Admittedly it is déclassé to kick someone when they’re down and even more so when they’re dead. Yet with recent hagiographies of Whitney Houston by well-intended but totally immoderate friends and family, it appears the time has come.

We highly esteemed Miss Houston’s talent. Her voice used to be singularly moving, even if she squandered it over the years. The quandary comes when (for all intents) such one-dimensional personages leave the stage. What should be a dignified (and mercy’s sake, private) affair is often marred by the most outrageous profligacy of public eulogizing. Thus it is for those well-wishers, present tense and future, to which this entry and its counsel is sincerely dedicated.

When your relative dies doped-up on a hospital gurney at home or slides into the hotel bathtub with a champagne glass, do not—we repeat, do not—immediately run to the public at large shouting, “We don’t know it was the drugs!” Yes, we do. You may not, but we all do. It absolutely was the drugs. Even if it wasn’t the drugs this particular time, it was definitely the drugs in aggregate.

Don’t make with the doe eyes and faux-physician routine pretending someone can do hard drugs for years (or decades), abruptly quit, and everything is suddenly as it once was. Only a fool thinks doing hard drugs day in and day out, hours at a time, for months on end doesn’t play havoc with your innards.

Fans, Americans especially, are a remarkably forgiving species. No one will rub your nose in what has apparently occurred. If you don’t mention it, chances are no one else will, either. Does anyone ever talk about Eddie Murphy picking up a transvestite or Hugh Grant picking up what looked like one? These stars neither defended nor denied their acts, so we all go see Eddie’s next Nutty Professor installment. But the minute you insist the obvious wasn’t the culprit, people begin throwing things at the television set. And writing articles.

Do not tell us the newly deceased celebrity was on the verge of a stellar comeback. If they were, they wouldn’t be lying in the morgue due to advanced pin-cushionage. Yes, Michael had a concert series planned. “Planned” does not a comeback make. We’ll give him a “came close,” but that’s as good as he gets.

As for Whitney Houston and Amy Winehouse, the nearest these addiction specialists were to comebacks was Season II of Hell to the No (otherwise known as Whitney Is a Raging Cokehead, though sometimes referenced as Being Bobby Brown) and…well, it says quite a bit when Amy was so busy making track marks she couldn’t pull herself together enough to run a down-and-out-of-control reality-TV train wreck off its rails.

To hear amateur Rhodes Scholars tell it, Whitney Houston integrated primetime. Odd, in that we recall the most pointed barbs during her life were for singing “too white.” (One wonders if being physically abused, becoming addicted to crack, and being a single mother makes her sufficiently “black.”)

Michael was supposedly one of MTV’s first mainstay nonwhite acts. So what? It may come as quite a shock to people under thirty, but there were actual real-life black people on television long before anyone thought of MTV. Nielsen ratings in those days were the kind television executives today would don a Klan robe to see light up the sweeps-week returns.

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Nat King Cole had his own program preceding MTV’s existence by more than twenty years. Soul Train is the second-longest-running syndicated program in history; America’s Black Forum is the third. It’s safe to say there were a few black folk on television prior to Michael’s backward strut. Robbing those others of their achievements doesn’t transform someone into MLK post-mortem.

Do not tell us how you care about the children/the family/the significant other, then proceed toward immediately pimping out images of the deceased and filing massive lawsuits on their behalf. It is clear all you care about is the money. Fair enough. Money is important. But sanctimonious testimonials as to how you are the only selfless thing standing between a cruel, cruel world trying to pilfer royalties of the special Limited-Edition Chia Michael Jackson and the poor innocent dears already richer than Midas are enough to make anyone retch before reaching across the red carpet to slap some sense into your fool head.

Speaking of which, cheers to a little personal responsibility in the matter. Michael’s problems didn’t begin with Conrad Murray. Amy’s ex-husband might have gotten her hooked, but it’s pretty clear she enjoyed staying there. And as to Whitney, the aforementioned villain Bobby Brown was actually performing in concert on the night she was sliding beneath the suds.

And please curb the excessive praise. In the week since Whitney’s passing her supposed friends told us she was the greatest singer of her generation (agreed); she was the greatest singer of the century (doubtful); and she was the greatest singer who ever lived (suggesting her advocates smoke as much crack as Whit ever did). Even at her four-hour (YES, it was actually FOUR HOURS) funeral actor Kevin Costner eulogized that once she arrived in the Great Beyond the Lord Almighty Himself would be doubtful even He could create such a magnificent creature. (There are many inappropriate places for blasphemy, but delivering it at someone’s funeral tops the list.) 

Finally, and this cannot be stressed enough, do not confuse great ability with being a great person. Listening to such conflation during recent celebrity deaths has been sickening. We’re first to admit one or two of Michael’s songs still have us tapping our toes. He was also guilty of some highly questionable behavior. Amy led a tragic life, but tragedy is only one ingredient of martyrdom. Whitney had a fabulous voice. It doesn’t mean she was anything more than a great singer. Even Mahatma Gandhi wasn’t as great as he’s cracked up to be.

Amid the multitude of interviews following her demise was a conversation with the principal of Whitney E. Houston Academy. It used to be that public buildings were never named after living people, mainly because the honorees might turn out to be addicts or deviants, and no one wants their children attending Hophead Jr. High. They appear proud of it now.

So please, family members and friends of recently deceased celebrities, resist the temptation to fabricate a divine myth out of whole cloth. Too much of it lying around these days was threadbare from the start. Appreciate the genuine accomplishments, pass over the unseemliness, and simply recognize sometimes the old ways are best. Foremost among these is practicing discretion while in the wake of a wake.

Ooh, that smell! Can’t you smell that smell? Pew! It’s the latest report from the Pew Center on the States, and it concludes that America’s voter-registration system stinks.

Released on Tuesday, Pew’s report, titled Inaccurate, Costly, and Inefficient: Evidence That America’s Voter Registration System Needs an Upgrade, arrived at these nostril-searing statistics:

• Approximately 24 million—one of every eight—active voter registrations in the United States are no longer valid or are significantly inaccurate.
• More than 1.8 million deceased individuals are listed as active voters.
• Approximately 2.75 million people have active registrations in more than one state.

A possible contributor to the problem is the fact that only six states currently require voters to present photo ID at the polling place. In addition to those six, South Carolina and Texas have passed laws requiring photo ID from voters, but their petitions are being stonewalled by Eric Holder’s sleazy mustache. In South Carolina’s case, Holder’s goons have alleged that requiring photo ID would place an unfair and discriminatory burden upon the state’s black voters, who are presumably too lazy or stupid to learn how to acquire photo ID.

In many other states, you can register to vote without photo ID. But in nineteen states plus the District of Columbia, no ID whatsoever is required of registered voters at polling places.

What could possibly go wrong?

It’s not like you need photo ID to cash checks, open bank accounts, or buy Sudafed. Or board an airplane or drive a car. Or apply for welfare and food stamps.

It’s not like 70% of likely American voters recently said they see nothing wrong with requiring photo ID at polling places. But when has Eric Holder shown anything but contempt for the majority of Americans?

Although this will shock, awe, surprise, and flabbergast you, Democrats are making this a racial issue. Claiming a mystical soothsaying ability to peer inside the dark evil hearts of Republicans, they claim it has nothing to do with making elections honest and is merely a cynical move to “disenfranchise” the poor, the elderly, the poor blacks, the poor elderly, and the poor black elderly.

Florida Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, who’s apparently dumber than a plastic lawn flamingo, said that requiring voter ID really means that Republicans “want to literally drag us all the way back to Jim Crow laws.” Bill Clinton and his allegedly coke-perforated septum have also raised Jim Crow from the dead for this occasion.

Why would they ever do something so insane as to let facts get in the way? Georgia passed a law requiring photo ID in 2008. It was obviously intended to disenfranchise the poor, because it allows for residents to apply for a free voter ID card. The law devastated, discriminated against, and disenfranchised Georgia’s black voters so thoroughly that at least ten percent more of them are allegedly now registered since it passed. Georgia’s black electorate was so thoroughly intimidated and frightened away from the polls that their participation in midterm elections reportedly increased 17% from 2006 to 2010.

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OK, well, maybe so, but, still, uh, who cares? Republicans are lying, anyway, because that’s what evil racist liars do! Didn’t you know the idea of “voter fraud” is itself a fraud?

America’s perpetually scoffing progressive nation—the same fun-lovin’ killjoys who a dozen years ago screamed until their throats bled that George W. Bush stole the presidential election—are now pooh-poohing the very idea that voter fraud could possibly still be a problem. Huffington Post writer Robert Koehler said it’s “a made-up problem invented by GOP operatives.” The Soros-fueled Brennan Center for Justice scoffs so imperiously at the very notion that “Voter Fraud” exists, they put the phrase in quotes.

Of course it doesn’t exist. Neither do all the electoral-fraud disputes currently engulfing the globe. Oh, and Reconstruction, post-Reconstruction, Tammany Hall, and the City of Chicago? They never existed, either.

It’s not as if a recent investigation found that 232 Californians had miraculously voted after they died. It’s not as if a study in Missouri uncovered “281 potential ‘dead voters.’” This never happened in Houston, either. Nor in Tennessee.

It’s not as if absentee-voter fraud has ever been verified in Alabama, Arizona, Florida, Mississippi, New Jersey, New York, Ohio, or Texas, either.

And 70 ACORN employees in 12 states were never convicted of voter-registration fraud. It’s not as if a THIRD of the 1.2 million registration forms ACORN submitted in 2008 were ruled invalid. It’s not as if they were ever caught registering 7-year-old girls and 13-year-old boys to vote. It’s not as if one ACORN employee confessed to registering her three friends to vote 40 times. It’s not as if a Florida Department of Law Enforcement review of 260 ACORN applications found that 197 of them “contained personal ID information that did not match any living person.” It’s certainly not as if they ever used the names of the Dallas Cowboys on fraudulent voter-registration forms.

It’s not as if more than a quarter of Hispanics who voted in the 2008 election were, ahem, “immigrants.”

