Top That

I challenge you to watch this clip without cringing or covering your face with your hands. It’s the honor system around here. No cringes. I couldn’t do it, and I thought Licensed to Drive was a good movie. I actually said aloud the words "Please just stop acting like that."

Utmost Respect

I’m sure you know by now about the goodwill mission to buy a crapload of soccer balls that have different countries flags on them, from a market in Kabul, and distribute them to the poor areas of Afghanistan. The muslims promptly flipped out because there was a Saudi flag on there, and the Saudi flag has the word allah on it, and allah should never be on something you kick.




This is a perfect example for me to repeat what I call “The Jibbili Effect”. It’s sort of a reverse gift giving concept. It’s what I consider to be one of the most backwards and deeply insidious flaws of the middle east. (You thought I was going to say Islam.)* If you give them gifts it makes them feel weak and lowers their social standing. They’re humiliated that someone so wealthy gave them something, contrasting their inability to provide. Pointing out how the gift was unacceptable or inadequate is a face saving move. Demanding a gift, or making it appear as though they've taken a gift by force are also Jibbili methods. It's very weird and runs contrary to the way you would think people interact with each other.

I think the best move for us would be to demand the soccer balls back. I bet they’d return very few of them. C’mon, it’s a freakin soccer ball that was already sold in Afghanistan. Folks didn’t have a problem with it, until it was a gift from the Americans.

I really liked this quote about the horribly disrespectful soccer ball disaster.
“Muslims treat with the utmost respect any printed matter containing verses of the Quran or the name of Allah or his prophet on it. Most would find the idea of kicking a ball emblazoned with those two names as deeply offensive.”


In other news, a murderer has detonated explosives during evening prayers at a mosque in Iraq, killing at least nine people...with the utmost respect.


*I also have a huge problem with their strength/weakness concept, and they way they use open threats as a low level bargaining tool. Bargaining/bribe societies with frequent use of low-ball technique feel horribly dishonest to me too. Yet, Jibilli is still the biggest hindrance to their success.
** Before anyone feels an overwhelming desire to throw out the "r" word; let it be known that I don't believe these flaws are genetically predetermined, but rather deeply imbeded societal traits.

Flute of the Commodores

Ok, so there's this show on HBO on Sunday nights. It's funny. I thought I was the only person in the world that thought this stuff was great, then Bucket put up a post about it. The show is great, but when they do their songs, there's usually something that makes me laugh out loud. They make fun of different types of music, and they really get to the heart of each style.









This one is my favorite so far. It perfectly nails what Americans think of France. All of the beginner French class vocabulary had me laughing. I'm personally a big fan of doing the "huh, huh, huh" thing that we associate with speaking French. It's sort of the "durka, durka", for France. I wonder what the standard language sound is for English?

Keeping It Real......Real Dumb

C'mon, if you're going to smear US troops at least make it unfalsifiable. They're not even trying anymore. I'm not even all that mad that they're trying to slander the military. It's that they're just relentlessly absurd and people eat it up. I think that the editors of AFP and Yahoo News need a rudimentary lesson on how a rifle works.



In case you're wondering, my last sentence wasn't a snide threat. I literally mean that they should sit in a classroom figure out the cycle of operations. It's not hard.

(pssst. The unfired rounds still have casings on them.)

For the naysayers out there, I'll take the liberty of making your argument, because you know it flashed through your mind.

"Well technically, the article can be true, because they never explicitly say that the bullets were fired, but merely that the lady said that they hit the house. The unexpended rounds, could have, technically, been thrown at the house like a handful of sharpies. I applaud the AFP on their fantastic, and technically possibly 100% true, journalism."

Get Real.

At least they don't have square backs.

NERD FEST

OK, I admit it. I’m a closet geek. Actually I’m pretty open about it. This weekend I went to the most massive nerd fest in all of the land. Some of this story is make pretend, and you can sort it out if you feel like it. Brando and the gang went to The GenCon. Just in case you’ve never heard of this GenCon, here’s the quick run down. If all the nerds you’ve ever met all got together and said “I’m here, I’m a gamer, get used to it”, for a solid 4 days, then this would be it. It’s sort of the Superbowl for gamers. There were role-playing games, board games, strategy games, tactical games, video games, miniatures games, vendors, buyers, demo games, soon to be released games, and hordes of games related merchandise.

Folks were dressed up in costumes; extremely hot women were dressed up in skimpy elf/pirate/barbarian costumes. Oh, and some extremely un-hot women were also dressed up in skimpy elf/pirate/barbarian costumes.

