I Used To Believe

Ken AshfordWeb RecommendationsLeave a Comment

UsetobelieveNot to be confused with This I Believe, I Used To Believe is a charming little website that collects childhood beliefs submitted by contributors.  Some examples:

"I used to believe that there was a magical ingredient in birthday cakes that allowed you to age another year, and that’s why you had to eat it."

"I used to think that vanilla was the absence of chocolate, not its own flavor."

"Once, when I was 8, I told my Mom about this weird experience I had where the exact same thing happened to me twice. She explained that it hadn’t happened twice, but that I had déjà vu. The next day at school, I told all of my friends that I had this weird French disease that made me get stuck in time and repeat things I’d already done."

"When I was a kid, I was very afraid of chicken pot pies, and wondered why anyone would ever eat any such thing. It was probably because I wasn’t yet clearly hearing a distinction between ‘chicken pot’ and ‘chicken pox’. So I must have been thinking of them as ‘chicken pox pies’."

"I used to believe that whenever I went into the restroom in public, everyone outside instantly stopped whatever they were doing and all paused to listen to the speakers which were placed all around the store so that everyone could listen to me in the bathroom. Of course, everyone went back to normal once I came from the bathroom."

"I used to believe that when the judge sentenced a criminal to an impossibly long sentence (like 100+ years) that they kept his body in prison after he died until it was there for the whole sentence."

"when i was a little girl i believed that the veils on a nun’s habit were nailed to their heads and that they were all bald underneath it and that they slept in it and never took it off! that is what my brother told me. at religious instructions class i asked a nun if it hurt when they pounded the nails in. she took me aside into a cloak room and took off the veil to reveal her beautiful long hair"

"As a four-year-old with a very large vocabulary, I decided the ‘Civil War’ was the one war where everybody pretended they were nice to everyone else. For example, a soldier would offer the enemy a cigarette, shoot him when he least expected it, and then pretend to be sad about it."

"I used to believe that speedbumps were actually there for the blind to drive, and they read it like braille. Thanks to my older brother and sister of course."

I suppose I — like everyone — had some crazy beliefs as a child, too.  I just can’t remember them.

Overreaction

Ken AshfordCrimeLeave a Comment

In the wake of the Virginia Tech murders, the Dean of Student Affairs at Yale University has banned the use of all stage weapons in theatrical productions:

In a speech made before last night’s opening show of “Red Noses,” [student director Sarah] Holdren said that {Dean of Student Affairs Betty] Trachtenberg’s decision to force the production to use wooden swords instead of metal swords will do little to stem violence in the world.

“Calling for an end to violence onstage does not solve the world’s suffering: It merely sweeps it under the rug, turning theater — in the words of this very play — into ‘creamy bon-bons’ instead of ‘solid fare’ for a thinking, feeling audience,” she said. “Here at Yale, sensitivity and political correctness have become censorship in this time of vital need for serious artistic expression.”

***

“I completely understand that the University needs to respond to the tragedy, but I think it is wrong to conflate sensitivity and censorship,” Holdren said in an interview. “It is wrong to assume that any theater that deals with tragic matter is sort of on the side of those things or out to get people; they’re not — they’re out to help people through things like this. I want my show and all shows to be uplifting to people. That’s why I’m upset about this — it’s not because my props were taken — it’s about imposing petty restrictions on art as the right way to solve the problems in the world.”

Put me down as supporting Holdren.

Staged hangings, by the way, are still permitted.  Go figure.

When They Stand Up, We’ll Stand Down?

Ken AshfordIraqLeave a Comment

Bush’s Iraq strategy, in his own words:

Our strategy can be summed up this way: As Iraqis stand up, we will stand down, and when our commanders on the ground tell me that Iraqi forces can defend their freedom, our troops will come home with the honor they have earned.

Turns out …uh …not so much:

Military planners have abandoned the idea that standing up Iraqi troops will enable American soldiers to start coming home soon and now believe that U.S. troops will have to defeat the insurgents and secure control of troubled provinces.

Training Iraqi troops, which had been the cornerstone of the Bush administration’s Iraq policy since 2005, has dropped in priority, officials in Baghdad and Washington said.

So now what’s the plan (even the rhetorical plan) for victory in Iraq?

Well, just for the U.S. military to fight the insurgency without help from the Iraqi security forces.  Of course, the enemy now is pretty much the entire Iraqi populace, since we are now getting slammed from both Shia and Sunni.

In a word, it’s a clsuterfuck, and we’re in the middle.

Philip Carter explains in Slate why this new strategy will meet the same fate as the first five strategies.

