You, Too, Can Join In!

Get yer sexting name here!  Here's mine...

"Hey, Babeeeee..."

H/t:  Cassandra at VC.

Goofy, Indeed

Mr. Varvel has it right.  There's been a lotta loose talk about secession of late which, in my mind's eye, only reinforces the right-wing nutter stereotype.  All this secession talk is the Right's version of "I'm moving to Canada if Booosh wins," writ large.

We're better than that.

Saturday

Good stuff at the Usual Source this week... including this horrible, terrible, amazing, well... this:



From the Tube O' You notes:

Kareteci Kiz (English: "Karate Girl") is a 1973 Turkish film.Directed by Orhan Aksoy, the cast includes popular Turkish actress Filiz Akın, and actor Ediz Hun.

In September 2012, the film gained some attention for arguably having one of the worst death scenes of all time, though the cited clip has been edited from the original to add an unending scream. Bülent Kayabaş is the dying actor in the referenced scene.

It's pretty funny, though.

Speakin' o' BAD...



Ah... nevermind.  Go back to sleep, please.  PLEASE.

Victims

Gov. Romney was right and you know he's right if you watched any of the pathetic speeches given at the Dims' convention.  You also know why.

Yup.

That's basically true, from the Left's POV.  Memeorandum has been All Ryan, All the Time since Saturday and I've been reading a lot of Lefty blogs and columnists over the past few.  Ya know what that's been like?  Like this:

Mostly stupid, though.  With a touch o' panic.

Heh

Ain't THAT the truth?

―:☺:―

In other news... I have to run off to The Big(ger) City™ this morning, coz my phone has looked like this since 2130 hrs last evening:

Terrible glare from the flash, I know, but the phone hung during a "routine" software update and is dead for all intents and purposes.  I hope the Sprint store can fix it, but I'll give ya a dollar to a donut that I'll lose ALL my contacts, saved messages, photos, yadda, yadda in the process... IF they can fix it on-prem and not mail it off to Taiwan or someplace like it.  Sometimes I HATE technology.

Update, noonish:  Back... with a working phone, minus ALL my contacts, apps, yadda, yadda.  So now I'll have to send e-mail to everyone I normally speak to and ask 'em to call me so I can kinda-sorta rebuild my contact list.  (sigh)  It's ALWAYS sumthin'. 

Again?

Yeah, again.  It's hard to stay off OWS when fully half of the 'toons at the Usual Source are about this subject.  Here's but one...

I recognize that feeling... but I had a valid excuse for my behavior: it was the beer goggles.

―:☺:―

Speakin' of "again"...  We've fallen back into old habits, which is to say stayin' up well into the wee hours and sleeping half the day away.  I keep tellin' myself "no harm, no foul" but I really hate it when I do this sorta thang: half the damned day is gone and I haven't even poured my second cup yet.  Type A behavior never dies... it just keeps strange hours.

Just One More...

... and then we'll stop flogging this dead horse, coz these asshats are getting too much attention from everyone, including me.  That said, here's Lisa Benson's take:

Some big-time Dems are making foolish public statements of support for the OWS crowd, revealing either their clue-free nature or their true colors, or both.  I'm not the first guy on the right to think and say "you just go right ahead..."  But it DOES take some kinda gall to continue to ask for campaign money from the very people you're bad-mouthing, don't it?

It Ain't Funny Anymore

Two from the Usual Source about the OWS "protesters"...

I dunno about you, Gentle Reader, but I'm sick to death of these asshats, the people making excuses for them, and the media coverage.  Their 15 minutes is UP; it's time for the tear gas and rubber bullets.

