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Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wagn'nagl fhtagn ("In his house at R'lyeh dead Cthulhu waits dreaming."). --HP Lovecraft, The Call of Cthulhu

The stars hath turned in the heavens once more: Mighty Cthulhu stirs. His dreams reacheth forth, communing with those with ears to hear. Iä! Shub-Niggurath! His thoughts trample down along the pathways of thy mind; thou knowest His footprints, each of which is a wound...

Wednesday, November 24, 2004





What I'm Thankful For

In addition to being grateful for the support and devotion of my close friends and family, I'm grateful for that which makes me proud to be an American: The
Constitution of the United States, and the ten amendments in its attendant Bill of Rights. I'm thankful that my government has been defined into disparate and discrete duties/obligations, and that each has a set of checks and balances that prevent either of the other branches from abusing power in pursuit of their own agendas.

Huh, lemme think about that...you know, let's just rename this post "What I Was Once Thankful For"

The Constitution isn't holding up so well beneath the boot-heels of conservatives in the Judicial, Legislative, and Executive branches. That precious document envisioned that each branch would voluntarily act to limit the excesses of the other two. The Founding Fathers never envisioned a day when all three would actively seek to support eachother in their refutation of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights.

Speaking of, I guess I can be thankful for the Second Amendment (the prohibition of Congress against my right to own a gun), the Third (the prohibition of Congress against ordering me to house and feed a soldier), and the Seventh (prohibition against denying me my right to a jury trial in a civil suit) as well.

But I really miss:

Perhaps I'm just bellyaching, but I really feel that my ability to even have friends and family, let alone pontificate from this virtual soapbox, extends purely from the Constitution and the Bill of Rights; but does not come from goose-stepping brownshirts that want to take away my independence and ram their medieval religious fanatacism down my throat.

To this end, I'm thankful for those who have defended these sacred documents--in the courts and on the battlefield. I am fully congnizant that their sacrifices have paid for my freedom, and am truly grateful to them.

Needless to say, those that have assaulted these sacred ideals--under the guise of "religious values" or the WoT®--have earned nothing but my boundless hatred and contempt for the scum-sucking hypocritical traitors that they are.

Happy Turkey Day.
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Tuesday, November 23, 2004



DHMO.org

Stopping a Subversive Killer

Kevin Drum posed
a hum-dinger of a question that exposed some terrifying things about my countrymen: They ain't always up on their science. A survey done by the USG's National Science Foundation resulted in the following warning signs:

Well, I could complain, or I could do my part to ease the ignorance within which so many of my countrymen wallow. Hence, the banner above, and this notice of a deadly toxin among us: Dihydrogen Monoxide. Follow the link, read up on this chemical killer, and help spread the word.

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A Knife to a Gunfight

Do conservatives understand that they are constantly being outsmarted by Earth's little despots? Saddam was the most bumbling tyrant the Middle East has seen since
Darius, yet even he managed to buy massive amounts of WMD's from Reagan and Bush Sr. He gassed his own civilians with chemical weapons stamped with "Made in USA", and then turned around and bought more WMD's from the US. Let's face it, if it weren't for his megalomania blinding him to the socio-military realities of facing off against the US Army, he'd still be around today. Saddam never really understood the rules of playing the conservatives in Washington, but did alright for two decades nonetheless.

Iran and North Korea, though, they know how to make the conservatives dance. Kim Jong-Il wanted to be bribed or he'd start building nukes.
Clinton bought him off. But what does ShrubCo™ do? They bluster, they bully, they strut around like a bunch of drunken cow-hands...and then they buy off Kim Jong-Il after he built a bunch of nukes. So now that little pot-bellied pig will have his bribe, but also has--thanks to the conservatives--a half-dozen nuclear weapons to play with (or, more likely, sell). Lovely.

Iran really knows how to outsmart the conservatives, though. In the 80's, they fought Washington through proxies like Hezbollah, and must have done back-flips of joy when Reagan sent the Marines into Lebanon. Now, a country that had no hope of attacking America suddenly had thousands of ready targets right on Iran's front porch. And Iran wouldn't even have to get dirty doing it; just give money and a nod of approval,
and 241 Marines get to die for an ignorant and arrogant conservative agenda that never had any chance of succeeding.

