Unqualified Offerings

By Thoreau

Hehe.  Santorum.  Hehe.

By Thoreau

America’s Finest News Source delivers succinct and flawless analysis of the NDAA, leaving the rest of the Fourth Estate in the dust.

By Thoreau

My wife and I decided to check out The Bachelor, and one of the women is an epidemiology PhD student doing a rap about love as a disease.  Between that and the LHC Rap, we white people have much to apologize for.

To white science geeks everywhere, I must say this:  If you absolutely insist on rapping, please, please, PLEASE listen to a rap song written after 1989.  I’m just sayin’, yo.  Even the cosmic embarrassment known as Vanilla Ice at least had more rap style than white science geeks.  If you want to see some science geek rap, go to 1:37 in this video.  Still pretty basic stuff, but at least it has some variation in the beginning.

By Thoreau

I agree with everything that Phil Ebersole says here and here.

By Thoreau

It is January 1, 2012, and aside from a  handful of Marines at the embassy, the  US military has left Iraq.  I am pleased to be wrong in this prediction.  There, I said it, I was wrong.

Now, let’s not be too hasty in concluding that this marks a substantial shift in US foreign policy.  The Obama administration practically begged Iraq to let US troops stay.  And while the military is gone, there’s a very large  privatized army of mercenaries.  Ostensibly they are there to protect the very large diplomatic mission, and God knows that US government employees need protection after all of the sins that this country has committed against Iraq.  However, I somehow suspect that some segment of that mercenary army will be doing things that support any number of covert activities.  My dark suspicion is that this will someday lead to An Incident.  Still, the withdrawal timeline was adhered to, and I was wrong.

Now, let’s talk about the future:  It is a perpetual UO hobbyhorse to notice drums being pounded for war against Iran.  However, there is ample reason to suspect that there is hot covert activity against Iran, and you can only have so many covert actions before something goes wrong and there’s An Incident.  If that Incident happens when the drums are being pounded with calls for war, that is dangerous.

I’d be less worried about war with Iran if we had learned from Iraq.  But we haven’t.  On the other hand, how much new is there for us to learn, really?  The chief problems with the Iraq War were that it was a humanitarian disaster, it made nobody safer, it was unprovoked and based on lies, and it was horrendously costly.  All of these things were utterly foreseeable in 2002.  That they were realized merely confirms what was already known.  There wasn’t really anything new to be learned.  If we could ignore the obvious in 2002, we can ignore it again in the future.  If not in Iran, then somewhere else.

John Perich plays us out of 2011 – to our DOOM Bwa ha ha ha ha!!!!!

Or not.

Did the researchers go out to test both fathers and mothers, for instance, to find out what the impact of both fathers and mothers might be on a child’s obesity?

Can you guess the answer to that one? Yup, they only tested mothers, not fathers.

More.

By Thoreau

The Finest News Source just won’t stop pointing out that they understand the Iraq War on a much deeper level than you:

1) Iraq declares partial law

2) Iraq war memorial planners forced to revise length again.  Best part: “Once work is completed on the ongoing Iraq War Memorial, the ABMC will reportedly begin planning the War in Afghanistan Memorial Mobius Strip.”

3) Lest we forget how far back this folly goes, this one is from the Clinton years:  70 percent of Americans in favor of watching Iraq get bombed on TV

Given that they are pwning the rest of the media, I wonder how long it will be before Clifford Baines starts moderating presidential debates.

UPDATE:  (from 2006) CNN renews ‘This week at war’ for next eight seasons

By Thoreau

Mother Jones points out that libertarians and rappers have a lot in common.

By Thoreau

You may recall my post about the attempt to use cupcake frosting as a delivery system for transporting gels onto planes.  Would you believe that the inventors of this “cupcake in a jar” have opened a bakery in Istanbul?  That’s right, a city full of Muslims, the capitol of in a country with an Islamist government, now has a shop that produces jars of this delicious gel-like concoction.  How long before Syrian musicians start snacking on these things?

UPDATE:  Actually, it’s even worse than that.  The “cupcake in a jar” that the TSA stopped was from a different bakery.  This means that we have not one but two places making these devilish concoctions!  And, the bakery in question is from Massachusetts, the original home of the War on Christmas.