Re-top-secretization

The NY Times is reporting that since 1999 the US Goverment intelligence has been busy reclassifying documents that Bill Clinton declassified in 1995. This makes sense. After all, the man smoked Mary Juh Wanna. He’s a dirty hippy and he can’t be trusted. What they forgot is that I, Matteus Von Mustard, am the world’s greatest deconstructionist detective – a chaser of erasure and a pimp of the palimpsest!

To give you an idea of how complicated this situation is, the article actually included the following sentence:

If Mr. Leonard finds that documents are being wrongly reclassified, his office could not unilaterally release them, but he could urge a reversal or a revision of the reclassification program.

In some situations the CIA seems to have gone crazy. For example, one file recently re-deemed re-top-secret was an English translation of an article from a very public Belgrade newspaper. Unless I’m mistaken, there are people outside of the CIA who speak both English and Serbian.

For the purposes of top-secrecy, the rest of this text will be in remorse code. What I have written above has been widely ported by spectable remembers of the repress, but what I am about to late to you is more slippery than a banana repeal and more confusing than a broken telephone recall. I know you’re waiting with rebated breath, so I won’t lax. Like Don Quixote in full galia I will sume my request! I will not treat, even if it looks like remission impossible!

Oh. Oh my. I have perhaps replyed myself with too much high-reproof rum. My remain point has slipped my remind. Oh, now I member! Within these stricted ports relies a resign of the apocalypse! See, I never remiss my remark!

That’s enough of that.

While they were declassified, historians made copies of some of the reclassified documents for private collections and by taking note of what the government is making re-top-secret we can get an accurate sense of their plans for the near future. Let me tell you dear readers, it is more terrifying than even I would have imagined--

“Among the 50 withdrawn documents that Mr. Aid found in his own files is a 1948 memorandum on a C.I.A. scheme to float balloons over countries behind the Iron Curtain and drop propaganda leaflets. It was reclassified in 2001.”

Good god? Don’t you see what this means?? IRON ZEPELLINS! Or MAYBE ATOMIC ZEPELLINS dropping MIND-CONTROL LEAFLETS! OR EVEN, god forbid, LED ZEPPELINS dropping BLUES-INSPIRED ROCK RIFFS! AAAGGHH!!! HEAD FOR THE HILLS!

Cartoon Chaos

Cartoons depicting the prophet Mohammed have been published in newspapers in Europe, most famously in Denmark. One of the cartoons apparently shows Mohammed with a bomb as a hat. I haven't actually seen any of the cartoons, because to be honest, I'm scared shitless that google will sell my search records to Iran and they will nuke my private islands in the Persian Gulf. This would not only be a personal tragedy, but the destruction of my aviaries would likely lead to the extinction of both gryphons and hippogriffs.

Sure, if you knew the guy who drew the cartoon, you would have every right to no longer hold him in high-regard. You could justifiably be cold to him at the office. He doesn't take your religious convictions seriously and he's not a nice guy. But to become so irrationally furious that you attack the embassy of the country where this guy comes from? Let me tell you something; there are assholes in this world and everyday they do things that are much more craven and unforgivable than drawing offensive cartoons -- such as, for example, raping children. Why is this so much more offensive to you?

This sort of over-defensive zeal in regards to religious convictions is not limited to Muslims. Indeed, it is illuminating to compare these protests to the christian fundamentalists who were burning copies of Harry Potter a few years back.

The Harry Potter books were burned because they discussed witchcraft. Who cares? Everyone except for these weirdo fundees took them for what they were -- FICTION! Is your grasp of your own religion really so superficial that it could be threatened by a work of fiction? Are you really worried that people will read Harry Potter and think, oh, this must be true, and stop beleiving in Jesus?!?? Christ, are you an idiot? It almost seems as if the only justification these people have for their entire religion is that it was published in a book and so they get touchy whenever anything contradictory is published. You didn't hear scientists protesting Harry Potter and, let me tell you, some very unscientific things happen in those books -- for example any anthropobotanist worth his salt knows that Mandrakes have been extinct for nearly two hundred years. If you don't see any difference of authourity between your own holy texts and a FICTIONAL CHILDREN'S BOOK then you have a shallow and pathetic spiritual life.

