Category: Stupid

Pentagon to Engage in Psych Warfare Domestically

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The full article is in Harper’s.”

Meet the Pentagon’s New Spin Unit: Bush Administration hacks court bloggers, talk radio

Ken Silverstein
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The rapid-response team has been shut down but several sources tell me that another of Smith’s spin projects is ongoing. This project seeks to bypass the traditional media and work directly with talk radio and bloggers, mostly those with a heavily conservative tilt. The unit, which one source says was originally called “Surrogates Operation” but was later rechristened “Communications Outreach,” also reportedly provides talking points and briefings to retired military officials who now support the administration in appearances as media pundits. (I haven’t been able to learn which blogs and individuals the unit has been working with, but urge anyone with such information to contact me via email.)

It should be noted that this effort appears to violate the law which forbids domestic Pentagon propaganda operations.

The article, while informative, buries one of the important points in the last graph:

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The irony here is that Gates has a far better relationship with the media than Rumsfeld, who treated journalists as the enemy. But with Smith running amok, Gates’s honeymoon with the media and with the military may be coming to an end.

Vacation, All I Ever Wanted….

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The fact that the Iraqi Parliament is going on vacation indicates that they know something that our morally bankrupt intelligentsia do not, that regardless of what they do, GW Bush will not pull out of Iraq.

If Lichtenstein were to conquer Texas, and claim it as their own right now, George Bush would not pull a single soldier out of Iraq to stop them and to take it back.

For Shrub, it’s all about him, and Iraq, for various oedipal and addictive personality driven reasons is what he thinks he is.

Another Case of Flying While Brown.

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An American Airlines employee, boarding an American Airlines flight from an American Airlines bus caused a flight cancellation because he appeared to be of “middle eastern origin”.

And we also have case of flying while a Cancer survivor, in which a woman was made to remove her prosthetic breast and check it through luggage.

It’s not just that this stuff is stupid. This stuff is counterproductive. DHS has, for reasonso of political expedience and incompetence, created an atmosphere where panic reigns, and this makes it easier, not harder for someone wishing to do bad things to succeed.

You end up with primate brain (terrorist) against lizard brain (panic).

The Depressing Thing is That Someone Will Get Tenure for This.

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Someone got paid to come up with this?

Women prefer well-built blokes: official
By Lester Haines
Published Tuesday 10th July 2007 14:44 GMT

Here’s some good news for the gym monsters among you: women are “predisposed to prefer muscularity in men”, according to researchers at UCLA.

The team’s report, published in Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, suggests “muscles in men are akin to elaborate tail feathers in male peacocks” which “attract females looking for a virile mate”, as Reuters puts it.

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Google for Idiots

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Too funny for words. Google needs to use this in their next Superbowl ad.

Google in Colorado safe cracking caper
By Cade Metz in San Francisco
Published Tuesday 10th July 2007 19:49 GMT

It’s true. Google can help with anything. Minutes before they operned several locked safes at a “family fun center” in Colorado Springs, a team of masked bandits sat down at a nearby PC and Googled “safe-cracking.” “They brought up a site called ‘How to Open Safes,'” Colorado Springs detective Chuck Ackerman told The Register.

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Ten Schoolgirls Murdered for Bush’s Oedipal Issues

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This is what George W. Bush’s Oedipal obsession with Iraq has bought us: the Taliban taking over Afghanistan again.

As War Enters Classrooms, Fear Grips Afghans
By BARRY BEARAK

QALAI SAYEDAN, Afghanistan, July 9 — With their teacher absent, 10 students were allowed to leave school early. These were the girls the gunmen saw first, 10 easy targets walking hand-in-hand through the blue metal gate and on to the winding dirt road.

The staccato of machine-gun fire pelted through the stillness. A 13-year-old named Shukria was hit in the arm and the back, and then teetered into the soft brown of an adjacent wheat field. Zarmina, her 12-year-old sister, ran to her side, listening to the wounded girl’s precious breath and trying to help her stand.

But Shukria was too heavy to lift, and the two gunmen, sitting astride a single motorbike, sped closer.

As Zarmina scurried away, the men took a more studied aim at those they already had shot, killing Shukria with bullets to her stomach and heart. Then the attackers seemed to succumb to the frenzy they had begun, forsaking the motorbike and fleeing on foot in a panic, two bobbing heads — one tucked into a helmet, the other swaddled by a handkerchief — vanishing amid the earthen color of the wheat.

