[Quote:]

A new book about humor under the Nazis gives some interesting insights into life in the Third Reich and breaks yet another taboo in Germany’s treatment of its history. Jokes told during the era, says the author, provided the populace with a pressure release.

Hitler visits a lunatic asylum. The patients give the Hitler salute. As he passes down the line he comes across a man who isn’t saluting.
“Why aren’t you saluting like the others?” Hitler barks.
“Mein Führer, I’m the nurse,” comes the answer. “I’m not crazy!”

That joke may not be a screamer, but it was told quite openly along with many others about Hitler and his henchmen in the early years of the Third Reich, according to a new book on humor under the Nazis.

But by the end of the war, a joke could get you killed. A Berlin munitions worker, identified only as Marianne Elise K., was convicted of undermining the war effort “through spiteful remarks” and executed in 1944 for telling this one:

Hitler and Göring are standing on top of Berlin’s radio tower. Hitler says he wants to do something to cheer up the people of Berlin. “Why don’t you just jump?” suggests Göring.

A fellow worker overheard her telling the joke and reported her to the authorities.

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It seems that according to our leader, I along with the majority of Americans, just don’t understand what is going on in the world.  I especially don’t understand what is going on in Iraq; and upon today’s speech by the president, I don’t understand him nor his administrations stance on torture and how to conduct even a fabricated war with dignity.

As he reminded us today:

You can ask this question all you want, but the bottom line is – and the American people have got to understand this – that this program won’t go forward if there’s vague standards applied like those in Common Article 3 of the Geneva Convention. It’s just not going to go forward.

When I mull it over, there really is a lot I don’t understand…

See Mr. Bush, with tax cuts, I don’t understand this:

I’ve just never understood how the horror of this:

Led to the horrors of this:

or this:

T be perfectly honest, I don’t think I’ll ever fucking understand these:

As far as your speech today?  Guess what?  I can’t get my head around this either:

And yes, this:

and even this too:

There is a lot I don’t understand about your thinking and actions Mr. Bush.  Now that I’ve thought about it, I hope I never do.

[Quote:]

Watching the president on Friday in the Rose Garden as he threatened to quit interrogating terrorists if Congress did not approve his detainee bill, we were struck by how often he acts as though there were not two sides to a debate. We have lost count of the number of times he has said Americans have to choose between protecting the nation precisely the way he wants, and not protecting it at all.

On Friday, President Bush posed a choice between ignoring the law on wiretaps, and simply not keeping tabs on terrorists. Then he said the United States could rewrite the Geneva Conventions, or just stop questioning terrorists. To some degree, he is following a script for the elections: terrify Americans into voting Republican. But behind that seems to be a deeply seated conviction that under his leadership, America is right and does not need the discipline of rules. He does not seem to understand that the rules are what makes this nation as good as it can be.

The debate over prisoners is not about whether some field agent can dunk Osama bin Laden’s head to learn the location of the ticking bomb, as one senator suggested last week. It is about whether the United States can confront terrorism without shredding our democratic heritage. This nation is built on the notion that the rules restrain our behavior, because we know we’re fallible. Just look at the hundreds of men in Guantánamo Bay, many guilty of nothing, facing unending detention because Mr. Bush did not want to follow the rules after 9/11.

[Quote:]

Gunmen have shot dead an Italian nun in the Somali capital Mogadishu, witnesses and medical workers have said.

The attackers shot the nun three times in the back in a hospital in the south of the city, also killing her bodyguard before fleeing the scene.

The nun, who has not been named, is believed to be in her seventies.

It is unclear whether the shooting is connected with strong criticism by radical Somali clerics about the Pope’s recent comments on Islam.

Hardline cleric Sheikh Abubakar Hassan Malin on Friday told worshippers at his mosque to hunt down and kill whoever offended the Prophet Mohammed.

Why are religions insisting on demonstrating their idiocy all the time?

[Quote:]

After the fall of Saddam Hussein’s government in April 2003, the opportunity to participate in the U.S.-led effort to reconstruct Iraq attracted all manner of Americans — restless professionals, Arabic-speaking academics, development specialists and war-zone adventurers. But before they could go to Baghdad, they had to get past Jim O’Beirne’s office in the Pentagon.

To pass muster with O’Beirne, a political appointee who screens prospective political appointees for Defense Department posts, applicants didn’t need to be experts in the Middle East or in post-conflict reconstruction. What seemed most important was loyalty to the Bush administration.

O’Beirne’s staff posed blunt questions to some candidates about domestic politics: Did you vote for George W. Bush in 2000? Do you support the way the president is fighting the war on terror? Two people who sought jobs with the U.S. occupation authority said they were even asked their views on Roe v. Wade .

Many of those chosen by O’Beirne’s office to work for the Coalition Provisional Authority, which ran Iraq’s government from April 2003 to June 2004, lacked vital skills and experience. A 24-year-old who had never worked in finance — but had applied for a White House job — was sent to reopen Baghdad’s stock exchange. The daughter of a prominent neoconservative commentator and a recent graduate from an evangelical university for home-schooled children were tapped to manage Iraq’s $13 billion budget, even though they didn’t have a background in accounting.

The decision to send the loyal and the willing instead of the best and the brightest is now regarded by many people involved in the 3 1/2 -year effort to stabilize and rebuild Iraq as one of the Bush administration’s gravest errors. Many of those selected because of their political fidelity spent their time trying to impose a conservative agenda on the postwar occupation, which sidetracked more important reconstruction efforts and squandered goodwill among the Iraqi people, according to many people who participated in the reconstruction effort.

[..]

Smith said O’Beirne once pointed to a young man’s résumé and pronounced him “an ideal candidate.” His chief qualification was that he had worked for the Republican Party in Florida during the presidential election recount in 2000.

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The African-American past is an iceberg, still 90 percent submerged. Because so much material remains in family hands or lies piled in the unvisited attics and basements of libraries, newspapers, and even police stations, rich discoveries await. Currie Ballard, a historian in Oklahoma, has just made what he calls “the find of a lifetime�?—33 cans of motion picture film dating from the 1920s that reveal the daily lives of some remarkably successful black communities.

The film shows them thriving in the years after the infamous Tulsa Riot of 1921, in which white mobs destroyed that city’s historic black Greenwood district, which was known as the Black Wall Street of America. Through the flickering eloquence of silent film we see a people resilient beyond anyone’s imagining, visiting one another’s country homes, parading through downtown Muskogee in some two dozen Packards, crowding an enormous church in Tulsa not long after the riots, during a gathering of the National Baptist Convention.

[Quote:]

Two mothers have started a fast-food delivery service to schoolchildren in response to the healthy dinner campaign by the chef Jamie Oliver.

Julie Critchlow and Sam Walker say that children don’t want to eat the “overpriced, low-fat rubbish�? offered to them at school. Instead, they are making daily deliveries of sandwiches, fish and chips, pies, burgers and fizzy drinks. Their service has become so popular that they now use an old supermarket trolley to make deliveries to up to 60 children each day at Rawmarsh Comprehensive School in Rotherham.

Although that is already newsworthy in a funny sort of way (more articles here and here) the school response had me laughing real hard:

John Lambert, the head teacher, said: “All the freshly prepared food served by the school now complies with the Government’s guidelines. I can’t imagine why the children want to go elsewhere.�?