Sins and virtues

Format inspired by this entry by Fictional Correspondant.

Luxuria - Filipina Colada continues to flirt with increased amounts of touching, whenever she happens to show up at the site with her parents. When you're bored and in a job you're not overly fond of, that can be a welcome diversion/distraction. Plus, how can you not dig somebody who says, upon hearing of someone younger than her who got pregnant, "That's like a punch to my endomitrium"? That's worth breaking Commandment #7 right there! Possible example: perhaps I can arrange a swap with Fictional Correspondant, trading Filipina Colada for Gypsy, because if I don't I might end up covering her in black pepper and sneezing all over her.

Virtus - Of course, I'm doing nothing about it. Partly because I'm not too interested, but it's possible I'd give her a whirl if her parents hadn't initiated the whole thing. Plus, I suspect she's just being friendly with what's around. Possible example: even when I look like Shiva from the extra pair of arms draped around me, I don't go for the obvious return move.

Gula - I spend too much time online, but more in line with the classical idea of gula, I've discovered the joys of Ben & Jerry's Cherry Garcia ice cream. I used to be dubious about paying triple for less volume, but I have to admit that's a goddamn tasty ice cream. Possible example: hand-packed ice cream. Who knew?

Frenum - Of course, I usually only buy a 500ml container on the Friday or Saturday, and that does me for the week. 1040 calories for the whole shebang (I like that word), for those of you that count such things. Possible example: just because I want something doesn't mean I'll go and get it, even if it's well within my means. I tend to think there's some value in experiencing the difference between wanting something and reaching for it.

Avaritia - Other than keeping my time all to myself, I can't self-identify anything for this at the moment. I'm sure others would disagree. There's a hard drive and cpu I wouldn't mind picking up, but I can wait. Not because I can't afford it, but mostly because I don't particularly need either of them. Possible example: having only myself in my life, it's hard not to do things than don't have me as the focus. Shrug.

Liberalitas - What can I say? If someone needs something and I have it, that's that. It doesn't come up very often really. Possible example: I gave a bag of about eight bagels to a beggar the other week.

Acedia - This one has me - I'm a lazy bugger. Haven't delivered a slim IDE cable that should have been handed off months ago, I don't call people, I don't exercise as frequently as I should, I don't spend as much time learning as I used to. Possible example: I haven't done a single physics calculation in just under two years. TWO YEARS! I used to love that shit! And I'll get rusty if I don't. And I need to be more diligent about skipping rope.

Industria - Even though I know the job is ending, and that my own company doesn't really care about the site, I keep plugging away at it as diligently as I can. This is probably a misplaced loyalty, but I prefer to think of it as giving the client what they're paying us all those thousands of dollars each month for. Possible example: you don't take a day off work unless you physically can't make it in. Did I say "you"? I meant "I".

Ira - Yeah, I get mad. I get mad at people doing the things that people do out of pure selfishness, or for short term (apparent) gain at the sacrifice of the long term benefit. I get mad that my guards won't do what I think is an incredibly simple list of things to do, at possibly the softest site since Pillow Patrol at the Cotton Batten warehouse. Not to mention the sort of person who says "We need such-and-such", when it's completely clear that they simply want it. Possible example: whenever I hear the latest thing that one of my guards has done, I call somebody local (not connected to the site) and bitch about it. This blows off some steam, but I doubt anybody besides me gives a whoopity whoop. Like the guy I just removed from the site, who at his worst managed to get three hits during his entire shift, as opposed to the 50+ (non elevator) that I require. How lazy can you get? Oh, by sleeping? Yeah, he does that too.

Patientia - When I get reamed for the actions of my guards, I more or less take it stolidly. Usually with nothing more than "I'll talk to him about it" coming from me. If they ask me questions, I usually agree with what they're saying (not being a yes-man, they're just right) but I don't rip on my guards or company to the client. And when I deal with them later, I've usually played all the "making them cry" scenes in my head to get them out of the way, so I'm reasonable (but firm) when I do finally deal with them. There are excuses, there are denials, there is hostility. But I'm well seasoned to it at this point, so I can simply take it and move on.

