Diary of the Mad Pigeon

Pigeontrack: SNL Amedinejad Skit

Even more Mahmoud Amedinejad goodness over at Stop the ACLU!

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U.S. Embassy rips Senate plan on Iraq

"The U.S. Embassy...joined a broad swath of Iraqi politicians — both Shiite and Sunni — in criticizing a nonbinding U.S. Senate resolution seen here as a recipe for splitting the country along sectarian and ethnic lines."  CONTINUED 

Our own Senate said that?  Are they crazy? 

Let me get this straight... we'll give Iraq a weak central government, and then split Iraq into three parts like some sort of Islamic Neapolitan ice cream.  That means The Kurds will get the rich Kirkuk oil fields, while the Shi'ites gets port access (I imagine the Sunnis, then, while get the highly fertile Anbar Province).

Which means the already weak Iraqi state will be divided economically amongst factions who, last I checked, don't really get along too well.  What a [PIGEONED] brilliant idea!

Didn't we have our own Constitutional Convention specifically to avoid having a crippled central government?

IN OTHER NEWS:

UN envoy meets Myanmar democracy leader:  A U.N. envoy was unable to meet with Myanmar's top two junta leaders in his effort to persuade them to ease a violent crackdown on anti-government protesters, but was allowed a highly orchestrated session Sunday with detained opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi.  CONTINUED

Good luck, Mr. UN:  Myanmar--excuse me, Burma--didn't give a [PIGEONED] in 1988, and I don't think they give a [PIGEONED] now.  After all, it takes that special sort of Junta to fire on clergy.

Col. Austin Bay (USA, Ret.) writes....

...and presents the best description of the art and science of intelligence I've ever read.

Intelligence is an art — a grand, interpretive collusion of linguistics, geography, mathematics, history, theology, psychology, physics, metaphysics and every other human means of analysis and explanation. Former CIA Director James Schlesinger nailed it in October 2003 when he said: “But major organizational change (of U.S. intelligence agencies) is not the salvation. I would submit the real challenge lies in recruiting, fostering, training and motivating people with insight.”

Insight. If that sounds artsy, well, it is.

Find the full post and context here and here.

Intelligence (in the military and national security context), is a tricky beast to describe, even more difficult to train, and even more trying to master.  It's also rather thankless, tiring, graying, aging, and a game of egos and personalities the likes of which would frighten Howard Hughes.

Death by PowerPoint? Not this time around.

An unintentionally hilarious PowerPoint presentation: http://blog.wired.com/defense/2007/09/omg-navy-calls-.html

Interesting Presidential Ticket Idea

From Texas Fred's:

9/11 Yarn a Web of Lies

WingmanX writes:  Hey, Pidge!  Seen this one?

9/11 Yarn a Web of Lies

EXCERPT:  In all the stories that came out of 9/11 -- stories of love, loss and heroism -- Tania Head's tale had it all. As president of the World Trade Center Survivors' Network and as a tour guide at ground zero, she told countless people for the past six years about being burned on the 78th floor of the south tower. Head says she was rescued by a citizen hero, and felt compelled to escape by her promise to return a wedding band to a victim's wife and by her love for a man she later learned had died in the north tower.

Tania Head's story, however, was too good to be true, as The New York Times reported Thursday.

Pretty crazy that she'd make it this far.  I'll bet half the time she called those people whose "soul" she stole, which is an interesting choice of words that I can bring myself to understand, she was actually wracked with guilt over what she was doing. One can only hope.

(Article forwarded to MOGS)

MOGS writes:  Wow.

Dude, I honestly don't know what to say on that one, just wow.

I would post it, without commentary.  See what others say, and then re-attack after three or four days....

The Mad Pigeon: I concur.  Readers, you may fire when ready!

A Short USMC Quote

Katie Couric, while interviewing a Marine sniper, asked  "What do you feel when you shoot a Terrorist?" 

The Marine shrugged and replied, "A slight recoil."

