean nothing to the liars in the current Federal Administration, violating their oaths to the Constitution of the United States of America.

A pox upon them.

What would we have done without them.

Learn about them here.

Update, 10/14/2006

Craig Schelske ran for office four years ago, though his website it still alive (that’s not really a surprise–my old AOL web address still works, though I left AOL almost three years ago).

As far as I am concerned, this in no way affects the point of my post, which is pretty much this: If you want to be in public life, you need to behave, or, at least, be conscientiously hypocritical. What kind of self-entitled arrogance leads one to misbehave, for heaven’s sake, on Craig’s List?

Oh, I guess it was the same type of self-entitled arrogance that led Congressman Cunningham to write out his bribe menu on a napkin, that led Congressman Ney–oh, never mind.

Now, back to our regularly scheduled flame wars.

Some years ago, the local school district went through a bad time. The Superintendent was sort of like, well, treating it as his own personal domain. What finally drove him from his job was the revelation that one of the school board members had purchased a refrigerator for him with school funds.

In the next school board election, the reform ticket carried the day (one of the winners in the election was the ex-principal of my children’s high school, who got fired for standing up to the Superintendent–sort of a delicious irony, that).

At the time, someone I knew suggested I run for the school board.

I declined. I’m too lazy to run for public office.

But, had I been interested, I still would have been deterred by the thought that, when someone runs for office, anything he or she has ever done may become ammunition.

Some of my fondest memories (waving a picket sign in Richard Nixon’s face, attending the Big One, conducting workshops at ISPI Conferences, watching my kids grow and mature), and some of my least fond memories, like the time I . . ., and the time I . . ., not to mention the time I . . . , would have been subject to discovery and use.

So how stupid is this? (from RawStory)

Lurid divorce story for GOP candidate, country singer Evans

Or have some politicians concluded they are beyond the law and beyond public opinion?

Oh, yeah. I forgot.

They are just following the lead of George W. III.

General William Odom, USA (Ret.), on the Global War on Terror and George W. III:

Edmund Burke, were he alive today, would say they do, judging by his opposition to the British policies that caused and lost the war against American independence. In his letter to the sheriffs of the city of Bristol in 1778, we can see the line of reasoning that he would voice today against the Guantanamo incarcerations, military tribunals, the use of the “terrorism” label, and the Patriot Act. Burke subjected the parliament’s American Treason Act to blistering criticism, noting that it was the ninth in a series of such ill-advised laws enacted to support its American policy, adding dryly that “our subjects diminish as our laws increase.” Today he could say to Americans that “your allies diminish as your counterterrorism laws increase.”

Burke was outraged that the American Treason Act provided for a partial suspension of habeas corpus and enabled the king’s administration “to confine, as long as it shall think proper, those, whom that act is pleased to qualify by the name of pirates.” Thus they could be “detained in prison…to a future trial and ignominious punishment, whenever circumstances shall make it convenient to execute vengeance on them under the colour of that odious and infamous offence.”

If one thinks of the Guantanamo prison and changes “piracy” to “terrorism,” then Burke’s charge sounds surprisingly contemporary. The “terrorism” label is a source of great mischief in U.S. policy today. So-called acts of terrorism are crimes if committed within a U.S. jurisdiction; they are acts of war if committed from abroad against U.S. citizens or interests. In other words, we have more precise terms for so-called terrorist acts, words far more appropriate for legal statutes.

Terrorism is a political label intended to whip up anger against one’s enemy, not to ensure justice in the due process of law. Shouting furiously at the world about the evils of “terrorism” makes the United States look hypocritical, if not downright silly and incompetent.

From FactCheck.org:

Disclaimer: See FactCheck for a bipartisan list of lies and distortions, along with detailed analyses of each case. What leads me to highlight this particular one is it’s being a nationwide party strategy of deception (this surprises me how??) as opposed to smears and distortions within individual races.

Republicans are tagging Democratic opponents across the country for wanting to “give Social Security benefits to illegal immigrants.” But nobody’s proposing paying benefits to illegals, not until and unless they become US citizens.

The charge is a mischaracterization of part of the immigration bill that passed the Senate last May with a healthy bi-partisan majority, 62-36. Among hundreds of provisions in the bill is one that would allow naturalized immigrants to count taxes paid while they were still illegal towards their Social Security accounts – if and when they become citizens.

The measure has become a popular campaign issue for Republicans, particularly incumbent House members who raise it against their Democratic challengers. We have counted 29 GOP ads attacking Democrats with various versions of this misleading claim. Similar misconceptions about the measure were spread as part of a chain e-mail last spring and summer.

