(no subject)

you know, when you are trying to compose yourself, trying to figure out what you want to say, and a little voice keeps screaming "blood!" after every thought?

not helpful.

i find that certain words or concepts, well, they sit in my head, and shout periodically.


monkey, fish, hat and cheese are all classics.

sometimes they produce at least marginally interesting things, like Monkey Rumble™.

or the thing about the fish and the hat and the greeting.


i actually think Mr. Fish, the fish in the hat, is an archetype. no, really. i just don't know his stories.

but that fish? wearing the hat and greeting you in your head? that's your mr fish.


i found a neat thing today.

it's a... tent-peg-like object. 18 inches, 1/8'' thick metal rod, looped at one end. one inch down from the 1.5 in loop, two inches are flattened, parallel to the loop. heavily pitted and rusted. the loop has rusted together. merged. there is a small, sharp point in the loop, on one side.

i love rust. it's beautiful.

better than rust? a rusty thing, cleaned off and worn smooth and dark and slightly shiny on the raised edges of the pits.

so i cleaned and oiled it.

it is a rod of power, and of might. it is an ankh. because any rod is a rod of power and might. and any stick with a loop at one end is an ankh. just, well, a subtle ankh. but i'm perceptive, and i can see what it means.

what i say three times is true. five makes it false and true. seven is false and true and false. i'd throw in a 23, but that's probably really confusing.

probably makes it true if and only if a) you think it's true, b) you know it's false, c) you choose it to be true and... uh. bears. i guess.





oh, bears aren't a classic yet, but they've been beatified.

(no subject)

( that south park meme. )

(no subject)

yeah yeah yeah, color meme.

copy-paste etc: <font color="username"><b>username</b></font>

padmaclynne

i have no clue why it does it.

or, well, fails to. it's usually green. sometimes. other times it seems to not work.

bla!

(no subject)

okay, yeah, go to zenarchery for banners.

like this one:

(no subject)

( meme meme )

(no subject)

okay, look. i don't care about your politics. i don't. but fact is that the us, under rumsfeld and cambone, explicitly supported the torture. this is a war crime, and they should be prosecuted. i find it incredibly hard to believe that bush was entirely unknowing, but i doubt we could get anything to stick.

first, read this: (well, lemme find a good excerpt to use as the link. oh, it's from the New Yorker. they do decent fact-checking, right? i ask sarcastically.)
Rumsfeld and Cambone went a step further, however: they expanded the scope of the sap, bringing its unconventional methods to Abu Ghraib. The commandos were to operate in Iraq as they had in Afghanistan. The male prisoners could be treated roughly, and exposed to sexual humiliation.

“They weren’t getting anything substantive from the detainees in Iraq,” the former intelligence official told me. “No names. Nothing that they could hang their hat on. Cambone says, I’ve got to crack this thing and I’m tired of working through the normal chain of command. I’ve got this apparatus set up—the black special-access program—and I’m going in hot. So he pulls the switch, and the electricity begins flowing last summer. And it’s working. We’re getting a picture of the insurgency in Iraq and the intelligence is flowing into the white world. We’re getting good stuff. But we’ve got more targets”—prisoners in Iraqi jails—“than people who can handle them.”

Cambone then made another crucial decision, the former intelligence official told me: not only would he bring the sap’s rules into the prisons; he would bring some of the Army military-intelligence officers working inside the Iraqi prisons under the sap’s auspices. “So here are fundamentally good soldiers—military-intelligence guys—being told that no rules apply,” the former official, who has extensive knowledge of the special-access programs, added. “And, as far as they’re concerned, this is a covert operation, and it’s to be kept within Defense Department channels.”


okay, me again. this bit is about Bush's bloody hands. sf gate, which, yes, is pretty liberal, but the thing is full of references. read them. be outraged. are you human?

Word has it Bush probably didn't hear the actual details, of the specific brand of U.S.-made hoods or of the rape techniques employed, because, as everyone knows, Bush is a "big-picture guy" who likes only the general Cliff's Notes overviews of world events and can barely find Baghdad on a map and can't really handle too many simultaneous thoughts.

But here's where it gets sticky. Here's where the smell of rot starts to really singe your intuitive nose hairs. Because every president, no matter how unsophisticated or perpetually tuned out (Hi, Mr. Reagan) or disconnected from what's actually happening in his regime, must get briefed. Every day.

And when you're a president who lusts after war the way Bush does, you gotta hear all the grisly facts, the various actions and tactics and super-secret operations, lest you seem completely out of touch during one of your incredibly rare press conferences wherein you scrunch your face all tight and furrow your brow and wag your finger and say things like, "My job is to, like, think beyond the immediate."

It is the eternal Bush conundrum. How to appear sort of blank faced and ignorant of the true atrocities your administration commits so as to avoid any sort of direct accountability, and yet still pretend to be a savvy, aware, tough-guy leader who gets things done and takes no bull and launches unprovoked wars on anything that stands in the way of his dad's portfolio.


thank you, danger_army

(no subject)

for fuck's sake, when the CIA thinks it's too much, it is pure evil. (yeah, it's the same story)


By fall, according to the former intelligence official, the senior leadership of the C.I.A. had had enough. “They said, ‘No way. We signed up for the core program in Afghanistan—pre-approved for operations against high-value terrorist targets—and now you want to use it for cabdrivers, brothers-in-law, and people pulled off the streets’”—the sort of prisoners who populate the Iraqi jails. “The C.I.A.’s legal people objected,” and the agency ended its sap involvement in Abu Ghraib, the former official said.

The C.I.A.’s complaints were echoed throughout the intelligence community. There was fear that the situation at Abu Ghraib would lead to the exposure of the secret sap, and thereby bring an end to what had been, before Iraq, a valuable cover operation. “This was stupidity,” a government consultant told me. “You’re taking a program that was operating in the chaos of Afghanistan against Al Qaeda, a stateless terror group, and bringing it into a structured, traditional war zone. Sooner or later, the commandos would bump into the legal and moral procedures of a conventional war with an Army of a hundred and thirty-five thousand soldiers.”

The former senior intelligence official blamed hubris for the Abu Ghraib disaster. “There’s nothing more exhilarating for a pissant Pentagon civilian than dealing with an important national security issue without dealing with military planners, who are always worried about risk,” he told me. “What could be more boring than needing the coöperation of logistical planners?” The only difficulty, the former official added, is that, “as soon as you enlarge the secret program beyond the oversight capability of experienced people, you lose control. We’ve never had a case where a special-access program went sour—and this goes back to the Cold War.”