Category Archives: War

TWAT: operation enormous burrito

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Burrito of Terror! 

From AP, via Fark. TWAT continues to protect our airports from swarthy, t-shirt wearing Americans, and our schools from Irish-American eighth graders carrying oversized lunch foods.

CLOVIS, N.M. – A call about a possible weapon at a middle school prompted police to put armed officers on rooftops, close nearby streets and lock down the school…

The drama ended two hours later when the suspicious item was identified as a 30-inch burrito filled with steak, guacamole, lettuce, salsa and jalapeños…

After the lockdown was lifted but before the burrito was identified as the culprit, parents pulled 75 students out of school, Russell said…

“The kid was sitting there as I’m describing this (report of a student with a suspicious package) and he’s thinking, ‘Oh, my gosh, they’re talking about my burrito.‘”

In eighth grade, that’s all anybody can talk about, Mike.

But could it be the revenge of the illegals? Was poor Mike just a simple stooge in a Mexican bomb plot?

No illegals means no burritos, America

operation global media domination: porn stalker!

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TIAWell this is odd. Sometime in the last 72 hours someone (no idea who) labelled my blog as porn, using the handy-dandy WordPress “Label this blog Adult” feature. Someone on the forum told me this is supposed to flag it for review and, if the blog is indeed found to be porn, it’s taken off search engine updates, dropped from the “Next Blog” “Tag Surfer” “Blog of the day” “Top Posts” and “Latest Posts” rolls, and the blogger can no longer post comments, which I found out when I tried to inform whatsername with the Starbucks iced coffee coupon that it is, in fact, legit.

Well, now I have reason to believe that the instant someone tags the fucker with “Porn” it sticks, and only an appeal will get it out of the gutter and back into the starry sky.

So that’s what happened. Sometime last night it dawned on me that my hits were half, count ’em, half what they should normally be, and that for some reason my posts weren’t showing up where they should.

And this does not take me to my happy place.

I posted a question in the forum and sent in a Support Contact Form, as one is supposed to do. About six hours later (in fairness, it WAS the middle of the night) I get an email from Barry saying sorry, we checked your blog, it’s fine, it had been “porned” and it’s not, so you’re good to go.

Surely, I thought, surely that would have given me some kind of period of immunity, like a vaccination.

Silly me.

“Referrers” is a stat table that lists the links that people have come to your blog through, and how many came through each. For today so far, mine looks like this:

Referrer Views
wordpress.com/tag/porn 11
wordpress.com/tag/porn/7 8
colddesert.blogspot.com 5
topix.net/who/cloris-leachman 4
wordpress.com/tag/porn/6 3

Yes, someone has gone through 8 or more pages of Porn tags on WordPress, looking for mine. No doubt thinking if s/he can whine “oh but she has 22 posts tagged “porn” it’s an open and shut case. Well it’s not, because I have never posted porn on this blog and I defy anyone to say it’s not PG-13. Particularly since Photobucket took down my pictures of large public sculptures; okay, so the Boris Vallejo was a bit edgy. Believe me, I’m well aware of those boundaries, having dealt with that issue for several years.

Let’s take a look at some of the blog entries tagged “Porn” on the ol’ raincoaster blog, shall we? Because we know you like to look at porn.

BoingBoing on TWAT, which reproduced a BoingBoing post of a RyanAir ad about people (small, distant, probably Irish people) taking their clothes off at an airport.

Operation Global Media Domination: The Rear View, in which we discover I’ve been linked to by both LibertyForum and Nastyfuckingporn.com, a link blog.

If Men Wrote Advice Columns, a joke column I found on Fark.

Beaver Shots. The ever-popular. Beavers swimming in the Okanagan.

Check into the Paris Hilton, an SNL skit starring guess who? Dirty puns, nothing more.

Ah yes, the infamous Marketing Tips for Hookers, an original piece of humour blogging from the Downtown EastSide, featuring stories that were just too funny to go in my book.

The Shebeen Club: Book Banning, Free Speech, and Mein Kampf. How ironic.

Had a minor heartflip an hour ago when it appeared I’d been re-porned, but Barry now tells me that’s not the case and probably would advise me to take two asprin and get a life, if he weren’t such a polite lad, but he is, and he can’t help it.

UPDATE: all my comments, including the ones on this very blog, are now being labelled Spam and held for approval. Swellerific.

TWAT: The War Against Tees Part Deux: Revenge of the Tees!

