Tuesday, May 31, 2005

My Hillary Clinton rant

I wish people would stop speculating whether Hillary Clinton will run for President, or will consider running for President.

I'm a registered Democrat even though I'm a libertarian at heart, and a Hillary run for the Presidency would be just one more disaster for a Democratic Party which seems to have lost its political bearings.

During the last election's nomination process, it became clear that the Dems had no one the general public could take seriously enough to make President. President Bush got reelected despite being unpopular on the Iraq War issue and despite an economy that was in the proverbial shithole at the time.

Things are no better today, and while Hillary is a prominent Democrat often talked about as a potential presidential candidate, she really is not viable and if she ran, the Dems would lose by an even bigger margin than last time, unless, of course, the economy is in a deep depression or if the Republicans were to fuck up bigtime in some other major way. Unfortunately, the Republicans seem to be better managers of their public perception than the Democrats, thanks probably to Carl Rove, so barring Carl Rove slipping on a banana peel and hitting his head on the curb, things look dim for the next Presidential election as well.

The fact is, men almost universally dislike Hillary. They totally understand why, with a harpy like her, a man might want to fool around with a warmer body like Miss Monica Lewinsky. (BTW, where's she been lately?) Hillary clearly is supported by a certain feministic slice of the female voter pie, but she is reviled by innumerable stay-at-home housewives and moms, who will never forget her "cookie baker" comment which seemed to imply a disdain for women who don't want to work in the worlds of business or politics, and would rather be that someone who is waiting at home for the kids after school.

Hillary's views on kids are scatterbrained. While on the one hand, she mouths the concept that "It takes a village to raise a child," she quite contradictorily takes stands that take away the ability of parents and schools to be involved in and control the lives of young people. Parental notifications of abortions come to mind along with Hillary's support for giving children increased rights vs. their parents. When I was a kid, if a man walked into a bathroom and found a boy writing on the wall (to take an example), not only might the kid get his ears boxed, but the kid's parents might have thanked him for acting in loco parentis. Imagine that happening today! Today, when kids misbehave or cause trouble with a school, 9 times out of 10 the kids are backed up by complicit parents.

Between the 75%-80% of men who wouldn't vote for Hillary if their lives depended on it, and the huge percentage of women who she slighted with the cookie baker comment, she stands no chance whatsoever of ever becoming President of these United States, and if the Democrat leadership has the welfare of the party in mind, they'll take her aside and tell her so.

The allegations of torture

Anybody who knows me would hardly portray me as a liberal. I'm more like a libertarian. So, I take neither liberal nor conservative dogma at face value. I think on my own.

While the latest report of Amnesty International portraying the United States as a major abuser of the rights of political prisoners seems a bit over the top and overly strident, the refusal of the United States to permit neutral third-party observers complete access to the facilities is troubling.

What needs to be separated is torture by policy and torture by individuals in violation of policy. This is not always easy to distinguish because much can be done with a wink and a nod by underlings who perceive that their superiors are willing to turn a blind eye to certain bendings of the rules.

While Amnesty International is losing credibility in the eyes of the U.S., clearly it is having an impact on the perception of the U.S. worldwide, so a dispassionate, neutral investigation would seem to be called for.

If we have nothing to hide, that is. Which we should not.

Sunday, May 29, 2005

Thank heavens for stupid people

How would the rest of the world make money if it weren't for people who believe in things which are obviously stupid?

How about people who believe in alien abductions? Some of them are putting us on, of course, but some of them actually believe they've been abducted. Of course, there are people who believe the earth is hollow, too, but that isn't evidence it's true. And why would a race with the superior technology to travel through space (and through time as well, given the unimaginably huge distances involved) come here just to stick probes up our asses and vaginas?

How about people who believe in the "out of body experience"? One hospital had a shelf all the way around the room at ceiling level where a researcher placed a message that, because of the shelf, could not be read from floor level. None of the people in this hospital who claimed to have hovered over their bodies remembered seeing this message. Of course, this leaves aside the question of how one might see without eyeballs, and a functional nervous system. It reminds me of the people who straightfacedly and seriously will tell me that after being guillotined a disembodied head uttered some words. Now, how does a head utter anything without access to the lungs? Tell me that!

How about people who believe in this John Edwards huckster? A friend of mine tells me basically that "He knows things he couldn't know without being in touch with people on the other side." My reply is, "He appears to know things, but if you change the channel you're likely to see a chimpanzee who appears to speak English or a man who appears to be wielding a light sabre who can also with a wave of his hand send his opponent flying across the room. I'm sorry...I just can't buy the argument that because it's on TV it must be true.

I also love the street preachers who are telling us "The end is near! Get right with God!" Did you ever ask yourself if they said anything different 500, 1000, or 1500 years ago? "Don't worry! The end is still pretty far off! Break The Ten Commandments with impunity for now because the end is still many hundreds of years off in the future!"

