Charisma Man

"I always wanted to stay anonymous. At first, I didn’t even give my name to the Criminal Investigation Division. I just burned a copy of the pictures onto a CD, typed an anonymous letter, put them in a manila envelope, and handed them to an agent at CID. I said, “This was left in my office,” and walked out.

But about an hour later, this little short guy named Special Agent Pieron came to my office and started grilling me about where the pictures came from. It took him about half an hour before I gave it up...

That was one of the most nervous periods of my life. I was constantly scared. I started getting paranoid. I kept my gun with me at all times. I took it to sleep with me... I would lie there in bed with both arms behind my head and my left hand inside the pillowcase, gripping my nine-millimeter with the safety off. I would just listen..."

In an Aug 17th interview, Noam Chomsky mentions an interesting Program on International Policy Attitudes poll on the US budget in Feb 2005, as an indicator of just how far from the mainstream the Bush administration and Congress is:

"What's happened is that both political parties are pretty far to the right of the general population on a host of serious issues... If you take a look at popular attitudes on international affairs, on international crisis, on who should take the lead on the so-called "War on Terror", on domestic issues like healthcare, on and on, [the public's attitudes are] just radically different.

One of the most striking examples was the major study of public opinion right after the Federal budget was announced in February of 2005, the Federal budget of the Bush administration. There was a major study by the Program on International Policy Attitudes, the most respected polling institution. Public attitudes were almost exactly the opposite of the budget.

Where the budget was going up the public wanted it to go down, by large majorities: military spending, supplementals for Iraq and Afghanistan, and so on. Where spending was going down the public wanted it to go up, also by very large majorities: health, education, welfare, renewable energy, support for the United Nations...

[But] the results [of this poll] were apparently not reported. A friend of mine who does database searches checked carefully and couldn't find a single report in any American newspaper of very dramatic information: information that says the public is completely opposed, radically opposed, to the Federal budget, meaning public policy. And the same has been true on occasion after occasion. Now that's a serious problem within the United States."

Word of the day: cloy

To disgust or nauseate with excess of something originally pleasing

"I am posting this (and it is long) because I think our society needs a huge “Wake-up” call.

As a shelter manager, I am going to share a little insight with you all...a view from the inside if you will... All of you breeders/sellers... should be made to work in the 'back' of an animal shelter for just one day.

Maybe if you saw the life drain from a few sad, lost, confused eyes, you would change your mind about breeding and selling to people you don't even know... that puppy you just sold will most likely end up in my shelter when it's not a cute little puppy anymore. So how would you feel if you knew that there's about a 90% chance that dog will never walk out of the shelter it is going to be dumped at? Purebred or not!

About 50% of all of the dogs that are "owner surrenders" or "strays", that come into my shelter are purebred dogs. The most common excuses I hear are; “We are moving and we can’t take our dog (or cat).” Really? Where are you moving too that doesn’t allow pets? Or they say “The dog got bigger than we thought it would”. How big did you think a German Shepherd would get? “We don’t have time for her…”. Really? I work a 10-12 hour day and still have time for my 6 dogs! “She’s tearing up our yard…”. How about making her a part of your family? They always tell me “We just don’t want to have to stress about finding a place for her…we know she’ll get adopted, she’s a good dog”.

Odds are your pet won’t get adopted & how stressful do you think being in a shelter is? Well, let me tell you…your pet has 72 hours to find a new family from the moment you drop it off…sometimes a little longer if the shelter isn’t full and your dog manages to stay completely healthy…if it sniffles, it dies. Your pet will be confined to a small run/kennel in a room with about 25 other barking or crying animals. It will have to relieve itself where it eats and sleeps. It will be depressed and it will cry constantly for the family that abandoned it.

If your pet is lucky, I will have enough volunteers in that day to take him/her for a walk. If I don’t, your pet won’t get any attention besides having a bowl of food slid under the kennel door and the waste sprayed out of its pen with a high-powered hose. If your dog is big, black or any of the “Bully” breeds (pit bull, rottie, mastiff, etc…) it was pretty much dead when you walked it through the front door. Those dogs just don’t get adopted.

If your dog doesn’t get adopted within its 72 hours and the shelter is full, it will be destroyed. If the shelter isn’t full and your dog is good enough, and of a desirable enough breed…it may get a stay of execution…not for long though. Most get very kennel protective after about a week and are destroyed for showing aggression…even the sweetest dogs will turn in this environment. If your pet makes it over all of those hurdles…chances are it will get kennel cough or an upper respiratory infection and will be destroyed because shelters just don’t have the funds to pay for even a $100 treatment.

Here’s a little euthanasia 101 for those of you that have never witnessed a perfectly healthy, scared animal being “put-down”. First, your pet will be taken from its kennel on a leash…they always look like they think they are going for a walk…happy, wagging their tails. Until they get to “The Room”, every one of them freaks out and puts on the breaks when we get to the door…it must smell like death or they can feel the sad souls that are left in there, it’s strange, but it happens with every one of them.

