“Iraq War is About Oil” Says Returning Security Officer

I almost forgot to write about this. While I was going through my rent-a-cop training, I had the chance to talk with a guy with an impressive amount of experience in security work. He never mentioned his name, but he gave me a couple of anecdotes that were interesting. One of which has bearing on the motivation of the Bush Administration in going to war with Iraq. He said he had a bachelor’s degree in “International Affairs” or something similar. Back in 2003 he was present during the initial Baghdad invasion. He says that the first building that was secured was the one belonging to the ministry of oil (or whatever it was called).

Then after saying all this he says:

“And they say this war isn’t about oil!” with a huge eye roll.

Abyssal’s Blog Gets a D!

I found this nifty Website Grader which scores you based on how good its “Marketing Effectiveness” is. I gave it a shot and ran my blog through it, as I was curious to see how it would do.

My score was 64/100. Ouch. Actually, that’s really not bad. Sounds not-so-good at first (it would be a D if it was a school assignment), but what the score means is that my site was more “effective” than 64% of the sites that have been plugged into the grader so far. Presumably there’s been quite a few, so I’ll take my D as a compliment.

You Might be a Fundie…

If you believe that mental illness is a myth, but demonic posession is not, then you might be a fundie.

Symptoms of Mental Illness? Cho’s Girlfriend Jelly and his Old Pal Vlad

[Explicit Content Warning]

After the identity of the gunman who perpetrated the Virginia Tech shootings was discovered, everyone began asking the obvious question, ‘why did he do it?’ It was notlong before it was apparent that Seung Cho, like basically every other school shooting perpetrator had a long history of mental illness and strange behavior.

Gotta Love War!

This is an email forward thing or something that has been going around. I figured it was worth reproducing, it may make the warmongers think a little bit about the consequences of their use of the ballot box.

Six Boys and Thirteen Hands

Each year I am hired to go to Washington, DC, with the 8th grade class from Clinton, WI, where I grew up, to videotape their trip. I greatly enjoy visiting our nation’s capital, and each year I take some special memories back with me. This fall’s trip was especially memorable.

On the last night of our trip we stopped at the Iwo Jima memorial. This memorial is the largest bronze statue in the world and depicts one of the most famous photographs in history – that of the six brave soldiers raising the American Flag at the top of a rocky hill on the island of Iwo Jima, Japan, during WW II.

Over one hundred students and chaperones piled off the buses and headed for the memorial. I noticed a solitary figure at the base of the statue, and as I got closer he asked, “Where are you guys from?”

I told him we were from Wisconsin. “Hey! I’m a Cheese Head, too. Come gather round Cheese Heads and I’ll tell you a story.” he said.

(James Bradley just happened to be in Washington, DC, to speak at the memorial the following day. He was there that night to say good night to his dad, who had passed away. He was just about to leave when he saw the buses pull up. I videotaped him as he spoke to us and received his permission to share what he said from my videotape. It is one thing to tour the incredible monuments filled with history in Washington, DC, but it is quite another to get the kind of insight we received that night.)

When all had gathered around, he reverently began to speak. Here are his words from that night:

“My name is James Bradley, and I’m from Antigo, WI. My dad is on that statue and I just wrote a book called ‘Flags of Our Fathers’ which is #5 on the New York Times Best Seller List right now. It is the story of the six boys you see behind me.

Six boys raised the flag. The first guy putting the pole in the ground is Harlan Block. Harlan was an all-state football player. He enlisted in the Marine Corps. with all the senior members of his football team. They were off to play another type of game. A game called ‘war.’ But it didn’t turn out to be a game. Harlan, at the age of 21, died with his intestines in his hands. I don’t say that to gross you out, I say that because there are people who stand in front of this statue and talk about the glory of war. You guys need to know that most of the boys in Iwo Jima were 17, 18, and 19 years-old – and it was so hard that the ones who did make it home would never talk to their families about it.

You see this next guy? That’s Rene Gagnon from New Hampshire. If you took Rene’s helmet off at the moment this photo was taken and looked in the webbing of that helmet, you would find a photograph – a photograph of his girlfriend. Rene put that there for protection because he was scared. He was 18 years-old. It was just boys who won the battle of Iwo Jima. Boys. Not old men.