This reminds me: By using abstruse mathematical means on the vast amount of data in The Torah, various scholars (not many of them actual scientists) have discovered or found what they feel are significant "codes" in The Bible. One of them dared skeptics to find predictions of assassinations of major assassinations in Moby Dick. Brendan McKay, a professor of Computer Science at the Australian National University, took up the challenge and found a number of such references. However, what Bible Code believers fail to understand is that a bunch of words, even in proximity (a "cluster," as they call it) are not a prediction. Predictions have a subject-predicate structure using the familiar parts of speech: "Schlomo Christenson will slip on a cow pie and fatally hit his head on a rock," or something like that. If you find "Robert Kennedy" and "gun" in a cluster, this only has real significance in retrospect, and yet code researchers seem to feel that the so-called code can make predictions. They do not tell us how. When codes start appearing in whole sentences, they can be verified or tested, but not untilthen. Read more here.

Stupid people. You gotta love 'em for all the amusement they provide.

Saturday, May 28, 2005

It's very easy to be greedy

Remember that sleaze Gordon Gecko from the movie Wall Street? His motto was "Greed is good!" and the top managers of Enron certainly practiced what Gecko preached.

I just saw The Smartest Guys in the Room, which is the story of the rise and fall of Enron, and it's an amazing and appalling story of how greed at the top trickled down to the company's front lines, with its traders running amok, going so far as to shut down power plants in California in order to drive up the price of Enron stock so they could earn generous bonuses.

Enron was in the habit of counting estimated/predicted future profits as income. It also hid its debts in offshore satellite firms which it effectively owned. It financed itself by talking leading investment banks like CitiBank, J.P. Morgan, Chase, and Merrill Lynch into lending it money merely based on its reputation as a hot company. It didn't do this purely through fraud or "smoke and mirrors." No, just as much it relied upon the greed of people in the banks, in their law firm, and in their accounting firm (Arthur Anderson, which also had a conflict of interest through acting as a consultant to Enron as well). It also bribed and bullied stock analysts into giving its stock favorable ratings and reviews.

The firm was flying high as a Wall Street darling when, in 2001, senior reporter for Fortune Bethany McLean asked a smple question which for a healthy and honest firm would have had a simple and obvious answer: "How does Enron make money?" She asked this because, strangely, Enron was in the habit of not producing financial reports.

With the publication of McLean's Fortune article, "Is Enron Overpriced?" more questions arose, and Enron's house of cards began to tumble. Jeffrey Skilling, the CEO during this period left for undisclosed "personal reasons" a few months before Enron declared bankruptcy. By doing so, he left Ken Lay, the Chairman, holding the bag. Lay became the CEO at the helm when the firm was forced by circumstances into bankruptcy.

Unfortunately for Skilling, he probably didn't bail soon enough to protect the huge profits he made by dumping his Enron stock. (The one winner in this category is Lou Pai, former CEO of the Enron Energy Services subsidiary, which failed, and who took $335 million in profits early enough to escape insider training charges, and who quickly became the second largest land owner in Colorado).

The biggest tragedy of the failure of Enron, though, isn't the big people. It's the little people who had Enron stock in their portfolios. This includes numerous employees of Enron. To take one example, when Enron bought Portland General Electric, PGE employees' PGE stock became Enron stock, which was frozen when Enron filed for bankruptcy. While the stock was frozen (could not be sold), the value of the stock was not frozen, and so all of these little people had to watch the value of their investment decline daily until it was worth virtually nothing.

And then let's not forget all the individual investors and mutual funds which were heavily invested in Enron. Countless Enron investors were left holding Enron's bag while Enron execs tried to ascond with hundreds of millions of Enron funds. Funds which, if recovered at all, will be in the "pennies on the dollar" range.

The tragic truth is that even if we learn a lesson or two from this financial train wreck, it can happen again, and again, and again, as long as people believe that "gree is good." And so...it will happen again, as sure as the sun will rise tomorrow morning.

Friday, May 27, 2005

Paris Hilton, I love you

I don't understand why everyone hates Paris Hilton. I think there is a lot of idle bullshit about her and things she can't help. She can't help being rich, for one thing, which is why a lot of people don't like her, I'm sure.

Surely people don't hate her because of the famed "sex video." You might pity her for being less than a superstar in bed, but hate her for it, why? I think that under the circumstances, she has maintained an admirable degree of poise.

Has she exploited her wealth, fame, and infamy? Of course she has, and so would you. Don't lie to yourself.

What I find most disingenuous (especially when uttered by a male) is the idea that she's "not very good looking." Who are you trying to kid? Most guys would crawl across a mile of red-hot broken test tubes for the privilege of sucking shit out of her ass.

A group of prudish whiners is objecting to her Carls Jr. ad where (if I remember correctly) she washes a car and eats a Carls Jr. burger while wearing a black bikini. Yes, of course it's "soft porn." So what? It's very soft porn, and at least she isn't sticking the hose up into her cunt or laying on her back stuffing the burger up her butt as might be the case in the real world of pornography..

