NEW 2.1

"The modal human is too damn dumb to pour piss out of his boot if the instructions were printed on the heel."
--Lyndon Baines Johnson


9/9

There are albums that I want to live in.  Just climb right inside the vinyl & move into the cool house hidden in the grooves.  In the case of what's playing now, the '70s mellow prog-fusion LP "Valley of the Temples" by Perigeo, the house would be a reclusive Italian villa overlooking some uncluttered part of the Adriatic.  I'd visit the village below to buy my food, always dressed in black & wearing sunglasses, always accompanied by a small white cat with a bejeweled collar.  Everyone would recognize me, but no one would know me.  "What secrets does he carry?" they'd whisper as I drove up the steep mountain road back to the villa in my Alfa Romeo.  I could be spotted there on the veranda overlooking the hillside, sipping a reserva chianti classico while petting the equally mysterious white cat, as she supped on a bowl of the finest Mediterranean seafood.
Then I'd prly spill pesto sauce all over me.  But I'd still be cool.

Instead, I'm stuck in this craphole.  But I do have the white cat!  So it balances out.

Saturday night I arrived home with something Kill Kill found fascinating--2 big pieces of plastic with a metal part.  She immediately clambered onto it when I put it on the floor.  I had to tip it almost 90 degrees to get her off it so that I could assemble it.  I figured that when it was done, she'd understand that it wasn't anything she'd like on Sunday: A Cat Carrier.  She didn't seem to recognize it.  The old 1 prly smelled different or something.
Well, she figured it out today.  It's about 50% larger than the old 1, which is good, as she can be squeezed more easily through the larger door.  When I brought her in, the woman at the grooming place said "Is that Kill Kill?!"  They only see her every 6 weeks or so, but they recognize her (like they do at the vet) from her distinctive name, kittysupermodel good looks, &  the fact that they need a crowbar to get her the hell out of the carrier.  Unfortunately, the larger air vents in the new carrier gave her a place to wedge her back paws into.  For the 1st time it took 2 people to get her, 1 to hold the box & the other to pull her out.  Maybe she was more nervous than usual, as their was a little weiner dog in the same room who went "BARK!!" when I brought the carrier in.  The weiner was actually smaller than KK, but I don't think she's ever heard that noise before.  She herself made a howl-meow-yowl that I've never heard before either when they got her out.
How long did it take?  10 minutes round trip total.  She gobbled a plate of Friskies wet food when we were home, then wanted to chase mice.  I was more than glad to oblige, as on the way back I saw an outdoor cat, as completely black as KK is white.  Laying by the side of the road.  Dead.
Second busiest road in town, & some people give no thought to letting their pets go out into the war zone.

Last night was supposed to be the day I backed up the Pookie, & today the day I put in the new hard drive.  It went well at 1st, until I realized that the C drive was being backed up to the C drive.  That's like thinking "Hey, I could lose this grocery list!  Better write down a copy of it!  On the back of the same piece of paper!"  Repeated tries to make it go to the new E drive led to failure-- Mr CD Burner always thinks that the CDR is write-protected, even when it's brand new.  At this point, the only irreplacable stuff are the MP3s.  750 of them, & I'm routinely flinging CDRs in the trash when they don't copy correctly.  So  the HD replacement is back on hold.

Ah, crap.  I typed into the beginning of Adult Swim.  Any SANE person isn't even on the Web!  If you are insane, I know that I am.  Or at least was accused of insanity when I voted for Nader last year.  At least I'm not the craziest Green voter.

9/10

I woke up 2 hours later than I wanted today. Summer is fading quick. The leaves outside the window have already started to die, Big Lots has the Xmas decorations out, and the Honda dealer near work has a sign that yells "SNOW BLOWERS COMING SOON!"
Kill me. Kill me now.
2 hours of Summer lost in bed. I went to the state park anyway, but abbreviated my visit. I turned the key to start my car, & the college radio station had a pause before the next song played.
It was...Perigeo! From "Valley of the Temples"! What are the ODDS?!
Mentally, I put the dark glasses on and drove the Alfa Romeo.  On the left side of the road.

In the real/less interesting world, I bought groceries, including a Hartz Mt 12-pack of pastel mice. "That's a good way to spoil your cat!" said the teenaged blonde at the register. "That's what cats are for!" I said, and explained that 12 mice wouldn't last long with my cat. They're prly all under the waterbed. She said, "Some day, you'll be sleeping, there'll be a mouse, on your face, from the bed, and you'll wake up, and you'll scream, cuz you'll be scared of the mouse from the bed she found!"
Uh-huh.
Threw the mice for KK when I got home. A couple went under the fridge, which causes her much consternation. Me too, as she lies on the floor jabbing her paws underneath, and there's a hot water pipe down there. I grabbed the flashlight and found out where all those missing mice have gone.  The fridge is the Bermuda Triangle of Vernon CT.  There was one very VERY sad emaciated critter there that was her very 1st mousey. I just threw it now for the 1st time in 2 years.
And it went under the fridge.

Christian Fundies think that they're the Most Normal People on God's Earth. But they act batshit insane sometimes. F'rinstance, they're bringing back arranged marriages. Yeahhhh, THAT'S progress.
"The Prices were stunned when Mr. Moss came to them one day that he had heard God tell him that Kara was to be his wife. Kara was only 14 at the time. That night, entirely unaware of his interest, Kara told her mother that God had told her Casey Moss was to be her husband."
"To this day, everyone involved agrees that there was no way the two young people could have known of each other's confessions."
Well, there is the fact he was the girl's babysitter.  Possibly they had a conversation to that effect.  But, no, it makes more sense when GAWD tells you to be a holy pedophile.
"You don't raise kids to hear God, and then say, `Gee, I don't think he told you that,' " Mrs. Price said. "If you raise them to trust what the Lord says, then you have to trust what they say the Lord is telling them." Oh no! That stupid Berkowitz dog is talking again! Keep the happy couple away from Lovers' Lane!!

A long, fascinating article on pay phones, and the one-sided conversations overheard on them.

9/11

"May you be fated to live in interesting times."--Chinese curse

 

The clock radio went off this morning.  That's not the announcer, I thought, it's a news reader.  Something's happened.
Wait, it's not a news reader.  It's Bush.
Next thought:  "Oh, FUCK."
Something very big happened.  The radio assumed that I knew what, so I had to piece it together while I got ready for work.  World Trade Center hit by a plane.  No, hit by planes.  The Pentagon, also hit by a plane.  NO, hit by JETLINERS.  The chilling moment when a reporter said she could "see the fires where the World Trade Center was."  "Was"?!
There's a traffic information sign on I84 West, the highway that leads to New York.  It read
AVOID I95
NEW YORK
NEW JERSEY
VERY HEAVY DELAYS
If you fly a plane from Boston to NYC, there's only 1 other state you can fly over.  They closed all 3 malls in central Connecticut, then cancelled all afterschool activities, then started announcing that all the churches and synagogues (but not the mosques?) would be open for prayer services.  So, they blow up the WTC and the Pentagon, and their next targets would be the malls? And then the schools, but only after classes. But they won't hit the churches.
Hundreds?  Thousands??  TENS of thousands dead?

