"Non, je ne regrette rien" pas de deux

Whew! Sometimes the gainful employment thing just gets in the way of regular blogging, I hear some people do it for a living but I know that's crazy talk.

I showed my daughter a video send up on Bonnie Tyler's immortal classic "Total Eclipse of the Heart"on Write Enough. I thought it was hip, funny and original but her reaction served as an convenient update of how out of date and passe I really am.

At any rate some days the fish just jump into the barrel and invite you to go dynamite fishing, that would be the case of this item of interest. The French it seems have ventured out side their borders and set up their first new military base in fifty years. I imagine their last one was on some unfortunate Pacific atoll as they've been reducing island paradises in that region to radioactive rubble since about then.

Their new base for La Force Frappe is in Abu Dhabi which I am reliably informed is named after what Fred Flintstone said when he started his car, it will increase their presence off the pirate ridden Horn of African at least until some Somali buccaneers capture their navy. This action begs the question why would such a risk averse military ( And lets face it they have very good reasons to keep their army and navy away from potential adversaries.) venture so far from the protection of Belgian Army?

With the French emphasis on speed and flexible response, I believe that by pre-positioning their men and material at, as it were, the sharp end of the spear, they serve as a force multiplier for bulky conventional arms mixes that can be called up from allies or even Metropolitan France. By maneuvering in tandem they can advance on multiple axis until they are cut off, left without supplies and forced into a degrading, humiliating surrender. In other words it keeps them from having to wait for some Persian Panzer column to make its way from Tehran so they can rollover.

The outcome of this effort will probably be either they sink one of our ships accidentally or we sink one of theirs not so accidentally, having the French as an ally is a lot like having Barney Fife for a deputy, he has a badge but you don't want to give him more than one bullet.

Passages

We here at PODM would like to pause for a moment to mark the passing of a man of the people, a man of vision, a man that will be missed. I refer of course to Velupillai Prabhakaran, seen here in happier days in his official portrait for 26th annual Tamil Tiger smörgåsbord, golf tournament and pointless violence awards banquet brochure.

Prabhakaran was a shy, quiet and unassuming murderous thug as a child and didn't commit his first murder/assassination until1975 when he was twenty one. He founded the LTTE ( Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam) to establish a socialist state for ethnic minority Tamils and like every good socialist immediately started killing anybody he could get his hands on. He piled up an estimated 100, 000 bodies during the course of his war for the liberation of disinterested Tamils and turned a once prosperous island paradise into a humanitarian catastrophe.

Liberal ball washers have noted his many innovations in the field of terrorism, female suicide bombers, forced conscription of teenagers into his army and the air, sea and land capability of his liberation army. The L.A. Times described him as "innovative and ruthless" a description usually reserved for the founder of a successful business empire based on a clever kitchen utensil. I guess the headline, "World well rid of Maniac" is reserved for Dick Cheney. The Christian Science Monitor wonders whether the the LTTE can continue with out a sadistic charismatic mad man to lead them. The Guardian laments that Prabhakaran's vision of an earthly socialist heaven was "tantalizingly close" but holds out hope that overseas Sinhalese will support some other psychotic megalomaniac and keep the good times rolling.

Adios Velupillai Prabhakaran, you never missed a meal but your obsession with a socialist home land for Tamils impoverished them, killed off their best hope for the future and guaranteed a generation of repression in retribution for your "liberation" army's excesses. You sowed the whirlwind baby and got for it precisely nothing.

Bulletin: CVA needs new lunatic to run asylum

In news that reinforces my conviction that the left is playing with a deck that has less than the usual compliment of cards, prominent member of Iraq Veterans against the War and Colorado Veterans Alliance (CVA) founder Rick Duncan, nee, Richard Glen Strandlof apparently made a few trifling additions to his resume. He claimed to be a USMC Captain and graduate of the Naval Academy who was in the Pentagon on 9/11 then severely wounded in Iraq.

The good people at The Gazette in Colorado Springs noted these discrepancies:

The U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis, Md., said the school has no record of a 1997 graduate named Rick Duncan.

Marine Corps spokeswoman Capt. Amy Malugani found no record of Strandlof or his alias Duncan serving in the Corps, and that the unit Strandlof claimed to have served with in Iraq doesn't exist.

But wait there's more:

The group said it found that Strandlof had been a patient in a mental hospital in Washoe County, Nev., at the time of the roadside bombing in Fallujah, Iraq, that he claimed left him severely wounded.

The blog This ain't Hell, but you can see it from here noticed that besides claiming to be the gay commander of a Marine Battalion Rick said an Iraqi IED was responsible for a plate in his head, his hip replacement and the loss of a finger. They also observed that Mr. Duncan, nee, Strandlof still had ten fingers left despite the loss.

