not surprisingly, a Christian shoot-em up game
This game immerses children in present-day New York City -- 500 square blocks, stretching from Wall Street to Chinatown, Greenwich Village, the United Nations headquarters, and Harlem. The game rewards children for how effectively they role play the killing of those who resist becoming a born again Christian. The game also offers players the opportunity to switch sides and fight for the army of the AntiChrist, releasing cloven-hoofed demons who feast on conservative Christians and their panicked proselytes (who taste a lot like Christian).
Is this paramilitary mission simulator for children anything other than prejudice and bigotry using religion as an organizing tool to get people in a violent frame of mind? The dialogue includes people saying, "Praise the Lord," as they blow infidels away.
Talk To Action | The Purpose Driven Life Takers (Updated)
Burning guitar. Evil swordsman. Primal scream. Cathedral of doom. Rock and roll wizards. Smoking pit. Sweet guitar solo. Giant rubber dragon. Tight pants.
YouTube - Yngwie Malmsteen - I'll See The Light Tonight(Not your speed? You could
watch Tawny Kitane wiggle on cars instead.)
quite
Bush supporters are not merely disinterested in seeing that they are in denial of reality; on the contrary, they actively don’t want to look at this, which is to say they resist self-reflection at all costs. Bush and his supporters perversely interpret any feedback from the real world which reflects back their unconsciousness as itself evidence that proves the rightness of their viewpoint. All of Bush’s supporters mutually reinforce each other’s unconscious resistance to such a degree that a collective, interdependent field of impenetrability gets collectively conjured up by them that literally resists consciousness.
THE MADNESS OF GEORGE W. BUSH
fyi
I hate children in television commercials, especially singing the Oscar Meyer wiener song and selling Welch's grape juice.
At a distance of 216 trillion miles, the light of Arcturus is spread out over a sphere with an area of 586,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 square miles. The Earth has a cross-sectional area of about 50 million square miles. So the fraction of Arcturus' light that falls upon the Earth is about 1 part out of 10 sextillions. That's 1 followed by 22 zeros.
Of the starlight that falls on Earth, an even tinier fraction enters the pupil of my eye to form an image of the star. Another calculation: How does the area of my pupil compare to the cross-sectional area of the Earth? I'll spare you the details. Click, click, click on the calculator. Another factor of 10,000,000,000,000,000,000, more or less.
So the fraction of Arcturus' light that enters my eye is one part out of 100,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000.
Science Musings by Chet Raymo
I don’t know about you guys, but I am so sick and tired of these lying, thieving, holier-than-thou, rightwing, cruel, crude, rude, gauche, coarse, crass, cocky, corrupt, dishonest, debauched, degenerate, dissolute, swaggering, lawyer shooting, bullhorn shouting, infra-structure destroying, buck passing, hysterical, criminal, history defying, finger pointing, puppy stomping, roommate appointing, pretzel choking, collateral damaging, aspersion casting, wedding party bombing, clearcutting, torturing, jobs outsourcing,...
:
Impeachment? No. Impalement!
print
The ethics of ambiguity:
Simone de Beauvoir
food for thought
History's domain was the memorable, the totality of events whose consequences would be lastingly apparent. Inseparably, history was knowledge that must endure and aid in understanding, at least in part, what was to come: "an everlasting possession," according to Thucydides. In this way history was the measure of genuine novelty; and those who sell novelty at any price have made the means of measuring it disappear. When the important makes itself socially recognized as what is instantaneous, and will still be the other and the same the instant afterwards, and will always replace another instantaneous importance, one can say that the means employed guarantee a sort of eternity of non-importance that speaks loudly.
The precious advantage that the spectacle has drawn from the outlawing of history, from having driven the recent past into hiding, and from having made everyone forget the spirit of history within society, is above all the ability to cover its own tracks -- to conceal the very progress of its recent world conquest. Its power already seems familiar, as if it had always been there. All usurpers have shared this aim: to make us forget that they have only just arrived.
With the destruction of history, contemporary events themselves retreat into a remote and fabulous realm of unverifiable stories, uncheckable statistics, unlikely explanations and untenable reasoning. For every imbecility presented by the spectacle, there are only the media's professionals to give an answer, with a few respectful rectifications or remonstrations. And they are hardly extravagant, even with these, for besides their extreme ignorance, their personal and professional solidarity with the spectacle's overall authority and the society it expresses makes it their duty, and their pleasure, never to diverge from that authority whose majesty must not be threatened. It must not be forgotten that every media professional is bound by wages and other rewards and recompenses to a master, and sometimes to several, and that every one of them knows he is dispensable.
All experts serve the state and the media and only in that way do they achieve their status. Every expert follows his master, for all former possibilities for independence have been gradually reduced to nil by present society's mode of organization. The most useful expert, of course, is the one who can lie. With their different motives, those who need experts are falsifiers and fools. Whenever individuals lose the capacity to see things for themselves, the expert is there to offer an absolute reassurance.
Comments on the Society of the Spectacle:
Guy Debord
correct
1. America Online (1989-2006)
2. RealNetworks RealPlayer (1999)
3. Syncronys SoftRAM (1995)
4. Microsoft Windows Millennium (2000)
5. Sony BMG Music CDs (2005)
6. Disney The Lion King CD-ROM (1994)
7. Microsoft Bob (1995)
8. Microsoft Internet Explorer 6 (2001)
9. Pressplay and Musicnet (2002)
10. dBASE IV (1988)
11. Priceline Groceries and Gas (2000)
12. PointCast (1996)
13. IBM PCjr. (1984)
14. Gateway 2000 10th Anniversary PC (1995)
15. Iomega Zip Drive (1998)
16. Comet Cursor (1997)
17. Apple Macintosh Portable (1989)
18. IBM Deskstar 75GXP (2000)
19. OQO Model 1 (2004)
20. CueCat (2000)
21. Eyetop Wearable DVD Player (2004)
22. Apple Pippin @World (1996)
23. Free PCs (1999)
24. DigiScents iSmell (2001)
25. Sharp RD3D Notebook (2004)
PCWorld.com - The 25 Worst Tech Products of All Time
As this sweater testifies, just because something can be made as nationalistically as possible, it is possible to revolt people with it, and should not necessarily be done. (The man wearing this disaster is right wing tool and CNN talking head
Glenn Beck.)