In other news... I had mentioned in passing a couple o' weeks ago that my new satellite teevee provider didn't have PBS in their channel line-up.  Turns out I was wrong about that, as I happily discovered last evening.  I was looking for the Portales PBS station... KENW... and it ain't there, still.  But I DO have PBS out of Amarillo, which is a Good Thing, and it only took me a little less than three weeks to find it.  The bad news is the station is on Central Time, which means I have to recalibrate my internal clock and watch McNeil-Lehrer (I know, but that's what it still is to ME) at 1700 hrs instead of 1800 hrs.  Same-o, same-o for all my other faves.  But Hey! there will be much more teevee at El Casa Inmóvil de Pennington in future; we're Happy Campers now.  For the moment.

Green... More and Less

First... Jerry Holbert, from the usual source:

I liked that more for the light bulb than the Green jobs thang. 

And then there's this, a love note I received overnight from Gen. Mike Dunn:

AFA members, Congressional staff members, civic leaders, DOCA members, there is much news on activities in Washington – especially about the budget.  What strikes me is that to decipher much of it, one has to be almost an insider to understand the numbers.  Here is the simple version:

President Obama has directed the Department of Defense to cut $450B+ over 10 years starting with its FY13 budget.  [This will cut the base defense budget – and was part of the 2 Aug deficit reduction agreement with Congress.]  It looks like the cut will be laid into the budget on a more or less flat line basis, e.g. $45B per year.  The Air Force portion of that is not yet fully known, but if trends continue, it will be $11B - $13B per year – perhaps more.  Once again, this does not include wartime spending – which is still off-budget.

The Joint Select Committee on Deficit Reduction is tasked to come up with $1.5 Trillion in cuts over 10 years.  If it fails, then an automatic cut kicks in which will cut $1.2 Trillion in spending.  Half of this must come from “national security” accounts – DOD, Department of Homeland Security, Department of Energy, and a bit from the State Department.  I estimate DOD’s share would be about $450B+.  This is in addition to the $450B+ in the paragraph above.

A few observations.  First, the $1.5 Trillion to be cut is only a cut in the growth in spending.  The federal budget is expected to grow – during the next 10 years – by about $12 Trillion by some estimates.  Thus a cut in the growth in government of $1.5 Trillion is only a cut of 12%.  At the end of 10 years, if nothing else is done, the US debt will still grow from about $15 Trillion to $25.5 Trillion.

Secondly, to take almost a trillion dollars out of defense spending in the next 10 years would call for draconian cuts.  It would gut many programs; throw tens of thousands of troops out of work; cause major force reductions; and necessitate closing bases.  Our allies would begin to question our commitments in both conventional and extended deterrence realms.  And … according to some experts result in a “new isolationism.”  I do not need to remind this group that defending our nation is job one for any government.  In fact, the Preamble to the Constitution says:  “… provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare … “ – and not the other way around.  And … base defense spending in the 2012 request amounts to 3.5% of GDP – almost a record post-WWII low.  In the aggregate, the defense budget is clearly an affordable investment.

Finally, DOD base defense funding in the FY12 request was $553B.  [The Senate Appropriations Committee has marked it to $513B.]  The Administration request for HHS was $893B – 1/3 of a Trillion more.  This gap is projected to double by 2014.  It is interesting to note that HHS spending was $47B in 1977 – just one-twentieth of what it is today.

For your consideration.

Mike


Michael M. Dunn
President/CEO
Air Force Association

I don't normally post these things in their entirety but this brief piece needs to be complete for the point to be made effectively.  I didn't know that half of the Select Committee failure mode "trigger cuts" were coming out of "national defense accounts," to include DHS and other agencies.  I thought ALL of the half of that 1.5 trillion were coming out of DoD's hide, based on the way the media are reporting this.  But you can bet DoD will bear the brunt of the cuts if the Select Committee fails its task.  The other thang that amazed me is the amount of money Health and Human Services gets.  I know all of THAT money ain't goin' into cancer research.

Related:  The Army announced an 8.6% troop reduction (50,000 heads) yesterday.

The House Armed Services Committee released analysis detailing the effect of the "trigger cuts" on the armed services.  That's some pretty scary stuff... but then again, it was meant to be.

Heh

From the Usual Source.

