Thursday, June 30, 2005

One last thing

Crazy Foreigners

Apparently, the president elect of Iran is this fuckhead:

fuckhead

The fuckhead on the right is Mahmood Ahmadinejad.  The man on the left is an American hostage.  The picture is from the American embassy in Tehran in 1979.

Representative of the religion of peace Ahmadinejad said,

“The wave of the Islamic revolution will soon reach the entire world… Thanks to the blood of the martyrs, a new Islamic revolution has arisen and the Islamic revolution of 1384 [the current Iranian year] will, if God wills, cut off the roots of injustice in the world,” Ahmadinejad was quoted by the official Iranian news agency as saying. “The era of oppression, hegemonic regimes, tyranny and injustice has reached its end.”

The best way to ensure that in Iran would be for dear Mahmood and his cronies to immediately remove themselves from power, and for good measure, this life. 

Besides participating in the the takeover of the U.S. embassy in Teheran, Ahmadinejad’s other credentials include serving as Teheran’s mayor, as a senior commander in the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, responsible for the nation’s missile and nuclear weapons programs, and has been identified as a suspect in the killing of Kurdish dissidents in Europe in the late 1980s and early 1990s.  As an unsurprising bonus, he has long been regarded as the most anti-Western of Iran’s presidential candidates. 

Give peace a chance!


Posted by Buckethead on 06/30/05 at 05:53 PM
Crazy Foreigners • Permalink

Go west, middle-thirties man!

Just So You Know

The Buckethead Clan will be departing the DC area at an undetermined time this evening, heading toward an undisclosed location somewhere in Ohio.  I am concealing this information from you and my wife for the eminently simple reason that I have no fricken clue.  But sooner or later, probably later, we will load up the bucketmobile with fireworks, small children and dogs; and newly equipped with iPod, we will drive off into the sunset with (at last count) as much as 2.4 days worth of music to listen to.

This patriotic journey to the heartland to celebrate (two days late) the signing of the Declaration of Independence will leave me far, far from my computer.  While I may have occasional access, I doubt I’ll be feeling much like posting, seeing as we have relatives to visit, picnics and fireworks to attend, a wedding to go to, (and wedding gifts to buy) and who knows what else. 

I hope everyone has a explosion and fire-filled Independence Day, consumes vast quantities of cheap hot dogs and cheaper beer, and takes at least a minute to reflect on the liberty we enjoy.


Posted by Buckethead on 06/30/05 at 05:41 PM
Just So You Know • Permalink

Religious beliefs and other tools for scoring cheap PR points

Unmitigated Gall
Via today's Best of the Web, we find the travails of Bethany Hauf, of Victorville CA, in a story entitled Term paper about 'God' earns student failing grade.
He told me you might as well write about the Easter Bunny. He wanted to censor the word God.
The horror!
Hauf's teacher approved her term paper topic — Religion and its Place within the Government — on one condition: Don't use the word God. Instead of complying with VVCC adjunct instructor Michael Shefchik's condition Hauf wrote a 10-page report for her English 101 class entitled "In God We Trust."

"He said it would offend others in class," Hauf, a 34-year-old mother of four, said. "I didn't realize God was taboo."
So she wrote it anyway. Perhaps she should have dropped English 101 and taken a basic comprehension course instead. Either that or she was spoiling for a fight.
"I don't loose my First Amendment rights when I walk into that college," Hauf said. She is demanding an apology from the teacher and that the paper be re-graded.
Mmmm... o-kaaaay. Which of the words below were foreign to her, I wonder:
Shefchik wrote her back an e-mail approving her topic choice, but at the same time cautioning her to be objective in her reporting. "I have one limiting factor," Shefchik wrote, according to the ACLJ. "No mention of big 'G' gods, i.e., one, true god argumentation."
Being an utterly irreligious fellow, I can't get too jacked up by either Hauf's overt religiosity or her teacher's overt lack thereof - they're each entitled to their kinks. But several things jumped out at me from the story.

First, the author or editor of the story needs to reread the style guide for the Daily Press, assuming they have one. It probably contains a maxim such as "Q: What is hard to lose but can sometimes become loose? A: Your bowels". And if it doesn't have a style guide, it should. Failing an editorial lapse, maybe Hauf actually said "loose", in which case she should be immediately demoted to a remedial spoken English course. And failing that, of course I'm just being too picky, but only because I'm perfect in every way.

Second, even giving credit for the teacher's apparent antipathy toward things religious, Hauf received a valid assignment for an English class, and a challenging one, given her choice of topic. Rather like the lipogram by Ernest Vincent Wright called Gadsby, only a whole lot shorter and easier.

Finally, who is this ACLJ, and why do we need yet another set of harpies to advance the cause of feigned infringement on our basic rights as human beings? Even if we did need such an additional advocacy organization (and I'm not saying we do, by a long shot), at what point in time did the First Amendment become stretched to cover fulfillment of class assignments, as distinct from simple expression of opinion? I don't think one loses one's rights to free speech when entering a classroom, but there's a time and place for expression of opinion, and it's the part of the class where, well, people are discussing opinions. In an expository paper, such as the one she was assigned, opinion has next to nothing to do with, and fulfilling the assignment has everything to do with one's grade. If she'd gotten a bad grade because of her views, I'd understand the umbrage, but she clearly got a bad grade because she explicitly failed to fulfill the assigned task.

And hollering about repression isn't a substitute for just doing the damned assignment.

Posted by Patton on 06/30/05 at 12:09 AM
Unmitigated Gall • (0) Trackbacks • Permalink