This is not photoshopped. John Sidney McCain III, when startled, reverts back to his gargoylic ancestry. It is particularly effective at frightening away all manner of witchery and evil spirits. Sadly, it is less effective on debate moderators and political rivals. Of course, Obama, being the Antichrist, is immune anyway.
Although you cannot tell from this picture, special glands in John McCain’s neck and back would also have released a foul tasting mucous designed to deter predators and investigative journalists. While this seldom proves useful in and of itself, many of McCain’s supporters enjoy the hallucinogenic effects they can experience by licking him.
That’s in general. Air Quotes are annoying. They make you look condescending, not intriguingly post-ironic.
Using air quotes around “Women’s Health” in the way that you did, makes you look like a callous unfeeling patriarch who thinks of women more as property than as individuals with the right to choose what happens to their own bodies. I thought you were supposed to be trying to pretend not to be one of them, even if your running mate, Sarah Palin, makes no effort at all to hide her feelings? Opposing abortion even in the case of rape? Seriously? You really think the American people, as a whole, are going to go for that? Or was your choice of Vice President also supposed to be ironic? Perhaps, given both your records on opposing equal pay for women, you picked a woman VP in order to save the tax payer a few bucks?
Senator McCain, seriously, air quotes are so 80s. That does make them about 30 years more modern than your views on women’s rights, but still, you’d be well served to stop using them.
Also it makes you look like Dr Evil. Some might say that is a step up from being compared to Gollum though.
Hmm, has this post been overly partisan? Let us even things out with this “lovely” piece of “music”.
And the answer to the title question is “No. Probably not”. But MMOs have been drawn into the elaborate web of not very good lies that are the adventures of John Darwin. If you’re not familiar with the John Darwin saga, it is truly a gift that keeps giving. It is a sad example of what happens when two rather stupid people start thinking that they’re a great deal cleverer than they actually are.
Now it has been revealed, for reasons I’m not entirely certain of, that Mr John Darwin was torn from his wife by an MMO! Maybe they’re trying to take their revenge out upon the Google and its internet friends for its role in bringing them to justice. The BBC reports from Anne Darwin’s trial:
Mrs Darwin said her husband turned secretive when he joined an internet role-playing game.
She said: “It was like a virtual world which was played over the internet.
“The people who played it became characters in this world and they had money to buy and sell things and they used to cast spells on each other.
“He became rather cagey when using the headphones and speaking into the computer if I came into the room. It was obvious he was in conversation.”
Mr Darwin later flew out to Kansas in the US to meet a woman, who his wife believes he met while playing the game.
I know I’d totally love to play a game in which “The people who played it became characters in this world and they had money to buy and sell things and they used to cast spells on each other. ” She makes it sound kind of like Tron, but with MAGIC, thus making it extra-awesome.
While he had headphones, there is no mention of him having a microphone. Given that Teamspeak and Vent are a bit confusing to set up properly even for non-idiots, it is possible he was just playing Baldur’s Gate 2, and had a crush on Jaheira. (Hands off, Darwin. She’s mine.)
It’s unclear from the BBC report whether this took place before he faked his own death, or during the period where he was supposed to be dead, but in fact was living next-door to his wife, visiting her via a secret passage, disguised by a false beard. Not knowing when it happened makes it hard to figure out what game they’re talking about. Either WoW or one of the Everquests, I’d guess.
I’ll update when we know more!!!
Update: It seems that Mr Darwin’s online adventures took place after he faked his death in 2002. The trip to Kansas was to visit a lady he met in the game by the name of Kelly Steele. Far from being a femme fatale as I had initially suspected, it seems that she was in fact just one more victim of his bizarre schemes:
Having made contact with Kelly Steele, a mother of three from Kansas, while playing an online role-playing game, Darwin persuaded her to buy a 20-acre ranch in her name using £25,000 he sent her.
He told Mrs Steele, 41, his wife had died of cancer, he had made a fortune on the stock market and had always wanted to be a cowboy.
When he flew to Kansas to see the property he asked Mrs Steele if she knew “some single girls in Kansas who want a rich husband”.
He later demanded his money back and sent Mrs Steele threatening emails which left her in fear of her life. “He is the creepiest, oddest and most frightening man I have ever met,” she said later.
