Yeah, that sounds about right.
I have a pretty strong constitution. Blood and guts, snakes and bugs, human suffering, ABBA - none of these things get to me. But when I saw this grotesque abortion of bureaucracy, I actually recoiled in horror.
This unholy clusterfuck of a powerpoint slide is the “process” the military uses for choosing new equipment. Is it any wonder we end up pissing away more than half our federal budget on the armed forces and still can’t manage to beat a couple hundred jackasses living in caves?
That chart isn’t just unnecessarily convoluted, it’s deliberately convoluted. The only way a process gets to that point is if you’re trying to waste as much resources as possible while accomplishing as little possible. I shudder to think of the man-hours (not to mention tax dollars) spent on just coming up with the process, let alone the hundreds (thousands?) of paper-pushers required to actually follow it for every single piece of equipment used by the military. And this is just one small aspect of the massive armed forces bureaucracy. Can you imagine the process for the rest of it?
This is why it’s not OK to simply let people believe dumb things. Sooner or later, they’re going to act on their dumb beliefs, and the outcome is never good. Superstition is never “harmless”.
Alt-text: “Dear editors of Homeopathy Monthly: I have two small corrections for your July issue. One, it’s spelled “echinacea”, and two, homeopathic medicines are no better than placebos and your entire magazine is a sham.”
I Have two small corrections for Randall: One, homeopathy’s primary tenant is that like cures like, so that to get pregnant homeopathically, you’d actually want highly-diluted morning-after pills. Diluted semen would be a contraceptive. And two, the other main tenant is that the more diluted it is, the stronger it is, so you’d actually want to water it down like 30,000 times, not just 30.
Yes folks, homeopathy is just that crazy. (via XKCD)
We’ve spent almost 300 billion dollars waging a war on (at most) 100 terrorists in Afghanistan. We’ve spent more than double that fighting terrorists in Iraq that didn’t even exist until we created them. That’s over a trillion dollars pissed away on practically nothing. And don’t get me started on the absurd cost of security theater right here in the US. Fuck it already. Just fuck it. Some planes crashed into some buildings a decade ago. A few common-sense improvements to airline security have long since insured that it can never happen again. Eerybody involved is either dead, captured, or vanished. Get over it. Stop sending good money after bad and move the fuck on.
Happy birthday, Iraq war! Seven great year of waste, fraud and abuse. Sure, we may have pissed away close to a trillion dollars, lost nearly 5k American soldiers, and killed almost 100k civilians, but at least we got rid of all those WMDs, right? I know I feel safer. (via HuffPo)
Twilight TOTALLY Invented Werewolves
According to a (hopefully fake) email sent in to a movie review website by some tween fuckwit, Universal Studios should be ashamed for ripping off the whole “werewolf” concept from the Twilight franchise. Oh, and also for doing a bad job of it and making the werewolf ugly, instead of totally dreamy like the gay indian kid in Twilight.
I weep for our future.
In an article that somehow does not contain the words “kook”, “loony” or “wackadoo”, ever reliable and not-at-all-biased Fox News reports that some people are afraid of a pink Ouija board. Seriously. In 2010, there are still people who think there are evil spirits trying to attack us through board games.
Everybody knows the evil spirits attack us through popular music and dancing. That’s just science. (via Boingboing)
Following in the grand tradition of Heavy Metal Parking Lot, I was overjoyed to find Sarah Palin Parking Lot. How dumb are people willing to wait in line for 8 hours to meed a vice presidential failure and gubernatorial quitter? This dumb. (via Boingboing)
Still a week to go before Thanksgiving, but all the stores are already pushing the traditional Christmas values of joy, understanding, and buying stuff on credit. Unfortunately, they’re not pushing quite hard enough for some people. Yep, there are already good christian soldiers massing to wage a war against the “war on Christmas”. Say “Happy holidays” instead of “Merry Christmas”? You’re the enemy. Don’t mention Christmas prominently enough in your holiday sales flier? To hell with you. Apparently anybody who dares to acknowledge the existence of the half-dozen other religious holidays that happen in late December is guilty of “persecuting” the poor, downtrodden fundies. (via Digg)
