Oklahoma: Filling in the Blank

So why am I even here in Oklahoma? Why do I continue to live in a state that can’t even kill people on purpose cleanly, accept federal dollars to improve the health care provided to its citizens, resist electing the most extreme kind of dumb-asses the country has to offer, etc?

It’s simple: I was born here, my kids live here and if I were to just write the state off… well, the terrorists would win.

It wasn’t but a year or two ago when a co-worker came to me to ask if it wasn’t true that “Obamacare” required that children be injected with a microchip (“the Mark of the Beast”). 70+ percent of the voters approved a statewide referendum to prohibit ‘Sharia Law’ here. As many people that claim, nationally, their belief that the Hebrew God created the world less than 10,000 years ago, I’d bet that almost twice as many Oklahomans believe the same. If a plurality of my statesmen aren’t home-schoolers that are ‘hooked on phonics’, they wish they had the patience/resources to be.

Oklahoma’s people are largely an ignorant and fearful folk: they fear negroes (especially the President), non-European immigrants, change, secular anything,  books, the commie United Nations, most new ideas and the Big Scary World.  Believe me, I know about Oklahoma. I was born here, grew up here and stayed here.

Believe me: it was not always this FUCKING STUPID A PLACE TO LIVE.   No, the Dark Flame of Ignorance has been carefully tended and stoked to make Oklahoma a Beacon of Idiocy:

• Governor Mary Frick’n Fallin, the adulterous darling of the Tea Party, has been paid to oppose damned near everything that could make things better for this state while her spoiled brat daughter openly mocks Native Americans
• Senator James Mountain Inhofe, who has for years been a global laughing-stock over his conspiratorial thinking on human sexuality, climate change and the dang-nabbed 20th Century in general
• The numb-skull state representative that put a 10 Commandments monument on the grounds of the capitol but couldn’t get the spelling right
• Another cretin on the state payroll that campaigned against using human fetuses in food products
• The list goes on and on!

So why am I still living in Oklahoma?

Some amazing things have happened here.
I have fond memories of ‘liquor by the wink’.
Once upon a time, we had the highest per capita membership in the Communist Party in the nation.
Cannabis was once the number one cash crop.
The musicians are amazing here.
The state bird, the scissor-tail flycatcher, is cool.
Gas prices are low.
Maybe I’m too lazy to move and if I did only the Crazies would be left!

Fuck Governor Fallin and all her kind.
Fuck the followers of Oral Roberts and his fellow travellers.
Fuck the Koch Brothers and their veinal scheming.
Fuck all the manipulators of well-meaning Okies! Their hearts are pure, but —

I’m staying here to fill in the blank, the blank that they told me to erase and write something else in (but I won’t!).
I’m staying here to remind them of every time they are so terribly wrong that they pretend like they weren’t.
I’m the fly that stays clear of their patent medicine ointment.
I’m no Tom Joad, but for crying out loud, if people like me left this state, what would be left besides the easily led?
I am an Oklahoman, and I’m  staying here whether they like it or not: I want to rub them the wrong way.

Maybe I’m staying just to annoy the rest of ‘us’… because ‘we’ need to be annoyed.
What they’ve done to us shouldn’t be forgiven or forgotten or excused.
Those bastards did it for money and power and greed, straight up.
I wanna be here to watch the payback, if it ever comes.

 

 

Gods and Monsters

Dark Horse has launched a new comic book series where atheist superheroes protect the Earth from supernatural forces they don’t even believe in.

Here’s 11 horror movies that are incredibly scary because of what they say about humanity. I thought they all were!

Rare non-face palm news out of Indian Territory! The first 24 hour automated library in the U.S. has been installed in Norman OK!

The robot apocalypse has been postponed! In front of dozens of journalists yesterday in Hong Kong, DARPA’s 330 pound Atlas robot lost its balance and broke its ankle during a demonstration of walking.

Law of Urination: all mammals empty their bladders over the same duration.

A new study published in the American Journal of Medicine finds that heavy pot smokers tend to be slimmer than former marijuana users and non-smokers. So that’s what happened to my 30 inch waist!

Poor children are now the majority in American public schools in South, West. Standardized testing won’t fix that.

Yes, Evil Knievel endorsed a scooter-chair in his declining years. Sad, isn’t it?