The scope of this convention sort of shocked me. It took up the convention center in Indy. Like every single huge hall in the whole convention center. It also took up many/most of the public rooms in the nearby hotels, including their convention halls. Gary Gygax was there and apparently threw the first die. Larry Elmore was there, and I went over to his booth and checked out his paintings that I had drooled over for years. I couldn’t think of anything to say other than “You paint real good!”, so I said nothing. The Starcraft II demo was there, and it looks fantastic, but the crowd was just way too big for me to elbow my way in. My graphics card couldn’t handle it anyway, so that game is sort of off limits until I get a new computer. I also checked out that Eve Online game that Moif used to talk about. It looks pretty fun, and it also looks better than my graphics card could handle. I liked the look of the sleek black ships that shoot thermal or something.

Cyberninja sort of led the pack of us out there.


Snowspeeders got pwned by some AT-ATs.



Many adventures were had by imaginary heroes.









Adventures were had by real heroes.



Although we played may games involving sith lords, cylons, or orcs; we mainly went so we could do the True Dungeon. Which is accurately billed as “Real Dungeon, Real Props, Real Cool”. It’s like a haunted house where you solve puzzles, and play shuffleboard which simulates fighting monsters. It was supposed to be hard, but we’re seasoned adventures, and rarely get surprised. Although I really didn’t care for the guy blasting a CO2 horn cupped to the side of my head and calling it a “shrieker”, which is apparently some sort of mushroom. You buy little chips which represent your gear, weapons, armour, potions, scrolls, etc. One of the options was ‘small steel mirror”, so take a wild guess at what enemy we expected to face. The ole ‘Dusa. There was also a “Stone-to-flesh” spell. Yup, you guessed it…Stone Golem. We had to wheel and deal to maximize our gear to match our character classes.



It was actually extremely fun.



Anyway, we breezed through it without losing anyone, and then we earned the right to drink in the “True Dungeon Tavern”.

Which was basically just a hotel drink stand, selling an overpriced rail. Whatever. I didn’t care. We’re adventurers darnit, and I’m drinking my Beefeater, and toasting to the demise of the Beholder.

I didn’t come home empty handed. I got my mark of the great old ones.

For a more complete rundown of the excitement, swing on by the Cyberninja’s place and check it out.

They don't know

Sooooo, you like to shoot mortars?

Lead On Target

This is a little bit of a long one, so grab a cold one, and enjoy the read.

A staple of this blog is pointing out how folks, who are supposed to be bastions of truth and objectivity, are actually just for whoever is against the United States. From the looks of it, I will have many years of material to highlight, because folks aren't getting any better.

I want to talk for a second about propaganda. All wars are fought not only with guns and blood, but also with concepts and ideas. Propaganda works. News agencies can paint a picture, not only by falsifying stories, but by simply choosing which news reports are stressed or which ones are published. The medium isn’t important. Only the message. All wars are wars of perception. Especially terrorist wars. Terrorist’s primary weapon is the perception of strength. Their primary weapon is propaganda.

Yes. The perception of strength. Not actual strength. They are usually pretty shitty warriors. When they step up to men, they usually get kicked in the teeth. They excel at murdering non-combatants. They behead prisoners. They use kidnapping to raise money for their nefarious purposes. They tell everyone that this is a sign of their might, and most people believe them. Don’t believe it. I’ll say it again. Propaganda works. The same way that advertising works. We should do our best to tell our story. And the enemy is doing his best to tell his story. We try to make it sound like we are kicking the terrorists asses, and the terrorists try to make it sound like they are kicking our asses. Unfortunately, our news agencies are telling the enemies' story. Yeah, yeah, sure. You’ve heard all this before. You’re probably already dismissing it. You’re saying that I’m “labeling” good honest people. But I’d like you to take a look at this article published by CNN, about a recent event in Afghanistan.

The cold hard facts are that over 70 Taliban attacked a US and Afghanistan base. These militants had so little military proficiency that they failed to overrun the base, got 20 of themselves killed, and killed exactly zero NATO or Afgan National Troops in the process. No matter which way you slice it, that was a bad day for terrorists. You would have to be a pretty darn good wordsmith to make it sound like the terrorists were good fighters. Yet CNN sure tries awfully hard with their headline. It makes you wonder if they actually share the terrorists’ world view.

"Taliban stages brazen attack on U.S. base"

Did you notice the adjective “brazen”?

That almost sounded like a compliment.

Brazen: bold and unashamed: showing or expressing boldness and a complete lack of shame

Wow. That’s really twisting the perception of what happened. That’s changing the paradigm.

So were they “bold and unashamed” before or after they got their asses handed to them and they ran for their lives?

