Absolute BS

Tonight we didn’t feel like going to the store so I thought I’d play a little Survivor: Kitchen. I found a chicken breast in the freezer, so I let it defrost in some teriaki/peanut oil/salt/peper and then sauted it with onion, red and green peppers, and an orange. The sauce was mostly (and probably too much) orange juice with a little plum sauce (no idea why I have this) and sriracha. I added a little brown sugar at the end because it wasn’t sweet enough. The chicken was a little over cooked because I left it in the wok while the sauce was reducing, but overall it was pretty good and it didn’t get voted off the Island.

Bruce Schneier pointed out a couple of interesting posts about national security today, specifically about how politicians (Bush and Obama) exaggerate the threat of terror for their political ends (duh). The first one, at Tom Englehart’s blog, is a very good read. Obviously, the risk of being killed in a terrorist attack is much smaller than the risk of getting in a car wreck, being murdered on the street and even being struck by lightning. But that doesn’t stop the President from using even a failed attack like the Christmas “Underwear Bomber” to spend a bunch of money and increase further the power of the executive office. I suggest you read the whole thing.

Bruce also linked to a newsweek article with similar sentiments. As I started reading this one I was thinking it was quite refreshing to hear the “chill the fuck out” message coming from the mainstream media:

However, if you scroll down just a little bit, you see that Newsweek can’t take it’s own advice as they attempt to generate a little more advertising revenue with a scary picture of a terrorist and an alarmist link:

I guess I shouldn’t be surprised the media can condemn politicians for “tough-guy bluster” and in very the same article advertise a link to the 10 scariest terrorists they can find. What does surprise me is that anybody takes this hypocritical rag seriously enough to pay for a subscription to it.