Got a pesky neighbor that you want removed?
Trick the US into doing it for you! Just spoon-feed misinformation and money to "dissidents" like Ahmed Chalabi, and the conservatives will do the happy-dance while wetting themselves over an excuse to take out Saddam. There: Problem solved, no Iranians get killed doing it, and--best of all--your sworn enemy is paying in coin and blood for a war that they never had any vested interest in to begin with. Stupid American conservatives: Always bringing a knife to the international arena.

Want some extra money? Want to give your sworn enemy yet another black eye?
Why not do both? Do Kim Jong-Il one better by using the nuclear weapons card for money, but also goad the conservatives in Washington into playing the bumbling bully. EU stature goes up, they give us free money, and US stature goes down yet again.

Hmmm, what could be better? Oh, I know! Let's see if we can
goad them into another war! We'll just feed the US more misinformation through "dissidents"; works every time. Europe would freak, start to really fear a renewed imperialism in Washington, and cash-in all those US T-Bills they've been sitting on. Voila! The massive Federal defecit comes home in a hurry, the US economy crumbles faster than a Soviet 5-year plan, the US military embarrasses itself by not showing up for a war because they don't have any more bodies to spare, and we get more free money!

Really, this is almost too easy: The conservatives never, ever admit their mistakes, and so can never learn from them. They never budge, they never change: Just the same old failure after arrogant failure, always based upon a stupid and racist "get tough" agenda. Playing them is easy, because the same tricks work every single time.

Maybe the conservative agenda is to get whipped so easily and so often by Tehran and Pyongyang that those tyrants will start to feel guilty and finally back off. That must be it. Because if the conservatives are thinking that they're ever going to outsmart Earth's pettiest tyrannies after 20+ years of deadly failures, then a whole lot more innocents--American and otherwise--are going to suffer:



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Monday, November 22, 2004





Calling Katherine Harris

Washington's gubanatorial race is still too close to call, triggering recounts in five counties. The RNC is
trying to stop the recount in heavily Democratic King County (Seattle). Oddly enough, they are not filing lawsuits in heavily Rebublican counties (Spokane, Pierce, and Skagit counties, which include Washington's second and third largest cities, Tacoma and Spokane).

Apparently, what's good for the sow isn't good for the swine.

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Cyber-stalking Shirley Manson

Ye Ancient One has to admit that one of the reasons He lurks at
BartCop is that the curmudgeon that runs the site has one of the finest collections of Shirley Manson photographs extant.

Another reason, of course, is that BartCop is so refreshingly shrill that he makes the word seem like a synonym for "composed" or "zenned-out navel-contemplator".

And he posts the occasional knee-slapper, like the one above...

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Wednesday, November 17, 2004




(Flavius Honorius, just before his date with Alaric)

The More Things Change...

When you've been around a while, you see some pretty pathetic things. Sometimes they make you shake your head slowly in disbelief. At other times, what you see makes you shake your head so fast that your skull goes whuppity-whuppity-whap! from the way your tentacles whip around and smack your ears. Well, Mine does that; I dunno about you puny air-breathers.

ANYway...reading the memoirs of
Ammianus Marcellinus makes me shake my head slowly in disbelief. Soldier, scholar, spy, he knew many famous Roman generals and emperors, and was present at many momentous historical events. From the Siege of Amida to the Battle of Adrianople, Marcellinus was there, and paying his usual attention to detail. Intrigues were plotted, mobs rioted, armies retreated or rebelled, walls crumbled, cities burned, and thousands of people--great and small--died before his eyes.

However, in that truest sense of not seeing the forest for the trees, Ammianus never seemed to know that he was documenting the Fall of the Roman Empire. Perhaps it was unthinkable to the aristocratic soldier-historian that an empire that had stood for 600 years could possibly fall, no matter the rot from within, nor the arrogance and stupidity with which it treated its neighbors. Rome was a beacon, a light to the world. She was the pillar of Western Civilization. No matter her sepsis and hubris, she could never actually fall, right?

Yet, only twenty years after Ammianus passed, Alaric would lead his Visigoths in
the sack of Rome. Some people, no matter their brilliance, can be a bit blind.

For instance, I take a long, hard look around me now, and see my country going through some interesting times...but it'll all be fine. Right? Right? I mean, what's the worst that could possibly happen to America?

Whuppity-whuppity-whap!