Next up:  The part where we rush to bomb some scapegoat, followed by more attacks in revenge, followed by the cessation of our civil liberties in the name of Security, followed by the economy collapsing when we inflate spending on the military.  Prly on stupid shit like Star Wars.  Say, weren't the terrorists supposed to build missiles and launch them at us?  Instead, they just used flying car bombs.

Welcome to Interesting Times.

Luna on the tragedy.  "It's her birthday today & they've prepared a surprise party, so no one said "Happy Birthday"... she's been really upset about it, even though she'd never admit it, & now she'll never know that they remembered."

9/12

I've been trying to upload this since 1030PM EDT.  Why won't it?

Yesterday was very slow at work. Well, the Mall's a half-mile away, and it was closed while Willis and Scharzenegger and Norris made us SAFE, swinging on ropes with guns a-blazin' at them thar terrorists like in them movies.  So that may've affected business. But today the mall was open, and business was even slower. Maybe I'm not the only one who thinks that our economy is too heavily structured on "consumer confidence" and the Fantasy League Economics of the Stock Market to not be pummeled by this jolt of the real world.
Maybe I should've bought those Ocean State Job Lot MREs.

The newspaper editorialists have begun frothing at their mouths, claiming, in essence, that We will not be bowed by Their attack, but that They will be bowed by OUR attack. Yep, that's why there's eternal peace in the Middle East and Northern Ireland. More killing is the only way to stop more killing.
Joe Six-Pack thinks going to War would be okay, showing the same strategic insight that the Soviet Union had when it came to invading Afghanistan.
Joe Half-Wit goes paranoid when he sees a guy with a kinfe and a turban, obviously planning on taking over an Amtrak train and crashing it into...a Greyhound bus or a hot dog cart or something.
The White House claims that the White House was the target, not the Pentagon, offering not a shred of evidence for this "proof" that Bushbaby wasn't a gay fag looser for flying as far away from DC he possibly could, as quick as he could. They also claim Air Force One was a target, not explaining how a commercial jetliner could possibly take out a plane regularly protected by F15s, or how these obvious evil geniuses didn't know he was in Florida at the time, reading a book to schoolchildren (his professed favorite, "The Very Hungry Caterpillar," maybe?).
A cheery article on how the attack won't hurt the Stock Market, with weird Civil War references. A crash is "unlikely to transpire if authorities do their job and thus avoid the fate that befell Gen. George McClellan two months after Antietam. President Lincoln replaced him with Ambrose E. Burnside after complaining about McClellan’s failure to press his advantage after victory. His comment: 'If you don’t want to use the Army, I should like to borrow it for awhile.' The Bush administration likewise has a vast set of financial weapons at its disposal to battle this assault." Oddly, it doesn't mention Gen. Burnside's real claims to fame:
His amazing facial hair was so impressive, it was named "Sideburns" after him.
He was the worst military commander in US history, and we're counting Custer here.
His 2 shining moments came when he sent Union troops into a suicidal attack across a Confederate-controlled bridge, despite the fact that his scouts found a place where his troops could WADE across only a hundred yards away.  His other triumph was when he decided the best way to attack the heavily-entrenched enemy was by digging a tunnel under their fortifications, planting a bomb underneath to destroy them, then, in the chaos, sending his troops in to attack.  The tunnel was dug, the bomb went off, the troops rushed in.  Rushed into the crater formed by the bomb.  They were immediately surrounded, and massacred.
Stock Market Dude needs to work on his military metaphors.

But there are voices of sanity. Mysteriously lost in the 24/7 rote repetition of the same old news was the fact that Bush wanted "a virtual blank check for taking whatever actions the president considered necessary." "I didn't come here to have written on my tombstone that any president could, if he wanted, put eight divisions into Afghanistan or go to war with the entire Arab world without consulting with any other human being in government," said Rep. David Obey.
And there's also the only sane idea for retaliation I've heard.

But will sanity prevail? Are the unelected corporate sock-puppets of the Bush Administration capable of handling this?
Hell, they couldn't even steal the election without outside help.
I don't want to live in interesting times.
Or die in them.

9/13

Five thousand.

The page went down last night. When I dragged myself from bed, I could finally FTP to it, but everything I'd already uploaded was gone. Gone.

Gone.  All gone.

I was unhappy, given the bullshit I went through last month with Geocities. Had I violated some unspoken TOS with Readyhosting?

Five thousand gone.

It didn't seem as important as it did the last time.
Some "catastrophic failure during regular backup" caused it, according to Readyhosting.
Catastrophic?
It's nothing.  A web page is nothing.

That didn't stop Star Chaser, Lilly & Vyn from worrying. Earlier at work, I called Jessica. I misunderstood an email; I thought she wanted to get together tomorrow rather than next Friday. "Is everything okay?" she asked nervously. Yes, why? "Well, you called me at work..." I thought we were getting together this Friday, is all.
Then we talked about our fears, the fears Joe Six-Pack Half-Wit seems not to share.  The potential collapse of the economy.  A war that drags on for years.
Middle-aged men in the office at work, utterly confident that they're looking at another push-button war, a war where the military rains missiles at the touch of a switch, and they watch the designated Bad Guys get massacred with the flip of a remote. They always invoke "World War II" and "Pearl Harbor." Like WWII was anything like the Gulf War.
Well, it's going to be WWII, with its incredible death count, mixed with Viet Nam, with its invisible enemies that can't be stopped with our Smart & Magic Bombs, but unlike either war, there WILL be massive civilian deaths in this country.

Twice today I heard from co-workers how "We should kill them all!" is the solution. But they are already bent on killing all of us. If it's an action movie, it's one where you & all your friends & family are the anonymous extras that get killed.
It's like WWII in that we will have to accept massive deaths on our side, and still implacably march forward. It is like WWII in that we are again dealing with the worst concept in human thinking: An enemy that's convinced They Are Right, and All Not Exactly Like Us Must Die.  An enemy Chosen by God to destroy.  But it is not WWII. The Nazis didn't want to die. Islamic Fundies don't only not fear death, they welcome it. You can't reason with a person like that who also thinks God guides his actions, and killing civilians leads to the Highest of Heaven. Maybe we can convince the Taliban to give the bastards up--if they ARE the bastards, & not just one part of a group/s involved (ever hear of Hezbollah?  The White House & the Media apparently haven't).
A war with the Afghanistan...There's no way in, except through other countries, which are either unsympathetic to us (Pakistan), or unwilling to let the whole damn US Armed Forces just go traipsing in (China, India), or have their own personal nightmares. Like Russia.
Screw what Ron Reagan crowed. The Afghani took down the Soviet Union. The Soviets had the biggest army in the world, back then.
Rebels with ancient weapons took down a Superpower. Of course, they only had ancient weapons until Ronnie started funding the Mujhadeen, with modern weapons & modern training.
We created the Frankenstein. So shall ye reap...

In the office at work, 2 middle aged men declaimed on What We Should Do. They were unhappy that, unlike in the case of WWII & "the Japs" (as they called them), we couldn't just round up every Arab in America & thow them in concentration camps. One bitched that Bush's teleprompter-read speech after the attack wasn't being favorably compared to FDR's "Day of Infamy" speech. "He had a whole WEEK after Pearl Harbor to prepare!" he said in disgust. He didn't read just what the scriptwriters wrote, I said, he personally changed it from from "A day that will in history" to "infamy." A word FDR spat out in a way that made it unforgettable. Blank look on the boss' face, then "YEAH, he comes up with this ONE BIG WORD and everybody goes OOOH!"
And he and the other middle-aged man, also without draft-aged children, smirked at their brilliance.
They don't get it. No one crying "WAR!" seems to get it. We're all on the front lines now. We're all looking at getting our 15 minutes of fame. On CNN, as endlessly looped background footage of a suicide bombing.
They both have kids in elementary schools.  Even they are our front line soldiers now.
Five thousand could seem like nothing a year from now.