The same applies to music. Meet Janet Greene, twit, nabob.
Like a musical Ann Coulter, Janet Greene tells it like it "is", so watch out, [head shakes in mocking condescension] poor liberals! It's a good thing there are people around whose job it is to sift hrough the dustbin of history and find crumbs like this, otherwise we might be deprived of the ghosts of right wings past, because in 1964...
WFMU's Beware of the Blog: Janet Greene, the Anti-Baez (MP3s)
Remind us, George. Why are we at war?
Tip: If you pretend you're a republican, it's fun to hear the lies.
Night of the Hunter style. Click for larger version.
owned
If you sell your broken laptop on ebay, get all the incriminating crap off of it first.
Written as the guy who sold it, by the guy who bought it, it's
the broken laptop i sold on ebay
print
National Review's list of its top 50 conservative rock songs, with the magazine's explanations of its choices:
Conservative Top 50 - New York Times
sweet
See what websites people are visiting, as they do it. GUI-riffic. May be experiencing technical difficulties today, server upgrade. Firefox plugin.
Swarm the dot com
The series finale of Alias was good. Sloan wound up buried alive forever in Mongolia after he became immortal, Sidney saved the world, her mother died after trying to end it, her father died blowing up Sloan's tomb and burying them both (he was mortally wounded anyway), and that guy who was brought on with the blonde chick this year to add some much-needed intrigue to the show died in the subway. Several potential plot lines had to be abandoned in the quick closing out of the series, but at least everybody died who needed to. Now I can move on with my TV life.
The wife and I are going to Wisconsin to visit her family and cook out. We're in charge of bringing the chips.
I think we're buying a new car today.
If you want to watch Rush Limbaugh in 1988 on Crossfire, you can download that
here. Rush denies that he's a radical and says he's just an entertainer who wants to have fun. This predates Rush's oxycontin days. It's funny to hear people arguing about what Nelson Mandela represents, if hearing grown men shouting unsweetened nothings at each other can be thought of as funny.
Today in 1805 they made Napoleon king of Italy.
Today in 1969, The Who released "Tommy", famously the first rock opera. Rock operas became so popular that now there's one on every corner. This event marks the beginning of the best days of Brian Adams' life, after which Jimmy quit, and Joey got married.
If you to see the craziest, cussingest preacher, go here:
WFMU's Beware of the Blog: God Curses a Blue Streak on Public Access TV (video)
be wary... of this nsfw post!
This post is going to have some boobs in it. Just warning you now. There's going to be a picture of them. At least one. Buckle your seat belt. There's not safe for workiness in this post.
Imagine there's a magic cirle that makes everything better, and all you have to do is stand in it. I'd want to find it and hang out there for a little while.
I was reading about breasts the other day. "The mammalian breast first evolved as an immunoprotective gland that produced bacteriocidal secretions to protect the skin and secondarily eggs and infants, and that lactation is a highly derived kind of inflammation response."
Which is pretty interesting. They come to this conclusion on the basis of three general lines of evidence:
1) Immunoprotective proteins are a significant component of breast milk.
2) The nutritional components of milk are synthesized by enzymes that are derived from immunoprotective proteins.
3) Many of the molecular regulators of lactation are shared with inflammation pathways.
If there was a magic circle that made everything better, and we break down what better is in terms everyone can agree on, I think improving health is mighty close to the top of the list. Breasts produce a magical elixir of health for newborn infants. I applaud breasts. Hey breasts, way to go!
I'm taking this information about breasts from this article.
Breast beginningsIt's fairly simple to understand even for a guy like myself, and it has made me appreciate breasts even more than I already did, which was a lot.
What would have to be bad about a magic circle that made people healthier with basically no bad side effects, to cause a ruckus? Maybe if that circle was in the center of a volcanic crater. That would be a circumstance that would mitigate. Or if that circle occasionally exploded and killed whoever was in it, say five per cent of the time. I'd understand then if that circle were a source of disagreement and access to it had to be regulated.
What is it about boobs that threatens people so much so that images of them --even drawings-- are banned from the popular press? Half the people in the world are walking around with good old baby-helpers on their fronts, and yet images of them are not allowed in the popular press. Have they done something wrong? Are they likely to? Of course not. My only non-rhetorical question is, who or what is damaged by breasts being seen? I should add that I don't want to be sent links to books about subverting the patriarchy or by Betty Friedan or any
squinky feminist screed. Ideology aside, why?
Here's something better to look at, if you ask the FCC, than the human breast:
the fattest man in the world!I think I've belched enough foam at you by this point to give up the controversial photographs of breasts. Here comes the big to-do. I'm sorry if you didn't catch all the warnings I've liberally sprinkled all over this post.
Thesis: if this frightens people, there's a serious shortage of things to be frightened by:
This post is in fond memory of Berkely naked guy Andrew Martinez, who killed himself Thursday, who said "I don't want to facilitate the power structure with my conformity."
SAN JOSE / Champion of nudity found dead in jail cell / 'Naked Guy' won fame in Berkeley, challenged values
I think one of these guys is average homeboy.
ZABA DENNIS HAZEN
You’re not a bad person, and no one hates you, but it would be valuable to learn the very personal preferences of your friends, family members, and co-workers before including them in unrequested email or choosing to expose their private address to people they don’t know.
Quick way to say "Thanks. No." - Lifehacker
Australian broadcast network has a lot of downloadable audio science programs. If I had to sit in front of a computer all day I might as well listen to them. Robinkisser.
Nic Svenson does the maths of the probability of a blink being captured by a camera's shutter.more:
Ockham's Razor on Radio Nationaland more:
Catalyst: Home - ABC TV Scienceand more:
All In The Mind
attention whore?
Yahoo:
An unidentified woman believed to be a relative wails outside Ibn al-Nafees hospital, after a suicide bomber killed at least 13 people and injured 17 when he blew himself up in a downtown Baghdad restaurant frequented by police in Baghdad, Iraq Sunday, May 21, 2006.
