I, Randall

In case anyone's wondering...

2008-01-08T16:25:00.000-06:00

I'm still around and I've not yet completely abandoned this blog. I'll try to post something interesting soon.

Happy Hanukkah!

2007-12-04T17:08:00.000-06:00

It Can't Happen Here

2007-09-30T05:31:00.000-05:00

Found at the LewRockwell.com Blog.

Black Jena 6 Protesters Stage Mock Lynching of Child

2007-09-29T19:52:00.000-05:00

News-Star article

Gramblinite article

Don't tase famous people, bro!

2007-09-20T02:52:00.000-05:00

Suck it, Jesus.

2007-09-11T15:02:00.000-05:00

"A lot of people come up here and thank Jesus for this award. I want you to know that no one had less to do with this award than Jesus. Can you believe this shit? Hell has frozen over. Suck it, Jesus. This award is my god now!" -- Kathy Griffin, accepting her Emmy

I've never really liked Kathy Griffin (I've heard that she's mean to co-workers), but I do applaud her outspoken atheism.

The censorship of her comment is, of course, ridiculous.

Israeli neo-Nazi ring busted

2007-09-09T05:46:00.000-05:00

In a case that would seem unthinkable in the Jewish state, police said Sunday they have cracked a cell of young Israeli neo-Nazis accused in a string of attacks on foreign workers, religious Jews, drug addicts and gays.

[EDIT]

All the suspects are in their late teens or early 20s and have Israeli citizenship, [police spokesman Mickey] Rosenfeld said.

[EDIT]

Police computer experts have determined they maintained contacts with neo-Nazi groups abroad, and materials seized include a German-language video about neo-Nazis in the U.S.
The group planned its attacks, and its targets were foreign workers from Asia, drug addicts, homosexuals, punks and Jews who wore skullcaps. In one case they discussed planning a murder, Rosenfeld said, without providing details.

[EDIT]

Under Israeli law, a person can claim citizenship if a parent or grandparent has Jewish roots. Authorities say that formulation allowed many Soviets with questionable ties to Judaism to immigrate here after the Soviet Union disintegrated. About 1 million Soviets moved here in the late 1980s and early 1990s.

Rosenfeld said all the suspects had "parents or grandparents who were Jewish in one way or another."

Full article

Holocaust Porn

2007-09-08T07:06:00.001-05:00

It was one of Israel’s dirty little secrets. In the early 1960s, as Israelis were being exposed for the first time to the shocking testimonies of Holocaust survivors at the trial of Adolf Eichmann, a series of pornographic pocket books called Stalags, based on Nazi themes, became best sellers throughout the land.

Read under the table by a generation of pubescent Israelis, often the children of survivors, the Stalags were named for the World War II prisoner-of-war camps in which they were set. The books told perverse tales of captured American or British pilots being abused by sadistic female SS officers outfitted with whips and boots. The plot usually ended with the male protagonists taking revenge, by raping and killing their tormentors.

After decades in dusty back rooms and closets, the Stalags, a peculiar Hebrew concoction of Nazism, sex and violence, are re-emerging in the public eye. And with them comes a rekindled debate on the cultural representation here of Nazism and the Holocaust, and whether they have been unduly mixed in with a kind of sexual perversion and voyeurism that has permeated even the school curriculum.

“I realized that the first Holocaust pictures I saw, as one who grew up here, were of naked women,” said Ari Libsker, whose documentary film “Stalags: Holocaust and Pornography in Israel” had its premiere at the Jerusalem Film Festival in July and is to be broadcast in October and shown in movie theaters. “We were in elementary school,” he noted. “I remember how embarrassed we were.”

Hanna Yablonka, a professor of history at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, says the film highlights what she calls the “yellow aspects of nurturing the memory of the Holocaust.”

“Are we taking it into the realm of semipornography?” she asked. “The answer is, we are.”

The Stalags were practically the only pornography available in the Israeli society of the early 1960s, which was almost puritanical. They faded out almost as suddenly as they had appeared. Two years after the first edition was snatched up from kiosks around the central bus station in Tel Aviv, an Israeli court found the publishers guilty of disseminating pornography. The most famous Stalag, “I Was Colonel Schultz’s Private Bitch,” was deemed to have crossed all the lines of acceptability, prompting the police to try to hunt every copy down.

Full article

Finkelstein, DePaul reach settlement

2007-09-05T14:50:00.000-05:00

The long-running confrontation between embattled professor Norman Finkelstein and DePaul University ended today without the dramatics he had promised.

Instead, he read a statement announcing his resignation this morning on the university's main quadrangle before about 120 supporters announcing that he and DePaul had resolved the controversy. But the terms were kept confidential.

Finkelstein had vowed to present himself at his office door today and, if denied entrance, to perform an unspecified act of civil disobedience. He vowed to go on a hunger strike if he were jailed.

Finkelstein, a scholar praised and damned for his strong criticisms of Israel, was denied tenure in June. However, his classes remained in the university's course schedule until abruptly canceled a little more than a week before fall term classes began on the school's Lincoln Park campus.

At that point, Finkelstein also was notified that he had been put on administrative leave for the 2007-08 school year. By long-standing academic tradition, a professor denied tenure is entitled to one last year in the classroom of his home university.

Full article

I hope Prof. Finkelstein got a good settlement and I wish him well in the future, but I was looking forward to the promised dramatics.

Opus Prohibitorum

2007-09-04T05:50:00.000-05:00

Here are the two censored Opus strips:

I don't even get where the offensive part is supposed to be.

Also, though I think everyone should just swim naked, I kind of like the burqini.

Finally, I realize that the title of this post should arguably be "Opera Prohibitorum" (since there are two strips), but I felt like that would be stretching the pun too far.

Free Speech/Blasphemy

2007-09-02T07:40:00.000-05:00

In keeping with the spirit of Fröken Wikstrom's editorial on voluntary censorship and Herr Ströman's editorial on the right to ridicule a religion, I'm collecting a few examples of blasphemy that can be found on the internet.

I've decided to limit this post to works that satirize or otherwise ridicule the most holy of holies of each of the major Abrahamic religions. I'll try to offend more ecumenically in future posts.

Free (Your Own) Speech

2007-09-02T07:24:00.000-05:00

The pitfalls of 'voluntary' censorship
By Cecilia Wikstrom

Friday, August 17, 2007
UPPSALA, Sweden

Just a few weeks ago, on the opening day of a summer art exhibition in rural Sweden, a collection of provocative pencil sketches of Muhammed were suddenly lifted off the walls. The gallery director said she feared for the security of Swedes abroad.

Such acts of "voluntary" censorship have become routine at cultural institutions in Europe. A Berlin opera house last year cancelled a Mozart premiere because of the fear that the stage show, which featured decapitations of religious figures, could provoke violence. Even more ominous, major Western providers of international Internet services routinely tailor their Web sites so that citizens living in totalitarian states are not exposed to "dangerous" ideas.

Pressure to draw a dark curtain over controversial cultural expressions is far from a new phenomenon in Europe. As an ordained priest, for example, I remember an outcry of righteous anger in Uppsala in Sweden in 1998. The town's cathedral, which is one of the oldest in Northern Europe, hosted an exhibition that depicted a gay, Aids-afflicted Jesus. There were bomb threats and Christians from all over Europe chastised the exhibition.

Censorship has a long and bloody history in Europe, but so does the defense of free speech.

Intellectuals and artists spearheaded the Enlightenment movement that demanded that all citizens be given the right to express themselves. I am proud to observe that Sweden became the first state to introduce laws that guaranteed freedom for the press in 1766, and several European states followed suit. The fundamental document for the French Revolution in 1789 stipulates: "The free communication of thought and opinion is one of the most precious rights of man; every citizen may therefore speak, write and print freely."

More than 200 years later, these rights are once again threatened. Meanwhile, European leaders are haggling over a new constitutional treaty covering issues ranging from environmental protection to tax polices. But that does not exclude the need to give a high-priority to key underlying values which are the foundation of democratic society, namely the universal right to free speech and expression. Therefore, the new EU treaty should include the appointment of a free speech commissioner, who reports directly to the President of the European Council.

