Borked Code

Today, here, it’s the 12^th of September.  Yesterday, the 11^th, ten years after the date of the attacks (and if you don’t know which ones I’m talking about, skip reading this), I specifically didn’t want to think about it.

But I couldn’t.  Know why?  Because a bunch of jerk-off conspiracy theorists were having a little shindig in the middle of Wencelas’ Square as Misa and I were walking by.

You know, if you want to make up stories about conspiracies, you go right ahead.  But keep that dumb shit to yourselves, please.  It’s bad enough that we had Conservatives, war profiteers running our country turn that event into the biggest fiasco and literally hand Bin Laden his desired victory as they did, but to see a bunch of dumb fucks wander around masturbating up the idea that it was all some kind of inside job a-la the Long Kiss Goodnight, is shameful.  Seriously, it’s shameful.  Not just that, but it’s dumb as a bag of hammers.  And if you buy into it, sorry, but you’re having a moment of profound DUMB.

Here’s why:

1. To assume that the attacks were some sort of massive conspiracy theory implies a few exceedingly improbable things:

a.  The crews and passengers of 4 jumbo-jets were subverted and/or complicit without leaks

b.  The towers were laden up with explosives which would have had to have been

i.      perfectly placed to collapse the towers, and

ii.      set up with enough armor/protection that they would survive the collision and conflagration of a jumbo-jet impact, and

iii.      no one noticed the demolitions being set

iv.      no one who set the demolition charges spoke out

(Seriously, have you ever watched one of those Discovery Channel programs where they take down an old Vegas casino?  That is really hard, precision work, and it takes a LOT of explosives, plus the right kind of detonation plan, and sheltered/shaped shields to channel the explosion.  If you don’t get that, you get a lopsided fall, and the building crashes into others and makes a bigger mess.

And these monumentally, profoundly stupid FUCKS think that someone can pull this off on the TWIN-FUCKING-TOWERS, eight years after someone tried already to blow them up, pull it off while not being noticed, and have all their work survive having a goddamned jumbo jet flown into them???  What kind of stupid genetic defective do you have to be to give that even a shred of credence?)

c.  The staff of the Pentagon were considered ‘expendable’

d.  Bush, Cheney, and their entire administration, being complicit, never produced a single leak

i.      This would imply that Bush actually accomplished something that he set out to do, I might add, which flies in the face of his otherwise spotless record of Epic Fail

2.  To present the attacks as some kind of massive conspiracy theory is to denigrate the deaths of not only the 3,000-odd people who died that day, but the thousands of our troops who were killed over the ensuing years in Afghanistan and Iraq, and the hundreds of thousands of civilians who also have lost their lives in those conflicts.

What do I feel when looking at the last ten years?

Ashamed.  Angry.  Frustrated.

Ashamed that when presented with a terrible tragedy and the unified spirit that formed behind it around the world (remember that part?  Where the Entire Known World got behind us after the attacks?) got pissed away with the Republican mantra of “move along here, just go shopping or something.”

Angry that the Republicans turned 9/11 into a pageant of criminality – the presentation of Giuliani and Kerik, Bush himself, and the rest as if they were some kind of heroes.  The free hand they got from the press while they did.  The use of the tragedy to spark an invasion of a country that had nothing to do with the attacks, and slay thousands upon thousands of their citizens.  Who were innocent.  Who didn’t attack us.  Whose only crime was being born to live in a repressive society under Saddam Hussein or the Taliban.  We murdered them.

(Side note:  and what really makes me want to punch dumbass conservatives in the mouth is their mind-numbingly stupid tripe about how ”they hate us fer our freedums!”  No, fuckwits, it ain’t our freedums they hate, they hate us because we blew up their children in the middle of their wedding, we slaughtered their entire family while they were driving their sibling to the hospital, we bombed their church in the middle of a service.  By reliable estimates, one of every twenty-five people has been killed violently in Iraq in the last ten years.  Four more have been forced to leave as a refugee.  And you dumb shits really think this won’t cause one or two of them to stop and think, “Hey, if those fucking Americans weren’t blowing shit up left and right, we might have only had to dodge Hussein and his goons.”)

Frustrated, that our country could have led the world forward in a fantastic opportunity to bring everyone together – we could have been on top of the world.  Instead our country became an international pariah, an outlaw nation.  We’ve staggered away from being massively successful to being on the brink of ruin thanks to a decade of Republicans stealing our tax dollars and paying them out to the richest people in the country, and there are not-so-rich people who seem to think that’s jolly good for everyone.  Frustrated because when the attacks took place, Bin Laden literally said he hoped the attacks would cause us to spiral into financial and moral ruin.  Which, in case you hadn’t been watching the news, we promptly did, led into the pit by Bush, Cheney, and their cadre of chickenhawk sadists.  Bin Laden won there, he beat the Republican “National Security” myth like a red-headed stepchild.

So yeah, I think that 9/11 should be remembered, all right.  I think it should be the red flag in which we wrap the burnt body of Conservatism and the Republican Party before we finally bury it.  I think it should be the example we hold up and show to our grandchildren and say, “See, this is how terrible even good people can be when they lose sight of reality in their anger.  Always value your anger, but temper it, and always make sure to direct it at the ones who deserve it.  Because if you are not careful, you can hurt a great many people who don’t deserve it.”

Libya, now in the hands of its own people, seems to be missing over 500 surface-to-air missiles, including 480 model SA-24s, which are the Russian analog to our Stinger missiles.

These are man-portable devices, and they are capable of hitting a target at 10,000 feet.  They are also capable of taking down a passenger jetliner.

