Sunday, April 20, 2008

Roundups, Ruminations and Even a Few Random Rants

Well! It's certainly been a busy couple of weeks, so I'll recap as quickly as I may:

The President (you know him, Kim Jong Bush) admitted not only the existence of the John Yoo Memo that said basically we can torture whoever the hell we want and the Constitution and international law doesn't mean shit, but said that he was aware of the meetings and approved of them. This was revealed late on a Friday afternoon thus guaranteeing that hardly anyone would pay any attention to it, and it was eclipsed in the Slave Media by Senator Obama's "bitter" comment.

The people I work for are working toward a system integration package, so I spent four gloriously boring-ass days in meetings last week, trying hard to think of ways to get out of it without shooting myself. However, the time wasn't completely wasted; I cranked out another 125 pages of content for the Spontoon Island website, including a rather neat story about Red Dorm going to the aid of Trotsky.

On April 9th and 10th I worked as a volunteer at the Sun n' Fun Airshow, the second-largest airshow in the country (right after the big one at Oshkosh, Wisconsin). While I was there I saw this plane, a concept for a new small business jet by Eclipse Aviation:
I recognized the design instantly, as it resembles the German Heinkel He-162 People's Fighter from 1945:

I guess you can't keep a good design down.
I hosted a family reunion/picnic at my house yesterday; with nearly 20 people present it's the largest party I've had at the house since I moved in eight years ago (I'm not much of a partier anymore, alas). Practically everyone brought something, leaving me to do the actual cooking of the burgers. Luckily the weather and everything else conspired to be just as nice as possible so the day went by very nicely. And, of course, it was nice to see people I haven't even thought of in years.
Getting back to the Slave Media, ABC outdid itself in irrelevancy by spending the first 52 minutes of its so-called "debate" asking stupid questions. I have often said that the only stupid questions are the ones you don't ask, but these weren't just stupid; they were nonsensical. What the hell does torture or national security have to do with a guy who was in the Weather Underground 40 godsdamned years ago? What does our sagging economy have to do with the necessity to wear lapel pins? Not a fucking things, but Charles Gibson and George Stephanopoulos apparently thought it did (Steph even taking pointers from Sean Hannity of Fox Noise). Fucking wankers.
A swarm of small earthquakes struck off the coast of Oregon, and a 5.2-magnitude temblor hit the Wabash System in southern Illinois. Coincidence? Nope. The swarm might have indicated landslides, or two terranes rubbing up against each other like million-ton kittens; the south Illinois quake served as a reminder that there are fossil faults underlying the entire country - not just California. Betcha there's a lot of people studying up on the New Madrid quake about now.
The Government Accounting Office released a report that said we've basically given up on the War on Terror. It seems that al Qaeda's leadership and main base of operations are in Pakistan; logic would indicate that we take those people out, hard. But since Pakistan won't let us, we've made no plans to get Osama bin Forgotten and very likely won't.
Speaking of Pakistan, they tested their new Shaheed-2 missile with a range of 1245 miles. Nice to see a nuclear power flexing its muscles like that; one wonders what India thought of it.
Muqtada al-Sadr threatened a new uprising by the Mahdi Army if the al-Maliki regime and the US kept screwing with him. Considering the way his followers acted in Basra, I'd lay odds on the Mahdi Army, and take the points.
We have suffered 4,037 combat deaths in Iraq since Bush's Wonderful Magical Mystery Military Adventure started (it's a mystery because the reason we invaded keeps changing). Even the Pentagon's own university, the Institute for National Strategic Studies, has admitted that Iraq is a debacle whose outcome is in doubt. At this rate, our record will end up 11-2-1, instead of 12-1-1. And Kim Jong Bush is now seemingly bound and determined to leave the mess for his successor - not all that surprising, really; this wastrel has failed in everything in his life, and usually walked away from the failures to let others clean them up. Cheney, on the other hand, seems equally determined to start a shooting war with the region's 800-pound gorilla. Someone needs to tell him that vicarious manhood doesn't come cheap.
The Democratic party primary process careens wildly toward the Pennsylvania elections on Tuesday. Ought to be fun.

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