The need for a commissioner to protect free speech grew evident during the Muhammad cartoon controversy in Denmark. The Danish government stood alone when it refused to apologize on behalf of the tabloid that published caricatures of Muhammad that caused a furor in Muslim states.

Commenting on Europe's unwillingness to help Denmark during the scandal, the Economist paraphrased Voltaire: "I disagree with what you say and even if you are threatened with death I will not defend very strongly your right to say it."

An EU commissioner would act to robustly defend the right to free expression in member states, as well as candidate states such as Turkey, where the right to free speech of the Kurdish minority has been under threat. An important task would be to publicize an annual assessment of the state of press and cultural freedom in all of the European Union. The free speech commissioner should also be a strong voice in public opinion and establish safe havens in Europe for persecuted writers and bloggers in other parts of the world.

At the same time, free speech can never be an unbridled right. Besides the obvious laws against slandering or inciting violence, the commissioner needs to be a voice for religious tolerance. The concept of religious tolerance should always go hand in hand with free speech. This was understood by Voltaire, who declared: "Toleration has never yet excited civil wars, whereas its opposite has filled the earth with slaughter and desolation."

Free speech is by no means a guarantee for a fair and just society. On the other hand, the failure to safeguard the rights of writers and artists has proven fateful in history. Heinrich Heine keenly observed the dangers of cultural censorship when he witnessed the Nazis' book pyres in 1933: "Where they have burned books, they will end in burning human beings."

Original article

Though I strongly agree with the points made by Cecilia Wikstrom in the above editorial, I do want to correct one error she made. It is very unlikely that Heinrich Heine could have witnessed the Nazis' book pyres in 1933, since he died in 1856.

More Muhammed Cartoon Controversy in Scandinavia

2007-08-31T05:44:00.000-05:00

Fears grew of a new confrontation over images deemed blasphemous by Muslims as Pakistan joined Iran in protest over a sketch by a Swedish artist portraying the prophet Mohammed as a dog.

[EDIT]

The publication, in the newspaper Nerikes Allehanda, came after several galleries had refused to display the drawings, apparently for fear of violent retaliation from offended Muslims.

Early last year, violent demonstrations erupted throughout the Muslim world after the publication in Denmark of 12 cartoons of the Prophet Mohamed which were also deemed blasphemous.

"Alongside the picture, we published a comment piece saying that it was serious that there is self-censorship among exhibition [galleries]," said the Nerikes Allehanda editor-in-chief, Ulf Johansson.

Full article

English translation of the Nerikes Allehanda editorial

Eli Valley's Foxman comic

2007-08-31T05:34:00.000-05:00

One of the best sites I've ever seen...

2007-08-23T18:06:00.000-05:00

Disinfotainment

Arson at the Crematorium

2007-08-23T14:48:00.000-05:00

Israel's only commercial crematorium, viewed by Orthodox Jews as an abomination, was severely damaged in a suspicious fire Wednesday, just hours after its secret location was revealed in a religious newspaper.

Full article

Lowbrow

2007-08-22T00:57:00.000-05:00

Earlier tonight on Ovation TV I watched The Lowdown on Lowbrow, a documentary about the lowbrow art movement, of which I am a great fan. La Luz de Jesus Gallery, Juxtapoz magazine, and Robert Williams were all featured prominently.

When I first moved to Hollywood, my apartment was on Lanewood Avenue, which is two blocks from Hollywood Boulevard. I walked past the nearby La Luz de Jesus many, many times, but I thought it was just a strange Mexican store-front church, so I never went inside. It was only after I had left California and started law school back in Louisiana that I began my subscription to Juxtapoz and discovered my mistake. Missing that opportunity to see such interesting artwork in my own old neighborhood is one of my three big regrets about my time in Los Angeles. (The others are never getting a hotdog at Pink's and never going to the Ackermansion.)

Local ADL Leader Fired Over His Refusal To Deny Armenian Genocide

2007-08-20T22:34:00.000-05:00

The national Anti-Defamation League fired its New England regional director yesterday, one day after he broke ranks with national ADL leadership and said the human rights organization should acknowledge the Armenian genocide that began in 1915.

Full article

Joey Kurtzman of Jewcy has written a great criticism of Genocide-denier Abe Foxman and follow-up pieces about the Watertown debate and Andrew Tarsy's firing.

Government to pay $80K to pair arrested for anti-Bush T-shirts

2007-08-20T06:08:00.000-05:00

The federal government has agreed to pay $80,000 to a Texas couple arrested and charged with trespassing in 2004 after they refused to cover up homemade T-shirts with anti-Bush slogans.

The American Civil Liberties Union, which filed the lawsuit on behalf of Nicole and Jeffery Rank of Corpus Christi, Texas, announced the settlement yesterday.

The Ranks were handcuffed, removed from the July 4, 2004, presidential rally at the state Capitol and held in police custody for between one and two hours.

Full article

A Little Intifada Now and Then Is A Good Thing

2007-08-19T07:02:00.000-05:00

I made the t-shirt design above and the one immediately below in protest of the forced resignation of Debbie Almontaser for actually discussing the meaning of the word "intifada" rather than just condemning the original INTIFADA NYC t-shirts. Click on either image to be brought to that design's store, where other shirt styles and more products are also available.

The a-Rab (which looks like it's going to be a very interesting website) has created its own t-shirt commentary on the controversy:

The Dollar Is Flat

2007-08-17T20:43:00.000-05:00

The new Thomas Jefferson dollars came out yesterday. Though I strongly support dollar coinage and Jefferson is probably my favorite President, I haven't gotten to the bank to buy my TJ's yet.

I did do an experiment with one of my George Washington dollars, though. I've lived near train tracks for most of my life, so I've flattened several dollars worth of pennies, nickels, dimes, and quarters over the years. I wondered what would happen if I put a GW dollar coin on the rail. Below are the results. I've included an unflattened coin for comparison.

I was a little disappointed that it wasn't flatter. You can even still read "IN GOD WE TRUST" on the side. I'm not sure if the coin fell off the rail before the entire train ran over it or if these dollar coins are just very sturdy.

"WARNING: I'm blogging this." T-shirt

2007-08-15T13:35:00.000-05:00

There's also a bumpersticker and a thong, so all scenarios are covered.

Clowning 4 Christ

2007-08-11T01:19:00.000-05:00

We are a Christ Centered, Bible believing Ministry and our goal is to spread the Gospel through our unique clown performance in churches and community venues through the United States. In addition to our performance we also teach a professional level of clowning to all Christian clowns as well as clowns in training.

Clowning 4 Christ

Uncle Joe, Il Duce, Der Fuehrer, & The Kingfish

2007-06-30T23:15:00.000-05:00

I see that it's been almost a month since I posted anything. I don't know why I stayed away so long. I guess I've just had lots of other things occupying my attention (e.g., the terrorist plots in the UK and some really good Degrassi marathons on The N).

Mostly to keep my June 1 post from getting lonely in the monthly archives, I'm posting this picture that I found online somewhere.

Sobran and Darwinism

2007-06-01T21:25:00.000-05:00

Joseph Sobran, whom I like and with whom I agree on some issues, has written an article which questions Darwinism by claiming that it's inconsistent with the evidence of human altruism. He never really makes it clear whether he's talking about Darwin's theory of evolution or Social Darwinism. I've excerpted a few non-consecutive paragraphs from his article and added my responses in bold below:

Of course we all want to survive. But we want just as strongly for others to survive too. Darwinism can’t explain the environmentalist movement (though I think it’s misguided). Nor can it explain why we write wills giving all we can to those who outlive us. Nor the Bill Gates foundation. Nor the sacrifices of parents who give their lives for their children. Nor the willingness of some people to suffer so that other people won’t kill unborn children. Nor nuns and priests who consecrate themselves to God in lives of charity and chastity (the pay isn’t all that good). Nor a hundred other forms of altruism.

The basic mistake that Sobran makes throughout his article is his idea that Darwinism is the same thing as absolute selfishness. If we lived forever, then selfishness at the expense of everyone else, including our descendants, might make sense from a Darwinian perspective. (I doubt that it actually would, for reasons stated a little later in this section.) Since we know we are going to die, we have concern for our descendants. They are an extension ourselves. That's why parents protect their children and try to make sure they are provided for even after the parents are dead.

