" I must point out that the US has not used its nukes yet."
Be sure to smile when you say that around a Hiroshima/Nagasaki survivor.
The Russians haven't used their nukes. The Chinese haven't used their nukes. The Indians haven't used their nukes. The Pakistanis haven't used their nukes. Neither have the French, the British or the Israelis. Not even the North Koreans.
"...the US has not used its nukes yet..." Yet, he says.
Bartender!
"Pretty obvious propaganda rather than a training aid, I would say..."
My point is that it teaches material that will require extra work and study to unlearn later.
For a few years now, I've been signing my Slashdot.Org posts with a .signature file that says, "It used to be that we were playing chess while they were playing go. Now, we've switched to golf."
What fool actually signed the approval to spend money on this bullshit propaganda? Did anybody in a position of authority stop to ask the game designers whether the games they were designing might actually be bad simulation training?
Meanwhile, the greens fees are soaring...
Paula, you might have the order of operations correct, but "Borrow-and-Squander" is the phrase you want. It puts the listener/reader into the picture: you borrowed all that money in our names, and now look how little good for us you've been able to do with it.
"Correction, make that Spend, Borrow, Spend More, Borrow More, Cut Taxes on the Rich, and Make the Rich the Lienholders."
The phrase you want is Borrow-And-Squander Republicans. Rolls off the tongue really nicely. Make sure to sneer the word "squander" when you say it. I've used this verbally to fabulous effect.
P J Evans writes: Salvias can be really insane...
I like how Salvia divinorum is thought to be a cultigen.
"Those of us who weren't wasted on cocaine and booze during the '60s and '70s recall how well the "Vietnamization" program worked."
The sad thing is there are lot of people who *were* wasted on cocaine and booze all through the 60's and 70's, yet who still manage to recall how well the "Vietnamization" program worked.
Our ruling clique is even more mendacious, malevolent, incompetent and stupid that we imagine— even after we take into account that they are more mendacious, malevolent, incompetent and stupid than we imagine.
p.s. Props to shrillblog for the beatz.
Oh, I can totally buy that maybe our hosts aren't as familiar with the sordid history of IHR.Org on the Internet as some of us old-timers who remember them from WayBackInTheDay™.
I was just worried that I was missing some really funny joke at the expense of the people at IHR.Org. You know the kind of joke I'm talking about— somebody writes a fictional story that appears to be a serious polemic on a subject near and dear to the target of the joke, convinces them to post it on their own website as a supporting argument for their particular flavor of wingnuttery, when the story is just a thinly disguised forgery designed to expose the credulity of the target of the joke.
Our hosts have been known to participate in such jokes in the past. 'S why I'm wondering if that's what I'm seeing now. Unfortunately, I haven't read enough of the genre typified by that IHR.Org piece to recognize any hints that it should be regarded as an obvious forgery. A bit of web searching suggests that the story is just another personal account of involvement in the investigation of a well-known atrocity. That's why I was worried I might be missing the joke.
I'm still hoping someone will be kind enough to explain the joke to me. I hate feeling like everyone else understands the subtle wordplay, and I'm the one with the inadequate grasp of history and language. Feel free to send it to my email account.
Sean Bosker writes: Has anyone heard this horrific radio interview with an American 'intelligence officer'?
Yes. In fact, I'm the guy who sent the tip to Media Matters. They cut some from the segment that I found horrifying, but they kept the portions that got across the point.
Here is where I first wrote about it.
So, I'm still confused. Why is Making Light giving link-karma to the reprehensible IHR.Org? I'm guessing [hoping] it must be a subtle joke, but I'm too dense to get it.
"We have anti-money and it is used as a weapon... credit cards."
Actually, no— that's not right. Credit cards are one of the many ways that banks create money. They really can't be considered as examples of anti-money. I would imagine that anti-money would have to be some kind of transferable token that served as the opposite of money. It would have to be a store of worthlessness, a barrier to exchange and a unit of exemption.
Hmmmm. I'm going to have to give this thought more consideration. It's possible I might be able to write a horrible parody of Neal Stephenson with it. I suspect it will have a twist ending that will make the reader want to kill me.
"So first off I wonder, what is anti-money? And what happens if it collides with money?"
I'd like to know how to create stable anti-money, and whether I can use it in a weapon system.
At Foo Camp '05, the Werewolf games ran until dawn every night. The games I played started with twenty-seven, then eighteen villagers. These were my introduction to the game.
I discovered that villagers have more to fear from their fellow villagers in the early rounds of the game than they do from the wolves. The wolves usually don't figure out who is the seer for several rounds, and the villagers are often overly quick to lynch their fellow villagers. This does two things that help the wolves: 1) it multiplies the risk of losing the seer each round; 2) it accelerates the increase per round in the odds the wolves will find the seer at night.