Your dog or cat will be restrained, held down by 1 or 2 vet techs depending on the size and how freaked out they are. Then a euthanasia tech or a vet will start the process…they will find a vein in the front leg and inject a lethal dose of the “pink stuff”. Hopefully your pet doesn’t panic from being restrained and jerk…I’ve seen the needles tear out of a leg and been covered with the resulting blood and deafened by the yelps and screams.

They all don’t just “go to sleep”, sometimes spasm for a while, gasp for air and defecate on themselves. When it all ends, your pets corpse will be stacked like firewood in a large freezer in the back with all of the other animals that were killed…waiting to be picked up like garbage. What happens next? Cremated? Taken to the dump? Rendered into pet food? You’ll never know and it probably won’t even cross your mind…it was just an animal and you can always buy another one right?

I hope that those of you that have read this are bawling your eyes out and can’t get the pictures out of your head…I do everyday on the way home from work. I hate my job, I hate that it exists & I hate that it will always be there unless you people make some changes and realize that the lives you are affecting go much farther than the pets you dump at a shelter.

Between 9 and 11 MILLION animals die every year in shelters and only you can stop it. I do my best to save every life I can but rescues are always full, and there are more animals coming in everyday than there are homes.

My point to all of this.. DON'T BREED OR BUY WHILE SHELTER PETS DIE!"

"At a law school Supreme Court conference that I attended last fall, there was a panel on "The Rehnquist Court." No one mentioned Bush v. Gore, the most historic case of William Rehnquist's time as chief justice, and during the Q. and A. no one asked about it. When I asked a prominent law professor about this strange omission, he told me he had been invited to participate in another Rehnquist retrospective, and was told in advance that Bush v. Gore would not be discussed.

The ruling that stopped the Florida recount and handed the presidency to George W. Bush is disappearing down the legal world's version of the memory hole, the slot where, in George Orwell's "1984," government workers disposed of politically inconvenient records."

From Has Bush v. Gore Become the Case That Must Not Be Named?
(Thanks to Jesse)

Photographers in NYC are arrested and harrassed just for taking pictures.

"These arrests for 'taking pictures' usually come in the course of police officers doing their job, arresting someone else, and they don't want to be photographed arresting someone, so they charge the photographer with obstructing justice, or disorderly conduct, or they throw them to the ground and then charge them with resisting arrest. A Reuters photographer who was photographing police was charged with 'obstructing traffic.' It's getting ridiculous."

America is #1 ?

"The ink of the scholar is more sacred than the blood of the martyr." --Muhammad, Sunnah (c. 630)

San Francisco journalist jailed for not handing over video to the government. More from Slashdot.

"There's an old story about a young man who cornered a world-famous violinist and begged to be allowed to play for him. If the master offered him encouragement, he would devote his life to music. But if his talent was not equal to his calling, he wanted to know ahead of time so he could avoid wasting his life. He played, and the great violinist shook his head. "You lack the fire," he said.

Decades later the two met again, and the would-be violinist, now a prosperous businessman, recalled their previous meeting. "You cahnged my entire life," he explained. "It was a bitter disappointment, giving up music, but I forced myself to accept your judgement. Thus, instead of becoming a fourth-rate musician, I've had a good life in the world of commerce. But tell me, how could you tell so readily that I lacked the fire?"

"Oh, I hardly listened when you played," the old master said. "That's what I tell everyone who plays for me -- that they lack the fire."

"But that's unforgivable!" the businessman cried. "How could you do that? You altered the entire course of my life. Perhaps I could have been another Kreisler, another Heifetz--"

The old man shook his head again. "You don't understand," he said. "If you had had the fire, you would have paid no attention to me." --Lawrence Block

"A bizarre biological discovery about punning was made by a German surgeon named Forster in 1929. Dr. Forster was operating on a patient's brain to remove a tumor. Whenever the surgeon manipulated the spot where the tumor was located, the patient would start with whatever words the doctor had just uttered and make a series of puns about his own brain surgery. He didn't mean to do it; he couldn't help it. The surgeon had discovered the spot in this patient's brain that made him pun. Since then the rare disorder of compulsive punning has been called Forster's Syndrome. It is a physical affliction a bit like epilepsy." --Kathryn Lindskoog

More than 100 years ago, a French sociologist named Émile Durkheim did what nobody since has been able to do: He explained the mind of the suicide bomber.

That, at least, is the contention of numerous scholars and authors whose resurrection of Durkheim's ideas has been gaining traction within the field of terrorism studies...

"Durkheim's genius lay in identifying suicide as a social or political act, rather than as something genetically determined or some psychological impairment," Weinberg says in a telephone interview. "I realized the same thing worked with Palestinian `martyrs.'"