i’ve stopped counting

Today’s rant was inspired by a picture posted on my new favorite website. It’s a picture of an American tank driving by a row of dead Iraqis. It’s not gory or close-up, but it’s a real picture of real dead people, so you may just want to take my word for it. That said, here it is.

The guy on the right is wearing handcuffs. Take a moment and try to figure out why he’s both cuffed and dead.

Perhaps he was fighting our troops and was killed, sans handcuffs. Then there was some reason to put handcuffs on him. Perhaps the handcuffs make a cool sound when they lock and some soldier needed an excuse to hear it. Perhaps when they were moving the bodies off the road, the guy’s arms were flopping all around and it was just easier to restrain the arms so it didn’t take four people to carefully carry him to the softer grass.

Or it’s crazy theory number 2. That he was handcuffed before somebody shot him. Who shot him? Maybe the guy in the big tank thing. I acknowledge it’s just a theory, but this looks like a war crime. Not sure what rule it violates, but it may have something to do with not shooting prisoners of war. (Okay, maybe it’s not so much a war as a ‘kill lots of people near the oil fields for no reason’-thing, but that’s a different rant.)

Why are there so many war crimes surfacing when our army is so well-trained, well-educated and disciplined? Simple! The powers-that-be followed my ‘Easy 1-2-3 War Crime Checklist’!

* Train several hundred thousand people how to kill legitimate bad guys.
* Tell them that there actually are legitimate bad guys.
* Fail to tell them that most of the legitimate bad guys are dead or don’t exist.
(That would be counter-productive.)
* Give them lots and lots of giant guns.
* Encourage them to shoot things: sand people, wounded sand people, POWs…
* Put them in a desert full of things they don’t like being around.
* Make them aware they’re not going home with both their life and their limbs.
* Get them to destroy a sovereign government for a good cause.
* Let them figure out that the cause was bupkis.
* Encourage the strange sand people to fight your soldiers.
(Do this while wearing a sand person getup. Remember to make clicking noises.)
* Tell the soldiers that the sand people are organized.
* Fail to tell them that the sand people organizers are dead.
(That would be counter-productive.)
* Still following this checklist? I’m amazed. I didn’t think there’d be anybody who was that big of an a-hole against humanity. Congratulate yourself with a bag of pretzels.

Eh, well maybe it’s not so good of an idea. Maybe we should reduce our war crime rate to around one a day. This is getting (dare I say) a little unnecessary.

–

Non-related thought… The tempting reader(s) with the comment thing without actually implementing comments might be as useful as a gimmick as not providing months or years to my dates. It might be a good idea to never actually add comment support. If you feel strongly one way or another, feel free to comment.

Sending military amputees back to work
This makes me feel sick. Rehabilitating people who you injured is a good idea and the right thing to do. But rehabilitating them on tank simulators? That’s just wrong. People should recover from injuries so they can play sports again, not so they can fight more ‘insurgents’ who’d rather shoot them dead than have them ravage their family and country for no reason.

News today in the unending crapfest. I mean treason. I mean Dubya’s Folley. I mean … go america?

Steel expert gets fired for being a steel expert
The vast majority of the steel in the WTC never got past 250 degrees C during the fires. All steel has to be over 1100 degrees C before it starts melting. The WTC steel was rated for 2000 degrees C, but in all likelihood would have survived 3000 degrees. The group in charge of explaining the collapse said it’s because the fire wrecked the steel. Sure, reactions of some kind took the towers down, but it damn sure wasn’t burning jet fuel. Probably just bombs the government installed the day before, just a couple days after the WTC security strangely shut down. Around the same time hundreds of emergency workers showed up to the emergency they weren’t supposed to know about.

This is exhausting. Just go here. Then go here.

Observations of the day:
The lies and cover-ups are so intertwined, that if one aspect of it all fell apart and was actually preyed on by the media, the whole damn thing would fall apart, and our government would be in ruins. I think that the people who have evidence and could do something about it are too scared to try to fix it, for fear of having to go through the process of fixing it.