She's pretty, she's smart enough to take advantage of people who are fascinated with her and more power to her.

Wednesday, May 25, 2005

Talking about Star Wars bullshit

Yeah, Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith is the best of the prequels, but it's taken too long for George Lucas to get this film done. By taking nearly 30 years to produce the entire series, he gave up some of the opportunities he might have had if he had compressed the project into, say, an eight year period.

Peter Jackson (Lord of the Rings) us showed how to do a monumental series: Do them all at once while all the actors are alive and before time takes a toll on them. I mean, suppose George wanted to do a flashback of Princess Leia saying something to Luke Skywalker. For Christ's sake, Carrie Fisher is now nearly 50 years old. She was 21 when the original Star Wars was made.

But let's set that aside. The biggest problem with Revenge of the Sith is that we've outgrown that sort of movie. Years of watching The Discovery Channel and The Science Channel has shown me the absurdity of the whole thing.

Have you noticed that the characters can hop in a spacecraft and be on the other side of the galaxy in about the time it takes to drive from Oakland to San Jose? Oh, yeah, there's a gizmo they use for doing this, but at least in Dune we got an explanation (albeit a severely wacky one) as to how it's done. In this film, we simply have to take it for granted.

Now, this story takes place "long, long ago in a galaxy far, far away," but everyone speaks English, even though England won't exist until far, far in the future in a galaxy far, far away. And did you notice that most aliens seem to be built on the homo sapiens model? And this even though homo sapiens only evolved on the planet Earth about 250 million years ago, which in the cosmic scale of time, measured in billiions of years, is not very long at all.

Then there's the rather byzantine and questionable politics in this film. We know that Chancellor Palpatine is an evil dictator bent on becoming Emperor of the Galactic Federation, but is the correct solution to suspend the Constitution and violently overthrow Palpatine? I don't have the answer, but the question had me squirming in my seat. I literally could see Anakin Skywalker's point of view, which was that the Jedi were throwing their own principles out the window in order to fight the Sith. How good are principles, one has to ask, if they don't work for you when the chips are down? In these times of girding our loins against terrorists, we have to ask ourselves questions like this.

And here's a funny question for you: Did you notice that before every fight, a Jedi will drop his cloak to the ground. You never see the warrior pick it back up, and most of the time when the fight is over they are far away and quite possibly heading off in an entirely different direction. Once I noticed this, I could hardly control my laughter every time a warrior dropped his cloak. I guess when you become a Jedi, you are granted an unlimited supply of cloaks.

I enjoyed the movie, but mostly because I've seen all the others and I wanted to see how it all turned out (or began, to be precise), but I think the series has become far too juvenile for most adults to take seriously. It's child's fare at the Saturday morning cartoons level. To tell you the truth, The Matrix movies give one much more to think about, if deep thinking is one's thing.

I'll give it four stars if you've been following the series. Two stars otherwise.

Now, supposedly this was "the last Star Wars movie." However, it set box office records the day it opened, so what do you think? Have we seen the last of Star Wars? Personally, I think Hollywood is far too greedy to leave a golden goose like this alone.

So, I'm calling them liars for saying we've seen the last of this series. When they do make the next three installments of Star Wars, though, I think they should get Peter Jackson to direct. Otherwise, I'll be dead before the series is done.

A burning question for students of gay-ness

I was surfing for porn (oh, yeah, like you don't!) and I ran across this category: "gay bestiality."

What could this possibly mean? I'm imagining a man fucking a horse in the ass or a woman licking a dog's pussy.

Someone help me to understand this concept of "gay bestiality"!

I know what "gay" means when all of the participants are human, but in bestiality, does the concept of gayness apply at all?

Sunday, May 22, 2005

The Hiroshima/Nagasaki fallacy revealed

More than once I've heard people say that "By dropping the bombs, we actually saved more lives than we ended, because if there had been an invasion of Japan, the loss of life on both sides would have been astronomical."

Now, let me ask a simple ethical question. If we are just counting lives, then suppose the Japanese had offered to surrender if we would simply give them a six year old American girl that they could douse with gasoline and set on fire.

This would have ended the war with the loss of only one life, and according to the body count methodology would have been an even better way to end the war than dropping the bombs.

Somehow, looked at this way, the body count excuse sounds like a pretty bad excuse. Does it still sound good to you?

Wednesday, May 18, 2005

Why AMTRAK is practically dead

I live in Portland, Oregon, whose Union Station may be the most beautiful operational train station in the country. I can hop on a train and go up to Seattle and get off in what may be one of the dumpiest train stations in the entire world. Nine out of ten Greyhound bus terminals are like the Elysian Fields by comparison.

If something isn't done, I'm afraid that passenger trains may disappear from the face of the land. Now, normally, I'm all for letting the market rule and if that would mean the end of passenger train travel, what would be would be.

