Books Lying Open
• Patricia Cornwall, Portrait of a Killer

I pranced along last week so gaily going 18 or 20 or 24 hours w/o sleep, and then just napping for 3 or 4 hours between waking sessions, and loved it.  Now this week I can't make it til midnight.  Bleh.

And another friend and long-time site reader mailed last night and mentioned that he likes to read these on his lunch hour at work, and it's been getting perilously close to impossible, with my recent updating schedule.  He's in Cleveland, where it gets cold in the winter, so needs all the amusement he can find.  So now I'm feeling, pretty much for the first time in the year I've been doing this, that I have an actual audience of people who I'm letting down if a day's entry is suxor, or late.  Or both.  It's an odd sort of pressure.

We used to run around in a panic on the D2 site, working feverishly all night trying to get something finished so we'd have fresh content, or at least freshly-regurgitated content, every morning EST, so readers would see something new when they checked.  That was back in the early D2 days, when there were dozens of kicking fansites, and it was all a great competition.

My other excuse for being late here lately is that I've been spending hours a day talking to various women on ICQ.  I do that while working on other stuff, but I'm concentrating on both, usually more on what she's saying and I'm saying in return, and inevitably I get a lot less work done.  It's worth it, I really enjoy the chatting and getting to know/discuss personal issues, but it's quite a time sink.

It has also generated topics for three really good blogs, though none have yet been written.  Next week though, stuff that's fascinating and horrifying.  Monday and Tuesday and Wednesday, probably.

I'd do one today but I need to actually spend some time on them both, write them out, maybe edit some, etc.  Not just bang my fingers until it's done and then post it, as I did with the Price Club rant yesterday.  That's the topic again today, down below, since I got an interesting email about it, and it needs to be addressed.

Here's some various news stuff.

There are also photos of Jewel's boobies, semi-hot pretend Russian lesbians, the cast of Daredevil, and a wrong way view of a figure skater.  Have at it.

It's actually improved by shrinking the image.  The one you see right here is 100 pixels wide, half the size that it is on the news page, where it looks like nothing but a big blotch.  It's a miracle!

Talk about a dirty old man.

LINCOLN - Metro Conference athletic directors and the Nebraska School Activities Association will be watching their high school basketball sidelines more closely after Omaha police detained a 74-year-old man for training a camera on high school cheerleaders.

Omaha Marian Athletic Director Jim Miller said Wednesday that cheerleaders from his school became uncomfortable because of the man's apparent picture-taking at a Jan. 30 girls basketball game at Omaha South.

Miller said the girls alerted Marian's dean of students, who told South administrators. School officials called police, who interviewed the man. The man told authorities that he was a fan of Omaha Marian and Omaha Creighton Prep and was just there to observe the game.

The girls later told Miller they had seen the man at other games.

The article talks about their worries that the photos might end up on porn sites.  Yeah, blame the Internet for everything!

So um, are high school cheerleaders actually showing so much skin that it's appropriate for a porn site?  Damn I went to school ten years too early.

esterday

As I typically do, I could not/did not stick entirely to my "slow obese people at Price Club" opening though, and segued it into an excoriation of American society, and by extension all Western Civilization.  As part of that I commented on how the US Military is basically a mercenary force, at this point.

A reader, Tom by name, took exception to that.

I have been a big fan of your writing ever since I discovered your column on diabloii.net and then checked out your homepage. However, what you said regarding the armed forces today is utterly reprehensible. I am in reference to your description of the armed forces as “basically mercenaries.” It is my sincere hope that I read into what you said too much and that you were simply phrasing a fleeting thought haphazardly. To equate American soldiers, sailors and marines with mercenaries just because some of them came from low-income families is preposterous. Even if some of these young men and women do come from lower rungs on the socioeconomic ladder I fail to see why it should play any role in your opinion of them.

The statements also come as quite a shock to me based on previous ideas you had put forth. For instance, in yesterday’s blog you referred to a dream in which you proposed a plan to cut defense spending, but give all troops a 25% pay increase. Why the conflicting messages? Are you in support of the U.S. military or are you against it? 

Perhaps I am skewed in my perception of the message you intended to get across; I remain optimistic that this is the case. I will close with my belief on the matter. Whomever serves the USA in armed conflict deserves our utmost respect. Troops work absurd amounts of hours, and they do so with a salary that is meager at best. I wish that you would retract your statement about them being mercenaries or at least go into more depth as to why you think this. 

