She won Miss Congeniality!
Sometimes you hear two sides of a story from two well-known liars and it's hard to decide who is lying or if they both are. Case in point:
Putin says US was behind conflict *
Wherein Putin points out that there were numerous US citizens present in the area of South Ossetia shortly before hostilities broke out there. Putin contends that they were acting on the orders of the Bush administration, arming and training the Georgian army.
"Why... seek a difficult compromise solution in the peacekeeping process? It is easier to arm one of the sides and provoke it into killing another side. And the job is done."
"The suspicion arises that someone in the United States especially created this conflict with the aim of making the situation more tense and creating a competitive advantage for one of the candidates fighting for the post of US president."
White House spokeswoman Dana Perino dismissed Putin's allegations as pure crazy talk:
"To suggest that the United States orchestrated this on behalf of a political candidate - it sounds not rational."
Actually, it sounds perfectly rational, but that doesn't mean it's true. It certainly wouldn't be the first time the U.S. had employed the strategy Putin is describing. Putin, a veteran cold-warrior himself, would doubtlessly recognize it as such from the old days of U.S.-Soviet proxy wars. And if the Ossetia conflict was an early-arriving October surprise, it looks to have been an effective one, resulting in a bump in the polls for the hawkish McCain, who benefits not only from any opportunity to sound tough on foreign policy but also any chance to shift the subject away from the domestic economy. So the motives of such a move are certainly in place, but as anybody who has ever watched a crime drama on TV knows motive alone does not establish guilt.
The conundrum presented here for me is this: When I hear Putin say anything, I react with great skepticism because this is the man who has created a cult of personality around himself in the process of assuming virtually uncontested control of an increasingly authoritarian Russia, a man whose control of the Russian media calls to mind the state-run media of Soviet days, a man who sets the agenda and is not used to having his facts checked by reporters. Not exactly a trustworthy source.
On the other side, we have the White House press secretary.
As a lifelong cynic it is not difficult for me to believe that one of these sides is lying. What is tough to swallow is that one side or the other might be telling the truth.
Priest to hold nun beauty pageant
"An Italian priest says he is organising the world's first beauty pageant for nuns to erase a stereotype of them as being old and dour."
...
"Father Rungi stressed that nuns were not being invited to parade in bathing suits, saying it will be up to them whether they pose with the traditional veil or with their heads uncovered."
I have nothing to add here.
Update: Headline of the Next Day
Priest cancels nun beauty contest
An Italian priest who said he wanted to hold the world's first beauty contest for nuns has decided to cancel the project, saying he was misunderstood.
His suggestion that nuns who wished to enter the contest send their pictures to him so that readers of his blog could vote on them was evidently "interpreted as more of a physical thing," said Father Rungi.
"My superiors were not happy. The local bishop was not happy, but they did not understand me either," he added, explaining his decision to call off the contest.
An End To Playing Hooky
Three years ago I posted this paranoid little screed about how "protecting the children" was the most popular trojan horse for ill-advised incursions into civil liberties ever devised, due to the fact that no matter how Orwellian and insane an idea may be on the face of it, ultimately very few people are willing to publicly argue against keeping children safe from harm. I speculated that the school districts requiring kids to carry GPS-chipped ID cards ("for their own protection") looked like the leading wedge of other more intrusive measures.
By way of saying "I told you so,"* please enjoy this story, about how the city of San Antonio Texas is now using the ankle bracelets commonly associated with house arrests to prevent truancy.
Besides performing the obvious function of keeping problem students from skipping school or thinking for a second that Big Brother doesn't know exactly where they are and what they're up to at all times, this program has the added advantage of getting these troubled youths used to being treated like the hardened criminals they will no doubt one day become. This, accompanied by the random searches and urine tests to which junior high school students have become accustomed over the last decade, will go a long way towards ensuring their compliance in the great walled-in Safety State of our glorious future, a world in which all Americans, young and old alike, will be perfectly safe forever just as our Founding Fathers intended.
Texas: leading the way to our safe, free, not-at-all dystopian future!
The following is a Mission (or "Pronunciation") statement that accompanied a piece of performance art I saw a while back. It is reprinted verbatim with only the troupe's name removed:
Mission or (Pronunciation)
[Name Redacted] makes plays that are not plays. We make theatre that may or may not be theatre. We generate pieces that are rooted in an internal logic and rigid structure that audiences may or may not understand. However, our work does not beg to be understood. We don't care to be understood, to understand is a lie.
[Name Redacted] is an intimate, intelligent, connected group of emerging artists who create work with and for one another. We are mercurial youngsters with style and wit. We keep secrets and speak in code. Nobody is the Boss but you must Respect the Boss.
Driven by boredom and disgust for theatre, we craft fierce, audacious performance pieces. Call these pieces irreverent and disrespectful, for they can be just that. Sources of inspiration are contemporary politics, economics, literature, philosophy, religion, and illness. Etcetera etcetera, the world around us, blah blah blah. [Name Redacted] intends to explode the form, to barrel past mediocrity and stagnation, and to shove conformist theatre into a deathly abyss.
We love nothing more than a good pie in the face. Yes, and more and yes and yes.
[Name Redacted] has been getting a lot of local buzz these days among the tiny, tiny circle of people who pay attention to such things, with one local critic enthusing that their spectacular performances are "the opposite of pretentious."
It prompted me to dig up this mission or (pronunciation) statement and re-read it. It makes me wonder if there will ever come a day when forward-thinking artists will rebel against the iconoclasm and nonconformity that characterizes so much contemporary art and instead try something different.