However, there is something about traveling by train. It's more leisurely than either driving or flying. I mean, I can drive to Seattle in three-and-a-half hours, but the train ride takes about five. Still, I don't mind. I can alternate between reading and looking out the train window to see an America that's hidden from my eyes on the freeway. It seems like when people design freeways, they try to find the most boring route between two points.

AMTRAK turns out to have the market sense of a dildo. While the train ride to Seattle takes place pretty much during the day, many of the other routes happen to go through the most beautiful parts of their routes overnight. Combine this with the fact that trains frequently pull into their destinations at something like 3 or 4 a.m. and you have little reason to go by train.

Another problem is that places you'd think would be a prime train destination, such as Las Vegas, don't even have an AMTRAK terminal. Instead, you have to get off somewhere else and take a bus ride into Sin City, probably from somewhere in California.

Oh well, I suspect our train system will be one of the next terrorist targets of choice, and that'll probably reduce ridership to the point where we'll lose AMTRAK entirely, but it sure would be nice to see the line's management try a little harder for the traveler's buck.

Of course, another problem is that the cutthroat airline industry has made traveling by plane frequently cheaper than going by train, and you get to your destination with much more time to visit, and for business travelers it's a total nonstarter, so it might be a totally lost cause.

This is too bad, because trains really are the way to look America in the eye. I've traveled by train in Europe and it's fabulous. It's too bad we seemingly can't have a similar experience here.

Sunday, May 15, 2005

Don't pack your bags: we're staying right here

I'm a normal guy. I like science fiction, but there's a lot more fiction than science in a good deal of it, especially when it comes to space travel.

Now, I'll grant right from the start that there are some loopholes and fig leaves the starry eyed believers can rely on for a glimmer of hope, but the truth is rather glum when it comes to traveling to explore the stars.

I'm not going to throw formulae at you because you probably wouldn't understand them any more than I would. I'm trained in philosophy, not astronomy, physics, or astrophysics. I barely passed algebra before I majored in art in high school.

Even so, I'll tell you some things you should know, and probably would know if you'd spend more time on the Discovery or Science channels and less time watching sitcoms or sports.

The nearest star, Alpha Centauri, is nearly 4.4 light years away. That means that the fastest thing we know of, light, takes more than four years and four months to get here. Nothing other than light travels this fast, and in fact traveling at anything even close to the speed of light is impossible, because the closer you get to the speed of light, the more energy it takes to go that little bit faster, until there simply isn't enough energy available to accelerate any more.

It'd take hundreds, thousands, or millions of years to get anywhere else we might want to go outside our solar system. What are people on Earth supposed to be doing? Waiting for the space travelers to come home and file their report?

But let's imagine that you could go close to the speed of light. Other problems arise. You see, while we think of space as a vacuum, it is not a true vacuum. After all, we and all the stuff in the Universe are in it. Leaving aside gross objects like galaxies, stars, planets, moons, meteors, comets, and so forth, we know that there is space dust out there, and that there are free-floating atoms as well. At 3/4 the speed of light (to take an arbitrary speed), it might be possible to detect and avoid hitting an object the size of a star, planet, or moon, but how about a rock the size of a football? And what would such an object do to a spacecraft that hit it at such a speed? Well, consider hitting a much smaller object...

Astronomer Frank Drake wrote, "At relativistic speeds, even a collision with a particle of a few grams results in something close in energy to a nuclear bomb blast."

It doesn't stop there. Isaac Asimov wrote: "When you begin to approach the speed of light, hydrogen atoms become cosmic-ray particles, and they will fry the crew....So 60,000 kilometers per second may be the practical speed limit for space travel."

While we're talking about cosmic rays, let's talk about gamma rays. They are not so good, either, and together they cause cellular damage, having a very bad effect on the nervous system. Gamma rays are very difficult to shield, requiring at least 10 cm of lead to reliably stop them. A craft of any size with a 10 cm thick lead hull, or lead shielding sufficient to protect a substantial living area, would likely be far too heavy to get us where we want to go.

So, we probably won't go anywhere because of the near impossibility of shielding ourselves from cosmic radiation.

Let's suppose the radiation problem is solved and we're off to Alpha Centauri at a conceivable rate. Some scientists are quoting 40 to 44 years. And that's to reach the closest star system. Stop to think about how impractical such a long trip would be. Cryonics exist in the movies, but hibernating people for 40+ years is a technology that seems far, far off if it's possible at all, which is doubtful.

How about shortcuts? Frank Herbert's navigators in Dune puffed on a magical spice and got so high they could fold space, making travel even from one end of the Universe to the other a momentary thing. Stephen Hawking's postulation, later proven, of black holes in space showed a way to disappear into the opening of a black hole, and while no one knows for sure where matter going into a black hole ends up, one theory is that the black hole is merely the mouth of a so-called "worm hole," which dumps it elsewhere far, far away, perhaps extremely far away.

Science fiction writers have jumped on the black hole/worm hole thing to postulate that given the appropriate information and technology, you could simply surf into a black hole and end up somewhere else in one piece. These guys have obviously not considered what happens when you cross the "event horizon" of a black hole (the point of no return, where it's no longer possible to escape a gravitational pull so strong it can even capture light).

