tvashtarkatena

Cats love boxes, so if you leave the oven door open....

I always bring a generator to base camp. Anyway, if you're in the Seattle area and you have an extra, small, countertop microwave oven you'd like to lose, drop me a PM with the make, model, and $$$. Mine just went bang, then dead.

No wonder FW loves him.

LULZ!

That's the vision: Dome the entire country, and take out the Bad Guys with a push of a button...inside or outside The Dome. No muss, no fuss. Now back to our regularly scheduled programming. You gotta love the term Homeland Security, too. What a wholesome mix of Der Faderland, Mom's apple pie, paranoid xenophobia, New Speak, and the comfort of a soft, fuzzy widdle blankie; perfect for that half of our population with the mentality of a spoiled 6 year old. I wonder how much the Bush Administration paid that lucky PR firm to come up with it? I forgot the mini domed security enclaves for asset strippers within the maxi dome. Da-Double-Dy Domeland, chock full Dubyas, Double Dees, and Domestics. Right out of a Robert Heinlein novella...had he been psychopathic.

That's the vision: Dome the entire country, and take out the Bad Guys with a push of a button...inside or outside The Dome. No muss, no fuss. Now back to our regularly scheduled programming. You gotta love the term Homeland Security, too. What a wholesome mix of Der Faderland, Mom's apple pie, paranoid xenophobia, New Speak, and the comfort of a soft, fuzzy widdle blankie; perfect for that half of our population with the mentality of a spoiled 6 year old. I wonder how much the Bush Administration paid that lucky PR firm to come up with it?

We would have been far, far better off to simply say 'fuck you, we're going to continue to be a free and open nation' and take a few more hits, rather than becoming a paranoid, bankrupt police state full of paranoid pussies manipulated by cynical asset strippers and chest puffing posers. We would also have done better to not over simplify and dehumanize 'The Bad Guys' , and take a look at a pretty rotten foreign policy track record. Such philosophies are simply not in an asset stripper's playbook, however. The Right Wing is a movement based on cruelty and bullying, so it's only natural that their response was to outdo the atrocities of the enemy, rather than take the high ground, as any principled society should always do, but most importantly during times of threat and crisis.

Those wacky Nigerians....

Hindsight is great. I wonder how many emails, phone calls, letters Homeland Security/FBI/CIA/US embassies get per day saying, "I/someone I know/this guy on a streetcorner, etc am going to blow up a plane/kill the president/release sarin gas in the mall, etc" Bullshit. We had well-sourced, substantiated, and actionable info in 9/11, Ft. Hood, and this case. His father is a high-placed banker within Nigeria, not some random nut job. It's not at all a matter of hindsight - it's the same pattern of dropping the ball between field offices and Washington, between unconnected security systems, between individuals who lack the authority or interest to connect-the-dots. From an Israeli perspective its incompetence plain an simple. From a systems perspective it's a matter of the inability of complex human-machine workflows to provide the necessary coverage. Most credible analyses of 911 would agree here. The Bush administration had direct, specific warnings about Al Qaeda and basically took a do nothing approach. Bush himself was doing a whole lot of brush cutting prior to 911, as I recall. Regarding 911, it's true that several of the hijackers were under close FBI surveillance, but the dysfunction and lack of prioritized focus in that agency prevented it from acting. Rather than addressing the specific inadequacies in each security agency, an overall of our post 911 security apparatus produced the WMD debacle, a vastly bloated and unwieldy bureaucracy, a deep attack on our civil liberties and a host of human rights atrocities. Good response.

Hindsight is great. I wonder how many emails, phone calls, letters Homeland Security/FBI/CIA/US embassies get per day saying, "I/someone I know/this guy on a streetcorner, etc am going to blow up a plane/kill the president/release sarin gas in the mall, etc" HS has greatly exacerbated this 'crisis of abundance' by absorbing everybody down the the local dog catcher. One example is Suspicious Activity Reporting, the latest fad being both pushed from the top down by HS and bottom up by local yocals who've watched one too many Bruce Willis flicks. LAPD list of Suspicious Activities to watch for include photography and note taking. Good luck with all that 'useful intel' guys! Hermetically sealing a country of 350 million is a costly fantasy. We've been bullies for a while, but after 911 we decided to become the world's biggest asshole, so now we've got to watch our back to the tune of a trillion or more dollars a year we can no longer a afford. In the process, we're burning down our basic, middle class values and lifestyle in exchange for the appearance of security. Yeah, I'd say we have a national security problem, but it has nothing to do with little brown guys in caves. It's an internal problem. We have a political party in this country that has, for decades, openly advocated destroying every single system, from education to health care, that provides real security for our middle class. If we really want to take out some Bad Guys and eliminate the greatest threat to true national security this country has ever seen, the RNC would be a great first stop.

