Forget "e pluribus unum," I think the above, meaning "that's not funny," ought to be our new national motto. Nobody can take a joke anymore, and when people do laugh, it isn't a "ha-ha" kind of sound, but more of a coughing, strangled snarling. Really, we're turning into a nation of flinty-eyed, angry-looking people. We're even walking more intensely, and when you look in your rearview mirror at a stoplight, and you check out the driver behind you, don't you notice that they usually have this pissed-off expression? Might be something to do with the way I drive, but there's no explaining the general tightness of things. What's that? You don't believe me? Consider the following:

Kinda Like Baseball

Except you spend your life behind bars. Lots of news around today about that Supreme Court ruling on California's "Three Strikes" law, wherein the justices decided that a third felony conviction warrants a minimum 25-year term.

The reason this is so important is that the Feds have been really busy over the last decade packing in a lot of new laws—felonies—into the system and it's getting harder than ever to avoid committing one of 'em. The thing I can't figure out is why three is such a magic number here; there's no logic to it, and some people are paying a heavy price.

People like Leandro Andrade (shown at right), who got 50 years for stealing around $150 worth of videotapes, or Gary Albert Ewing, who bought a 25-to-life ticket for swiping three golf clubs worth $1,197 are the cases in question. The dissent on the bench came from justices Stevens, Ginsburg, and Souter who argued that the third strike often results in a disproportional sentence. Still, when I look at Andrade's photo, I'm kinda glad he's locked up.

Sacramento public defender Quin Denvir, said the two rulings essentially give states carte blanche to legislate unrestricted sentences for chronic offenders.

Terror Is Sweet

Another group that's lost its sense of humor is the FBI's joint-terrorism task force, who came down hard on a man and his girlfriend who were taking pictures of the Norris Dam near Knoxville last Sunday morning. To be fair, we've been getting warnings that al Qaeda clowns might be looking at blasting a dam or two, so when a local cop spotted Ahmed Helmy Mostafa and his squeeze shooting dam photos at 4:00 am, and considering that there was a warrant out on Mostafa and his brother Elsakaan for fraudulently obtaining driver's licenses, well, you can kind of understand everybody getting all jumpy.

Turns out that the young lady here had been on some kind of self-imposed chocolate-eating ban and had just hit the one-year mark, so she hooked up with Mostafa for a little celebration, which involved him snapping pics of her wolfing down a Hershey bar against a scenic background.

"We were having a chocolate fest," she said, adding that if she'd known how all this was going to turn out she'd just have partied at home. Mostafa and Elsakaan got a good laugh out of this before they waived their right to counsel at an appearance in U.S. District court Tuesday and were led away in leg chains.

Fun with Lynne

Don't mess with Cheney's wife. John Wooden, the satirist who runs the whitehouse.org Website, found out that Lynne can't take a joke when he got mail from the Vice President's office telling him to take down some pictures of her he's been running on his site.

As you can see, Wooden's quite the PhotoShop pro, but Cheney's staff weren't amused and fired off this letter, letting him know he's in violation of all kinds of federal laws over the parody. So he put a sincere and thorough disclaimer on the page saying it's not real...

And, it added, the editors of the Web site were "confident that any rumors about Mrs. Cheney formerly being a crystal meth pusher are 100 percent likely to be absolutely untrue. Similarly, any stories about her penchant for licking brandy Alexanders off the hirsute belly of her spouse are all lies, lies, lies!"

Girls Gone Mild

Lastly, in our tour of the uptight, the mayor of Panama City Beach has informed the producers of the "Girls Gone Wild" video series that they'd better not try anything funny.

The gals and the crew, along with the whole tour bus and everything are down there right now, and local police are on high alert so as to prevent any wanton naughtiness from spontaneously occurring when "real girls" decide to...I'm sorry, this is just too silly.

"I hope, and have asked, that those people who unchain (the girls) and ask them to go wild make that trip (to jail), too," said Mayor Lee Sullivan, a former police chief.

