Possibly the worst film I’ve ever seen in my life, Dreamcatcher is a reminder to me of why Stephen King is better read and not viewed.

Let me begin by saying that Stephen King is my favorite author.  I own all of his books and have read many of them more than once.

Going against my basic rule for movies based on books (always read the book first), I got too busy over the last two weeks to read Dreamcatcher and decided to go see the movie anyway.  It’s a Stephen King adaptation, so I would have seen it at some point in time (it’s obligatory for me, even when I know the film will be bad).

I have enjoyed many King-based films, such as Stand by Me, The Green Mile, Christine, Storm of the Century, and Carrie — to name a few.  Many of his works which are translated to film, however, get mangled in the process and come out on the big screen looking like some art experiment gone terribly wrong.  Dreamcatcher falls into the latter category.

There are so many things wrong with this movie that it’s difficult to find someplace to start, but I’ll try.

The special effects are awful.  It’s as though a child’s finger paintings were used to fill in where digital animation was supposed to be.  Who’s responsible for this mess?

The story is choppy and, as in most King book-to-film transitions, poorly written.  Stephen King’s books always take you away to a different place while you get caught up in the imagination of a genius.  I’ve never been disappointed with a King novel or story, so it’s hard for me to see where this movie was anything more than loosely based on his novel.  Perhaps people should read the book before making a movie by the same name.

The acting is atrocious.  It’s silly and wooden and predictable as some very good actors tackle some very bad parts.  Morgan Freeman, who is a personal favorite of mine, has the most underdeveloped part and comes across as a stranger in the movie — that is, a stranger to the movie, as he never seems to fit into the story.  The rest, suffice it to say, do not fall far behind him.

Overall, the movie is an appalling attempt to transition what is undoubtedly a fantastic piece of work by King to the big screen.  I have learned over the years that many King-adapted films will be worse than deplorable — they’ll force you into the bathroom to lose your popcorn and candy.  This movie is more than poorly conceived and completely unrealized, it’s an example of the kind of movie that should never be made.

I’m already forcing myself to forget it was ever made and that I ever saw it.

The movie is distant from the content, there’s no emotional connection to the audience since you never find any of the characters worth caring for, and it will leave many with a bad taste in their mouths when it comes to Stephen King works, and that’s the worst part since his writing is beyond reproach and compare.

I nearly got up and left the theater only 30 minutes into it, then regretted not having done so for the remainder of the film.

Don’t waste your money or time on this movie.  It’s nothing more than trash with Stephen King’s name put on it in the hopes of drawing a crowd.  Sadly, this movie is likely to draw nothing except flies.

Get the book and read it instead.  This is a case where I have lost more than two hours of my life in the most horrific and painful way.

How often have you heard that the war plan for Iraq was poorly devised?  You've undoubtedly heard that we started with too little force in the arena, we didn't account for the ferocity of the pro-Saddam forces that we would be fighting, and that we've stalled (paused) to regroup and rethink our attack strategy.  And all of this is coming from the armchair generals, sitting in news studios across the planet, believing themselves to be better able to judge our success, our approach, our strategy, and our progress.  All I know is that I want some of whatever these folks are smoking so I can be as out of touch as they are.

"Did we start the war with enough force?" Newsweek asks.  "The blame game begins," they add.  "There were both military and political miscalculations in the run-up to the war," the BBC claims.  The Washington Post reports, "…former U.S. military officers are blaming Rumsfeld and his aides for the inadequate troop strength on the ground in Iraq."  Salon.com leads into one story with "As the war turns sour, hawks blame the messengers."

How could all of these fine folks be so misguided?  I have to wonder where all the negativism is coming from.  Did someone announce America had lost the war while I wasn't listening?

It's pitiful that all of the armchair generals and major news organizations are trying so hard to show that we have already lost the war, that our battle plan has completely fallen apart, and that they've always known better.

One problem I have with all of this is a simple truth which appears to have been lost on all of these people: they have no clue what's going on.

I doubt they were briefed with the war plan before we moved in, so how do they know we're not right on track?

And this little thing about the "pause" in our battle plan so we can regroup.  What the hell is that about?  No one has paused.

