Don't ask, don't look

In this town, gay rights trump religious and aesthetic sensitivities every time...
Next time, pal, don't look. It's safer.

Look on the bright side, gay liberals: The New York Post is finally standing up for the rights of Muslims! The right to discriminate against you, specifically. Baby steps.

And what about this dude's right to fuck horses without being sentenced to three years in jail, Andrea? It was a female horse!
[Pic via]

Bahari was released on $300,000 bail by Iranian authorities yesterday. It was initially unclear whether he would be allowed to leave the country, but Newsweek just announced via press release that he has arrived in London. We trust he won't return to Tehran for his next court date. Bahari's wife Paola Gourley is due to give birth in six days.

Evin Prison is a very, very bad place. Another Canadian-Iranian journalist, Zahra Kazemi, died there in 2003 after reportedly being tortured and raped. The Iranians said she suffered a stroke. Bahari was dragged before cameras not long after his arrest and "confessed" that the western media were deliberately trying to undermine Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. We are glad he is out, and hope that one day he can safely return to his homeland.

She got nine months in jail. Which is not too bad, considering all that stuff she did, allegedly. KSL.com reports:

The 22-year-old pleaded guilty in August to third-degree felony forgery, two misdemeanor counts of issuing a bad check or draft and one misdemeanor count each of attempted forgery, attempted identify fraud and attempted issuing a bad check or draft.

Ferrell on Friday was given credit for 132 days she already served behind bars. She also was ordered to pay a $1,000 fine and $4,194 in restitution.

Bucky Turco notes that she actually beat one of her charges. Way to be! We don't know whether Kari will get time off for good behavior, but either way she should be free before Valentine's Day—just in time for our Win a Date With Kari contest.

But ex-cons need jobs. What's next for Kari? Yea, she can try the blogger thing, and maybe sell her story as a tell-all, or try to squeeze some money out of someone for a TV interview. But realistically that's not going to make her rich. Expand the book idea, hmmm? She can write a guide to picking up hipsters, or something. Tell men how to get hipster women. And how to tell if they're grifters! Get it at the Barnes & Noble checkout racks all across Middle America! Who else is better positioned to explain the young artsy coastal elites to citizens of Utah-like states? Build your brand, Kari! Build your brand!

Email us and we'll help. Also, stop all the crime stuff. That's mean.

[Oh and FYI Hipster Grifter Halloween costumes are one of the very coolest ones you can wear this year, according to TONY. Make a note! Nerd.]

In rural Brazil, ayahuasca really is used for its mystical, spiritual properties. In Santa Fe, New Mexico, ayahuasca is used by hippies who equate spirituality with drugs. Which is okay, because they're a certified church, and this is their right! It is not any more crazy than "Jesus."

The WSJ reports that neighbors say they're worried about hippies driving all crazy after getting wasted on psychedelics, and also they're worried that teenagers will break into their hippie greenhouse and steal the two separate plants it takes to brew up ayahuasca, which, haha, not when it's much easier to steal your prescription Valium, mom. Anyhow, who are you to say god is not actually a transforming machine elf?

"They" were also definitely in the house. It may be that Terence McKenna has simply seeded the meme-space that surrounds some tryptamines with his famous tales of self-transforming machine elves that proffer various alien objects/machines/languages with an almost malignant glee. But I certainly know what he is talking about, and these fellows now haunt the tryptamine realm for me. Tonight they leaned in quickly: "Oh you are back. We suckered you in here once again!" And they proceeded with their mischevious chittering bee-dance, as if they were coaxing me into some kind of hyperdimensional circuit that would leave sanity far behind. I never "gave in" though, whatever that means, and by the end of the trip, I was utterly tired of their cavortings.

[Pic via]

The NYT sent a trained journalist to stroll amongst the masses out at a park, in New York City. She found that—despite the fact that smokers are nasty baby killers who should just go stand over there (no, farther over there)—people are not so hot on banning citizens from engaging in solitary activities in the park. What's next, masturbation?

"Where else are people going to go where they can enjoy themselves because it's free? Except the jail or the park, that's it."

A man can't enjoy himself in the park or in jail these days! Mayor Bloomberg is defending this nannyish notion, but, come on, did you see his speech at his "party" last night? All the speechwriters in town can't hide the fact that you're a nerd, Mayor Mike. A big one.
[Pic via]

Seattle, despite being home to many hippies on heroin, voted down a proposed 20 cent tax on plastic and paper bags. Said one disappointed hippie, "We're going to lose it because more people are concerned about their cost of living than what they take their groceries home in."

