jeremyjarratt.com

Former U.S. soldier droppin’ some Truth about this bullshit war in Iraq. Do your self and your conscience and your country and your fellow human beings a favor by watching this and then doing something about it.

If i were living in a video game, i would probably do video game things: senseless slaughter, reckless driving, and generally causing mayhem. It’s sure as hell fun in a video game.

I’d probably have a real itchy trigger finger; blowing character’s heads clean off would cause me to ceaselessly cackle as i wheel about looking for more victims, and more nastiness to get into.

Soldiers, however, do not live in video games. They kill real people. Actual human beings, with lives and families and friends and day jobs - be they evildoers or just innocent civilians, caught in the line of fire. Sometimes, though, things go wrong. Horribly, horribly wrong.

Frankly, it’s getting a little tedious, hearing and reading about all the civilian deaths in Iraq. It has been going on for a long time, after all.

That’s why i put off reading this The Nation piece (alt.link.print) for about a week before i got around to reading it.

The Iraq War is a vast and complicated enterprise… Fighting in densely populated urban areas has led to the indiscriminate use of force and the deaths at the hands of occupation troops of thousands of innocents.

I can not and will not blame soldiers en masse or individually. It’s a real bad situation over there, and we need to get those guys out of there as quickly as we possibly can, before more soldiers crack under pressure and bring the whole damn thing down.

It’s ok to be against the war and NOT spit on returning soldiers. That kind of folly is for idiot hippies with misguided frustration. These guys need a lot of help, from many different angles. War does terrible things to a man’s soul. But we must have hope that these inner demons can be defeated, every last one of them, for every last soldier who was there and saw bad things happen.

The bottom line: we’ve gotta get out of that place.

In the four long years of the war, the mounting civilian casualties have already taken a heavy toll–both on the Iraqi people and on the US servicemembers who have witnessed, or caused, their suffering. Iraqi physicians… published a study late last year… that estimated that 601,000 civilians have died since the March 2003 invasion… [They] found that coalition forces were responsible for 31 percent of these violent deaths, an estimate they said could be “conservative,” since “deaths were not classified as being due to coalition forces if households had any uncertainty about the responsible party.”

“Just the carnage, all the blown-up civilians, blown-up bodies that I saw,” Specialist [Jeff] Englehart said. “I just–I started thinking, like, Why? What was this for?”

“It just gets frustrating,” Specialist [Garett] Reppenhagen said. “Instead of blaming your own command for putting you there in that situation, you start blaming the Iraqi people…. So it’s a constant psychological battle to try to, you know, keep–to stay humane.”

Check out this angrily passionate editorial by the great Keith Olbermann re: the new, absolutely diabolical Military Commissions Act. (Read up on it and know that this is terrible and insane.)

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Wonderful and insightful interview with Dug Pinnick of one of my all-time favoritest bands ever, King’s X

National Film Board of Canada: 50 animated shorts - excellent stuff!

Dr. Miracles - short film. Completely juvenile, and hilarious. ER gone badly weird.

This Flash “mind reader” seems spooky at first - until you figure out how it works (but do try it first, following the site’s instructions): Notice that the symbols repeat. Also notice how one number may have different symbols when you repeat the process. Then, notice that you can’t just pick a symbol, you HAVE to do the math. NOW… try this: Do the math for 5 different numbers. Do you see a pattern? They’ll all be the same symbol! So no matter what number you pick, if you do the math and pick the correct symbol, it will ALWAYS be right!

Bizarre fish with human-like teeth caught in Texas lake. (Not just human… British.)

Speaking of which… catfish, um, really get this big?!

Bandai’s hilariously weird “God-Jesus” robot toy from the 1980s.

Experiments in the Revival of Dead Organisms. Fucking creepy. Found via Grey Lodge Podcasting Company’s YouTube link dump.

Mazen Kerboj, musician and artist, blogs from ground zero in Lebanon. Check out his improv piece, Starry Night, during which you can hear bombs and air $raid$ sirens in the background. Beautiful and unsettling, all at once. Read his blog and pass it along. Chilling. I hope that he stays safe. He seems like a good man. He says things like:

“we know you are with us. we know you are seeing us. we know you hear the fucking bombs we are hearing. we know you worry for us. but don’t. because you know we are tough guys. you know that we’ll [survive?] this shit. you know that we survived massacre and we’ll do it again today. you know we’ll see each other soon. keep in touch and stay with us.”

People get ready: all this Middle East violence is giving the End-Timers a serious hard-on for the Rapture. A sicker bunch of fuckwits probably do not exist. Zealots are fools. It is religious zeal that has got the world into the mess that it’s in now. How do you spell worldwide suicide? Z-E-A-L-O-T-R-Y.

Zealots of the world: fuck you. I do hope that you all die the vainglorious deaths that you ridiculous, ignorant fools are all hoping for. So GO APESHIT FOR JESUS/MOSES/MUHAMMED! Kill each other to bloody, pulpy fucking smithereens and let the rest of us get on with our futures!

Lookit what hatred can do (photos from arabist of the Israel-Lebanon conflict)

Warning: some extremely graphic images of victims of Israeli war violence in Lebanon.

It’s too bad that the assholes in Hezbollah have to literally ruin the lives of Lebanese civilians by incurring the extreme wrath of Israel (who, let’s face it, pulled the trigger in the terrible images linked to above). I’ve always had a great fondness for the Lebanese. I had a childhood friend who (if i remember right) was Lebanese (he didn’t speak a word of English but we had fun, i hope), and who couldn’t love the country that gave us the late, great Khalil Gibran.

Extreme bad behavior never benefits anyone, whether coming from aggressors or defenders. Violence is violence. If this is how we solve our differences, then the human race truly is doomed to extinction, and godspeed.

130 years ago, a genocidal maniac was finally put down. Long may Gen. George Armstrong Custer rest.

NDNs pwnd U sucka!!1!!

Here’s an idea: DIY impeachment!

If you don’t think there’s enough evidence to mandate an impeachment of George W. Bush, you might not have been aware of the facts. That’s okay. We don’t actually blame you.

I can see it now: “But sir! Nobody told us we couldn’t torture & humiliate suspected enemy combatants!”

Pentagon to omit Geneva ban from new army manual: report - Yahoo! News

LOS ANGELES (AFP) - New policies on prisoners being drawn up by the Pentagon will reportedly omit a key tenet of the Geneva Convention that explicitly bans “humiliating and degrading treatment.”Citing unidentified but knowledgeable military officials, the Los Angeles Times said the step would mark a further, potentially permanent, shift by the US government away from strict adherence to international human rights standards.