Soul-Devouring Worry
¤ Living petless.

Curse of the Day:
¤ May your hands ache for no good reason.

Also, in the fall I'm through with my main summertime baseball work, and more free time is coming up.  This time of year I'm just starting work, and am usually pretty miserable about it.  This year is no exception, though at least with plans to go up and see Malaya on a semi-regular basis, I have something more to look forward to.

And I really am trying to get my head around the idea of writing fiction for hours a day.  Starting ASAP.

Two quick bitches.

First of all, this new keyboard is killing me.  The keys require maybe 50% more force to depress then the old one did, and while it's not really noticeable on a short typing burst, over time it's very tiring. My fingers and hands are just aching now, after writing this and some other stuff for the last couple of hours, and more than just tiring, I'm making so goddamned many typos as I keep getting one letter down faster than I want to and another slower.  The spacebar is like a rock too, so I keep doing words w/o space between them.

Which means I have to backspace over that and retype it, assuming I don't make another mistake requiring a second retyping.

And yeah, I know there are starving children in North Korea and Iraq and Africa, etc.  And compared to reality my tired fingers are far from important.  But none of that makes them any less tired right now, though I do thank you for your concern. Bastard.

Okay, just one bitch, I was going to talk briefly about the amazingly high % of men I see at work who are overweight this year, but I'll save that for when my hands are not aching so much and it's not past 5am with my alarm due to go off to get me up for work in 6 hours, whether I've slept or not.

Some news.  Not much though.

¤ Impressively-creepy article about a recently-abandoned torture warehouse in Iraq. Yahoo article has a picture.

Something terrible happened here. Something murderous. Something evil.

The proof lies in a cargo container nearby. Its metal door hangs open and inside are pages and pages of files. Each sheaf of notes contains a picture of a man or woman. Each and every one has been shot in the head. Their wounds are mangled and gaping. Many of them barely looked human any more as the anonymous photographer chronicled their dead faces. It is a horror almost beyond words.

It's hard to not see this sort of article and regard it with great suspicion, for it sounds very propaganda-esque.  Like the hysterical news about PFC Lynch, the female US Marine who was a POW and then rescued. First reports was she fired to her last bullet, was shot and stabbed, etc.  Then once she's in the US military hospital we find out she's got an injured back and a broken leg, injuries I'm betting occurred in the initial attack or the truck she was riding in crashing, and I won't be surprised to hear (if we ever get any factual info about it) that there were hardly any shots fired by the US troops before they were captured.  They weren't really combat troops anyway, but were truck drivers or mechanics, etc.

And yes, I'm aware that as far as we know the Iraqis murdered a number of them in relatively cold blood once they were POWs, and even though the US regularly flaunts all inconvenient international laws, those wrongs do not make a right for the Iraqis to murder US soldiers they capture.  If the US troops did the same to any of the Iraqi prisoners, I would hope that would be denounced just as strongly as when the Iraqis do it.

But my point is that Jessica Lynch's story was pumped up for melodrama and heroism, as a feel good mini-saga in the middle of a much bigger campaign, and it's essentially a distraction from the important events. And as we know by now, the media lives to endlessly document minor distractions, such as oh, OJ Simpson, or Monica Lewinski, rather than getting to anything more important.

Interesting blog that appears to be almost entirely stories of "pro-war" protesters attacking or threatening or trying to drown out anti-war protesters. It's an odd phenomena, with the majority of people in the US clearly supporting the war, at least from the uniformed PoV the media has put them in. So why are various redneck types so infuriated by people who are against war and violence?  Why does it piss them off so much?  Why do they even take notice when clearly the policies of the current US leadership are very pro war, and small batches of anti-war protesters here and there won't have any real effect at all?

The easiest reply is that the pro war types are violent rednecks and of course they support blowing up Iraqis, since their own conflict resolution skills lean heavily towards the use of baseball bats with nails driven through them. They don't have the intelligence or cognitive abilities to understand the whole "oppose the war but support our troops" mentality. And they probably are in the 50% or greater amount of US citizens who have somehow come to the conclusion that Iraq was heavily involved in the 9/11 terrorism. Knowing what the hell you are talking about is never any sort of requirement for violence, after all.

