The Ministry of Minor Perfidy

Ministers

His totemic animal is a 40lb. NYC sewer rat

VP of Pillaging, Viking Industries

stalwartly equivocal

heteropatriarchal phallocentric violence-addicted prosthetic cock smoker

Hostess for the All-Ministry Pre-Ragnarok Tea Party and Rave

Future owner, Calgary Rough Riders

Minister Emeritus

Windy City Mike
social democrat, ca. 1930 trade-unionist, and professor of alleged history

Perfidious Advertising

This, too can be yours

Perfidious Merchandise

Perfidious Store Thingy

Most recent entries

Monthly Archives

Syndicate

Join our Mailing List

Calendar Thingy

<<	February 2005					>>
S	M	T	W	T	F	S
		1	2	3	4	5
6	7	8	9	10	11	12
13	14	15	16	17	18	19
20	21	22	23	24	25	26
27	28

Hosted by:
Bloghouse, a Home for Wayward Blogs

Powered by Expression Engine

Thursday, February 10, 2005

This is no good at all

Jazz organ giant Jimmy Smith is dead. Eric Olsen at Blogcritics (linked) has the obit. This one hurts me a lot, actually. I have spent hours and hours listening to Jimmy’s records and playing along on the bass. His footwork was funky, tight, and groovy, and my ability to dig a deep groove owes in large part to him. Man… and I was still hoping to see him live.

Posted by Johno on 02/10/05 at 06:02 PM
Music Wonkery • Permalink

Those Goddamn Liberals…

taking control of the Democratic party, throwing it so far to the left it’s almost antipodean. That damn Howard Dean, that filthy pinko, that usurper of power, that MoveOn-powered moonbat hijacker of the minority voice. That filthy pro-Second-Amendment fiscally conservative Gingrich-admiring cool-on-Clinton state’s righter pinko is going to take the Democratic party to its doom with his Berkeley love-ins and his hairy-legged birkenstocked sensitivity advisors. Its doom, I tell you! Its doom!

My ass.

Posted by Johno on 02/10/05 at 02:19 PM
Unmitigated Gall • (0) Trackbacks • Permalink

Wednesday, February 09, 2005

If I give you $10 a day for ten days, how much do I give you total?

It depends on which ten days you look at!

If any of us tried this, the IRS would hit us so hard our granchildren would feel it. Our Fearless Leader’s Fiscally Prudent And Unassailably Conservative Medicare plan will now cost north of One… Trillion… Dollars all told. In case you’re confused, $1.2 Trillion is more than $720 Billion, which is another estimate, which is bigger in turn than the $400 Billion that we were all told - and none of us ever believed - the program would cost in the first place.

So how’d they do it? Simple! They lied!

When the Medicare bill was passed, the Congressional Budget Office said the cost would not exceed $400 billion over 10 years. In a letter to The New York Times published on Nov. 20, 2003, Thomas A. Scully, who was then the Medicare administrator, wrote, “We are spending $400 billion.”

Just two months later, in January 2004, the White House said the cost, for the same 10-year period, would be $534 billion.

Dr. McClellan said Tuesday that “there has been no significant change in the cost of the drug benefit” for the years 2006 to 2013. But, he said, the new estimate covers two additional years, 2014 and 2015, when Medicare enrollment will be larger and drug prices will be higher. In 2015 alone, he said, Medicare will spend well over $100 billion on the drug benefit.

Assumptions about the cost of the Medicare drug benefit were included in the budget that Mr. Bush unveiled on Monday. A table in one volume of the budget, titled “Analytical Perspectives,” shows the drug benefit as costing $345 billion from 2005 to 2010.

Lawmakers said they were shocked to see that number because it was close to the $400 billion figure they had previously been given as the price tag for a full decade. Estimates prepared by the chief Medicare actuary show that the spending for the prescription drug benefit will total $1.2 trillion from 2006 to 2015, before taking account of income that will offset some of that cost.

The best part of the foregoing is the ludicrous misdirection employed to sell the plan. See, the original estimate was from 2004-2013, which is in fact a ten year period - just not a ten year period in which the bill takes effect. The new new estimates cover the years 2006-2015, ten years in which the bill will be fully funded and the Giant Money Hoover fully operational. See how it works? Costs + Timeshift = Big Big Savings!

Let’s say my car costs $10000, payable in monthly installments over five years.(Actually, it would cost me plenty more than that with interest factored in, but interest is haaaaaard so I will leave it aside for now.) If I say my car will cost me $10000 over five years, I can’t just save some money by picking a random five-year window and computing the cost then (My car cost me $0 - free! - from 1888-1893). But the car is not free, and that $10000 is still due in a very real and binding sense, if I am going to continue having the dual pleasures of a car and a sound credit history. There’s no getting around it. And yet, picking a time series at random seems to be good enough for government accounting.

