So Amnesty International releases its 2005 report on worldwide human rights violations, and has this to say about the US:

Hundreds of detainees continued to be held without charge or trial at the US naval base in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. Thousands of people were detained during US military and security operations in Iraq and Afghanistan and routinely denied access to their families and lawyers.

Military investigations were initiated or conducted into allegations of torture and ill-treatment of detainees by US personnel in Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq and into reports of deaths in custody and ill-treatment by US forces elsewhere in Iraq, and in Afghanistan and Guantánamo. Evidence came to light that the US administration had sanctioned interrogation techniques that violated the UN Convention against Torture. Pre-trial military commission hearings opened in Guantánamo but were suspended pending a US court ruling.

How do our leaders respond to these serious allegations?

Bush:

“It’s absurd. It’s an absurd allegation. The United States is a country that promotes freedom around the world.”

“It seemed like to me they based some of their decisions on the word of — and the allegations — by people who were held in detention, people who hate America, people that had been trained in some instances to disassemble — that means not tell the truth. And so it was an absurd report. It just is.”

Cheney:

“For Amnesty International to suggest that somehow the United States is a violator of human rights, I frankly just don’t take them seriously.”

“Occasionally there are allegations of mistreatment. But if you trace those back, in nearly every case, it turns out to come from somebody who has been inside and been released … to their home country and now are peddling lies about how they were treated.”

Maybe in 2008, regardless of which party wins, we can at least get some grown-ups in the Oval Office.

The rapidly diminishing, if not completely exhausted, number of people coming here looking for my fool-head ejaculations¹ regarding comics are probably wondering why I haven’t mentioned them in a long time.

Well, part of this is by design, but a lot of it is due to the fact that it’s been a pretty dry few weeks for me when it comes to comics. Last week there was nothing for me except the new Previews, so I didn’t pick it up. Week before that I grabbed two weeks’ worth of books, which consisted of:

• The Losers vol 3
• Rex Mundi vol 2
• Jack Staff #8

…and that’s it. That was two weeks of comics for me. This week, according to the Diamond list, I can expect a new issue of Fortean Times, a new volume of Hikaru No Go, and Super F***ers #1, so I’ll be heading up to grab those.

So in lieu of funnybooks, I’ve actually had time to read some “real” books. I finished the one I’d sorta been reading off and on, The Difference Engine by Doron Swade (the Dorons were always my favorite Star Trek aliens). It’s a two-part story, the first being the tale of Charles Babbage and his amazing, unbuilt, pre-computer computers, and the second part being the British Science Museum’s attempts to actually build one according to his plans. Not a bad read.

Becky had grabbed The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time by Mark Haddon from the library and tore through it. I then picked it up and finished it in about twelve hours. Not only was it a fairly easy read, it was extremely compelling. It’s the story of Christopher, a high-functioning autistic child who begins investigating the murder of a neighbor’s dog and winds up discovering a lot more. I really enjoyed it and it shamed me that last year I was reading that damned stupid Da Vinci Code crap instead of this.

Now I’ve started on another book that I’ve had for a while, Milorad Pavic’s Landscape Painted With Tea. I really enjoyed Pavic’s first novel, Dictionary of the Khazars, which was a tour-de-force of wild fantasy. Landscape has so far proven to be very similar. It’s written in a highly bizarre, yet poetic language, and you pretty much just have to accept every single thing written and let it go.

I did get two funnybooks — Adrien Tomine’s Summer Blonde and Greg Rucka’s Whiteout — from the library, and I need to read those before I have to return them, but for now I’m happy to give other parts of my brain some attention and stick with straight up prose for a bit.

—

1 — Definition 2.

Awwwww yeah. Four-day weekend, folks. That’s what I’m talkin’ about. And what did we do during this heapin’ helpin’ of holiday? Glad you asked!

Friday we bought a new bike for Becky:

and then that night we re-watched Attack of the Clones in preparation for re-seeing Revenge of the Sith.

Saturday we had to take the new bike (and my fixed up one) for a test ride, so TJ and Mary joined us in Forest Park for some biking. Thankfully, Becky and I quit just before we dropped dead, so it wasn’t as hard on us as it could have been. The bikes did well, and we’re looking forward to some more biking soon!

That morning we got up in the attic and straightened it out some. I got some serious eBaying to set up, which will be great for getting rid of stuff and getting some cash, but damn it’s such a pain in the butt to do. Then we watched Clone Wars vol 1, the Cartoon Network micro-series which I’d ordered the DVD of.