The truth is that some forces have reached their appointed positions and are waiting for logistics and other forces to catch up.  We continue to fly sorties day and night, many units continue their forward movement, and we continue to gain more ground.  The fact that some forces are sitting still at the moment while others continue moving is just part of war.  No one can guarantee that all forces will reach the same destination at the same time, especially when they're all taking separate paths.

It's ludicrous that there are many people out there who are so full of themselves as to think they know better than the forces on the ground.

All of those actually involved with the war are making it clear that there is no pause.

All of those actually involved with the war are making it clear that troops continue to poor into Iraq as planned (except for the Turkey fiasco, but that's another story).

All of those actually involved with the war are making it clear that the battle plan is on schedule and was built with flexibility so as to accommodate the unknown.

Despite the armchair generals claiming our troops are falling apart, have no food and water and ammunition, have lost their will to fight, and that we are apparently losing the war, the truth of the matter is that we are doing just fine.  We're only ten days into the fight, so it would seem that they had the wrong expectations to begin with — not the government or our troops.

No war plan survives the first encounter with the enemy, so we shouldn't be surprised that so many who have second-guessed the plan from the start are now backpedaling in order to cover their own stupidity.  Instead of admitting that they guessed wrong (since they had no clue to begin with), they want to start pointing fingers and saying our front is falling apart and that our plan has crumbled.

I happen to think things are going fine.  We've taken a significant amount of the country away from the régime, we control 95 percent of the air, and we've started getting humanitarian assistance into the country.

Let's be honest — the worst part of the fight is still ahead.  What we've seen thus far was to be expected (I knew that, and I'm not an analyst).

Hey, to all you armchair generals and news organizations who can't admit to being wrong, hate the fact that all you can do is guess and must blame your wrong guesses on someone other than yourselves, do us all a favor.

Shut the fuck up!

Someone in the military wrote an email about all of the peace protests.  Being quite upset about all of the senseless protesting and lack of alternatives being offered by the peaceniks, the intent of the email was to help these people understand that sometimes war is necessary.

While this is not exactly how I view the possibility of war, it is a lesson I think peaceniks everywhere should learn — that force, although unpleasant, is sometimes the only response available when all other reasonable options have been exhausted.  A last resort, if you will.

If you happen upon a peace rally…

1) Approach ignorant, liberal person talking about peace and saying there should be "no retaliation."

2) Have a brief conversation with him and ask if military force is appropriate?

3) When he says, "No," ask him, "Why not?"

4) When he says, "Because that would just cause more innocent deaths, which would be awful, and we should not cause more violence."

5) Punch him in the face… hard.

6) When he gets up to punch you, point out to him that it would be a mistake (and contrary to his values) to punch you because he would be causing more violence.

7) When he agrees with you that he has pledged not to commit violence, punch him in the face again… only harder this time.

Repeat steps 2 through 7 until he understands that sometimes it is necessary to punch back.

I've grown so tired of all the negative, dare I say hateful, anti-American propaganda our own news organizations are putting out.  It's becoming more difficult to find the truth as you are forced to wallow through all the junk that's being spewed forth.  Armchair generals think they know what's going on and can make better decisions than those on the ground and with the real intelligence in hand.  The anti-America liberal leanings of most are bubbling to the surface, smelling of decay and rotting flesh.  Overall, I think the true colors of most news organizations are finally showing.

ABCNews has finally pushed my last button, so I will no longer watch or read their out-of-touch, liberal, spiteful, negative crap.  Each and every day their reporting becomes more hateful.  They focus on the negatives, offer conjecture like it's the truth, report from Saddam Hussein's point of view, and refrain from offering any positive news whatsoever.  It's all in how you look at things, and I think everyone at ABCNews needs antidepressants.  I'll take a root canal instead of that junk, thanks.

Salon.com had some miserable, weak-minded nobody (Scott Rosenberg) writing about how he knew before the first bomb dropped that the war plan "showed scary signs of overconfidence."  As nothing more than a wanna-be, I'm certain he was involved in all of those classified discussions — so his frame of reference can't be wrong.  Whatever.

Wired.com ran an article entitled Iraqi Dead Counted, Not Forgotten in which they legitimize a web site that is estimating the number of Iraqi civilian casualties by counting all of the reports of civilian casualties.  Why don't they just call Saddam Hussein and ask him how many we've killed?  That must undoubtedly be easier than scanning through all of the news reports in order to add all of the guesses and conjecture together to come up with an estimate.  This one's not even laughable.

