Penn & Teller’s television show, “Bullshit!“, really covers a lot of material with little more than simple logic.  This particular episode, from 9-May-2005, carries with it the same type and amount of raw disbelief and vitriol that I’ve ranted when discussing 9/11 Conspiracy Theorists, right down to the choice of nouns and adjectives.
     People can say foul language, name-calling and violence never solve anything, but in certain situations, they certainly make you feel better. Besides — why should I show restraint to people who none? The Golden Rule does apply.
     If you agree, watch it, because it has all of those things.  If you don’t, then … well … don’t watch it.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-jKxVUHuMhc

     Someone told me recently, “Calling them idiots and dumbasses doesn’t do anyone any good! You catch more flies with honey!”

     I’m sorry, but, why should I have to catch flies here?

     In the immortal words of Penn Gillette, “Are 49.3% of us just f$&*ing crazy?”

     Sometimes a picture’s worth a thousand words.
     Other times, they’re worth ten thousand.  I’ll try not to write them all down.

     Throughout my travels, I actually have very few pictures, let alone pictures of me.  That’s why this one is so special to me.  It was taken 28-Dec-2000.

     Nine months later, those beautiful landmarks were gone.  I was in a foreign country having abuse and saliva hurled at me by random morons with their, “Fucking yanks got what you deserved!” and other such slanders.
     Mind you, “screaming” is considered a violent act there, and they had a tendency to make examples of non-citizens, so I had to either take the abuse or take my chances beating on some of them.
     Door number two was easier, knowing that I could go home and shave my hair and beard, and they’d be too stupid to know it was me if they saw me again.

     Contrary to popular belief, the 9/11 attacks took little to pull off.  That’s the one thing the public doesn’t like to hear.
     It wasn’t the work of a brilliant, criminal mastermind with an endless supply of money.  All it took was a few idiots with the nerve and will to actually do it.
     I was out there, and I know first hand that there are a lot of idiots in the world, with the will to do it.  Fortunately, few of them have the nerve, but the possibility has always been there, and continues to be there.

     “There was no problem before this stupid President!  We could travel anywhere under the last one!”
     Even through the 90’s, foreign travel was discouraged to “ALL COUNTRIES, DUE TO HIGH POSSIBILITY OF ANTI-AMERICAN ACTIVITIES.”  These notices were in every Post Office and Airport in the country.  Surely I’m not the only one who noticed them.
     But certainly, after 9/11, it got worse.  Half the world saw America as weak, saw that retribution could be had for whatever made-up reasons we needed it, and apparently, all it took was a few plane tickets and some box cutters.

     “We shouldn’t be in Iraq since it had nothing to do with 9/11!”
     We unhinged Afghanistan because there were camps training armies of Jihaadists.  These things are all over the Middle East, as well.
     Regardless of whether or not Iraq had anything to do with it, two facts remain.  First, it was an unsecure country with  tons of munitions.  Second, a stabilized Iraq dead in the middle of a Jihaadist region is a perfectly good thing.
     For Iraqis who are fed up with Totalitarian control, isn’t it nice to see them on television now wearing Levis and playing soccer instead of being terrorized by a leader who has had no qualms about killing them by the hundreds of thousands?
     And for Jihaadists … Iraq is a poison pill where the majority of them will face the front, and die for their cause, without killing as many innocent civillians as they have for last thirty years.

     “You’re more likely get killed by lightning than killed by a terrorist!”
     Maybe that’s true.  But maybe it’s only true of now, post-9/11, because we certainly didn’t think it would happen on 10-Sep-2001, now did we?
     Realistically, the NOAA & NWS agree that there were 3684 reported deaths by lightning between 1959 and 2004.  2997 people died (not including the hijackers) on that single day, 11-Sep-2001.
     Given those statistics, is it really fair, comparing nearly fifty years to a single day?
     Regardless of how we may dislike the new “security” measures at airports, they usually don’t inconvenience us terribly.  Sure, we’ve hit a few bumps lately, but we’ll get through it.

