Tuesday, March 31, 2009

You Murdered 14,000 People. What Do You Have to Say for Yourself?!?!

"My bad!...but everybody was doing it!"

PHNOM PENH, Cambodia — The commandant of the most prominent Khmer Rouge torture house apologized in court Tuesday for atrocities he had committed but said that he had feared for his own life and that he was being made a scapegoat for others.

“I would like to express my regret and heartfelt sorrow,” said the commandant, Kaing Guek Eav, also known as Duch, who is the first defendant in a trial involving the deaths of 1.7 million people from 1975 to 1979 from starvation, overwork and disease, as well as torture and execution.
Heartfelt sorrow? Really? Heartfelt sorrow comes out somewhere between death #1 and, say, more than 3 decades later when your tired ass is finally brought to justice.

"Scapegoat" he says. Hmm:
[Prosecutor Robert Petit] illustrated what he said was Duch’s brutality by describing the fate of his “teacher and mentor,” Chay Kim Huor, who recruited him into the communist party in 1964. “Fifteen years later the accused would supervise the torture and execution of Chay,” Petit said. “That single fact I submit as highly revealing.”
Duch's probably right that there are many more people who should be facing trial (and, may I note, the gallows if they allowed the death penalty), but the "just following orders" defense has been tried before. And I still don't buy it.

Any real sense guilt would have manifested itself by now--probably in the form of suicide cum mea culpa--for any human being worth his salt. If there is an argument in favor of the death penalty (and retributive torture), this guy is begging for it.

Monday, March 30, 2009

Amen, Brother!

And vice versa.

Courtesy of reason.

Thursday, March 26, 2009

Afternoon Dance Party

I know this was an ADP once on F&S, but the song is catchy as hell and fun, so I'm running it again. (And it's not like my love for 80s era Michael Jackson songs has diminished, so get used to repeats every now and again.)

Wednesday, March 25, 2009

Allah Is His Copilot

This might explain the inferiority of Arab air forces...
PALERMO (Reuters) - A Tunisian pilot who paused to pray instead of taking emergency measures before crash-landing his plane, killing 16 people, has been sentenced to 10 years in jail by an Italian court...

The 2005 crash at sea off Sicily left survivors swimming for their lives, some clinging to a piece of the fuselage that remained floating after the ATR turbo-prop aircraft splintered upon impact.

A fuel-gauge malfunction was partly to blame but prosecutors also said the pilot succumbed to panic, praying out loud instead of following emergency procedures and then opting to crash-land the plane instead trying to reach a nearby airport.
As Jonathan Turley put it: "There is something to say for having a pilot who has nothing to look forward to in a crash situation."

Since Obama Made Fun of the Special Olympics, Can We?

YES WE CAN!

Tuesday, March 24, 2009

Afternoon Dance Party

Ok. So it's not afternoon. But I wanted to christen the new site with a little music, so here goes:

After F&S

Yeah, so, it's over.

The recession hit us all and, in the middle of a bunch of other stuff on top of it, Freedom and Shit [dot] org just stopped being a priority for most of us. All of us, really. It was hard enough keeping writers interested--not to mention keep it among my own top priorities. So when the plug was pulled, no one really put up a stink. Hell, it took Tera a couple weeks til she even noticed. I don't blame her really; we all have our own lives and most of us do writing that actually bears our names--and that stuff actually PAYS.

So, I hope you enjoy this site. I highly recommend putting this in an RSS feed if you're going to follow it at all, because frankly, I can't say this is one of the most important things in my life and so the entries will probably be sporadic. I know I'm not selling this all that well, but I've always been honest with my readers--one of the great pleasures of anonymity, let me tell you--so I'm not going to start bullshitting you now. I miss the more irreverent side to my writing, and this is an excellent outlet.

For those used to the F&S format: I'll keep the Afternoon Dance Parties (although I'm switching from videos to SeeqPod) and the topics will pretty much remain the same too. The major difference is that this is all me, and not a pseudo-collaborative project. And that isn't any kind of slight at my friends from the F&S days--priorities changed and there are ZERO hard feelings. It was a lot of fun and I sincerely thank Aynnie for the opportunity to write there and also for keeping the site going for so long after she stopped writing for it.

As before, feedback is always appreciated.

Thanks for reading,

Sue