The other, less familial acts of altruism (e.g., environmentalism, Bill Gates' philanthropy) also help the actor's own descendants, even though they help a lot of other people, too.

Such acts also frequently help the actor. Even most truly selfish people are not so inwardly directed that they can be happy living in an ugly world. The desire to be personally comfortable is not altruism, but it sometimes motivates us to make the world a lot nicer.

Also, we recognize that the more dangerous we allow the world to be, the more likely we are to fall victim to those dangers. There's a difference between selfishness and short-sightedness.

Animals may do that sort of thing [risk their own lives] for their own young, but not for other animals they’ve never met. The altruism of cows, for example, is pretty narrowly circumscribed, and bulls leave even more to be desired. Samuel Johnson once observed that if a bull could talk, it might say, “Here I am with this cow and this grass; what being could enjoy better felicity?” Touché.

I'll leave aside the altruism of animals, which is probably more developed in some species than Sobran seems to think. That's really a bit off-topic and I'm not sure I understand what Sobran's purpose was in bringing it up. I assume he's trying to make a point about humans having souls.

I will say, though, that I've known lots of men who could sincerely say, "Here I am with this cow and this grass; what being could enjoy better felicity?” except that they don't know what the word "felicity" means.

As I write these words, I’m listening to a stunning recording: Laurence Olivier reading the Psalms in the King James translation. They tempt me to superlatives, of course, but the real point is that I can’t think of, or even imagine, anything comparable in the animal kingdom. There are no analogies. Bulls don’t praise cows, let alone their Creator.

Explaining the phenomenon of praise is a real challenge for the Darwinian; it doesn’t appear to confer any particular advantage in that ruthless struggle for survival we’re always hearing about.
Praising our benefactors makes perfect sense from a Darwinian perspective. If the benefactor can hear our praise and is moved to benefit us again, then the Darwinian angle is obvious. Even if that particular benefactor can't or won't help us anymore, praising those who have done something that we like increases the likelihood that someone else might be motivated to do something similar. (I am assuming that Sobran isn't just talking about praising God, but also lesser benefactors.)

I can understand why atheists think religion does a lot of evil, because sometimes it surely does. But they never explain why man wastes so much time and energy in activities they insist are pointless and have no biological utility. If we found all the cattle in the pasture dancing and mooing in unison, wouldn’t we be curious about why they were behaving in this extraordinary fashion?

We would be curious about why the cattle were behaving in that way because it has always been observed that cattle are unable to dance and don't have the organizational skills necessary to moo in unison.

As to Sobran's claim that atheists have never explained "why man wastes so much time and energy" on religion, he's just wrong. Many studies, by atheists and others, have shown that some people derive pleasure or a lessening of anxiety from religion. There's nothing altruistic about that. The basic atheist response is that these people are in a state of denial, which can be blissful if maintained with sufficient fervor.

I suppose killing your own children makes some sort of sense from an atheistic and Darwinian point of view. If survival is a ruthless competition, your kids are your competitors, right? No wonder Darwin’s legions are in favor of this “choice.” It accords perfectly, methinks, with Ayn Rand’s “virtue of selfishness.”

Again, if we could live forever, then our children might be our competitors (or they might not). Since we can't, they are our best hope of achieving something like immortality. It is in our interest to not kill them.

I know I left some points unaddressed, such as altruism by childless people.

I also ignored some basic arguments that could support my position:

1) Darwinism is about the survival of the whole species, not just the individual and his direct descendants.

2) Much of altruism is learned behavior rather than instinct.

3) Extreme altruism may simply be one of those illogical things that some people do, like suicide or other self-destructive behaviors.

I decided that this post was getting too long and discussion of those issues would have taken up a lot more space and time. Maybe I'll come back to them in another post.

Until then, I'll end with these words:

As man advances in civilisation, and small tribes are united into larger communities, the simplest reason would tell each individual that he ought to extend his social instincts and sympathies to all the members of the same nation, though personally unknown to him. -- Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man

Misunderstanding Evolution

2007-05-30T23:14:00.001-05:00

Paul Bloom and Deena Skolnick Weisberg have written an article called "Why Do Some People Resist Science?" that examines, among other things, how the intuitive thinking of children can be a roadblock to their understanding of how nature actually works.

Their theory is interesting and almost surely correct.

I've excerpted the paragraph below for my own separate purpose, not because it summarizes Bloom and Weisberg's theory:

Consider, for example, that most adults who claim to believe that natural selection can explain the evolution of species are confused about what natural selection actually is—when pressed, they often describe it as a Lamarckian process in which animals somehow give birth to offspring that are better adapted to their environments. Their belief in natural selection, then, is not rooted in an appreciation of the evidence and arguments. Rather, this scientifically credulous sub-population are deferring to the people who say that this is how evolution works. They trust the scientists.

The popular confusion of Lamarck's theory of evolution with Darwin's theory of evolution (and later theories) is one of my main pet peeves. I am truly amazed at how often well-educated people don't know the difference.

In my first year of college, one of my honors-program classmates derided me for completely rejecting Darwin's theory. Of course, I wasn't doing that. I was only telling my classmate that he was incorrect when he said that evolution took place as a result of the inheritance of acquired traits . He thought that this was the basis of Darwin's theory.

To be fair, Darwin's theory isn't perfect, but my classmate was clearly talking about Lamarckism, calling it Darwinism, and believing that it was established fact. For example, he was claiming that if you bound a person's ears beginning in childhood, then that person's children would somehow inherit small ears. I have since learned how common such mistakes are.

This is my explanation for how the confusion happens:

In high-school biology classes many out-dated evolutionary theories are explained along with the most up-to-date theories. This is as it should be since the students need to learn about the history of science.

Lamarck's theory is often illustrated by the "giraffe story" which claims that some ancient proto-giraffes stretched their necks to reach the higher leaves and then their offspring were born with pre-stretched necks.

If the biology teacher is good at his job, he then explains that that's not what actually happened. In reality, some giraffes were born with long necks because of random mutations (which are mostly bad or irrelevant, but sometimes good). Since they had an advantage over the shorter necked giraffes, they lived longer and had more offspring. This natural selection was how the long-neck gene spread through the giraffe population.

When the students remember evolution, however, they remember the giraffes-stretching-their-necks story because it's more visual and easier to understand. It sounds like a Just So Story.

The random mutation and natural selection story, in contrast, is counter-intuitive and complex and requires an understanding of genetics that most high school students (and most college-graduates) don't have.

(All this fits in with what Bloom and Weisberg were saying, by the way.)

Buddha in the Tree

2007-05-28T16:46:00.000-05:00

I wedged this little Buddha head into a cranny at the base of an oak tree that is in my front yard. I'm hoping that the tree will grow around it. I put a toy soldier in the same spot several years ago and it's completely disappeared into the tree.

Many hours after I had shoved the Buddha's head into the tree and taken the picture, I started preparing this blog entry. I tried to find a website that I saw a few years ago. It showed pictures of things (fences, signs, a gun, a bicycle, etc.) that trees had grown around. I was going to provide a link, but I couldn't find that site. I did, however, find this, which I had never seen. Strange.

Lesha's Grown -N- Sexy Mens Department

2007-05-28T15:02:00.000-05:00

Photo taken at the local Goodwill.

Jews for Allah

2007-05-28T13:57:00.000-05:00

Separated as babies in China, twin girls reunited in Louisiana

2007-05-28T13:28:00.000-05:00

Ten years after life took them on different paths, two fraternal twins born in China and abandoned at an orphanage were reunited Saturday in Pineville surrounded by their adoptive parents.

Eleven-year-old Jennie Nadel and Rachel Halbrook didn't know of the existence of each other until a few months ago, after Allison Hornsby connected the dots.

[EDIT]

Hornsby explained that the search for Jennie's twin sister began when someone translated Jennie's Chinese name to English.

It was during a business trip to China that Hornsby, who is in the toy import business, was conversing with a business colleague and a Chinese speaker who happened to see Jennie's passport.

"He said to me 'Do you know what her name means?'. I said, no. 'It means big twin,' he said."

Hornsby said that day she learned that in Chinese culture it's very common for a family who has twins to name them, 'little twin' and 'big twin.'

Full article

European Man Found in Ancient Chinese Tomb

2007-05-27T23:26:00.000-05:00

Human remains found in a 1,400-year-old Chinese tomb belonged to a man of European origin, DNA evidence shows.