I can think of some more accurate terms that CNN should have used:
#1. incompetent
#2. foolish
#3. ill-planned
#4. islamic
#5. hilarious

Taliban stages brazen hilarious attack on U.S. base

Adjectives are almost always subjective. Yes, I understand that sometimes subjective terms get into headlines, however their word choice backs enemy propaganda. They’re telling the enemy’s story when they should be telling our story. And here’s the kicker. Here is the thesis. Are you ready?

I think it’s on purpose.

It would be sort of nice if our own news agencies wouldn’t choose to be enemy propaganda outlets. They're in the same boat we are. If our republic falls, I think that would hurt their interests too. I dunno. Maybe they were raised wrong.

Anyway, I wonder which unit was there at the time. It sounds like they were having fun. I raise my glass to the gents putting lead on target.

And I give my sidewards glance to the 5th Column. I know what you are.

Tornado Story

There was a man traveling in Iowa this summer, through a number of small towns. He stopped at a Casey’s (Gas Station), to use the restroom and grab a soda. While he was in the restroom he heard the tornado siren indicating that shelter must be taken immediately, on account of high winds and swirling clouds. When he got out of the restroom he was surprised to find that the lady behind the counter had left and that he was locked inside. Apparently the two people that were working there had fled across the street to some other store that had a basement, and had locked the door behind them, trapping the man in the gas station. He went looking for another exit, but either there wasn’t one, or it was locked. He was indeed a prisoner, in a ground level building, during a tornado warning. The best thing he could think to do was find the strongest part of the structure, somewhere near the stoves, and hang around that.

The phone rang. He answered it. It was someone who wanted to order a pizza.

He asked them to call the police, so he could be freed from this building of death.

Sometime later the woman returned to unlock the place, and she had two main things to say to him.

1. “You didn’t steal anything, did you?”

and

2. “You’re not allowed in back.”

A defeat for terrorists and liberals

Ha ha, in your face.

It is not our intention to offend anyone

So this bad boy is hanging up in the Portland Airport. It is dripping with the symbolism of the jihadist Death-to-America bunch.

Does it look similar to this openly Anti-US propaganda from Iran?



Here’s the pic again.
The symbols are pretty much stock standards for terrorist sympathizers. Those weapons even look like AK-47s. Symbols of illegitimacy and terrorism. Even note the crosses around the border. Don’t be silly and say “Maybe they mean something else.”

You know this liberal argument. You know precisely what it means. Oil, Christians, AKs, Death, Bombs.

And even with full knowledge of what they’re saying, I don’t think it should be taken down by law. I think the Portland Airport should choose to do so. But they shouldn’t be made to do so. I also don’t think that tax money should be used for this. Taxes shouldn’t be levied to trumpet the enemies’ propaganda. (water is wet)

At any rate, the point of this post wasn’t to demand that it should be taken down. What slays me is what the Portland Airport authorities said.

It is not our intention to offend anyone.

That one deserves a big fat “Get Real”.

It was precisely their intention to offend!

Imagine what CAIR would say if there were little pictures of Muhammad on it instead.

So by that logic, what other things were “not meant to offend”? Jim Crow Laws? Paris Riots? 9/11? A middle eastern corpse dragging party? (I actually thought about posting a pic on that last one)

Imagine a cross burning in the front yard of black American family, with the perpetrators all decked out in KKK gear. One of them goes up to the door and says “It’s not our intention to offend anyone.”

Get Real.

Here's the letter. It's chock full of BS.

Thank you for sharing your concerns with us regarding artwork in the airport.

Please be assured that it is not our intention to offend anyone. Art is inherently subjective and can be provocative and thought provoking. We understand how it can affect people in different ways and we regret that this one has affected you negatively.

The artwork you mentioned is part of an Art in the Schools exhibit that is one element of an airport-wide art program. Our goal with this temporary, rotating display, as with all of the art at PDX, is to show our support for the arts and to offer opportunities for the public to view various art forms. This particular program also seeks to assist Oregon college and university art students with the development of their craft. The art is displayed for six months at PDX and some of it has previously been shown in various community venues in the state.

We are not taking a position on this piece of artwork or any of the other pieces in this program. We contract with the Regional Arts and Culture Council to manage this program. They, along with the colleges involved, review and select the art based on its artistic merit, not on its content. Since the program’s inception, hundreds of pieces of artwork have been displayed in the airport in this exhibition area and we do hear many positive comments from travelers who enjoy the art exhibits in the airport.

Although we retain the right to decline art that is chosen under this program, we do not plan to remove art from this display until its normal rotation ends in November of this year.

Again, thank you for sharing your opinion,


Customer Relations
Portland International Airport

There are a number of claims in that letter that are “Get Real” worthy, but I'll stick with just the one for now. Portland, huh? I'll file that in the memory banks.