2006-02-09

And pics from the Foja Mountain expedition

While I'm on the subject of pics. National Geographic has pictures from the expedition to Foja Mountain in Indonesia

Beautiful pictures of China

On Digg I saw a link to a collection of pictures of the hidden beauty of china.

Wow, rice terraces of china. Prettier than any pictures I've seen of Banaue and other mountain province terraces. Although that's probably just a matter of having a vehicle and the time to drive around looking for the right shot.

2006-02-04

US Military Rape

There's an article on US Military men raping female soldiers and the effects of that. I can't judge how much of that to believe. The main source is Gen Janice Karpinski, who commanded at Abu Ghraib at the time of the torture scandal there, and it's in a forum where I wouldn't be surprised if much of what is printed is untrue since it's so liberal/Democratic. The extremes of both the Democratic and Republican spectrum are similarly nutzoid. The Republicans perhaps more than the Democrats, but the extreme left Democrats are just as much lying bastards who feel no shame about their lying that it's difficult to believe anything un-corroborated that comes out of that end of the spectrum.

So the story is that US female soldiers in Iraq weren't drinking any liquids in the afternoon and at night because they didn't want to go to the latrines since they were afraid of being raped.

I'm not too concerned about the female soldiers, myself. They're americans, there are avenues of appeal (the article shows they don't work, but they can still always quit the army and bring up the stink in the papers, or they can frag the bastards, although maybe that's male thinking and the berserker culture that can do that and not care too much about being caught isn't something women do). What I wonder is, what are the rape statistics on Iraqi women? And since violence is certainly *far* easier to slide into than rape, even for a blooded american soldier, what are the statistics on torture and battery and unjustified shootings and killings of civilians?

Those are probably one or two (maybe even three) orders of magnitude over the female soldier rape cases. But of course the US doesn't care, or not enough to do anything about it. After all, the US military exists in order to protect americans. The rest of the population are targets.

Boy, George W is going to have *some* session with St Peter. I wonder how he's going to squirm his way out of that, the lying bastard.