the Shackle Report

The week’s reading, straight off the razor wire:

THURSDAY

From the LA Times about what the world is coming to:

ARMY’S OPPOSITION TO INK FADING

WASHINGTON — The Army has a message for the growing legions of flamboyantly tattooed American teens: Uncle Sam even wants you.

Facing one of the worst recruiting climates in the all-volunteer military’s history, the Army has decided to relax standards that dictate which parts of a soldier can be festooned with body art. Specifically, the service will accept recruits with tattoos on their neck and hands.

The service long had prohibited soldiers from having tattoos on places not covered by a dress uniform.

— Or body armor.

WEDNESDAY

From MSNBC:

CHINA SLAPS TAX ON CHOPSTICKS TO HELP SAVE TREES

BEIJING – China said Wednesday it will slap a tax on chopsticks and raise them on goods ranging from yachts to gasoline and car engines in a bid to save trees, protect the environment and conserve energy.

A 5 percent consumption tax on both disposable wooden chopsticks and wooden floor panels will help curb the plundering of timber resources, the Ministry of Finance said.

—So, dirt floors and eating with your hands. Onward.

TUESDAY

From the Washington Post:

MORE FAMILY CEMETERIES DYING AWAY IN THE SOUTH

Throughout the South, family cemeteries pepper the landscape. But as cities from Atlanta to Memphis radiate rapidly outward, the growth is swallowing rural land that swaddles the graves.

—The family values crowd is gonna hit the barricades over this most recent assault on the very fiber of our country.

MONDAY

From the Washington Post about the clarion call of religious freedom resounding around the globe:

AFGHAN CONVERT’S CASE DISMISSED

KABUL, Afghanistan, March 26 — A court on Sunday dismissed the case against an Afghan man facing possible execution for converting from Islam to Christianity, officials said, paving the way for his release.

Abdul Rahman, who became a Christian in the 1990s while working for an aid group in neighboring Pakistan, might be freed as soon as Monday, an official said. Muslim extremists had demanded death for Rahman, branding him an apostate for rejecting Islam, and warned Sunday that the court decision would touch off protests across this religiously conservative country. Some clerics had previously vowed to incite Afghans to kill Rahman if he was released.

“He looks very calm. But he keeps saying he is hearing voices,” the prison warden said.

— The voices say: “You’re dead, apostate. Dead. Dead, we say. Dead, dead, dead. You know how you’re alive now? Soon, all that will change. Totally. Bet you’re sorry you left a cool religion like Islam now, aren’t you Mr. Smarty-britches? Sure you don’t want to think it over? Hey, everybody, wise-guy here wants to be a Christian! Let’s stone him to death from inside his skull, c’mon…!

The week’s reading, straight off the razor wire:

FRIDAY

From the NY Times about the incipient Iraqi unity:

IN PLACID IRAQI KURIDISTAN, STRIFE TO THE SOUTH ELICITS LITTLE SYMPATHY

SULAIMANIYA, Iraq, March 19 — Like most young Kurds in this northern city, Asad Ali does not speak Arabic. He has heard about the rising wave of sectarian killings down in Baghdad, but it seems a world away from the quiet rhythms of daily life here in Kurdistan.

So when a discussion broke out near an outdoor book market about whether there would be civil war between Shiite and Sunni Arabs in Iraq, Mr. Ali, a 24-year-old who wears rimless glasses and blue jeans, did not hesitate to give his opinion.

“It is beautiful that our enemies are killing each other,” he said with a grim chuckle.

“It’s clear that the civil war will be intensified,” Mr. Ali said with a shrug. “The Shiites have come to power, and the Sunnis won’t accept it. But we have a Kurdish proverb, ‘If the fire is far from me, it’s not a problem.’ “

— Man, that is a great proverb. It’s pithy, exotic in a kind of somewhere-east-of-here way, and it’s totally narrow.

THURSDAY

From the NY Times:

ANOTHER KILLING AT A DENNY’S, FOURTH IN 3 DAYS

LOS ANGELES, March 17 — An 18-year-old man was shot dead early Friday and another man was wounded after a fight broke out at a Denny’s restaurant in Anaheim, the third fatal shooting episode at a California Denny’s in three days.

The Denny’s Corporation, which operates or licenses over 1,600 diner-style restaurants nationwide, issued a statement Friday calling the shootings “three separate and random acts of violence.”

— The food would gave gotten them soon anyway.

WEDNESDAY

WERE ARABS FIRST TO DISCOVER AMERICA?

Did the Arabs contribute in a way or another to the discovery of the Americas? According to a book review from the Arab language Al-Khaleej, Arab and Muslim scientists played a key role in the discovery of the once unknown continent.

