An Inconvenient Truth

Yeah, I saw An Inconvenient Truth. Of course I agree. It's not like I can have any less respect for the current administration, so the eye-opening stuff was just more of the same.

I could write an entire diatribe, but what would be the point? Few people who read my blog would disagree, and those who do are so blatantly partisan--you'd have to be, to ignore that much science--that there's no point in arguing.

I really, really wish "we" (I didn't vote for him, of course) hadn't gone and screwed over the planet by electing the wrong person as President. Twice. Gore in '08. Hillary can rot in the Senate for all I care (old link but she's still sponsoring it as a "alternative" to a Constitutional Amendment. I'm really beginning to loathe that woman, politically speaking.)

Boo Friggin' Hoo

Please allow me to once again inject my own brand of self-righteous
indignation (or "poorly-constructed rant") into the current topic du jour: the male crisis.

I've been hearing (or reading, rather) a lot lately about men and boys in crisis. They have crappy test scores, chick-lit is all the rage, there are too many hair-care products, etc. Some individuals have "risen up" against this terrible wussification of our culture to fight back. I guess. The problem is, they're fighting back against a nonexistent threat.

Take today's WP article on how boys' test scores aren't really lagging. Add to that the rise in "frat lit" as a response to chick lit, and you have a weird juxtaposition: everybody's crying about males doing badly while also saying males need to stop crying about everything and man up.

I agree with the second part. But that's not a male- or female-specific problem, people just need to learn to differentiate between actual problems (lost your job, got hit by a car, got cancer) and perceived problems (broke up with boyfriend of 3 weeks; didn't get to go to baseball game last night; gender doing slightly less well in mathematics exams).

My point is this: there are many things in the world you can't just "walk off". These things include African genocide, middle east conflict, mass tort litigation, and ice cream headaches. If there's anything "wussier" about society today, it's that both genders often fail to realize that you don't actually deserve to have happiness handed to you on a silver platter. When things go bad, or wrong, or poorly, suck it up and stop complaining about how unfair it all.* It's not unfair, it's life. It's up and down. You are no more inherently deserving of the ups than you are of the downs.

* I realize it's super-funny to my family that I of all people am now
claiming that life isn't fair. But I only mean you have to MAKE it
fair, you can't just sit around and wait for it to naturally exist
that way.

UPDATE: Hyperlinks that don't hyperlink 1, blogging by email 0.

Giants Among Men

I went to my first San Francisco Giants game last night, at the very
convenient and charming AT&T Park (or is it SBC? I can't keep up).
Some observations:

The Giants are, in a word, craptacular this season. I mean, there are
worse teams (there always are) but they certainly haven't been doing
much to keep themselves out of the dregs of the league. Despite this,
the Giants still have a much better fan showing on a Tuesday night
than, say, the 1st-place Detroit Tigers, who after years of neglect
(read: craptacularness) still don't sell out games even though they
have one of the best records in the majors.

A fact I still cannot believe, by the way. Armed with my new Detroit
hat (wearing with pride again! for the first time? who knows...) it
has become difficult to convince people that I'm not a fair-weather
Tigers fan. Those who remember me in high school and college know
differently, but the recent appearance of many, many Detroit hats
around the country casts my own loyalties in suspicion, I guess.

Back to the team at hand, however. The Giants played the Angels
(Anaheim for those who don't know/care) and, despite a fairly
lackluster effort on both sides, managed to come away with a win
(3-2). The night was made even better by the spectacular seats--club
level, right behind home plate. You could smell Omar Vizquel's cologne
and (insert obvious steroid/Bonds joke). One of the partner's in the
firm has season tickets that he gives away when he can't go, and I was
lucky enough to be invited by the lovely lass who won 'em.

Night at the ballpark: highly recommended.

It's like the Olympics, or Haley's Comet

Apparently, every ten years we give the President the ability to legislate.

I didn't have a blog in 1996. I'm not actually sure that anyone did. But I didn't agree with the line-item veto then, and I certainly don't agree with it now. Granted, this newest version isn't as powerful as Clinton's brief foray into legislating, but it still undermines the process.

Nobody likes pork-barrel projects except congresspersons. Often times the people they benefit don't even care; they're just there to enhance image and waste some of the trillions the government has to spend.

But that doesn't mean we need to upend the democratic process to get rid of them. Pork is there because legislation is all about compromise and consensus. Sure, one party holds sway most of the time, but consensus is still necessary. Senators barter. Representatives bargain. If you give the President carte blanche to eliminate the fruits of those bargains, it dampens the entire process.

