By Mark | December 21, 2005
This just in from MM.com reader Brian Hunter….
The Soviet dictator Josef Stalin ordered the creation of Planet of the Apes-style warriors by crossing humans with apes, according to recently uncovered secret documents.
Moscow archives show that in the mid-1920s Russia’s top animal breeding scientist, Ilya Ivanov, was ordered to turn his skills from horse and animal work to the quest for a super-warrior.
According to Moscow newspapers, Stalin told the scientist: “I want a new invincible human being, insensitive to pain, resistant and indifferent about the quality of food they eat”…
(I know it sounds really terrifying, but this archival image that I found of a prototype creature really doesn’t look all that scarey, does it?)
What if, instead a nuclear arms race, the second World War had spawned a human-hybrid race? I wonder if we could have come up with something better than just plain gorilla-men, like giant gorilla-men with owl heads and octopus arms?
By Mark | December 20, 2005
The extremists on the far-right are defending Bush and his spying on American citizens (I heard Rush asking a caller today what good his civil rights would be if he were killed by a terrorist), but some former Republican loyalists are beginning to see what’s going on. This afternoon on the Diane Rehm Show, Bruce Fein, constitutional scholar and former Associate Deputy Attorney General under President Reagan, said that Bush is claiming “more power than King George III had at the time of the revolution, in asserting the theory that anything the president thinks is helpful to fighting the war against terrorism he can do.” (Audio is available here.)
Senator Barbara Boxer agrees, and goes so far as to say that what he’s done appears to be an impeachable offense. In preperation for just such an opportunity, Howard Dean announced earlier today that he has filed a Freedom of Information Act request to get at all the relevant White House and NSA documents. Here’s a clip from Dean’s letter to his supporters:
…By now you have probably heard the news that George Bush is using the National Security Agency to conduct surveillance on American citizens without the consent of any court. After initially refusing to confirm the story, the President has admitted to personally overseeing this domestic spying program for years and he says he intends to continue the program.
These actions explicitly violate a law designed to protect US citizens. But the administration says that other laws somehow allow for this unprecedented use of a foreign intelligence agency to spy on Americans right here in the United States. According to reports, political appointees in the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel wrote still-classified legal opinions laying out the supposed justification for this program…
The most disgusting thing of all (well, maybe not the most disgusting thing of all) is that the New York Times knew about Bush’s illegal eavesdropping before the 2004 election and chose not to run the story. (They’re only running the story now, it seems, because one of their reporters is getting ready to release the information in a book… According to Newsweek, Bush called the Editor and Publisher of the Times to Washington last week to ask that they continue to sit on the story, but by that point it had become clear that his request was motivated less by concern over ongoing terrorism investigations that could be compromised than by the President’s fear of being exposed as a liar and a criminal.)
If lying about getting your cock sucked is an impeachable offense, I find it hard to believe that lying about something as serious as this wouldn’t qualify as well… At the very least, I thnk that most Americans would agree that this calls for a Congressional investigation into the actions of the administration and the role of the NSA. Let’s just hope that the American people don’t allow this story to disappear in the hussle and bussle of the holiday season.
By Mark | December 20, 2005
I didn’t think it was possible, but my dad was able to take my recent zombie-related activities and interpret them as further evidence of my rapid descent down the icy slope toward Communism. I tried to explain to him that the zombie movement knows no ideology, and that I was marching right along-side undead Bush supporters, but he persisted, ultimately presenting me with this video footage proving conclusively that zombies and Democrats are one in the same. (As an aside, I should mention that I have always hated Bob Hope.)
By Mark | December 19, 2005
With the President’s approval, the National Security Agency (NSA) has been spying on American citizens without oversight. They’ve been doing it since 2002, but Bush has just admitted it. (You know, I really didn’t believe the story that came out a few days ago about Bush saying to his advisors that the Constitution is “just a goddamned piece of paper,” but now I’m starting to wonder if there might be some truth to it.)
I guess from now on we should all just assume that we’re being watched all of the time… Did you see in today’s news that a student at U-Mass was visited at home by federal agents after requesting an inter-library loan of Chairman Mao’s little red book? That’s not really the kind of thing you’d expect from a free society, is it?
Of course Cheney says that if Clinton had allowed warrantless surveillance 9/11 never would have happened. As the folks at Think Progress point out, however, that’s absolute bullshit. Here’s a blurb from their post on the subject:
The NSA “already had the capacity to read your mail and your e-mail and listen to your telephone conversations. All it had to do was obtain a warrant from a special court created for this purpose. The burden of proof for obtaining a warrant was relaxed a bit after 9/11, but even before the attacks the court hardly ever rejected requests.” Indeed, from 1979 to 2002, the FISA court issued 15,264 surveillance warrants. Not a single warrant application was rejected.
But we needed to make it easier… eliminating any written documentation, as well as oversight.
I guess maybe we should just be happy that we aren’t being tortured… at least not on U.S. soil.
(note: This post was brought to you courtesy of the brand new They Might Be Giants podcast.)
By Mark | December 19, 2005
Can someone please translate this page for me? I generally don’t care too much what people say about me and my projects, but nothing I’ve ever done has gotten written about in a ‘squiggly’ language before and I’m curious.
update: The best attempt at a translation comes from Douglas Skinner in New York: “Mark Maynard, of Zobieclaus, Missouri, leads the members of his church in a holiday parade. He and his congregation have dressed as Pilgrims, the legendary founders of their country, to show support for President Bush and his policies.”