For context, how others view us:  From New Zealand:
(It's late, I'm tired, so I'm going to give this "pre" tags, meaning it may look bad.  I'll fix it tmw if so)

HARD NEWS is also available in MP3 form from http://www.mp3.net.nz and in
text form at http://www.scoop.co.nz. You can subscribe to the 95bFM Hard
News mailing list at http://www.95bfm.com/hardnews.php
GOOD DAY MEDIAPHILES ... It was as strange as if we had dreamed it. And, in
a very modern sense, we have. We have seen Armageddon, Deep Impact and
Independence Day. We have seen New York laid waste in the movies.
        As that great cloud of smoke, paper, masonry dust and human remains
teemed down the from Trade Centre towers, then stormed towards the cameras,
it followed a visual syntax familiar to us all. But this time it was real
and that was what was so hard to grasp. This time, it wasn't Godzilla.
        Yet even as we feel for America, we are fretting about America's
response. The President's speeches reassure his people - and unnerve the
rest of us. What exactly is going on here?
        As it happens, two of America's finest essayists, Lewis Lapham
writing in last month's Harper's, and Gore Vidal, in this month's Vanity
Fair, have given us instructive and insightful works with which to untangle
the horror.
        The Lapham essay might have been written as a study guide to the
utterances of George W. Bush on the day of the attack. Bush's first words to
his nation were: "Freedom itself was attacked this morning." America not
only loves freedom - it *owns* freedom. His big speech on the evening of the
attack was littered with words like "justice", "peace" and "freedom" - not
once but repeatedly.
        It served to support the dangerous fantasy that America has worn a
white hat for the past five decades. The Americans now calling for their
country to get dirty have missed the fact that their country has played
dirty for a very long time.
        Television pictures of a few hundred celebrating Palestinians have
already enraged Americans. But if I had spent 20 or 30 years rotting in a
refugee camp in Lebanon, I think I, too, would celebrate a strike against
the country that had, year after year, used its veto to thwart the will of
the United Nations over Palestine.
        In 1988, a US missile cruiser shot down an Iranian airliner en route
to Dubai, under the impression that it was a warplane. 290 civilians died,
their relatives later told to get lost by the US Supreme Court. America paid
$2.9 million in compensation - but only to the families of non-Iranian
passengers.
        When it happened, the father of the current American president was
then campaigning for office. His statement was this: "I will never apologise
for the United States. I don't care what the facts are." Today's terrorists
might be equally callous, but surely not more so.
        America has also, when it has suited, ignored acts of terrorism by
foreign governments on its own soil. Take, say, the 1976 murder by car bomb
of a Chilean opposition leader and his American assistant. It happened in
downtown Washington DC and the American government knew precisely who was
responsible: the Pinochet regime it had helped install in Chile.
        America didn't punish Pinochet: instead, it offered him FBI help in
tracking down other dissidents, presumably so they too could be assassinated
in the Land of the Free.
        Pinochet has been allowed to survive into the refuge of his dotage.
Henry Kissinger, directly complicit in the deaths of thousands of innocent
people, will die comfortably in old age, no doubt accorded a state funeral.
        It is rarely heads of state who pay the ultimate price for their
actions, but ordinary people. And this week, thousands of ordinary American
people have been horribly snatched away. The awfulness here is almost
impossible to grasp. Children with no one to pick them up from school. Three
hundred and fifty firefighters taken as they tried themselves to save lives.
About 5000 lives lost in all. And people in planes and buildings making
cellphone calls to say goodbye, forever.
        Even this far away, most of us have been shaken. I had to talk to my
kids about it, especially my 10-year-old, who just could not understand why
someone would do this - he is a very moral boy. I eventually realised that
the non-stop TV coverage was really upsetting him. I turned the TV off,and
he asked if he could be alone for a while. A 10 year old.
        But this doesn't make it any better that thousands more people may
soon die in a probably fruitless, low-risk attack on the trappings of Osama
Bin Laden - who was once himself helped and cultivated by the CIA, when it
suited.        Or that Ariel Sharon, who oversaw the massacre of more than a
thousand Palestinian civilians in a few days in 1982, is now the Prime
Minister of Israel, which receives billions of dollars from US taxpayers
every year. Or that, by the estimate of the United Nations, 600,000 Iraqi
children have either starved to death or been poisoned in the years since
the Gulf War.
        It is not a just world, and blind American anger will not make itso.
        Bin Laden himself is a murderous, Islamist pig; a rich racist with
an endless supply of cannon fodder. But he does not inflict mindless,
motiveless violence. He acts in a deeply political context. Which is where
Gore Vidal can help us. He writes about the last great slaughter of American
innocents; the Oklahoma bombing.
        Timothy McVeigh acted with a cold reason that he was able to explain
in detail to anyone who asked; after Waco he felt himself to be at war with
a hostile government - his own. Yet, in public, writes Vidal: "There was to
be only one story: one man of incredible, innate evil wanted to destroy
innocent lives for no reason other than a spontaneous joy in evildoing."
        The story was the same this week. In his evening address to the
nation, Bush punctuated his words so that the phrase "America was attacked
by evil," stood on its own. Good was attacked by evil. It was that simple.
        Yet, as Lapham relates, he visited France this year, shortly after
an opinion poll in which people were asked about images that came to mind
when they thought of America. From a short list of words, two-thirds chose
"violence" and "power". Half chose "inequality" and "racism". Only 20 per
cent chose "freedom", the image in which Bush chose to dress America. And
this in a Nato member country.
        "Gradually it occurred to me," writes Lapham. "That the French
didn't fully appreciate the doctrine of America innocence."
        This tragedy has also drawn out the best in the American people. The
deeply symbolic rush to give blood; the way little people went to help, or
turned over their websites to personal coverage of what was going on. These
are positive and poignant responses to trauma. But the American people's
profound ignorance of their own government's foreign policy bodes ill.
        A massive military response is being assembled even now. The cold
fact that American military might isn't much use against the kind of
opponent America is fighting will be ignored. Bush will use this week as an
excuse to spend billions of dollars on missile defence - even though missile
defence is now more absurd than ever.
        The US intelligence agencies - outsmarted yet again - are already
demanding that civil rights be rolled back in the hope of catching the next
group of criminals. There will be pressure as never before on privacy. John
Perry Barlow has depicted the attack as the burning of the Reichstag - the
calamity that unleashed the Nazis. We can only hope he's wrong.
        And already, it seems, American anger has been turned inwards on
Arab Americans - or even anyone who looks like they might be Arab.
        The economic consequences here are yet unknowable. Only hours before
the attack, there was very bad news on the global economy, with concerns
focused on Japan. It's not yet clear what the additional impact of
destruction, interruption of business, an insurance nightmare and a general
loss of confidence will be.
        On the other hand, money spend setting right disaster will boost
American GDP; and it may be fear of economic consequences that stays the
hand of America's military might.
        For us, Air New Zealand has fallen in a hole at precisely the wrong
time; things may be tough for the air travel industry for a while now.
Still, there are worse places to be right now than a food basket in the
South Pacific ocean.
        The world has changed and it already seems a long, long time since
last Friday night and the B-Net New Zealand Music Awards and the late, late
party after at the Bowler. Special big-ups to MonkeyBoy for storming the
decks with his his two new Subware remixes and to SirVere for his good grace
and general niceness after that unfortunate incident with the fireextinguisher.
        Anyway, when I finally did leave the party, about 4.30, I walked up
the hill and along K Road, as you do, before catching a cab. It was a
grotty, battered little taxi, driven by a little man in Muslim garb.
        We got talking. Turned out, he was an electrical engineer. He was
finishing off his PhD part-time, feeding his family by ferrying out-of-it
twentysomething in an out of K Road. And he couldn't understand why there
wasn't a real job for him - or for most of his friends. They were from
Pakistan; not refugees, but skilled migrants whose skills New Zealand now
didn't seemed to want.        He asked me about my work, said he
felt bad about being a drag on the country - surely the government didn't
want this? I told him I was ashamed that he didn't have a job worthy of his
skills. And then stood on the footpath watching him drive away, kicking
myself for not just tipping him the last twenty in my wallet.
        Now, with local mosques having to increase security, with Winston
Peters standing up in Parliament to suggest that the Afghan refugees still
headed here might be terrorists, with, even here, bigotry in the air, I fear
the little guy has more problems than ever. I hope I'm wrong, I really do.

