Hilarious

Okay, so I was reading this, nodding along thinking "Yup, typical. Association of Physicists posts one article by a few members arguing against client change + sloppy editing + same day as Gore speech = Right wingers start jizzing all over the place about how the rats are abandoning ship and the planet is doing just peachy."
And then I got to the end:

So, what happened here? Climate Progress explains the story very well, but it appears that one sloppy editor relied on one frequently-debunked British Lord — and conservatives reflexively pounced on a development that was far from what it appeared to be.

Kevin summarized this nicely: “Lord Monckton, who triggered the original article in DailyTech, may be a lord, but he’s also a longtime global warming skeptic. There’s nothing new here, and, as you might expect, scientists continue to believe that climate change is largely driven by human activity. Nice try, though.”

LORD MONCKTON?! BRILLIANT! THANK YOU, UNIVERSE.


Also, have you ever heard of KBR? It's a subsidiary of Halliburton, and it's been doing the bulk of the contracting work over in Iraq.

Well, on top of the numerous suspicious incidents, rapes and killings of female employees which go unprosecuted, and the mounting evidence that they've been effectively stealing money from the government for years now, it turns out that they're shitty electricians.

The NYT has a piece about the electrical conditions in troop facilities in Iraq, and it's apalling. The conditions are unacceptable--getting electric shocks in the shower?!--people have DIED, more have been injured (this is troops, you understand), and on top of it KBR and the Pentagon seem to have been quite happy to do absolutely nothing about it even when they knew damn well what was up. The only reason this is coming out now at all is the family of a soldier who died in the shower pushed for answers.

Electrical issues are the number one non-combat risk to troops.

Further in the "horrific" department, part of how this happened seems to be that because the government contracted out so much work so fast to KBR, oversight officials couldn't keep up, and KBR couldn't do all that work fast enough and so subcontracted to other entities that often employed poorly educated Iraqis who made only a few dollars a day.

In other words, if the government hadn't been in such a tearing hurry to pour money into Halliburton, our troops would be better equipped, better housed, and in better health. And some of them might be alive today.

These are the ones who berate us for not supporting the troops.