Example: Barbara Boxer wants funding for tree-huggers in Marin, and Trent Lott isn't terribly interested in helping her out. But she says she'll stop opposing some conservative social issue if he'll fund her pet project. They agree. Now, Lott didn't necessarily need Boxer's actual vote for the budget, because he's got the majority. But now he can count on less of a media fuss about his issue, so in their eyes, everyone wins.

Now enter the President, who thinks tree-hugging is for pinkos and vetoes that item out. Congress--Republicans out of principle and some Democrats out of anti-pork feelings--agrees and easily votes to agree. The end result is that Boxer has lost her half of the bargain, because we let the President muck around.

It's a simplistic example, I know, but I threw it together in 10 minutes. At the end of the day, it doesn't matter who heads up the Executive Branch (even if it's me); that's not one of the powers of the President, and it tips the scales too far in his already-lopsided favor (executive orders, anyone?).

Muzak

Another good meme from Dennis!, and everybody knows I'm a sucker for easy content. You can read the "rules" on his blog, but a quick summary is thus: these are the first lines of the first 20 songs (roughly...) that played when I opened iTunes and hit random. You could guess what they are, but methinks nobody will bother so I just did it out of curiosity.

My own pathetic attempts at defending my weird musical tastes are also included. Let's begin!

1. "Well beer, we've had some good times..."

2. "Humming... all the way to Reno."

3. "I've been looking so long at these pictures of you."
If you don't get this one, and you're under 35, punch yourself in the face.

4. "Come on, oh my star is fading. And I swerve out of control"

5. "May god bless and keep you always, may your wishes all come true."
Okay this is pretty unmasculine so far. I hope it gets better.

6. "You let me violate you. You let me desecrate you."
Woah. You ask for it, you got it.

7. "Suzanne! You're all that I wanted of a girl."
Not too hard when the title is the first word of the song...

8. "This or that. This or that. This or that. This or that."
Rap really is repetitive.

9. "Sometimes in our lives, we all have pain. We all have sorrow."

10. "You and I in a little toy show buy a bag of balloons with the money we've got."
Hmm. It's better in German.

11. "At last, my love has come along."
I swear to God my music collection isn't really this wussy.

At which point iTunes crashes my computer. Or rather, "Bye Bye Blackbird" by Ray Charles crashes it. I don't blame iTunes. Reboot and let's go!

12. "I wish I would have met you. Now it's a little late."

Interlude: Polaris, by Zero 7. No words.

13. "He came riding fast like a phoenix out of fire flames."

Another interlude: War Cry, from the Grosse Pointe Blank soundtrack.

14. "Here comes the hot stepper (murderer), I'm the lyrical gangster (murderer)."

15. "Lights go out and I can't be saved. Tides that I tried to swim against."

16. "Stand in the place where you live, now face north."
Man, two R.E.M. and two Coldplay? Whiny-rock represent!

17. "I want to break free. I want to break free."

18. "I know what you want. I wanna take you to a midnight show tonight."

19. "Manic depression is touching my soul."
This one goes out to all my Zyprexa homies. I feel ya.

20. "We got married in a fever hotter than a pepper sprout."
There's no one like the original, damn you.

Well that was frightening for all involved (me and the neighbors). Turns out, it really IS Bye Bye Blackbird that crashes it (not iTunes) because it just did it again. What the hell, Ray? Why you gotta hate on iTunes?

Money Makes a Shill

Yes it's late, but that's when I do my best ranting.

Back when he was press secretary to our last useful President, Mike McCurry was a personal hero of mine. He seemed forthcoming and straightforward in a business (politics) that rarely sees "forthcoming" and never sees candor. He was a great press secretary, not like the talking chimps the Bush Administration has ponied up to the podium. Well, Ari was deft, but in a more malevolent, dark-side-of-the-force way.

That's why it's so sad and depressing to see someone of his former pragmatism shilling for what is possibly the worst government-meets-tech idea since email taxation. I won't go into the whole debate--you can read McCurry's hugely twisted slant here and the much more enlightening (and not written by a hired gun like McCurry) viewpoint here--but I just wanted to show how easy it is to fall from grace. Maybe someday I'll stop being idealistic and will sell my soul to AT&T for millions, but I can always say that McCurry & Co. did it first.

