The Pagan Science Monitor

NO WAY! FBI documents show decades of spying on NLG

The only surprise here is that the New York Times is covering it. The NLG Chicago member who called this morning to make sure I would buy the paper agreed with my theory: The Times wants to atone for Judith Miller and swallowing the Bush regime's lies before the war.
Anyway, the story:
In 1977, the New York City chapter of the National Lawyers Guild sued the FBI, seeking relief from the persistent surveillance, infiltration, and disruption.
The case moved speedily along, as these sorts of suits always do, and twelve years later the government settled with the Guild. As part of the settlement, the FBI turned over 400,000 pages (you read that right) of surveillance logs, typed reports and handwritten notes by infiltrators, and dossiers on provocateurs.

Happy Johannestanz day

June 24, 1374, Aachen: An outbreak of dancing mania grips the town.
The citizens hallucinate and experience convulsions until dropping from exhaustion.
The phenomenon was widespread in Medieval Europe and known before the twentieth century as "St. John's Dance."
(Aside: "St. Vitus's dance" is a neurological disorder related to Huntington's Disease and unrelated to manic dancing.)
(Further aside: The pic is a lithograph of the Danse Macabre, also totally unrelated; it's just that I'm listening to The Faint.)
The Skeptical Inquirer has a good breakdown on dancing mania here. (Three fallacies.)

I Disappear
I disappear / I lost control / My body's moving / All on its own / I watch myself / Walk away / A foreign spirit / Took my place....
--The Faint, Wet From Birth, 2004

(Housekeeping: Starry D. & Severn don't blog here anymore. T.P.S.M. is a one-man show.)

Tags: St. John's Dance, dancing mania, Danse Macabre, Skeptical Inquirer, Committee for Skeptical Inquiry, skepticism, The Faint, Zombies.

Quotation du jour: Sat. 6-16-07

The patron had engaged me as kitchen plongeur; that is, my job was to wash up, keep the kitchen clean, prepare vegetables, make tea, coffee, and sandwiches, do the simpler cooking, and run errands.... (Ch. XX)
...And yet the plongeurs, low as they are, also have a kind of pride. It is the pride of the drudge -- the man who is equal to no matter what quantity of work.... (Ch. XIV)

-- Orwell, Down and Out in Paris and London, 1933

Because the temperature in my apartment rose with the sun, and sleep became impossible, and I realized I had dreamed I was a dishwasher again. I took the book off the shelf (whoever snagged my copy of Catalonia, bring it back) and found my favorite passages again before the dog woke or I even made coffee.

Quotation du jour, Fri. 6-15-07

My mother called me to her bedside
These words she said to me
If you don't quit your rambling ways
They're gonna get you in the penetentiary
Gonna get you in the penetentiary poor boy
Gonna get you in the penetentiary
If you don't quit your reckless ways
They're gonna get you in the penetentiary

Well the jury said I had to pay
And the clerk he wrote it down
And the judge called out my number
Two sixes upside down
Two sixes upside down poor boy
Two sixes upside down
The judge called out my number
Two sixes upside down

-- Woody Guthrie, "Poor Boy," posthumously released, 1968

Seeya, Scooter.

Tags: politics, law, policy, Scooter Libby, prison, Valerie Plame, Valerie Plame Wilson, Impeachment, Zombies.  

Anti-death penalty lesbian prosecutor for president in 2008

So you work in public-interest law, and you'd rather be thought of as a reader than a TV-watcher, but your secret, guilty pleasure is a crappy police procedural on NBC. So how thrilled are you to learn that Serena Southerlyn is going to be the next president of the United States? Will it make you start taking electoral politics seriously? Get off your bicycle and put your clothes back on? Stop wringing your hands about the war and the war and the war and the war and the torture and the torture and the other torture and the wiretapping and the wiretapping and the wiretapping and the wiretapping and, oh yeah, the war?!
Oh, you answered, "Yes"?
Well, screw you, it's actually this guy who's running for president.

He sure looks presidential, too, huh?


Oh, yeah, don't forget to call the corporate media the COMA.


Tags: politics, election, 2008, presidential race, media, corporate media, COMA, "Law & Order", Elisabeth Rohm, Fred Dalton Thompson, Fred Thompson, LGBT, lesbians, Iraq, Iraq war, torture, eavesdropping, wiretapping, FISA, skepticism, Critical Mass, World Naked Bike Ride, Zombies.

Nazis bash LGBT march in Moscow

Remember how mad you were the last time you got queer-bashed and the cops arrested you? It happened today in Moscow.
The city again banned a Pride march, for the second year running. Moscow LGBT activists (including organizer Nikolai Alexeyev) instead rallied to present a letter from members of the European Parliament to the notorious homophobe who runs the city.
Guess who got slugged by neo-nazis? Remember how happy you were the first time you heard "I'm Too Sexy"?! Richard Fairbrass, the lead singer of Right Said Fred, gets thumped in Moscow.

Watch the video & turn it up. Then do what i'm being yelled at to do: GET OFF THE COMPUTER AND COME BARBECUE!

"It's partly good" set to replace hackneyed go-to phrase

In recognition that the Democrats will not end the war, impeach the crooks, stop the torture, or unplug the wiretaps, the Official Registry of A-List Lingo (O.R.A.L.) announced today that "It's all good" will no longer be said.
Further, persons continuing to use the demonstrably false hipster/poseur phrase may be ruthlessly mocked under the new O.R.A.L. rule.
The new rule was adopted on the same day in which the Democratic leadership gave oodles & oodles of blood money to the president with no strings attached.

Tags: politics, law, policy, Iraq, Iraq war, Congress, funding bill, Pelosi, David Obey, Maurice Hinchey, benchmarks, anna eshoo.

Other things G-d hates

It's unlikely that the Phelps Monsters will ever surf on in, but, just in case, may yawl find this list helpful.
G-d also hates:
1. Your stylist. Lev. 19:27
2. Also, your do. (Priests only.) Lev. 21:5
3. That Patricia Arquette show. Lev. 19:31 (YHWH ain't alone on this one.)
4. The way you leave granma or granpa in that nursing home. Ex. 20:12
5. Your cheatin' ways on the bathroom scale in the morning. Lev. 19:35-36

In The Pagan Science Reading Room: "Rights on Trial," Arthur Kinoy (1983)

Friday afternoon conspiracy theory --
Here's a refreshing change: The theory's author admits it's only a hunch. But it's a hell of a hunch.
"Few events have had as cataclysmic an impact upon the course of American history as Watergate. And yet no period remains quite so clouded, so little understood. To this day the true explanation for the extraordinary developments which rocked the country remains hidden behind the self-serving accounts written by the participants.
"There were moments, however, when the layers of camouflage were torn away and the underlying truth lay exposed, revealing a frightening reality which had brought the nation closer to the brink of disaster than any turn of events since the rebellion of the southern slaves states over a hundred years earlier.
"Such a moment of truth was the argument on February 24, 1972, before the U.S. Supreme Court of a case with the strange name of United States v. United States District Court for the Eastern District of Michigan...."

This is Arthur Kinoy's pretty good guess about how the case he argued -- and its unforeseen outcome at the Supreme Court -- lead to the discovery of the bugging of the Democratic National Committee in the Watergate Hotel.

He lived just long enough to see Roe made irrelevant

Jerry Falwell dropped dead.
The argument that Carhart circumvents the rights established in Roe, and makes a direct attack on Roe forever unnecessary, is here.