Tourism is big business in Florida and in these weak-dollar days, much of it is from abroad. Of course it's not what it used to be and one of the reasons I've heard from regular visitors from Europe is the hassle of entry. Fingerprinting, revealing financial records, confiscation of computers are amongst the stories I hear and I've met people who have their Florida Winter houses and condos up for sale, because they're tired of being treated as insurgents.
Arriving on the Queen Mary in Queens' Grill class, you may feel in the lap of luxury, but one foot in the good old USA and you may feel that bad old cold war Soviet bloc vibe. It's going to get worse and yes, it's because the terrorists have won again without having to blow up anything.
General Thomas McInerney USAF (Ret.) said on Fox this weekend that we should strip search Muslim men entering the US and he may get his wish.
"every individual flying into the US from anywhere in the world traveling from or through nations that are state sponsors of terrorism or other countries of interest will be required to go through enhanced screening."
says the TSA. All passengers flying into the United States from abroad will be subject to random screening. Starting today, there will be a lot of patting down of brown behinds because although there are only four countries listed as "State Sponsors of Terrorism:" Cuba, Iran, Sudan and Syria, an unnamed Administration official told Politico today that passengers from other countries like Nigeria, Pakistan and Yemen will be searched as well. Think that's going to stop them? I don't either. One would-be attacker with a Canadian or UK passport will force us to put everyone up against he wall - and what about an American citizen with a surname like Jones -- or McVeigh? Think the TSA is relieved we won't be hosting the Olympics in Chicago? Me too.
Our policy of acting incrementally and only in response to specific provocation makes it all too easy and particularly when no plot need actually succeed in doing anything but costing us more and making us panic. Why not simply recruit some passionate fool and give him a defective device when there's less chance of retaliation and it still hurts us so much? Face it, terror is the objective of terrorism and they just won again.
On the one hand, the blending of electronica dance rhythms and traditional instruments, along with all the pageantry you see in this video, tell us that a gigantic cultural explosion has been building up behind the firewalls of Islamist statehood.
It happened because of the internet. It happened because students explored a virtual world and became aware of the truth about their regime. When the regime reinstituted cultural oppressions, the people awoke to form a movement so democratic it's practically anarchist.
I've opened a liveblog on my website because the news coming out of Iran shows the people are winning. The state has brought power to bear and Iranians have thrown themselves at the state without hesitation. They have overpowered Basiji, who are now the ones concealing their faces. They have beaten riot squads into submission. They have rescued two men from death by strangulation and sent security forces running away...on camera.
And they have done it all without a real leadership, while having evolved into...this. This beautiful, suddenly-tolerant...culture.
I'm making a prediction: if the regime falls, invest in Persian carpets. I have one I can sell you...
Tiger Tiger sinning bright Crashed his SUV one night
Brit Hume here for the amazing Redeem-O-Matic Christian sinwashing system. That's right folks, no accountability, no bitchy paybacks, no hard work, no punishment, no silly pagan begging for rice in uncomfortable robes! This miracle device lets you feel like you're off the hook instantly and it won't cost you a dime. Come to Jesus now ( 'cause you know we can't do this all day) and we'll double the offer -- you get 14 adulteries washed for one dunk.
Fox hound Hume tells nominally Buddhist Tiger Woods and us that Buddhism is a second rate religion because you don't get the same quick-kick forgiven feeling you get with Christianity. No, really.
'Tiger turn to the Christian faith and you can make a total recovery and be a great example to the world."
said Hume to Chris Wallace on Fox this morning. Well I don't know about old Prune Face, but I would prefer my "great example" to spend more than a Sunday morning's glossolalia session and perhaps seek to make amends to his wife and children -- perhaps even to any of those women he may have deluded into thinking their relationships were going anywhere before punching the reset button on his moral character.
Of course the selling of Christianity like some labor saving kitchen device or laundry product should offend Christians and I'm sure it does, hell, I feel offended for them, but that's Fox, and that's Hume. Join our tribe, buy our stories, splash on some anger sauce and religious whitewash and you'll feel better about your sorry self right away. You getting this camera guy?