Invidia - Not so much, really. I have to admit though, that I sometimes wish when I see certain people that I'd rolled out of the cart before I ended up where I am; job-wise, education-wise, travel-wise, hair-wise. Incidentally, you now know where the makers of the GeForce got their name from. ;)

Humanitas - I feel for those who have been thoughtlessly trod over by people who don't even realize it, and wouldn't care if they did. The countless small (and sometimes not so small) slights and denials and such that make life harder than it needs to be for many. This doesn't include you not getting the colour of the SUV you wanted slitch, when you already had more than you needed. Possible example: a guard physically near me (site-wise) called up Operations on the radio the other day with (paraphrased) "Operations, call the police!" They assented, but then asked what they were calling the police for. The answer (and the only one they got) came back as "Bad guys are doing bad stuff!" Even though it's funny (or maybe you had to be there, I don't know) I feel for the guy. Obviously he was stressed and his composure had cracked, and he wanted help in a big way. I never found out what it was exactly, but I heard the mobile unit that went to assist him radio in that it was all clear awfully fast for such a dire situation.

Superbia - I'm full of myself. And I say things in the definitive, even when they should be in the subjective. Also, I'm better than you. Really though, I think I may possibly milk my relationship with the client (i.e. they like me) for credibility when I'm dealing with an errant guard. Possible example: I don't let my guards rewrite their own orders - they have to do it my (better) way, despite their reasoning. I find the reasoning flawed, but that doesn't mean that they do.

Humilitas - I don't let you know how much better I am than you. ;) And if I can do something good without anybody knowing about it, that's the good stuff right there. Too many people have tooted my horn (kinky!) for me to need to do it too often myself. Possible example: in the forums I ghost around, I often PM information to people engaged in disputes so they can present it themselves in defense of what they're saying, rather than posting it myself with a smarmy comment.

Hmmm, this didn't turn out to be as interesting/amusing as I'd hoped. Ah well, it's all I've got. Let me shift the balance by telling you about Powerclown - the Vancouver-based middle aged, whiskey drinking, cigarette smoking, foul mouthed jerks who cover Iron Maiden songs in full clown regalia. Follow the link to see a picture of Pisstank and Sketchy, or check out this semi-mockumentary below:



I only know about these guys because Valium Wailer was at their concert at the Cobalt, and tried to tell me a story about what he was getting up to there, but I got stuck at the concept of of the band. Here's a clip:

Hide and seek

Nope, never had this as my computer's startup sound.



And definitely nobody had to listen to it when I set up for lan parties. No sir!

And, as my friend Fictional Correspondant reminded me when he saw this, I also used to use this as my startup sound:



Tres frais, non?

On Friday, at about 1830, I got radioed from from the office advising me that my trainee was at the front door.

"I have a trainee?" I asked.

"You do." was the reply. Huh.

And so I did - and it was the old bugger than Cookie Monster and company have been mentioning to me over the past several weeks. Of course, they didn't

Trained new guy for site
Met Buffalo Kisser at Future Shoptell me that I was training ahead of time, but it worked out okay. Sort of.

I never actually asked his age, but he remembers having a blackout room during the second world war, so I'm guessing he's in his late sixties. He's not used to as much walking as my site requires either.

But he will be available a week sooner than I thought he would. That's a plus.

He also told me that the office was jiggering my schedule so he can work Sunday to Thursday, rather than the current Monday to Friday. That's a minus.

That's nice that he's spent the last five years on that particular schedule, but that skews my weekend lineup to the point where Valium Wailer won't be able to work there.

And in fact, that will effectively mean I can't get normal weekend workers again. No students, no part-timers, just people who want to work full time but can't get a regular site, so they're jammed in.

In other words, people worse than I tend to already get.

I'm not sure how this new guy is going to do, but starting in a week we're going to find out.

Today (Sunday), I found Buffalo Kisser working as a security tard at a Future Shop.

I'd gone there to see about getting some better listening apparatus for my mp3 player than the stupid earbuds that came with it (seriously, earbuds are a good idea that just couldn't be implemented properly) and there he was.

