Went to the Re-Use Center yesterday to see if there were any diamonds-in-the-rough for travel luggage... picked up a couple random things, but found this in one of the pockets of a bag:
Somewhere in the back of my mind, there's a teenager who won't stop giggling. ("heh... they said 'bone' ")
Came home to a funny burnt plastic smell the other day. Everything was still on, no fuses blown, couldn't really find anything. Not until days later, shuffling things on the shelf and bumping cables that the IKEA Sansa lights went out. Hmm... what do we have here? Ah, a burnt stub falls out of the transformer.
Great, just fucking awesome. That lump on the end of the wire? That was the white nylon-ish screw terminal - you can see the other one still intact. It burnt itself up, and still kept working. It doesn't creep me out that it burnt, it creeps me out that whatever caused it to burn would still be powered up, and supplying current to the lights, and potentially continuing to heat things.
Fucking IKEA. Shiny things, cheap prices... this is what I get for it.
After the house fire years ago, it took a while to start trusting consumer electronics again. This, well, this makes me leery all over again. I'm not going to flee to the woods or anything, but... damn.
Ok, I'll admit it, it's out of perverse curiosity. That's the best reason I can come up with. I do this every now and then... knowing it's propaganda, I figured I'd see what people are spewing these days. Sometimes I'll turn on the radio late at night when driving through the bible belt, other times I'll wish I could get those guys in the bow ties to sell me a copy of The Final Call.
But this time, it was something that arrived along with all the other crap-vertisements in my mailbox, at some point weeks or months ago. A DVD - Obsession: Radical Islam's War Against the West.
So I watched the DVD. The parallels are really quite striking... between the rhetoric in Obsession, and the rhetoric of the Religious Right. Heck, between the rhetoric that Obsession deries, and the way they decry it:
From Obsession: "If you want to get people to fight, you have make them think there's a threat and they're in danger." hunh... no kidding. So... how is what they're (arbitrary "they") doing different from what you're doing? It's all rhetoric of fear to me. Es ist mir Wurst. ("it's sausage to me" - German phrase meaning: enh. whatever. same difference.)
This, along with the montage earlier that plays the "Tuesday morning, World Trade Center, NYC.... Thursday morning, Madrid train bombing... Thursday afternoon, London bombing... (some other day of the week) Beslan School - 200 children killed" What bugs me most? That the Beslan thing was so not a religious terrorist attack, but a nationalist seperatist group, and the deaths were caused by the Russian security forces and their misuse of tranquilizer gas during the standoff.
They compare the propaganda and global domination aspirations to Nazi Germany. They even interview a former Hitler Youth guy (now in his 70s) who, after montage of thronging masses at a rally, says "Now can you imagine: we were enlightened people, and we fell for this. Why wouldn't muslims fall for this." Nice one, buddy. "enlightened people"? Apparently you're not so enlightened, given that you seem to be a bigoted prick who considers himself superior to anyone who isn't like him. No surprise you were in the Hitler Youth.
The filmmakers hype up the way that mullahs preach about the divine blow to the enemies of Islam, and how eventually Islam will conquer the world. Hunh. Sounds a lot like what I saw in Jesus Camp.
More "death to the infidel", just this time, it's whitey screaming it from the rooftops calling for Jesus to conquer the world. More of the same, more of the same.
I look back on the time I spent watching this crap and wonder why I do it. I knew what kind of crap it was, and I watched it anyway. I guess I've got it out of my system now, but perverse curiosity has it's way with me every now and then.
