I like these odds

The war in Afghanistan is going great again after that brief period last week when a case of Bud Light Lime was tactically misappropriated and we had to switch generals. But we are back on mission to protect the freedoms and the liberties from the evil clutches of the Al Qaeda, the terrorists, and the terrorism inside the Afghanistan.

Now perhaps you've read this blog before and have pieced together that Sean and I aren't exactly bullish on the prospects for success on the mission nor do we think the war is a worthwhile use of money. It was probably all the times that we said we aren't bullish on the prospects for success on the mission nor do we think the war is a worthwhile use of money. That probably tipped you off. That was before we knew we had such tactical superiority.

The U.S. has committed nearly 100,000 troops to the mission in Afghanistan. ABC This Week host Jake Tapper asked CIA Director Leon Panetta how big is the al Qaeda threat that the soldiers are combating:

TAPPER: How many Al Qaeda, do you think, are in Afghanistan?

PANETTA: I think the estimate on the number of Al Qaeda is actually relatively small. I think at most, we’re looking at 50 to 100, maybe less. It’s in that vicinity. There’s no question that the main location of Al Qaeda is in the tribal areas of Pakistan.

Hey hey, anywhere from a 2000:1 to a 1000:1 advantage. I like those odds. Makes you wonder why this war makes the Hundred Years War look like a couple of short jaunts in France.

Of course you may be thinking "Why must we have a 1000:1 troop advantage and spend nearly a billion per Al Qaeda per year?" Because we don't want to make the same mistake that every other country that went to war in the Graveyard of Empires made. I haven't researched this one bit, but I'm betting all those countries didn't have a staggeringly overwhelming troop, technology, and money advantage.

So I'm sure we'll be able to get this all under control within another several years... or decades. 50 is a big number.... and it might even be 100! What's your fucking obsession with finding out the length, tactics, and value of endless costly wars? The President doesn't have a crystal ball. Look, it's simple: as soon as we kill everyone that wants us to leave, then we can leave. Not one second before.

Afghanistan: A short play

President Obama: You know Stan, I'm glad to have you running things in Afghanistan. As I've said many times publicly: your strategies, leadership, and vision are absolutely integral to any future success our mission in Afghanistan will have. Especially now that we're entering one of the most critical "make or break" times in our offensive campaign against the Taliban and Al Qaeda. Again, you are absolutely integral to our mission.


General McChrystal: Thank you Mr. President and let me say how honored I am to be leading this vital charge against the Afghan insurgency.
...
By-the-by, and this is just a little thing.... I may have given a tiny little interview to Rolling Stone where I maybe had a few too many Bud Light Limes and was maybe a little critical of your administration. Nothing serious, but maybe a few of my aides go a little too far in criticizing specific people in your administration. Not me, mind you, my aides. A little embarrassing? Sure. A little short sighted? Sure. Ripe for parody? Definitely. But nothing that would cause anyone to drastically reassess our geopolitical strategy vis-a-vis the war on terror and our counterinsurgency strategies and Afghanistan policies... right?


President Obama: ..............YOU'RE FUCKING FIRED!!!!!!

FIN

Nice to see that we won't let something like a war or a war strategy get dicked around over what amounts to an indelicate decorum gaffe combined with incessant, brainless 24-hour news outrage, right? Eh, at least we'll have those trillions from those Afghan minerals to spend soon.

Cheap Blogging Crutch 06.09

From Buzzfeed's Annotated Guide To Images From The Anti-BP Movement

In We All Know This Intuitively news the AP has kindly revealed that 58% of all the judges in areas affected by the BP spill have financial ties to the oil industry. Seems low. Just wanted you to know that in case you were getting any ideas in your head about "They'll get theirs through the legal system." Nah, kid, nah.

Breaking from years of established US government and official New World immigration policy, Native Americans have been allowed a legal victory that will seemingly come without betrayal from the white man, smallpox blankets, mass slaughter, some horribly inhumane forced resettlement, or a cloying portrayal as cat people in a James Cameron movie. It seems some in the justice system have forgotten the principles this country was founded on: fucking over Indians at all costs. Hopefully this is stopped before they gain the sense and legal standing to get justice on all that other stuff we, by which I mean all the white people who were here before my ancestors immigrated here, did to them.

With all the reports of environmental calamity coming from the Gulf, it's hard not to consider the worst case scenarios for the entire region, economy, and wildlife. But what about considering the worst case scenario for BP? Thankfully Andrew Ross Sorkin goes through what might happen and the possible future is quite a theoretical delight. Bankruptcy, cleanup costs going over $20 billion, $15 billion in claims, billions in Clean Water Act fines, Tony Hayward being pushed into a wheat thresher and then having pig excrement rubbed in his wounds, endless litigation, an unrepairable reputation, and BP being forced to break itself up are all possible options. All of them might happen. I'm crossing my fingers for the wheat thresher one. Just keep thinking positive and they all might happen.