So they are just basically idiots, and get angry when people believe things they don't understand or agree with?  It's a very simplistic view of people with a simplistic view, so my inclination is to reject it, since I don't like simple answers, but it might well be correct

A more complicated (and probably incorrect) psychological profile angle is to ponder if the pro-war types are really that insecure in their beliefs.  When people are unsure in what they believe in, especially when they think they should be secure about it, they tend to get violent and angry and bitter as a sort of overcompensation.  Are the various pointing and shouting rednecks really that insecure in their "kill them all and let God sort them out" PoV?

I don't think so, they aren't intelligent or nuanced enough to exist on that many levels at the same time.

I've been thinking about this some recently, and it pains me to say it, but I'm really considering that the majority of Americans are simply too stupid to be allowed an opinion on the direction the country should proceed in.

That the % of people who believe Iraq was involved in 9/11 has been steadily increasing despite constant news reports to the contrary, and Bush isn't even trying to lie about it anymore is just shocking to me.  It's such obvious evidence of a sort of dis-ease with the Iraq Attack, and that people aren't feeling like we have enough reason to be blowing up Baghdad and getting US soldiers killed in Iraq, and therefore convincing themselves that this is revenge for 9/11, or a way to make the world safer from those who back terrorists, etc.  All bullshit, but the sort of belief Bush encourages.  And as is now clear, he has a damn good point in doing so, since it's working. People aren't just believing the lies, they are elaborating on them.

And the major media is in a sort of "who can be the most jingoistic" competition, spurred on by the FOX News/Propaganda reports, and guess what? They work.  They get the highest ratings, despite having the least truth or objectivity.  It turns out that telling the people what (lies) they want to hear makes good business sense.

Other evidence was in NOW, a news magazine show I saw a few days ago on PBS. They were interviewing some media critics, non-partisan guys from major media magazines, and it was shockingly depressing.  One example they talked about was USA Today, which is far from a real newspaper and is quite pro-war/America.  USA Today had run some photos of dead Iraqi troops on the front page, and inside they had some PR photo op type pic of various Iraqi civilians waving happily at the US invading forces.

Based on that, USA Today got something like 1500 emails and letters and calls protesting, saying that they should have presented the happy fun photo on the main page, and the picture of the reality of war on the inside, or not at all. And that was a shot of dead Iraqi troops, not some babies who were killed by an errant cruise missile.  Soldiers!  I mean the whole point in the war is to kill the Iraqi Army, and people aren't even comfortable seeing that, while they "support the troops". So they are basically asking to be lied to, or at least to have the truth concealed, since it's icky.

Of course I guess I have to consider the possibility that the pro-war types who are attacking anti-war protesters are really patriotic and don't have any subterfuge to them, and they just can't understand that anyone could feel differently than they do.  It really is right vs. wrong for them, like how parents would feel if they saw a pro-pedophile group marching on the streets.  I just can't really emphasize with that PoV, since anti-war is not anywhere near the same as pro-pedophilia, other than in the mind of some very stupid people.

There were other examples given of various newspapers and TV news programs showing dead Iraqi civilians, and getting tons of angry mails and calls of the "How dare you! You are supporting the terrorists!" type. And from real people, no matter how insane their opinions might be.

I guess this sort of hypocrisy isn't real surprising, I mean it's just a human/international version of the old "Don't go to a slaughter house if you want to keep enjoying hamburgers." but I see it as a responsibility, even a requirement, to know exactly what is happening to the troops you are supporting, and to know what they are doing in the wars we send them off to fight.  If you can't take the sight and knowledge of the people they are killing, then you should really re-evaluate your PoV.

I actually suspect that the people writing those angry letters were predominantly pro-war types who think that they can take the pictures, but are worried that the average person, or the fence-sitters, will see actual blood and grow queasy in their support for this war, and the others planned for Syria, Iran, Libya, etc after this.

I've also been wondering what this will lead to; if reporting the news with a slanted "we are great" perspective is so popular and financially sound, how long until all the networks are doing it, now that news is about ratings and money, rather than being a public service for the country or local community?  And why stop with just skewing reality to conform to your preconceived point of view? Why not just make stuff up?  And I don't mean minor details, like making the good guys a bit better and the bad guys a bit worse (which the media does now).  I mean inventing outright lies and fictions, of the sort that certain people want to hear? News is now entertainment, not information, with celebrity fluff pieces becoming ever more popular, and the more honest and realistic and objective the news reporting is, the lower the ratings it gets.

Anyway, I'm too tired to think this through any more tonight, but it's seeming very Orwellian/1984ish, and worse than that, it's not being imposed on the people by some central evil bureaucracy... it's being demanded by the people to keep them from unhappy thoughts.

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