Nashville Scene - 20 Things to Do Outdoors (in Tennessee) Before You Die21. Go to the Hank Williams Jr. free museum in Crossville! BOCEPHUS FOREVER DUDE!
22. Go to the site of Mo Fun, the late great game room, now sadly defunct.
23. Drive to Arkansas. Drive back to Tennessee again.
Other things to do in Tennessee?
After you die, perhaps?
Ever wondered what happens when you play a film backwards? You get an entirely new film. For example:
Star Wars
A rather large moon-sized spaceship suddenly appears in the vast depths of space and, to prevent it from disappearing again, a nice young man called Luke extracts a bomb from its central chambers. The space station re-assembles a disintegrated planet, saving its occupants, and slowly begins to dismantle itself as a group of rebels become more and more disorganised. The young man goes home to his farm.
The Awful Forums - Backward Films - Films Backward
Have I posted this already?
The earth rising over Mars.
I wish I had these.
A cop showing how awesome he is.
Darla read Cosmo religiously.
The Welk was a fake.
From Fred "a little too much energy on the subject, if you know what I mean" Phelps,
insanity is alive and well.watch the video!
not again
For the creationist nearest you:
Fetus' Feet Show Fish, Reptile VestigesOr if they don't like reading things other than the bible, maybe they'd like to compare embryos with one another and see if they can tell which pollywog is which:
embryo-compareI woke up thinking about war, which was what my dream was about. Not the "glorious" kind you get to read about in the paper, but the "shitty" kind that blows stuff up down the block from your house. I was thinking, why is it that so many religious people I know, Muslims and Christians alike, are resigned to an omnicidal apocalypse scenario. They shrug, and say that the end of the world and god's wrath and armies and death is written in some book, so what can you do.
I don't believe that god exists, that god likes me, that there's a special reward after you die, or that being itself is anything but transitory. I
do believe the search for spiritual meaning is doomed and useless, because I do
not believe there's no such thing as a spirit to begin with. Anyone reading this blog for more than a week knows this about me, and I would like to offer my deepest apologies that the world is such a completely stupid place that I feel the need to remind myself of what makes sense so frequently. It's my reaction to the religious right in America, guys. I need provide no examples.
I think religious belief
all around is a copout, a way to meet one's personal needs, such as
1) to feel superior, esp. morally
2) to have someone/thing to blame (evil, satan, porn, whatever)
3) to feel existentially meaningful
If you are a religious person, imagine what a world with no god would be like for you. Then see what kind of bad feelings you get from it. Examine those feelings and you should have a pretty good idea of what your emotional needs are, and you can take steps to address those in therapy, and without having to give your money to a church. Bonus: it's a more permanent solution.
The problem that will end the world is not religion. No, religion is not the problem (though it does push back the frontiers of intelligence), but a mask for it, a symptom of badly managed worldviews.
The world doesn't revolve around the believer and isn't supposed to make any sense. By removing your needs for it to, your life becomes your own in ways you couldn't otherwise grasp. Religion tells you life
can make sense, then when it doesn't, blames you for not understanding. Example: it sucks when children die of cancer, and god has nothing to do with that or anything else. God's simply not there to blame, or ask, or thank. And no world-ending series of righteous hydrogen bomb explosions will make him/her/it show up and start taking credit.
Any real wars from here on out will just make everybody die, which believers love, because only "everybody dies" will once and for all level the playing field of the modern world, in which people investigate cause and effect and god's never, ever it. They're getting tired of their beliefs retreating every time they have to think critically, and the best defense is a good offense, which is why the Christian right in America loves the war on terror. They know it's a -wink- war on Islam, and it brings it all back to the prophecy, which is where it belongs.
The most important war left on earth is the war between the sentient (me) and the walking undead, the believers that the next life is more important than this one.
There was a series called I believe on NPR at one point in the recent past, and this could be mine:
I believe that the world we
do live in would be a better place, if all who think the world we
don't live in is important, would hurry up and get themselves out of this one and leave the rest of us alone.
new good plugin
Stealther
print:
“Fairy Tales” (Harpers.org): "“This administration,” Bob Graham, the former Senator and chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, told me, “does not seek the truth as a basis for its judgments, but tries to use intelligence to validate judgments it has already made.”"
Presidential approval map:
MyDD :: Blue Nation
The capitalist news media are far more about generating support for elite policies than they are about empowering people to make informed political decisions.
print:
Manufacturing Consent by Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky
the ten worst corporations of 2005 @
San Francisco Bay Guardian
Behold the ridonculousness that is:
Patriot Art
what a pimp
Scriabin died in Moscow from septicemia, contracted as a result of a shaving cut. For some time before his death he had planned a multi-media work, to be performed in the Himalayas, that would bring about the armageddon, "a grandiose religious synthesis of all arts which would herald the birth of a new world". This piece, Mysterium, was never realized.
Alexander Scriabin - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Although it's normally what you'd try to
avoid watching, here's
a collection of eighties videos on youtube.
that would be me
the country’s watch schools and programs only graduate about 50 new watchmakers annually...
AWCI creates two new watch jobs to counter decrease in watchmakers
funny
Alberto Gonzales's grandparents were obviously illegal immigrants.
But don't take my word for it. Watch him dance around it in an interview.
video at
Crooks and Liars
scuby doo
If a dog throws up while he's having sex, is it not safe for work?
video
There comes a time for everyone to say "I could have seen this coming and I'm kicking myself for not predicting it", and for me that time is now.
...reaction from Cannes critics ranged from mild endorsement of its potboiler suspense to groans of ridicule over its heavy melodrama.
In an office somewhere in Hollywood, people are frowning in uncomprehending irritation. In a perfect reversal of the surprise success of "Springtime for Hitler", where did they go wrong? They bought the rights to the best selling book since "the celestine prophecy", they got Tom Hanks to star in it, and yet their movie sucks?
Dogs don't know it's not bacon and loathsome uncreative people, the ones who decide which movies to bankroll, don't know that adding sums doesn't make art. This is the first movie since Titanic I knew there was no way in hell I would watch.
