Porto-Vecchio to Bastia

Distance: 213 kilometers.

It was Marcel Kittel day at the Tour. He won the Yellow, the Green, and the White Jerseys as well as the stage. The riders listed for the Green and White Jerseys are actually the seconds in those classifications.

Everyone has the same official time, 4 hours, 56 minutes, and 52 seconds, because they were all together at the finish.

The BBC reported that Geraint Thomas expected “carnage” in Corsica, and Geraint was right as today Team Sky wait on Geraint Thomas scan. A monstrous team bus got stuck under an overhead finish-line bar as the riders were approaching, and in the resulting confusion there were pile ups. Geraint is definitely going to be riding in pain tomorrow, if he doesn’t have to withdraw. The BBC Stage 1 report offers more details.

Marcel Kittel ( Ger – ARG – 197 ) [Yellow] 4h 56′ 52″
Alexander Kristoff ( Nor – KAT – 103 ) [Green] 35 points
Juan José Lobato del Valle ( Esp – EUS – 115 ) [Polka Dot] 1 points
Danny Van Poppel ( Ned – VCD – 208 ) 3 [White]

Team: Vacansoleil-DCM ( VCD – 201-209 ) [Yellow numbers]
Stage winner: Marcel Kittel ( Ger – ARG – 197 )
Combative: Jérome Cousin ( Fra – EUC – 053 ) [Red numbers]

Top Ten:

1 Marcel Kittel ( Ger – ARG – 197 )
2 Alexander Kristoff ( Nor – KAT – 103 )
3 Danny Van Poppel ( Ned – VCD – 208 )
4 David Millar ( GB – GRS – 176 )
5 Matteo Trentin ( Ita – OPQ – 158 )
6 Samuel Dumoulin ( Fra – ALM – 084 )
7 Gregory Henderson ( NZ – LTB – 026 )
8 Jurgen Roelandts ( Bel – LTB – 027 )
9 José Joaquin Rojas ( Esp – MOV – 129 )
10 Kris Boeckmans ( Bel – VCD – 202 )

The Rest of the Field:
[Read more →]

Yesterday Juan Cole commented on another ‘leak’:

NBC reports that Gen. James “Hoss” Cartwright is under investigation as the source for David Sanger’s 2012 New York Times article revealing that the United States is behind the Stuxnet computer virus, which was used to infect computers at Iran’s Natanz nuclear enrichment facilities and at the Bushehr nuclear energy plants and delay their going hot.

Dr Cole’s point is that the MSM isn’t going to start calling Marine General Cartwright a ‘traitor’, and David Gregory isn’t going to suggest that David Sanger should be arrested.

Let’s consider the actual effects of the two leaks. Snowden informed the public and the world that the US was spying on its own people, in addition to spying on everyone else, which by the way everyone else already assumed. This has created domestic political problems, nothing else has actually changed because the rest of the world already assumed this was happening.

On Cartwright, I would like to point out that only a total psychotic would ever come up with a plan that injected a virus into a computer system that was involved in any way, shape, or form, with anything that included the word ‘nuclear’ in its description. Anyone who has that kind of concept in their mind for more than 4 seconds, should seek immediate psychiatric help, and be confined until the episode has passed.

Even without that, these clowns infected the Internet with yet another piece of truly annoying software that eats bandwidth and wastes people’s time, and this software is now in the hands of the ‘script kiddies’ who do things just because they can. Computer viruses are illegal under the laws of the US and most of the world, and the US sends people to prison for creating them. It was the height of hypocrisy for the US to start faking anger when Saudi petro facilities got infected, and accused Iran of being naughty. The US gave the world the go ahead to do this crap when they released Stuxnet.

Everyone involved in the Stuxnet project should be sentenced to prison until 51% of the attendees at a Linux convention can be convinced to switch to Windows 8.