Atomic Nerds

Let me show it to you.

Agents will push ahead stagnant prosecutions as a means of mitigating the potential for lone wolf terrorists to strike out of frustration or revenge, the official said. Field offices have been authorized to expand their surveillance and monitoring to include hundreds of subjects. Potential terrorism suspects might be arrested on valid charges not related to terrorism to keep them off the streets, officials said.”

It’s not re-listing crypto as muntions, but…

In New York, the police are swabbing backpacks and shoulder bags and using Sabre 4000 chemical and biological agent detectors at subway entrances.

If anybody needs me, I’m just gonna assume I’ll be over in Room 101 about 10 minutes after I hit “publish.”

So they got Osama, huh? Does that mean we’re all safer now and we can get rid of some of the Constitution-rape we’ve had since 9/11? Maybe shitcan TSA? This is my pre-emptive shocked face.

I’ll be amazed if they aren’t seriously trying to make us all get microchipped by the weekend. I would not be surprised if they tried to re-list strong cryptography as a munition. It won’t do anything since that cat is so far out of the bag it had its own kittens, but since when has current security been about actually doing anything productive?

My keyboard has an LCD screen in it that can take an RSS feed. I leave it pointed at some default news tap just to have something more interesting than how much RAM I’m using or whatnot.

This morning, it scrolled the headline “Cables show Iran ‘vulnerable’.”

This afternoon, it scrolled the headline “Iran’s president abruptly fires foreign minister.”

I larfed and larfed.

Everybody has heard of the Fire Triangle, right? Three things are necessary for fire: fuel, heat, and oxygen, and should you remove one element everything collapses and the fire theoretically goes out. I’ve come up with a similar triangle, except it is for how much people suck, and it works backwards.

Look, I know the reason the triangle metaphor works for fire is because if you take a single leg out it all collapses, rather than needing all three legs gone, but I’m going to blame this on the fact that people are clever and can turn a triangle with a missing leg over on its side to a / which will still kinda stand. I’m reaching, you say? Fine. Design your own damn triangle. If yours includes blackjack and hookers, I may even be interested.

Anyway.

As with the fire triangle, there are three elements in this little polygon of human decency: Porn, Pork, and Pets. Take out any one side, and the odds are that you’ve still got a fairly decent person. Consider, there are many folks who find porn distasteful for some reason or other. Well, that’s no deal-breaker as far as being a tolerable person. So long as the person is still down for a good BLT and appreciates a good loyal dog, or a nice cute kitten, I’d be willing to bet we can all still get along. Not ameniable to cats, dogs, guppies and geckos? Again, I’ll look at you askance, but so long as we can ogle various lovelies both artificial and natural over a nice Christmas ham, there’s no need to get too worked up. Don’t like pork chops, but down with porn and pets (though hopefully not at the same time)? Again, probably still a decent enough person.

Take out another leg and see what happens. No porn, no pets? Well, we can discuss the finer points of bacon, but we’re going to run out of conversation before long. Likewise if you hate pork and pets, one can only discuss the exploits of Belladonna for a limited time. If porn and pork are off the table, we can discuss Fluffy for a while, though I suspect this condition is what spawns crazy cat ladies.

Now let’s go one step further. If you hate porn, pork, and pets, what the hell do you do for fun? Wait, you’re gonna tell me there’s a huge swatch of the planet where porn, pork, and pets are right out? I’m suspicious! And now, for a cherry on top, we find that Saudi Arabia has banned selling dogs and cats because you can pick up babes with pets.

So let me get this straight.
No bacon.
No titty mags.
And I can’t use Fido to go out and covertly attract some non-paper boobage, which I couldn’t see anyway because boobs are so horribly corrupting that they and anything attached to them must be hidden from all sight lest I lose my barely-there self control and go on Rapefest 9000.

See, now if I could at least get a ham sandwich in Riyadh, which sounds suspiciously like something you chant to summon an elder god with tentacles for a face anyway, things might just be tolerable. As it stands though, I think the options are either mass deployment of daisy cutters, or to relocate Las Vegas, and give a battalion or two of Marines the best deployment of their lives.

Hell, I think for this plan we might even be able to bring Frankie and the Rat Pack back from the dead to help out.

Both LabRat and I think self-reliance is the way to go, and a fair number of you clever so-and-sos reading tend to agree. We’ll quote at each other how the government that governs best governs least, and all the like. We tend to think that trusting the government to get a job done is a good way to get a job done badly. We also tend to think that Iranian president Ahmadinnerjacket is a flaming nutjob that needs to be Dealt With.

So how come we’re all waiting on the .gov to finish up in Iraq so they can handle it for us? A recent comment at Matt’s from one Hazel Stone noted “So many AK-47s in that region…we can’t find one silly SOB to take a potshot at that arsebag?”

Rather than waiting on the feds to get the ball rolling, I could come up with a hundred bucks or two to chip in. Just sayin’…

Neo-neocon discusses the revisionist-history approach the dropping of the atomic bomb. Naturally, this is a topic near and dear to anyone who lives in Los Alamos. The Bradbury Science museum keeps a section aside purely for the debate over the bomb; one side is manned by “It’s terrible and Japan was JUST about to surrender and Groves and Truman both knew it but wanted to test the bombs on PEOPLE!”, and the other side is manned by “You insane hippies are completely full of shit”. I am, of course, paraphrasing slightly. It is perhaps needless to say that the pro-bomb crowd is heavily stocked with and supported by veterans, some of which have direct recollection of just how likely Japanese surrender was at the time. By far the most entertaining feature of the museum is the guest book in which people conduct a debate essentially in graffiti format. I plan to brush up on my drawing skills for the next time we take a visitor around the place so I can contribute some editorial cartooning.

Eric of Classical Values makes a case for the overpopulation of deer as a major driving force behind the rapid spread of Lyme disease. Eric is right, by the by, about Lyme so often going misdiagnosed or entirely unrecognized. At the dog board where I spend a good deal of my online time, a big concentration of the posters are East Coasters in heavy Lyme areas; it’s gotten to the point where having a vet test for tick-borne disease has become standard operating procedure for any dog exhibiting a mysterious change in behavior or stiffness/pain not easily traceable back to an injury. A surprising amount of the time, it DOES turn out to be Lyme or ehrlichiosis. I think a few people have traced an apparently unconnected array of symptoms back to Lyme, as well.

This is a little older but ties in neatly with Eric’s post- Terrierman has an extensive, informative, and a little bit sickening tome on what happens when the “BambiNos” get their way. Here’s a hint: it’s an exceedingly horrifying outcome for the animals, and not much better for the people.

I could rightly be accused of practicing simple reciprocal linky-love for this, but Minuteman’s “Al-Qaeda Training Camp” video is just flat so damn funny I’d be linking it even if he wasn’t a friend. We both got several minutes’ hearty giggling manly laughter out of it.