Patrick M Brennan

My web hosting service, like most such services, provides a facility for me to view this site’s statistics, such as how many times the site is visited, which pages are the most popular, etc. (In case you’re wondering, my site doesn’t generate a huge amount of traffic, but there does seem to be a more-or-less regular readership. Thanks, Mom!)

In the very detailed report which my hosting service delivers to me on a daily basis, one of the more interesting headings is called “Search Strings". Did you know that when you type a search term or a set of search terms into Google, or Yahoo, or wherever, your search strings can be passed along to any page that you access by clicking on the links that the search engine displays to you? I didn’t know that, either, and apparently the details of how your search terms are encoded into the referring page’s URL vary with each search engine, so my hosting service can’t deliver a comprehensive report of the search terms which have led people to my site. Still, the ones which do arrive provide an interesting glimpse into the minds of at least some of my visitors. (For example, that most people still haven’t learned how to use quotes to group their search terms. But I digress.) Judge for yourself:

• “asian religious text that predicted the tsunami tribe moves to”: Looking to convert?
• “dell sony bank of america boycott abortion”: Ah, yes. Dell, Sony, and Bank of America. Bring them down, and you end the scourge of abortion forever!
• “george bush on the issue of evolution the verdict is still out”: It’s hard to tell where this person stands on the issue, but at least he knows where George stands.
• Current Favorite - “help me humiliate my husband”: Sorry, lady, I can’t help you.

“Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away".
         – Philip K. Dick

A car carrying a father, a mother, and their children was stopped by US gunfire yesterday as the car approached an Army foot patrol. The mother and the father were killed by machine-gun fire; several of the children were wounded. There were no weapons on or in the car.

Here’s a question, especially for the Republicans out there: As the children in that car heard the bullets flying all around them, as they watched their mother die and their father absorb “so many bullets that his skull had collapsed, leaving his body grotesquely disfigured”, what emotion do you suppose they felt? Might it have been … terror?

Let Freedom Reign!

So some children saw their parents gunned down in front of their eyes, but hey, says the US military, it was their own fault. And there, in microcosm, is the whole fucking war: blow some shit up, kill a bunch of people, blame them for their own deaths, and when they resent that, push the boot down harder. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat…

“But we’re not there as conquerors – we’re there as liberators,” I hear you saying. Sure, we just liberated some kids from their parents, just like we’ve liberated thousands and thousands of Iraqis from their loved ones, their homes, their security, their health, and their lives. You think that makes them love us?

If you voted for W, you voted for this. Are you enjoying your war?