It’s not as if the feds convicted 70 people of election rigging between 2002 and 2005 and only two of these convictions were for civil-rights violations.

None of this ever happened. So keep quiet and listen to what Eric Holder and George Soros tell you. You don’t want to force them to take extreme measures and call you a bigot, do you?

Here’s the most significant takeaway from the Pew study:

[R]esearchers estimate at least 51 million eligible U.S. citizens are unregistered, or more than 24 percent of the eligible population.

So a quarter of American adults can’t even bother to register. Is it because the system makes it impossible? No, the system makes it very easy. We’d guess that most of them suspect the entire electoral system is a fraud.

Most Americans wouldn’t know the difference between Boko Haram and Boca Raton, even though a Congressional report from November fingered the Nigerian jihadist group as an “emerging threat” to US interests.

Though it’s unclear how the rabid Islamists of Boko Haram might pose any threat to the placid retirees of Boca Raton, an escalating wave of attacks on Nigerian soil threaten that country’s very existence.

In scarcely over two years, Boko Haram—it’s not their official name but rather a nickname that roughly means “Western education is sinful”—has pulled off a string of terrorist acts so ferociously audacious, one would think they’re jealous of all the attention the media have been lavishing upon al-Qaeda and the Mexican cartels.

And despite a widespread impression that they target mainly Christians, Boko Haram is known to murder anyone—including Muslims—who so much as utters a negative word about them. On Thursday, two presumed Boko Haram members drove up on motorcycles and murdered a sixty-year-old Muslim man as he was leaving a mosque. His crime was that he’d publicly criticized their tactics, so they publicly shot him dead.

This came only two days after Boko Haram botched a pair of suicide bombings at northern Nigerian military bases.

And it came scarcely two weeks after what has been called the largest terrorist attack in Nigerian history, when a series of orchestrated bombings and assaults in the city of Kano left at least 185 people dead.

And that had come less than a month after a Christmas Day bombing of a Catholic church that killed 43.

Last summer they used a car bomb to blow up a United Nations building in Nigeria’s capital city of Abuja, leaving at least 23 corpses in the rubble. Two months before that, they’d bombed a police barracks in Abuja. And on the preceding New Year’s Eve, they bombed an army barracks in Abuja.

After federal Nigerian forces captured Boko Haram founder Mohammed Yusuf in 2009—and apparently murdered him while he was in custody—bloody street clashes between authorities and Yusuf’s followers in northern Nigeria led to an estimated 700 deaths. That’s when Boko went full-blown loco. In subsequent attacks that often target churches and police stations, Boko Haram is thought to have claimed around 1,000 lives since.

Using AK-47s, shrapnel bombs stuffed into soda cans, and even the occasional poison arrow, Boko Haram has sought to wrap the iron fist of sharia law around the nation’s throat. But that was already nearly a fait accompli before they were even founded, at least in the traditionally Islamic north.

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Boko Haram is definitely a threat to Nigerian stability. What’s worse is that Nigeria was never quite stable in the first place. “Nigeria” is largely a national fiction patched together a century ago by Western powers that failed to weigh the area’s deep ethnic and religious divisions, ones that make Ireland seem uncomplicated by contrast.

Although Nigeria hosts dozens of tribes who speak countless dialects, its people can roughly be split along a vague north/south divide. The region comprising northern Nigeria has been predominantly Muslim for centuries and currently boasts some of the world’s highest poverty rates. Ethnically, its people are largely Hausa-Fulani and comprise about a third of the country’s population.

Southern Nigeria hosts the lush oil reserves that lube the nation’s economy. The ethnic Yorubas of southwestern Nigeria are split between Christians and Muslims, while the southeast’s Igbos are mostly Christian. None of the southern Nigerian states currently operates under sharia law.

The Igbos have previously attempted to secede. All the blood that Boko Haram has spilled so far is but a drop in the ocean compared to the Nigerian Civil War of 1967-70, which left an estimated one to three million bodies in its wake. The war was partially set off when southeastern Igbos declared themselves the independent Republic of Biafra. Although their attempt was crushed, the same ethno-religious regional hostilities have festered ever since.

Nigerian evangelist Elliot Uko warned last week that Christian Igbos will only tolerate the attacks for so long. He told an interviewer that his people “are being slaughtered like goats in the North” and that “Igbo corpses are lying in morgues in most northern cities.” He cautions that his people may finally lose their patience and “react in a way that will shock the establishment to their bones.” He says if the Igbo finally “take up arms, not even the UN can contain the explosion” and boasts that when the Igbos “remove their shirt to fight they will not put it back until blood flows.”

Christians who still live in the north’s sharia zones are reportedly fleeing into southern Nigeria and neighboring Cameroon. But despite a general appearance of turning the other cheek, Nigeria’s Christians are not entirely innocent in all this. They’ve been “revenge-bombing” mosques at least as far back as 2003 and as recently as last month. In August of last year in the high-tension city of Jos, mobs of Christians reportedly seized upon Muslims who’d gathered to pray for Eid. If these gruesome video and pictorial links are to be trusted, they also killed, roasted, and ate Muslims for the camera.

As in all human matters, it appears that no one is entirely innocent here. It’s yet another tribal struggle over land and resources.

Nigeria is a place where children are persecuted for being witches. It also engages in child trafficking. It’s where men get arrested carrying bags containing 70 infant corpses. It’s where a fundamentally primitive public erupts in mass panics about how a simple phone call can kill them. And did any of these things occur in the irredeemably backward Muslim north? No—they all happened in the presumably civilized and westernized south.

To put it politely, Nigeria is a failed nation. To put it bluntly, Nigeria is fucked.

Maybe the United States’ interests would be best served by having nothing to do with Nigeria. Let Boko Haram teach about how “Western education is sinful” to anyone who’ll bother listening.

The irony is that these days, the core message of Western education—at least how it’s taught here in the West—is also that Western Civilization’s very existence is a sin. So what’s the beef, everybody? No one seems more eager to dismantle the West than Westerners do. Boko Haram doesn’t pose nearly the threat to the West that the West itself does. Even if it took a bunch of blood-guzzling African jihadists to teach us that, we should be grateful for the lesson.

Dark decades of direct experience with human beings have given us reason to operate from an ecumenical distrust of human nature. Although perfectly natural, human nature is a foul entity regardless of what skin color, genitals, or ideology the individual human in question chooses to hide behind. Them humans is sneaky snakes, sho’nuff.

Since there’s literally no “government” beyond the humans authorized to run it, our distrust of human nature leads us to a special wariness of those who possess the legally sanctioned power to harm and extort others. Without ways to keep government power in check, the whole world would devolve into the Stanford Prison Experiment within a week. Then again, since the “governed” are also human beings, we also greet their every word and deed with suspicion—if not outright disdain.

So when someone complains about police brutality, our default presumption is that both sides are at least guilty of something and that we’d need clear evidence of innocence to exonerate anyone. Yes, sure, some police officers are sadistic rageballs who take out their castration fears on the skulls of hapless citizens they’d stopped for minor moving violations. But flipping the flapjack over, many citizens are irredeemably unhinged drunken lunatics who endanger everything in their path and aren’t above lying to score a huge civil-rights judgment that the taxpayers, not the “state,” are obliged to pay. Faced with such a dismal choice, why should we even pick sides?

Sadly, not everyone is so evenhanded. Opinions about police mostly fall into two rigid camps: “Shoot the scum pigs” or “Shoot the scum criminals.”

But sweeping all ideology aside and looking at things in practical terms, if a certain Taser gun had been stocked with fully functioning batteries back in 1991, it’s likely that LA police would never have hammered on a resolutely uncontrollable Rodney King with billy clubs and 53 people wouldn’t have died in the ensuing riots.

If the full-time complainers were handed the awful responsibility of actually having to hold and administer guns, billy clubs, and Tasers, we doubt they’d behave any nobler than the “pigs” on the street already do. Personally, we doubt we’d have the patience to perform a policeman’s job for a week without losing control. It’d be hard to maintain composure after some plastered idiot wandering amid traffic took a swing at us. Hell, it’d be difficult not to tase someone merely for calling us “bro.”

Words such as “justice” and the idea of how much punishment someone “deserves” are fatally subjective. In that spirit, allow us to speculate what we would have done if we’d been wearing the policeman’s badge during any of these recent cases involving law enforcement and Tasers. We make these snap judgments with the understanding that we are receiving the facts in each case only as they were reported and that even the reporters may be lying.

CASE: CALIFORNIA PARK RANGER TASES DOG OWNER IN LEASH-LAW INCIDENT
DETAILS: The Golden State’s “dog community” is up in arms about this story, and if there’s one group you don’t want to upset more than the gay community, it may be the dog community. Slightly before 5PM last Sunday, Gary Hesterberg, 50, was walking his two pooches in a state park near Half Moon Bay. A female park ranger stopped him and told him to leash one of his dogs. When she asked for identification, he allegedly gave a false name. Eyewitness accounts differ on whether Hesterberg’s demeanor was peaceful or belligerent. While the ranger was talking on her radio, she instructed him not to leave and said she’d tase him if he did. He turned his back and started walking away, at which point she tased him.
VERDICT: We would have kept following him while calling for backup. Tasing him was overreaching. Given a motivated and litigious “dog community,” this case may wind up costing millions.

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CASE: PORTLAND POLICE TASE MAN WHO WAS SWINGING PLASTIC LIGHTSABER AT TOYS “R” US CUSTOMERS
DETAILS: Sure, it’s all fun and games until some innocent passerby gets bopped in the head with a plastic lightsaber. Police at an Oregon Toys “R” Us store responded to a call after a crazed 33-year-old David Canterbury had already struck three other customers with such a weapon. When they tried tasing him, he ripped the Taser wires loose with a mighty swing of his toy lightsaber. At this point they piled on him and subdued him using the sort of brute force that even his plastic lightsaber could not repel.
VERDICT:  We may have tased him merely for being a grown man who’s still into Star Wars.

