Bloggledygook

Of Course, The Whole Point Of A Doomsday Machine Is Lost If You *Keep* It A *Secret*!

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as Dr. Strangelove.

Looks like Iran "obtained" a document on the black market that the IAEA says serves no other purpose but to build a nuclear bomb. How the entire country even got through the doors of the black market is beyond me. If true, this is an engineering marvel on the par with the Pyramids.

First mention of the documents was made late last year in a longer IAEA report. At that time, the agency said only that the papers showed how to cast "enriched, natural and depleted uranium metal into hemispherical forms."

The agency refused to make a judgment on what possible uses such casts would have. But diplomats familiar with the probe into Iran's nuclear program said then that the papers apparently were instructions on how to mold highly enriched grade uranium into the core of warheads.

In the brief report obtained Tuesday, however, the agency said bluntly that the 15-page document showing how to cast fissile uranium into metal was "related to the fabrication of nuclear weapon components."

Asked about the finding, a senior diplomat close to the IAEA declined to elaborate but emphasized that the documents had no other use.

The report said the document was under agency seal, meaning that IAEA experts were able in theory to re-examine it, but "Iran has declined a request to provide the agency with a copy."

Iran "says" that it didn't ask for the document (actually, it was quite loud there, for a while), but was given it as a special bonus for purchasing other black market booty. Sources were unaware of any effort to purchase enriched uranium with Green Stamps.

* Title reference.

 

This Is Another Fine Mess You've Gotten Us Into.

From registeredmedia.com via Maggie.

Failed Filibuster Dooms Dems.

All the lefty blogs are calling for a purge al a Stalin, I guess, of the unfaithful leadership of the Democratic Party and all those who voted for cloture yesterday in the house. Not content with noting that the two senators leading the Pickett's Charge were from one of the bluest of blue states and could easily afford to make themselves look like asses for the masses, the rousing keen and wail from the ranks of the Unelectable brings to mind a high school football coach who, wanting to replace his quarterback who has thrown four interceptions, looks for the second-stringer, only to find that he has his helmet on backwards.

Failing on principle based on a false premise only serves to make one appear as a fool. With a president whose approval ratings are just this side of the Edsel, Democrats have shown once again that when it comes to political maneuvering, no one is driving the short bus. If you can't out wit a nitwit, what does that make you?

One of the best, succinct commentaries of the Democrats' predicament was codified long ago in the Bush-Dukakis debates and the send-up of same by Saturday Night Live. After Bush (Dana Carvey, I think) gives a rambling answer to a question, Dukakis (Jon Lovitz) responds, "I can't believe I'm losing to this guy."

And so it is for the Democratic Party. The "base" (why it is called such a thing is a mystery) goes after formerly favored Senators like Robert Byrd, who looked at his constituency and voted the way it was leaning. But that isn't the way it's to be done, apparently, in the minds of those who think that the electorate is just too damn stupid to realize when they're being hoodwinked.

The failure of the filibuster has made it virtually impossible for there to be much of a fight mounted next time around. Look for a Supreme Court nominee to the right of the right of the right. Had Messrs Kerry and Kennedy allowed the vote to go forward--probably splitting more or less along party lines--the threat of a sub-60 senator vote could have been retained. Now, all we have is paper tigers and hissing kittens when what we need are lions.

Good for the Republicans, I guess, but bad for the country. It's hard to take seriously the faux hand wringing of the right when they bemoan the Democratic implosion as being detrimental to the two-party system. What most would like is not a see-saw election cycle, but a just-strong-enough Democratic Party relegated to permanent minority status that would be happy for small victories along the way. That's not so surprising, actually. Most Democrats want the entire GOP put behind bars.

What this illustrates is a profound misunderstanding of two-party politics and a dangerous tendency towards totalitarianism. Either side, when pressed for honesty, only wants to win and win big.

Yes, we have wounded our republic as we have wounded ourselves. The Democratic Party had seized the gun and promptly placed the barrel in the left-most part of its mouth and spun the cylinder. Click.

Coretta Scott King, RIP.

Reports are that Coretta Scott King has died.

