Monthly Archives: September 2005

Military photo feedback…

Saturday, September 3, 2005

I was asked to dig up some of the feedback that UnderMars has generated, positive and negative, so I thought I might as well share some of it here (since I don't want to put a feedback page on the site itself because that politicizes it). There's quite a bit of feedback that I haven't included here as well (mostly positive) because it includes comments that identify the writer and I don't want to do that.


…man…I can't find the words to express what I feel right now…just saw all the photos and read your text. I saw just a fraction of war myself 10 years ago in former Yugoslavia and it left me thinking and dreaming about it for a while…it was somewhat hard to get back to “normal” life.
Somehow you managed to make a true neutral website/document about something so extreme…and that's awesome!!
Thanx and greetz from Holland

I only wish you all die, you stupid and naive mother fuckers.This “war” you fighting is not to defennd America but you idiots are fighting for Jews.
See you in Hell ! Pussies ! You want be playing nintedo games there !
P.S.
Looking at your faces I found that almost all of you look kind of retarded, so you as well might die nobody wants you to pollute our gene pool anyway.

EVERY ONE IN HELLAS WE HOPE AND PRAY FOR A BETTER WORLD… WE HOPE THAT AMERICAN SOLDIERS AND MOST OF THE AMERICAN CITIZENS WILL FIND A
VERY VERY PAINFULL DEATH AND THEN GO WHERE THEY BELONGE… TO HELL!!! :-)
YOU ARE THE INVADERS !!!
YOU WENT THERE FOR THE OIL
SO NOW I HOPE THAT ONE DAY YOU WILL BECOME … HUMANS

So this is my wish
PLEASE DIE…

I knew american military were metally sick, with Abu Grabe prison sick sadist crap and it seems from the pictures on your website proves my views on what is going on over there is SICK!
No wonder you sick people will not win!
Before you shoot your mouth off and call me a whinning Liberal democract……….Wrong Assumption, because I am a stern Constitutionalist and 100% hold to the fact, that all public servants, be they Govt. burrecracts or military personnel that took the OATH to uphold The Constitution Of The United States and do not keep that OATH as traitors!
P.S.
I will turn this websit Link over to my US Congressman & US Senator for review!

You really should get checked into a mental hospital before they take your health insurance away. At first I was like “This guy is a total piece of shit” but then I realized that seeing what you've seen can't possibly leave your sanity intact. Seriously. You need help.

The photos from US Sodiers doing their duty in Iraq was both entertaining and enlightening. It's good to see a typical day in a soldier's life there…both the doldrums as well as the more serious reasons we're there. God Bless our soldiers. I pray He brings our men and women, every one, home on His shoulders. And that the country of Iraq and the surrounding countries benefit from our presence there, thus securing our own peace and prosperity. Love you each and every one.

No I don't have a picture but I can hardly wait until every US soldier is blown to bits and appears on your screen!!!

hey
just wanna drop a line to say the site is awesome!
i like to see the army etc have a good time and its nice to see some of my own [brits!!] having a good time!

Thank you for making this site available. I have always been curious about the combat experience.

I dont have any pictures to send in. nor am i affiliated with the army or any other armed forces except that i am an american. i think what you're doing with this site is wonderful. it gives people the real truth, not the media truth. it puts things in perspective; especially from a soldier's point of view. so, again, thank you for doing this.

A moving tribute to men and women who serve. This is what is called “Photography” most others are just snapshots. The presentation is graphic yet tasteful in its purpose. I was directed to the site by a Military friend. As the old saying goes indeed ” A Picture is worth a thousand words.”

you are a fuckup.
The fact that your website would show these NOT FUNNY captions that these dumb as rocks military men write shows it.
Why make the situation this way?
Show things in a better light and maybe people would take you seriously.
Only Marines and other shitheads would laugh at the not funny jokes you have.
If you know anyone in the “war”, i hope they get killed –
i can laugh at a picture of them with their body parts blown all over the countryside.

I'll assume you get a lot of crap mail. Just a quick note to say that your project is very impressive, and I have a great deal of respect for the way in which you are going about it.

you are a bunch of fucking pituitary retards

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More pictures on UnderMars.com

Saturday, September 3, 2005

I added some a few more pictures to the military photo site. With this site I'm trying to present an honest and non-politically tainted snapshot of the first-hand experience of serving in the military… If any of you reading this have friends or family that you think might be willing to share some photos (or can yourself), please do send them to the site. To add pictures, all they have to do is email them to undermars@gmail.com. If you want the pictures captioned a certain way, just let me know, otherwise I'll just use the filenames as captions.

