21 Feb 2005
Women Sue Over Gorilla's Breast 'Fetish'

Personally, I'd like to nominate Koko as Grand Marshall for this years running of the Indianapolis 500. He seems to have the unoffical slogan down pat...

AP - Two fired caretakers for Koko, the world-famous sign language speaking gorilla, have sued their former bosses, claiming they were pressured to expose their breasts as a way of bonding with the 300-pound simian.

(link) [Yahoo! News: Top Stories]

ASL images via Where.com

00:00 /Humor | 0 comments | permanent link

State nails smokers who didn't pay taxes

Here's a foot in the door for you: if they can subpoena records from tobacco sites and collect sales and excise taxes, what's to stop them from doing the same to, say Amazon or even eBay?

Purchases made from off-line, paper catalogs have been sales and use tax exempt for years: why the difference if your catalog is digital?

Smokers who have bought cigarettes online are starting to get notices from the state to pay up the $2-per-pack cigarette tax they avoided.

(link) [Detroit Free Press]

00:00 /Politics | 0 comments | permanent link

Controversy generates online war of words

Right-wingers are often contemptuous of the "Main Stream Media", hereinafter referred to as the "MSM", accusing them of a "liberal bias" in all of their reports. Yet somehow, when a left-wing academic makes offensive and absurd statements it gets all over the MSM, but a case like this never rises from the local rags.

Ward Churchill's asinine remarks about 9/11 have been rightly condemned by all and sundry. But his freedom to make them has remained sacrosanct. This guy, Hermann Hoppe, was actually reprimanded by his university employer for his bit of jackassedness, although the reprimand was later withdrawn after a campaign from the blogosphere. But who is Hermann Hoppe and what did he step in?

In a covenant founded for the purpose of protecting family and kin, there can be no tolerance toward those habitually promoting lifestyles incompatible with this goal. They -- the advocates of alternative, non-family and kin-centered lifestyles such as, for instance, individual hedonism, parasitism, nature-environment worship, homosexuality, or communism -- will have to be physically removed from society, too, if one is to maintain a libertarian order.

Here's a self-described libertarian(!) calling for the "physical removal" of tree-huggers, commies and queers... kind of like a pacifist advocating nuclear war.

So if the MSM is left-wing, and so biased against the right, why didn't this little incident appear in headlines everywhere? Wouldn't it have been smarter for them, politically, to play up this bit of lunacy instead of Professor Churchill's off the wall screed? Are they just stupid?

I think the reality of the matter is that the MSM are naught but bloggers with printing presses and broadcasting facilities rather than PC's and networks. They call it like they see it: sometimes to the left, sometimes to the right, but, unlike many bloggers, trying to maintain some sense of reality through it all.

Curiously, journalists habitually rank right down there with lawyers in popular polls of least-respected professions. And gods know, I can't stomach most lawyers... but even I will have to admit that without journalists and lawyers doing their jobs, a free society would be an oxymoron.

This incident also shows how bloggers are becoming MSM - the impact on the university that caused them to (rightly) withdraw the reprimand was generated almost exclusively by bloggers. We are becoming MSM ourselves, and the sooner we realize this and begin to act with some approbity, the better off our society will be. There will always be a place for the rants and screeds that often comprise our personal web logs - but sooner or later some modicum of respectability has to creep in, too, or we will be rightly dismissed as irrelevant.

Lloyd Cohen hasn't been to Las Vegas in 13 years. He's never met UNLV professor Hans-Hermann Hoppe.

But when he saw a recent article about Hoppe's struggle to clear his record after UNLV administrators accused him of creating a hostile learning environment, Cohen, an economics and law professor at George Mason University in Fairfax, Va., became a sort of spokesman for him.

(link) [Las Vegas Review Journal]

00:00 /Politics | 0 comments | permanent link