Category Archives: Stupidity

The gift that keeps on giving……..

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Pocket Taser Stun Gun, a great gift for the wife.

A guy who purchased
his lovely wife a pocket Taser for their anniversary submitted this:

Last weekend I saw something at Larry’s Pistol & Pawn Shop that
sparked my interest. The occasion was our 15th anniversary and I was
looking for a little something extra for my wife, Julie. What I came
across was a 100,000-volt, pocket/purse-sized taser.The effects of the
taser were supposed to be short lived, with no long-term adverse
affect on your assailant, allowing her adequate time to retreat to
safety.

WAY TOO COOL! To make a long story short, I bought the device and
brought it home. I loaded two AAA batteries in the darn thing and
pushed the button. Nothing!

I was disappointed. I learned, however, that if I pushed the button
AND pressed it against a metal surface at the same time; I’ d get the
blue arc of electricity darting back and forth between the prongs.
AWESOME!!! Incidentally, I have yet to explain to Julie what that burn
spot is on the face of her microwave.

Okay, so I was home alone with this new toy, thinking to myself that
it couldn’t be all that bad with only two triple-A batteries, right?

There I sat in my recliner, my cat Gracie looking on intently
(trusting little soul) while I was reading the directions and thinking
that I really needed to try this thing out on a flesh and blood moving
target.

I must admit I thought about zapping Gracie (for a fraction of a
second) and thought better of it. She is such a sweet cat. But, if I
was going to give this thing to my wife to protect herself against a
mugger, I did want some assurance that it would work as advertised. Is
that wrong?

So,there I sat in a pair of shorts and a tank top with my reading
glasses perched delicately on the bridge of my nose, directions in one
hand, and taser in another.

The directions said that a one-second burst would shock and disorient
your assailant; a two-second burst was supposed to cause muscle spasms
and a major loss of bodily control; a three-second burst would
purportedly make your assailant flop on the ground like a fish out of
water. Any burst longer than three seconds would be wasting the
batteries. All the while I’m looking at this little device measuring
about 5′ long, less than 3/4′ in circumference; pretty cute, really,
and (loaded with two itsy bitsy triple-A batteries)thinking to
myself, ‘no possible way!’

What happened next is almost beyond description, but I’ll do my best!
I’m sitting there alone, Gracie looking on with her head cocked to one
side as to say, ‘don’t do it, dip shit,’reasoning that a one second
burst from such a tiny little ole thing couldn’t hurt all that bad. I
decided to give myself a one second burst just for heck of it. I
touched the prongs to my naked thigh, pushed the button, and… HOLY
MOTHER OF GOD…WEAPONS OF MASS DESTRUCTION…WHAT THE HELL!!!

I’m pretty sure Jessie Ventura ran in through the side door, picked me
up in the recliner, then body slammed us both on the carpet, over and
over and over again. I vaguely recall waking up on my side in the
fetal position, with tears in my eyes, body soaking wet, both nipples
on fire, testicles nowhere to be found, with my left arm tucked under
my body in the oddest position, and tingling in my legs!

The cat was making meowing sounds I had never heard before, clinging
to a picture frame hanging above the fireplace, obviously in an attempt
to avoid getting slammed by my body flopping all over the living room.

Note: If you ever feel compelled to ‘mug’ yourself with a taser, one
note of caution: there is no such thing as a one second burst when you
zap yourself!

You will not let go of that thing until it is dislodged from your hand
by a violent thrashing about on the floor. A three second burst would
be considered conservative!

SON-OF-A-BITCH!!! THAT HURT LIKE HELL!!!

A minute or so later (I can’t be sure,as time was a relative thing at
that point), I collected my wits (what little I had left), sat up and
surveyed the landscape. My bent reading glasses were on the mantel of
the fireplace. The recliner was upside down and about 8 feet or so
from where it originally was.

My triceps, right thigh and both nipples were still twitching. My face
felt like it had been shot up with Novocain, and my bottom lip
weighed 88 lbs. I had no control over the drooling. Apparently, I shit
myself, but was too numb to know for sure,and my sense of smell was
gone. I saw a faint smoke cloud above my head which I believe came
from my hair. I’m still looking for my nuts, and I’m offering a
significant reward for their safe return!!

