Man buys wife a Taser for personal protection. Brings it home and can’t resist playing with it.

What happened next is almost beyond description, but I’ll do my best…..

I’m sitting there alone, Tabby looking on with her head cocked to one side as to say, “don’t do it master,” reasoning that a one-second burst from such a tiny little ole thing couldn’t hurt all that bad.. I decided to give myself a one-second burst just for the heck of it. I touched the prongs to my naked thigh, pushed the button, and HOLY MOTHER, WEAPONS OF MASS DESTRUCTION@!@$@$%!@ *!!!I’m pretty sure Jessie Ventura ran in through the side door, picked me up in the recliner, then body slammed us both on the carpet, over and over and over again. I vaguely recall waking up on my side in the fetal position, with tears in my eyes, body soaking wet, both nipples on fire, testicles nowhere to be found, with my left arm tucked under my body in the oddest position, and tingling in my legs. The cat was standing over me making meowing sounds I had never heard before, licking my face, undoubtedly thinking to herself, “do it again, do it again!”

SON-OF-A-.. that hurt like he**!!! A minute or so later (I can’t be sure, as time was a relative thing at that point), collected my wits (what little I had left), sat up and surveyed the landscape. My bent reading glasses were on the mantel of the fireplace. How did they up get there??? My triceps, right thigh and both nipples were still twitching. My face felt like it had been shot up with Novocain, and my bottom lip weighed 88 lbs. I’m still looking for my testicles? I’m offering a significant reward for their safe return.

Still in shock.

Well, it could have been worse. Just imagine if he’d hung a picture of pretty girl in a swim suit around his own neck!

O, my Beloved, in order to vindicate the justice of the Islamic cause, and in order to reveal the greatness of God, and to make known to the entire world the wickedness and cruelty of the Franks, Time Magazine (blessings and peace be upon it!) informs the world of the struggles of the brave jihadi Mohammad al-Qahtani. (Identified by the intelligence forces of the Great Satan as having been intended to be the 20th hijacker on September 11, 2001, travelling on Flight 93. But who was prevented by the enemies of God from entering the United States, was deported, and then re-captured by the infidels in Afghanistan a few months later.)

Brother al-Qahtani has obtained legal representation by infidels made mad by God and compelled to battle against those who would protect them from the vengeance of the Faithful.

Consequently, in accordance with Allah’s will, the mujahid Mohammad al-Qahtani now proclaims that all of his earlier statements and confessions (providing intelligence and identifying Al Qaeda personnel) were lies extracted from him by such brutal tortures as intrusions into his personal space, the pouring of water he declined to drink upon his head, and worst of all (Have pity, O Believers!): the hanging ’round his neck of images of beautiful women clad only in swimming suits!

So ever may the Faithful be permitted to confound the unbelievers and thus bring them ever nearer to their appointed destruction. Allahu Akhbar!

84 page Interrogation Log — Detainee 063 23 November 2002 — 11 January 2003

Special Prosecutor Patrick’s Fitzgerald’s latest filing contains a paragraph referring to a “transcript of the conversation” between the Washington Post’s Bob Woodward, columnist Robert Novak (who started the whole thing), and an official whose name was redacted. Editor & Publisher infers that this may imply that Woodward taped the conversation, or (at the very least) that he made a very detailed set of notes.

Leftblogger emptywheel took that transcript, converted it to an MS WORD document, and went to work counting spaces in the redacted portion.

Using one inch margins and Times New Roman, I recreated the passages at paragraph 43 and paragraph 52 that name Woodward’s (and Rove’s) source. Richard Armitage fits at paragraph 53, and Armitage fits in both spaces at paragraph 43. Cheney, Bush, Hadley, Rice, Joseph, Bolton … none of those alternatives fit. The one other possibility I can think of (it is slightly shorter than Armitage, but with the non-justified pages, it’s hard to tell) is Fleischer. Update: I think Rumsfeld is an outside possibility, too. Note that the passage at 43:

Moreover, Libby has been given a transcript of the conversation between Woodward and [redacted] and Novak has published an account briefly describing the conversation with his first confidential source ([redacted]).

Which would still allow two different sources for Novak and Woodward.

——————————

Meanwhile Tom Maguire (who is the lead specialist in L’Affair Plame coverage) suspects that Fitzgerald’s lengthy redaction of the overview of his investigation means he’s hiding something significant.

If Fitzgerald is seriously probing some sort of cover-up, that might explain the silence of Bob Novak. And there is surely *something* going on – on p. 2 Fitzgerald promises a detailed overview of the investigation on pages 2-12, all of which are redacted. [NOTE – well, there was something going on at one time – maybe this is water under the bridge now. Fitzgerald did say in a Miller-related filing that his investigation was substantially completed, except for the testimony of Cooper and Miller.]

So, is this all about the Karl Rove angle, with Matt Cooper and the missing Hadley email? Or is there more, and might that “more” explain Novak’s continued silence?

