Tea Party

Gleefully gleeped from YubaNet.

The really cool part will be when the water boils off and the teapots the wingtard gasbags have for heads burn out. I think some of them are awfully close. I hope they do it on-air, like Beck is doing. Heh.

Children of the Taliban

I watched this last night on Frontline World on PBS. Pleae take the time to go see this 37-minute video report and read the synopsis if you want to see true right-wing extremism in action.

In a village 6 hours from Peshawar, it is the first time that the new deputy leader of the Pakistani Taliban, Hakimullah Mehsud, has been filmed.

Arriving in an American Humvee his men have just captured in an attack on a NATO convoy, he tells the cameraman, “If America continues bombing the tribal areas… and martyrs innocent people…then we are compelled to attack them.” He also sends a message to Islamabad: “If the Pakistani leaders and army maintain their stance… then we will take control of Peshawar and other cities.”

This is no empty threat. The war has already arrived in the capital and Pakistan’s largest city, Karachi.

The state education system in Pakistan has virtually collapsed, leaving more than 1.5 million children studying at schools like this one. Sitting down to be interviewed, Shaheed explains what Sharia Law has taught him about women.

“The government should forbid women and girls from wandering around outside,” he says calmly. “Just like the government banned plastic bags -- no one uses them any more -- we should do the same with women.”

Leaving Karachi, the reporter tries to make contact with the Taliban leadership in the tribal areas. She wants to talk to the men who are recruiting children from these religious schools for suicide operations.

After lengthy negotiations, she meets with Qari Abdullah, who makes no attempt to hide his face.

“We never used to fight against Pakistan, because we thought the Army were Muslims,” he tells her. “But when they started bombing us, we had to do jihad against them.”

When she asks him about using young children to carry out such attacks, he replies:

“Children are tools to achieve God’s will. And whatever comes your way, you sacrifice it.” He then reveals that he recruits children as young as 5, 6, and 7 years old.

Coming to the end of her bleak journey, Obaid-Chinoy reminds us that there are 80 million children in Pakistan, many of them living in poverty. If the militants continue to expand their war and to recruit children freely, as they do now, then Pakistan may soon belong to them.

It's getting more serious by the day, and Bush gave the Taliban a seven year head start in Pakistan.

We're on the verge of defeating the American Taliban who would make us as ignorant as the AfPak Taliban are doing over there. I hope we can help the Pakis defeat their Taliban before that country is lost to them.

The peasant mentality lives on in America

Matt Taibbi

On teabagging parties:

What’s next? The Great Dirty Sanchez-In of 2010? A Million Man Felch? (Insert Rusty Trombone joke here).

More stuff I gotta go look up...

When the wingtards find out they've been conned into advocating doing something named after basically just a normal Saturday night in Frisco, they're gonna be pissed! Heh.

Or maybe not:

[...] Beck has an audience that’s been trained that the rich are not appropriate targets for anger, unless of course they’re Hollywood liberals, or George Soros, or in some other way linked to some acceptable class of villain, to liberals, immigrants, atheists, etc. — Ted Turner, say, married to Jane Fonda.

But actual rich people can’t ever be the target. It’s a classic peasant mentality: going into fits of groveling and bowing whenever the master’s carriage rides by, then fuming against the Turks in Crimea or the Jews in the Pale or whoever after spending fifteen hard hours in the fields. You know you’re a peasant when you worship the very people who are right now, this minute, conning you and taking your shit. Whatever the master does, you’re on board. When you get frisky, he sticks a big cross in the middle of your village, and you spend the rest of your life praying to it with big googly eyes. Or he puts out newspapers full of innuendo about this or that faraway group and you immediately salute and rush off to join the hate squad. A good peasant is loyal, simpleminded, and full of misdirected anger. And that’s what we’ve got now, a lot of misdirected anger searching around for a non-target to mis-punish… can’t be mad at AIG, can’t be mad at Citi or Goldman Sachs. The real villains have to be the anti-AIG protesters! After all, those people earned those bonuses! If ever there was a textbook case of peasant thinking, it’s struggling middle-class Americans burned up in defense of taxpayer-funded bonuses to millionaires. It’s really weird stuff. And bound to get weirder, I imagine, as this crisis gets worse and more complicated.