While right now the site is almost exclusively US and Iraq oriented, I'm happy to post stuff from military anywhere in the world and from any nation, and from any particular journey…
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War is a Racket

Saturday, September 3, 2005

I saw a good quote in a Metafilter thread attributed to the poster's atmospherics professor:


“Great White Sharks exist for only two purposes: To eat and to make little Great White Sharks. And hurricanes exist for only one purpose: To disperse heat from the equatorial regions towards the polar regions.”

That is, in the simplest of terms, the reason we're seeing the South flooded right now (look at the pictures in the previous entry) is due to global warming… which means it's going to get a whole lot worse, since pollution continues to rise dramatically and energy consumption goes up yearly. I think it's also worth quoting Walter Maestri who is the emergency management chief in Jefferson Parrish, Louisiana. Last year Bush cut the funding for flood control measures to prioritize war.


“It appears that the money has been moved in the presidents budget to handle homeland security and the war in Iraq, and I suppose thats the price we pay. Nobody locally is happy that the levees cant be finished, and we are doing everything we can to make the case that this is a security issue for us.”

Every death that happens in Louisiana and Mississippi and every bit of property damage might have been averted if the money to defend against this type of disaster had not been diverted into Halliburton and the other corporate friends of the administration — and those who voted blindly to support the war share in that blame. With a $1.4 trillion projected cost, is the Iraq War really worth it? Is it more important than ensuring the safety and prosperity — and future — of Americans? Along those lines, let me also quote from a story from a month ago:


“When members of the Louisiana National Guard left for Iraq in October, they took a lot equipment with them. Dozens of high water vehicles, humvees, refuelers and generators are now abroad, and in the event of a major natural disaster that, could be a problem.”

Too bad the National Guard got drafted for Iraq service…

How messed up is it that Venezuela — who Bush names as the South American “axis of evil” leader and has mulled invading — can offer relief aid of food and fuel to Americans while Bush laughs it up and plays guitar with Mark Wills (see the picture in the previous entry). Hell, Venezuela has even offered free eye surgery to Americans without healthcare.

I've linked this story before, but with Morgan Stanley predicting a 90% chance of economic armageddon, and with President Bush having mood swings described as “paranoia bordering on schizophrenia” coupled with “pre-senile dementia“, one has to wonder what steps can be taken to medically relieve someone from office… I mean, on Star Trek the chief medical officer could relieve the captain of duty if he was unfit to command — is there a person with that power in the United States, or does it take some vigilante patriot voting from the rooftops?

Why oh why couldn't Bush just have a slightly more humorous disorder?

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Image update posted

Saturday, September 3, 2005

.

I've just posted another thousand images to BME's public galleries today (tomorrow is going to be the members' update). Thank you to all the contributors, and to Urea and his girlfriend (in Brasil) for the cover shot of them play pierced together.

A number of people have sent me warnings about the UK mulling a ban on “violent porn“, after a woman was killed by a man obsessed by sadistic pornography. Some quotes from the BBC article:


The aim is for a new offence of possessing violent and abusive pornography, which could be punishable by up to three years in prison, Home Officer Minister Paul Goggins told BBC Radio 4's Today programme. Mr Goggins said such images were “extremely offensive to the vast majority” and had no place in society. “These forms of violent and abusive pornography go far beyond what we allow to be shown in films or even sold in licensed sex shops in the UK, so they should not be available online either.”

“There is a recognition, even in the proposals, that 60 years of research into media effects shows no conclusive evidence that violent images cause violent acts, so I think that the very idea that we need to ban it doesn't hold water,” [Dr Chris Evans, founder of a group called Internet Freedom] said. “But I think the serious problem with it is the assumption that ordinary people cannot be trusted to make up their own minds about what they read, watch or see.”

The worry that I have, as is mirrored by many others, is that BME would somehow get lumped in as “violent or abusive pornography” as well, which is ridiculous and totally incorrect. Everything on BME is consensual and makes the people in the photos happy. There's no paid models on BME being beaten or put in pain simply because they're being paid, and the acts in the photos would have happened whether or not a camera was there documenting it.

