A recent study in stress at Nottingham Trent University found that watching the news triggered depression, confusion, irritation, anger and anxiety. News comes at the price of your peace of mind.
Homeland stupidity
I meant to blog this a couple of weeks ago, but you know how it is. I meant to become rich, rich I tell you, rich, ha ha, rich beyond dreams of avarice, but I didn’t get around to that either.
A New Jersey miracle man has been charged under the Patriot Act for allegedly shining a laser into two pilots’ eyes.
David Banach could face up to 25 years in prison and a $500,000 fine for disrupting the operator of a mass transportation vehicle – a charge covered under the controversial Patriot Act – and lying to the FBI. Authorities claim that Banach, 38, admitted to shining a laser at a jet plane and at a helicopter flying over his home. The jet pilots were momentarily blinded by the green laser light, according to state officials. Their Cessna Citation flying at 3,000 feet had six passengers.
Earlier this week, the FBI dismissed the idea that a string of “laser in the cockpit” incidents were part of a terrorist plot to bother pilots. The Feds, however, have now applied the long arm of the Patriot Act – invented after the Sept. 11 attacks – to Banach’s supposed crime.
“We are not saying this is a grand terrorist incident,” U.S. Attorney Christopher Christie told the New York Post. “We have to send a clear message to the public – no matter what the intent was.”
So. Does anyone really believe that Mr. Banach is a terrorist mastermind? Does anyone believe that he’s anything more than a suburban goofball playing around with his laser pointer? And yet, his life is going to be severely disrupted, at best — if not destroyed — so the powers that be can make an example of him. That’s the world we live in these days. That’s the sort of thing the Patriot Act allows. And anyone who can still argue that “the innocent have nothing to hide” is officially Too Stupid to Breathe.
…for that matter, does anyone really believe you could aim a penlight laser at a moving airplane thousands of feet in the sky with such specificity as to target the cockpit — which is traditionally not placed on the underside of the plane, in my experience — and “blind the pilot”? I’d bet dollars to donuts that this whole thing is an after-the-fact justification by overzealous homeland security types. Or something else is going on here, but in any case, the “blind the pilot” thing just doesn’t pass the smell test.
Slowpoke
I’m giving my friend Jen Sorensen some ad space to push her new book, partially to make up for the fact that I forgot to write a blurb she asked for (d’oh!), but mostly because I am genuinely a huge fan of her work. So check it out.
The wankery du jour
The accusations about Kos being a Armstrong Williams-esque shill for Howard Dean are bullshit. Everyone knows it. Why are we even bothering trying to legitimately counter it? It’s bullshit, we all know it’s bullshit, the right-wingers all know it’s bullshit. But they know the “Al Gore invented the internet” line is bullshit too, and you still see it in weblog comments.
Oliver Willis or Jesse Taylor could write 2,000 of the most eloquent, intelligent words on the dangers of the current Middle East crisis. Within the first five comments, some dipshit loser will simply respond “oh, I suppose you’d rather have the army run by a guy who raped a retard in ‘Nam, wouldn’t you?”
They don’t care. They don’t care about their own self-evaluations. What matters- the only thing that matters- is that they said something they think was really clever on the comments section of some person they’ve likely never met.
Heh, indeed, etc. The Kos pile-on is the perfect example of what I was talking about here. Right wingers are really, really good at this crap, at maneuvering liberals and lefties into a corner from which they must sputter, “We’re not robots and/or aliens! Really, we’re not!”
I mean, this nonsense spills out of the blogs and onto Fox and suddenly O’Reilly is equating Kos’s relationship with Dean — which he fully disclosed, which I remember being completely aware of at the time — to Armstrong Williams secretly receiving nearly a quarter million dollars of taxpayer money. Bullshit, pure and simple.
Baba Wawa
I’m paraphrasing from memory, but after the initial pre-interview chitchat she says something to Bush like, “Okay, if you’re ready, let’s begin the torture.” And everyone has a hearty chuckle.
Didn’t anyone at ABC cringe when they watched that footage?