Scots - The Jews Of Britain?

A British coroner, summarizing his findings in the death of Captain James Philippson, who died in a firefight with Taleban fighters, concluded that British soldiers in Afghanistan have less equipment than the Taleban. He lambasted the British government for its failure to properly equip troops for combat, concluding: "It's not really the Ministry of Defense (MoD) who are responsible - it's that miserable, harsh, parsimonious Scotsman we now have as prime minister who starved the MoD of funds."

I don't disagree with his findings. British troops are woefully under-equipped, just like US troops. I'm just wondering how Gordon Brown's ethnicity made its way into his report. Try re-reading that quote and substituting 'Jew' for 'Scotsman'. Miserable? Harsh? Parsimonious? They sound like the dehumanizing words commonly used in anti-semitic rants. Are Scots the Jews of Britain?

EricDaneCancergate Update!

According to US Weekly,

Eric Dane's "fight against cancer" was not nearly as dramatic as it sounds.

"Eric Dane does not have cancer," his rep tells Us Weekly in its latest issue, on newsstands now. "He spoke with OK! to clear up some inaccuracies they were planning to run. His story certainly does not compare with those actually suffering from the disease."

Dane, a source tells Us was "mortified" by the cover. "Never in a million years would he have expected they would exploit his story," says the source. "He's considering legal action."

Thank God. Now we can live again.

Cancer's Worse When You're Pretty

The intertubes are burning up with the story of actor Eric Dane's grueling cancer ordeal and how his brave battle with the deadly illness has caused him to lose ten pounds. If you actually read it, his dermatologist sprayed a little liquid nitrogen on a crusty patch on his lip. Cancer Ordeal! I had six of them frozen off and two cut out last Saturday. I looked fine a couple of days later. Where's my ten pound weight loss and article on IMDb? As one BoingBoing reader put it, I'm not hot and I don't have a television show, so nobody cares. No disagreement there, but when did a little liquid nitrogen spray become a cancer ordeal?

Pimp My Child

MSNBC journalist David Shuster was suspended last week for commenting that Hillary Clinton's campaign had "pimped out" Clinton's daughter, Chelsea. Shuster groveled repeatedly, if unconvincingly, and Hillary sent a brief, dry note of distaste to the network threatening to boycott future MSNBC debates. So what's the big deal? I use 'pimp' all the time. But unlike Shuster, I use it in a way which corresponds with its actual meaning.

In current usage, pimp has two meanings. To pimp an object (or person) is to adorn it in a manner befitting a pimp, preferably a pimp from the 1970s, or by extension to ornament with as much useless bling and gadgetry as can be financially contrived. MTV's Pimp My Ride, starring the impossibly congenial Xzibit, turns sad, dusty, old cars into blingalicious pimpmobiles.

Pimp also means to promote or sell a product or person. When I distribute fliers or attend an event to push my yoga classes, I am pimping myself and my business. Confusing the natural subject and object of the verb 'to pimp' lies at the heart of the tragically unhip Shuster's mistake. A pimp promotes his whores. A whore does not promote her pimp, although she may enrich him. The Clinton campaign is not pimping Chelsea. Chelsea is pimping her mother, selling a product to the superdelegates and, hopefully, America. Is it just to punish Shuster for using a reference to prostitution? No. For using slang that he doesn't understand? Unquestionably yes.

Junior bin Laden - UPDATE!

Osama bin Laden's son (maybe), Omar, appeared on the Today Show this morning with his lovely wife, Morticia. From the few seconds that I watched before I covered my face with my hands and stabbed blindly at the mute button, I've come to the realization that, whoever he is, he's doing a brilliant performance tribute to the late comedian Andy Kaufman. But he still has a great rack.

Since I'm Going to Hell Anyway

Here's Stalin in 1902. Do I even need to point out that we would hit that so hard that we would leave dents?

Young Mitt Makes the Cut!

In our continuing series of youthful photos of the candidates, Mitt Romney was a looker. A little stiff, but we'd still hit it.

Young Barack Obama

He looks better now. No hit. Sorry, buddy.

Rudy Giuliani

Young, old, male, female: however you want to present him, you couldn't pay us to hit that.

It’s Not Easy Being Green

I just sat down to fill out my ballot for the California Primary Election. That’s pretty easy for most people: Clinton or Obama? Huckabee, McCain or Romney? But not for me, because I’m a registered member of the Green Party. Which means that I’ve never heard of any of the candidates, except of course Ralph Nader. I know that I’m not voting for Ralph. Susan Sarandon showed us how that works when she and Ralph teamed up to throw the election to George W. Bush and introduce the US to totalitarianism. Screw that.

So why am I registered Green, you ask. Good question. I like the idea that there should be more choices than Democratic and Republican, and that can only happen if somebody actually supports the other parties. Don’t get me wrong. I would never actually vote Green in the real election. That’s crack talk. But in the primary, I don’t have a choice. I get a Green ballot.

