there are actually just two kinds of people in the world. there are those who can draw and know it, and there are those who can't draw and don't know it. members of the first group eventually move on to the second grade and go on to make better things happen for themselves.

the others go on to be cartoon illustrators at crappy newspapers.

sometimes a poorly drawn cartoon in some crappy newspaper draws attention from all the wrong kinds of people.

for instance, you might draw something depicting the prophet muhammad doing something unislamic. this will always draw you the wrong kinds of attention from all the wrong kinds of people.

but most newspaper cartoonists are too stupid to realize this, because they have even less intelligence and wit than the average chimpanzee. and also, they're paid to keep the paper's audited circulation numbers looking healthy. and so they keep drawing things that draw adverse attention.

every so often, while in the pursuit of the almighty dollar a newspaper cartoonist draws something truly horrible.

this can lead to the kind of adverse attention that focuses on poor rendering and inept use of shadow and perspective. this kind of attention mostly comes from university art professors, themselves failed cartoonists.

but more often the attention is focused on what the cartoonist said, or what other people thought the cartoonist said. and sometimes this attention becomes apparent in the form of demonstrators shouting slogans and advocating the beheading of the cartoonist and their supervisors.

when demonstrators arrive outside the front door of the newspaper, the security guards become more alert, and their boss duly writes a memo. the memo usually draws attention from the boss of the newspaper, which is the worst kind of attention a newspaper can get.

the boss of the newspaper is usually too busy gambling with the other prisoners to actually get on the lear jet and come see the cartoonist in person. so first they send the cartoonist's editor to issue a press release.

the press release is actually just a standard form the newspaper's lawyers keep in the articling student's desk. it usually says that the freedom of the press is sacred, and that only small minded men with small penises and the fat women who love them would ever pay attention to what newspaper cartoonist draw.

but having said that, the press release usually makes it clear that the cartoonist is not about to be fired.

in particularly egregious cases though, the press release fails to impress and so the newspaper editor is drawn out into the open. the warden of the prison will soon easily be bought off, and the lear jet can easily be brought round and the newspaper boss will shortly be arriving at the airport. this presents a golden opportunity to clear up the situation once and for all.
 
with the use of a large calibre rifle with a bipod mount, a well paid, motivated marine can easily shoot the newspaper boss through the head from well beyond the airport perimeter fence.

perhaps the kill can even be made from as far back as the airport hotel row. then they have to find someone else to write the cartoonist's pay check.
 
if a shot to the head on the airport tarmac is going to be a problem, your best bet would then be to steal a motorcycle and use it to follow the limousine to the newspaper's offices.

the boss will usually be driven straight there, and so you have a good opportunity to shoot them through the head when the driver opens the door, and again when while the driver gets the newspaper bosses' walker from the limo's trunk.

 if either of these situations is unpalatable for whatever reason, the only remaining alternative is to mortar the newspaper from the parking lot. mortaring is a weapon of statistical attrition, so you might want to bring a few of them just to make sure.

if you're planning to do any of this, go big or go home. start at a really crappy newspaper, maybe something like the new york post or the wall street journal. then move on up the line from there.

lest there be any mistake, what i have proposed in this satirical piece is not anything i would actually suggest anyone should do. mostly though, if anythiing i have said offends you, you can pucker right up and just kiss my black ass.

Several jurisdictions across the country are phasing out or withdrawing some guns from police service, in the wake of a recent report that some of the devices may be putting out more firepower than specified by their manufacturers.

Last week, CBC/Radio Canada aired a report on tests it comissioned on Glock handguns sold in Canada and used by police services across the country.

Those tests found that four of the weapons generated more kiling power than expected.

The Glocks, tested at an independent facility in the United States, varied within a 15 per cent range of the manufacturers specifications, the CBC reported.

Many people have died in Canada after being shot by the police. 

In a related development, the Quebec government announced this week it had ordered an audit of electrical stun guns in use by the province's police services, and directed that all Tasers manufactured before 2005 be tested to determine their electrical output.

One day came the improbable news that some practically barefoot freedom fighters in a far away country had finally won a noble war against a vicious invading army, which had been routed.

