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Saturday, October 18, 2003
A Washington Post op-ed on a recent study of news viewership. The study suggests FOX News is giving people a lot of really strange ideas about what the facts are; the writer here says "well yeah, that's the point of FOX". | Friday, October 17, 2003
The Senate voted to make half the Iraqi reconstruction money a loan. I have real problems with this. We can't go in somewhere, blow up their stuff, and then graciously loan them the money to put it back together at a very reasonable rate of interest. It makes us look reeeeeeal bad. Maybe the Democrats think this makes them look good to the anti-war voters, but nobody asked for this. We wanted guarantees on how the money was going to be spent and how we would proceed from here in Iraq, and we didn't get any of that. Bad calls all around. | Thursday, October 16, 2003
The wisdom of Lt. Gen. William G. Boykin, now a Deputy Undersecretary of Defense, on his days fighting Muslim warlords in Somalia: "I knew that my God was bigger than his. I knew that my God was a real God, and his was an idol." He went on to explain that Islamic extremists hate the United States "because we're a Christian nation, because our foundation and our roots are Judeo-Christian. ... And the enemy is a guy named Satan." This AP story pretty much tells you everything you need to know. Of course, Mr. Rumsfeld immediately rushed to Mr. Boykin's defense, proclaiming "we're a free people. And that's the wonderful thing about our country. I think that for anyone to run around and think that that can be managed and controlled is probably wrong. Saddam Hussein could do it pretty well, because he'd go around killing people if they said things he didn't like." OK, so give the guy his freedom of speech, but perhaps now isn't the best time to promote such bulls into the upper levels of the US Government, hmm? A few hours after this comes out, and the Australians (well, the Sydney Morning Herald, anyway) are already making fun of us; what happens when the Iraqis hear this one on Al-Jazeera? | Wednesday, October 15, 2003
How 'bout them Sox? I must apologize to certain misguided people, but I'm definitely rooting for Boston. First of all, they haven't been to the series since 1918, so they're due. Second, they're not the bloody Yankees. Anyone who buys up like every good player in the whole bloody league just deserves to lose. Course, it looks like the Cubs are going down as of right now. Too bad. No one likes the Marlins. | I don't know what to say about it. The Chinese sent a man into space and brought him back safely. On one hand, it's another advance for humanity. The way I see it, space is a really big place and we could always use another hand up there. The more countries have space launch capabilities, the more likely that one day we'll have functional space stations and eventually manned space exploration. On the other hand, I have to look at this kind of thing and mourn for the US. Certainly our program is light years ahead of the Chinese. They're doing what we did in the 50s. But they're advancing, and we're puttering around on 20-year-old space shuttles. The height of our space program was when Apollo 11 landed on the moon in the 1969. And it's not only the space program. What used to be the center of the world's industry in the American heartland has decayed into what we call the Rust Belt. The tallest buildings in the World are going up in Singapore and Hong Kong, not New York and Chicago. The US continues to lead the World in technological innovation, but to what use are we putting it? Why are we still driving around in gasoline-powered cars that pollute the air we breathe, served by highways and power lines from the 1950s, lacking in any kind of comprehensive education, left to starve when we can't find a job and left to die when we get sick? Can't we do better than this? As I write this, I see myself drifting in another direction as another thought hits me. The US didn't get to be a superpower by fiat of God (dispite the proclamations of Jerry Falwell and his ilk), we got here by applying generations of hard work and individual genius under the ideas of freedom, justice, and equality that this nation was founded under (although we made enough mistakes along the way). And because we followed that path, we have historically been a different kind of superpower. Unlike Rome or the Ottoman Empire or Nazi Germany or the USSR, we were loved and admired instead of hated and feared. If there's anything history should have taught us, it's that an empire based on hatred and fear, no matter how powerful, WILL fall violently in the end. The power of this nation is enormous. What, then, should we put it to? I feel that we spend an enormous portion of our power on simply trying to maintain that power. That never has worked, and that will not work for us. We got where we are because for centuries, the best and brightest of the world have longed to come to America, the New World, the Land of Opportunity. That is our strength. If we allow that designation to lapse, we will fall. There is nothing I am more sure of. | Tuesday, October 14, 2003
After taking a look at my counter statistics, I have discovered that The RipZAW is currently the #1 result in an MSN search for "Political Mistatements". Sweet! (Although how I earned the distinction, you'll have to ask MSN's code monkeys). | Monday, October 13, 2003
Slogan of the Day: "Why do something millions of people have proven to work when you can make some crap up?" | Ah, the eternal mystery of why Google's top Columbus Day link comes from the American Embassy in Sweden. Universal mystery courtesy of As the Apple Turns | When I read it the first time, Gregg Easterbrook's review of Kill Bill in The New Republic didn't really register with me. I mean, I thought it was a little shrill, and the last paragraph was a little wierd, but the guy's entitled to not like whatever movies he doesn't like. It was only when Atrios brought it up that I really thought about it. The last paragraph in question is this: Set aside what it says about Hollywood that today even Disney thinks what the public needs is ever-more-graphic depictions of killing the innocent as cool amusement. Disney's CEO, Michael Eisner, is Jewish; the chief of Miramax, Harvey Weinstein, is Jewish. Yes, there are plenty of Christian and other Hollywood executives who worship money above all else, promoting for profit the adulation of violence. Does that make it right for Jewish executives to worship money above all else, by promoting for profit the adulation of violence? Recent European history alone ought to cause Jewish executives to experience second thoughts about glorifying the killing of the helpless as a fun lifestyle choice. But history is hardly the only concern. Films made in Hollywood are now shown all over the world, to audiences that may not understand the dialogue or even look at the subtitles, but can't possibly miss the message--now Disney's message--that hearing the screams of the innocent is a really fun way to express yourself. Now, I have to say I'm not entirely certain what he was trying to do here. Was he trying to blame the Jews for society's violence? Did he mean this to be anti-semetic? If not, what the heck was he trying to say? This is just too wierd. Unlike some of the people on Atrios' comment board, I'm not ready to start calling Easterbrook names, but I'd really like to hear his explanation. I've sent him an email asking for the same. | Sunday, October 12, 2003
In this article about Schwarzennegger's Gubernatorial victory, people keep joking that Northern California or Coastal California should secede from the rest of the state. But all jokes aside, would that really be a bad idea (assuming you could do it legally)? California is one big mofo of a state. The enmity between NoCal (with the water and the liberals) and SoCal (with the giant blocks of thirsty conservatives) is legendary. And why do 50-some-odd million people only get 2 senators? I've always been a fan of smaller political units and government close to home. Maybe California is just too damn big for reasonable governance. | |