So now, listen up cartoon-protesters and let Matteus set you straight -- many people do not believe in your religion and you will have to accept that if you want to avoid going bonkers. To be fair, your anger is more justified than the anger of the anti-potter wackos, but still, hear me out. If you want to have a proscription within your religion against depicting your god and prophet, that's all well and good, I can see the theological justification and how it will help observant members of your religion, but why you think it would apply to people that don't believe in your religion I'm not sure. Yes, it would be deeply offensive if someone from within your religion were to make offensive stereotypes of the prophet, but you already know that many people don't take your God seriously, so why do these cartoons come as such a shock?

If I truly believed in an all-powerful God who would ensure my salvation, I wouldn't give a flip what some idiotic Danes who are going straight to hell think. If I know the bloody word of God, then their opinions pale infinitely in comparison. If your faith is so strong, these cartoons should be laughable (curious how in this case 'laughable' means the opposite of funny). My mother is a gorgeous and wonderful woman. If someone makes a "yo' mama joke" at her expense, I do not take offense, it slides off my back like water off the back of a duck with water sliding off its back because its a duck. I am not offended by these jokes, because they are so immediately and obviously inaccurate. It is those people who are genuinely uneasy about their mothers' reputations who take offense. If anything, this outpouring of anger is a sign of the weakness of many people's faith, not a testament to its strength.

To Quote the heavy-thinker Mc Lyte:

And I tell all of you like I told all of them
What you say to me is just paper thin


I guess the idea behind the satire was to suggest that all muslims were violent or that islam itself somehow condoned terrorism. To me this seemed pretty idiotic at first, but if you want to convince people that you have been unfairly stereotyped as being violent and uncompromising, the worst thing you can do is to firebomb embassies full of people who were probably also offended by the cartoon.

Until this debacle I had been firmly convinced that the Muslim world was being driven into a corner by the United States and villified in the media, but now I may have to reconsider. Although many of the protests were civil and appropriate and many muslims didn't think the cartoons were worth protesting at all, still, there are way more crazy muslims out there than I ever imagined; so, good work on those protests guys, you really succeeded in providing justification for what, before your protests, were thoughtless and ungrounded stereotypes.

This entire controversy reminds me of a brilliant onion article about Gay Pride parades --
"Gay Pride Parade sets Mainstream Acceptance of Gays back 50 Years." -- which interviews ordinary people watching a gay-pride parade saying things like, 'Well, there's a guy at work who's gay and he always seemed nice, quiet, you know an ordinary stand-up guy, but watching this parade I may have to reconsider, I mean these are sex-crazed weirdos, they're all shouting rude things and wearing leather, bottomless chaps in public. I always thought gay people were so normal too."

Intriguely though, the opinions I have expressed here are not as certain as most of my proclamations. I Matteus Von Mustard am willing to be persuaded. That rocky area where hate speech and free speech overlap is surely the most difficult ethical terrain in the world.

More Ammo to Argue Against Handguns

Reading the Star today, it turns out that the Boxing Day shooting was done with a gun stolen from a gun collection. Why in God's Name can't people collect replicas? If you said you were a hand grenade collector or a nerve gas collector we wouldn't be so idiotic as to allow you to continue with your hobby no matter how safe you were about it. Collecting handguns is a stupid and dangerous thing to do.

"A 9mm handgun stolen from a southern Ontario gun collector was involved in the Boxing Day shooting that left 15-year-old Jane Creba dead and six others injured." Toronto Star, Feb. 10

Global Warming

Clearly global warming is going to be a factor in our upcoming apocalypse. And just in case there's anyone out there who someone still thinks it isn't really happening --

"The World Meteorological Organization said late last year that the decade from 1996-2005 contained nine of the 10 warmest years on record."