CASE: FLORIDA POLICE TASE 77-YEAR-OLD KNIFE-WIELDING MAN AT CANCER CENTER
DETAILS: Last Tuesday night at the University of Florida Shands Cancer Center, police arrived after medical staff reported that Juan Carrasquillo, 77 and presumably a cancer patient, had brandished a knife at them in the midst of treatment. The arrest report said he was holding the knife “With his arm coiled so he could strike quickly with it.” Police subdued him with one Taser jolt and then arrested him.
VERDICT: Very tough call. Given his age and the fact that he’s likely terminal, we would have tried exhausting every possible option before tasing him, whether it involved gentle persuasion or somehow making him slip on a banana peel. But if he’d come directly at us with the knife, then ZAP!

CASE: ILLINOIS SUSPECT GRABS TASER GUN FROM ARRESTING OFFICER AND TASES HIM
DETAILS: In the course of interviewing 19-year-old Dashawn James for a possible curfew violation, Chicago police say James initially tried fleeing, then became “combative” after they caught up with him. He swung at two officers and in the ensuing scuffle grabbed one of their Tasers, zapping one cop in the arm with it. The other officer deployed his own Taser on young Dashawn, subduing him.
VERDICT: If we were the officer who got tased, we would have tased ourselves again due to shame for being so clumsy.

CASE: POLICE IN WASHINGTON, DC TASE “OCCUPY” PROTESTER
DETAILS: Last Sunday at an atypically long-lasting Occupy DC encampment, police began placing flyers on tents that instructed everyone to disperse in compliance with the law. Ryan Lash, wearing eye-searing pajama pants, a T-shirt that said HE LOVES IT IN THE ASS, and the scruffy bearded-moppet look so common among these bold opponents of “greed,” almost instantly began removing the flyers, ripping them to shreds, and shouting, “Here’s your trash, you fucking pigs!” (At 0:11 of the above-linked video.) Police followed him through the park. Even though he made a conscious decision to wear those pajamas, he began chanting,  “I HAVE DONE NOTHING WRONG.” When police attempted to apprehend him, he physically struggled (at 1:34-1:40), at which point they tased him, instantly bringing out the shrill chirping of the camp’s “Justice Whistles” (or whatever they call them) and an audible assurance from a compatriot: “Yo, yo, it’s a lawsuit, brother, don’t worry.”
VERDICT: These people want nothing more on Earth than to have filmed evidence of police doing anything worse than serving them warm meals, so we would have strained with all our being not to tase him. These people see nothing odd about the fact that they moan of police brutality at an event they organized and purposely called “Fuck OPD (Oakland Police Department).” They see nothing askew with the fact that they openly flout the law yet jump at the chance to file lawsuits. Since he struggled, yes, he deserved to be tased. Since it’s stupid to scream at cops and call them pigs, yes, he should have received an extra jolt merely for being stupid. And since the cost of cleaning up their juvenile gypsy shenanigans will fall on average members of the “99%” who don’t make a habit of pooping in public parks, sure, zap him one last time for good measure. But since that’s exactly what he wanted, we would have found a way not to give it to him, if for no other reason than spite.

Instead of “Take Me Out to the Ball Game,” Florida’s homeless population may soon be singing “Put Me Up at the Ballpark.”

Florida Senate Bill 816 unanimously passed a preliminary committee vote on Monday and now must leap through three more procedural hula hoops before it reaches the Senate floor. If it and a similar Florida House bill pass, the owners of the Sunshine State’s pro sports teams would be required to pay back an estimated $271 million in public funds they’ve received if they fail to prove that they’ve used their facilities as homeless shelters on days when they weren’t being used for contracted sporting and entertainment events.

Come again?

As freaky-deaky as it sounds, the bill is based on an actual passage in a Florida statute that was passed in 1988 and called for precisely such an oddball arrangement—in order for team owners to receive public funding to erect their glimmeringly gaudy athletic palaces, now-deceased Democratic Senator Jack Gordon had insisted on a stipulation where sporting arenas were required to be used for housing the homeless—or the indigent, or the disenfranchised, or the unsheltered, or street persons, or bums, or whatever you prefer to call them—on days when there were no Jacksonville Jaguars games or Miami Sound Machine concerts.

News reports have referred to it as “a long-forgotten law,” an “old statute” that opportunistic lawmakers recently “dug up,” “a dormant 1988 law,” “a little-known state law,” and something that was “Tucked away deep in the annals of Florida law.” The way they talk, one would think you needed a rusty old crypt key to find it. Truth is, it’s been there in the public record since 1988 for anyone who bothered to read it.

It’s simply never been enforced. And apparently none of Florida’s team owners, nor the multiple out-of-state owners who still receive public funds for using Florida ballparks during spring training, have ever obeyed it.

Not that it’d be easy to obey. The 1988 statute obviously didn’t consider logistics. What do you do when the local team has an extended home stand? Herd the stadium’s part-time occupants into buses and dump ’em back on Skid Row until the team goes on the road again? And exactly how homeless does one have to be to score the luxury suites?

Some are now alarmed that there’ll be bums in the bleachers and derelicts in the dugouts and that knife-wielding, crack-puffing ne’er-do-wells will be stinking up the skyboxes. They warn that conditions would quickly devolve into a bloody Katrina-level Superdome rapefest. Others cheer that the state is finally doing something to more adequately serve Florida’s homeless population, which is estimated at anywhere from 50,000 to 90,000—in other words, far more people than usually attend a Marlins home game.

Back when Mickey Mantle was swatting home runs and Bart Starr was throwing touchdown passes, major-league sporting arenas tended to be privately funded.

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But that all started changing a few decades ago. The Cleveland Browns now play in a $290-million stadium, 74.7% of which was provided by taxpayers. The Indianapolis Colts gallop around in a $720-million monstrosity, 86% of which was derived from taxation. Since 2000, over half of the funds used to build 28 major-league stadiums came from the public coffers.

Ironically, the greater the public funding, the less likely it became that the building would be named after public heroes or landmarks. Stadiums used to be named after cultural icons or local streets or—perish the thought—the team itself rather than, say, banks, chain stores, and orange juices.

Supporters of public funding for stadiums cite the “multiplier effect” and claim that any initial tax burdens are easily offset by the increased tax revenues and jobs that major-league sports bring to a city. They cite a huge influx of revenue to local hotels, restaurants, and other tourist-related services. They also claim that sports teams bring intangible benefits in the way of civic pride and an unquantifiably vague feeling of rah-rah municipal camaraderie.

Opponents say that if consumers weren’t paying grossly inflated prices for tickets and parking and popcorn and souvenirs, they’d spend their entertainment dollars elsewhere and the city would be no worse for it economically. They cite numerous academic studies that claim public funding of sports teams only benefits the owners and players.

What makes the current situation in Florida even more anomalous is exactly who’s supporting the push to knock down the gates and fill the coliseums with unsheltered barbarian hordes, as well as the rhetoric they’re employing to achieve their goal.

It’s the Republicans, and they’ve trotted out the sort of anti-corporate, bring-the-wealthy-to-their-knees class-war jargon typically reserved for MSNBC commentators and writers at The Nation. Apparently the Florida GOP has done extensive test marketing, and “soak the rich” is what’s selling with voters this election year.

The Senate bill’s main sponsor, Republican Michael Bennett, defends the legislation thusly:

All of the sports teams always preach up and down about playing fair….We have spent over $300 million supporting teams that can afford to pay a guy $7, $8, $10 million a year to throw a baseball 90 feet. I think they can pay for their own stadium….[This is] yet another example of how taxpayers are supplementing the super rich owners of sports franchises while the taxpayers of Florida are receiving very little in return.

A supporter of the House bill, Republican Frank Artiles, echoed this unexpected new GOP strategy:

I cannot believe that we’re going to cut money out of Medicaid and take it away from the homeless and take it away from the poor and impoverished, and we’re continuing to support people who are billionaires….

Maybe Florida’s Republicans have suddenly had a change of heart. Or maybe they are only shedding alligator tears for their state’s disgruntled indigents. Perhaps they’re cynically seeking votes while slyly avoiding leftist criticism by offering to let downtrodden street urchins rush the 50-yard line and soil the corporate bird’s-nest. Politics is politics, ma’am, and just like the homeless, it usually stinks.

When G8 leaders convene in Chicago this May to discuss managing the global economy, they’ll be meeting in a city that has botched its own finances so thoroughly, even its morgue is overcrowded.

The Chicago Sun-Times recently reported that backlogged bodies are being stacked like Lincoln Logs in a cooler at the Cook County Medical Center. According to an unnamed source, 500 bodies—including the corpses of an estimated 100 babies—were crammed into a storage unit designed for 300. In some cases, infants’ remains were being placed alongside the cadavers of the “thinnest adults” due to the cramped space. “There are so many bodies in there now, they can’t keep it cool enough. The stench is like nothing I’ve ever seen,” said another source (who apparently suffers from synesthesia), adding that the entire situation is “sacrilegious.”

The excess inventory of adult corpses is being blamed on last summer’s suspension of a program that paid private funeral homes $1,600 per body to bury Chicago’s indigent deceased. Although the program has been reinstated, many funeral homes now refuse to continue accepting such cases.

The overstocked county meat locker’s surplus of infant remains is partially due to an ordinance last year that banned the interment of fetuses and infants in “communal wooden coffins” and instead required individual burial containers. According to one source, the medical examiner’s office has failed to cough up the funds to pay the company that builds the tiny individual baby coffins. But according to Medical Examiner Nancy Jones, these legally mandated mini-caskets have yet to even be designed, much less built—all while an estimated 100 infant corpses are sharing refrigerator space alongside adults.

Although it accounts for less than two percent of the state’s land mass, Cook County, AKA Crook County, is home to two of every five Illinois residents. Its county seat is Chicago, so legendarily corrupt that one suspects even Mrs. O’Leary’s cow was on the take. The city has held corruption trials dating back to 1869. In Chicago, politics and criminality have been entangled since prostitution and gambling scandals of the late 1800s all the way up to the recent guilty plea of a Water Department engineer who managed a heroin-distribution ring. Since 1972, at least 26 Cook County officials—19 of them judges—have been convicted of crimes.