The London Times reports another key breakthrough of contemporary science. Canadian anthropologist Peter Frost has produced a study on the origin of blond hair. And the World Health Organization warns of its impending disappearance.

According to the study, north European women evolved blonde hair and blue eyes at the end of the Ice Age to make them stand out from their rivals at a time of fierce competition for scarce males.

The study argues that blond hair originated in the region because of food shortages 10,000-11,000 years ago. Until then, humans had the dark brown hair and dark eyes that still dominate in the rest of the world. Almost the only sustenance in northern Europe came from roaming herds of mammoths, reindeer, bison and horses. Finding them required long, arduous hunting trips in which numerous males died, leading to a high ratio of surviving women to men.

Lighter hair colours, which started as rare mutations, became popular for breeding and numbers increased dramatically, according to the research, published under the aegis of the University of St Andrews.

“Human hair and eye colour are unusually diverse in northern and eastern Europe (and their) origin over a short span of evolutionary time indicates some kind of selection,” says the study by Peter Frost, a Canadian anthropologist. Frost adds that the high death rate among male hunters “increased the pressures of sexual selection on early European women, one possible outcome being an unusual complex of colour traits.”..

..A study by the World Health Organisation found that natural blonds are likely to be extinct within 200 years because there are too few people carrying the blond gene. According to the WHO study, the last natural blond is likely to be born in Finland during 2202.

My wife retorted:

Females choose the males in a great many (perhaps the majority) of vertebrate species – does this not match your own (blond) experience?

I’m afraid that it does.

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi reaffirms the
Democratic Party’s promise to remain marginalized

The Onion reports:

WASHINGTON, DC—In a press conference on the steps of the Capitol Monday, Congressional Democrats announced that, despite the scandals plaguing the Republican Party and widespread calls for change in Washington, their party will remain true to its hopeless direction.

“We are entirely capable of bungling this opportunity to regain control of the House and Senate and the trust of the American people,” Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) said to scattered applause. “It will take some doing, but we’re in this for the long and pointless haul.”

“We can lose this,” Reid added. “All it takes is a little lack of backbone.”

Despite plummeting poll numbers for the G.O.P nationwide and an upcoming election in which all House seats and 33 Senate seats are up for contention, Democrats pledged to maintain their party’s sheepish resignation.

“In times like these, when the American public is palpably dismayed with the political status quo, it is crucial that Democrats remain unfocused and defer to the larger, smarter, and better-equipped Republican machine,” House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) said. “If we play our cards right, we will be intimidated to the point of total paralysis.”

Here

Terry Gillam depicted a similarly-designed Homo sapiens organ in The Adventures of Baron Munchausen (1988), used by the Sultan to play his new composition: The Torturer’s Apprentice.

Katherine DeBrecht has published another of her satirical children’s books. The new one evidently features various leftwing Hollywood celebrities popping out the hamper to tell the kids what to do and think, while urging them to buy expensive consumer goods. This is a sequel to her earlier Help! Mom! There are Liberals Under My Bed!

Wretchard reflects on Tim Blair‘s observation that the Danish cartoons were more widely published in Islamic countries than in Canada, New Zealand or Australia, and went unpublished by a single major US daily, and concludes that the media’s self-censorship wasn’t really occasioned by fear of Islamic violence.

I think the real reason for the reluctance among Anglospheric publications to print the Danish cartoons was less timidity than the fear of tacitly repudiating the underlying assumption of the President Bush’s War on Terror, that the West is not at war with Islam but only with a small group of extremists who have corrupted “the religion of peace”. The Danish cartoons threatened to convert this limited war into a more general confrontation between the value systems of the West and Islam…

Once the Danish cartoon crisis threatened to knock the props out from under President Bush’s limited war on Islamic renegades and escalate it to a “clash of civilizations” the barrenness of the Lefist intellectual cupboard became obvious even to themselves. There was no recipe to deal with this contingency. A “clash of civilizations” would pull matters from their grasp precisely because they refused to touch it in the first place. They could only continue to pretend Islamism didn’t exist; and so they thrust their heads into the sand even further. The Danish cartoons? What cartoons?

California definitely features America’s most colorful crime. On Monday, a 68 year-old Sonoma former gaming executive grabbed his .357 Magnum revolver and dispatched an intruder who had pursued his 64 year-old wife into the house. The intruder was armed, and apparently dressed as a ninja.

Police investigators looking into the shooting death of a ninja-style assailant at a semirural home in Healdsburg say they have not yet been able to identify the masked intruder or establish a motive for his actions.

The intruder was shot dead Monday morning by Louis J. Phillips, a former tribal and Nevada gaming executive, shortly after the man attacked Phillips’ wife, Sandra, outside their home on Sunset Drive, police said. The man struggled with her and chased her inside, where Louis Phillips opened fire with his .357-caliber Magnum handgun.