Authority > Leadership. “Authority in the Village from Italy to Ireland“.

There’s an interesting “sedition petition” that’s got over 40,000 signatures.

At a loss for words? Try the Tea party Insult Generator! It’s powered by actual insults spewed on John Boehner’s Facebook wall!

Beloved Imbeciles

“The righteous hates falsehood, but the wicked brings shame and disgrace” – (Proverbs 13:5). Yea and verily, my own district’s Rep. Jim Bridenstine (R-Pekoe and Orange Pekoe) issued the following statement on his vote to continue the government shutdown Wednesday night:

I voted ‘No’ on the bill to raise the debt ceiling without any spending controls and fund the government without providing any relief to millions of Americans being harmed by Obamacare. The President’s policy of funding all of the government or none of the government violates the principles of a representative republic and is devastating to a nation historically governed by consensus.

Yep, them Obamacare casualties are just littering the streets, aren’t they?  This kind of hyperbole, coupled with the fact that Bridenstine is known to be able to both read and write, is why I conclude that he is a very lazy liar that just doesn’t care to sound even a little credible. Because, hey, TYRANNY!, right?

Mr. Bridenstine doesn’t seem to comprehend that, under the Constitution of this representative democracy, there are just two ways to undo the Affordable Care Act (since the Supreme Court has already killed the “declare it unconstitutional” gambit):

1. Pass a bill in congress to overturn the ACA, and have the president sign it into law, or
2. Pass a bill in congress to overturn the ACA, have the president veto it, then override the veto by two-thirds vote in both houses of congress

It’s a little odd to have to explain this to a congressman, even a spurious ‘wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross‘ rookie like Bridenstine, but he’s just a mendacious little tool and not an overly bright one at that. Go Okie voters!

Rep. Tom Cole was the only member of Oklahoma’s all-Republican delegation voting to re-open the government. I’ve lauded Rep. Cole in the past for being the most pragmatic member of the Oklahoma delegation, by far. We might not agree on much, but with Cole you won’t get an argument about the sky being “up” or 2+2 being equal to 4. This sets him head and shoulders above the rest.

On the other hand, in the Senate, crazy old Tom Coburn (R-Rampant Lesbian) was among the 18 senators who voted against the measure. Sen. Jim Inhofe, recovering from surgery to remove a scientific hoax, was unable to vote but released this statement:

The president has taken care of his pet projects while letting the most foundational elements of the Constitution — from budgeting to national security — sit on the back burner. Because of his leadership, we have operated from one crisis to the next. It happened once again when he and Majority Leader (Harry) Reid held Congress hostage with the debt ceiling in order to forge a deal that falls short of anything worthy of conservative support. It’s time this ends and my colleagues face the overdue discussion on the scope and size of federal government.

Does that parse as being as disconnected from reality to you as it did for me? Maybe it was only the Demerol talking, though with Inhofe how would you ever know?

Mr. Cause, meet Mr. Effect

The movie we’ve all been waiting for! “Hell No!”, the sensible horror movie.

Right out of “Creepshow“: Russian team recovered a half-tonne chunk of the space rock that exploded over Chelyabinsk earlier this year, but they broke it.

What fact do you accept intellectually, but still feels “wrong” to you? It’s quite a discussion over at Reddit.

A herpes drug can make people with renal failure insist they are dead – a condition called Cotard’s syndrome – and may provide insights into consciousness.

Here’s what the fox really says, Ylvis.

Connecticut College students and a professor of neuroscience have found “America’s favorite cookie” is just as addictive as cocaine – and just like most humans, rats go for the middle first.

Donkey Baseball (which is, as the name implies, baseball played while riding on donkeys) became a popular fad in the 1930s. In 1934, William Beck became the first fatality for the fledgling sport.

How the Bible and YouTube are fueling the next frontier of password cracking.

A drug similar to ketamine has been shown to work as an antidepressant, without the psychosis-like side effects associated with the party drug.

Billionaire businessman Richard Branson last week spoke on CNN against the ‘War on Drugs’, labeling it “an abject failure”. Speaking in purely business terms, Branson said that if he “had a company that had failed for 60 years I would have closed it down 59 years ago”.

Q: How many cops does it take to throw a suspect down a flight of stairs? A: None; he tripped. More police-state fun! 