P.S. My wife loved the gift, and now regularly threatens me with it!

‘If you think education is difficult, try being stupid.’

MADD Has Gone Mad

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I guess this story was around earlier this week. I just heard about it on Fox News’ Red Eye. Hey, “Man Vs Wild” is a repeat.

A cop comes into my kid’s classroom, tells him and his classmates that some of their friends were killed in a drunk driving accident, and then after an hour or so bring them to the athletic field and say, “Just kidding! No one’s dead. We just wanted to show you how bad you’d feel if it DID happen.” Oh. Helllllll no!

Mothers Against Drunk Drivers (MADD) started out doing great work. Educating people on the dangers of drunk driving and getting the legal BAC lowered to a reasonable level. That was 28 years ago and I think we can say that they managed to get that job done. They probably got the job done about 20 years ago, so in order to continue rationalizing their existence, they continue to mess with people.

Look, you want to continue campaigning to get the legal BAC down to zero? Go ahead. You want time out of my son’s academic schedule to educate him on the evils of drinking and driving? Absolutely…you can do it during Gym or Health or some assembly. Bring the trashed car with the blood and brains all over it. He’d think that was cool. But seriously, you pull that kind of crap, telling kids that their friends are dead, in Idaho? You’d better be well armed. Here in Idaho, we shoot back when you kill our dogs…imagine what we do when someone hurts our kids.

Attention Local Weather Forecasters

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Temps in the 30s with wind, rain and snow, does NOT qualify as “SEVERE” weather.  If I can see down my street clearly to the “T” intersection (about a block and a half away) this is not limited visibility.  Visibility would be more limited if we weren’t getting any weather and the smog got a chance to settle down.  “Mountain passes are closed!” is not a reason to break into Regis and Kelly, it’s what’s known as “normal” for winter in the freaking mountains!  A crawl across the bottom would suffice.  Seeing your red, panic-stricken, hyperventilating face telling me you’ve come in early to “monitor the situation” doesn’t make me think any better of you, it makes me think you’re an idiot who migrated here from Southern California back when we were in a draught.

Seriously people, get a grip.  It’s just snow and ice.  You handle it by driving what we call “carefully.”  Say that with me, “Care-full-ly.”  Full of care.  It’s simple.  Slow down and be aware of the people around you.  Get off the damn phone, especially if you’re talking to someone you’re on your way to see.  Oh, and your four wheel drive protects you against, say it with me, “nothing.”  We’ve had black ice for the past three nights.  In case you haven’t learned the hard way yet, all four tires slide on wet ice just fine.

Your freaking out over every “weather event” just makes people become immune to your warnings.  If we ever do get a no-kidding, rip roaring blizzard dumping a foot or three of snow on us, we’re not going to believe you when you say to stay inside.

Confessions of a Wireless Customer Service Rep, 080125

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Working for Ginormous Worldwide Telecom can sometimes be a chore. Especially if you have a sense of personal responsibility.

Right now, cell phone companies sell cell phones at hugely discounted prices, sometimes even giving them away, in return for a commitment from the customer to stick around for X amount of time. If you break that commitment, there’s a fiscal penalty. There’s always the choice to buy a phone at full price with no commitment. People don’t normally choose to buy a phone at full price, they chose to take the discounted price and agree to the commitment.

Right now, cell phone companies sell service plans for X amount of minutes. You can sometimes get drastically reduced rates on your service plans if you agree to stick around for X amount of time. This, it seems to me, is a good thing. If I know I’m getting good service in my area from a company and they’re willing to sell me more minutes for less money, or even the same amount of minutes for less money, in return for a commitment, I’m all about that.

That may change one of these days. If it does, you can blame California.

If this class action lawsuit goes through, and the folks who have filed it win, you can bet that we’ll all suffer for it. There will be no more discounted cell phones and there will be no more reduced-rate service plans. We’ll all pay more because some folks who can’t read a contract before they sign it or who refuse to honor a contract after they’ve signed it, decided that they’re special and the rules that the rest of us live by don’t apply to them.

