"Mr. Morrel has issues."

Thanks to Deb.

Now if I wasn't distracted by yet another racial lecture, I'd be banging out a Top Ten list.

But I got nothin'.

Whoah! Another one!

Raped by a... wombat?!?!

Posted by: Ace at 11:50 AM | Comments (81)
Post contains 60 words, total size 1 kb.

The news blurb.

LINK TO FILM: Here.

Thanks to Portly Pirate. For the link too. Now we can see what all the hubbub is about.

LiveLeak link. English translation.

Embeds below the fold, but they're behaving weirdly... maybe there's just too much strain on LiveLeak's servers? Dunno. Update: There's a red banner announcement that there's such high demand they've had to disable some features... embedded video may be one. Pardon the weirdness of the below nonfunctioning embed.
more...

Posted by: Ace at 10:35 AM | Comments (54)
Post contains 110 words, total size 1 kb.

Marriage rates have been plummeting in the UK and now they've crossed something of a milestone. Well, two milestones, actually.

The proportion of men and women getting married is below any level found since figures were first kept nearly 150 years ago.

And the number of weddings held in 2006 was the smallest since 1895, when the population was little more than half its present level.

The evidence that marriage is withering away at an increasing pace was met with a furious response from critics of Labour's benefits system, which disregards the status of husbands and wives and pays parents extra to stay single.

At some level there is an interesting sociological experiment going on over in Britain. They withdrew what we typically think of as the governmental benefits of marriage (lower tax rates for joint filings, survivor benefits, etc.) and then the government essentially offered unmarried parents a choice: (1) stay single and raise the kid and get a tax credit or (2) get married and get no tax credit.

It turns out that marriage is not more cherished than a tax credit, in the UK at least.

More: The hyperbolic title to this post comes from this observation from the article: "But it is a disaster for children, families and society."

Peter Wehner at Commentary Magazine continues in the same vein:

The causes of the collapse of marriage range from the rise in the Western world of a highly individualistic ethic, to a profound shift in moral and religious attitudes, to the sexual revolution, to the widespread use of abortion and the pill, to changes in law, among other things. The precise damage that the collapse in marriage is having on different societies is hard to measure – but we know it cannot be good. Marriage remains the best arrangement ever devised when it comes to sexual and emotional intimacy, raising children, and finding fulfillment and completeness between two people, not to mention things like financial security, better health, and longer lives. It is, as Bennett wrote, “the keystone in the arch of civilization.”

I have highlighted what I believe to be the truest portion of his remarks. Marriage is beneficial for our society in more ways than simple childrearing. Rates of marriage have important effects on issues as diverse as health care, the housing market, and employment. And I believe that we should make efforts to incentivise marriage when it is reasonable to do so. But I'm not ready to call this a disaster and if it came to choosing between high marriage rates and the modern "moral and religious attitude", contraception, and "the highly individualistic ethic" then I'd have to regretfully let marriage rates slide.

Posted by: Gabriel Malor at 10:31 AM | Comments (71)
Post contains 471 words, total size 3 kb.

Meh.

Via AICN, thanks to Demure Thoughts.

Posted by: Ace at 10:14 AM | Comments (26)
Post contains 19 words, total size 1 kb.

Let's face it, we can do with a lot less of this controversial "God" stuff as well.

The pastor, Rev. Gretta Vosper, has had it with “Big God-ism” and wants to turn the West Hill United Church into a New Age encounter group. Vosper says that the world has outgrown Jesus Christ and the church is finished unless it gives up God, Jesus, and pretty much the entire Bible, except possibly for the Sermon on the Mount. Her new book, With or Without God, makes plain her hostility to the tenets of Christianity over the last two millenia and the need to replace God with Human.

Below, a repost of an old Top Ten. more...

Posted by: Ace at 09:55 AM | Comments (64)
Post contains 488 words, total size 3 kb.

I didn't intend this to be bash minorities day, but this is just ridiculous.

One of the worst gang mass rapes I've ever heard of, of a mother and her son. Oh, and it gets worse.

For three hours, the pair say, they endured sheer terror as the 35-year-old Haitian immigrant was raped and sodomized by up to 10 masked teenagers and her 12-year-old son was beaten in another room.

Then, mother and son were reunited to endure the unspeakable: At gunpoint, the woman was forced to perform oral sex on the boy, she later told a TV station.

Afterward, they were doused with household cleansers, perhaps in a haphazard attempt to scrub the crime scene, or maybe simply to torture the victims even more. The solutions burned the boyÂ’s eyes.

Rachel adds that by "burned," they mean the boy's eyes were blinded with nail polish remover.

Sharpton's beef? Well, click on the link.

Here's some of that open, candid discussion on race we're supposed to be having: Stop fucking defending and rallying support for loathsome monsters just because they're fucking black, huh?

Howzabout that?

Plucked from the Conservative Grapevine.

Posted by: Ace at 09:26 AM | Comments (156)
Post contains 200 words, total size 1 kb.

The New York Times reporters who provided terrorists with valuable information on US espionage programs have written a book about their exploits. Apparently, they are proud of what they did, go figure.

To promote the book one of the authors, Eric Lichtblau, has written a piece for Slate magazine which reeks of self importance and self congratulations. The Jawa Report reads Slate so we don't have too and has a take down here.

My favorite part is where Lichtblau describes a White House meeting where officials tried to convince the Times not to publish highly classified national security information.

Finally, one afternoon in December 2005, as my editors and I waited anxiously in an elegantly appointed sitting room at the White House, we were again about to let President Bush's top aides plead their case: why our newspaper shouldn't let the public know that the president had authorized the National Security Agency, in apparent contravention of federal wiretapping law, to eavesdrop on Americans without court warrants. As New York Times Editor Bill Keller, Washington Bureau Chief Phil Taubman, and I awaited our meeting, we still weren't sure who would make the pitch for the president. Dick Cheney had thought about coming to the meeting but figured his own tense relations with the newspaper might actually hinder the White House's efforts to stop publication. (He was probably right.)

