First: If you are a contributing BME/extreme member that is known to me, and you are in need of injectables and you were under the impression they were no longer available, feel free to contact me personally for access.
Now, you may have already seen this elsewhere, but the screens are made… again… for this shirt design. This time I think we really aced it. The print has a black backing as well and is really slick (and big). They'll run at the start of the week as far as I know. (Comments?)
I'm really not sure that if this new US policy of bombing Mosques in Iraq is going to fly. I realize that guerilla forces are not only using the mosques as bases, but also to store weapons and so on. But the problem is, by attacking a mosque, you attack both civilians and Islam itself… Symbolically and politically it plays directly into the hands of leaders like al-Sadr. Fuck, sometimes you wonder if the US commanders have ever read anything by Mao or Guevara.
Oh, and I don't know if you watched Nightline last night, but Ted Koppel was talking about the plans set into motion via 9/11. They started with “Continuity of Government” and explaining why Bush didn't return immediately to Washington after the attacks — “This was absolutely the Armageddon plan put into effect.” (with the implication that they're still on).
Richard Clarke also backed up that they went into that mode after the war, saying,
Every federal agency was ordered, on the morning of 9/11, to activate an alternative command post, an alternative headquarters outside of Washington, D.C., and to staff it as soon as possible. [We'd had drills where we'd] gone off into caves in mountains in remote locations and spent days on end in miserable conditions, pretending that the rest of the world had blown up, and going through the questions, going through the drill. . . . Everyone there play acts that it's really happened. You can't go outside because of the radioactivity. You can't use the phones because they're not connected to anything.
Wonderful world they're planning for…? Now maybe you have a better understanding of how all the big nuclear ICBMs they've been test firing along with Russia, China, India, Pakistan, are actually going to be used… After all, it's not like you need any of these shadow government preparations for terrorists. This stuff is exclusively about fighting large-scale enemies in a total-annihilation-style thermonuclear war.
Let's see what Donald Rumsfeld has to say about this, and his role in all of it…
Don't divide the world into “them” and “us.” Avoid infatuation with or resentment of the press, the Congress, rivals, or opponents. Accept them as facts. They have their jobs and you have yours.
Sounds pretty “them” and “us” to me.
I don't normally post newsfeed stuff here, but holy crap is this a neat one:
The headline:
U.S. declares war on porn (more)
Obscenity: For the first time in 10 years, the U.S. government is spending millions to file charges across the country.
The fact that they're starting to arrest people doing normal pornography in America is pretty scary… It was bad enough when you just had to constantly fight for your financial rights as an adult content provider, but threatening to take someone's freedom away because they sold a video of a facial or something is frightening.
The Justice Department is being very clear that this is not about “edge” porn like rape, snuff, and so on — this is about shutting down the porn mainstream in America as well. I highly doubt that it'll survive in court, but they don't care — because they have money and time on their side. When you start arresting webmasters and levelling false charges, you do put the little guys out of business, even when the charges are thrown out. Just like Todd Bertrang has had to sell his house to defend himself against false charges like “kidnapping” because his girlfriend referred to herself as his “slave” (as probably a million other people in BDSM relations do as well), and you can bet he's not getting it back even if/when he wins in court.
If you want to make it a little scarier, a man was just arrested on some terrorism charger here in Canada after the NSA tracked him down via email monitoring (more). I'm not going to comment on the details of the case, what's scary is the monitoring ability. As the NSA points out, because so many of the big international communications hubs are in the US, they have not only the ability to monitor it, but, in their mind, “the NSA has a perfect right to monitor all Internet traffic”.
Every day I feel more and more like I'm watching “first they came for the pornographers…” play out right in front of my eyes.
You know, when tribal groups who've spent a thousand years fighting each other call a truce to kill Americans (more), maybe it's time to start taking the news a bit more seriously? I hear so many people saying things like “I've stopped watching the news because of this…” Death rates are way up for US troops (more), and their helicopters keep getting shot down (more). Al-Sadr's militia is capturing more territory (more), with at least two cities under his rule. And, American troops have gone back to getting bad press for imprecise killings of women and children (more), which really doesn't help!
Other than that, back at home, more Americans are being told they can't fly and other random rights suspensions (more) in order to “fight terror”. The US is also pouring a ton of money into land mines research, work that almost every other nation on the planet has decried as monstrous (more). In addition, because the world is an increasingly violent place, countries need their weapons — so the US is pushing through changes to its export laws to allow arms dealers to more readily sell high-end US weapons to future enemies (more). Don't like it? You know where the diesel fuel is, and you know where the fertilizer is.
Oh, and you thought that crazy North Korea, with its 1.1 million person standing army, over double the size of the US army (122,000 in special forces alone), just waiting to shove bayonets into the guts of high school kids that just thought joining the army was the only job they could get, was last years story? Think again… US troops are currently in training for the brutal urban combat that is being planned (more)… Suicidal… The US needs to bite the bullet and either pull out of these combats (and face the consequences) or simply start with the nuclear carpet bombing.
Financially those are the only two options.
So Bush says that the world should expect violence in Iraq to escalate in the next little while (more). I believe the expression is “no shit, Sherlock”.
In a short period we've ramped up from one American a day being killed over there to ten a day being killed in Iraq — and that doesn't count the ten men with blown off limbs and other non-fatality casualties for every dead man (more). Now, thanks to dumb-ass moves like this bullshit in Fallujah, it's just going to escalate and get a whole lot worse for all the kids over there (to say nothing of the Iraqis daily hell).
For those of you who have been living under a rock, Fallujah is one of the many regions that the American troops felt were too dangerous, so instead of putting up their own positions there, they used local and imported civilian labor — human shields that is — around their own positions. The US troops would then go out on daily “terror runs” and basically drive around threatening the locals and trying to keep them in line with fear… Then, of course, they snapped and, like a beaten dog, attacked the weakest thing near them — the dead contractors who we've all seen the brutal footage of lately.
Anyway, now the US is saying they've going to contain the entire city, effectively making the single stupidest move in anti-guerrilla strategy: They've suddenly converted most of that city to the “side” of the guerrillas (more). I mean, Fallujah isn't some little crappy desert village. It's a city about the same size as BOSTON* for fucks sake. This is how you build a resistance movement, by attacking civilian cities wholesale. This is where guerrillas come from.
I hate making this comparison, but it's important to note that the death rates for this war are spiking a lot harder and a lot faster than Vietnam… And the problem is that the neo-con Cabal has effectively engineered a war to which there is no exit strategy. Thanks.
*
Although I suspect the rent is lower.