I wonder if I could try this the next time I get audited. “Yes sir, I did make $0 last year. I only counted the hours from midnight-6 AM, and I made no money during that time. Why - is that a problem?”

[wik] Not to harp on this but… if these are the kinds of ‘facts’ that entered into the Bush administration’s policy planning of Medicare reform, what other ‘facts’ are attached to other initiatives? Not that every President doesn’t do it, but I seem to recall myself carping about the same tactic when Clinton used it, and Bush I before him. Before that, I only cared about GI Joe, rock guitar, and homework.

Posted by Johno on 02/09/05 at 06:39 PM
Filthy Lucre • (0) Trackbacks • Permalink

Note to self

Don’t move back to Virginia.

No disrespect to Buckethead, Ross, my wife’s family, or the beautiful city of Alexandria, but I can’t live somewhere where I can’t wear my pants how I want, no matter how low or tacky. Oh, also the gay thing. Hey… both are the state’s decision and rightly so… but…

Posted by Johno on 02/09/05 at 06:33 PM
Partisan Politics • (0) Trackbacks • Permalink

It’s not the Special Olympics, so everyone’s just a loser with a limp.

Watching Jonah Golberg and Juan Cole go at each other is like watching Max Cleland box Larry Flynt . It sounds like it would be funny to see two wheelchair dudes fight, but in actual fact it’s tawdry, exploitative, and leaves everyone feeling dirty and vaguely disappointed that there wasn’t more punching. Nevertheless, if you want to, here’s the recent rounds.: Cole/Goldberg.

“Thanks” to QandO for the collation and for an energetic fisking of Cole to boot, though I don’t necessarily agree and find it a bit unseemly to pile on the weak besides.

[wik] My original post read “John” Cole. John Cole is the blogger at balloon juice, but he’s a Steelers fan and therefore not to be trusted.

Posted by Johno on 02/09/05 at 06:14 PM
Darwin Award Contender • (0) Trackbacks • Permalink

The Judge Hamoud al-Hitar Talking Jihad Cure Blues

In loving memory of Minister Emeritus Windy City Mike’s occasional coffeehouse sets back in the halcyon days of college and too many cigarettes, and his audience favorite, “Talkin’ To My Neighbor Ed Blues,” I offer this left-field story of Yemen’s success in fighting terrorism.

In this era of war and mistrust, fueled by mutual distrust, rampant misperception, and the more than occasional exploding object, it is popular to decry the “know your enemy” argument as being a mushyheaded, bleeding-hearted leftist approach to reducing the number of terrorists and incidents of terrorism in the world. Many argue that the only ways to achieve this end are either 1) kill all the terrorists (which earns the A. Jackson Prize for clarity of purpose), or 2) kill all the terrorists we can, meanwhile making sure the social conditions that created them are minimized or eliminated (which earns the W. Wilson Prize for ambition of goal). There are many, many merits to recommend these two approaches, but there are numerous drawbacks as well.

The incomplete success of the Jackson and Wilson plans to combat terrorism has resulted in a situation where, as one Iraqi interlocutor of Michael Totten put it, the best sentiment we can hope for in the Middle East is, “Thank you for coming, now please leave and take us with you.” (or, as Minister Mike once put it, “Yankee go home!... Stay for some mezza?”). As far as that gets us, that’s pretty good, and in fact as good as we can expect. But we still face a situation where, inescapably, no matter what the US does, we’re still the asshole. This is, of course, fine. Pleasing everybody will get us all either dead or in burqas, and sharply reduce the number of opportunities Americans have to be complacent about being #1. But this also means that any help we as a society can get from within the Islamic world to combat terrorism through soft means (those avenues which are shut off to us in our capacity as King Badass/ Great Satan / Corrupter of the World / Main Destination for Everyone’s Emigrants) is welcome.

Which is why this story is so fascinating. A young Yemeni judge named Hamoud al-Hitar has begun engaging in Koranic debates with the terror-inclined zealots arrested in his country, with the aim of talking them out of their terrorist ways.

According to the Christian Science Monitor (linked above), it’s working.

More Perfidious Goodness...

When Judge Hamoud al-Hitar announced that he and four other Islamic scholars would challenge Yemen’s Al Qaeda prisoners to a theological contest, Western antiterrorism experts warned that this high-stakes gamble would end in disaster.

Nervous as he faced five captured, yet defiant, Al Qaeda members in a Sanaa prison, Judge Hitar was inclined to agree. But banishing his doubts, the youthful cleric threw down the gauntlet, in the hope of bringing peace to his troubled homeland.

