Late Night Laugh: Only Six Months To Go

Smart Dumbass, Naked Dumbass, Cigars And Life Savers

Dumbass genius:

A maths genius has learned an expensive lesson after he fought a £60 speeding fine – only for it to end up costing him £20,000.

Penniless physicist Dr Iain Fielden challenged the speed camera ticket after it clocked his wife doing 36mph in a 30mph zone…

He argued that as the camera was on a bend, a principle called cosine error wrongly showed his wife, Vikki, 49, driving faster as she drove her VW Polo through Brockholes, West Yorkshire.

He took measurements, poured dye on the road to track car motion, wrote equations and even took moulds of kerbstones to argue his case…

Philip Gwynne, of West Yorkshire Casualty Reduction Partnership, said: ‘In speeding matters, it is the law of the land not the law of physics that matters.’

Happy, Happy Meal:

Newlyweds Terry and Alice Speller were McLovin’ each other when they tied the knot and then enjoyed a £7.18 wedding day feast – at a McDonald’s.

Terry, 25, and 26-year-old Alice, from St Austell in Cornwall, wed at a church before they were chauffeur-driven to their favourite fast-food restaurant.

Cigar Case Politics:

London’s flamboyant mayor Boris Johnson is fuming after police took possession of a cigar case he removed from the looted home of former Iraqi Deputy Prime Minister Tariq Aziz shortly after the U.S.-led invasion in 2003…

He handed the case to the city’s Metropolitan Police on Monday, and wrote a letter in Tuesday’s Telegraph complaining about the pettiness of a case which he blamed on the ruling Labour Party.

The police will consider whether the case is of “archaeological, historical, cultural, rare scientific or religious importance” and whether it was illegally removed from Iraq.

Johnson said the investigation was opened after political rivals raised the issue with police, and accused the Labour Party of being “petty” and “time-wastingly idiotic.”

He added: “I am accused by my political opponents of removing a cultural artifact from Iraq.

“As it happens, I also have in my possession a letter from the lawyers of Tariq Aziz, informing me that Mr. Aziz wishes me to regard the cigar case as a gift.”

Another Dumbass:

So which is the worst crime: possession of stolen goods or public indecency.

It appears 49-year-old Bill Merit thought the latter. Bad choice Bill. Police said Wednesday that Merit was picked up for public indecency shortly after being freed from jail in Chatham County, Ga.

They say Merit told an officer that he wasn’t wearing the clothes jailers gave him because he thought they were stolen.

According to the police report Merit – released after having been booked two days earlier on charges of criminal trespass and disorderly conduct – “appeared rational, except for being naked.”

The Other Lifesaver:

An ailing, retired farmer who refused to give up his outhouse after authorities declared it to be a public nuisance finally got a new one.

Elbert “Lew” Preston, 79, stood his ground long enough for a nonprofit group to come to his aid and build him a sturdy new outhouse with a waste tank underneath.

“There she is,” Preston said as he showed off the new outbuilding. “She’s a lifesaver.”

Crisis Darfur: How The Left Embraced The Genocide In Darfur

From Guernica:

French philosopher Bernard-Henri Lévy on how 3 great ideas of the political left have backfired on the people of Darfur:

…I would like to sum up in a few remarks what I saw and what I concluded during this journey which I made in this very ill-informed area. We have very little information from this area where I was, with a photographer of the French agency Gamma. I would like to sum up the conclusion I did draw from this journey. My first conclusion was and still is that we should stop speaking of the crisis of Darfur or even the war in Darfur. It is not a crisis. It is not a war. A war presupposes of course a frontline, presupposes organized battles, and presupposes, even more, two real armies. It is not a war between two armies. It is a war by an army against civilian populations. It is not a civil war, it is a war against civilians…

…There are a lot of big stories about the Janjaweed, these horsemen of the devil, ill-equipped themselves, arriving in the villages burning the huts, spreading fear, like in the Middle Ages. What I saw is not exactly that. I saw huge holes in the ground, craters from bombs which were the result of a bombing. Not of a horseman, but a plane, which flew over the area a few days before my arrival. This is not Janjaweed. This is a real bomber. What everybody told me is that these Janjaweed when they arrive, generally in lorries, in trucks, they are commanded by people in uniforms or have uniforms that happen to belong to the Sudanese Army. I saw something also, this is something else, this is the vestige of a little house which was destroyed a few days before my arrival..

