Read' fsectionid="333&fArticleId=">"http://www.capetimes.co.za/index.php?fSectionId=333&fArticleId=2149318"> Read this. I don't know exactly what to think of it...
 

Psychosis: Have we no dignity?

(But whose psychosis is it, really?)

Tonight, I was at my girlfriends house, and her brother was watching "Fear Factor". Tonights episode...the little that I caught before being too repulsed to watch...had three teams, each consisting of one adult and one of their children.

Now, these children were by my estimation twelve years old each. A twelve year old can't really "volunteer" for something...their parents generally have final say over whether the child will get to do stuff or not, or whether they have to do something. Children, up until about 15 or 16 years old, are incapable of deciding things and fully weighing out the pros/cons of stuff.

The adults, in the event I watched, would stand back as their child was locked in a fiberglass box, with their head sticking out on top and their hands locked in a stocks-like appendage.

Then, live cockroaches...about a fifty-gallon bucket worth...were dumped in on the child.

The parent had to move enough roaches with their mouth to fill a box to a red-line level. Then, they would get a set of three keys to give to their child, one of which would unlock said child and release them from the roach box.

As I watched, in horror, the child in this particular case was complaining that he was being bitten periodically by a roach. The dad took big mouthfuls of live...gigantic...roaches, and put them in another bucket.

At this point, I was far too disgusted to continue watching. Leah and I left.

I don't know which is worse: that people will sell their dignity, or that the price is so low. The Fear Factor prize is a pissant little 50,000 dollars. I would never...ever...bathe in live cockroaches for 50 grand. At least, I like to think I wouldn't.

But I can safely say that even though I hate kids, I would NEVER put a child...much less my OWN child...in a tub of live insects for any amount of money. Ever. Period. It frightens me that anybody would do this to themselves, or their children, for any amount of money at all. I am sickened and thoroughly disgusted.

Comments? Leave one, or e-mail me directly at deepfnord@yahoo.com and I'll either ignore you or say something insightful. Or maybe just ramble on, like I usually do.

Todays links have been pirated from CNN

News:

Iraq is being handed back over to the Iraqis. Paul Bremer stepped down this morning at approximately ten-thirty AM, handing power in Iraq over to Ayad Allawi, interim Prime Minister in Iraq.

Reactions among the Iraqi citzens have apparently been mixed. Some poeple have been celebrating the handover of power, whereas others seem to believe that the handover of power is a joke since there are still US troops all over the nation, which you have to admit is a compleeing argument. "We're pulling out, but we'll leave these big scary men with guns here."

We'll see how this develops. Further updates on Iraqi power as events warrant.

Irony:

Some firefighters in Dallas, Texas came back to their station after successfully battling a fire, only to find that some potatos they had left on the stove had caught fire, igniting their firehouse. Delicious irony.

Psychosis:
Recently, Ronald Reagan died. Or, as The Onion put it, "Reagan's Body Dies." Well, good! He was a no-good, useless motherfucker before the alzheimers even hit him. Why is everybody so upset? Reagan is the direct cause of a great many of the problems plaguing the world today: He financed Osama Bin Laden to fight the Russians, giving him power and money and weapons. He also turned a blind eye to the evils of Saddam Hussein, even (if I remember correctly) financing his war against Iran, based on a "The enemy of my enemy is my friend" philosophy. He fucked our economy up the ass, mistakenly believing that rich people would give money to poor people or contribute to the economy by spending a lot of money, if only they didn't have to pay taxes for those darn government services.

At any rate, who cares that Reagan died? I sure don't give a shit. I mean, it's always sad when someone dies, but if I don't know them personally, the worst I can feel is kind of a "gee, that's too bad" sensation. And with a colossal fuckhead like Reagan, I really don't care.

Headlines:

Suspected Militants have been bombed again in Iraq. At least twenty people are dead, bringing the total death toll from airstrikes this week to forty people. The US believes that there's an Al-Quaeda leader hiding in Falluja; apparently, there's been rather a lot of violence from both sides in this city this week.

Just as a side note, I find it interesting that we can kill people that we only suspect of being militants in Iraq. Imagine if, say, a Hungarian came to our nation and killed someone he suspected of being anti-Hungarian. And nobody seems to care; people are too busy watching Extreme Makeover to notice that we're killing people by the dozens for suspicious reasons. I suspect that they probably wouldn't care, even if they noticed.

In Health News:

Scientists have apparently cracked the genetic code of MRSA, which is a drug-resistant bacteria that infects tons of stuff in hospitals. Speaking as a respiratory therapist, I can say that MRSA is a huge pain in the ass: everybody has to gown up and suchlike to go see the patient, who is kept under strict isolation.

From the article: "It has evolved a 'Pick'n'Mix' genome that incorporates favoured genes that improve its resistance and ability to cause disease - genes that are vital to its spread and success."

Randomly:

Apparently, there's a Mutant Superbaby in Berlin. Just read it.

Read this.

The News:

The following two articles are from the New York Times. You can register for free at their website. Italic quotes and the hyperlinks are all from the Times; anything in straight print is my own.

