I stumbled across an old favourite track while iPod shuffling yesterday and it really made me smile, thinking about ye olde days of the 1990's. Ah...I was a real pain in the ass....
There's a place in the world for the angry young man
With his working class ties and his radical plans
He refuses to bend, he refuses to crawl,
He's always at home with his back to the wall.
And he's proud of his scars and the battles he's lost,
He struggles and bleeds as he hangs on his cross,
And he likes to be known as the angry young man.
Give a moment or two to the angry young man,
With his foot in his mouth and his heart in his hand.
He's been stabbed in the back, he's been misunderstood,
It's a comfort to know his intentions are good.
He sits in a room with a lock on the door,
With his maps and his medals laid out on the floor
And he likes to be known as the angry young man.
I believe I've passed the age of consciousness & righteous rage
I found that just surviving was a noble fight.
I once believed in causes too, I had my pointless point of view,
But life went on no matter who was wrong or right.
And there's always a place for the angry young man,
With his fist in the air and his head in the sand.
And he's never been able to learn from mistakes,
He can't understand why his heart always breaks.
His honor is pure and his courage as well,
He's fair and he's true and he's boring as hell!
And he'll go to the grave as an angry old man.
'Angry Young Man' - Billy Joel
My two favourite political bloggers on these here interwebs are Andrew Sullivan and Glen Greenwald. I'd recommend both of their sites without hesitation. Andrew is an old-school conservative who is slack-jawed with horror at what the conservative movement in America has become. I often disagree with his politics, but I appreciate his willingness to present points of view other than his own, even to the point of occasionally admitting he was wrong and changing his position. In the blogosphere, this almost never happens.
Glen Greenwald, on the other hand, is about as bleeding heart a liberal as I am. Where Andrew's site is full of mostly brief posts covering a wide range of topics, Glen's features longer, more detailed examinations of political issues and debates. He's a terrific writer, incisively intelligent and really passionate, which I appreciate.
The reason I mention these two guys is that Andrew posted a link to Glenn's site in which they both touch on an issue that I've been thinking about a lot lately:
Greenwald bemoans "how extremist our political consensus has become" against the rule of law:
The express policies of the right-wing Ronald Reagan — “applying the rule of law to terrorists”; delegitimizing Terrorists by treating them as “criminals”; and compelling the criminal prosecution of those who authorize torture — are now considered on the Leftist fringe. Merely advocating what Reagan explicitly adopted as his policy — “to use democracy’s most potent tool, the rule of law against” Terrorists — is now the exclusive province of civil liberties extremists. In those rare cases when Obama does what Reagan’s policy demanded in all instances and what even Bush did at times — namely, trials and due process for accused Terrorists — he is attacked as being “Soft on Terror” by Democrats and Republicans alike. And the mere notion that we should prosecute torturers (as Reagan bound the U.S. to do) — or even hold them accountable in ways short of criminal proceedings — is now the hallmark of a Far Leftist Purist.And a Reagan-Thatcher pragmatic Christian Tory like me is now a conservative heretic. And a centrist like Obama is a communist. God help us.
Hold on to your hats, folks.
Coded references to New Testament Bible passages about Jesus Christ are inscribed on high-powered rifle sights provided to the United States military by a Michigan company, an ABC News investigation has found.
The sights are used by U.S. troops in Iraq and Afghanistan and in the training of Iraqi and Afghan soldiers. The maker of the sights, Trijicon, has a $660 million multi-year contract to provide up to 800,000 sights to the Marine Corps, and additional contracts to provide sights to the U.S. Army.
...references include citations from the books of Revelation, Matthew and John dealing with Jesus as "the light of the world." John 8:12, referred to on the gun sights as JN8:12, reads, "Whoever follows me will never walk in darkness, but will have the light of life."
[Michael] Weinstein, an attorney and former Air Force officer, said many members of his group who currently serve in the military have complained about the markings on the sights. He also claims they've told him that commanders have referred to weapons with the sights as "spiritually transformed firearm[s] of Jesus Christ."
Who knew Jesus carried firearms? I'm encouraged that our armed forces are marching into battle with God on their side. (As if there was ever any doubt!) I think we should just drop the pretense and start equipping our military with large crosses on long poles that can be mounted on our tanks and Humvees.