The resistance in Falluja and elsewhere in Iraq isn’t the work of well trained Al-Qaeda terrorists. It’s the work of some of the frightened civilians who think that surrender isn’t an option since they’d just get slaughtered in cold blood anyway. I - have - no - idea - why - they - would - think - that.

And finally, for those of you who think the strange events of 9/11 were some random coincidence, here’s a guide to believing it.

Oh God, I’m crazy enough to start writing emails!
This one goes out to all my homies at http://kerry.senate.gov/ …

Mr. Kerry,
As you were campaigning for President, I became more and more informed of your history of service to America and how only you were in a place of enough power to do anything about the overall condition of the planet. I was proud of you and the Democratic party for choosing you to run for the election.

You are disappointing me and several billion other people. Your inaction is analogous to grand-scale involuntary manslaughter. I beg of you, please do something about it and make us proud to be Americans.

[Sincerely, Another Tin Foil Hat Man]

I have a theory that my paranoid ramblings would be better received if they were formatted in pretty cascading style-sheets, so here goes…

• Osama Bin Laden died mid-December, 2001, but the U.S. won’t admit it because without his threat, things like the Patriot Act wouldn’t get all the way through the approval process.
• Abu Musab al-Zarqawi died a while ago during the early bombing process in Iraq. This wasn’t really publicized by the U.S. army either because they’re running out of top Al-Qaeda officers, and they need more reasons to invade stuff.
• Israel and the U.S. have a weird non-publicized relationship. Israel was caught with spies in this country recently, and we didn’t really do anything about it. Back in 1967, Israeli planes killed a relative of mine, along with 33 others on the USS Liberty. We didn’t do anything about it then either. I don’t understand this relationship, probably because I haven’t read enough about stupid economy logic that makes it okay to randomly violate the rights of your allies.
• The U.S. will invade Iran regardless of what happens. Now that Bush stole the election with a squeaker [ahem] ‘mandate’, he feels he has carte-blanche to invade any country and do whatever the hell he wants, even if mutual defense treaties will cause that to snowball into WWIII in under a week.

Did it work? Do I sound like less of a crackpot?
(Oh yeah - the comments aren’t working yet. They’re not even started yet.)

What is outside of Pleasantville?
Perhaps in tweleve years we’ll find out.

[Update - Direct link to the suprnova torrent removed. It’s called “Bush Family Fortunes” and it’s a BBC documentary by Greg Palast. It’s a documentary, aired on British television to everybody, so I assumed it was made with the intention of letting anybody watch it. Unfortunately, the good people who make documentaries usually aren’t the same as the retards who own the copyright, so byebye direct link. If you want to watch it, search the biggest torrent site for the above-titled tv documentary. It’ll take you all of ten seconds to track it down.]

Something more specific that’s been bugging me today - the view that opposing a ban on something is the same as embracing that thing. If you don’t support a ban on gay marriage, it doesn’t mean you want more gay people roaming the streets. It doesn’t mean you are gay yourself. It just means you don’t support banning gay marriage. [Note - ‘gay marriage’ is being used as an example here as a single, simple idea. Obviously it’s far more complicated - see the following post if you haven’t already.]

I guess another annoyance is how many people like banning things whenever they get the chance, even if they perceive it as an over-ban. Ban now, patch the ban later. Or ban now, forget about it later because the media isn’t terribly focused on it and besides it never directly affected me anyway. Or my favorite - Ban now, and with the increased precedent of banning shit, ban even more later so you can live in a safer homogenous world where everybody shares your specific moral values and nobody does things like pushing the envelope or questioning the Top 40.

[Update 2/13/2005 - Keep in mind I wrote this after the election, but before the problems with the election and vote-counting were publicized. Now I know that more people voted for Kerry overall and in both Florida and Ohio. I still think that the ‘moral’ view of homosexuality is over-the-top hateful, but I don’t blame them for Bush’s fake re-election.]