Physical integrity is lost as an object descends into the black hole, and finally the intense gravity tears it apart. Since anything with the information required to reassemble that object would be destroyed, too, there really isn't much hope for coming out someplace else in one piece. Perhaps as a burst of energy, but not as a spacecraft.

No, we are not going anywhere. Not a couple or a few of us, and certainly not all of us! So, we'd better figure out how to make things work here on Earth or being an Earthling will be just a passing fad.

Saturday, May 14, 2005

We are all stereotypes, are we not?

I told a friend about the great experience I had seeing the movie Crash, which explores race, race relations, and racism in America, and she said, "I heard that it deals in stereotypes."

Yes, Virginia, it does deal in stereotypes, but we are stereotypes, are we not? Am I not much more like your typical white guy than your typical African-, Mexican-, or Asian-American?

The idea that everyone should be treated fairly translates in many people's minds into the idea that everybody is the same, which of course is bullshit. Not only are we unique as individuals, but we belong to unique social and ethnic groups as well.

Let me give you an example, I grew up with African-Americans, and while it's a stereotype that black folk like barbecue, let me assure you, it's true often enough, and it's a rather harmless stereotype. The stereotype that all young black men are dangerous hoods is a harmful stereotype.

I hope we all can see the difference.

What the movie Crash does with stereotypes is to say, "Yes, we look at each other through stereotypes which are sometimes wrong but often right, but you know what? people you think are bad can be not just good but absolutely heroic, and people you think are good can do very bad things. Rather than getting rid of stereotypes, which is probably impossible and would wipe out our ethnic identities, it's best to be aware of them and not think that because part of the stereotype is true, or that it's true in some cases, it has to be swallowed as a package or must always be true. We need to keep our minds open."

Yes, we are all stereotypes to one degree or another, but our stereotype doesn't sum us up.

The positive after-effects of slavery

Forgive me for an attention-getting headline, but I wonder if you realize that slavery actually has a proud history?

When the Greeks fought a war, they would capture enemy soldiers. They had the problem that if they let the soldiers go, they might return to fight against Greece another day, which wasn't satisfactory. This left them with two options: either execute the enemy soldiers or enslave them.

Slavery then was an act of mercy.

Of course, slavery in the U.S. was sheer kidnapping for the purpose of exploitation, so our slavery is nothing to be proud of.

Even so, if you're an African-American, have you ever thought about the following facts: If not for slavery...

1) you wouldn't be living in the most prosperous country on earth, but instead you might be living in a village in an AIDS-ravaged country;

2) you probably wouldn't even exist, because your mother and father would never have met;

3) most white people are NOT descended from slave masters and many, many whites are descended from people exploited by slavemasters;

Many white people are descended from poor whites who unfortunately had to compete against unpaid slave labor, which may be behind some of the residual racism in the U.S. The blame is misplaced, just as blaming all white people for slavery is misplaced. However, if you want an explanation for anti-black racism, this is certainly part of it.

Friday, May 13, 2005

There's a reason fat people are fat

And it's usually nothing to do with glands.

Take today. Walking ahead of me toward an elevator that goes up a maximum of two floors and next to it a fat person had to choose between the elevator and a set of stairs that goes up the same distance. I took the stairs but the fat person took the elevator.

I'm pushing 60 and at my age keeping the pounds off, if it's been a problem the rest of your life, is extra hard. So, I no longer have a car and have a bicycle instead. If the weather or the distance has me opting out of a bike ride, I'll at least take a bus, which involves some walking.

I no longer have that second helping of mashed potatoes and I've learned to enjoy open-faced sandwiches. My alcohol of choice is dry red wine now, not the rich delicious ale the Pacific Northwest is so famous for.

I dated a nurse for a while and once we saw some woman waddling down the street who must have weighed at least 400 lb, and the nurse said, "You know, they say it's glands, but no one can keep that kind of weight on at 1000 calories a day."

While on the one hand I don't believe we should publicly ridicule or humiliate fat people, I'm not one to go along with "fat is where it's at." Fat people are fat because they eat more calories than they burn.
True, some have almost hopelessly screwed up their metabolisms through crazy dieting, but even so, as the nurse said, there is some caloric intake level where the body has to start burning fat instead.

And let's not forget the role of exercise. By using up calories, it aids the diet in taking the pounds off. It's also good for one's overall health. There are few downsides to getting plenty of exercise.

Find it and burn it, fat people! I'm not giving you any excuses.

Wednesday, May 11, 2005

The Crash that could save America

For a change, I'm praising something rather than ranting or griping, and the reason is that I just saw a movie that really cuts through the bull about racism in America.

Paul Haggis establishes himself as a master director with this, his first major directorial effort. Prior to this, you might have known him (if you knew him at all) as a screenwriter for several television series, including thirtysomething and Family Law and the movie hit, Million Dollar Baby.