I watched Julia Sweeney in Letting Go of God on Showtime the other night. Seeing how her thought processes led her at first to reject Biblical literalism and finally Theism and religion in general, put a big smile on my face since it mirrored my own in so much detail. For some reason it seems like the large majority of atheists I know come either from Roman Catholic or Jewish backgrounds but I won't speculate here about the reasons.
There is evidence that religiosity in the US is on the decline, with fewer people seeing religion as a solely positive influence and more feeling that religious teachings are out of date, but of course the opposition makes a lot of noise and has a lot of political power. I don't know whether any of the above applies in heavily Catholic Ireland, but the anti-blasphemy law which went into effect yesterday is sure to be challenged and the high profile of some of the challengers is sure to cause considerable embarrassment to those who have to enforce it. Whether Catholics in Ireland are as likely to let go of God as they are elsewhere, those in Ireland who have and those of other traditions are going to have a field day.
The Irish constitution extends religious freedom only to Christians and that may be a surprise to many who see Europe in general as moving away from belief and from Church domination. It's worthy of curiosity to see whether the ordinary practice of other religious traditions will constitute blasphemy as well. Will it be blasphemous to say that Jesus was not the actual son of God but permissible to accuse Jews of murdering him and of eating Christian babies? I guess we'll see. Will showing Letting go of God be punishable? Will it be illegal to publish Nietzsche, or Dawkins? Michael Nugent, chairman of Atheist Ireland calls this idea
"dangerous because it incentives [sic] religious outrage, and because Islamic states led by Pakistan are already using the wording of this Irish law to promote new blasphemy laws at UN level."
Dangerous indeed and so diametrically opposed to American views of religion -- at least as reflected by those who wrote the Constitution -- that an attempt to import it to the US wouldn't be surprising. I remember former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani's attempt to close the Brooklyn Museum because of a painting he considered blasphemous. ( it wasn't) Many people still wish ihe could have been successful.
The US constitution certainly does not grant special rights to Christians or to any other religious groups and that fact seems to be a massive thorn in the side of the religious right; a thorn they'd love to remove and I will be amazed if some Republican doesn't attempt to introduce something similar by next Christmas. The test of the Irish law is in whether it outrages a large number of people and if we had such a law within the viewership of Fox, we can be sure that outrage would flow forth like a mighty flood of medieval values upon the land and our courts would grind to a halt whild civilization is one again snatched from the jaws of victory.
Once again, I have appropriated the music of friends to create a video. The Course Of Human Events is not meant to be a crowd-pleaser, however. If it played on a movie screen, the MPAA would force an R rating on it just for the visuals. This is an indictment of our times, a celebration of progressive values, and a long view on the movement that gave us every good and decent thing that its opponents take for granted. It also seeks to channel anger in the most appropriate direction rather than surrender ground we have gained.
It is the decade of systemic government failure by leaders who disbelieve in the very notion of effective governance. It is the demand for change stymied by relentless self-interest. It is loud, and in fact should not be watched without turning the volume as high as you dare. Some of the images might bring tears to your eyes. Others will infuriate you. But in the end, I hope you will feel the same sense of pride I feel when I call myself a progressive, so do yourself a favor and watch it in full-screen mode.
Here is wishing everyone a New Year of Jurassic-sized felicity. I’ve just returned from Philadelphia, where I spent the weekend. Which means I had to fly since I live nowhere near Pennsylvania. Which means I had the high honor and distinct privilege of experiencing how the authorities dealt with a perceived elevation of the terrorist threat thanks to Christmas Day’s near-disaster.
Lines were at least tolerable, but slower. I arrived at PHL hoping to get an earlier flight. Silly me. By the time I got to the airport around 6:30 a.m., boarding pass in hand, the security line was already very long and not moving very fast. We all know you can’t trust granny with that menacing walker of hers—she just might be al Qaeda. But me they singled out for a patting down. I suspect it was just so they could find an excuse to handle a living fossil, not because they thought I might belong to some radical group. Well, no harm done. At least they didn’t yank my tail and call me “stupid lizard” the way children do.
