Damn it!

My car stalled earlier tonight in perfectly good weather while waiting for some jackass to pull through the gate to our parking lot; when I pulled my cell-phone out a minute ago something about the way it'd been jammed in my pocket had set it blinking some kind of cryptic panic sequence, only the near-useless buttons blinking, the screen dead. While I was able to pop open my phone, remove and re-insert the battery, close it up and plug it in to charge without incident, my car may have some kind of alternator issue, and it's due for an oil change anyway. Not to mention the continued window issue.

I'm really irritated that I just now might be able to start saving money again, and conveniently, less than three months after its last soiree into expensive town, my car wants to have cataclysmic failures at the mechanic again! Fucking shit!

I HATE cars.

Well, that was a hideous mistake, US soldiers

Read about the Feb. 20 incident with US soldiers purportedly 'accidentally' burning a pile of Q'rans while they were raiding a prison and wow. There is just no safe way out of this, is there? Because if they were to put the soldiers on trial as an actual show of faith to Afghanistan, there's no guaranteeing that the soldiers in question wouldn't feel cheated and abandoned, and childishly shout inflammatory things. After all, considering the severity of the crime they committed, they might expect to be killed for it, and who cares if they incite war on their way out, right? So the USA has to protect their soldiers because they probably can't trust them, but by doing that they're giving absolutely none of the respect they should to Afghanistan if they wanted to, I don't know, maintain good relations.

Well, there was ONE way out of this: not letting your soldiers disrespect other peoples' cultures, even if you wanted to get rid of 'extremist' statements in their religious books. I don't value a man's life as highly as a book, sure, but I do think that if you're stationed in a region like that you should damn well know better.

And for the record, I am absolutely typing the kind of person that is currently serving in the US military over there as somewhere along the lines of 'arrogant and disrespectful to anyone who's not part of the US military machine', because my experience with vets from the modern military, and members of the modern military in my day to day life, have taught me that generally, the people who served there don't value the rest of us non-military folk. I don't think extremist justice is the answer, but I don't think letting it happen in the first place is acceptable.

Sigh. Here, have a much more interesting article about political satire on Putin's sexual prowess instead.

I'll be hitting up the mechanic on my way home today, and leaving work early to make sure I get there before they close. Maybe they'll have good news. I hope, I hope. Maybe it's nothing.

On the bright side, character creation for Dusty's game is tonight. Now I just have to decide between Tanli, Aigua and Mahi. Existence of Cavalier-Bard hybrid class? Pretty tempting!

Edit: Post now edited to minimize any language that might make it sound like I think I'm an expert in the subject or anything more than the fact that I'm expressing my opinion.