Thursday Open Roost

Have a post to share?  Trackback it here!  Remember I have to manually approve trackbacks, so there'll be a delay before I add your ping to the list:

The Knucklehead of the Day award from The Florida Masochist
Lets have a debate from The Florida Masochist
Hokey Smokes! Caption Contest: Week 69 from The Bullwinkle Blog
Back to the Moon & Then to Mars - Permanently! from The Pink Flamingo
There is no truth in the news and no news in the truth from Planck's Constant
The AFLAC Scam from Stix Blog
I Guess Dingell Didn't Mean It from Rhymes With Right
Of Course, The Percentage Is Down from Rhymes With Right
Weekend Open Trackback Sept 28 - 30 from Church and State
No Jews in State Department program, no Jewish bullets in Iraq, Afghanistan from Right Truth
The Partitioning Solution from Conservative Cat

Want to participate?  You can read the rules here, and a discourse on the point of open trackback sessions here.

Don't have trackback capability, or just want to submit a link you found?  Put your link in the comments section or email me at thebigpigeon-at-yahoo.com, and I'll add your submission to the list!

Full Frontal Nerdity

Nerdity.  Geekery.  Nerdery.  Dorkitude.  Whatever you call it, chances are your workplaces, families, social circles, or hell, just plain old YOU are in some small or large way part of the geek nation. 

That being said, allow to illustrate a rant which I think sums up a couple bored conversations I happened in on during my latest TDY.  Yes, when you put together a bunch of air force people, everybody from space to intel to pilots and comm weenies, it stands to reason that sooner or later someone is going to bring up something along the lines of.....

10 things i hate about star trek

Actually, you can just about ignore 10-6 and skip right to 5, which I think is the MOST IMPORTANT and salient point, esp these days in the military...but hey, it's your time :)

10. Noisy doors.
You can't walk three feet in a starship without some door whooshing or screeching at you. My office building has automatic sliding doors. They're dead silent. If those doors went "wheet!" every time a person walked through them, about once a month some guy in accounting would snap and go on a shooting rampage. Sorry Scotty, the IEEE has revoked your membership until you learn to master WD-40

9. The Federation.
This organization creeps me out. A planet-wide government that runs everything, and that has abolished money. A veritable planetary DMV. Oh sure, it looks like a cool place when you're rocketing around in a Federation Starship, but I wonder how the guy driving a Federation dump truck feels about it?

And everyone has to wear those spandex uniforms. Here's an important fact: Most people, you don't want to see them in spandex. You'd pay good money to not have to see them. If money hadn't been abolished, that is. So you're screwed.

8. Reversing the Polarity.
For cripes sake Giordi, stop reversing the polarity of everything! It might work once in a while, but usually it just screws things up. I have it on good authority that the technicians at Starbase 12 HATE that. Every time the Enterprise comes in for its 10,000 hour checkup, they've gotta go through the whole damned ship fixing stuff. "What happened to the toilet in Stateroom 3?" "Well, the plumbing backed up, and Giordi thought he could fix it by reversing the polarity."

Between Scotty's poor lubrication habits and Geordi's damned polarity reversing trick, it's a wonder the Enterprise doesn't just spontaneously explode whenever they put the juice to it.

7. Seatbelts.
Yeah, I know this one is overdone, but you'd think that the first time an explosion caused the guy at the nav station to fly over the captain's head with a good 8 feet of clearance, someone would say, "You know, we might think of inventing some furutistic restraining device to prevent that from happening." So of course, they did make something like that for the second Enterprise (the first one blew up due to poor lubrication), but what was it? A hard plastic thing that's locked over your thighs. Oh, I'll bet THAT feels good in the corners. "Hey look! The leg-bars worked as advertised! There goes Kirk's torso!"

6. No fuses.
Every time there's a power surge on the Enterprise the various stations and consoles explode in a shower of sparks and throw their seatbelt-less operators over Picard's head. If we could get Giordi to stop reversing the polarity for a minute, we could get him to go shopping at the nearest Starship parts store and pick up a few fuses. And while he's shopping, he could stop at an intergalactic IKEA and pick up a few chairs for the bridge personnel. If you're going to put me in front of a fuseless exploding console all day, the least you could do is let me sit down.