On Perry and Conspiracies

This past Saturday Governor Perry did what everyone with three interconnected synapses knew he was gonna do: declared himself a candidate for president.  It didn't take long... a mere matter of hours... for the lefty secular-humanists to crawl out of the woodwork, shouting "Christer!" and other such blather.  Sunday's memeorandum page was chock-full of this sorta bullshit, including one particularly obnoxious hit piece in the Daily Beast (appropriate name, eh?) by one Michelle Goldberg that managed to slime both Perry AND Michele Bachmann at the same time.  A couple o' excerpts:

With Tim Pawlenty out of the presidential race, it is now fairly clear that the GOP candidate will either be Mitt Romney or someone who makes George W. Bush look like Tom Paine. Of the three most plausible candidates for the Republican nomination, two are deeply associated with a theocratic strain of Christian fundamentalism known as Dominionism. If you want to understand Michele Bachmann and Rick Perry, understanding Dominionism isn’t optional.

Put simply, Dominionism means that Christians have a God-given right to rule all earthly institutions. Originating among some of America’s most radical theocrats, it’s long had an influence on religious-right education and political organizing. But because it seems so outré, getting ordinary people to take it seriously can be difficult. Most writers, myself included, who explore it have been called paranoid. In a contemptuous 2006 First Things review of several books, including Kevin Phillips’ American Theocracy, and my own Kingdom Coming: The Rise of Christian Nationalism, conservative columnist Ross Douthat wrote, “the fear of theocracy has become a defining panic of the Bush era.”

The article gets even worse than that... those are just the introductory grafs which dwell on a preemptive disclaimer for the idiocy that follows, i.e., "Take me seriously!  Please!"  Well, no.  I can't.  I thought we... us Americans... got over this sorta stuff after JFK was elected.  Apparently not, and there's no lack of people willing and able to stir the pot of intolerance.  This sort of thing just makes me scratch my head and go WTF?  I mean, really...

But there are rational agnostics in this country as well, Mr. Roger Simon being one such.  He posted a piece on Sunday too... titled "Agnostics for Perry."  An extensive quote:

Which leads me to why this agnostic — and I hope other agnostics of various stripes — could and should support Perry.

We live in a time when the economy trumps all other considerations by a staggering amount. The global financial system is on life support, teetering on the brink of depression, if not already over it. This has placed our country in a weaker state than any time since World War II, endangering world peace and encouraging a wave of despotism unseen since the rise of the Soviet Union and in many ways identical to it, except that it is motivated by jihadism rather than by communism.

Can a single human being solve this? Unlikely. He or she will need a lot of help. But we are in dire need of leadership, not of the policy wonk kind — God knows we’ve had a lot of that — but of the moral and inspirational kind. We need someone to call forth the best in America the way Ronald Reagan did in the 1980s. We need someone unafraid to speak for the democratic values of Western civilization and to fight for them economically and politically as well as militarily, if that is necessary.

The incumbent president has proven to be none of those things. He is at best ambivalent about our values and at worst an enemy of them. Rick Perry is the reverse. I had the pleasure of having dinner with him in Austin well over a year ago and could see it almost immediately. Call him a cowboy, call him a Christer, but this man is a passionate American and a passionate American is exactly what we need right now. And that kind of person, I am sad to admit, is unlikely to come from the ranks of the agnostic and the secular. It will come from the ranks of the religious, those who have faith. That’s just the way it is now.

But I will try to reassure my fellow agnostics with this. We are not nearly as far from religious people as we think. Though we may brood on the timing and veracity of the Big Bang, speculate on Einstein’s unified field theory (if we can understand it), debate St. Anselm in our heads or just throw up our hands and say the whole question is above our job description, when it comes to the way we actually live, our values, most of us do just as our religious brothers and sisters do. Like them we are products of the Judeo-Christian tradition and we live by the Ten Commandments — or try to.