Along with this latest swarm of ads comes some related mischaracterizations, including a claim that the Senate plan “pays foreign workers more than Americans.” The Senate bill does have provisions to ensure that guest workers are paid no less than Americans. But no guest worker could be hired if a US citizen accepted the job.

On the rare night I watch a little television, other than Law and Order reruns, I saw three ads for this.

Cellflirt

Jeez oh man, there must be one born every minute.

Two interesting stories today about “Liberty Dollars“:

As preamble, at one time, almost any United States bank was allowed to issue its own money. Congress put a stop to that in the early days of the Republic. It caused monetary chaos and, if a bank failed, as happened from time to time in recessions, the money it issued became worthless.

From the Local Rag, a story about NORFED (the National Organization for the Repeal of the Federal Reserve Act and Internal Revenue Code) and its funny money.

Privately minted in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, and made of silver, Liberty Dollars are a hedge against inflation because they have intrinsic value, according to the Indiana organization NORFED – the National Organization for the Repeal of the Federal Reserve Act and Internal Revenue Code – which began distributing them eight years ago.

Today, with more than $20 million in Liberty currency in circulation, the group claims a network of about 100,000 people who collect Liberty medallions, (known as “specie”; don’t call them coins), and 2,500 merchants nationally who accept them in trade. Pennsylvania is among the group’s 10 fastest-growing states, a spokesman said. (By comparison, a federal official said, there is an estimated $700 billion in official U.S. currency in circulation.)

Though competing with the almighty dollar might seem like a crackpot’s game, the U.S. Mint, fearing pollution of the wider money supply, takes the group seriously.

“We don’t want consumers to be fooled,” a mint spokeswoman said in a recent alert, adding that the Justice Department says it’s a crime to use Liberty Dollars as legal tender.

The Washington Post emphasizes the crime aspect more heavily:

The U.S. Mint acted after federal prosecutors around the country began forwarding inquiries about the coins. “We don’t take these consumer alerts lightly,” said spokeswoman Becky Bailey. “Merchants and banks are confronted by confused customers demanding they accept Liberty Dollars. These are not legal coin.”

NORFED responded to the Mint on its Web site. “Here it is in plain sight . . . the Liberty Dollar is not a coin, not legal tender, and backed with inflation proof gold and silver!”

(snip)

Norfed encouraged people to keep doing “the drop,” referring to its advice to drop the coin into merchants’ hands so they can feel its weight.

That could land the dropper in prison, Bailey warns, for up to five years.

The U. S. Constitution seems to put the lie to NORFED’s claims that what it is doing is legal. NORFED can claim it’s not a coin, but, if it walks like a coin and quacks like a coin, it’s a coin. (Of course, they claim to be Republicans, a group which has become expert in serving us bologna and calling it steak.)

The Congress shall have power to lay and collect taxes, duties, imposts and excises, to pay the debts and provide for the common defense and general welfare of the United States; but all duties, imposts and excises shall be uniform throughout the United States;

(snip)

To coin money, regulate the value thereof, and of foreign coin, and fix the standard of weights and measures . . . .

I used to have a co-worker who believed those websites that claimed you could legally avoid paying your income taxes. I kept hoping he wouldn’t try it. What with all the metal detectors around today, it would have been difficult to slip him a cake with a file baked in it.

At first glance, this seems to be another one of those outfits for people who want the benefits of living in the modern world, but don’t want to pay for them, kind of like the average over-compensated CEO, though the SPLC thinks this group has more sinister aims.

All seriousness aside, people who promulgate and who believe this kind of fanciful propaganda undermine the social contract. If they refuse to pay their share, let them not drive on the roads, not use the hospitals, not send their children or grandchildren to public schools, not use the post office, and, most of all, not accept protection from the police, the military, and the FBI.

But, of course, they don’t want to put their money where their mouth is. They want to benefit from our tax money, while running their mouths and undermining the polity.

The Guardian hazards a guess:

But what can be hazarded even in a best case is that the US is likely to be less engaged in the region in the future than in the past. That runs against the logic of the war on terror, and against the logic of the western world’s interest in the critical energy-producing countries, as well as being the opposite of the Bush administration’s idea of America as the conductor of a grand democratic Middle Eastern orchestra. But the normal results of a traumatic and costly intervention almost certainly will still apply, in a more cautious approach and in disillusion both with the supposed beneficiaries of American policy and with the reluctant European allies who either helped only a little or not at all.

Let us hope another made-up war does not prove them horribly wrong.

And you thought instant messaging was the biggest hazard . . .

A three-year-old Lincolnshire computer whizz bought a £9k car on eBay while his mum’s back was turned, the BBC reports.