Maybe it's too fine a point for outsiders to understand, but I'm much more concerned with consent than whether something is “violent” or not. The type of pornography that one might be able to link with real world violence (and I think the link is dubious) is that which involves the subjugation of others — rape porn, degradation of women, and so on…

Even in mainstream porn you'll see violent throat-rape, women being spit on and slapped, jokes about abusing and taking advantage of women, and so on — while I don't think either should ever be banned, I'd be a lot more concerned with the effects of mainstream porn on hundreds of thousands highschool football jocks raping and beating their girlfriends than I would be with the effects of fringe porn on the one psycho in twenty years that acts out on it.

In America, someone is raped every two minutes.

If you think that's because of BME-type porn, you're kidding yourself.

And if you really want to know where rapists come from, you need to look a lot farther than porn. Porn is fundamentally healthy and an outlet for people to safely explore sexual fantasies. Porn is rarely where rapists come from. Rapists — and I suspect the desires for abusive porn — are bred from religion, from repression, from poor parenting, and from banning pornography and sexual expression.

If you want to ban anything that turns people into rapists, ban the Bible.

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"And men forgot their passions in the dread"

Friday, September 2, 2005

Well, the military has been sent in to New Orleans with orders to shoot to kill, since the city currently is controlled by lycanthropes firing on rescue helicopters and murdering and looting in the streets, while rape gangs roam the less flooded areas searching for teenage girls and children. Amid explosions and fires, dead bodies are floating in the toxic sewage that has filled the streets, and, according to the security policy analyst at FEMA, “There is not enough money in the gross national product of the United States to dispose of the amount of hazardous material in the area.”

Rebuilding of the city, if it happens, will take years, which is sad because this was entirely preventable and the decision was willfully made to cancel funding of levee upgrades and remove equipment in favor of the Iraq war. Those of you who voted for Bush have a lot more blood on your hands, and this time it's American blood. And while the US federal government has made no offer of real aid yet (and at first even refused offers of international aid from Canada, Venezuela, Jamaica, and others), they are paying Israeli settlers well over $200,000 per family to move out of the Gaza strip. Oh, and they're paying crazy Pat Robertson to pray for Katrina victims. I'm so sure Christianity is the answer.

So… Israel, Iraq, and Evangelical Megachurches are more important to the US taxpayer and US government than people inside the nation in real need? Ah, priorities…


I've gotten a fair amount of mail and messages asking how people can help the IAM members (more on Needled) who ignored repeated warnings to evacuate the city, as well as those who did and still lost everything. Right now it's too early to give a solid answer but when I have one I'll post it here. Until then my advice would be to simply donate to the Red Cross, but honestly, I'd wait. Once there is a clearer view of the problem I'm sure that help with housing, jobs, basic supplies of life, anything, would be greatly appreciated and we can set up a network to help with that here.

If you were affected by this, please do drop me a line if you have advice for me as to what you feel you need from this community.

It's pretty scary, because on the scale of things this was a tiny disaster in terms of what's possible… It really makes you worry about what America would come to if a really serious disaster struck that affected a larger region and more people. That things could devolve this quickly into anarchy and pure thuggish animalism is highly disturbing and degrading. Can't people just help each other?


All earth was but one thought - and that was death,
Immediate and inglorious; and the pang
Of famine fed upon all entrails - men
Died, and their bones were tombless as their flesh;
The meagre by the meagre were devoured,
Even dogs assailed their masters


Oh, and with a hundred thousand people in the city, many of them corralled with no water or food, one has to remember that humans need at least two quarts of water per day to survive, and you can only go a couple days without water before you die. If the National Guard (and their gear) wasn't in Iraq right now, the evacuations could have been completed already, but without the staff to do them, the toll of the disaster could climb exponentially with every day that passes.

Not that Bush cares.

UPDATE: To people writing me saying “stop looking for someone to blame”, well, that's essential. The way this has been handled and the fact that there was no preparation (or that defenses were even lowered) is a crime, and since these colossal fuckups keep happening over and over and over, people need to be held accountable simply so it stops happening. Is all this death really worth cutting taxes for the rich and funnelling money into megacorps? And with an administration that doesn't care unless the media really comes after them, blame is essential simply to get help out there. After all, Bush and Condi didn't even cancel their vacation for this until the press came after them.

