Q: Where is Osama bin Laden not hiding?

A: Once again proving that any footage is terrifying if you play the Requiem for a Dream score under it:



Civilization is crumbling, or something. In other news, go Tribe!!!

Q: Seriously, who is burning down Greece?

A: I meant all week to link to this story in the Christian Science Monitor, Why is Greece on fire?, since it was the only reference I'd seen to this oddly ominous comment from Prime Minister Costas Karamanlis:

"So many fires breaking out simultaneously in so many parts of the country cannot be a coincidence."

By the terms of my 99% Doctrine, I only accuse the Bush administration of crimes I am 99% sure they committed, but my gut reaction here is MARK IT DOWN: Dick Cheney is burning down Greece to build condos.

Or that's what I was about to say, before just now when I noticed this odd comment from an anonymous reader:

True the answer may surprise you. I suggest you read the following article which provides an interesting explanation of these events

I have not yet read the story, but it begins, "Please read to the end of this article the answer who done it is given." The blogger identifies himself only as "Firecracker." Needless to say, I'm very excited. More on this story when I get to the part about Dick Cheney.

(But first, I'm going to go outside, so I can be with summer when it dies. Go Tribe.)

EARLIER: Is our homeland burning?

Q: Why are doctors going postal? Part one

A: Fox News surprised some people when Roger Friedman, their film critic, called Michael Moore's SiCKO "brilliant". Of course, Fox News being Fox News, they're still leaving room for some healthy fearmongering. As Think Progress reports, yesterday's Your World with Neil Cavuto featured National Review Online columnist Jerry Bowyer warning us how universal health care will get us all killed by terrorists. But there was a delicious irony to Bowyer's comments that Think Progress seems to have missed.

In the transcript, Bowyer argues that the bureaucracy of a public health care system would breed vulnerability:

A state run health care enterprise is bureaucratic, and I think the terrorists have shown over and over again, whether it’s dealing with INS or whether it’s dealing with airport security, they’re very good at gaming the system with bureaucracies. They’re very good at getting around bureaucracies.

(Let's ignore, for a moment, that the recent terrorist threat in London, allegedly orchestrated by foreigners within the national health care system there, was largely unthreatening. Or that every domestic "terrorist" plot we've busted up over the past six years eventually turned out to be either:

1. the pipe dream of incompetents; or
   
2. a work of fiction relayed by the Justice Department and/or Homeland Security; or
3. some horrific combination of the two.

Have you ignored those things yet? Shouldn't be too tough; most of the populace is already doing it.)

Assuming the terrorist threat is as real and present as the average Neil Cavuto viewer fears, Bowyer seems to be making a valid point. Government bureaucracy is a real problem. Things fall through the cracks here and there. So I guess universal health care could theoretically pose an opportunity for terrorists... right?

Except later in the same segment, Bowyer undermines his point into oblivion:

And if one of your guys is a jihadist, if one of your doctors is spending all the time online reading Osama bin Laden fatwas, someone’s going to notice that. But the National Health Service is more like the post office, you know there’s a lot of anonymity, it’s easy to hide in the bureaucracy.

Hmm, post office? What's this "post office" you speak of? A government bureaucracy that comes into regular contact with, and has access to the homes of, millions of average citizens every day? OMG THAT SOUNDS TERRIFYING. Thank God we're not socialists, or else we might start some kind of "post office" here in the United States. We'd all be killed within hours.

P.S.: If Bowyer thinks the current health care system isn't a crippled bureaucracy, he's apparently never been covered by Kaiser Permanente. I abandoned Kaiser a couple years ago, but from what I remember of the place, by now it must be like the Al Qaeda reading room over there.

P.P.S.: Before you remind me that jihadist mailmen did try to anthrax the bejeezus out of us in 2001 (but then forgot about their nefarious plan and took a nap), it might interest you to learn that all signs point to those attacks being carried out by a government scientist. Specifically, by a government scientist whose career stood to benefit greatly from anthrax hysteria.

Anyway, I'm sure the terrorists will be striking our mailboxes any minute now. Your new issue of TV Guide is probably coated with AIDS. So please remember to be frightened of everything.

Q: Is Paul Wolfowitz going to resign from the World Bank?

A: If so, expect him to do so in the next two hours. Having worked with the Bush administration, Paul Wolfowitz is surely aware that anything announced late on Friday afternoon doesn't count as ever having happened. Meanwhile, European protesters are standing by.

---

In other news of W.-related jackassery, check out Wired's interview with Mark Klein, the retired technician who blew the whistle on AT&T for helping the government spy on your emails. Klein calls for Congress to take action, but he isn't optimistic:

"They could hold hearings and subpoena people and give them immunity. Right now there are people who could come forward and say what they know, but they need immunity. That's the bottleneck. I don't see a resolution coming from this Congress. It's a conspiracy against the American people."

Unfortunately, that conspiracy I can't debunk.

Q: Why did the mainstream media fail to cover the "strange death" of the woman who filed a rape lawsuit against George W. Bush?