Chinese scientists who analyzed the DNA of the remains say the man, named Yu Hong, belonged to one of the oldest genetic groups from western Eurasia.

[EDIT]

The tomb containing Yu Hong's remains has been undergoing excavation since 1999.

It also contains the remains of a woman of East Asian descent.

The burial style and multicolor reliefs found in the tomb are characteristic of Central Asia at the time, experts say.

The people pictured in the reliefs, however, have European traits, such as straight noses and deep-set eyes.

"The mixture of different cultures made it difficult to confirm the origin of this couple, and the anthropologists also could not determine the race of these remains, owing to the partial missing skulls," Hui said.

To learn more about the history of the couple, Hui's team studied their mitochondrial DNA, a type of DNA inherited exclusively from the mother that can be analyzed to track human evolution.

The research shows that Yu Hong arrived in Taiyuan approximately 1,400 years ago and most probably married a local woman.

Carvings found in the tomb depict scenes from his life, showing him to have been a chieftain of the Central Asian people who had settled in China during the Sui dynasty (A.D. 580 to 618).

The carvings suggest that his grandfather and father lived in northwest China's Xinjiang region and were nobles of the Yu country for which he is named.

Yu Hong died in A.D. 592, at the age of 59. His wife, who died in A.D. 598, was buried in the same grave.

Full article

Derb

2007-05-26T16:15:00.000-05:00

John Derbyshire is one of the most intriguing journalists I know of. He writes smartly and bravely about the big taboos, he has a very eclectic set of beliefs, and his personal history is interesting. The fact that he was beaten up by Bruce Lee (in a movie, not for real) also really adds an air of coolness to his persona.

He's written a fascinating article called "Towards a White Minority" at National Review Online. Here's a little of it:

This reinforces a number of findings from recent years suggesting that people are much more willing to be taxed for the benefit of people like themselves than for the benefit of the Other. Old people already grumble about paying taxes to support extravagant educational establishments. As the racial generation gap opens up, with the oldsters being noticeably more white and Anglo than the kids being educated, the grumbling will escalate into action — most likely, the simple action of yet further residential segregation, the old and white-Anglo living here, the young and dark Hispanic living there.

Though, of course, the unwillingness to be taxed to support the Other cuts both ways. How will a majority nonwhite young workforce feel about paying out income and Social Security taxes for the sustenance of old, white Anglos? I don’t know about you, dear reader, but I, at least, have looked forward glumly to my last days, most likely spent stuck, incapable, in some cruddy nursing home with a bunch of other helpless white geezers, my daily needs in the hands of resentful black and brown orderlies whose educations featured long catalogs of the wrongs done to Them by Us.

Back of all that is the question: As white Anglos decline into a minority, will we see the rise of white-Anglo race consciousness? The common understanding at present is that open expressions of race consciousness are taboo for white-Anglo Americans, but just fine for everyone else. A leading black presidential candidate subtitles his best-selling biography “A Story of Race and Inheritance”; the main lobbying organization for Hispanics carries the proud title “National Council of the Race”; and so on. This word is, however, not available to white-Anglo Americans in reference to themselves, and white-Anglo Americans are indoctrinated from childhood to believe, or to pretend to believe, that race is an empty category.

Full article

Earlier this year, Derbyshire and Joey Kurtzman had a great dialogue at Jewcy about whether the points Kevin MacDonald made in his Jewish trilogy (A People That Shall Dwell Alone, Civilization and Its Discontents, and The Culture of Critique) were valid. It's a long set of articles that roams a little off-topic and everything in it is interesting, so I won't even try to excerpt any of it. You should just read the whole thing (Kurtzman's contributions are at least as good as Derbyshire's) starting here.

Tom Tomorrow's "Great Moments In Punditry: Four Years Later"

2007-05-26T07:41:00.000-05:00

WWII Porno-Propaganda

2007-05-26T07:18:00.000-05:00

The first item was a two-page folding leaflet. Its theme was the Kaisers Germany's patriotic song " The Watch on the Rhine". A very gloomy picture of a snow covered grave somewhere on the Russian front, headed the first verse of the Watch on the Rhine:

Lieb vaterland magst ruhig sein _ ( dear fatherland you may rest assured )

By rights that inspiring thought would be followed by a second verse.

Fest steht und treu die Wacht am Rhein _ ( Firm stands true the watch on the Rhine.)

Instead, the picture of the soldiers grave and its reassuring caption was followed by a second page overleaf showing in colour a picture of a naked girl, painted in the style favored by Adolf Hitler in such beloved pictures as "Leda and the Swan" about to seat herself on the upright penis of some dark haired and dark skinned non-German.

The Caption read: "Fest steckt's und treu der Fremdarbeiter rein."

(" Firmly sticks it and true the foreign worker in").

Full article

Another article with many more examples

White, Non-Hispanics To Be Minority Among U.S. Newborns By 2011

2007-05-26T06:47:00.000-05:00

In 2006 white, non-Hispanics accounted for:

56 percent of persons 9 and younger
60 percent of persons 10 to 19
67 percent of persons 20 to 64
81 percent of persons 65 and older

From July 1, 2005 to July 1, 2006, the white population grew by a miniscule 0.26 percent. The minority population grew by 2.42 percent.

If the white and minority populations continue growing at their respective 2005-06 growth rates, present day minorities will attain majority status by the year 2038. (Table 1.) (This is much earlier than the Census Bureau projects, primarily because they presume a reduction in legal immigration.)

Full article

Albana the Contortionist

2007-05-23T03:52:00.000-05:00

I did a Google image search for "ska" for a project mostly unrelated to this blog and this was one of the first results.

Though it diverted me from what I was working on, I had to investigate.

Albana is a student (a "scholorship student" according to the website from which the photograph came) of Ska von Schöning.

This photo barely hints at the things that Albana can do. If you are interested in contortion acts, I encourage you to view the full gallery. I am particularly impressed by Albana's ability to do other activities such as brushing her teeth or talking on the telephone while performing.

I've been fascinated by contortionists since a trip I made to the circus when I was a boy. I wasn't really impressed with the three-ring fare, but the sideshow was another story. One of the sideshow acts involved a young woman (a Gypsy, I think) lying down in an elevated box and then having wide blades inserted into the box. How she avoided the blades was not visible from where the audience was standing, but for 50 cents any of us could go up on the stage and look into the box. As I walked by the box, I could see that she had contorted her body in such a way as to avoid the blades. It was impressive and well worth 50 cents to see. I have a clear memory of her in her twisted pose looking up and making eye contact with me as I walked by.

You should also check out The Incomparable Ula, though a few of her pictures (here, here, and here) seem a little disturbing if you don't know what's going on.

Eli Valley's "Song of Songs"

2007-05-22T07:49:00.000-05:00

Thanks to Jewcy.

A History of "White Trash"

2007-05-19T10:11:00.000-05:00

Whether they use the term white trash or not, most Americans are unaware of its long and ugly history. If you had to guess, you’d probably say that the term arose in the Deep South, sometime in the middle of last century, as a term that whites coined to demean other whites less fortunate than themselves. Yet most of what we presuppose about the term is wrong.

The term white trash dates back not to the 1950s but to the 1820s. It arises not in Mississippi or Alabama, but in and around Baltimore, Maryland. And best guess is that it was invented not by whites, but by African Americans. As a term of abuse, white trash was used by blacks—both free and enslaved—to disparage local poor whites. Some of these poor whites would have been newly arrived Irish immigrants, others semiskilled workers drawn to Baltimore and Washington, D.C. in the postrevolutionary building boom, and others still may have been white servants, waged or indentured, working in the homes and estates of area elites. The term registered contempt and disgust, as it does today, and suggests sharp hostilities between social groups who were essentially competing for the same resources—the same jobs, the same opportunities, and even the same marriage partners.

Full article

Dennis Kucinich and Wife

2007-05-18T20:32:00.000-05:00

I have not been following the Democratic Presidential race as closely as I should have been. I did not even realize that Dennis Kucinich was married.

Bravo, Dennis, bravo.

Pat Buchanan's "But Who Was Right—Rudy or Ron?"

