perfidy

Murdoc is on vacation and people have hardly noticed. His substitute bloggers are doing such a bang up job, Murdoc might not even be invited back. One example of the newfound puissance of the Murdoc Online, or rather three, is the series on America's lesser known allies in the war on terror. Most conscious citizens are aware that Great Britain has been there with us in proportionally large numbers from the start. Those who are more conscious are aware that there are more nations with troops fighting along side, but are often hazy on the details, or only become aware of it when, say, a terrorist bombing causes a whole nation to chicken out. Like, say, Spain.

Nicholas, who very occasionally blogs on his own blog, the Smell of Freedom, has done a bang-up job in gathering the details on these other troops. In three installments, he has illuminated the contributions of Romania, Italy, and Japan; Poland, South Korea, and Georgia; and Australia, Denmark, and El Salvador. Nicholas is himself an Australian, you can almost hear him choking up when he discusses the Aussies.

I think this is important. While some have been pleased to ridicule the comparatively small contributions that some nations have made - I remember that one island nation sent two soldiers (out of a population of a few thousand, probably) - these countries are actively helping. Which is certainly more than we can say for allies in name France, Germany, Spain (hey, weren't they all fascist within living memory?) or for China and Russia, our strategic partners. We have allies. Countries like Poland and Romania understand what we stand for - because they were oppressed for decades by what we stood against. Britain and Australia get it, but then, they are us, for reasonable values of "us." I'm glad these nations are our allies. I can't say I'm really sorry to see France on the outside.

Once more unto the breach, the Ministry attempts to inject a tiny dose of geo-social knowledge into its readership. This time, we assault the very big state of California.

• We sure got a lot of Queers
• As Seen On TV
• The Granola State
• The Biblical State; as in Fire, Floods, Quakes and Drought
• Next Disaster, Locusts!
• Nobody's actually from here
• Silicon Valley in the North, Silicone Hills in the South!
• By 30, Our Women Have More Plastic Than Your Honda
• Fast reloading lanes available
• The Cereal State: nothing but fruits, nuts and flakes
• Wish they all could be California Girls!
• With Satan, too, all things are possible -- and way more fun!
• More electoral votes than you can shake a stick at, plus the stick
• The Death Valley State
• Caution: Large Fake Breasts On Board!
• The really long state
• The Gold-Plated, Silicone-Implanted State
• We will invade Oregon. You just wait.
• Proud Home of Richard M. Nixon and the Colossus of Yorba Linda
• Fake Women, Pretentious Wine, Bad Song

[wik] Bonus slogans!

• The Birthplace of the Stretch Hummer
• Pretentious is an Understatement
• Our Food is Organic but Our Women Aren't Any More
• Visit West Hollywood - It isn't Just the Burger Grills that are Flaming
• Defines Pretentious Better Than Any Dictionary
• Putting Break Dancing Back on the Streets where It Oughtta Be.
• Got Porn?
• Where Everybody Knows Your Stage Name
• Sleep with the Producer, Become a Star!
• Dashing Young Actresses' Hopes Since 1936.
• Come Visit Before We Split Off from the Mainland and Drift Away
• If the Midwest is America's Heartland, then We're the Erogenous Zone
• Hot Like Florida, but Less Old People and 'Gators
• So Innovative, our Freeways Double as Parking Lots
• Come for 'Frisco, Stay for LA

What great leader do you most resemble? Take the great leader test and find out. I was pleased but not surprised that I am sympatico with Abraham Lincoln:

Clowns are creepy, as all thinking people agree. They wear bizarre makeup. They act strangely. They hang around retarded people and midgets. They bother sick people. Some are even fundamentalists. They represent all that is unholy - so much so that Stephen King used one in a horror story with virtually no exaggeration. I myself bought an "I Hate Clowns" tshirt to openly display my contempt and disdain for clowns. But now, on DefenseTech, we find that clowns are also anti-nuclear protestors. These clowns, in both common uses of the word, broke into and vandalized a nuclear facility.

The activists used bolt-cutters to get into the E-9 Minuteman III facility, located just northwest of the White Shield, North Dakota. "Using a sledgehammer and household hammers, they disabled the lock on the personnel entry hatch that provides access to the warhead and they hammered on the silo lid that covers the 300 kiloton nuclear warhead," the group said in a statement. "The activists painted 'It's a sin to build a nuclear weapon' on the face of the 110-ton hardened silo cover and the peace activists poured their blood on the missile lid."

This was all done while wearing face paint, dunce caps, misfitting overalls, and bright yellow wigs.

We dress as clowns to show that humor and laughter are key elements in the struggle to transform the structures of destruction and death. Saint Paul said that we are “fools for God's sake,” and we say that we are “fools for God and humanity.” Clowns as court jesters were sometimes the only ones able to survive after speaking truth to authorities in power.

Guards responded within minutes. And when they arrived, the protesters "ate a lot of gravel," I'm told.

The three nukewatch clowns were charged with Class A misdemeanors for criminal trespass and criminal mischief, though I have to agree with commenter Defiant Infidel that those charges seem a bit light, considering they were hammering on a nuclear missile silo hatch. With a fully loaded, nuclear armed Minuteman III missile inside.