The Arabs’ scientific studies had a major impact on the West. Arab scientists established in the ninth century that the world was round and under the Caliphate of Mamun (813 – 833), the first map of the globe was made. These scientific theories, that were available in Latin translations, paved the way for the discovery of America by Columbus, who owed much of his success to Muslim scientists and researchers.

At the same time, the Arab and the Islamic world began to lag behind because of a number of political problems. Their weakness and decline were mainly caused by European colonialism, which denied the Arabs full involvement in global civilization. In fact, colonialism in some Arab regions lasted from the 16th century until the end of the 20th century. And while the European civilization was growing, both scientifically and technically, Arabs achievements declined to dismal levels.

Indeed, this book unveils the truth about the past achievements of the Arabs and Muslims, that should make the new generation proud of the accomplishments of their ancestors. These facts can also keep the Islamic culture intact in the face of Western attempts to cast doubts on the Arab intellectual contribution to human civilization.

— And, more recently, you guys brought us the I-Mam.

TUESDAY

From the LA Times about the seething unrest in Europe:

DOZENS INJURED IN DRUNKEN SPANISH RIOTS

MADRID — Mass street-drinking sessions fueled clashes between Spanish youths and riot police Saturday, leaving 80 people injured and 70 arrested in Barcelona and Salamanca, police said.

Tens of thousands of young people gathered Friday night in cities around Spain in an attempt to hold the biggest street drinking session, called a botellon, or “big bottle.” In the southern city of Granada, police said 25,000 people joined the botellon.

The botellon has become part of city life in Spain in recent years. Teenagers, bored at home and too poor to go to bars, buy beer, spirits and cartons of wine from food stores and lounge around plazas, drinking the night away.

— Oh, this is sure to offend all those Muslim unemployed young people who have to lounge around with nothing to do sober. Don’t they see they’re creating more terrorists?

MONDAY

From the LA Times about a setback in the movement towards religious tolerance:

AFGHAN MAN PROSECUTED FOR CONVERTING

KABUL, Afghanistan — An Afghan man who allegedly converted from Islam to Christianity is being prosecuted in a Kabul court and could be sentenced to death, a judge said Sunday.

The defendant, Abdul Rahman, was arrested last month after his family went to the police and accused him of becoming a Christian, Judge Ansarullah Mawlavezada told Associated Press in an interview. Such a conversion would violate the country’s Islamic laws.

“We are not against any particular religion in the world. But in Afghanistan, this sort of thing is against the law,” the judge said. “It is an attack on Islam. … The prosecutor is asking for the death penalty.”

— Wow. So if they kill him, this dude is going to be in Christian heaven and Islamic hell at the same time, which means he’ll have to deal with:

Garments of fire have been prepared for the unbelievers. Sclading water shall be poured upon their heads, melting their skins and that which is in their bellies. They shall be lashed rods of iron. Whenever, in their anguish, they try to escape from Hell, back they shall be dragged, and will be told: ‘Taste the torment of the Conflagration!’

— But he’ll be in the presence of Christ for it all, so, not so bad, really…

Kitty Lyons, the political Wankette whose “Secret Life” ran bimonthly at www.nerve.com between Monicagate and the Dawn of the Age of Terror, gets back in touch with herself.

My girlfriend Mandy came by with her Blackberry. This was back when she thought that Blackberry’s parent company might lose its patent fight and go dark. She was so frantic, you’d have thought that the FDA had banned Ativan.

I hadn’t seen Mandy since she gave up performance art for public relations, and I’ve got to say corporate has done wonders for her wardrobe. If a girl is going to smear herself all over with something, IMHO Prada beats pudding. I was trying to deliver this compliment tactfully, but Mandy kept typing on her Device with her thumbs, so that my flattery fell on deaf eyes. I finally understood why they call them Crackberries.

Seeing how addicted she was, I insisted that she grant me custody of her toy for the rest of her visit. I stuck it in my pocket and we went to sit on my sofa. “Now we can really talk,” I said, which is the last thing I remember for the next half hour.

Because what happened was that (bzzzzz) her Crack-thing began to vibrate almost immediately against mine, and it felt so good that I started to want a job in public relations myself.

The person who would need my services, I realized, would be Michael Brown. He’s the guy who got appointed to head FEMA because he was friends of a friend of President Bush, who called him “Brownie” and thanked him for doing “a heckuva job” in New Orleans, once it was clear that he totally hadn’t. (Bzzzzzz.)

Brownie has recently started a disaster-preparedness consulting firm, “Michael D. Brown LLC,” based in Boulder., CO. For money, he’ll help you learn from his mistakes. I imagined that he has made so many mistakes that his lessons last for weeks, which will cost clients an arm and a leg, enabling him to buy me a Bzzzzzberry.