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Tuesday, November 16, 2004



Why Cthulhu could never be Preznit
(Or, "96hrs to Flip-Flop")

When Great Cthulhu isn't plotting and scheming the destruction of Man in order to get back His sandbox, He spends time being being what you ape-spawn would call a "computer expert". And when the insane prophet John isn't penning new editions of the Necronomicon, he too is a computer expert, only more so (Gibbering and drooling isn't nearly as time intensive as being the embodiment of interstellar evil.). So when Cthulhu's precious gaming machine started
blue-screening, we took it as more of a minor nuisance than a real problem.

A
BSOD on 98SE? Haven't seen one of those in four years. It only happens now when I play a game. Other than that everything is fine. Better muck around in the registry. Reboot. Everything looks good, so let's fire up a game...BSOD. Oh well, format the HD and reinstall the OS. Nope, that didn't work. Hmmm...low-level format this time, then reinstall. Nope, damned thing still BSOD's whenever I run up a game.

Okay, low-level format, then install
XP. Still crashes when I run a game, but no more BSOD's. Getting better, but not good enough. It's not OS-specific, though.

Must be hardware. Power fluxes? Feedback? Swap out the power-supply. No, that's not it. Disconnect one CD drive, then the other, then the floppy drive. Reboot and test after isolating each drive. Nope.

Gulp. Is it the
CMOS? Flash the ROM and update the BIOS. Damnit, that didn't work either.

Man, this is really
FUBAR.

Could be the video card, although it's hard to see how Great Cthulhu's precious GeForce4 could be guilty of any wrong-doing. Disable to go straight to onboard video. Nope, that didn't work. Replace with old Voodoo3...damn.

Hokay, swap out the entire
mobo, RAM, and CPU with identical ones. Test...BOHICA.

Did I mention that we're experts in this sort of thing? So, of course, it was only four days later that Mighty Cthulhu finally thought to
JFGI. Surprise surprise, there are dozens of experts just like us (only not as tentacled) with the exact same problem: This specific motherboard works great most of the time, but fails when running games (games are very graphic-intensive). No fix for the prob, either (the manufacturer says it works fine, go figure).

So our expert solution? Trash it and get a whole new motherboard from a different manufacturer.

And that is why Great Cthulhu can never be your Preznit: He flip-flops on the issues (even if it did take Him four freaking days to do it).

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Sunday, November 14, 2004



The Spoof roxors

Go here, read it. Friggin perfect:

Dear Red States,

We've had a good 220 some years together, and you'll always be special to us, but, let's not beat around the Bush. We need to break up. This just isn't working out for either of us. 140 years ago when you wanted to break up, and we fought so hard to keep you, maybe we were being a little selfish. Now we think you were right... Like they say, if you love something, let it go free. So you're free now, Red States.

We'll always care about you, but we just can't get the image of you and the Church out of our heads. You promised us you and the Church had separated, and you weren't going to see it anymore. That was a promise you didn't keep....

We fell in union once, and, now, I hate to say it, we've fallen out of union with you.

You really have something going on with Iraq there, and, we think once we split up, you can explore it fully. We know you never thought of yourself as facist-sexual, but, you need to admit to yourself you are at least facist-curious. But, its just not something we can do with you.

We need to go our separate ways. But we wish you all the luck in the world...


The rest is even better...




pic via BartCop

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Friday, November 12, 2004





Cthulhu isn't much of a cat fan

so no Friday cat-blogging. But here's some rhino's doing the family thingy.

You're welcome.

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Wednesday, November 10, 2004





Meanwhile, Mess-o'-potamia still burns

Just as a counter to Rumskull's spin, and the SCLM's whoring,
the BBC has this:
In the Hasbiyyah area, I counted the bodies of at least six US soldiers lying on the ground.

Some of them were badly mangled with various bits blown off. Others were in better condition, as if they had taken small-arms fire.

I noticed two of the US soldiers were still clutching their guns tightly across their chests. But most of their weapons were missing.


Ghaith, of course, is also on the scene for The Guardian:
"What are you doing?" he asked one of the fighters.

"We are preaching to them about Islam," said the fighter.

"Why? They are not Muslims?"

"No."

The young man looked with puzzlement at the other fighter and said: "But then, why don't we kill them?"

"We can't do that now. They are in a state of truce with us," the fighter said.