“It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.” -Mark Twain

Besides the train-wreck the GOP and their fellow travelers are causing, the U.S. really doesn’t have a debt crisis. What we do have is a crazy crisis!

More than half of low-wage workers employed by U.S. fast-food restaurants rely on public assistance to get by, possibly due to laughably low wages.

So, let me get this straight: you voted for werewolves to dismantle the government and now you can’t get any help? SD ranchers demand to know “Where’s that gubbermint we voted against?”. Pardon my shocking lack of sympathy.

Here’s the plotting of the “Putz Putsch” conspirators, caught on video. Shipping all those teabagger pukes to Gitmo is better than they deserve.

“Food is the First Thing, Morals Follow On!”

“Food Will Win the War” –  an awesome 1942 propaganda cartoon from Walt Disney. Tom Waits gives us a rougher taker on ‘food security’ (what a screwed-up euphemism)!

While  the US government is shut down, the Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) Food and Nutrition program will not be receiving its regular federal funding. Feminist Hulk is building a list of alternative sources of infants and children nutrition aid sources… while the Teahadi terrorists inflict their childish tantrums (at full pay) on the vulnerable.

Fox News host Elisabeth Hasselbeck on Thursday suggested that welfare recipients who had air conditioning and cell phones were part of the “ugly side of entitlements”. Then Jesus threw His beer at the TV and damned her and all those like her to Eternal Torment.

Have they been huffing starter fluid, or what? “Truckers Ride For The Constitution” (a Tea Party group formerly known as “Truckers To Shutdown America” before their original Facebook page was killed) plans to clog the Interstate 495 inner loop from Oct. 11 to Oct. 13. Apparently they wish to emulate French farmers, who regularly pull this kind of stunt!

Get Out Your Calculators, It’s Time To Go To Crazyland, TX for a look at Louie “Louie” Gohmert’s FEC filing. “Why does his staff get pizza but he dines at The Capitol Hill Club for $1,500 a month? Do you think the staff will try to poison him when they find this out?“. And where does he get a $10 plane ticket?

Death is permanent in Ohio, lurking everywhere in Florida… and debatably redundant in Oklahoma.

It’s that time of year again! New Pumpkin Spice Channel To Offer Fall-Themed Hardcore Pornography (TheOnion).

The Smell of Peanut Butter Could Diagnose Alzheimer’s, because your olfactory is one of the first things affected.

Noted holy man Pat Robertson cranksplains AIDS: “I think the World Health Organization was doing some experiment in the Congo on a monkey virus, a monkey injection to fight polio and it wasn’t an injection, they put it in sugar cubes and they gave it to these Africans, a couple hundred thousand in the test.”

The Wurst is Yet to Come

Have you tried crossing the beams?

Republican Debt-Ceiling ‘Truthers’ Are Risking a Financial Disaster: “Like the insane, nuclear bomb-worshipping mutants who live beneath the Planet of the Apes, the debt-limit truthers and denialists are willing to risk disaster in a last-ditch attack on Obamacare”. Here Are Three Debt-Ceiling Lies You’ll Hear From the GOP This Week.

The Big Lie that the Affordable Care Act was “rammed through in the middle of the night without a single Republican vote” doesn’t align well with the years of debate and negotiations Senate records show. Look out for that “memory hole”!

Ohh, burn! Taliban mock ‘selfish and empty-minded American leaders’ over government shutdown. ‘Even a stopped clock’, as the saying goes.

On the origins of “goo goo ga joob”.

How to Spot a Narcissist… just Google “Ted Cruz”?

How much energy does it take to vaporize a human? We have the technology.

According to a new documentary, the quantity of cow intestines required to manufacture Zeppelins for WWI was so enormous that the making of sausages was temporarily outlawed in Germany and allied or occupied parts of Austria, Poland and northern France.

Neuro-enhancement in the military: far-fetched or an inevitable future? I’d settle for a Legislative Branch that wasn’t brain-dead.

Eighty to 90 percent of people who use crack and methamphetamine don’t get addicted, and the small number who do become addicted are nothing like the popular caricatures.

Robotic Snakes Slither Their Way Into Ancient Archaeology. First the Congress, now the Pyramids.

