BunkBlog

I got another great Faux News Alert moment just a few minutes ago. First, some background. When I was a G.I. here, we watched CNN Headline News in the break room, or History Channel or the occassional South Park episode on swing shift. Now, they invariably have the Fox News Channel on. Could there be a more blatantly biased network? Fair and Balanced, my eye.

Anyway, this morning the news anchor was talking to another journalist by remote. The remote journalist was discussing the recent polls in Iraq which indicated that the average Iraqi would really like the U.S. troops and _coalition_ to leave so they could get on with their sovereign government work. The anchor interrupted (!) the remote so he could burst in with, “How reliable is this poll?” The answer: It was conducted by the coalition authority, so it can’t be much more reliable. “Well, the next question you have to ask is if the Iraqis would prefer to have Saddam back in power.”

No, that’s *not* the next question, unless you’re a simpleminded twit. The next question is, “How quickly can we get out of Iraq while not leaving the country in anarchy or civil war?” Of course they don’t want Saddam back, they’re not children. That doesn’t mean we need to be just a little better than a psycho; we need to be near-perfect. We haven’t been.

CNN has a quick article about a fresh challenge to ‘Fahrenheit’, Michael Moore’s anti-Bush movie. One person who is trying to get people to write movie theaters protesting the movie’s release says he’s in favor of free speech. So why not let the market be the speech? If nobody agrees with the movie, nobody will go see it and it will close faster than a J-Lo and Britney double feature.

Of course, what the Move America Forward (blatantly neocon group) spokesman really meant to say was, “I assume my neighbors are idiots and I must tell them what they are allowed to see or hear. Political comments which disagree with me are wrong.”

Now that I’ve settled into a decent WordPress and LJ combined posting system, there’s one more item to address. Those of you reading this via Livejournal, would you prefer to have the separate LJ commenting system as it is now, or would you prefer to jump into the main comment setup on my site (as demonstrated by the link at the end of each dual-posted item)? I’m flexible, but I know some of you are hidebound and anal. 🙂

Somali Native Charged in a Bomb Plot, Ashcroft Says

bq. “Current credible intelligence indicates that al-Qaeda wants to hit the United States and to hit the United States hard,” Ashcroft said.

That required some real top-notch intelligence gathering, I suppose. In case we were wondering if perhaps al Qaeda had decided to lay off the U.S., since we’re not fun to pick on any more.

Looks like General Karpinski isn’t going to just go away and be a good little scapegoat. She actually spoke to BBC News and spilled some fun little details.

She claims that she was ordered to treat the prisoners like dogs. Nice, eh?

This still doesn’t take away any of her responsibility. The buck doesn’t get passed along so easily in the Army. I’m ashamed to be a veteran associated with people who let these kinds of things happen, no matter how proud of my service I may be otherwise.

In a widely awaited decision, the Supreme Court has rejected the Pledge of Allegiance challenge. Of course, they rejected it not on its merits as a case, but because the man who brought the suit was not legally allowed to do so. So no actual resolution of the issues involved, as is par for the Court it seems.

Music Legend and Pioneer, Ray Charles, Succumbs at Age 73

Go buy the album, Genius Loves Company, when it comes out.

I’m attempting to use the LJ-Synch plugin again. Let’s see if it’s working now.

What this means to you: adding the feed to your friends list should no longer be necessary, as I’ll be able to synch new posts between my site and . Kind of neato keen.

After I backup the Movable Type database to a flat text file, I’m going to nuke the MT database off the server, as well as the 20 megs of archived HTML. One big benefit of WordPress over MT: No redundant files. Every time I update the blog, MT rebuilds something that takes somewhere between 30 seconds and 10 minutes, depending on what it interacts with. The HTML that gets served up is prebuilt for the viewers, so that saves an SQL hit, but it incurs a lot more PHP time for each rebuild, so I think the space and time savings with WP will be better overall. We’ll see. Since I’m backing everything up, if I get a wild hair and want to go back to MT, I can. If I can get the LJ plugin to work in WP, I may not even look at switching away from the Open Source WordPress anyhow. Open Source is my friend.

Further adventures in culinary achievement…

One more experiment down, Hasselback Potatoes last night. They turned out ok, but not really worth the time it took to make them. This is actually about the same as the Orange Marsala Hens, which were quite yummy, but not appreciably better than the $5 whole roasted chicken from the local grocery store.

