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2000 soldiers dead. That sucks.

10,000+ Iraqis dead. That also sucks, but you'll never hear our media admit it.

What, don't they have souls too? Hmm?

Or is this one of those "your soul's only good if I can get credit for saving it" scenarios?

There is an evangelist who likes to bring his little sign-holding buddy down to my uni every few days and shout at us. Now, most evangelists are pretty persuasive, you know, they try to use positive appeals to get attention. Not this fucker.

In one week I have heard him say:

"You're dead"
"God hates you"
"You move your lips but I don't hear anything, you so-called intellectual"
"There is no prayer that can save you"

etc, etc. Bile. Rubbish. And then, the cherry on the damnation sundae:

"I know I'll go to heaven because I was saved by the Lord"

Newsflash, shitstain: No. You weren't.

From what I know of Christianity, salvation by baptism, magic words, or whatever ritual your church chooses, isn't revocable by mortal deeds. That was kinda the whole point of that dying-on-the-cross thing, remember?

So if one person is 'saved' then so's everyone else. Jesus didn't play favorites, since he was sort of otherwise occupied at the time.

And if one person's not saved, then neither is anyone else. Which means, basically, that if I'm going to hell....YOU'RE ALL COMING WITH ME.

Anyways, that said, it's ridiculous, the way people here will be so one-sided. I'm well aware that any expression of grief for the other side is seen as "America hating." Let's just make one thing very, very clear:

I do not hate AMERICA.

It's AMERICANS who drive me nuts.

My hate is very potent and specific and as such, it doesn't get too many outings. I'm more angry than anything else. Whatever. I want to know why 10,000 Iraqis aren't worth one American to you people.

They're your God's creatures too, aren't they?

Think for a minute of the people of Florida who are beset by the hurricanes. Do you blame each and every single last one of them for living in a hurricane-prone area? No, you are sympathetic, you say, they are just people who happened to live in the path of a hurricane, they couldn't help it.

Do the same for Iraqis. Just for ONE day - think of the regular people there, mothers, fathers, children - not as our sworn enemies but just as people who happen to live in a country that we have enemies in.

It's not little Ali's fault that there are bad guys living in his land. Spare a thought for him, and all the other Alis over there who suffer for 'democracys' sake.

After all, if he was born here, you'd do it gladly.

(note: this is not directed at any person in particular.)

Mm...slow day on the old boards...

::gets a bottle of vodka from the fridge::

Doesn't say anything here about not mixing with cold meds...

::wanders around in her pajamas, drinking and pushing sleeping posters out of windows::

This is TOO easy...

[why are we still running for the exits?]

I thought this was quite interesting...

Einstein said the significant problems we have cannot be solved at the same level of thinking with which we created them. Does the war against Iraq make us safer or less safe?

After spending $420 billion annually for the military and an additional $270 billion for the war in Iraq, why are we still running for the exits? Has the so-called war on terror made us less safe?

::sings:: paranoia may destroy ya...

We are all signals, and products of those signals. Why else would we fear chaos and disorder so much? We spend all that time carefully filtering and arranging the signals and ideas that make up our identities, that we cannot bear the thought of something disrupting it.

Fair enough, that's rather obvious...

In spite of all our posturing, though, we are constantly susceptible to being influenced by these signals, and we tend to cover for that influence by waving our egos around saying "It was my idea all along. I meant to do that."

But the effect of environment on attitude is palpable, regardless, why else would people feel the need to migrate? To "get away from it all" and "change the scenery" is an irrelevant statement, unless there actually is an "all" to get away from and scenery to change...

I hold within myself, at any given moment, an infinity of warring possibilities. There are dominant themes of course, and I can find myself flipping between one and the others instantaneously, a sort of "Who am I today?" routine. But ultimately a pattern emerges, and we call it a personality, and you interact with that personality on the screen and call it by my name.

The very fact that I have time to sit and think these thoughts is significant, it means that I am doing substantially better than a good deal of the world's population, some of whom will never get to learn to read in their lives, much less touch a computer.

To a great extent, the elite countries - the rich ones, the fat ones - are responsible for this. They have engineered it so that the rich get richer and the poor get poorer and well, angrier. You'd be angry too if you saw your town, your home, your kids get bombed for the sake of [Insert Vague Moralistic Cause Here.]

And we all know what happens next.

But then, we ought to know - we're the ones who made that environment for them. And we are all, when you get down to it, products of our environment. And so are they.

So it occurs to me that, if we want to stop creating these situations, creating these people who have nothing to live for and want to take us down with them, that we could start by not engineering their environments to be as miserable as possible.

Oh, sure we can change, I'm not suggesting a copout. Just because you can name your enemy doesn't mean you're capable of fighting him...the same factors that blind us from seeing how we're products of our environment have also blinded us from seeing our way out, to some extent. We reach for the same tools everyone else does. We fail just like everyone else does. What comes next? I don't know. I'd like to say enlightenment. I'm a bit too cynical for that, though...but can you really blame me?

http://www.theyesmen.org/hijinks/



Pure class.