An extinct Judean date palm has been grown from a 2,000 year old seed found in the ruins of Herod’s palace. Still no progress rekindling patriotism or honor among the Tea Party zombies, though.

This bizarre lizard bleeds green poison that can kill you. Sort of like the Koch Brothers.

(TheOnion) Shutdown breakthrough! “According to Congressional aides, if the White House agrees to deliver Malia, as well as a pint of Michelle Obama’s blood, a ram’s horn, and a shard of obsidian to the basement of the Cannon House Office Building by this evening, a House vote on the bill could take place as early as Saturday“.

Electronic cigarettes could save the lives of millions of smokers, or they could set millions of non-smokers on the path to nicotine addiction. The pressure to regulate them piles up… without a speck of science.

Dutch authorities using ‘scratch and sniff’ cannabis cards to bust pot growers. This brings up a funny-but-true story. A good friend of mine, a graphic artist, wanted to do a cannabis-scented scratch’n’sniff  thing for a local “head shop” in the ’70s. 3M was the sole provider of the technology at the time, so he ordered some samples, but none of them smelled anything close to right. After some back and forth with 3M, he finally got someone on the phone who told him “Look, 3M is a pretty conservative company. Even if one our fragrance engineers knew what pot smelled like they could never admit it.” And thus the project was dropped. Apparently it’s not a problem for the Netherlanders today.

Something surreal from Banksy:

It’s “Whack-a-Mole” Wednesday!

“Anybody who watches Fox News knows that there is an inherent anti-Muslim bias in their reporting and has been for quite some time,” Reza Aslan said on Wednesday. “I don’t actually blame them for it. They’re a commercial enterprise. They know how to sell a product and, frankly, fear sells a product.” Lauren Green’s interview with Aslan set a new low for television interviews, even for Fox News, and Aslan says he feels really bad for her.

National Security Agency director Gen. Keith Alexander was met with jeers and heckling Wednesday at the Black Hat conference in Las Vegas, and for good reason.

Oklahoma native Bradley Manning faces up to 136 years in prison, despite being cleared of the “aiding the enemy” charges brought against him. The sentencing phase of his trial began today. I say we bust him out!

The Real House Thieves of New Jersey: David Dayen points out the absurdity and hypocrisy of the Obama/Holder Justice Department. Wall Street banksters illegally foreclosed on 244,000 customers for an estimated $48 billion, defrauded mortgage investors, manipulated energy prices, and fraudulently tampered with lending rates at a total cost that may well run into the trillions. How does the Obama/Holder DoJ indictment count reflect the magnitude of criminality? Let’s look at the record.

Indictments for reality TV stars who accused of defrauding banks in order to obtain approximately $2.4 million in loans: 2.

Indictments of bankers who falsified millions of loan documents, defrauded homeowners and investors, evaded local property sales taxes, and committed multiple other frauds large and small: 0.

Sometimes we do see a glimmer of justice: Judge to serve 28 years after making $2 million for sending black children to jail.

Craven senators Max Baucus and Orrin Hatch want to use this one weird trick to shield authors of toxic tax giveaways from the public view.

A new analysis of the writings of mass killers reports they suffer from an intense form of paranoia.

On the occasion of Stanley Kubrick’s 85th birthday, explore the director’s favourite films.

Avondale (AZ) police say they arrested a man Monday afternoon who allegedly started a fire in his bedroom closet because he was trying to rid his room of demons. Haha- demons LIKE fire, you whacko!

Looney Pat Robertson tells viewer with ‘demons’ to ‘burn the house down’ or get exorcism. Haha- demons LIKE fire, you whacko!

Aleppo rebel religious committee forbids ‘colonial’ croissants.

Dog eats paralyzed man’s testicle.

Here’s Boris Karloff’s sherry-infused guacamole recipe, because it’s AWESOME that Frankenstein liked guacamole.

Donald Duck teaches us about family planning, a dozen years before this bizarre ‘abstinence only’ horseshit took hold:

Big Brother, ‘Prism’ and the Tentacle Porn

I don’t know about anyone else, but I have always assumed They (you know, ‘Them’?) were watching Us, even before the whole ‘Prism’ story broke. Of course, the sheer volume of data being collected would make it almost useless if they actually were looking all of it without some kind of filter or AI to crunch the data and connect the dots for the mere hyoomans. That’s argument one for Them having to rather selective with the data They have access to. It’s probably still a good idea to keep jiggling the wires, though, what say? Make losts of random calls to say “Squad B: the old cat on the south fence is gray!” to whoever answers the phone, and you actual evil-doers out there just remember to dial at least five wrong numbers (and keep them on the phone as long as possible using coded-sounding language) for every co-conspirator’s number you call, just to keep the waters nice and murky.