The BBC reported "50 civilians die" under a headline of 'Many dead' in Baghdad blast — right on the front page.  Their information is, of course, based on the word of Iraqi officials.  Am I the only one who noticed these were the same folks shooting their own civilians?  Did the BBC not notice when SCUD missiles began flying toward Kuwait — missiles Iraqi officials had denied having for years?  Pitiful, really, and surprising for the BBC.  I've lost much respect for those folks recently, as I've seen a drastic increase in slanted reporting from them.

CBS News was still reporting that a missile strike in Kuwait City was likely the result of an errant American missile, despite confirmation hours earlier that it was indeed an Iraqi-made missile based on the Chinese "Silkworm" technology.  Similar to cruise missiles while being notoriously less accurate, this type of missile comes in low so as to avoid radar, hence the lack of Patriot missile engagement and air raid sirens in the city.  I would have hoped that CBS would keep up with current events and correct their obvious false reporting and anti-American content to reflect the truth of the situation, but that wouldn't accurately reflect the true nature of the CBS pro-Saddam propaganda machine.

I find that many news organizations have no problem reporting things that are less reliable than conjecture.  This appears to be based on the hope that they will have been the first to report it.  Hello, Florida…  Anyone remember the election of 2000?

Needless to say, I'm sanitizing my news more and more lately.  I've already given up on ABCNews altogether, as I've had it with their pitiful attempts to break the American spirit from within.  I dropped CNN long ago once I realized CNN really stands for Clinton News Network.  Spin doesn't begin to describe that organization — tornadic whirlwind would be more appropriate.

I just wish these folks would piss off and die or get their shit together and be real journalists.  They don't have to be patriotic (that's not entirely objective), but they definitely shouldn't be anti-America.  Screw 'em, I say.

I updated the gallery with a picture that was sent to me today.  It's the most adorable picture of a kitten who obviously was very hungry and very tired.  The two don't mix very well.  I've attached the picture here for easy viewing.

A meteor approximately the size of a Volkswagen exploded in Earth's atmosphere over the Midwest, showering up to four states with fragments and lighting up the sky.  You can read the details here.

You've no doubt heard it many times since the beginning of the war in Iraq — the first casualty of war is the truth.  It's true regardless of which side you're on, due in part to intentional equivocating as well as the nature of war (fighting does not stop so facts can be documented and truths uncovered).  How your news is filtered depends on which side of the fight you're on, however, as recent events clearly demonstrate.

During a massive bombing campaign on Baghdad, so-called "bunker buster" bombs were used to destroy telecommunications facilities within the city.  The attack gutted a seven-story telephone exchange complex on the east bank of the Tigris River in downtown Baghdad.

The telecommunications director of Baghdad, Husein Moeini, immediately announced that people were buried beneath the rubble of the building (civilians, of course).  One would think that some type of search and rescue operation would take place if that were true.

As we've come to expect from the Iraqi régime, journalists who arrived at the scene less than three hours later found no such rescue operation under way.  No sign of any rescue operation could be found, and there were no indications of any mass casualties due to the bombing.  Since it's highly unlikely that even a telephone exchange complex would be full of people during the wee hours of the morning, the claims of buried civilians is suspect at best — if not simply a blatant falsehood.

To add insult to injury, the Iraqi régime has continually claimed mass civilian casualties from coalition bombings.  In fact, they've gone so far as to say that we are specifically targeting civilians.

Any civilized person would know that's not true, although an errant bomb or missile could hit civilians.  This would be an unintentional tragedy, of course, and coalition forces are trying desperately to minimize the chances of such events.

What the Iraqi government is not admitting is that they themselves are targeting their own civilians.

Outside of Basra, thousands of civilians were trying to leave the besieged city.  In response, Iraqi militia and paramilitary forces opened fire on the crowds with mortars and machine guns in an apparent attempt to force them back into the city.

It would not surprise me if Iraq claims any casualties from this attack were the result of coalition attacks despite evidence to the contrary.

Both situations come on the heels of reports that the Iraqi military is forcing men to fight by taking family members (mostly children) and threatening them with death if the men of the family do not take up arms and fight the coalition forces.  Other reports indicate that the Iraqi military is using women and children (or civilians in general) as human shields as they advance on coalition forces.  Yet other reports show Iraqi irregulars forcing civilians to fight at gunpoint rather than allowing them to surrender or melt back into the civilian population.