10:38:50 PM       

This meeting of the Raven's Irregular Society is now in session. Order, please. Thank you. We will now take roll...the Raven is present. Late-arriving members will be recorded in the comments section. Our first order of business is:

Unfinished Business

As depressing as that mall T-shirt story was yesterday, I'm glad to see that local activists got their act on and showed up at Crossgates Mall in Guilderland, N.Y., to give 'em hell Wednesday.

Here's Karen White and her daughter, Lillian, 8, at the food court, where some 100 protesters—with anti-war T-shirts—gathered to make mall management aware that they have crossed a serious line that should never have been breached.

Protesters met with a mall manager and said they would stop protesting when charges against the shopper were dropped and when the mall outlined its policy. A mall spokeswoman did not immediately return calls for comment.

The Today show this morning has footage of continuing protests going on at the mall, and the T-Shirt Shoppe where the orginal shirts were sold is doing a bang-up business making and selling anything with the word "peace" on it. This is a good time for civil disobedience and I'm glad those people are out there causing a scene. Wish there were more soccer moms and fewer of the Birkenstock crowd involved, but that's life.

Any further unfinished business? Turns out that the Jane Russell poster we mentioned was sold at Christie's yesterday, fetching $82,200—about $50,000 more than expected. Oddly, this story doesn't mention the destruction of the second poster. The owners ought to be fed to wild dogs for doing that.

Now then, any new business?

Americans Aren't Very Bright

Hard to draw any other conclusion from this column titled "God, Satan and the Media," by the NYT's Nicholas Kristof. He argues here that the news media have been overlooking the "46 percent of Americans" who indentified themselves in a recent Gallup Poll as "evangelical or born-again Christians." The poll, for reference, is located here.

About 8 in 10 Americans (79%) identify with the Christian faith in one way or the other, and about half of all Americans (47%) are Protestants.

• Those for whom religion is not very important are significantly less likely to approve of the job Bush is doing than those for whom religion is either fairly or very important.
  
• White Protestants are much more likely than others to approve of the job Bush is doing.
  
• Whites who are born-again give Bush much higher job approval ratings than do others. In the most recent Gallup Poll, the difference between these two groups is 23 percentage points.
  

This implies that a large segment of this country's citizens are likely to feel disconnected from a mainly secular media that sneers at them, and they're probably reassured in having a president who supports their conservative Christian mythos. The picture of contemporary American society we see is thus a kaleidoscopic array of class and wealth divisions further fractured along lines of religion and education. Oh, and each group is filled with contempt for the others who are damned and going to Hell. Order! Thank you.

We have time for one more item of business. I hear a motion to discuss a Unabomber story. Seconded? Kaczynski has the floor.

The Mad Bomber Inside All of Us

This is really a book review about Alston Chase's new release, titled, The Unabomber and the 'Culture of Despair'.

Theodore J. Kaczynski, Chase argues, is a lot less weird than most people think and that his experiences in America's educational system are primarily what drove him over the edge into the pit of psychopathic homicide. The key discovery Chase made was that Kaczynski had the misfortune of submitting to psychology experiments conducted by Harvard's Dr. Henry A. Murray, who subjected his volunteers to exercises in ridicule and humiliation for research purposes. However, Murray also had a taste for sadomasochism which he explored with a colleague and detailed in a diary.

And [Chase] concludes that Mr. Kaczynski and his classmates unwittingly served not only Murray's highly esteemed research but also his "sadism, sexual fantasies, desire for power, anger, need to explode and cause pain."

The oversocialized person cannot even experience, without guilt, thoughts or feelings that are contrary to the accepted morality; he cannot think "unclean" thoughts. And socialization is not just a matter of morality; we are socialized to confirm to many norms of behavior that do not fall under the heading of morality. Thus the oversocialized person is kept on a psychological leash and spends his life running on rails that society has laid down for him.

10:01:27 AM