But Sunday was the big day! We headed up to Belchertown with Dan and Jen for a barbecue at John and Christine’s place. We met their daughters, Gina and Josie, and also a friend of Dan’s and John’s named Brian (and his two sons, whose names I forgot). There was excellent food (mmmmmm…grilled salmon…) and a lot of fun, especially when we broke out that pinnacle of outdoor entertainment, Jarts!

  

  

John says he tried to sell this set on eBay and they took down the auction! Apparently SOME people seem to think that throwing metal spikes around is somehow dangerous. Whatever!

Monday was a national holiday, Sophia’s Birthday, so once again I had the day off from work. We started the day with the new Doctor Who episode, and then returned to Forest Park for some geocaching, which we hadn’t done in a while! We decided to take Beebo along for the hunt, to see if he would perform better than the GPS (it was kind of a tie.) Becky was the first to spot the cache. Beebo actually did very well in the park, not really grousing at anyone and keeping a good walking pace. Cesar would have been proud of him!

  

We returned home and did some yard work. Then I headed over to Mike’s with Dan for board games. We played Age of Mythology, which I won due to a unique blend of luck and stupid luck.

In addition to all of the above, we also broke out some jigsaw puzzles and worked on those. I got some reading done, Becky did some sewing, and in general we had a very pleasant holiday. I keep thinking I’m forgetting something, too, in case all of that wasn’t enough!

Today is Memorial Day, so in addition to thinking of departed soldiers, take a moment to think of the sacrifices made by our country’s soldiers. They are people like you and me, torn from their daily lives and deposited on the other side of the world. There they have been put in a dangerous environment, their lives constantly at stake, with insufficient training and equipment. Upon their return, they will see their veterans’ benefits cut by the very same people who put them in that situation and claim to support them. The very same people who are more than willing to send these soldiers into combat to fight, but were unwilling to do so themselves and are unwilling to send their own children.

In addition, these fighting men and women are placed in a situation where they are ordered to perform tasks that most people would find abhorrent. Our leaders have decided that torture is just dandy, and leave it to our soldiers to perform this task. When such actions are exposed, the same people that gave the orders feign shock and happily serve up the soldiers as scapegoats.

All of this is done in the name of a war which was predicated upon not one lie, but several lies. All of the reasons we were given for going to war in Iraq have turned out to be lies — not changes in emphasis, not misstatements, not poor choices based on faulty information, but flat-out lies. Perhaps the only true thing said was that Saddam Hussein was a tyrant who was cruel to his own people, although his tyranny and cruelness was not a problem when Donald Rumsfield was selling him weapons so that he would fight people we hated even more.

Memorial Day, however, is intended to remember our fallen soldiers, who have died in the line of duty. In our current climate, though, recognizing their sacrifice is considered “controversial“. Apparently soldiers should be killed and not seen. Even when the fallen soldier is famous, his death is to be lied about. And yet, these are the people who claim to support the troops because they have yellow ribbon magnets on their cars.

The best way to memorialize our deceased soldiers is to make sure there’s no more of them than need be. To not send them in unless absolutely necessary, to make sure they have the proper equipment and training once they’re there, to give them an honorable cause for which to fight, to remove them as soon as possible, and to thank them for their work with proper care and service once they return.

Whenever someone in the Middle East combines religion with hatred, he’s referred to in the press as a “radical cleric”. Not so with our own American Christian Haters. At worse, they’re “activist priests”. Here’s an example of such a person:

The headline for this?

Church sign sparks debate

FOREST CITY — A sign in front of a Baptist church on one of the most traveled highways in the county stirred controversy over religious tolerance and first-amendment rights this weekend.

A sign in front of Danieltown Baptist Church, located at 2361 U.S. 221 south reads “The Koran needs to be flushed,” and the Rev. Creighton Lovelace, pastor of the church, is not apologizing for the display.

“I believe that it is a statement supporting the word of God and that it (the Bible) is above all and that any other religious book that does not teach Christ as savior and lord as the 66 books of the Bible teaches it, is wrong,” said Lovelace. “I knew that whenever we decided to put that sign up that there would be people who wouldn’t agree with it, and there would be some that would, and so we just have to stand up for what’s right.”