They ‘let President Bush’s top aides plead their case’? Well, wasn’t that mighty generous of their Royal Highnesses at the Times? It’s a good thing they didn’t have anything better to do that day or perhaps the administration wouldn’t have been allowed to ‘plead their case’ for not providing vital information to terrorists who just 4 short years earlier had killed almost 3,000 Americans, most of them in the city the Times calls home.

And if the Vice President of the United States had participated in the meeting it might have given extra impetus to the Times to publish this information? Considering they did so anyway, what would they have done if Cheney had been there? Hand delivered that dayÂ’s paper to as many terrorists as possible and given them a discount on their subscriptions?

I do thank Mr. Lichtblau for his honesty if not his judgment or decency.

Below the fold, Slublog got his hands on Lichtblau's book jacket photo. more...

Posted by: DrewM at 08:59 AM | Comments (29)
Post contains 420 words, total size 3 kb.

Guess That Party? Well, sort of... CNN cops to his party, which they seem to do because he's not technically a member of the Democratic Party.

ov. Anibal Acevedo Vila was charged Thursday with 19 counts in a campaign finance probe, including conspiracy to violate U.S. federal campaign laws and giving false testimony to the FBI.

The indictment also charged 12 others associated with Acevedo's Popular Democratic Party as a result of a two-year grand jury investigation, acting U.S. Attorney Rosa Emilia Rodriguez said.

The 13 are accused of conspiring to raise money illegally to pay off Acevedo's campaign debts from his 2000 campaign to be the U.S. island territory's nonvoting member of Congress.

Acevedo, who is running for re-election as governor, will not be arrested, Rodriguez said. But at least five others named in the indictment were led in handcuffs early Thursday into the U.S. federal building in San Juan.

"The governor will be permitted to turn himself in deference to his position," she said.

To be fair, Wikipedia doesn't seem to note any actual formal connection with the actual US Democratic Party. But it seems like they're copacetic in terms of economic populism/socialism -- it's a liberal party. There seem to be three main parties in Puerto Rico, so it may be that two of them are actually Democratically/liberally aligned.

Isn't it funny that CNN can finally identify the party of a Democrat when he's not actually a Democrat?

Thanks to genghis, who I know as Jenjis.

Posted by: Ace at 08:26 AM | Comments (32)
Post contains 271 words, total size 2 kb.

The conviction stands, but the penalty phase of the trial needs a re-do in order to impose the age-old death sentence standing against this cocksucker.

Cocksucker? Cockroach more like it -- You just can't kill this fuck. He'd even survive the coming Global Warming Climate Change Ecocalypse.

When's Daniel Faulkner getting his re-hearing?

Thanks to tmi3rd.

Posted by: Ace at 08:08 AM | Comments (26)
Post contains 70 words, total size 1 kb.

Surprise! Online org The Smoking Gun turns out to have a more finely tuned bullshit detector than the J-school dweebs at the LAT.

Patterico's article is especially interesting because it does suggest an answer as to who killed Tupac Shakur.

Who did?

All of us.

And: You're welcome.

No, seriously, it was (the theory goes) Suge Knight in cooperation with a corrupt LAPD officer; it's the latter element that keeps law enforcement from digging in too deep.

Sorry... About the Tupac joke. He was a real talent. I'm told.

I guess white people can't understand the shock caused in the black community by Tupac's death, nor the feelings of suspicion and powerlessness engendered by the still-unsolved case.

So I, having joined Senator Obama's Great National Dialogue on Race, will try to explain it to my fellow white people.

It's like this:

Suppose a beloved musical figure in the white community -- oh, let us say, John Mayer -- got into a feud with an "East coast" singer also much beloved, let's say... Ben Folds.

So John Mayer is always singing about what a punk-ass bitch Ben Folds is, and Ben Folds responds by saying he's going to take the "hos" in John Mayer's "stable" and "turn them out" for his own profit. Such hos being, I don't know, Sarah MacLachlin and Melissa Etheridge. Maybe Jewel.

Suddenly John Mayer is gunned down during a concert where he's singing a heartfelt cover of Suzanne Vega's My Name Is Luca, and then, just a month later, Ben Folds is shot in front of a business he owns, a scuba/dive shop which also sells novelty bongs shaped like Spiro Agnew.

Suspicions range far and wide, most often involving superproducer Todd Rundgren, who produced Meat Loaf's albums, giving them that revolutionary "Wagnerian Rock" sound we all enjoy, and also scored a minor hit on his own with (I Just Wanna) Bang on This Drum. And yet no case can ever be brought against Todd Rundgren, because, well-- Meat Loaf. No one fucks with The Loaf.

Various East Coast/West Coast summits are arranged to bring the feuding wings of the Folk-Core community together, relying especially on "Old School" legends to quell the anger, but one of these ends in violence as Huey Lewis and two of the News get into some "shit" with the rhythm section of Mister Mister and an unidentified, minor sessions musician with Hall and Oates.

Who, it turns out later, is actually -- Oates.

So peace remains elusive. And the case remains unsolved.

And yet John Mayer somehow keeps putting out albums, from yet beyond the grave, a chilling reminder of the power of a single brave voice and an accoustic guitar.

And Todd Rundgren just keeps counting his money from Bat Out of Hell and Bat out of Hell 2: Back From Hell. Untouchable. And possibly in cahoots with Nickleback.

And even possibly-- Oates.

Anyway, I think that's what it's like.

more...

Posted by: Ace at 06:25 AM | Comments (75)
Post contains 669 words, total size 4 kb.