It's The Muppets! - Getting Real

It's The Muppets! - Getting Real

If there's one thing that is pure American... right before we say goodbye to the fourth of July celebrations, I think it's perfect time to stop and look at some really neat things. Like Muppet outtakes.



If that doesn't cheer you up, I don't know what will.

H20 and You

H20 and You

It being the weekend directly after 4th of July - one in which it took place during a Wednesday, thus creating an island in itself not being able to be attached to any specific weekend, chances are you're going to be drinking copious amounts of alcohol.

Then again, you probably do this regularly in an attempt to escape your mundane 9 to 5 job.

But just in case you're new to this sort of high level alcohol induced world of liquor consumption, let me give you one piece of advice -- DRINK PLENTY OF WATER.

In fact, it's good to note how much water you should be drinking when you're drinking. Or more to the point, the science in how alcohol drinking effects your body. 90 seconds after your first sip, the alcohol hit your brain. At that point it effected your Neurotransmitters - thus making you more social. At the same time the chemical Vasopressin, which would normally send a signal to your kidney's telling them how much water to take from your blood. But since you've been drinking, alcohol turns this chemical off. At which point your kidney's don't know where to channel your water and just send it on down to your bladder.

Here's where the magic starts. For every one drink you have, you pee out four times as much than you consumed. Your dehydrated liver, in an effort to filter out the poisons, only has your brain to turn to for water, in doing so, your brain shrinks just a little and this shrinking pulls on the membrane -- Thus why you get hangovers.

In all, the alcohol you drink is quickly absorbed through your stomach and small intestine. This happens faster if your stomach is empty, so having it filled with some food to absorb some of it first is always a good thing. Women are less efficient at breaking down alcohol prior to it hitting the bloodstream and is probably why women get tipsy faster.

Then there's how much you're sweating out as well to factor in. Consuming alcohol on a hot day is pretty risky considering you're going to be sweating a lot more, and thus will be more likely to become dehydrated.

So what is the recommended amount? Well, most alcohol abuse prevention centers recommend that you drink 24 ounces of water, followed by 6 ounces of water for each serving of alcohol. The National Institute on Alcohol abuse and Alcoholism suggest alternating water with every drink of alcohol you consume.

By doing this you avoid and prevent dehydration from kicking in, but it will not make you sober by any means. You metabolize alcohol at the same rate no matter how much water you consume. The NIAAA recommend limiting yourself to one alcoholic drink per hour. This allows your body time to eliminate alcohol from your system before you become intoxicated.

It should be noted that a standard drink is defined as 0.6 fluid ounces of pure alcohol, equal to 5 ounces of wine, 12 ounces of beer or 1.5 ounces of the hard stuff, such as whiskey, vodka or gin. You should be careful with mixed drinks as those sneak up on you the fastest due to their sugars.

We're Pretty Great

We're Pretty Great

As I type this I hear a lot of loud bombs outside of my place. In a shocking turn of event, the majority of these are not gun shots.

Shocking, I know.

Happy 4th of July... Or more to the point, you're probably reading this on the 5th. So, Happy 5th of July. The day you nurse those hangovers and deal with the mess of paper and burnt remains on the street near your home. Just remember, that's just a sign on how BAD FUCKING ASS our nation is...



So I hope you had a happy death to Amerikkka day... no wait, that's wrong.



How did that get in there? Shame! America owns! All my America braws, let's grill meat and drink a shit ton of beer and shoot us some fireworks! Cause we takin' this 4th of July all da way to the motha fuckin' weekend!



Then again, what kind of slacked jaw faggot are you? Forget the Fourth of July. You want to talk about true American patriotism, who gives a shit about only celebrating the complete badassary of this country on one day. how about shutting the fuck up and lovin' America every goddamn day - 24/7/365 days a year, Boooyah!

4th of July

4th of July

Just gonna post things -- make of them what you will and think of America as you should after seeing such things..




Side note - that flag only has 34 stars....





Happy 4th of July

Beer Ads

Beer Ads

It's a day away from the Fourth of July. I think you may still be wondering what you're going to be get shit faced on leading up to the celebration of this great nations birthday...How about letting some beer ads sway you




















Hmmm. I'm guessing none of these beers are what you'll be drinking tomorrow.

