Idiocy in action

U.S. to require passports for nearly all

By BEVERLEY LUMPKIN, Associated Press Writer 1 hour, 18 minutes ago

WASHINGTON - Nearly all air travelers entering the U.S. will be required to show passports beginning Jan. 23, including returning Americans and people from Canada and other nations in the Western Hemisphere.

Michael Chertoff in an interview with The Associated Press. The Homeland Security Department plans to announce the change on Wednesday.

Until now, the department had not set a specific date for instituting the passport requirement for air travelers, though the start had been expected to be around the beginning of the year. Setting the date on Jan. 23 pushes the start past the holiday season.

The requirement marks a change for Americans, Canadians, Bermudians and some Mexicans.

Currently, U.S. citizens returning from other countries in the hemisphere are not required to present passports but must show other proof of citizenship such as driver's licenses or birth certificates.

Visitors from most countries in the hemisphere are required to show passports. However, people from Canada, Bermuda — and those from Mexico who enter the U.S. frequently and have special border-crossing cards — have been allowed to use other forms of identification, including driver's licenses.

"Right now, there are 8,000 different state and local entities in the U.S. issuing birth certificates and driver's licenses," Chertoff said. Having to distinguish phony from real in so many different documents "puts an enormous burden on our Customs and Border inspectors," he said.

In a few cases, other documents still may be used for air entry into the U.S. by some frequent travelers between the U.S. and Canada, members of the American military on official business and some U.S. merchant mariners.

Under a separate program, Homeland Security plans to require all travelers, including Americans, entering the U.S. by land or sea to show a passport or an alternative security identification card starting as early as January 2008.

Here's the problem.

Most Americans never get a passport. Many, I would say most, who travel overseas, do so on a US military ID, which is accepted as a passport for the military and their dependents. It is believed that only one out of six Americans have a passport.

Most other Americans travel on their drivers licenses and birth certificates. The imposition of the cost and need for a passport, which is over $100, is going to be challenged, because it is a clusterfuck waiting to happen.

Congress is going to come under pressure to end this requirement, quickly. Someone sat in an office and thought this up without realizing how uncommon a passport is among Americans.

Funny celebrity news

Almost immediately after we heard Britney Spears was finally going to ditch her leach of a husband Kevin Federline, we heard of the now famous sex tape.

Federline has already been approached by a porn mogul in the U.S. to buy the tape, but choose to pass on the deal.

Now Britney Spears says she may just “give away’ a copy of the sex tape the couple made on their honeymoon two years ago.
.....................'

“Brit figures she’ll beat that sucker to the punch, just like she did by giving away pictures of Jayden James,” said Spears family friend Nyla Price, 55, the owner of Nyla’s Burger Basket.

“Half of nuthin’ is nuthin’, and that’s what her lying skunk of a husband will get if she gives that video away before he can find some sleazeball to buy it.”

Federline has been saying the sex tape is four hours long, however, Price says the tape is closer to forty-five minutes.

Excellent.

When Spears met the new Vanilla Ice she was banging a married guy. But once she realized that she had a bum of a husband, months after the world realized same, her gambit to stop the freeloader by releasing a sex tape is both clever and funny. Like it would hurt her career. It would be a boon, look what it did for Pam Anderson.

Well, the bum has one pay day, a New Year's Day asskicking by John Cena of the WWE. live on RAW. Maybe his fake wigger ass might find a new career, punching bag.

The College Assholes strike again

BU College Republicans rally on Comm
Ave.

BU group offers white scholarship
Award meant to protest race-based scholarships

Clarissa Bottesini

Looking to draw attention to what they call the "worst form of bigotry confronting America today," Boston University's College Republicans are circulating an application for a "Caucasian Achievement and Recognition Scholarship" that requires applicants be at least 25 percent Caucasian.

"Did we do this to give a scholarship to white kids? Of course not," the scholarship reads. "Did we do it to trigger a discussion on what we believe to be the morally wrong practice of basing decisions in our schools and our jobs on racial preferences rather than merit? Absolutely."

