Shannon Larratt is Zentastic

I want to put a tiki design on the next BBQ shirt… I can draw one I imagine, but I was hoping that someone else would volunteer to do this design. I'm looking for a tiki head loosly based on the BME logo. If anyone is up to it, please send ideas to glider@bmezine.com. Here are some very crappy doodles I just did. I am also very open to Mexican wrestler mask designs if anyone feels inspired on that path as well…

Since people seem to be forgetting it lately, let me remind them that IAM is not an indie-rock or other youth culture site. It is a body modification site. If that's not your primary interest here and it's not what got you here, you are in the wrong place. I'm getting very very sick of seeing pages make it quite clear that the person involved doesn't give a damn about body modification (unless it's their star tattoo or old school design of the month which isn't really a tattoo — it's just a part of the “uniform” they've been tricked into wearing).

IAM is for the members of BME, and it's clear that it's moving away from that due to the influx of non-BME readers; users that moved over from other community sites, etc… Now I'm even having to deal with the fact that many of those people are buying memberships for their friends who have nothing to do with BME. I've thought about it for a while, and I've eliminated paid IAM memberships. Yes, it means I'll have to generate more revenue elsewhere to support IAM, but I don't need the headache of these idiots flooding the site.

If anyone has productive feedback on how to (a) keep these people off the site, and (b) generate the revenue required to support the site, please feel free to pipe up in the whatever forum… But I'm not interested in getting into a “but these members are good for the site” debate; this not a general community site. It is a “specialty” community site and I do not want it to stray from that.

Let's talk first just about things we know so as to set the scene of the story. We know that in the US “faked” the Tonkin Gulf Incident, along with a slew of other fabrications in order to convince the American people to both launch and stay in an unjust war. Yes, it did help American corporations, but it killed and maimed and kept on killing an maiming.

• About 60,000 Americans (almost a third of whom were married, and 61% who were 21 or under) were killed in the war.
• Add to that the 75,000 who were severely disabled.
• Over 30% of those that died were drafted.
• The US dropped 300 pounds of explosive into Vietnam for every man, woman, and child (that's 22 tons per square mile), killing in the end between one and three million Vietnamese, depending on who's numbers you use. This includes things like the carpet bombing of My Lai which killed over 300,000 civilians (yeah, that's not as bad as killing 3,000 Americans with an airplane, right?).
• After Saigon fell, 1.7 million Cambodians were killed. I don't know if this can be directly counted, but certainly indirectly it can be. That said, in 1970-1973, American bombs killed more than 150,000 Cambodians without any help from the Vietnamese.

Anyway, all of the above is very easy for anyone to confirm from even the most mainstream of sources… None of it is conspiratorial or particularly up for historical debate. So… We know that the US government is willing to kill tens of thousands of its own people, and millions of people in other countries, if it serves the interests of American corporations (and the war machine). We know this because it's happened.

Vietnam is only one example; I could list dozens more.

According to the latest satellite photos of the Udeid air base in Qatar, American build up for a war against Iraq is proceeding quickly. In the past ten years, America has already killed something like a million Iraqis, both directly and indirectly via sanctions, and continues killing them — remember, during the Gulf War the US fired almost a million depleted uranium shells into often civilian areas… Now the soldiers that did it have “Gulf War Syndrome”, and the families in the area that survived have birth defects well past what they should statistically expect.

Anyway, I'm going off on a tangent. The point is, America will keep doing this as long as one of the two following things happen:

1. You, the American people, stop it.
2. America goes bankrupt and fails as a nation.

One of the above two will happen. It's up to you which one. These attacks and those that follow will be crippling to the US no matter what the outcome, and unless you like the idea of living in poverty ruled my megarich overlords (oh wait, we already are), you must at a minimum contact your congressman (the EFF has a good page on it as well) and demand that no unjust attacks be launched on Iraq.

And before you begin with a [patriotic] “but if we don't stop Saddam…” type rant, remember that the only people behind the attack are the fat cats — every political expert, every military expert, the UN, every weapons inspector, and even Iraqi rebels who are fighting to overthrow Saddam think that a US attack is a horrible idea — only the ["I hope the US throws us some scraps"] British are sort-of behind it as well. The attack is there to keep you poor and to keep them rich. Oversimplied, that is the only reason.

This is unrelated, but I thought it deserved a link; I mentioned it before but it was just in Berkowitz's column:

Scene One: Bombs exploding on the mountainsides of Afghanistan.
Narrator: “This is the bombing of Afghanistan.”

Scene Two: US bombs hitting several Afghan villages. Dead men, women and children litter the streets.
Narrator: “This is the bombing of Afghanistan, on drugs.”

Well, back to work for me…