'Da Vinci Code' Misses the Mark for Critics - Yahoo! News
Must-see video of the daily show, skewering fox news channel and the president over NSA wiretapping. Best 15 mb ever.
Crooks and Liars
don't kill me
Somebody showed me the average homeboy video a few days ago. You can find it in the Jan Terri comments. Here's another one. Its awfulness is total.
blazin hazen
musical dots
In this movie, each of the 48 dots is moving in a circle. Each of the dots is on a 3 minute cycle. At the end of 3 minutes, the outermost dot will have moved around the circle once (this dot represents the first harmonic or fundamental). The next dot will have moved around the circle twice (representing the second harmonic). The next dot three times, and so on. The innermost dot moves around the circle 48 times.
Now, imagine these dots are raised bumps on a disc which is controlling a music box, with each bump triggering a note when it passes the zero degree line (a line extending from the center to the east). The result would look and sound something like this three minute looping movie:
whitney music box var. 0 - chromatic - 48 tines
FBI - Federal Boob Investigation(not as safe for work as dead children)
smell the freedom
A senior federal law enforcement official tells ABC News the government is tracking the phone numbers we (Brian Ross and Richard Esposito) call in an effort to root out confidential sources.
"It's time for you to get some new cell phones, quick," the source told us in an in-person conversation.
Uncle Sam's government is now
tracking the media's phone conversations.
now it can be told
I was told secondhand by my father a couple of days ago to keep it real, so in the spirit of keeping it real, I present to you
Double Flee A Behind The Music: Jaems FlowersImmature? Maybe. Called for? Definitely.
Ok, that dickhead at the pharmacy's real name was not James, but Jaems Flowers. It's really spelled that way. Awesome, huh?
Here's
the first time I mentioned him on the blog, and
here's the second.
He's about thirty two, has blond hair, three children, and a wife named Luci Flowers.
Luci used to work at my hospital years ago, but then she moved to California to be with Jaems's brother, with whom she was in love. While she was out there drinking that funny water, she --whoops, how'd that penis get in my body!-- performed a mutual inveigling with Jaems, who she married and moved back here. Love's a funny thing, ain't it? Something about those Flowers boys makes them interchangeable. I have to disclose for personal reasons that the thought of either of them having sex shocks me to the core, but the two of them doing it together will ruin the quality of my sleep for years to come. If I call you panicking someday, you'll know this was a contributing factor. Just tell me I'm not being chased and to please sit down and wait for help to arrive.
According to Jaems, Something in Luci's past was bad and was found on her routine background check. Her being fired resulted from this, which created literally an unlivable financial situation for the Flowers family. Jaems, his two children from a previous marriage, his (probably) fugitive wife, and their new hungry mouth to feed, baby Arianna will have to find a place where they don't have computers and can't find out about whatever it is she did, which in his words, is chasing them around "like a ghost". They've moved on, and are Iowa's problem now.
I was too nice to include this before, but I'm keeping it real, so he also told me about his crush on this way too hot (and normal) for him asian chick who I just watched graduate pharmacy school Friday, Billie, from Vietnam. He should have kept that to himself and I wish he had.
Why.
1) nobody wants to hear about it
2) you're fuckin' married and everybody knows your wife
3) it's disgusting because you're Jaems Flowers
a) you smell bad
b) everybody knows your whole life amounts to the consequences of decisions you made in desperation
Jaems Flowers, I hope you're googling yourself and find this, and that maybe it will serve as a warning to you, not to go Jaemsing around all over everybody like you did when, just for a while back in Minneapolis, it looked like your life wasn't going to be a total piece of shit. Which barring your winning the lottery, it is. People from all around the department (I was surprised how many, and I expected quite a few) came to me to celebrate your departure and when they did we experienced a communion of sweet bliss that you will never know, a serene joy that can only be described... as Jaems-less.
Trader Joe's opened a store in St. Louis Park, which is about four miles from here. Minnesotans love nothing more than a new store opening up. It was very busy. They had a belly dancer and some guy playing the ukulele calling himself Pineapple Bill to celebrate the opening. They serenaded the overflowing parking lot. If there hadn't been a police officer telling people to move along and find parking elsewhere, the parking lot's full, it would have been very ugly indeed.
Trader Joe's sells stuff without any high fructose corn syrup or trans fats, so I'll actually buy it. And it's cheaper than the famously extreme "all get out". I plan to become a regular customer for things that are frozen and for soy milk. Also, I saw that two buck Chuck has gone up. It's now three buck Chuck.
watch it
WFMU's Beware of the Blog: Insane, Offensive Video From The Westboro Baptist Church*This video not representative of all churches MSRP tax title and registration extra void with other offers batteries not included.
Though Fred Phelps does make me think: If you thought you were speaking for god, who wasn't around to do it himself, what would you be obsessed with on his behalf? Once you've reached that level of certainty you can justify practically any behavior.
oh boy
Master Yoda's webloglink goes to my favorite posts
these PBR tall boys are 4.99 a six pack
Scary energy propaganda: children for coal!
ABEC:learnaboutcoal.orgIt must be nice when you're a republican and no one can convince you the truth is something other than what you and fox news want it to be. Because then it won't bother you that
Cheney Pushed U.S. to Widen Eavesdropping - New York TimesSmall consolation that
Karl Rove has been Indicted on Charges of Perjury, Lying to Investigators, and the FBI raided Dusty Foggo's house.
nsfw weekends begin tomorrow
I've decided that on the weekends I'm going to indulge my desire to post photos of women that might not be considered as acceptable as death and violence in the contemporary american workplace. This will begin tomorrow unless I hear persuasive objections. I've amassed quite a collection of tasteful awesomeness that I long to share with you, my cherished readers. Going... going...
congratulations
Hank graduated from UT yesterday. He's moving to Nashville to work.
Way to go dude!
I dreamed I was being nipped at by five mutt puppies. Three of them were conjoined. The meaning of this dream, I think, is that I need a day off. Monday I get one.
