Category: Stupid

Moron

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Notwithstanding the nobility, and moral necessity of his actions, the person who leaked the helecopter “collateral murder” video, the leaker is a f%$#ing moron.

You see, he revealed that he was the leaker to some random guy online, and now has been arrested:

Federal officials have arrested an Army intelligence analyst who boasted of giving classified U.S. combat video and hundreds of thousands of classified State Department records to whistleblower site Wikileaks, Wired.com has learned.

SPC Bradley Manning, 22, of Potomac, Maryland, was stationed at Forward Operating Base Hammer, 40 miles east of Baghdad, where he was arrested nearly two weeks ago by the Army’s Criminal Investigation Division. A family member says he’s being held in custody in Kuwait, and has not been formally charged.

Manning was turned in late last month by a former computer hacker with whom he spoke online. In the course of their chats, Manning took credit for leaking a headline-making video of a helicopter attack that Wikileaks posted online in April. The video showed a deadly 2007 U.S. helicopter air strike in Baghdad that claimed the lives of several innocent civilians.

Admitting to the leak to some random guy online, particularly given Obama’s, and his Department of Justice’s, jihad on leakers, is Palin-level stupid and arrogant.

It’s even stupider when you realize that he outed himself to Adrian Lamo.

I think that he did the right thing, because the coverups that the military engages in on such matters are simply not acceptable in a democracy, but in blithely telling someone that he did, and then doing something this mind-bogglingly stupid, and getting caught as a result, he dissuades future whistle-blowers, which is a blow to keeping our military, and our government honest.

He’s also completely screwed, because while he might be able to prevail on a civilian jury to see that the whistle-blowing served the public good, there is no way that a group of officers is going to show any mercy to an SPC (Specialiats) who does not even qualify as an NCO.

If there has been anything consistent about the progress of military justice since 911, whether it be torture at Gitmo and Abu Ghraib, the death, and subsequent cover-up of the details of Pat Tillman, etc. it is that the military will go to extremes to cover-up the truth, and if forced to prosecute, it will go after enlisted men, as a first step.

Oh For F%$#’s Sake!!!!

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Bueller? Bueller.

Google™ Adsense™ is at it again.

This time, the American Spectator magazine, which was a useless pile of deceit to begin with, and now that it’s no longer channeling the specifics of Monica Lewinski’s diet is completely irrelevant, ran an ad on my site.

In the scheme of things, I am sure that it won’t matter to them, it might cost them a penny, and get me ¼¢.

I probably would not have noticed, but for the fact that they were touting their new Senior Editor, Ben Stein. You know, the guy who got fired by the New York Times because he was whoring himself out to one of the “free credit score” scams.

They should have fired him for the advice he was given: You can become very rich by listening to Mr. “The credit crunch is way overblown,” and going the other way.

He is also thee guy who wrote the speech that Nixon never gave about not resigning.

It is amazing how the lamest of the lame seem to achieve success in this world, and then somehow, they appear in the lamest of ads on my blog.

Please note: once again, that I do not vet, nor do I endorse any ad that appears on my site, and I reserve the right to mock both the ads that appear on my site, as well as the advertisers.

Also, please note, this should be in no way construed as an inducement or a request for my reader(s) to click on any ad that they would not otherwise be inclined to investigate further. This would be a violation of the terms of service for Google™ Adsense™.

IMFed

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Yes, going through a debt crisis means selling off state assets at pennies on the dollar, so that private operators can underfund basic maintenance and overcharge consumers for luxuries like, you know, water:

Greece on Wednesday outlined plans to sell stakes in state-owned railway, water and real estate companies as part of a drive to raise billions of euros to help restore its ailing public finances.

…………

The European Union/International Monetary Fund bailout for the heavily indebted country projects revenue of 1 billion euros ($1.22 billion) per year from privatizations for the 2011-13 period.

…………

As part of the plan, the cash-strapped government will sell 49 percent of loss-making railway company OSE, 39 percent of Hellenic Post, 23 percent of Thessaloniki water EYATH and 10 percent in Athens water EYDAP.

I hope you are ready for the riots when people’s water bills triple overnight.

It’s sh%$ like this makes things worse.

The method is: sell the assets at an undervalued price, remove the revenue stream from your control, and they tell you that net result will be financial stability.