Whatever You Do, Don't Make Fun Of Brokeback Mountain. Or Vote For Alito.

Uh, people? People?

When you read something like this, it might be a good thing to wonder if it is written as satire or not.

On the other hand, this doesn't look much like satire, does it?

This might be a proper time to reflect on who is anti-gay and who is not. Or who has a sense of humor, and who does not. Jeez.

The Hero Of Morgan Stanley, September 11, 2001.

A&E is airing tonight "The Man Who Predicted 9/11," about Rick Rescorla, the man who was convinced that Osama bin Laden would attempt to destroy the World Trade Center, and who gave his life to save his fellow Morgan Stanley employees. From the A&E website:

In 2001, Rick Rescorla was the 62-year-old head of security at the Morgan Stanley Bank situated high up in the South Tower at the World Trade Center. Rescorla was convinced that Osama Bin Laden would use jet planes to try and destroy the World Trade Center. Long before September 11th, he developed an evacuation plan for the bank, hugely unpopular amongst the city whiz kids who worked there who thought he was mad. His evacuation plan however ultimately saved 3,000 of their lives. Rescorla's plan was put into effect after the first jet hit the North Tower--even though WTC managers were instructing everyone to stay in the buildings. When the second jet hit the South Tower, he averted panic and organized a rapid evacuation. Rescorla went back inside to help those injured and trapped get out. He was still inside when the building collapsed. His body was never found.

The show airs tonight @ 8:00 PM  and tomorrow @ midnight. Watch it, please.

Waiting For Alito.

Senator Edward Kennedy demonstrates the proper way to eat a microphone.

Ted Kennedy made a rousing speech from the Senate saying that Sam Alito as a Supreme Court Justice will strike down the Voting Rights Act, personally sew up pregnant women's vaginae until ready to give birth and force small children to eat tainted mayonnaise.

A cloture vote is due any day now.

Bury Me Not On Brokeback Mountain.

The pressure is on. I have so far resisted the cajoling, the petty connivances and the outright disdain. Sherry wants to see Brokeback Mountain. I stare straight ahead and answer that there is no way in hell or Cleveland that I will be accompanying her to this particular movie. On the inside.

Instead, I quip that I will go with her just as soon as I complete my membership in the Oprah Winfrey Book Club. I suggest that she take one of her friends with her. Maybe Isaac Mizrahi is available. For the record, I feel compelled at this moment to state that the only reason I know of Isaac Mizrahi is that every mother-lovin' Saturday I have to sit through his Clothes Encounters of the Weird Kind just to get her to hit the Best Buy. Then it's off to Target for some mega-wrapped toilet paper and there's more frickin' big-tooth Isaac.

"Do you want me to be gay?" I ask in manly tones, but with an undercurrent of testy whining that prompts me to a throat-clearing hmmmmmmpfp! and to the lowering of my voice by two octaves.

Let this be clear: Brokeback Mountain is the worst thing to happen to the straight American male since Stevie Nicks.

In case no one is aware, there's a game coming up this weekend, so I'm safe right now, which is why I have taken the opportunity to express my dismay at the malaise that is about to overtake my tranquil household.

I see it all clearly. I walk up to the counter and meekly whisper to the ticket dweeb, "Two for uh, Br-Brokeback, uh what's it called?" I know damn well what the thing is called. The dweeb, disgusted, yells back, "Is that TWO for BROKEBACK MOUNTAIN?"

I turn to display my ring finger like an obscene gesture to the line of people behind me, all collectively picking their teeth and leaning on the rope. In the faces of the men I see two reactions. The first is a smirking you are such a pussy condemnation. The second have their heads down turned, but I can see them, saying without a word, don't you look over here, motherfucker. You're not getting a thimble of sympathy from me. These are the ones that will be sitting in the same theater that I have been sentenced to, and we must protect ourselves lest we make eye contact in the men's room.

"Just give me the damn tickets." My teeth are clenched and I'm doing Clint Eastwood now. But not the stiff-spined badass Eastwood, but a hollow sniveling rendition, slumpy and embarrassing for all of us. Sherry's standing off to the side, having made her way from the Ladies' and cross-armed, cocks her head in mock understanding. I show everybody.