The fighters belonged to Tawhid and Jihad, the group that has claimed responsibility for most of the violence sweeping Iraq. Eradicating these men is one of the prime objectives of the US offensive on Falluja.


A Christian journalist crossing into enemy territory to talk peacefully with "insurgents" (Would that Hannity or Novacula had a pair like that). Which reminded me of one of Ghaith's experiences in June of 2003:
I had to go but as I was about to leave he grabbed my hand and asked me if I was an Iraqi, I told him yes, he whispered to me: “god help you Iraqis you have been humiliated but inshaallh god will help you defend your self against the occupiers”. He was so somber when he was telling me these words.

A few minute later he called me

-are you a Muslim?
-No.
-Why is that?
-Well I think that is due to some technical reasons related to the fact that my mother and father mated when they were Christians.
-But how come you are not a Muslim? you are smart (!!!!) and you handle two languages easily you should be a Muslim!
-But I always considered my self a member of the Islamic culture.
*he acted a if he didn't hear my answer*
-my friend I m ready to talk to you whenever you want.

He was so nice and in the same time wounded in his pride, he was betrayed. Allah betrayed him he told him to go, cross the border and there he will find all the infidels he wants. He could go and kill as much as he could to purify the land of the Muslims from those filthy animals. Instead he is trapped in this fuckin’ hospital, being taken care of by cute Americans.


These are the insurgents, the ones who plant IED's to greet our soldiers (apparently they didn't get Rumskull's "flowers and candy" memo). So, you know, there's really no point talking to these people, right? I mean, they hate our Freedumbs®, don't they?
The amir told me: "All we want is the Americans to leave, and then everything will be fine, the Kurds will stop talking about seceding from Iraq, the Shias will stop talking about settling scores with Sunnis and each province will elect a council and these councils will elect a president.

"That is the election we see democratic, not an American one."


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We're gonna wish we still had Asscroft

Emperor Chimpy™ has
annointed Alberto Gonzales to this nation's highest law-enforcement post. So who is this guy? He's the jack-booted fascist thug that authored a memo stating:



He shamelessly endorsed ShrubCo's™ policy of indefinitely detaining "terrorist suspects" without charge, access to lawyers, or access to the courts. Oh, yeah, one other thing: Former lawyer for Enron.

I swear, the neo-clowns eat their own young...

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Tuesday, November 09, 2004





On a more somber note...

The last time Marines went into Fallujah it was a humanitarian disaster. Drastically outnumbered on a mission dictated from--but not supported by--the White House, the Marines
resorted to some pretty rough tactics:

We stop, turn off the siren, keep the blue light flashing, wait, eyes on the silhouettes of men in US marine uniforms on the corners of the buildings. Several shots come. We duck, get as low as possible and I can see tiny red lights whipping past the window, past my head. Some, it’s hard to tell, are hitting the ambulance I start singing. What else do you do when someone’s shooting at you? A tyre bursts with an enormous noise and a jerk of the vehicle.

I’m outraged. We’re trying to get to a woman who’s giving birth without any medical attention, without electricity, in a city under siege, in a clearly marked ambulance, and you’re shooting at us. How dare you?




There is only one hospital in Fallujah. If you're an injured civilian, you have to cross one of two long bridges to get to it. Last time, Marine snipers made it clear that that wasn't an option:

We load the ambulance with disinfectant, needles, bandages, food and water and set off, equipped this time with loudspeakers, pull up to a street corner and get out. The hospital is to the right, quite a way off; the marines are to the left. Four of us in blue paper smocks walk out, hands up, calling out that we’re a relief team, trying to deliver supplies to the hospital.

There’s no response and we walk slowly towards the hospital. We need the ambulance with us because there’s more stuff than we can carry, so we call out that we’re going to bring an ambulance with us, that we’ll walk and the ambulance will follow. The nose of the ambulance edges out into the street, shiny and new, brought in to replace the ones destroyed by sniper fire.

Shots rip down the street, two bangs and a zipping noise uncomfortably close. The ambulance springs back into the side road like it’s on a piece of elastic and we dart into the yard of the corner house, out through the side gate so we’re back beside the vehicle.




This isn't to say that the insurgents in Fallujah are misunderstood patriots just defending their homes; they are mostly foreign thugs, bent on Taliban-like oppression of the local populace, as well as murdering whatever Americans that they can find. Their nature forces the Marines to respond in kind, even if that means drilling an ambulance driver center-mass "just in case".