It's OK to be a peasant. It's not OK to be stupid and let the Masters con you into thinking wrong is right.

It is Jihad!

Heh ... The Republican Civil War has begun. Our pal Montag feels a bit of sadness for the Doughy Pantload though:

...

I know I should be happy that they are trying to eat their own, but Boss Limbaugh really does make Jabba the Hut seem like a decent soul.

Heh ... again.

Don't forget!

It's tax day. Teabag a Republican for good measure.

The Dead End Quarter ...

No, not a low rent neighborhood in Paris or London; the 25 (thereabouts) percent of Americans who are fucking morons:

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This same 26-30% keeps cropping up in poll after poll, and they really believe some of the dumbest things in the world.

...

Headline of the Day

Homeland Security Warns of Rise in Right-Wing Extremism

Not exactly rocket science, huh? Pretty amazing, actually, given the source, for which I apologize. Pretty good day for F** Noise - overstate the obvious like it's news, which it probably is to them even though they started a lot of it, and see the next post down. Heh.

"Bullshit Becky" poisons the very air around him!

Please forgive me for posting video of this asshole, but it's worth it!

Slow day

Light to none blogging today. Mrs. G has taken control of the big set to do our taxes, and mini-Hal's air card is dealing with a one-bar tower here in town. Slower'n molasses/50-weight in January. I actually called AT&T about it, and the tech brought up our tower and said it was possibly the weakest one in their whole system. Figures.

Anyway, I got a short window while Days Of Our Lives is on.

It's funny, but when me'n Mrs. G got hitched, we lived in an older house that had a bathroom so small that it wouldn't be acceptable in a travel trailer today. I used to think marital happiness was having two bathrooms. Now it's two TVs and two computers. Heh.

It's always been two motorcycles.

Just as a closer, I figured out how to deal with Somalia.

First, since Somalia has the longest coastline of any nation in Africa, find every landing craft and catering truck on the planet. Assemble catering trucks to landing craft and position them just offshore of Somalia up around the tip of the HOA under the protection of the warships of all the nations affected by piracy and tell the Ethiopian and Kenyan armies that there'll be a shore lunch as soon as they can get there. Invite Eritrea and Djibouti too. And bring yer families!

Alternatively, I have a 'two birds with one stone' approach: offer the food to the Somalians and serve it on the landing craft. As soon as they're all chowin' down, back all the boats off the beach and keep going. Let 'em all disembark in Iran. That oughta get 'em to the negotiating table! Heh.

Privatize it!

Pic stolen from our pal UL, who has a post up about the Rethugs' next 'great idea' to stop the pirates.

And for a good idea or two on the subject, drop over to Comrade Misfit's place and see what a well thought out policy looks like.

Quote of the Day

DaveNoon:

...

Leave aside the obvious qualifier that former employees of the Bush administration -- which projected, among other things, Madovian annual returns on the Iraq War while arguing that we could improve Social Security by anchoring its benefits to the stock market -- are uniquely unsuited to the task of identifying and offering solutions to policy problems.

...

Oh, I'm ever so Elite!

I haven't done one of these in a while and I saw this one over at Grandpa Eddie's. Try it.

My Liberal Identity:

You are a Reality-Based Intellectualist, also known as the liberal elite. You are a proud member of what’s known as the reality-based community, where science, reason, and non-Jesus-based thought reign supreme.

Take the quiz at www.FightConservatives.com

Aaargh!

Gleefully gleeped from YubaNet.

Area 51

Everbody get their tinfoil hats on and go read!

LATimes Magazine

After decades of denying the facility's existence, five former insiders speak out

"We couldn't have told you any of this a year ago," Slater says. "Now we can't tell it to you fast enough." That is because in 2007, the CIA began declassifying the 50-year-old OXCART program. Today, there's a scramble for eyewitnesses to fill in the information gaps. Only a few of the original players are left. Two more of them join me and the Slaters for lunch: Barnes, formerly an Area 51 special-projects engineer, with his wife, Doris; and Martin, one of those overseeing the OXCART's specially mixed jet fuel (regular fuel explodes at extreme height, temperature and speed), with his wife, Mary. Because the men were sworn to secrecy for so many decades, their wives still get a kick out of hearing the secret tales.

