….then they came for Bernie Taupin

Jailed for being a lyrical terrorist, eh? Land of the free.

She is also accused of possessing a sniper rifle manual, a firearms manual, a handbook for rocket-propelled weapons and a document entitled “How To Win Hand-To-Hand Fighting“.

Reading about how to fire a gun isn’t really the same as firing one, is it? It’s like saying that having an Eddie Hobbs book on your shelf means that you’re rich.

I wish I knew how to win at hand-to-hand fighting. Then I would exact some righteous revenge on quite a few people, let me tell you.

Say. If hand-to-hand fighting is evidence of terrorism, shouldn’t they be stopping clean-cut young men who look like they work out at the gym from getting onto planes? I demand that all men wearing rugby shirts get shackled and strip-searched before boarding any flight to anywhere in the world. Because they are potential terrorists and their bare hands are deadly terrorist weapons.

The moderates among us will win this war in the end, you know.

Update: The BBC has more on this dangerous fiend:

The court also heard that she wrote about terrorism on the back of WH Smith receipts.

One note read to the jury said: “The desire within me increases every day to go for martyrdom.”

On other till rolls, police said they found scribblings about Soviet spy weapons and “poisoned bullets” capable of killing the inhabitants of an entire street.

And to think that I might have once purchased a packet of Wrigleys Extra off this woman!

First They Came For The Millionaire Supermodels

I’m always tense around anyone operating at that altitude — they’re so judgmental.

Martina Devlin. She, on the other hand, is the personification of unjudgmentalism, assuming such a word exists, which is why she likens anti-fur demonstrators to monkeys, zealots, communists, storm troopers and crusaders. And she’s far more rational in her approach to doing away with fur coats.

My motivation for putting that rabbit skin jacket back on its hanger — a shade reluctantly, I can’t deny it — was because I didn’t want to wear creatures that were killed so I could feel beautiful. I wouldn’t feel particularly attractive whenever it occurred to me. Tell a woman that and, nine times out of 10, she’ll put the fur coat back voluntarily. Jeer at her in the street and you’re forcing your viewpoint on her by blackmail.

The best approach, then, for anti-fur demonstrators, is to hang around shops where fur coats are sold, presumably not dressed as storm trooper monkey communist crusaders, stalking the customers. When someone picks up the coat, you say ‘Hmmm…carcass…just not really you, missus.’ That’ll work.

And as with all such actions that violate seemingly established norms, this is just the thin end of the wedge:

Then, they might turn their attention to fake fur. “Okay, so it’s not real, comrades, but it looks too convincing.”

Before long we’re into meat-eating territory, with chicken off the menu and a slab of tofu in its place. And don’t even think about lighting up a cigar afterwards.

I saw a man parking a car on a double yellow line this morning. We really need to crack down on this. If we don’t, these people will be parking their cars everywhere: our front rooms, in toilet cubicles, on top of graves.

Where will it all end, eh? Show trials? Firing squads?

Torture by Op-Ed

Gotta lurve this Alan Dershowitz op-ed on torture in the Wall Street Journal. Shorter version: I’m personally against torture, but I can think of lots of situations where it would be justifiable to use it and where I wouldn’t be personally against it.

There are some who claim that torture is a nonissue because it never works–it only produces false information. This is simply not true, as evidenced by the many decent members of the French Resistance who, under Nazi torture, disclosed the locations of their closest friends and relatives.

The kind of torture that President Clinton was talking about is not designed to secure confessions of past crimes, but rather to obtain real time, actionable intelligence deemed necessary to prevent an act of mass casualty terrorism. The question put to the captured terrorist is not “Did you do it?” Instead, the suspect is asked to disclose self-proving information, such as the location of the bomber.

So, bearing in mind that torture worked for the Nazis, there may be some circumstances under which it would be justifiable to behave like Nazis.

These circumstances are doubly hypothetical.

First of all they exist in a hypothetical fantasy world where the good guys track down the evil villain to his pied-a-terre downtown, the evil villain twirls his moustache and laughs maniacally, and the good guys know that he maintains total knowledge of all operations carried out by his subordinates, because he keeps the plans for them in a secret safe that is only revealed by tilting one of his Vermeers 45 degrees anti-clockwise. How do they know this? Because they’re the good guys, dumbass. We are not talking about really existing terrorism, because really existing terrorism does not work that way.

It is also based on a hypothesis that torture will elicit an appropriate response from the suspect, a suspect being someone of whom the charge has not been proven. Hang on, it’s triply hypothetical then. Because you also have to hypothesize that the suspect is indeed a terrorist.

I have no way of knowing if you know the answer to the question I am going to ‘ask’ you, and I do not know if you are in fact a terrorist. Nonetheless, I must torture you like the Nazis did. It takes a real hero to act like a Nazi, you know. I’m personally opposed to torture, just so you know.