Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Historically it was a little unusual for the president to be an incoherent babbling moron.

If you can’t control your emotions, someone else will.

Dear media: perhaps we ought to let Donald Trump speak for himself!

Sitting here in limbo waiting for the dice to roll

DeSantis transforming Florida into 1930s Germany with gators and theme parks.

Well, whatever it is, it’s better than being a Republican.

The words do not have to be perfect.

So very ready.

People are weird.

Hot air and ill-informed banter

Peak wingnut was a lie.

Pessimism assures that nothing of any importance will change.

Hell hath no fury like a farmer bankrupted.

Whatever happens next week, the fight doesn’t end.

President Musk and Trump are both poorly raised, coddled 8 year old boys.

“Loving your country does not mean lying about its history.”

It is not hopeless, and we are not helpless.

“In the future, this lab will be a museum. do not touch it.”

Damn right I heard that as a threat.

Optimism opens the door to great things.

Dear legacy media: you are not here to influence outcomes and policies you find desirable.

The revolution will be supervised.

I don’t recall signing up for living in a dystopian sci-fi novel.

The way to stop violence is to stop manufacturing the hatred that fuels it.

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Archives for 2003

Nancy to the Rescue

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Don’t worry, illegal aliens- Nancy Pelosi has your back:

U.S. House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi said on Friday police raids on dozens of U.S. Wal-Mart stores in the search for illegal immigrants this week amounted to “terrorizing” workers.

“It instills a great deal of fear in people who are only trying to earn a living and put food on the table for their family,” Pelosi, a California Democrat, told reporters on a Congressional visit to Mexico.

Hundreds of workers at Wal-Mart Stores Inc. locations across the United States were arrested on immigration charges on Thursday in an investigation into contractor cleaning crews.

Pecisely what does the word illegal mean anymore?

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Why Don’t Memes Ever Die?

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Have you ever wondered why memes never die? Because so-called respectable journalists regurgitate them when they have nothing else to back up their argument. Here is Big Media Matt Yglesias re-spinning the tale that the Clinton Administration passed on to the Bush White House a plan to fight Al Qaeda:

Nevertheless, because Lowry wants to play the culpability game, let me suggest that an accusation of weakness on terrorism can be more plausibly pointed at the pre-9-11 Bush administration than at Clinton’s. By all indications, Bush, upon entering office, actually reduced the priority given to fighting terrorism from a level that was, in retrospect, already inadequate. According to Time, Clinton officials developed, in the waning days of their administration, a plan for combating al-Qaeda more vigorously, but — wanting to avoid sticking the incoming administration with a policy it had not designed — they delayed implementing the plan and instead passed the matter on to the incoming national-security team. Bush’s aides didn’t get around to discussing these anti-terrorism efforts at the highest levels until September 2001.

Do we really have to go through this again? First, just to get this out of my system: Liar, Liar, Pants on Fire. Here is Newsmax on Clinton himself pulling the plug on any such plans, and since you wingnuts never trust Fox or Newsmax or anything to the right of NPR, here is the Daily Howler with the relevant Sandy Berger Quote (and if you don’t know who Berger is, quit arguing with me:

BERGER: Now, the second question you asked

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Well Surprise, Surprise!!

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If you can remember as far back as two months ago, there was a horrible tragedy in Baghdad, as a truck bomb blew up the UN compound killing close to two dozen people (including Sergio Vieira de Mello) and wounding over 100 others, the first reaction was one of shock, and then almost immediately the blame game began:

UN and US officials traded blame over security at the UN headquarters in Iraq as the world body vowed to remain in the war-torn country in spite of a deadly truck bombing.

Tuesday’s attack on the headquarters killed the UN envoy to Iraq, Sergio Vieira de Mello and 23 others, shattering any pretence that normality was returning under the US-led stewardship of the country…

UN Secretary General Kofi Annan vowed that the United Nations would not be deterred from continuing its work in Iraq.

“We will go on doing whatever we can to help build a better future for the Iraqi people,” he said.