Does what happened in Darfur deserve, if I dare say, the name genocide or not? I know that there is a polemic on this point. Some say that it is a genocide, others say that it is not quite a genocide.. What I saw, what I witnessed…makes this sort of discussion completely absurd and frivolous.

First of all, as you know, the decision for genocide, the planned decision to eradicate, to exterminate a people is never known in real time. It is never announced on CBS News or in AFP. As you know, the conference of Wannsee, where the final solution against the Jews was decided, was only made known long afterwards… I traveled five or six hundred kilometers and in that vast area I hardly found a trace of human life. Sometimes I did not even find a trace of human death; even the dead had been violated…this burnt earth, this complete devastation, this will to eradicate even the [least] trace of human life, I must confess that I [haven't] often seen it—maybe never.

Another thing which I never saw to this extent (and which makes the polemic about genocide completely outrageous and frivolous) is the impossibility of giving the real number of dead. Nobody knows if it is 200,000 dead, the number which has been given on and on for years, if it is, which is my evaluation, closer to 300,000 or 350,000; some human rights organizations—serious ones—say 400,000, maybe 500,000. From 200,000 to 500,000—nobody being able to decide which is the right figure? Which means that there might be in Darfur hundreds of thousands of children, women, men, raped, killed, burnt without any memory, without any inscription anywhere, without graves, without a face, without a name, without a number.

…This huge mass murder [that’s] impossible to calculate, these hundreds of miniscule lives, tiny lives not even worthy of remembrance, or who their murderers rendered not even worthy of remembrance. There is a very famous American book of James Agee, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. I would like tonight, and I have tried without stopping for one year, to praise, to try to praise, if I can, unfamous men, men without fame, men without names, murdered people without any trace in the memory of mankind. This is Darfur today. I don’t know if it is genocide or not, but it is a situation which is uncomparable to most of the killings which take place, and which are also horrible of course, in other places of the world. You have some places where you have some killings, you have some funerals, you have the possibility to cry, you have the possibility to [count] the number. Here, it is the reverse.

The question now is to know why. My last, or nearly last remark: why? And why is the international community so passive?… Why this inability to [make] decisions or, when they are made, to make them respected? Of course, there are some obvious reasons: the regime in Khartoum, the regime of murderers has some oil. And to have some oil in the modern world, in the world of today, gives you some rights which you don’t have if you don’t have oil. You have also the reason (which is true) that the Khartoum regime managed to make the Western countries, and especially America, believe that they had a card to play, they—Khartoum—in the war against terrorism. As you know, Osama Bin Laden lived in Khartoum before September 11th for a few years. He left a real documented part of his life there, and the Khartoum regime has gathered—I don’t know to what extent it is true, maybe it is true—has collected intelligence on bin Laden. This is probably another reason…

But the main reason of our indifference… is an ideological one.

Anti-racism: you have a huge part of the population in America and in Europe, who believe, as a sort of Pavlovian reflex, that these sort of murders, these sort of genocides, can only be committed by ugly, stupid, white men. As we did: white men in Auschwitz, in the Gulag, and so on, which is undoubtedly true. There is the idea that such mass murders committed by people who were themselves victims of racism [for] such a long time is a sort of contradiction in terms.

Anti-colonialism: we have been bred in the idea, in the conviction that colonialism—and it is true—is a crime, is something we have to get rid of; intervention in the affairs of a country of the third world is something we have to avoid absolutely because it produced such ill effects in the past, colonialism. This is true. And it produces the idea that when a country of the third world which was colonized (as was Sudan), commits such bloodbaths, commits such crimes, to stop this, to try to prevent this, to intervene in order to make it stop, could be an act of colonialism.

And in America and in France, you have a lot of people [of] the Left, to which I belong, [who believe that] we cannot interfere in the internal affairs of Sudan. Let’s be careful not to impose under the flag of human rights the old rule of Western superiority. The result of which is that we are abandoning to that [idea] the worst death, these unnumbered lots of people. And in the end: anti-racism, anti-colonialism, and anti-imperialism. We are prisoners of a scheme of thought in which, if you are a victim and if you don’t play a role, if you don’t have a part on the big stage, in the big history, in the big tale of the opposition of the evil empire and the good anti-imperialist forces, you don’t really deserve attention.

