perfidy

No, there is no Chinese analogue to "Jeremiah Johnson".

Die Welt is reporting that the Austrian military recently conducted mountain warfare training for a clutch of Chinese officers.

The feds claim that the training really amounted to survival in alpine climates, with general mountaineering, constructing improvised shelters, operating without a supply chain, and the like, and without a direct combat training portion. A small group of Hungarians and Montenegrins also attended, and the whole exercise fell under the rubric of recent EU-China military cooperation agreements.

Those opposed in the Austrian gubmint are a-froth, however, claiming that these officers' new training can only be applied in Tibet and in the context of special operations forces, light units operating beyond their supply line in hostile terrain.

I don't think I'm being overly cynical if I believe it's both, although the article headline- "Federal Army Trains Chinese Military"- overstates the event a bit. By which I mean, alot. And further concerns that Austria would now be complicit in human rights abuses in Tibet is also a touch overstated.

There was a somewhat similar flap years ago when Germany was all set to sell Turkey some... I believe they were Leopard IIs, which might have been a fairly straightforward arrangement between two allied powers, but some people were bent out of shape about it for fear that they would be used to kill Kurds.

But I think that if you're going to be in the business of arms sales- which in the Austrian example includes training- then I think people need to understand that that weaponry or training might actually be applied someday. Maybe even soon.

Check out the sexy clean lines on the new BMW M3 concept car! OMG. Sorry Ross, you can take your 5-series and drive it into the drink. THIS is the car to have.

I confess, I actually can't really drive an M3. I've tried. I'm so used to soft Japanese clutches, that I don't lay off the clutch and feed it gas quickly enough to keep from stalling. I stall out pretty badly. (Granted that was a test drive in a friend's car almost 8 years ago when I didn't drive regularly.)

But I so totally want this car, or the M3 SMG. The paddles are kinda nifty. I was sitting in one the other day and thinking, "This is a year's worth of my salary. BUT HOLY COW is it nice." I mean, if I had to take a machete and kill the cow they were going to use to make the leather seats, just to get this car, I would. I know the other ministers would help out, just for a chance to take the car on the track. (HELL YEAH!)

This is one MEAN looking car. That stare you down, glare at you over the tops of the glasses, and tell you to get the fuck out of the way mean. In a 'I broke my nose in a fight' mean kind of way. (I can't say I like the bump on the hood. It's exactly like a broken nose.)

This is the PERFECT SPECIMEN of what I need to conquer the left lane of the Dulles Toll Road with my "Smart Pass". Who's smart now muthafucka?

Hat tip to fellow PF Blogger, Hazzard of Everybody Loves Your Money for the link.

As my friends like to say, Sieg Mapgirl!

Thank you dear Ministers for this lovely opportunity to rant and rave, thus sparing readers of my other blog from my less than genteel opinions of the world.

For a misanthrope, it means a lot when I say, "Awwwww. I love you guys." Because really we know that it's a lie and I secretly hate men.

I promised Buckethead that I'd write about budgeting for zombies. He didn't specify how, but I assume he actually meant zombie defense and not care and feeding. First of all, let me tell you that Shaun of the Dead had it wrong. Never toss your old vinyls. You could sample that shit and be the next DJ Dangermouse. But I'll get to that later. Right now, the game is just to get out of the hot seat and stick someone else with it.

Now where are the cabana boys to bring me a Guinness?

Researchers atop Mount Washington, New Hampshire's answer to a Dantean vision of frozen Hel (except with a mountain in the middle instead of a giant winged Satan devouring classical villains), discovered that boiling water instantly freezes up there. Dig it.

I expect they will soon also discover that tauntauns don't only smell bad on the outside.

The Ministry is pleased to inform you that yet another blogger has been assimilated into our perfidious collective. Loyal reader, successful blogger, and knitter Mapgirl has, after years of begging, been accepted into the fold. The Ministry would like to make clear that we did not resist bringing Mapgirl on as a Minister years earlier because she was a girl. Or because she knits, or because we are prejudiced in any way toward any ethnic, social, religious, technical, or recreational group that Mapgirl might be a member of. It is only because we didn't think she was serious when she said she wanted to join. Finally, the Ministry was made aware of the error of its mistake when Maps stopped being subtle, sly, and making oblique references to the desirability of Ministerial rank and just said, "Let me in, or I'll plant my size six Doc Martins so far up your ass you'll taste Kiwi Black Shoe Polish for a week."

Once things were made clear, things started moving. The code gnomes were roused from their slumber, and whipped into action. The left sidebar bears the fruit of their pain, in the form of a new entry for our newest minister. As we speak, her passwords, credentials and secret decoder ring are wafting their way through the internets, and soon, we will be privileged to read our first post from our new minister.

The Ministry insists that everyone welcome Mapgirl. Thank you for your cooperation.

Old story - ancient, in fact. Didn't this come out last week some time? The week before? Whatever.

