WHAT'S HAPPENING TODAY

1. Oil is still spilling into the Gulf of Mexico. The following techniques/equipment/terms have been discussed: top kill, top hat, diamond saw, robot submarines, oil gusher, junk shot. I expect mention of "sharks with laser beams attached to their heads" in the next 2 - 3 days.

2. A mother found her kidnapped kids on Facebook (story : http://www.opposingviews.com/i/mom-finds-kids-on-facebook-15-years-after-kidnapping-dad-arrested ). A people search of Osama bin Laden yielded no good results -

[ 2.5 brb the FBI is here ]

2.7 - but Dzulkifli Bin Jais and Adhiraj Malhotra made the top 10, along with Steven Vieth and Tudor Grangure. Still, it was worth a shot. Maybe after Mark Zuckerberg finishes dreaming up ways to subtly make our private information public he can fix Facebook's search parameters.

3. People are still rarararara!!! (for some reason it occurred to me to use "angry pekingese noise" as a stand-in adjective for "angry," "fuming," etc) about DADT, which a) leads me to my next point and b) sounds like a related rate [ if a = hm(o^2)t, da/dt = ?] , some kind of date rape drug , or BP's next solution for the oil gusher (if the sharks fail).

https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgn98wklwg_hqiVgE1LvKuIjoSrDPB3vvzfBGvRVHXZfXMkdbhgk-W3sO69DYFXevjbzMoONwA9EvA4a8v2c4wHTwazR4eBrOarY8dKRE7twmIApJxk6Ti0bmuHMcac4n_8l3aMVBiXrZTR/s400/GUSHERS.jpg

Now. DADT. Some people in the military don't get it. They don't get the whole "gay" thing, or it challenges their entire upbringing, or they just don't like to see two guys blowing each other. If soldiers are worried about sleeping and showering among guys who might want to put their tab As into their slot Bs (get it? slot B?), well, that's stereotyping and very similar to freaking out when an Arab gets on your plane, clutching your purse when you're alone in the elevator with a black guy, and planning to leave the country whenever an Alaskan governor gets a VP bid.

If you're gonna put that rap on gays, why stop there? Ban everybody who's black, they tend to hold first place when it comes to crime and giving them weapons training is clearly a disaster waiting to happen. Might want to watch out for the young white guys, too, since they're usually the type to shoot up their schools and college campuses. And you KNOW that Christians and Jews won't be able to squeeze the trigger when it's time to take a life.

By definition, gay men are men who are into other men. But that doesn't mean they're gonna do some gay shit and Private Barnes is gonna wake up one morning to find he's being teabagged. An activist is somebody who really stands for a cause, not somebody who will definitely set cars on fire and get shot while trying to scale the White House fence. A rottweiler is a dog that can produce 320+ pounds of force in a bite; that doesn't mean that one will snatch your infant, run away with her and eat her. (Then why are they highly represented in dog-attacks-human studies? see : http://www.gladwell.com/2006/2006_02_06_a_pitbull.html ).

This DADT shit isn't new. It's just some old school profiling made interesting because we're dealing with the idea of homos in our armed forces, and that sounds more fun than "a black guy just got busted for weed." Profiling isn't a surefire way to prevent bad shit from happening, but it's a great way to piss off large volumes of people. Think profiling would have stopped that African guy from lighting his balls on fire on the plane last Christmas? He was just a dark guy who wanted to fly. No beard, no turban, no scary accent. Ee probahbly sounded like da African guy in my class, who spoke sloowly, and wif tact and no aeir of meh-nuh-cing. (Or maybe he sounded like Ludacris, I don't know. I'm still guessing he didn't sound like a 24 villain.) But he totally had explosives strapped around his package. Here's an excerpt from Gladwell :

"'If you look at the London bombings, you have three British citizens of Pakistani descent. You have Germaine Lindsay, who is Jamaican. You have the next crew, on July 21st, who are East African. You have a Chechen woman in Moscow in early 2004 who blows herself up in the subway station. So whom do you profile? Look at New York City. Forty per cent of New Yorkers are born outside the country. Look at the diversity here. Who am I supposed to profile? You think that terrorists aren't aware of how easy it is to be characterized by ethnicity?' Kelly went on. 'Look at the 9/11 hijackers. They came here. They shaved. They went to topless bars. They wanted to blend in. They wanted to look like they were part of the American dream. These are not dumb people. Could a terrorist dress up as a Hasidic Jew and walk into the subway, and not be profiled? Yes. I think profiling is just nuts.'" (That's coming from NYPD's commissioner, by the way)

I'd also like to mention that whenever a gay guy enlists, he's signing up to maybe give his life in defense of the entire country and its way of life. Participants include the Westboro Baptist Church ("god hates fags" and "thanks god for our dead soldiers"), the Ku Klux Klan, the neo-Nazis, the cheaters, the immoral, the commies and the flagburners, the white collar crooks etc. You're gonna tell a gay guy who voluntarily wants to step up and defend all that bullshit, "No, you're gay, get your homo-ass tight pants and open shirt outta heah, I don't want you buttfucking my platoon 'cause I KNOW you'll do that shit"? That's fucked up. Their bright clothing might compromise GI camouflage, that's one thing. But the other stuff is all bullshit.