2007-05-18T03:45:00.003-05:00

When Ron Paul said the 9-11 killers were "over here because we are over there," he was not excusing the mass murderers of 3,000 Americans. He was explaining the roots of hatred out of which the suicide-killers came.

Lest we forget, Osama bin Laden was among the mujahideen whom we, in the Reagan decade, were aiding when they were fighting to expel the Red Army from Afghanistan. We sent them Stinger missiles, Spanish mortars, sniper rifles. And they helped drive the Russians out.

What Ron Paul was addressing was the question of what turned the allies we aided into haters of the United States. Was it the fact that they discovered we have freedom of speech or separation of church and state? Do they hate us because of who we are? Or do they hate us because of what we do?

Osama bin Laden in his declaration of war in the 1990s said it was U.S. troops on the sacred soil of Saudi Arabia, U.S. bombing and sanctions of a crushed Iraqi people, and U.S. support of Israel's persecution of the Palestinians that were the reasons he and his mujahideen were declaring war on us.

Full article

Paul For President

2007-05-16T23:53:00.000-05:00

I watched the Republican Presidential debate last night and V for Vendetta earlier this evening. Though the pairing was not planned (the movie just happened to make it to the top of my Netflix queue a few days ago), it was apt.

The most poignant part of the debate, I thought, was the happy defense by most of the candidates of torture. Only John McCain and Ron Paul finished their answers still looking human to me.

Earlier in the debate, Paul pointed out that the 9/11 attacks were largely a reaction to the military policy that the United States had followed in the Middle East for the previous several years, especially the bombing of Iraq. Rudy Giuliani responded, surely lyingly, that he had never heard anyone say such a thing and called on Paul to take back what he had said. Paul did not back down.

FOX News' post debate coverage included a text-messaging poll which asked viewers to vote for the candidate they thought won the debate. Paul finished second - behind Mitt Romney and ahead of Guiliani - in the poll, though he was in first place through much of the polling period. Most of FOX's commentators and guests condemned Paul's telling of the truth. Some demanded that he not be allowed in future debates. They dismissed the text-message poll as irrelevant, saying that it didn't really measure anything significant. (FOX's own Sean Hannity was among the polls detractors, though he didn't explain why FOX would sponsor such a silly poll and feature it so prominently as a part of their post debate coverage.)

For more on the reactions to Ron Paul, see:

Plenty of reasonable people can disagree about foreign policy. What's really strange is when one reasonable position is completely and forcibly excluded from the public debate.
Such was the case after 9-11. Every close observer of the events of those days knows full well that these crimes were acts of revenge for US policy in the Muslim world. The CIA and the 911 Commission said as much, the terrorists themselves proclaimed it, and Osama underscored the point by naming three issues in particular: US troops in Saudi Arabia, US sanctions against Iraq, and US funding of Israeli expansionism.

From Lew Rockwell's "Ron Paul Said It"

It’s a good thing for him that Russell Kirk didn’t have to live to see the deranged caricature of itself that American conservatism has now become. Kirk, one of the key architects of that movement, spent the last years of his life opposing every military adventure of the U.S. government. The average conservative today, on the other hand, who knows only what the government and its neocon shills tell him, would be at an utter loss to account for that.

From Thomas E. Woods, Jr.'s "Ron Paul Violated the Rules"

What Ron Paul’s participation in the 2008 presidential race is accomplishing is this: It is making people such as Rudy Giuliani think about things they’ve never thought about before and causing them to view the U.S. government and its long-time paradigm of empire and interventionism in an entirely different way. It’s also why he is engendering considerable discomfort among people who have long believed that the federal government is a deity whose foreign policies are beyond reproach. Don’t be surprised to hear more calls for suppressing Paul’s participation in future debates, even while the critics continue to wax eloquent about how U.S. soldiers are killing and dying in Iraq for the sake of “democracy.”

From Jacob G. Hornberger's "Giuliani’s Attack on Ron Paul Falls Flat"

V for Vendetta mirrors many of the themes that were discussed in the debate and evoked by its coverage. Of course, real world villains and heroes mostly seem pretty plain when compared to their cinematic counterparts. Maybe, if Ron Paul would wear a Guy Fawkes mask to the next debate....

Happy Mother's Day!

2007-05-13T18:40:00.000-05:00

Is L.A. burning?

2007-05-09T23:39:00.000-05:00

The recent fires in the Hollywood Hills reminded me of a sight I saw one night when I was living high up on Lookout Mountain Avenue in Laurel Canyon.

I had not watched the news or left the house that day, so I hadn't heard about or seen the fires. When I went outside for something (to do the laundry, I think) and looked to the east, I was surprised to see several fires burning on one of the other hills. The fires were miles away and there were lots of roads and canyons and other obstacles between me and them, so I wasn't afraid of them spreading to where I was. But, it was still an eerie thing to see. The fires must have been pretty big to have been so visible from far away, but I couldn't really judge their size any more precisely than that. It was already dark out. Even in daylight it would have been hard to establish a frame of reference for estimating the size of the fires since the area that was burning was mostly trees and bushes of various sizes. From a distance, the fires were just orange shapes growing and moving around an otherwise dark section of the hills. I was much too far away to hear any of the sounds that the fires and firefighters must have been making. It was very quiet where I was, as Laurel Canyon usually is.

Cannabis and the Christ

2007-05-09T21:31:00.000-05:00

Although the idea that Jesus and his disciples used a healing cannabis ointment may seem far-fetched at first, when weighed against the popular alternative (one that is held by millions of believers) that Jesus performed his healing miracles magically, through the power invested in him by the omnipotent Lord of the Universe, the case for ancient accounts of medicinal cannabis seems a far more likely explanation.

Full article

Thanks to my good friend JC (no relation to the JC, so far as I know) for sending me a link to this interesting article.

Teen Art Students Unwittingly Create Recruiting PSA for Belize Military

2007-04-27T07:21:00.000-05:00

Marcus Waller, 17, and Jacob Menache, 17, thought they were working on a class project.

The assignment: create public service announcements for the Belize Defence Force.

[EDIT]

What the teens didn't know was that their commercials will air throughout Belize.

Full article

I'm glad these two boys had the opportunity to develop and display their video editing skills. I also congratulate them on their success and wish them well in their future careers. However, I'm not sure that U.S. public high school art classes should be doing PR work for Central American militaries.

Granny Rube

2007-04-25T04:49:00.000-05:00

While going through some old family photographs recently, I found these two great pictures of my paternal grandmother. She's the tall girl in the middle in the trio above and the one wearing the suit in the quartet below. I don't know why they were cross-dressing.

Zombie Jesus Loves You

2007-04-22T00:08:00.000-05:00

Thanks to The Invisible Library, where you can find a version of this image large enough to make into a t-shirt transfer.

Some Things I Froze a Long Time Ago

2007-04-21T21:49:00.000-05:00

My digital camera (a Sony Cybershot DSC-P51 that I bought in 2002) is one of the most useful purchases I ever made. In the old days I probably wouldn't have wasted film taking a photograph of the contents of my freezer. (Well, I might have.) Thanks to digital photography, however, I've been able to freely document much of the minutiae of the most recent five years of my life. That's why I'm able to show you exactly what was in my freezer at 2:38 p.m. on January 24, 2004.

I recognize the Totino's, the bags of shredded mozzarella, the caviar, and the aluminum foil-wrapped hamburger patties as mine. The rest belonged to my then-roommates.

I don't know why I had caviar in the freezer. Surely I didn't actually freeze it. Maybe I had bought it very recently and it hadn't been refrigerated, so I wanted to let it chill before eating it. Or maybe I just put it in there to make the picture classier.

Help find Miss Atomic Bomb

2007-04-21T20:22:00.000-05:00

Her name is almost certainly Lee Merlin and if she is still living she is in her early seventies.

A woman resembling Miss Atomic Bomb and identified as Lee Merlin appears in a Long Beach Press-Telegram photograph in the newspaper's July 25, 1953 edition. In the photograph Merlin stands between Long Beach, CA Mayor Lyman B. Sutter and Jack Arnold of the Long Beach Culinary Workers union. The article concerns the mayor’s proclamation of "City of Hope Week"

Merlin came to Las Vegas in late 1953 or early 1954.

Her first job was at the Desert Inn Hotel.

