If you were hoping that the ever deteriorating situation in Afghanistan might lead U.S. military and civilian leaders to just declare victory and go home, then I’ve got a spot of bad news for you. It comes in the form of a front page New York Times headline that reads: U.S. Discovers Vast Riches of Minerals in Afghanistan.

These are the opening paragraphs of the story in question:

WASHINGTON — The United States has discovered nearly $1 trillion in untapped mineral deposits in Afghanistan, far beyond any previously known reserves and enough to fundamentally alter the Afghan economy and perhaps the Afghan war itself, according to senior American government officials.

The previously unknown deposits — including huge veins of iron, copper, cobalt, gold and critical industrial metals like lithium — are so big and include so many minerals that are essential to modern industry that Afghanistan could eventually be transformed into one of the most important mining centers in the world, the United States officials believe.

An internal Pentagon memo, for example, states that Afghanistan could become the “Saudi Arabia of lithium,” a key raw material in the manufacture of batteries for laptops and Blackberries.

I hate to be the one to say it, but… well, let’s face it: we’re never leaving, now.

(Edit: OK, now that I’ve had a few moments for the story to sink in, I’ve got to ask the question: why the fuck were we prospecting in the first place? Does the U.S. military just make it a habit to travel around with a troupe of oil and minerals industry geologists wherever they happen to invade?)

You saw the Dale Peterson, douchebag of the day ad, right here on Stinque. Well, here’s the only possible response to such nonsense… a brilliant parody:

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Now this Dale Peterson I’d vote for!

God bless Pat Buchanan. He makes our jobs so much easier. You see, we’ve all known that if you scratch beneath the surface of your typical hysterical teabagger you get an angry white man or woman who’s furious that the browns tricked a bunch of young, white college kids into getting one of their own elected president.

But most of these teabaggers also know that the horrible injustice of “political correctness” means they can’t actually wear their racism on their sleeve and so they go to extraordinary measures to disguise their bigotry. Helps if you’ve got a Jewish niece to hide behind, for instance (Too bad the internets caught you smearing your niece as a “little jewess” and mocking her batmitzvah.)

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It might take you a couple of reads before you realize what precisely it is that, Thomas Fuller, a New York Times reporter is describing in this paragraph:

A renegade Thai general was shot in Bangkok on Thursday as the military prepared to encircle the barricaded encampment of antigovernment protesters.

The general, Khattiya Sawatdiphol, 58, was struck in the head by a bullet during an interview with this reporter about 7 p.m. on the street in central Bangkok, near a park occupied by his hard-line followers. This reporter, who was facing the general and about two feet away, heard a loud bang not unlike a firecracker. The general fell to the ground, with his eyes wide open, and protesters took his apparently lifeless body to the hospital, screaming out his nickname.

You’d be hard pressed to find a better example of the stilted conventions of  hyper-neutral, impersonal, distanced, journalistic diction than this paragraph whose language goes a long way in obscuring the fact that what this reporter is talking about is SOME DUDE’S… FUCKIN’… HEAD EXPLODING TWO FUCKING FEET AWAY FROM ME WHILE I WAS FUCKING STANDING THERE JUST TALKING TO HIM!!!! …JESUS, FUCK, JEEEEEESUS FUCK!

You gotta wonder how many Vodka Martinis it took before Fuller was able to put pen to paper and carve out that unimpeachably grammatical,  perfectly emotionless paragraph.

So I’m browsing through The Maine GOP Party Platform/Teabagger Manifesto, (PDF here)when I come across this gem:

b. Seal the border and protect US citizens along the border and everywhere, as is the prime directive of the Federal Government.

So wait… sealing the border is the “prime directive” of the Federal Government? Says who, exactly? And what’s this “prime directive” stuff anyway? As always, Wikipedia can help:

In the fictional universe of Star Trek, the Prime Directive, Starfleet’s General Order #1, is the most prominent guiding principle of the United Federation of Planets. The Prime Directive dictates that there can be no interference with the internal development of pre-warp civilizations, consistent with the historical real world concept of Westphalian sovereignty. It has special implications, however, for civilizations that have not yet developed the technology for interstellar spaceflight (“pre-warp”), since no primitive culture can be given or exposed to any information regarding advanced technology or the existence of extraplanetary civilizations, lest this exposure alter the natural development of the civilization. Although this was the only application stated by Captain Kirk in “The Return of the Archons”, by the 24th Century, it had been indicated to include purposeful efforts to improve or change in any way the natural course of such a society, even if that change is well-intentioned and kept completely secret.

Oh God, has it really come to this? The GOP has been overrun by theocrats, gun nuts, racists and pimply Science Fiction obsessed losers.

ith apologies to Monty Python, I’d like for you to try a thought experiment. Imagine being a fly on the wall at a gathering of Tea Party intelligentsia. Now, imagine leaving that empty room and attaching yourself to a wall in an adjacent quarters that is playing host to a gathering of hysterical, conspiracy obsessed Tea Party organizers planning their next rabble rousing rally. Amid the fiery rhetoric and lunatic invective, the leader stands up and demands “What has Obama ever done for America?”

Then, unexpectedly, at the back of the room a solitary individual who didn’t get the memo about our president being the Antichrist, timidly responds by producing the following three charts. Read more »

Hubris is one thing, but this is something altogether different… hubris, coupled with arrogance and an unbelievable contempt for the great unwashed masses that can’t possibly understand the things you do and so must be kept in the dark (lest they do themselves harm, you understand).

In 2004 a debate raged inside the Federal Reserve as to whether the U.S. was entering a dangerous housing bubble. Alan Greenspan’s response? Such discussions had to be suppressed. No word of these concerns should leave the ivory confines of the Federal Reserve. The natives, you see, just wouldn’t understand…

We run the risk, by laying out the pros and cons of a particular argument, of inducing people to join in on the debate, and in this regard it is possible to lose control of a process that only we fully understand.

Of course, in retrospect, the most absurd aspect thing about this quote is that Greenspan was worried he might “lose control” of something as irrationally driven and wildly out-of-control as an economic bubble. Was his “understanding” really any different from that of a witch doctor ordering virgins to be thrown into the mouth of a volcano, worried that if he should offend the gods by not doing so, the mountain will erupt?