When Segways Attack!

Best Foto-Funny of the Week
So good, it doesn't even need captioning!



But, here are some great ones anyway:
Best Captions of the Week

"Smirk practices jumping the shark for the 2004 GOP convention"

"Help me Laura, the wheels are all sideways on this mo-ped."

And, of course, our old friend Kevin Cunningham chimes in.


Best Headlines of the Week

President Bush and the Segway of Mass Embarrassment
Deadbrain
June 13, 2003

Bush loses fight with space-age scooter
Ireland Online
June 13, 2003

Nice trip Mr President?
ITV.com
June 13, 2003

Bush okay after Segway attack
The Register
June 13, 2003

Technology on top as Bush goes riding for a fall
The Scotsman
June 14, 2003


Best Reporting of the Week

Flail to the Chief
Daily Record
June 14, 2003

He toppled Saddam Hussein. Now George Bush has toppled a hi-tech scooter it's impossible to fall off.

Five super-sensitive electronic gyroscopes adjust to compensate for scooter users' every movement.

That means it should stay upright even if you tap dance on it. But it seems the president, a former fighter pilot, was more than the £3000 Segway could cope with when he went for a spin at Kennebunkport, Maine.

Which makes you glad he's the man who has his finger on the button controlling the US nuclear arsenal ...


Bush Encounters 'Foolproof' Technology
The Mirror
June 14, 2003

The makers promise it will never fall over...

So even George Bush should be able to use the Segway personal two-wheel transporter without tumbling off.

After all, it's kept upright by some of the most sophisticated gyroscopes known to man, linked to a series of computers to detect the slightest movement.

But if anyone can make a pig's ear of riding a sophisticated, self-balancing machine like this, Dubya can.

The President climbed on, stumbled a bit, then crashed off the other side - before it had actually gone anywhere.

And this is the man who used to fly fighter planes. ...

The £3,000 machine was invented by the president's friend Dean Kamen, who also designed a wheelchair that can climb stairs.

Maybe Dean should now build a Segway with stabilisers - specially for Mr Bush.


Best "Believe It Or Not!" Line of the Week

The machine's creator, Dean Kamen, wants to see US Special Forces troops eventually ride Segways into battle.

Bush fails the Segway test
BBC News
June 14, 2003

Best Easter Egg of the Week
The Mirror story above ("Bush Encounters 'Foolproof' Technology"). Why? Because the original URL of the story was:

http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/allnews/
content_objectid=13068500_method=full_siteid=50143_headline=-
You'd-have-to-be-an-idiot-to-fall-off,-wouldn't-you-Mr-President
%3F-name_page.html

I swear, that was the actual URL as of last night. (Guess somebody didn't appreciate the HTML coder's sense of humor, 'cause it's been changed.)

But wait, there's more!
Caption THIS Photo!



Go ahead, send me your captions!

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Comments

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Posted Tue, 17 Jun 2003 00:21:44 GMT

Dave Pollard:

 

"And this, Dad, is how you signal a left turn...hyuk, hyuk, I guess we don't have to worry about learning that one, huh?"

 

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Posted Tue, 17 Jun 2003 00:47:31 GMT

Sitkaboi:

 

"Daddy! Stop! It's the white-haired zombie from Dawn of the Dead!"

 

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Posted Tue, 17 Jun 2003 00:48:12 GMT

Leeal:

 

"Hey, Dad, we took a wrong turn somewhere - how did we end up at the Kennebunkport Nursing Home for the Aged? And why do they let the patients wander around by themselves?"

 

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Posted 4:01:26 PM   Send comment

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Why You MUST Keep Hammering at Joe Sixpack's Tiny Brain

This says so much about the shameful ignorance of Mr. and Mrs. Joe Sixpack (and the way BushCo exploits that ignorance to the nth degree), I don't even want to comment on it right now; my disgust for Joe and the missus is too far over the top, even by my standards. I'll just let you read the highlights (or lowlights) while I search around for another bottle of Maalox:

 

A third of the American public believes U.S. forces have found weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, according to a recent poll. Twenty-two percent said Iraq actually used chemical or biological weapons.