Since there was no way to physically just blow past him, we said hi and he kept me pinned there while he told me all about how he worked as a longshoreman. It was mostly as fascinating as you can guess (i.e. not at all), and he said that he did security to fill in the gaps in his weekly schedule. It's for a different company than he used to work for - this is one that seems to be primarily composed of immigrants from India. They get a strange mix of sites, and he bounces around.

He still smells funny - I think it's the ginger aftershave that I don't like. :P

In finding that He-Man clip, I really wish I'd had this at the time:



or, Gord help me, this:

If God intended me to be with one woman, why did he make me so damn fine?

Got in to work yesterday and Eyes & Ears, sitting with three others at a table doing coffee, asked (sharply, for him) "So did your guard even show up last night?"

"He did, lucky for me" I replied.

"Did he show up groaning and holding his sore tummy?"

I laughed. "No, he was coping."

"Not coping very well - I thought to myself 'I wonder how Rimmy's new guard is doing?' so I ran off his access record." Uh oh, I thought.

"And?" I asked.

"He only moved three times all night." Aw shit.

So after enduring (and admittedly, composing) the jokes and taunts of the people sitting at the table, including the observation that with all the guards I go through I'm the one who trains them, I go off and check his records for the rest of the week, with Eyes & Ears standing over me.

The day before - five hits.

The day before that... was me covering because he hadn't shown up at all. Sixty-some hits.

The day before that, his first shift of the week, coming on right after the server room had been going through heating fits and needed emergency ventilation requiring constant monitoring... nine hits. And only three of those were at the server room, and he stopped going there after the first ninety minutes. Sigh.

That sent Eyes & Ears through the roof. "Get rid of him."

So I've got a new guard coming in two weeks - he's the guy that Cookie Monster, my field manager, and a guy from Operations all made a point of asking me if it was okay if he came to my site. But he's on vacation, so Cookie Monster wanted me to hold on to this guy for the two weeks.

So I marshalled my arguments, polished a few choice phrases... and as the guy showed up for his shift so did my field manager, and he proceeded to address it instead and he did it far too lightly.

I added a few things, and clarified (since I knew what I was talking about, and the F/M only sort of did), but that was that.

The guy said that he had no excuse, and it won't happen again.

Eyes & Ears called me this morning - we'd been robbed. So much for me claiming that due to my brilliant leadership since I took over we hadn't been hit even once.

However, it wasn't laptops. There was no broken glass. Nothing sexy.

Lawn furniture.

That's right, you read it correctly.

Granted, it was pricey lawn furniture. Heavy heavy metal furniture that was chained down - out on the back veranda-esque area for the smokers.

And some of it vanished last night. I assume it was scrap metal thieves.

I haven't been in to read the guy's report, but I'll bet there's no mention of it. This makes us look even more (if that's possible) like chumps than we did before. My only hope is that when I'm called on the carpet over it, is that I can point out that we aren't allowed to go outside, and that the bike patrol goons didn't notice it either.

Although Q-tip did - he phoned me while I was talking to Eyes & Ears. He's a good egg, and he said that none of the night guards noticed either.

My horoscope for this week stated Your incredible reflexes, hand-eye coordination, and taciturn nature will cause you to become known throughout the West as The Man Who Handcuffed Lightning But Was Afraid To Talk About His True Feelings. It was less than helpful.

Remind me why I'm still doing this. Anybody?

P.S. My friend Scoob who first dubbed me Rimplestiltstalker some ten or eleven years ago wanted me to let you know about soup options for your child in New York. He recommends Mad Dog 20/20 or Ripple, but advises that Champale just won't cut it.

The fifth coming of Jesus Christ this week shows that I haven't been paying as much attention as I'd thought.

Because I keep forgetting to tell you things. Not interesting thing, mind you. Just things.

Monday night I got a radio call to phone in to the office. This was at about 2230. I was informed that my relief's mommy had called in to say that he had a tummy ache, and wouldn't be coming in tonight.

Ah, joy. It's always fun trying to get someone to come in to work graveyard on little notice.

And I failed.