What makes it new again, at least for me, is the commentary in today's hometown Houston Chronicle by the Miami Herald's Leonard Pitts, Jr.:

Somewhere, the gods are amused.

Sharpton is not. He has pronounced himself torn by conflicting emotion: humiliation, anger, pride and, above all, shock.

The reaction from Thurmond's family, meanwhile, has been characterized by that curious shrug of shoulders, that ambivalence and eagerness to change the subject, one often finds in white people when slavery gets personal.

"I don't feel one way or the other," Thurmond's 74-year-old niece, Doris Strom Costner, told the Washington Post.

"I have no comment," Paul Thurmond, the senator's youngest son, told the New York Daily News.

Somewhere, all the other the race-baiters like Al "Tawana Brawley" Sharpton are also amused.

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Note: Strangely missing from the Wikipedia entry linked above is the Sharpton Jew-baiting incident which resulted in riots and dead Hasidim in Crown Heights during 1991. Also missing, the incitement to burn Freddie's Fashion Mart in Harlem during 1995, resulting in yet more deaths. So much for Wikipedia's previously impeccable reputation for completeness. Oh, it also omits his 1983 brush with the FBI, reported in 2002 along with his apparently still-unsuccessful $1 billion lawsuit against HBO for having aired the tape of the event, after which he allegedly turned into an FBI informer to avoid investigation for involvement in drug transactions on behalf of Don King and the NY Mob. A complete and total piece of shit work, this guy.

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Anyway, Pitts seems surprised to find that Thurmond's descendants don't feel personally responsible, or even embarrassed, by the actions of people whose lives predate their own by 100 years or more. Imagine that! What the hell's wrong with those people?

Sharpton feels humiliation (as though Thurmond had owned him?), anger (for what, I don't know), pride, and shock. Those last two, I can understand - it's not often that a demagogue of his stature is handed an issue, on a silver platter, that his mouth-breathing fellow travelers in the "professional outrage for shake-downs, fun, and profit" community, if nobody else, can take seriously and run with. So he's equally shocked and proud.

Normally, you see, such agitators have to incite or invent their own, well, agita.

Pitts continues:

Of course, by this point, maybe he has stopped listening. Maybe you have, too. Mention of that 350 years tends to have that effect.

Hence the ambivalence — "nervous chuckles," reported the Orlando Sentinel of a visit to Thurmond's hometown — that greeted last week's news in some quarters. Small wonder. It removed the shield of abstract. It put a face on the thing. And the danger is that if we can imagine that face, we can imagine others.

Condoleezza Rice purchased as breeding stock.

Oprah Winfrey raped on a nightly basis.

Will Smith, his back split open by a whip.

Sen. Barack Obama living with the same rights under the law, the same expectation of dignity, as a horse or a chair.

We spend a lot of time running from this. But we never escape.

Lost on Pitts is the utter absurdity, in today's world or any world that's existed in the past 50 years, for ANY of the things he lists as bogeymen to actually occur. So we're "running from" putative, but completely imaginary, future shit that would never, ever occur anywhere but in the fevered brains of those who can't bear to see the racial divide bridged.

And if Pitts, Sharpton, Jesse Jackson, and the myriad others who make all or part of their livings being the agents for the perpetually aggrieved have their way, damned straight, we'll never escape.

I guess it might be in certain areas, but it's instantaneous, when compared to something like that reported in this UK Telegraph story:

Two female students had heard Mr Safronov's body land and reported that he was still alive. They rang emergency services and were told to ring back in 30 minutes if the journalist was still moving. By that time he was dead.

[wik] Whiskey Tango Foxtrot?

[alsø wik] Unrelated memo to myself: Don't even think of pissing off Vladimir Putin.

"Nihilism is best done by professionals." - Iggy Pop

Here's something I find interesting. And by interesting, I mean offensive and retarded. Lately, the category of "Global Warming Skeptics" - nomenclature that affords a degree of dignity to those lumped under its rubric - has seen a subtle but significant change. They are now "Global Warming Deniers." This, I assume, is meant to put those who wonder whether or not we are actually headed toward a local anti-Fimbulwinter, or even whether if we are headed toward that grim fate we have ourselves or nature to blame, into the same mental box as Holocaust deniers. Now, Holocaust denial is offensive and retarded. Anyone who doubts the historical reality of the holocaust is a malevolent delusional fuckwit. Some people would have us feel the same about something that might happen in the future - or, being generous, even if it's certain to happen is not at all certain where to point the unerring finger of blame.

The National Post of Canada has a series of articles up on these Global Warming Deniers. I've read a couple, and the tone of the stories is odd. Go read them, and see if you see what I see. I'll talk more on this later.

[wik] It seems that this sort of thing is in the wind, as BBC 4 is about to run a big documentary on the subject this Thursday. I wonder if we'll be able to see that here in the States.