The next guy here, the third guy in this tableau, was Sgt. Mike Strank. Mike is my hero. He was the hero of all these guys. They called him the ‘old man’ because he was so old. He was already 24. When Mike would motivate his boys in training camp, he didn’t say ‘Let’s go kill some Japanese,’ or ‘Let’s go die for our country.’ He knew he was talking to little boys. Instead he would say ‘You do what I say and I’ll get you home to your mothers.’

The last guy on this side of the statue is Ira Hayes, a Pima Indian from Arizona. Ira Hayes was one who walked off Iwo Jima. He went into the White House with my dad. President Truman told him ‘You’re a hero.’ He told reporters ‘How can I feel like a hero when 250 of my buddies hit the island with me and only 27 of us walked off alive?’ So you take your class at school, 250 of you spending a year together having fun, doing everything together. Then all 250 hit the beach together and only 27 of your classmates walk off alive. That was Ira Hayes. He had images of horror in his mind. Ira Hayes carried the pain home with him and eventually died, dead drunk, facedown at the age of 32, 10 years after this picture was taken.

The next guy, going around the statue, was Franklin Sously, from Hilltop, KY. A fun-lovin’ hillbilly boy. His best friend, who is now 70, told me ‘Yeah, you know, we took two cows up on the porch of Hilltop General Store. Then we strung wire across the stairs so the cows couldn’t get down. Then we fed them Epsom salts. Those cows crapped all night.’ Yes, he was a fun-lovin’ hillbilly boy. Franklin died on Iwo Jima at the age of 19. When the telegram came to tell his mother that he was dead, it came to the Hilltop General Store. A barefoot boy ran that telegram up to his mother’s farm. The neighbors could hear her scream all night long and into the morning. Those neighbors lived a quarter of a mile away.

The next guy, as we continue to go around the statue, is my dad, John Bradley, from Antigo, WI, where I was raised. My dad lived until 1994, but he would never give interviews. When Walter Cronkite’s producers or the New York Times would call, we were trained as little kids to say ‘No, I’m sorry, sir. My dad’s not here. He’s in Canada fishing. No, there is no phone there. No, I do not know when he will be back.’ My dad never fished or even went to Canada. Usually he was sitting there right at the kitchen table eating his Campbell’s soup. But we had to tell the press that he was out fishing. He didn’t want to talk to the press.

You see, like Ira Hayes, my dad didn’t see himself as a hero. Everyone thinks these guys are heroes because they’re in a photo and on a monument. My dad knew better. He was a medic. John Bradley from Wisconsin was a care giver. In Iwo Jima, he probably held more than 200 boys as they died. And when boys died in Iwo Jima, they writhed and screamed, without any medication or help with the pain.

When I was a little boy, my third grade teacher told me my dad was a hero. When I went home and told my dad that, he looked at me and said, ‘I want you always to remember that the heroes of Iwo Jima are the guys who did not come back. DID NOT COME BACK.’

So that’s the story about six nice young boys. Three died on Iwo Jima, and three came back as national heroes. Overall, 7,000 boys died on Iwo Jima in the worst battle in the history of the Marine Corps. My voice is giving out, so I will end here. Thank you for your time.”

Suddenly, the monument was not just a big old piece of metal with a flag sticking out of the top. It came to life before our eyes with the heartfelt words of a son who did indeed have a father who was a hero. Maybe not a hero for the reasons most people would believe, but a hero nonetheless.

We need to remember that God created this vast and glorious world for us to live in freely, but also at great sacrifice.

Let us never forget, from the Revolutionary War to the current war on terrorism, and all the wars in between, that sacrifice was made for our freedom.

Remember to pray praises for this great country of ours’ and also pray for those still in murderous unrest around the world.

Stop and thank God for being alive and for being free at someone else’s sacrifice.

God bless you, and God bless America.

Interesting how it ends with the usual God-shouting, flag waving right-wing clap-trap right after it was giving details of thousand of boys dying brutal deaths, boys disembowled by enemy machine guns and other horrible things.