That's the voice of reason speaking.  I'm prolly a lot like Mr. Simon when it comes to religion... which is to say I'm basically agnostic... even if I describe myself as a closet Buddhist.  Mr. Simon talks about his admiration, bordering on envy, for people with strong faith elsewhere in his essay and I identify with that, too.  His bottom line, as you can see from the above excerpts, is he has no problem with Perry's faith and neither do I.  The entire piece is worth a read.

That said... I don't identify with asshats and conspiracy theorists like Ms. Goldberg; I consider the woman and those of her ilk to be much more dangerous than the people she rails against.  Religious intolerance is close to the worst sort of bigotry there is and when you combine intolerance with conspiracy you get something truly dangerous and poisonous to the body politic.  I suspect we'll see much more of this stuff as the campaign goes on.

But... back to Governor Perry.  I'm pretty damned close to putting up a "Perry for President" link in my sidebar.  I think I've found my candidate.

A Change O' Heart

I used to be a denier... one of those guys who rejected the proven science of Anthropomorphic Global Warming... err... Climate Change.  Well, no more, thanks to Sunny... who puts the whole problem in language that even a simpleton like YrHmblScrb can understand.  Watch and see if you don't agree with me.

See?  You like parks, don't you?  So... climate change is REAL.  Now all you have to do is give up toilet paper and you're THERE!

Thanks, Sunny. 

h/t: Fenris at Mitchieville.

What an Asshat

The right-side commentary about Barry's foot-stamping, piss 'n' moan, hissy-fit during his presser last evening was pretty entertaining reading (one such example).  I got the biggest kick out o' readin' all the gnashing and thrashing in the fever swamp blogs, though.  It seems like nobody likes poor Barry these days, even the moonbats who used to worship him.  That breaks my iddy-bitty lil heart.

Not really... Schadenfreude Я Us.  

And Now... Asshat Assange

Goin' to prison?  Fuckin' PRICELESS.

Via the Guardian's PDA, and we suppose THOSE asshats think this is cute.  OUR mileage most definitely varies.

Even MORE "Get Off My Lawn" Stuff

How did I miss this?  Specifically, "New Mexico Department of Workforce Solutions," mentioned in the post immediately below.  "DWS" prolly has sumthin' to do with employment statistics, job opportunities, and the like but one cannot rightly tell from the pompous title.  I was thinkin' any organization with a title like "Workforce Solutions" just had to be ate up with the dumb-ass.  And I was right.  Witness:

The New Mexico Department of Workforce Solutions is a World-Class, market-driven workforce delivery system that prepares New Mexico job seekers to meet current and emerging needs of New Mexico businesses; and ensures that every New Mexico citizen who needs a job will have one; and every business who needs an employee will find one with the necessary skills and work readiness to allow New Mexico businesses to compete in a global economy.

That's their "vision statement," and they also have a mission statement, of course:

Enhance productivity and competitiveness of New Mexico business and industry by improving the quality and availability of the New Mexico workforce. We will accomplish this through a system that offers universal access to lifelong learning based on relevant local and regional labor market needs, via integrated, customer-focused accountable service partnerships. 

We ALL know any gub'mint org and most Fortune 500 companies need vision and mission statements chock-a-bloc with the latest and greatest in biz-school buzz words.  It's just too damned bad those things don't SAY or MEAN any-gotdamned-thing.  I can recall MANY painful hours working in ad hoc task forces chartered to develop such "statements" from my days with Ross Perot's Excellent Data Company... AFTER Mr. Perot left, of course.  We've gone on about this sorta thang before, specifically where my Beloved Air Force is concerned.  Here's an excerpt from one such rant:

There's nothing like the bureaucratic hive mind when it comes to developing and institutionalizing inanity.  Speaking of bureaucracy...

The chief master sergeant of the Air Force, the director of Air Force Public Affairs, the Air Force director of force management policy, and the commander of Air Force Recruiting Service provided the leadership oversight for the motto team research experts.

