Stupid Is

If you haven't been keeping up with this story, it continues to get sillier and sillier. There's two reasons I bring it up here.

For one, these goofballs are suspected of planning to attack NPTU Goose Creek. Gimme a break. I was stationed there for a year, and it was a great experience, primarily because the only active units on the base are Naval Nuclear Power Training Command and the Nuclear Power Training Unit. Collectively, Nuke school. It may sound intimidating, but it's home to the biggest bunch of nerds in uniform today. Before this story broke the base was mildly notorious for having the highest rainbow chit rate in the whole Navy. A would-be attacker would have to fight their way past innumberable golf courses, navigating a gauntlet of drunken Chiefs towing their bass boats up and down Red Bank all day. Any attempt to avoid the main road would put them at dire risk of being devoured by gators. Not to mention the site is guarded vigilantly day and night by the ghost of Hyman G. Rickover. Seriously, Pope AFB's right down the street. At least there you stand a good chance of blowing up a volleyball game.

That being said, and not really knowing much about this case, I have a strong suspicion these guys aren't guilty of anything more than speeding while donning bodacious chinbeards. But c'mon, guys. Us Jews, we've learned the hard way when it's a good time to lay low. If it was 1942 and you were Japanese, you probably would think twice about that camping trip to the woods around San Fran with the Amateur Ham Radio and Astronomy Club. Similarly, if your name is Mohamed (or, alternately, Megahed, which I'm pretty sure is a Bobby-Sue like combination of Mohamed with Megatron) you probably should avoid speeding around in the dead of night outside a nuclear submarine base with homemade bottle rockets in the trunk. I'm just saying.

Paranoid Android

I once attended a concert featuring Atari Teenage Riot, the Wu-Tang Clan, and Rage Against The Machine. I really only wanted to see ATR, my buddies and I were big Rage fans, and we kinda figured Wu-Tang would be an added bonus. ATR turned out to be a wash; German thrashcore ends up sounding like total crap in a big outdoor pavilion. Rage was pretty good, since this was before de la Rocha went nutty, but I got beaten so badly in the mosh pit I ended up throwing up in the lawn. When you're 16 and 130 pounds soaking wet, don't put yourself in a pit where everyone else has the size, build, and demeanor of Henry Rollins. I'm just saying. But Wu-Tang spoiled the whole escapade. Hip-hop music, like thrashcore, really doesn't work outside at anything bigger than a block party. And the Clan, who has more members than Parliament (and I don't mean the George Clinton kind) kept shuffling people on and off stage so we had no idea from the cheap seats what was being sung or if we were even looking at anyone famous. At any given time there were at least 5 people schlepping around the stage shouting, with no indication they were even doing the same song. ODB didn't even show. Instead, vast portions of the show were screamed by somebody's (RZA's?) 7-year old nephew, who didn't give a shit about the words and whose voice kept clipping the amps. Wu-Tang would easily lead the list of "Worst Performers I've Ever Seen" if not for that David Bowie concert.

I bring this up because I'm pretty sure these guys could've put on a better show.

Positive Reinforcement

One of the things technology gets us is the ability to communicate, quickly and easily, with those who share similar ideals, visions, hopes and dreams. The Internet takes this to the next level; newsgroups, chatrooms, message boards and blogs allow rapid gatherings of those with like minds to share and develop great and powerful ideas.

At least in theory. In practice it allows people to build insular communities shielded from those who might think of disagreeing. While at the worst case it helps build al-Qaeda cells, the more common examples are more mundane. If, at least, you consider dressing up like an animal and having sex with other people dressed as animals to be mundane. (Note: Do not, ever, actually follow the second link.) As the title of this post states, it becomes a self-reinforcing feedback loop, with no hope of correction.

Which brings me to the reason for this post. These glasses.


Click on the picture and you'll get the Coolhunter post describing some fashion designer making it huge with her "fun and funky" yet "quirky fashions." Coolhunter every now and then has some bitchin' resorts I'll never have the millions to afford to go to. But in the end most of what's on the site is ridiculous, and remains so because it focuses on the avant-garde of the fashion industry, and the fashion industry has such a flawed feedback loop. You would need to have your head firmly ensconced in your own sphincter to really believe that a guy who looks like this is a hip trendsetter. The creme de la creme, though, is these glasses.


Look, I don't know why these women have some unidentifiable but clearly not sweat fluid on their faces. (Maybe they're crying after seeing their visage in the mirror.) They look like they might even be attractive in person. We'll never know, because they look like they decided to get their accessories from a Happy Meal.

Don't make their mistake. Seek exterior feedback today.

In a world run by Men

US Out Of The Mall

This is clearly a quagmire, regardless of how the Administration tries to pretty it up. By the sounds of it we're losing ground every day. The whole town crawls with soldiers and it's not slowing the deterioration down one bit; if anything, having those boots on the ground is just making it worse. If you ask me, it's high time we strategically redeploy out of that cesspool before we get any more bogged down. I recommend Philadelphia, of course.