She worked as a Copa Girl at the Sands Hotel (now the Venetian Hotel and Casino) from 1954 to the summer or early fall of 1957.

She lived with one of her co-workers at the Bali Hai Apartments on Desert Inn Road for most of her time in Las Vegas.

One of her fellow dancers, Carolyn MacMullen, recalls Merlin as "very bookish" with a "dry" sense of humor.

Photographer Don English was assigned by the Las Vegas News Bureau to take a picture outside the Sands Hotel in connection with an above ground atomic test. By 1957 the repetition of the tests had inspired English to become creative in his photography on this theme. He and his colleagues designed the striking mushroom cloud that adorns the bathing suit worn by Merlin. It was constructed of cotton wadding glued to cardboard.

Don English did not photograph Merlin at the exact time of the detonation. Also, the landscape behind Merlin demonstrates that the picture was taken facing east, away from the test site.

Contrary to oft-repeated claims, there was no beauty contest preceding the photograph and the title "Miss Atomic Blast" that is sometimes associated with the picture is incorrect.

Thanks to Conelrad Alert, where you can learn a lot about atomic culture.

Genetic Diversity Among Chimps and Humans

2007-04-21T07:06:00.000-05:00

They may all be black and hairy and they may all eat and act in much the same way, but chimpanzees from different parts of Africa are genetically more diverse than all of humanity, researchers reported on Friday.

Full article

Chimpanzees and genetics are two of my favorite subjects.

Part of the article was distracting, though. Here's the second paragraph:

Experts have long marveled that older ideas of race are not reflected in human DNA. Genetic diversity is more pronounced within population groups than between them, with only a few gene differences accounting for the wide variations seen in eye, skin and hair color across humanity.

It's slightly awkwardly placed in what was otherwise a coherent article. The second sentence of that paragraph especially caught my attention, because it includes the first part of a non-sequitur that has annoyed me for a long time. (The author of the chimpanzee article doesn't actually make the non-sequitur, but the appearance of its premise reminded me of the whole thing.)

My sociology professor used to make the point in class about there being more genetic diversity within each race than between races. He surmised from this that race had no genetic basis. I've heard this argument made more and more over the years. However, it doesn't really make sense.

The idea seems to be this: The genetic difference between the two most genetically dissimilar members of any one race is greater than the genetic difference between the typical member of that race and the typical member of any other race. That's true, but it's not as significant as it might sound at first. The difference within any one race is huge. Just think of the two most dissimilar white people you know of. Of course the difference between them is greater than the difference between the typical white person and the typical member of any other race. That leaves plenty of room for interracial difference.

I realize that the question of whether race exists is a complex one and it gets some people very upset. I've only barely touched on the subject here. This post is not a thorough examination of the question and I don't want it to be. I just wanted to give my criticism of one of the arguments that I've heard.

I know that the people who claim that race does not exist have good motives. They want to stop racial animosity and mistreatment. (I suspect, though, that a few of them just want to play iconoclast or contrarian.) However, we can like and respect each other and treat each other right without discounting or denying the differences that exist among us.

I don't think that many of us will do that, but we could. Even if race didn't exist, there would still be lots of differences on which we would base our prejudices and our dislikes. That basic moral flaw is what we should be trying to get rid of.

A Very Special Concert

2007-04-21T00:37:00.000-05:00

The enduring bond between Huey Lewis and the developmentally disabled

There is, however, one stereotype about retarded people that is true, one broad brushstroke that one can make about them all: Good gosh a'mighty, retarded people love them some Huey Lewis. Part of the reason is that Huey is apparently a sweetheart who does a lot of volunteer work with people who have developmental disabilities. But another big part is the music.

Full article

Really interesting article. You should go read the whole thing. I'm a pretty big Huey Lewis & the News fan myself.

Thanks to Slice O' Life (a very good blog) for bringing the article to my attention.

No More Limbo

2007-04-21T00:05:00.000-05:00

The Catholic Church has decided there is no limbo.

I'm a little sorry to see limbo go. I don't actually believe in it. (I'm a devout atheist. I don't believe in any sort of supernatural things.) However, it's just that sort of weird mythical thing that makes religion fascinating to me. (I do also enjoy the philosophical content of religions, but I consider that a separate subject.)

I actually thought about joining the Roman Catholic Church when I was a teenager. I didn't believe in Church dogma, but I figured it might be interesting to be Catholic. After awhile, reason won out. Then, I became interested in the Mormons.

In my 20's I had an idea about going through the motions of converting to several different religions (e.g., Catholicism, LDS, Orthodoxy, all sorts of Protestantism, all sorts of Judaism, Islam). I never did any of that, but I thought the experience could have provided the material for a good book. The title of my book was going to be The Faker.

Aishwarya Rai has gotten married

2007-04-20T21:33:00.000-05:00

...but, sadly, not to me.

More Aishwarya

Happy 420!

2007-04-20T00:01:00.000-05:00

Wright on Imus

2007-04-19T20:24:00.000-05:00

Elizabeth Wright, editor of the black conservative Issues & Views, has written a great commentary on the Imus controversy:

The day that CBS canceled Imus's show on WFAN, Mike and the Mad Dog, the afternoon sports entertainers on the station (now subbing in the morning), expressed their shock that so many "friends" had deserted Imus. Don't they know that the one thing you can count on white men to do is abandon other white men? Where have they been? The idea of loyalty among whites is a notion that abides only in misguided brains. Blacks often mistake class solidarity among particular circles of whites for a race bond. Do you think the tightly knit Bush social-financial circle of relatives and friends is focused around skin color?

There are thousands of Mike Nifongs out there, in one capacity or another, waiting to pounce upon what they consider the vulnerable, and supposedly hated, white male. Just as blacks, like Sharpton, use members of their race to enhance their profiles and careers, so do whites, especially when it offers a chance to show the world just how "anti-racist" they are, how good and moral. Those Duke University students were viewed by prosecutor Nifong as dispensable fodder, who can afford to take a hit or two, and even go down a time or two. After all, they've got the world on a string, according to this illusion, and their white skin allows them to bounce back from anything.

[EDIT]

One of the most unfortunate consequences of this episode is the fact that yet another white man has helped to restore credibility and social power to those two cynical buffoons, Jackson and Sharpton. Just when it looked like their stars were waning, along comes the groveling Imus, to remind us blacks of just who our "leaders" are.

Full article

Grindhouse / New Beverly Cinema

2007-04-19T02:33:00.000-05:00

I saw Grindhouse last week. I liked it, especially Planet Terror. I was surprised by that preference since I'm generally more of a Tarantinoist than a Rodriguezian.

I had mixed feelings upon hearing Nouvelle Vague's cover of Too Drunk to Fuck used in a scene in Planet Terror. I'm a big Nouvelle Vague fan and I like their version of the Dead Kennedy's classic a lot, but I'm always a little disappointed when one of my relatively obscure interests gets a lot of attention due to its use as an element of some larger pop cultural work. That happened to me big-time with the Priory of Sion and The Da Vinci Code.

I was looking forward to seeing Grindhouse because its double-feature-with-trailers gimmick reminded me of one of the things I miss the most about Los Angeles: the New Beverly Cinema. The New Beverly (which was thanked, I saw with delight, in the credits to Grindhouse) is a revival theater where you can see double-features for the price of one admission. The movies they pair always have something in common. Usually, it's something obvious, like the same director, but sometimes it's harder to figure out.

I saw several good combos there, including:

2001: A Space Odyssey / A Clockwork Orange

Easy Rider / Two-Lane Blacktop

City of Lost Children / Delicatessen

Mulholland Dr. / Lost Highway

The Third Man / The Magnificent Ambersons

I know I saw others, but can't recall what they were. I think I saw Kubrick's Lolita there, but can't remember what it played with.

The New Beverly doesn't have a parking lot (or, at least, it didn't when I used to go there), so movie-goers had to park a block or two or three away in a residential neighborhood and walk to the theater. Most of the residents of this neighborhood were ultra-Orthodox Jews (black hats, beards, etc.), which really added to the whole experience. I especially enjoyed going to the New Beverly on Friday nights, when the sidewalks were full of shul attendees.