 

But such weapons have not been found in Iraq and were not used.

 

Before the war, half of those polled in a survey said Iraqis were among the 19 hijackers on Sept. 11, 2001. But most of the Sept. 11 terrorists were Saudis; none was an Iraqi.

 

The results startled even the pollsters who conducted and analyzed the surveys. How could so many people be so wrong about information that has dominated news coverage for almost two years?

 

"It's a striking finding," said Steve Kull, director of the Program on International Policy Attitudes at the University of Maryland, which asked the weapons questions during a May 14-18 poll of 1,256 respondents. ... Kull noted that the mistaken belief that weapons had been found "is substantially greater among those who favored the war." ...

 

"Most people get little whiffs and fragments of news, not in any organized way," said Thomas Mann, a scholar at the Brookings Institution, a centrist-liberal think tank. "And there have been a lot of conflicting reports on the weapons." ...

 

Bush has described the preemptive attack on Iraq as "one victory in the war on terror that began Sept. 11." Bush officials also say Iraq sheltered and helped al-Qaeda operatives.

 

"The public is susceptible to manipulation, and if they hear officials saying there is a strong connection between Iraq and al-Qaeda terrorists, then they think there must be a connection," Mann said.

 

"Tapping into the feelings and fears after Sept. 11 is a way to sell a policy," he added.

 

Polls show strong support for Bush and the war, although 40 percent in the May survey found U.S. officials were "misleading" in some of their justifications for war. A majority, 55 percent, said they were not misleading. ...

 

Several analysts said they were troubled by the lack of knowledge about the Sept. 11 hijackers... Only 17 percent correctly said that none of the hijackers was Iraqi.

 

"That really bothers me, because it shows a lack of understanding about other countries - that maybe many Americans don't know one Arab from another," said Sam Popkin, a polling expert at the University of California-San Diego who has advised Democratic candidates. "Maybe because Saudis are seen as rich and friendly, people have a hard time dealing with them as hijackers." ...

 

War poll uncovers fact gap:

Many mistakenly believe U.S. found WMDs in Iraq

Philadelphia Enquirer

June 16, 2003

 

Posted 3:44:19 PM   Send comment

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On Making the 'Bush Lied' Case

I was going to just send you straight over to the story about how Australia's Prime Monkey John Howard is finally getting a taste of long-overdue backstabbing, courtesy of former Australian defence analyst Andrew Wilkie (who quit an Aussie intelligence agency when Howard decided to drag Oz into the Iraq "war").

 

Instead, I'm going to send you over to the (so-far brief) discussion of the story at Democratic Underground, where Shocking Elk (who more than deserves a plug for a very well-researched and useful Web site) makes a good point about the best way to drive home the "Bush lied" argument:

 

"There is no doubt that Iraq did have weapons at one time and something will eventually be found and dressed up as justification, but it won't be anything of the magnitude we were led to believe."

 

STOP saying "Bush lied" - they will spin the discovery of any WMD so as to discredit people that broadly said "Bush lied". Stop talking about laundry lists of every statement concerning WMD. Concentrate on statements that are categorically false and will remain false forever nomatter what is found:

 

On March 30th, Rumsfeld claimed to know where the WMD were - in areas we've controlled for quite some time now:

 

MR. STEPHANOPOULOS: Finally, weapons of mass destruction. Key goal of the military campaign is finding those weapons of mass destruction. None have been found yet. There was a raid on the Answar Al-Islam Camp up in the north last night. A lot of people expected to find ricin there. None was found. How big of a problem is that? And is it curious to you that given how much control U.S. and coalition forces now have in the country, they haven't found any weapons of mass destruction?

 

SEC. RUMSFELD: Not at all. If you think -- let me take that, both pieces -- the area in the south and the west and the north that coalition forces control is substantial. It happens not to be the area where weapons of mass destruction were dispersed. We know where they are. They're in the area around Tikrit and Baghdad and east, west, south and north somewhat.