The Drone Warfare

The Drone Warfare

I got into a couple of weeks back on the subject of modern combat and the use of drones - or for that matter, the whole notion that drones are not any better for the mental health of our troops. It really doesn't help with a lower amount of PTSD cases and if anything, it sort of offers a slight disconnect on having on the ground reaction.

Besides, on a infrared camera, a group of civilians going to church also look like a terrorist cel. In any instance, here's a long read, but a worthy read about this whole drone mess and why we really shouldn't be proud of using these goddamn machines.

Combat commuters: dishing out death with drones

Ten minutes into Lieutenant Colonel Matt J. Martin's first mission as a Predator drone pilot, he marked a target in Baghdad for a "Spooky" gunship. And then it opened fire.

"Death from above. Poor bastards down there in the windows never knew what hit them," he wrote in a 2010 book.

As he stood up to stretch in a trailer at Creech Air Force Base near Las Vegas, he remembered that his wife had asked him to buy some milk on his way home. Lieutenant Colonel Martin was one of the US military's first "combat commuters". These virtual top guns serve on the frontline of the United States' international military operations - but from trailers in the middle of the Nevada desert.

Drone (Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV)) pilots are centre to the foreign policy objectives of the US President, with Barack Obama personally signing off the use of drone strikes to take out terrorists*.

'Long distance warriors'

so who are these pilots who carry out the President's commands?

On the surface, their lives aren't that different from the average office worker.

"[We] commute to work in rush-hour traffic, slip into a seat in front of a bank of computers, 'fly' a warplane to shoot missiles at an enemy thousands of miles away, and then pick up the kids from school or a gallon of milk at the grocery store in his way home for dinner," wrote Lieutenant Colonel Martin in the book Predator: The Remote-Control Air War over Iraq and Afghanistan: A Pilot's Story about his time flying drone missions over Iraq and Afghanistan

"Sometimes I felt like God hurling thunderbolts from afar."

Associate Professor Missy Cummings, one of the US Air Force's first female fighter pilots and an expert on these "long-distance warriors", told smh.com.au their experiences were "surreal at best"

"When I used to fly missions, you would come back and you would be in that environment 24/7.

"In the UAV missions, you might fly these missions and you might launch weapons and kill someone and there is a debriefing that you go through ... But you are home much sooner than you would [usually] be."


Drone pilots mostly operate out of Air Force and Army bases in the US - and also from the Central Intelligence Agency's headquarters at Langley, Virginia.

They are briefed about their missions, then sit together with a sensor operator - who operates the drone cameras - for a 12-hour shift, watching a multitude of screens and holding joysticks modelled after PlayStation controllers**.

Most of the time, they are monitoring targets or compounds. But sometimes, they also take out targets.

In the early days of the program in the mid-2000s, all pilots previously flew fighters or bombers. But as the demand for drones grew exponentially, there weren't enough existing combat pilots to fill the roles***, Associate Professor Cummings said.

To meet the need, the Air Force began to roll out a new recruitment and training program tailored for UAV pilots.

The Air Force now trains more drone pilots than F-16 pilots and expect their numbers to hit 1100 in the next year or two, Air Force Magazine reported.

Post-traumatic stress disorder

But the constant demand for more drone missions has taken a toll on the overstretched pilots. An Air Force study found that just under one-third of active duty drone pilots reported symptoms of burnout and 17 per cent of them reported "clinical distress" - the point when their work and personal lives are affected by stress, Reuters reported.

Their main source of stress was long hours and lack of staff. Combat stress was another issue. Some pilots experienced "existential conflict", a "guilt feeling, perhaps - or a 'Did I make the right decision? Was this a friendly fire incident? Was it a good outcome? Was it a bad outcome? Could I have done it better?'" Colondel Hernando Ortega, a surgeon for the Air Force's Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance Agency,

"We have guys who have not deployed anywhere and yet can still have combat effects of distance places." The long hours watching screens has also thrown up another potential problem - boredom. "You can watch a wall of screens and nothing will be happening. You could be waiting for something to move. Waiting, waiting, waiting. So it can actually be excruciatingly boring," said Associate Professor Cummings.

So in the first world a work-life balance is key. That's why I choose to fly a drone. I can take out a wedding and still be off in time for my 4:30 happy hour. But hey if it feels so bad to kill towel heads as a pilot of these things, then perhaps you should stop doing that job. But hey, your average day consist of blowing up twenty people, gotta pay the bills somehow, right?