One time I stopped at a garage sale. I bought a rotary telephone, which I still use. As I was leaving I saw a menorah, which I really wanted. Since I had already paid for the phone and was afraid I might be late for the movie, however, I passed on the menorah.

Graffiti on graffiti

2007-04-18T23:35:00.000-05:00

Thanks to Titty Blog.

Cindy Brady has a blog

2007-04-18T00:07:00.000-05:00

R.I.P., Kurt Vonnegut

2007-04-12T07:40:00.000-05:00

This is the closest I will ever come to writing an autobiography. I have called it "Slapstick" because it is grotesque, situational poetry -- like the slapstick film comedies, especially those of Laurel and Hardy, of long ago. It is about what life feels like to me. --- KV, from the prologue to his novel Slapstick

Kurt Vonnegut, my favorite writer, died slowly from a fall.

So it goes.

"Be careful what you say (out loud) about race." or "The First Amendment is not enough."

2007-04-11T19:37:00.000-05:00

Race is the great taboo in our society. No one white can talk about it, seriously or jokingly, without knowing that he or she is treading on dangerous ground. People hesitate when the subject comes up in conversation. Some of the things that go unsaid aren’t worth mourning, but others leave great holes in the discussion that we should be having about race.

There is no legal guarantee that America will be a land of open public discourse. There can’t be. The Constitution protects speech from restrictions by the State, but there are more basic and personal obstacles to free and honest discussion. Hypersensitivity to the words of others is one. Timidity in the face of our critics is another.

Nappy Headed Poe

2007-04-10T13:09:00.000-05:00

R.I.P., Johnny Hart

2007-04-09T08:21:00.000-05:00

Johnny Hart died on the Saturday between Good Friday and Easter Sunday.

After Hart became an evangelical Christian (a conversion he attributed to a born-again father-and-son team of satellite TV system installers), he began occassionally infusing his strips with overtly religious themes. I appreciated the irony of Christian content appearing in a comic strip called "B.C."

His most famous strip is the one shown above from Easter 2001. It caused great controversy, as illustrated by this parody from the JDL website:

Maundy Thursday, Good Friday, and Easter Sunday at Eye of Ra Ha

2007-04-08T13:06:00.000-05:00

In recognition of the last few days of Holy Week, I've posted the following three photographs over at my photo blog. Click on the pictures to be taken to the original posts.

Wax Judas (Hollywood, California, 2002)

Pietà (Vatican City, 2004)

Spider Thread (Hollywood, California, 2002)

Happy Easter!

2007-04-08T07:43:00.000-05:00

Here's my favorite Easter sermon:

Easter Sermon (WARNING: bad language)

I found this picture online, but cannot remember where. Anyway, I think it's one of the most ominous / funniest Easter pictures I've ever seen.

Parakeets of London

2007-04-07T11:47:00.000-05:00

Invasion of the parakeets

It's been a case of pretty polly up to now, but it may not be for much longer. Government scientists are to investigate the activities of the flocks of rose-ringed parakeets breeding in London's suburbs, amid rising fears that they may be harming native British bird species.

The brilliant green parakeets have hitherto been a popular sight in the parks and gardens where they are to be found, squabbling and dashing from tree to tree, in a broad swath of south London from Croydon in the east to Esher and beyond in the west. But since they first began breeding in the wild more than 40 years ago, their numbers have built up to a point where now some ecologists fear their population is exploding, with potentially damaging results. It is feared that the parakeets, which nest in holes and crevices in trees, may be displacing British tree-nesting species such as woodpeckers, nuthatches and starlings.

There is as yet no hard evidence that this is taking place, says the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB). But as a precaution the society has asked the Government to investigate the risk from the parakeets under its recently launched strategy for dealing with invasive non-native species.

The strategy is focusing on troublesome plants such as the rapidly-spreading Japanese knotweed, whose eradication from the Olympics site in east London alone may cost millions of pounds, and invertebrates such as the Chinese mitten crab, which is doing much damage burrowing under the banks of the Thames and other rivers.
The rose-ringed parakeet,Psittacula krameri, which is native to a great belt of land stretching from Africa across to India and the Himalayas, is the most obvious bird which in Britain today could be seen as invasive and non-native.
No one knows how it came to start breeding in London, although it is certain to have been the result of the accidental or deliberate release of captive birds. One persistent theory is that an entire flock escaped from Shepperton Studios in Surrey in 1951, during the filming of the adventure drama The African Queen, starring Humphrey Bogart and Katherine Hepburn.
They are now particulary plentiful in west London, especially in the wooded stretch of the Thames from Kew to Hampton Court; they have become a permanent feature, for example, at the Royal Botanic Gardens, where their sharply-loud screeching call and long flight silhouette are as distinctive as their brilliant emerald plumage.
The ecologist Tony Drakeford thinks their population must be in excess of 30,000, and rapidly expanding. He is convinced they must be displacing native birds. "Recently I went to Bushy Park where there thousands of parakeets and very few native birds," he said. But he thinks it may be too late to do anything about it. "A major cull would meet with a lot of opposition," he said.
News reports of the Government inquiry, to be carried out by the Central Science Laboratory, have prompted local paper headlines that a cull is imminent, backed by the RSPB. But an RSPB spokesman, Andre Farrar, denied the society was backing any mass killing. "We have simply asked the Government to study the situation," he said. "Some people think they are doing harm, but as yet there is no hard evidence that they are."
If it were proved that the parakeets were causing a reduction in the conservation status of native British bird species, "then a cull might be the right answer", Mr Farrar said - pointing out that of the 1,200 globally-threatened species of birds, 340 were threatened by introduced non-native species.

But, he said, at the moment the RSPB was not calling for any cull, merely for an inquiry.

Original article

What are ring-necked parakeets doing in London?
Among London's diverse residents are a range of birds including the St James' Park pelican, the odd red kite and an enormous colony of ring-necked parakeets.

These stunning birds (also known as rose-ringed parakeets) squawk noisily each morning. No one knows for sure where they came from, but suggestions range from aviary escapees, a pair released by Jimi Hendrix on Carnaby Street in the Sixties, refugees from the Ealing studio film-set for African Queen and angry partners releasing prized pets following relationship breakdowns. Any or all of these stories may be true.

The fact is that these birds now number something in the region of 30,000 across London, mainly concentrated in the west and south. Their number is predicted to top 50,000 in the capital by 2010.

Up to 6,000 parakeets now congregate at their communal roosting site in Esher, bringing an assortment of other parrots with them!

Ring-necked parakeets are long-lived, eat a diet of seeds, berries and fruit and live in holes in trees. There is no record of their presence impacting on native birds, but the RSPB is monitoring areas where these birds have settled.

Complaints about them vary from the noise they make to the destructive power of their beaks on garden feeders. The Government is developing a framework for dealing with non-native species.

These bright green birds are now recorded in every single London borough. In the 2006 Big Garden Birdwatch, they featured in the top tens of six boroughs: Bexley, Greenwich, Hounslow, Kingston-upon-Thames, Lewisham and Richmond-upon-Thames.

Original article

I'm fascinated by feral flocks of exotic birds. Here are some related links:

How do parakeets survive in the UK?

Wild parrots settle in suburbs

Feral Parrot Population Soars in U.K., Study Says

The Norwood Grove colony of Ring-necked Parakeet

Quaker parrots invade Barcelona

Brooklyn Parrots

Feral Monk Parakeets in Chicago!

The California Parrot Project (Their link page.)

Feral Parrot Populations in San Francisco

Born Wild In the USA

Happy Good Friday!

2007-04-06T08:27:00.000-05:00

I wasn't sure whether this picture was more appropriate for Good Friday or for Easter. It looks as though Jesus has been resurrected, but he's still on the cross. Since I have something else planned for my Easter entry, I decided to post this one today.

To see many different versions of the Savior, go to Jesus of the Week.

R.I.P., Bob Clark

2007-04-05T03:21:00.000-05:00

Obama the Christ

2007-04-04T07:20:00.000-05:00

I resisted the temptation to entitle this post "Chocolate Jesus II," but I had to include that joke in here somewhere.

I hope your Holy Week is going well.

Happy Passover!

2007-04-02T16:56:00.000-05:00

Here's a Passover greeting from Harold Stern, my second-favorite Jewish cowboy. (You're still number 1 with me, Kinky.)