The scholarship, which is privately funded by the BUCR without the support of the university, is meant to raise awareness, group members say. BUCR member argue that racial preferences are a form of "bigotry." The group has a similar view on affirmative action.

The application for the $250 scholarship, due Nov. 30, requires applicants be full-time BU undergraduate students and one-fourth Caucasian and maintain at least a 3.2 cumulative GPA. Applicants must submit two essays, one describing the applicant's ancestry and one describing "what it means to you to be a Caucasian-American today."

BUCR President Joe Mroszczyk said he spoke to Dean of Students Kenneth Elmore before publicly releasing the scholarship to make sure it would be legal. Mroszczyk said BUCR members also talked to others beforehand, some of whom were initially "agitated or upset" but understood the point after members explained themselves, he said.

Let's see, white surburan kids going to one of the most expensive private universities in the US feel victimized.

They should stop in the library and look at some yearbooks. See how many non-white faces are there from before 1980.

What the hell is wrong with the College Assholes? Every stunt they come up with is racist to an extreme level. If it isn't hunting Mexicans, it's making fun of blacks. I mean, most colleges don't have a Klan chapter, but they have a College Assholes chapter.

They repeatedly define the GOP as the White party with their actions and no one calls them on it.

The College Assholes are killing the GOP.

So at least something good is coming from this.

The draft gambit

Keep up, private snowball


Charlie Rangel's call for a draft has had people flipping out. Not that even his own constituents are for conscription, they are emphatically are not.

But there is one reason to let him bring his legislation up

Hearings.

For three years, we have been lied to about recriuting, stop-loss and basically every personnel issue with the armed forces.

Once Rangel is allowed to get people under oath on the Hill, we could get some very interesting answers, like what recruiters do to fill their quotas, why gays are still being expelled from the military, the abuse of IRR and stop loss.

Oh, the questions which would flow from a hearing on the draft would be amusing and place any talk of a longer stay in Iraq on the table.

The Pentagon would swear everything is fine, but then we get the ex-recruiters, the academic experts. Oh, it would be a cavalcade of fun calling the Pentagon on their bullshit.

What happened in 2003 is that the GOP brought the bill to a vote without hearings. Hearings changes the whole game. The testimony would be out in the open and the bullshit would stop. Rangel and the Congress would have the evidence of the obvious, as long as the war in Iraq continues, recruiting will be a problem.

Oh yeah

The Bilge Bucket

What sucks worse, the CBS Evening News with Katie Couric or Nightline?

The surge

U.S. Considers Large, Temporary Troop Increase in Iraq

By DAVID S. CLOUD
Published: November 21, 2006

WASHINGTON, Nov. 20 — Pentagon officials conducting a review of Iraq strategy are considering a substantial but temporary increase in American troop levels and the addition of several thousand more trainers to work with Iraqi forces, a senior Defense Department official said Monday.

The idea, dubbed the “surge option” by some officials, would involve increasing American forces by 20,000 troops or more for several months in the hope of improving security, especially in Baghdad. That would mark a sharp rise over the current baseline of 144,000 troops.

But some officials and senior military officers are arguing against the idea, saying that it could undercut a sense of urgency for Iraqi units to take on a greater role in fighting the insurgency and preventing sectarian attacks. Gen. John P. Abizaid, the head of the United States Central Command, told Congress last week that the military was stretched so thin that such an increase could not be sustained over the long term.

“There are people who believe that a short-term surge would have a beneficial impact, but there isn’t universal agreement on that yet,” said the senior official, who said that President Bush was scheduled to be briefed in the next several weeks on the developing options, which were first reported Monday in The Washington Post.

There is far more consensus within the Pentagon on the need to increase the number of American trainers, more than 3,000 of whom are working with Iraqi Army, police and border units. General Abizaid endorsed that idea in general terms in testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee last week.

I think the day is coming when an Iraqi unit kills or captures their American trainers.

This show has science in it?