A: If you're looking for hot reading material, the popular social media site Reddit's always got plenty to offer — but one story in particular today has all the makings of a must-read. Sex! Crime! Death! Mystery! The world's most powerful man! And that's just the headline: The Strange Death of the Woman Who Filed a Rape Lawsuit Against Bush, by Jackson Thoreau.

Granted, the premise here is a bit, ahem, far-fetched: that George W. Bush and FBI agents may have drugged and raped a Houston woman, Margie Schoedinger, in 2002; and that the woman's purported suicide in 2003 may have been state-sanctioned murder. Nonetheless, the story was an immediate hit with Redditors, who voted it up near the top of the front page within a few hours of its being posted late last night.

I suspect that a major part of the story's popularity has less to do with President Bush drugging and raping women, per se, than it does the entirely plausible accusation that the media has failed us. As Jackson Thoreau (a pseudonym, btw) writes in his conclusion:

For all I know, maybe Schoedinger did kill herself. Maybe she dreamed up a lot of this stuff. But I don't know, am I "deranged" to think it's weird that in this mass-media, detailed-information age, so few people are even asking any questions about how a woman who filed a rape lawsuit against the president could be dead less than a year later?

It seems like a reasonable question. Unfortunately, it turns out there are a few teeny little details Thoreau neglected to mention...

The author makes a big deal out of the fact that only one other reporter, LeaAnne Klentzman of the Fort Bend Star, covered Schoedinger's original lawsuit. So why doesn't he include Klentzman's story among his links?

Is it maybe because — in his effort to convince you that his theories are totally plausible — he was hoping you won't notice that Schoedinger apparently suffered from a mental disorder not unlike paranoid schizophrenia?

Here are some of the other claims made by Schoedinger, revealed in Klentzman's piece, which Thoreau conveniently glosses over:

• George W. Bush raped her several times in her home in a suburb of Houston, beginning in Oct., 2000 — a few weeks before the election. Just to make sure this point is clear: In the heat of campaigning against Al Gore — a period during which he was being followed by reporters and camera men at all times — Bush was making secret trips to the Houston, for the purpose of raping this woman. He would continue to make secret rape trips, apparently even after he became President.
  
• The alleged victim did not actually remember any interactions with Bush during the period that he was raping her. In fact, she did not even know that she was being raped; she didn't find that out until later, when an unnamed FBI agent revealed to her that it was part of a large conspiracy organized by a racist organization (Schoedinger was black).
  
• The FBI agent also revealed to her that Bush was spying on her, and also continually raping her. And that the people who traveled with Bush, who were apparently also FBI agents, were also raping her. Thoreau does mention that, although he leaves out the detail that Bush and the FBI agents also may have raped her husband (but apparently he was drugged too, so he couldn't know for sure whether or not he had been repeatedly raped). The alleged victim was not sure how many times she had been raped, obviously, given than she didn't even know she was being raped until the FBI agent revealed it to her.
• "Section VII of the lawsuit states; 'Whether or not Plaintiff's husband was raped remains in question, as Plaintiff was drugged after she was raped and her husband was drugged before her rape. Plaintiff can only state that these men purported to be FBI agents raping her for the purpose of covering for how many times they had drugged her and allowed the Defendant to rape her in the same manner.'" Sorry, I was unable to figure out what any of that meant.
• The FBI and local police department refused to take any actions to protect the alleged victim. The police department, however, "conducted a background investigation into Plaintiff's past activities. In the end, this investigation yielded the following information: Plaintiff had seven dates, (which became seven lovers), had told no lies, committed no crimes, gotten 2 traffic tickets and dated George W. Bush as a minor." Why the police would have revealed such information to Schoedinger — or why their internal investigations are recorded in the form of brief nursery rhymes — remains unclear.
  

Gosh, all of that stuff seems kinda pertinent, doesn't it? Maybe Thoreau was going to mention it, but he forgot. Or maybe Thoreau is just part of the cover-up himself!!!

Still, before you get up on your high horse about how journalists are afraid to reveal the truth, Mr. Thoreau, maybe you should try to avoid being such a shitty journalist.

Back to Thoreau's original essay (riding high with 141 points, as of this writing, and still among Reddit's top stories):

But I remember being puzzled by Schoedinger's attitude after hanging up the phone. I wondered that if she had made up such a wild story, why she didn't come up with something a little less outlandish, in which people couldn't necessarily dismiss her as a kook...

Besides Pravda and Internet ezines - one of whom referred to Schoedinger as "deranged" - I haven't seen stories on this strange death of a woman who filed a rape lawsuit against the U.S. president and wound up dead nine months later. I can't say I'm surprised. Or even angry. I don't know what the hell to think. All I know is I was one of the last - if not the last - reporters to speak to Schoedinger, and she didn't sound "deranged" to me in July 2003. She sounded like someone who had gone through something weird and was trying to sort it out. She sounded like someone who wanted the truth to come out.

The truth? I'm beginning to suspect Jackson Thoreau can't handle the truth.

(And look, I don't mean to make light of this poor woman's mental illness. The fact that she was suffering from delusions clearly wasn't her fault, and isn't something to laugh about, especially considering she ended up taking her own life. But trying to suggest that those delusions deserve to be top news — and attempting to politicize her death as an assassination — is entirely laughable. Or, no, cryable maybe. I can't decide.)

