Gitmo

Do you know what the youngest age of someone at Guantanamo was when it opened?

11.

They were holding an 11-year-old at Gitmo. And I think he's still there.

God this country is fucked.

Want to be depressed?

Read this. Lays out very succinctly what a failure this administration has been in dealing with terrorism.

Iranian missile followup

Clearly, if the Iranian news agency hadn't half-assed their image doctoring, it would have been far more effective...

From the "You couldn't make this shit up if you tried" files...

Iran sucks at Photoshop.

The French are dumb

We rename side dishes, they ban the use of ubiquitous words because they sound too English-y. And stupidity knows no borders...

Castro

According to the History channel, we tried to do the following to Castro:

• invade him
• get his girlfriend to give him botulism
  
• get his lawyer to give him a scuba suit infected with not one but two deadly biological agents
• pack a mollusk with enough explosives to kill him
• 634 other weird assassination attempts
  

Man, we're fucking assholes. No wonder that guy is so angry and bitter.

Also, rather unrelatedly, after the Soviet Union launched Laika into space, they launched Belka and Strelka, also dogs. Strelka had puppies after returning to earth, and one of them was named Pushinka. Pushinka was then given to Caroline Kennedy, JFK's daughter, as a gift (inevitably kind of a "fuck you" gift, I have to imagine). Before Caroline could have Pushinka, the CIA had to screen Pushinka to make sure she was not a Soviet spy dog. I have to wonder how that interrogation went.

"WHERE ARE YOUR ALLIANCES?!"

"*turned-head, ears-up, inquisitive doggy look*"

"TALK!"

"Woof!"

"Don't fuck with me, dog! We can do this the easy way, or we can do this the hard way!"

"*licks ass*"

Interestingly, one of JFK's other dogs boned Pushinka, and she had puppies that JFK referred to as pupniks.

Who says you don't learn anything on television?

Let them eat OLPC!

Hear, hear! Glad to see someone whose opinion seems to be more valued than mine seems to agree.

Russia votes early and often

Lest you delude yourself into thinking Putin was democratically elected...

Venezuelans vote aftermath

...and we have our answer: Yes, Venezuelans are stupid!

You know, after looking at Nazi Germany, Bush's election, and now this shit in Venezuela, I'm really much less keen on the idea of democracy as a means to promote effective government.  It empirically really doesn't seem to do a hell of a lot better than the other options, frankly.  And I'm half-serious here...even a dictator has to maintain his support or, at some point someone will come in and shoot him.  How much different is that from convincing a population to vote to give you whatever powers you want?

I suppose that sentiment is just a rehash of the now-infamous Goering quote:

"Of course the people don't want war. But after all, it's the leaders of the country who determine the policy, and it's always a simple matter to drag the people along whether it's a democracy, a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship. Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism, and exposing the country to greater danger."

Update: I, erm, take it back?

Venezuelans vote

Alternative article title: "How stupid are the Venezuelan people?"

Also, doesn't the whole "vilify an external power for political gain" thing sound vaguely familiar?

The failure of OLPC

This BBC article gives a nice summary of why I think the One Laptop Per Child project is misguided. First and foremost:

"In an interview with the BBC, Nigeria's education minister questioned the need for laptops in poorly equipped schools.

Dr Igwe Aja-Nwachuku said: "What is the essence of introducing One Laptop per Child when they don't have seats to sit down and learn; when they don't have uniforms to go to school in, where they don't have facilities?"

The whole concept is...okay, I'm not going to say dumb. Its heart is in the right place. But really, this is running before you can walk. Spend the money on teachers, desks...infrastructure, for chrissakes, before you go blowing $100 million on an unproven technology without the lesson plans, teacher training, etc. to go along with it.

Nevermind. Yes, it is dumb. And now Negroponte is spouting conspiracy theories about Intel and Microsoft undermining them. Actually, the problem isn't so much conspiracy theories as, well, the fact that he seems surprised that an effort to flood a good portion of the world's untapped markets with new hardware and new software might, you know, catch Intel and Microsoft's attention. Umm...duh? These are multi-billion dollar industries. You expected them to roll over out of some kind of corporate morality?

Kasparov arrested

Predictable but sad. Things seemed like they were looking up for Russia under Gorbachev, but it looks like they are descending back into the old ways. Sigh.

Your daily douchebag (10/10/07)

A Daily Douchebag to a head of state: Hugo Chavez.