Memo: A Rich Banquet

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To: Various
From: Sgt. Mom
Re: A Surfeit of Crow

1. What a deliciously rich week this has been, as regards legacy media meltdowns! I can barely keep up with it all. Every time I repair to the kitchen for another bowl of popcorn,( lightly salted with schadenfreude) there is another development. At this point it looks rather like the stateroom scene in the Marx Brothers “Night at the Opera”. It’s as if everyone wants their fifteen minutes of infamy all at once.

2. Ted Rall has flexed his buns and squeezed out another offensive turd of a cartoon, alleging the extreme stupidity of those who join the military and claiming (if I can read his lettering correctly) that every one of them killed raises the overall IQ of the United States. To which I have two reactions: One – someone still publishes Ted Rall? And two: He hasn’t met too many military people lately, has he? A fair percentage of them do attend college, one way or the other – the conventional indicia, for what that is worth. Regardless, I’d bet most of them could draw better drunk than Ted Rall can sober.

3. A formerly obscure reporter for McClatchy Newspapers decides to be a total d**k to a soldier guarding an entry point to the Green Zone in Baghdad, and play the “Do you know who I am?” card? Note to Mr. Bobby Calvan – this gambit is only really effective if the public easily recognizes your face, or in Brittny Spears’ case, your nether regions. Mr. Calvan then compounds this bad judgment by lovingly detailing the incident on his blog, in an account which fairly oozes with faux-macho bravado and self-regard. He is promptly slammed with nearly two hundred comments unanimously pointing out with varying degrees of wit, exactly what kind of d**k he is. As was the phrase at Mount Gleason Junior High School, “he was chopped down so low he could play Sea Hunt in a loogie”.Such a beat-down is rare and to be cherished; and although Mr. Calvan took down the whole post and the comment string, it was saved and replicated by others for the delectation and amusement of us all.

4. Hollywood’s current string of anti-war movies are tanking like the Titanic… all except possibly “The Kingdom”, AKA “CSI-Riyadh”. Well then, what did you guys expect – as I pointed out here “No, we will not line up and plunk down our movie ticket dollars to have our country slimed, our military family members defamed and our efforts to fight terrorists belittled, and all the glowing reviews from your media buds will not make us toddle down to the multiplex to watch your damned movie. At least the Hollywierd ‘tards can comfort themselves with the thought of how well their anti-war wankfests will play on foreign movie screens. And all their media syncophants will coo and ahh and tell them how brave they are, speaking “trooth to power”! Apparently none of these “creative geniuses”* paid attention to the guy from www.boxofficemojo.com who pointed out “…audiences seek out movies for inspiration, for laughter and to be moved.” Yes, the audiences in flyover country America have indeed figured out that the yellow stuff pissing down on us from the cinematic clouds is not rain. You want to make movies for the overseas audience? Be my guest – everyone needs a hobby. But it looks like American audiences outside your little circle have a better use for their time and money than indulging you in yours.

5. And the wall of denial regarding Baghdad Diarist and Hemmingway wanna-be Scott Thomas Beauchamp finally crumbled, spectacularly! To quote P.J. O’Rourke – just desserts! Just hors d’ oeuvres! A just main course of crow! Practically every veteran or serving military member took one look at the infamous posting (once their attention had been drawn to it) and thought – “Gee, that doesn’t sound quite right…” Young Pvt. Beauchamp may survive the debacle relatively unscathed, but it doesn’t look like gullible editor Franklin Foer will for long. Frankie, Frankie, Frankie – it’s not the crime; it’s the cover-up, as I am sure anyone who recalls Watergate could tell you. Jeeze, I’ll bet he falls for Nigerian spam emails asking for his bank account number. Some people are just too damn gullible to be in the news business!

Thank you all for providing this rich vein of amusement. I can hardly wait for next week.

Sincerely,

Sgt Mom

* viciously skeptical quote marks

Memo: Just to Make One thing Clear

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To: The World, and Especially KDFW “News” Reporter Rebecca Aquilar
From: Sgt Mom
Re: Do-It-Yourself-Law-Enforcement

1. As you may have gathered by now, residents of Texas take a rather rough-hewn approach to law enforcement and defense of self and property. This sometimes results in the perforation and/or premature demise of assorted freelance criminal types.

