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October 26, 2006
Coffee Snorters: Your Morning Dose Of Zen Edition
Quote of the Day, via Howard Bashman:
"Nothing shows the seriousness of your convictions about an issue like a pizza box."
Welcome to the snarkpit of fascism. Speaking of which, we weren't going to link to this little news item on the theory that it amounts to excessive encouragement of the Oink Cadre, but it is just too funny:
”The whipping therapy becomes much more efficient when a patients receives the punishment from a person of the opposite sex. The effect is astounding: the patient starts seeing only bright colors in the surrounding world, the heartache disappears, although it will take a certain time for the buttocks to heal, of course,” Sergei Speransky told the Izvestia newspaper.
Is old Russkaya proverb. That which doesn't kill us, only makes us stronger.
Hmmmm...maybe they should have tried spanking therapy:
Supermodel Naomi Campbell has been released on bail after being arrested in London on suspicion of assault. Sky's crime correspondent Martin Brunt said Campbell was arrested yesterday afternoon after a woman walked into a central London police station and made an allegation of assault.The Sun newspaper reported that Campbell attacked her drug counselor.
The paper claimed the therapist made a complaint after she was "scratched all over her face" by the catwalk model.
A spokesman for Campbell said he believed there had been a "misunderstanding".
He said: "We are sure it will all be sorted out when the police investigate.
No doubt. These things happen, after all.
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Why do they hate us? Perhaps it would help if our own government wasn't giving them reasons:
The State Department publicly supported Alberto Fernandez after he apologized for making anti-American comments on the Arab network Aljazeera last Friday. But now it appears it was not the first time he'd done it.The National Review Online says that Fernandez gave another interview to Aljazeera on September fifth — and said: "We should admit that there's an American haughtiness and stupidity." He also says the U.S. made "a lot of mistakes" in the Middle East. And he adds: "Today, no doubt, Americans ... are trying intentionally to encourage hell in the Arab world."
Don't even get us started on the ones who are trying to stir the anthill.
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...speaking of which, Oh! the humanity!
A high-calorie diet combined with life in the cell block — almost around the clock in some cases — is making detainees at Guantanamo Bay fat.Meals totaling a whopping 4,200 calories per day are brought to their cells, well above the 2,000 to 3,000 calories recommended for weight maintenance by U.S. government dietary guidelines. And some inmates are eating everything on the menu.
One detainee has almost doubled in weight, to 410 pounds, said Navy Cmdr. Robert Durand, spokesman for the detention facilities at Guantanamo, a U.S. Navy station in southeast Cuba.
Human rights groups attribute the weight gain to lack of exercise. They cite accounts of released detainees who complained they were allowed to exercise fewer than three times a week outside their small cells.
But Durand said detainees are simply served a wide variety of food and are expected to choose what appeals to them.
"The detainees are advised that they are offered more food than necessary, to provide choice and variety, and that consuming all the food they are offered will result in weight gain," he said.
Most of the prisoners at Guantanamo picked up in Afghanistan and other conflict zones were slightly underweight when they arrived. Since then, they've gained an average of 20 pounds, and most are now "normal to mildly overweight or mildly obese," according to the most recent measurements, he said.
The meals include meats prepared according to Islamic guidelines, along with fresh bread, vegetables and yogurt. With nearly all detainees fasting in the daytime during the Muslim holy month of Ramadan, authorities have arranged for a post-sunset meal and a midnight meal. Traditional desserts and honey also are served during the Ramadan observances.
Even two detainees who have been on a hunger strike for more than a year are at "100 percent ideal body weight," from nutrients fed through tubes inserted in their noses, Durand said.
The calorie intake at Guantanamo is well above the norm for federal inmates in the United States, who receive about 2,900 calories a day, said U.S. Bureau of Prisons spokesman Michael Truman. He said weight gain in the civilian system is not widespread and that most inmates "keep themselves in pretty good shape."
Prisoners at Guantanamo who behave well get more exercise time. The most compliant get up to 12 hours a week, including access to treadmills, stationary bikes and other fitness equipment, Durand said. Guantanamo officials say compliance is gauged solely by whether a detainee follows detention center rules and avoids causing disturbances, and has nothing to do with whether he is providing information to interrogators.
Detainees clashed with guards in May, using fan blades and broken light fixtures as makeshift weapons. Other inmates were recently discovered to be removing springs from sink faucets to use as stabbing weapons, the military says.
No doubt the half vast readership expects the editorial staff to retreat into some jejeune reference to spanking therapy, however we are far too mature for such predictable and trite sallies.