5. Rule by committee.
Here's the difference between Star Trek and the best SF show on TV last year:

Star Trek:

Picard: "Arm photon torpedoes!"
Riker: "Captain! Are you sure that's wise?"
Troi: "Captain! I'm picking up conflicting feelings about this! And, it appears that you're a 'fraidy cat."
Wesley: "Captain, I'm just an annoying punk, but I thought I should say something."
Worf: "Captain, can I push the button? This is giving me a big Klingon warrior chubby."
Giordi: "Captain, I think we should reverse the polarity on them first."
Picard: "I'm so confused. I'm going to go to my stateroom and look
pensive."

Firefly:

Captain: "Let's shoot them."
Crewman: "Are you sure that's wise?"
Captain: "Do you know what the chain of command is? It's the chain I'll BEAT YOU WITH until you realize who's in command."
Crewman: "Aye Aye, sir!"

(MOGS)  - this my friends, is the pinnacle of awesomeness, and the no 1 thing that I personally can't stand about Star Trek (next to the fact that with few exceptions, you're constantly waiting around hoping that the good guys are going to stop whining and start kicking ass at some point, something the Jedi never seem to have much of a problem with I notice...)

Note the difference illustrated between an actual working, effective chain of command, and a bunch of spandex-wearing losers who constantly get their ship destroyed (what are they on like Enterprise number 40 or something by now?) You can skip the rest of these if you want, I got my point across :)

4. A Star Trek quiz:
Kirk, Spock, McCoy, and 'Ensign Gomez' beam down to a planet. Which one isn't coming back?

3. Technobabble.
The other night, I couldn't get my car to start. I solved the problem by reversing the polarity of the car battery, and routing the power through my satellite dish. The resulting subspace plasma caused a rift in the space-time continuum, which created a quantum tunnelling effect that charged the protons in the engine core, thus starting my car. Child's play, really. As a happy side-effect, I also now get the Spice Channel for free.

2. The Holodeck.
I mean, it's cool and all. But do you really believe that people would use it to re-create Sherlock Holmes mysteries and old-west saloons? Come on, we all know what the holodeck would be used for. And we also know what the worst job on the Enterprise would be: Having to squeegie the holodeck clean.

1. The Prime Directive.
How stupid is this? Remember when Marvin the Martian was going to blow up the Earth, because it obstructed his view of Venus? And how Bugs Bunny stopped him by stealing the Illudium Q36 Space Modulator? Well, in the Star Trek universe, Bugs would be doing time. Probably in a room filled with Roseanne lookalikes wearing spandex uniforms, walking through doors going WHEET! all day. It would be heck. At least until the Kaboom. The Earth-shattering Kaboom.

Now, for those of you somewhat confused as to where you fit in the whole geek grand scheme of things, fear not, the heroes of Brunching Shuttlecocks are here to help:  Note, don't worry if you have no earthly idea of what a "furry" is, or "cosplay" instead, consider yourself lucky.  The problem with knowledge is once it's out of the bottle, it's impossible to put back in.  Ignorance is bliss. They should add a category for emo.  You know, emo can be deadly.  So can too much cowbell.

Pigeontrack: "Pork Parade" at Don Surber.com

Excerpt:  Here is a roundup of some of the crap that federal taxpayers will be buying instead of stuff to provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty:

$500,000 for a new pavilion for a beach in Rhode Island. The state failed to keep the old one in good repair. Lesson: Spend nothing on maintenance and your senator will get you a new one.

Continued!

Holy Pigeoned!  You really ought to check out the list--indeed, I find the $7.5 million for USC and UCLA combat childhood obesity among minorities to be a really nice touch.  Isn't running, playing tag, or some old fashion Duck Duck Pigeon free?

(Oh yeah, I forgot... tag's outlawed in some states now).

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