Year: 2009

Have to Put my Resume in With These Folks

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Leeds University advertises for lap dance research officer:

The advertised position, in the School of Sociology and Social Policy, is for: “Research Officer – The rise and regulation of lap dancing and the place of sexual labour and consumption in the night time economy”.

The advertisement further stipulates that “prior experience of conducting research in the female sex industry” is essential.

Of course, if this does not appear on Letterman, Leno, or Stewart, they aren’t doing their jobs.

Needless to say, Sharon* is not amused at my suggestion that I apply for the position.

*Love of my life, light of the cosmos, she who must be obeyed, my wife.

We’re Still Torturing at Black Prisons

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So much for change we can believe in.

The CIA is still maintaining gulags where prisoners are tortured:

An American military detention camp in Afghanistan is still holding inmates, sometimes for weeks at a time, without access to the International Committee of the Red Cross, according to human rights researchers and former detainees held at the site on the Bagram Air Base.

The site, known to detainees as the black jail, consists of individual windowless concrete cells, each illuminated by a single light bulb glowing 24 hours a day. In interviews, former detainees said that their only human contact was at twice-daily interrogation sessions.

“The black jail was the most dangerous and fearful place,” said Hamidullah, a spare-parts dealer in Kandahar who said he was detained there in June. “They don’t let the I.C.R.C. officials or any other civilians see or communicate with the people they keep there. Because I did not know what time it was, I did not know when to pray.”

The jail’s operation highlights a tension between President Obama’s goal to improve detention conditions that had drawn condemnation under the Bush administration and his stated desire to give military commanders leeway to operate. While Mr. Obama signed an order to eliminate so-called black sites run by the Central Intelligence Agency in January, it did not also close this jail, which is run by military Special Operations forces.

The problem here is that he wants to split a difference, because he is too eager to please people, and there is no difference to split: You either torture, or you don’t. You either allow the ICRC to review conditions at POW camps, or you don’t, you either try terrorists in real courts, or you don’t.

What’s more, this is well corroborated:

Although his and other detainees’ accounts could not be independently corroborated, each was interviewed separately and described similar conditions. Their descriptions also matched those obtained by two human rights workers who had interviewed other former detainees at the site.

(emphasis mine)

What Barack Obama (and Eric Holder, and much of the rest of Obama’s security/intelligence appointees) has done is to spiff up the image of the torture, but it is still going on.

There is a point where a line gets crossed, and it won’t be just covering up for Bush and His Evil Minions™, and maybe shading a few lines on due process.

After a few more months of this, Barack Obama becomes a war criminal too.

Zimbabwe Update

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Well, it’s been a while since I’ve posted on the subject.

The macro picture is that Mugabe continues to refuse to behave in accordance with any of the agreements that he signed, and Tsvangerai can’t do much about it, and the SADC in general, and South Africa in particular, won’t do much about it.

It’s kind of a dysfunctional stasis.

That being said, the trial of Roy Bennett, the MDC treasurer and nominee for deputy agriculture minister, the government’s star witness has said on the stand that his earlier testimony was coerced by torture.

The judge has ruled that eter Michael Hitschmann’s confession cannot be used against Bennett because of this.

Not This Contemptible, Self-Serving, Psychopathic Loser Again

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The Green Party of Connecticut is lobbying Ralph Nader to run against Chris Dodd for Senate.

Ralph Nader has harmed his reputation, his movement, and the Green Party, which not only bore the brunt of the blow-back from his candidacy fro President in 2000, but also never got access to his contributor or mailing lists for that elections.

But still, the clueless in Connecticut, want to put the Former President of the WWE, Linda McMahon, who has put on homophobic rape filled theater as “pro-wrestling”, in the Senate by running Nader against Dodd.

NASA: Lame Beyond Belief

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So, in an attempt to make NASA look cool again, they have signed up “The Rock”, the wrestler turned actor who now goes by his given name, Dwayne Johnson, in order to make space travel look cool again:

Perhaps space travel has become old. Perhaps people have come to take it for granted. It’s been seen in so many movies. So many space shuttles have taken off and returned to Earth that we think little more of them than we do of jumbo jets.

NASA therefore has to use its imagination to persuade tomorrow’s generations that space travel continues to be a large step for man.

One small step in this process is a new public service announcement featuring that fearsome space creature, “The Rock.” Dwayne Johnson himself, a man who has appeared in so many scientifically concocted movies such as WWF SmackDown, WWE Backlash, and WWE Crush Hour, is now telling kids that NASA is cool.

You know, going into space is cool, the fact that you have to lose an actor to convince people that it is is more of an artifact of your incompetence in running the space program than it is the fundamental coolness of space.

Learning to find one’s own ass with one’s own hands would be a good start.

Video below.

We All Went to Manhattan Today

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We drove down from my mother-in-law’s to Washington Heights, where we parked, and took the subway (the A train) down.

Natalie wanted to go to the American Girl® Place on 49th & 5th Avenue. She wanted her doll repaired, an arm need to be reattached, and she hoped to have it addressed at the doll “hospital”.

Unfortunately, between a computer glitch, and the fact that it was one of the original style dolls, we had to leave it there, and they will mail it to us.

To say that Charlie was less than amused to be in the store would be a gross understatement.

He was in a state of blind panic and revulsion at having to cross the threshold into that problematic palace of pervasive pinkness.

By way of apology, I took him to the Sony Wonder Technology Lab at Madison Avenue and 56th St.

It was a sort of digital playground, with robots, and motion capture dirven dancing avatars and suchlike….Best of all, it was free.

We had some quintessentially New York moments:

  • We bought hot pretzels from a street vendor.
  • On our way back on the subway, some guy shouted that he was Jesus Christ, then apologized, and got off at his stop.