UPDATE: To people writing me saying “cutting the funding so the Iraq war could go on makes no difference because the Class-5 levees would not have been complete by now anyway”, while there is some truth to that, they would have been in better shape, and shelters would have been stocked and plans would have been in place. Since the National Guard and the gear are off in Iraq, that's not an option. So the funding issue is very relevant, even if the problems could not have been totally averted.

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Because I got high…

Thursday, September 1, 2005

In response to pressure from the United States, even though it has hundreds of years of cultural history here, long ago and still today, Mexico degraded itself by making possession of marijuana a serious crime. It's gone even further by agreeing to destroy the runways of small airports up and down the coast (the Baja used to be a paradise for private pilots because every hotel had an airstrip). When I was in Canada I smoked pot every day for the last five years, and during that period I was in great shape mentally and physically, and generally felt good about myself and the world. Now that I don't smoke pot because of being in Mexico (because of the risk mostly), I've gained fifty pounds (because I drink instead, which is an atrocious substitute) and feel pretty terrible most of the time.

Now, you can say that I shouldn't do either if you want to, but you have to understand as well that it's not as if I smoke pot only because I like getting high (and I do really like it). I have degenerative neurological disorders that I've mentioned here before and are, well, pretty damn unpleasant, and smoking pot makes them a lot easier to deal with (to say nothing of helping with stress — I pound through incredible amounts of data on a daily basis and I don't want to drop dead like some Korean), I have chronic pain from bad joints, and so on… But I don't want to make this a oh, sad me, complain-a-rama entry, that's not my point. What I'm saying though is that marijuana helps me and improves my life, I enjoy it, and I think my productivity and ability to work over the last five years speaks for itself.

I'd wager to say that if you look at people who've changed the world for the better that you'll find a high percentage of them have smoked marijuana regularly, to say nothing about the famous scientists that were tokers. Now that they've shown there is no lung cancer risk even from heavy smoking, the “gateway drug” effect has been thoroughly debunked, and given that with marijuana being an easy drug for anyone to grow there's not even a need for anything but local distribution if it's decriminalized (etc, etc), one has to ask oneself why it stays illegal (especially when far, far more documentably dangerous drugs like alcohol and tobacco are legal and readily available).

Let's look at why marijuana is was made illegal and how it escalated from there.

At the turn of the 20th century, marijuana was legal in America, and especially among the Mexican immigrant population it was smoked regularly. Put simply, a few racists in the government hated the Mexicans — and hated it even more that their kids might hang out with Mexicans, smoke pot, be friendly with them, and pick up some of their culture — and pushed through legislation banning it. Its political value in getting easy arrests among dissidents, racial minorities, and lower classes became immediately apparent to the ruling class, and it snowballed. The economic benefits to the prison lobby — well over a billion dollars per year — helped it snowball further. Other industries like plastics and logging profited as well and had equally powerful lobbies. In addition, marijuana prohibition pushed people into alcohol, tobacco, and heavier drugs, pushing upwards of two hundred billion dollars per year into the healthcare and pharmaceutical industries. Marijuana prohibition, while no good for the people has been incredibly lucrative for big business and has even helped the ruling class maintain power. Legalizing it would be profitable as well, but for different people — small farmers have no power in comparison to megacorporations (except maybe at the height of a megawar when they're desperately needed).

Let's rewind a moment though and wonder — what if the American ruling class of the twenties hadn't hated Mexicans quite so much? How different a place would the world be if marijuana had never been criminalized in the United States? Is it a pipe dream to imagine that maybe people wouldn't be so uptight, that maybe we'd not be drowning in war after war after war? That maybe we wouldn't have a destructive class system that's currently playing out in the most miserable of ways in Louisiana? That maybe the world would be a more loving, egalitarian, and less short-sighted money-obsessed place?

Before you tell me that it is a pipe dream, understand that marijuana prohibition has been a key cog in the megacorporations of today getting its grips into the government. So not only has the prohibition of marijuana cost the People a total of at least $5 trillion over the last century, but it has helped reshape society in ways that amplify our current problems. I'm lowballing by the way with the figure of $5 trillion — I suspect that when you include the damage that the plastics industries, the logging industries, and all the other industries that fought to keep industrial hemp off the market in the equation (on top of potentially saved healthcare costs, prison costs, and so on), that the number is dramatically higher. Ah, the damage that a few bigots can do once big business figures out how to manipulate them…

Well, I'm off to Amsterdam, where I plan on doing what's right.

I'll be online periodically over the next two days but won't be resettled there until some time on Saturday.
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