2. In the long run, no one is very sorry about this. There are very few home-invasion robberies in the Lone Star State, since a fair number of would-be home-invaders are dropped on the doorstep, so to speak, by a well-prepared homeowner or tenant.

3. Count yourself fortunate that being an obnoxious pain in the ass with a TV camera attracts only scorn and derision. I trust that this episode has made it plain to you that a large chunk of the public holds your kind in contempt.

Sincerely,

Sgt.Mom

(Go to Instapundit and scroll down – Da Blogfaddah is all over this like white on rice)

And, an amusing poll to take, here, courtesy of Ace of Spades. And no, no multiple vote casting!

Addtional thought: One of the most gaulling things about this whole thing is how rude and relentless she was in questioning someone whom she would not expect to ever interview again… and contrast how deferential interviewers are when they interview someone they will have to deal with over a long period of time. Why don’t we ever see hostile interviewers hector people like Teddy Kennedy, or Al Gore, or anyone else you could name like this? It’s pretty clear that the press would cheerfully burn the little guy and suck up to the bigger ones in the name of preserving access.

Dan, Dan, Dan

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What is it they say; the first time tragedy, second time farce? What do they call it when it was a farce the first time around – only dressed up in the high seriousness of a Searing Sixty Minutes (dum-de-dum-dum!) Expose? Here it comes around again, with Mr. Rather’s suit against CBS News for making him the scapegoat in the whole “not only does the Emperor not have any new clothes he is as nekkid as a jaybird” imbroglio that was the 6o Minutes “scoop”, concerning the so-called finding of some 1973 Texas Air National Guard.

For those of you who spent 2004 in a coma, the memos appeared to give backing to the contention that President Bush spent part of his Air National Guard service AWOL, and that his then-commander (now deceased) was exceeding wroth about this. Unfortunately for CBS News, for 60 Minutes and all of Mr. Rathers’ minions, those documents appear to have been inexpertly forged; a fact that became fairly obvious early on. One can only assume that Mr. Rather and his team desperately wanted them to be authentic, in spite of considerable evidence to the contrary. And that they desperately wanted to drop a just-before-Election-Day bomb on the Bush campaign, and didn’t care how thin the evidence was.

Quelle tacky, Mr. Rather, quelle tacky. Kind of makes one wonder about all the other documents uncovered by Sixty Minutes over the years, which made one or two flash appearances on camera and then were gone before anyone could say, “Hey, wait just a cotton-pickin’ minute!” Ah well, just another reason that legacy media is melting faster than the Wicked Witch of the West when Dorothy threw a bucket of water on her.

Anyway, enough of a stink was raised about this at the time… and now it looks like we are in for another round of slapstick. Dan Rather is going to sue CBS for mishandling the resulting s**tstorm. Cooler and more legally-oriented minds than mine are betting A) that it is just a means of squeezing some more retirement monies out of CBS and B) that if it continues, the process of discovery is going to be embarrassingly revealing and C) Pass the popcorn, it’s a pity they both can’t loose.

Myself, I keep imaging the hostage-taking scene from “Blazing Saddles”… only instead of Cleavon Little holding a gun to his own head and begging for mercy, I’m seeing Ted Baxter (the hamster-brained newscaster from the Mary Tyler Moore Show) holding himself hostage and squeaking “Lemme out of here or the newscaster gets it!”

Oh, yeah… pass the popcorn. I’ll take mine with melted butter, but hold the salt.

(Later: More here from Captain’s Quarters)
Even later: still more giggling and requests for popcorn, here

Fallout

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Well, it took about a day longer than I estimated for the Beauchamp-TNR kerfuffle-du-jour to expand to the size of the Hindenburg, metaphorically speaking, and then explode like a couple of wads of dubble-bubble chewing gum once the upper expansion limits had been reached.