Annan also criticised the United States for failing to secure the situation in Iraq for international humanitarian workers, saying: “The occupying power is responsible for law and order and the security of the country.”

But US officials said their UN counterparts in Baghdad had not wanted the same high-profile security provided for coalition authorities.

It was tasteless, crass, and stupid, not to mention a lie, when Annan tried to blame the United States for failing to secure the UN compound. Two months later, revered and fearless leader Annan should probably change his tune:

A U.N.-appointed panel investigating the Aug. 19 terrorist attack against the U.N. compound in Bagdhad delivered a blistering indictment of the United Nations’ role in the tragedy, charging that its system for ensuring protection of the U.N. operation had fundamentally “failed in [its] mission to provide adequate security to U.N. staff in Iraq…”

The team outlined a systematic pattern of incompetence, negligence and poor judgment among senior U.N. leadership that raised questions about the organization’s fitness to protect U.N. workers in any high risk operation. And it recommended the appointment of an independent body to review the culpability of individual U.N. officials.

Not that systematic incompetence, negligence and poor judgement is anything new at the UN, but it is nice to see them recognize it internally for a change.

“The main conclusion of the panel is that the current security management system is dysfunctional,” the report stated. “It provides little guarantee of security to U.N. staff in in Iraq or other high-risk environments.”

The findings constitute the most damning internal account of a U.N. failure in the field since U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan ordered the publication of two major reviews of the U.N. and the international community’s failure to prevent mass killings in Srebrenica, Bosnia, and Rwanda. And the authors said that the United Nations would require a “radical” reform of its security procedures before it could face the growing threat, particularly in the Islamic world, where al Qaeda and other militant groups have identified the United Nations as a target in their war against the United States.

While the authors of the 40-page report do not directly criticize Annan, they presented a harsh assessment of the U.N.’s chief actions before and after Aug. 19, noting that Annan twice refused recommendations of his top political and security officers to evacuate staff in Iraq.

“The Secretary General declined to follow these recommendations, primarily to maintain a core institutional presence in the country,” the report said. “It is the opinion of all U.N. security staff interviewed by the panel that the current conditions in Iraq have far surpassed the capacity of the United Nations to provide adequate security to its staff in the country.”

I breathlessly await Annan’s apology to the deceased member’s families and to the coalition on whom he tried to blame their tragic and unfortunate deaths. As usual, I expect to be waiting a while.

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Interesting, But

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There have to be some security implications regarding this feat:

A home-brew supercomputer, assembled from off-the-shelf personal computers in just one month at a cost of slightly more than $5 million, is about to be ranked as one of the fastest machines in the world.

Word of the low-cost supercomputer, put together by faculty, technicians and students at Virginia Polytechnic Institute, is shaking up the esoteric world of high performance computing, where the fastest machines have traditionally cost from $100 million to $250 million and taken several years to build.

The Virginia Tech supercomputer, put together from 1,100 Apple Macintosh computers, has been successfully tested in recent days, according to Jack Dongarra, a University of Tennessee computer scientist who maintains a listing of the world’s 500 fastest machines.

The official results for the ranking will not be reported until next month at a supercomputer industry event. But the Apple-based supercomputer, which is powered by 2,200 I.B.M. microprocessors, was able to compute at 7.41 trillion operations a second, a speed surpassed by only three other ultra-fast computers.

How is this going to impact exports?

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Bwahaha

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If you thought Krugman’s meltdown yesterday was something out of bizarro world, you weren’t the only one:

Letters to the Editor
The New York Times October 21, 2003

To the Editor:

In his obsession with criticizing U.S. policy, Paul Krugman underestimates the significance of the anti-Semitic diatribe by Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad before the Organization of the Islamic Conference (“Listening to Mahathir,” Oct. 21).

Mahathir’s comments cannot be explained away by themes of domestic politics. They come in the context of a surge of anti-Semitism in the Islamic world, and not only on the fringes. Conspiracy theories about blaming Jews for 9/11 are believed by tens of millions. Denial of the Holocaust is rampant in the media. Images of Jews in op-ed pieces, editorials, and cartoons reflect classic anti-Semitic stereotypes

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