Read the entire article.

A Palestinian Voice For Life

Sometimes, no matter how hard parents try to raise decent and moral children, the surrounding culture fails them. When that culture is designed to fail, the pain is even worse.

Via Leah Friedman comes this heartbreaking and uplifting story:

Palestinian Killed By Israeli Security Guards Donates His Organs To Save Six Israelis

Bethlehem – Ma’an – The family of an 18-year-old Palestinian civilian, who died after being shot by Israeli security guards a few weeks ago, have donated his organs to save the lives of six Israelis.

Patient “A” was clinically dead when he was transferred to the intensive care unit in Shiba medical center in Tel Hashomeir. But doctors were unable to resuscitate him.

The Hebrew daily newspaper Ma’ariv reported that his family decided to donate his organs to those who needed them, regardless of their race, religion or identity.

The National Center for Organ Transplants promised to keep information concerning his identity confidential for the safety of his family who live in the Palestinian Authority area. The families of the recipients were told about the identity of the donor but have also agreed to keep the information confidential, according to the newspaper.

On Wednesday evening the Patient “A”’s father had an emotional meeting with the patient who received his son’s heart.

Patient “A”’s father described his son as “a great person who was loved by everyone. He was big-hearted and I didn’t hesitate to donate his organs to needy patients, even though he was killed by Israeli security guards.”

“At first it was hard for me, but God inspired me to take the right decision to help the patients by donating my son’s organs. I’m happy with this decision and I don’t differentiate between Jews and Arabs. All I care about is saving people’s lives. That’s why I didn’t ask about the patients’ identities,” he added.

Those who author and perpetrate the dysfunction and evil that have become the foundation stones of what passes for Palestinian culture will have much to answer for.

Peace in the Middle East will come when voices like the father of that young man are listened to over the voices who promise nothing but death and destruction and who deliver nothing but misery.

The Other Sexual Freedom

The following is a guest post by reader Sara G, originally written in 2005. We are republishing this post in response to a BlogTalk Radio podcast hosted by Fausta that aired yesterday.

Elizabeth Blackeny of Media Lizzy, Jazz Shaw of Middle Earth Journal and The Moderate Voice, and Shane Burgess of Political Vindication all contributed to a fascinating conversation on culture, relationships, sexuality and morality.

In her post, Sara G discusses abstinence, a topic all too often dimissed as ‘unworkable.’ The essay is not preachy or didatic. She discusses abstinence and how it works for her and she is remarkable in that she is an ‘every person.’ She is not a religious zealot nor she embrace any kind of ‘off the wall’ agenda. When it is all said and done, it is clear that there is a lot of us in her- and that should give us as individuals and as parents, much to think about.

True Sexual Freedom: No Place for Abstinence in the Sexual Revolution? Get a Clue.

I have been asked by Sigmund, Carl, and Alfred to guest post. I don’t update my own blog often, and my comments on the blogs of others are infrequent at best. So, I was kind of clueless about what I should say. So, I asked him (them?) what he (they?) wanted me to post about, and he (they?) informed me that I should post about the subject I commented on previously – sex. Then, I started thinking about what to say, and as you will read, I did, indeed, get a Clue. As a 26-year-old virgin, I am not often asked to talk about sex, and I can’t really blame people for not asking. After all, if I needed to have my car fixed, I wouldn’t want to ask a mechanic who said, “Well, I’ve never actually done it, but I’ve sure heard a lot about it.”

This post is a chance for me to explain what sexual freedom means to me, and why I am frequently frustrated (all right, stop snickering, and get your minds out of the gutter!) with what I perceive as a societal sexual double standard. Fair warning: I don’t offend easily. Comment all you want. You’re not going to change my mind or hurt my feelings. In fact, I probably won’t even remember what you’ve said about me by the end of the day.