I really hate warmongers. Especially when they act like sending those boys off to be tortured and killed is somehow beneficial to them and that they support the troops by doing so. Makes me sick just thinking about it. If you assholes support the war so much then why aren’t you fighting it?

UFO Oops

I recently posted an entry detailing what seems to be a UFO sighting I had at about 10 PM on 11-19-2007. I now must say that I made an error in that entry. I posted an animated gif purporting to give a crude visual of the more detailed part of the sighting. Unfortunately, I accidentally posted the first, less accurate gif that I made. I have replaced it with the image below, which better demonstrates the change in speeds the “object” exhibited.

I’m going to post a follow-up on the sighting in the future, so keep an eye out.

And in Other News…

Yesterday I turned twenty years old. I really don’t feel like I should be twenty. Wow. The years just fly by. My only comfort is the ice cream cake my dad bought me. Calories heal all wounds.

*Insert that Bible verse about a person’s lifespan being like fog in the morning here*

I Just saw Some UFOs

I dunno, maybe this will ruin all vestiges of scientific credibility I’ve tried to create for myself, but I can’t help but post what just happened to me a little bit ago.

A couple of hours ago I got a call from an old high school buddy. We chatted it up for a while, and after I hung up, I stepped outside. It’s been fairly nice out, though a little windy. I start pacing around trying to rid myself of cabin fever, and reminiscing a bit about the good old days. There was a lot of cloud cover. Great sheets of cloud were being blown much faster than usual, rolling across the sky at a pretty quick pace. The moon wasn’t full, but it was on its way, and the night was well lit.

Gradually the clouds slow to a halt and there was a nearly perfectly circular gap in them that was kinda like a window looking directly at the moon. My mind was wandering, and I paced back and forth, ocasionally stopping to look at the bright moon and marvel at the Silvery Light reflecting off the clouds and the Grandness of the Scheme and The Works of His Hands and all that sappy rubbish.

After doing this for about ten minutes, I look at the moon again and just when I start to turn away, I notice not quite out of the corner of my eye a tiny pin-prick of red light sitting right below the center of the moon which as soon as I see it, zips in a perfectly straight line to the right and disappears behind the cloud cover.

Before I can get over what I just saw, which I immediately wondered if I was seeing a UFO or if my mind was playing tricks on me (though leaning towards the former). I’ve seen shooting stars, but they were always pale, ephemeral things that traveled in weak arcs. This light looked more “solid” and traveled in a perfectly straight line.

Suddenly, I see another identical tiny red light, this one at the moon’s upper left side. It also immediate zips in a straight line, although at about a 60 degree angle out to the upper left, and behind the cloud cover. Now I was really wondering what was going on. Again, I thought “UFO,” but felt stupid. Even though it didn’t look like a shooting star, I knew I was no astronomer and I could have been wrong. But I didn’t think I was.

At this point I’m really weirded out. I sort of deny what I had seen. I go back inside and ask dad to step out. When he comes I tell him to look at the moon. Together we stand there looking at the moon. He asks why I wanted him to look at the moon. I explain to him what happened. He tells me to go get some binoculars and look at the moon through those.

I run inside and come back out. I pull up a chair and sit there for about five minutes staring at the moon. I got a pretty good look at it, through the binoculars you can see the craters and everything, which surprised me. Dad gets bored and goes in. I sit there for about ten more minutes. Nothing.

I get up and start moving around. The nervous energy was driving me to pace about. About ten minutes later I look up again and I see a tiny spot of pale yellow light. “Ha!” I think, “Another UFO!” The light was really tiny and moving slowly towards my right. It pulsed regularly. I chastise myself for thinking it was a UFO.

After seeing the weird red lights by the moon, my imagination is running away from me and now every little plane or star is going to look like a UFO. I felt stupid. Then again, this light was kind of…odd. Something about it just seemed “un-airplane-like,” although at this point I couldn’t put my finger on just what it was.

I live not to far from an airport, so we get a lot of planes in and out of the area, but planes usually have red or green lights or something besides the blinking white strobe. This had no trace of any color besides pale yellow. And, the way this object “flashed,” I dunno it was just a bit different than the way I remembered planes flashing. It was almost like the timing was a bit less regular it just seemed more… organic. Later I decided that “pulsing” was a term more suited to the way the light changed brightness.