So I did it myself. Wasn't killer, and luckily one of the cleaners had brought me some chicken from Swiss Chalet (he works there) so I didn't have to chew off my own arm for nourishment.

I got to say hi to a lot of people I don't often get to see, and that was all good. Got to see Cafeteria Lady looking like a spooked cat when she caught sight of me, which was also amusing. You know how when a cat sees something moving way off in the distance, and they snake upwards with huge eyes, going rigid?

Yeah, that's what Cafeteria Lady was doing. Slightly gape-mouthed too. If I moved slightly out of sight (which I did several times to see her do this), she'd move so she could see me. What a weirdo.

Crazy Cougar Receptionist came in on time! Including the four times she did when I did my year of graveyard, that makes five times! I was sitting at my desk, reading (had four minutes to go on the shift - it's not like I was going to crack off a patrol) when she came in. She had a big (fake of course) smile on her face and her mouth open to greet me, then she realized I wasn't the usual guy and her mouth clamped shut with an audible clomp. She then turned and pretended to fuss with her bag while she dealt with her confusion, since she's not exactly quick on her feet.

Also, in the HR manager's office on his bookshelf I noticed what I thought was a board game. It had a few people in heroic poses on the box, and I could make out the word "Super". So I flicked on the lights to see what game it was.

Super Visors can keep your company union-free

That's what it was. A box set of videos. Displayed openly like that. Hardcore!

Oh, and because I keep trying (and failing) to find a video of Science Ninja Big Ten doing their thing for Fictional Correspondant, here's a video of their keyboardist, Ghastly, playing on his hubjo. Enjoy



Sadly, I'm sure I had more things in mind that I'd forgotten to blog, but they seem to have escaped my mind, closed as it is. Sorry. :P

EDIT: turns out that I can find something from Science Ninja Big Ten, although it's a cover and not something of their own. But... and thank you YouTube, here it is:

New evils require new remedies... new sanctions to defend and vindicate the eternal principle of right and wrong

Dicegimp's gone from the site - did I forget to blog that?

Well, he is. Oh, happy day! :D

Mind you, he tells everybody he got a promotion and is making an extra four bucks an hour, but when they ask about the site he says "I'm not allowed to say."

Which of course is another way of saying "I don't want to tell you anything that will let you verify I'm lying." Hee!

Note that this "promotion" came suspiciously close to the date he was caught stealing garbage by his supervisor, as I mentioned before. Surely it's a coincidence.

Another fun thing that happened at the site happened a couple of Mondays ago. A panic button had previously been pressed in one of the tenant's suites (not mine). They're moving out, and the thing got bumped. So a police cruiser shows up, and all is well.

Then it happened again, and this is the fun one.

Rather than bothering to go inside and confirm, they set up outside. They ignored the site guard (Q-tip) and called for backup. There was in excess of twenty cars, at least two dog teams, police setting up with long guns across the road and at sites at a distance but essentially surrounding the building. A helicopter was diverted to the area.

After about three quarters of an hour of this nonsense, someone thinks to go inside. "We're all clear, we can disperse." Morons.

I went and saw The Illusionist last weekend. It was ace.

Good mood, good camera angles, and once again I realize I think that Edward Norton is a great actor, whatever he does. For some reason I always forget that inbetween movies, but once again it's confirmed.

Plus, the movie inspired me for a roleplaying game I'm semi-inserting myself in. That's good stuff.

And this weekend I finally dragged myself to see A Scanner Darkly, which I've meant to see for some time. And it was a reasonably good adaptation of the book, which I enjoyed.

Even better, I came out introspective AND slightly dialed out of reality, which I definitely enjoy. And as I came out of the theatre on Granville, and looked from the ramparts of the mighty scratching the sky down to the filth and the downtrodden on the streets below, I felt my own head shuddering slightly as the hemispheres of my brain sang their competing songs.

And all I wanted was to get those albino shapshifting lizard bitches for only selling me nine gears on the eighteen speed bike.

I used to think it was awful that life was so unfair. Then I thought, would it be much worse if life were fair, and all the terrible things that happen to us come because we actually deserve them? So now I take great comfort in the general hostility and unfairness of the universe.