A Canadian by birth (London, Ontario), Haggis' time in Hollywood has certainly given him a studied appreciation not only of the US and our racial conundrums, but of LA as well.

Using the device of a web of incredibly unlikely coincidences, he takes us on a tour of our racial disease with an unflinching eye, exploring the racism in every ethnic segment of our society, including the minorities.

Haggis does so with unusually complex characters who at first appear to be stereotypes but prove to have unexpected depth.

You start out thinking you know who is bad and who is good, but by the end of the movie you realize that people simply aren't that simple. A seeming anti-black bigot can place his life on the line to save a black's life. A person you were sure was "good" ends up killing someone through making a race-based assumption. Someone fearful of another race discovers someone of that race is her best friend. And on and on and on.

Nobody is spared and almost every conceivable grievance (or type of grievance) one race or ethnic group has against another is explored.

Crash is miles ahead of most movies about race, which tend to be didactic or preachy. This one says, basically, before you feel contempt for anyone else, first look at yourself.

I would love to recount some of the specific incidents and quotable dialog in the movie, but I wouldn't want to spoil one single second of it for you.

As I hinted above, Los Angeles is almost a character in the movie itself. Haggis has a grasp of this melting pot city that parallels that of Michael Mann and James Ellroy.

All in all, this is one of the most important movies about race in America ever made, and I can't recomment it highly enough.

Common sense regarding ethnic "profiling"

I'm a libertarian kind of guy, so I'm opposed to racism in any guise, but I can't agree with racial and ethnic minorities who object to profiling per se. This doesn't mean I agree with all profiling, but I do think that sometimes it has to be done.

Since terrorism by Middle Eastern Islamic extremists seems to be the biggest threat right now, it only makes sense to treat it that way.

Liberals will argue that there's nothing stopping the terrorists from using little old ladies or men of white European heritage to carry out their missions. One has to note that (a) this hasn't happened yet and (b) these terrorists do it for religious reasons so that dying in the act seems to be one of the major motives for doing it in the first place.

When little old ladies and European-looking businessmen start blowing themselves up or diverting airliners into skyscrapers, it will be time to profile them, but until then profiling the young, middle-eastern-looking male seems to be the rational thing to do, even though it has an unsavory "feel" to it.

Stopping or thwarting terrorism is a top priority and the resources which can be applied to it are limited, so until resources are unlimited and everyone can be profiled (if that's what we would really want to do!) or unless we don't want to profile anyone and just roll the dice, I'm afraid that racial/ethnic profiling makes a lot of sense.

Now, stopping cars based on the fact that an African-American male is driving a beamer (the offense referred to as "driving while black") does not make sense and does intrude into the rights of law-abiding black folk in an unreasonable way. That is the sort of profiling we should worry about.

Monday, May 09, 2005

Hang on: here's my pit bull rant

Everyone knows that dog and cat lovers can't be rational about cats and dogs.

Several days ago, a 2 year old boy was so badly mauled by the family's dog, a pit bull, that his tender little life is still hanging on by a thread and it would not be surprising were he to die.

I look at pit bulls as similar to a stick of dynamite. It's safe unless misused by someone. I have known several pit bulls, and the ones I knew were wonderfully friendly with me. Except for the fact that I always carry a dangerous knife with me except when flying, any of these dogs could have killed me had they switched into attack mode.

If ever attacked by a pit bull, I'm giving it my left arm and my right arm is going to open up what is called a "tactical folder" (a folding knife used as a Plan B knife by special forces solders and SWAT team members), and I'm going to slice it's throat from ear to ear.

Dog lovers will say, "Dogs are never the problem; dog owners are." First, I'm not totally convinced that dogs can't get sociopathic genes just the way people can. Secondly, this platitude isn't a solution to the problem.

I suppose I could say that sticks of dynamite aren't the problem, dynamite handlers are, except that a stick of dynamite just sitting there, while having lethal potential, does not have a little mind of its own and is a lot less likely to just spontaneously explode than a pit bull is to switch into attack mode and maul someone. We don't always know why pit bulls attack.

Don't get me wrong. I don't think pit bulls are bad dogs per se. The ones I've known have been almost excessively friendly and were practically canine clowns. Maybe due to their sad history, they actually enjoy being around people more than other dogs. One exception, however, seems to be small children.

Now, the right to own a dog isn't a Constitutional right, and while I generally hold the view that we should have all the rights we can unless there is some substantial need not to have them, owning a potentially lethal dog seems to be one of those things that should minimally be licensed, and owners subjected to bonding and to severe penalties should the dog ever attack anyone. (And by "attack," I mean an attack even if the dog is restrained by the owner.)

We license guns, but at least a gun can't go off unless someone actively pulls the trigger. Dogs have triggers of their own.

All too often, when going around town I see that the people with pit bulls are in gang attire or look to be the sort whose own life is hardly under control and may actually involve illicit activities. You know, the sort of people who try hard to look tough, probably due to some deeply-held feelings of inadequacy, similar to the big-tires=small dick thing (which may or may not be true in a particular case, but many of us think it).