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Beyond such ethical turpitude, the county is also severely mismanaged: Chicago’s budget deficit this year is projected to be around $635 million.

Illinois is infamous for imprisoning four former governors, most recently Rod Blagojevich and his irresistibly stylish hair. But although Democrats have held a stranglehold over Chicago for 80 years, Illinois corruption has always been ecumenical. The Chicago Tribune accused the city’s last Republican mayor, “Big” Bill Thompson (1915-23 and 1927-31), of tainting the metropolis with

filth, corruption, obscenity, idiocy, and bankruptcy…moronic buffoonery, triumphant hoodlumism, unchecked graft, and a dejected citizenship.…He made Chicago a byword for the collapse of American civilization.

Much more recently, Illinois Republican Governor George Ryan (1999-2003) was convicted of racketeering and fraud and is currently incarcerated.

But not only is Illinois famously corrupt; it’s virtually bankrupt. The state has the nation’s worst credit rating.

Last year the state jacked up its income tax by a staggering 66 percent. The move was intended to help stave off an immediate shortfall of around $8.5 billion in unpaid bills. (Illinois also suffers unfunded pension liabilities to the tune of $85 billion—around $6,600 per resident.)

Despite what was described as the largest tax increase in the state’s history, furry little Illinois Comptroller Judy Baar Topinka announced on Wednesday that the state remains $8.5 billion in arrears. She added that Illinois is still paying off bills from four and a half months ago.

So while Illinois is still piling up debt, from a purely public-relations standpoint Chicago would be wise to clear out its stacks of dead human bodies from the county morgue before the G8’s highly manicured mavens come to town in May. It’s more than a matter of cosmetic unseemliness. There are also practical matters that need to be considered here. If the bomb-throwing anarchists and the roving late-spring flash mobs show up at the G8, the morgue may actually need the room.

On New Year’s Day, NBC honking head Andrea Mitchell tried making America hip to the Hawkeye State’s unforgivable lack of hipness:

The rap on Iowa: it doesn’t represent the rest of the country—too white, too evangelical, too rural.

This isn’t the first time Ms. Mitchell—presumably a reporter rather than some wacked-out urban-supremacist sockpuppet—has made such a statement. In 2008 she chuckled while wondering why Barack Obama would bother to campaign in Southwest Virginia:

This is real [laughs] redneck, sort of, um, bordering on Appalachia country.

Mitchell’s recent comments about Iowa echo those made by New York Times publisher Arthur “Pinch” Sulzberger in a December 17 column:

Iowa has long been criticized as too much of an outlier to be permanently endowed such an outsize influence in shaping the presidential field. Too small, critics say. Too rural. Too white.

Iowa ranks 26th in the USA for area and 30th for population, so rather than being “too small,” it’s pretty average. We’re also not sure what’s meant by “too rural,” but it apparently means that 61% urban simply isn’t urban enough for snooty coast-huggers such as Sulzberger and Mitchell. And the Washington Examiner recently cited a Pew survey pegging Iowa as slightly less evangelical than the national norm. So in truth, Iowa isn’t all that freakishly small, evangelical, or rural.

Which leaves us with “too white.”

While Mitchell and Sulzberger were careful not to call Iowa “too white” themselves—they used such responsibility-deflecting phrases as “the rap on” and “critics say”—we’ve yet to see them depict Mississippi as “too black” or the relatively tiny isle of Manhattan—where, as luck would have it, Sulzberger, Mitchell, and her husband, ex-Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan were all born—as being too, you know, “Armenian” or whatever.

This ain’t to say that Iowa ain’t white. The state is currently around 91% white—not terribly different than America as a whole was in 1960. But by modern standards, it’s now a little extra-white. Compared to the current national average (63.7% in 2010) Iowa is roughly “over-white” to the same degree that New York City is “under-white” (33% in 2010).

Washington Post writer Courtland Milloy—a black man whose skin tone is somewhat over-white compared to the national Black Mean Hue, not that we ever notice such things—recently found Iowa to be far too white for his tastes:

I noticed that nearly everybody was white: white people smiling over coffee, white people applauding at candidate forums, white people singing praise songs at church.

Why, it sounds like the apocalypse!

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On the opposite end of the Terror Spectrum are those who make it clear they think the state’s too white by roving in packs and beating the hell out of people at the Iowa State Fair.

But as we’ve been repeatedly lectured, we live in a post-racial society, so the possibility that certain elements of the overwhelmingly urban-based mainstream media have some sort of “anti-white, anti-rural” agenda is a laughable notion that only retarded toothless inbred pale-skinned ghostfaced crackers who live in the boondocks would ever believe.

Obviously we can’t trust anyone in the media to say what they actually mean, so when they say Iowa is “too white,” we must assume that they are speaking in code.

Maybe they really mean it’s too German.

Maybe they secretly mean it’s a very safe place where there can be massive flooding without massive rioting. Maybe they mean it was recently rated the eighth-safest state and the sixth-best state in which to live. Or maybe not, because then they’d have to concede that the states rated as even better and safer—places such as New Hampshire, Vermont, Maine, the Dakotas, and Wyoming—were themselves almost unconscionably white.

Maybe they want people to know about Iowa’s economy. It has one of the nation’s lowest unemployment rates, and the few states with even lower rates are, well, mighty-tighty-whitey themselves. Comparing income to the cost of living, sweet li’l Des Moines is the USA’s richest urban area.

Maybe they feel that Iowa has been unfairly stereotyped as a breeding ground of superstitious illiterate cornfield bumpkins. In reality, Iowa has been one of the most literate states in America for 100 years and running. Iowa students are said to “consistently lead the nation in standardized achievement-test scores.” A government website claims that 93 percent of Iowa’s schools perform above the national average. Iowa ranks third when it comes to libraries per resident. It also has one of the nation’s lowest high-school-dropout rates. To be fair, not all of Iowa’s schools perform so well. To be fairer, these schools tend to be in areas that few would describe as “too white.”

So when they say Iowa is “too white,” what they really mean is that it’s too safe, too economically stable, and far too literate to adequately represent mainstream America—especially the “mainstream America” they have planned for us.

We agree. Iowa is definitely too white.

Thursday marked 220 years since the Bill of Rights was signed. As tribute, the US government fed the Bill of Rights through a paper shredder. This week they shoved forward two bills that would neuter the constitution. Then, almost as if they were deliberately giving the finger to the entire nation, the White House Tweeted:

Happy Bill of Rights Day! The US continues to stand with citizens & governments around the world who empower free expression.

US propaganda says we invaded Afghanistan and Iraq after 9/11 to export democracy. Thursday marked the official end of the Iraq War. Our grand mission to export democracy was successful, because as of this week, it no longer exists here. We’ll have to move somewhere else to find it.

Like a Rock ’Em Sock ’Em Robot, the feds came out with both fists swinging this week. On Wednesday the White House told reporters that Obama had rescinded his own public promises to veto SB1867, otherwise known as the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA). That bouncin’ baby bill contains a clause permitting the feds to indefinitely detain anyone so much as suspected of having terrorist affiliations. On Thursday a Congressional committee held a hearing on amendments that would soften H.R. 3261, AKA the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA). That particular legislative confection would give the feds a Great Firewall of China-level authority to shut down websites at whim.

The National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA)
One of the main things that got Barack Obama elected—other than his shimmering, hazelnut-colored skin—was public outrage over the Bush Administration’s indefinite detention of suspected terrorists at places such as Guantanamo Bay. So after Obama’s election, when reputed “conspiracy theorists” such as the portly porcupine Alex Jones would warn that the feds planned to declare martial law and corral US citizens into internment camps, they were roundly dismissed as wackadiddly paranoid schizos—and, of course, racists who couldn’t stand seeing a black guy get all the chicks.

It turns out that only the cuckoo clocks knew what time it is. Sections 1031-1032 of NDAA contain the prickly clauses about indefinitely detaining terrorists without judicial review. This passage…

The requirement to detain a person in military custody under this section does not extend to citizens of the United States.

…would seem to exempt US citizens. But critics charge it is delicately worded—unlike foreign nationals suspected of terrorism, the US is not required to hold them indefinitely, but they are still permitted to do so.

According to Senator Lindsey Graham:

1031, the statement of authority to detain, does apply to American citizens and it designates the world as the battlefield, including the homeland.

On Wednesday the House passed the bill 283-136. On Thursday—Bill of Rights Day—the Senate passed it 86-13. The bill now awaits Obama’s certain signature.

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Obama had originally threatened to veto the bill, but not over the indefinite-detention clauses. In fact, bill sponsor Senator Carl Levin (D-Mich.) says it was the White House that insisted the language be altered to include American citizens:

The language which precluded the application of Section 1031 to American citizens was in the bill that we originally approved….and the administration asked us to remove (it) which says that US citizens and lawful residents would not be subject to this section.

Under the bill, American citizens can be indefinitely detained without proof merely on suspicion of having supported terrorist groups. Exactly what constitutes such “support” is, as always, the government’s guess.

The Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA)
Similar to the PROTECT IP Act the Senate Judiciary Committee approved in May, SOPA is ostensibly designed to protect intellectual property and discourage copyright infringements. But critics say it threatens to “break the Internet.” It conveniently allows los federales to obliterate any site that’s so much as accused of featuring copywritten material. In such cases, “infringement” can consist of merely linking to another site that, say, features a stock photo of kitty-cats that it hasn’t obtained permission to use. Merely embedding a video containing copy-protected material is a felony that could result in five years’ imprisonment. A site can feature 100,000 comments on a message board, but merely on the unproved accusation that it hosts one unauthorized photo, the entire site can be made to disappear. Perfectly legal speech can be blotted from existence because the feds have flushed due process and probable cause down the loo in its quest to legalize prior restraint. The potential for governmental abuse is enormous. After reviewing dozens of proposed amendments to the bill on Thursday, the House Judiciary Committee finally delayed its vote on Friday, meaning the bill will likely not be submitted to the House floor until early next year.