It’s been well said by others that much of what we do at the airport by way of vigilance is “security theater” rather than genuine protection. I feel neither taught nor delighted, nor rendered safer, by this participatory theater of the absurd. Maybe the title of the play ought to be, after the manner of Luigi Pirandello, Mille personaggi in cerca di buon senso.
The Detroit incident suggests that to a significant extent, safety is in the hands of the passengers. No security regimen – not even the eminently sensible proposal to invest more in intelligence and dot-connecting than in the above-described “theater” – will prove 100% effective. I suppose this just means that if and when someone near us stands up mid-flight and tries to set fire to his shorts, makes as if to light the wick hanging ever so oddly from his snappy new netbook, or begins to carry out some other cartoonish but deadly scheme our adversaries think of next, we are going to find it necessary to take notice. Polite attentiveness should become part of flight culture. Of course, there’s no need for paranoia – the odds of anything bad happening on any given flight (terrorist-induced or otherwise) are low.
Evidently, it is all but impossible to get certain agencies to act with the necessary common sense and alacrity. If a young man’s father walks into your office and says something on the order of, “My mixed-up son is consorting with terrorists and I am convinced he’s going to do something irretrievably awful. We must stop him!” you’d think that you would be able to issue an immediate request to keep that young man off any airplane whatsoever. But even something this obvious only begins to set the creaking wheels of the security apparatus in motion, and evidently requires weeks, if not months, of processing, bethinking, and consideration. I wish I could see it getting better, but it’s just too predictable human behavior to expect improvements with confidence. People dither, and even the authorities, when confronted with the need to act rapidly and boldly, tend to look around and bleat, “why don’t the authorities do something?” Still, the demand for improvement in intelligence connectivity should be made, and followed up on, too.
On a positive note in keeping with the new year, I believe the most important thing we can do to make ourselves safer is to get out of the oil-consumption business as quickly as possible. We are targets at least partly because of our entanglements in the politics of a certain region of the world. That need not be interpreted as “blaming Uncle Sam”; it’s simply to point out that changing our relations with the Middle East to something less complex or high-stakes than they are at present would benefit us, as would finally arriving at a workable solution to the longstanding Israeli-Palestinian tensions. Neither accomplishment would make terrorist outfits regard us kindly, but both might lessen the appeal of their warped, murderous ideology to the lost individuals they turn to their purposes. In the long run, what we have on our hands is a political problem, not a directly military one or even one that can be settled by ever-increasing security measures. I think it's worth keeping that in mind.
The woods decay, the woods decay and fall The vapors sweep their burthen to the ground, Man comes and tills the field and lies beneath, And after many a summer dies the swan
-Tennyson-
Every year at this time I let Doctor Syntax out of the Vicarage and let him raise hell with the way we've ruined the greatest language on Earth: spray painted it like an old abandoned subway car, put it up on blocks and stolen the wheels and made it all but impossible to have an intelligent conversation because, like one of those German Enigma machines, every word seems to change meaning every time it's used.
Every year brings the same references to "language police" because you know it's true and you know we're guilty of polluting the minds of millions with silly, balbative portmanteau words like Ginormous or Sexting, our relentless verbing of nouns like texting and friending and our instant acceptance of every cliche metaphor, metastatic Malapropism, stupid solecism and yes, with every pusillanimous political polemic we pass along.
No, if conservative, liberal, reactionary, fascist, anarchist, Marxist, royalist, and Fascist are all used interchangeably, we might as well stop talking, legislating, voting and adjudicating and take up arms. And we do.