Still, it was silly to act like this was anything other than a normal everyday plane at high altitude. I thought my imagination was running away with me. I know I’ve said this before, but everytime I started to think I was seeing a UFO, I felt really stupid and embarrassed. After all it was moving at the right speed, certainly not making right angle turns or any of that UFO type stuff. I get a little bored with this airplane and as I turn away, just out of the corner of my eye, I notice it speeding up.

In just about a second, it ends up at about one and a half times to twice the speed that it was before. The object begins changing the “behavior” of its light. It now looked smaller, but no less bright. It’s color changes almost imperceptively towards the redder end of the spectrum. Previously it had been slowly pulsing, but this quickly became a rapid “flickering.”

Then, if all this wasn’t weird enough, it does something that really stuns me. It makes a sudden “U-turn,” and is now flying back up and over the path it had been going before. Once it gets about two thirds of the way back to where it was when I first noticed it, it stops. It paused briefly, and then stunned me even further by shooting off to the right and disappearing in a nearly straight but slightly parabolic path. The light left an extremely long, faint motion blur behind it.

Even though I had briefly considered that it may be a UFO, I didn’t expect it to really be one. I felt weird after seeing that, like sort of dazed. I then began searching for conventional explanations. It flew horizontally at a nearly straight line at high speed, so it had to be a satellite, right? I stood rooted at that one spot.

I still felt dazed, and tried to review the events in my mind. The rapid U-turn the light performed killed the satellite explanation. At this point I realized that I had literally gone into denial about what I had seen. Whatever this was, it wasn’t an airplane, satellite or shooting star. This dazed period lasted only a few seconds, but it seemed much longer.

Now the clouds were starting to roll in again and the object vanished. I went over to the right following the direction the light traveled, estimating where I would be able to see it again if the clouds cleared up. Then I waited. Suddenly it appeared again, when the clouds started thinning out. It made weird random motions like whirligig beetles on a pond. It was flying faster than I had ever seen an airplane of similar altitude fly, but not extremely fast like a meteor. It made swooping turns. Everytime it did this, just like before, it pulsed faster and looked a bit more reddish.

It vanished again as the clouds started rolling overhead again. Then appeared briefly. More clouds rolled in. I don’t know how many times I saw the object again, but it was a couple. Maybe four at the most. The clouds started rolling in even faster, until the entire sky was covered and the light was hidden from view.

I waited and the object didn’t appear. After I became confident I wouldn’t miss seeing the object again in the process, I went in to get my dad again, hoping it would appear for him and my story could be corroberated. We waited about 10 minutes. The clouds covered the sky completely and showed no signs of clearing up. Dad went back inside. I waited outside staying vigilant, watching the sky. About 45 minutes or so, later I gave up and went inside again.

I don’t know how long this experience lasted. The last time I had check a clock, it was not quite 9:30. It was 11:08 when I came in. The first thing I did after the incident was begin typing this. It took me about an hour, I think, before I actually posted it.

Update #1: I’ve added more detail to the description of my sighting of the red lights and why I felt they were not shooting stars.

Update #2: I’m removing foolish, inaccurate speculations about the yellow object’s elevation. The original text can be found below.

I live not to far from an airport, so we get a lot of planes in and out of the area, but they’re almost always recently taken off or soon to be landing which means that they’re almost always at low altitude. This sure wasn’t. If it was the size of a plane, then it had to be at a height that I don’t recall ever seeing any airplane at. And planes usually have red or green lights or something besides the blinking white one. This had no trace of any color besides light yellow. And, the way this object flashed, I dunno it was just a bit different than the way I remembered planes flashing. It was almost like the timing was a bit less regular it just seemed more… organic.

AiG’s Goals –Proof or Promotion?

By now the $27,000,000 Creation Museum built by creationist organization Answers in Genesis has become old news. I’m sorry I haven’t had time to give comment on it but life has gotten in the way (I have a post about its portrayal of Archaeopteryx which is still incomplete and will probably remain that way) and the main obstacle, of course, being that I’ve never had a chance to visit it.