Six students were shot here on the afternoon of June 12, two of them fatally. The Qalai Sayedan School — considered among the very best in the central Afghan province of Logar — reopened only last weekend, but even with Kalashnikov-toting guards at the gate, only a quarter of the 1,600 students have dared to return.

Shootings, beheadings, burnings and bombings: these are all tools of intimidation used by the Taliban and others to shut down hundreds of Afghanistan’s public schools. To take aim at education is to make war on the government.

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Great Headlines: Ahmadinejobless

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It’s the hed for a Foreign Policy Magazine article about the Iranian president, and how his general cluelessness is leading to his irrelevancy, and possible removal.

That being said, the article is substantive, and right off, it makes the important point:

Iran’s radical president is sinking fast, and he knows it. Now, there’s only one man who can keep Mahmoud Ahmadinejad out of the unemployment line: George W. Bush.

There has been no greater resource for fundamentalist dictatorships and terrorists than George W. Bush, and his crusade against his father the norms of international behavior.

George W. Bush: Generating capital for terrorists and religious fundamentalists since 2001.

Gordon Brown Has Nothing to Fear from These Morons

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The Register has an article, ISPs face down Tories on file sharing, where the ISPs basically told Conservative Party Leader David Cameron to go pound sand after a speech that he gave to record distributors.

The ISPA’s response was blunt:

A spokesman for ISPA said: “The Internet Watch Foundation is very focused in what it does and has taken a long time to get there working with the police. Unlike distributing images of child abuse, copyright infringement can be a civil offence.

“Any kind of blocking has to be the preserve of the courts.”

People who use music online understand the dynamics. They understand that record distributors cheat artists as an integral part of their business model. They understand that these companies want to make people pay multiple times that these people OWN, in order to put it on a walkman, or in their cars.

For the Tories to be sucking up to these folks confirms the worst suspicions of every British voter.

Wanker of The Day

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Stephen Dunne.

That’s tough dude, I guess you have to keep living in your parent’s basement, surfing the net for gay pr0n.

Bar-exam flunker sues: Wannabe rejects gay-wed question
By Donna Goodison
Friday, July 6, 2007 – Updated: 08:15 AM EST

A Boston man who failed the Massachusetts bar exam has filed a federal lawsuit claiming his refusal to answer a test question – related to gay marriage – caused him to flunk the test.

Stephen Dunne, 30, is suing the Massachusetts Board of Bar Examiners and the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court, claiming the “inappropriate” test question violated his religious convictions and his First Amendment rights. Answering the question, Dunne claims, would imply he endorsed gay marriage and parenting.

The suit also challenges the constitutionality of the 2003 SJC ruling that made Massachusetts the nation’s first state to legalize same-sex marriage.

Dunne, who describes himself as a Christian and a Democrat, is seeking $9.75 million in damages and wants a jury to prohibit the Board of Bar Examiners from considering the question in his passage of the exam and to order it removed from all future exams.

“There’s a different forum for that contemporary issue to be discussed, and it’s inappropriate to be on a professional licensing examination,” Dunne told the Herald. “You don’t see questions about partial-birth abortion or abortion on there.”

Dunne scored a 268.866 on the bar exam, just missing a passing grade of 270. The exam question at issue concerns two married lesbian attorneys and their rights regarding a house and two children when one decides to end the marriage.

“Yesterday, Jane got drunk and hit (her spouse) Mary with a baseball bat, breaking Mary’s leg, when she learned that Mary was having an affair with Lisa,” the bar exam question stated. “As a result, Mary decided to end her marriage with Jane in order to live in her house with Philip, Charles and Lisa. What are the rights of Mary and Jane?”

Dunne claims the question was used as a “screening device” to identify and penalize him for “refusing to subscribe to a liberal ideology based on ‘secular humanism,’ ”according to his lawsuit.

“Homosexual conduct is inconsistent with (Dunne’s) Christian practices, beliefs and values, which are protected by the First Amendment,” the lawsuit states.

“I respect people with alternative lifestyles, and we must do that in a civil society,” Dunne said. “I just have a different opinion that millions of people share with me, and I believe that my opinion should be respected just as much as (pro-gay) opinions. I have no intent in spreading hatred or discrimination.”