Aside from Easter, the day Jesus, whose biological father was god himself, rose from the dead so that I would get a day off, it'll be the first day in 65 days that I haven't had to be somewhere at eight in the morning. I expect I'll spend most of the morning panicking, then have a light lunch, and round out my afternoon pacing nervously. By Wednesday I'll be back to my good old lazy self and my company should be tolerable.
Again, congratulations to my brother, who now has to see how he likes post-student life working for the man.
me too man
screw registration & so on
Killing the CIA
In Goss, Bush found the perfect hatchet man to take vengeance on a despised agency. Now Goss is gone, scandal looms -- and the CIA is ruined.
By Sidney Blumenthal
May. 11, 2006 | The moment that the destruction of the Central Intelligence Agency began can be pinpointed to a time, a place and even a memo. On Aug. 6, 2001, CIA director George Tenet presented to President Bush his presidential daily briefing, a startling document titled "Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S." Bush did nothing, asked for no further briefings on the issue, and returned to cutting brush at his Crawford, Texas, compound.
In Bush's denial of responsibility after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, the search for scapegoats inevitably focused on the lapse in intelligence and therefore on the CIA, though it was the FBI whose egregious incompetence permitted the plotters to escape apprehension. Bush's intent to invade Iraq set up the battle royal that followed.
Tenet, an inveterate staff careerist held over from the Clinton administration, had ingratiated himself with the new White House tenant with salty stories, but it was in his eagerness to please Bush on Iraq that he ensured his tenure and made himself indispensable. At first, Tenet opposed including in the president's speech of October 2002 the disinformation that Iraq was seeking to build nuclear weaponry using yellowcake uranium Saddam Hussein supposedly sought to purchase in Niger, and the reference was knocked out. Yet, having already been discredited, the falsehood was inserted into the president's State of the Union address of January 2003, becoming the now infamous 16 words.
Tenet reassured Bush that the case for Saddam's possession of WMD was a "slam-dunk." At CIA headquarters in Langley, Va., Tenet promised then Secretary of State Colin Powell that for Powell's Feb. 5, 2003, speech before the U.N. Security Council, the information that would be used to prove Saddam had WMD was ironclad. Powell insisted that Tenet be seated behind him while he spoke as visual reinforcement of his statement's unimpeachable character. Yet every piece of it was false, and the humiliated Powell later said he had been "deceived." Tenet resigned on June 4, 2004, and shortly thereafter was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
After the brief interim appointment of CIA professional John McLaughlin, on Aug. 10, 2004, almost three years to the day after the Aug. 6 presidential daily briefing on bin Laden, Bush named Porter Goss the new director of central intelligence. The president was looking for someone to rid him of the troublesome agency. In Goss, he thought he had discovered the perfect man for the bloody job, but the nature of the task undid Goss, and in his unraveling another scandal unfolded.
In the absence of any reliable evidence, CIA analysts had refused to put their stamp of approval on the administration's reasons for the Iraq war. Vice President Dick Cheney and his chief of staff, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, personally came to Langley to intimidate analysts on several occasions. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and his then deputy secretary, Paul Wolfowitz, constructed their own intelligence bureau, called the Office of Special Plans, to sidestep the CIA and shunt disinformation corroborating the administration's arguments directly to the White House. "The administration used intelligence not to inform decision-making, but to justify a decision already made," Paul Pillar, then the chief Middle East analyst for the CIA, writes in the March-April issue of Foreign Affairs. "The process did not involve intelligence work designed to find dangers not yet discovered or to inform decisions not yet made. Instead, it involved research to find evidence in support of a specific line of argument -- that Saddam was cooperating with al Qaeda -- which in turn was being used to justify a specific policy decision."
But despite urgent pressures to report to the contrary, the CIA never reported that Saddam presented an imminent national security threat to the United States, that he was near to developing nuclear weapons, or that he had any ties to al-Qaida. Moreover, analysts predicted a protracted insurgency after an invasion of Iraq. Tenet, despite the lack of cooperation from the CIA's Directorate of Intelligence, acted as backslapper for the administration's policy.
The White House was in a fury. The CIA's professionalism was perceived as political warfare, and the agency apparently was seen as the center of a conspiracy to overthrow the administration. Inside the offices of the president, the vice president and the secretary of defense, the CIA was referred to as a treasonous enemy. "If we lived in a primitive age, the ground at Langley would be laid waste and salted, and there would be heads on spikes," wrote neoconservative columnist David Brooks in the New York Times on Nov. 13, 2004, citing White House officials and "members of the executive branch" as his sources. Reflecting their rage, he called on Bush to "punish the mutineers ... If the C.I.A. pays no price for its behavior, no one will pay a price for anything, and everything is permitted. That, Mr. President, is a slam-dunk."
Goss combined the old-school tie with cynical zealotry. A graduate of Hotchkiss and Yale (class of 1960) and married to a Pittsburgh heiress, he had served as a CIA operative, left the agency for residence on Sanibel Island, Fla., a resort for the wealthy, bought the local paper, sold it for a fortune, and was elected to the House of Representatives in 1988. There he struck up an alliance with Newt Gingrich and his band of radicals. And after they captured the House in 1994, Goss used his CIA credential to become chairman of the Intelligence Committee.
In that position, he proved his bona fides to the Bush administration time and again. "Those weapons are there," he declared after David Kay, head of the Iraq Survey Group, reported that there were no WMD. He blocked investigations into detainee abuse at Abu Ghraib and into prewar disinformation churned by the neoconservatives' favorite Iraqi exile, Ahmed Chalabi. "I would say that the oversight has worked well in matters relating to Mr. Chalabi," Goss said. He also derided the notion of investigating the outing of covert CIA operative Valerie Plame Wilson: "Somebody sends me a blue dress and some DNA, I'll have an investigation." Goss was on board with the cavalier way in which Plame was outed, a breach that revealed ingrained contempt for the agency as well as the supremacy of political objectives over national security.
On April 21, 2005, his mission dictated by Bush's political imperatives, Goss became CIA director. Immediately, he sent a memo to all employees, ordering them to "support the administration and its policies in our work." He underscored the supremacy of the party line: "As agency employees we do not identify with, support, or champion opposition to the administration or its policies."