U.S. Uses Terror Law to Pursue Crimes From Drugs to Swindling

By ERIC LICHTBLAU

Published: September 28, 2003


WASHINGTON, Sept. 27 — The Bush administration, which calls the USA Patriot Act perhaps its most essential tool in fighting terrorists, has begun using the law with increasing frequency in many criminal investigations that have little or no connection to terrorism.

The government is using its expanded authority under the far-reaching law to investigate suspected drug traffickers, white-collar criminals, blackmailers, child pornographers, money launderers, spies and even corrupt foreign leaders, federal officials said.

Here are some other quotes from Mr. Lichtblau's article:
But a new Justice Department report, given to members of Congress this month, also cites more than a dozen cases that are not directly related to terrorism in which federal authorities have used their expanded power to investigate individuals, initiate wiretaps and other surveillance, or seize millions in tainted assets.

For instance, the ability to secure nationwide warrants to obtain e-mail and electronic evidence "has proved invaluable in several sensitive nonterrorism investigations," including the tracking of an unidentified fugitive and an investigation into a computer hacker who stole a company's trade secrets, the report said.

Justice Department officials said the cases cited in the report represent only a small sampling of the many hundreds of nonterrorism cases pursued under the law.

The authorities have also used toughened penalties under the law to press charges against a lovesick 20-year-old woman from Orange County, Calif., who planted threatening notes aboard a Hawaii-bound cruise ship she was traveling on with her family in May. The woman, who said she made the threats to try to return home to her boyfriend, was sentenced this week to two years in federal prison because of a provision in the Patriot Act on the threat of terrorism against mass transportation systems.

So, is this abuse of the Patriot Act a good thing or a bad thing? Is the patriot act itself good or bad? And what's the deal with Ashcroft, anyway? Send me an e-mail or something and I'll put it up here.

Our other article ripped-off from the times:

Drunk on Rummy
By MAUREEN DOWD

There are many disturbing passages in the soon-to-be-published book "Rumsfeld: A Personal Portrait," by Midge Decter.

Ms. Decter is doyenne of the neocon movement, wife of the neocon patriarch Norman Podhoretz; mother of John Podhoretz, the neocon Iraqi war cheerleader and new "West Wing" adviser; and friend of the neocon clan of the über-hawk Bill Kristol.

Her son wrote in his New York Post column last February that those who worried that the Bush team had no postwar vision were "pathetic" sophists: "No one has thought more deeply or seriously about what a post-Saddam Middle East could or should look like than Bush's foreign-policy team. The question has been a near-obsession for conservative foreign-policy intellectuals for more than a decade."

Allow me to laugh so hard that my kidneys rupture. George Bush and his team of cronies didn't think hard about this. Bush is little more than an ignorant little boy playing soldiers in the sandbox. Except that unlike an actual ten-year-old, he can kill people. Anyway, back to the article.

There are many disturbing passages in the soon-to-be-published book "Rumsfeld: A Personal Portrait," by Midge Decter.

Ms. Decter is doyenne of the neocon movement, wife of the neocon patriarch Norman Podhoretz; mother of John Podhoretz, the neocon Iraqi war cheerleader and new "West Wing" adviser; and friend of the neocon clan of the über-hawk Bill Kristol.

Her son wrote in his New York Post column last February that those who worried that the Bush team had no postwar vision were "pathetic" sophists: "No one has thought more deeply or seriously about what a post-Saddam Middle East could or should look like than Bush's foreign-policy team. The question has been a near-obsession for conservative foreign-policy intellectuals for more than a decade."

Now Mom has written a love ode to the 71-year-old "studmuffin" defense secretary so palpitating it recalls the clip of a teenage Judy Garland singing "You Made Me Love You" to a picture of Clark Gable.

Others may be wondering whether the Bush administration had a testosterone explosion that sent America a cropper in Iraq, alienating the allies and infuriating the Iraqis, building up hate and debt.

Others may be demanding Donald Rumsfeld's McNamara-slick head, as John Kerry did on CNN: "He rushed this to war. He has not listened to the military personnel. Our military is weaker today. They're overextended. He and Mr. Wolfowitz proceeded with false assumptions."

Teddy is spoiling for a fight with Rummy. "The tragedy," Senator Kennedy said on the Senate floor Friday, "is that our troops are paying with their lives because the administration failed to prepare a plan to win the peace."

But swelling problems in Iraq have not impeded Ms. Decter's swooning prose. The chapter on invading Iraq is called "Push Comes to Shove." (Shouldn't it be called "Bush Comes to Shove"?) The author avers that Rummy's manly Midwestern aura will prove a more potent legacy than his changes in the military.

"The consensus among many of Rumsfeld's friends is that the role he has come to play is somehow connected to his qualities and experiences as a wrestler," she writes. The book is replete with hubba-hubba photos of Rummy wrestling, playing polo, skiing, on a tractor. The one in his Navy flight suit features the caption, "On duty to self and country." (World domination to follow.)

I may be sick. I highly reccomend reading the whole article, though, because the author does an excellent job.

More later.

This is good news.