He travelled to Kansas in 2004, probably ruling out World of Warcraft and Everquest 2 , which were both released in the final two months of that year, which makes Everquest the most likely culprit. Dark Ages of Camelot, and Ultima Online are also possibles. I don’t see him as the type to be playing anything more off the beaten track than those three. I could be wrong, of course!
Update:
According to local Kansas media it was Everquest. John Darwin played a druid. Bet he wishes he could SOW in real life too.
It turns out the MMO connection was in fact revealed back in December 2007 in the News of the World. I’m surprised it didn’t get mentioned on any of the MMO sites I read, though I applaud all of us for having no idea what the News of the World says about anything.
Update: The Evening Standard is claiming the game Darwin was playing was Asheron’s Call. There are no druids in Asheron’s Call, so I suspect it is talking nonsense.
The American leader, who has been condemned throughout his presidency for failing to tackle climate change, ended a private meeting with the words: “Goodbye from the world’s biggest polluter.”
He then punched the air while grinning widely, as the rest of those present including Gordon Brown and Nicolas Sarkozy looked on in shock.
Mr Bush, whose second and final term as President ends at the end of the year, then left the meeting at the Windsor Hotel in Hokkaido where the leaders of the world’s richest nations had been discussing new targets to cut carbon emissions.
He’s not even bothering to pretend any more. The world is counting the days til he’s gone, and we can get things back to some degree of sanity.
Seeing as we have no footage of this incident, lets take a trip down memory lane and revisit one of President Bush’s other great foreign diplomacy hits.
Christopher Hitchens is a man who I find profoundly irritating most of the time. He has perfected the art of arrogance to the level that even when he is saying something I agree with (It’s about 50:50), I still mostly want him to shut up. He has frequently been an apologist for Bush’s interventionist policies, and the ensuing misery that perpetuates from them. However he is nothing if not a complicated man, and he was recently willing to put himself through something pretty unpleasant for a piece in Vanity Fair. I hope his experience, and his conclusions, will inform his future pronouncements.
You may have read by now the official lie about this treatment, which is that it “simulates†the feeling of drowning. This is not the case. You feel that you are drowning because you are drowning—or, rather, being drowned, albeit slowly and under controlled conditions and at the mercy (or otherwise) of those who are applying the pressure. The “board†is the instrument, not the method. You are not being boarded. You are being watered. This was very rapidly brought home to me when, on top of the hood, which still admitted a few flashes of random and worrying strobe light to my vision, three layers of enveloping towel were added. In this pregnant darkness, head downward, I waited for a while until I abruptly felt a slow cascade of water going up my nose. Determined to resist if only for the honor of my navy ancestors who had so often been in peril on the sea, I held my breath for a while and then had to exhale and—as you might expect—inhale in turn. The inhalation brought the damp cloths tight against my nostrils, as if a huge, wet paw had been suddenly and annihilatingly clamped over my face. Unable to determine whether I was breathing in or out, and flooded more with sheer panic than with mere water, I triggered the pre-arranged signal and felt the unbelievable relief of being pulled upright and having the soaking and stifling layers pulled off me. I find I don’t want to tell you how little time I lasted.
The interrogators would hardly have had time to ask me any questions, and I knew that I would quite readily have agreed to supply any answer. I still feel ashamed when I think about it. Also, in case it’s of interest, I have since woken up trying to push the bedcovers off my face, and if I do anything that makes me short of breath I find myself clawing at the air with a horrible sensation of smothering and claustrophobia. No doubt this will pass. As if detecting my misery and shame, one of my interrogators comfortingly said, “Any time is a long time when you’re breathing water.†I could have hugged him for saying so, and just then I was hit with a ghastly sense of the sadomasochistic dimension that underlies the relationship between the torturer and the tortured. I apply the Abraham Lincoln test for moral casuistry: “If slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong.†Well, then, if waterboarding does not constitute torture, then there is no such thing as torture.
If waterboarding is neither torture nor bad nor dangerous, then any public official that supports it should be willing to go through a similar experience to Mr Hitchens. As he pointed out himself, with a safe word and knowing he’d be tucked up in his own bed at the end of the day, it only hints at the awfulness that the real thing must offer after days of sleep deprivation, casual brutality, and not knowing when or if you’d ever see your family again, let alone a lawyer. If an official refuses to try it out (as they would if they have any sense), surely that is an admission that it is dangerous and cruel, and thus illegal.
