Monthly Archive for August, 2007

Missed in the hustle and bustle of Friday as I saw my affianced off on the Three Day Walk for Breast Cancer and had a project at work, was the hugest news ever to come out of a sewage grade celebrity gossip reporter…

OMG Fidel Castro is Dead! (and, no I’m not going to link to it, because if I link to it, the terrorists will have won.)

Perez Hilton, omnipresent celebretard blogger who, like the morons he covers has gained a certain level of notoriety not for any real talent, but instead for just being, expanded his reporting horizons beyond the drunken hook-ups of bimbos and reported on Friday afternoon that Fidel Castro was dead. The story was later picked up on by the totally-real-always-trustworthy Drudge Report.

Now what does this say about society? The simple answer is not much. Perez Hilton is a member of South Florida’s extra-gossipy Cuban-American community, and rumors of Fidel Castro’s death bubble out of there faster than a Mitt Romney flip-flop.

The more complex the answer? That our entire media-information complex is broken and only the miraculous reincarnation of Walter Cronkite and Edward R. Murrow will save us from certain stupidity. One of the more interesting arguments about the fall of the Roman Empire, attributes at least part of the collapse to presence of widespread lead poisoning leading to a decline in the birthrate among the patricians. Looking back a thousand years from now anthropologists will look back and ascribe part of our failure to the retardation of the American public because of the crap that we read.

And if this week it should come out that Fidel Castro really did die late last week? Then I’m fashioning a garrote out of wire twist-ties and offing myself, because the end is nigh.

State Of Minnesota Too Polite
To Ask For Federal Funding

February 23, 2005

“According to U.S. Department of Transportation records, Minnesota has not requested an increase in highway funds for 10 years, in spite of the fact that the majority of their roads are plagued by rutted or uneven surfaces, cracked pavement, potholes, and other deterioration.

“If it were a life or death situation, you can bet your bippy we’d ask for it, but since it isn’t…” Pawlenty said. “Well, we can make do with the transportation-department budget they decided to give us back in 1995. That was more than generous.”

But U.S. Transportation Secretary Norman Mineta said Minnesota’s highway system is “dangerously underfunded.”

From this morning’s New York Times

To believe that Americans, with an occupying force that long ago outlived its reluctant welcome, can win over a recalcitrant local population and win this counterinsurgency is far-fetched…

Coupling our military strategy to an insistence that the Iraqis meet political benchmarks for reconciliation is also unhelpful. The morass in the government has fueled impatience and confusion while providing no semblance of security to average Iraqis. Leaders are far from arriving at a lasting political settlement. This should not be surprising, since a lasting political solution will not be possible while the military situation remains in constant flux….

In the end, we need to recognize that our presence may have released Iraqis from the grip of a tyrant, but that it has also robbed them of their self-respect. They will soon realize that the best way to regain dignity is to call us what we are — an army of occupation — and force our withdrawal.

Until that happens, it would be prudent for us to increasingly let Iraqis take center stage in all matters, to come up with a nuanced policy in which we assist them from the margins but let them resolve their differences as they see fit. This suggestion is not meant to be defeatist, but rather to highlight our pursuit of incompatible policies to absurd ends without recognizing the incongruities.

We need not talk about our morale. As committed soldiers, we will see this mission through.

(emphasis mine)