Since privacy is the respectful acknowledgement that everyone’s got something you really don’t want to know about, if I was running a benevolent modern Surveillance State, here’s what I’d do: to keep from wasting time on the merely secretive behaviors of average citizens,  I’d establish the Bureau of Whimsy to get to know everyone’s secret greasy hearts, their quirks and hang-ups, to separate ordinary oddball behavior from the actually suspicious. “Oh HIM? He’s just rooting around for tentacle porn again. Add him to the Creepy But Harmless List and get back to watching what the non-kinks are up to”. That’s what I’d do.

Hey, speaking of tentacles, does anyone else remember the Octopus Conspiracy? It was a big non-story in the media a decade ago.

“Intelligence Chief James Clapper Answers A Craigslist Missed Connection“, as told by Paul Bibeau.

The Onion reports “Area Man Outraged His Private Information Being Collected By Someone Other Than Advertisers“!!!

Big brother is watching! Sales of George Orwell’s dystopian novel “1984″ have skyrocketed in the wake of revelations of US government surveillance. I’ll worry when the same happens to “Catcher in the Rye”.

Why it’s so much harder for the government to spy on your snail mail than your email (hint-hint, evil-doers).

Bill Maher writes that economic incentive to legalize weed and the failure of the War on Drugs have produced a sea change in America that’s here to stay.

Take this with a pillar of salt: young people who consider themselves “spiritual but not religious” are more likely to commit property crimes than those who identify as just “religious” or “spiritual and religious,” according to a study from Baylor University, a Baptist institution.

Pope Francis has acknowledged the existence of a “gay lobby” in the Vatican. I’ll bet it’s decorated more tastefully than the rest of that dump!

Get real, comrades! Russian lawmakers on Tuesday approved a bill that would ban the “promotion of homosexuality”. What, they hand out discount coupons?

“I’m hoping he will confess that he’s a psychotic Bipolar and he’s going to start taking psychiatric medicine” is one reply to the story that total ass-clown Glenn Beck has a document that will take down the “entire power structure, pretty much everything.” Pardon me for not tuning in to hear whatever ooze-spurt that idiot will emit.

Combining two of my favorite things: drones and sushi! London-based chain YO! Sushi is testing a new way to get food to customers’ tables. Yes, it does look pretty messy!

The United States of Looney and Killer ‘Bots

92 years ago today, Tulsa was the site of what remains the single worst incident of racial violence in American history. The Tulsa Race Riot of 1921 left the Greenwood area, once known as “The Black Wall Street”, a smoking ruin.

Imprisoned CIA whistleblower John Kiriakou sends us a “Letter from Loretto”: “It turned out that I had to get a copy of my formal sentencing documents to prove that I wasn’t a child molester. I did that, and was welcomed by the Aryans, who aren’t really Aryans but more accurately self-important hillbillies.”

Ricin is all the rage again! Once the hallmark of basement-dwelling militia losers, now dangerous gun-kook losers are showing their patriotism by mailing ricin-tainted letters to the President of the United States, the Mayor of NYC and so forth, because TYRANNY! What a compelling argument for their cause. Let’s hope they get to argue their case from a cage in Gitmo, like the cowardly terrorists they are.

…And right on cue, noted ass-clown Alex Jones is ready to claim it’s all a setup by the Illuminati or something. Makes so much more sense than just your average knuckle-dragging gun-crazies, right?

…Meanwhile, responsible Americans (including non-insane gun owners) are polling at 80% or more in favor of universal background checks.

Manufactroversy (măn’yə-făk’-trə-vûr’sē)
N., pl. -sies.

1. A manufactured controversy that is motivated by profit or extreme ideology to intentionally create public confusion about an issue that is not in dispute.
2. Effort is often accompanied by imagined conspiracy theory and major marketing dollars involving fraud, deception and polemic rhetoric.

