I didn’t have to work late today so there will be an update! Rejoice or find medication depending on how you feel about my little update things.
I spoke yesterday about the local election. Well the election had the highest turn out that we have had in my memory, with over a thousand votes cast. The person that I (and my wife) voted for lost by thirteen votes. Keep that in mind when you are talking about your vote not counting. I bet we could just walk around town and find thirteen people that would have voted for our guy had they known it was going to be that close. I am sure that the same could be said for the other guy as well, though the last position that he ran for was city council and he won that by a lot. It was my thinking that a lot of the people who didn’t show up to vote were going to vote for the guy who lost, but didn’t vote because the guy who won had won his last post in a landslide. I suppose it is like being really drunk and hooking up with a transvestite hooker at last call, you only regret it the next day, and for the rest of your life, or so I’ve heard. Yes, I do believe that was the worst analogy of all time! Daddy always told me if I was going to write really bad analogies I had to be the best.
I had not used ICQ for several years, now I find that it is on this new machine. I am not sure why I quit using it, wait, oh, yes, okay, one day it just quit working and they wanted me to download a newer version of it and I just really didn’t want to. All the people that were on my list were people that had found my number through my old website or the Megadeth chat. Not really the type of individuals that I really would like to currently try to hold a conversation with. Unless of course we were trying to recreate the famous Budweiser commercial. To my surprise, my old ICQ number still worked after all of these years. The number is 14479550. If you wonder why I remember that, go ahead and ask why I know that the license plate on my boss’s truck is af410p, or why I know that the van is ‘510lzn’, or why I know the corvette that my dad drove had the plate ‘jng457’ (he died 14 years ago, btw). My first motorcycle had the plate ‘m413432’, which I remember mostly because it was quite similar to my dad’s driver’s license which was ‘1343132’. I don’t know why but I just genarally remember trivial numbers after a single glance. I haven’t yet figured out how to use all the credit card numbers that I have memorized for evil, but when I do, boy god there are going to be a lot of pizzas going to a couple of people that I strongly dislike.
• I checked out the Political Animal website again today and it turns out that there are a lot of stories breaking about the abuse at the Abu Ghraib prison and the possibility that someone other than the few people who were photographed may have been involved…DUH!…If you are doing something that you know is wrong you are not going to pose for photos. If, however, your head of command comes in and says, “I wonder what they would look like in a naked pyramid.” That might make you want to 1) force them to get into a naked pyramid and 2) not be afraid to be photographed while doing it.
I don’t see any other way this could have happened. Of course there is all the requisite double-talk and blatant untruthful information coming from people the higher up you get in the chain of command, but it is all a load of steamy, smelly crap.
I just tried to google up a story about the guy in the fifties (I think) that used a little box to study how far a person would go when being commanded. I was not able to find the story that I was looking for, but it broke down thusly. Someone would apply for and get a job to test a new machine that was meant to cause harm to another human. An anonymous person in a lab coat would tell him to intensify the pain at regular intervals. No one was being hurt, there was just a tape playing of someone screaming in different degrees of pain as the dial got turned ever higher (yet the subject person on the dial did not know that). Most of the people would turn the dial past the point where it said certain injury or death. As I said, I was not able to find an actual article about the machine or the tests that they did, but I think that is quite relevant for the situation in Abu Ghraib. Hell, I think just the fact that I can now spell that without having to go to google must prove something…
I really think that the people who were in charge at that prison knew exactly what was going on, hell, they were probably the photographers. No one would have ever said a word about it had the U.S. media not got a hold of it and started to strangle it. Whether this is good or bad is something that is quite subjective. Does humiliating foriegn soldiers actually make them give up information? Does treating the same soldiers humanely make them less likely to divulge information? The truth about all that happened at Abu Ghraib will never be known, or if it is ever known it will be fifty years from now when the history channel can interview some of those that were involved while they are on their death beds.
I really believe that what we are seeing here is just a microcosm of the totally inept and monumentally fucked-up approach that Dubya adopted when he decided to attack IRAQ. It is like he thought that since his daddy was able to just walk right through Kuwait, he would do the same in IRAQ. The one thing that he totally forgot to factor in was that his daddy really did liberate Kuwait from the evil IRAQ, while he was trying liberate the evil IRAQ from a single guy. Iraq didn’t want to be ‘populated’ by our military, they wanted Saddam and his regime gone and then they would figure something out. Had we left Iraq very shortly after Saddam and his cohorts fled the country, and left Iraq to liberate themselves, we would be in far better shape than wer are now. After all, a forced democrocy is little more than a tyranny with a different name.
Once again this has gone political, I must end this now. I will leave you with a final thought, “Vote Quimby”.