Has it been five years already? It seems like yesterday that I rudely answered my phone after getting on the bus, and struggled to hear my sister excitedly tell me that civilation was collapsing, as it became increasingly hard to hear due to the phones ringing around me. This was before incidents were fully understood as attacks, and we all thought it was an ugly future where pilots were stupidly gliding into tall buildings, and explosions just happened at the Lincoln Memorial. Oh, for those innocent days of 6:45 AM PST, 9/11/2001.

What have we learned five years later? That everyone who hates America may have a point. I am mystified by proponents of the War, who insist everything is going hunky-dory. Don't they want to win? Bush isn't even pretending to crave victory anymore. He thinks that even establishing a objectives for victory is sending the wrong message. Heck, he wants to invade Iran, which would finish the proecess of reviving the conservatives there that the invasion of Iraq began. The cultural response from the Right has been even sicker. We must sacrifice freedom. Dissent is bad. there are conservatives who actually seem to admire Muslim societies. At least that's empathy.

I honored the anniversary the usual way, by watching movies. I screened a bunch of conspiracy documentaries, which were tedious, as well as a bootleg of World Trade Center, which was boring as all shit. The high point was when I watched 11'9"01, which was not great, except for Alejandro González Iñárritu's segment, which was mostly an audio montage, with clips from the big day. There's a part when you can hear the sounds of the WTC collapsing from the inside, each floor rythmically hammering at the ones below, accompanied by screams that sounds like they're coming from a rollercoaster. It's pretty hard to handle. Someone should post that part, and nothing else from the movie, on You Tube.

After five years, I'm starting to develop a little empathy for the affected. I read an article about the September 11th widows, which I would link to, but I can't find it. Basically, it's all about how widows and lovers got fucked around by greedy family members, and the injection of sudden wealth. It's bad enough to lose a loved one, but to then suffer through an existential Dickensian lesson on thrift and spending is pretty fucked up.

Click here for my real-time, day-of emails from September 11, 2001.

Click here for my mordantly amusing one-year anniversary article.

I figure I'll tackle the subject again in ten years, if I remember.

"Blue Moon" by Big Star

Let me be your one light
And if you'd like a true heart
Take the time to show youre mine
And I'll be a blue moon in the dark.

While you sleep you'll see me there
Clouds race across the sky
Close your eyes and don't ask why
And I'll be a blue moon in your eyes.

Morning comes and sleeping's done
Birds sing outside
If demons come while you're under
I'll be a blue moon in the sky

Let me be your one light
And if you'd like a true heart
Take the time to show you're mine
And I'll be a blue moon in the dark.

This is an odd bit of viral marketing, isn't it? There were a dozen or more of these scattered alongside the road by my house.

Holy. Living. Fuck. Are you fucking believing this? Over.



Holy mother of fuck. The fucking moon. Over

Like anyone gives a fuck what he thinks.

Sometimes my judgement is so bad even I can tell how bad it is.

I was irritated by the report that Pluto has been officially downgraded from "planet" status. What is the new classsification? Oh, it's "dwarf planet." How lazy can you get. The worst thing is the criteria astronomers used for dwarf planets was specifically designed to downgrade Pluto, by specificying that actual planets need to have near-cirular orbits (Pluto's orbital ellipse is far more pronounced than the others in the solar system, taking it within Neptune's orbit on some rotations). What a bunch of fuckers.

Honestly, if someone had told me yesterday that this story would have upset me so much, I'd have thought they were crazy.

"I would never question the patriotism of somebody who disagrees with me. This has nothing to do with patriotism. It has everything to do with understanding the world in which we live."

-- President George W. Bush

Seriously. Bush said that. BUSH said that.

I think we killed them.

I think we killed them.

Hempfest

Britney Spears

She's certainly acting... odd...

My favorite columnist at National Review Online is Mark R. Levin. On a site loaded with sputtering, impotent white men with a slighted sense of entitlement, Levin trumps them all. It is almost required of a writer for National Review to hold loyalty to the Beloved Leader above idealogical consistency, the good of the country and even personal best interests.

Levin is supposedly a legal scholar and author, and yet when an entirely fair comment on his torture advocacy is made, he is so unable to comprehend how anyone could question his... well, to call it faith would paint his struggles with an unearned and wholely blasphemous purity, so let's say his sense of entitlement to allow torture, the best he can do is sputter in outrage: "Why does anyone take this guy seriously anymore?"

"This guy"? I know the appeal of blogging is the insta-journalism of it all, but surely a professional writer would be a little more artful. At least one would hope.

This post deserves to be quoted in full:

Gitmo Finally Revealed
07/31 03:02 PM
I want to congratulate the attorneys who work with me at Landmark Legal Foundation for tenaciously pursuing the untold story of the systematic abuse of American MPs by the al-Qaeda terrorists at Guantanamo Bay. It took us a full year to bring this stunning information to light, but the truth is now out. Thanks to Pete Hutchison, Mike O'Neill, Matt Forys, and Eric Christensen.

Because prison guards are the true victims of the War On Terror.

The other thing I like about Levin is how his mug shot at NRO is cleverly cropped to disguise his baldness.

National Review does a pretty good job with their mug shots all around. Perhaps their greatest achievement was in making David Frum, to all appearances a subhuman pig man, almost frattishly handsome.

Trunk Monkey

I had this idea a while ago, but it was as a panhandler response system. This is pretty good, though.

Holy crap, the women of the Israeli Defense Force are hot!











I read this article (hopefully a translation) about what they do.

Who'd have thought if you handed a rifle to a young Jewess she'd become so appealing?