Just a heads up, the article said it was USAF and army, the navy also does the drone thing. So yeah, this is just fucking sick. Even more so is that Obama did a thing where any Arab male of any age is to be considered an "enemy combatants".

But hey, at least it gets rid of that pesky PTSD, right.... oh

How to Prevent Drone Pilot PTSD - Blame the 'Bot

The human operators who control America’s killer drones are susceptible to the same psychological stress that infantrymen sometimes experience after combat. But better drones and control systems could help reduce the controllers’ stress levels — by allowing the people to blame the robots for the awful human cost of remote air strikes.

But there’s a downside. Sometimes you don’t want drone operators avoiding feelings of guilt.

At least that’s what Stanford University researcher Ryan Calo has concluded. Calo, one of the country’s top experts on the legal and ethical aspects of robot technology, has written extensively on the subject — and closely tracks the work of other researchers in his field. “It really matters how you design the controls,” Calo tells Danger Room. “Design and interface design … can change incentives and can change the psychological impact.”

When a missile gets fired or a bomb dropped — something that’s happened hundreds of times in America’s fast-expanding robotic air war — someone or something is going to get blamed for any resulting deaths. The question is whether a human being absorbs all of that culpability, which can mean an enormous emotional burden.

For drone operators, many of whom live in the U.S. and steer their armed drones via satellite from air-conditioned trailers, combat stress can be accentuated by the contrast between their jobs and their otherwise peaceful surroundings. “You shoot a missile, you kill a handful of people,” Missy Cummings, an MIT drone developer and former pilot, told Salon. “And then — this is what is strange — you go home. Your shift is over.”

When you fight in a war without living in a combat zone, “it’s harder to keep it in perspective,” Cummings said.

The question is who shoulders the feelings of guilt and remorse that can result from even justified drone strikes that kill only enemy combatants, Calo says. “People feel more, or less, responsible for tasks they perform, depending on whether or not [the tasks] happened to them virtually or physically.”

In other words, the more operators can offload their feelings onto the robots, the better they’ll feel. The problem with today’s Predator and Reaper drones and their standard ground control stations is that the stations don’t give the human controllers a chance to shift feelings of responsibility onto the ‘bots.

Blah blah blah. The rest of the article is pretty fucking boring and I realize it has details, but it's all sounding the same. In short, this is all about having responsibility free war. War is yuk, we all know it. That's why people respect the troops, they have to do some crazy shit and you really don't want that job, do you? They have to be places they don't want to be - on the other hand, a drone can kill a guy in Kabul from Langley while the pilot drinks a coffee, he's probably got ESPN on in the background and sees his pals after work for a beer. Should this guy give a fuck? Nah, it's just a day job, he probably wants to be a writer.. a romance novel writer.

And really, that's part of the problem. Drones stand to change a lot of what war is going to be like. All thanks to the greatest Nobel Peace Prize winning President we have. Drones are awesome for a president because no one gets killed except for "bad people" and I dare you to prove they weren't bad people... you know, from their dental records or something.

But these drones take out a lot more -- such as the bad people at the ruin of a wedding ceremony trying to help the survivors of the drone attack that took place 15 minutes prior. Imagine, if you could have wars in 10 countries at once and everyone's still buying their cornflakes and seeing their dads. Now that's the America most want to live in... that most want to believe in.

One day we might have a drone-from-home system. Log in and fly your drone, it's worth 15 bucks an hour! Just point and click, it's like a game that helps your country -- even if you can't kill hookers and steal cars with it.

You just have to wonder what their weakness is. I mean, seriously though, would these things be any more susceptible to cyber warfare? I know there was a situation where a bunch of drones got a computer virus and that's the sort of shit that you could write on a computer from home without much special gear, but are they safe even with this potential of hacking into a drone?

I mean, a drone is considerably more sophisticated, but I suppose it should be possible for a nation with access to decent technology to jam the communications between the drone and the control center. Although I assume these things have automatic piloting programs so it would just probably go around in circles and head back home.

Then again, I'm fooling myself into thinking that the US will ever be the aggressor against an actual nation with actual technology instead of essentially picking on random groups of people inside a given area that have the latest technology that is a little more than rocks and stones.

But hey, maybe they could just target ID via google face recognition. Only you'd have to do a quick openbook for "OMG GETTING MARRIED TODAY SOOOOO EXCITED" before the drone emits whoops and beeps and deploys hellfire missiles on those poor bastards.

