ARABS' LAST CHANCE
IF IRAQ'S DEMOCRACY FAILS . . .
If you monkeys mess this up for us, it's POW! A nuclear punch to the moon for the whole lot of you.
August 2006 Archives
Via Don Henley
It was pretty big year for fashion
A lousy year for rock and roll
The people gave their blessing to crimes of passion
It was a dark, dark night of the collective soul
And I was somewhere out on riverside by the el royale hotel
When a stranger appeared in a cloud of smoke
I thought I knew him all too well
He said now that I have your attention
I got something I wanna say
You may not wanna hear it, Im gonna tell it to you anyway
You know Ive always like you boy
Cause you were not afraid of me
Things are gonna get mighty rough here in gomorrah-by-the-seaYa said its just like home
Its so damn hot I cant stand it
My fine seersucker suit is all soaking wet
And the hills are burning
And the wind is raging
And the clock strikes midnight in the garden of allah
In the garden of allahNice car
Ah, I love those bavarians
So meticulous
Yknow I remember when things were a lot more fun around here
When good was good and evil was evil
Before things got so fuzzy
I was once a golden boy like you
And I was summoned to the halls of power in the heavenly courts
And I dined with the deities who looked upon me with favor,
For my talents, my creativity
And we sat beneath the palms
In the warm afternoons and drank the wine
With fitzgerald and huxley
And they pawned the biting phrase from the tongues hot with blood
And drained their pins of bitter ink
Vainly reaching for the bottle full of empty edens
Branded especially for the ones who had come with great expectations
To the perfumed halls of allah, for their time in the sunAnd we were stokin the fires and oilin up the machinery
Until the gods found out we had ideas of our own
And war was coming and the earth was shaking
And there was no more ruin in the garden of allahToday I made an appearance downtown
I am an expert witness because I say I am
And I said gentlemen, and I use that world loosely
I will testify for you, Im a gun for hire,Im a saint, Im a liar
Because there are no facts, there is no truth
Just data to be manipulated
I can get you any result you like
Whats it worth to you?
Because there is no wrong, there is no right
And I sleep very well at night
No shame, no solution, no remorse, no retribution
Just people selling t-shirts
Just opportunity to participate in the pathetic little circus
And winning, winning, winningIt was pretty big year for predators
The marketplace was on a roll
And the land of opportunity
Spawned a whole new breed of men without souls
This year notoriety got all confused with fame
And the devil is downhearted babe, cause
Theres nothing left for him to claimHe said its just like home
Its so low-down I cant stand it
I guess my work around here has all been doneAnd the fruit is rotten, the serpents eyes shine
As he wraps around the vine,
In the garden of allah
In the garden of allah
In the garden of allah
We must protect our precious bodily fluids from the hippies who would destroy our Purity of Essence.
It's hard to believe that the man is a senior writer for U.S. News & World Report.
Then again...
Scott ponders
...and, as Brad notes, it's unclear why the ozone hole closing up - after a set of regulations favored by environmentalists was put in place - should be embarrassing to environmentalists, but then maybe I lack Ann Coulter's deft reasoning abilities...
Man, this is like easy. The right wingers believe that the whole reason that environmentalists have for living is to simply make people's lives miserable. It isn't about an actual goal. It's all about inflicting suffering. So the fact that the ozone hole is closing simply removes one lever the environmentalists have to inflict their regime of suffering.
It's pretty much a religious line amongst all of the right. And it's no coincidence that this is essentially the central theme of pretty much all Ayn Rand's rants: the people who actually care about things are really the people who want to rip you off or inflict needless suffering for some unexplained reason.
It's a fucked up way of viewing the world and I've known far too many people who share this fucked up belief (I work with far too many of them as well). They simply have no soul left and simply can't imagine anyone who doesn't have greed and selfishness as their only motive in life.
Mass murder in the skies: was the plot feasible?
So the fabled binary liquid explosive - that is, the sudden mixing of hydrogen peroxide and acetone with sulfuric acid to create a plane-killing explosion, is out of the question. Meanwhile, making TATP ahead of time carries a risk that the mission will fail due to premature detonation, although it is the only plausible approach.
Certainly, if we can imagine a group of jihadists smuggling the necessary chemicals and equipment on board, and cooking up TATP in the lavatory, then we've passed from the realm of action blockbusters to that of situation comedy.
It should be small comfort that the security establishments of the UK and the USA - and the "terrorism experts" who inform them and wheedle billions of dollars out of them for bomb puffers and face recognition gizmos and remote gait analyzers and similar hi-tech phrenology gear - have bought the Hollywood binary liquid explosive myth, and have even acted upon it.