And pit bulls are not the only dogs which might be licensed. Remember poor Diane Whipple, the 100 lb woman who was literally torn appart by a pair of presa canarios in San Francisco? These dogs have pit bulls for lunch. They weigh about twice as much as a pit bull, are very sturdily built, and have jaws massive enough to engulf a small child's head. The dogs that killed Ms. Whipple were actually well over the breed's standard, which calls for a maximum weight of 88 lb. Both of those dogs weighed more than Ms. Whipple. She literally had no chance of surviving the attack. She might as well have stepped into a river full of crocodiles.

This breed, though monstrously capable of killing, is thankfully rare, but other more familiar and common breeds are attack problems as well. According to the CDC, pit bulls are at the top of the list, followed by Rottweilers (typically much larger than pit bulls and so probably even more likely to fatally attack), german shepherds, huskies, malamutes (a type of husky), and doberman pinschers.

Sure, we have a right to own a dog, but we also have a right to drive a car or get married, and both of those are subject to license. I have no problem with licensing and bonding the owners of certain breeds of aggressive dog.

If it's dog owners who are the problem, then the owner is the appropriate place to address the problem.

Sure you can tell a book by the cover!

I was walking down the street with a friend of mine (or maybe now an ex-friend) who happens to be a black woman and an attorney. Here in Portland, the bus mall is one of the most active drug marts in the city.

I saw some 20-ish guys and gals hanging out on a corner wearing Oakland Raiders jackets. And not just jackets, but bulky winter-style jackets. This is in June, mind you.

I made some reference to them as gangsters and probably drug dealers and she was all over me with "You can't tell a book by the cover. You don't know they're gangsters."

My reply was short and sweet and may have cost me some degree of friendship at least for a while: "Are you, a black woman, honestly telling me that if you saw a bunch of guys coming down the street in white sheets and pointy hats and carrying a burning cross, you wouldn't make any assumptions about their values and attitudes?"

Her silence then and during lunch told me I had scored a hit, but at a price.

We do use our clothing to announce who we are, what our values and attitudes are, and what you can likely expect from us.

If a kid dresses like a gangster, maybe he's not in a gang, but he's telling us that he admires gangs and gang values and that we can expect to be treated by him as though he were in a gang.

My friend is a dignified person committed to truth, justice, and the American Way, who wants to be perceived that way, and so she does not dress like a gangster bitch, which is not to say she doesn't dress like a bitch.

Female attorneys dress like a different kind of bitch and it doesn't involve wearing a print dress and ribbons and bows in her hair to court.

Maybe you can't tell everything about someone by their attire, but their attire is trying to shape what you think about them, which in itself reveals their values.

Thursday, May 05, 2005

Incredi-bull anti-cheerleader legislation

Apparently, it's time to do something about cheerleaders. In Texas, anyway. You know, that state where if your cell phone goes off in a movie theater you'll probably be on Death Row in short order contemplating what to order for your last meal.

Well, CNN reports that another one of those watchdogs of decency, Texas State Rep. Al Edwards, sponsored a bill, which passed 85-55 in the Texas House of Representative which would ban "overtly sexually suggestive" cheerleader routines.

No more booty-shaking. No more panty-revealing cartwheels. No more shoulder lifts (unless they can find a way where the boy's hand doesn't tough the girl's butt...last night on the Jimmy Kimmel Live show, they spoofed the law by showing a guy cheerleader lifting a girl wearing a kitchen mitt.

Of course, this whole cheerleader deal has always revealed a cultural hypocricy on our part. On the one hand, we decry the sexual exploitation of underage people, especially females, while on the other hand parading them around in short cheerleader skirts, by having them do those open-legged cartwheels and splits, showing their spanky pants. Does anyone here really believe men (and let's not forget the lesbians) don't get a bit of a rise out of these activities?

I know I do...and I'm certainly not going to call my state legislators to complain! Let's hope that the Texas Senators have more sense than their Representatives.

Wednesday, May 04, 2005

The runaway bride and the ball-less wonder

Jennifer Wilbanks has succeeded in becoming the poster child for fucked up women everywhere. Put aside for a moment her crazy eyes, and what does this story get you thinking about?

She's obviously a mentally deranged, narcissistic attention slut, but what's worse is the reaction of John Mason, her fiance, who reportedly still wants to marry her!

What is masculinity coming to in America that when a man's fiancee takes a Greyhound most of the way across the country and fakes a kidnapping to avoid marrying him, he doesn't take her off his Christmas card list?

But...NO!!! He still wants to marry her. I mean, on the one hand he seems pathologically wimpy. On the other hand, he sounds like stalker material as the guy whose self esteem (perhaps deservedly) is so low that he won't take what I would call a fairly strong hint that perhaps she has mixed feelings at best about him. It's as if he's saying (as any good stalker would), "She really loves me, or will once she realizes what a great person I am and how unconditional my love is for her."