No, it’s just a slope to bankruptcy and the destruction of the middle class, and it is why the IMF is so justifiably despised across the world.

Does Jordan River Water Make You Stupid?

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Because it does appear that stupidity is way too common in the Middle East.

Case in point: After 9 deaths, and a major propaganda victory, Hamas is refusing the supplies that the ships were trying to deliver:

Israel has attempted to deliver humanitarian aid from an international flotilla to Gaza, but Hamas — which controls the territory — has refused to accept the cargo, the Israel Defense Forces said Wednesday.

Palestinian sources confirmed that trucks that arrived from Israel at the Rafah terminal at the Israel-Gaza border were barred from delivering the aid.

Does this place make people stupid-crazy, or is it that the people who aren’t stupid-crazy simply leave?

I’m just wondering, because there has been an endemic of stupid over the past 72 hours or so.

Why Do I Torture Myself?

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I know I shouldn’t have, but I read an Amity Shlaes opinion piece again, and this one suggests that regulating banks should be handled in the same way that a social networking site for 10-13 year olds polices itself, because, it’s like, you know, too tough to regulate things.

I think that Barbie put it best, when she said, “Math is hard.”

Gah!!!!

I think that what got to me the most was her brief bio at the end which noted that, “Amity Shlaes [is a] senior fellow in economic history at the Council on Foreign Relations.”

Here is someone who does not have a degree in economics, or history. She has a BA in English, she doesn’t understand, or worse does understand and lies with, statistics, and she is a senior fellow in economic history at the CFR?

Seriously, what the hell is wrong with our public institutions?

And what’s wrong with the publications that employ her?

At least the FT had the good sense to fire her incompetent lying ass.

OK, So Al and Tipper Gore are Separating

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It’s really no one’s business but their own. They are both over 60, and they have been married for 40 years.

It’s really none of our business.

So, why am I writing about this?

Because once again, the Washington Post demonstrates just how horrible a human being you have to be in order to have some sort of gig writing opinions for them.

In this case, it’s Stephen Stromberg, who is suggesting that there was something “false” about their kiss at the Democratic Convention in 2000 because they are getting separated now.

He’s making a point about people complaining about Obama being too cook, but he can’t manage not to take a shot at a married couple who are breaking up after 40 years, because that’s what the Beltway Kule Kidz do.

Mr. Stromberg, I’m sure that you don’t read my screeds, but you are a miserable human being, and I would not piss on you if you were on fire.

Full disclosure: I did actually vote for Nader in 2000, because my vote did not matter, as I lived in Texas, and I regret that vote to this day.

The GCV Looks Like the Troubled Child of FCS

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Click for full size

Yes, I know that this is a 1/24 plastic model

When the Future Combat System was canceled, it was done for cost growth, schedule slips, and concerns about a number of the technologies.

The army still feels that it needs a vehicle to succeed its Bradley, and so we now have the Ground Combat Vehicle (GCV).

Well, the military has begun the source selection process.

Here’s the kicker, they are expecting it to weigh 50 tons, as versus the 30-35T of the current Bradley.

There are some improvements, most notably the ability to carry a full 9 person infantry squad, but you could do that with the Bradley if you were to retrofit a remotely operated turret, as the current turret takes up about 1/3 of the usable internal space, you could fid a full squad.

With weight comes cost, fuel consumption, and, in the long run, fewer vehicles.

What’s more, it appears that the 50 ton IFV is actually a 70 ton IFV:

Two days before industry proposals were due, Gen. Peter Chiarelli, vice chief of staff of the U.S. Army, provided new details about the Ground Combat Vehicle (GCV) program, saying the new vehicle could weigh up to 70 tons, but only if the threat environment required it.

“We’re looking at a vehicle that ranges in weight between 50 and 70 tons,” Chiarelli said May 19 at the Army’s armor conference.

What he is suggesting is that in a high threat environment, and we know now that this means IEDs, not enemy tanks, you would bolt on armor to improve the survivability of the platform.

This is complete and utter bullsh%$.

If you add 20 tons to a 50 ton vehicle, it means that you have to size the propulsion, transmission, fuel stowage, etc. to accommodate that weight, which means that your 50T vehicle is going to get even heaver.

Otherwise, the vehicle at 70T will have the mobility of a motorized wheel chair.