Reanimation

So I'm starting this thing back up. Previous blog attempts haven't made it very far at all, but hopefully this instance has a bit more staying power.

Why am I (re)starting this blog? Pretty simple, really. One, blogging (disturbingly enough) seems to be an excellent venue for meeting girls. Why, I'm still not quite sure; you would expect it to have about the pull power of administrative rights in a Debian support chat room. But no, it seems to work pretty well. Two, I enjoy telling other people what I think; this could be rephrased as 'I like the sound of my own voice'. I don't think typing it out takes any of the oomph out of the narcissism.

Some change is in order, of course. Minutiae of blog appearance may be changed. I've anonymized the blog upon recommendation from legal counsel. But the big change is that I'm gonna try to cut the politics crap down a bit and transition to more entertaining stories of drunken downtown antics. We'll see how that goes.

At A Loss

Went down to the Five and Dime, bought myself a copy of Time. And, on the cover, was a woman that I knew when I was excavating in the mountains of Peru. Caught a plane to LIA, didn't know what I would say, maybe she would like me, I had lost a lot of weight since she had last seen me in 1988.

Went to a local bar, ordered a Cerveza, asked a man about the woman on the cover. "Dijo claro que si, es El Presidente's daughter." Asked him where she might be; "You did not hear this from me: the girl is a terrorista en las montanas a Chuquibambilla." Took a bus through mountains, oh, my head was pounding. Gotta keep strong and carry on. Gotta keep strong, it won't be long. Arrived in the villa, surrounded by guerillas; then my girl took me in her arms.

She said, "How you been? Oh, but I'll see you again." I woke up in a coffin underneath an altar to the east of Machu Pichu. The sun was bright, it burned my eyes. I knew that she was gone, so I went down to the riverside, I cried. I went down to the riverside, I went down and I cried.

Muchas veces, I'm at a loss, I don't know if I'm coming or I'm going.
Muchas veces, I'm at a loss as what to do.

My friends say she's nothing but pain. I say that I still love her the same. All she needs is a little bit of love and I'm sure I can make her change. So What about that girl in Zaire that you met while a volunteer? She got quite the education and quite the pair of legs on her." Oh, she married an Englishman, a correspondent for CNN. She thought he was rather handsome in a UN blue flak jacket. Oh, I see where you're coming from, but for me there is no other one. I must be on my merry way.

Clutch's "Muchas Veces." Sometimes I'd rather post song lyrics than commentary. So sue me. ;P

Yarr.

Full sail, bouncing on the briny
Jolly Roger's flapping with a score of 84's
Many pretty treasures, so much booty to be taking
The cannon and the cutlass on a rebel man-o'-war

The lyrics come from a Real McKenzies song, “Cross the Ocean.” I don't remember where or when I first heard it, sometime shortly after I'd joined the Navy. But it became my unofficial anthem, every time my boat pulled away from the pier. Every sailor has that little bit of a pirate in him; the knowledge that he's really outside the realm of normal people, cast off from any civilized nation, free to prowl the seas as he may. If you don't have that passion for the open ocean, you'll tire of the life pretty rapidly, and many sailors do. Me, I loved it. Nothing summed it up better than my rare excursions topside on the surface, late at night, with the cold spray in my face, and not the briefest hint of land in any direction.

The pirate lifestyle has seen a resurgence as of late. Modern interpretations gloss over the rape, pillage, buggery, slavery and other undesirable aspects genuine piracy usually involved, instead glorifying the free, idealistic, rebellious life romantically attributed to it. From movies like Pirates of the Caribbean to cartoons like One Piece pirates are now heroes. (I'm not going to even try to interpret the pirate's role in Flying Spaghetti Monsterism) This is the theme I'm trying to invoke, not the lawless, despicable reality of piracy centuries ago, or today on the seas of southern Asia or South America.

There's also a line that's been making the rounds of the blogosphere lately, this one from H.L. Mencken: “Every normal man must be tempted at times to spit on his hands, hoist the black flag, and begin to slit throats.”

That's pretty much it. I started this blog because there's an unbelievable amount of Very Important Stuff going on in the world right now that few people seem to know about, fewer seem to care about and fewer still seem to be actually informed about to provide any useful dialogue about it. Honestly I'm probably in the second category much more than the third, but at least I'm trying. Seeing controversies like the Danish Cartoon circus and the horribly uneducated debate over the UAE ports deal infuriated me. This country (and the rest of the world) are at one of those points in history where our behavior affects the outcome of the world for centuries to come, and the majority of the people involved either have no clue what's going on at all or are hopelessly undereducated about it. So now I have a venue where I can speak my piece, outside of someone else's post comments, hoping that I can enlighten at least a few other minds. I'm hoisting my black flag, and nailing it the beam right here. I'll leave you with the last verse from the same song as above; hopefully you'll see ahow it sums up this whole enterprise.

We are sailing from our homeland
Cross the ocean, on the sea
For whatever our reasons be
We question all authority