It appears that Mr. Strandlof's transparent deception was either a desperate plea for help by a troubled individual or he was just plain stupid.

Members of CVA did contact the FBI when they noticed the discrepancies in his story I wonder if it was the fingers that tipped them off. The guy's history was a complete fabrication that he parlayed into fund raising and lots of news coverage, it seems the "Main Stream Press" was completely gulled by this charlatan, you would think due diligence would require fact checking, like maybe just a little, like some maybe. It couldn't be that his anti-war narrative dovetailed with their preconceived notions about the war, could it?

Here's a summary of his lies according to The Gazette:

Graduated from the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis, Md., in 1997
Commissioned as an officer in the Marine Corps, attained the rank of captain.
Survived the 9/11 terrorist attack on the Pentagon.
Served three combat tours in Iraq.
Severely wounded in a roadside bombing in Fallujah.
War injuries resulted in his having a plate in his head, synthetic ribs and a hip replacement.

Oh yeah, and they're investigating if he embezzled $25000 in funds he raised to send packages to soldiers in Iraq.

Vatican Mafia

Sorry to be so tardy posting, I’m in a Fijian Strap Match with the jack booted Scientologists at Earthlink over my Internet service. I believed the money I sent them was supposed to allow me to get on the Internet occasionally. They disagree and think I sent it because they are nice people. It appears that Earthlink is winning.

That said I am gratified that Hollywood has broken its creative drought as far as villains go, I am of course referring to the Vatican in the movie extracted from the Dan Brown masterpiece “Angels and Demons”. With all the talk about fire, air, water and earth I thought perhaps an eighties Funk band Earth, Wind and Fire had taken over the Holy See but I was wrong , it was just some bullshit to put into the mouths of the Illuminati, the dark masters that control our lives and are doing such a splendid job of running the world.

It’s understandable why Hollywood latched onto the Catholic Clerics as arch enemies of good, they wear a bewildering variety of hats, they swish around in menacing floor length cassocks while behaving like Roman Polanski and Woody Allen.

I love baddies, when Anthony Hopkins growls “Oh Senator… Love your dress…" to Diane Baker in "Silence of the Lambs" I get all fertumlt. For a long time baddies have been rogues; rogue cops, rogue CIA, rogue businessmen, even rogue terrorist as in Alan Rickman’s remarkable slice of ham in "Die Hard". Of course that franchise hosted a remarkable bunch of rogues; rogue mercenaries in "Die Harder" , Alan Rickman’s rogue Euro-trash brother Jeremy Irons in "Die Hard 3" and finally a rogue computer geek in "Die Hard 4".

I am not referring to “The Rogues” a fine piece of televised fare starring Gig Young, Charles Boyer and David Niven, so shut up.

It’s been a while since Hollywood cast a member of a readily recognizable denomination as evil incarnate, usually it’s limited to rogue priests bent on blowing smoke up Damien’s ass prior to the Apocalypse, crazy Protestants like Carrie’s mom or bigoted fundamentalist that don’t understand that kids gotta dance. I am okay with that if it keeps them from making the movies they want to make.

Hollywood treads delicately around the racial character of baddies as well. Over the years whole categories of baddies have vanished like Indians as in Native Americans that ambushed the wagon trains and India Indians that ambushed Victor McLaglen, Cary Grant and David Niven in “Gunga Din”. If you don’t count WW2 era movies involving Key Luke there hasn’t been a decent purely Asian baddy since Fu Manchu. Modern war movies make the Japanese seem like bumbling allies that accidentally bombed the Arizona and we over reacted when we declared war on them.

Terrorist are okay baddies as long as they are Irish or vaguely European with just a hint of German because they’re all Hitler loving, bat shit crazy, militarists, but an Arab terrorist is verboten, that’s a word I heard Euro-terrorist use. As far as Hollywood is concerned the guys that hijacked the planes on 9/11 may as well have been members of the Skagerrak Liberation Army.

If villains belong to an obvious racial group, they are immediately branded a Mafia, as in Jamaican Mafia, Russian Mafia and Japanese Mafia. In Movies like The God Father and The Sopranos the actual Mafia, the one with Italians in it, the Mafiosi are complex characters, usually likable and not evil cut outs with one dimensional motivation. Tony Soprano was a concerned father as well as a murderous thug when he dispatched Big Pussy, whereas the Russian Mob would be just as soon send Viggo Mortensen over to gut you like a cat fish in front of the kids. This is possibly because the real Mafia does business in Hollywood and one doesn’t bite the hand that is stuffing money into your pocket.