Just go and fit the Bradley with the CTI 40mm remotely operated turret, and use advantages in non-metallic armor to improve the survivability.

You will probably end up at around 40T, so there would need to be a bit of an upgrade to the engine and suspension, but you will still save at least half the cost.

Once again, the US Army is well into a development death spiral.

Its a Death Trap, It’s a Suicide Rap

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Rupert Murdoch has decided that Times of London and the Sunday Times will go behind a pay-wall.

I generally think that this is a bad idea since:

  • People haven’t paid for content from news publications for over a century, it’s been advertising supported, with the cover/subscription price covering only a portion of the actual cost of printing.
  • Putting general interest content behind a firewall tends to remove it from the Internet consciousness, which drives subscriptions and ad revenue down. (See the New York Times‘ abortive attempt with their OP/EDs)

That being said, I think that Murdoch’s plans go way beyond a simple pay-wall, and straight into crazy town, because, as the New York Post, a Murdoch publication that I would like to see vanish into pay-wall obscurity notes, observes, the Times of London won’t just be going behind a pay-wall, they will also lock out the search engines almost completely:

The UK’s Times and Sunday Times are putting up search walls in addition to pay walls.

The papers, which plan to start charging users for access to their newly redesigned Web sites in late June, will prevent Google and other search engines from linking to their stories.

Although they are not the first papers to erect pay barriers around their content, the papers are going a step further by making most of their site invisible to Google’s Web crawler. Except for their homepages, no stories will show up on Google.

The papers are betting that loyal readers will covet access to scarce content. Critics say the move will make it tougher to attract new readers who discover content by searching the Web.

This isn’t just a misbegotten business plan, it’s an attempt to force payment for links, and it ain’t gonna work, at least not unless Murdoch can convince various legislatures to make linking illegal, a course of action that I find profoundly unlikely, since it essentially bans the web.

Another Shoe Drops on Blumenthal

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The Stamford Advocate quotes him as saying, “I wore the uniform in Vietnam,” which sounds particularly damning, though there is not video or audio tape at this time.

Seriously, the primary is in a few weeks, Connecticut Dems, time to switch horses.

It’s more than just a misstatement or two, because saying things like this:

“I wore the uniform in Vietnam and many came back to all kinds of disrespect. Whatever we think of war, we owe the men and women of the armed forces our unconditional support.”

Appears to be at the core of his public personae. It’s his version of, “A noun, a verb, and 911.” Every 3rd word out of his mouth is something like this, or like the largely apocryphal spitting stories, and as such this makes him seriously damaged goods.

If he does not lose the primary, he just got the state party endorsement, he will very likely lose the general.

H/t The Plum Line.

First, You Say Something Stupid, Then You Lie About It, but It’s On Video

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There is nothing wrong with your television set. Do not attempt to adjust the picture. We are controlling transmission.*

No, not Blumenthal, he fessed up in the back-handed way that pols do.

I mean Sue Lowden, who is a Republican running for US Senate against Harry Reid in Nevada.

First, she suggests that people should barter chickens for medical care, and does not have the good sense to say she meant, “Bargain,” and now she is denying that she ever said this.

The problem is that she has been caught on video repeatedly making just such a statement, so let’s roll tape, specifically the inestimable Rachel Maddow.

The first rule is that when you are in a hole, stop digging.

The former anchor woman turned politico brings to mind the immortal Don Henley lyric, “We got the bubble-headed-bleach-blond who Comes on at five, She can tell you ’bout the plane crash with a gleam In her eye.”

In any case, she may be Harry Reid’s electoral salvation.

*Virtual Kewpie doll for whoever picks the reference for the caption.

OK, This is Really Stupid

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Blanche Lincoln went to vote today, but she was turned away because she had already requested an absentee ballot:

Sen. Blanche Lincoln suffered what might be one of the all-time greatest campaign staff fails this morning. According to her campaign staff, Lincoln was initially turned away when she tried to vote at her home her polling place this morning after elections officials discovered she had already requested an absentee ballot be sent to her Virginia home. Poll workers told Lincoln their records showed she had already voted.

So, her photo-op turned into a clusterf%$#.

Sounds typical for Ms. Lincoln.