In his court documents, Dunne described homosexuality as a “voluntary human behavior that is changeable.”

“Societal recognition and perpetuation of rampant homosexuality is neither prudent nor wise,” his lawsuit states.

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Military Times Says Army “Nearing a Breaking Point”

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They are deploying troops for a year. In WWII, they determined that soldiers needed relief after 180 days.

When this is over, we will have many broken men, and recruiting problems for a generation.

Editorial: Balance home, away time

Many soldiers have deployed three, four and more times to Iraq, Afghanistan or both. But you won’t hear much in the way of complaints, because a shared sense of honor and duty overrides most self-interest.

Yet there is no escaping the fact that the Army is nearing a breaking point.

In the fifth year of war in Iraq, when deployments should be winding down, combat tours instead are being extended.

Time between deployments, meanwhile, is unchanged. So today, soldiers can look forward to 15 months in the war zone for every 12 months at home.

Fifteen-month deployments mean some soldiers can expect to miss two Christmases, two anniversaries, and two of the same child’s birthdays in one war tour. It means more mental health problems for soldiers, more stress on families and less support for the mission at home.

This is bad policy.

Sen. Jim Webb, D-Va., plans to introduce legislation to mandate that deployed troops get a month at home for every month deployed. So if a deployment does have to last 15 months, soldiers wouldn’t have to go back for another 15 months.

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US Mega Embassy in Baghdad Uninhabitable

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Once again, I am compelled to make the repeat the wisest thing that I’ve read this century:

But it does inspire in me the desire for a competition; can anyone, particularly the rather more Bush-friendly recent arrivals to the board, give me one single example of something with the following three characteristics:

1. It is a policy initiative of the current Bush administration
2. It was significant enough in scale that I’d have heard of it (at a pinch, that I should have heard of it)
3. It wasn’t in some important way completely f#$@ed up during the execution.

Seriously. I’ve yet to see anything wiser yet, and I’m using the loose definition of the 21st century which includes the year 2000.

Construction Woes Add to Fears at Embassy in Iraq
By Glenn Kessler
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, July 5, 2007; A01

U.S. diplomats in Iraq, increasingly fearful over their personal safety after recent mortar attacks inside the Green Zone, are pointing to new delays and mistakes in the U.S. Embassy construction project in Baghdad as signs that their vulnerability could grow in the months ahead.

A toughly worded cable sent from the embassy to State Department headquarters on May 29 highlights a cascade of building and safety blunders in a new facility to house the security guards protecting the embassy. The guards’ base, which remains unopened today, is just a small part of a $592 million project to build the largest U.S. embassy in the world.

The main builder of the sprawling, 21-building embassy is First Kuwaiti General Trade and Contracting Co., a Middle Eastern firm that is already under Justice Department scrutiny over alleged labor abuses. First Kuwaiti also erected the guard base, prompting some State Department officials in Washington and Baghdad to worry that the problems exposed in the camp suggest trouble lurking ahead for the rest of the embassy complex.

The first signs of trouble, according to the cable, emerged when the kitchen staff tried to cook the inaugural meal in the new guard base on May 15. Some appliances did not work. Workers began to get electric shocks. Then a burning smell enveloped the kitchen as the wiring began to melt.

All the food from the old guard camp — a collection of tents — had been carted to the new facility, in the expectation that the 1,200 guards would begin moving in the next day. But according to the cable, the electrical meltdown was just the first problem in a series of construction mistakes that soon left the base uninhabitable, including wiring problems, fuel leaks and noxious fumes in the sleeping trailers.

“Poor quality construction . . . life safety issues . . . left [the embassy] with no recourse but to shut the camp down, in spite of the blistering heat in Baghdad,” the May 29 cable informed Washington.

Such challenges with construction contracts inside the fortified enclave known as the Green Zone reflect the broader problems that have thwarted reconstruction efforts throughout war-torn Iraq.

The “fairly serious problems” noted in the cable indicate that First Kuwaiti’s work fails to meet basic safety standards, said an administration official who was not authorized to speak to the news media. But the State Department’s Overseas Buildings Operations (OBO), which oversees construction of the new embassy, has kept a “close hold” on the project, making it difficult for anyone else in the government to gauge progress. “We are suspecting we will find the same issues in the new embassy,” resulting in months of delays, the official said.