[W]e’ve seen at least five major strategies implemented in Iraq, and all have failed, creating a legacy of bad blood that undermines our continuing efforts. Much of this failure owes to the naive belief that we can impose our will on the Iraqi people through our strategies, or win their support with a combination of security and reconstruction.

Gen. Petraeus and his brain trust have devised the best possible Plan F, given the resources available to the Pentagon and declining patience for the war at home. But the Achilles heel of this latest effort is the Maliki government. It is becoming increasingly clear to all in Baghdad that its interests—seeking power and treasure for its Shiite backers—diverge sharply from those of the U.S.-led coalition. Even if Gen. Petraeus’ plan succeeds on the streets of the city, it will fail in the gilded palaces of the Green Zone. Maliki and his supporters desire no rapprochement with the Sunnis and no meaningful power-sharing arrangement with the Sunnis and the Kurds. Indeed, Maliki can barely hold his own governing coalition together, as evidenced by the Sadr bloc’s resignation from the government this week and the fighting in Basra over oil and power.

Plan F will fail if (or when) the Maliki government fails, even if it improves security. At that point, we will have run out of options, having tried every conceivable strategy for Iraq. It will then be time for Plan G: Get out.

Speaking about Plan F, Kevin Drum puts it bluntly, “This is a ’slow bleed.’”

"Getting out" is the only option left us.  Even GOP Senators are realizing this, as they are sponsoring a bill requiring withdrawal of troops within 4 months of the bill’s passage.

By the way, whose plan was it to go into Iraq in the first place?  Bin Laden’s.  So says none other than Karl Rove:

"I wish the war were over," Rove said. "I wish the war never existed… History has given us a challenge."
…
In a question-and-answer period after his speech, Rove was asked whose idea it was to start a pre-emptive war in Iraq.

"I think it was Osama bin Laden’s," Rove replied.

He’s right.  Here’s bin Laden himself:

All that we have mentioned has made it easy for us to provoke and bait this administration. All that we have to do is to send two mujahidin to the furthest point east to raise a piece of cloth on which is written al-Qaida, in order to make the generals race there to cause America to suffer human, economic, and political losses without their achieving for it anything of note other than some benefits for their private companies.

Bin Laden succeeded in provoking the United States into working against its own interests, in goading us into becoming mired in a war in the Mideast much like the one that ultimately helped destroy the Soviet Union. And Bush & Co fell for it.

Gee, I don’t know.  Maybe we should stop doing what our enemies want us to do.  That seems to me the basis of any good military policy.  Call me crazy….

In Lieu Of The Friday iPod Random Ten

Ken AshfordPopular CultureLeave a Comment

I offer a little classic Pat Benatar.

Takes you back, eh?

Here’s the plot, as far as I can tell.

Pat is riding on the back of the bus, chanting.  Nobody seems to care or notice.  She turns to the passenger next to her and shouts "WHOA-OO-WHOA-OO-WHOA-OO-WHOA-OO-WHOOOOOAA!!", but it has no apparent effect.

Flashback to Pat storming out of her house.  She has just had a fight with her father, Nathan Arizona (from "Raising Arizona").  He’s upset because she always sings, and never just talks.  Mrs. Arizona wrenches her hands in silent despair.  Pat waves "goodbye" to her younger brother, Jimmy, who her parents have locked in his upstairs bedroom, probably because he lacks fashion sense.

Pat eventually finds herself roaming the streets of New York which, as we all know, is populated almost entirely by sluts and brawny gay men who apparently have nothing better to do but grease themselves down with baby oil.

This was, of course, during the time when there was a clothing shortage, and many New Yorkers were forced to walk around in their underwear or torn clothes found in the trash.

We learn that Pat’s father operates a Mom & Pop store — the kind of place with creaky wooden floors and where you can get a fountain soda or a root beer float for a mere "three bits".

We also can be certain that Pat is in New York, as she is frequently the object of shoving and rude stares from the gay men who seem to surround her all the time.

Pat’s father is disgusted by his wife’s cooking, and cannot eat it anymore.

Pat finds a job at one of those seedy "Ten-Cents-A-Dance", which, contrary to popular belief, did NOT disappear in the 1930’s and were, in fact, staggeringly popular in the 1980’s.  The place is populated by more gay men, and an unusual number of sneering women who were never taught how to cross their legs in public.

This, we learn, is a very boring job.  Pat does not seem to be enjoying it, no matter how man gay men ask her to dance.  She sends a postcard to Jimmy, still imprisoned in his bedroom.  Jimmy is amused to discover how sad Pat is, and envies her freedom.