On the up side, the raspberry cheesecake brownies are fantastic, and a big hit at work today.

According to CNet, music labels are trying to dampen CD burning yet again. So far, this has never worked. Every method of copy protection fails. This is especially true of audio CDs, because you have to be able to *hear* them for it to make any sense to buy them. Since anything you can hear can be copied, any copy protection of audio (or video) is doomed to failure.

I would think this would be obvious, but apparently it’s not to the music and movie industries, who think fighting with and suing their customers is a good business idea.

I’ve been making recipes from a magazine I’ve recently subscribed to. Last night, meatball subs with homemade (baked!) meatballs. They were quite yummy and about 18 pounds per sandwich. Tonight, we had steak grillades on pepperjack noodles. Tomorrow, orange marsala hens.

I’m very happy with my cooking this week. 🙂

Bush Honors U.S. Military Dead from War on Terror

Is this the first time he’s been at the cemetary since the war in Iraq began? He’s gone to such lengths to avoid anyone else seeing the caskets, it is a valid query, no? More than 200 American men and women died in the past two months; compared to the 138 who died during the “actual combat” phase. One wonders what this is, if not combat.

As a side note, the Reuters wire article uses the phrase “Bush, who avoided combat in Vietnam.” I guess the media isn’t going to let that one go, no matter how much the President wants them to.

I know all my readers (that is to say, both of you) are waiting anxiously to find out what happened since my last school post.

You’ll be happy to hear that my final final was graded finally. Somehow, a percentage grade of 86% for the class (96 on the final, thank you very much) ended up giving me an A in the class. I didn’t think college classes had curves. If you write your curriculum correctly, there is no need to have curves. Take an instructional systems design class and get things straight.

Anyway, that keeps my GPA where it was when the semester started: 3.666 – I have the GPA of the beast. If I get at least a B in my summer class (I’ve never gotten below a B in any UMUC class), I’ll be on the Dean’s List in the fall. Isn’t that exciting? Nah, not to me either. That BS in the spring of 2005, though…

Thanks to ThrowingStarDNA on Livejournal for this article:
Origins of the American Military Coup of 2012

An excerpt:

bq. What made this all the more disheartening was the wretched performance of our forces in the Second Gulf War.[73] Consumed with ancillary and nontraditional missions, the military neglected its fundamental raison d’etre. As the Supreme Court succinctly put it more than a half century ago, the “primary business of armies and navies [is] to fight or be ready to fight wars should the occasion arise.”[74] When Iranian armies started pouring into the lower Gulf states in 2010, the US armed forces were ready to do anything but fight.

Preoccupation with humanitarian duties, narcotics interdiction, and all the rest of the peripheral missions left the military unfit to engage an authentic military opponent.

In the last two days, approximately seven million flies have appeared on our dining room floor. They seem to have come out of nowhere to die in our house. I believe that it is all part of an insectoid suicide pact. I picture a tiny messianic figure and itty bitty barrels of koolaid.

As I mentioned earlier today, the instructor in Romania posted my grade. This evening, the instructor in the Dominican Republic posted my grade (only a B this time).

I took three tests in one week, the first on Monday, the others Wednesday and Thursday. Which one is not posted? The one from Monday, which is the only one that didn’t get sent to another country to be graded. Amazing.

I took three classes last semester, all online. One of the teachers is in Washington state, one in Romania, and the last in the Dominican Republic. The finals were all taken in one week, with the Washington one first and the Romanian one last. One test has been graded so far, and I’m sure you can guess which one it is. That’s right – Romania.

I shouldn’t be surprised at the lack of urgency from the Washington instructor – it was evident throughout the semester. I wrote about him previously. The test which had to travel the farthest and which was mailed latest is graded first. Go figure.

In good news, it was an A. 🙂

According to a CNN story, “Sanchez said he put the prison under the command of a military intelligence brigade in November to improve the facility’s defenses after a series of mortar attacks in late 2003.”

Um, Military Intelligence is not a combat force. MI is combat support, so if you wanted to improve the defenses of a facility, you’d maybe use folks with heavy weapons, not MI geeks with M16s? It’s getting kind of deep around here.