(no subject)

[from gibsonfeed, William Gibson's blog, which has re-emerged after a Hiatus shortly after Pattern Recognition was published]

http://www.williamgibsonbooks.com/blog/2004_10_01_archive.asp#109876689887217489

The amount of high explosive now revealed to have gone missing from a single site in Iraq could produce the equivalent of 4000 blasts on the scale of the explosion that destroyed the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City.

Anyone with a few Mercedes trunks full of that stuff is definitely ready for Halloween.

But you really weren't supposed to know that until after the election, because the invasion of Iraq has only made Americans safer.

This is exactly the right time to re-read Naomi Klein, reporting from Baghdad.

(no subject)

[spurred by something thewronghands shared vis-a-vis electoral insight]

For folks working on either campaign, there is only one rule: Get 270 Electoral College votes. That's it. Anything and everything else is secondary - vote-trashing, social engineering, the lovely smear campaigns polluting our broadcast media, what have you. When it's win-at-all-costs, because the enemy (or, if we're hell-bent on remaining civil, "opponent") will stop at nothing to do so, I look at my initial reaction to this state of affairs, and I have to wonder.

When something is -that- fucked up in our electronic lives (or maybe just mine), it's time to burn what you absolutely can't live without to CD, then nuke and pave. Start from a clean environment so that all the fragmented folderol, parasitic bullshit, and disk kipple that accumulates is blown away and you can start over.

It's this sort of thinking that makes me suggest taking the Declaration of Independence and the original Constitution on tour, along with some of the spiffiest things from the Smithsonian, then make sure every elected federal official, member of Congress, and all nine justices are sitting, and make a big glass parking lot on the Potomac. Even when I lived in Arlington, the idea had a lot of appeal.

*sigh*

Being the one to play by the rules doesn't mean that when one's opponent is an asshat doesn't mean I don't want to invoke the ounce-of-lead solution for their misdeeds.

(no subject)

Monday, the Bush administration downplayed the threat posed by the missing explosives and tried to shift the responsibility for safeguarding them to the Iraqi military. White House spokesman Scott McClellan pointed to the "more than 243,000 [tons of] munitions" already destroyed by U.S. forces. "The sites now are really ... the responsibility of the Iraqi forces," he added.

What's left unstated here is the fact that the U.S. is supposed to have trained / be training the Iraquis. Or didn't you remember that little factoid, Mr. McClellan? It's part of those billions and billions of US citizens' tax dollars you're not spending at home, or putting towards balancing the budget, remember?

Out. Out of my (oval) office! I don't want to clean up all your lying, misleading detritus when we take the oath in January '09.

Asshats, begone!

What, you may ask, is "Office Halloween Angst"?

A couple weeks ago the office "Fun Committee" came to angel_renewed and I, because we're the overt freaks with can-do moxie, and asked us for ideas for a haunted house to be set up in part of the office.  Okay, sure, we kicked some out.  "Oh, wait, we can't use a lot of plywood."  we kick out other ideas.  all of which will have to be built Thursday after-hours.  volunteers may or may not show up, and if they do, may or may not be worth their weight in ziplock bags full of donkey snot. (sunday afternoon was five-plus hours of doing up wizard of oz decorations for our part of the office. . . only to learn, this morning, that there won't -be- an inter-departmental decorating contest. . . thanks, knowing that ahead of time would have been great).

the fun committee and the other half of our "team" (two sub-teams in what's ostensibly "our group" - the doers are me, sil, and shaky, the useless dead weight on our team is cat, and there are five pieces of deadweight comprising the quality team, who would be utterly without redeeming values if two or three of them weren't fun to look at) have thus far proven to be either incompetent, unresponsive, or unable to find a clue when it's stapled to their eyebrows.

so, at this point, i'm willing to get slapped with the "not a team player" label by either a) going -completely- type A when it comes time to get things done and be very direct about telling people to either do what i tell them or get the fuck out of my way so i can get it done, or b) letting the dead weights try to do it without me, and if it sucks, that's not my fucking fault. *sigh*

hopefully this weekend, things will improve.  still have the sore hammys, and that's only gonna get worse tomorrow, because i'm taking delivery of 3300 lb worth of pavers so i can have a front walkway and pseudo-driveway.  pix will be posted in the usual location.