I mentioned this is a comment, and was asked to diary it.

Short diary, but a pretty goddam nasty subject.

The crowd is getting ugly. Soldiers roll up in a Hummer. Suddenly, the whole right half of your body is screaming in agony. You feel like you've been dipped in molten lava. You almost faint from shock and pain, but instead you stumble backwards -- and then start running. To your surprise, everyone else is running too. In a few seconds, the street is completely empty.

You've just been hit with a new nonlethal weapon that has been certified for use in Iraq -- even though critics argue there may be unforeseen effects.

According to documents obtained for Wired News under federal sunshine laws, the Air Force's Active Denial System, or ADS, has been certified safe after lengthy tests by military scientists in the lab and in war games.

As we venture into full-on election season, we know that DKos (and Kos) has been getting a great deal of publicity. It has been vilified and deified. It has been given the status of kingmaker and of a hypocritical voice in the wilderness.

Ironically, it has been called an oppressor.

As expected, we are starting to get a fair number of diaries from high UIDs that have, shall we say, a certain "spoiler" quality to them.

Sometime today, my diaries disappeared, including a couple upon which I worked very, very hard.

Short diary, I'll delete it, but there's no open thread, so here goes...

OMG...Too horrible to contemplate.

After I read this blog, I just knew that I had to find out if they had gone the other way.

God help me...they have.

New 'Anti-Abortion Pill' Kills Mother, Leaves Fetus Alive

May 10, 2006 | Issue 42*19

NEW YORK--Pro-life advocates celebrated approval of the new anti-abortion drug UR-86 by the Food and Drug Administration Tuesday, calling it a "safe and effective method" for terminating pregnant women while leaving their unborn children unharmed.

This is simply a page that I put together when I was exploring the concept of "Social Infrastructure." It is really not much more than a publishing of a raw stream of consciousness. I don't diary very often, and won't usually go out of my way to create a diary. This just happened to be something I had put together for the heck of it, and I just dumped it into this diary. There's a ton more that can be written about this subject. Maybe I'll write more. Maybe not. I don't know if I really need to keep this up. I think I got my thoughts together on this.

NOTE: I had put this in a comment, but figured it could rate a diary for the record. Since I'm lazy, and diary only every now and then, I figured "what the hell"...

Before he was injured, Corporal Jason Poole had planned to become a teacher. He now hopes to volunteer at a school or perhaps work as a teacher's aide.

I just can't stand hearing about how this war isn't like Vietnam. Sure, there's less mud and bamboo, but there's lots of dead, and even worse, there's the people who don't die.

Thanks to modern technology, the death rate in Iraq is less than Vietnam. But it would be a whole different story if it weren't for this medical technology.

These are people who were young, vibrant, hopeful and looking forward to life when they signed up, and are now learning things like how to ride a bus and buy chewing gum.

I've had a fun couple of weeks learning that there is virtually no difference between the DKos community and almost every other Internet community in which I have participated.

Well, I'll be back at work tomorrow, and will be devoting considerably less time to this forum.

It's been interesting, but I'd strongly suggest that people planning on attending YKos start being nicer to each other, or the convention is likely to be punctuated by numerous fistfights.

I think that we all have a lot more in common than we have differences.

Below the fold, read an old post that I wrote up for another community that wound up imploding under the sheer nastiness of its denizens. Kind of like what's happening to the Republican party.

What the heck, I'll start the year with a diary. I don't do too many of these, but this seems like a fairly reasonable topic.

One of the keys to the Republican juggernaut has been a tremendous "lockstep" that affects the party from the very highest, to the very lowest. They use business tactics, heavy on branding and marketing, coupled with an iron-fisted discipline.

Keep Reading...

[Update]: I changed the title, because it really isn't the same thing as the NPR series. That was not a good choice on my part.

I had responded to a comment with one of my usual windbag pontifications, and it was suggested that I "diary" it (We are modifying the English language as we go here, folks).

I thought about it, and agree that, for this kind of thing, why not.

It is a "bullet point" list of personal beliefs. I don't know about anyone else, but it was actually a good excercise for me to do this.

In many ways, I actually hold conservative beliefs. In many other ways, I have some pretty radical beliefs.

The important thing is that I do have beliefs. None of these conflict with each other. If they seem to, then look closer.

I do think that my beliefs are the result of the Forge of Life Experience, and reflect an interesting and varied life.

Without further ado...

...filet Neocons.

I always make The Daily Rotten a regular stop on my day's browsing.
The stories are often crude and tasteless, but every now and then, we get a good one.
The chap who runs the site is an admitted not nice guy, but he is rather eloquent. He has a style that renders these bios as ROTFL.

I did not author this. It was sent to me by email, with no attribution.
I just thought that it was well worth sharing.
Maybe we could add to it...