 

9/14

I overheard a bit of a speech from a televised service in NYC, where somebody said that there was "no explanation" why God allowed Evil to exist in the world. Let's check the possible explanations:

 SPACE GHOST:  (pause)  "You're bringin' me DOWN, man!!"
Enough obsessing.  My brain needs a break.

Kudos to the Onion, for being the only funny webpage that didn't shut down.  It's one thing to not feel funny, but to think that this is a time when no one needs to laugh about something, anything, is kinda weird.
If they decide next week that they didn't feel funny this week, I'll understand.

A co-worker is driving a car with an American flag on the antenna, & a "Yankees SUCK" sticker on the bumper.
A Red Sox fan, for those of you not in New England.

That was at the Small Store, & while I was there, I checked out our fellow plaza-member Big Lots.
I was greeted by a life-size Jerry Van Dyke cutout.  Greeted, repulsed, whatever.

We brought in a large selection of new beers at the Big Store, about a hundred types from all over the world.  I'm psyched!  Beer is Friend to Bill!  I'm gonna buy a few tmw to try over my last remaining vacation days.
They have...interesting names.  "Complete Bottom."  "Old Engine Oil."  My fave: "Old Jock."  "Can you guess our Special Ingredient?  Hint:  We're WEARING it!"
That last part was a joke!  However, it really does have a recommendation of food to have with it:  "Meat & nutty cheeses."  That follows.
There was also a bottle of Belgian beer that used a famous local statue as its label. This one, minus the clothes. Well, that's what drinking beer does to ya. 

9/15

The TV in the store office that's been eternally on since Tuesday was set to NBC, I think, today. They've obviously run out of actual NEWS on the tragedy, so they had an hour-long biography. Of Hitler. Excuse me? What similarity does Hitler have to anybody in the current crisis? (Yes, I know that I made a Nazi comparison here, but that was about how this is different) I guess that bin Laden is now the "Next Hitler" du jour. As the last Next Hitlers were Saddam Hussein and Slob Milosevic, I don't understand why this is supposed to scare me anymore. The only similarity I can see is the amount of morons shrieking that we should "kill all the Arabs in the world!" Genocide is fun when you've got GAWD on your side!


"Who CARES if bin Laden and the Afghani didn't do it? Kill them anyway!" There's another constantly repeated retarded rhetoric. What message does that send? To the Islamic world, it says "Ahh, you towel-heads look all alike! Oh, and yes, we ARE the Great Satan the Fundies warned you about!" To the people that DID do it, it says "Yep, you got away with mass murder! We don't care about justice, we want scapegoats! Say, when do you use those stolen Soviet tactical nukes you've got?" (A "tactical nuke," to the American military, is a bomb with a yield less than 100 kilotons. Hiroshima got hit with 25 kilotons)

What disgusts me is the glee some--hell, most--Americans are showing towards The War. They think it's gonna be Gulf War II: Die Harder. Another "Nintendo war," as KMDS says. I've been telling people "You want to know what this war's going to be like? Like TUESDAY. They have no tanks or planes, the only weapon they have is you. If you thought Tuesday was fun, you're in for a really great war." Reserve your family's gravesites now!

Religion's Misguided Missiles, on the closeness of the religious brain to the brain of a pigeon.

Is bin Laden not just a scapegoat, but a fall guy? "The terrorists who attacked the World Trade Center and Pentagon Sept. 11 practiced near-perfect operational planning, coordination and execution before their mission but left behind obvious evidence leading to other operatives who may have supported the hijackings. This begs the question of whether these evidence trails were intentionally left in order to distract U.S. law enforcement from other terrorists."

From Russell Brown, who wrote the piece from New Zealand:

There has been a lot of email since Hard News went out on Friday. It began not long after: To quote, the people who wrote thought it was "perfect", "fantastic stuff", "a bright beacon", "one of the best thought pieces about the week", that it "ruled" and that Hard News was "the last sane voice in the media".

A little later, some very different feedback began arriving. Hard News had been "trite" and "cheap", an "attempt to excuse the inexcusable, or explain the unexplainable" and would be seen by mainstream America as "an article from a spoiled, arrogant brat from a pissy little country in the middle of nowhere."

Without exception, the praise came from people living outside America and the condemnation from within; both American citizens and New Zealanders living there. Clearly, none of us out here can know what it's like to have something like this happen in your own country, or, as is the case for an old friend of mine who wrote an emotional letter to me, in your own city. I sometimes forget the reach Hard News has these days, and if I have hurt anyone or made their week even a fraction worse, I am genuinely sorry.

After I delivered the bulletin, I realised that perhaps I hadn't said enough about the things I love about America and the people who live there. And I do. New York City is the greatest city in the world, and America's contribution to every facet of modern human endeavour is almost beyondmeasure. But I can't and won't resile from my point. Watching television here, we see a stream of vox pops from angry Americans, demanding a massive and immediate military response against an enemy whose location isn't even known. As I often do, I have dipped into forums and newsgroups to see what Americans are saying. After the shock and bewilderment, there have seemed to be two beliefs: that this came out of the blue and that ensuring a future free of terrorism is a matter of eradication by massive force. When I mentioned others who have died, it was in no sense an attempt to excuse the evil of this week, to dismiss the suffering in America, or to tot up a body count for the other side. I was trying to put this in context. Tuesday was an escalation, not a beginning. To me, this can't be made sense of without contemplating the chilling fact that Osama bin Laden - who is almost certainly the culprit - set up his organisation with the help of the American taxpayer.

President Bush's declaration that "what our enemies hate and have attacked" was "the best that is in our country, [our] courage and concern for others" doubtless lifted the spirits of his people, but it will not go far towards explaining how or why something so hideous could happen. Bush worries me. We see the speeches and press conferences here: you can read the pain and weariness on Rudolph Giuliani's face; Colin Powell seems to be a leader of genuine composure. But Bush? I don't know. The American foreign policy climate has become so much worse lately: Kyoto, missile defence, the blocking of the accord on biological warfare, the humiliation for America of being voted out of its seat on the UN Human Rights Commission by a dozen apparently friendly countries.