As well they should be, hippie. How high does "what they take their groceries home in" really rank, reasonably, on the average hobo's priority list? Free shopping bags means you don't have to buy garbage bags, and that's called recycling.

God. Hippies.

Why can't you all be more like New Yorkers, what with our bootstrap-pulling can-do ways? A ten-year-old girl got a $50 ticket for selling lemonade without a license in a city park—days later, she has the Parks Commissioner buying lemonade from her, the ticket quashed, and the ticketing officer pulled off the fucking job. That's called "Don't fuck with me," and it's the power of savvy PR war games like that that will pull this city out of economic malaise. That, and lemonade revenue.

In California, they're still dealing with crayfish poaching. It's only getting worse now that people are poor and hungry and craving the sweet, sweet flesh of the crayfish.

If California crayfisherman had half the sense of little New York girls selling lemonade lord knows we wouldn't be in this mess today.

To reiterate: this book, entitled The Cartoons That Shook the World, is about this cartoon controversy. But Yale told the author that it was banning not only images of the cartoons themselves, but also three other classical representations of Muhammad which were to be included. This is their reasoning, according to the NYT:

John Donatich, the director of Yale University Press, said by telephone that the decision was difficult, but the recommendation to withdraw the images, including the historical ones of Muhammad, was "overwhelming and unanimous." The cartoons are freely available on the Internet and can be accurately described in words, Mr. Donatich said, so reprinting them could be interpreted easily as gratuitous.

So now books are no longer including any content that is "freely available on the Internet?" Time to shut down the publishing industry. The images are offensive to some people. And? Books are published about Nazis, and lynchings, and genocide, and include copious images of awful events. That is called "communicating information," and it's what books do.

May we repeat: This book is *about* these cartoons. But Yale University Press will not print the cartoon, because religious fanatics once went crazy over them.

Donatich says he fears "blood on my hands" if he publishes them. First, this is a preposterous fear, as many other experts point out in the story—the images have been shown everywhere by now. Second, John Donatich, you have zero respect for academic freedom. You live in fear of imaginary bogeymen. You value the idea of the possibility of upsetting religious zealots more highly than you value your own author's right to publish freely. Why don't you just resign?

[Or go to work for a newspaper? The NYT didn't publish the cartoon either.]

Some misguided individual has invented a UV flashlight that reveals all the little tiny bits of cocaine on your face. Cops are using it to destroy the nightlife business:

COCAINE-using clubbers were refused entry to a Blackburn nightclub after a high-tech ‘magic torch' device revealed they had been sniffing the drug...
Four men were stopped from entering Liquid and Envy nightclub in the town centre on Friday night.

Where are cokeheads welcome, if not at "Liquid and Envy"?
[Animal NY. Pic via]

The kind of seriously interesting part of this story is that RadarOnline claims that they're a news organization, and the state can't restrict what they cover. But the California Labor Department claims they're just another entertainment company, and must therefore abide by child labor laws and get an "entertainment permit" and an on-site teacher for the kids and everything else. Wouldn't it be interesting if this turned into one of those strange bedfellows-type cases, with all the media coming together to defend RadarOnline's right to cover the most bottom-of-the-barrel "news" imaginable? It could happen!

Instead of dwelling on that, we bring you this new quote from Octo-Grandma:

"The babies have no inkling," she said. And Suleman's older children "think it's fun," she said, adding that sometimes they stick their tongues out at the camera.

America's right to freak shows is guaranteed by the Constitution!
[LAT]

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Just for example. Although few say "Negro" any more!
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Here is the U.S. State Department's instructions for journalists traveling with President Obama to Saudi Arabia later this week:

The Saudi government is permitting journalists accompanying President Obama entry into the country without a visa or the usual customs procedures. While in Saudi Arabia, therefore, journalists are expressly prohibited from leaving the hotel or engaging in any journalistic activities outside of coverage of the POTUS visit. Those who do so risk arrest and detention by Saudi authorities.

Oh no! How will Ed Henry ever find out what King Abdullah's most "transcendent moment" has been, thus far?

Whoops! Meanwhile, while all the journalists are locked in their hotel, Obama will be dining with King Abdullah begging him to make the oil cheaper again, so that he can tax it, in order to save General Motors. Amnesty International would like the President to maybe ask the king about all those political prisoners they're probably holding in secret, too.