In Punishing the Whistle-blowers, Not the Criminals They Expose news, the US Intelligence analyst who exposed the video of helicopter gunmen essentially murdering innocent civilians was arrested. It's nice to know what our priorities as a country are: arrest people who expose wrongdoing; let the perpetrators who flagrantly breaks laws off scot free while continuing their illegal policies. We have an awesome country.

Rolling Stone has put up an article on the BP oil spill and the Obama response. It should essentially be titled The Shit You Should Actually Be Mad At Obama Over. It goes over the hiring of cronies, the failure to reform MMS, and all the other problems we pointed out before. It'd be a good place for our media to start taking a look. But instead we'll continue to get stories about whether Obama needs to get angrier, the crisis over Obama not showing enough anger, and now: did Obama show too much anger when he said "know whose ass to kick" on the TV? Like I said, our priorities as a country are just super.

In closing we leave you with a review of Willow Ufgood/Wicket's biography Size Matters Not.

TB Science Corner

via the Big Picture blog's Saturn: That Ringed Bitch series.

Because I'm tired of cataloging the ways in which our society moves backwards.

Third time’s a charm, Congress passes science act
Ho ho, finally Democrats figured out a way so that Congress could vote on a bill that creates growth, creates jobs, and provides much needed funding to science and technology, but also not prove they're all sex obsessed fiends who love government employees looking at porn. Because when it comes down to voting for scientific advancement in this country or voting against scientific advancement because some cheap procedural trick made you susceptible to "pro-porn" attack ads, our elected betters will always choose to hamper our future. At least they found a way around it... this time.

BP OK's test of Costner's oil-cleaning device
Yes, the celebrities will finally be allowed to save us. Costner's machine, which separates 97% of oil from water and can do 210,000 gallons of water a day, will be allowed to be tested in the Gulf. I think this marks the first cleanup attempt that will not involve spraying the most harmful chemicals, or improperly setting up booms, or pumping mud, trash, and golf balls into the sea in order to slow the oil. If you're counting at home, that makes it one outside idea that's being listened to. And why not, it looks like BP has a handle on this whole thing.

Hubble Watches as Star Slowly Devours Planet
And you thought the Hubble was just for science. No, it's for perversely watching the death of planets many, many light years away. In this case a sun slowly devouring a planet over 10 million years. Of course we won't get 10 million years of "Ahh, ahhh, we put our tip in the sun again", it'll just a few seconds of "Hey.... did the sun just get fifty billion times larger and start expanding this way at a rapid rate? No, I'm not fucking around." and then we'll be immediately incinerated. That is if our society can last for another couple billion years. It's not looking good. One century at a time, civilization, one century at a time.

What is the Air Force doing with space?
Without even reading the article, I'm going to guess... militarize it. Yup, *pumps fist* I was right. But the Bad Astronomy blog looks into the Air Force and the mysterious Mach 6 hitting X-51A and the even more mysterious X-37 B "Flying Twinkie". At least one of the sectors of government is committed to making the ship technology of Battlestar Galactica a reality.

Quantum teleportation achieved over 16 km
Good news if you're a photon and you need to get information to another photon 16km away. You can now teleport it instead of calling or e-mailing it. I going to take a wild stab at this and say we're literally a few weeks away from Verizon and Comcast handing out Quantum Entangled Particle cards for our cell phones and internet connections so we can text and download porn instantaneously.The future is here, people.

The military got gayed

After months of promises and years of work, finally a compromise has been reached that will allow gay men and women to serve in the US military. This is, of course, the end of the world. Now we'll have gays all up and down our armed forces... something that has never before occurred in the history of combat or something. They'll be in there, translating things into and from Farsi and Arabic... in a gay way. They'll be gaying up combat, shooting terrorists all gay like. They'll be wearing sequined camo, talking about how such and such a tank is faaaabulous. A tank is not fabulous, it is a machine of war!

Because this is terrible and the end of US military dominance or something, the usual suspects have been out in full force to tell us how Obama just ended the world in a hellstorm of ultra gay fire. I think you'll be surprised in the direction they took this.

During a radio broadcast, Bryan Fischer of the American Family Association explained:

So Hitler himself was an active homosexual. And some people wonder, didn't the Germans, didn't the Nazis, persecute homosexuals? And it is true they did; they persecuted effeminate homosexuals. But Hitler recruited around him homosexuals to make up his Stormtroopers, they were his enforcers, they were his thugs. And Hitler discovered that he could not get straight soldiers to be savage and brutal and vicious enough to carry out his orders, but that homosexual solders basically had no limits and the savagery and brutality they were willing to inflict on whomever Hitler sent them after. So he surrounded himself, virtually all of the Stormtroopers, the Brownshirts, were male homosexuals.

