In late September, news agencies all over the world printed this concise cultural analysis made by Afghan mujahedin fighter Maulana Inyadullah, the Ricky Carmichael of eXtreme Musliming:

The Americans love Pepsi-Cola, we love death.

Well, it's January and I'm drinking a Pepsi and Mr. Inyadullah is probably dead.  So, contrary to the dire predictions of the clerk at the food coop, the war had a happy ending for everyone.  Stuff that in the hole of your two dollar spelt donut, hippy. That slogan's part two of my plan to humiliate the know-it-all clerks at the food coop.  Part one is starting to make eye contact with them while they're ringing up my spelt donut every day.

On November 15th, Taliban supreme leader Mullah Mohammed Omar made the following scary threat:

Keep in mind this prediction. The real matter is the extinction of America, and God willing, it will fall to the ground. I tell you, keep this in mind. This is my prediction. You believe it or not -- it's up to you. But we will have to wait and see.

Looking back, it's less of a threat, and more of a kind of democratic plea to please believe that he's going to crush you and freedom beneath the heel of his culturally appropriate word for army boot.  Still, in light of the Taliban's immediate, embarrassing defeat, Omar's statements remind me of our victory over another supposedly invincible Fascist madman who rose to power in Germany in the 1940s: The Final Boss Monster of Return To Castle Wolfenstein.  In the game's intro, he tells a pretty formidable looking wizard:

you fool, you know as well as I that I cannot be destroyed!

Because this is before the invention of science, the wizard has to take the boss monster's word for it and, instead of killing him, traps him forever in a prison whose walls are made of magic. Following this, mistakes are made, the slippery slope, one thing leads to another, and one thousand years later I end up fighting the indestructible Boss Monster. And I'm like, well, he's indestructible, I'm screwed, but what the hell, I may as well shoot him once.  And so I do, and a big gout of blood spurts out of his neck!  It turns out that this whole episode makes a perfect case for empiricism over irrational voodoo wizardry, because while it's technically true that he couldn't be destroyed by, I guess, some things, such as things that aren't weapons, like fresh air or our warmest regards on the occasion of your graduation, I discovered through experimentation that he could be destroyed by pistols, grenades, electricity shooting guns, and flamethrowers.  In fact, here's a picture I took of me destroying him with a little dagger:

I don't know if the creators of Return to Castle Wolfenstein meant the entire game to be a parable of America's sort of one-sided fight against the Taliban, or whether there was just a big feud between the people who wrote the intro and the people who designed the boss monster, which kept them from ever communicating with each other.   But either way somebody should take that screenshot, turn it sideways, and sell it as a flag.

Speaking of which, under my scary, though honorifically impressive pseudonym, Dr. Butcher, MD, I've been busy advising the government from my position as head thinker of a conservative think tank I started in December.  How much influence did I have on U.S. policy? You tell me: Did U.S. troops take all the excess blood donated to the Red Cross in the wake of 9/11 and use it to demoralize the fleeing Taliban by dumping it on them from planes, like at the end of Carrie?  If not, then the answer is not much.  But if so, then please send me or Chet a link to wherever you heard about it.  I told Chet that I wasn't going to emerge from my bed - which, for tax and other purposes, we referred to as the "thinking tank" - until the war was over and I could feel safe going outside again.  Because watching the news was never a big priority for us, and because we felt that that policy was especially justified in light of the media's liberal bias and our newfound responsibilties as proud parents of a conservative think tank advising the government, our first order of business was to figure out how we would ever know that the war was over, because we didn't want to end up like those Japanese soldiers who were still fighting World War 2 while living in a ditch on an island in the Pacific as late as 1975. On the other hand, both of us found that we thought better while lying on the thinking tank playing Axelay on the Super Nintendo, so we were both actually pretty happy to have an excuse to just do that until we both died of an enormous, connected bed sore.  But that's the achilles' death star exhaust port of think tankery - the deadly allure of too much thinking.  So we decided that sometimes Chet would look out the window and see if the lady across the street had taken down her new American flag and put back up her old cute Pineapple flag.  We figured there was a risk that when that happened it would mean terrorists had blown up the Dole corporate headquarters, but we were pretty sure it would just indicate that things were finally back to normal. 

Two weeks ago, Chet looked out the window and saw this:

We hadn't counted on a flag with cute pictures of little flags on it.   It's simultaneously an oppressive symbol of American hegemony and totally precious. After working it into our thinking agenda, we decided it meant the war was going well for us, but probably wasn't over. 

Yesterday, this flag appeared:

We did some research on the Internet, and found this description:

This fuzzy bear-angel proudly represents the importance of freedom and liberty for all.

We weren't sure how the dead bear adds extra importance to the message of freedom and liberty ostensibly represented by just a regular American flag.  The most coherent message we could attribute to it was "Dear Foreigner, I'm a proud American, but don't be mad because I'm also a harmless retard."  At this point, we were tired of thinking and figured this flag was completely meaningless enough to indicate the war was probably over.  So we're back.

Just to prove to the Taliban that there's no hard feelings, and that, in our secret hearts, we're just as against progress as they are, I've created this anti-empiricist montage that I compiled from the games of America's foremost haters of pencil-necked scientists, Jason Hall and the employees of Monolith:

Here I am in Shogo menacing a pair of craven scientists in front of their vaguely scientific equipment.

Here I am in Blood 2 menacing a pair of craven scientists in front of their vaguely scientific equipment.

Here's a couple of scientists from Aliens vs. Predator 2 acting like sissies in front of a bank of machines clearly designed for doing science. Notice that they both sport the ultimate emblem of the future: the unisex leotard.

No One Lives Forever: two cowardly scientists cowering in front of some nondescript sciencey stuff.  As a kind of a scissor-action attachment to the olive branch for extra peaceful penetration, the scientist on the left looks Jewish to me.