Meanwhile, all is not well at the "Ten Cents A Dance" emporium.  Pat refuses to dance with another gay man.  A gay greasy Mexican with a John Travolta outfit and a gold tooth — his name is Camarro — dances a little "dirty" with one of the other girls. 

This sends Pat into a rage.  She and the other girls surround him and invade his personal space, which is very uncomfortable for the gay Camarro.  She pushes him back against the bar, and shakes her magic shoulders at him.  The other girls join in.  They all shake their magic shoulders at him.

Camarro looks nervously around the club.  "Is anybody else seeing this?" he wonders.

Pat and the girls perform the "Here Come The Jets" routine from West Side Story, occasionally lifting their arms to dry their sweaty pits.

More shaking of the magic shoulders entices Camarro to join Pat.  Playing along for a while, Pat lets out with a "Oh, no you di-int" and throws water on him.  Camarro grabs Pat’s wrist, but she is able to break away from his very gay stronghold.  Eventually, he melts from the water (although this is merely implied). 

Drunk with their newfound fem-power, Pat and the other dime-a-dance girls take their shoulder-shaking routine outside, where it is midnight.  They are (one assumes) in search of the dancers from Donna Summer’s "She Works Hard For The Money".  They proceed down an abandoned dead end street where, remarkably, it’s suddenly noon.  They stop their dancing, and perform the "goodbye" scene from Godspell. 

It’s only now that we realize some of the "girls" are actually male transvestites, in an M. Night Shyamalan/"Crying Game" surprise twist ending.

The sound of the bus driver’s whistling snaps Pat back to the present, and we again see her on the back of the bus.

She pouts.  "Love is a battlefield" she muses.

FUN FACT:  The part of Jimmy was played by Will Farrell’s brother, Dominick.

Gonzales Resignation Watch

Ken AshfordAttorney FiringsLeave a Comment

I have little to say about this.  By all accounts, he tanked yesterday.  His story was a concoction of "mea culpa" combined with "I’m not responsible" combined with "I don’t recall".  Bottom line is that Gonzales is either lying about his role in the U.S. Attorney firings, or he is incompetent in that he was "out of the loop" about the firings.

He was so bad that Republican senators on the committee openly suggested that he should resign.  In fact, he was so bad that one (unnamed) White House people insider said that his appearance before the Senate Judiciary Committee was like "clubbing a baby seal" and that his tesimony was "going down in flames".  Ouch.

The official White House statement given late yesterday is one of unflinching support for Gonzales, but it doesn’t take much to see that his resignation is imminent.  I would expect it today, or possibly tomorrow.  There’s no way he can survive.

Too bad I’m not a betting man.

UPDATE:  The New York Times is rather blunt about Gonzales’s performance yesterday, beginning with:

If Attorney General Alberto Gonzales had gone to the Senate yesterday to convince the world that he ought to be fired, it’s hard to imagine how he could have done a better job, short of simply admitting the obvious: that the firing of eight United States attorneys was a partisan purge.

Mr. Gonzales came across as a dull-witted apparatchik incapable of running one of the most important departments in the executive branch.

and ending with:

We don’t yet know whether Mr. Gonzales is merely so incompetent that he should be fired immediately, or whether he is covering something up.

But if we believe the testimony that neither he nor any other senior Justice Department official was calling the shots on the purge, then the public needs to know who was. That is why the Judiciary Committee must stick to its insistence that Mr. Rove, Ms. Miers and other White House officials testify in public and under oath and that all documents be turned over to Congress, including e-mail messages by Mr. Rove that the Republican Party has yet to produce.

Shorter Townhall Pundits

Ken AshfordRight Wing Punditry/IdiocyLeave a Comment

Shorter Mike Gallagher: I’m not going spend an entire column capitalizing on the Virginia Tech murders.  Instead, I’m going to write about me and my thoughts (about the Virginia Tech murders).

Shorter Phil Harris: If fetuses had laptops and email accounts, here’s what they would say.

Shorter John Hawkins:  I’ve figured it out, everybody — Cho Seung-Hui was baaaad.

Shorter Chuck Colson: I’ve figured it out, everybody — Cho Seung-Hui was baaaad.

Shorter Jerry Bowyer:  I’ve figured it out, everybody — Cho Seung-Hui hated McDonald’s.

Shorter Paul Greenberg:  A guy I know — I won’t say who — likes baseball.

Shorter Paul Greenberg:  Okay, it’s me.  I like baseball.

Shorter Bert Prelutsky:  Look, all he did was call them "nappy-headed ho’s".  He’s not Hitler for Chrissakes!