 

Bush claimed photographic evidence of WMD facillities - had these actually been WMD facillities, we would have heard of them and not "two trailers":

 

"Satellite photographs reveal that Iraq is rebuilding facilities at sites that have been part of its nuclear program in the past."

 

"And surveillance photos reveal that the regime is rebuilding facilities that it had used to produce chemical and biological weapons."

 

DrBB adds:

 

Very good point -- they said LOTS of specific things that are now disproven on their face. I've posted this before -- they shouldn't enjoy the luxury of only having to show one chemical warhead or whatever and say "See??? We TOLD you so!" when the scariest claims -- nuclear weapons programs "reconstituted" etc -- are what they really sold the war on. Krugman has been quite good on this, making sure every time he mentions it to set the bar at tens of thousands of tons of nerve agent, etc., taking the creeps at their exact word.

 

damnraddem disagrees:

 

Bush lied.  And he is lying still. Yes, he lied about what the U.S. knew, about what the intelligence was. The message we must get out is that he lied to force the U.S. into war. True, if any WMD is found, that will be spun -- but the lack of any WMDs is also being spun. Any careful statement as to what Dubya lied about will be ignored. The important thing is to keep up the chorus. Bush lied.

 

Both methods -- nail 'em on specifics, and don't nail 'em on specifics -- are useful. No, I'm not being wishy-washy; when you're arguing any point, you just have to remember who you're talking to, and how that person best receives information.

 

If you're talking to a right-winger who can argue specifics (a rare breed indeed), go with Shocking Elk's advice. But if you're talking to Joe Sixpack, whose opinion is the result of regurgitating Fox News sound bites, then listen to damnraddem.

 

Me, I prefer picking at the tiniest details until they positively bleed (the extreme form of Shocking Elk's tactic). But I know that's useless when confronting the usual idiocy from a blindly ignorant family member (the sort who thinks Limbaugh is an okay guy "who makes lots of good points"); that's when I go for the simple, damnraddem-endorsed tack of "Bush lied."

 

(By the way, Shocking Elk also provides links to White House and Pentagon sources for the Rummy and Shrub quotes; you can pull them off the DU post, since I try to avoid linking live to .gov sites.)

 

Posted 3:36:20 PM   Send comment

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Why Does Poodle Boy Look So Surprised?

The UK Labour Party's official website has fallen victim to hackers.  On Monday morning the site's usual content of Labour Party news was replaced by an image of US President George Bush carrying his dog with Tony Blair's head superimposed on it. ...

 

Labour website hacked

BBC News

June 16, 2003

Posted 2:37:47 PM   Send comment

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Doubleplusgood Must-Read!

If there are two books you need to read (or re-read), they are George Orwell's 1984 and Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale, in that order (and for a very good reason). I won't get sidetracked into a detailed review of either here; just trust me when I tell you that both will leave you deeply ill at ease, and much, much wiser. As Atwood notes regarding Orwell's Animal Farm (another must-read): "The whole experience was deeply disturbing to me, but I am forever grateful to Orwell for alerting me early to the danger flags I've tried to watch out for since."

 

Click the link on this one, and read it in its entirety. There is much to be gleaned from Atwood's thoughts, the greatest gift of which is, perhaps, her take on Orwell's mindset during the writing of 1984 -- which is not one of cynicism and hopelessness, but great faith in human resilience and resolve, and the subtle message that good, in the end, wins:

 

...the essay on Newspeak is written in standard English, in the third person, and in the past tense, which can only mean that the regime has fallen, and that language and individuality have survived. For whoever has written the essay on Newspeak, the world of Nineteen Eighty-Four is over. Thus, it's my view that Orwell had much more faith in the resilience of the human spirit than he's usually been given credit for.

 

In any case, I strongly recommend you read 1984 before reading this piece, as Atwood gives away the brutal ending, in no uncertain terms!