So here I am faced with a list of people that I’ve never heard of. I went to the Green Party website, but that was useless. So I went to Wikipedia and followed links to the candidates’ websites. One of them seemed to be running for governor of East Tennessee or North Virginia and the first plank on his platform was developing the local film industry. Next!

Another one had just switched over from the Dems and had a pretty extensive political history. I couldn’t really figure out her platform from her website. She had, however, introduced a bill in congress to investigate Tupac Shakur’s death. Don’t get me wrong. I like Tupac. In fact, I was playing a Tupac CD during this whole mess. But introducing a bill like that seems a bit frivolous.

So I finally decided on Kat Swift. Her website actually told me what she thinks. She has a big, fat paragraph on GLBT rights. And she seems like a nice young lady. I’m still going to vote for Hillary in the election, but I’m happy that I found a reasonably quixotic choice for the primary.

Just To Be Fair

Here's Ralph Nader in the 1960s. And, yes, we would hit that, too. In fact, we'd hit it pretty hard.

Junior bin Laden

Here's Osama bin Laden's son, Omar. Maybe. He claims to be Osama bin Laden's son and Osama bin Laden has 19 children, so it's possible. But not definite. Omar, 26, currently resides in Cairo, but his British wife Zaina (nee Jane Felix-Browne), 52, wants to bring him to Britain. The heavily be-dreadlocked Omar aspires to be a goodwill ambassador between Al Qaeda and the West. Kumbaya. I hope he succeeds despite that hairdo. In the meantime, we may not know exactly who he is, but we do know for sure that he has a great rack.

Roostersucker!

I had the opportunity yesterday to type the word cunt and post it online. One doesn’t generally have a lot of good reasons to do that, but I took the chance. In responding to a post on BoingBoing about a broken, life-sized Elvis doll, one reader said “He looks like a c*nt.” Because, apparently, replacing the ‘u’ with an ‘*’ makes it all better. What? Are we 10 years old? Is saying, “F*ck you!” somehow less offensive than saying, “Fuck you!”? I don’t think so. His post was rude, misogynist and possibly homophobic. The asterisk just made it juvenile and cowardly as well.

So why is ‘cunt’ such a hot button word? At some point, it was just the normal word for lady parts. Why has it been empowered as hate speech? Nobody thinks twice about calling a man a prick. If genitalia are insulting (which is weird enough – try living without them), why are women’s so much more hateful to invoke? I guess that it’s just prima facie misogyny.

And what’s up with respectable words turning dirty? I was born in the Year of the Cock (yeah, baby!) But when I look it up now, it’s become the Year of the Rooster. Cock is no longer preferred usage. Pretty soon, tub and tile caulk will become “self-adhesive transparent sealant” so your plumber doesn’t have to admit that his fingers smell like caulk at the end of the day.

I suppose that ideas about obscenity go in and out of fashion. In Victorian times ‘leg’ was suggestive: tables and chairs had ‘limbs’. I say take your chances and use the whole language, but if you say, “Shut up your bitch, there’s a beautiful pair of tits in that bush”, you’d better be bird watching in Britain with your neighbor and her dog.

Rise of the Drones

Did you think that half of babies are girls, the other half boys? Well, they’re not. There are about 106 boys born for every 100 girls. In theory. In reality, the ratio is quite different in some countries. In India and China, which comprise about half the world’s population, far more boys than girls see the light of day. In Punjab, for example, there are only 793 girls born for every 1,000 boys.

The missing girls are victims of female infanticide. In some cultures, girls are seen as a drain on the system, boys as contributory. Up to about fifty years ago, female infants in such societies were left outside to be eaten by wild animals. Now, they can be detected in utero and conveniently aborted. Of course, it’s illegal, but nobody cares. It’s the way it’s done.

This dearth of women has already led to a shortage of marriage partners in societies in which marriage is the backbone of existence. We’ve all seen enough Discovery Channel specials on mammalian behavior to know what happens to disaffected males who are consistently denied the opportunity to mate. They become rogues, angry and violent. And that is happening now to human males throughout the world.

Enter The Gay Gene. Everybody’s looking for it. It’s El Dorado and the Holy Grail for quite a few scientists. If there is a gay gene, and we isolate it, how long before we start aborting gay fetuses? Cultures that don’t value women don’t usually cotton to fags and dykes either.

Can you see the train wreck coming? A world of heterosexual men. No females to mate with and no inclination to display a little brotherly love. It will make a great sitcom: (un)Married With(out) Children.

Drool: It's the New Spooge!

Remember when drooling on yourself in front of somebody was embarrassing? Not any more. I was perusing some male erotica (take a deep breath and get over it), when I came across this (tightly cropped for your virtue) picture of porn star Steve Cruz, with a trail of loogie hanging from his mouth onto his chest hair. What's the message here? You make me so hot that I can't control my lips? All my secretions are yours to lick? The dentist gave me too much novocaine? Spit is back, baby!

John McCain, Prisoner of Politics

Remember when John McCain was the Republican that you didn’t really hate? He was a centrist: he supported abortion rights, campaign finance reform and holding government to some ethical standards. He said exactly what was on his mind even if it was impolitic. He let Comedy Central follow him around and make fun of him, taking it all in good humor. If we had to have a Republican President, please let it be him.