And here you thought the main objection from religious types and social conservatives was that gays were too weak and girly to be in the military. Some terrorist would come over the horizon and a gay soldier would shriek like a woman, throw his purse at the enemy, and then spring out of the bunker to strike at the enemy with limp wrists, screaming "You brute!"

Nope. Turns out gays were not only the backbone of the Nazi party, the Nazi war machine, and the Nazi SS, but they were in fact too brutal and savage. So violent and unhinged that we can never let them serve. I'll say this: he might have got his history completely wrong and tried to tie gays and Nazis together in one of the most ugly ways possible, but at least he moved his stereotypes forward a little bit from a foppish, effeminate caricature to some sort of overly manly savage killer. That's... a kind of progress.

The kind of progress the Family Research Council was not ready for.

On a conference call with reporters today, FRC Senior Fellow for Policy Studies Peter Sprigg delivered the results of what he said was the first-ever study of "homosexual assault" in the military.
...
"We are today releasing an analysis of publicly available documents which show that homosexuals in the military are three times more likely to commit sexual assaults than heterosexuals are relative to their numbers," Sprigg said. "We believe this problem would only increase if the current law against homosexuality...were to be repealed."
...
"If open homosexuality was permitted in the military, these numbers can only increase," Sprigg said. "The number of homosexuals would grow, the threat of discharge for homosexual behavior would be eliminated and protected class status for homosexuals would make victims hesitant to report assaults and make commanders hesitant to punish them for fear of appearing homophobic."

That's right. Repealing DADT will turn the military into some internal gay rape factory, where innocent straight men are wantonly raped by gays and are afraid to report it because the gays have been made emperors of the armed forces. And he backed it up with a completely scientific study that I'm sure would stand up to scrutiny from an independent, outside source.

So I think you can see the clear case for why this is the end of the world. Stripping DADT will not allow men and women to proudly serve this country openly and without fear of discharge. No, it'll create the gay rape SS. Do we really want that?

Things you don't want to hear the military say

There are things you don't want to hear the military say. Things like "Sorry we accidentally killed all those civilians", "Sorry we purposely killed all those civilians", "I just read a Glenn Beck book, who wants to start a Tea Bag militia with actual soldiers?", "I found the pin, but where's the grenade?", or "Anyone seen a large nuclear bomb shaped object lying around... perhaps with a southern man in a cowboy hat riding it... no?".

How about "we foresee a severe oil crisis that will drive up prices drastically as demand outstrips supply and further compounds large scale economic problems" and notes that they're going to be operating and planning for the future under these projections?

The US military has warned that surplus oil production capacity could disappear within two years and there could be serious shortages by 2015 with a significant economic and political impact.

The energy crisis is outlined in a Joint Operating Environment report from the US Joint Forces Command. ... "By 2012, surplus oil production capacity could entirely disappear, and as early as 2015, the shortfall in output could reach nearly 10 million barrels per day," says the report, which has a foreword by a senior commander, General James N Mattis.

It adds: "While it is difficult to predict precisely what economic, political, and strategic effects such a shortfall might produce, it surely would reduce the prospects for growth in both the developing and developed worlds. Such an economic slowdown would exacerbate other unresolved tensions, push fragile and failing states further down the path toward collapse, and perhaps have serious economic impact on both China and India."

Well.... goody gumdrops. Bonus points to a Mad Max apocalypse scenario. Now I know I won't look like an ass for armoring up my dune buggy and creating an array of fearsome costumes and masks.

I know you might be thinking "Well that's just the military and blarg blarg conspiracy raaargh no blood for oil", but if there's one thing that the US military takes seriously it's their ability to wage war and massive oil shortages fuck with their ability to wage war. On the bright side they're talking about 2015 and by then we'll probably have all that coastal offshore oil drilled out by then.

Sunshine and smiles everyone. Start hoarding gas and take lessons on how to subdue a school-bus full of gas, crossbow wielding rebels, and feral children with a Dodge Charger and a few thrill seeking minions.

Hearts and Minds in Many Pieces

Yesterday morning Wikileaks released a long-anticipated classified US military video depicting the 2007 killing of approximately 12 Iraqi civilians -- including Reuters employees Namir Noor-Eldeen and Saeed Chmagh. Reuters filed a FOIA request for the video soon after the attack but was constantly rebuffed. Wikileaks credits several anonymous whistleblowers with providing the footage. A senior military official has confirmed the video's authenticity.

I've posted the 17-minute edited version below. The entire tape is available for research purposes at Wikileaks. This is not easy to watch.



For more information head to Wikileaks and Collateral Murder.