Month: April 2007

04/13/2007

Just when you thought the War on Terror couldn’t get any stupider, you read a story like the one about terrorist-hunting dolphins (quoted from Associated Press):

About 75 dolphins and 25 sea lions are housed at Naval Base Point Loma in San Diego Harbor as part of a Navy program to teach them to detect terrorists and mines underwater.

Holy cow, underwater terrorists? That seems pretty dire. I can’t even imagine the conversation that led to this development. Were there a bunch of analysts sitting around a big conference table, talking about the dire threat of underwater terrorists, when one of them hit upon this brilliant idea?

“Gentlemen, I have it. We’ll train dolphins to find them!”

But that’s not all. Working in conjunction with the dolphins are– you guessed it– terrorist-hunting sea lions!

The sea lions carry in their mouths a cable and a handcuff-like device that clamps onto a terrorist’s leg. Sailors can then use the cable to reel in the terrorist.

That’s right, ladies and gentlemen… the sea lions who bark for fish at your local zoo can also attach handcuffs to an underwater terrorist so sailors can “reel him in”.

(Shown here is a photo of a different but related program, where the Navy actually attached laser guns to dolphins. Yes, this is completely real.)

Wow.

04/13/2007

A few weeks ago I bought an Xbox on eBay. I wanted it to build a media center for the family room, and after a bit of tweaking I got it working nicely. It’s a great little device, and the price tag of $60 is perfect.

With the Xbox came a stack of games which I didn’t want: a handful of John Madden NFL games, NHL, snowboarding, and the all-too-popular Grand Theft Auto (motto: “hey kids, smoking crack and beating up prostitutes is fun!“). I figured I’d sell them on eBay and get a couple bucks back, lowering the price of my new media center still further.

So I listed them with a starting price of a dollar, and a shipping cost of ten dollars. Ten bucks seemed reasonable to mail seven DVD cases.

The auction ended with a single bid, which was (naturally) a dollar. So I collected my $11.00 and went to the post office today to send them. The cost? $10.95.

Whee! I made five cents on the games. But wait– eBay charged me 40 cents to list the item, plus another 22 cents based on the selling price. So in the end, I paid for some guy in Pennsylvania to take seven games off my hands.

Chalk that up as Dumb Financial Decision #156.

04/12/2007

Lee Iacocca (remember him?) says this:

Am I the only guy in this country who’s fed up with what’s happening? Where the hell is our outrage? We should be screaming bloody murder. We’ve got a gang of clueless bozos steering our ship of state right over a cliff, we’ve got corporate gangsters stealing us blind, and we can’t even clean up after a hurricane much less build a hybrid car. But instead of getting mad, everyone sits around and nods their heads when the politicians say, “Stay the course.”

Stay the course? You’ve got to be kidding. This is America, not the damned Titanic. I’ll give you a sound bite: Throw the bums out!

You might think I’m getting senile, that I’ve gone off my rocker, and maybe I have. But someone has to speak up. I hardly recognize this country anymore. The President of the United States is given a free pass to ignore the Constitution, tap our phones, and lead us to war on a pack of lies. Congress responds to record deficits by passing a huge tax cut for the wealthy (thanks, but I don’t need it). The most famous business leaders are not the innovators but the guys in handcuffs. While we’re fiddling in Iraq, the Middle East is burning and nobody seems to know what to do. And the press is waving pom-poms instead of asking hard questions. That’s not the promise of America my parents and yours traveled across the ocean for. I’ve had enough. How about you?

I’ll go a step further. You can’t call yourself a patriot if you’re not outraged. Why are we in this mess? How did we end up with this crowd in Washington? Well, we voted for them– or at least some of us did. But I’ll tell you what we didn’t do. We didn’t agree to suspend the Constitution. We didn’t agree to stop asking questions or demanding answers. Some of us are sick and tired of people who call free speech treason. Where I come from that’s a dictatorship, not a democracy.

04/12/2007

“Unless we could impeach Cheney at the same time, the best argument against impeaching Bush is ‘President Cheney’.”

— Lord Slepnir, on Slashdot

04/11/2007

Last week I was privileged and honored to receive a personal letter from Senator John McCain, in which he announced his candidacy for President. Of course he rambled on about his service in the armed forces and his long history in the Senate, dropping a few names here and there to impress me.

But then things got a little weird. The rest of his letter was a survey in which he asks penetrating questions about domestic and international policy. He wants to know how I, a common American citizen, feel about the pressing issues facing our country today. Although I don’t have a problem with that in principle, some of the questions were surprising.

Make the U.S. tax code fairer and simpler.
( ) I agree
( ) I disagree
( ) I have no opinion

Umm, what? Who on earth would say “I disagree”? Is there someone out there who thinks the tax code should be more complicated and more unfair? What kind of question is that?

Aggressively rein-in government spending.
( ) I agree
( ) I disagree
( ) I have no opinion

Again, what kind of boneheaded question is he asking here? “No, John, I think the government should keep spending money like it’s going out of style, funding every crazy pork-barrel project they can think of!”

Reduce federal deficit.
( ) I agree
( ) I disagree
( ) I have no opinion

Hmm. Let me think about that, John. No, I disagree– I think we should increase the federal deficit, because we all know the positive results that brings.

Continue to provide American troops with state-of-the-art weapons.
( ) I agree
( ) I disagree
( ) I have no opinion

John, I think we should give our troops muskets. Forget this body armor crap, too. Davy Crockett coonskin caps were good enough at the Alamo; they’re sure good enough for the troops in the Middle East today.

I used to actually respect McCain. That all changed a few years ago when it became clear he was one of Bush’s yes-men, and idiotic stunts like this survey only reinforce my opinion that he’s either

( ) a bonehead
( ) unable to form his own opinions, thus asking us to form it for him
( ) both

I shudder to think that someone like him may actually become President some day.

04/08/2007

“There’s always somebody who is paid too much, and taxed too little – and it’s always somebody else.”

— Cullen Hightower

(Particularly apropos as Tax Day approaches and I need to scrape together the money I need to pay the IRS. It seems like I pay them every year, sigh.)