I know that when I have a fundamental problem, I bury it with an enormous expensive bureaucracy stamped with a NAZI moniker. Doesn't everyone? Does anyone take our federal government seriously anymore?

My Outback's not that sexy, unless you're a lesbian with a fetish for scrap metal.

Airline Security: No parody required.

And, correct me if I'm wrong, but didn't the passengers, you know, have to get up out their seats to subdue Mr. Hello I'm From Nigeria?

I'll be interested to see what happens when a flight crew encounters their first case of explosive diarrhea during the final 'sit down and STFU' hour of a flight. Good luck with that.

I'm posting in the wrong fucking thread. One might argue I do that 100% of the time.

I made my GF a mid century modern table lamp and Noguchi cutting board. Bitches.

I'll add it to my collection. Yours will replace my wal-mart pup tent, however.

That, and the Prez was refreshingly up front in his statements. Nice supporting post, PP. I smile everytime an Rfuck rails on the Prez for being ineffective. It's not hard to notice that the Rfucks now almost unanimously: support reducing carbon emissions support same sex unions and or marriage want us to cut our losses in Iraq and Afghanistan and stop waisting money there. Support health care coverage for ALL Americans yet continue to claim Obama's too far Left. Well, they've never been the go to guys for logical consistency...or logic of any kind, for that matter.

Obama would have done better to expend some of his political capital to leverage his populist capital to push an agenda that actually addresses today's problems in a substantial fashion. That would have meant kicking the right wing in the nuts when they were down. They're still down, but now his populist capital seems to have evaporated along with the economy. All eyes were on the health care issue. It's the one that scares Americans the most, and it was the one to make happen. It didn't. History shows that's one issue you don't want to lose on. Good luck, Obama. You're a good man, but not the right man for this moment in history. But you were way, way better than the alternative. At least you're doing nothing, which is better than putting us all on a path to near term destruction.

Good piece.

The Reagan Revolution, continued by the Bush II team, was a denial of real reasons for our defeat in Vietnam, and reaction to the lack of confidence in federal leadership that resulted from that debacle. Rather than do that sane thing: recognize our mistakes and attempt to correct them, Reagan implemented more of the very same ignorance and arrogance that caused that defeat, propelled by the myth that 'if we'd just gone bigger', we could have won that war. In hindsight, it's really hard to imagine how the U.S. could have gone any bigger than it did in Vietnam: 600,000 troops, 10 years, many times more bombs dropped than in WWII, expansions into Cambodia and Laos... The results of such stupidity have been predictably disastrous; A string of defeats across the globe whenever the U.S. has acted unilaterally, culminating in the Soviet style bankrupting of the nation. When the U.S. has acted in concert with it's allies with clear, predetermined political goals in mind, however; Kosovo, Iraq I, military and even some of those political goals are somehow magically achieved. The difference in the two philosophies could not be more stark. The Neocon philosophy is drawn from the NAZI playbook: force produces fear; enemy cows and bows to our impressive might. There are no real tangible political goals to it; it simply seeks a state of permanent global domination by force. Hence all the modern day B movie rhetoric about killing all the bad guys blah blah. The Clinton/Bush I multi-lateral philosophy recognized, more astutely, what historian have always known: that war is only one, drastic foreign policy tool used to achieve a finite set of predetermined political goals. Historians will continue to argue about whether GWB or Reagan was the worst president in our history regarding the damage they've done to this country. From the destruction of the middle class, creation of a police state, evaporation of our respect and moral legitimacy worldwide, and a bankrupted economy, the list of their monumental achievements is long. Historians will probably all agree that they're in a class by themselves.

...to all you spraylords, poseurs, commies, wingnuts, Ltards, Rfucks, potheads, drunks, sheepshaggers, peakbaggers, bolters, grave robbers, cluckers, and palmfuckers. May 2010 bring The Goodness to you and yours.

"She's not gonna shit right for a month."

freed salty nuts on the bar?