See, this isn’t a hate-filled religious leader trying to foment a holy war. He’s just “creating controversy”. All he’s doing is stimulating a lively debate over whether declaring that another religion’s holy book should be flushed down the toilet represents religious tolerance. And quite frankly, why on earth should we tolerate religions that are clearly false and evil?

Or maybe Lovelace was unaware that this statement might be offensive to some people. Like Muslims, for example.

“Well, I thought about it and I said there may be people who are offended by it but the way I look at it, Jesus told his followers that if the world hates you, don’t feel bad because they hated me first,” said Lovelace. “If we stand for what is right and for God’s word and for Christianity then the world is going to condemn us and so right away when I got a complaint I said ‘well somebody’s mad, somebody’s offended, so we must be doing something right.’”

(Ah yes, the good old American ideal of “If someone is mad at me, it’s not because I’m an asshole, it’s because they can’t handle the right that I’m doing.”)

However, this radical cleric eventually apologized, saying:

“When I posted the message on the sign, I did not realize how people of the Muslim faith view the Qur’an that devoted Muslims view it more highly than many in the US view the Bible.”

So it was all just a simple misunderstanding. He was simply unaware that Muslims held their holy book in as high a regard as Christians hold theirs. Hooda thunk it? Of course, one can read into his apology a smarmy comment that people (and by “people” I of course mean “Americans”) seem more interested in protecting the Qur’an than they are in protecting the Bible, because of course, Christians are such a persecuted minority in this country.

Remember, folks, they have fanatical zealots promoting a religion of hate, while we just have that “old-time religion”.

I hesitate to say that there will be spoilers in this post about ABC’s popular show Lost, the only TV show I watch other than the new Doctor Who. If you haven’t been watching it, I hear they’re repeating the whole thing this summer. This is a bandwagon you really need to jump on, so that you too can experience the excitement of last night’s season finale, in which one or two plot threads NEARLY got resolved! Is it a spoiler to reveal that nothing is revealed? If so, that’s the only spoiler here.

I have to admit, I’m not sure why I started watching the show in the first place. I should have avoided it for the same reason I avoided 24 — I’ve no desire to watch a single, season-long plot. I hated it when they did it in Buffy, I hate hate hated the “mytharc” in The X-Files, and wasn’t interested in a show touting that as a “feature”. For some reason, it’s been decided that long-ass entire-season (or, in the case of Lost, apparently, entire-series) plots are now the mark of Quality Television, despite the fact that few to nobody does it well. I can’t speak about Babylon 5, the show most people hold up as an example, since my interest in it was very brief. Buffy sort of employed this device in its first three seasons, and it actually didn’t work too bad, but from season four on the sprawling plots, whose motion could only be measured in geological terms, became unbearable, culminating in the “Glory” season in which the only way to prolong this three-episode storyline was to make everyone into a moron. So yeah, not sure why I signed on again.

My fears were a little relieved by the fact that the creators were aware of what went wrong with The X-Files and Twin Peaks, but alas, that doesn’t seem to be the case. They’ve also fallen into the same problems as many comic book series.

There should be some kind of rule that says you can only have so many plot threads dangling at any one time without resolving any of them. The lobotomies that powered season five of Buffy are in full-effect here, as others have noted. These are the least talkative, most uncurious bunch ever. At the end of last night’s season finale, something finally happens that has been a mystery for months, and that’s when it ends. Now, the presumption is that next season will begin with the ramifications of this event, but given the history of the show, I’m fully prepared for the characters to simply walk away from it and not discuss it until at least maybe sweeps week.

In two hours last night we moved possibly fifteen minutes worth of actual plot, if that much. Of course, we also had to take time out for the character flashbacks, which started out serving the purpose of explaining who these people were, but by now are simply intrusive and annoying. A large portion of time was spent running around, maintaining the status quo.

Based on my experiences with The X-Files I know that people are just dying to tell me things like, “Jeez, you want them to just reveal every secret and end the show?” Of course not. I want them to reveal, or at least explore some secrets and move the show along. Global warming will scrub this island from the map before they even get around to things like, oh, verifying that it is in fact a damn island.

I will probably watch the premiere of season two, if I remember to. But they have two, three episodes tops to actually do anything before I decide to better use my time.

Work’s gonna be kicking my butt all week, so posting may be light, but this needed sharing:

Nope, it’s not a wig…

Christine: …As to my comment that John Williams always delivers - I will hear no negative things said about the Yub-Yub song.

Me: “Yub” is Ewok for “Jar”.

Christine: It is the hell not! What did I just say, Dave?