I am not a prude. I am not a person who considers sex to be dirty or “bad”. I am not offended by sexual content in movies, television, and literature. I am not a nun. Hell, I’m not even Catholic. Someday, I would very much like to have sex, and I am glad that in these modern times, people can have as much of whatever kind of sex they prefer as they want. I am not judgmental or homophobic. I think everyone has a right to express themselves sexually (with the obvious exceptions of rape, incest, and child molestation). I have many friends who are in sexual relationships – many of whom are very happy. I am happy for them. Not just that they are having sex and enjoying it, but that they are in relationships that make them happy in many different ways – sex being only one of those many kinds of happiness. I also have friends who have had sex because they felt pressured by their date and by society to go all the way. That’s what people do, right? You’re dating someone, and having sex is just part of it. If you’re not doing it, there’s something wrong with you. The Sexual Revolution has gone so far that it is not about freedom anymore. It, like everything eventually does, has come full-circle to the point of demanding conformity.

That said, I do not wish to come across as a right-winging anti-sex prude machine. That is not me, and not what I am about. What bothers me is not that lots of people are having sex, but that it has become unacceptable not to. Many people assume that opting to wait for marriage or committed relationship means that you are obviously a conservative, possibly Bible-thumping sexual teetotaler. That if you are not doing it, you must believe it to be wrong. Or, that you just can’t get any. This is the aspect that bothers me. True sexual freedom is the right to have sex with whomever you choose (consensually, of course), AND the right to choose to wait. Society dictates that rape is wrong. To rape someone is a vicious, terrible act that is punishable by law. Forced sex is not just criminal, it is morally reprehensible. No sane, decent person would argue that forcing another human being into a sexual act is in any way acceptable behavior. That the socio-moral stigma against rape exists shows that as a general rule, most people believe in the basic human right to choose the time, place, and partner for sexual behavior. To take away that choice in any way violates a person in a deep, damaging way. There is a reason that victims of sexual assault often need counseling. They have been harmed, violated, and need emotional healing and release just as an injured person needs physical medical attention.

Now, before anyone gets mad and thinks that I am comparing sexual freedom to rape, or that I am suggesting that society is raping us by forcing their views upon us, let me state that the example of rape was meant only to provide context; to illustrate that there are boundaries and limits to complete sexual freedom that everyone agrees upon. If it is known that to force sexual behavior is wrong, then it is only natural that society has created laws against and penalties for committing the crime of rape. If it is truly the right of every human being to choose the time, place, and partner for sexual behavior, is it not also their right to postpone that time, place, and partner indefinitely? It is never okay to force someone. So, within that framework of law and basic humanity, if a person decides that not only was tonight, in the Billiard Room, with Colonel Mustard not the time, place, and partner they would choose, but that there is no room in the unfortunate late Mr. Boddy’s house that would make intimacy with the Colonel seem enticing, that there is then no obligation on Miss Scarlett (or Professor Plum, if the gate swings the other way) to give it up to the Colonel. Not now, not ever. If Miss Scarlett or the Plum Professor (I always thought he was a little fruity – everyone groan with me now) decides that tomorrow night in the Conservatory, with Mr. Green is their cup of tea, then more power to them. They can even bring the rope, so long as all parties are in agreement. Hell, if all parties are in agreement, they can even let Ms. Peacock watch, for all I care.

Now that none of you will ever be able to play Clue again without wondering what exactly Miss Scarlett was doing in the Conservatory with Mr. Green AND Ms. Peacock, I will hurry up and get to the point. Sexual freedom is about choice. Delaying a choice due to personal conviction is valid. Period. No one should feel obligated to have sex. This is not the Dark Ages, when people had to hurry up and reproduce a whole bunch before wolves and the Plague carried off 70% of their offspring. There is no mad rush. People should have sex because they want to, whether it is no-strings attached, purely physical release, an emotional bond expressed physically between people who are in love, or an attempt to create a child. Different people have different wants, needs, and desires. What works for one person, what makes one person happy – may not be right for another. Most people would apply this to all areas of life. Jobs that would make me miserable are sources of great joy for others. There are people who are friends with people I find annoying. There are people who find me annoying and choose not to be friends with me. Why then can this thinking be applied to everything under the sun except for sex? Right now, waiting feels right to me. Until it doesn’t feel right, I will wait. And that is okay.