Taliban Rely On Fark, Rotten, Something Awful, IgNobel

This cracks me up. The “nuclear weapon instructions” that were found in a Taliban HQ were, in fact, a deliberately nonsensical article from AIR, the The Annals of Improbable Research. These are the same people that bring you the igNobels.

Apparently, the journalist who found this stuff is completely ignorant of physics, read a few choice phrases, and decided he was looking at something legitimate.

This is a copy of the document he found.

There are two things I take from this.

1. The journalist “discoverers” Anthony Lloyd and John Simpson are self-important arseholes who knows too little to admit that they know nothing. And The Times is disingenuously eliding around the fact that their wild rumour mongering was based on little more than the output of stoned physics undergrads from the 1970s. The BBC issues no comment whatsoever.

2. The Taliban seem to rely on the Internet for a lot of their resources, including street demo posters. Which dooms them to vanish into the same purgatory of confused and imploded delusional cults Heaven’s Gate and Aum Shinrikyo.

The Internet, let’s remember, was invented by the US Department of Defence. Maybe all it is, really, is a long-term scheme to divert the attention of potentially damaging cults and factions towards sanity-sapping dwarf porn and ludicrous misinformation. Before the Internet, when the Scientologists were making their grasp for power, they at least had the sense to attempt to infiltrate the FBI and the Justice Department to get some valuable information. But all the Taliban can do is download nonsense.

And one question remains. Which demonstrates greater stupidity? Downloading obviously humourous nuclear joke articles from the Internet… or discovering them and, with all the resources of an international news organization, taking the same documents at face value?