Recently, at TED, the Technology, Entertainment, Design conference, Al Gore spoke about the challenges facing our world:
I guess it’s too late for him to break into the Democratic nomination now. The remaining Democratic runners have been rather quiet on the most important issue of our time. Hilary Clinton and Republican John McCain even want to suspend petrol tax (18 cents a gallon) for the summer. While that might be a temporary help to low-income drivers, the vast amount of money it would cost would be far better spent on fuel conservation, such as subsidising fuel-economic vehicles, and promoting car-pooling. Not to mention that gas taxes are ringfenced for maintaining road infrastructure, so the long-term cost to the public purse would be far greater than any short-term gain.
Oddly, the idea of a windfall tax on those oil producers enjoying a profit bonanza has not occurred to any of the Presidential nominees. Such a windfall tax could pay for a gas tax holiday, subsidised fuel, and more besides.
“I have opponents in this race who do not want to change the Constitution. But I believe it’s a lot easier to change the Constitution than it would be to change the word of the living God. And thats what we need to do is amend the Constitution so it’s in God’s standards rather than trying to change God’s standards so it lines up with some contemporary view of how we treat each other and how we treat the family.†– Mike Huckabee
In some parts of the world, they have a special name for a system of laws based upon “God’s standards.”: Sharia Law. It is quite strange that many of the same folks who recall in horror from the idea of Sharia law, are the same folks who would relish Evangelical Preacher Mike Huckabee becoming the next President of the United States. As things stand now, he is one of the front-runners for the Republican nomination, having won in Iowa. He is likely to win the upcoming South Carolina primary also.
“A wife is to submit herself graciously to the servant leadership of her husband even as the church willingly submits to the headship of Christ.” – Mike Huckabee.
“I don’t think the issue’s about being against gay marriage. It’s about being for traditional marriage and articulating the reason that’s important. You have to have a basic family structure. There’s never been a civilization that has rewritten what marriage and family means and survived.” – Mike Huckabee.
“If a person dresses provocatively, they’re calling attention — maybe not the most desirable kind — to private parts of their body.” – Mike Huckabee. Perhaps if the women were to wear some sort of full body covering, or a veil, that might solve the problem, Mike.
“If you want to believe that you and your family came from apes, that’s fine. I’ll accept that. I just don’t happen to think that I did.” – Mike Huckabee
“It is now difficult to keep track of the vast array of publicly endorsed and institutionally supported aberrations—from homosexuality and paedophilia to sadomasochism and necrophilia.” – Mike Huckabee.
In 1997, Huckabee requested an amendment to a state Senate bill stating “that it is Arkansas public policy to prohibit sodomy to protect the traditional family structure.†. That was as Governor of that state. Would he take similar actions as governor of the whole country?
As the video shows, he desires to alter the Constitution of the United States to fit into his own narrow view of what it is that God desires. How far would such a man be willing to go? I move that if all his beliefs were enshrined into the Constitution, it would be very similar to Sharia indeed.
Bible literalism is incredibly dangerous.
HAYDEN, Idaho (AP) — A man who believed he bore the “mark of the beast” used a circular saw to cut off one hand, then he cooked it in the microwave and called 911, authorities said.
The man, in his mid-20s, was calm when Kootenai County sheriff’s deputies arrived Saturday in this northern Idaho town. He was in protective custody in the mental health unit of Kootenai Medical Center.
“It had been somewhat cooked by the time the deputy arrived,” sheriff’s Capt. Ben Wolfinger said. “He put a tourniquet on his arm before, so he didn’t bleed to death. That kind of mental illness is just sad.”
It was not immediately clear whether the man has a history of mental illness. Hospital spokeswoman Lisa Johnson would not say whether an attempt was made to reattach the hand, citing patient confidentiality.
The Book of Revelation in the New Testament contains a passage in which an angel is quoted as saying: “If anyone worships the beast and his image and receives his mark on the forehead or on the hand, he, too, will drink the wine of God’s fury.”
The book of Matthew also contains the passage: “And if your right hand causes you to sin, cut it off and throw it away. It is better for you to lose one part of your body than for your whole body to go into hell.”