I'm not anti-gay. It's just that if I want to see overly emotional girlie cowboys, I'll watch a Dallas football game.

And for all I know, Brokeback Mountain is the best movie since Spaceballs, but I would rather find that on my own, squirming in the safety of my home. This is what DVD was invented for.

The trouble is, Brokeback Mountain is perfectly lose-lose. If you refuse to go, you're automatically a homophobe. If you go, you either have to keep your wife from telling anybody what you did for at least two weeks or you get the looks from her friends that say, collectively, I knew it.

Maybe I made a mistake. I probably should have run into the house one evening after work and shouted, "I can't wait to see Brokeback Mountain!" It would have scared Sherry so terribly that she would have immediately burned every Sex In The City DVD in the house and run out to buy me multiple copies of Penthouse. Now, I'm just a dumb man who's like all the others.

There will be one of us guys who breaks. There always is. And then the floodgates will open and things will never be the same. Oh sure, the weak one will garner favor with the girls, but he can kiss being invited out for pool and beer goodbye. 

Wait a minute. We don't go out for pool and beer. Unless the wives are out, too. With us. Shit! It's too late.

So this is what happens. The Sunday after the Super Bowl is the Sunday before St. Valentine's Day, a holiday rigged towards outlandish expenditures on dying flowers and ugly jewelry, and hopeless boxes filled with gauzy thongs that will find their way to the bottom of the drawer after a sniff and a flick. Included in this festival of red, red, red! both in one's obligatory greeting cards and bleeding bank account, is the false promise of sex with a woman you thought was your wife. When you married her.

Since the Day lands on a Tuesday this year, any sensible (that is to say boring and/or married more than two years) couple will "celebrate" on the preceding weekend, prompting every restaurant in existence to offer a prix fixe menu of something sounding vaguely French for an appetizer and your choice of rubber lobster, a filet so mignon as to be both insulting and forlorn at once, or a vegetarian napoleon with exactly thirty-seven cents worth of ingredients for the main course. This will be followed by a glass of sour ginger ale masquerading as Champagne and a flourless chocolate torte, either just removed from the freezer and thus harder than Bakelite, or soupy from languishing near the heat lamps while your waiter panders to the big spender who popped for the Veuve Clicquot.

I am, or will be, in Hell. The chance that the cost of this fine night out on the town with your best girl will be compensated by a little conjugal interaction is directly in inverse proportion to the amount of time it takes to get seated, waited on, filled with mediocre food, sufficiently buzzed and home.

The way is fraught with so many detours that one must be on his game at all times. This means that before you leave the restaurant, you must both use the urinal and brush your teeth. It is advisable that you purchase a travel toothbrush and a small tube of paste just for this activity. Throw them away immediately after use to avoid detection. The reason for this is that as soon as you get home, time will be working against you. You must be in her company at all times. Going to the bathroom opens up the possibly that when you return, Sleepless in Seattle will be playing on TNT.

If you wish to ply her with an extra dose of alcohol, have the bottle opened before you leave and set out two clean glasses. If you are deft, you can run to the kitchen, pour two glasses of wine (maybe even chugging one for good measure), and return in about thirty seconds. Even then, there are no guarantees. Yes boys, No means No. The cheap champagne will already be working on her delicate head and the chocolate torte and lobster will be causing some bloat, so biology and possibly ptomaine is working against you.

And for God's sake wear some respectable socks. Nothing turns a woman to thoughts of disgust than to look down and find an errant big toenail that hasn't been trimmed since the Carter Administration staring at her like a turtle going after a hunk of bacon. Better still, take the damn things off first. There are few sights more anti-libidinous to a woman than a naked man with dark socks on. And if she has had enough to drink, she will be seeing at least two of you, which will put her off any thoughts of mercy.

Because that's what you're getting. Mercy.