Once more, the Ministry offers a dollop of education on top a fat steaming pile of poo. Today, more state mottoes for the poor, but misunderstood, state of Arkansas, the only state with its name on its flag, so the people won't forget.

• We're like a piratical Kansas
• Attention, K-Mart Shoppers!
• More Than Kansas
• It's Trailer-rific!!!
• Litterasy Ain't Everthing
• At least we're not Mississippi
• We now have electricity
• The nation's incest capital
• we put the K in ejukashun!
• Don't hold Clinton against us
• Honest, we were just try'n to get that sheep back over the fence
• That's Aar-Can-Saw, dumbass
• Only the last "s" is silent
• We aren't all Hatfields and McCoys
• The natural state, if by natural you mean unimproved and devoid of economic value

[wik] Bonus Slogans!

• The Delaware of the South
• If Florida's the Nation's Wang, We're Sort of the Colon
• Like Vermont, but Bigger and Less Faggy

Picked this up from Wizbang. I so very much want this to be true. If this actually happened, it retroactively gives meaning and purpose to the SCA.

Iowahawk is running a beauty pageant, of sorts. For a year, now, he has been running a regular feature - famous throughout the blogosphere - The Hoosegow Honeys. Now it is time, he believes, to pick Miss Hoosegow 2006. This is not merely a popularity contest - contestants will also be judged in a talent competition, where one point will be awarded for each $100 of bail demanded by the magistrate.

As of this moment, the two Jessicas are in the lead, but that must not be allowed to stand. I encourage all Ministry readers to go and vote for Hoosegow honey #15, Lacey, whose sorrowful Madonna expression cries out for comfort. Winning the Miss Hoosegow pageant might bring a smile to that morose, regretful, yet still beautiful face. Please help her.

[wik] While we're on the subject of Iowahawk, show your support for the troops by mailing your surplus-to-need refrigerator magnets to Operation Mag-Neato. Sgt. Darren "Doc" Lee is attempting to completely cover his humvee with refrigerator magnets. Help him in his quest by mailing those fridge magnets to:

Dr. Darren Lee
310th PSYOP Co.
COB Speicher
APO AE 09349

Cover the Dumb-Vee with your love.

[wik] Lacey has moved up, and is now tied for sixth. Vote early and vote often!

This is well worth reading.

Thought this was cool - a new observatory in Germany hopes its new apparatus will detect gravitational waves. The GEO 600 gravitational wave detector in Hanover is now in continuous observation mode, and scientists hope that their gizmo will in the near future detect the teeny, tiny ripples in the spacetime continuum caused by the passing of a gravitational wave. These gravitational waves are created when supermassive objects like black holes or large stars do something freaky like explode. Current theory holds that all mass can create gravitational waves, like when I shake my hips, but the gravitational force is so weak compared to the other forces that only the largest objects doing the most violent things will create gravitational waves that might be detected here on Earth. For an idea of the relative strengths of the primary forces, consider that you are held more or less firmly to the earth by gravity. The mass of the Earth is considerable - 5.9742 × 1024 kilograms. Yet despite all that mass pulling down, a moderately strong magnet on a crane will lift a multiton car easily. The chemical bonding forces of superglue will also easily support a midget from an I-beam, as we all remember from the commercials. If the force of gravity is taken to be 1, then the weak nuculer force is 10²⁵, the electromagnetic force is 10³⁶, and the strong nuculer force is 10³⁸. (This assumes that the universe follows the modern physics model. This interpretation would be tragically mistaken if it turned out that the theories of Intelligent Falling were in fact a better description of underlying reality.)

GEO 600 is working alongside a US project known as Ligo (Laser Interferometer Gravitational Wave Observatory). It may also be joined in the hunt by an Italian lab within a year. A simultaneous gravity wave detection at these facilities would be a major milestone - both a confirmation of existing theory and the beginning of a whole new field of astronomy.

Laser interferometers are looking for disturbances in their experimental set-ups that are equivalent to mere fractions of the diameter of a proton, one of the particles that make up the nucleus of an atom. Getting GEO 600 to approach this level of sensitivity has been an immense challenge.

"There's more to come from GEO 600; I think we're still about a factor of three away from the design sensitivity over part of the frequency range. But the sensitivity we have makes it very worthwhile stopping improvement to run for an extended period," said Professor Jim Hough, from the Institute for Gravitational Research at Glasgow University, UK. Achieving the necessary sensitivity has been a huge challenge: "I think the most likely event for us to detect at the moment are coalescing black holes. I'm extremely confident," he told BBC News. A detection would be a final test of Albert Einstein's General Theory of Relativity.

Pretty cool stuff.

It took the Roman Empire centuries to build 50,000 miles of roads. We did it in a couple decades. We rock. And this week is the 50th anniversary of the Interstate Highway System, brought into existence by my personal savior, President Eisenhower. Over here you will find an informative history of the highway system. You can also go here or to the ever-useful wikipedia if the first one didn't slake your thirst for highway knowledge.

[wik] This is interesting, too: a proposal for a Transglobal Highway.