You have to go back to Murder Incorporated to find a really reprehensible Jewish baddy and even then Peter Falk played Abe Reles. It's hard to picture our beloved Lt. Columbo as a soulless psychotic even knowing as much as we do about him now. Of course Jewish actors managed to play baddies by impersonating other ethnic groups that they shared an affinity, like Abner Biberman as Chota in the afore mentioned Gunga Din. It's similar to the shared affinity Hollywood recognised between the Chinese and Swedes when they cast Warner Oland as Charlie Chan.

Black people got to be the best of baddies first in that racist peon “Birth of a Nation” Woodrow Wilson adored, except that all the black baddies were white guys in black face which seems like an insult and a jip. There weren’t any good black baddies after Melanie got ambiguously bothered in Gone With The Wind until Danny Glover played a serial killer on a train and Densel Washington played a rogue cop.

Oh yeah and Candyman. And the five or less players in those Dirty Harry movies and something Robert Hooks did in the seventies, without IMDB I’m screwed. Damn you Earthlink!

Aloha Akbar

Good news for Religion of Peace fans but especially those in Hawaii, the lickspittle state legislature in an outstanding case of toadying for potential tourist dollars has declared September 24th "Islam Day". At least I hope its old fashioned toadying, I pray they don't actually believe the justifications put forth.

The bill seeks to recognize "the rich religious, scientific, cultural and artistic contributions" that Islam and the Islamic world have made.

Aside from creative beheading, spontaneous spousal abuse, IEDs, suicide bombings and Cat Stevens I'm stumped. I know they invented alcohol and Hashish, for which a grateful world applauds them, but its been a millennium or so since they've wowed us with anything. I hope they get on their horse and come up with something soon because if Vince is right about those ShamWows the era of invention is drawing to a close. I don't hold out much hope, if it weren't for Brits and Americans showing them where (and how) to suck oil out of the sand, they'd mostly be remembered for having some great beach front property and buggering TE Lawrence.

I suggest we go nation wide with this "Islam Day" thing its way too much fun for Hawaii alone. We could hold parades where they can deplore the Great Satan, behead their female kin and blow up national monuments. I think its been a long time coming since we have days where we honor Christians and Jews for "the rich religious, scientific, cultural and artistic contributions" they made to a little thing I like to call Western Civilization.

Oops! I've just been informed we don't have any Christian or Jewish days, something about the ACLU and the separation of church and state.

Apparently Christmas is OK because it is devoid of Christian content, and Easter squeaks by because commemorates the miracle where our Savior made a bunny lay eggs to call attention to global warming.

I always thought religion was a matter of personal conscience but thanks to the Hawaii state legislature I realize just how wrong I have been. I am glad to stand behind people that consume a diet based on legumes then kneel down and pray five times a day facing Mecca, and not just because I enjoy bashing sincerely held religious views, they are the only folks I know that take more breaks a day than UAW workers and Obama is putting an end to that.

Of course I kid, I send up these prayers for tolerance in the hope that the boobs who don't get it will see the title of this Blog and understand it is satire, and the ones that do get it will realize I mean every snarky, sarcastic word.

Ling Carter

The long time editor in chief of Interesting News Items, Ling Carter, has left a comment on our article that gave a long term perspective on Swine Flu, Pirates and Torture, titled We're All Dead. We at PODM appreciate that he took time out of his busy schedule to give us his opinion, we know that with his interest in professional badminton, jurying numismatic competitions and his on going work looking for a cure for gingivitis he has little discretionary time especially for a publication like PODM which is generally considered unfit to lick the boots of anyone on the Internet.

The firm that audits our circulation cites Ling for increasing our readership by 25%, it rocketed from 4 to 5 readers when he commented. Perhaps more worrisome, while the audit does count several of the voices I hear in my head it doesn't include the dog I got from David Berkowitz that tells me what to write about. I assume he's a regular reader.

We're All Dead

The one thing I’ve learned in 47 years of blogging is you have to jump on a subject as soon as it surfaces or every other blog will have it covered better and funnier than you have. That’s why I’m jumping on Swine Flu now I figure there will be two or three days of interest in the pandemic before millions start dropping dead in their tracks and it all becomes passé.

But first these two farts in the whirlwind: The pirate guy and torture.

You may remember the pride of Poopchute Somalia, Abdiwali Abdiqadir Muse Whatever, he was the blood thirsty but incompetent cut throat his fellow cut throats sent to the USS Bainbridge to negotiate ransom for the release of Captain Richard Phillips of the Maersk Alabama. After some American Seals finished the preliminary negotiations with his compatriots, Mr. Whatever thought he had won an all expenses paid one way ticket to the Federal Court in New York City and showed up states side with a big old grin on his face beneath his saucer shaped eyes and jug handle ears. He apparently neglected to read the small print on the ticket stub.

