What?

Dedicated to my butcher, IOZ. Stick that in my Tennessee!

1. You’ll live about 10 years longer. Won’t that be fun.
2. You’ll be able to understand and empathize better with your family. Won’t that be fun.
3. You’ll be able to remember every stupid thing you said at the party when you were totally uncomfortable being the only sober one there. Won’t that be fun.

No reason to rub it in any further I hope. Vodka is hardest to smell on your breath and, generally, the more expensive the alcohol, the more gently the morning after goes.

For those of you thinking about moving to Seattle, I want to clarify. This is an awesome town. But you’ve heard that before. The clarification being this picture is representative of Seattle mornings and afternoons every single day from September through March. See also–

Seattle

1. Jet City—hereafter minus jets.

2. Seatown—neither a town nor on the sea.

3. the Emerald City, take 2—somewhere between rain drenched poppy fields, androids, and electric sheep.

4. eight months of winter rain and unemployment dying to teach your sorry Midwestern ass that Seasonal Affective Disorder is all that stands between you and meeting Kurt Cobain in person.

Risk is part of life. Where there is risk there cannot be total security. There is no force or amount of preparation which can entirely mitigate risk in the natural world. Therefore you can never be entirely secure.

Being safe is part of being secure. If you can be hurt, and you can be, you are not safe. Therefore you are not secure.

If you are prohibited from taking risks, you are not free. If you are prohibited from doing, what in the eyes of the democratic majority constitutes, harm to yourself, you are not free.

If you want security, you can’t have freedom. It’s as simple and irrefutable as basic addition. The quest for total security is the quest to eradicate freedom and only the latter has any chance of succeeding.

Let’s stop all this talk of how we are defending freedom with the ventures and the rules and the renditions and the pouring out of contact lens solution. You can at least appreciate ruthlessness, stupidity, and cowardice when it is tinged with honesty.

1. Given that approximately 20,000 priests (2-‌4% of priests) have sexually abused church goers, especially male children, in the last 50 years: Have you ever molested or raped a parishioner?
2. Have you ever known about another priest doing so and helped cover it up?
3. Have you ever used church resources to give aid to a criminal? Or to commit a crime?
4. How many violent crimes have been confessed to you? How many of the confessers were you able to convince to turn themselves in? How many times did you try?
5. Who confirmed the Virgin remained one? Did Mary’s hymen somehow remain intact even after delivering the Christ? Why again does the Bible say Jesus had brothers and sisters?
6. Given that Joseph spent his life married to a woman he never touched: Was Joseph maybe homosexual?
7. Why aren’t Jews, Moslems, and pagans tortured to death by the Church anymore?
8. Given the heavy-‌handed stance against condoms: How responsible is the Church for the AIDS epidemic in Africa? Millions of the dead? Hundreds of thousands? None?
9. How could there have been 40 Popes who were never Pope?
10. Have you got answers for any of these: Ten Questions to Ask Your Pastor, Reverend, Minister, or Priest?

Three numbers are available with customizable display options. E.g.–

Which adds up to –

Put this in your page

<p>
<script type="text/javascript"
 src="http://sedition.com/js/casualties.js">
</script>
</p>

Get this

Only want the number?

<p style="text-align:center">
<script type="text/javascript"
 src="http://sedition.com/js/casualties.js?text=off">
</script>
</p>

Get this

And that, as they say, is that.

The data comes from iCasualties.org. The default display is the sum of their Iraq and Afghanistan numbers. You can set it to return just one or the other. The numbers link back to them, as they should. Those folks work hard on their site and getting it right. Here is their donations page; they broke it and don’t have one you can link directly anymore so…

The numbers displayed by the JavaScript are updated from them often. No guarantees but unless you are checking all day, our version is much more likely to reflect the current values at iCasualties than what you saw the last time you looked.

