The latest on the US’s mismanagement in Iraq is that its new police training facility is a “disaster”.
The Baghdad Police College, hailed as crucial to U.S. efforts to prepare Iraqis to take control of the country’s security, was so poorly constructed that feces and urine rained from the ceilings in student barracks. Floors heaved inches off the ground and cracked apart. Water dripped so profusely in one room that it was dubbed “the rain forest.”
A seventy-five-million dollar disastrous police academy.
That’s what they get for hiring this guy:
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WASHINGTON — Facing an ongoing set of failures on domestic and foreign fronts, the Congress of the United States has filed for Chapter 11 protection under the Moral Bankruptcy Codes.
“Between the clear selling-out we did a few years ago to get votes from the right-wing fundamentalist religious loonies and the way we’ve sold conservatism, America and the values our great nation was founded upon for a mess of pottage, we’re basically out of bucks to pass,” said Bill Frist (R - MD) on Friday.
“Forget about Iraq, Afghanistan, smallpox or even the US-Mexico border,” Frist said. “Basically our shit hasn’t been in one coil for years.”
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The TSA has relaxed some if its pointless bans. You can now carry lip gloss and hand lotion onto aircraft.
Good thing, too — I was getting tired of the chafing.
The news about a 3.3 million-year-old ancestor of “Lucy”, a very early human ancestor, is breaking all over the place, including this headline from the Washington Post:
3.3 Million Years Later, Skeleton of Girl Found
…Which led John Mark Karr to confess yesterday to her murder.
I’d've thought, in 2006, that pretty much all multicellular life had been catalogued, particularly life that’s close enough to the human-survivable biosphere to be visible from, say, standing height.
Nope. Several dozen new marine species have been discovered near Indonesia, including a shark that walks on its fins. (Of course, there’s no such thing as evolution, so this transitional form from fin to foot should be ignored as the heresy it is.)
Life continues to astound.
Unfortunately the US Department of the Interior is planning to drill the site for oil next week.*
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* Not really, but if there was oil there, you know they’d be asshole enough to do it.
A stone tablet has been found that’s around 3,000 years old, inscribed with a writing system heretofore unrecognized. The tablet, unearthed in Veracruz, Mexico, contains symbols that are apparently reminiscent of Olmec. At first, there was little hope for translation of the tablet’s contents.
Experts who have examined the symbols on the stone slab said they would need many more examples before they could hope to decipher them and read what is written. It appeared, they said, that the symbols in the inscription were unrelated to later Mesoamerican scripts, suggesting that this Olmec writing might have been practiced for only a few generations and may never have spread to surrounding cultures.
However, hope came from a quite unexpected source. Using a breastplate and goggles made of gold, a teenaged farm boy named Jose Herrero has claimed he can translate the text, which he says describes the efforts of an angel named “Moron-y” to establish the first Shoney’s south of what would eventually be called the Rio Grande.
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Oops.
REGENSBURG, Germany - Pope Benedict XVI on Wednesday called for harmony in his diverse and sometimes fractious church, saying that like a church organ it needed to remain in tune.
Do we really want to be drawing attention to misbehaving organs in the Catholic church?
