freedom: it just put your ass in a biometric database
I don’t know if I’ve ever loved a news story the way that I love this one from USA Today. See, the U.S. military needs to identify insurgents in Afghanistan, so it’s using retina scanners and fingerprint scanners to build a database encompassing “all Afghan males of fighting age.” Then they lift fingerprints from a [...]
max boot, shameless lying asshole
“Above all, the terrible fear of Saddam and his secret police, of the knock in the night, has been lifted. Numerous radio and TV shows, newspapers and magazines air a variety of viewpoints, and politicians from a multiplicity of parties compete in free and fair elections.” — Max Boot, Winning the Peace in Iraq, the [...]
the empire has a glitch
I left one thing out of my post on Todd Purdum’s empire worship, yesterday: the main point. I got distracted by the glorious awfulness of Purdum’s ponderous paragraphs, and lost track of the indescribable blindness that he shares with the subjects of his worshipful journalism.
Purdum argues that Washington is “broken,” that procedural disfunction prevents the [...]
the michael o’hanlon machine is making its favorite sound, again
There’s nothing on earth quite like a Michael O’Fuckinghanlon. In the weekend edition of the Wall Street Journal, he says that — go ahead, try to guess — it’s too early to judge the success of our war in Afghanistan, and the next few months will be fucking critical.
Fuck. You. Asshole. Why, why, why, do [...]
is that glass of blood half empty, or half full?
If we leave Afghanistan, this will happen to the women there!
And, uh, don’t tell anyone, but if we stay…
retail manager resigns after admitting that stores try to make money
The president of Germany resigned in shame after saying, in a speech delivered in Afghanistan, that his country was engaged in military action there in the service of its national economic interests.
It’s a scandal to openly say things that are merely and prosaically true in the very most obvious sense. The pageantry of the state [...]