Wednesday, May 04, 2011

"72 Virgins. As Promised..."

"They should have captured Bin Laden alive and made him..."


They should have captured Bin Laden alive and made him continually go through airport security for the rest of his life.        Favorite Retweet Reply

"Some of you say that religion makes people happy..."



Via Dedroidify: Funnies

Tuesday, May 03, 2011

"...what I think when I hear priests quote statistics about molestation" - So. Much. This.


"I shot Bigfoot yesterday. I ate him and dumped the remains in the lake before I could prove it. Just take my word for it. Seriously." - Doug Stanhope

Truth/Perspective 101 - "Osama Won" Via Hit & Run: Reason Magazine.

Osama Won - Hit & Run : Reason Magazine:
"...Osama bin Laden’s motivation for the attacks that he planned in the 1990s, and then the September 11 attacks, was to draw the U.S. and the West into a prolonged war—an actual war in Afghanistan, and a broader global war with Islam.

Osama got both. And we gave him a prolonged war in Iraq to boot. By the end of Obama’s first term, we’ll probably top 6,000 dead U.S. troops in those two wars, along with hundreds of thousands of Iraqis and Afghans. The cost for both wars is also now well over $1 trillion.

We have also fundamentally altered who we are. A partial, off-the-top-of-my-head list of how we’ve changed since September 11...

  • We’ve sent terrorist suspects to “black sites” to be detained without trial and tortured.

  • We’ve turned terrorist suspects over to other regimes, knowing that they’d be tortured.


  • In those cases when our government later learned it got the wrong guy, federal officials not only refused to apologize or compensate him, they went to court to argue he should be barred from using our courts to seek justice, and that the details of his abduction, torture, and detainment should be kept secret.

  • We’ve abducted and imprisoned dozens, perhaps hundreds of men in Guantanamo who turned out to have been innocent. Again, the government felt no obligation to do right by them.

  • The government launched a multimillion dollar ad campaign implying that people who smoke marijuana are implicit in the murder of nearly 3,000 of their fellow citizens.

  • The government illegally spied and eavesdropped on thousands of American citizens.

  • Presidents from both of the two major political parties have claimed the power to detain suspected terrorists and hold them indefinitely without trial, based solely on the president’s designation of them as an “enemy combatant,” essentially making the president prosecutor, judge, and jury. (I’d also argue that the treatment of someone like Bradley Manning wouldn’t have been tolerated before September 11.)

  • The current president has also claimed the power to execute U.S. citizens, off the battlefield, without a trial, and to prevent anyone from knowing about it after the fact.

  • The Congress approved, the president signed, and the U.S. Supreme Court upheld a broadly written law making it a crime to advocate for any organization the government deems sympathetic to terrorism. This includes challenging the “terrorist” designation in the first place.

  • Flying in America now means enduring a humiliating and hassling ritual that does little if anything to actually make flying any safer. Every time the government fails to catch an attempt at terrorism, it punishes the public for its failure by adding to the ritual.

  • American Muslims, a heartening story of success and assimilation, are now harassed and denigrated for merely trying to build houses of worship.

  • Without a warrant, the government can search and seize indefinitely the laptops and other personal electronic devices of anyone entering the country.

  • The Department of Homeland Security now gives terrorism-fighting grants for local police departments across the country to purchase military equipment, such as armored personnel carriers, which is then used against U.S. citizens, mostly to serve drug warrants..."

  • Sunday, May 01, 2011

    "How does our own cyberspatial technology relate to presence of this Neo-Platonic Ur-object?" - Terence McKenna

    [Again, the man makes me wish I was smarter.]

    Training.

    Shadowboxing - Bas Rutten MMA Workout - boxing - 8x2m rounds
    Hip thrusts/dislocates/pullaparts/hyperextensions
    P90X D21 - Yoga - Tony Horton One-one-One 'Patience Hummingbird'

    The week in food.

    The Mrs has been out of town/upcountry since midweek, so much much on the creative cooking front.
      
    As for my nutrition/staying on course, it was basically an abortion, as described here so no point in separating out the good from the bad, like I usually do...  so here's everything I scarfed this week [not the quantity, but the... substance?...  there's a better word, but I'm blanking.  For example - you see one beer and one liter of water.  I had many, of both.  That Ceres Stout is about the only beer I've found in Liberia I kinda like.  But I digress...]
    Onwards...

    Mmm... Jesus Burger.


    Via Landover Baptist Church - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia:
    "The Landover Baptist Church is a fictional Baptist church based in the fictional town of Freehold, Iowa. The Landover Baptist web site and its associated Landoverbaptist.net Forum are a satire of fundamentalist Christianity and the Religious Right in the United States."