Wow, look at all that sticky pink stuff all over the place… some of that is stuck in places and on people who will probably never be able to peel it off of themselves and go about their business as usual. Having written and published the “Shock Troops” pieces is a richly deserved embarrassment, but I don’t think the two most responsible parties will ever acknowledge that their own actions had a part in bringing on the landslide-quantities of fall-out. I imagine they will find some handy other party to blame it all on.

But I can almost bring myself to feel kind of sorry for young Pvt. Beauchamp, and Franklin Foer; it’s all a jolly good game, until someone gets hurt. And no one ever starts out intending to put themselves under the million-eyed, coldly analytical publicly-wielded CAT-scan that is the blogosphere. The inexperienced editor of stalwart and once-respected legacy media magazine probably had no idea of the firestorm that would erupt, once milbloggers and veterans began looking carefully into “Scott Thomas’s” curious accounts of vehicular canine-icide, trash-talking in the dining facility, and games with dead things.

If all one knows of the military life is the movies… especially Vietnam-War movies, such an account must have seemed quite credible. Sad to know that of all the staff at a mag like TNR, there was no one on hand with any sort of experience in the military in the last twenty years or so, who could take a look and say, “Look, there’s something not quite right about this.” Or even to do as Cpl. Blondie did, when she read about running over dogs with a Bradley. Which was to fall about laughing, and then to say, “Whatta pile of bull-s**t!”

And as for Private Beauchamp; I don’t think even the most relentless narcissist really would enjoy having their Myspace page fisked down to the sub-atomic level, and their own person, and every shred of their writings relentlessly and coldly analyzed by thousands of strangers. But then again… he put it all out there, on Myspace and in the TNR. . Made no real secret of wanting to be the next Wilfred Owen/Ernest Hemmingway, but comes off as a haphazardly educated, very bright, self-centered young idiot with an elevated sense of his own talent and not a shred of sense. He is still young enough to grow out of it; honestly a lot of people his age are idiots, but most of them improve over time, and exposure to real world of consequences.

And he sucks as a writer, too, which is even sadder. He doesn’t have that certain gift; that way of “seeing” that a writer has to have. Oh, you can have the vocabulary, you can sling together the sentences, and it all will parse on the page, but unless you can “see into” other people, and sense how they think, and deal with their foibles and take on their voices, your words all fall rather flat. Intuition, empathy, whatever you call it; if you have it, you can create people on a page, you can write about a place or an event and make it so other people can see and feel it also. Good writers, good story-tellers have that, but narcissists can only fake it for a little bit, about as far as Pvt. Beauchamp did. What a waste of time and tuition, and TNR’s reputation, just to mince up and re-hash outtakes from “Full Metal Jacket” and “Platoon”, for the titillation of the readers. And what a waste for the magazine. Of all the milbloggers on active-duty tours in Iraq, Mr. Foer had to select this unconvincing, unobservant fabulist, and throw his magazine’s authority behind him… because his wife/significant other worked there. How lame. What a smack in the face to the hundreds or even the thousands of better writers among currently serving milbloggers.

Power and Control

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Well, so much for active-duty Army mil-blogging, if the Army Powers-That-Be have their way. Talk about shooting yourself in the foot, public affairs-wise… but color me fairly unsurprised by this latest move to constrain active-duty Army bloggers. Frankly, if I am surprised at anything, it’s that milblogs by active-duty troops managed to escape the clammy clutches of the Public Affairs office for as long as they have. For a long while, I thought that someone up in the higher-echelons was actually being rather clever; in taking the hands-off approach. Milblogs got the word out, without being tainted by association with military propaganda; about the war, about the military, provided expert commentary and feedback, under no particular censorship other than that of good sense and op-sec as practiced by the individual.

For surely the military public affairs world must have known about military bloggers, fairly early on (say at least by 2002). I myself made a long slog up to the PA shop at BAMC about that time, offering to pass on any appeals they might have on behalf of injured troops. This was when Blondie was over in Kuwait, and our readers at the time were overwhelmingly generous to her unit… to the point where I wanted to see it shared with other troops. I talked to a civilian PA type, who at least had heard of military blogs, and promised to pass on my e-mail and URL to his superiors, and that was the last I ever heard. I’d have thought, based on my own experience, that as interested as the Public Affairs was in traditional media coverage of the military… I’d have seen a little more interest. Unless they were total boobs about this newfangled internet thingy. That wouldn’t have surprised me… much, but assuming some sort of hands-off policy at least gave credit for intelligence and creative thinking at the highest military PA level.