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Stating the Obvious

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That Joe Lieberman is a small and petty man, and has allowed imagined personal slights to be a springboard to vindictive behavior:

So why is he doing this? Because he’s bitter. According to former staffers and associates, he was upset by his dismal showing in the 2004 Democratic presidential primary. And he was enraged by the tepid support he got from many party leaders in 2006, when he lost the Democratic primary to an anti-war activist and won reelection as an independent. Gradually, this personal alienation has eaten away at his liberal domestic views. His staff has grown markedly more conservative in recent years, and his closest friends in Congress are now Republicans John McCain and Lindsey Graham. For Lieberman, the personal has become political, and it has pushed him further to the right.

Simply put, Joe Lieberman is a vile, vain, vindictive, and petty person. and because he feels that he was not sufficiently worshipped by the Democratuc Party, he is determined to extract his revenge.

What a petty and pathetic excuse for a human being.

Rom Houben Is In a Persistent Vegitative State

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You’ve doubtless heard about the miracle in Belgium, where a man has been determined to have functioning intellect.

I’m with Michael Shermer on this, this is Ouija board style “facilitated communication type hoax:

It’s a hoax, folks. Sorry to be the spoiler of a feel good story—that of Rom Houben, the Belgian man who allegedly “woke up” from a 23-year long coma—but the hard truth must win out over hopeful emotions. Houben’s “communications,” his “statements” about how he’s been aware all along of his condition, his “talking” to reporters (all descriptive terms used by hardened journalists softened into bleeding heart jelly) is nothing more than the “ideomotor” effect, where the brain subtly and subconsciously guides the hands and fingers over a keyboard, or a Ouija board, or directs the movements of dowsing rods in search of underground water……

…. Houben is just sitting there in a chair looking like he’s in a coma, with the facilitator standing next to him, his hand firmly gripped by hers, guiding his hand over the keyboard. ….

A simple test to prove my claim: show a picture of an object (say, a cat) to the facilitator and show a different picture of an object (say, a dog) to Huben. Don’t let either one see the other photographs. Then see what gets typed: cat or dog? As a control, show them both the same picture and see what gets typed. Prediction: Whatever the facilitator sees is what will get typed. Would someone there please run this simple test?

Such a test was already done in the 1990s when something called “Facilitated Communication” (FC) was all the rage with autistic children who, just like the Coma Man, “suddenly awoke” from their long sleep and began talking up a storm and sounding all the world like perfectly normal bright children, some even returning to school to take classes. Only they weren’t. Normal. Or talking. A facilitator stood next to a child, held his or her hand firmly in a grip with the index finger pointing down over a keyboard, then typed. In controlled tests by experimental psychologists, a photograph of an object was shown to the facilitator and a photograph of an object was shown to the child. Neither one saw what the other one saw. Sometimes the pictures were of the same objects, sometimes they were different. Result: whatever the facilitator saw is what got typed, 100% of the time, and never (0%) did what the child see get typed unless it was also what the facilitator saw. ….

Prediction: if the Coma Man story is not thoroughly debunked now, within a short time the families of people in comas will be snapping up these plastic keyboards and facilitating the communication of their loved ones locked up in a broken brain. Only they will be doing no such thing. They will be wasting their time, money, energy, and worst of all their emotions, setting themselves up for being crushed when awareness dawns on them that FC doesn’t work. Please, would someone in the Houben family put an end to this charade before it spreads through the coma community and wreaks emotional havoc.

(emphasis mine)

No happy endings here. We are merely seeing the ability of human beings to delude themselves, nothing more, nothing less.

An Austin Powers Moment

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Sharks with Frikken Laser Beams!*

So, the latest selling point for the F-35 JSF is the fact that you might, at some ill defined point in the distant future, be able to put a laser on it:

The Lightning II may eventually be fitted with lasers able to shoot down attacking missiles. The head of Lockheed Martin’s Lightning program and former test pilot, Tom Burbage, said in Canberra the company was looking at special applications including an anti-missile laser system.

”They are lethal countermeasures in that with a laser you could actually destroy something that’s coming at the aircraft,” Mr Burbage said.

The classic rejoinder is the Yiddish, “Az der bubbe vot gehat baytzim vot zie geven mein zayde.” (If my grandmother had balls she’d be my grandfather.)

Certainly, with the transmission for the STOVL lift fan being able to handle something on the order of 25,000 KW, but it’s clear than any aircraft purchased today will never have that capability.

The JSF remains obscenely over priced as it has been sold, over budget compared to that price, and well behind schedule, and no amount of Ronco™ style, “But wait there’s more,” revelations will change this.

I am not one of the people who thinks that building a gazillion F-22s at a cost per Troy ounce approaching that of gold before its recent run-up† is a good idea, but the F-35 JSF is an exorbitantly expensive pig, even before you have “Frikken laser beams attached to their heads.”

H/t ELP Defens(c)e Blog

*Actually Mike Meyers missed a joke here. Dr. Evil, having been frozen in the 1960s, would never have heard of the “Sea Bass”, it’s a marketing term. If he had known about them at all, he would have know them as a “Patagonian toothfish”, which lends itself to confusion, and all sorts of puns, and a number of humorous asides….I’m just saying.
†Empty weight, 43,430 lb, 12 Troy ounces to a pound, and $200 million price tag, gives a cost per Troy ounce of $383.76, which is very close to where gold was 5 years ago. (click graph for full size)‡
‡Yeah, I know the whine, “But if we buy more, the unit cost would go down!” Listen, 187 were bought, for a cost of $62 billion, which gives a cost of $331½ million each, and even the USAF’s (bogus numbers put the marginal costs well over a hundred million, and that’s not including the modifications that any new production would need because the parts are not made any more….And let’s not go into thee fact that it’s as expensive expensive as hell to just plain fly too.