These guys for sure still ain't tellin' 'em about the real 'secret base'. Heh.

Enjoy.

Oh, the irony...

Ironic Times

Pirates Pose Threat to International Trade, Commerce
Organized, highly trained, equipped with the latest weaponry, the West's aging armed forces are no match for these sophisticated swashbucklers.

Okay ...

Now that Captain Phillips is safe aboard USS Boxer, soon to make his way home, it's time to talk about our policy in dealing with the pirates. The captain and crew of Maersk Alabama, wittingly or not, have changed the paradigm and we can no longer have a "wait and see" attitude once a ship is taken.

No longer will the pirates operate as they have previously. Freighter crews will be in more danger as the pirates will now assume active resistance on the crews' part. They know they will have to work faster, bring more manpower, and be more heavily armed with weapons made to fight in the confined spaces between the bulkheads (an AK is a bit big, lengthwise; too easy to get hung up on gangways and bulkhead fittings). They will be more inclined to shoot first, more inclined to kill hostages before warships arrive on the scene. Rightly or wrongly, post-Maersk, these holdups will become more violent.

So now I ask, in light of the events of the past week; do we have a policy to deal with the situation now that things have obviously escalated? Will the Rules of Engagement for CTF-151 change now that the rules of the game have changed? Or will we just go along as we have until a crew is murdered?

As you all know, the news was entirely devoted to Captain Phillips' rescue yesterday, even the European networks. I heard a lot of people in merchantman circles give their two cents and almost all said there has to be a more aggressive policy when dealing with the pirate problem. General Mark Kimmitt, yesterday on CNN, echoed my sentiments yesterday saying (paraphrasing) that Somalia's problems would require 10 to 15 years fix and we don't have that long. I would agree, adding the next incident with the pirates will not be as peaceful.

The point is, President Obama and his defense people have a decision to make, and quite soon. Will we let the Navy play it by the seat of their pants (as they did this time), hoping for a break (not every hostage is prepared to take his own fate in his hands like Captain Phillips), or will we aggressively hunt these creeps down and kill them? There is no middle ground anymore.

The pirates will not give up their raids because three of them have been killed, the payoff is too lucrative. While the safety of the merchant crews is the priority, allowing the shippers, and their insurance companies, to pay ransom hurts us all. We, all of us, pay for it in the cost of goods shipped via the Seven Seas. It is also an incentive to others who see it as a way to supplement their income. The problem has to be nipped in the bud, before it spreads farther.

President Obama must act now to put a comprehensive policy in place and move enough assets to the region to deal with it effectively, whether or not our partners in the operation follow suit or not. Without action, the international waters off Somalia will never be safe and will only become more dangerous.

Sunday Crazy Redneck Music Blogging

This goes out lovingly to crazy women everywhere. Texas has more than its share I am sure, but no monopoly!

Jonathan Edwards ~ Crazy Texas Woman

Thanks to MiNDTV35, Philly.

Africa Command

Fixer's post just below this one got me to thinking about the larger picture in the Horn Of Africa. It's not something we think about a lot, but maybe we should. The Somalian pirates finally fucked up bad enough to try and capture an American-flagged ship, at which they failed, but they did succeed in bagging the skipper, more or less at his own request, and the drama is such that the Sunday talking head shows are all atwitter about it today.

The Somalian pirates have made it to American TV big time. Their 15 minutes begins.

Breaking News: Captain Phillips is free and safe. Three of his captors are dead and the fourth is in custody. Shoulda stuck ta stealin' goats from the Ethiopians, assholes. But I digress...

I found this excellent, reasonably short article by Thomas P.M. Barnett in Esquire, dated 27 June '07.

A few years ago, with little fanfare, the United States opened a base in the horn of Africa to kill or capture Al Qaeda fighters. By 2012, the Pentagon will have two dozen such forts. The story of Africa Command, the American military's new frontier outpost.

Ethiopia's Meles regime, which American Central Command officers describe as "xenophobic to the core," was going into Somalia last December whether the Americans approved or not. The recently installed Somali Council of Islamic Courts, with its loose talk of getting back another star point in its flag (otherwise known as Ethiopia's Ogaden region), simply had to go. As it happened, the Americans, who had been quietly training the Ethiopian troops for years, did approve.

