I know I should really expose the bloodthirsty dirtbags who populate our state's military wing more often, but sometimes it takes an extraordinary piece of outrage (plus the fact that it's Fleet Week here in New York, and the place is swarming with killers) to help me get my thoughts together. The Haditha Massacre that is just being exposed now is awful, but I just assume, despite a Joint Chief's assurances, that this is par for the course in Iraq.

But today I came across a nasty piece of filth from (where else?) Texas, a story about one of the Marines whose death sparked the slaughter of innocent people in Haditha.

The father of a U.S. Marine killed by a roadside bomb in western Iraq in November believes his son's comrades did nothing wrong despite a criminal investigation into events that left more than 20 Iraqi civilians dead, including women and children.

"It's very hard for me, I don't even listen to the news," Martin Terrazas said of reports of the mass killings in Haditha, in Iraq's Anbar province. "The insurgents were hiding in there with the kids."

He doesn't listen to the news, but he knows the insurgents were hiding with the kids. That's because he thinks anything America or its agents do is by definition good. Nuking Japan was good because WE did it. Belgrade's 9/11 was good because WE did it. Butchering a house full of people minding their own business is good because this guy's son's friends did it.

These are the kind of people we are dealing with. You can't reason with them; the only way to neutralize their credibility is to demonstrate to the rest of the rational world that the military is made up of, and backed up by, monsters.

At the urgent request of the Pentagon, scientists and engineers are rushing to create an artificial arm that works like a flesh-and-blood one for the growing number of soldiers who are losing their limbs in the Iraq war.

This will no doubt have some ignorants saying, "thank God for the Pentagon, now we have prosthetic limbs able to perform fine movements." Not to sound callous, but amputation and paralyzation are not common enough for the market to have decided that much more should be done above what has already been done. The allocation of what will no doubt be an astounding number of millions of dollars in research money could have been spent on something more in demand/efficient.

By the way, the similarity between the argument for government-funded research and the arguments used to show the existence of the free rider problem is impossible to ignore.

It's hard to find a story that gives me more satisfaction than learning that a bunch of "weekend warriors," America's National Guard Reserve, are being forced to stay in military service even after their contract with the government has expired. The reason is that the military is shortstaffed in this time of war. Something about people not wanting to sign up for a free trip to getting shot at and maybe killed in Iraq, I guess.

"I don't think during a time of war you would want to let people go when you have a shortage of people," Army Reserve spokesman Steve Stromvall said.

Certainly not, Mr. Steve, and I agree. I think stop loss is a wonderful phenomenon. It serves so many purposes.

1) It makes the retained soldiers hate the military. These are the guys who all of a sudden oppose the war after they decided they didn't want to go to war, they just wanted to say they were in the Reserves to get chicks, or maybe just to put a little more oomph behind waving that big flag in their yards. An added bonus is that they maybe do poor work, as people tend to do at jobs they hate.

2) It keeps possible recruits, at least those smart enough to read or who watch the news (slim pickins, I know), from joining up, since they could very well be prevented from un-joining up.

3) It satisfies my revenge lust and punishes the stupid in one fell swoop. I love that the state's enforcers, even the part-time ones, suffer at the hands of the state they so love. And I ADORE the fact that anyone so stupid as to think a contract made with the country's monopoly contract enforcer would in any way secure a single one of their rights or hold any personal benefit whatsoever may learn the error of their ways in this manner. Or if they're really stupid, just suffer without understanding why. Maybe even in a 120-degree Iraqi summer as their businesses back home collapse from neglect. I like that last item, it opens up the market for people who were not dumb enough to join the Reserves to take their places, and therefore makes wealth flow to more peaceful and/or rational people. I smell the efficiency, do you?

The military repels future recruits, makes its members hate it while they're still working for it, and jingoist pigs get what they deserve. That's hot.

I read with great amusement an article about the Mossad hit on Palestinian terrorist Wadia Haddad in the late 1970s. Over a six-month period, they fed the 300lb fatass poison-laced Belgian chocolates, smuggled to him in Baghdad by a Palestinian collaborator. He died in 1978 of "symptoms of leukemia."

I figure if the US is going to prop up such an unsustainable state, I might as well get a few chuckles out of it until it collapses. These overly-elaborate assassinations sure do the trick.

An Indian Catholic organization has called on members to starve themselves to death in protest before the release of the DaVinci Code movie. I think this is a marvelous idea, and that Muslims should take notice and emulate these heroic Christians.

An organization official said, "It's a more Christian way of doing things rather than pulling down things and tearing them up."

Well the Christian way has tended to be to slaughter people as Jesus allegedly dictated, but I guess it's been a couple centuries since that happened on any significant scale. So I guess he's right. Yes, any Christians so offended by a work of fictional entertainment that they lack the will to live, do the Christian thing and starve yourselves to fucking death.

Armin Meiwes, the weird German guy who shared a meal of pan-fried penis with its donor and then with the consent of the latter butchered and ate him, has been sentenced to life in prison. The government originally conceded that he didn't murder anyone and sent him to prison for 8 years. On appeal, the judge, disgusted by the case, decided the sentence was too lenient and has now found Meiwes guilty of murder, even though the maximum sentence for "killing on demand" is five years.

It would be hard to argue that Meiwes is a fine man to have as a neighbor and isn't a generally creepy freak all around, but certainly based on his statements and background -- he never hurt anyone before, and he never would have without consent -- he is not a threat to society. Considering we're talking about Europe, if he had simply shot a man on the street in cold blood he'd still probably only get around 20 years in prison. Something about cutting someone up and eating him makes Meiwes more offensive to the German state than a real murderer. Meiwes will go to prison for the rest of his life because he made the judge go "ewwwwwwwwwww." How's that for rule of law? Law is and always has been a completely arbitrary farce molded by the whims and tastes of the powerful.

I say free the weirdo -- he committed no crime. And then force the judge to watch something offensive to his religion as "sensitivity training."