Yoga appears to be the new menace these days with Catholic priests and Muslim clerics (here and here) warning of its satanic appeal. Now, E.W. Jackson, a Republican candidate for Lieutenant Governor in Virginia, is campaigning against the practice yoga and meditation as making people vulnerable to Satan.
Category: Bizarre
I have repeatedly written against the use of shaming and novel sentencing by judges around the country (here and here and here). Judges often thrill the public by imposing their own forms of justices — departing from conventional criminal sentences to force people to clean courtrooms with toothbrushes, wear demeaning placards, or carry out publicly humiliating tasks. These judges often develop a taste for such power and the public acclaim that unfortunately comes from humiliating people. Cleveland Municipal Judge Pinkey Carr is a case in point. Carr garnered clearly welcomed public attention by requiring a woman to wear a sign to punish her for reckless driving near a school bus. Now, Carr has taken to making such placards herself and, when citizens do not comply as marionettes, throwing them in jail. Such is the case with Richard Dameron who refused to carry an “idiot” sign hand crafted by Carr. In the hearing, Carr appropriately compared herself to the Burger King of the justice system.
Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., shocked many yesterday when he went public to muse over the question of whether bloggers “deserve First Amendment protection? These are the issues of our times.” Actually, it may be a question for Lindsey Graham but it is not a question of our time. Bloggers are clearly entitled to first amendment rights as are other citizens. Graham appears to be trying to raise the question of whether they are entitled to protections accorded journalists under a federal shield law.
There have long been complaints about the temperament and civility of Judge Edith Jones of the New Orleans-based 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. Indeed, when I clerked on that court, Jones was rather infamous for her run-ins with colleagues and others. Jones has been criticized for her extremely conservative views and, more importantly, her perceived intolerance (and hostility) for opposing views and colleagues. This includes telling another judge to “shut up” in oral argument. Now, she is facing a formal complaint over a Federalist Society speech given at the University of Pennsylvania where she allegedly said that certain racial groups are predisposed to crime and that defenses like mental competence and actual innocence are “red herrings” among other bizarre claims.
There is an interesting tort case out of Miami where a New Jersey woman, Anna Burgese, is suing W Hotel (owned by Starwood) after a beat down by prostitutes outside of the hotel. Burgese says that the hotel is widely known as catering to a large prostitution business and failed to protect guests. Police believe that the prostitutes assumed that Burgese was a “working girl” intruding on their territory.
Continue reading “New Jersey Woman Sues W Hotel After Beat Down By Prostitutes In Miami”
Cindy Jacobs is not just some other television prophet selected by God to guide mankind. Jacobs not only walks in the path of God, she wears magical shoes with holy soles that do not get holey. In explaining how the faithful are given miracles in her 10 Minute Prayer School, Jacobs explained “I mean, I remember one time that I had a pair of shoes that I wore and wore and wore and wore and it just — for years, these shoes did not wear out. And I wore them years and years and years.” She also describes how in having friends of her kids over, God would multiple food in jars as she spooned out lunches and snacks.
Continue reading “Sole Searching: Television Prophet Discusses Miracle Shoes and Pasta Sauce”
There are some obvious answers about the cause of the epidemic of rapes in India. There is the religious and culture treatment of woman in traditional areas. There is hostility of police to rape victims. However, the municipal council in Mumbai sees the cause elsewhere . . . lingerie mannequins. The council voted overwhelmingly to ban the ceramic vixens to prevent rape in the city.
Continue reading “India Leaders Face Rape Crisis . . . By Banning Lingerie Mannequins”
We previously discussed the bizarre case of Heath Campbell, who ran into a bit of trouble when he tried to get a store to prepare a birthday cake for his son Adolph Hitler Campbell. It turns out that the parents gave all of their kids Nazi-related names. After the “mein cake” controversy, the state appears to have placed the couple under investigation and then took away their children. The New Jersey neo-Nazi is now fighting to get back his kids. He did it however in a curious way — he and his new fascist Frau showed up in full Nazi uniforms to court. This raises a significant free speech issue. Most of us view this Nazi obsession to be weird and unbalanced. However, it is also a form of political expression. While the state insists that there is a history of violence in the family (including an “anonymous complaint”), there have been no details of the extent of this history. Should this bizarre conduct and hateful belief system be considered on the custody question.
Rindfleischetikettierungsüberwachungsaufgabenübertragungsgesetz is now kaput. Germany has officially removed its longest word from us. Without the 63-letter word, it is not clear how people will refer to a law regulating the testing of beef in sentences like “just looking at the sizzling steak, you hardly needed a rindfleischetikettierungsüberwachungsaufgabenübertragungsgesetz to know this was a fine piece of meat.”
Continue reading “Farewell Rindfleischetikettierungsüberwachungsaufgabenübertragungsgesetz”
James Lowder and Katie Young hay have the best wedding picture ever. The credit for the idea goes to photographer Quinn Miller volunteered to shoot wedding photos for his friends. He suggested that the entire wedding party pretend that they were running from something and then added a T-Rex with the help of Photoshop.
We just discussed a story of a kindergartner who was disciplined for a LEGO gun that he brought to school that was smaller than a quarter. Now we have another kindergartner who was suspended for the rest of the year (10 days) for bringing an orange-tipped toy gun to school. Rather than simply discuss the matter with his parents, school officials proceeded to interrogate him for hours without calling his parents– a growing problem that we discussed in another story today. The toy was in the boy’s backpack and he was pulled into an interrogation with police. I cannot imagine what officers did for two hours in questioning a 5 year old child but it is clear that Calvert County officials have zero crime and even less judgment. During his detention with the officials and police, the boy wet his pants.
Many people in the world have been waiting for the departure of extremist Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. From the sounds of his likely replacement, Saeed Jalili, some may look back with longing. Jalili is a former Revolutionary Guard who continues the extremist Islamic principles of governance of his predecessor. This week, he promised to “defend the rights of women as mothers” as opposed to what he referred to as “economic context” of feminists and the West. Men will continue of course to be defined as men as opposed to fathers.
The Catholic Church’s top exorcist, Father Gabriele Amorth is calling on Pope Francis to relax current limits on priests performing exorcisms. He insists that the demand of the faithful for exorcisms is rising and the Church needs to increase the supply of the rites. For his own part, Amorth now claims to have sent 160,000 demons to hell — that is over 1818 a year or roughly 5 a day or one demon every 4.8 hours every day every week every month.
In the last couple weeks, it has been astonishing to watch Democrats once again abandoning a core principle — in this case the protection of the free press — to excuse another abuse of the Obama Administration. The new talking point for defenders of the Obama Administration is that it is really not that bad to seize the records of journalists or label a journalist a potential criminal co-conspirator so long as they are not actually prosecuted. None however are quite so adamant as Georgetown Professor and MSNBC Political Analyst Michael Eric Dyson who called Eric Holder our “law giver” and “the Moses of our time.” In this case, of course, Moses came down from the mountain and endorsed the killing of any citizen deemed a national security threat, allowed warrantless surveillance, blocked public interest challenges to abuses of power, and attacked the free press. While some of us believe Holder should be fired, Dyson apparently believes Holder should be be beatified.
There is a troubling case out of Harris County, Texas where a court has issued an order barring 16 individuals from a Houston neighborhood on the ground that prosecutors alleged that they are gang members up to no good. However, this was a civil proceeding where the 16 individuals were neither given representation nor were present. The precedent established by such a public nuisance ruling is chilling if prosecutors can bar citizens from neighborhoods based on associations or future conduct.