Those days are gone. He has reversed his position on virtually every topic. Abortions: Reverse Roe v. Wade! Gay marriage: Constitutional prohibition! Confederate flag: Fly it! Torture: Assume the position! Iraq: Nuke ‘em! He pulled out of his own campaign finance reform bill. IT HAD HIS NAME ON IT!

So let’s get in the Wayback Machine and travel to 1967. McCain was captured by North Vietnam and held as a POW for five and a half years, tortured regularly for two years. He was beaten two or three times per week, even had bones and teeth broken. And in all of that, he never cooperated with his captors. His refusal to be released, unless all the POWs who preceded him in captivity were also released, was considered remarkable even by the North Vietnamese.

So what the fuck is up now? How can you stand up to torture by enemy captors, then spread your legs for the religious right? Is being President so important that you’re willing to be remembered not as a brave man of integrity, but as Mister Flip Flop? I wouldn’t have voted for a Republican anyway, but it would have been nice to have someone in the opposition who wasn’t a sell-out. You piss me off, John McCain. You took your status as a hero and flushed it down the toilet. Shame on you.

John McCain in the 1960s

Ninety-nine and forty-four one-hundredths percent of gay men agree.

We would hit that!

The Truth About Lying

Is it bad to tell a lie? Conventional wisdom suggests that you should always tell the truth, but is that good advice? There are situations when lying is the right thing to do. When the Nazis bang on your door and ask if you’re hiding any Jews, you better not say yes. It might seem like a ridiculous example, but half the world lives under repressive, totalitarian regimes, where lying and survival are inseparable parts of everyday life. Even in what we’re calling democracies, society may be so racist or male dominated that subterfuge is survival. If you’re 16 and queer, and admitting it to your parents means getting kicked out on the street to hustle for a living, say what you need to say and don’t feel guilty about it.

I’m lucky. I’m white and male and grew up in a time and place where I could always tell the truth without having to face any real consequences. That’s true privilege. The opportunity to be honest, to be yourself without reprisal is the most fundamental human right, and the one that is most denied. I’m grateful for the privilege of honesty that I’ve enjoyed. That’s why I’m unwilling to condemn others for doing what they need to do.

And yet, lying can destroy you. When you lie for fun, to avoid petty inconveniences, to make friends, you lose your own truth. If there’s a lie that you should never tell, it’s the one that you tell yourself. It’s like voluntarily putting yourself in prison. The truth is the best tool that we have for fixing our lives. Don’t lie unless you have a good reason, be truthful with yourself about doing it, then forgive yourself and move on. Honest.

What’s Up with Buddhist Monks?

I’ve always had this idea that Buddhist monks and nuns lived a life of peaceful asceticism, wearing modest robes and generally being harmless. But in 2007, my assumptions were shattered by massive protests against the repressive Burmese junta – protests led by Buddhist monks. At one point, a few months before the protests became international news, monks kidnapped a group of officials and set their cars on fire. To paraphrase Ice Cube, “They picked the wrong Buddha to fuck wit.”

Of course, monastics in Buddhism are required to take quite a few vows relating to poverty, non-violence and other virtues, presumably including not kidnapping people and torching their cars. So who exactly are these worldly monks?

In the Western world, our knowledge of monks and nuns mostly stems from Roman Catholicism, maybe Eastern Orthodoxy if you live in a city with a large Russian population. Monastics in these traditions take their vows in adulthood and, for the most part, keep them for life. But this hasn’t always been true. In Medieval Europe, monasteries and convents were used as Extra Children Storage Facilities for the upper classes. Property was generally inherited by the eldest son. That left a lot of siblings to be disposed of, and monasteries provided bed and board, education and a dearth of opportunities for producing undesirable offspring. If the eldest son died, the next in line was pulled out of storage.

Buddhist monasticism often fulfills an analogous function in the modern world. Poor children can get a cheap education by joining the monastery at a young age. Huge numbers of regular folk take vows for a few weeks or a year in order to earn spiritual credit. When they’re done, they go back to sex, drugs and Rock & Roll. So when you read about Burmese monks setting things on fire, it’s not quite the same as Mother Teresa with a Molotov cocktail.

If burning cars don’t jive with your idea of Buddhism, how about rap music and fashion shows? In December 2007, Japanese monks and nuns held a fashion show at a major Tokyo temple. Monkish fashionistas hit the catwalk in decidedly un-Zen robes to a rap version of a Buddhist sutra.

What’s next in Buddhist monasticism? One quarter of monks in Southeast Asia smoke. Drinking and eating meat are common, though forbidden. Don’t even ask about celibacy. My fantasies about the secret lives of monks lie in ruins, but I guess it’s good to know that they’re just human like the rest of us.

Well, He's Hot!

A Russian gentleman snogging Stalin's portrait on his 128th birthday. He may have killed 60 million people, but who could resist those soulful eyes and that big, ticklish moustache?