API, CSS, and placement

The (X)HTML it generates looks something like this (whitespace added)–

<span id="USmilBodyCount">
US military deaths in war on terror:
<b><a title="Iraq + Afghanistan casualties"
 href="http://icasualties.org/">[number]</a></b>
</span>

Text in a span with an id (in bold above) you can hook with your own style sheet if you choose. The generated (X)HTML is appended to the nodes of whatever parent it sits in. That means it might jump down somewhere you don’t expect or want. If that happens, just wrap it in <p>[script here]</p> to anchor it as a child, the only one, of that paragraph tag.

Content served as application/xhtml+xml will not be placed correctly. The script self-identification technique used only works if the script can see the DOM as it is loaded; streamlike. In application/xhtml+xml, as other XML, the DOM is only available, atomically, after it has all been loaded.

Allowed arguments in src querystring

no, the number of fatalities for which country

no=full, the default, shows both combined

no=a, for Afghanistan’s number only

no=i, for Iraq’s number only

text

text=on, the default

text=off, to only show the number

sep, the separator of the text and number; using it implies you want the text on

sep=:, the default, for a colon

sep=n, for an en-dash with whitespace

sep=m, for an em-dash without whitespace

sep=br, for an (X)HTML line break, <br/>

Two more examples

<p>
<script type="text/javascript"
 src="http://sedition.com/js/casualties.js?sep=n;no=a">
</script>
</p>

<p style="text-align:center">
<script type="text/javascript"
 src="http://sedition.com/js/casualties.js?text=off;no=i">
</script>
</p>

NB

There is no branding (Sedition·com) on it right now. If you want it to stay that way, make sure to mention us if you use it.

Now for some SEO missing above

US military fatalities, troops killed.

I just accidentally noticed that today is Sedition·com’s ninth anniversary. We’ll save a major retrospective for 10, or 20 if parole takes longer than I’d like. For now, nine years ago–

• Publisher’s Page, majenta vol. 3, no. 1
• Armageddon Soup
• Articles of Presidency
• untitled for queers
• Reactionary Fungi

Writers and artists without bylines include Vivian Five VI, Barnaby “I rest my rectum” Hazen and Erich “I gave my sister all her ideas for the X-Men costumes” Mingenbach.

MIT coed with fake bomb “art” arrested

Troopers arrested an MIT student at gunpoint Friday after she walked into Logan International Airport wearing a computer circuit board and wiring on her sweatshirt. Authorities call it a fake bomb; she called it art. Glen Johnson, AP

Blogger “exposes” annoying quote abuse

Isn’t it “funny” how something can “really annoy” you for ages and then you discover via “the Internet” that the same thing “really annoys” thousands of “other people,” too? AP, regarding Bethany Keeley’s “blog”

Dear Y’all,

Quit biting my 2003 material unless you’re gonna do it better.

Sincerely,
–Grand Master Ash, the Furious Five

PS: Take note. The word sincerely above was entirely without quotation marks but the effect remains unchanged.

Nebraska state senator sues God

And we have a new hero at Sedition·com—Ernie Chambers. God even provided him with an impromptu halo for this photo to show He can be a good sport.

God is dead. Nietzsche

God is served. Pond

Giuliani: I’m Among Best Known Americans

“I’m probably one of the four or five best known Americans in the world,” Giuliani told [a bunch of nobodies whose names you’ll never know].

If you’d ever travelled without an entourage or bothered to meet any foreigner who is not rich enough to have a second home in New York City, asshat, you’d know the top five looks something like–

1. Michael Jackson
2. Madonna
3. Brad Pitt
4. Kenny G
5. Ronald Reagan

You would not even crack the top 2,000, my poor deluded honky. David Hasselhoff alone is so much better known than you that there are no punchlines to top it. I suspect you’d be mistaken for a Central Park gardener by 9,999 out of 10,000 citizens of any other country.

Tens of thousands of CCTV cameras, yet 80% of crime unsolved

In fact, four out of five of the boroughs with the most cameras have a record of solving crime that is below average. thisislondon.co.uk

Anyone who is surprised by this should be kicked in the gonads by every member of A.C. Milan.