Prior to his arrival my friends and boon companions had been inclined to call down the wrath of Hell on the Pirates of the Horn but the photos of Mr. Whatever won their hearts and cleansed their minds of any common sense so suddenly it was like talking to a bunch of girls that decided Richard Ramirez or some other serial killing psychotic was dreamy. He was after all accused of the second most forgivable crime of our time, abducting and threatening an American. (The first most forgivable crime is the killing of Americans; we after all drove them to commit the crime with our dysfunctional foreign policy and arrogance. Of course it’s still a heinous crime but it would be patriotically remiss not to place all the blame on the dead Americans who after all are symbolic victims as compared to the real victims, the hijackers, who suffered… I could go on forever but I’ll let some one at the Huffington Post do it instead.)

From Monster to 90 pound teenager with jug ears, saucer eyes and big ass grin all in one rendition flight, apparently he was less pleased when he heard the charges he faced and started crying like the grinning, jug eared, saucer eyed 90 pound teenager he is. I’m sure he’ll cry just as hard when he discovers how popular grinning, jug eared, saucer eyed, 90 pound teenagers are on Rikkers Island.

He’s in New York now represented by only his public defender and how many battalions of attorneys the ACLU has been able to put on the case in short notice. In other words he’ll be out in no time.

I’m sure his defense will involve cruel and unusual treatment which seems to be the only sort of treatment the United States dishes out these days. Mr. Obama and Mr. Chaney are in a pissing contest over some memos that Mr. Bush received from counsel regarding torture, specifically water boarding. The public argument seems to be whether torture of any kind should be used at any time or just when Jack Bauer deems it appropriate. There is concern whether our use of torture will infuriate our enemies and cause them to be less restrained in their use of beheading, suicide bombing and IEDs. I suspect it will be agreed that the United States will torture only when it has to and our enemies will only behead and bomb innocents when they want to.

The best thing about this exercise is the frequently stated concern by both sides about how this will affect the ability of lawyers to do their job. They may want to make this appear to be about national security but it’s really about the Lawyer's Guild protecting its work product.

Now, the Swine Flu. In1919 a great flu swept across the world and killed 40 million people, you’ve never heard about because it happened during the presidency of Woodrow Wilson but he didn’t do anything about it so it must not have been too important and besides you went to public schools.

The flu virus is very mutable that’s why you have to get a new vaccine every year. Its also very contagious and air born unlike hemorrhagic fever which is conveyed by fluid contact or Zommbieism which can be spread by the bite of a zombie or skin contact with certain unspecified chemicals the Army experimented with back in the sixties.

There is no effective treatment for the virus beyond moderating the symptoms; Medical Science has been too busy with Acid Reflux, Restless Leg Syndrome and Male Pattern Baldness to look into something as mundane as lethal flu. Because the virus is so mutable and so small when an infected person sneezes in your face you're exposed to millions of varieties of infectious particles some virulent and some not. If you get a moderate case you live otherwise you may die, its the luck of the draw, 36,000 Americans die of flu during a normal season. Dying of flu can be as pleasant as drifting away in the swirling hallucinations of flu caused pneumonia or as distressing as coughing up blood and necrotic lung tissue. Either way you’re screwed.

There are effective ways to control the spread of epidemics especially quarantine. Quarantine as you all know is derived from either the French, Italian or Latin word for forty and refers to the number of days your ship sits in port before anyone one or thing can get off if your port of origin had plague in it. It implies that the place doing the quarantining can prevent the quarantined from off loading their ship load of plague ridden goodness, this flu originated in Mexico, you do the math of the likelihood of closing that border.

Quarantine requires the suspension of all your rights and privileges as a citizen to be effective, fortunately Mr. Obama will have no qualms in that regard. An epidemic is the situation the word emergency was meant to describe, not some foreclosed houses in Palmdale, but it requires brutal determination to limit its destructiveness. We’ve been here before and I don’t mean in 1919, in the 1980’s AIDS was killing gay men and many cases were linked to sexual behavior in bath houses so public health officials proposed closing the bath houses. This offended activists who didn’t want their God given right to buggery infringed and twenty some years later over a million are dead, more are infected every year and the band plays on.

Hopefully this swine flu will just be a blip in the history of flu, in 1919 when it took seven days to cross the Atlantic on a steamer it managed to kill 40 million. I don't see how it can get any funnier than that.