In fact, Centcom was very eager for the operation. Most press leaks made it sound like our main targets were a trio of Al Qaeda senior operatives responsible for bombing American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania a decade ago. But the real story is one of pure opportunism, according to a knowledgeable source within the headquarters: "There were three thousand foreign fighters in there. Honestly, nobody had any idea just how many there really were. But we wanted to get them all."

When the invading Ethiopians quickly enjoyed unexpected success, Centcom's plan became elegantly simple: Let the blitzkrieging Ethiopian army drive the CIC, along with its foreign fighters and Al Qaeda operatives, south out of Mogadishu and toward the Kenyan border, where Kenyan troops would help trap them on the coast. "We begged the Kenyans to get to the border as fast as possible," the Centcom source says, "because the targets were so confused, they were running around like chickens with their heads cut off."

"We could have solved all of East Africa in less than eight weeks," says the Centcom source, who was involved in the planning. Central Command was extremely wary of being portrayed in the media as Ethiopia's puppet master. In fact, its senior leaders wanted to keep America's participation entirely secret. The goal was for Ethiopia to get all the credit, further bolstering America's controversial but burgeoning military ties with Meles Zenawi's increasingly authoritarian regime. Proud Kenya, still visibly nervous from the 1998 embassy bombing, would have been happy with a very quiet thank-you.

It was a good plan. And it was leaked to the press almost as soon as it started.

Those involved in the Central Command operation suspected two sources: 1) somebody in the Office of the Secretary of Defense who couldn't wait to trumpet their success to bitter personal rivals in the State Department, or 2) a dime dropper from our embassy in Kenya who simply couldn't stand the notion that the Pentagon had once again suckered State into a secret war.

The quotes are all from page 1 of a 6 page article. A 'must read' primer if you're interested in what is going on in the last great untapped global battlefield.

One final quote. This is the sort of thing we're up against culturally:

He tells the story of a primary school deep in the Muslim village of Bargoni where all the girls would drop out once they hit puberty. In Africa, the impulse would be to think: AIDS, birth control, clerics bearing down. But it was something far more prosaic. When I had first arrived inside the wire at Camp Lemonier, I'd seen a portable toilet labeled "Muslim female." The girls at the school were forced to quit at puberty because strict Islamic practice says that males and females can't share the same bathroom once girls come of age. McKnight and his crew offered a simple fix: HOA would build the school a bathroom just for girls.

The impact was immediate. For the first time, girls stayed in school, parents were happy, mullahs were satisfied, local leaders immensely gratified. Word got around: "The Americans did this!" McKnight's eyes well up as he remembers.

Kinetics is what the military does. Iraq is a quagmire because kinetics is all we planned for. But in this new time, on this continent, the military also builds latrines for girls. That simple act might someday keep trigger pullers out of this village.

"I don't need to go back to Florida and my inner-city school," McKnight says. "I've got it all here. It feels just like home."

Please read it.

And you wonder ...

Why progressives are characterized as pussies?

As you all know, Gord and I been on this pirate thing for the last 6 months, since the escalation in their frequency of attacks. In the last week, since Maersk Alabama was attacked, we've been posting more regularly. So has the rest of the blogosphere. And, as you all know, we've been somewhat disappointed with the response of the U.S. government. Most on this side of the dial aren't.

The reason I bring up other progressive bloggers is, aside from a few, most have adopted the line that you can't blame the pirates because of the poor situation found in their homeland. Oh, the poor dears can't find work. Oh, the unfortunates have no functioning government. Oh, they're trying to feed their families and we have to fix the systemic problems in their country instead of blasting the pirates and their 'headquarters' into subatomic particles.

Fuck them.

Firstly, the window for helping the Somalis opened and closed in 1993. Remember Black Hawk Down? One of Bill Clinton's rare fuckups. You think we have a clusterfuck in Iraq and an unwinnable war in Afghanistan? Try bringing about "regime change" in Somalia. Ain't happening. The American people won't have it. Maybe, had we not our other military obligations, it would have been a "good fight", but not when we're stretched so thinly, not when our economy is on the balls of its ass.