In early 2010, the motto team engaged in almost nine months of hands-on research that began with extensive face-to-face meetings with nearly 300 total force Airmen from all job specialties and in every major command. Airmen described to the team what they thought it means to be an Airman, to serve and what is unique about the Air Force.

[...]

An Air Force-wide survey to validate and quantify input from discussions indicated Airmen have a shared pride in their abilities to adapt to meet any threat, and they feel empowered to bring innovation and excellence to the mission of national defense.

After understanding the shared identity, the motto team began transforming words and concepts into a unifying, enduring and credible motto, said Lt. Col. Clark Groves, Ph.D., the lead scientist for the project.   

WTF?  Doesn't that just REEK of Harvard Bid'niz Review?  But leave us not not belabor the obvious.  Color me old fashioned, call me a fuddy-duddy, or just assume I'm not fully caffeinated at this hour but taking senior leadership's eyes (if PA and such can be called that) off the operational ball for "nine months of hands-on research," not to mention eating the time... however small it might have been... of "nearly 300 total-force airmen" to develop a frickin' motto tells me the kids ain't all right.  

You'd think the enlisted guys (that's in reference to credit given to the CMSAF) would have more sense but you'd be wrong, Gentle Reader.  There's more at the link, if'n you're interested.

Nannies and Bots of the Evil Kind

It's still way early (for me) but David Burge is leading the sweeps for the day's best tweet with this:

@iowahawkblog David Burge

All in a day's work for the U.S. Department of Facepalm dailycaller.com/2011/06/22/fed…

Heh.  I'll have to file that away for future use.  Burge is right though... facepalm is the appropriate reaction after reading shit like this (from Burge's link):

The federal government has a growing interest in the eating habits of Americans for the same reason it has an interest in tobacco consumption, said Kathleen Sebelius, the secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services.

The reason is money, because three-quarters of medical-spending is driven by chronic diseases, such as obesity and tobacco-related diseases, she said.

Sebelius’ comments came at the tail-end of Tuesday’s White House press conference where officials showcased nine new photos that must be carried on cigarette packs. Officials used a survey of 18,000 people to find the images that would have the most distressing impact on groups of smokers, including young smokers and mothers of young kids. 

Ah, yes.  There's much to dislike here.  A "growing interest in the eating habits..." sounds both ludicrous and ominous at the same time, if that's possible.  Then again, those two words describe much of the gubmint's activities these days.  I won't rant about Nanny's new cigarette pack "warnings," except to say gubmint at ALL levels should be very careful what they wish for.  The taxes paid by cigarette smokers provide for a LOT of gubmint services, especially at the state level.  If every smoker in America quit today each of the 50 states would be in a budget crisis tomorrow.  What?  Oh, OK... make that a worse crisis.

―:☺:―

In other news... My baby has her new hat.  I left El Casa Móvil de Pennington just before 0700 hrs yesterday morning and didn't return until nearly 1800 hrs, which made for a mighty long day, lemmee tell ya.  I put that time to good use by doin' sumthin' I rarely do these days:  I read Robopocalypse from cover to cover (so to speak) in a single sitting.  The lede grafs from a review at IO9:

Cool robots unlike any you've seen before battle humans in a near-future world where computerized cars and military drones are out to smash all homo sapiens. Until some robotics geeks and an army of Osage natives learn to fight back. 

It sounds like the plot to the most awesome robot uprising movie ever, and one day it will be. For now, it's Daniel Wilson's first novel, Robopocalypse. Long before it hit bookstores this month, Wilson's book was already in Steven Spielberg's hands, being turned into a futuristic war movie. And when you read it, you'll see why. Though Robopocalypse follows the general outlines of the classic robot uprising story, it's packed with enough realistic detail and surprising twists that you'll be riveted. Imagine the smartest parts of the Battlestar Galatica remake crossed with the most awesome fight scenes from Independence Day. Yeah, it's kind of like that.

The references are lost on me seein' as how I'm not familiar with either, but the book is a serious page-turner.  This is just the ticket if you're looking for a beach book and you like sci-fi.