OJ Simpson charged with kidnapping, armed robbery

Boy, that’s weird.

World should brace for possible war over Iran: France

World leaders should brace for possible domestic feedback delivered in staccato crescendo¹.

Canadians celebrate loonie’s parity with US dollar

Well you should. Maybe start to wake up some folks down here that the only way to destroy America outside the masturbatory Islamofascist Chinese fire drills is to keep voting Democrat and Republican. Without a thriving economy, the US is nothing but a smaller version of Canada with better beaches.

Associated Press: Madonna: I’m an “ambassador for Judaism”

Sedition·com: Israel faces new insurmountable challenge, end of days begun.

Firefighters save donkey trapped in well

I hate to give ammunition to my enemies but this photo is clear proof of God. Also proof that He is either dyslexic or just plain old funny.

• DiscardedTrophyBrides.com
• celebrity-relics.com/?q=Tom+Cruise&item=scapula
• enronexecutiveexecutions.org
• mail-a-turd.cx/?address=1600+Pennsylvania+Avenue
• CongressionalPunch.org
• www.fantasy-jihad-pool.net

PS: Did you know the Middle English wif means both wife and a band for faggots? Fill in the musical punchline of your choice.

PPS: Did you know that post scripts are considered bad style and are only used by the least serious and most disorganized writers?

All “what do I care” references on a discussion board are redundant.

Nobody cares.

son of parnas, Wednesday, November 02, 2005

Jesus, I haven’t had beer for breakfast in 10 years. What kind of life is that!?!

Those lovely eyelashes are what originally drew me in.

If the face rings a bell…

Mr…?

Baba. Ponda Baba.

Am I the only one who found the ratings page for X-Men: Last Stand a little odd?

All the rest of you: be honest with yourselves; it’s time for you to admit defeat.

I got a break-barrel air rifle instead of a repeater, or something easier to load, for the intersection of two particular reasons.

1. It only fires one shot at a time, then you have to crack it open with serious effort, carefully feed a pellet, close it, and snap a very noisy safety to off.
2. Blood lust isn’t some alien disease impossible for mankind to understand, it’s in-built and once it’s on, even reasonable, professional people start doing fucking stupid shit like firing wildly when they have no aim or idea what’s 50 yards behind the target; here’s just one example.

Responsibility starts before you’re in the middle of a thing. For the younger readers who might have enough uncorrupted gray matter to accept this as axiomatic—if you live this, you will live long and large, your way.

A lesser pantheon fan I’d linked posted on his site some pictures of dead song birds he’d shot. I removed all links on Sedition·com to him within 5 minutes. Why?

Shooting songbirds is illegal, I believe in all the US. They are protected. But beyond that, there is not one good reason to shoot one unless, and this is debatably reasonable, you’re a taxidermist or a natural history curator. You can’t eat them. A blue bird could in no manner be considered a pest or vermin. He shot them, presumably, just to show off his aim. Oh, and because someone called him a pussy. Killing a couple of totally innocuous 3 ounce animals out of peer pressure doesn’t make you a man. It makes you the kind of perdedor who will end up in real trouble someday because you can’t stand up for yourself.

You know why I miss Neil so much sometimes? Because when I called him a pussy the first time he didn’t go start a fight with his girlfriend, steal from his roommate, or shoot a bird. He lunged for me. I hook-kicked him in the face. He rolled me right the fuck over anyway.

This fellow, indeed a male, got on the bird feeder one time too many today.

But, but Ashley… but you just said… but I thought you loved animals. How could you?!

I do love animals. I love them more than you could guess because I haven’t published the story this is from yet–

I’ve cried over birds, snakes, dogs, cats, the works. Even a pet tarantula who took a spill from a height.