Okay, I said I wouldn't get into it, but briefly:
- the Internet is already regulated: regulated meaning kept neutral so that infrastructure owners must allow equal access to content-providers.
- the communications companies want an end to these regulations and a beginning to a "tiered" Internet where money buys fast-loading webpages
- Translation: right now, my blog (Blogger technical problems notwithstanding) and eBay load at the same speed. This would change if the telecomm companies get there way, and my page would load at a crawl so that eBay, which can pay, can zip people in and out.
- Even eBay, which has the money to do this, opposes this idea. That's because it's a colossal mistake.

Now it's super-late, and I'm not sure I'm making sense. But go ahead and read those articles, they're written "with care" and probably "edited for grammar", and you know neither of those things are particularly popular here at DU.

Update: CNN Steals Posts

Perhaps it is unfair to paint all of CNN with the plagiarist's brush
when it is only Lou Dobbs who, by sheer coincidence, says the
same thing today in his online column. A little more eloquently, maybe, but still: I'm watching my sitelogs
for CNN employees, Dobbs. I'm on to your crafty game.

Update to the Update: Apparently blogger doesn't like HTML tags in emailed posts. Who knew?

Of Amendments and Rights

President Bush is apparently seeking to further entrench himself into
the Presidential wastebin of history (say hi to Herbert Hoover when
you get there!) by promoting an ill-conceived,
snowball's-chance-in-hell anti-gay amendment to the Constitution.

Aside from this amendment having almost zero chance of coming even
close to ratification, and aside from the oh-so-blatant political
strategy it's designed to promote, such an amendment would be a first
for the U.S. Constitution. Why? Because the Constitution, brilliant
document that it is, does not strip rights from citizens, almost
without exception.*

What do I mean? Well, take the first 10 amendments (the Bill of
Rights, people. Come on, read your civics books). None of those
amendments, which almost all Americans cherish (even pesky #2) takes a
right away from anybody. They limit what the <i>government</i> can do,
not what citizens can do. No abridging speech, no abridging press, no
limiting religion. Later, a clearly drunken Congress did manage to
pass an amendment that took something away--the 18th Amendment,
creating prohibition, which lasted all of 13 years.

I'm not saying that gay marriage is good. I mean, I would say that,
but that's not the point. The point is even if it's proven that gays
getting married causes eyeball cancer in puppies, it shouldn't be the
subject of a Constitutional Amendment. It's not what the Constitution
is for. Furthermore, using the promotion of an amendment--a change to
the rock that our extraordinarily powerful and prosperous society is
built upon--as a political tool is absolutely asinine. Politics will
adhere itself to everything, of course, but to create an amendment for
pure political gain? Have you no sense of decency, sir?

*Some might argue that the 26th, while prohibiting interference with
the right to vote, also codifies the voting age at 18 and thus limits
those 17 and younger from voting. I say, who cares what kids think?

This is my first attempt at an email-based blog, so my apologies if it
comes out green or in Sanskrit or Wingdings or makes your monitor
asplode.

Broken Record

I hate to bring it up almost twice in a row, but I keep running across stuff that makes me question why exactly everyone is so quick to dismiss "conspiracy theories".

First of all, there are "conspiracy theories" and then there are things that haven't been explained well. It seems to me that these should be exclusive categories. Most "conspiracies" have been explained (i.e. the 'fake' moon landing, crop circles, etc.) but in situations like this one, most of the irregularities not only haven't been explained, they've been ridiculed.

I'm all for ridicule. I enjoy it. I ridicule people, places, feelings, NASCAR, and weather patterns on a routine basis. But I also believe in fact, and in not deriding a theory simply because it can somewhat easily be lumped into a grouping of other, crazier theories. And it seems to me that the mainstream media--not just partisan media, but pretty much everyone--falls to easily into the trap of automatically discounting a theory simply because there are other theories about the same event that are kooky.

Example: Someone alleges that the 2004 and 2000 elections were "stolen" by a CIA taskforce intent on ensuring a GOP presidency. They believe this because a former CIA intern is in the background of a picture taken in Palm Beach, FL, during the big 2000 mess.* Somebody else alleges that the voter rolls from 2000 and 2004 were extraordinarily low in some precincts, and that this abnormality is compounded by all the precincts being traditionally Democratic strongholds.**

Now, the first person just has a kooky theory, based on nothing but a photograph. The second person just has questions that need answering. If you can't see the difference in these two "conspiracy theories" then you need to read it again until you do.

* I made this up.
** I did not make this up. Sadly.