The Pagan Science Monitor

What the 7th circuit did today & why it should bug you

MacGregor v. Rutberg, No. 06-2829 (7th Cir., Feb. 27, 2007).
"Posner's analysis of the law is of a kind with his other empirical studies. To him, all aspects of life are on a balance sheet.
"He has argued that a higher proportion of black women than white women are fat because the supply of eligible black men is limited, thus black women find the likelihood of profiting from attaining an elegant figure too small to compensate for the costs of dieting.
"The right wing in legal thinking supports the right wing in the economic area. Political and economic argument has been transformed into constitutional argument...."
--Martin Garbus, The Next 25 Years, New York: Seven Stories Press, 2007, p. 151

Skeptics needed

Take a deep breath. Remember how, when you first heard a handful of neocon cranks start to talk about Iraq and Saddam in the months after 9/11, you just made a farting noise with your mouth. "What a crock. That'll never get any traction."
It was transparently meritless. The corporate media would have to be in a -- well, COMA -- to treat it with any seriousness.
It's Iran now. It's going to happen. Do you want to stop it? The past weekend's factual primer is here.

What T.P.S.M. will not be doing this Wednesday night

...Pogoing like it cost $19.99 at Subterranean whilst The Thermals play to a sold-out house!
(Well, actually, it was only supposed to cost $12.)

Quotation du jour

Evidence against Muslim charity appears fabricated
An official summary of an FBI wiretap contains anti-Semitic slurs that do not appear in the actual transcript.
Read the full article in the Sunday L.A. Times.
The following excerpts are T.P.S.M.'s QDJ today:

Sorry to disappoint (again)

You got here totally by accident, following a link from some search engine, and the blog's name sounded weird, so you thought you'd check us out.
Nothing that you're looking for here is actually here, though, and we're nerds.
Today, it was Blackfire. (Yes, we look at our stats; I already told you, we're nerds.)
Let me assure you sincerely, nobody associated with T.P.S.M., not even graphic-novel god Severn, cares one whit about anything in the DC comics universe.

Her name was Abier Kassim Hamzah al-Janabi

And thank you, AlterNet, for putting her name in your lead.
Abeer Qassim Hamza al-Janabi (and other spellings) was 14 years old when U.S. soldiers in Iraq raped her and killed her, and then killed her family.
A U.S. army sergeant was sentenced today to a minimum of 10 years for a war crime that the U.S. military is prosecuting as an "ordinary" rape-and-murder case.
Last November, a lower-ranking soldier also pled guilty and was sentenced to life in prison (effectively, a sentence of a minimum of 20 years).
And her name was Abier Kassim Hamzah al-Janabi.

Department of: what're you guys doin'?

Cuba boots 3 foreign COMA (corporate media) reporters.
Have you lost your dang minds? Who does this anymore?
The U.S. just locks 'em up. Or whacks 'em, then claims it was crossfire (scroll down to "Iraq").
But killing their visas? Now that's an outrage.

T.P.S.M. deeply shocked

The editor is curled up on the couch with the dog, and they're both making pathetic sniffling sounds, so i though i'd better take a crack at this.
Apparently, gentle readers, we have some not-so-gentle readers, who may include self-pleasuring Sadists who post comments here and blog here.
And, yes, Virginia, that's a Marquis de Sade African violent.
And, yes, Virginia, you may say, "Marquee Day Shar-day," ala Brad Pitt's character in Se7en.

Tags: Prince Harry, Sadism, Marquis de Sade, superstition, African violets, Hagakure 419, kittens, sailors.

Questions about the Brits in Iraq

The U.S. corporate & state-controlled media are doing their best to spin the news of the British withdrawal from Iraq. (T.P.S.M.'s fave distraction, of course: Prince Charming goes to war.)
But what actually is the British policy? Will the UK pull out three thousand troops by May 2007, or only one thousand? Has Blair committed his successor to a minimum deployment of four thousand British troops in Iraq through at least 2013?
And what about British support for the Afghan war?
UK researcher and writer Sarah Meyer sorts through British and international corporate-media coverage of changing British policy from August 2006 through this month, at Index Research, and puts it in chronological order.

Tags: politics, law, policy, war, surge, withdrawal, Iraq, Afghanistan, Bush, Blair, Prince Harry.

Martin Garbus: "The Next 25 Years" -- a critique

By itself, The Next Twenty-Five Years: The New Supreme Court and What it Means for Americans, by well-known trial lawyer Martin Garbus, isn't quite the book we need.
If you first read American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America, by former New York Times reporter Chris Hedges, and place Garbus's conclusions into the frame of Hedges's broader argument, you'll go a long way to understanding the historically unique, urgent, and dangerous moment we're in right now.