The Blog of War

Army Squeezes Soldier Blogs, Maybe to Death
Noah Shachtman / in Wired

The U.S. Army has ordered soldiers to stop posting to blogs or sending personal e-mail messages, without first clearing the content with a superior officer, Wired News has learned. The directive, issued April 19, is the sharpest restriction on troops' online activities since the start of the Iraq war. And it could mean the end of military blogs, observers say.

Military officials have been wrestling for years with how to handle troops who publish blogs. Officers have weighed the need for wartime discretion against the opportunities for the public to personally connect with some of the most effective advocates for the operations in Afghanistan and Iraq -- the troops themselves. The secret-keepers have generally won the argument, and the once-permissive atmosphere has slowly grown more tightly regulated. Soldier-bloggers have dropped offline as a result.

The new rules obtained by Wired News require a commander be consulted before every blog update.

"This is the final nail in the coffin for combat blogging," said retired paratrooper Matthew Burden, editor of The Blog of War anthology. "No more military bloggers writing about their experiences in the combat zone. This is the best PR the military has -- it's most honest voice out of the war zone. And it's being silenced."

More here ...

Don't forget to write home!

Apocalypse Of The Honeybees

How poetically appropriate that the End of Humanity should come from such a tiny, sweet source

By Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist
Wednesday, May 9, 2007

From outta nowhere the tiny ones came, while humanity was busy trembling and sweating in the face of major global cataclysm, of global warming and nuclear war and rainforest devastation and melting ice caps and E. coli outbreaks and Ashlee Simpson and lethal hurricanes and the Apocalypse-hungry Christian right and a simply stupendously vile Bush juggernaut that has threatened all intelligent life everywhere. Onward they came, buzzy and calm and happy to be our very own adorable, unexpected harbinger of doom.

Yes, now we can see it clearly. Now we can be appropriately alarmed and now maybe we can even say, Oh holy hell, maybe we should have seen it coming all along: Of course the end of mankind should come from something as sweet and commonplace and unforeseen as the honeybees.

The rest the story here ...

The Post-Rapture Post

"Watch ye therefore: for ye know not when the master of the house cometh, at even, or at midnight, or at the cockcrowing, or in the morning: Lest coming suddenly he find you sleeping. And what I say unto you I say unto all, watch."

(Mk. 13:35-37)

The time of the rapture is at hand. The signs described in the Bible that foreshadow the return of Jesus Christ are becoming all too clear. Not all who live during coming Great Tribulation will be spirited away to be with God. The Bible tells us that only those who repent of their sins and follow the teachings of Jesus Christ may enter the Kingdom of Heaven.

Do you know someone who is in danger of being "left behind" because of a sinful life? Imagine if you could write a letter to a friend or loved one after the Great Day of Reckoning. Maybe a message to your family telling them to trust in God, and that everything will be okay. Perhaps you would leave instructions to care for your pets after your departure. It could be that your message is the light that opens a sinner's eyes to the Glory of God and allows them entrance to Heaven during the trials before the Second Coming. This is where the Post-Rapture Post comes in.

Just write your letter and it will be hand-delivered immediately following the exodus of the pure from the Earth. But you must be thinking to yourself, "How can the letters be delivered after the Rapture?" The answer is simple. The creators of this site are Atheists. That's right, we don't believe in God. How else would we be able to deliver your correspondence after the Rapture?

I only wish I'd thought of it ...

Still Life

Still Life with Glasses
Ambient Light - 2 seconds. f8


Still Life with Glasses
Strobe Lit - 1/160 sec., f8

Those fanatical atheists

It's popular these days to equate those who question God with the worst kind of zealots, but it's not fair

Dan Gardner, The Ottawa Citizen
Published: Saturday, May 05, 2007

Yesterday was one major religion's holy day. Today is another's. Tomorrow is a third's. So I thought this is an opportune moment to say I think all three of these faiths -- these mighty institutions, these esteemed philosophies, these ancient and honoured traditions -- are ridiculous quackery. Parted seas. Walking corpses. Nocturnal visits to Heaven. For goodness sake, people, the talking wolf in Little Red Riding Hood is more plausible.

So ... when we come right down to the basis of the atheist's fanatical argument, it sounds a lot like this ...

If you claim that something is true, I will examine the evidence which supports your claim; if you have no evidence, I will not accept that what you say is true and I will think you a foolish and gullible person for believing it so.

Richard Dawkins

Now THAT'S REAL Fanaticism for ya!

There more to the story ...

If you're a Christian, you do not accept that Allah is the name of god and Mohamed is his messenger. If you are a Muslim, there can be no other way. If you are a Muslim, Christ was not the son of god and an integral part of a trinity what made him one with god. Christ was merely a prophet among prophets. Animists worships rocks and trees and mountains, believing in their god-ness, a god-ness that the rest of us dismiss. No one believes in Zeus or Woton anymore, but they are the names of gods that commanded worship for centuries in western history. Ra, Isis, Baal, Mithra, Quetzalquatal, ... the list of gods is almost endless and we are all "atheistic" about all of these gods.

An atheist just goes one god further.

The "What Were They THINKING" Award goes to ...

The Claremont Institute



uh ... click the image to find out how this might be.

Didn't Churchill at least win his war?

Just Clowning Around

Street Clown
Tucson Hot Rod Show
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