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mbranesf
Christopher/ M-Brane SF

May 2017

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Family Research Council at it again

May. 26th, 2010 08:13 pm
mbranesf: (Default)
I won't go on at length about this one. You can, if you really want to, read the details here at TPM . The gist of it is that the Family Research Council claims that their "research" has proven that the repeal of the dumbassed Don't-Ask-Don't-Tell law for the US military will ipso facto result in a lot of gay-perpetrated rapes of innocent str8 servicemen, blah, blah, blah-blah, blah. Also, if you dig pain, like to puke, and you crave even more exposure to sociopathic fucknuttedness, over on the right hand side of the TPM page is a link to another article about one of these dickbags claiming that Hitler and his whole Holocaust operation was a gay project.

The only reason I mention the whole dumbassity here at all is that I don't think I have yet bothered to highlight the Family Research Council in particular as one of the most bugfuck, batshit, looney-tunes, froot-looped boatload of gibbering morons that ever blighted this vale of tears. Even in a land stacked to the rafters with psychotic bigotry, they manage to stand out from the heap of worn-out discarded old shit, like a sleet of bat guano overlaying an attic full of someone's redneck grandpa's Klan memorabilia. To borrow some verbiage from the venerable Harlan Ellison, "I do not think I demean them much by perceiving them as creeps, meatheads, clods, fruitcakes, nincompoops, amoeba-brains, yoyos, yipyops, kadodies and clodhoppers."

In case you didn't bother to click over to the TPM article and decided to just take my word for it, I am copying here the picture that they used of one Peter Sprigg, "Senior Fellow for Policy Studies" at the Family Research Council. Don't let the haircut fool you: in fact, it's a dead giveaway. Peter Sprigg is almost certainly a bitter closeted homosexual. They all look and act more or less like this when they get into these kinds of jobs where they can work out their personal pain by amping up mouth-frothing insanity against their own kind. Remember this image. If you don't see Mr. Sprigg himself, you will see someone exactly like him someday and you will know the truth.

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What a relief! Russia cancels missiles in Kaliningrad! That was a close one!

Sep. 18th, 2009 08:22 pm
mbranesf: (Default)
Whenever I hear a news report about something Senator John McCain says, I generally have two reactions: 1) I feel even more glad than ever that he was not elected President last year; 2) I wonder exactly when it was that he "jumped the shark." I had once considered him to be pretty respectable as Republicans go, back when I considered the respectable Republican to still be an extant species (more on that in some future post). Did he lose it when he decided to run for President? While I can't really stomach watching GOP Presidential primary fights, I did notice how skillfully he brushed aside his main challengers, Douche Mitt Romney and Nutbag Mike Huckabee. But sometime after that, he seemed to just lose his mind and is now basically embarrassing himself every time he speaks publicly about anything.  Take for example his complaints just today about the Obama administration bagging that silly Bush plan to deploy a missile defense system in the Czech Republic and Poland.


I won't quote the whole thing, but it was a tiring little fusspot of a statement about "security" and "threats" and how if we don't do that thing with the missiles, then we will be crapping on our very important allies...Poland and the Czech Republic. Look, I have nothing against those countries and would love to one day visit both of them, BUT who the hell cares what Poland and the Czech Republic have to say about how the US chooses to deploy its expensive war toys? What are they gonna do? Break off diplomatic relations with us? Even within those countries, it sounds as if it is only their right-wing elements who are mad about it anyway. Also, Poland and the Czech Republic and the rest of those Eastern European ex-Soviet vassal states really don't have a foreign policy or military security future apart from the European Union and NATO anyway. Take Poland, for example. For a couple of centuries, its geopolitical role on Earth was to be a big buffer zone between Russia and Western Europe. Well, those days are over. Now it's part of NATO and the EU, and where and how the US places its missile defenses has got fuck-all to do with what Poland's future will be like.

I am not even going to get started in any detail on the whole preposterous premise of the missile defense plan. But the short version of it is: Iran may one day attack Europe with long range missiles (hmmm...riiiight, cuz that makes sense) so the way to deal with it is to erect an untested, hitherto unbuilt anti-missile system that is as much science fiction as anything right now. Oh and it won't be ready for years and years anyway, even if we do want to go ahead with it. And, for the love of god, the system needs to be housed in Poland and the Czech Republic...for some reason. 

This is the kind of crap that McCain goes on record blasting the Prez about. Of course he's not the only one. I think every GOP lawmaker has had his say on it today. Obviously they have all concluded that they need to oppose Obama no matter what, even though the Pentagon and their whole beloved military-industrial complex seems to think the new plan is better than the old one. Personally, I think the new plan is a big waste of time and money, too, but I have long since quite dreaming that we will ever stop doing dumbass crap like that. And it sounds like the new plan wastes quite a bit less money and might actually WORK should the GOP's  beloved wet dreams of an Iranian missile attack ever actually come to pass.

But whatever anyone thinks of the merits of these missile defense plans, there has been one piece of undeniably good news resulting from Obama's decision to shelve the Bush plan: Russia has backed down from its dire threats to place its own new defensive missile batteries in the Kaliningrad Oblast, a Russian exclave which used to be a chunk of German East Prussia and is now sandwiched between Poland and Lithuania.  No doubt these new Russian missiles, had they been deployed, would have ratcheted up tensions in the critical Polish-Lithuanian-Russian border area to such a degree that John McCain himself might need to have been sent over there personally to do some righteous and crotchety fist-shaking!



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Military affairs: Logistics (Hot!)

Aug. 3rd, 2009 09:29 pm
mbranesf: (Default)
 Of all the public radio programming that I heard today that related to military matters, I bet you could not even begin to guess which story impressed me the most. You might think, because of my social consciousness, that I'd be quite impressed with all the coverage of the new GI Bill for post 9/11 service personnel. While that is most impressive and I am delighted, that wouldn't be the answer today.  Was it the retired army colonel on Talk of the Nation discussing how the Pentagon ought to rescind the silly no-alcohol general order for Iraq and Afghanistan and restore the timed-honored custom of the beer ration? That would be a bell-ringer for a beer-lover like me on any other day of the week, but even that was not today's winner.

Today on Here and Now, a general was interviewed, and not just any general, but Major General Kenneth Dowd, the one in charge of--get this--the logistics of the US withdrawal from Iraq. Not just the concept of getting the eff outta there, but the actual planning and implementation of moving the shit: literally how to get not just the soldiers and Marines but all their stuff out of there, and what to do with stuff that they are not taking with them, and how to decide what that stuff is and what happens to it.  This may be some kind of signpost of my extreme geekiness, but I have always thought that logistics is the single sexiest element of military operations. I myself never served in the military and all my knowledge of it is based on things I've heard from people who have served, things I've listened to on the radio, books that I have read and shows that I have seen on the Pentagon Channel. But, as a total civilian, I am drawn again and again to the supply chain elements and the moving of stuff from where it is to where it needs to go. This may be a result of my background in event planning, catering, and restaurant management, which is all about supplies and equipment and personnel and their timely movement.  I put a link at the start of the this paragraph from which you can listen to the interview or read a transcript of it. I found it totally fascinating and I felt a real flash of jealousy for a moment that this was not my job! (by the way, the transcript is only a small portion of the total interview).

It so happens that my novel-in-progress, Shame, is to a large extent a work of military science fiction and one of its major characters is the logistics officer for his people's operation...and he happens to have a culinary background as well.  I should put up a sample chapter or two from that thing one of these days--it might motivate me to finally, blessedly finish the  remainder of Draft One if I have actually let people see any of it.
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