(Anyway, maybe you should shut up about George Bush being a rapist and instead focus on how he's a shitty president who has done nothing positive for health care — or, say, for the treatment of the mentally ill.)

---

Redditors, I should note, are generally a discerning lot (and less susceptible to propaganda and yellow journalism than their peers at Digg). So I'll forgive them for this lil' misstep.

And hey, perhaps it's not so surprising if the story is striking a chord, at this particular moment in American history. Strip away the specific accusations, and consider the underlying themes fueling the article itself:

• Blanket distrust of governmental authority.
• Loss of faith in a justice system corrupted.
• Disgust for the mainstream media, and its distorted sense of perspective.
  
• A nightmarish characterization of a president whose dangerous actions seem completely disconnected from a sense of rationality or consequence — and who will go to any lengths, no matter how destructive or criminal, to hide his own misdeeds.
• A world defined by lies, selfishness, cowardice and disregard for human life.
  

If those concepts sound familiar, it's probably because they're your inner monologue.

Q: Are recording industry execs the puppetmasters for the entire Canadian government?

A: YES!!!!! Or...wait. No.

Boing Boing, the "directory of wonderful things," is one of the world's finest blogs -- if not the finest -- for the huge output of consistently cool stuff it showcases every day. But one post yesterday, by Boinger Cory Doctorow, struck me as uncharacteristically dumb: Canadian Heritage Minister Oda in the pocket of recording execs, pulling from this piece by Canuck blogger and University of Ottawa professor Dr. Michael Geist. This is the BB post, in its entirety:

Michael sez, "Following a debate on CBC Radio with Canadian Recording Industry Association President Graham Henderson, Michael Geist is reporting that according to documents recently obtained under the Access to Information Act, last year eleven professional organizations representing most Canadian copyright holders in the music industry, including songwriters, composers, performers, record producers, and publishers, wrote to Canadian Heritage Minister Bev Oda and Industry Minister Maxime Bernier to reject CRIA's new opposition to the private copying system and to 'express their reservations concerning the legal protection of technological measures used to limit access to, or reproduction of, musical works.'

"Moreover, the government documents reveal incredible access for CRIA to the highest levels of the Canadian government. CRIA was busy arranging an event for government officials within days of the election which led to a sponsored lobby session on March 2nd that included a government-funded lunch and a private meeting with Minister Oda. New documents reveal that this was merely the tip of the iceberg. Four weeks later (on April 1st), CRIA hosted a private lunch at the Juno Awards for Bev Oda featuring Henderson and the presidents of the major music labels followed by an artist roundtable. Six weeks after that (on May 16th), Graham Henderson was granted another meeting with Bev Oda, this time to counter the news that the indie labels had left CRIA and that the CMCC had launched." Link (Thanks, Michael!)

Doctorow seems to have just cut and pasted an emailed press release from Dr. Geist. While that's not a problem in itself -- sometimes, posting a dozen+ daily missives to your blog means not having time to add insightful commentary -- does the text itself even close to justify the conspiracy implied in the alarmist headline?

Take note: X-Files was filmed in Vancouver, not set there.

The entire first paragraph can be summed up as, Last year, eleven representatives for the music industry wrote letters to the Canadian Heritage and Industry Ministers. Um, so the fuck what? Individuals and organizations write letters to government officials all the time. It's usually more a formality than anything else, as most government officials don't have time to read their mail (although this is quaint, adorable Canada we're talking about, so maybe things are different).

The second paragraph reports that the CRIA (the Northern equivalent of the RIAA) has "incredible access to the highest levels of Canadian government," indicating a lobby session, luncheon and private meeting with Oda. OH MY GOD! CALL OLIVER STONE! Or...no, wait, that sounds like standard operating procedure for a governmental official's dealings with a large corporate body; big business does have better access to government than the average citizen. We knew that already.

But wait! "New documents reveal that this was merely

Take note: Iceberg big, tip small.

the tip of the iceberg"!!! The rest of the iceberg? Another luncheon the following month. And another private meeting six weeks later. Hey, isn't the iceberg supposed to be bigger than the tip of the iceberg? Either Geist is on very thin ice, or these luncheon involved a lot of iceberg lettuce. Which would indeed be a disgrace, as iceberg lettuce offers very little nutritional value.

Look, it pains me to offer a defense of the greedy Luddites of the recording industry, who are no stranger to alarmist declarations themselves. And I was greatly amused by Boing Boing's Monday post providing photographic evidence of just how backwards the industry can be.

I also understand that it must be very tempting to rush such material to one's blog, if only because attacks on record moguls, the Bush administration, the PS3 and/or the Zune greatly improves one's chances of hitting the front page of Digg.

Maybe Oda really is in the pocket of the Canadian record industry; maybe the recording industry controls the cabal of Jews who, of course, control all the world's governments. But if the record industry is calling the shots, our governments make for a terrible lapdog, because piracy is as rampant as ever.

So maybe we should stop making paranoid claims under the guise of breaking news, and start kicking back and enjoying that new Andrew Bird album.