But a thought occurred to me again, today (well, the day I began typing this anyway): what a waste of money that museum was! Seriously. Twenty seven million dollars wasted on a vapid illogical museum arguing in favor of a vapid illogical belief system. It might as well be flushed down the toilet. Actually it would be better off flushed down the toilet. At least nobody would be being deceived that way. There’s also the theological objection to Christian big-spending like that: think of how many starving children could have been fed, homeless given a place to live, chruches built in impoverished countries, etc.

That’s the stuff I had on mind before, though. Today something completely new occurred to me. I had been clearing away the spam from my blog’s comments (I hope you noticed <_<), when I saw a link left by a creationist commenter. This link led to a bunch of “Dinosaur and Man Living Together: Evolution is a Lie!” type stuff. I browsed it mostly disinterested, but then I had a brief epiphany that helped cement in my own mind the view that the whole young earth movement is a charade and a fraud.

If creationist organizations like Answers in Genesis were really interested in engaging in science and in proving their belief system, why would they spend $27,000,000 of their generous followers’ donations on a propaganda center instead of on research that would help confirm their views?

Well guys, why do you think that is? After all, we all know that the evilutionists are all out to get the creationists and refuse to publish or fund any of their research, you’d think that $27,000,000 in obligation-free funding would be the ultimate godsend for creation science. The ICR’s website says….

Question: “Then why don’t creationists publish in the standard scientific journals?”

Answer: Creationists do publish in the standard scientific journals, in their own respective scientific disciplines, and their publications’ records compare well with any other comparable group.
…
Whenever these articles or books have creationist implications, however, they must be “masked” in order to get them published in secular outlets. So far, at least, all frankly creationist articles or books are simply rejected out of hand by such publishers.

See? Creationism is being squashed by The Establishment. It’s all a big conspiracy. Now, however, they can buck the establishment. They have all the money they need to find that dinosaur in the African jungle or the Loch Ness Monster and prove once and for all that dinosaurs not only cohabited with humans, they still do! They could fund expeditions to faraway lands to scour the globe for geological formations that can only be explained by a gigantic Flood. They could perform genetics tests on people from all over and prove that we had a common hebraic ancestor that lived about 4,500 years ago.

If creationism was true, $27 million would be more than enough to prove it.

Even if you say, “But evolutionists are so closed minded that nothing we ever find would convince them,” you have to acknowledge that one of the evolutionists’ biggest complaints about the creation science movement is how they never seem to end up doing science, and when they do, it doesn’t end up pertaining to creationism, and in the rare instance that it does, it ends up being a huge flop (like the RATE debacle). That criticism could be dispelled in an instant. Just consider what could be done with $27,000,000.

An expedition to find the Ropen? Check.

A voyage into the Congo to find the Mokele Mbembe? Check.

A survey of Loch Ness? Check.

A search for Caddy? Check.

A genetics study to prove that all modern people are descended from Noah? Check.

In fact, they could do all of these things. And then some. So why don’t they? I could think of a few reasons.

1. ) D’OH!- They would love to do this, it’s just that all those PhD scientists just didn’t think of it! D’oh!

2.) They know their research would fail- Maybe the bigshots of the YEC movement don’t
have a whole lot of faith in their system. They may doubt that YECism’s testable predictions would turn out to support it after all. In order to keep their worldview in the good graces of the public they have to prevent their ideas from seeing real testing – and thus disproof.

3.) They don’t care about creation science- I’m sure there may be a dozen other reasons why YECs would want to avoid doing real research but I’m not going to waste your time by listing them, or mine by trying to brainstorm. I’m cutting to the chase and this is it:

The leaders of the creation science movement don’t care about research, science or learning. Their choice to use millions in funding in order to build a fancy shmancy PR and propoganda center is clear evidence that the leaders of the creation science movement care only about increasing the power and influence of the movement for its own sake.

There. I’ve said it. The creation science movement is not about science! It is about pursuing the personal agendas of the significant figures involved, religiously, financially, politically, influentially and otherwise! I don’t mean to insult, or talk down to any creationist reader here. I’m sincerely hoping that you will take this as a wake up call. You are being lied to and cheated, collectively, out of millions of dollars that is used only to spread the influence of a social movement. And one thing is for sure: science is not a part of, nor a pertinent enterprise to this movement.