Anyone ever read his romance novels? They're so hysterical....especially the one where he's a Pirate....

YARRRRR

my shoes my shoes
neatly all lined up in twos
how i love yous on my feet
make my outfit nice and neat
and put together-
i have shoes for every weather
some with bows and some with feathers
and some with straps and high, high heels
i even have some shoes with wheels
to wear at the roller rink
and banged up shoes to wear while playing sink
and chucking rocks
with shoes like this who needs borrowed co*k?
shoes shoes shoes
how i love yous

http://www.iol.co.za/index.php?set_id=1&click_id=29&art_id=qw1103201460519B216

London - Urged by her professor to "do something useful", a British mathematician has made a crochet model of chaos, the BBC reported on Thursday.

Hinke Osinga of the engineering mathematics department at Bristol University in the west of England needed 25 511 stitches to represent the Lorenz equations that describe chaotic systems.

Osinga and her professor, Bernd Krauskopf, were offering a bottle of champagne to anyone who cared to follow the pattern published in the journal Mathematics Intelligencer, the public broadcaster said.

Osinga was making hexagonal lace motifs during a Christmas break two years ago, when Krauskopf asked: "Why don't you crochet something useful?"

The two spent 85 hours - whether during their working hours or spare time was not reported - to create their representation of chaos, propped up by steel wire.

"Imagine a leaf floating in a turbulent river and consider how it passes either to the left or to the right around a rock somewhere downstream," Osinga said.

"Each stitch in the crochet pattern represents a single point - a leaf - that ends up at the rock," she added.

The result is currently finding use as a Christmas decoration, suggesting it will be tossed out with the rest of the tattered festive trappings on Twelfth Night - January 6. - Sapa-dpa

Written after seeing the finale:

Women can never win in this world. If we are not decorations, then we are aberrations. Ballbreakers, bitches and dominatrices, or else shrinking violets, either way we get screwed.

But really, it is the men who are slaves to the machine, who don't even KNOW they're slaves! We say "Ok, we give in. What do you want us to be? Shall we be skinny? Shall we be pretty? Busty? Loud? Soft? Nice? Mean? Flashy? Submissive? What, just tell us what so we can do it and get on with life!"

And you don't know, do you? You don't, so you keep changing the game, and every time we have a taste of success, you steal the bottle away so we can't have more. Every time we come close to winning, you change the game, because we are "breaking the rules" when nobody even knows what those rules are.

Unfortunately, guys, we're ahead, and you know it. We're closer to freedom because we were the first to figure out that we were slaves. We KNOW that the rules make no sense, that the game is rigged.

You still seem to be under the delusion that you are winning here. But you are not. By trying to destroy us, you destroy yourselves. You still think that this world is a game with rules that can be enforced on one side and not the other. You still think we are all identical pieces and that with enough control we will all fall into line and be perfect little clones like the women in the bra ads.

And yet, that's your greatest fear, and we know it - you don't WANT those women, you want real women, flesh and blood and attitude, you want one that is unlike any other in the world, you want us as real companions and coworkers and yes, bosses sometimes - because you know that it is a reprieve from that harried man's world of cell phones and competition and early heart disease. You know that we are the ones who can see you as you are, as flesh and blood and spirit, and not as dollar signs and diplomas, we can give you authenticity and the freedom not to play that game.

But you fear that freedom, don't you? It's the real prize, but like anything worth having, it comes with a price. So you hire the lazy man who kisses your ass, and you fire the competent lady who has a few too wrinkles for your little man's taste; you pinch bums and encourage the next generation of boys to become chauvinist CEOs and teachers and doctors and fathers, and you keep the game going, even though it makes you sick and lonely.

You idiots.

Published on Thursday, December 9, 2004 by CommonDreams.org
The US Administration and The ICC*
by Congressman Dennis Kucinich

*International Criminal Court

The ICC derives from the principles and purposes of the United Nations, specifically that all states shall refrain from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state

Each and every member of the community of nations under the United Nations Charter, Article 51, has an undisputed right to self-defense. That right is express. Any nation may claim it. As a matter of record, I assert here and now that the United States has a right to defend itself. I also assert, for the record, that our US Administration has confused the difference between defense and offense.

In order to fully understand the determination of the current US Administration to stand outside the ICC, thus remaining unaccountable for violations of international law, one must understand the difficult situation the Administration finds itself in for ordering a preemptive attack upon Iraq, without prior authorization of the UN Security Council.

The Administration's case against Iraq, if it ever had a credible one, has fallen apart: Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction (WMDs). Iraq was not attempting to get uranium from Niger. According to our own intelligence, Iraq did not have the capability, or the intention of attacking the United States. Iraq had nothing to do with the tragedy of 9/11.

Unfortunately, there is an abundance of evidence which suggests the Administration used the tragedy of 9/11 as an excuse to attack Iraq, and had, indeed, been planning an attack on Iraq from the earliest days it came to power.