“If you can convince us that your ideas are justified by the Koran, then we will join you in your struggle,” Hitar told the militants. “But if we succeed in convincing you of our ideas, then you must agree to renounce violence.”

The prisoners eagerly agreed.

Now, two years later, not only have those prisoners been released, but a relative peace reigns in Yemen. And the same Western experts who doubted this experiment are courting Hitar, eager to hear how his “theological dialogues” with captured Islamic militants have helped pacify this wild and mountainous country, previously seen by the US as a failed state, like Iraq and Afghanistan.

“Since December 2002, when the first round of the dialogues ended, there have been no terrorist attacks here, even though many people thought that Yemen would become terror’s capital,” says Hitar, eyes glinting shrewdly from beneath his emerald-green turban. “Three hundred and sixty-four young men have been released after going through the dialogues and none of these have left Yemen to fight anywhere else.”

. . . . . . .

Seated amid stacks of Korans and religious texts, Hitar explains that his system is simple. He invites militants to use the Koran to justify attacks on innocent civilians and when they cannot, he shows them numerous passages commanding Muslims not to attack civilians, to respect other religions, and fight only in self-defense.

For example, he quotes: “Whoever kills a soul, unless for a soul, or for corruption done in the land - it is as if he had slain all mankind entirely. And, whoever saves one, it is as if he had saved mankind entirely.” He uses the passage to bolster his argument against bombing Western targets in Yemen - attacks he says defy the Koran. And, he says, the Koran says under no circumstances should women and children be killed.

If, after weeks of debate, the prisoners renounce violence they are released and offered vocational training courses and help to find jobs.

Hitar’s belief that hardened militants trained by Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan could change their stripes was initially dismissed by US diplomats in Sanaa as dangerously naive, but the methods of the scholarly cleric have little in common with the other methods of fighting extremism. Instead of lecturing or threatening the battle-hardened militants, he listens to them.

“An important part of the dialogue is mutual respect,” says Hitar. “Along with acknowledging freedom of expression, intellect and opinion, you must listen and show interest in what the other party is saying.”

. . . . . . . .

“It’s only logical to tackle these people through their brains and heart,” says Faris Sanabani, a former adviser to President Abdullah Saleh and editor-in-chief of the Yemen Observer, a weekly English-language newspaper. “If you beat these people up they become more stubborn. If you hit them, they will enjoy the pain and find something good in it - it is a part of their ideology. Instead, what we must do is erase what they have been taught and explain to them that terrorism will only harm Yemenis’ jobs and prospects. Once they understand this they become fighters for freedom and democracy, and fighters for the true Islam,” he says.

Some freed militants were so transformed that they led the army to hidden weapons caches and offered the Yemeni security services advice on tackling Islamic militancy. A spectacular success came in 2002 when Abu Ali al Harithi, Al Qaeda’s top commander in Yemen, was assassinated by a US air-strike following a tip-off from one of Hitar’s reformed militants.

The Monitor notes that terrorist activity has declined markedly in Yemen since this program was begun, though much of the credit also goes to an aggressive government policy against militant Islamic madrassas and training camps. Of course, Yemen has a long way to go from the point of view of the US. It is still a hotbed of anti-Western sentiment and the attendant poverty and desperation that such sentiments are a convenient outlet for. But, if the talking cure is working in Yemen (and I’m willing to bet that a Koranically-focused ‘suasion technique will actually stick, will little backsliding), more power to them. Maybe it can work elsewhere too.

Too Goddamn Much Perfidy...

Posted by Johno on 02/09/05 at 02:41 PM
Crazy Foreigners • (0) Trackbacks • Permalink

Tuesday, February 08, 2005

This Week in Exemplary Human Behavior

I am back from the dead.

Over the weekend I spent some time under the care of the Ministry’s crack team of gnostic chirurgeons. Most of them are refugees from our now-defunct Babylon office, and others are… well… let’s just say they don’t get out much and that’s lucky for us all. After exhausting all the powers of modern medical science to no avail, the Ministry’s medical staff went to work. Twenty-four hours later, I was miraculously on the mend. Though not without a fight, our in-house healers were able to draw a quantity of fluid from my chest cavity (not without a fight… Linda Blair vomited less than I did… the powers of the old ones are strong… I wonder if this was all to do with that aging invoice I hoped they’d forget...), and I am feeling stronger by the day. Soon, once again, you shall all cower before me.

In my absence, I am both gratified and saddened to see that the innate pettiness of the human spirt has rolled on unabated. In this week’s quickie edition of This Week in Exemplary Human Behavior, we focus on the unremarkable: those stories that we could recycle at least twice a year without even trying. Perhaps next week we will see humankind aspire to greater heights of creative cruelty. Or perhaps we will not have to write this feature at all for want of suitably exemplary material. Suit yourself; I know which one I’d put money on.