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From BoingBoing. If you need a refresher about The War Against Tees, click here.

It seems Arab-looking people are not allowed to wear Arabic lettering on their tee-shirts in American airports, or at least not if JetBlue has anything to do with it.

Now, I can tell you from personal experience that white people can.

It’s true the sample size wasn’t large, but it was in this case equal to the other test, so I’m calling it equivalent. And it’s also true that I was wearing it in gold, rather than printed on 100% cotton or even a poly/cotton blend, which would naturally be somewhat suspicious, especially in business class.

But then again, the only item I had that identified me as an Arab sympathizer was a nameplate necklace, the name of which did not correspond to the name on the expired passport I was carrying as my only ID.

And the nice formerly-Iranian lady at US Customs and Immigration who could, as it happened, read Arabic perfectly well, which is a helluva lot more than I can do, laughed when she read my passport and said “So I guess your name is not Cheryl then? That’s what your necklace says.”

And indeed it is not. I said that in that case my sister had my necklace, we shared a chuckle, she handed my passport back, and I got on the plane. End of story.

Then again, not only is my name not Cheryl, but I don’t even look like a Cheryl. 

More to the point, I don’t look like an Almira, either.

I am not a terrorist. I am just a t-shirt wearer

T-shirt: “I am not a terrorist,” in Arabic
Tim Murtaugh tells BoingBoing,

 After reading about blogger Raed Jarrar’s experience at JFK (he was forced to take off a shirt with Arabic writing on it or miss his flight), I finally stopped being depressed about the war on terror and began being proactively pissed off. I made this shirt, which says “I am not a terrorist” in Arabic. I plan to wear it every time I go to the airport from now on.

On the t-shirt site, Tim says: “All the shirts are set to $1.00 more than the Spreadshirt base price — all profits will be sent to the ACLU.”

TWAT: the theory and practice, by the Coolidge Committee

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Lincoln on freedom

Read the Introduction by Susan Maret, Ph.D. and the entire report on The Memory Hole:

You can get a taste of the report from this quote:

Being a democracy, the government cannot cloak its operations in secrecy. Adequate information as to its activities must be given to its citizens or the foundations of its democracy will be eaten away…on the other hand, our democracy can be destroyed in another way, namely, by giving a potential enemy such information as will enable him to conquer us by war. A balance must be struck between these conflicting necessities.

But I need to see what you're doing

TWAT roundup

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Just a quickie roundup of TWAT news buzzing around the blogosphere.

Yes, I've used this before, but it just keeps on applying

British schoolchildren are being fingerprinted without parental approval, and on pain of suspension for non-cooperation. So Guido was late to it; I’m later than anyone, but not too proud to post!

Ah yes, and they’re being fingerprinted by the same corporation that trains interrogators for Abu Ghraib and Gitmo. We all love a strong corporate culture, don’t we? Mind you, this isn’t the same company that’s being sued by all those war widows for the wrongful deaths of their husbands. I know, it’s just so hard to keep them straight!

A Florida company is looking for permission to stick RFID chips in all service personnel in the US. Look for legislation making it an offence to remove these chips, if such legislation’s not on the books already. And don’t expect an out when you retire. We’ve already covered in this blog the fact that there IS no meaningful retirement anymore.

VeriChip Corp, based in Delray Beach, Fla., and described by the D.C. Examiner as “one of the most aggressive marketers of radio frequency identification chips,” is hoping to convince the Pentagon to allow them to insert the chips, known as RFID (Radio Frequency Identification) chips under the skin of the right arms of U.S. servicemen and servicewomen to enable them to scan an arm and obtain that person’s identity and medical history. The chips would replace the legendary metal dog tags that have been worn by U.S. military personnel since 1906.

And if they can’t get your children or yourself, they’ll at least get your garbage cans. Fighting TWAT in the back alleys, in the Rubbermaids…Churchill would be so proud.

 Half a million household wheelie bins have been secretly tagged with hidden electronic “bugs”, it has been reported.

The tiny devices identify each bin so that records can be kept on the waste disposal habits of its owners, and up to 500,000 bins in council districts across England are thought to have already been fitted…

A similar controversy also emerged in Ryde, a suburb of Sydney, Australia, earlier this week.

Residents accused the local authority of acting like “Big Brother” after workers suddenly began fitting the devices to the rims of an estimated 90,000 bins.

The devices use Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) technology which have also been used to identify objects as diverse as animals, vehicles and expensive goods.

Like cannon fodder units.