Survival

Who are these guys? Taliban? PKK? Al-Queda? A Saudi rap group?
Nope.
They are NASA trainees, photographed after a Death Valley survival vacation.

This might be a good time to brush up on your survivalist skills- it seems as if the end times are just around the corner...what else is new, right?

The current state of martial law in Pakistan is troubling, to say the least. Pakistani president 'Pervy' Mushareef's sham government is teetering on the brink of collapse, with radical Islamic fundamentalists poised to take power- we know from our own history that when the religious lunatics take over government, the first thing they do is start wars. One need look no further than our current regime for an example of what happens when religious fanatics are put in charge of dangerous things like armies, prisons and nuclear bombs- just wait until the Islamic wack-jobs get their hands on the modern military equipment and atomic weaponry that the United States sold to Mushareef...oh and yeah, do you remember a guy named Osama? He's in Pakistan- the same Pakistan that has nukes and U.S.-built F-16s.

Then there's Turks and Kurds and Iranians, oh my. The Turks and Kurds are fighting each other, both sides are armed and supported by the U.S. , which is a wee bit dicey...things are complicated, to put it mildly. It seems that the PKK has kidnapped a number of Turkish soldiers and the Turks are pretty much determined to go to war to get them back- against the wishes of the White House. I imagine that a conversation much like this fictionalized dialogue has taken place recently:

Turks: "We are going to invade Iraq and get our soldiers back."

BushCo: "Please don't do that."

Turks: " Why? When Hezbollah kidnapped two Israelis, you guys gave Israel the green light to bomb the living shit out of Lebanon...the PKK nabbed eight of our guys and you are telling us to 'take it easy' and NOT to retaliate? Your foreign policy makes absolutely no fucking sense."

BushCo: "Um...well, if ya gotta go into Iran, would ya consider not using the guns marked 'Made in the USA'? We are trying to convince a skeptical world that Iran is a global menace and it just wouldn't look right if people found out that we are helping terrorists to kill Iranians..."

Turks: "You are talking to the wrong Turks. Go fuck yourself, cowboy."

Do you remember a while back when it was reported that the US in Iraq had 'lost' a huge shipments of arms and munitions, including RPG's, anti-aircraft missiles and nearly 200,000 automatic rifles? Nobody seems to know what happened to all those guns...coincidentally, the Kurdish PKK rebels have recently obtained a seemingly endless supply of modern weaponry, the source of which no one seems to be able to identify.

Fuckin' mysterious, man...one pile of guns vanishes, another cache materializes...hmmm. Obviously, the problem in the Middle East is this: Gun shortages.

The U.S. Defense industry cannot keep pace with the escalating demand for weapons that the BushCo foreign policy has created, which has in turn generated a great new profit center for the burgeoning Chinese War Machine...of course, BushCo doesn't wan't the Chinese to supply the Iraqis with weapons, since that will almost certainly lead to Iraq shipping more oil to China, which means less for the US and higher prices everywhere...I swear, if I didn't know better, I would speculate that the entire purpose behind the 'War on Terra' is simply to raise oil prices and increase arms sales.

Mission Accomplished, motherfuckers.

To make things even more complex, the PKK has a splinter group that operates in Iran, fighting against the Iranian government, often using terrorist tactics- and presumably U.S. aid- to carry out attacks on Iranian infrastructure- meanwhile BushCo , with the limp capitulation of Hillary Clinton and other Senate Dems, has labeled certain Iranians as 'terrorists', which, by default, gives BushCo the unconstitutional authority to declare yet another unilateral war of aggression...when viewed from a distance the situation is much like one of those grade-school word puzzles, except without the underlying logical foundation:

Q:All Sneets are Snoots, but not all Snoots are Sneets. Some Sneets are Snaaps, but no Snaaps are Snoots. What is a Sneet and whose side are they on?

A:Who cares? 9-11!