We've given extraordinary credit to a collection of jihadist wannabes with an exceptionally poor grasp of the mechanics of attacking a plane, whose only hope of success would have been a pure accident. They would have had to succeed in spite of their own ignorance and incompetence, and in spite of being under police surveillance for a year.
But the Hollywood myth of binary liquid explosives now moves governments and drives public policy. We have reacted to a movie plot. Liquids are now banned in aircraft cabins (while crystalline white powders would be banned instead, if anyone in charge were serious about security). Nearly everything must now go into the hold, where adequate amounts of explosives can easily be detonated from the cabin with cell phones, which are generally not banned.
Ben Sargent nails it
Toady. Bootlicker. Ass kisser. Complete and utter idiot who deserves to be stuck in an endless loop, subjected to full body cavity searches by a man named "Moe" with size 14 shoes.
Today on NPR's Marketplace, David Frum managed to wrangle himself a commentary segment so that he could push for the ultimate wet dream fantasy of the modern right wing: racial profiling. His tap dance starts off innocent enough by railing against the state of insanity that is our modern airport security procedures. But then he sticks the shiv in the back of sanity by using the inconveniences of misguided airport security as an argument for racially profiling Muslims.
His arguments in defense of profiling are so thin as to be transparent. Basically he sets up a straw man of claiming that the current practice of "suspecting everyone" would never have turned up the terrorists that U.K.'s MI5 just caught. Let's leave aside the fact that these jokers may turn out to be just as laughable as terrorists as the now forgotten Florida dunderheads seem to have been (let's just say that confessions under Pakistani torture doesn't increase my confidence, not to mention the lack of tickets and even passports). The simple and completely verifiable fact is that profiling does not work. Not only does it not work, it actually is far more likely to miss terrorists than random searches.
Don't believe me? Well, just check out the science behind it. It's child's play to defeat profiling. Hell, drug dealers stoned out of their minds even figured out how to beat profiling. Only people who simply don't understand what the problem is and haven't figured out the glory of evolutionary selection (without even any risks, mind you!) think that profiling is a good idea.
Well, certainly those and people like Frum, Malkin and apparently 20% of the polled population of the United States who think that rounding Muslims up and making them wear yellow arm bands with a red crescent "so we can identify them easier" makes good policy.
Morons.
Frum, of course, goes for the trifecta by linking the policy of random searches (which MI5 would subscribe to, of course) to the overwhelming lobbying efforts of the PC crowd (read "dirty hippies") that have congress cowed into submission such that they are powerless to propose the very draconian laws that Frum and Malkin so desperately want.
And of course, the Malkins and Frums of this country simply don't consider the fact that simply *not* pissing off the very people that you want to get on your side - i.e. the Muslims of this world who are just as upset about terrorism as the right thinking white folks of this country - is actually a damn good strategy that will bear far more fruit than alienating them in an idiotic effort that even a stoned drug mule can figure out how to defeat.
But no one ever claimed that Frum was bright. And Malkin? Well, shit. She certainly doesn't seem to be getting by on her brains.
Update: Be sure to read this gem: CSIS boss calls racial profiling 'fundamentally stupid'
The director of the Canadian Security Intelligence Service said Tuesday that the spy agency avoids racial profiling because it is "fundamentally stupid'' and does not knowingly use information gleaned under torture offshore because the practice is "morally repugnant.''
Frum, Coulter and Malkin, however, are completely down with moral repugnant practices - 'natch.
Oh, these Terrorists won't let me be. Lord have mercy on me. Woe is me.
Again, things are just getting a wee bit bizarre lately. Yesterday I was driving to work listening to our local commie, pinko, Osama funded, terrorist loving liberal public radio station and I heard the DHS secretary Chertoff saying that he was envying the British laws regarding the holding of suspects without charges. You see, in the U.K., the police have the ability to hold terrorism suspects for 28 days (that's one full moon cycle to the rest of us) to see if they turn into werewolves to make a case against these blokes.
And the weird part is that Chertoff is envious of this ability.
I mean, what world is Chertoff living in? Hello? Does the name José Padilla mean anything to Chertoff? Hello? What does the secretary of DHS think that "Hang 'em High" Gonzales has been telling the congress on a repeated basis regarding the administration's powers to do whatever the fuck they want to in a time of war?
I think the only rational explanation is that the entire cabinet of this administration has been whisked away in an alien space craft, repeatedly probed - anally - and replaced with a mutated form of cat DNA and their human clones.
