SRF Heavy Industries

An interview with Pulitzer Prize-winning New Yorker journalist Seymour Hersh:

HERSH: There was a meeting. Among the items considered and rejected — which is why the New Yorker did not publish it, on grounds that it wasn’t accepted — one of the items was why not…

There was a dozen ideas proffered about how to trigger a war. The one that interested me the most was why don’t we build — we in our shipyard — build four or five boats that look like Iranian PT boats. Put Navy seals on them with a lot of arms. And next time one of our boats goes to the Straits of Hormuz, start a shoot-up. Might cost some lives.

And it was rejected because you can’t have Americans killing Americans. That’s the kind of — that’s the level of stuff we’re talking about. Provocation. But that was rejected.

So I can understand the argument for not writing something that was rejected — uh maybe. My attitude always towards editors is they’re mice training to be rats.

But the point is jejune, if you know what that means. Silly? Maybe. But potentially very lethal. Because one of the things they learned in the incident was the American public, if you get the right incident, the American public will support bang-bang-kiss-kiss. You know, we’re into it.

…What happened in the Gulf was, in the Straits, in early January, the President was just about to go to the Middle East for a visit. So that was one reason they wanted to gin it up. Get it going.

Look, is it high school? Yeah. Are we playing high school with you know 5,000 nuclear warheads in our arsenal? Yeah we are. We’re playing, you know, who’s the first guy to run off the highway with us and Iran.

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Decode this for a chance at valuable secret prizes:

(bonus secret message)

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Mainichi Daily News shuts down its infamous WaiWai column in a fit of propriety. Next, The Sun scales it back to coverage of celebrity radical liposuction accidents and PRAVDA‘s main offices spontaneously switch to decaf and ban smoking. Of anything.

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Such as things are…

…things are as such.

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Someone tell me why modern skyscrapers aren’t being designed with this aesthetic.

Click on the pictures for an excellent article (and many, many more awesome pictures) put together by M. Christian on Dark Roasted Blend.

Rating: π^1/log(π) out of 10.

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Feel free to ignore this. It’s for research purposes only.

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I’m having a lot of fun—but I’m not the only one—over at the short-short fiction clearing house, Microhappy, created just a handful of days ago by jc1000000. Each piece has an illustrative pic, largely because it’s hosted at the newly revamped moblog, and posts won’t go through without a JPG attachment. Or an audio file. Or a phonecam video. You get the idea. But the BIG idea is you get a list of stories to read on your mobile while you wait for the bus or dick around at the cafe or pub waiting for company to show up.

You can view the mobile version at http://m.microhappy.us and, thanks to the excellent app design by the folks at moblog, you won’t miss anything by using the mobile site that you would get from the desktop browser view. In fact, the moblog mobile site kicks all kinds of ass.

If you want to submit, however, you’ll have to sign up for an account at moblog, join the group, and send in a [copyright-legal] pic (or an audio file or a video snip) in an email or MMS with enough [copyright-legal] words to tell the story. I do it from my phone just because.

Can’t beat that.

If you prefer to pipe these into your RSS-reader thingy, then here is the feed address.

Share and Enjoy.

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more

Balloon Lumpfish earn their name from their tendency to migrate via party balloons to new colonies when ecological and population pressures force them from their rocky, deep-sea homes.

Infrequent rains of fish occur when the balloons unfortunately pop en mass. This only happens when they drift to high altitudes where the difference in pressures between the thin atmosphere and the gases trapped inside the pressurized balloons becomes too great.

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Recent missile tests by Iran have captured public attention lately, and I’d like to say a few words about that.

What we’re seeing here is a basic and natural mammalian territorial threat display not unakin to chest-beating. Also in that category I would put Israel’s long-range airstrike drills and a certain world power’s careful repositioning of naval battle-groups.

Don’t get me wrong. In troops of chimpanzees, gorrillas, and baboons, for example, threat displays go quite a long way quelling disputes short of actual violence. Even scaled up to the level of nation-states, primate chest-beating is a quite useful and fundamental tool of territorial diplomacy.

Do I wish that we all could skip the primitive and laughably fallacious “might-makes-right” primate diplomatic philosophy? Of course I do. However, when a number of humans are locked in a room with a number of baboons, it is absolutely necessary that everyone present know how to speak baboon. This is true even if there is only one baboon. I say this, diplomatically, without pointing any fingers at any baboons I feel to be present in the room.

It is up to the non-baboons to locate and apply any monoliths they might happen to have on hand until wasteful primate threat displays are no longer necessary or useful.

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What they don’t know, apparently, is that when you hard-freeze one a these sumbitches, you can put an edge on it like a machete.

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