So, how could I? That rat, and his family, ate the electrical wiring in my wife’s car; not once, because I let that slide, not twice because even that didn’t garner a killing, but three times. Then they ate the fuel line on my car. Then they ate the baby birds in a nest of house finches I’d been watching in the ivy on our chimney. Left the bones. Chewed the flesh off the chicks. At least two (one, two) of the rats have died in the walls of the house and stunk everything up while producing clouds of flies inside. One thousand dollars of car repairs and a stack of dead song birds bought that little guy a .177 caliber wake-up call.

Bad as that picture might look, it was all over in 5 seconds for him and he never knew what was going on. The impersonal stuff is far worse. Traps—takes days to die, usually of starvation/dehydration. Agony. Poison—it’s an anti-coagulant that makes you bleed to death from the inside, plus the squirrels or other animals I’ve got no beef with might get into it.

Why post the picture, now you cry? There are more reasons than you might expect.

Nature is bloody, vicious, painful, and awful. Awful in the original sense really. I don’t know how valuable it might be for humans to escape the animal but most of you seem to have forgot that you have any at all. That’s a dangerous illusion. You believe yourself so eager to love and protect nature, yet you’re so utterly disconnected from it and ignorant of what it means.

You think you’re not a killer. You are. Walking down the street, you kill animals. Taking a shower, you kill animals. Rub your eyes. You just killed animals. Even the painfully empathetic who lean all the way to vegan are mass killers. A bag of produce which wasn’t sprayed with pesticide is loaded, loaded, with bugs. Harvesting the produce and grains kills by the million. Harvesting it at all causes mass starvation of the survivors. It’s not a zero sum game but you might not have time to make your own chair before the music stops.

You should use what you kill. It’s a nice photo. It’s a jumping off place. A note on that point—that rat didn’t die to give me something to write about. He died so we could afford to own a car. This piece and photo are reuse.

That’s a Chinese animal with no business in this environment. I advocate shooting, where it’s legal, domestic cats too. For the crybabies who think Exxon is the Devil, your tabbies and seal-points do more damage every three weeks than the Valdez did.

Heart shot, you’ll notice. No scope. The break-barrel only affording one chance at it. The rat only allowing two seconds to try.

Thousands of GIs cope with brain damage

The war in Iraq is not over, but one legacy is already here in this city and others across America: an epidemic of brain-damaged soldiers. The Associated Press, Marilynn Marchione

Also, since it’s Christmas time–

Do you like honey? I do. Do you know what honey is? I do.

It’s insect vomit.

Do you like bee barf? I do.

The number varies a bit depending on the timing and headlines but 54% of Americans would like to see Vice President Dick Cheney impeached.

This morning, against my better judgement, I picked up a Time magazine while waiting at the methadone clinic to discover that only 68% of Americans even know that the Vice President of the United States is Dick Cheney.

So… assuming the Venn is properly aligned and those positively answering question A belong to the set of those bright students in the know regarding question B–

80% of Americans want Dick Cheney impeached.

Dick, Dick, Dick… you’ve got one chance left, my negro. There is one, and only one, political avenue open that leads to Redemption Gdn for someone in your position. It has turned some of the worst, least popular Presidents into heroes. And just think of the great company you’ll have when you’re greeted by Abe and Johnny ’neath the Italian signage.

Just another lazy day in the backyard pulling knotweed.

And though my pastor tells me I shouldn’t do it, and my sponsor warns against this sort of relapse… ducks.

Do you know who the biggest asshole in the world is?

The dickweed who knew I wouldn’t want to get up early, even though I needed to, and moved the alarm to the other room last night so I’d have to get out of bed to turn it off.

Three French cats went sailing in a bathtub and do you know what happened?

Un, deux, trois, quatre, cinq.

I bought the dual G4 I’m typing on right now for three thousand bucks two weeks before Apple announced the new G5s which were better computers and cheaper along with the improved specs.

iPhone? $200? Pardon my French but y’all are a bunch of fucking crybabies.

Not to rub salt in it but I feel now is the time to remind you that AT&T, the only carrier for the iPhone, gives phone records to the government without so much as an if-you-please, let alone a warrant.