My impression of Sarah Palin is that she is a craven, crass, calculating no-nothing with a bubble around her head so opaque that the only ideas she is ever exposed to are her own, ricocheting around and becoming more and more bizarre and exaggerated over time. The fact that John McCain selected her as his running mate was the most fatal indictment of his candidacy for me.
She is populist mediocrity in designer glasses, a christianist nightmare that could only have been taken seriously by the media after eight years of President George 'I don't read newspapers and am in bed every night by 9 o'clock' Bush.
The fact that she's still being touted as one of the major contenders for 2012 is deeply worrying so this poll reassures me that her particular brand of crazy hasn't really taken off with the mainstream in a big way...
Poll: CBS
Wow. I saw a rundown of NBC's new primetime weekly schedule for the period starting in March after Jay Leno moves back to the Tonight Show.
They are going to be showing 5 hours of Law and Order in primetime every week.
5 hours. Maybe I'm out of the loop and this is normal for NBC, but it seems a bit like overkill to me.
Here's the run down.
Monday
8pm-9pm: Chuck
9pm-10pm: Trauma (beginning March 8)
10pm-11pm: Law & Order
Tuesday
8pm-10pm: The Biggest Loser
10pm-11pm: Parenthood
Wednesday
8pm-9pm: Mercy
9pm-10pm: Law & Order: Special Victims Unit (encores beginning March 3)
10pm-11pm: Law & Order: Special Victims Unit (originals beginning March 3)
Thursday
8pm-8.30pm: Community
8.30pm-9pm: Parks and Recreation
9pm-9.30pm: The Office
9.30pm-10pm: 30 Rock
10pm-11pm: The Marriage Ref
Friday
8pm-9pm: Who Do You Think You Are?
9pm-11pm: Dateline NBC
Saturday
8pm-9pm: The Biggest Loser (encore episode)
9pm-10pm: Law & Order (encore episode)
10pm-11pm: Law & Order: Special Victims Unit (encore episode)
Sunday
7pm-8pm: Dateline NBC
8pm-9pm: Minute To Win It
9pm-11pm: The Celebrity Apprentice (season premiere March 14)
What exactly is Jeff Zucker's area of expertise, because it doesn't appear that he's particularly good at running a network.
And they wonder why TV audiences are dwindling...
The other day I overheard someone referring to Iris Robinson MP, wife Northern Ireland's First Minister, as admirable for having an affair with a younger man. That seems to be the angle of some in the mainstream media regarding the current scandal plaguing the DUP, she's a 'cougar.'
For anyone that isn't familiar with the details, the nutshell version is that Iris Robinson - an evangelical Christian who has built a career on condemning others from her lofty and pious position - has been discovered to have had an affair with a teenager whom she had known since he was nine years old.
To make things worse, this teenager was in a very vulnerable position at the time, having just lost his father to cancer.
To make things worse, she had also been having sex with his father.
To make things worse, she also arranged for the teenager to get a £50,000 loan from a property developer to set himself up in business (and kept £5,000 of it for herself) without disclosing any of this as required by her role as a Member of Parliament.
And let's not forget that in June of 2008 she took the occasion of a brutal attempt on the life of a gay man in a homophobic attack to call gay people 'abominations.' She later followed this up by stating that homosexuality was morally worse than raping children. Recent events may offer some indication of why she made this particular comparison.
Before all of this came to light, she announced that she was resigning from Parliament due to mental health issues, and since the horrific details of her private behaviour have been made public she's claiming to be suicidal. I guess it's upsetting to lose the moral high ground, even when you're a reprehensible pervert.
Tony pointed out to me last night that if this scandal had been revealed about any other politician, Iris Robinson would have been the first to gleefully and publicly crucify them. So. Let's all try not to lionize the heinous bitch too much.
Dubai.
Dubai has been in the news recently for two main reasons, first because it needed to be bailed out by the UAE due to its sluggish economy, and second because of the completion of the Burj Dubai - the world's tallest building. It's a popular destination for vacationers and businesses looking to take advantage of it's tax system (no personal income tax).