But hey, why does the war have to have all the fun? How about our police officers joining in on some of that action?

American police officers may soon be able to use unmanned aircraft not only for surveillance, but also for offensive action. The drones may be equipped to fire rubber rounds and tear gas.

“Those are things that law enforcement utilizes day in and day out, and in certain situations it might be advantageous to have this type of system on the UAV (unmanned aerial vehicle),” Chief Deputy Randy McDaniel of the Montgomery County Sheriff’s Office in Texas told The Daily news app as he outlined the possible development.

The US military and CIA have used drones armed with lethal weapons to target militants overseas for years. The prospect of having “lite” versions of those remotely controlled killer-machines circling over America gave some second thoughts to rights groups.

“It’s simply not appropriate to use any force, lethal or non-lethal, on a drone,” Catherine Crump, staff attorney for the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), told CBSDC.

She explained that an officer operating an armed drone from afar would simply not have the same understanding of a situation that an officer on location would have. So judgment on the use of force would be limited by this narrowness of observation.

“An officer at a remote location far away does not have the same level of access,” she explained.

ACLU is also worried about the general atmosphere of pervasive surveillance that may engulf America as the use of drone technology becomes wider.
“We don’t need a situation where Americans feel there is an invisible eye in the sky,” said Jay Stanley, senior policy analyst at ACLU.

“The prospect of people out in public being Tased or targeted by force by flying drones where no officer is physically present on the scene,” Crump added, “raises the prospect of unconstitutional force being used on individuals.”

There are other potential threats of a wide fleet of armed drones operating in a country. For instance, their communication is not tamper-proof, as the recent downing of an American spy drone by Iran showed. So malignant hackers may take over control of a police UAV and use it for nefarious ends.

The US Federal Aviation Administration allowed several public safety agencies to use drones domestically with fewer restrictions last week. UAVs weighting up to 11.3 kilos can now be operated by police, fire and similar departments without special approval.

The step moves forward a campaign for broader use of drones in America, which was launched by Congress in mid-February.

I, for one, welcome our new police drone overlords. Now all America needs to do is invest in their opponents' armies so that they can have their own drones, and we can just have drone vs drone combat during the day and then put down our controllers at night. One big happy international community.

What I really wonder about in all this is how much Pentagon money is going out to all those tech magazines and websites to run those stories and videos lately with non-combat drones trying to get nerds to accept the technology as neutral and useful to civilians.

This Simpsons quote really rings true;

"The wars of the future will not be fought on the battlefield or at sea. They will be fought in space, or possibly on top of a very tall mountain. In either case, most of the actual fighting will be done by small robots. And as you go forth today, remember always your duty is clear. To build and maintain those robots."

What they're going to do is get some slick Lockheed fuckface to design an automatic terrorist hunting prowl routine for the drones, then their going to spend all day sexually harassing the weakest people in the command trailer until the buzzer goes off and they have to make a 5 second call for approval to nuke an orphanage.

So with that in mind, I probably will support drone autonomy simply because the most fumbling, rudimentary machine intelligence will still be morally superior to a troop.

It's also not like they're by any means cheap. A predator drone is about $4 million per drone, which I guess is small compared to most US military projects, but still pretty fucking pricey. reapers are apparently over $100 million with all the command and control shit needed to operate them.

Oddly enough, the most expensive part of the drone is the stealth skin. But that's cause Uncle Sam isn't touching anything without a million dollar coat of paint on it. That's just how he rolls. Oh how we should bankrupt the nation of mean that our machine children might live.

Factored into all that is the cost of R&D, since they're still in active production that price is going to go way way way down eventually. I guess I'm still going to believe they're expensive because I never really want to find myself in the mindset of calling something worth $4 million as "cheap" to be perfectly honest. I realize that in this new world of billions and trillions that it's not the case, but still, goddamn. Hey, welcome to the united states government, the best government in the world...

In fact, the only thing cheaper than a drone is human life. I mean, literally, that's the case. This is actually very true, a human life (American, that is) is worth about 400,000 dollars to the military. That is the maximum limit on life insurance when you're in the military. I'm also pretty sure that it's some "official" economic valuation in regards to the lost value of a human life in America.

