Tag: government

Homeland security for kids

http://www.ready.gov/kids/

Our attention was strayed. While we were pursuing disorganized and almost harmless Islamist terror cells around the world, the furries were quietly infiltrating the most secret and sensitive offices in the government. We have moles. Also cougars, wolves, skunks, and a shitload of foxes.

Deep beneath the Blue Bayou restaurant in Disneyland, a brain in a jar is being lowered into an immensely powerful biomechanical cyborg Mickey Mouse character. The day of reckoning is near when He will lift up His glove-like hand and the Yiffening will begin.

HOW WERE WE SO BLIND?

computers are hard and the government spies on me from the air vent

flata points out that some people lost their heads because the all-knowing government spy agency, the NSA, put cookies on people’s computers.

A “privacy advocate” named Daniel Brandt is upset about this, and has previously been upset about the CIA using persistent cookies on their public website.

I feel sorry for the web monkey who put those in for whatever boring typical reason people use persistent cookies, because that person is in big trouble. I also think that a “no persistent cookies” policy for websites of this kind is a fine idea, almost entirely because it reduces this kind of pointless paranoia. But let’s get real, here. You can turn off cookies, and anyone who’s serious about privacy does. There’s no way the NSA is using persistent cookies to track individual website visitors; that’s inane.

Danny boy, the NSA has shit you don’t even know about, probably archiving the entire Internet way better than Alexa and analyzing it and putting it in databases and crunching it up to find Al-Qaeda and screw the Chinese. They don’t need “cookies”, okay? Oh, and by the way, you keep mispelling “rendez-vous” in your emails to your mistress, the one in Dayton. Get that shit straight, okay?

This was almost as “good” as the podjacking idiot.

Government Can’t Explain Change in 2002 TSA Contract

The modification to the contract involved switching the interview sites for tens of thousands of airline passenger screener jobs from a contractor’s own assessment centers to hotels and luxury resorts.

Federal auditors eventually called into question an array of expenses, including charges of $525 for an airport shuttle trip in Tallahassee, $7,920 for beverage breaks at a Manhattan hotel and $514,000 to rent tents in Boston.

So let’s get this straight. Homeland Security changed from using classrooms to using luxury hotels, we got charged $343 million for this, and no one can explain why?

I want someone’s head on a plate.

The End of Zero Tolerance: That 16th time

At least in the FBI.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/worldlatest/story/0,1280,-5333345,00.html

My favorite favorite favorite quote:

Current rules prohibit the FBI from hiring anyone who used marijuana within the past three years or more than 15 times ever. They also ban anyone who used other illegal drugs, such as cocaine or heroin, within the past 10 years or more than five times.

“That 16th time is a killer,” McCaffrey said.

Junkie Nation update

Hurray, the new Microgram report is out! Highlights of this one include:

  • Heroin-saturated paper
  • Blotter acid with 5-METHOXY-ALPHA-METHYLTRYPTAMINE instead of LSD in it
  • Cocaine in granola boxes
  • Opium chocolates

Plus of course a dissertation on people who take multistate car trips buying the maximum quantity of Sudafed at each drug store.

It’s the bestest government publication ever. Infrequent, but syndicated as microgram so you can see when the next one comes out and click through.

In praise of Lysenko

My new icon is in honor of Trofim Denisovitch Lysenko.

Who was he? Here’s a man who saw around the foolish plodding of the so-called scientific method. Starting as an unknown country agronomist, he carved himself a place in this world with good peasant sense, pluck, spunk, and old fashioned elbow grease.

Of course the “geneticists” didn’t buy his theories, but Trofim Denisovitch went over their heads to the real guardians of sanity: the Soviet government. And Josef Stalin listened, because Stalin was smarter than those stuck-up biologists too. They complained like crazy, but try as they might they couldn’t stop this feisty underdog with a plan to save his country. And if they tried, they were shot or jailed. That may sound harsh, but standing in the way of the happiness of the people is a serious matter, and bad science has to be rooted out deep or it’ll come back. And you know, those science guys, they were elitists who weren’t in touch. Arrogant nerds. A lot of them were Jews and they had all kinds of chips on their shoulders, you know.

Of course none of his science worked just right. It was all pretty crazy. You can’t “vernalize” plants by cooling them down to make them produce more. You can’t change the next generation of plants by modifying this generation, either; it’s called the Lamarckian mistake and everyone knows this. But you couldn’t slow down a man like this with theories; he was about cold hard facts. And if those were hard to come by, he could scare up a few; he was good at scaring. If the man asked you how the vernalization was going on your collective farm, some answers were healthier than others, and even starving peasants don’t care to be shot.

Soviet biology and agriculture didn’t recover from Lysenko. His theories were used well into the 1960s, and even later in China. Some of Lysenko’s agricultural innovations played a part in Mao’s unfortunate farming changes in the Great Leap Forward, contributing to famines that may have killed tens of millions of people; the statistics are hazy but not so good. But we know that’s not the point. He’d given all those people something: hope. And that’s what it’s all about, really.

Why is Lysenko our hero today? He had vision. And he understood something about science that we’re only just rediscovering today. Scientists shouldn’t keep nattering away about global warming, or Peak Oil, or the ozone layer, or all of these other crappy negative theories. That doesn’t make our nation proud and strong, and it sure doesn’t help us fight terror. We need science that builds us up instead of breaking us down. And if people don’t like evolution, stop ramming it down their throats. Who’s paying your salaries, anyway?

Learn something from Trofim Denisovitch. A guy from nowhere with a can-do attitude is worth more than a hundred overeducated weenies with permanent jobs! Maybe you guys can give us some science we can use for a change, something to make people feel the pride again. Something positive.

And if you don’t like the way things are going, watch your mouth. Naysayers need to be isolated and dealt with around here, or we’re just playing into the hands of the terrorists.

Freedom science is on the march.