Nextly, there are several million other folks who are trying to feed their families in Somalia who aren't pirates, starving their asses off in refugee camps. Do the pirates, who netted $80mln in ransom last year, use that money to buy food for their fellow countrymen? Um, no. They cruise around in American SUVs, have satellite dishes, and buy dope for themselves. And let's not forget the weaponry (making their job of capturing ships that much easier), getting more sophisticated all the time. Were they attempting to be modern-day Robin Hoods, I might be a little more understanding. Were they trying to finance an army to break the grip of a corrupt, tyrannical government in their country, I might be inclined to help them. They are doing nothing but looking out for Number One.

Lastly, taking the above into account, they are merely criminals. Just as their forebears centuries ago, they are nothing but thieves and murderers. Gordon will correct me, but I'm pretty sure one of the missions of the Marines back then was to hunt down and kill these bastards. It's what they should be doing now.

Someone mentioned, either in comments here or on another blog that it shouldn't be that difficult to follow these guys clandestinely (the Navy's watching that fucking lifeboat holding Maersk's captain inside with their little toy planes) and find out where they live. The Air Force and CIA have more toy planes that can make some craters where the pirate hideouts (and pirates) used to be. Most certainly. It is unconscionable that these clowns can sit within a few yards of a United States Navy warship and basically give them the finger without consequences. We look like a fucking joke.

Listen to me. While Somalia is in a bad way, we can't afford to worry about them right now, on many levels. There is a tangible threat to the civilian shipping lanes in international waters and that should be dealt with aside from all of the other Somali problems. The pirates have to be shown there are consequences for interfering with international trade. Paying them millions of dollars, euro, or drachmas isn't a fucking deterrent, you boneheads. Helping the refugees and 'negotiating' with either the pirates or the government in Mogadishu will do nothing to discourage the pirates. Making these criminals look over their shoulder all the time, wondering if a little model airplane, unseen thousands of feet above, will decide to shittify their day most certainly will.

Fuck the pirates, this is no time to be touchy-feely. Bring it to an end the same way we did with Blackbeard and his ilk. Kill them brutally and hold them up as an example to those others who would attempt to burglarize the high seas. The Seven Seas belong to all of us, for shipping, for defense, for recreation, and in my case for travel. We pay, in so many ways, for the actions of these renegades and it's time to start recouping our losses.

The End of Christian America

From the article:

There it was, an old term with new urgency: post-Christian. This is not to say that the Christian God is dead, but that he is less of a force in American politics and culture than at any other time in recent memory. To the surprise of liberals who fear the advent of an evangelical theocracy and to the dismay of religious conservatives who long to see their faith more fully expressed in public life, Christians are now making up a declining percentage of the American population.

While we remain a nation decisively shaped by religious faith, our politics and our culture are, in the main, less influenced by movements and arguments of an explicitly Christian character than they were even five years ago. I think this is a good thing—good for our political culture, which, as the American Founders saw, is complex and charged enough without attempting to compel or coerce religious belief or observance. It is good for Christianity, too, in that many Christians are rediscovering the virtues of a separation of church and state that protects what Roger Williams, who founded Rhode Island as a haven for religious dissenters, called "the garden of the church" from "the wilderness of the world." As crucial as religion has been and is to the life of the nation, America's unifying force has never been a specific faith, but a commitment to freedom—not least freedom of conscience. At our best, we single religion out for neither particular help nor particular harm; we have historically treated faith-based arguments as one element among many in the republican sphere of debate and decision. The decline and fall of the modern religious right's notion of a Christian America creates a calmer political environment and, for many believers, may help open the way for a more theologically serious religious life.

That was a pretty wordy way of saying, "Worship any god(s) you like. It is your right under the Constitution to do so or not as you choose. Keep it to yourself. Respect my rights as well and quit trying to elect people and pass laws that will force me to believe as you say you do or there's gonna be trouble."

Many conservative Christians believe they have lost the battles over issues such as abortion, school prayer and even same-sex marriage, and that the country has now entered a post-Christian phase. [...]

Halle-fuckin'-lujah!

I walked in the door about ten minutes ago with my new dead-tree copy of Newsweek and posted this on the strength of the cover. Now I am going to go sit on the couch and read the rest of it.