Oh, you could change. You could be the kind of man she thought she had married: Sensitive, understanding, supportive. Instead of slovenly, uninspiring, suspect. But that would mean messing around with you, wouldn't it? You'd have to go against your base instincts, if you in fact knew what your base instincts, other than food, elimination and screwing, were. You are a simple creature with simple needs. You also think, mistakenly, that the effort you have put forth this one day somehow earns you something. But wouldn't it be easier and better to make smaller, yet more meaningful gestures throughout the year?

Nahhhhh.

As that dreadful day approaches, I will be like every other man alive and in love, wondering whether the protestations to not do much are real or an elaborate grift. There must be some way out of this. Some way I can alleviate the mutual pain that we will surely endure for the sake of not being cheap and not having to wash the dishes like every other day? I feel a bargain coming on.

I know now what I must do. It won't be easy, but I just can't go through one more crappy Valentine evening, no matter how falsely important it is. I'll do anything, anything to get out of that night. And if I play it just so, I will get not only a reprieve from my fate, but earn a few extra points to put in the ol' relationship savings account.

I can't wait to see Brokeback Mountain.

Chesnoff On Iran.

SANCTION - BEFORE IT'S TOO LATE

by Richard Z. Chesnoff, New York Daily News, 1/30/06

The Mideast mess just gets messier. Last week's Palestinian election win by the Islamist terrorist party Hamas was bad enough. Now we face a growing nuclear threat from the Islamo-facist regime in Iran. Let's not make any mistakes here. The Mad Mullahs of Tehran want a nuclear weapon and despite a flood of international objections, they continue investing mega-millions of their oil money in developing and building one. Once a nuclear bomb is in their hands, Iran will use it - or the threat to use it - to advance its radical agenda. That includes recent promises by Iran's new inflammatory President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad "to wipe Israel off the map" and "to produce a world without America," something this thug/politician swears is both "attainable, and surely can be achieved." The Iranian leader's "intelligence adviser," Hassan Abbassi, has obliged us with more specifics. A stunning new policy paper from the Washington-based anti-terrorism Committee on the Present Danger, includes quotes from Abbassi detailing "a strategy drawn up for the destruction of Anglo-Saxon civilization." The committee, which is led by the likes of Sen. Joe Lieberman, former Secretary of State George Schultz and former CIA head James Woolsey, says Abbassi boasts that "we must make use of everything we have on hand to strike at this front by means of our suicide operations or by means of our missiles." To ignore such blatant threats would be as foolish as ignoring Adolf Hitler's threats when he first published "Mein Kampf." So what can be done? Pleas from the UN, the United States, the European Union and even China for Iran to limit its nuclear activities have gone unheeded. Even a proposal by Russia to accommodate Iranian energy ambitions by having Moscow monitor Iranian nuclear waste so it can't be used for weapons development has been rejected by Tehran up until now. Some believe that only military action will stop the Iranian nuclear march. Rest assured, contingency plans have already been drawn up in more than one world capital - Israel's included. But there are other options. One, suggested by the Committee on the Present Danger's policy paper includes a series of smart sanctions - economic embargos and restrictions that target the Iranian leaders, not the Iranian people. For example: some 35% of Iran's lucrative import-export business is directly controlled by corrupt mullahs and their crooked minions who've grown fat on oil and business profits. Put the squeeze on them. Another would be to create an international tribunal that would gather evidence and begin to try the mullahs for human rights offenses against their own people, not to mention their ongoing open support of terrorism. The Iranians have begun moving government funds out of Western financial institutions. But they can't hide them everywhere. There is also a desperate need to increase open support for legitimate Iranian opposition groups. The global fight with Iran is with its government, not its long suffering people. Iran doesn't need war. It needs a regime change. The din of the alarm is deafening. Putting our fingers in our ears would be a tragic mistake, one we could all live to regret - if we survive.

Google Is Gone.

In the empty gesture department, I have removed Google Ads and the Google search box from the site. This does absolutely nothing to Google, and means little, if anything to me. I don't believe that boycotts generally work, and I am under no illusions that this accomplishes much, save lightening my conscience a bit.

Anybody wanna call Blogads and beg on my behalf? Didn't think so.