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Amazing
Cynthia McKinney actually manages to top her “Negro Tolerance Level” quote with her most recent escapade.
Although nothing is as strange as:
Three Men Charged in ‘Dungeon’ Castration
Three men have been arrested on charges of performing castrations on apparently willing participants in a sadomasochistic “dungeon” in a rural house, authorities said Friday.“It’s extremely bizarre,” District Attorney Michael Bonfoey said in a telephone interview. “It’s incredible the amount of ways that people can find to run afoul of the law.”
Sheriff’s investigators said Richard Sciara, 61, Danny Reeves, 49, and Michael Mendez, 60, admitted performing at least eight surgeries, including castrations and testicle replacements, on six consenting clients over the past year. None of the three is licensed to practice medicine, officials said.
…
Each man faces 10 felony counts — five each of castration without malice and conspiracy to commit castration without malice — as well as eight misdemeanor counts of performing medical acts without a license. Each felony carries a maximum three years and three months in prison, Bonfoey said.
Stranger still is that there was already a law against this sort of thing. How often does this sort of thing happen?
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Quick Saturday afternoon round up
- Baltic Crusades – on WikiPedia. Interesting.
- Tips for startup companies
- The torn up credit card application – this is scary – get a shredder now.
- An interesting article about the self-described “The Hell with them Hawks.“
- Interesting post from Marginal Revolution about inherent tensions in libertarianism.
- Borders is refusing to stock a magazine that is showing the Mohammed cartoons. More here and here.
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Odd statements
The consensus response after I tell people that sparks flew out of my new vacuum is “What? You were vacuuming? Really?”
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Nifty
The 15 best skylines in the world, by city.
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Back in Louisville
The lucky silver dollar.A long post about my grandfather will be up soon.
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Sad
Here’s the obit.
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Blogging will be light the next few days
I’m off the old country tommorow, I’m not sure when I’ll return.
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Well worth watching
On a related note, everyone should check out the most recent BloggingHeads, which features a very interesting dialogue between James Pinkerton and Mickey Kaus. Very good bigthink about the future (and a lovely new term, technological determinism) and immigration.
One quibble is that he reiterates the theory held by most people, which is that we could reduce illegal immigration to a trickle without much effort by building a wall. It’s similar to the thought that we could win the drug war if only we tried harder.
The government can’t keep drugs out of prisons, and the Soviets had the biggest police state in history, and they had tremendous drug problems. It’s ridiculous to think while we can’t successfully ban inanimate objects, we can successfully ban animate ones.
I imagine we’ll do what we’re doing with the drug war, which is spend a lot of money and civil liberties to create self-perpetuating interest groups (much like the classic bootleggers and Baptists unions of the prohibition era) and to deal with the actual problems as poorly as possible.
For the record I think sanctions on employers is the most effective way of dealing with the total number of illegal immigrants (not that it will do that much) and the main thing we should be doing (if we insist on some collective action) is to rapidly Americanize the immigrants that are here. Put simply, we need to change the Mexicans living here into Americans of Hispanic descent and throw this whole notion of multiculturalism away (the illegal immigrants did).
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Alex Tabarrok has the line of the day
In this post
Brad just doesn’t know right-wing agitprop. My friends walked out, but I exited the theater, pumped my fist in the air and shouted, Wolverines! (That’s when I first knew I was a rather odd Canadian – perhaps this was destiny.)
He would later (legally) immigrate to America and taste the sweet air of freedom.
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An undercovered story
Deaths fall for U.S., rise for Iraqis
U.S. military deaths during the past month have dropped to an average of about one a day, approaching the lowest level since the insurgency began two years ago, according to a USA TODAY analysis of U.S. military data.The decline in U.S. deaths comes as Iraqi casualties are the highest since the U.S. military began tracking them in 2004.
I’ve noticed this from ABC’s This Week coverage as well, though they don’t give the numbers over time. It would be interesting to see a chart of democide in Iraq (I’m counting the insurgency as a prospective government for the purpose of this post); I would wager it’s roughly stable year to year. After so many decades of being a police state, Iraq contains a sizable number of people for whom killing is their only skill.
And while we’re on the topic, check out the WikiPedia entry on Democide. It’s an informative read on mass murders by governments over time, going back to the Mongols.