So of the last ten years, all but ONE of them were hotter than ANY OTHER YEAR since 1850. That ain't a statistical fluke folks.

"Fluke folks." I like the sound of that. I think it will be the name of my first album.

Conservative Cabinet

Oh boy! The more I read, the more I realize just what a doozy this is.

First off is David Emerson, the liberal cabinet minister who switched sides to become minister of international trade. This is despite the fact that he barely eeked out a victory over the NDP candidate in his riding and the conservatives finished a distant third. He himself suggests that no point of principle influenced his decision. He is refusing to return the $96,000 that his Liberal riding association raised for his campaign.

If you're as offended as I am you can sign this online petition to have him recalled.

Jim Flaherty FINANCE MINISTER -- The number-one goon for Mike Harris. He proposed legislation to throw homeless people found outside of shelters in jail and even suggested the creation of special constables assigned to the homeless. That's right special police to defend us against the most dangerous villains of all -- THE POOR! He ran for the leadership of the Ontario PC's against Ernie Eves on a platform of FURTHER TAX CUTS. Yes, he wanted more TAX CUTS than Mike Harris. He had already sold the 407 to help hide the deficit that Harris was running.

Vic Toews -- MINISTER OF JUSTICE -- Staunchly opposed to gay marraige, Vic Toews plead guilty under the Manitoba Election Finances Act to charges of overspending in the 1999 provincial election. Excellent choice. In his defense, he apparently had difficulty coordinating the spending of two seperate units within his campaign. I'm not sure whether it makes it better or worse that the crime was a result of incompetence.

Gordon O'Connor -- DEFENCE MINISTER -- "Mr. O'Connor, who lobbied government on behalf of a number of companies between 1996 and February of 2004 — including Airbus, which wants the Defence Ministry to buy its A400M tactical airlift planes"(from the globe) is our new minister in charge of choosing what to buy. This is despite the fact that the Conservative Accountability Act criticizes the movement "back and forth" between lobbying positions and elected positions.

Micheal Fortier -- MINISTER OF PUBLIC WORKS -- Micheal Fortier wasn't even elected. In fact he has never been elected for anything. I'm serious! He was a back room boy for the Conservative Party in Montreal, who Harper appointed to the Senate - after all the broo-haha he has kicked up about Senators being elected. He will not be available for questions in the House of Commons. This one is really crazy, it's like Bush appointing Karl Rove for the Supreme Court or something. Micheal Fortier chaired Stephen Harper's leadership bid for the Conservative Party and Co-chaired this year's campaign -- as far as I can tell that is the extent of his political experience.

If this is a sign of how far the Conservatives intend to stray from their promises of being well, conservative, and moderate, well then we're luckily in for a very short-lived minority government.

Best Speech Ever!

As I mentioned in my previous post, I intend to analyze why the President's speech on Tuesday had a rate of secondary-applause-per-minute that was only 44.5% of what it was in 2002. I submit to you, that the reason is his audience's inability to recognize oratorial genius. For Bush to present himself as a strong, reasonable and decisive leader in 2002, in light of the September 11th attacks and his invasion of Afghanistan was simple enough, but for him to manage to do the same thing this week after four years of utter ineptitude required a display of semantic gymnastics the likes of which have never before been seen on this earth.

Even before the speech began, Bush's minions were at work. W. had invited Cindy Sheehan, a pro-peace activist who lost her son in Iraq, to attend the speech. Not surprisingly, she wore a t-shirt listing the number of US soldiers who had died so far. She was arrested. Obviously the charges were dropped immediately after the speech, because well, there's no law against wearing a t-shirt with a number on it. This might seem ethically questionable, however, Bush's goons also arrested the wife of a congressman who was wearing a tshirt which said "Support our Troops" at the same time. As a result, they made the intentions behind the arrests so complicated and inexplicable that they were difficult to criticize because of their sheer incomprehensibility. This would be the theme of Bush's speech.