While these cyclopean threats to basic American freedoms were being made this week, the mainstream media was a quiet village of sedated crickets. During Thursday’s Republican presidential debate, a gaggle of lumpy, gassy candidates fielded questions about Israel, the countries surrounding Israel, and the relations between Israel and the countries surrounding it, but nothing about either NDAA or SOPA. Some have insinuated that a deliberate blackout was in effect.

On Monday, Gallup released a poll that showed most Americans, left or right, said they feared the government more than big business. Despite the fact that both Democrat and Republican lawmakers seem to love both NDAA and SOPA, social-media voices from both the left and right howled in disapproval at the bills. On Twitter, one suddenly encountered something unimaginable only a month ago:  rightist libertarians and leftist Occupiers united in the belief that the government has gotten WAY the fuck out of hand. You’d see hashtags for #OWS and #TeaParty on the same Tweet. In the twinkling of an eye, jarheads and potheads agreed on one basic fact: The government that claims to represent them is instead their worst enemy. Instead of left versus right, it’s suddenly the government versus everyone. Whether it also becomes everyone versus the government remains to be seen.

After soul-shredding millennia of bloodshed and insane sectarian conflict, a small candle of hope finally flickers in the Middle East. That candle’s name is Binyamin Netanyahu, a man who may finally bring the world together. Across every latitude and spanning every longitude, hopping from continent to continent while straddling the equator as if riding a giant invisible mechanical bull, the peoples of this planet are united in disliking him. We may not agree about religion or politics, but we can all hold hands and agree that he’s more than a bit of a jerkoff.

Perhaps that’s overstating things by a wee morsel. To be fair, there are still hardcore Zionists who think he’s the bee’s knees. There are also hordes of blinkered American Christian Goyim who’ve been mind-tooled into venerating a religion/ethnicity/political system that places zero value on Christians and all other Goyim—but beyond that, the world has closed ranks and simply can’t stand this arrogant, obstinate, belligerent, charmless, sweaty, green-skinned, liver-spotted creep.

Oh, wait—there’s Congress, too. Anyone who witnessed the Nuremberg Rally-level tongue bath Netanyahu received from the eager pink tongues of both Republicans and Democrats as His Holy Schmuckiness graced them with his presence earlier this year—they kept leaping to their feet and roaring their approval almost as if he owned them—would know that Congress thinks he’s sweeter than apples dipped in honey on Rosh Hashanah.

But beyond those special-interest groups, yeah—we think he’s a putz, a schmendrick, a schmuck, a schlub, a nudnik, and a schlemiel. If you prefer, he’s a stooge, a cretin, a chump, a dipstick, and a goon. We care neither for him nor for those Deputy Dawg jowls of his. As far as we’re concerned, he can go pound matzo balls up his ass.

Although the Cold War terrorized minds for decades with its potential to blow up the planet, it failed. But this lone rogue stubborn fanatical douchebag whom his few friends call “Bibi” may finally get the job done. His public speeches are splattered with the word “evil,” and just as Nietzsche counseled us to beware of those in whom the urge to punish is strong, we should be extra-wary of a nuclear-armed politician who liberally uses the word “evil.” Especially if said politician won’t admit he owns nuclear weapons. Extra-super-especially if he’s making loud noises about attacking another nation because he suspects that they think that they might possibly want to build nuclear weapons themselves at some undetermined point in the future.

At the opening of a—how to put this?— long-delayed Auschwitz blueprint exhibit last year, Bibi again used the word “evil,” this time in reference to Iran and its evil campaign to evilly exterminate Israel from the map in the evilest manner possible. (Just don’t hold your breath waiting for him to trot out the blueprints for Israel’s nuclear-weapons facilities anytime soon. Apparently those aren’t quite as evil.)

Netanyahu has made a career of fanning the flames of fear about “terrorism,” which he has described in theory as “intrinsically evil, necessarily evil, and wholly evil” but which he appears to define in practice as “anything that stands in the way of Israel acting like a bunch of pushy, entitled, anointed, supremely arrogant noodges.” But he’s firing blanks, seeing as how Israel was itself founded on terrorist bombings, murder, and a decidedly undemocratic forced purge of despised ethno-religious “others.”

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He has accomplished the almost unimaginable feat of making Israel even more hated by its geographical neighbors than it was before he started mucking up the sandbox. Since he reassumed his grip on the Golden Israeli Pony’s reins as prime minister in 2009, he’s soured relations with Turkey, Qatar, and the UAE. And no one knows better than he does that when the sand finally settles from the Arab Spring, he’ll start getting choked from all sides by the hostile Islamic boa constrictor surrounding him.

He’s also alienated his presumed friends in the West, or at least that part of the West still willing to do his fighting for him. Earlier this year German Chancellor Angela Merkel reportedly upbraided him: “You are the one who disappointed us. You haven’t made a single step to advance peace.” Earlier this month, reporters at the G20 summit in France overheard Obama and Nicolas Sarkozy kvetching about him, too. “I cannot stand him. He’s a liar,” Sarkozy allegedly said, unaware his mic was hot. Obama’s response was classic: “YOU’RE fed up with him? I have to deal with him every day!” It was almost as if he’d said, “YOU think she’s a bitch? Try sleeping with her every night!”

King Bibi even felt entitled to define what the Obama Administration’s two main objectives should be—“preventing Iran from gaining nuclear weapons” and some casual aside about fixing the economy.

As if all that was insufficiently annoying, he is now, through an ad campaign produced by his Ministry of Immigrant Absorption, guilt-tripping American Jews for not being Jewish enough—or not Israeli enough. Or not nearly quite as Semitic as they ought to be. It’s all so confusing.

The ads have been placed on TV in five American cities. In one 30-second spot,  an over-Americanized Jewish girl breaks her Israeli Grandpappy and Grandmammy’s hearts by saying it’s Christmas instead of the correct answer, which is Hanukkah. (Since this article was first published, the video has been removed by YouTube and Netanyahu is now claiming the campaign was released without his authorization. We suspect it’s only a matter of time before the second video gets yanked, too, so watch it while you can. —Ed.)

In the following ad, a likewise over-Americanized doofus boyfriend mistakenly thinks his girlfriend wants a romantic night together with him instead of what she actually wants to do— which is what any loyal Jewish woman would do—sit in front of her laptop and cry about the Israeli war dead:

The commercials’ message is clear: In order to be a True Blue Jew, get your tuchis back to Israel. There’s even an Israeli government website that will show you how to apply for citizenship on your mobile phone.

Bibi realizes he’s painted himself into a corner with his paranoia about existential threats, so he’s crying out for fellow tribespersons to come keep him company. Come back to the homeland so we can all get pushed into the sea together. We have no doubt this cabbage-faced serial prevaricator is shvitzing something fierce right about now. But it’s hard for us to shvitz even one drop of sweat on his behalf. His very existence conjures the squirmy question of whether it’s possible for Jews to cause anti-Semitism.

He is Jewish, right? Shouldn’t he at least be funny? Surely the Jews could have picked someone more charming than this.

About a hundred miles south of the smog-choked, rust-eaten city of Cleveland quietly sits pristine Ohio hill country, home to one of the nation’s largest concentrations of Amish people. Down there amid the hex signs and distelfinks where the Ordnung reigns supreme, nestled betwixt the small communities of Scroggsfield and Wolf Run, is the village of Bergholz, population 769. A splinter—some would say heretical—Amish sect known as the “Bergholz clan” led by 66-year-old Bishop Sam Mullet inhabits a compound near Bergholz.

Early Wednesday morning as the Mullet compound’s men slept peacefully, their full-length traditional Amish beards intact, federal authorities raided the premises and arrested seven male sect members. The accused—including patriarch Sam Mullet, his sons Johnny S. Mullet, Lester S. Mullet, and Danny S. Mullet—were connected to a series of four violent nighttime attacks starting in September wherein the Bergholz clan would set upon Amish rivals, forcibly restrain them, and hack away at their beards with garden shears and battery-powered clippers. In one case, a woman received a forced haircut that left her scalp bleeding.

On September 6, an estimated six men and six women stormed into a house in Mesopotamia, OH, knocking a married couple to the floor and furiously chopping away the man’s beard and his wife’s hair. The victims were former associates of the Bergholz clan—so closely associated that among the attackers were the victims’ sons.

Two more assaults came the night of October 4, as five members of the Bergholz clan hired a non-Amish driver—later turned state’s witness—to spirit them from one crime scene to the next and then back home. Two of the victims are thought to have been attacked for providing “aid and counseling” to one of Mullet’s sons after he’d fled the group years ago. Victims were left shorn and bleeding, and the Bergholz clan triumphantly returned home with photographic evidence of their escapades.

Then on November 9, even after five of the Bergholz clan had been arrested on state charges and the case had been nationally publicized, clan member Emanuel Schrock lured more ex-Bergholzers to his house after promising them in a series of letters that they’d be safe from harm. After having his beard whacked away with shears that were sharp enough to cut leather, one of Schrock’s victims confronted him about his false promise. Schrock reportedly shrugged and said, “I guess I lied.” Again the Bergholz clan had photographed their handiwork as a perverse sort of religious hunting trophy.

Sacred Amish tradition forbids women from cutting their hair and married men from shaving their beards. Patriarch Sam Mullet freely admits—these humble hillfolk are apparently so cloistered from the modern world, they never heard of the Fifth Amendment—that the attacks were conducted for religious reasons to purposely humiliate rivals after years-long doctrinal squabbling over who exactly had the right to shun whom. To federal authorities, the clan’s motives—rather than the crimes themselves—were the real crimes. In Ohio state court last month, authorities had charged five members of the Bergholz clan with literal crimes related to the attacks—namely, kidnapping and aggravated burglary—but they eagerly dropped all state charges and handed the baton to the feds, who on Wednesday filed an affidavit claiming probable cause to arrest Mullet and his minions for violating the Matthew Shepard and James Byrd, Jr. Hate Crimes Prevention Act.