 

Margaret Atwood cried her eyes out when she first read Animal Farm at the age of nine. Later, its author became a major influence on her writing. As the centenary of George Orwell's birth approaches, she says he would have plenty to say about the post-9/11 world

 

I grew up with George Orwell. I was born in 1939, and Animal Farm was published in 1945. Thus, I was able to read it at the age of nine. It was lying around the house, and I mistook it for a book about talking animals, sort of like Wind in the Willows. I knew nothing about the kind of politics in the book - the child's version of politics then, just after the war, consisted of the simple notion that Hitler was bad but dead. ...

 

To say that I was horrified by this book is an understatement. The fate of the farm animals was so grim, the pigs so mean and mendacious and treacherous, the sheep so stupid. Children have a keen sense of injustice, and this was the thing that upset me the most: the pigs were so unjust. ...

 

The whole experience was deeply disturbing to me, but I am forever grateful to Orwell for alerting me early to the danger flags I've tried to watch out for since. In the world of Animal Farm, most speechifying and public palaver is bullshit and instigated lying, and though many characters are good-hearted and mean well, they can be frightened into closing their eyes to what's really going on.

 

The pigs browbeat the others with ideology, then twist that ideology to suit their own purposes: their language games were evident to me even at that age. As Orwell taught, it isn't the labels - Christianity, Socialism, Islam, Democracy, Two Legs Bad, Four Legs Good, the works - that are definitive, but the acts done in their name. ...

 

How quickly the precept "All Animals Are Equal" is changed into "All Animals Are Equal, but Some Are More Equal Than Others". What oily concern the pigs show for the welfare of the other animals, a concern that disguises their contempt for those they are manipulating. ...

 

Animal Farm is one of the most spectacular Emperor-Has-No-Clothes books of the 20th century, and it got George Orwell into trouble. People who run counter to the current popular wisdom, who point out the uncomfortably obvious, are likely to be strenuously baa-ed at by herds of angry sheep. ...

 

Then along came Nineteen Eighty-Four, which was published in 1949. ...  Animal Farm charts the progress of an idealistic movement of liberation towards a totalitarian dictatorship headed by a despotic tyrant; Nineteen Eighty-Four describes what it's like to live entirely within such a system. ...

 

The constant surveillance, the impossibility of speaking frankly to anyone, the looming, ominous figure of Big Brother, the regime's need for enemies and wars - fictitious though both may be - which are used to terrify the people and unite them in hatred, the mind-numbing slogans, the distortions of language, the destruction of what has really happened by stuffing any record of it down the Memory Hole - these made a deep impression on me. ...

 

Orwell has been accused of bitterness and pessimism - of leaving us with a vision of the future in which the individual has no chance, and where the brutal, totalitarian boot of the all-controlling Party will grind into the human face, for ever.

 

But this view of Orwell is contradicted by the last chapter in the book, an essay on Newspeak...

 

Orwell became a direct model for me much later in my life - in the real 1984, the year in which I began writing a somewhat different dystopia, The Handmaid's Tale. ... I wanted to try a dystopia from the female point of view - the world according to Julia, as it were. However, this does not make The Handmaid's Tale a "feminist dystopia", except insofar as giving a woman a voice and an inner life will always be considered "feminist" by those who think women ought not to have these things. ...

 

Now it appears we face the prospect of two contradictory dystopias at once - open markets, closed minds - because state surveillance is back again with a vengeance. The torturer's dreaded Room 101 has been with us for millennia. The dungeons of Rome, the Inquisition, the Star Chamber, the Bastille, the proceedings of General Pinochet and of the junta in Argentina - all have depended on secrecy and on the abuse of power. Lots of countries have had their versions of it - their ways of silencing troublesome dissent. ...

 

[N]ow it seems that we in the west are tacitly legitimising the methods of the darker human past, upgraded technologically and sanctified to our own uses, of course. For the sake of freedom, freedom must be renounced. To move us towards the improved world - the utopia we're promised - dystopia must first hold sway.

 

It's a concept worthy of doublethink. ...

 

Margaret Atwood

Orwell and Me

The Guardian

June 16, 2003

 

Posted 1:33:30 PM   Send comment

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