In the opening lines of this State of the Union address, President Bush created, in my eyes, perhaps the greatest-ever euphemism for cataclysmic disaster, when he described his time in office as "one of the most consequential periods of our history." Unfortunately, congress did not recognize the brilliance of this obfuscatorial feat and failed to applaud. Considering that Bush has presided over the quagmire that is Iraq, the collapse of the Auto Industry, Hurricane Katrina and the proliferation of nuclear weapons in Iran, to proudly take credit for the consequences of his actions in this manner takes an amount of chutzpah not possessed by all the Jewish grandsons in New York City. And just to show us that this was no idle slip of the tongue, he concluded his speech with the phrase "Fellow citizens, we've been called to leadership in a period of consequence."

When Bush declared that "On September the 11th, 2001, we found that problems originating in a failed and oppressive state 7,000 miles away could bring murder and destruction to our country," congress once again failed to applaud. Perhaps this is because the members of congress are at least partially-educated and took him to be referring to Afghanistan. The brilliance that they failed to see is this: Bush knows full well that half the American people still believe Saddam Hussein was responsible for the terrorist attacks that took place on September 11th and he certainly does not want to dissuade them of this idea. However, he also recognizes that anyone with a functional brain knows this is a lie and so, he makes this ingeniously vague statement. Look at it. It's not even clear what country he's referring to! Certainly Iraq and Afghanistan are about the right distance away, and they're both pretty thoroughly failed and oppressive. But considering that 15 of the 19 hijackers came from Saudi Arabia and considering the imprecision of the word 'failed,' he could easily be referring to Saudi Arabia as well. So this one sentence is both a heinous perpetuation of America's ignorance AND the most refreshingly candid thing Bush has ever said about his family's long-time allies in the oil cartel.

At other times, he took responsibility for achievements that clearly were not his.
"In recent years, America has become a more hopeful nation. Violent crime rates have fallen to their lowest levels since the 1970s. Welfare cases have dropped by more than half over the past decade. Drug use among youth is down 19 percent since 2001. There are fewer abortions in America than at any point in the last three decades." This statement is particularly awesome for a pro-life president to make following the release of Freakonomics which proved statistically that the leading cause in the recent drop in crime was the legalization of abortion in the 70's.

On a number of occasions Bush simply stated the exact opposite of the truth with such certainty and confidence as to be convincing --

"Our government has a responsibility to provide health care for the poor and the elderly, and we are meeting that responsibility." I guess if he means the legislated responsibilities of the state which he hasn't yet unlegislated, then yes, the government is meeting these responsibilities.

Or twisted the truth, with clever little adjectives like "non-security" --

"Every year of my presidency, we've reduced the growth of non-security discretionary spending, and last year you passed bills that cut this spending." The balls that it takes to present himself as somehow fiscally responsible when the budget deficit has reached a new record during EVERY SINGLE YEAR of his presidency is astounding. Congress should have applauded like a thousand missile-strikes on Pakistani villages.

Bush's bold-faced lies were not restricted to factual matters where he might hope that his listeners were uninformed, indeed he made abstract claims of such a profoundly illogical nature that their veracity could be disproved with nothing but a dictionary and common sense --

"There is no peace in retreat." As far as I understand peace, at least one warring party HAS TO retreat or surrender. The idea that one could somehow achieve peace by pressing ever-forward into war is a spectacular feat of absurdity unequaled even by Beckett or Ionesco. Applause!

"Freedom is on the march." A march is a military walk, a lock-step precision which binds a group of people to a single rhythm contrary to their desires or personal idiosyncracies. I'm pretty sure that freedom gambols or at the very least traipses. It certainly never marches.

I, Matteus Von Mustard, declare the most recent State of the Union address to be THE greatest speech of all time, because Bush has taken Orwellian double-speak out of the pages of our greatest fiction and into the Oval Office with a panache and gusto that many would have considered impossible.