Okay, I'm done. :P

The face of dumbfuck

Kimveer Gill

In case you hadn't already seen the pic, this is the guy that shot some twenty people at Dawson College on Wednesday.

I'm not going to go on about how shooting people is wrong, because you either already know that or you're not bright enough to read. I'm not going to go on about how immigrants come to Canada and don't respect our laws, because that's a pointless argument. Mostly because even though his name is foreign (Punjabi name), it doesn't mean his family hasn't been here for generations.

I won't go on about him having a mohawk. No word yet if he wore copious amounts of gold and drove a black van with a red stripe.

I'm not going to compare him to Marc Lepine, since at this point the only thing they have in common is shooting, Montreal, and a school.

Lord knows I'm not going to mention Columbine. School + shooting does not automatically equal Columbine.

I'm not going to go on about the only video clip I could find online about the news last night (streamed from a late-night worker's machine while I was at work) was on CNN, even though it clearly said Global up on the top right. Global didn't have the clip, nor did CBC or anybody else.

I also won't bandy about how in the clip (there were a couple of them, actually) the reporters would stick their microphone into someone's face and ask "How did it make you feel when you saw people being shot?" or "Were you scared when the shooter pointed his gun at you?". Why even ask that? What are people supposed to say, "Naw man. When I finish school I'm hoping to get work as a pencil, so I was just thinking 'Hey, free lead!'" Idiots.

No need for me to go on about how the guy lived with his parents and yet still had a few guns.

Ditto with him posting on http://www.vampirefreaks.com/ using the handle `Trench'. Nor the tossup from that site over which will be the most overused soundbite in the days to come - that he wrote "You will come to know him as the Angel of Death" or "Work sucks ... School sucks ... Life sucks ... What else can I say? Metal and Goth kick ass. Life is like a video game, you gotta die sometime."

Also, Goth doesn't equal "dangerous weirdo".

No, out of all this, specifically the video clips (of which there are now more, including one taken on a cell phone from inside as the police advance) what seems to be sticking out is that everybody is mentioning the trenchcoat the guy is wearing.

I've heard it (once) compared that the assailants at Columbine wore trenchcoats. I've heard insinuations that it's somehow part of the madness that the guy was wearing one. Here's a theory for you:

THE GUY WAS CARRYING THREE GUNS - WHAT THE FUCK DO YOU EXPECT HIM TO WEAR? SPANDEX?!

One watt fuckwits.Sorry, but the reporters and commentators seem to have got on my pecs. And it's not like you expected to get insightful opinions on my blog, did you?

One final thought: Kimveer shot twenty people, and one of them died. Not to make light of Anastasia De Sousa's death, but that's a pathetic ratio. And I'm glad it was so pathetic, don't get me wrong.

But he could have got the same result if, instead of choosing death by cop, he'd just gone out into the woods and shot himself.

Floor 106, you ARE the weakest link. Goodbye!

Okay, so I'm insensitive. It must be because I'm jealous of the US way of life or something. Let's get this out of the way:

THE MONEY SHOT

cue ridiculous music

Where were you, when the towers came down?

I was sleeping. I'd stayed up late playing Red Alert 2 online, and I wasn't working. I also didn't have a tv or radio - by choice. When I woke up, I went to the computer as usual and popped up my browser to do my usual morning surfing routine. Back then I had yahoo.com as my homepage, and in place of the usual various news stories were a bunch of near-identical headlines about a plane or two hitting the World Trade Center towers. I refreshed a couple of times, and then went on to read my usual web comics and forums.

After all of that, I went back to the active news headlines on Yahoo. And they were still talking about planes hitting the WTC. So I called up my brother to tell him that some hacker had switched all the headlines on Yahoo and (whatever other headline site I used to go to back then - I can't remember which). I was amused.

My brother had a tv. He informed me that it was real, that he'd seen it on the tube. Cleverly calculating that it would indeed be quite a hacking feat to hack the tv (Captain Midnight, where are you?), I concluded that it must be true.