Dubai has sprung up out of the desert very quickly and is very shiny and new, festooned with glittering skyscrapers and full of outrageous indulgences for the rich.
But there is a darker side.
Dubai regularly imports poor migrant workers from India, Pakistan, Kuwait, and other countries where workers are desperate for income. Human Rights Watch found that many of these workers toil 12 hours a day, six days a week. They endure extreme desert temperatures that have led to illness and in some cases, death. Their substandard housing usually involves sleeping up to eight men to a room. And for all this work, researchers say migrant workers in Dubai average only $175 a month — less than $0.60 an hour. Since Dubai has no minimum wage laws, workers have little course of action against abusive and exploitative employers.In addition to exploitative conditions, a number of indicators of full-fledged slavery have been found among migrant construction workers. Some workers have come to Dubai by means of debt bondage and indentured servitude. Others have had wages withheld and passports taken away “for security reasons.” Slavery and exploitation in Dubai are the old and dirty parts of an otherwise shining city.
And apart from being built by 21st Century slave labour, it's a dictatorship with a draconian legal system. Here's a couple of impressive examples just from this week.
A father-of-three who was found with a microscopic speck of cannabis stuck to the bottom of one of his shoes has been sentenced to four years in a Dubai prison.
Keith Brown, a council youth development officer, was travelling through the United Arab Emirates on his way back to England when he was stopped as he walked through Dubai's main airport.
A search by customs officials uncovered a speck of cannabis weighing just 0.003g - so small it would be invisible to the naked eye and weighing less than a grain of sugar - on the tread of one of his shoes.
...One man has even been jailed for possession of three poppy seeds left over from a bread roll he ate at Heathrow Airport.
A BRITISH woman who made a rape complaint in Dubai has been arrested for having illegal sex with her fiance, according to reports.
The 23-year-old from London said she had been raped by a waiter in a luxury hotel after celebrating her engagement to her 44-year-old boyfriend, also from London.
But when she reported the alleged rape to police in the Middle Eastern state, she and her boyfriend were arrested for having sex outside marriage and illegally drinking outside a licensed premises... It is understood that the couple are still in Dubai. They could face up to six years in jail if found guilty of having sex outside marriage.
Friendly place, eh? They clearly want to be the city of the future...with the medieval mentality.
While I'm on the gay thing, I thought I'd just highlight this gay-baiting gem from epic hypocrite and closet homosexual Matt Drudge. Rumors surrounding Homeland Security Secretary and former Governor Janet Napolitano's sexuality are old news, but Drudge is certainly in no position to be throwing stones.
Just in case it's not clear, the article Drudge was linking to was about the new scanners that may be installed in airports that can see right through your clothes, and the 'Big Sis' crack is yet another right wing reference to their baseless claims that the current government aspires to totalitarianism. Unlike their guys, Bush and Cheney, who lined their bird cages with the bits of the Constitution that they hadn't already used to wipe their asses.
Is my indignation showing?
Portugal's legislature has just passed a gay marriage bill which is expected to be signed into law shortly. When it is, Portugal will join Spain, South Africa, Canada, the Netherlands, Sweden, Norway and Belgium in the exclusive club of nations that have chosen to recognise the same-sex marriages of their gay citizens.
It's worth mentioning that while some of these are the type of liberal, Scandanavian countries where you would expect to find more acceptance for gay folks, Portugal and Spain are still countries where the Catholic church is very dominant. And the Catholic church under the leadership of the current Pope, in case you haven't been paying attention, is extremely hostile to gay folks and blames them for a whole host of society's ills. And South Africa is bordered by African nations where gay people not only aren't allowed to get married, they are in danger of being imprisoned (or worse) for simply existing.
Even in the European nations, it would be a mistake to think that these laws recognising gay marriage are universally popular or that those who enact them do so at no risk to themselves or their careers. These nations have demonstrated that courageous politicians do exist, and that sometimes governments do look out for their more vulnerable and marginalised citizens.
So any bets on how many more years (decades?) it's going to be before either the US or UK are led by politicians willing to stick their neck out on this issue? Obama and Brown have both made it clear that neither of them support changing the law to allow gay marriage and if the so-called liberal progressives aren't on board, who will be?
