NO KIDDING! We have RAY GUNS we can use on Iraqis, if we want!

So, I like figured out how to work the On Demand thing on my cable TV, and it's like really cool because you can watch like movies or tv shows "on demand", like whenever you want--it's kind of like TIVO but it's not as cool as TIVO, because it's only the shit that they want to give you for free plus some "premium" movies that you would never pay to see in the first place anyway like some shit with David Spade or something.

Anyway, I got into the "On Demand" thing and all I could get on the fucking channel was this olden days pilgrim movie bullshit, it's called "The Constable" or something like that and I left it on cause it said in the Maltin Movie Guide it had teenage witches--but get this: it had Winona Ryder in it and at the beginning of the movie she goes out into the woods in the middle of the night with her olden days pilgrim girlfriends and they RIP open a CHICKEN and smear its BLOOD, and then one of them takes off her dress and GETS NAKED but it was too dark in the woods for me to see whether it was Winona or not, and it was too dark in my living room too, so I got up to see closer on the TV and then Winona's father the olden days minister showed up and broke up the whole girl-girl thing because he was the minister and that was the last "witchy-naked" kind of thing they did in the movie!

No more naked witches, no more special effects, nothing. Just Winona and Daniel Day fucking Lewis yelling at each other in Thanksgiving costumes. The rest of the movie was just some kind of heavy talky bullshit pilgrim metaphor for the political climate in the McCarthy era.

Big fucking deal. So I turned off the TV and started to "surf the net,"--and look what I found! We've got fucking ray guns we can use in Iraq now, if we want to! Do you believe this shit? I shit you not!

Aug 29, 5:03 PM EDT
Pentagon Nixes Ray Gun Weapon in Iraq

By RICHARD LARDNER
Associated Press Writer


WASHINGTON (AP) -- (In 2003) U.S. commanders were telling Washington that many civilian casualties could be avoided by using a new non-lethal weapon developed over the past decade.

Military leaders repeatedly and urgently requested - and were denied - the device, which uses energy beams instead of bullets and lets soldiers break up unruly crowds without firing a shot.

It's a ray gun that neither kills nor maims, but the Pentagon has refused to deploy it out of concern that the weapon itself might be seen as a torture device.

Perched on a Humvee or a flatbed truck, the Active Denial System gives people hit by the invisible beam the sense that their skin is on fire. They move out of the way quickly and without injury.

(HO. LEE. SHIT. Do you be-leeeeeeve this shit?)

On April 30, 2003, two days after the first Fallujah incident, Gene McCall, then the top scientist at Air Force Space Command in Colorado, typed out a two-sentence e-mail to Gen. Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

"I am convinced that the tragedy at Fallujah would not have occurred if an Active Denial System had been there," McCall told Myers, according to the e-mail obtained by AP. The system should become "an immediate priority," McCall said.

...McCall, who retired from government in November 2003, remains convinced the system would have saved lives in Iraq.

"How this has been handled is kind of a national scandal," McCall said by telephone from his home in Florida.

(You bet your sweet ass it is, Professor McCall. We have ray guns and we're NOT using them? WHAT KIND OF FUCKING BULLSHIT IS THAT!?)

A few months after McCall's message, in August 2003, Richard Natonski, a Marine Corps brigadier general who had just returned from Iraq, filed an "urgent" request with officials in Washington for the energy-beam device.

The device would minimize what Natonski described as the "CNN Effect" - the instantaneous relay of images depicting U.S. troops as aggressors.

(YOU BET YOUR SWEET ASS IT WOULD, General Natonski! We would look like friggin' starshoop trippers or something, getting out of our Humvees with our ray guns firing invisible fucking rays to convince Shi'ites and Sunnis they were on fire, it would be like WAR OF THE FUCKING WORLDS, and the only thing that could stop us would be the tiny common cold, which Good God, in his wisdom, put here on the earth--but until we all catch cold we could be ray-gunning their asses over there, with a cool sound effect like on Space 1999, like "nihnihnihnihnihnin--" or "eeeeeeeeeeee"--you're telling me that CNN wouldn't be all over THAT?)

The main reason the tool has been missing in action is public perception. With memories of the Abu Ghraib prison scandal still fresh, the Pentagon is reluctant to give troops a space-age device that could be misconstrued as a torture machine.

(WHAT? Has the United States of America become so impossibly pussed out that we cannot use our own RAY GUNS, now that we have finally got them? How is this worse than anything we are already using over there? This will save lives, Goddammit, the lives of everyone of the 437 crew members on this ship! It will save the lives of insurgents! When they hear we have ray guns now, they will SHIT themselves and be to embarrassed to come out and fight!)