So, inbetween games of RA2 I trolled the newsfeeds to figure out what the hell was actually going on. And I learned lots of interesting stuff.

That it was an accident, that it was a hijacking. That there were as many as a dozen planes over the continental US that were currently on course for collisions, that the US Air Force had shot down at least one jetliner.

I heard the death toll was over 10000 at one point. That's ten thousand.

The names and pictures of the hijackers appeared suspiciously quickly, especially considering that they'd used false names. The name Osama or Usama bin Laden got bandied around, along with a series of pictures of bearded men.

A bunch of firefighters died. Police too. A cloud of asbestos and other garbage rolled over New York City.

Unlucky.

Flights were grounded, everywhere. People scurried about like ants. I know people in Calgary who were security guards that got assigned to gatehouses at fuel processing plants because "the terrorists could hit here".

"Anthrax" starting going through the mail. Or rather, a whole lot of white powder was being mailed in envelopes. Not exactly the best delivery method for anthrax, especially when it turns out to be corn starch, dishwashing soap, and other harmless semi-inert material.

People became afraid to open envelopes.

The news (mostly US news, really) kept this going, telling people that the WTC impacts were just the beginning, that it was going to happen everywhere. That terrorists were going to hit population centres with dirty bombs (which are explosive bombs containing radioactive material as their payload - the bomb explodes and scatters the radiologicals so that people get sick over time. It's not a nuclear weapon with a highly explosive yield) and biological (usually anthrax) agents.

People began to duct tape polyurethane sheets over their windows. Some even laid in supplies of paper dust masks.

A whole lot of people changed the way they lived day to day, even if it was just being nervous when they heard a plane overhead. Or avoiding public places like city centres or shopping malls.

The US federal goverment uses the WTC incident as a pretext to crack down on civil liberties in the form of the PATRIOT Act, along with other policies which continue to this day.

A few things I want to comment on at this point:

The US had done nothing to deserve being attacked!

This is a stretch for anybody, even a diehard "patriot" with an IQ not to exceed the current outdoor temperature.

The US keeps active military all over the world. There are armed warplanes flying over countries that never agreed to allow them, there are carrier groups that consider anything withing their range to be essentially US territory, and there are US troops telling citizens where they can and can't go in their own countries.

US business interests, especially in resource exportation, is horrific. Usually a country, or at least the people in the immediate area, end up in a worse state when an outside country (not just the US, but the US is everywhere) starts pumping oil, or finds some element or compound worth taking. Environmental concerns and human rights fall by the wayside. Pick a country that you would consider to be third world (although since the fall of the Soviet Union, who uses that term anymore?) and google it with an eye for "foreign business". You'll get the gist.

Even down to the world's perception of US tourists, the stereotype of which is "dumb, fat, and disrespectful of local customs".

There's a lot of hatred amongst the victims of US hubris. And a lot of it is perfectly understandable.

And if you live in a place where a US warplane had dropped munitions, you have some fairly reasonable justification to be pissed off. If Argentina flew over your town and blew up the supermarket on double coupon day, you might nurse a bit of a grudge yourself.

Fine, but hijacking planes and flying them into the World Trade Center towers wasn't revenge against the military - it was the murder of innocent civilians!

I'll give you that, it was murder. But... the US calls itself a democracy, or rather a federal republic, but still a democracy. Which means that the government is "of the people, for the people". Which means that citizens are responsible for their government, and its actions.

Using this view, there aren't any "innocent civilians", especially from the outlook of someone not from such a society.

And beyond that, it's the US money-making machine (economy) that drives all this nonsense foreign policy, and in many ways that centered on... the WTC. It was stuffed with government organizations and groups you'd associate mentally with Wall Street.

And they were big towers. If you've only got one non-comprehensive attack planned, going for a symbolic target makes sense. And hitting the church of the US's god, money, is fitting.

Not that I agree with all of that, just that it makes a certain amount of sense.

Things I find interesting:

There were apparently a whole lot of stock transfers (unusual ones, and great volumes) just before the towers were hit. Does this imply that large stockholders had some foreknowledge?