Shorter Lorie Byrd:  The Virginia Tech murders?  That’s freedom at work, baby!

Shorter Kathleen Parker:  My anti-abortion rhetoric is better than your pro-choice rhetoric.

Shorter Oliver North:  Virginia Tech, Iran, same diff….

Shorter David "Not My Brother" Limbaugh:  Women like Justice Ginsberg — who refuse to bow to the patriarchy and who believe woman should control their lives — are just being inflexible.

Shorter Charles Krauthammer: People should use the Virginia Tech killings to advance their own political ideology (P.S.  Ignore what I said two days ago)

The 32 Victims

Ken AshfordCrimeLeave a Comment

Today is the Day of Mourning for the people of V Tech, and to a larger extent, the country — after which (one hopes) all can never forget, but move on.

You may want to avoid the maudlin media profiles of the V Tech victims and try to understand more about them by viewing their myspace pages.  Mydeathspace has compiled the links of 17 of them.

Do My Stuff

Ken AshfordWeb RecommendationsLeave a Comment

DomystuffI find this appealing — an eBay-like service where people post their chores they don’t want to do:

Whether is cleaning out your gutters, buffing your car or being a good father to your children, you can post it up. People then bid down on your task, until you select someone to do the work. You then place your money in escrow with the company, until the task is accomplished and your new slave assistant gets paid. It’s possible to limit bidding by location, and, well, that’s it.

It’s called domystuff.com and if it catches on (the way eBay has done), it could become one of those indepensible things of daily life (for some).  One wonders, however, how far people will take the phrase "do my stuff".

I Blog Like A Girl

Ken AshfordBloggingLeave a Comment

At least, I blog like a girl according to researchers who have devised an algorithm for this sort of thing.

Well, I blog sort of like a girl.

Words: 540

Female Score: 724
Male Score: 559

The Gender Genie thinks the author of this passage is: female!

Try it yourself.

The Blame Game

Ken AshfordCrime2 Comments

Compiled by Cynical-C Blog:

It’s the fault of violent video games.

It’s the fault of movies.

It’s that no other students were armed.

It’s the cowardly students who didn’t rush the shooter.

It’s the first victim’s fault.

It’s secularism’s fault.

It’s the Muslims’ and/or foreigners’ fault.

It’s the Atheists’ fault.

It’s the fault of the colleges and how they coddle their students.

It’s society’s fault.

It’s the Second Amendment’s fault.

It’s the bureaucracy’s fault.

It’s the fault of Roanoke Firearms, where he bought the gun.

It’s the authorities’ fault.

It’s the Liberals’ fault.

It’s pedophilia, homosexual couplings and adulterous behavior’s fault. (Not sure if he means all at the same time or separately.)

It’s capitalism’s fault.

It’s the fault of psychiatric drugs.

It’s the Devil’s fault.

It’s South Korea’s fault.

It’s the hippies’ fault. (Nobody’s blaming the Yippies yet)

It’s the media and culture’s fault.

It’s the murderer’s fault.

It’s the legal system’s fault.

It’s the fault of the Virginia Tech officials.

It’s the fault of the Chinese.

It’s the fault of this blogger who happens to be asian, likes guns and who recently broke up with his girlfriend.

It’s Simon Cowell’s fault.

It’s Bill Gates’ fault.

It’s the fault of trauma induced mind control by a military industrial complex.

It’s the killer’s parents’ and/or gun makers’ fault.

It’s the fault that colleges have co-ed dorms and/or students who major in English.

It’s a lack of funding for mental health services’ fault.

It’s the GOP’s fault.

It’s the Democrats’ fault.

It’s NBC’s fault.

It’s autism’s fault.

It’s al Jazeera or Palestinian TV’s fault.

It’s the fault of pro-choice doctors.

It’s Collective Soul’s fault.

It’s the fault of professors who survived the Holocaust and are not armed to the teeth.

Well, I have my own (stupid) pet theory.  It’s the fault of a woman named Regina Rohde.  Trouble seems to follow her:

Eight years ago, she was a freshman at Columbine High School in Colorado when two classmates, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, came in armed to the teeth and bent on murder.

***

And now, on Monday morning, it was happening again. Rohde wasn’t in the direct line of fire, but she knew that a gunman was on the prowl, and she found herself experiencing the same emotions as she had in 1999.

"It was a lot of the same reactions. ‘What’s going on? Who’s hurt? Where do we go?’ — the same kind of questions that we asked ourselves" at Columbine, she said.