Spotlight: Massachusetts- Defrocked priest Paul Shanley will die in prison after being convicted of repeatedly raping a young parishoner in the 1980s. Despite the ultimate thinness of the prosecution’s case (only one of four victims made it to the trial phase without either being dropped from the case or going into hiding), a jury convicted Shanley on the strength of reportedly repressed memories recovered by the plaintiff. The Boston Phoenix has spent a good amount of time documenting Shanley’s deep, deep weirdness-- including, for example, his perplexingly thumbs-up attitude toward bestiality and pedophilia-- which makes a good circumstantial case that the former “street priest” is at least a hobby-level sicko, but one witness’ recovered memories do not a case make.

There’s so much here to love: a creepshow priest; a jury willing to accept “memory recovery” as ironclad evidence; a diocese who, regardless of this one priest’s record, aided and abetted a casual kiddie-toucher ring for decades, privileging their own institutional comfort over the anguish of generations of helpless victims. Nice.

Spotlight: Los Angeles- Home of The the Angels Angels of Anaheim. What is it this time? Natural disaster? Mouthy limo-lib celebrity? Dead rap star?

Nope! It’s that old chestnut, appalling police brutality! In a story that will be no surprise to anyone who has ever driven I-5 at rush hour (or seen the Steve Martin classic, “LA Story"), the LAPD ended the stolen-car joyride of thirteen-year-old Devon Brown by shooting him. The Department’s defense is that Brown, at the end of the chase, backed his car into a police cruiser in a maneuver that we in Boston like to call “parking a little close.” The police chose to signal their displeasure at Brown’s novice attempt at full-contact driving by shooting into his car ten times, thereby stopping the car. Oh right-- and killing Brown too.

Like Uncle Jimbo said, “it’s all right to shoot anything, as long as you make sure to yell, ‘oh God, it’s coming right for us!’ first.”

Spotlight: Iraq- Suicide bomber kills 21. Nothing to say that wasn’t said the first 200 times.

Spotlight: Saudi Arabia- Security officials from 50 countries elected to put the fox in charge of the henhouse this week, with the establishment of an international counterterrorism center to be based in Saudi Arabia. Now, I understand that the Royal House of Saud ‘n’ Waffles has a vested interest in quashing terrorism in their country because all those grassroots terrorist groups kind of suck the wind out of their own state-sponsered terrorist groups but really… do you put the fat guy in charge of the buffet?

Spotlight: Sudan- The UN continues to waggle the Giant Finger Of Blame at Sudan, charging that the Sudanese government really doesn’t give a shit about the ongoing genocide within its borders. If the Sudan does not respond to waggling, the organization is expected to move on to Sighing Aggressively. In other news, a new study by the United Nations Commission on Self-Justification shows that sighing saves, on average, 300,000 children a year from dying by machete or Kalashnikhov.

[wik] Did I really say we might never have to do this again? What was I drinking?! Here’s some more for you.

Spotlight: Florida- Via Julian Sanchez at Reason.com comes a chilling story of a Tampa couple who systematically tortured their seven adopted children. The official reports cite that the children were, among other things, were “subjected to electric shocks, beatings with hammers and having their toenails yanked out with pliers.” One set of 14-year-old twins weighted 36 and 38 pounds respectively, or about a third the normal weight of boys that age.

This height of depravity against children strikes me as a strong argument against God (what God would let this happen?), against evolution (what process of evolution would retain this impulse?), and in favor of enforced eugenics. But ultimately, I think this episode sits alongside many, many others of various stripes, flavors, and varieties as an incontrovertable, ironclad, and urgent argument against Florida.

(A fun final note: According to Florida law, the real threat to adopted children comes from the queers.)

Posted by Johno on 02/08/05 at 08:46 PM
Just So You Know • (0) Trackbacks • Permalink

Thursday, February 03, 2005

The score

Six weeks sick.
Tired all the time.
A 30 year old with a senior’s symptom-- a persistent pleural effusion just hangin’ out outside my left lung-- creating shortness of breath and back pain.
Two rounds of X-rays.
Two CAT scans.
Two rounds of blood tests.
A complete physical.

And all I can say for sure is it’s not caused by pneumonia or a pulmonary embolism, and that I probably don’t have HIV, lupus, or cancer. Probably. Or mono. Probably. Third round of blood tests come back today; if they end up naming a disease after me I’ll be pissed.

So please excuse me if I don’t post much on the interweb.

Posted by Johno on 02/03/05 at 02:26 PM
Just So You Know • (0) Trackbacks • Permalink

Page 2 of 2 pages < 1 2