     Without the politics to add fuel to these arguments, they all fall apart.  We can sit here, as citizens, getting a tenth of the story at best, and try to second guess, analyze, and make all these stupid connections to find a single person responsible for the mess.
     Thoughts like that will almost never represent the truth.

     We should remember what life was like, realisticly, before 9/11.  We should remember the day.  We should remember those who died for no reason.  And we should never forget.
     Maybe when we all start doing that, we’ll begin to see some improvement.

Thanks, Mia, for the last two pictures

Swanky blathered a pretty decent post today.

When was the last time anyone you knew was poisoned by a product tampered with in a store? But how many times have you started to squeeze out some mustard or pour some honey and realized you had to open it up and remove the “tamper proof seal?”

“Some sort of terrorist inoculated Tylenol capsules with cyanide in 1982, killing seven people. However, that frightening and much-publicized event (it generated 125,000 stories in the print media alone and cost the manufacturer more than $1 billion) failed to inspire much in the way of imitation.”

     We’ve all complained about the endless child-proofing and tamper-prevention of things…
     But I have no sense of humour today.  I have to take exception, and remember some history.

     Back in the 1970’s, American had gone through two oil embargos on such a grand scale that many of our local gas stations were forced to close.  Electricity prices skyrocketed.  In some areas, water was dangerously close to being rationed.  There were a rash of airline hijackings.  There were hundreds and hundreds of hostage situations.  Our Export program was completely in the toilet.
     In the 1980’s, as hard as things were, a lot of that changed.  We began meddling in the affairs of the Middle East more actively, and have avoided multiple embargoes.  Electricity prices declined as nuclear power and better infrastructure was instated.  The rise in water prices also allowed for better infrastructure.  Airline hijackings dropped as metal detectors became the norm, and we expected no less in other countries.  Nobody dared take hostages any more.  And our exports increased exponentially as our newer “shelf stable,” sealed packaging allowed us to send food and pharmaceuticals to countries we’d never been able to before, regardless of the climate.

     All the complaining we do can’t measure up to the fact that tamper-resistant seals had enough benefits to help the entire country at the expense of minor annoyance.

     But, seeing John Mueller’s article, “A False Sense of Insecurity,” mixed in there and applied just goes to show me how completely uninformed most Americans are.  Especially college kids from OSU who’ve never worked in the real world.
     “Public Hysteria” about terrorism, I feel, is in the public’s best interest.  Americans need to wake the Hell up and realize things were already bad well before 9/11, and well before weird foreign wars that Media will certainly tell us are right-wing conspiracies.  They also need to know what’s coming.

     When I started travelling the world in 1996, the State Department said, “Hey, don’t go to this list of twenty-four countries, because as an American, you may be a victim of terrorism.”
     But by 1998, it had been amended to say, “Don’t travel out of the country.  Nowhere.  You’ll probably be a victim of terrorism, because the rest of the world hate us and has little regard for human life.”
     I’m paraphrasing, of course, but the sentiment is true.

     The really nasty part comes in the fact that 9/11 killed more people than the last thirty years of terrorism combined.  That one day killed more people than the constant border-struggles between Lebanon and Israel.
     Times they are a-changing.  They’re setting their sights higher.

The terrorists have indeed won. No, they didn’t blow us all up. They just made us all so scared of a few dozen guys in the desert that we do all sorts of stupid, costly and annoying things, to ourselves and others. And, I might add, do all these things rather than help out our fellow Americans and humans. Taking money out of positive and helpful pursuits and into all sorts of things that help no one.

     I can remember how people complained about metal detectors in airports back in the 80’s.
     “How is me taking all the loose change out of my pocket going to affect whether some Iranian steals a plane or not?  Why are we wasting all of this money rather than doing something positive with it?”
     Ten years later, people didn’t see it as an inconvenience.  And, of course, flight crimes decreased exponentially.  People were less afraid to fly, and prices dropped drastically.
     Eventually, we stopped seeing it as an inconvenience, and dropped our guard.