I just wanted to point out what happened last time we went to Fallujah: The carnage, misery, and suffering of the civilian populace caught in the crossfire. And remember that all of this is brought to you by ShrubCo™:
Slaughtering civilians in defiance of the UN because Saddam Hussein didn't have WMD in defiance of the UN.

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Har! EP1 = p(X1) + (1-p)(X2), suckahz!

Ye Mighty Cthulhu must admit to empathizing with the Democratic Party, inasmuch that Mine Magnificence gains when people think, but suffers when people do not think. It is, therefore, with much gloating and happy-dancing that Ye Ancient One presents Ronit Bhattacharyya's†
"Infallible Logic of Cthulhu Worship":
So we can describe our calculus of pain, holding (p) as the probability that Cthulhu exists, and (1-p) that he does not exist.

If you worship him, we assign ‘X1’ as the pain if he does exist, and ‘X2’ as the pain if he does not exist. X2 is less than X1 because in both instances you go through the pain associated with worshipping Cthulhu, but in X1, you also get eaten, which is more painful.

If you worship him your expected pain (EP1) is some finite constant:

EP1 = p(X1) + (1-p)(X2)


Study the subsequent (EP2) equation carefully‡, ape-spawn: This will be on the test. Remember, EP2 > EP1 if you mortals want to fully reap the benefits of Mine mercies.


† It's only fitting that Cthulhu's worshippers have names with more consonants than Nyarlathotep.

‡ But don't follow the link through to
Pascal's Wager. Great Cthulhu tried that, and Mine eyes rolled up into Mine sockets, and Mine liver was forced to jump up into Mine skull and strangle Mine brain before Mighty Cthulhu suffered a Mighty aneurysm.

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Monday, November 08, 2004





ShrubCo™ gets bit

The Judiciary is pushing Dumbya, Rumskull, and Asscroft into a corner: Either honor the 3rd Geneva Convention, or abrogate it. You can't try to
have it both ways:

A federal judge ruled Monday that President Bush had both overstepped his constitutional bounds and improperly brushed aside the Geneva Conventions in establishing military commissions to try detainees at the United States naval base here as war criminals.

[Snip]

The conventions oblige the United States to treat Mr. Hamdan as a prisoner of war, the judge said , unless he goes before a special tribunal described in Article 5 of the Third Geneva Convention that determines he is not. A POW is entitled to a court-martial if there are accusations of war crimes but may not be tried before a military commission.


The neo-clowns would like to have a War on Terra®, but don't want to have any actual "prisoners" of said War. They want the world to treat American captives with due consideration of the 3rd Geneva Convention, but don't want to be held to the same standard.

And the Judge told them what they could do with that hypocrisy.

Nevermind that violating the 3rd Geneva Convention negates the ability of American captives to demand fair treatment (the neo-cons don't seem to give a rat's ass what happens to our troops, anyway); the key point here is that the Judiciary is telling Chimpy™ that he can't just up and decide which laws to follow when he feels like it.

Of course, the rightards don't agree:

"By conferring protected legal status under the Geneva Conventions on members of Al Qaeda, the judge has put terrorism on the same legal footing as legitimate methods of waging war."


Well, there you are, then: Terrorism isn't a "legitimate method of waging war", but launching rockets at dozens of unarmed Iraqi civilians "just in case" is perfectly legitimate:



I'm so glad we got that straightened out.


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Schadenfreude is what...

...the freepers and other rightarded jack-booted fascists are enjoying on my account. Sigh...hoisted on my own petard.

Oh well. Some things to note:



The point is, the sky hasn't fallen in: It's just a little closer to our heads than we'd like. Stay focused, stay involved. A small number of Americans sided with Dumbya™ over single-issues: These can be won over if we learn to play the Rethug game on their field with their rules.

I've been meaning to post sooner, but Blogger gets busy in my time zone when I'm able to publish, so posting gets problematic. However, to help out on this end, I present to you...

A New Co-Poster: My friend, John, is doing the right thing by getting more politically active, rather than just giving up and moving to Canada. Since I already cruise the blogosphere, I've invited him to post here at will (instead of going through the arduous process of getting a raw blog known). I hope you will treat him with the same scorn and derision you have all so warmly shared with me.

Until next time...

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