Our fucking government made torture legal today. Fuck the geneva conventions, and fuck anybody who disagrees with the President. They can be named an enemy combatant! Held without trial, or lawyer, or benefit of habeas corpus! Indefinitely! The bill doesn;t quite say these things out loud, but seems to make a point of giving the president the power to do this if he decides to. Military tribunals for all!

I honestly can't believe this just happened. What country am I living in? It's fucking sick, and fucking disgraceful. As Pelosi said, "This Bill does Violence to the Constitution." And fucking John mcCain signed off on this? Gave it his support? What a moral fucking chickenshit piece of shit horseraper of a man. Wasn't he held in a foreign prison and tortured? Why would he authorize this behavior from our own government?

Granted, we've always done this, but it was always a dirty little secret. Now we can have legal torture! Our government officially sanctions violating the Geneva conventions! Why the shit would any developed, moral, decent country ever trust us or feel any friendliness towards us again?

AAAAAAAARRRRRRRRRRRGGGGGGGHHHHHHHHHHHH

I'm so pissed. And the Democrats were such weak pansy mother fuckers on this that I feel inclined to not vote for a single damn one of them this fall. What worthless pieces of shit. FUCK THEM. Moral cowardice all around. FUCK.

Our country's awful mass-media (have you seen the softballs they've lobbed at Iran's leader, lately?) often speaks of the "Arab Street." Here military historian and classicist Victor Davis Hanson writes on the "American Street."

There is an American Street that is a far more powerful, and a more responsible force than any such populace in the Arab world. Like many of you, I tire of hearing "Death to America" from the mobs in Teheran or Jericho, and am sick of the usual coffee-house Middle Eastern hack intellectual that CNN drags out from London, who, during the past 5 years, in his condescension and pompous diction, and in the safety of a host Western humane society, starts listing various perceived grievances against the West, and then issues warnings (!) about the furor of the temperamental "Arab Street."

I respect and fear the American version far more, because its anger is fueled by reason and is slow and steady and furious when released. The world should not worry when the half-educated, fueled by zealotry and nursed on conspiracy theory, starts chanting; but it should when a rational and patient American slowly fumes and decides he has had it with the Iranian "President", Hezbollah's fascism, the various thugs on the West Bank, the Sunni Triangle's murderers, the primordial of the Hindu Kush, or some subsidized dictator in Pakistan or Egypt lecturing us.

As Hanson himself notes in "Carnage and Culture," in warfare, Americans are the most effective killers on the planet. Our mix of religiosity, capitalism, and republican constitutionalism makes "American justice" swift, overwhelming, and lethal in ways the less-free always fail to realize.

Pay no attention to this.

Or this.

Andrew Sullivan on Pope-gate.

Of course, what Benedict has said about Muslims is positively benign compared to what he has said about homosexuals. But somehow, I don't think we'll get an apology. After all, we don't threaten to kill people.

Sullivan's post also has a link to Hitchens' excellent anti-Pope piece.

This very, very big Reason article on Star Trek's greatness might be the best article on Star Trek I've read.

If you still believe Shatner is just a laughable ham, nothing will convince you otherwise. People of refinement know better and recognize Captain Kirk's total commitment, his vein-popping intensity, his refusal to be cooler than the material, as the acting equivalent of the right stuff--an indefinable quality, not quite stagy, not quite cinematic, at once too big for TV and just right for it. On a fresh viewing, it's striking to see how ably Shatner, Nimoy, and the late DeForest Kelley sell Star Trek. Because even if you never believe those tinfoil props are really phasers or communicators, you never doubt for a second that they believe it.

Unintentionally humorous LA Times article about cultural assimilation classes for Africans.

"What do you know about America?" Kassim asked at the beginning of a recent orientation class. Students yelled out their answers: It's a superpower. People are always in a hurry. Neighbors don't talk to each other. Dogs are treated like people. Gay people get married. All children go to school.

Don't forget that we love guns and Jesus!

I'd never thought of this category before. It's pretty neat.

Fascinating Newsweek look at the "clash of civilizations" now taking place in Europe's massive underclass. Eastern European Catholics are butting heads with African Muslims. It's the Middle Ages all over again!

I just read a piece by Mark Millar that was not really worht linking to, but mentioned that John Cassady was just signed to direct a feature film. This makes me think several things all in rapid succession:

• Is this the first time a comics artist has made the leap to directing?

• This makes some amount of sense. He's an incredible visual storyteller, and presumably if the script is good he'll have a really great handle on how to tell it. I have no concept of what actual story he might bring to the table, but telling the story? No problem.

•His storyboard artist is going to have a hell of a time.

•Astonishing X-Men is never ever going to finish. This says nothing of Planetary, which only has like 1 issue left, right? That issue is NEVER going to come out.