Passover Greeting

Legion of Episcopalian and Anglican Super-Heroes

2007-04-02T05:48:00.000-05:00

Kim Richards and Olivia Barash

2007-04-02T00:05:00.000-05:00

Tonight, Hallmark is showing Escape to Witch Mountain and its sequel, Return from Witch Mountain, both starring Kim Richards. This brings back nice memories for me because Kim was one of the two great celebrity crushes of my early childhood.

The other was Olivia Barash. When I was a little boy in the 1970's and early 1980's, Kim and Olivia were on TV very frequently and I thought they were the two prettiest girls in the world.

Since I usually saw them in movies or reruns that were a few years old, they appeared to be the same age as me, but I was aware that they were older because I would sometimes see them in more up-to-date roles.

Kim seemed to have the more active acting career. I was a faithful Hello, Larry viewer, primarily because of her. The episode in which she let the blind kid feel under her shirt is one that I'm sure I'll remember until I die.

I remember that they also sometimes had cross-over episodes with Diff'rent Strokes and her character, Ruthie, would interact with Arnold and Willis and Kimberly.

I was aware that Kim was growing into a very hot young lady. What I didn't realize at the time was that she was the sister of Kyle Richards, who appeared on Down To Earth, one of my favorite shows from the 80's. I wouldn't make that connection until the late-90's, after the internet made learning so much easier. Later, I would be even more surprised, and a little dismayed, to learn that she and Kyle are the aunts of Paris Hilton.

I was not able to follow Olivia's development as thoroughly as I followed Kim's. I saw her in an episode of Alice in which she played Tommy's girlfriend and I can remember vividly her appearance in a very special (and, to me, very disturbing) Little House on the Prairie two-parter, but I mostly lost track of her. Maybe it was because our cable company started offering an expanded package of channels in 1986 and I just had so much more to watch.

Now, I know (thanks to the internet, again) that I did see her in later roles, but I just didn't realize it was her. Perhaps my failure to recognize her was due to a crucial gap in my observance of her career, but she did change in appearance a lot more than Kim did.

I re-watched Repo Man a few years ago just so I could look for Olivia. Knowing that it was her, I could see the resemblance, but I wasn't surprised that I hadn't been able to recognize her on earlier viewings. She was still very beautiful, but different. Apparently, she's also in Floundering (playing a character named Ruthie), but I've not gotten around to re-watching it.

Strange story: Kim and Olivia appeared together in the film Tuff Turf. I watched that movie (on cable, shortly after its theatrical run) when I was in high school primarily to see Kim (who looked fantastic), but I didn't recognize Olivia. I'm sure the movie would have meant so much more to me if I had.

Happy Palm Sunday and April Fools' Day!

2007-04-01T02:47:00.000-05:00

I don't have anything to post about Palm Sunday, so here are two April Fools' links:

Possible Origins of April Fools' Day

Top 100 April Fool's Day Hoaxes of All Time

What appears below was added to this entry on April 20, almost three weeks after the post was originally made. I'm explaining this because I'm not sure if it's proper etiquette to substantially edit a blog entry this long after it was posted without explaining that you've done so. Given that Kurt Vonnegut has died since I made the original post, I thought some sort of disclaimer like this was especially appropriate. I don't want anyone to think that I'm psychic or anything like that. I would have just posted my addendum in the "comments" section, but I thought you might miss it if it were there. I also considered waiting until the next time that Palm Sunday and April Fools' Day coincide, but I didn't want to have to figure out when that would be. Also, I may be dead by then. In any case, I don't want to wait that long.

Too late, I thought of an appropriate post for Palm Sunday / April Fools' Day:

I asked an Episcopalian priest the other day what I should say to you about Palm Sunday. She told me to say that it was a brilliant satire on pomp and circumstance and high honors in this world. So I tell you that. --- Kurt Vonnegut, from a sermon he delivered on Palm Sunday 1980 at St. Clement's Episcopal Church in New York City, later quoted in his essay "In the Capital of the World," which was published in his book Palm Sunday

Prominent evangelical backs out of pro-Israel event over proselytizing disclaimer

2007-04-01T00:23:00.000-05:00

Christian radio talk-show host Janet Parshall, a high-profile American evangelical known for her strong support of Israel, has dropped out of a Jerusalem conference sponsored by a Christian caucus of the Israeli Parliament. Parshall says she decided not to speak at the conference after she learned that the Knesset Christian Allies Caucus "condemns" and does not associate with groups that share the gospel of Jesus Christ.

Parshall says she is also troubled that the strict religious political party Shas has yet again introduced legislation in the Knesset that would give up to a one-year prison sentence for people who share the gospel in Israel. "I thought, wait a minute: we can't just blindly support Israel," she observes. "We have to be able to tell them, as a friend, [that] you can't do that. You can't silence us."

Full article

Jesse Jackson Endorses Barack Obama

2007-03-30T22:02:00.000-05:00

However, I still wonder whether Obama will really be embraced by average black Americans as one of their own since, in so many ways, he is not one of them:

1. He's half-white.

2. His ancestors didn't come to America as slaves. Instead, his father came here as a college-student (and then went back to Africa).

3. His black ancestry is East African, whereas most black Americans are descended from West Africans. (I doubt this will actually present a problem, since the ethnic differences that exist among Africans aren't noticed that much by most Americans of any race.)

4. He was raised by his white mother, her parents, and his Indonesian step-father.

5. He didn't grow up in Chicago or Harlem or Mississippi, but instead in Hawaii and Indonesia.

6. His childhood was privileged by white American standards.

Some columnists (black and white) have commented on this issue, but I wonder how much kinship average black Americans feel to Barack Obama. More importantly, I wonder how much kinship they will feel to him after the newness wears off and they have to choose among him and Hillary and Edwards.

Tancredo For President

2007-03-30T20:48:00.000-05:00

It looks like Tom Tancredo will officially enter the Presidential race on Monday.

While I also like Ron Paul a lot, Tancredo's alliterative name and his work on immigration reform make me lean more toward supporting him.

Let us hope they both make it into all the Republican debates and get the media attention they deserve. I must admit that I doubt the latter will happen. I'm not really sure about the former happening, either.

"Politically its OK to hate the white man"

2007-03-30T04:03:00.000-05:00

The display, a collection of 33 U.S. flags, includes two sentences with no punctuation: “Politically its OK to hate the white man” and, “Is it OK for me to hate if Ive been a victim”

“What I’m trying to say is that right now, the only politically correct form of prejudice is that anyone can say anything about a white person,” [artist Alvaro] Alvillar said. “I think that’s wrong, but it happens to be a reality and that is the idea of the first sentence. The second sentence is made to make you think about where you stand if you have been a victim.”

Full article

Chocolate Jesus

2007-03-30T03:05:00.000-05:00

Scariest Easter candy ever.

There's also a rear view.

Mormon Toys

2007-03-26T22:55:00.000-05:00

Gigantic Stuffed Animal

2007-03-20T20:05:00.000-05:00

As I said in my previous post, I used to work at G4. From the top of the parking structure next to G4's corporate headquarters in West L.A., one could see into an enclosed area across the street.

The most striking thing about this enclosed area was the gigantic stuffed animal that was always sitting there. It appeared to be a dog or maybe a wolf or coyote.

I always wondered how it got there and what its purpose was. It seemed to be guarding something. Or maybe it had been abandoned and, since it was too big to fit in anybody's car, nobody could adopt it.

Later, I decided it might be some sort of promotional tool that, when not in use, had to be stored out in the alley because of its size.

One of the best emails I ever received

2007-03-02T00:00:00.000-06:00

It really made my day. That's why I've saved it all this time and why I'm opening this blog with it.

I got the email while I was working on a show at G4 (a cable channel devoted to video games). When anyone sent an email to the address that appeared on the screen during our show, that email went to my inbox. On the morning of July 4, 2002, I arrived at work and found the email that I have transcribed below. (I should explain that "Diane" was the Asian-American host of our show.)

Here's the email:

I really appreciate that you take the time to work hard on your show and my opinion of your show is that you are a bunch of faggots with no lives that should all be killed. Your bodies should be fed to iraqies and even they wont want that shit. Diane why do you go down to california and sell your body. How come I hear you screaming sucky sucky 5 dollar.