Month: September 2012

First checkpoint in the “Why Lie? I just want an Xbox” pledge drive reacheed!

Well, I guess that it all now starts becoming a question of trade-offs.






Kinect/no Kinect? Do I get the 250 GB before the Kinect, or can I squeak by on 4 GB? What accessories should I be buying? Heck, what GAMES should I be buying? …And, of course: thank you, for everybody who has participated, or is planning to. It means a lot.

#rsrh State Department prepares for the Lebanese Embassy being overrun.

That’s the semantic translation of this sentence: “Diplomats at the U.S. Embassy in Beirut have started to destroy classified material as a security precaution amid anti-American protests in Lebanon and elsewhere in the Middle East and North Africa.”  You always want to destroy the paperwork ahead of time; when the mob actually shows up at your door with torches and various hand weapons it’s usually too late.  And while sensible regimes always send along agents to make sure that embassy staff (well, the foreigners, at least) make it out alive*, they’re also there to make sure that as little paperwork as possible gets destroyed.  But you also don’t want to do it too early, either.  Or at all, if you can help it.

Apparently, they decided not to take the chance**.

But don’t worry! The President is on the case!

…sort of. Look, at least he didn’t move too far from where the White House staff parked him, OK? That’s… progress, if you squint and look at it right.

Moe Lane

*Don’t let this administration’s apparent disinterest in the murder of our Ambassador to Libya fool you; that was a legitimately big deal, and there eventually will be a proportionate response to it.

**By the way: just because something is ‘routine’ doesn’t mean that it’s not significant.  It’s actually routine to destroy the documents when you think that you’re about to lose control of your diplomatic station.

…You know, I’m just going to take the rest of the morning off. [UPDATED]

Maybe I’ll be in a better mood after lunch. Everybody, take a break. Smoke ’em if you got ’em, and don’t live in an urban area where’ll you hunted down by the cops. Hit the freaking tip jar, so I can take the blessed thing down.

[UPDATE]: Alternatively, I could just go to RedState and reap a deadly harvest among the trolls; that seems to have perked me right up. Hit the freaking tip jar anyway; this is one of my weirder pledge drives.





#rsrh Carter 2.O and the high price of gas.

Via AoSHQ (and Zero Hedge) comes an alarming chart for your day:

Now it’s important to look at what that graph is saying: it’s saying that gas prices have never been higher for the second week of September. This is kind of important because of the following graph, which shows overall gas prices over time for the last five years:

…or perhaps we should look at prices over the last eight years.

As you can see from the first graph, gas prices took a sudden tumble in the fall of 2008, as part of the general meltdown of the economy that was taking place then.  As you can see from the second graph, prior to that point we were seeing steadily-increasing prices for gasoline; gas prices afterwards took about three years to recover.  As of today, we’re more or less back to the peak prices of the summer of 2008.

There’s just one small problem: the economy hasn’t recovered.  When it comes to gas prices, we are in the bizarre scenario where the economy is in stagnation, but the price of a vitally necessary commodity is showing severe inflation over time.  If only there was, you know, a word or something to cover this sort of situation*…

Moe Lane

*Yes, I believe that I have used this particular formulation before.  Which just shows that possibly the Democrats should start listening to me.

#rsrh Weak Horse Watch: Syria/Lebanon.

Marvelous.

Missiles fired by Syrian warplanes hit Lebanese territory Monday in one of the most serious cross-border violations since Syria’s crisis began 18 months ago, security officials in Beirut and Lebanese state media said.

The officials, speaking on condition of anonymity in line with regulations, said four missiles fired by two Syrian jets hit a rugged and remote area on the edge of the Lebanese border town of Arsal. There were no immediate reports of casualties.

Hey, remember that Cedar Revolution thing that happened, back during the Bush administration? Yeah, well, the Syrian regime would like the Lebanese government to forget that it ever happened, too.

Via:

Moe Lane

Well, we cannot PROVE that Obama was fiddling as Camp Bastion burned. :pause: I GUESS.

So, last Friday 15 Taliban fighters managed to successfully [conduct] a raid where they traded 15 fighters for 2 dead US Marines, moderate to severe damage to the British-run Camp Bastion’s facilities… and 6 of our Harrier jump jets destroyed/2 damaged, which last is going to have severe consequences on our ability to conduct and support military operations in Afghanistan.  Despite the best efforts of Wired to suggest otherwise (H/T: AosHQ) this was NOT due to any stupid Youtube video.  I don’t care what the movies tell you, successful commando raids of this level  of sophistication and planning (the attackers wore American uniforms, had clear objectives, and met them) do not get thrown together and launched because a bunch of people without reliable electricity are upset about an online movie clip.  In short, last weekend we got an honest-to-God, no-fooling black eye that will eventually get more NATO troops dead.  Oh, and almost forgot!  Prince Harry is serving at Camp Bastion right now! So we almost had that to worry about. Continue reading Well, we cannot PROVE that Obama was fiddling as Camp Bastion burned. :pause: I GUESS.