The essays I quoted in Hard News - both written by Americans, in American publications - were composed well before September 11. The fact that, in different ways, they could almost be overlaid on what has happened this week was hard to ignore. There were ironies elsewhere, of course: Jacques Chirac's speech declaring that France had never supported terrorism - France, the country whose government committed the only act of international terrorism my own country has ever seen - stood out. And now we wait to see what happens next. There must be a military response, of course. And the promise is that a sustained, targeted campaign will not only punish the culprits but drive terrorism from the face of the earth. Perhaps it will work, even though this war seems so profoundly different to wars past. But maybe you can't bomb an idea - even a wicked, hateful idea - out of existence. And even if you could, what proportion of the world would you need to brutalise to do so? I worry about many more families dying because of choices others have made, about creeping bigotry in my own backyard, and about the freedoms so dear to Americans being wiped away: the FBI was granted unprecedented powers of surveillance this week.

And I worry about Americans themselves. I can't really imagine how it must feel to be American at the moment, but I do know that the world depends on their confidence and dynamism of Americans, and that loss is our loss. The tears have welled up several times as I have written these two pieces. But I can only hope that we can agree that there is a lot that needs to change before things get better.Russell Brown

---- I would appreciate it if readers could forward on this follow-up to anyone they sent Friday's Hard News, and if the person who posted it to the Salon.com TableTalk forum could do the same with this. Finally, here's a link to a piece written by Robert Fisk, the best of all the Middle Eastern correspondents, on the day following the atrocity. He says it much better than me: http://www.zmag.org/fiskawecalam.htm

I wrote him to tell him that not every American is an war-hungry idiot.

More context: "What could some political thing have to do with blowing up office buildings during working hours?" one bewildered New Yorker asked yesterday.

There is a fishing boat in New London, Connecticut, that is so eager to be the first boat out to the fishing grounds that the crew sleeps on board every night. There is a small apartment overlooking Long Island Sound that watches them leave every morning before dawn.
One night, a night that has been years in the planning, the residents of the apartment board the boat. They kill the crew in their sleep. They bring a large, heavy crate onboard.
The tiny ship, The Melville, takes its usual course across the sleepy seaport, then wanders towards the Base. It wanders closer, closer, but even during The War it's such a familiar sight that no one at the Groton Nuclear Submarine Base reacts until it's a mile away.
A mile is as good as an inch when you have a 50 kiloton tacnuke on board.
Groton is vaporized; the nuclear weapons and atomic reactors on the subs don't explode, as they're designed that way. But the plutonium and uranium in them vaporize too. The radioactive cloud spreads from Boston to NYC, before the Earth's rotation drags the fallout into the shipping lanes, and the richest fishing seas off America.
Tens of thousands die in the initial explosion and radioactive tidal wave. Millions die in Connecticut, Long Island and Rhode Island from radiation poisoning. Slowly, painfully die over the course of days. Tens of thousands die in New York and Massachusetts. Hundreds of thousands more will die over the years as the radioactivity works its way into the drinking water and the food chain.
Connecticut, Long Island, Rhode Island. They now are known as only a radioactive pit that will be too contaminated for humans, animals, plants to live in. For the next ten thousand years.

Sorry. Just worrying out loud again.

And now, further into the realm of science fiction....

"God Bless America," said the clerk without emotion.
"God Bless America," she repeated wearily.  She remembered when the clerks at the grocery store would say "Have a nice day."  They don't really care if I have a nice day, she'd thought back in those days. But she'd reply "You, too!" right back, as if she really meant it.
So long ago.  So long since there'd been a nice day.
So long since God blessed America.

She walked the ten miles home.  Three miles an hour, that's walking speed, she thought.  "It's good exercise!" said Grandma when she was a kid.  "Back in World War Two, we had gas rationing!  We had tire rationing!  Did you know that back then, Detroit stopped making civilian cars for the whole war?!"  Grandpa would (always) say, "Bet you can't imagine that today!"
She walked past that rusted, blown-out SUV she always walked by.  It'd been there for years.  Tattered, faded American flags hung limply off the radio antenna.
Detroit.
Cars.
Tires.
Tires!  Winter was coming soon.  She'd need to find tires to burn.

 "GOD BLESS AMERICA!" said her neighbor, the stooge.  His eyes were bright and unblinking.  He saw everything.
She forced her best fake smile.  "God Bless America!"
"What ya got there?"
Eyes bright and unblinking.  Cameras on.
"Food.  Beans, MREs, the usual."  She kept the forced smile.
"Beans."  Eyes bright slowly looked her over.  Once down, then back up, never blinking.
"Too bad about Detroit, huh?"
The shift in the conversation threw her for a tiny second.  Beans, then Detroit.  But she couldn't show any reaction but the right one.  "Those BASTARDS!  What did they do now?  When will we kill them all?!"
"Detroit.  Worse than Groton."
Her eyes grew wide and she gasped.  Groton, that radioactive pit in what was once Connecticut.  "What...what could be worse than Groton?"  DAMN!  She thought.  The eyes, he has the eyes!  Don't let them think anything about me!
 "They're dropping like flies.  Disease."  The eyes were on her chest, monitoring her heartbeat.
Don't be nervous--I'm not an Arab! she thought.  I'm born innocent!  "D-disease?  What do you--"
His whole body shook, his eyes, those all-watching eyes, rolled back into his head.  He was downloading.  She waited.  Running away would look like she was guilty.  Of something, to those eyes.
She could do nothing.  Was he FBI?  NSA?  NPF, the National Police Force?  Who could say?  Who could say anything these days?
He started shuddering. She still stood there.
What was the news he was downloading from Washington?  DC, the mighty fortress.  Where the Pentagon went a thousand stories into the ground, where  no American civilian had set foot since Groton.  When the only sane retaliation had been launched.  Use an A-bomb on us?  We have H-bombs!
All those bombs.  Sprayed over the Islamic world.  Like bug spray.  "Kill the roaches!"
Cold, cold world.  Nuclear winter world.
But it wasn't enough.  Detroit, now?  Disease, now?!  Next, it'll be OUR diseases that we spread to their countries--
With a scream, blood poured from his nose and mouth and eyes.  He collapsed, and began convulsing.
The bag of precious food dropped from her hands.  Fatal error in the download to his computer-enhanced brain!  But his eyes!  The cameras in his eyes!  SHE was the last thing that he'd seen!
Somewhere, the helicopters were being given their orders.  Last seen, terrorist.  Location, this stairwell.
She began to sing "GOD BLESS AMERICA!  LAND THAT I LOOOVE!!" at the top of her lungs.
2 stories above, her children cried and her husband grabbed both them and the suitcases that had been packed since the FBI launched Operation Benedict, the operation that assumed that everyone might be a traitor.  Her family ran down the fire escape.  The song was their personal code for "run."  It meant  "I'm the scapegoat.  Abandon me."
She kept singing.  She remembered when the song brought tears to her eyes, back when the World Trade Center attack seemed like something big.  Back when freedom was something to be protected.  Back before Groton, the attack when all Americans decided that there was TOO much freedom, and too little safety.  She'd been so happy when they suspended the Bill of Rights "for the duration of the current crisis."  10 years ago.
She heard cars.  Cars!  Only the NPF had cars now.
She prayed that her family had escaped.  But she'd never know.

