TxBubba.com A Texas Bubba's Internet Sandbox

Congresswoman Jackson-Lee makes Houston proud! Votes for pay raise..

Ok file this one in the "Houston Proud" category...

The Houston Chronicle is reporting that Representative Sheila Jackson Lee (D-Houston) was the ONLY Texan to vote to back a congressional pay raise.  Yep, on a vote of 412-15 against the measure, Mrs. Jackson-Lee was one of the 15 who thought she deserved a pay raise this year.  Nevermind that the economy is in a slow recovery, 10% of Americans are out of work, and states like California and Michigan are in deep economic trouble, she needs herself a pay raise on top of the $170k+ that she makes already.

Show me the money!

When are you IDIOTS that live in her district going to finally have enough of this clown?  Oh this isn't the first time she has shown what a piece of garbage she is... take a look at this video of her at a town hall meeting talking on her cell phone while someone is trying to address her.  She called it "multi-tasking" and I call it bullshit.

Texans are smarter than this, and I hope that one day the folks in her district start showing it.

-TxBubba

G8 Summit Needs 596 Porta-Potties

I think the Canadians have got everything figured out when it comes to politicians...

The G8 Summit is scheduled for this summer in Ontario, and the Royal Canadian Mounted Police have ordered 596 porta-potties for the event.  From the website of CTV.ca:

The Mounties want to have 596 porta-potties, each with minimum two-ply toilet paper, distributed around the posh Deerhurst Lodge resort, where leaders of the world's biggest economies gather for talks June 25-26.  But the single-seaters, which include disposable seat covers, are not for any of the world's leaders. Instead, they're reserved for the thousands of government workers who will need washroom breaks as they prepare for the event throughout June.

That's a lot of crap.  But, hold on, it get's better.  The article continues:

And in a gesture of conciliation, 10 of the comfort stations have been set aside for the anti-G8 protesters expected to gather in the designated "free speech area" near the meeting site.

What?  Only 10 for the protesters?  I guess they feel those people involved with the summit will be full of more crap than the protesters.

-TxBubba

Victory in Afghanistan? I got it figured out…

I read an article today from the internet site Real Clear Politics (www.realclearpolitics.com) regarding the war in Afghanistan and how we might be losing this war to the resurgent Taliban.  Congress issued a report last week that came to this conclusion for a variety of reasons that I won't go into here, but you can read the report on your own.

This particular excerpt from the article on the Real Clear Politics site caught my attention:

The aim of counterinsurgency, according to Galula, is "...to cut off, or at least reduce significantly, the contacts between the populace and the guerillas...This process of getting acquainted with the population may be speeded up if the occupied villages are divided into sections and each is assigned to a group of soldiers who will always work there."

Man, that sounds like a lot of work!  I got to thinking about this in more depth after hearing from an old friend, a Marine, who recently was deployed in Afghanistan (Stay safe, Tim!).  He was relieved that he was finally able to connect to the wifi system at the military post he was stationed at.

Then it hit me - I think the easier road to the destruction of the Taliban is through something that is slowly destroying us right here at home, in corporate America, and that is Facebook.  Yeah, Facebook!  Talk about your master time wasting, bandwidth hogging, free application that has America hooked.  I was visiting with the IT guy here at our office last week regarding our current bandwidth issues.  He told me that he took some "snapshots" of where our bandwidth was being used at different points of the business day and over 60% of the bandwidth was pointed at Facebook!  Yeah, 60%!!  That means over 60% of the time spent in the office was on updating personal status on recent bathroom breaks, how bored they are at work, uploading pictures of their dog, or harvesting crops in Farmville.  Could you imagine the amount of work we could get done if I blocked Facebook from our office servers? I would probably never find out as I would be lynched and run out of town on a rail..

The Taliban will LOVE Facebook!

So, my simple Bubba solution is this:  drop in a couple of thousand refurbished Dell laptops into Afghanistan that point to Facebook.  That, coupled with some big-ass wi-fi antennas in selected regional hotspots and WHAM you got people focused on their profiles and not on killing each other.  Throw in an opium-based version of Farmville (Crackville?) and you have hooked even more folks on a regular basis.  Soon you'll start to see cool Taliban Facebook groups springing up all over the place like "Get secret Crackville items in my cave" (lol whut?) and "Kabul pottery school alumni and friends".

Sound far fetched?  Maybe..  Would it work?  I am willing to bet it would.  Facebook is internet crack in it's purest form.  Give this crack freely to the enemy and see how long it takes before they are hooked.

If you control your office's IT function try cutting off the Facebook crack for a couple of days and see what happens in your office.  I can't wait to hear how it turns out..

I welcome your comments.

-Bubba

Oh, and how did I hear from Tim in Afghanistan?  Facebook, of course!