     9/11 kinda proved that.  Who would’ve thought a box cutter was a bad thing to have on a plane?  Certainly not the 450 people who died on the planes that day.
     That caused public hysteria.  People were scared as Hell to fly any more.  And so they have a false of security — at least they’re getting back on the planes, giving money to an industry that was failing miserably in the wake of it all. A lot of companies are hiring Fast Guard security to protect them and their customers. The rest of the world hates America.  And it has nothing to do with the current President, politics, foreign policy, or anything else.  It’s simply due to the fact that the majority of the world is Socialist.  People are told what to think, what to buy and where to buy it.  All of their best products are exported out of the countries, while their citizens get to “make due” with whatever scraps and second-hand items are around.
     The only people telling us what to think are Academics (who repeatedly show that they have less experience than idealogy), Media (constantly for fodder to increase their profits) and Politicians (who will lie, cheat and omit to forward their own lust for power).  We can buy most anything we want anywhere we want.  And we get to enjoy the spoils of our efforts in manufacturing -and- trade (think our products suck, being that they’re all from China?  Try buying the same product in another country and you’ll realize — we do get the best of everything!).

     And, c’mon, Swanky, be honest…  When’s the last time you were harrassed and inconvenienced by the guys at the gates?  😉

     LR2 posted a great link today to The Best Page in the Universe.

     It’s no secret what I think of 9/11 Revisionist morons.  Faced with hard evidence and eyewitness accounts, they are stupid enough to simply ignore the fact that more than a few people saw, let’s say, a plane hit the Pentagon, for instance.
     But Maddox hit the nail on the head — with a sledgehammer, mind you.  That Glenn Beck / $100 Bill folding bit is freaking brilliant!

     As far as I’m concerned, these “Loose Change” asshats are case in point that Condoms are only 97% effective when used properly.

     Since I posted about the joint effort between Blogitude.com & Instapinch.com making it a special point to lambast the 9//11 Revisionist, Spook911, there have been several new developments.  Foremost has been the revelation that Spooked claims to be a “biomedical researcher,” which should indicate that he has some grasp of Physics and Scientific Process.
     Fortunately for us, he doesn’t. 

     On July 9th, Pinch posted some links to Spook’s first experiment.  The experiment — using a bucket, some bent wire coathangers and gasoline — intended to disprove the fact that the WTC frame was made structurally inert by a hydrocarbon fire.
     This, however, was merely a predecessor to the “better model,” which Pinch pointed out on June 28th.  This experiment — using an empty rabbit cage and kerosene — intended to prove the same.  The rabbit cage was his “better model” of the wire-frame construction of the WTC.

     Using moonbat logic, the following things come to mind:

• In the 1987 movie Fatal Attraction, an infatuated woman boils a family pet — a rabbit.  This also resulted in an empty rabbit cage.
• Rabbit cages usually hold rabbits, which were used to test for pregnancy from 1927 onward, thus the phrase “Rabbit test.”
• Wire coathangers have been increasingly difficult to find since the 1981 cinematic release of Mommy Dearest.
• Star of Fatal Attraction, Michael Douglas, married Catherine Zeta-Jones.  The movie Rabbit Test stars Joan Rivers.  Mommy Dearest was the story of an abusive mother, Joan Crawford.

     More facts:

• Rabbits are usually stuck with needles either in injecting placental blood during a rabbit test, to sedate them prior to killing them or when injecting them with substances during Biomedical Research.
• Wire coat hangers are often used in makeshift drug laboratories to hold buckets and beakers over flame during the production of illicit drugs due to the fact that real laboratory equipment is extremely expensive.
• “To jones” (two Joans, and an outright Jones) is to show physical symptons due to a physical or mental dependence, i.e. “to jones for a fix.”

     Using moonbat logic and taking into account needles, wire coat hangers, buckets and “jones,” I have deduced that Spook is a methamphetamine addict.

     The evidence is right there!