By all accounts, actively flying a large passenger jet is difficult, especially doing high speed maneuvers. And yet apparently all of the people alleged to have piloted those planes into their targets were non-flyers before taking a few months-long course.

The calls from people on the planes. I remember this bothered me right from the start. Because cell phones lock on to microwave towers and each cell phone has a short range, usually what happens when you're driving along is that you get passed from tower to tower.

But in a fast-moving low-flying aircraft, you'd be switching towers really fast. Like, too fast for the system to keep up. With some altitude, I could see it. But at less than 2000 feet? Unlikely.

How in the hell did a plane, even one filled to the brim with fuel, take down one of those buildings? By all accounts, it shouldn't have worked, impact and subsequent fire be damned.

And not to be a conspiracy nut, although I do tend to think that there are always motives and influences we don't see, but with good quality video you can see floor-wide flashes in the buildings, at various spaced levels, both after and before the planes impact. Preset explosives?

Where's the debris from the Pentagon impact? There was a perfectly round hole, in an area that was under renovation, and had no critical offices in it, with no sign of wings or tail. The damage and lack of debris is consistant with a missile strike, people other than myself have noted, and I agree. Where's the video showing the damned plane? There's a three frame clip that was released a year or two after the event showing a scene, followed by a blurred shadow (too small for a jetliner), and then an explosion. Bah.

Why was all the video footage from everything around the area confiscated by the government? Why were radio and radar logs taken?

Sigh. Beats the piss out of me.

Meanwhile, CIA-trained and armed Osama bin Laden was the pretext for going to war in Afghanistan. A supposed link between him and Saddam Hussein (also US-trained and armed) was the justification for going to war in Iraq, along with (disputed by those whose job it was to know) "proof" of weapons of mass destruction.

So, the death count for the US military during these operations has exceeded the death count of people in the WTC. The death count of people in those named countries is far higher, possibly because of the "blow up the fruit market to kill one guy, who we think might be in there" tactics of the US.

The world is an even more unstable place, with new grievances created to fuel the next several generations of violence. Civil liberties in the US and abroad are stripped.

I wouldn't compare the US to Nazi Germany, but there's definitely more than a whiff of totalitarianism wafting from the direction. And as a nextdoor neighbour, that's bad news for me.

So in conclusion, if you want to remember the people that died on 2001-09-11, more power to you. If you use it as a rallying point or justification for anything, you're a twit.

I didn't want to make this an analysis of all the events and people involved, mostly because I'm incredibly lazy, but I will leave you with this article, which I'll reproduce in full in case you are afraid that if you click, the terrorists will get you. Don't worry, it has absolutely nothing to do with what happened in the US on September 11, 2001.

U.S. Military Wanted to Provoke War With Cuba

Book: U.S. Military Drafted Plans to Terrorize U.S. Cities to Provoke War With Cuba

By David Ruppe
abc News

N E W Y O R K, May 1, 2001 In the early 1960s, America's top military leaders reportedly drafted plans to kill innocent people and commit acts of terrorism in U.S. cities to create public support for a war against Cuba.

Code named Operation Northwoods, the plans reportedly included the possible assassination of Cuban émigrés, sinking boats of Cuban refugees on the high seas, hijacking planes, blowing up a U.S. ship, and even orchestrating violent terrorism in U.S. cities.

The plans were developed as ways to trick the American public and the international community into supporting a war to oust Cuba's then new leader, communist Fidel Castro.
America's top military brass even contemplated causing U.S. military casualties, writing: "We could blow up a U.S. ship in Guantanamo Bay and blame Cuba," and, "casualty lists in U.S. newspapers would cause a helpful wave of national indignation."

Details of the plans are described in Body of Secrets (Doubleday), a new book by investigative reporter James Bamford about the history of America's largest spy agency, the National Security Agency. However, the plans were not connected to the agency, he notes.

The plans had the written approval of all of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and were presented to President Kennedy's defense secretary, Robert McNamara, in March 1962. But they apparently were rejected by the civilian leadership and have gone undisclosed for nearly 40 years.

"These were Joint Chiefs of Staff documents. The reason these were held secret for so long is the Joint Chiefs never wanted to give these up because they were so embarrassing," Bamford told ABCNEWS.com.