Saddam Hussein and all those responsible for these heinous acts must be held accountable for war crimes and crimes against humanity.  The blatant abuse of his own people must not go unpunished — for anyone involved in such atrocities.

Yet I doubt our French or peacenik friends will be mentioning this in their next public appearance.  Sad little people, they are, and terribly misguided.

I just found out that my cousin has been deployed to Iraq.  He’s a Marine.  I won't reveal his name, unit or rank, but suffice it to say that we are all very concerned about him and all of the other soldiers — American, British and others — fighting in a distant land to protect and defend the values — and oil — we hold dear.  My thoughts are with them all.

I've grown so offended and disgusted by the French that I can barely contain my desire to bomb them next.  OK, so that's a bit harsh, but their most recent geopolitical spit in the eye of America is as reprehensible as eating shit (something they must do quite a bit in order to be so full of it).  France is working hard to be the lead in the post-Saddam Iraq.  Pity they are stumbling over the corpse-laden battlefield to be the first in line.

The French snubbed their noses at ousting Saddam Hussein and his régime of terror and slavery.  They wouldn't even send any of their spare white flags to the Iraqi military for use when surrendering.  No, they found the idea of war so revolting that the dust from their expeditious retreat from the UN to their normal state of insignificance had not settled before they decided it was time to demonstrate their audacity once again.

Saddam wasn't bad enough to fight.  He hadn't killed enough people to be removed from power.  The French were likely in bed with him too much to notice such things.

France recently announced that the US and Britain should not be allowed to participate in the post-Saddam rebuilding of Iraq.

Not one French soldier is involved in the war.  Not one French weapon will be used by the good guys (although I strongly believe Saddam has been provided with plenty of French weapons to use against us, thanks to the beret-wearing nitwits).  Not a single ounce of support has been offered by the French except to Saddam, yet they believe they get to decide what happens in Iraq after the war.

Let me be perfectly clear on this, Frenchy.  I don't fucking think so.

It makes me sick to my stomach to think that the French are as callous as they are arrogant.  They vehemently protect Saddam's right to murder his own people and violate the will of the world, yet they're already stumbling over the still warm bodies on the battlefield in order to make some money.

In their quest to screw America at all costs, France is trying to line their own pockets with money paid for by coalition blood.

Even more pathetic and sickening is that we (the coalition) are giving our lives to free the Iraqi people from a repressive régime that rivals that of Hitler, yet France strides in with their cash register and attempts to fill their own coffers at the expense of the Iraqi people.

Our blood has been shed on the battlefield, but France believes they have every right to run things so as to maximize their own profits.

People are dying in Iraq.  The war has only just begun.  Yet in that fantastically offensive French way, Chirac and that backward, sorry-ass country he pretends to run shows up to cut some deals.  Mr. Chirac, you're a moron.  There are families which haven't even been told about loved ones lost to battle.  How dare you!

I suspect that France is more concerned about being financially bankrupt than with being morally bankrupt.  Such behavior is not civilized or acceptable.

While the French are rummaging through the pockets of dead and dying coalition and Iraqi soldiers looking to steal spare change, we'll continue to fight for the freedom and rights of the Iraqi people.

Allow me to say to all of those who support such animalistic selfishness that you are as repulsive and inhuman as Saddam Hussein.

Countries around the world should reconsider calling France a friend, since the relationship is obviously nothing more than a cover so France can rob you blind and leave you beaten, bloody and broke.

After launching their English web site on Monday, Al-Jazeera has been battered by denial of service (DoS) attacks.  Neither of their sites — English or Arabic — has been available since early in the week (and it's now Thursday evening).  Although they denied any attacks and claimed the sites were being overloaded by viewer traffic, those reports were soon proven false.  Al-Jazeera had to admit that a DoS attack was indeed being waged against their web presence.  To add insult to injury, a little social engineering allowed a hacker to redirect Al-Jazeera's web site to a different address (a method called "DNS poisoning") — essentially hacking the site while leaving it physically untouched.  Despite having resolved the DNS problem (but not the continued attacks), Zone-H.org was able to capture a snapshot of the "new" Al-Jazeera before it was taken down.  You can view the hacked version here.  A wee bit of free expression, I think.