Get Cynical

Falwell was too cuddly for the Phelps klan:

WBC to picket the funeral of Rev. Jerry Falwell – at Thomas Road Baptist Church, Lynchburg, Virginia – in religious protest and warning: “God is not mocked!” Gal. 6:7. God Hates Fags! & Fag-Enablers! Ergo, God hates Jerry Falwell, Billy Graham, Pat Robertson, and all such Arminian heretic preachers – from the fundamentalist evangelicals to openly gay Episcopalians and pedophile Catholics – all of whom have created the Satanic Sodomite Zeitgeist wherein America has irreversibly gone the way of Sodom.

There is little doubt that Falwell split Hell wide open the instant he died. The evidence is compelling, overwhelming, and irrefragable. To wit:

1. Falwell was a true Calvinistic Baptist when he was a young preacher in Springfield Missouri; and sold his soul to Free-Willism (Arminianism) for lucre.

2. Falwell bitterly and viciously attacked WBC because of WBC’s faithful Bible preaching – thereby committing the unpardonable sin – otherwise known as the sin gainst the Holy Ghost.

3. Falwell warmly praised Christ-rejecting Jews, pedophile-condoning Catholics, money-grubbing compromisers, practicing fags like Mel White, and backsliders like Billy Graham and Robert Schuler, Etc. All for lucre – making him guilty of their sins.

(Thanks Grant)

From Flickr:

A collection of 6,288 images from smithsonianimages.si.edu which appear to be overwhelmingly in the public domain. See our memo for more information.

From Wikipedia:

ETAOIN SHRDLU is the approximate order of frequency of the twelve most commonly used letters in the English language, best known as a nonsense phrase that sometimes appeared in print in the days of “hot type” publishing due to a custom of Linotype machine operators.

Take a tour of Australia’s new high-tech Guantanamo Bay-style immigration detention centre now nearlng completion on Christmas Island. For more information visit the website of the Refugee Action Collective in Melbourne www.rac-vic.org and this posting on Melbourne Indymedia

Related:
WikiNews on the Christmas Island Detention Centre.

(via Nothing to do with Arbroath)

From Yahoo! News:

BRASILIA (Reuters) – Outraged Indian leaders in Brazil said on Monday they were offended by
Pope Benedict’s “arrogant and disrespectful” comments that the Roman Catholic Church had purified them and a revival of their religions would be a backward step.

In a speech to Latin American and Caribbean bishops at the end of a visit to Brazil, the Pope said the Church had not imposed itself on the indigenous peoples of the Americas.

They had welcomed the arrival of European priests at the time of the conquest as they were “silently longing” for Christianity, he said.

Millions of tribal Indians are believed to have died as a result of European colonization backed by the Church since Columbus landed in the Americas in 1492, through slaughter, disease or enslavement.

Many Indians today struggle for survival, stripped of their traditional ways of life and excluded from society.

“It’s arrogant and disrespectful to consider our cultural heritage secondary to theirs,” said Jecinaldo Satere Mawe, chief coordinator of the Amazon Indian group Coiab.

From the Wall Street Journal Online:

Mike Conway set out to study the number of times Fox News commentator Bill O’Reilly used name-calling and other propaganda techniques on his show. Mr. Conway released his report and then watched Mr. O’Reilly employ some of the same methods to ridicule the research — the TV host even counted how many times he called someone a name in his rebuttal. “It was a bit surreal,” Mr. Conway told me.

Mr. Conway, an assistant professor of journalism at Indiana University, and his colleagues recruited volunteers to watch hours of Mr. O’Reilly’s regular two-minute segment, “Talking Points Memo.” The volunteers saw 105 episodes, all of them aired in 2005. They tallied the use of seven rhetorical techniques identified as elements of propaganda by the now-defunct research group Institute for Propaganda Analysis. Mr. O’Reilly’s totals were then compared with those of the anticommunist and antisemitic 1930s radio broadcaster Father Charles Coughlin, as measured by IPA-funded researchers in a 1939 book.

In the resulting research, the most-stunning number was in the category where Mr. O’Reilly vastly exceeded Father Coughlin. According to Mr. Conway and his colleagues, Mr. O’Reilly called someone a name 2,209 times over 248.65 minutes, or 8.88 times per minute. “O’Reilly is a heavier and less-nuanced user of the propaganda devices than Coughlin,” the researchers stated in a press release.

From the Straight Dope:

Is there such a thing as cow tipping? I have two friends, both sons of farmers. One says it can be done and is great sport. The other says no way.

Do cows sleep standing up? Can they be tipped? I suppose this will take some late night research.

The Telegraph has a profile on one of my favorite authors, Patricia Highsmith.

Patricia Highsmith’s superior crime fiction is informed by her interest in the unconscious and her mastery of suspense, argues Maria Alvarez

Patricia Highsmith’s mother tried to abort her by drinking turpentine. Later in life, she said to her daughter: “It’s funny you like the smell of turpentine, Pat.”

Casually brutal characters are always wreaking havoc in Highsmith’s fiction. In “The Terrapin”, one of the short stories in Eleven, re-issued this month by Bloomsbury as part of their Highsmith series, a mother triggers a young boy’s psychic disintegration at an inexorable pace. Like the 12-year-old Highsmith, the boy is fond of reading Karl Menninger’s psychoanalytical study The Human Mind.

Highsmith’s understanding of the unconscious and the irrational, coupled with her lucid prose and sophisticated mastery of suspense, are the reasons why many see her as having elevated crime fiction to an art form.

Not that her fiction is crime fiction as such. There’s no whodunnit element, nor even the whydunnit of so much psychological crime fiction.

Strangers on a Train is so much different than Hitchcock’s adaptation of it that it’s basically a different story. I’ve read most of her Ripley novels and the second one is surprisingly good.