Wouldn't a no-bullshit guy say, "Jenn, you have embarrassed me deeply, and not just in private, in front of the whole world. I'm sorry, but you're gone and gone for good. There's no way in hell I'll ever marry you. In fact, I am going to have to sit down and figure out how I could have been so fucking blind!"

People are already offering excuses for her, but I'm not buying. Anyone who can hop on a bus and fabricate a kidnapping can work up the gumption to call off a wedding.

Unless of course you're a pathological dope, which Jennifer Wilbanks most definitely is.

Tuesday, May 03, 2005

Bush's Social Security "solution" is fucked!

According to our esteemed fearless leader, George Bush, the "solution" to the impending bankruptcy of the Social Security program is for people to plan for their own retirements by socking money away or investing it.

Well, George, I have news for you: We're already doing that! To the extent we can, any smart person is preparing for retirement but counting on a bit from Social Security as well.

Not everybody needs Social Security, of course. Some of us will have a million dollars sitting in a Swiss bank account somewhere or we'll own a business that brings us regular income even once we reach the point we are too old to work in it.

But, due in large part to this country's dismal support for education, there exist millions of people who are incapable of making wise choices when it comes to planning for their future. Setting aside the fact that a certain portion of the population is stupid to start with, someone who is a crack addict, or whose parents were, is probably not going to be socking away $200 a month for retirement (though it might be argued they won't be around to collect Social Security anyway). And the same might be said about millions upon millions of ordinary Americans who are not, and never will be, very talented at creating and managing retirement funds. These are the people who need Social Security.

It seems George doesn't understand that not everyone is a business whiz. And what about the people who make investments in good faith that fail? Are we seriously going to tell them that they have to sleep under a bridge until they die of exposure? You see, it's not just crack addicts who need something more reliable than personal retirement accounts.

Social Security needs a "solution" down the road, but George's solution doesn't solve much.

Monday, May 02, 2005

I've had it with feminist idiots!

Okay, not all feminists, but most of them. The ones from the mainstream to the "feminazi" far right (or left, depending on how you categorize people who want to limit your rights and control the way you think, feel, and act).

There are good feminists like Camille Paglia (required reading for any anti-bullshitist) and Christina Hoff Sommers, but most of them are just whiners.

Sure, women deserve a better lot, but 100% equality? That depends upon how you define equality. I believe in equal pay for equal work, but "equal work" means that your attendance is as good as the male's, you stay with the company as long as the male, you're just as willing to travel as the male, you take no more health-related time off, you take no more frequent smoke breaks, you don't have to take time off to shuttle the kids here and there, etc., etc., etc.

The trouble is, as any manager will tell you (including female managers who aren't in denial) that because so many women don't stack up in the above-mentioned respects (and others) they can't make as much as men and for the forseeable future will skew the statistics in favor of men.

I suppose, speaking as a male, my biggest complaint about women is the way they whine about things instead of doing things about their problems. They have many valid complaints, but do they get to work making substantial changes? No, rather they whine about it. Now, it is, as they say, "a man's world," but men don't respect whining. We regard it as childish.

It's also ironic that among a group that blabbers on and on about being treated like children in a paternalistic society and in paternalistic institutions like corporations, they usual advice when some pathetic Joe hits on them in the Xerox room is to run to the HR office and file a sexual harassment complaint. Maybe the HR department is maternalistic rather than paternalistic, but paternalistic or maternalistic, it still means you want to be a child. By contrast, a good feminist like Camille Paglia would recommend either kicking the guy hard in the nuts or embarrassing him in front of his peers.

The capacity for women infected with feminism to complain about things which will never change (because they're hardwired into the male psyche) is just plain weird. I mean, do we really want men who think like women? because that is what it would take: men who are just as "nurturing" as women is one example. There is no doubt that, on the whole, women are gentler than men with children, but I'm not sure it's true that children would benefit by having two parents both of whom act like mothers. It's been said that the male and female parental roles complement each other, with the mother making sure the child is sustained during the maturation process and the male teaching them the skills they need to succeed in the wider world.

I'm not going to take the bullshit anymore!

This site exists to expose and fight all the bullshit in the world. Government bullshit. Feminist bullshit. Politically correct bullshit. Religious bullshit. Racial bullshit. Gun control bullshit. People in denial bullshit. Bullshit in the news. "The sky is falling" bullshit. Pseudoscience bullshit. Food, diet, and nutritional bullshit. Medical bullshit. Bullshit about consumerism. Conspiracy bullshit. Drug war bullshit....You get the idea.

There's bullshit I see and bullshit you see. I'll tell you about mine and you tell me about yours. If yours is interesting enough, I'll post it...even if I disagree with it. Just send me your rant.

I'm certainly open to suggestions as to how to improve this blog and how to make a few bucks off it as well (might as well get a little for the time I put in here!...and that's no bull!). Write away!