Oh My God………

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OK, I was a bit of a fan of Dodd, so I was upset, Geithner and Obama hung him out to dry over his doing their bidding on AIG bonuses.

At least the person selected by the powers that be to replace him, Connecticut Attorney General Richard Blumenthal, had a lock on the seat in the general, because the Nutmeg State is very blue.

Well, not any more. It appears that the Blumenthal, who has repeatedly used his service in Vietnam to justify his support for military tribunals and a continued military presence in Iraq and Afghanistan, has been lying about serving in Vietnam:

At a ceremony honoring veterans and senior citizens who sent presents to soldiers overseas, Attorney General Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut rose and spoke of an earlier time in his life.

“We have learned something important since the days that I served in Vietnam,” Mr. Blumenthal said to the group gathered in Norwalk in March 2008. “And you exemplify it. Whatever we think about the war, whatever we call it — Afghanistan or Iraq — we owe our military men and women unconditional support.”

There was one problem: Mr. Blumenthal, a Democrat now running for the United States Senate, never served in Vietnam. He obtained at least five military deferments from 1965 to 1970 and took repeated steps that enabled him to avoid going to war, according to records.

……

In 1970, with his last deferment in jeopardy, he landed a coveted spot in the Marine Reserve, which virtually guaranteed that he would not be sent to Vietnam. He joined a unit in Washington that conducted drills and other exercises and focused on local projects, like fixing a campground and organizing a Toys for Tots drive.

……

But what is striking about Mr. Blumenthal’s record is the contrast between the many steps he took that allowed him to avoid Vietnam, and the misleading way he often speaks about that period of his life now, especially when he is speaking at veterans’ ceremonies or other patriotic events.

I’m with the Swing State Project’s take on this, “The Dem statewide convention is this weekend. Conceivably delegates could nominate someone other than Blumenthal. If someone else wants to get on the primary ballot via petition, they need to file 7,500 signatures by June 8th (PDF).”

I think that it is probably too late to get the convention to nominate someone else, but there are 3 weeks to get the signatures, though I would make sure to get at least 12,000 because the PTB who selected Blumenthal in the first place will challenge them.

What I do know is that there are hundreds of hours of Blumenthal lying on video and audio tape, and whoever runs against him will play it over, and over, and over again.

He is dead meat.

I’m beginning to think that serving as attorney general or DA should be taken as a strike against those serving higher office.

Idiocracy Was a Documentary

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Idiocracy writ small

Yes, this an actual campaign ad in which a candidate is lambasted for believing in the independently observed fact that is evolution.

It’s actually a little more complex, because it’s an ad for a Republican primary, and intelligence and fact count for very little in that world.

Additionally, it may be the Alabama Education Association, the state branch of the NEA union, that is running the ad.

The AEA has had a number of long running battles with the candidate, Bradley Byrne, most prominently over his attempts to ban community college employees from holding public office.

Whether or not it’s the AEA funding this, the point is that they (probably correctly) see a person who understands the scientific method and proof as being vulnerable if this is exposed to the Republican party base.

It’s probably true, and it’s very sad.

Morons

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After all that has gone on with the Euro over the past year, and the fact that the Baltic Republic is suffering through a brutal recession, which its government has made worse by implementing an austerity program, Estonia has announced that it will adopt the Euro next year.

While I understand the issue here, national pride basically, anyone who joins the Euro now, when the state of the currency, and its central bank are currently in flux, is dangerously reckless.

The Demon Sheep is Back

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For a sequel, it’s pretty good.

A while ago, I, and pretty much everyone else in the blogosphere, along with the inestimable Rachel Maddow, pointed out just how remarkable, in a Plan 9 from Outer Space way, Carly Fiorina’s demon sheep campaign ad against Tom Campbell was.

Well, the California Democratic Party and the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee riffed on that bit of political agitprop, and came up with a “sheep” ad of their own.

It’s actually amusing, or it is if you’ve seen the original in all its ghastly glory, though I’m concerned that this is not a good allocation of resources. After all, amusing me, a voter who does not live in California, and would sooner gnaw off my own leg than vote Republican, does not help Barbara Boxer get elected.

Software Design that is Bad Stupid Bordering on Criminal

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OK, my wife has a domain for her special education business, SEDRA, and it comes with email.