He installed four political aides to run the agency from his offices on the seventh floor at Langley. Within weeks, an exodus of professionals began and then turned into a flood. In the Directorate of Operations, he lost the director, two deputies, and more than a dozen department and division directors and station chiefs out in the field. In the Directorate of Intelligence, dozens took early retirement. Four former operations chiefs, horrified by the carnage, sought to meet with Goss, but he refused.
As a result of hectoring by the 9/11 Commission, Bush established the position of national director of intelligence, a new layer of bureaucracy, but one that lacked operational or intelligence resources of its own. Suddenly, the CIA's preeminence was shattered. Since its creation by the National Security Act of 1947 at the onset of the Cold War, the CIA had dominated the intelligence community. But now the "central" part of the CIA was handed off to the new NDI, whose lines of authority and power were untested and uncertain.
The "global war on terror," meanwhile, was a boon to the concentration of power within the Pentagon, and that department gained control of more than 80 percent of the total budget for intelligence. Without its assigned place at the top of the pyramid, the CIA became disoriented and ever more peripheral. That suited Rumsfeld's empire building. And the CIA's plight was aggravated by the power grabs of the first NDI, John Negroponte (coincidentally an old Yale classmate of Goss'). Without natural functions of its own, Negroponte's office seized them from the CIA.
Acting on the president's charge, Goss in effect purged the CIA. He was even conducting lie detector interrogations of officers to root out the sources of stories leaked to the press -- to the Washington Post, for example, in its Pulitzer Prize-winning exposé of CIA "black site" prisons where detainees are jailed without any due process, Red Cross inspection or Geneva Conventions protection. Last month, a CIA agent, Mary McCarthy, was fired for her contact with a reporter. Like others subjected to questioning, she was asked her political affiliation.
But Goss' purging weakened the agency and his own inherent bureaucratic strength in relation to his voracious rivals at the Directorate of National Intelligence and the Pentagon. The more he served as the president's loyalist, the less was his power. By fulfilling his mission, he diminished himself. The butcher's defense of the integrity of the CIA from the directorate and the Pentagon lacked all conviction.
Goss' attempt to run the CIA through his own band of loyalists proved his ultimate undoing. It turned out that the "gosslings," as they were known at Langley (after "quislings"), had unsavory connections that trailed them into the agency. An unintended consequence of Goss' dependence on his team of political hatchet men was that his future was dependent on their past.
As Goss parried with Negroponte and Rumsfeld, federal investigators began to close in on his third-ranked official, in charge of contracting, Kyle "Dusty" Foggo, for possibly granting illegal contracts to Brent Wilkes, the military contractor named as "co-conspirator No. 1" in the indictment of convicted former Republican Rep. Randy "Duke" Cunningham, now serving eight years in prison for accepting $2.4 million in bribes. Wilkes, who gave $630,000 in cash and favors to Cunningham, remains under investigation by prosecutors. Cunningham has confessed to accepting a $100,000 bribe from "co-conspirator No. 1." Wilkes' business associate, Mitchell Wade, has pleaded guilty to bribing Cunningham.
For years, Wilkes hosted "hospitality suites" at the Watergate Hotel for House members and other associates that involved poker games and, allegedly, prostitutes. That, too, is under investigation. Foggo has admitted his presence, but "just for poker." At least six House members, unnamed so far, are alleged to have participated. Goss has denied attending as CIA director, but not as an elected representative. Yet another hand at the poker table has been identified as Brant Bassett, aka "Nine Fingers." Bassett was Goss' staff director on the House Intelligence Committee and was hired as a consultant to the CIA's Directorate of Operations.
Foggo and Wilkes are best friends going back to high school in suburban San Diego. They were roommates at San Diego State, where they were members of the Young Republicans, were best men at each other's weddings, and named their sons after each other. Wilkes pays for a joint wine locker for them at the Capital Grille steakhouse favored by lobbyists and Republican legislators.
The White House announcement of Goss' resignation was incredibly abrupt, without advance warning or a named successor. White House aides frenetically briefed the press that the sole reason was an internecine conflict between Goss and Negroponte. But such an internal controversy could have been managed for a smooth transition. Something else appeared to be at work.
Indeed, in March, the CIA's inspector general had launched an investigation into Foggo's relationship with Wilkes, who had received CIA contracts in Iraq. Three days after Goss left, Foggo quit, too. In a highly unusual development, two days later, on Wednesday, the special agent in charge of the Defense Criminal Investigative Service's investigation in the "Duke" Cunningham case, Rick Gwin, spoke publicly: "This is much bigger and wider than just Randy 'Duke' Cunningham," he told Southern California's North County Times. "All that has just not come out yet, but it won't be much longer and then you will know just how widespread this is."
President Bush has nominated Gen. Michael Hayden, the former director of the National Security Agency and currently Negroponte's deputy, as the new CIA director. He has distinguished himself as a loyalist to the administration by using his uniform as a shield against the heat generated by the revelation of illegal domestic surveillance by the NSA.
Regardless of anodyne assurances offered in his forthcoming congressional testimony, Hayden will preside over the liquidation of the CIA as it has been known. The George H.W. Bush CIA headquarters building in Langley will of course remain standing. But the agency will be chipped apart, some of its key parts absorbed by other agencies, with the Pentagon emerging as the ultimate winner.
The militarization of intelligence under Bush is likely to guarantee military solutions above other options. Uniformed officers trained to identify military threats and trends will take over economic and political intelligence for which they are untrained and often incapable, and their priorities will skew analysis. But the bias toward the military option will be one that the military in the end will dislike. It will find itself increasingly bearing the brunt of foreign policy and stretched beyond endurance. The vicious cycle leads to a downward spiral. And Hayden's story will be like a dull shadow of Powell's -- a tale of a "good soldier" who salutes, gets promoted, is used and abused, and is finally discarded.
No president has ever before ruined an agency at the heart of national security out of pique and vengeance. The manipulation of intelligence by political leadership demands ever tightened control. But political purges provide only temporary relief from the widening crisis of policy failure.
something for everyone
She's blonde, but something tells me we'd get along anyway. nsfw
MarketaIf she doesn't do anything for you, look at this car:
Shelby Cobra :: All Chrome Body
I'm going to Duluth May 31. It's going to be a guys only thing. Let me know if you want to come.
could it be?