But… and that is the industrial-sized, multi-purpose, all-wool-and-a-yard-wide but (Hey, who let Rosie O’Donnell in here?). But… the military is an authoritarian institution. Top down and paved wall-to-wall with regulations for most things. As a rough rule of thumb, those in charge are supposed to have an idea about what the lower ranks are up to… yes, even you, General Karpinski. And those in charge prefer that those lower down the chain of command are doing what they have been told to do. Personal initiative is all very nice, and even lauded from those who have proved they can exercise it wisely and responsibly. For everyone else, there are rules. And it is one of those lamentable realities of the military world that almost the first reaction to a new situation or set of conditions is to make a rule or regulation about it. Leopard, spots, can’t change. Reaction, knee-jerk, officers for the use of.

I thought the Army was about the most extreme in this regard; the Air Force generally operated on the initial assumption that their personnel were intelligent and responsible, and only descended like a ton of bricks when an individual decisively proved the contrary. The Army seemed to operate from the opposite set of assumptions…possibly because it either saved time or was just easier. I saw a perfect example of this during my year in Korea, at Yongsan Garrison. Out of the clear blue, the Army Powers-That-Be suddenly forbade uniformed personnel to consume food from street-vendors, unless it was something like a sealed soft-drink can, or something in a package. Probably some poor troop got a tummy-ache from a bite of bad bulgogi at a street stand, but after a great deal of vociferous complaint and requests for clarification (what constituted the sort of food that was forbidden, what exactly was a street vender? Some of the open-air vendors were pretty permanent establishments!) the Powers-That-Be grudgingly clarified their purpose; which was that they didn’t want us to be eating food prepared by unlicensed vendors. Well, asked we at AFN… wouldn’t it be more logical just to tell people to not eat from unlicensed vendors… maybe, perhaps, maybe teach our audience what a Korean Department of Health food-vendor’s license looked like, and how to request it politely?
Certainly not, returned the Army Powers-That-Be, rather grumpily… that was not how the Army did things.

Ah, said we, in resignation… Of course; it was just the easy way. Not the most thoughtful way, or the way that encouraged people’s own sense of self-preservation, or the way that preserved the livelihood of those hard-working and licensed local national food vendors, or the way that might truly protect uniformed personnel from bad food. It was just the easy way. Make a rule.

If We Pull Out

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If we pull out of Iraq, the United States will never be trusted by anyone ever again.

If we pull out, the massacre that follows of anyone who even smiled at a U.S. soldier, much less who collaborated with us or accepted our help, will make the killing fields of Cambodia look like a freaking picnic. All of that blood will be on our hands because we failed to honor our promise to see this through.

If we lose, who wins? Al Queda, Iran, Syria, all of the folks who have been stirring the shite up since we got there. The entire region, not just Iraq, will fall into the hands of the people who want you, me, everyone who isn’t their kind of Muslim, dead. I’m guessing the Shi’ites will have the numbers so… The Sunnis, they’re dead. The Kurds, finally, once and for all, wiped off the face of the earth. We’re already responsible for a couple thousand Kurds dead due to bailing on them after Desert Storm, now we’ll be responsible for their genocide.

Ask the Iraqi people if they want us to leave. Ask the soldiers on the ground if we’re losing.

If this thing is lost? If there’s no hope for winning? Then to ask our troops to continue one more day is completely dishonorable. Every death that’s come before this day is completely without meaning.  If this is already lost and we don’t pull them out immediately? Every single American casualty from here on out is on our heads. Reid and his ilk want it both ways. “We’ve already lost, we have no chance of winning, but we’re going to leave our guys on the ground to continue dying for six more months so it APPEARS that we’re giving the government the chance to pull it together.”

If the war is really lost, call to immediately defund the war. Immediately. Have the balls to pull our guys out of harms way and let the slaughter begin.

UPDATE:  Which isn’t to say I think things have been going all that well.