Yesterday evening, we started getting timeouts when trying to send mail. Receiving worked just fine.

We finally discovered that the registrar and host, HostMonster, had changed the configuration to prevent virus infected machines from spamming. They changed the port used from 25 to 26.

OK, no big deal, it took me 5 minutes talking with tech support to figure that one out.

Unfortunately, there appeared to be no way to change the port number in Eudora®.

So I used Microsoft Mail to change the port, and I could post from that, but not from Eudora®, because it was not available in the options.

Well, I thought that this was stupid, how can you not be able to change the SMTP port in an email program?

Obviously, we could go to a new client, but that would mean hand holding Sharon* through learning a new email client, something that I view with no small amount of dread. I hate being the family call to Bangalore.

So, I Google, figuring that there is probably a setting in the .ini file that I can tweak

What do I find? I find this:

Eudora for Windows

Eudora has chosen to hide the Port change option in version 6.0 and up, making it more difficult to make this change. If you have purchased Eudora, we would suggest contacting them about making this option available by default again. To enable changing ports:

  1. Navigate to your Eudora install directory.
  2. Look in the Eudora directory for the directory “extrastuff”.
  3. In this directory is a file named “esoteric.epi”. Drag (copy or move) this file into the main Eudora directory. There will now be options extra listed, including a Ports page.

[they neglect to mention that you have to restart Eudora here if it is already open]

To change the outgoing mail port from 25 to 26:

  1. Launch Eudora
  2. Drop down the Tools menu, and choose Options
  3. Click on Ports
  4. Change the port from 25 to 26
  5. Click OK
  6. Restart Eudora

So, they had scrupulously hidden these options, and required you to manually move a file in order to be able to access these options.

Not only that, this was not an oversight, it was a deliberate decision to change the program so that you had to do this, and they made this decision when ISPs are increasingly moving away from ports 110 (incoming) and 25 (outgoing) so as to deal with botnets.

I can understand putting this under “advanced”, and popping up a warning, as Firefox does with “about:config”, or perhaps requiring someone to set “advanced menu mode.” or somesuch but deliberately burying the features and requiring that someone track down this obscure fix which involves moving an extensions file to the home directory of the account is stupid.

Actually, it’s more than stupid, it’s stoopid, really, really, really stoopid.

This is a level of deliberately stoopid that makes Sarah Palin look like Albert Einstein.

In any case, I found the fix, and I implemented it, and it works, but it took about 6 hours more than it should have.

*Love of my life, light of the cosmos, she who must be obeyed, my wife.

When Glenn Beck is More Reasonable than You…

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Bummer of a birth mark, little Johnny

It’s game over, dude.

In this case, it’s John McCain, who is suggesting that mirandizing the alleged Times Square bomber is somehow evil and wrong, and Glenn Beck, yes, Glen Beck, who is suggesting that we need not shred the Constitution, and give American citizens their constitutional due.

So John McCain is being called a demagogue, by the tag team by Jon Stewart and Glenn Beck.

Click for full size


This is one big shark that he jumped.
With Frikken

Lasers!Jumping C. Megalodon*

*The largest shark, and likely largest predator fish ever. It died out some 1.5 million years ago. The Genus is still in dispute, between either Carcharodon (Great White) or Carcharocles (broad toothed Mako). But in either case, you are jumping C. Megalodon, you have jumped the biggest shark ever.

Questions that Need to be Asked

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Is Every Right-Wing, Anti-Gay Christian Bigot Sucking Off Rent Boys?

I think that the answer is, “Yes”:

That man was George Alan Rekers, of North Miami—the callboy’s client and, as it happens, one of America’s most prominent anti-gay activists. Rekers, a Baptist minister who is a leading scholar for the Christian right, left the terminal with his gay escort, looking a bit discomfited when a picture of the two was snapped with a hot-pink digital camera.

Reached by New Times before a trip to Bermuda, Rekers said he learned Lucien was a prostitute only midway through their vacation. “I had surgery,” Rekers said, “and I can’t lift luggage. That’s why I hired him.” (Though medical problems didn’t stop him from pushing the tottering baggage cart through MIA.) Yet Rekers wouldn’t deny he met his slender, blond escort at Rentboy.com—which features homepage images of men in bondage and grainy videos of crotch-rubbing twinks—and Lucien confirmed it.