What I would do for Brownie, I decided, was to show the world that he wasn’t as incompetent as everyone first thought. He was just a little unfocused and easily intimidated by superiors and eager to pass the buck. And, you know, who isn’t? So I went to see him out in Boulder, wearing what Mandy had on, (only it fit even better on me), and, (bzzzzzz) I purred at him, “Browwwwwnie luv, everyone in D.C. saw the tape where you tell the President about the levees giving way during hurricane Katrina, proving that you were only following his lead when you responded to the flood with callow calm (bzzzzz), but millions of ordinary Americans may have missed that clip. So I’d like to package it into a porno DVD and get your vindication out to, like, well, everybody. Here, take a look.” And I pop my disc into his computer.

We lean back on his office couch and start taking notes in each other’s laps while the story unfolds. It is about a civil engineer who is hung like one of those Arabian steeds Brownie used to rep, and the sort of lady newscaster who knew that people were trapped in the Astrodome before the White House did (only this newscaster has implants). And the engineer is now demonstrating with his penis how the levees should have been reinforced with many big, pounding rivets.

The newscaster and I are panting in time to his demonstration and Brownie is starting to get that “Anything specific I should do or tweak?” look of his, when all of a sudden the newscaster cries “It’s giving way! The levee is giving waaaaay!” and we all thrash about screaming as if we’re washing out to sea in a toxic surge, surrounded by refrigerators and hapless pets, while the DVD cuts to the shot I inserted of the White House, and Brownie’s warning call.

“See?” I tell him afterwards. “Now every Christian family, Hasid and feminist sex scholar in America will know that your name has been cleared.”

And because I have done him such a big favor, and because, as a beneficiary of cronyism he believes so strongly in rewarding his intimates, he hires me on the spot.

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© Maggie Cutler all rights reserved.

“HE’S ON THE TIP OF MY TONGUE”

Has this ever happened to you: You’re at a party or bar, and spot an opportunity to reel off the names of the nine most strenuous defenders of White House interrogation policies, but you just can’t remember their names?

Well, don’t feel too bad; it happens to us all. But now there’s a handy guide you can carry in your pocket to help you out when memory fails.

The BEAST now offers, free of charge, a set of nine trading cards showing the “ Allstars of Torture” on the front and their stats plus player information on the back.

Be sure to collect them all.

The week’s reading, straight off the razor wire:

FRIDAY

From the NY Times about the seeds of a revolution:

NOT ’68, BUT FRENCH YOUTHS HEAR SIMILAR CRY TO RISE UP

PARIS, March 16 — Once again, students are on the barricades in France, evoking comparisons to the uprising of May 1968. But this is not a revolt. It is not 1968 revisited.

The students’ goal this time is far more modest. They want the abolition of a new law, the First Employment Contract, which aims to increase hiring by allowing employers to fire new workers without cause in their first two years.

The headquarters of UNEF, the student organization, in a gritty section of northeast Paris reflects the disparate nature of the movement. The walls are lined with posters advocating causes like new schools, an end to the war in Iraq, a boycott of McDonald’s, a ban on smoking. The air is filled with smoke.

The motto on UNEF fliers protesting the new labor law is hardly a call to action. “Against Precariousness,” it reads.

—Oh, man, this is gonna explode. When these people join with the “Against Levity” bunch in Germany, mass torpor is sure to follow.

THURSDAY

A development in the new push for alternative energy sources from the LA Times:

BIGGER ESTIMATE OF ALASKA OIL LEAK ADDS FUEL TO DEBATE

SEATTLE — Officials on Friday upped their estimate of the oil leaked from a corroded pipeline at the northern tip of Alaska to at least 265,000 gallons, making it the largest spill on record in the oil-rich North Slope field — and one of the worst in the 29-year history of the Trans Alaska Pipeline System.

—I guess now we have to invade Iran.

WEDNESDAY

From the LA Times:

HUMPBACK CALF HURT BY A WHALE-WATCHING BOAT

A whale-watching tour boat carrying dozens of schoolchildren collided with a humpback whale calf off Maui, injuring the animal but no passengers, officials said in Maalaea.

—We saved our children.

TUESDAY

From the LA Times:

BAGHDAD — Radical Shiite cleric Muqtada Sadr described the United States, Israel and Britain as a “triad of evil” in a television interview Friday.

—I assume that in your language, that has the same helpful, poetic ring that “axis of evil” has for us.

MONDAY

A new link found in the evolutionary chain from the LA Times:

A BLOND, BLIND CRUSTACEAN DISCOVERED IN SOUTH PACIFIC

PARIS — A team of American-led divers has discovered a new crustacean in the South Pacific that resembles a lobster and is covered with what looks like silky blond fur, French researchers said Tuesday.

—And you know, if the fur had been black, we would never hear about this.