APPENDUM:

You may remember my analysis of the last State of the Union Address in which I stated that Bush had lost all sense of the meaning of the word freedom and that the speech made more sense if one replaced instances of that term with the word America. For extra credit, please consider the following excerpts in light of that theory:

"No one can deny the success of freedom, but some men rage and fight against it."
"We're continuing reconstruction efforts, and helping the Iraqi government to fight corruption and build a modern economy, so all Iraqis can experience the benefits of freedom."
"Freedom is on the march."

Appointment leads to Disappointment

My conviction that George W. is the worst president of all time grows stronger every day. Not only are his political beliefs out in space, but he is fundamentally incompetent as a leader. In part, this is because of his beliefs, which severely limit the pool of people who will work for him.

Now we have, only a few months after the fiasco with Brownie, where a horse-breeder was installed as the head of FEMA at the cost of hundreds of human lives, a Bush appointee at NASA resigning on the day that news reports are published that he doesn't actually have the university degree he mentioned on his resume! Why couldn't Bush get a real scientist? Because he asked the man to claim that climate change was a myth and that the Big Bang was just a theory, and very few people have managed to succeed in a scientific program of study while still believing these right-wing folk tales.

from the nytimes:

"George C. Deutsch, the young presidential appointee at NASA who told public affairs workers to limit reporters' access to a top climate scientist and told a Web designer to add the word "theory" at every mention of the Big Bang, resigned yesterday, agency officials said.

Mr. Deutsch's resignation came on the same day that officials at Texas A&M University confirmed that he did not graduate from there, as his résumé on file at the agency asserted."

State of Union 9.5% less laudable than in 2002!

Those of you who have been following the media closely as of late will perhaps have seen various talking heads discussing the ins-and-outs of what W. said during his speech on Tuesday. These men and women have completed missed the point. If polling has taught us anything, it is that every aspect of the political system worth discussing is easily quantifiable. With this in mind, I, Matteus Von Mustard, present you with the applause-per-minute method of dissecting the State of the Union address. I would like to extend a hearty thank-you to the Whitehouse.gov website for including all instances of applause in their transcript of the speech.

In this week's State of the Union Address W. received applause only 66 times. In 2002, congress applauded him a stunning 73 times. Some might argue that the difference is not so great. However if we remember that even a trained monkey could say something laudable once per minute, we realize that only those applause in excess of one per minute are worth noting. This year Bush received applause at a rate of only 1.269 times per minute, while in 2002 he was applauded 1.604 times per minute!
These means that the rate of secondary applause per minute in this year's address was only of 44.5% what it was in 2002.

In 2002 Bush delivered a shorter speech and still received more applause. He sometimes even received applause for mere sentence fragments because the things he was saying were so mind-blowing laudable that congress couldn't wait until he got to a period. In 2002 Bush was really on top of his game and received applause for such seemingly unlaudable statements as:

--"My economic security plan can be summed up in one word: jobs. (Applause.)"
It seems to me plans ought to be significantly more complicated than this. However congress proved me wrong.

--"Last year, some in this hall thought my tax relief plan was too small; some thought it was too big. (Applause.)" I'm assuming that, at this point, Congress was applauding the value of a healthy difference of opinion in democracy.

--"Our budget will run a deficit that will be small and short-term, so long as Congress restrains spending and acts in a fiscally responsible manner. (Applause.)" What's better than a budget deficit? NOTHING! HUZZAH!

--"My budget includes the largest increase in defense spending in two decades -- because while the price of freedom and security is high, it is never too high. Whatever it costs to defend our country, we will pay. (Applause.)" PAYING! YES! WE LOVE IT!!! MAKE US PAY BUSHIE, MAKE US PAY!

In 2002, Mr. Bush also received applause for taking decisive action when other countries were "timid in the face of terror," for the existence of the military prison at Guantanamo Bay and for his belief that September 11th "brought out the best in America."

This year, the applause were more measured and in my next post I will take a look at why.