So millions of Americans apparently poured out of the polls in support of John Kerry and honesty and civil rights. Unfortunately, millions more Americans poured out of the polls to vote based on ‘moral issues’. The sacred institution of marriage was being threatened by gays and their sinful wishes to live amongst us. States like Mississippi and Arkansas were being threatened with the presence of men who lived together, constantly turning heterosexuals to the dark side for their parades and healthy food. Being obvious sexual deviants, they threatened these wholesome American states with inevitable paths towards exhibitionism, polygamy, necromancy, and incongruence. To the rescue came every evangelical Christian in the known universe. Never again will gays be able to establish families or visit each other in the hospital in these states. Never again will a man be able to take care of his dead lifemate’s estate. Never again will two people of the same sex be able to join together in paying their taxes, thus forcing themselves into a higher tax bracket. And to top it off, the rest of the states had similar turnout to ensure domination everywhere to reintroduce national legislation banning gays from looking at each other with them devil eyes.

There is some light and darkness at the end of the tunnel. Many courts are already saying that these amendements were illegally worded, infringe on inalienable rights, or both. The thing I wonder about is if these amendments were clearly unacceptable given current laws, statutes, rights, etc., why did they still get to the ballots to waste everybody’s time? The only answer I can come up with is to motivate these millions to get out and vote and assert their dominance in the ‘religiously motivated anti-homosexual’ demographic. It doesn’t take much imagination to picture Karl Rove about five-six months ago, realizing that as things were going, he might face another 2000 election. Knowing he couldn’t get away with directly stealing the presidency again, he needed a plan. Eureka! Offer millions of southern and midwestern voters the chance to KO that pesky homo-gay sect of the population. Tell them that God and Jesus want them to vote for these bans to prove they are good Christians. Whether or not those motivations had any chance of fruition, it won’t matter. With their corageous participation against these dangerous half-citizens, the election will see a significant Republican boost across the board. Any suggestion that this was a dirty trick will be quieted by the new government and the sheepish media that salivates over any guidance they are given.

I have a hard time coming up with any good reason to support a gay marriage ban or any restriction of rights based on sexual preference. Sexual preference isn’t something you buy at Wal-Mart. It isn’t something you choose from a greeting card. You just have it or you don’t. Some people dig chicks, some people dig dudes. It doesn’t matter whether you vomit whenever you picture two guys going at it. You can think whatever you want, but when it comes to legal rights, it’s just a no-brainer. All people are equal.

Marriage is composed of two separate things - a personal commitment between two people, and the legal rights afforded them by the state. The personal commitment part, being just a state of mind, isn’t anything that can be regulated. What sexy or disgusting things those two people choose to do with each other is none of your business, just like before they said their ‘I do’s. The legal part is so basic I can’t believe anybody would willingly want to deny it. If your significant other is dying in a hospital after visiting hours, it should never matter what shapes they have under their pants. Other things like burial determination, bereavement leave, and survivor benefits are clearly in the same category in my mind. They are logical benefits to a lifelong mutual loving commitment. Two dudes live together for years, and one dies? How could anybody tell the survivor that he’s not fit to be part of the decision-making?

I conclude with some memorable quotes from the only organized pro-ban website I could find, located at Petition Spot dot com. Have a look.

* gay marriages are wrong and gay so stop them you gay gays
* last fag i saw got a broken jaw, skinnk prissy fuck. jaw broke like glass and they call it queer fear? homophpia? i think not. and i say its ok to beat gay women as well, i mean they want to be a man and i think they should be beat like one! sick bitches
* I think gay marriage sucks and also illegal immigration. we should send fags and illegals i a remote island and blow it up because both of them are nothing but sick, immoral, thieving job taking scum
* Acceptance of homosexuality is like making murder legal. THINK ABOUT IT!
* Gays don’t need to be married. They need to leave. Go to Africa, because that’s where AIDS is, and that’s what they helped to spread in this country.
* The streets of AMERCIA should run red with the blood of gay people. ONLY THEN WILL WE AS A SOCIETY BE CLEANSED of their filthy immoral ways.
* AIDS IS THE CURE FOR FAGS, LET THEM ALL DIE FOR ALL I CARE.