I was a villager eliminated in the first round in the first game I played. I was a villager eliminated in the third round in the second game I played (and the seer was eliminated by a lynching in the first round). I'm pretty familiar now with the degree with which the game can be fun for dead villagers to watch.
I came up with a novel strategy that I tried to play when it was my turn to offer a defense in the second game. I falsely confessed that I was a werewolf, and I proceeded to finger the people at the table I thought were the real wolves. I had hoped this would prompt somebody to start a discussion about my motives. I'm sorry to say this didn't work at all. The villagers were seized with a blood lust and lynched me without any discussion other than to laugh at me.
Oh, and for the record: I was right about one of the people I fingered as a wolf. It was still fun to play, and I learned to see the wolves as the good guys. Next time I play and I get dealt a villager card, I'm going to try to help the wolves kill as many villagers as possible. On general principle.
Villlagers. Must. Die.
amysue writes: when is everyone going to get that this country is being run by crooks, thieves and really nasty people...?
I prefer to live in the happy delusion that everybody already gets this, and that anyone currently pretending not to believe it is either one of the crooks or trying to become one.
If the goal is to disrupt the American economy and culture (and therefore make it more difficult for us to implement foreign policy) there are so many opportunities
I'm surprised too. I've made a mental list of all the opportunities that have come to mind, and I check them off whenever I hear news that somebody in a position of authority has recognized the potential threat and moved to do something— anything— to lower risks. This doesn't happen often enough to keep me feeling happy about the progress I keep hearing we are supposed to be making.
On the other hand, it could just be my problem. For instance, I've got a short story in a folder on my computer at home that I just know is going to get me in trouble some day. It's called, Hello, My Name Is James, And I'm An Asshole. It's written in first person singular and the plot concerns the hijacking of a supertanker and steering it at full steam into the side of a container ship docked at the Port of Oakland.
I wish I had never seen this now. I worry that if I'm not careful, I could write myself into a nice all-expenses paid holiday at the bottom of a hole in some officially non-allied country like Syria or some such place.
John Ford writes: For instance, an establishing shot of Lombard Street in San Francisco will, instead of being captioned Somewhere in Hong Kong, will be captioned Somewhere in Dili, East Timor.
Why does this line of thinking remind me of a certain China Miéville story I just read. Ah, yes— here it is: Reports of Certain Events in London.
Not long after 2001-09-11, the San Francisco pedestal of the western segment of the Oakland Bay Bridge got all new fortifications around it. Some wise guy figured out that a well-placed explosive charge of surprisingly small yield would drop the whole suspension system. It's now a lot harder to get close enough to do that. You have to really mean it to blow up the Oakland Bay Bridge now.
In my line of work, we often refer to the Oakland Bay Bridge as the "Trans-bay Fiber Path" because of all the network traffic that runs over the bridge. Not terribly far from the bridge terminal, there is a large boring building— with architecture so dull and tedious that you can't miss it for its dullness and tediousness— that contains vast tracts of telecommunications hardware. It's a major switching point for just about every kind of terrestrial telecommunications network you can imagine. One of the west coast Internet MAE's is in that building. I shudder to think about how much it would cost and how long it would take to rebuild the contents of that building if it were destroyed. Just the hardware in the racks alone has to run well into the tens of millions of dollars.
Cut the cable between the switches, and they just patch the cut or run new cable. Smash the switches and you have a much bigger and tougher reconstruction job. Do you have any idea how much one of these costs? How about one of these as well?
You could probably take out that building the same way Timothy McVeigh dropped the Murrah building, and you'd do a whole lot more economic damage. I bet the other ten or twenty buildings like it around the country are similarly vulnerable, given who owns them and how those people are used to thinking about physical security. A coordinated attack could be mounted by a group of only a few hundred people. It wouldn't be a "mass casualty" event, but the ripple effect through the economy would seriously fsck up a lot of people. With networks unavailable for days or weeks, depending, a lot of data would get lost and logistics systems that rely on fast networks would unravel. It seems to me the economic damage could be very high, and I don't think anyone has gamed out what the full consequences would be. This is exactly the scenario that folks like me have been wanting the DHS cybersecurity people to take seriously, but instead we have them getting their underwear in a twist over jihadis using email to coordinate their paintball games.
I'm sure glad the terrorists like to hit high-profile symbolic targets. How's that false sense of security working for you?
Oops. It looks like julia got here first. Sorry about that.
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|---|---|
| 2005 | 43 |
| 2004 | 3 |
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