"The whole point of a democracy is to have leaders responding to the public will, and here this is the complete reverse, the military trying to trick the American people into a war that they want but that nobody else wants."

Gunning for War

The documents show "the Joint Chiefs of Staff drew up and approved plans for what may be the most corrupt plan ever created by the U.S. government," writes Bamford.

The Joint Chiefs even proposed using the potential death of astronaut John Glenn during the first attempt to put an American into orbit as a false pretext for war with Cuba, the documents show.

Should the rocket explode and kill Glenn, they wrote, "the objective is to provide irrevocable proof … that the fault lies with the Communists et all Cuba [sic]."

The plans were motivated by an intense desire among senior military leaders to depose Castro, who seized power in 1959 to become the first communist leader in the Western Hemisphere — only 90 miles from U.S. shores.

The earlier CIA-backed Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba by Cuban exiles had been a disastrous failure, in which the military was not allowed to provide firepower.The military leaders now wanted a shot at it.

"The whole thing was so bizarre," says Bamford, noting public and international support would be needed for an invasion, but apparently neither the American public, nor the Cuban public, wanted to see U.S. troops deployed to drive out Castro.

Reflecting this, the U.S. plan called for establishing prolonged military — not democratic — control over the island nation after the invasion.

"That's what we're supposed to be freeing them from," Bamford says. "The only way we would have succeeded is by doing exactly what the Russians were doing all over the world, by imposing a government by tyranny, basically what we were accusing Castro himself of doing."

'Over the Edge'

The Joint Chiefs at the time were headed by Eisenhower appointee Army Gen. Lyman L. Lemnitzer, who, with the signed plans in hand made a pitch to McNamara on March 13, 1962, recommending Operation Northwoods be run by the military.

Whether the Joint Chiefs' plans were rejected by McNamara in the meeting is not clear. But three days later, President Kennedy told Lemnitzer directly there was virtually no possibility of ever using overt force to take Cuba, Bamford reports. Within months, Lemnitzer would be denied another term as chairman and transferred to another job.

The secret plans came at a time when there was distrust in the military leadership about their civilian leadership, with leaders in the Kennedy administration viewed as too liberal, insufficiently experienced and soft on communism. At the same time, however, there real were concerns in American society about their military overstepping its bounds.

There were reports U.S. military leaders had encouraged their subordinates to vote conservative during the election.

And at least two popular books were published focusing on a right-wing military leadership pushing the limits against government policy of the day.

The Senate Foreign Relations Committee published its own report on right-wing extremism in the military, warning a "considerable danger" in the "education and propaganda activities of military personnel" had been uncovered. The committee even called for an examination of any ties between Lemnitzer and right-wing groups. But Congress didn't get wind of Northwoods, says Bamford.

"Although no one in Congress could have known at the time," he writes, "Lemnitzer and the Joint Chiefs had quietly slipped over the edge."

Even after Lemnitzer was gone, he writes, the Joint Chiefs continued to plan "pretext" operations at least through 1963.

One idea was to create a war between Cuba and another Latin American country so that the United States could intervene. Another was to pay someone in the Castro government to attack U.S. forces at the Guantanamo naval base — an act, which Bamford notes, would have amounted to treason. And another was to fly low level U-2 flights over Cuba, with the intention of having one shot down as a pretext for a war.

"There really was a worry at the time about the military going off crazy and they did, but they never succeeded, but it wasn't for lack of trying," he says.

After 40 Years

Ironically, the documents came to light, says Bamford, in part because of the 1992 Oliver Stone film JFK, which examined the possibility of a conspiracy behind the assassination of President Kennedy.

As public interest in the assassination swelled after JFK's release, Congress passed a law designed to increase the public's access to government records related to the assassination.

The author says a friend on the board tipped him off to the documents.

Afraid of a congressional investigation, Lemnitzer had ordered all Joint Chiefs documents related to the Bay of Pigs destroyed, says Bamford. But somehow, these remained.

"The scary thing is none of this stuff comes out until 40 years after," says Bamford.