Unable to establish a justification for its war, unable to find the WMDs, and with its doctrine of preemption in collapse, the Administration switched its causus belli for the attack on Iraq to . . . regime change - - and made the ouster of Saddam Hussein the reason for the attack on Iraq. It is well understood that, under widely recognized international law, no nation has an inherent unilateral right to breach the sovereignty of any nation and to relieve people of any nation of their leader or government.

In the wake of the attack on Iraq, questions have been made regarding the responsibility of members of the Administration and their contractors, for authorizing torture, for the destruction and appropriation of property, unlawful confinement, attacks on civilians, attacks on civilian objects, exacting excessive incidental death, injury or damage, destroying or seizing the enemy's property, employing poisoned weapons, and outrages upon personal dignity, all of which constitute war crimes or crimes against humanity under the International Criminal Court statute, which entered into force on July 1, 2002.

Given the public record of its conduct in Iraq, is it any wonder that the Administration, in order to avoid accountability under the ICC for the results of its own directives, would go to extraordinary efforts to weaken and even destroy the ICC, and to threaten nations which support it with economic reprisals?

The Administration has told the American people that it refuses to participate in the ICC in order to protect our troops from being brought to the Hague. One might ask should troops be held accountable and those who sent them not be accountable? In fact, all troops are protected because there is a specific provision in the ICC in which all military personnel have the right to be returned to their home country for trial. The ICC gets involved only if a suspect is being "shielded from criminal responsibility."

It is more likely that those whose protection the administrators seek wear not the uniform of our nation, but the business suits of top civilian government officials who wrap themselves in the flag and hide behind the troops while insisting upon impunity for the deadly consequences of their own political decisions.

Unfortunately, the cascading effects of bad decisions necessitate that the current US Administration construct a wholesale revision of the role of the United States in the world community, making in our own nation a religion of unilateralism. How else to cloak blatant violations of the UN Charter, the Geneva Conventions, the Hague Conventions and our own US Constitution, which under Article I, Section 8 reserves war-making power to the US Congress? How else to escape the legal and moral requirements of the rule of law and the establishment of justice which the very founders of the United States saw as having transcendent meaning?

There are many in our United States government who do understand that Peace can only be obtained through international cooperation and adherence by all nations to high principles. We know that, as a matter of the survival of the human race, unilateralism must yield to multilateralism. The American electorate may experience a sharp partisan division. Today that division has been translated into policies which set the United States apart from the rest of the world on matters of the International Criminal Court, the nuclear Non Proliferation Treaty , the Kyoto Climate Change Treaty, the Biological Weapons Convention, the Chemical Weapons Convention, the Small Arms Treaty, and the Land Mines Treaty.

In times when principles of international unity are under attack, it is urgent for all those of us who appreciate the endless ways in which the people of the world are interrelated and interconnected to stand up, to assert and to enact principles which respect, assert and codify the imperative of human unity. Each of us has the responsibility and the gift to work within our sphere to construct a world where all may survive and thrive in peace and justice.

We must work tirelessly for ratification or accession to the Rome Statute. That is why we must remind our constituents of the urgency of having a sustainable system of international justice. 9/11 remains a crime against not only this nation, but a crime against humanity. The perpetrators of 9/11 must be brought to justice. But no one nation can or should meet the task alone. International cooperation is mandatory. Only the ICC presents a workable framework for the functioning of an international justice system which will affirm the basic human rights of all people of all nations and will deliver the world from a so-called war on terror which ends up producing terror of its own.

We must do this work regardless of who is or isn't abusing power, regardless of who stands apart from the process or who is trying to wreck the process. We must focus on our own task, and reach out to all those who believe, as we do, that we can create a new world by international standards of justice.

The power of human unity is as inexorable as the power of human love. No matter how challenging things may seem in the moment, with compassion and patience we will create the world we seek, and those who today stand at the periphery of that world must continue to be welcomed inside, without fear. Thanks to each of you for truly being parliamentarians for global action.

Congressman Dennis J. Kucinich (D-OH) is Co-Chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus.

'Drew's' Ferguson to replace Kilborn

Tuesday, December 7, 2004 Posted: 9:06 AM EST (1406 GMT)

LOS ANGELES, California (Hollywood Reporter) -- It appears Craig Ferguson can get comfortable behind the host's desk on "The Late Late Show."

Sources said CBS has settled on the former co-star of "The Drew Carey Show" to replace Craig Kilborn as host of the late-night talk show, which follows "Late Show With David Letterman" in the 12:35 a.m. slot.

CBS declined comment Monday.

Kilborn exited in August after five years of hosting the show, saying he wanted to focus on writing and producing different television projects.

Following his departure, more than 20 guest hosts appeared on the show until early last month, when the network whittled the field of candidates to four: Ferguson, Damien Fahey, D.L. Hughley and Michael Ian Black. The four finalists were then invited to return for multinight hosting stints last month.

"Late Late Show" is produced by Letterman's Worldwide Pants production banner, which has the right to produce the show in that time slot per Letterman's contract with CBS.

Ferguson's feature credits include "Saving Grace" and "Chain of Fools" as well as the upcoming "Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events."

Copyright 2004 Reuters. All rights reserved.This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.