Every year, as our vocabularies atrophy, we make up words or as our overuse of superlatives diminishes them, as our misuse erases them, we have to invent new ones. After all, when your skate board or your X-Box is awesome, you simply can't discuss how you felt when you saw that Hubble picture of some distant nebula, now can you? What happens to the real verb "to befriend" when it's more fashionably idiotic to "friend" someone or worse, toBFF them? It dies quickly of course and any real dictionary these days is a virtual Arlington of fallen words.
There's a college up in Michigan, Lake Superior State University, that's been putting out an annual list of words that need to die for 35 years. I'm afraid the school will die before they have any results to show. In fact if we still have universities in 35 years I have to wonder whether they'll be teaching in Standard English in the way medieval Universities taught in Latin, while business and popular pursuits are conducted in some 'consumerized' argot or vulgate designed to boost sales and befuddle customers while the general population can't read Hemingway, much less Tennyson any more.
No, I'm not the language police. The real language police are the people who tell you you're a racist if you call an Asian tiger or bear an Asiatic tiger or bear -- or that you may never end a sentence with a preposition. No, I just love English and as you know I love wordplay and the inventive use of words. In principle I don't object to such silliness as "chillaxin," the compound of two bits of dialect; chillin' and relaxin' but only in principle and never when used by some underage hipster with a two thousand word vocabulary. I even thought the short lived "not so much" routine was cute for a few moments, but that's the thing: with fish, house guests, metaphors and the Macarena; after three days one notices a smell. At least I do. Maybe it's time you did too.
Yes, I agree that "shovel-ready" is shovel ready for burial; I agree that it's time to stop calling every adviser a Czar. I am sick unto death at the "app app app app" that I hear quacked out at the phone store, butLSSU's 15 words are not enough nor does the list expose the inverted elitism behind our linguistic cacophony. We may have majored in English at the best schools, but in our HowdyDoody hearts we know it's bad to be grown up and embarrassing to sound educated and so we try ever so hard to sound like the baggy pants crowd who know just how the really cool kids talk in the penitentiaries and crack houses. We always fail at it of course, because those kids change their jargon faster than we can.
As I said, I only do this once a year and that's because it's useless, of course. It only lets me vent some excess steam pressure, to rant against the dying of the light. I know that "impact" will ever hence mean affect and effect and influence and inform and not be just a carrion metaphor. I know that those words are gone forever from popular parlance and that this little rant will be as hard for my grandchildren to read as Chaucer. Hell, animated video clips may have replaced the written word altogether by then and the University of Wii may be the new Harvard. I don't know. I do know that no one cares how much of value we lose every day or with what dross we replace it. I do know there are still people who can write well and I'm proud to appear here with them. I do also know It's New Year's Eve again and time for old Syntax and me to drown our sorrows -- metaphorically speaking, of course.
Whatever the cause of Rush Limbaugh's chest pains, they haven't been as fatal as some have reported but whether or not angina is involved, we can be sure they weren't pangs of conscience. His web site thanks us for our prayers ( if only he could hear mine) and is, as always, jam packed and bloated with fear mongering, dire predictions and apocalyptic warnings that if we don't "fight like hell" our country will be changed forever.Let's hope.
I recently read that only about 5% of those admitted to hospitals with chest pains die within a year, so one important and very needed change is probably not going to happen -- all the more so since most billionaires can not only afford health insurance but can afford to do without it. If you or I had rendered ourselves uninsurable through a lifetime of belly bustin' burgers, cigars, uppers, downers, pain killers and beer we might have a rather different experience and a bit less cause for optimism.
Yes, we have to fight like hell to stop this "buffoonery" says Rush about Bob Menendez' call to set aside ideology, turn off Limbaugh and pass the legislation that most Americans want. But Congress is ignoring the will of the people -- or at least the minority of the people he represents, says Rush. Public health insurance will change America forever -- forever! Government will "take over" health care just the way it took over all those plans you made for retirement. ( huh?) Just the way Veteran's benefits took over - well whatever they took over and medicare helped keep exploding profits from eating up every last dime retired people have set aside.