So, Osama Walks into This Bar, See? and Bush says, “Whad’l'ya have, pardner?” and Osama says, “Well, George, what are you serving today?” and Bush says, “Fear,” and Osama shouts, “Fear for everybody!” and George pours it on for the crowd. Then the presidential bartender says, “Hey, who’s buying?” and Osama points a thumb at the crowd sucking down their brew. “They are,” he says. And the two of them share a quiet laugh.
The "Prescience" of the Anti-War Crowd
The anti-war crowd was unable to predict with precise detail the disaster which unfolded while the pro-war crowd's precise predictions about the success simply never materialized.
And let's not forget one of Dale Franks' eliminationist hits. Never tire of hearing that kind of rhetoric.
Still, what I posted on the eve of war looks fairly prescient...
one year from now, if Iraq is essentially the same security state as Palestine is under Israel today we have a 10 year occupation on our hands. If we still have troops fighting, suicide bombers and all the trappings of modern day Palestine, the critics of this war with Iraq are right. The administration has sold us a bill of goods that we were going to paying for decades from now - occupation of chaos is costly both in dollar terms and lives lost.
But even so, it's pretty amazing how short Franks' memory truly is. Heck, it was literally just days before Bush opened the main event that we learned that the state department had written things like this
Even if some version of democracy took root -- an event the report casts as unlikely -- anti-American sentiment is so pervasive that elections in the short term could lead to the rise of Islamic-controlled governments hostile to the United States.
"Liberal democracy would be difficult to achieve," says one passage of the report, according to an intelligence official who agreed to read portions of it to the Los Angeles Times. "Electoral democracy, were it to emerge, could well be subject to exploitation by anti-American elements."
The thrust of the document, the source said, "is that this idea that you're going to transform the Middle East and fundamentally alter its trajectory is not credible."
Sounds pretty damn prescient to me.
But I guess Franks wanted dates, times and names of troops killed for the next three years or - well - we're all just a bunch of amateurs compared to the abilities of his gigantic brain.
It's getting cliche, I know, but every time I think I've finally peeled back the onion of this surreal period of history to its core, another hideous layer of things I simply couldn't believe existed rips off its mask and leers at me from behind the shadows. The latest of these surreal bogeymen that appear from underneath the bed when you least expect them is the visage of grinning, long haired, bearded hippies from that period of shame we now call the Vietnam war.
For quite some time we've been subjected to the endless repetition of the mantra "Iraq is not Vietnam". For example - as one might hear on any well researched right wing blog - one is a country in the desert and the other is a country much like Hawaii only with really nasty people who we should have all wiped out in a manly surge of military might were it not for - you guessed it - the wild eyed, ragged beard, unkempt and certainly foul smelling hippies.
Who knew that flower power could reach across the decades with such raw power as to mess up yet another war we could have won - damn you! - if we hadn't had our will sapped by their willy hippy ways.
And quite a mythos has been built up around these hippies of yesteryear. The unkempt ones apparently are single handedly responsible for splitting the Democratic party and establishing a career of shameful loses in the political arena. Somehow the fact that Richard M. Nixon was the guy who ran on a platform of bugging out of Vietnam seems to have lost in the sands of time. Somehow the entire experience of Vietnam has been reduced to a bunch of hippies marching around central park, spitting on passing wheel chair bound vets while simultaneously placing daisies into the rifle barrels of the national guards.
Wait a minute. Damn LSD flashbacks! That was Kent state! Another Democratic fiasco! Or not. Can't remember any more. It's all just colors and lava lamps since Ned Lamont won. The 'shrooms are making things hard to sequence into serial thought so I can type it with my fingers, man. It's like the whole world is swirling.
The colors! The colors!
Fuck. What's that itching! It's BUGS! BUGS! BUGS, I TELL YOU.
Quick, I need another shot of whiskey - STAT. And throw me those uppers - yea, the red ones. I want to mix it with the bunch of other pills I got at the Lamont victory party. Yea, the one where we we planned the whole fascist takeover of the United States.
First Connecticut and then Chicago. Remember the Kent State 20 - er, 4. Or whatever dude. Just fuckin' get those Republicans out of office because - like - we need to weaken America with our Peace Symbol/Swastika so that our Islamofascist brothers can come and cover our women with burkas and make all the men grow really shaggy beards that they can't trim.
Yea, man. It'll be sooooooooooooo coool when the revolution comes around.
Soooooooooooooo cooooooooooooooooooooool.
Just you all wait, you short haired corporatist swine. Just you all wait.
So, I'm going off to merry ol' England in a week and a half for some business. Given today's events, it looks like I'm no going to be unable to carry my massive shampoo, conditioner and leave in conditioner that my luxurious hair requires for its daily maintenance regime. Oh well. I certainly hate - hate, mind you - buying the stuff over there. God knows I don't understand the currency. And they have brands that I've never heard of. Toothpaste is serious stuff, you know.