Am I the only one who finds this a little worrisome?

If you can bear dealing with Internet Explorer and downloading the Silverlight plugin, there are a series of excellent lectures on science (specifically physics) by Richard Feynman.  You know that old question of “who would you want to meet from history?” that people often ask?  This guy is in my top three list.

He worked at Los Alamos on the bomb, he was a pioneer in Quantum Physics, and an all-around fascinating person.  I highly recommend checking out all these lectures.

The first lecture in the series is on the Law of Gravitation, and its course throughout history.

Check ‘em out!

Looky, a brainless pastor decides he knows all the answers!  A national registry for atheists!  Because, you see, it’s just like having a national registry for sex offenders.

Should we pin a big “A” on our jackets, too, so we’ll be easier to round up and put on the trains later?

Pastor Mike, you are an example of precisely why religion needs to exit civilized society.  You are plainly insane, and from where I sit, dangerously so.  And it’s your religion that has made you this way.

Hopefully some of you out there who think Christianity is a “good” thing will take more than a few hints from this – this idiot is why we’re not simply sitting around ‘closeted’ any longer.  We’ve had quite enough, and even though many remain silent out of fear for themselves, it’s time to put an end to this Santa-Claus-for-Grownups bullshit.  Remember, this asshole is suggesting boycotts and harassment for starters, and you can bet your ass many of his parishoners wouldn’t think twice before committing vandalism or other violence.  Because, you know, Jesus will forgive them all their sins.

Especially if Pastor Mike is the mouthpiece.

Remember – every dollar you drop in that plate supports people like this.  Maybe not directly, but this insanity spreads far too easily.  And you are personally responsible for what you endorse.

The 5.8 quake that hit the East Coast of the US this morning (happy homecoming, Todd!) was, thankfully, not a cause of major disaster.

However, it very well could have been.  How so?

The North Anna nuclear reactor, 50 miles East of Charlottesville (and generally upwind), 50 miles NW of Richmond (and somewhat downwind), and 90 miles SW of Washington DC (which is definitely downwind), is located about eight miles to the West and four miles above the epicenter of yesterday’s earthquake.

View Larger Map

The North Anna plant was only built to withstand a quake of approximately 5.9-6.1 scale.  It has two reactors.  A third was planned and committed to construction in February.

During the 1990s, all seismographs were taken offline at the North Anna plant in response to budget cuts.

What’s most alarming, however, is that it possesses a “hot” spent-fuel pool (hot fuel is stored in water for 5-10 years until it is cool enough to be kept dry without melting) suspended several stories above ground, in the same manner as the Fukushima reactor.  North Anna is considered the seventh most likely plant in the United States to suffer core damage as a result of an earthquake.

During the quake, the plant lost all external power and was forced to go to its backup diesel generators.  Of the four, one failed at startup.  Not to be too much of a nit-picker, but a harsher earthquake would very likely have damaged or destroyed diesel generators.

Do I really need to spell out the potential disaster of a core meltdown or spent-fuel meltdown and the resulting contamination of the entirety of the Richmond-DC corridor?  Were you aware that the government of Japan has determined that every child under 18 living within about a 25-mile radius of Fukushima is going to be tested for thyroid cancer regularly for the rest of their natural lives?

Pardon me for pointing this out, but am I the only one who sees an opportunity here for well-paid jobs in the construction and renewal of reactor facilities, testing, and maintenance at the nuclear reactors in all fifty states?  A little job-creation, anyone?

Or are we still too concerned about the Republican-manufactured crisis of the debt ceiling?

UPDATE: I hate being right sometimes.  Seems the waste tanks were rattled quite a bit in their container – as much as 4.5 inches each.  4.5 inches toward one another could have been…disastrous.

An unrecognized link needs to be brought to light with regard to Libya.  Bear with me, we’ll get there.

During the summer of 2010, an unprecedented drought and heat wave cruised across the Russian bread-basket.  That drought and heat wave were a result of climate change.  It also sent wheat yields plummeting – and drove the global price of wheat, a common commodity, way up.

Approximately 70% of the diet in North Africa consists of bread.

Food insecurity is a common cause of conflicts, and the Joint Chiefs of Staff recognized this several years ago.  They even spoke out about it last year.

The Libyan rebellion – and many of the others that have rocked the region these last few months – began with food protests and riots.

In the case of Libya, there was also another problem – water insecurity.  Libya has been drying out, giving more ground to desert, and this has knock-on effects in food insecurity and causes localities to suffer friction against one another (a fact that Quaddafi has taken advantage of, playing tribes off against one another for decades).

When Tunisia blew, it sparked Cairo, which sparked Libya.

This is exactly the socio-political outcome predicted by climate change scientists more than 30 years ago.

So all you folks who love to think that climate change is just some big hoax that puts money in the pockets of scientists, I got a couple points for you:

• Scientists get paid, regardless of their findings.  Pro or con, they get paid for research, not outcomes.
• Scientists care about what happens to their kids*.  As a result, they prefer to see the world become a better place.
• It should follow for even the most addle-brained fool that when scientists sound an alarm bell about something, it’s probably because of the second point.

This set of events should be viewed with severe alarm by everyone who connects these dots.  Because the winds of climate change haven’t finished blowing.  India and Pakistan could just as easily been part of all this.

And unlike these North African nations, both of them hate one another already.  Both of them have fought wars over contested territory (Kashmir).

And both of them have nukes.

(*contrary to the average Red-stater or his/her congressional mouthpiece, who seem to think “it’s not happening” or “la la la” are appropriate responses, or at best who want to have things just stay the same as they are.)