“We don’t have a motive for the attack,” Police Chief Susan Jones said. “And we’d feel a whole lot better if we could identify the intruder.”

Jones described the dead assailant as a white man, about 35 to 40 years old. He was armed with a revolver and carried no identification. The man was dressed from head to toe in black, including a black mask and black leather gloves, Jones said.

The attacker’s motives, and identity, remain unknown, but Mr. Phillips’s former occupational associations might just possibly have had some connection with the attack. SF Chronicle

John Derbyshire suggests drastic measures:

Top ten reasons why Postmodernist philosophers should be burned alive in public squares atop piles of their books. (All taken from Stanley J. Grenz’s A Primer on Postmodernism.)

10. Whether we take the signified or the signifiers, language has neither ideas nor sounds that existed before the linguistic system, but only conceptual and phonic differences that have issued from the system. (Ferdinand de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics, p.120.)

9. Knowledge … creates a progressive enslavement to its instinctive violence. (Michel Foucault, Language, Counter-Memory, and Practice, p.163.)

8. No longer a coherent cognito, man now inhabits the interstices, “the vacant interstellar spaces,” not as an object, still less as a subject… (Edward Said, Beginnings: Intention and Method, p. 286.)

7. Understanding belongs to the being of that which is understood. (Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, p.xix.)

6. Post-modernism signals the death of such “metanarratives” whose secretly terroristic function is to ground and legitimate the illusion of a “universal” human history. (Terry Eagleton, Awakening from Modernity, p.194.)

5. Does truth, then, arise out of nothing? It does indeed if by nothing is meant the mere not of that which is, and if we here think of that which is as an object present in the ordinary way, and thereafter comes to light and is challenged by the existence of the work as only presumptively a true being. (Martin Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought, p.71.)

4. The author is therefore the ideological figure by which one marks the manner in which we fear the proliferation of meaning. (Michel Foucault, What Is An Author? p.159.)

3. It is these predicates … whose force of generality, generalization, and generativity find themselves liberated, grafted onto a “new” concept of writing which also corresponds to whatever always has resisted the former organization of forces, which always has constituted the rmainder irreducible to the dominant force which organized the — to say it quickly — logocentric hierarchy. (Jacques Derrida, Margins of Philosophy, pp.329-330.)

2. Truths are illusions of which one has forgotten that this is what they are. (Friedrich Nietzsche, The Portable Nietzsche, p.47.)

1. In the naming, the things named are called into their thinging. Thinging, they unfold world, in which things abide and so are abiding ones. (Martin Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought, pp.199-200.

Hat tip to Brian Highes.

Ralph Peters, reporting from Iraq, says the MSM lies:

The reporting out of Baghdad continues to be hysterical and dishonest. There is no civil war in the streets. None. Period.

Terrorism, yes. Civil war, no. Clear enough?

Yesterday, I crisscrossed Baghdad, visiting communities on both banks of the Tigris and logging at least 25 miles on the streets. With the weekend curfew lifted, I saw traffic jams, booming business — and everyday life in abundance.

Yes, there were bombings yesterday. The terrorists won’t give up on their dream of sectional strife, and know they can count on allies in the media as long as they keep the images of carnage coming. They’ll keep on bombing. But Baghdad isn’t London during the Blitz, and certainly not New York on 9/11.

It’s more like a city suffering a minor, but deadly epidemic. As in an epidemic, no one knows who will be stricken. Rich or poor, soldier or civilian, Iraqi or foreigner. But life goes on. No one’s fleeing the Black Death — or the plague of terror.

And the people here have been impressed that their government reacted effectively to last week’s strife, that their soldiers and police brought order to the streets. The transition is working.

Most Iraqis want better government, better lives — and democracy. It is contagious, after all. Come on over. Talk to them. Watch them risk their lives every day to work with us or with their government to build their own future.

Oh, the attacks will continue. They’re even predictable, if not always preventable. Driving through Baghdad’s Kerada Peninsula District, my humvee passed long gas lines as people waited to fill their tanks in the wake of the curfew. I commented to the officer giving me a lift that the dense lines of cars and packed gas stations offered great targets to the terrorists. An hour later, one was hit with a car bomb.

The bombing made headlines (and a news photographer just happened to be on the scene). Here in Baghdad, it just made the average Iraqis hate the terrorists even more.

You are being lied to. By elements in the media determined that Iraq must fail. Just give ’em the Bronx cheer.

Hat tip to Dr. Sanity.

notes Scott Ott:

With his characteristic optimism, President George Bush said today that his 34 percent approval rating in the latest CBS News poll, an all-time low for his presidency, could be worse.“I’m concerned, but I’m not pulling my hair out,” said Mr. Bush. “After all, it could be worse — I could be as unpopular as the CBS Evening News.”

Indeed, the flagship CBS News production languishes at the bottom of the network news heap, with a mere 10 percent share of a rapidly-dwindling audience of increasingly-older viewers — average age 61.2 years.