The NPF cops did their best to assemble into an assault team.  They were exhausted.  All these warrants coming in from those NSA freaks, the BugEyes.  Another damn arrest, thought one officer.  When does it all end?
He coughed up some more of that weird yellow phlegm into his hand, and wiped it on his pants.  He'd had this terrible cold since that bust in Detroit.

9/16

Weird addition to the science fiction: Today, the Sub Base in Groton banned all boat travel near it. But only after dark.
Terrorists. They don't fear death, but they are afraid of the dark.
Alert the NPF of any Arabs who use night lights.

At work the other day a woman flipped out at Shelley, because Shelley didn't abandon her line of customers to sell her lottery tickets. 5,000 dead in New York, I said, and someone thinks that waiting an extra minute to throw away money is a crisis. I was thinking about this on the drive home last night when I turned into traffic. The nearest car was about 12 car lengths behind me, and my central rule of driving is "Never make a maneuver that requires someone else to hit their brakes," so I immediately sped up to put more distance between us. The other car dropped behind me as I accelerated, then hit the gas to run right up behind me and flash his highbeams at me. I thought of the lottery woman and slammed on my brakes, causing the other driver to do the same. There are worse things going on the world than pretending you've been cut off in traffic, retard.
Or, of course, someone flashing their highbeams. But I never do that to even the biggest idiots--If I managed to survive their stupid maneuver, showing irritation with the lights or horn isn't going to make me more not dead.

"Some things never change," I sighed to Kill Kill today. "Like Mr Sartori's timeliness."
We were supposed to go see the last showings of both the movie "Himalaya" and the Prison Art exhibit at Real Art Ways. Arrive no later than 230, I said, and at 3 I called him. Seems he forgot about the movie due to his house being broken into yesterday.
The perp jimmied open the porch door, couldn't get in through the next door, so he smashed the window in, spraying glass all over the kitchen. It's unknown exactly what happened next, but he must've been scared off by their Jack Russell terrier Huckleberry. A playful, friendly dog, though he barks his head off at me when I knock on the door, and me he knows. I assume that he must've barked the whole time the guy was trying to get in, then went ballistic when the guy actually walked into the kitchen. Jack Russells are small dogs, but they're noted for their tenacity. Huck must've lunged at the jerk.
Casa Sartori was well defended, and the guy left with nothing. Well, nothing except the jewelry box he stole from the neighbors.

Too late for me to see the movie, and Kevin was busy replacing the door, so I went to the Prison Art exhibit. Some of it was amateurish, some astonishingly professional, and all of it interesting simply from the context. Obviously, the artists have a lot of time on their hands, and some of the pieces showed it. Like the astonishing sculptures of frogs done from recycled styrofoam food trays, toilet paper and floor varnish. By a guy using ball point pen caps as his sculpting tools, and who only has 1 arm. There were intricate alabaster sculptures, oddly cutesy in their design, but carved from soap! And a working model ferris wheel made from 11,472 pieces of potato chip bags.
I left, both impressed by the art and depressed by the artists. Largest prison population in the world has the Land of the Free. How many more will join them in the years to come?
You can read about the art and the artists here. The article doesn't have very many pictures, sadly.

After that, I went to return a shelf kit I'd bought at Ames, and use a coupon to buy a bigger one. In order to house these, from one of my favorite movies. I overpaid the seller by mistake, and *HE* caught it and refunded my money! There's honesty for you. I got the figures, and Kill Kill got an exciting new box to sleep in, imported from that land of mystery and enchantment, Canada.
Unfortunately, I picked the worst time to arrive. Customer service had 2 ill-defined lines (and only 1 person working). Some guy waited 10 minutes to buy a large office chair & return a pair of plastic little kid chairs. What, did he initially buy the kid chairs instead of the office chair, thinking that he could use 1 chair per butt-cheek? The kid chairs were worth a whole 50 cents. If time is money, that works out to .083 cents per second spent returning them.

Another voice of sanity in an increasingly insane country: Michael Moore.

The Skeptic's Dictionary on the Christian Fundies' assertion that God blew up the WTC: "Robertson, however, is unrepentant, and has added Internet pornography to list of things that have so angered his God as to murder thousands of innocent people. If we don't change our ways, he says, God is going to kill a lot more of us. Thus, when the carnage mounts in the years ahead as the U.S. and its allies try to eliminate terrorism and the terrorists continue murdering the innocent, we can look back at the dead and say that Pat Robertson predicted it."
Click on the "Nostradamus" link at the end for the story on the fake Nutty-D "predictions" that quickly made the Internet rounds. Some are ridiculously precise ("The city of York"? Come ON!), when the only thing that kept Nostradumbass in business so long was his incredible vagueness. The only concrete prediction he ever made was that the world would end in July of '99. (IMPORTANT NOTE: It didn't)

Let the censoring begin! The fall TV lineup is changing. "Beyond depictions of terrorist attacks, the networks have to be careful with any scenes of New York under siege. Fox, for example, has decided to pull its made-for-TV movie "The Rats" [which] takes place in Manhattan, as hundreds of rodents threaten to overtake the city." My Gourd, that is SO CLOSE to what happened Tuesday!! Maybe it wasn't bin Laden! Maybe it was--RATS! Flying rats! Why hasn't the FBI taken Rocky the Flying Squirrel into custody?!
"Even skyline shots of New York will have to be changed now that the cityscape has been dramatically altered. NBC will edit out scenes of the World Trade Center from an upcoming episode of its reality show 'Lost.'"
They're already editing reality, folks. Editing reality.

I don't know if anybody clicked that link to subscribe to Russell Brown's Hard News ML, but the current email has my letter to him in it. Number 3 out of 44K's worth of email. Well worth reading, but too much to be posted here, especially as the web editor I'm forced to use has pre tag problems.
Mine is really just a summation of all you've heard here already, except for this part:

>I don't really imagine how it must feel to be American at the moment.

I hear people cheering for genocide with a laughing confidence, thinking that they're invulnerable despite living exactly halfway between Logan Airport in Boston and the 5,000 dead in the rubble in NYC. Sometimes I don't know how it feels like, either.

I'd hoped to find a page that links to the responses. No luck. I did find this: Is this all a personal feud between the Bush family & the bin Ladens?

9/17

Man...I haven't shut up all week, have I?
Not even on the Space Ghost ML. Cartoon Network has either put on hiatus or cancelled Cowboy Bebop, one of the best things I've ever seen on TV. Apparently, in about 3 months, there was to be an episode involving a mad bomber. My opinion:

Building exploding in cartoon set on Mars: Inappropriate.
Jet hitting Tower, Towers collapsing, actual human lives being snuffed out in the hundreds or thousands, shown as endless loops in the background, thousands and thousands times over and over, reducing their deaths to the level of a screensaver: Respectful.
Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell saying that God killed all those people because of abortion and Gay & women's rights: REALLY respectful.

An opinion poll says that 85% of Americans have no problem with a war, even if it means civilian deaths. THEIR civilians, of course. The follow-up question "Would you support a war if it meant the deaths of your family and friends?" was not asked.
Another article claimed that bin Laden hates America because "our troops were allowed on Saudi Arabian soil." The 100,000 dead Iraqi civilians that really motivated his anger isn't mentioned.
They're editing reality.