—Scot Crawford

THIS JUST IN…

DOCTORS DISCOVER HOW TO BRING DEAD SOLDIERS BACK TO LIFE

Coming right behind an article in the LA Times about how close to real limbs the latest prosthetic limbs are for the Iraq war’s many amputee’s, doctors at New York Atheist Hospital announced that they had reawakened a dead soldier from the war in Iraq.

Dr. Rudolph Simian from the Atheist Hospital says: “Only a few years ago, people were saying; ‘Oh, bringing back the dead, that’s light years away.’ Not so.”

In fact, the dead soldier, Sgt. Vlad of the Last Marine Division, Iraq, not only is up and about and asking what’s been happening in the six months that he has been dead, but has said that he intends to return to the fighting as soon as the doctors give him final clearance: “When I found out the war was still going on, I was like; fuckin’ A, it is a long war. I’ll transform myself into a bat and fly over there.”

Asked what Sgt. Vlad’s release back to the war required, Dr. Simian replied: “Well, he’s got to seem human, not just alive, so we want to give him a few tests to find out if he’s really as well-meaning, hostile, and slow to learn as we human’s are. We don’t want to set the bar too high.”

—Scot Crawford

The week’s reading, straight off the razor wire:

FRIDAY

About a new front in the War on Drugs from the Washington Post:

DRUG TRADE BLAMED FOR AFGHAN WOES

Opium production and trafficking make up a third of Afghanistan’s economy, and security issues and corruption hamper efforts to eradicate the drug, the State Department said yesterday.

In its annual worldwide drug survey, the department said Afghanistan’s huge drug trade has severely damaged efforts to rebuild the country’s economy and threatened regional stability overall.

“Dangerous security conditions and corruption constrain government and international efforts to combat the drug trade and provide alternative incomes,” said the report, released on the day that President Bush made a surprise visit to Afghanistan…

—to get high.

THURSDAY

Some frothing nonsense from Al Jazeera:

“TORTURE, ABUSES WORSE THAN UNDER SADDAM”

Human rights abuses in Iraq are worse than they were under Saddam Hussein, John Pace, the UN’s outgoing human rights chief in Iraq said Thursday.

“Under Saddam, if you agreed to forgo your basic right to freedom of expression and thought, you were physically more or less OK,” Pace said in an interview with The Associated Press. “But now, no. Here, you have a primitive, chaotic situation where anybody can do anything they want to anyone.”

The scale of atrocity now “extends over a much wider section of the population than it did under Saddam.”

—Well, we said we were spreading democracy.

WEDNESDAY

From the
Washington Post about a minor setback in Iraq:

SENIOR IRAQI GENERAL KILLED IN AMBUSH

BAGHDAD, March 6 — The top commander of the Iraqi army division, Maj. Gen. Mubdar Hatim Hazya al-Dulaimi, was killed Monday when his car came under small-arms fire while traveling through the capital, the U.S. military said.

Only two weeks ago, Dulaimi had predicted that insurgent activity would decline because of the Iraqi army’s operations.

“Because of the bravery of our armed forces that sacrifice themselves on a daily basis, the amount of insurgent activity will continue to decrease,” Dulaimi was quoted as saying in a U.S. military statement.

—Shouldn’t have said that.

TUESDAY

More public discourse from Al Jazeera:

i guess if i lived in caves like you people i would the u.s too. but what irks me is your own leaders torture and kill your people while they sleeo comfortably in their castles and that’s ok. the u.s is the best place to make a living on this pla just ask the millions of s who live here and love the u.s. come over and witness the power of freedom. or stay in you caves and keep praying the destruction of the u.s. but you will be praying for that even after you meet your fate because the u.s will never fall to unsifisticated rodents like yourselves.

— Lou from U.S.A

lou from usa, are u ok.that is shows how amerinans are and how they are bad even thay don’t know how to talk

—John from canada

—Ok. Maybe communication between cultures isn’t a necessary component in the war on fundamentalism.

MONDAY

From the Arab News about the Saudis and their healthy attitude towards women:

WOMEN BARRED FROM DRIVING GOLF CARTS AT JANADRIYA

RIYADH, 2 March 2006 — Women were forbidden to drive golf carts in the cultural village at the Janadriya Festival during the three-day period set aside for women.

She observed that young Saudi men used the golf carts during men’s activities but women were not allowed to use them during the three days for women. The reason given was safety.

“Looking out for our safety and preventing accidents are not valid reasons to stop us from using golf carts inside the cultural village. I telephoned Gen. Saad Abu Ethnain this morning to ask about the ban on women driving golf carts and his response was that it was for security reasons.

—Yes. The last thing the Kingdom needs is marauding bands of women suicide bombers on golf carts attacking the oil infrastructure, or worse, targeting the clubhouse.

—Scot Crawford