Iowa judge suffers Epic Fail on public safety responsibilities

Old news by Internet standards after ten days, but just when you thought that things couldn't possibly get any stupider in life, this happens:

Iowa pastor and youth counselor Brent Girouex, who claimed with a straight face that he was trying to "cure" teenage boys of their "homosexual urges" by having sex with them, has had his sentence reduced from 17 years in prison to sex offender treatment and probation.

Since Girouex confessed to having sex with four underage boys, eight additional young men have come forward saying they were sexually violated by the 31-year-old pastor. Girouex, who is not longer a pastor at the Victory Fellowship Church, believed that he could rape away the gay by "praying while he had sexual contact" with the boys, all in an effort to keep them "sexually pure" for God.

Now this is exactly the sort of self-justifying sexual predator who completely, utterly deserves to be locked up behind bars as a danger to society, right?

...or not.

While the claim of raping in order to make the victim sexually pure is novel, rapists having their sentences reduced to virtually nothing is not. Girouex's drastic sentence reduction follows closely behind the heels of the actions of a Montana judge, who sentenced a convicted rapist to serve just  30 days in jail, and made comments about how his 14-year-old victim was an active participant in the sexual relationship. The victim, a girl in this case, subsequently committed suicide, and the judge apologized for his remarks, but left the light sentence in place.  

My, what a fantastic pair of examples of our judicial system at work in that staunch homeland of family values, Middle America.

Pardon me while I find a nice, quiet place to throw up.

Unsurprisingly, "nyet".

So, about those markings on Syrian rockets that don't appear to be in Arabic?

A United Nations report finding "clear and convincing evidence" of a deadly chemical attack built new momentum Monday for demands by the United States and allies to impose tough penalties on Syria if it fails to honor promises to surrender its arsenal.

Although the 38-page report from a U.N. scientific team does not assign blame, Western diplomats and independent experts said it offers undeniable evidence that Syrian President Bashar Assad's forces fired sarin-filled rockets with Russian markings (emphasis mine) into Damascus suburbs on Aug. 21. The United States says more than 1,400 people were killed.

Western diplomats said the weapons and sarin described by U.N. experts displayed sophisticated manufacturing techniques beyond the capabilities of rebel forces, and that U.N. data about the trajectory of the rockets indicated that they were fired from government-held territory.

"The technical details of the U.N. report make clear that only the regime could have carried out this large-scale chemical weapons attack," said Samantha Power, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations. "It defies logic to think that the opposition would have infiltrated the regime-controlled area to fire on opposition-controlled areas."

On the other hand, take a guess what Russia's reaction to all this was:

Russia sharply criticized the new United Nations report on Syria’s chemical arms use on Wednesday as biased and incomplete, hardening the Kremlin’s defense of the Syrian government even while pressing ahead with a plan to disarm its arsenal of the internationally banned weapons.

The Russians also escalated their critiques of Western governments’ interpretations of the United Nations report, which offered the first independent confirmation of a large chemical weapons assault on Aug. 21 on the outskirts of the Syrian capital, Damascus, that asphyxiated hundreds of civilians.

Although the report did not assign blame for that assault to one side or the other in Syria’s civil war, analyses of some of the evidence it presented point directly at elite military forces loyal to Syria’s president, Bashar al-Assad. The United States, Britain, France and human rights and nonproliferation groups also say that the report’s detailed annexes on the types of weapons used, the large volume of poison gas they carried, and their trajectories, all lead to the conclusion that the forces of Mr. Assad were culpable.

I hate to be snarky, here (well, maybe I don't), but if anything this proves that the historians who thought that the Soviet urge to engage in unsavory international acts was a de facto continuation of the Russian push for imperial hegemony were right.

Communism is supposedly as dead as a doorknob in Russia, but their need to play these sort of games hasn't ended. My guess is that the one thing standing in the way of a functioning democracy in Russia (beside Putin's need to be in complete control until he either dies of old age, gets assassinated or ends up in the hands of extraterrestrials, whichever comes first) is that all a leader has to do is play to the chauvinistic Wronged Great Power sensibilities of a certain bloc of voters there and voila! That person gets to be President for life and can play the game all over again.

Jerry G. Bishop, 1936-2013

Adios and thank for all the fun, even if I was a bit too young for Screaming Yellow Theater:

In a more than 40-year career as radio and TV host, Jerry G. Bishop won three Emmys and toured with the Beatles, but he may be best remembered as the original Svengoolie.

Mr. Bishop hosted "Screaming Yellow Theater," a horror-film show on WFLD-Ch. 32 from 1970 to 1973, as the coffin-dwelling hippie with a wacky sense of humor. His character has a devoted following to this day, family and former colleagues said.

"He was making really creative TV on almost no budget," said Wally Podrazik, curator at Chicago's Museum of Broadcast Communications. "I'd call Jerry G. Bishop the master of the non sequitur and running gag. Not just as Svengoolie, but as a radio DJ with a superb timing and a sense of unabashed silliness."

...which is exactly what you want in a horror movie show host, right?

To wit:

Plus a few clips with his chosen (?) successor, Rich Koz:

And let's not forget one of the most obvious ploys a horror show host can utilize: shameless pandering to the sensibilities of those male fans who've already hit puberty, shown right here (NOTE: there's nothing in this clip that's so raw that it can't be shown; it's just that FuzzyMemoriesTV insists on starting them on Play mode automatically, which means that the sound for this Tina McDowall segment possibly might be on whenever you arrive at this site. Hence, the link.