It's a tenet of Buddhism, and a nice bit of wisdom, that change is constant and suffering is universal when we refuse to accept it. It's too bad in this case that Rush's refusal to let go of failed 19th century ideas will cause more suffering for everyone else than it will for him. We have been changing from the outset in terms of making the US a better place to live for more of its people and Rush has been a major clot in the artery of truth and justice and decency.
No, I'm not going to descend to his level and wish him an immediate death, in fact I hope he lives long enough to see that not one dire thing he has predicted has materialized and that he's been pretty much wrong about every thing he's said -- and until that happens, I hope those pains continue to hurt like hell.
-Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying War against them, or in adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort.-
Article III
Orly Taitz is calling for armed insurrection against the government of the United States. That's right, the same demented creature who's been thrown out of many courts for trying to prove that Barak Obama wasn't born in the United States is advocating that we take up arms against the government of The United States of America.
"Seeing targeted destruction of our economy, our security, dissipation of American jobs, massive corruption in the Government, Congress Department of Justice and Judiciary, it might be time to start rallies and protests using our second amendment right to bare arms and organise in militias."
Seems to me she her best defense is insanity, since anyone seeing targeted destruction of the economy by those who appear to have saved us from what seemed inevitable destruction wrought by George Bush has a good claim to be a nut job. Illiteracy would be equally as demonstrable (bear Vs. bare) but it's hardly a legal defense.
Sure it's easy to laugh. She makes it so easy, after all, but far less laughable are the millions who essentially agree with her that the damage done by borrow, spend and borrow some more economic policies of the Republicans is proof of Democratic malfeasance. I got another one of those "humorous" tracts this morning: Dems don't pay taxes or work and Republicans have to support them. Right.
No, you can't fix stupid and I fear that you really can't fix insane, particularly when it's pandemic. You can however, begin putting traitors in jail.
Your ubiquitous (O)CT(O)PUS is no prude, but I get annoyed when breast and penis enlargement spam invades my e-mail box. Why spam when spammers know nothing about me, least of all my gender, proclivities, or species?
Neither this nor that, I am not a transgender, cross-dressing cephalopod in need of both. I have no interest in privileging one appendage over another and no innate need to preen or primp myself in gaudiness to facilitate naughtiness. In this or that, it seems, human beings are more akin to birds.
Perhaps followers of this forum have noticed: Spam is no longer delivered via e-mail but posted in the comment threads of popular blogs. The logic is simple: Why spam a single reader when you can reach a wider audience; for instance, a forum followed by hundreds or thousands of readers; and spammers have learned to customize their message with charm and inventiveness.
Recently, for instance, I posted this article, A Preoccupation with Rubber Ducks. Last week, one enterprising spammer raised the ante duck for duck and left this comment beneath my post:
While most birds are phallus-free, ducks are oddly endowed - up to 8 inches. Using high-speed video they found that ducks could go from zero to happy in less than half a second … That endowment should give the males an advantage during forced mating but these [editorial note: I eliminated the embedded url address that originally appeared here] free males aren't out of the woods yet … Why Yale decided to study duck penises in the first place I will never know.
The embedded url address links you to an online pharmacy that trades in generic versions of Viagra™, Cialis™, and Levitra™, among other prescription medications. Online pharmacies are illegal in the United States for good reasons.
Generic drugs manufactured offshore violate patents and trademarks, and consumers should be especially wary when purchasing drugs of dubious origin and quality. Furthermore, consumers should never self-administer any prescription drug, especially antibiotics and cardio-vascular drugs, without medical supervision.
Curiously, GeoTrust and McAfee have certified this obviously illegal enterprise as a secure e-commerce site. Furthermore, the horny duck accepts payment from American Express, Diners Club, Visa, MasterCard, and Western Union. American corporations, it seems, employ a double standard. They will litigate any infringements of their own rights yet sell anything to anyone for any purpose with impunity. These days, to make a buck is the most sublime of all virtues ... trumping laws, ethics, even hypocrisy. (O)CT(O)PUS intends to name them and shame them until they clean up their act.