The federal affidavit claims Samuel Mullet acted more like a depraved cult leader than a humble butter-churner:

In disregard for Amish teachings and scripture, SAMUEL MULLET, SR. has forced extreme punishments on and physical injury to those in the community who defy him, including forcing members to sleep for days at a time in a chicken coop on his property and allowing members of the Bergholz clan to beat other members who appear to disobey SAMUEL MULLET, SR. Moreover, SAMUEL MULLET, SR. has been “counseling” the married women in the Bergholz clan and taking them into his home so that he may cleanse them of the devil with acts of sexual intimacy.

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A rudimentary grasp of Miranda rights may have aided the fatally unwordly Mullets and their co-conspirators. In October, Mullet’s three sons and Eli Miller all openly confessed their crimes to investigators. In a call recorded from jail, Lester Mullet warned his father about the camera containing the crime photos and spoke of possible future beard attacks. In another recorded jail call, Levi Miller discussed the time that Samuel Mullet imprisoned him in a chicken coop for twelve straight days. An unidentified male eagerly spoke with Miller about future jaunts to “go get more beard hair.”

The Mullets’ brief reign of “shear terror” reportedly sent shock waves through Amish enclaves in Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Indiana. It’s understandable—except for the extremely rare killer, sexting scandal, or wild Amish teen leading police on a buggy chase, it’s a generally placid and low-crime world. Usually it’s the Amish who are getting murdered en masse or creamed in their buggies by rampaging SUVs. The lifestyle suits at least some of them well, as the national Amish population has doubled in the past 20 years, with cancer rates only 56 percent of the national mean and suicide rates a mere half that of the general population.

The Amish are unique in American culture for their stark sense of otherness and stubborn self-sufficiency. There’s a touch of inbreeding—the quarter-million or so modern American Amish are said to be mostly derived from a gene pool of about two hundred founders—complemented by an overt sense of separateness from the world and all the worldly temptations therein. They generally operate their own schools, refuse to carry health insurance or accept welfare, and are permitted by law to refuse paying Social Security taxes. Perhaps most significantly, they tend to avoid all contact with police and prefer to settle all community problems internally.

This makes the Mullet case anomalous. Terrorized by a small, fanatical ideological gang within the community, desperate Amish victims finally turned to the government for help. Seemingly overnight, the feds galloped in on a giant white steed, arrested the perps, and held a news conference.

In their unyielding quest to render thoughts more harmful than brutally wielded garden shears, the FBI affidavit included a quote from one victim that he would have rather been “beaten black and blue than to suffer the disfigurement and humiliation of having his hair removed”—in other words, extreme physical suffering takes a back seat to the idea of religious persecution. It doesn’t matter if it’s a “hate crime” that involves Amish people attacking other Amish people—and not even for being Amish, but for not being Amish enough.

For years local sheriff Fred Abdalla had feuded with the Bergholz clan. In 2007 he removed a 12-year-old girl from the compound, alleging she’d been “brutalized and raped” although he never filed criminal charges. Abdalla, who has called Sam Mullet “evil,” claims he’s received “hundreds and hundreds of calls from people living in fear” due to the beard attacks. He told reporters he’s glad that Mullet has been removed from the community and that “You just can’t realize the power and domination he has over his people.” Abdalla apparently deems it a good thing that the federal government has more power and domination over people than Sam Mullet could ever hope to achieve.

Federal prosecutor Steven M. Dettelbach told reporters that “When people commit crimes…based on somebody’s religion, the community that’s victimized is far broader than the victim of the attack.” Dettelbach pushed the point further and said that this imaginary act of mass victimization outweighs even a literal victim’s reluctance to press charges: “It is not the victim’s job to decide or to bring charges. I think that’s a message I would like people to understand. These charges in this case are the result of our independent determination that crimes occurred.”

Point taken. You’re sending a message—some might even consider it a veiled threat—that the federal government has more power to break into people’s homes, abduct them, and stuff them into chicken coops than the Bergholz clan does. You get to decide what’s a sin and what isn’t. You determine who gets shunned and who does the shunning. We get it. We didn’t think that was ever in dispute, though.

A report released Wednesday says that in 2010, one in five Americans took medication to relieve conditions broadly described as mental disorders. Such medications include antidepressants, anti-anxiety pills, pills for attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), and good ol’ American antipsychotics.

If you sprinkle the billions of painkillers on top of the mix—it’s said that there were enough painkillers prescribed last year to keep every adult American feelin’ no pain for a solid month—you have a public landfill’s worth of legally prescribed mind-altering substances.

That’s a lot of pills, possibly a lot of crazy Americans, and maybe even too much of both.

In the USA over the past dozen years:

• Sales of prescription painkillers roughly tripled.

• The number of deaths from prescription painkillers more than tripled, killing more people than heroin and cocaine combined and accounting for three-quarters of all drug overdoses. The number of annual deaths from prescription painkillers is nearly as high as the number of homicides.

• Prescriptions (read: “legal meth”) for ADHD conditions nearly tripled among women aged 20 to 44.

• Prescriptions for atypical antipsychotics have more than tripled among adults aged 20 to 54.

• The number of Americans classified as disabled due to mental illness has more than doubled.

• Prescriptions for antidepressants rose so much, it’s depressing. In 2005, antidepressants became the most-prescribed drug in the USA.

Over the past generation, huge swaths of the public have been softly lulled into becoming compliant, dependent, mush-brained pill zombies. This phenomenon, where people on psych meds started popping up everywhere like mushrooms in a barren field, was enabled by several landmark events:

• The expansion of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders in the 1970s that opened the legal and financial floodgates for a similar expansion of the pharmaceutical industry.

• The American Psychiatric Association’s invention of the concept of ADHD in 1987.

• The FDA’s 1997 decision to allow TV ads for prescription drugs.

• Increased payments funneled from pharmaceutical companies to psychiatrists.

• An ever-growing clinical definition of what constitutes “mental illness” to the point where what was once deemed mere shyness is recategorized as “social anxiety disorder.”

• A population that has become increasingly anxious, bored, depressed, and aimless.

These days, it seems as if everyone and their mother is on Celexa, Zyprexa, Lexapro, Paxil, Cymbalta, Sinequan, Abilify, Desyrel, and Lunesta—pills which could also be the names of new cars or black women. As if it were the Holy Eucharist, communicants are dutifully gobbling their SSRIs, SSREs, SNRIs, SARIs, NDRAs, NRIs, NDRIs, TCAs, TeCAs, and MAOIs.

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Side effects may include: Fever, chills, runny nose, drowsiness, dizziness, upset stomach, dry mouth, fainting, vomiting, hives, increased sweating, unusual swelling, unusual bruising, difficulty breathing, insomnia, impaired coordination, blurred vision, vivid nightmares, blistered and peeling skin, diarrhea, constipation, black or bloody stools, overactive bladder, severe headaches, severe ringing in the ears, severe hair loss, severe weight loss, severe weight gain, loss of sexual desire, loss of sexual ability, irreversible memory loss, hallucinations, panic attacks, hyper-aggressiveness, lung damage, liver damage, permanent brain damage, chest pain, upper-GI bleeding, gynecological bleeding, suicidal thoughts, suicidal attempts, successfully completed suicides, violent outbursts, disfiguring tics, seizures, heart attacks, stroke, and sudden death.

Oh—and sometimes antidepressants can make you more depressed.

But mostly they’re safe.

After all, a doctor prescribes them, right? You can go to a shabby city street corner and buy heroin or crystal meth, or you can go to your family practitioner and get a scrip for OxyContin or Adderall. The latter route is definitely safer, so much that it probably engenders a dangerously false sense of security amid the countless Americans who have no idea what to do with their emotional pain. Even if you get addicted, it’s all perfectly legal and therefore is probably not even a sin.

Ted “Unabomber” Kaczynski wrote of “a society that subjects people to conditions that make them terribly unhappy, then gives them drugs to take away their unhappiness….In effect, antidepressants are a means of modifying an individual’s internal state in such a way as to enable him to tolerate social conditions that he would otherwise find intolerable.”

A Zoloft TV commercial from a few years ago showed a sad-faced little bubble moping along under a dark cloud until it gulps down some Zoloft, the cloud evaporates, and the now-happy bubble bounces along with its cheerfully chirping bluebird friend. There was a soft, lobotomizing totalitarianism to the image that evoked an utterly passive and defeated nation eagerly gobbling what are basically pills to counteract modern reality’s grim, everlasting hangover.

There is no area of medicine less scientific and more abuse-prone than the study and treatment of the human mind. One thinks of Soviet doctors glaring behind face masks and wielding huge dripping syringes to stab people who don’t think correctly. Control over minds is the essence of political power.

Psychiatric medications are like welfare assistance for the mind: They seem to provide short-term benefits but destroy the self and render one placidly dependent upon higher, presumably wiser powers.

But it’s best not to be so paranoid, to just relax and let your meds work like tiny little shiny knives on your brain. If you think anything seems shady about this sudden explosion of pills, well, they’ll soon have a name for that particular mental disorder. They’ll have a pill for it, too.

A hallelujah chorus of joyous whoops and hollers erupted from an audience described as “mostly African Americans” as the Texas DMV voted on Thursday to reject a license-plate proposal by the Sons of Confederate Veterans. After hours of hearing what was said to be “emotional testimony” wherein “passions ran high,” the DMV’s board, all of its members appointed by dodo-brained presidential candidate Governor Rick Perry, voted 8-0 to reject a license-plate design that would have featured a square Confederate battle flag occupying roughly five percent of the overall plate’s area.

Back in April, essentially the same Texas DMV board (one member died and was replaced) split their vote 4-4 on whether to approve the Rebel license plate. Having recently survived his “Niggerhead” scandal, it is thought that the shape-shifting reptilian Perry instructed his minions to nix the license plate because he didn’t want to worsen his numerous displays of public retardation in the GOP debates with further accusations of racism. So this time around, the panel’s vote against the Confederate image was unanimous.

The Sons of Confederate Veterans, whose website features a small man in a Rebel outfit who startles the unsuspecting viewer when he suddenly appears and starts speaking to you once the page loads, have already had their logo approved on license plates in nine formerly Confederate states. They were forced to sue to win the right to do so in Maryland, Virginia, and North Carolina. They are now vowing to sue the state of Texas for the right to have specialty plates featuring what is described as a “baseball-sized” image of the Rebel battle flag.