UPDATE:  A few days ago, some on the right were quick to jump on the "blame Islam" bandwagon:

First it was Johnny Muhammad, now it was Cho Sueng Hui aka Ismail Ax. Precisely how many mass shooters have to turn out to have adopted Muslim names before we get it? Islam has become the tribe of choice of those who hate American society.

Hmmmmm.  Well, what was Cho’s "tribe of choice"?  Let’s check out today’s Bloomberg headline:

Virginia Shooter Compared Himself to Christ in Video

By Nick Allen

April 19 (Bloomberg) — The Virginia Tech university student who killed 32 people in modern America’s worst mass shooting compared his own impending death to the crucifixion of Jesus Christ.

"I die like Jesus Christ, to inspire generations of the weak and defenseless people," Cho Seung Hui, 23, said during a rambling video message that he mailed to NBC News after killing his first two victims.

Would those premature speculators like to revise their comments, and argue that Christianity "has become the tribe of choice of those who hate American society"?

No, I thought not.

The Stupidity, It Burns

Ken AshfordRight Wing Punditry/IdiocyLeave a Comment

It’s hard to understand why Dinish D’Souza is called one of the prominent thinkers of the American Right, when he writes absolutely amazingly dumb things like this:

Notice something interesting about the aftermath of the Virginia Tech shootings? Atheists are nowhere to be found. Every time there is a public gathering there is talk of God and divine mercy and spiritual healing. Even secular people like the poet Nikki Giovanni use language that is heavily drenched with religious symbolism and meaning.

Atheists are nowhere to be found?  How does Dinish know?

By the way, here’s what poet Nikki Giovanni said — in its entirety — at the Virginia Tech convocation on April 17.  Dinish says this is "heavily drenched with religious symbolism".  See if you can spot it:

We are Virginia Tech.

We are sad today, and we will be sad for quite a while. We are not moving on, we are embracing our mourning.

We are Virginia Tech.

We are strong enough to stand tall tearlessly, we are brave enough to bend to cry, and we are sad enough to know that we must laugh again.

We are Virginia Tech.

We do not understand this tragedy. We know we did nothing to deserve it, but neither does a child in Africa dying of AIDS, neither do the invisible children walking the night away to avoid being captured by the rogue army, neither does the baby elephant watching his community being devastated for ivory, neither does the Mexican child looking for fresh water, neither does the Appalachian infant killed in the middle of the night in his crib in the home his father built with his own hands being run over by a boulder because the land was destabilized. No one deserves a tragedy.

We are Virginia Tech.

The Hokie Nation embraces our own and reaches out with open heart and hands to those who offer their hearts and minds. We are strong, and brave, and innocent, and unafraid. We are better than we think and not quite what we want to be. We are alive to the imaginations and the possibilities. We will continue to invent the future through our blood and tears and through all our sadness.

We are the Hokies.

We will prevail.

We will prevail.

We will prevail.

We are Virginia Tech.

Moving words, but is that "heavily drenched with religious symbolism"?  I think not.

But then Dinish sinks to even lower levels of illogical delusion.  In his column, he skewers noted evolutionist Richard Dawkins, and then adds:

To no one’s surprise, Dawkins has not been invited to speak to the grieving Virginia Tech community. What this tells me is that if it’s difficult to know where God is when bad things happen, it is even more difficult for atheism to deal with the problem of evil. The reason is that in a purely materialist universe, immaterial things like good and evil and souls simply do not exist. For scientific atheists like Dawkins, Cho’s shooting of all those people can be understood in this way–molecules acting upon molecules.

Oh this is going to be fun.  Let’s apply Dinish’s logic to other people, as in:

"To no one’s surprise, Pat Robertson has not been invited to speak to the grieving Virginia Tech community. What this tells me is that if it’s difficult to know where God is when bad things happen, it is even more difficult to predict when He will send hurricanes to strike the Gulf Coast."

or how about

"To no one’s surprise, Jeff Foxworthy has not been invited to speak to the grieving Virginia Tech community. What this tells me is that if it’s difficult to know where God is when bad things happen, it is even more difficult to know whether or not you’re smarter than a 5th grader."

Really, Dinish.  There’s no reason to treat the non-invitation of someone as a rebuke of what they stand for.

This has been another installment in a continuing series known as "The Virginia Tech Killings Prove Everything I’ve Always Believed To Be True".

UPDATE: Another response to Dinish:

Then again we had an indifferent God who allowed thirty-two innocent people to be slaughtered and He couldn’t even bother to raise a finger

If this is the best God that religion has to offer, I think we’re gonna need a better deity…