Tamim Ansary, an Afghan journalist living in America, is uniquely suited to give his opinion on attacking Afghanistan: "New bombs would only stir the rubble of earlier bombs. Would they at least get the Taliban? Not likely. In today's Afghanistan, only the Taliban eat, only they have the means to move around. They'd slip away and hide. Maybe the bombs would get some of those disabled orphans, they don't move too fast, they don't even have wheelchairs. But flying over Kabul and dropping bombs wouldn't really be a strike against the criminals who did this horrific thing. Actually it would only be making common cause with the Taliban--by raping once again the people they've been raping all this time."

From my mother: (Pat is my sister, Ryan is in 1st or 2nd grade, I think)
"It is beyond absurd to hear yesterday on meet the press that the vp of the us didn't know anything about the hijacked planes until he saw it happening on tv like the rest of us. What kind of intelligence do we have that this could have been in the planning stages for 5 years and we didn't know about it. The horror of all those people dying is beyond my comprehension and I just pray for their families. I have stopped reading the papers and watching tv for I just end up crying. Ryan has been having nightmares about it even though he doesn't watch much tv. He asked Pat the other day if the bad men that died that did this would be now bothering his Grandpa up in heaven. Pat explained that bad people don't go to heaven so not to worry about Grandpa for he was in a beautiful place and the bad men were not there. That seemed to satisfy Ryan."

9/18

If you drew a triangle between my condo, the Salvation Army store, & Jessica's apartment, the triangle's sides would be a mile apart. In the middle there's a National Guard construction unit. A handful of HumVees & a lot of dump trucks. I drove by today and 2 soldiers carrying M16s were stopping people trying to drive in and demanding their IDs.
It's right next to the Legion Field, where the elementary school was having soccer games a week ago.
I feel like I'm living in an parallel universe.

Comic strips are written weeks before they're published; when they're on the web, it can be a couple of weeks later before you read them. They had no idea what last Tuesday would bring. From today's comics:
Wiley Miller's Non Sequitur runs a bit with one of those guys with a beard & sackcloth carrying a sign that says "THE END IS NEAR," which no one in the entire history of everything has ever seen in real life. But his sign says "THE END OF SUMMER IS COMING!" A passerby says "I'm getting re-e-eal tired of everyone playing it so safe these days." You got your wish, Wiley Miller.
Zippy th' Pinhead's Griffy laments "It's over, Zippy...3 thousand years of civilization, from ancient Egypt to Vermeer...to John Lee Hooker...over...all...over..."
...because McDonalds has opened "its first ersatz diner..."
Who would've guess that the most chilling coincidence would come from Funky Winkerbean? Think about that strip after you read it.

...And Science News has a cover article on mass extinction. (A very interesting article, saying that the next mass extinction will be/is being caused by humans, but they changed their page to a log-in. A log-in that doesn't work, so I guess you can't read it. There is a good article of the social organization of cats, though)

Robert Bain sent me this long article on our (latest) dread foe, Afghanistan. It predates the crisis by 3 months. It's from an (apparently) Iranian ex-pat page. Weirdly, another exile page, iraniantimes.com, once had the InExOb as a featured link. Small, weird world.

9/20

BTW: If you're thinking of using Readyhosting for your site, don't. Just don't. They stink.

I've had "sense of duty" postings before. But this is the new type: The "I have not been exploded" posting. Just so no one sends any worried emails. I AM alive, & DO have a life, you know.

Went to KMDS' yesterday; no time to post. We played with his birthday gift (Super Joy), & he supplied me with software that may solve the backing-up the Pookie problem, which I played with tonight; no time to post. Tmw night I go to see Jessica, where we will play with her birthday gift (Super Joy), and her NEW KITTEN!
There will be no time to post tmw, either.

Just to shut you up, here's 2 good links on How To Fight WWIII:
"We've learned that terrorism demands a special kind of war, which is more like Sim City than a first-person shooter like Unreal. Just as in Sim City, you win by keeping civilization going. Killing the bad guys is a side effect. And, just as in Sim City, no single strategy works, even when it is right and necessary."
And...
"How do you attack a trust structure -- which is what a network is? You're not going to do this with Tomahawk missiles or strategic bombardment."
"It's a whole new playing field. You're not attacking a nation, but a network."

One of the things I was taught in school, all those years ago, was that America would never be a dictatorship, as it had an FBI and a CIA, but no NPF, a national police force combining both.
Bush has created the "Office of Homeland Security."
"Homeland Security."
The HS.
What reaction will we have to those initials in 5, 10 or 20 years?
What price are we willing to pay for "Safety"?

9/23

I'm not sure why I thought that Jessica's new cat, a stray that decided to move in, was a kitten. Marjoriam (sp?) is a BEAST. A friendly, purring beast, but still. No wonder she calls him "Muscle-head." His head's made of muscle! If I pet KK on her neck & head, all I feel is skin & soft fur. This guy's like a freakin' rock! All over! His head reminds me of those guys I'd see when I worked at The Mall, all buffed & beefy & buying supplements to make them more look even more mutated down at GNC (that stands for "Generally Neckless Customers," you know; bodybuilders who can't turn their heads without moving their entire upper torso).
He seems to be someone's lost kitty that had to survive outside for a long while. I've seen 18 pound cats before, but always fatsos & never sheer solid blocks of muscle.
Kill Kill sniffed me all over when I got home, then suddenly, loudly hissssed. She doesn't even do that to the vet. Don't fret, darling; I'll take my little Callista Flockheart over Jessie's Schwarzenegger any day.

CoffeeCup, the HTML editor I'm using, has a spellcheck that doesn't recognize "neckless" but does recognize "Schwarzenegger."

I'll make some enemies & no friends by saying this, but after 2 non-stop weeks of seeing this everywhere, I have to say it:
"God Bless America"?!?!
NICE FUCKIN' JOB, GOD!!
WHY 9/11/01 would cause this inescapable outbreak of God Blessing the USA is beyond me. Your all-knowing, all-powerful, all-loving God really sucks.
GOD: "BLESS America?! I thought that you asked Me to BLAST America! Oh, is my omnipotent face red!"
Squeaking "G B A" is like having Daddy leave the lights on in your bedroom so the boogie man don't getcha. It makes you feel better, but it doesn't explain why He let the monsters in there in the 1st place.

"Has Everything Changed? Maybe not."
"While flag-waving is an appropriate and moving response to a frontal attack on our country there are a couple of wrong notes in the current national chorus. One of course is bullying, which is always the underside of patriotism. More novel, disturbing—and, I'm afraid, more characteristic of America today—is the theme of victimization. Oh, poor us. We need grief counseling, candlelight vigils, little ribbons to wear. Those ribbons claim membership and ask for sympathy more than they communicate resolve. We share the pain of actual victims not just through empathy and financial generosity (though there's been plenty of that) but also by feeling victimized ourselves. How long before some doctor discovers a "Sept. 11 syndrome" and some lawyer tries to sue Osama Bin Laden over it?"
(For 2 weeks we've heard people who think that they're not at risk in the War wonder if "America has the belly for this." OF COURSE WE DON'T. Remember Gulf War Syndrome? When it was pointed out that GWS was almost certainly caused by a release of nerve gas, either deliberately by Saddam or accidentally by our bombing, the main dude of the Gulf War Syndrome victims group said, "Well, that's possible, but it's not like we can sue Iraq!" Members of our own armed forces, suing the government because they got HURT in a WAR.
Yeah, they're ready for this! "'Can it be that America is nostalgic for the times it was getting daily deliveries of coffins from Vietnam?' asked Andrei Logunov, chairman of Moscow Afghan Veterans Assn. 'This time it will be even worse.'"
Another veteran of the Soviet's disastrous 12-year attempt to crush Afghanistan: "That's when Lisinenko said he began to understand that Western ideas of warfare might not succeed in Afghanistan. How do you battle a foe who has so little to protect in this world? A person who may believe a greater good will come from sacrificing himself, his home, his family? How do you vanquish an enemy for whom categories of defeat and victory, life and death do not match yours?
'Nothing we know works in their world,' he said."