It's hard to be critical of such an outspoken critic of Bush, but it not the case that the enemy of my enemy is my friend. Which is to say, Chavez is an asshole. I mean, after all, part of the reason Bush co. are assholes is that they are arrogant pricks who don't want to even listen to alternative viewpoints. That defines Chavez to a T. What kind of asshole interrupts another head of state at a summit? I don't give a shit if he's being critical of you. You're the president of a sovereign nation, not in fucking middle school. Grow the fuck up.

Oh, and stop trying to be a dictator, asshole. Vladimir Putin and Fidel Castro are not models to emulate any more than Bush is.

Benny Lava redux

Okay, so the Benny Lava _actual_ lyrics are almost as weird as the transliterated ones.

Also, I think this is a far better sound track for the original video.

Your daily douchebag (11/03/07)

A Daily Douchebag to Pervez Musharraf for being a typical douchebag dictator and declaring marshal law when the few checks and balances left in his country weren't being nice to him.

It makes me profoundly sad to see these cases where a country boots out an imperial power (England) only to descend into their own home-brewed authoritarian regime. Having watched V for Vendetta recently doesn't help matters.

Update: Musharraf: still a douchebag. Also, I can't help but see parallels here between Musharraf's rationale for declaring martial law and the Bush v. Gore decision. Both amount to saying, "we don't have time to actually sort out the legalities because not having a President _right now_ is just too dangerous!" Which is, of course, horse shit.

Gore's Nobel

I'm sure you've heard about Gore's Nobel Peace Prize by now (note that he shares it with the UN climate panel). I feel a little weird about it, to be honest.

It's not that Gore isn't a good guy who has done great stuff. I just think the precedent is a little odd. I was reading...somewhere, and I'm too lazy to try to dig up the reference...about some of the political dynamics of the economics Nobel work. The Nobel in economics tends to be given to someone for work they did 15 to 20 years ago, the reason being that it's only with that much historical perspective can you tell if the work was accurate and if it had an effect.

I feel like the same standard should apply here. It may well be that Al Gore's efforts have catalyzed global action on climate change, but I don't think we have the perspective yet to be able to assert that. Maybe he will have turned out to be the one to lead the sea change in policy opinion and priority that ultimately leads to the aversion of a climate crisis. But what if we've already fucked ourselves? What if anything we do now is too late and has essentially no effect? What if the momentum of the past few years fizzles and amounts to nothing? Has he really done the most to promote global peace in those contexts?

And, frankly, what has he done other than utilize his celebrity to highlight the issue and educate? Not that that isn't useful, but is it really the stuff of a Nobel award? Will this be forever known as the Apple Keynote presentation that won a Nobel Peace Prize?

Sex by country

We're losing to the fucking Swiss?!

Best way to go green: stop having so many fucking children

Not that I think China's draconian one-child policy is the best way to go about it, but somehow, in the noise about airplanes and carbon footprints, the simple fact that "a person who was never born has no carbon footprint" has been lost.

The growth in air traffic, oil consumption, and just about any other environmental issue you can think of is being driven my one simple fact: people keep fucking, and they keep popping out children. There's more air traffic because the number of _people_ is increasing. The rate at which we're consuming oil, and the rate at which we're belching carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, are increasing because there are more goddamn people on this little planet of ours. Deal with that issue, and the rest will, if not take care of itself, become drastically more tractable.

So environmentalists: how about instead of harassing air travelers, you hand out condoms and free birth control?

War from the perspective of soldiers

You know...the guys who were actually there?

The 3 heresies of Freeman Dyson

A _really_ thought-provoking essay by Princeton physicist Freeman Dyson (I just checked, and yes, that's the same Dyson that came up with Dyson sphere that Star Trek fans may be familiar with).

That may be the first essay to make me seriously question to what degree climate change is really a crisis. That said, I think his distinction between humanists and naturalists is specious. As Dyson himself so beautifully illustrates, we basically have no fucking idea what the planet is doing, let alone what it would do in response to any actions we might take. What we do know is that nature, as we have experienced it thus far, is capable of adequately sustaining human life. We don't know if that will continue to be the case if we fuck with it. Hence, when the very fate of humanity is at stake, erring on the side of "don't fuck with things" seems prudent. Moreover, seen in this light, "if we stop fucking with things, there are some people who won't make as much money!" seems a particularly retarded argument.