Saberi says she's still not sure why she was arrested; her captors made her tell her family that her crime was buying alcohol, but that was a lie. The government pressured her into a false confession; "The first few days, I was interrogated for several hours, from morning until evening, blindfolded, facing a wall, by up to four men, and threatened, as I said, that I would be put in prison for 10 to 20 years or more or even face execution." Later, she recanted it, and that pissed off her captors further:

The prosecutor got upset with me for recanting my confession and sent my case to trial instead of freeing me, and that's when I was sentenced to eight years in prison. I knew this was going to happen when I recanted my confession, but I told myself, I would rather tell the truth and stay in prison instead of telling lies to be free.

She went on a hunger strike—only water, for two weeks. She stopped only when her mom threatened to go on her own hunger strike. In all, she spent 100 days in jail. Saberi says the Iranian government had probably been monitoring her phone calls and emails for as long as two years.

Scary shit. Roxana Saberi is clearly far braver than, say, us. Now she's back in America, and writing a book. We should all buy it.
[NPR. Pic: Getty]

People such as, for example, the CEO husband of Countess Divorceé Marie Douglas-David (pictured), who would prefer that the public not have a right to know all about his alleged divorce sex fetish and cheap ass ring taking-back and other terribly embarrassing dirty (sexual) laundry. For example. But the attorneys for the party trying to get large sums of money from these rich people in their divorces feel the opposite way!

As soon as they find someone on either side without a self-serving motive we'll be willing to listen, but until then: Celebrity sadness is America's Enfamil.
[WSJ. Pic via]

After eight years of Republicans we have a knee-jerk reaction that this sort of thing should be incredibly controversial. But then we wake up, shake off the nightmare, and bask in the knowledge that Levi's has loved the gays for quite a while. They're based in San Francisco! They had Perez Hilton dancing in an ad campaign! They sponsored shows on gay network Logo! And in the latest move in support of the homosexual agenda, Levi's is displaying so-called "white knots" in their stores, which signal to those "in the know" that they support gay marriage and who knows what else.

Yes, gay people buy a lot of jeans, but there's more to it than that. It's somehow comforting to live in a world where the most standard, default maker of plain old jeans is vocally supportive of gay rights. This could have been much worse. We could be talking about Wrangler. Standing up for hipster photo shoots. And French existentialists. That's not American.
[NYT. Pic via]

This dickbag, Bush, didn't even win the election, but we were all so bored and drunk in 2000 that we just let him be President, anyway, and then, next thing you know, it's 9/11, just like that. It was shortly after 9/11 that all these perfectly nice and acceptable words suddenly became terrible. Like "freedom." Now, that word is like nails on chalkboard. Ugh.

People who still think "The Freedom Tower" is a good name for the new WTC building? GROW UP. After the last eight years that really sounds like a bunch of 7th-graders came up with it. "The America is Awesome Tower." "The Let's Roll Building." "Megatron's Bitchin' Castle."

So, "freedom." It is a thing we like, sure, but that Bush asshole just ruined it for a generation. "Liberty" is a more elegant, mature word for what we are supposed to be talking about when we talk about "freedom," but even that word with its rich history has this total "tobacco company-funded think tank" tone to it.

"Terrorism," obviously, was always a loaded term, but now it is also just a joke. "Evil" was already a word far too cartoonish to be used by serious people in political discourse (unless, you know, Hitler and Stalin are up for debate), so no harm, no foul there.

So: your precious "Freedom Tower" will not be called that childish name, officially, though you can certainly honor all those dead fireman by calling it whatever the hell you like, privately. We will call it "The Embarrassing Bureaucratic Corruption, Gradual Dissipation of Crippling Paranoia and American Real Estate Bubble Memorial Tower."

"You may not come in here. This is student's free space," says the cameraman, as a security guard pulls apart the flimsy barricade that the administration had chosen to leave in place for the past two days. As soon as the guard sets foot in the food court: "Excuse me, brutality here. You are on camera...Do not use brutality. You may not detain us, you are on camera!" This, as two security guard were moving away from him. "We deserve to be explained what is going on," he says to several bored-looking cops. Here's what's going on dude: you're not actually allowed to take over buildings. Believe it or not.

This video is a blow to romantic notions of student activism. A hilarious blow! [via NYU Local]

(Also: "We need to look at the situation, the hierarchy, the power relationship here." Okay: you're surrounded by cops.)