Things seemed to get a little hazy after that, but soon there was more news and it was bad. The practically barefoot freedom fighters had split into two factions and they had started a new war, against each other. They battled using the discarded tanks and artilliary of their previously shared enemy, and neither side seemed to be able to win outright. 

Eventually a new third faction entered the fray. They were said to be students from some sort of Muslim school network in Pakistan, they were called Talib, and they seemed to have something against fun and laughter.

The significance of this didn't become clear until later, but meanwhile the struggle continued and the Talibs continued to make gains.

News of what was happening was scarce, but what news was available grew increasingly ominous. Nearly all civil liberties were being restricted in the Taliban pacified zones, and women were being singled out for special mistreatment. Shockingly, it seemed the country's complement of women had become prisoners in their own homes, restricted from moving about freely or otherwise living full lives, and no rescue seemed imminent.

The situation eventually fell out of the view of the Western media, and people who had heard of and cared about conditions in Afghanistan didn't have to wonder why, because the reason was obvious.

The obvious reason nobody tried to help the people of Afghanistan was that the barefoot freedom fighters had been a proxy army in Ronald Reagan's fight against the Soviet Union, and they had been given enormous amounts of cash by the CIA, and now they had reinvented themselves as a murderous public relations nightmare, and there was no profit in doing anything to change the situation.

Thus the situation was kept out of the public debate in the free world, and people who knew what was happening could only wait and hope and condemn the guilty in their minds.

But not everybody was content to simply sit back and condemn the guilty in their minds.

The non-Muslim world learned a new word, jihad, and this new word meant that enraged Muslims from all the corners of the world were going to Afghanistan to fight, not for the women, but for the Taliban, for Allah, for Islam.

Eventually the notorious Captain Pussy and I wrote a song about the thing, and we called it Starving in Afghanistan. Click on the play button to hear it.

The essential message of the song is that modern suffering is a media commodity, and thus the people doing the suffering are dehumanized for profit.

The names of the places where the victims suffer are interchangeable, the mechanisms that cause the suffering are interchangeable, and the reaction to the suffering varies widely but predictably.

If your country suffers and there is a profit motive for ending your suffering, then a big army will roll in and demolish whatever needs to be demolished, and kill whoever needs to be killed.

After that the media arrives and interviews the survivors and videotapes the destruction for posterity. Everyone else has to settle for just being unfortunate victims, and they get seconds of your time over dinner and the news.

Eventually a change did come to Afghanistan.

On September 9 2001, a Talib posing as a news cameraman detonated a bomb during an interview with one Ahmad Massoud. Massoud was the commander of something called the Northern Alliance, and as such he was the Taliban's main enemy and a Talib suicide bomber had martyred him, effectively wnning the civil war in Afghanistan for the Taliban.

But in the Taliban's greatest hour of triumph came their biggest blunder. The Talib had been sheltering a jihadi comrade named bin Laden, and two days after cementing their victory in Afghanistan, this comrade ensured their eventual demise by engineering the spectacular destruction of the World Trade Center.

After that the story advanced quickly. The plight of the Afghan people immediately became an American taxpayer concern, and boots were put on the ground and planes in the air and people were marked for death and seriously killed the survivors imprisoned in secret torture chambers.

But soon the Americans had to move on, and the Canadian military was duly roped in to do its part to secure freedom for the people of Afghanistan.

And that's where the still respected Canadian army still is to this day, battling the Taliban in a seemingly endless war that no side seems to be able to win outright.

Now comes the sad news that some of the Canadian military ranks think that those Canadians who drive their big SUVs and eat their fancy donuts and live their little lives don't care about what goes on in Afghanistan.

The war in Afghanistan is tainted by the hypocrisy of the American response there, and there in Iraq and elsewhere. And so some in the Canadian military fear that nobody knows what they're sacrificing their lives for, and that the plight of Afghan women and their children is something Canadians don't care about.

Let's hope that they're wrong.

Al Jazeera reports scores killed as Gaza school hit by tank fire

In a move carefully calculated to finally bring lasting peace between Israel and its armed critics still alive, the Israeli Defense Force has attacked its neighbours to the west in Gaza with overwhelming force at sea, on land and in the air.peace envoys from Gaza have welcomed the IDF's latest moves with sustained bursts of AK-47 and opportunistic RPG fire. 