You would think that something as huge as the WTC attack would register on the brains of the "psychics"--Well, this proves that their "special powers" don't exist. But that doesn't stop some of them from simply strangling previous predictions around until they kinda sorta maybe look true. Or just making up flat-out lies. This woman claims "Roughly a week or so, before the WTC atrocity I was told that the 'green pools' held the key.--they were the connection. Also, Canteen. This was all written in a 'A Visitor Arrives' which many had access to before September 11, 2001."
Try and follow this twisted logic:
"At first I thought the "green pools" were actual water pools that were vortex's to other worlds, openings if you will. And they are, but who wants to control these entrances into other dimensions? So, I looked for a second meaning for "Green Pools"---
Green is the color of money in the US, and of course, the WTC housed many financial brokers.
Pools: Pool for gambling. Also, a mutual fund established by a group of stockholders for specializing in or manipulating prices of securities.
And, an agreement between competing businesses concerns to establish controls over producing market and price for common profit.
All fits together nicely>> Pool >>Funds>>Stakes >>Target
The Green Pools were the WTC."
OBVIOUSLY. Green pools, terrorist bombing, yeah, it's all fucking there.
That's not what pisses me off, but this: A clearly faked, postdated email that says, in part:
"for God sakes stay clear of the World Trade Center. That place is going up in smoke—here in September. As well as some other areas. The attacks on the US have already begun; people are just not taking notice...I saw a Presidential Limo with American Flags on it slowly driving by the WTC—in front of the two towers. The crown—a king—was thrown from Clinton to Bush. After the limo was past those two buildings then tumbled to the ground. You have got to listen to me this time—how many times do I have to tell you and others that come September we are going to be in a WAR—and NY will be hit first."
How many times do you have to tell us? How about ONCE? Yeah, wait a whole week after the attack to warn us! Isn't it amazing how vague the "green pools" crap is, but how incredibly precise the fake email is. But I guarantee that some retards will believe this, just like millions of retards believe that John Edwards, the "Crossing Over" cold reader, really talks to The Dead and not the bereaved's wallet. To paraphrase Mencken, "No one ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American people."

Buried in the news:
Yes, that story that They were going to attack the White House was a lie. DUH. Fleischer claimed it on Weds morning, before anyone knew anything about anything about the attack. So how did they know that the terrorists were targeting the White House & not the Pentagon? We were never told, & later that same day the White House mouthpieces abruptly dropped the absolutely unbelievable claim that Air Force One was also a target, without the Media noting it.
Oh, and how about this? "In other late-night news, a tearful Jon Stewart returned to Comedy Central's Daily Show Thursday. 'We've had an unendurable pain, and I wanted to tell you why I grieve but why I don't despair,' Stewart said as he was overcome with emotion [about possibly losing his job!]. He said jokes about Bush are out for the time being, but 'Lord willing,' he will be a punch line again, 'because it will mean we've ridden out the storm.'"
Jokes about Bush are out for the time being. Wow, that sure sounds like America, and not a third world dictatorship!
"We have freedom of speech in this country! So don't you DARE use it!!"
And we've got our idiot Attorney General warning Boston that it was going to be attacked this weekend, despite the FBI deciding that is was only a worthless rumor before he said it. Does that make you feel better about the people running this War?

SPAM always leaves a bad taste, but here's one I just got (speling intact):

UNITED WE STAND
In the aftermath of the tragic and cowardly attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon the American people's feelings have turned from shock and grief to burning anger at the insane fanatics who seek to destroy our way of life.
(But not those seeking to make a buck off of it!!)
AMERICAN PATRIOTS UNITED
(American Patri...WAIT! That stands for APU! Apu from the Kwikee-Mart! FUCKIN' DOT HEADS! KIll EM ALL!)
is providing a way for all true Americans to express our pride in America by making a supply of T-Shirts, Caps and bumber stickers available to you.
(Thanks, until APU came along my "bumber" was sadly stickerless)
A portion of the proceeds
(Any guesses on how LARGE that "portion" will be??)
will go to help the families of the heroic New York policemen and firefighters who died heroically while trying to save the lives of others.
T-SHIRTS American made 100% Cotten - CAPS & Bumber Stickers all come in the following designs:
1- UNITED WE STAND American Flag with Statue of Liberty superimposed being hoisted by Americans of all races.
(Actual product may exclude some races)
2- WANTED DEAD OR ALIVE Picture of Osama Bin Laden in the center of a bullseye.
3- AFGHANISTAN - THE NEXT GROUND ZERO Map of Afghanistan with Mushroom cloud.
(no comment needed)
T-Shirts come in sizes Small, Medium, Large, X-Large & XX-Large
Caps are adjustable to fit any head.
(including "pin")

Do yourself a favor and read these.

And remember: Any rights you let the Government take away to "protect you in the current crisis" will NEVER be given back.

I'm mad at everything right now. Everything.

9/24

SPECIAL REPORT:
AMERICA--UNDER ATTACK!

CIVIL LIBERTIES SUSPENDED!
"But he warns that the use of war as an excuse for reining in liberties can be abused. 'It is all too easy to slide from a case of genuine military necessity, where the power sought to be exercised is at least debatable, to one where the threat is not critical and the power either dubious or nonexistent,'"

AMERICAN JOBS given away to SWEATSHOPS!!
"The Clinton administration failed in several attempts to push the measure through Congress because of opposition from Democrats in the House. They insisted that future trade deals include provisions to protect American workers from unfair competition from countries with lax labor and environmental standards."

GOD BLESSES AMERICA! OR, POSSIBLY, ALLAH AKBAR!!
"For thousands of years, people of these religions have used this belief in Divine Vengeance to justify every imaginable atrocity against those they deem to be God's enemies. This view's dangerousness is only surpassed by its inanity. Yet, millions of people have adhered to it and adhere to it still. They despise liberty and the pursuit of happiness, unless it fits with their ideas of how to worship their God.
They think an Omnipotent, Perfect Being needs to be worshipped. As Epicurus pointed out a couple of thousand years ago: if the gods are perfect, they can't depend on us for their happiness. If our behavior can upset them, they're not perfect. If they need us to tell them we love them, they're not perfect. No perfect being would have to depend on other beings for anything.
These true believers think they have to do God's dirty work and punish those who don't worship their God the way they think He should be worshipped. Why would an Omnipotent Being need any of His creations to do anything for Him, especially since, according to the belief of most of these worshippers, eternal punishment awaits those who don't obey God's rules?"


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