Local parents and the American Civil Liberties Union urged the Springboro school board on Thursday to abandon a proposed policy listing creationism and evolution as “controversial issues” appropriate for discussion by Springboro students. They must love paying the ACLU’s legal fees.

The Louisiana House Education Committee killed a measure to repeal a 1981 creationism law on Wednesday, even though the Supreme Court has ruled it unconstitutional. The 1987 decision Aguillard v. Edwards ruled that their swamp-tard law was clearly intended “to advance the religious viewpoint that a supernatural being created humankind” and therefore violated the First Amendment. They must love paying the ACLU’s legal fees.

Noted creationist flim-flam artist Kent Hovind (AKA “Dr. Dino), has been ordered to pay more than $3.3 million in taxes and penalties, according to court documents filed May 15. He is currently in the Federal Correctional Institution in Berlin, N.H., serving a 10-year prison sentence for failing to collect and pay hundreds of thousands of dollars in employee-related taxes, obstructing tax laws and structuring transactions to avoid financial reporting laws. In other words “a holy man”.

Well, it finally happened: Michele Bachmann announced today that she won’t be running. And comedians across the country suddenly feel the weight of a great depression.
{I can’t be sure, but in the late ’70s/early ’80s I think I ran into ‘Bonkers Bachmann’ leading those zombies waving signs and screaming incredibly hateful things at the staff and clients of the Reproductive Services clinic in Tulsa. We tried to engage them reasonably once and came away convinced they were all psychotic. That would jibe with what we’ve all seen after she hit the national stage}.

Jack (John Holbrook) Vance, American mystery, fantasy and science fiction author, passed away Sunday, May 26 at the age of 96. Jack died peacefully in his sleep. Rest in peace and thanks for all those wonderful stories.

The UN Human Rights Council, meeting in Geneva, has produced a report calling for a moratorium on the development and use of “lethal autonomous robots” (LAR) while the ethical questions they raise are debated. LARs are machines programmed in advance to take out people or targets, which – unlike drones – operate autonomously on the battlefield.

SkyNet calling on line one! Behold the Guardium, which is exactly what the UN is worried about. Israel’s killer robot cars are currently patrolling the border with Gaza. Equipped with “auto-target acquisition”, they can “react to unscheduled events, in line with a set of guidelines specifically programmed for the site characteristics and security routines”.  That means that if it sees something it doesn’t like, it can apparently take action all on its own — hopefully alerting humans in a command center before opening fire. The IDF says the little robo-cars can “use various forceful methods to eliminate” threats.

UAVs in Domestic Airspace: Some Thoughts

With the FAA set to “integrate” UAVs into U.S. airspace in 2015, now is as good a time as any to give some real thought as to whether this is the best idea.

Now, don’t get me wrong: my black hat doesn’t have a tin-foil liner, but I’ve been pretty unimpressed with the appalling litany of UAV/drone failures and long-known vulnerabilities  in the open literature. I wouldn’t feel safe with that junk flying over my head and you probably shouldn’t either. Here’s a few reasons why:

A common design feature on many drones is how they act when they lose contact with their controllers: in the event of communication loss the drone is programmed to land automatically, “for safety”. That doesn’t work so well sometimes.

During the first demonstration of their shiny new UAV, the Montgomery (TX) Sheriff’s Department  found this out the hard way. While flying at an altitude of 18 feet, their $300,000 drone helicopter lost communications and performed an auto-land maneuver… right into their own Bearcat armored vehicle. There were no injuries reported, but imagine the same thing happening over a playground full of kids: the outcome would be “sub-optimal” (AKA disastrous).

Danger Room has pointed out that since many drones depend on GPS, and that GPS is a very low-power signal from space that is totally without any authentication whatsoever, UAVs (or anything else) depending on GPS for timing or navigation functions are incredibly vulnerable to attack by jamming or spoofing.

Jamming can be as simple as a $50 (illegal, but readily available) GPS jammer or a homebrew RF white noise source. Spoofing can be more complex, but simply receiving the GPS baseband signal, adding a bit of delay, then re-transmitting it at a high enough signal level to swamp the “genuine” one at the target can severely screw with many GPS-based systems (I’m looking at you, wireless broadband networks). Iran has claimed to have “hijacked” one of the CIA’s own RQ-170 drones by making it think it was at its designated landing coordinates.

