elfs | Lonely brains... (Reply)

Stuff to move you:

This has to be the most heartbreaking story making the rounds right now. A woman has a daughter and finds that actually, you know, feeding and diapering the baby was so difficult that when the police find the child, she's six, lying in a closet in her own feces, completely uncommunicative and unable to care for herself.

Stuff to anger you:

Glenn Greenwald hammers on the anthrax silence.

As most of us know now, a man named Bruce Ivans committed suicide just as investigators were about to raise his name as a suspect in the 2001 anthrax investigation. But as Greenwald points out, there are more questions than answers now. The anthrax attack, which actually killed people, was used as an excuse for the war with Iraq.

We now know the anthrax came from American labs. But in 2001, ABC reported "reputable sources" as saying that the anthrax had a preservative in it that wasn't used in the US, but was found in Iraqi labs. This was a lie, and Greenwald is appropriately hammering on ABC for covering up the lies. Greenwald's work is absolutely first class, and you just have to read the whole thing to see how deep the stink really is. ABC is as much an arm of the government as, as George H. W. Bush put it, "our man Ailes" (president of Fox News) is an arm. There is no mainstream adversarial journalistic outlet anymore.

Please tell me we assign people to Ambassadorships who know something about their region!

Wendy Chamberlain was appointed as Ambassador to Pakistan by President George Bush in 2001. She's now president of the Middle East Institute, which must be one of those cushy post-Bush farm jobs, because this woman isn't fit to lead a dog. In an interview with McClathly's, Ms Chamberlain, speaking of dealing with Pakistan's anmity toward India, said,

One thing we never understood is that India has always been the major threat for Pakistan.

Holy freaking memory hole. It was only two years earlier that Pakistan and India lit off nuclear bomb tests to demonstrate to one another that they had the capability to wipe each other off the map! Sweet Jesus, we had Google in 2001, right? RIGHT? You have Wikipedia in your universe, right?

These are the people in whom we've trusted our lives.

Stuff too silly to anger you:

WND: “Barack Obama has been worshipping at the Trinity United Church of Christ for 20-odd years. So we know for certain that he is not a Christian.”

[Sound effect] "The portrait [in the New Yorker] – it warms the cockles of one's heart – was meant to satirize those hick-rubes who thought, it would seem correctly, that Obama was once a Muslim." As Dennis Leary once said, I think Ms. Mercer is being warmed somewhere in the sub-cockle region.

Happy Stuff!

Scooby Snacks: The Official Recipe!

Because you needed a mental health break, and Hempfest is coming.

Funky Hindu Gods, Including Natalie Portman!

Just go watch. It's too much fun. Probably safe for work, too.