Morbid Versus Creepy From a conversation at work today: Me: "Morbid is me being obsessed with death. Creepy is me being obsessed with YOUR death..." Secretary who overheard me: "... You have issues...." That little snippet was only slightly better than a conversation involving kicking puppies at little children in line to see a mall Santa. Posted at 08:30:41 PM EST by copus The Mosquito A device has been invented that emits a noise that keeps young people away. Now if only they could find a sound that keeps their mothers from wanting to get pregnant in the first place. (Insert jokes about: my voice/other people's kids/John Tesh/etc. below) Posted at 07:20:20 AM EST by copus
Hail The Dark Lord Pat Robertson It's good to know that Pat Robertson is a covert Satanist. I'd hate to think that he was on our side... Posted at 09:14:23 PM EST by copus
Changeup Curveball The LA Times has a very detailed explanation on How U.S. Fell Under the Spell of 'Curveball'. CIA officials now concede that the Iraqi fused fact, research he gleaned on the Internet and what his former co-workers called "water cooler gossip" into a nightmarish fantasy that played on U.S. fears after the Sept. 11 attacks. Curveball's motive, CIA officials said, was not to start a war. He simply was seeking a German visa. That's right. A large amount of the "intelligence" used to justify the war in Iraq was actually a scam by a guy trying to get a German visa. Other interesting tidbits: In 1994, acting on tips from Israeli intelligence, U.N. inspectors even stopped red-and-white trucks in Baghdad marked: "Tip Top Ice Cream." Inside they found ice cream. Weapons of Mass Deliciousness, I'd say. Moreover, Curveball was "very emotional, very excitable," the doctor told one colleague. And although it was early morning, Curveball smelled of liquor and looked "very sick" from a stiff hangover. Well, working with all those dangerous biological agents really could drive a man to drink. More problematic were the three sources the CIA said had corroborated Curveball's story. Two had ties to Chalabi. All three turned out to be frauds. Errr... whoops. Takes one to know one. The analysts refused to back down. In one meeting, the chief analyst fiercely defended Curveball's account, saying she had confirmed on the Internet many of the details he cited. "Exactly, it's on the Internet!" the operations group chief for Germany, now a CIA station chief in Europe, exploded in response. "That's where he got it too," according to a participant at the meeting. This sounds like some of my former students. It's on the Internet, it *has* to be true!!! Powell's speech failed to sway many diplomats, but it had an immediate impact in Baghdad. "The Iraqis scoured the country for trailers," said a former CIA official who helped interrogate Iraqi officials and scientists in U.S. custody after the war. "They were in real panic mode. They were terrified that this was real, and they couldn't explain it." So, Iraqis believed the U.S. when they told the world they had WMDs. That's kind of humorous, actually. Curveball was last in his engineering class, not first, as he had claimed. He was a low-level trainee engineer, not a project chief or site manager, as the CIA had insisted. Hey, not everyone can be tops in their class. I mean, what do you call the guy who is last in their engineering class? (Answer: CIA informant) Most important, records showed Curveball had been fired in 1995, at the very time he said he had begun working on bio-warfare trucks. A former CIA official said Curveball also apparently was jailed for a sex crime and then drove a Baghdad taxi. Hmmm... you think this could have been researched BEFORE we went to war.... It sounds to me like the CIA was extremely unwilling to admit mistakes and throw out intelligence from "bad" sources. Oh, well, at least it all turned out for the best. Posted at 02:27:15 PM EST by copus
Away Message Pride In honor of OSU's come from behind win against Michigan, I thought I'd go down the list of some current AOL Instant Messenger away messages in my Buddy List... I'll leave the screen names anonymous for privacy reasons and stuff... Shall we begin? --- It's game day bitches!!! Go Bucks, beat M!ch!g@n!!! --- Go...O-HI-O.....FUCK....Michigan... --- walking for the homeless... then drinking for OHIO STATE! :-D GO BUCKS!! BEAT M*CH*G*N!! --- Do YOU know what time it is????? Its 10:00:59 PM and michigan STILL SUCKS! GO BUCKS!!! :-D --- FUCK YEAH! GO BUCKS! (PS I am still in love with Bobby Carpenter...) --- DRIVE, DRIVE ON DOWN THE FIELD! O-H!!! --- i will assert my buckeye pride tonight by partying until i can party no more! --- Nothing brings people together like a mutual hatred. Fuck Michigan, Go Bucks! --- On a related note, GO BUCKS! Do something pornographic to Michigan this weekend. --- GO BUCKS!!! --- We don't give a damn for the whole state of m*ch*g*n, we're from O - HI - O! GO BUCKS!!! --- Tressel really impressed me today --- Fuck Michigan, Fuck Lloyd Carr, Fuck Chad Henne, and Fuck the color Blue To all the Troy Smith haters SUCK IT! --- (There is an amazing amount of foul language related to football...hmmmm...) Posted at 10:05:56 PM EST by copus Vote Yes, No, or Maybe I'm not much of a conspiracy theorist (Note: this is a lie), but I do wonder why the accuracy of pollsters has been plummeting over the last 5 or so years. I've been wondering a lot more after seeing how polls were saying that a lot of the Ohio election reform initiatives (I actually did not support all of these) had pretty widespread support. These all failed by a pretty wide margin. I found a good article that rants about this issue far more eloquently than I could. Of course, I still am more likely to blame incompetence rather than malice behind "voting irregularities." But that's just the guy I am. Posted at 09:55:35 PM EST by copus |