Life is Hardest When You’re Dumb!

Famous swell guy Pat Robertson sez: PRAY HARDER and stop hitting yourself, Oklahoma!

Hackers gonna hack, and this time the deserving target is the Westboro Baptist Church: the hate group’s “God hates Oklahoma” page was transformed into a Red Cross donation site. High five to Jester! (Sadly, it looks like WBC has regained control of the site now).

This piece on how ignorance loves company brought me to review the history of the Great Library of Alexandria again this morning. The learned world still mourns.

The potent combination of our powerful intelligence with our massive reality denial has led to a dangerous world.

“The NRA says gun control won’t work because illegal guns are so easy to get. But as a convicted felon, I know Adam Lanza never could have gotten an illegal firearm. I challenge any pro-gun lobbyist and/or pundit to pocket a few thousand dollars and head out alone into the streets of any major city, find a shady character, and purchase a firearm illegally in the same manner that a psychotic and/or criminal would have to do if we had effective background checks in place”.

“Count me a proud wacko bird,” says newly minted Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tea Party). Is burning every bridge in sight the path to effective governance?

Hey, Ted, your theme-song is right here! Thanks, Austin Lounge Lizards!

Oklahoma Joe’s – your average Okie bigots

Feeling “serviced”?

Update: The Steifel Foundation will be matching donations to Camp Quest Oklahoma this week to help offset the back-stabbing by Oklahoma Joe’s #BigotBBQ!
Click here to donate (I just did)!

Oklahoma Joe’s Barbecue decided to go all “Children of the Corn” last night and screw over Camp Quest Oklahoma in the midst of a fund-raiser there. The problem seems to have started with Oklahoma Joe’s sanctimonious CEO, Joe Davidson, and his hill-billy religious discrimination. Those showing up for the cancelled-without-notice fundraiser were met with the sign above and have been expressing their feelings about being back-stabbed like this. Joe, when you kick people out of a long planned fundraiser and then lie about it, well, it pretty much blows any spirit-filled high-ground, doesn’t it? Man, you know you’ve screwed the pooch when even the local Fox affiliate highlights your hypocrisy. You just can’t buy press like that! The crap the BA location served up last night stunk soooo bad that even the (independent) Kansas City location is distancing itself publicly, and Joe had to pull down his Facebook page to avoid the well-deserved public acknowledgement of his little negative publicity stunt last night. I don’t think I’ll be eating there anytime soon EVER. They are dead to me! “Oklahoma Joe’s: put on your armbands and come on by!”

This link is to a video that illustrates the difficulty of downing a small drone with projectile weapons (starting at 1:18, volume warning!): lots of guns spewing lots of lead before it goes down (maybe try a shotgun?). Today, the Navy released video of a solid-state fiber optic laser system downing a comparably small drone with considerable poise and grace (and lots less noise). The lesson is pretty clear here: if they at least double the laser power, this approach would definitely be tactically significant, and not just for drones. Think artillery shells, missiles, etc.

WikiLeaks has launched a very large searchable database of diplomatic cables from the Nixon/Kissinger years. You might need to boil your eyeballs after reading. This massive database is the first installment of the “Public Library of US Diplomacy”, or PlusD, which a press release describes as holding “the world’s largest searchable collection of United States confidential, or formerly confidential, diplomatic communications.” PlusD holds “2 million records comprising approximately 1 billion words.” Let’s all go and search for dirty words, eh?

In January 1977, Playboy published an interview with an anonymous alleged designer of “assorted nasties” (silencers, explosive bullets, hallucinogens, envenomed felt-tip pens, that sort of thing) for a certain government agency (cough-CIA-cough). Titled “Mr. Death”, it’s just cock full of anti-social Maker info, with all the [deleted] bits easily pieced together if you know your chemistry and so forth. It gives an interesting insight into what was possibly going on in (and deniably outside) our government at the time.

A 4-year-old who picked up a gun at a family cookout killed the wife of a Wilson County (TN) sheriff’s deputy, authorities said Monday. More guns is the obvious NRA answer to the problem of guns being so damned good at killing innocent people that little children can do it accidentally </mournful sarcasm>. Pew-pew-pew, am I right?