Today's Irony

NYPD Edition:

What's Next

A gazillion people turned out in Paris for a rally to show support for Charlie Hebdo, and now the magazine is set to pop their latest edition with this cover art:

Way to go, guys.

From The Guardian:

Zineb El Rhazoui, a surviving columnist at Charlie Hebdo magazine who worked on the new issue, said the cover was a call to forgive the terrorists who murdered her colleagues last week, saying she did not feel hate towards Chérif and Saïd Kouachi despite their deadly attack on the magazine, and urged Muslims to accept humour.

“We don’t feel any hate to them. We know that the struggle is not with them as people, but the struggle is with an ideology,” she told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme.

The two gunmen who launched the attack on the magazine’s offices last Wednesday killed five of France’s top cartoonists, saying that they wanted to avenge the prophet for Charlie Hebdo’s satire of him.

The grieving journalists who survived the murderous assault promised it would be business as usual at the weekly publication.

--and-- 

Asked to explain the magazine’s front cover, which features a cartoon of a crying Muhammad wearing a “Je suis Charlie” badge under the heading “All is forgiven”, Rhazoui said: “We feel that we have to forgive what happened. I think those who have been killed, if they would have been able to have a coffee today with the terrorists and just talk to ask them why have they done this … We feel at the Charlie Hebdo team that we need to forgive.”

So the exercise for a while will be to find as many Radical Islamist websites as possible (harder than I tho't), and post one of Charlie Hebdo's cartoons in the comments section.  

(Is it weird that Googling "islamist assholes" only gets a list of blogs here in the US where all they ever do is hate on Muslims?  Yeah, OK - I don't think it's weird either.  Just checking.)

Which BTW should remind us that this is about pushing back against a shitty ideology, and not about fucking up the everyday people who get bamboozled (or bullied) into going along with a shitty ideology.

Today's Molly

"There is no inverse relationship between freedom and security. Less of one does not lead to more of the other. People with no rights are not safe from terrorist attack.” --Molly Ivins

Quotes from Ms Ivins are almost invariably borderline spectacular - I may have to make this a regular feature.

Hands To Yourself, Rev

This one's been making the rounds lately.



I think maybe we start with whether or not the tough-guy routine is nothing more than standard macho fantasy bullshit.  Probably it is, but in light of recent events, maybe we shouldn't be making that assumption.  

But anyway, if we take it at face value, we need to be asking why your all-powerful god needs you to go around beatin' up on smart-ass teenagers.  That's number one, but second: has the statute of limitations run out on this obvious perpetration of Assault and Battery?  And couldn't we get after this asshole for the commission of a hate crime?

Thirdly - how come these knuckleheads don't realize they're demonstrating to most of us that they're no different from radical religionists all over the world (and all throughout history) who're more than a little willing to attack and to brutalize and to murder anybody daring to mock certain fairy tales?

hat tip = Raw Story

The Greatest Lessons

...are the ones you don't remember learning.



hat tip = Addicting Info

Crumb

Is It God?

No.  But when something like this pops up, it's easier to understand how some of us insist on thinking that way.

I guess I just don't see how stopping at god is somehow more wondrous than our ability to push a little bit past that point to where we can actually figure out how such an amazing thing can happen.

Like the man said - we are stardust.  We are made of the same stuff everything else in the universe is made of.  We are the cosmos trying to know itself.

More info at UPI.

Zimmerman III

...or IV, or whatever we're up to now.  It's hard to keep track.  I guess I'm wondering when they'll finally get tired of fucking around with this guy and just Cop-Murder him, and I'm not advocating for the cops to punch this asshole's ticket BTW, but isn't that kinda what we do now?  We have a Criminal Justice System that doesn't work for shit, and an awful lot of our cops have come out of a military where the basic policy is Kill Your Way To A Peaceful Resolution - what're we waiting for?

Or maybe he's still alive because he's not anonymous enough to be disposed of discreetly.  Celebrity has its privileges here in USAmerica Inc.

CNN:

George Zimmerman -- the man acquitted by a Florida jury over the death of Trayvon Martin -- was arrested Friday in Florida on suspicion of domestic violence with a weapon, local authorities said.

Zimmerman, 31, was arrested by police in Lake Mary around 10 p.m. and booked into the John E. Polk Correctional Facility, according to that facility's website.

In addition to domestic violence, Zimmerman faces a charge of aggravated assault, reports the Seminole County Sheriff's Office, which operates the Polk Correctional Facility.

And one more little thing - battalions of Daddy State Chicken Chokers spent buttloads of time and energy defending George Zimmerman and slagging Trayvon Martin; when might we expect them to step up and tell us they got that one wrong?

The Real Contagion

From Brother Charles at Esquire:

There is a very sad story in Cleveland concerning what happens when the TV lights dim, and when one 24-hour news-cycle crisis abates and another one erupts somewhere else.

You may recall that, back when Ebola was going to kill us all in our beds because President Barack Nkrumah-Kenyatta wanted all of western civilization to start spitting up its own entrails, a 29-year-old nurse named Amber Vinson contracted the disease and, before she was aware of that fact, flew to Cleveland, and then drove to Akron, for a wedding. She shopped for a dress at a place in Akron called Coming Attractions. Then, after the wedding, she flew back to Dallas, where she became symptomatic both of Ebola infection and of cable-news hysteria. The sad punchline is that, because of the publicity around Vinson's visit, and the subsequent mindless terror, Coming Attractions announced it was going out of business.

People stopped patronizing a store where their favorite Nightmare Du Jour went shopping - because they were afraid of getting the dread disease - never stopping to think that maybe they weren't in any real danger since the owners/employees of the store - the people who were there all day every day - weren't fucking sick.

But hey - we live in a time when it's important to be oblivious to having been issued your opinions by Corporate News, and that those opinions must never be examined in the light of actual evidence.

And so, unfortunately, once again, the clear-eyed pragmatic capitalist rubes fail to reach the obvious conclusion that being stoopid is bad for business.

Too Close For Comfort

Makes me wonder if "witnesses" and the sketch artist are just having us on a bit, or if we've arrived at the point where the Radical Assholes are feeling so immune to the law that they can do anything they want, knowing they can hide behind a veil of notoriety - claiming Political Witch Hunt if anybody decides to go after 'em.

(tengrain at Mock Paper Scissors is a fucking genius)