A worse page than any page I've yet seen?
Deeker's Diaper Page
Adios, free time. Here come the google video hosted videos of
Neural Surfer
Can somebody build me a clone real quick so I can go to this?
Creative Electric Studios presents Negativlandland, a group exhibition by the "cultural jamming" and collage group, Negativland, who use high and low tech approaches to make art and media that pose questions about the nature of perception, media control, ownership, and propaganda. This exhibition will take place in conjunction with the group's 25th anniversary and will feature the collective's recent visual work as well as their trademark sonic work.
Specifically, this show features the old, infamous U2 LP album cover as well as a Abraham Lincoln audio aquired from Disneyworld, reciting (Negativland versions of) his original studio takes.
Over the years Negativland's "illegal" collage and appropriation-based audio and visual works have touched on many things - media hoaxes and pranks, anti-corporate activism, the banality of suburban existence, file sharing, intellectual property issues, media literacy, and artistic critiques of mass media and culture.
Negativland performs, lectures, writes and tours both in the US and in Europe. Their work is not only included in college curricula throughout the US, but it has been discussed in over 30 books (including NO LOGO by Naomi Klein, MEDIA VIRUS by Douglas Rushkoff, and various biographies of the band U2) and cited in many legal journals.
This show originated in New York (Fall/Winter 2005)at Gigantic Art Space.
For contact information:
Creative Electric Studios
2201 2nd Street NE
Minneapolis, MN 55418
612-706-7879
I have to be at a graduation that's not even my brother's.
me: Did you just ask me if I was hearing voices?
wife: No.
me: Well I guess that answers that question.
That was the first thing I said today. It got a laugh.
It started me to thinking that some people can, using their imaginations, construct a series of conversations, imagining many voices that interact and make up jokes with one another and become successful comedy writers, while other people who have a similar experience are chronic schizophrenics. What's the difference between these two examples of uncommonly nonboring people?
How does one person keep it real while the other fails to?
Why are some of the voices funny and others tragically mordant?
Is my assessment that a comedy writer hears voices way off base?
creepy
You know when sometimes you want to do bad things that you know are unwise and if you get caught, will get you in trouble? I blame that on testosterone and my feeling that the world is full of death, lies, and ugliness, and that something ought to be done about it, and that I'm just the guy to do it. Sometimes.
Apparently, some people don't have that impulse to confront, rearrange, destroy, and do other things signalling discontent, because their brains don't object to anything. A glance at this happy fun page and you will see exactly what it is that is worse than throwing down with reality:
hamster cityI got to page 12 before I went to the bathroom and puked blood.
damn that old devil
Damn him to HELL!
jack chick on steroids
/nacho, a fellow of infinite jest
impressive
Raul Hofer Torres Photographycheck out jesus and the fat chick, which is nsfw
In other nsfw news, School teacher Tericka Dye was recently fired because of her work in adult films several years ago. She had taught science at Reidland High School in Western Kentucky for the past two years. She was also the school's volleyball coach. Her films include In Thru The Out Door 7
and 8, Party House 5, Sex Freaks 10, Climax Shots 86 - Three To Tango, Double Your Pleasure Double Your Fun, Eruptions - Double Dippin, Rug Munchers, Major Slut, Butt Brats 7. and my favorite,
Ass Whores 12. To the board's credit, I can see how a career like that might affect a learning environment in a room full of horny adolescents... "Good morning, please take your seats. Now class, as I learned in Ass Whores Twelve, a working knowledge of protein synthesis really does come in handy in daily life. Let me explain."
interesting
WFMU's Beware of the Blog: Air America vs. Reality - Part 2(
part 1)
The future may not be rosy for the financially underperforming air america, whose ads brighten my life:
TV shows I would watch
Somebody pokes Larry the cable guy's eyes out with a sharp stick
Winnie the manic depressive apartment building manager
Now in their late thirties, Brian and his friends take revenge on their elementary school teachers
A couple of black guys drive around asking white girls if they want to hook up or what
Dog the Bounty hunter ponders aloud, critically about the Bush administration
The adventures of Jim Gladstone, world's most polite man
Great moments in contemporary oratory deconstructed
I decided to warn the highly influential Todd Horton that
evil day is less than a month away.
awesome
Some people got together and dressed up as employees of best buy. Here's what happened.
Improv Everywhere Mission: Best Buy
After four years, numerous appeals, millions of dollars, and a massive investment of government personnel and resources, the trial of Zacarias Moussaoui concluded Wednesday with a life sentence. Many have cited the case as an example of how difficult it is to try terrorists in civilian courts. In fact, it is an object lesson in how the government's overreaching has undermined our security.
How Not to Fight Terrorism
school
We're oiling the ETA 7750 (formerly Valjoux), and getting it all put together. It's like the other watches essentially; it just redirects force in more directions because of the stopwatch functions. We're all in agreement that the guy who designed it was really smart, but we haven't had to work on the Zenith El Primero yet, which is a much more difficult piece, so we can't fully appreciate the simplification that good design means by way of comparison. I could almost tell you right now without any reference material all the parts in the 7750, and which screws to use to attach them together with.
When you're working on watch with a lot of different kinds of screws it's helpful to screw them back into their holes after disassembly, just to keep track of where they go. Otherwise, if you don't make what amounts to a map, you're virtually guaranteeing you'll be wasting your time later looking for where they go. And sometimes, there are an awful lot of options.
I, personally, am waiting to see what the really hard part of watchmaking is. Once you get where you're not shooting parts everywhere and you're not beating parts up in other ways, watches for the most part put themselves together. You've got this big round thing. Where does it go? Oh, over here in the big round cut-out. Repeat. One thing that does have me interested --in the shiny new way of being interested-- is a remontoir, which is a device that supplies constant force. That is a thing that transcends regular power transmission in a way, and I want to learn more about it. It looks simple but I don't think it is.