But in any event, it's likely that I won't be able to take carry on luggage on the flight back from the old country. I'm not sure what I'm going to do with my computer, as - well - the last thing on earth I want to do is put that in my carry on luggage so that the baggage claim monkeys can toss that around with the traditional loving care and respect that they show each and every piece of checked luggage.
It also means that I'm going to be subjected to even more inane security checks. I guess, since they are forbidding us to carry any liquids on board that I'll have to make double sure that I've emptied my bladder before getting on the plane. Man, that would be incredibly embarrassing to have to remove its contents before I could get through the security barrier. And what about blood? It's a liquid, ain't it? And what if I had a bad burrito before arriving and I have the runs?
Think about it. Binary explosives hidden in explosive diarrhea.
Still, you have to admire the stiff upper lip of the entire right wing today. Rather than refusing to let the terrorists - you know - terrorize them, they are right with the program, running around like a chicken with their head cut off, or darkly mumbling numerological repetitions, peering inside their copy of Nostradamus' greatest hits, desperate for a sign that says "kill all the liberals". Some have opted out of the traditional dark arts and have skipped right into science fiction, elevating Al Qaeda to the level of "Terminator", granting the terrorists the meme of "unstoppable machines who will kill you". The latter, of course, throws in a gratuitous swipe at Ned Lamont because - you know - he's the reason why we're all going to die. After all, he killed Lieberman's chances, didn't he?
I'll just leave you with the wonderful JPEG that pretty much sums up the whole "Letting the Terrorists Win" theme that seems to be the song of choice on the right. It's currently the banner image at that bastion of fear clutched closely to the chest, Red State.
Yep, that's the image that the baby Jesus would be proud of.
Ossama, too.
IRAQ WAR THREE - THIS ONE, ONLY IRAQIS CAN WIN
Fuck them if they don't want our freedom - we've done our part
Yes, this is precisely what he's saying.
It's actually pretty amazing to see how easily these neocon jokers can jump from warmongering about Iraq to throwing them under the bus without even missing a beat. I mean, this is precisely what I expected all along, but to actually see it happen without the event even causing the slightest shimmer on the surface of lake "all is going well" - well, it's just completely surreal.
By the end of the month, I bet the common wisdom will not just be that we should be withdrawing all our troops from Iraq, but that it's the Democrat's fault for obscuring the debate such that we couldn't come to this conclusion six months ago.
Okay, you really have to see this to believe it. After you do, you'll realize that those locks you have on your doors? Well, they're completely and utterly useless.
Now I have to find some locks that aren't susceptible to an attack that my grandmother can perform.
More info here
Update: Okay, this is just sick. Here's a DIY vibrating lock pick made from an Oral B tooth brush.
A defense of Joe Lieberman, liberals' least favorite senator
When Democrats come back into power, they will need people like Lieberman to make sure they don't stay in power
So, this is going on the car.
Man, I never - ever - thought I'd miss Nixon, Reagan or Bush I.
This is kind of cool - at least to me - from several angles.
Tracking the Congressional attention span
Researchers wanted to know several things: how do elected leaders distribute their attention? Under what circumstances do leaders push or follow public attention to an issue? Is debate on most issues incremental or explosive? Now that they could accurately track topics over time, the researchers found, for instance, that "judicial nominations" have consumed steadily more Congressional attention between 1997 and 2004. In fact, the topic produced the most number of words published in a single "day" of the Congressional Record: 230,000 on November 12, 2003.
Another hot issue, abortion, has moved in the other direction. Abortion has steadily received less Congressional attention over the last decade, and floor speeches on abortion now remain stable at one percent of the total (down from six percent in the 105th Congress).
There are hundreds of fascinating ways to slice and dice this massive chunk of data; it gets most interesting, for instance, when the researchers match up spikes and lulls in certain topics with specific news items or political events. (For those interested in such things, section four of the paper makes for excellent reading.)
Section four - for those of you still reading - is the results of the analysis for the 105th -108th Senate. Section 4.3.3 is particularly interesting - Intervention Analysis: 9/11. <heh>
Anyways, you can read the whole report via PDF here, yourself. As I said, very cool stuff. Well worth the read.
From Red State's Leon H Wolf:
You must concede that the "classical liberal" ideas of freedom, liberty, tolerance, and self-rule are the genesis of this moral decay.
And there you have it folks. This one sentence pretty much provides the distilled essence of everything that's wrong with the modern conservative movement here in the U.S. This, in a nutshell, is precisely why Iraq is so completely and utterly fucked up. This is why they fight.
Kind of explains the whole genocide fetish, don't it...