Speaking before the US House of Representatives on October 11, the barely sentient Texas Congresswoman Sheila Jackson-Lee bloviated her hippo-shaped head off as she pled with Governor Perry to speak to his “higher angels” and reject the license-plate design featuring what she twice referred to as a “HEEN-ee-iss” symbol of hatred, bigotry, brutality, lynching, shattered families, and that old chronologically impossible canard about “four hundred years” of slavery. (We believe that “HEEN-ee-iss” is suppposed to be the word “heinous”; you can hear Ms. Jackson-Lee pronounce it HERE. You can also hear her talk about how the Confederates “opted to succeed [sic] from the Union.” It’s quite a fun and instructive clip.)

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Aiding and abetting Ms. Jackson-Lee were the usual ducks all lined up in a row, quacking about hatred and racism and bigotry and lynching and prejudice and intimidation and violence and bondage and fear. There was talk of shamefulness, of hurtfulness, of offensiveness. Texas State NAACP Conference president Gary Bledsoe, apparently a mover and shaker in some organization devoted to colored people, declared without flinching: “We know that flag is a true symbol of hate.” He also cautioned that it would be ill-advised for the state to project an image to outsiders that “we are a bunch of country bumpkins.” No, Mr. Texas Colored Person, we sure wouldn’t want to do that. Also coming out to voice her support of the license-plate ban was Texas State Representative Senfronia Thompson, whom we mention primarily because her name is “Senfronia.”

Legion are those naïve enough to swallow the popular narrative that all of Southern history can be compressed into a microdot of psychopathic raging evil. Even if one is sufficiently ill-informed to believe the War Between the States was entirely about slavery and had nothing to do with, oh, economic and political control, it would still mean that somewhere in the ballpark of 600K young pale peckerwoods gave their lives to free the slaves. But that apparently wasn’t enough of a sacrifice, so don’t you knuckle-dragging redneck throwbacks even suggest mourning your fallen ancestors.

To be fair, the official Texas declaration of secession from 1861 features highly impolite passages about “Indian savages” and “the debasing doctrine of equality of all men” and how the states were “established exclusively by the white race” and how Africans should be “regarded as an inferior and dependent race” and other sorts of things you won’t hear on many sitcoms these days.

In their frothily Pavlovian mission to extinguish anything that stinks of “racism,” the faceless hordes of online prog keyboard-peckers are exulting in this latest defeat for Dixie, rubbing their noses in how they lost again and it was 150 years ago and they need to get over it and get a life and get a grip and give it up, and for Christ’s sake, you sore losers, quit acting all butt-hurt and take your medicine—YOU LOST!

Funny how you never hear them lecturing the so-called Native Americans about how they’re bitter losers who should just get over it. You won’t hear them scolding the descendants of African tribesmen whose ancestors didn’t put up a very impressive fight when European slave-traders alighted on their shores. After all, black slavery ended with the Civil War, did it not? So can we, like, GET OVER that whole slavery thing, too? If the Civil War was about slavery, then the slaves won, so can their descendants maybe quit acting like sore winners?

Apparently not, at least if the powers that be have chosen you as a runway model in the pity parade.

On the day they shot down the Rebel license plate, the same DMV panel approved a plate honoring the Buffalo Soldiers, all-black cavalry units who played a big hand in the systematic slaughter, torture, and clearing-out of the “Indian savages” mentioned in the Texas secession declaration.

So the winners not only get to write history and dictate the narrative and wallow in their ancestors’ suffering—they get the license plates, too. History is funny that way. Some are commanded to get over it, while others are instructed to never forget.

If you’re going to do something as extreme, impetuous, and possibly ill-considered as setting yourself on fire, it would at least make sense to do it in the name of some higher cause.

So far this year, eleven Tibetan Buddhists have torched their skinny little yellow Buddhist bodies to protest Chinese restrictions on their religious rights, reportedly leading some Chinese riot police to carry fire extinguishers. The most recent self-immolation happened on Thursday when a Buddhist nun in Sichuan Province went down in self-inflicted flames alongside a public road.

The Tibetan nun’s self-barbecuing comes on the flaming heels of a Pakistani’s red-hot self-extinction in front of the Parliament House in Islamabad on October 25 and a group of a dozen disabled Egyptians who on October 31, despite their disabilities, threatened that they were physically able to set themselves aflame and “ignite a second revolution” if government officials failed to listen to their demands about enabling the disabled’s abilities to have “rights” or something.

It is widely agreed that the flashpoint of this year’s much-ballyhooed Arab Spring was last December’s gasoline-soaked auto-incineration of humble Tunisian fruit-and-veggie vendor Mohamed Bouazizi, whose bold act inspired copycat politico-Islamic self-immolators in Algeria, Mauritania, Syria, Saudi Arabia, and Egypt.

Lighting a fire under one’s own ass for political purposes was a hallowed practice amid Soviet-bloc protesters protesting against the Soviets blocking their ability to protest. The most famous (they’ve named streets after him and written songs about him) was Jan Palach, who in January of 1969 self-cremated in defiance of the Soviets’ Occupy Czechoslovakia movement. It took Palach three days to die in the hospital, during which he cautioned his supporters against self-immolation because if you survive, it’s REALLY PAINFUL. A month later, another Czech ignored his advice and self-incinerated at the precise spot where Palach had. Preceding Palach’s auto-bonfire by four months was the highly public suicide of Polish soldier Ryszard Siwiec, who lit himself ablaze in front of an estimated 100,000 witnesses at a Warsaw stadium, also in protest of the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia.

Perhaps history’s most famous incident of political self-immolation was 1963’s pictorially iconic self-oxidation of Vietnamese Buddhist monk Thich Quang Duc, who soaked himself with petrol and roasted himself like a marshmallow while sitting motionless in the middle of a busy Saigon street. Legend—a very kooky legend—has it that Duc’s heart would not burn and is being kept in a safebox at the Reserve Bank of Vietnam. Although Duc was protesting South Vietnam’s persecution of Buddhists, dozens more Buddhist monks would exit this earthly plane amid self-imposed balls of fire throughout the 1960s to illustrate their opposition to the Vietnam War in what may be the most flagrantly psychotic manner that a human being can illustrate their opposition to something. Multiple starry-eyed American peaceniks in the 1960s followed suit, turning themselves into charcoal to illustrate their belief that the Vietnam War was not groovy at all.

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Pacifist protesters have continued to torch themselves in opposition to the First Gulf War as well as the Iraq War. People have used their bodies as ideological kindling to make points about environmental issues, taxes, and even to oppose the Vatican’s stance on homosexuality, giving a vibrant new literal meaning to the term “flaming fag.”

Self-immolation is often more religious than political, with a long tradition centered chiefly in Hinduism and a splinter sect of the Russian Orthodox Church.

As far back as 316 BC, Greek observers noted how certain Indian wives sacrificed themselves atop their husbands’ funeral pyres. Known as sati, the practice was finally made illegal in 1829 by India’s British occupiers. It is estimated that merely in the fifteen years that preceded the British ban, around 8,000 grieving Hindu widows indulged in self-pyromania. Although still illegal in India, it’s estimated that the giant nation of one billion toll-free computer-software support-line operators saw 1,451 self-immolations in 2000 and 1,584 in 2001.

From the late 1600s to the late 1800s, a staggering 20,000 or so members of a Russian Orthodox splinter sect known as the Old Believers toasted themselves to death, often locking themselves in wooden church buildings and committing “fire baptism” en masse. In the mid-1800s, another Russian lunatic sect known as the Soshigateli, AKA the “self-burners,” burned an estimated 1,700 or more of themselves.

We suppose it’s good to believe in something. But is it good to believe in it that much? And is it worth dying for the cause of a better future if you won’t be around to enjoy it? What’s the purpose of “taking one for the team” if you’ll miss being sprayed with champagne in the clubhouse?

There ain’t no mistakin’ it—setting oneself ablaze, especially, say, in Times Square on New Year’s Eve or at the 50-yard-line during the Super Bowl, is a real attention-getter. It’s a very extreme example of what a Certified Social Worker might call “acting-out behavior.”

Way to go, drama queen. We get it. You are NOT bluffing. This convinces us WAY more than if you had only given up donuts for Lent. We may not agree with your cause, but pardon us for questioning your sincerity.

Your sanity is another matter.

Sitting there amid the flames that are licking away at their very existence, has any of these self-immolators ever thought, “Whoa—BAD decision! Should NOT have set myself on fire! What the HELL was I thinking?” And of the ones who survived, how many of them lie wrapped up like a mummy in the ICU thinking, “I am the biggest asshole that ever lived”?

Ultimately, what’s worth more—one’s body or one’s ideas? It’s best to take it on a case-by-case-basis. It depends on the body. And the ideas.

The seven billion huddled residents of this shimmering, twinkling, spinning orb undoubtedly performed millions of kind acts and noble deeds over the past week. The hungry were fed, the naked were clothed, and numberless innocently squeaking kittens were rescued from trees.

But unless the benefactor is a politician or an entertainer, such uplifting tales of selfless largesse rarely make headlines. People would rather read about what’s rotten. Left unattended and undisciplined, most souls fly straight toward the gutter. The media industry’s motto is “If it bleeds, it leads”—and if it doesn’t, nobody reads.

The following ten stories all made the news over the past week. As if stabbing the life from our lungs with an icepick, they all punctured holes through our faith in humanity.

FOUR OBESE TWENTY-SOMETHING NEBRASKANS CHARGED WITH FORCING TWO BOYS TO SLEEP IN WIRE DOG CAGES
Police in North Platte, NE, arrested a quartet of inexcusably corpulent young adults after a neighbor complained to authorities of squalid conditions at their trailer home. Upon investigating, a police lieutenant said he found “trash, dirty clothing, food, and animal feces and urine” throughout the rickety abode. He also found two boys, 3 and 5, sleeping on a ratty mattress inside “a 30-by-42-inch wire dog kennel” that had been wired shut to prevent their escape. The boys’ mother,  Ashly Clark, tried explaining it was the only way to keep her sallow young pups from crawling out the trailer window at night. At least the boys showed the good judgment to repeatedly attempt escaping their domicile.