I can see Tom's PoV on this, but the issue is his interpretation of what I said.  I agree with his ending paragraph entirely.

My saying they were a mercenary force was meant as an insult and reflection on the soft, gutless, sit at home population that has become so helpless and incapable of self-defense.  I mentioned villagers banding together to battle brigands, and while that's not a realistic comparison to the modern world (at least not the civilized Western parts of it), at least outside of various pockets of civil war and anarchy (what used to be Yugoslavia, for instance), it's an example.  The initial concept of the US military was of a volunteer, civilian-based corps.  That ties in to the whole second amendment, which is what gun fans always bring up to justify their ownership of semi-automatic machine guns.

Amendment II

A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed.

I'm not going to get into gun control issues today, but the concept of this, back in the 1770's when it was written, was that there was no large standing army, and that it was up to the citizens to band together in times of strife, to serve as a fighting force and to keep order.  Therefore the average man needed to possess and know how to use a firearm, since he would quite possibly need it against Indians or the British or whoever.

The world has changed greatly since this time, and gun control people argue that as a reason this amendment shouldn't allow private ownership of such dangerous weapons, since there isn't any need for citizens to band together in a posse to fight off a raiding party of Narragansets.

As I said, I'm not getting into that topic today, but I bring it up since back in that time, people were expected, even required, to be able to fight when they had to.  The average person was much more alert and aware, as they had to be since there were not so many laws for public safety, not so many cops to control pick pockets or muggers, etc.  This is somewhat similar to my comments in the past about the extended childhood today, where 16 and 17 year olds are seen as children, while in the past and in much of the rest of the world they've been married and working full time on their own land for 3 or 4 years.  While I treat the baby-ification of US youth with some scorn, it's essentially a good thing.

• It is a good thing that we have such safety and organization in society that we can afford and allow people to remain children to such a late age.
• It is a good thing that adults can wander around without a thought or worry in their heads as to their personal safety or protection.
  • No matter how annoying it might be at Price Club when one of them is meandering along in your way.

This state of affairs is why I say our military are mercenaries.

They are not "average" citizens, called upon to protect their own country.  They are basically lower class people who didn't have the same job opportunities and college tuition money, and are therefore forced into a dangerous, low-paying, difficult job to allow the rest of us to sit on our lazy asses and cheat on the taxes that go to pay their salaries.  Much as in past centuries rulers hired mercs to protect their lands and war for them, so they wouldn't have to dirty their own hands with such troublesome labor.

It's even worse when they are used not for protection or peace-keeping, but in military operations for the personal gain of those in power, or their business associates.

Some enlist to get college money, some to avoid prison, and some for idealism to protect and serve.  None deserve to be paid poorly and sent off to Afghanistan or Iraq or Panama or wherever to take out political enemies or secure oil fields or natural gas pipelines under the guise of anti-terrorism.

And yes, there is a good blog to be written about military atrocities, crimes that the US military is not innocent of by any means, and yes, soldiers are often nutty, violence-prone Rambo types who have the morals of a horny rat, and feel that their weaponry and training give them the right to do what they wish to locals.  The US Military has a long record of horrible behavior in foreign countries, to the point that most citizens in Japan and South Korea are quite vocal about wanting the US bases gone, after soldiers have raped local children, or run over people in military vehicles, and appear to be above the local law.  There was an inexcusable case a few years ago, I believe in Italy, where some US pilots were hopped up and joy riding in a fighter, screaming down canyons that were prohibited to planes, and cut a cable car loose with the tail of the plane, killing like 25 people going up a ski lift.

I also regard most military spending as pork and of no strategic value other than to the congressmen from the district the spending is being funneled to.

But I'm not going to get into that either.

My contention, if it's not been made clear thus far, is that our soldiers are now like mercs since they are treated poorly, paid poorly, and are not a demographical representation of the people they are fighting for.  If this comparison is an insult, I mean it as one for the general population, in their sloth and indolence, and as a compliment for the actual military forces, for rising so far above the general level of those they are paid to serve.

Feel free to comment on this, Tom or anyone else.  Agreement is not at all mandatory around here.

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