This latest attempt by the IDF to win over their detractors follows a period of rapprochement between the elected government of the territory of Gaza and the government of the state of Israel.

This period of calm was characterized by periodic homemade rocket fire originating from within Gaza and a subsequent blockade of the area, which furthered the inevitability of current conditions.

In other news, exiled Gaza government officials known to be hiding somewhere in Syria have issued appeals for a rational stand-down and resumption of talks aimed at discovering a comprehensive solution the last few remaining obstacles to peace and stability in Palestine.

Hopefully everyone involved remembers to keep to the convention of not shooting the messenger.

Tags: israel, gaza strip, Palestinehamas

 

globeandmail.com: Ottawa changes seal hunt rules

I love all the creatures of the world, great and small. And so I welcome any efforts by the Government of Canada to treat at least some of them in a humane fashion.

Now comes the news that the seal hunt is once again under the microscope. There are many who oppose this hunt. Among the rich and famous, it has long since become fashionable to eschew wearing the skins of cute animals in favor of items that part at the thighs. These photograph better when exiting limousines, and are less liable to attract protesters throwing paint on expensive wardrobe, good money after bad if you will.

The seal hunt is a miserable exercise for all involved. For the seals, they must face hordes of humans swarming the ice, smelling of the blood of their relatives and bearing clubs from which escape seems to occur not often enough. For the humans, there's the negative press and the cold weather work in dangerous conditions at sea. It's a bad situation all round.

Now Her Majesty's Government in Canada has decreed that clubbing the seals is not such a good idea after all. Viewed from Ottawa, the problem is that a clubbed seal might not be a dead seal once the knives come out, and the people start to remove the skins from those cute public relations nightmares.

I had not realized until now that the clubbing was quickly followed by a serious knifing, but apparently this is the case.

I can see why the public service might be beyond concerned. Who wants to have the screams of poorly clubbed seals on their consciences. What's worse, some Birkenstock wearing tree hugger reeking of patchouli might decide to bring a recording device out to the killing grounds, and before you know it there could be screaming seals all over the evening news.

There's also the risk that one of these tree huggers might be musically inclined and named say, Bono or McCartney. They have the wherewithal and the budget to take the terrifying step of putting these screams to music, and releasing the material with a group of their do gooding friends in one of those do gooder clusterfucks that happen every so often. Starving African babies on side A, screaming seals on side B.

The horror.

To seal the fate of any such campaigns and to appease the old country Europeans, those crazy Canucks have decided to take a bold step and protect the seals once and for all.

The Marine Mammal Regulations have been amended to prescribe that from now on seals will be shot instead of clubbed.

Further, the seals skulls will have to be crushed, and the blood of the animals will have to flow for a full minute before any knives can slip under their skins.

This will be backed up with high tech helicopter surveillance to ensure that thy Queen's will be done on earth and at sea so help thee God.

I see a problem with all this.

There appears to be no stipulation on what sort of guns may be brought out to the ice and used to kill the seals. What's to say that people won't bring old muskets and .22 calibre pop guns out to a situation that probably calls for more firepower? If there's a way to abuse a law, that way will be found. Even some do gooder seal hunters might decide to bring small calibre weapons out to further protect the seals from pain, and thus have to shoot these poor animals numerous times before welcome death arrives.

I now call up on Her Majesty's Government in Canada to correct the deficiencies in this ordinance before it is too late. There is only one way to guarantee these poor seals are dead before they are deprived of their skins. And that way is to use machine guns. Machine guns offer the benefit of a high rate of fire, combined with sufficient projectile girth to ensure death. That is why they were invented in the first place.

Join me now in calling upon the Government of Canada to finish the job of protecting the seals. Write to Fisheries and Oceans Canada, and demand that sealers be mandated to use the right tools for the job. Allow sealers to use automatic weapons in the hunt, and let's all do our part to save those seals.

Read all about it here and then do what you know you got to do.

Tags: sealhunt, Government of Canada, Marine Mammal Regulations, machine guns, automatic weapons, Fisheries and Oceans Canada