To be honest, there's just something particularly chilling about the whole notion of using drones for war. It's a sick feeling that the whole thing gives me in my stomach about the idea of a weapon that's only purpose is to be utilized against populations incapable of defending themselves. It's the same reason why we keep the B-2 Bomber. In the situation of defense, it couldn't defend us for shit and would have been decommissioned a long time ago for something more serviceable and faster. But since it's really good at doing its job of dropping bombs on people that can't shoot back, it's kept around.

This notion of oppression with complete impunity just bothers the ever loving shit out of me. But I guess it could just be summarized with this is simply not a weapon of war. It's explicitly a terror weapon and that's why it feels so wrong to have it be used on anyone. All these toys are pretty much just modified and refined Nazi V-1 buzz bombs, specifically designed to kill and terrorize civilians.

While I have your attention, please click on the following to see all the drone strikes in Pakistan

CLICK HERE TO BE SHOCKED

P.S. Don't forget to zoom in, you'll be extra surprised.

Quit Stalin

Quit Stalin

It's the first of July. That means we'll be blowing shit up starting from a few days ago till the fourth circle jerking this great country. Maybe we should take a hot moment to think about the communist option..



For those of you who know nothing about Stalin and would really like to learn some history that isn't full of western propaganda, this blog post is directly for you! First off;

Stalin was from Georgia. So it's easy to assume that he liked white suits, bulldogs, and pecan pie. Which is a good explanation as to why there were so few black people in Russia.

So the question remains - was Stalin a good or bad person? The verdict isn't in on that. You'll find just as many Marxists who find Stalin abhorrent and vile as those who find his actions may be excessive, but his actions justified and necessary. Also, there's ironic Stalinism.

Cause really, on one hand he murdered a lot of people who didn't agree with him. On the other hand he faced off against one of the worst invasions in the 20th century.

*waves hands up and down to imitate a scale*

To get into more detail, the bad parts were something like he oversaw the deaths of a few million people and the imprisonment of a few hundred thousand. But the good part was that he basically saved the Soviet Union from genocide and collapse by the Germans and oversaw massive increases in life expectancy, technological advancement, and general quality of living in the country.

Mainly, his name serves as a metonym for Soviet policy during his tenure but that is sometimes a problematic usage because there is some evidence here and there that he had to go along with a lot of stuff he didn't agree with to get things done without antagonizing the bureaucracy. Broadly speaking, most of the canonical horrors of Soviet Communism happened because the CPSU applied heavy-handed methods to deal with legitimate problems and didn't really have appropriate internal or public processes for fixing the methods or addressing the consequences..

So shit spiraled out of control and at some point they figured it'd just be easier to kill various people involved than to clean up messes properly. For example, the Great Purge started as a convenient way to simultaneously get disloyal elements out of the government and military, let common people vent frustrations with the bureaucracy, and maybe improve personal power politics, but wound up producing a few thousand corpses, many of whom were probably not even guilty of whatever they were accused of.

On account of the whole torture thing, still, the worst of Soviet atrocities were comparable to colonial atrocities, and the soviet victory over the Nazi invaders basically changed the game with what the imperialist power could get away with forever. Personally, I'm grateful that people were willing to take moral risk to fight the nightmares that capitalist-imperialist hegemony imposed on humanity, but I also understand people who aren't as okay with it.

If anything, after Stalin, we had Nikita Khruschev, who was just the fucking worst. Though you can't get any worse than Gorby. But man, Kruschev was bad, but he was like the Soviet equivalent of Joe Arpaio becoming head of a conglomerate Republican-Democratic Party and was the President of the USA.

It's as if an old racist and kinda stupid Grandpa used back country wisdom and a few old tips from Grandma to lead Soviet Union into.... increasing liberalization and derailment from revolutionary plans.

Besides, Stalin may have ordered some shitty things. But it seems a lot of things got pinned on him that the party was responsible for. As well as a lot of other things that were completely and almost entirely made up by western propaganda.

The death toll - Robert conquest's numbers - which were the basis for almost all reports of Stalin's death toll are fucked and include non-births from urbanization and Nazi's and civilians killed in WW2. I'm not saying Stalin didn't have people killed and stuff, I'm just saying that the numbers for it are inflated due to the ideology of the people reporting it.

They also include numbers from the famines that occurred regularly at the time in the same count than the engineered cotton production famines. What it boils down to is that the great dilemma of communism is that in order to thoroughly abolish capitalism, capitalism must first be thoroughly abolished.