The embassy cable prompted a stinging response from James L. Golden, OBO’s managing director for the embassy project. In a cable dated June 8, he berated personnel in Baghdad for sending their message over an open embassy system, rather than keeping the complaints in-house. He defended First Kuwaiti and accused the embassy and KBR — a Texas-based company that runs many facilities in Iraq and discovered the wiring problems — of making false claims to deflect attention from their own errors.

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Hmmm….is James L. Golden a political appointee? I quick google can’t confirm one way or the other.

Russia To Locate Missiles In Baltic Coast In Response to US Missile Defense Plans

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Let’s see. We locate a “Missile Shield” against Iran somewhere that leaves much of NATO naked, but is along the Russian border, and we are surprised when they get huffy?

This is Condi Rice trying to recreate the “Evil Empire” because her profession has vanished with its fall.

Someone should tell her that Diplomat means more than, “An extremely unwise thing to call Guido “Knuckles” Lomat“.

FWIW, missiles fired from Kaliningrad could take a depressed trajectory, and strike NATO targets with little or no warning, and said “missile shield”, which is exclusively exo-atmospheric, won’t be able to touch it.

Russia threatens European rocket deployment
MOSCOW (AFP): Russia issued a veiled threat on Wednesday to deploy rockets in its Kaliningrad region bordering the European Union if the United States built a missile defence shield in central Europe.

Moscow and Washington are locked in a standoff over the US plans for a radar station in the Czech Republic and interceptor rockets in Poland.

Russia says the plans threaten its security.

The threat to put missiles in Kaliningrad was made by the influential First Deputy Prime Minister Sergei Ivanov only two days after President Vladimir Putin again raised the missile shield dispute with US President George W. Bush.

Putin has suggested to Bush that the United States use a Russian-controlled radar in ex-Soviet Azerbaijan, near the Iranian border, instead of having a shield in central Europe.

Putin has also offered the use of another radar under construction at Armavir in southern Russia.

“If our offers are accepted, Russia will not consider it necessary to deploy new rocket units in the European part of the country, including Kaliningrad, to counter the threat” from the United States, Ivanov was quoted as saying by Russian news agencies.

Ivanov, who was on a visit to Uzbekistan, said Russia had “found an asymmetrical and effective response” to the US project for a European shield.

“We know what we’re doing…. If our proposals are not accepted, we will take adequate measures,” Ivanov said.

Washington insists that its proposed missile shield is intended to guard against possible attack from “rogue states” such as Iran. Moscow believes the systems are directed against Russia.

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They believe that it is targeted against Russia because it is targeted against Russia.

Some Things Never Change

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One of these things is that you will never find a more useless, self-centered, inbred, addle brained royal family than the House of Habsburg.

That being said, why the hell did this guy, get this back in the first place? Its a national treasure, not a plaything for the idle wealthy.

The estate is a duty to those who choose to serve their land in word and deed as nobility, not a toy to be discarded when bored.

Heir puts ‘Dracula’s Castle’ for sale

By ALEXANDRU ALEXE, Associated Press WriterMon Jul 2, 2:18 PM ET

A Habsburg heir is hoping someone will take a bite of his offer Monday to sell “Dracula’s Castle” in Transylvania.

The medieval Bran Castle, perched on a cliff near Brasov in mountainous central Romania, is a top tourist attraction because of its ties to Prince Vlad the Impaler, the warlord whose cruelty inspired Bram Stoker’s 1897 novel, “Dracula.”

Legend has it that the ruthless Vlad — who earned his nickname because of the way he tortured his enemies — spent one night in the 1400s at the castle.

The Habsburgs formally put the Bran Castle on the market Monday, a U.S.-based investment company said. No selling price was announced.

Bran Castle was built in the 14th century to serve as a fortress to protect against the invading Ottoman Turks. The royal family moved into the castle in the 1920s, living there until the communist regime confiscated it from Princess Ileana in 1948.

After being restored in the late 1980s and following the end of communist rule in Romania, it gained popularity as a tourist attraction known as “Dracula’s Castle.”

In May 2006, the castle was returned to Princess Ileana’s son, New York architect Archduke Dominic Habsburg. He pledged to keep it open as a museum until 2009.

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Opposition lawmakers have claimed the government’s decision to return the castle to Habsburg was illegal because of procedural errors.