Feel free, however, to indulge your baser instincts in the comments section.
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We can't even snark at this. Some things stand on their own merits:
President George W. Bush and Republicans have taken a battering over Iraq, but it's not because voters believe Democrats have a clear strategy for ending the conflict and bringing American soldiers home.
"If you ask people out on the street what the message is, they wouldn't know," said Joan Lowery, a 60-year-old insurance company manager, at a recent Democratic fund-raiser in Cincinnati.Only a quarter of Americans think Democrats in the Congress have a clear plan for Iraq, far less than the 36 percent who believe the president has one, a USA Today/Gallup poll in mid-September found.
But experts said the lack of a clear Democratic plan made no difference at all to most voters. Ambiguity has been part of the Democratic strategy on Iraq all along and has worked quite well, they said.
"For a lot of Democrats it is a very successful strategy to simply mirror the voters' underlying discontent with the war, but not to offer specifics that make them a vulnerable target," said Matthew Woessner, an assistant professor of public policy at Pennsylvania State University.
It has been remarked in the past that Hope is not a Strategy.
Apparently, while the (in our AO mistaken) imputation that we didn't have enough of a plan for the reconstruction of Iraq appears to be enough to have driven the administration's poll numbers into the toilet, the American public appears to be blithely resistant to the logical implication that perhaps the solution to that "problem" might require actually Having a Plan To Do Something About It.
Why does the HVES have a nasty feeling we are about to get the government we deserve?
Posted by Cassandra at October 26, 2006 06:32 AM
Comments
Most of the prisoners at Guantanamo picked up in Afghanistan and other conflict zones were slightly underweight when they arrived. Since then, they've gained an average of 20 pounds, and most are now "normal to mildly overweight or mildly obese," according to the most recent measurements, he said.
They sound just about ready to become American citizens, then...sadly enough.
(Quoth he, sveltely...)
Posted by: camojack at October 26, 2006 07:44 AM
Does this mean the beatings by Nancy Pelosi will continue until morale improves? Mortification of the flesh, and all that.
Uh, we has to ax the question; What is 'normal' overweight?
Posted by: Cricket at October 26, 2006 11:12 AM
Maybe that's the stage between "pudgy" and "pleasingly plump".
Posted by: Sly2017 at October 26, 2006 11:33 AM
Are you referring to "That which doesn't kill us, only makes us stronger" as an old Russkaya proverb? I thought that was Nietzsche, and he's German (if not, nevermind).
Did you know he died of syphilis?
Posted by: jpr at October 26, 2006 03:20 PM
Da. Kak isvestia to all non-hooligani type chelavyeki. I am being bolshoi smartasski, jpr. Also cannot speak Russki worth a darn, especially when mind is on HTML and the horrors of cascading style sheets.
I am pretty sure it was indeed Nietzsche, but I am too lazy to look it up right now. I'll try later.
Posted by: Between the Devil And the Deep Blue Sea at October 26, 2006 03:55 PM
I'm sorry to hear that your style sheets are cascading, or wherever it is they're going.
But in somewhat seriousness, it's a classic political tactic that if your opponent insists on self-destructing, don't get in their way. By the republicans tying their political fortunes to the President and Iraq, seemingly the democrats don't need to do much but get out of the way.
Also, once the public realizes what the "Having a Plan To Do Something About It" solution actually is, they're not going to like it. Higher taxes, perhaps, to pay down the debt. Sending over hundreds of thousands more troops from all services to bolster forces already there or backfill jobs around the world.
Posted by: jpr at October 26, 2006 04:34 PM
My style sheets have left the building. I was afraid to look and see what they were doing as they left.
If the human cost weren't so bad, I'd advocate the Rethugs just step back and say, "Here - you want to fix it... fine: catch!".
The amusement factor alone would be worth it. But that's so irresponsible, and that's exactly what they count on.
Posted by: Princess Leia in a Cheese Danish Bikini at October 26, 2006 04:56 PM
A large number of rotund Git’mo detainees will eventually be released back into the wild, where they will speak boldly of tales of their torture at the hands of the infidel, while their former associates theorize how much information they willingly gave the US in exchange for second helpings.
Posted by: Georg Felis at October 26, 2006 05:52 PM
"Princess Leia in a Cheese Danish Bikini" I like the imagery, oddly.
Perhaps the American public is (are?) so used to hearing "Stay the Course" and being told that things are going in the right direction that they've been lulled into a state of sleepy isolationist complacency. Sacrifice? Me? For them?
Posted by: jpr at October 26, 2006 06:02 PM