Some things are made to address problems; see "necessity is the mother of invention". While the maternal bond is the closest in nature, there are others as well, and I'm convinced there are other relationships to invention, many ways to get to the place. The father of invention would be probably something that I think of as based in machismo, that would result in things like more horsepower. The drinking buddy of invention gets you stuff like the hat that holds beer.
Things like the remontoir belong to my favorite class of invention, the improvement that while definitely useful and remarkably innovative, wasn't necessary, and to compare it to a kind of relationship, I'll pick my favorite kind of those, too, the one that resembles it the most, the flirtative relationship, the one that blooms, and is held only within the context of blooming. When one person is outdoing everything they've ever done in order to impress another, you get some pretty wild and beautiful stuff, and I think that's highly analogous to the situation of the remontoir.
We haven't covered it in school and I have to do the legwork on it myself, so more on what that is when I get some more time.
I don't believe for a moment anyone derives any satisfaction from the distant prospect of Moussaoui experiencing everlasting torment, I think it's the flip side of the false sentimentality to leads people to say, after a child has tragically died, "Heaven has a new angel now" or, after someone has suffered through a long, agonizing illness, "(S)he's in a better place now." No, they're not; they've simply been released from their suffering, which ought to be enough. Such cliches intended to comfort which provide no real comfort or consolation because the truth is that the grievous loss of a young child is a tragedy without any redeeming aspects, and for those who prize life there is no better place than among the living, here and now, not in some reserved space on the dry-ice clouds. Pretending otherwise is putting cake frosting on a wounded heart. Heaven and Hell are the good cop/bad cop headquarters of a religious theology that people cleave to in order to believe that earthly injustices are rectified in the hereafter--that the dictator who dies peacefully in his sleep gets his karmic payback in the infernal depths. The truth is that I don't entertain any great visions of Rumsfeld, Cheney, Bush, Richard Perle, and the rest suffering medieval torment; it would be bad faith of me to place them in a Hell I don't believe in, and goes against the spirit of the Tao. I'd be quite happy to settle for the fantasy-come-true of the architects of the Iraq war being arrested, convicted, and warehoused in a secure prison; like Moussaoui.
:
James Wolcott: Beezlebub's Barbecue Pit
if I had designed the world when I was 15
It would be racist to name this list, wouldn't it.
The Berenstain bears leave their back door unlocked and they just got this big-ass HDTV, too, yo
Jamal keeps it real (Keep, Jamal, keep!)
Snitches get stitches
What could possibly go wrong, by Tupac Shakur
The car that wouldn't hot-wire
The baby daddy that wouldn't pay child support
LaQuifa gets dem boots knocked (the miracle of birth)
How to blame whitey
Crack: not white by accident
I really wanted to come up with something good about this, but I can't make it better than it already is, as "something that sucks". It's a masterpiece of garbage. Where did it come from? Perhaps it was purchased at a schizophrenic shut-in's estate sale by a church volunteer who got a real powerful feelin' when she looked at it.
Behold, that which is...
Party Girl
fascinating
What did one ghost say to the other? | MetaFilterIf you print out the stuff from this post alone, you will be smarter than you were and you will have some excellent stuff to read, for example, while you're waiting for other stuff to happen.
I want to print this explanation of
parallel.
The two guys on my left are both watching the Stephen Colbert roasting of the president. Their faces are a certain kind of smiling you don't see that often. It's like the sun has broken through the clouds and they're at the end of the rainbow or something like that.
Our instructor in the second year has a habit of talking about what he's thinking, rather than what the lesson is. Lucky for us he's thinking about watches and so on, and even better, specifically the parts of the watch we're covering. So what is it that I'm bitching about? Bear with me.
The information we get is accurate, thorough, and technically exhaustive. We get, on average, one really great tip every day. If properly organized, our instructor's knowledge bank would be a gold mine and we'd all be rich quick.
Today what could have taken a much shorter period of time, our instructor turned into a long soak in cold pain. The things he said did relate to the subject at hand, were essential facts, were in fact exactly what we needed to know. But when you're looking at a page with parts that need to be labeled, you want to fill in the blanks, and his delivery, his style of presenting the information, is quite indirect.
Here's how it goes down: the piece you're supposed to label will appear in some sentence. If you miss it, you'll have to ask for it to be repeated, and he's going to sigh when he repeats it, or make some dramatic gesticulation or roll his eyes, and he's probably going to go so far as to say that he said it already, so what happens is this quasi-unbearable situation develops where you have to scrutinize every syllable as it's coming out of his mouth. Just to label the GD paper. This level of attentiveness is very hard, extremely hard, almost impossibly hard, to maintain because he talks for hours. By the end of a lecture-heavy day, and most of them are, I'm literally exhausted. I feel like my brain has been pounded on.
My problem with how he does things is so nearly personal, just a titch from hurty feelers, that I can't tell him about it. He spent years as a drama coach, for Pete's sake. He'd die. That and I'd have to suggest a whole new way of presenting information; I'd in essence be implying that he allow me to micromanage his whole shtick, and that's even more ridiculous than getting talked at badly all day.
What really hits me hardest about the situation is that I finally realized today that it's so unpleasant to endure I've never actively analyzed what makes it be painful. Instead I push it out of my mind and have a beer and move on, which you have to. Now that I've thought about it I realize it's strange to write and think and say; class some days is actually a source of suffering in a very real way due to exactly this kind of lecture. It's a psychological pain, if there's such a thing.
I really hope he doesn't find this and read it, or else he might get his feelings hurt. I'm taking a risk by even putting it down here. That's the internet for you.
Wired News: Feds Go All Out to Kill Spy Suit:
""It's like one of magic rings from The Lord of the Rings," Weaver said. "You slip it on and you are invisible""
In religion and politics, people's beliefs and convictions are in almost every case gotten at second hand, and without examination.
- Mark Twain
When I see this,
I think of this.
Guess it's the long green thing.
I knew this would happen. The chick tract's cultural moment of deconstruction has arrived. Let's do this. In the first of what I expect will become regular occurrences here, it's Nacho who comes across with the good stuff:
oh say can you see
all these boxes full of dead guys:
Go ahead and stare down the caskets of these guys who died over some made up shit.If this guy was in a box, they'd all still be alive.
Happy Mission Accomplished day!