ZIMBABWE MAN CLAIMS PROSTITUTE TRANSFORMED INTO A DONKEY OVERNIGHT
At 4 AM last Sunday morning when police in Zimbabwe chanced upon 28-year-old Sunday Moyo “performing a sex act on a donkey” he’d tied by the neck to a tree in his yard, he claimed that what appeared to the naked eye to have been born a donkey was, verily, a human prostitute he’d hired for $20 at a club the night before. At some point during their wanton marathon of uninhibited consortium, the woman willfully transmogrified into a domestic ass—or at least that’s how Mr. Moyo recalls it. On Monday, Sunday told a judge, “I only came to know that I was being intimate with a donkey when I got arrested.” He also says he suspects he made the same transformation himself. “I think I am also a donkey. I do not know what happened when I left the bar, but I am seriously in love with (the) donkey,” he told the judge. Moyo’s alibi was not accepted at face value, and the court ordered a psychiatric examination for him.

MAN FIREBOMBS GEORGIA TACO BELL FOR NOT PUTTING ENOUGH MEAT IN HIS CHALUPAS
Early Sunday morning after purchasing a pair of extra-large chalupas from a Taco Bell in Albany, GA, a man described in a police report as having “a voice tone that made [the restaurant’s female manager] believe that he was of the Caucasian descent” phoned to complain that his chalupas had contained an unforgivably meager measure of meat. After the manager explained that the restaurant was closing and they would therefore be unable to make restitution, the irate patron reportedly told her, “You must be one of them niggers up there. That’s all right, I’ll just come and redecorate the place.” His redecoration consisted of lobbing a “melting plastic bottle with a liquid substance” redolent of gasoline at the drive-thru window, causing a small fire. The meat-hungry firebomber’s identity is still unknown.

JUDGE DENIED PENSION AFTER USING PENIS PUMP WHILE ON THE BENCH
The Oklahoma Supreme Court denied former Sooner State judge Donald Thompson his retirement benefits due to his 2006 felony conviction for repeatedly using a penis pump on his naughty bits while hearing testimony in open court. Thompson will continue receiving a pension for his 1974-80 tour of duty as a state legislator, during which, to our knowledge, he never once got caught using a penis pump.

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SEVEN-YEAR-OLD BOY JOINS GIRL SCOUTS
After a spate of squabbling and quibbling, the Colorado Girl Scouts have finally agreed to allow seven-year-old Bobby Montoya to join their ranks and sell their cookies. Bobby’s differently surnamed mother, Felisha Archuleta, says Bobby, who still has a boy’s name and a boy’s genitals, has been fond of “girl stuff” since he was two. (Presumably he was as butch as Dick Butkus prior to that age.) Bobby claims to have been bullied for dressing like a girl, and by now we’ve been instructed to believe that his tormentors are ignorant and hateful bigots rather than children acting in accordance with their natural instincts. It is clear that they, and not Bobby, are confused.

WOMAN ALLEGEDLY STABS BOYFRIEND FOR CHEATING AT MONOPOLY
A rumpled, wart-covered, rancid-looking 60-year-old Santa Fe woman named Laura Chavez was arrested for reputedly smashing her boyfriend Clyde “Butch” Smith over the head with a glass bottle and then slashing him with a kitchen knife because, according to her 10-year-old grandson, she suspected him of “cheating at Monopoly.” Police say they found Chavez sitting under her porch drenched in blood and boasting that she “fucked him up.”

WOMAN GIVES BIRTH AS LIVE “PERFORMANCE ART”
Nothing portends a happy, well-adjusted life more than one’s mother squeezing your slime-covered newborn body out from between her legs for all the world to see as part of an art installation called “The Birth of Baby X.” Well, there’s that, plus naming you “Ajax Kotak” as if you were a feminine-hygiene product. In front of art-world witnesses, Li’l Ajax entered this earthly plane Tuesday morning at Brooklyn’s Microscope Gallery. His mother, Marni Kotak, explains that she is “driven to hold onto an authentic personal experience in a world that has essentially become consumed by an unreal hyper-reality.” She then added she sometimes fantasizes she’s a Russian spy named “Marnitov Cocktail.”

SOUTH AFRICAN GIRL DIES AFTER BEING BURNED ALIVE IN “SATANIC RITUAL”
While frolicking with friends near a swimming pool last Friday in Johannesburg, 18-year-old Kirsty Theologo was allegedly bound, doused with gasoline, and set ablaze by four young males in what they claimed was a “satanic ritual.” When Kirsty’s 16-year-old friend attempted to extinguish the flames by rolling her in sand, she, too, was torched. Theologo had been in a coma with third- and fourth-degree burns for nearly a week until she finally gave up the ghost this Friday.

TWO WOMEN PLEAD GUILTY IN PHILADELPHIA “HOUSE OF HORRORS” ABORTION-CLINIC CASE
In January, authorities arrested Dr. Kermit Gosnell and nine employees at his West Philadelphia clinic on murder charges for performing illegal late-term abortions in which at least seven babies were born alive and stabbed to death with scissors. Sherry West, 52, who allegedly was paid $8 to $10 in cash per hour to perform ultrasounds and give anesthesia while often failing to wear gloves despite the fact that she was infected with hepatitis C, pled guilty to administering a fatal anesthetic dose to a 19-year-old female immigrant. Andrea Moton, 34, entered a guilty plea for stabbing one baby to death “that she had pulled from a toilet where it had been delivered.” She also snapped cellphone pictures of an oversized 30-week-old fetus she’d murdered.

LOHAN FAMILY CONTINUES TO EXIST
Except for drugs, we still don’t know what Lindsay Lohan does. Last week during one of her seemingly thousands of court appearances, she looked as if she’d burned her face on a giant meth pipe. Her estranged father Michael, ever eager to wriggle into the spotlight despite a deafening lack of discernible talent or redeeming personal attributes, told a TV reporter his baby girl looked that way because she was “smoking a pipe with meth or crack.” Michael Lohan appeared in court on Tuesday to face charges that he’d assaulted his girlfriend for refusing to perform oral sex on him. Mere hours after being released from jail, Mr. Lohan violated a no-contact order with his girlfriend. When police arrived at his hotel on Thursday to arrest him, he jumped from the third-floor balcony and fell 30 feet, reportedly breaking his foot. He told arresting officers he’s “a sucker” and “an idiot.” Fair enough.

Pope Benedict XVI

On Monday the Vatican released a document with the unwieldy title “Towards Reforming the International Financial and Monetary Systems in the Context of a Global Public Authority.” Although The Bible counsels true believers to “Love not the world, neither the things that are in the world,” this new 18-page broadsheet unabashedly dives headfirst into the murky world of global finance and global government. It urges that a “central world bank” and a “global public authority” be established to right the world’s wrongs using the winged iron hammer of “a supranational authority” mercilessly wielding “universal jurisdiction.”

Some choice passages:

The economic and financial crisis which the world is going through calls everyone, individuals and peoples, to examine in depth the principles and the cultural and moral values at the basis of social coexistence….If no solutions are found to the various forms of injustice, the negative effects that will follow on the social, political and economic level will be destined to create a climate of growing hostility and even violence, and ultimately undermine the very foundations of democratic institutions, even the ones considered most solid.

In his 2009 encyclical Caritas in Veritate, Pope Benedict XVI tooted pretty much the same One World flute:

In the face of the unrelenting growth of global interdependence, there is a strongly felt need, even in the midst of a global recession, for a reform of the United Nations Organization, and likewise of economic institutions and international finance, so that the concept of the family of nations can acquire real teeth. One also senses the urgent need to find innovative ways of implementing the principle of the responsibility to protect and of giving poorer nations an effective voice in shared decision-making. This seems necessary in order to arrive at a political, juridical and economic order which can increase and give direction to international cooperation for the development of all peoples in solidarity. To manage the global economy; to revive economies hit by the crisis; to avoid any deterioration of the present crisis and the greater imbalances that would result; to bring about integral and timely disarmament, food security and peace; to guarantee the protection of the environment and to regulate migration: for all this, there is urgent need of a true world political authority….

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In a 2009 article, Taki’s Mag contributor Thomas Woods noted that such statements contradict earlier papal non-interventionist sentiments such as this one expressed by Pope Leo XIII (1878-1903):

If I were to pronounce on any single matter of a prevailing economic problem, I should be interfering with the freedom of men to work out their own affairs….[M]en must realize in deeds those things, the principles of which have been placed beyond dispute…. [T]hese things one must leave to the solution of time and experience.

Woods elaborates:

[W]ithin Catholic tradition there is ample testimony to the wickedness of monetary debasement, fractional-reserve banking, and numerous other institutional commonplaces we hardly give a second thought….[T]here is no moral or economic case for the monetary system under which we are forced to live—a system that has never been introduced voluntarily but has always been enforced by violence, with the police empowered to suppress alternatives. The insidious nature of the government’s monopoly on money becomes even clearer when a currency degenerates into hyperinflation, all known examples of which have occurred under monopoly fiat-money systems. Short of a completely state-run system, it is as far from a free market as one can imagine.

The system we have now involves a government-privileged central bank with a monopoly on the creation of legal-tender money, charged with watching over a cartel of ostensibly private but also state-privileged commercial banks. Its debasement of money makes it very difficult for people to save for the future without having to become speculators of one kind or another. A hard-money system, on the other hand, permitted the average person to save for the future simply by accumulating precious-metal coins, which, back in the days when they served as money, held or increased their value over time. Who today would save for the future by piling up Federal Reserve Notes? Society’s most vulnerable now must enter the stock market or take other kinds of risks just to hold on to their wealth. Is this not a moral issue?….

The monopoly central bank institutionalizes the problem of moral hazard. There is no physical limitation on the creation of additional paper money. For that reason, major market actors know there is no physical constraint on bailing them out in emergencies.

(Read Thomas Woods’s original 2009 article HERE.)