Left, Bettman/Corbis; Heidi Schumann for The New York Times

The TV show “Mythbusters” made models of the
Hindenburg to see what role its skin had in the
disaster, left. Jamie Hyneman, a host, said he and
the team “don’t have any pretense of teaching science.”

The Best Science Show on Television?
By JOHN SCHWARTZ
Published: November 21, 2006

ALAMEDA, Calif. — “This is where we blow stuff up.”

Jamie Hyneman — who, to be honest, did not actually use the word “stuff” — stood in front of a two-story, blast-resistant ruin of a building at the back of the former Alameda Point Naval Air Station.

Mr. Hyneman and his colleague, Adam Savage, are the hosts of “Mythbusters” on the Discovery Channel. It may be the best science program on television, in no small part because it does not purport to be a science program at all. What “Mythbusters” is best known for, to paraphrase Mr. Hyneman, is blowing stuff up. And banging stuff together. And setting stuff on fire. The two men do it for fun and ratings, of course. But in a subtle and goofily educational way, they commit mayhem for science’s sake.

As the name implies, the program tests what the creators call myths, hypotheses taken from folklore, history, movies, the Internet and urban legends. Can a skunk’s smell can be neutralized with tomato juice? Did the Confederacy come up with a two-stage rocket that could strike Washington from Richmond, Va.? Can a sunken ship be raised with Ping-Pong balls? Could a car stereo be so loud that it would blow out the windows?

Mr. Hyneman and Mr. Savage, who produce Hollywood special effects and gadgets for a living, come up with ways to challenge each thesis and build experiments with a small crew. If fire and explosions or, say, rotting pig carcasses happen to be involved, well, that’s entertainment.

What they came here to do on a clear and crisp October morning, with San Francisco posing magnificently across the bay, was set the Hindenburg on fire. Three Hindenburgs, actually, to address a debate over what actually doomed the hydrogen-filled zeppelin on May 6, 1937, in Lakehurst, N.J. Hydrogen, of course, is highly flammable and was the obvious culprit in the disaster.

But a counterargument had arisen that the doping paint used to toughen the craft’s skin of fabric contained aluminum powder and other materials that combined to resemble an explosive called thermite. That, the theory goes, made the fabric as combustible as rocket fuel.

To test the theory, the “Mythbusters” crew built three 1/50-scale models over three days. Two had re-creations of the skin on the original craft, and a third — well, we’ll get to that one.

The three members of the “build team,” Tory Belleci, Kari Byron and Grant Imahara, were not on the set the day of the shoot, but a small video team was. Cameras captured the action from several angles. Mr. Savage had also placed one camera on the ground, facing up toward the mini-blimp, with tiny models of people placed nearby to mimic the newsreel scenes.

It was time to make a disaster happen. Mr. Hyneman stood by an open door of the building to manipulate a long pole with a gas torch that he used to ignite the mini-zeppelin, which was more than 10 feet long, hanging inside. Mr. Savage pinballed between peeking through the door and sitting under a canopy outside watching video monitors.

The first blimp, not filled with hydrogen, burned slowly at its tail end for a minute and a half and then foomph! Fire raced along its length in just a few seconds. Mr. Savage shouted, “Oh, my God, look how fast it’s going!”

“Say it again,” the sound man said, moving in closer.

“Oh, my God, look how fast it’s going through the top!” Mr. Savage exclaimed again. And then, as if forgetting that the camera was still rolling, added softly, “It’s so beautiful.”

Mythbusters is one of my favorite TV shows. Mostly because it's clever. And they blow things up and shoot them.

Seriously, cable allows for more diverse shows which don't follow the NOVA model of hour long documentaries.

There are other clever shows, like How Things Are Made, Intervention and Dirty Jobs Work.

The shift to more creative programs on cable started with a UK series on ancient battles which used the Total War computer program to depict the battles. Military Channel, part of Discovery, has a new series, 20th Century Battles, which uses massive, but simple, computer animation.

What these shows do is make the difficulr easier to understand. You may not get the physics of ballistics, but when a bullet breaks up on hitting water, you get that.