Remember when we used to be at the epicentre for progress on human rights and individual liberty? No longer.
Well, snow afternoon, anyway. We've only been back from the holiday closure for a few days, but last night we got about four inches of snow and by lunchtime today, we'd had about three more. Having grown up in rural Nebraska and Iowa, that doesn't sound too significant, but it's completely out of the ordinary for this part of Britain, and as the city of Milton Keynes only owns one snowplow...
So we closed our office early today and I'm curled up on the sofa drying off in a t-shirt and sweats. Mucho macho.
As I've been AWOL from this blog for the past couple of weeks (sorry), I should mention that Tony and I had a lovely and low-key Christmas. We didn't do much in the way of presents this year, but we got to spend the holiday with Tony's family. Sadly, I was too ill to join in with the traditional British Christmas programme - i.e. drinking myself into a stupor.
Not that I would have, anyway, alcohol doesn't agree with me. For some reason, I generally get a pounding, splitting headache within about twenty minutes of my first sip. It's like I'm allergic, or something.
Photo
It's not been above freezing for about a week, which is pretty unusual for Milton Keynes. Apart from my car not wanting to start in the mornings, it's been kind of nice. Everything looks a bit prettier with a layer of snow on it. This shot above was taken out of the window of our spare room, overlooking the school playing field behind our house.
This frozen remnant of a spider's web on the outside of our conservatory also caught my eye this morning.
If you had approached me in the winter when I was 12 and living in the frozen tundra of Iowa that was under about six feet of snow and tried to tell me that I would one day find a bit of frost a novel and interesting thing I would have laughed at you. But here I am.
One more reason our mission in Afghanistan is a hell of an uphill climb:
The fledgling Afghan National Army faces numerous obstacles in its efforts to become a force capable of maintaining security on its own. And....the situation is made all the more difficult by the persistent use of hashish among troops.
"I think if they introduced drug testing to the Afghan army we would lose probably three-quarters to maybe 80, 85 percent of the army," says one U.S. soldier.
The U.S. marines training the Afghan army come across as consistently frustrated by how unfocused, and often high, many of the Afghans are. They complain repeatedly of soldiers coming to training without a lot of their gear, including their helmets.
One commenter wrote:
This can't possibly be a surprise to anyone with the most rudimentary knowledge of Afghan culture. Next to naswar (a skanky dusty kind of snuff), hash and hash oil are the only religiously permitted pleasures that make a life of grinding poverty there tolerable -- and few are poorer in Afghanistan than Afghan soldiers, who have no real chance of enhancing their lot through the corruption that enables those in other branches of Afghan officialdom to better themselves.
I can't blame the poor buggers for wanting to forget their troubles. They live in tribal Afghanistan under constant threat of gruesome death by Taliban, for Christ's sake. Count your blessings, at least they're not high on opium.
So Tony and I made one of our increasingly rare visits to the cinema on Saturday to see Avatar. General impression - very imaginative and visually fantastic with a very old and familiar story. There were no real surprises in the narrative, which is a pity. When a movie is this groundbreaking visually you hope for a similarly daring script and you don't get it with this film, unless a sci-fi retread of Dances With Wolves is your idea of daring.
Miranda
centreing around 'enchantments' and love potions, but that aside, there's been a satisfying balance of pathos and action that is well-measured to keep a diverse family audience entertained. Special older-man-hotness mention goes to Anthony Head as King Uther Pendragon. Woof.
What the hell is wrong with Joe Lieberman? He's been threatening to filibuster the health insurance reform bill because it includes an expansion of Medicare that he proposed just three months ago? Is this guy bitter or what?
And now he's talking up the possibility of switching parties?
Hey, Joe, maybe you haven't noticed, but the Republican party isn't such a welcoming group when it comes to New England moderates anymore. So unless you're prepared to jettison almost everything you've ever stood for, move south of the Mason-Dixon line and become a gay-bashing, anti-abortion fire breather with a deep distrust of brown-skinned people, that elephant-themed welcome mat ain't gonna last long. They act like they like you now because you're blocking every move the Democratic Senate tries to make, but just you wait. You'll discover just how loyal your new Republican friends are once you start trying to claim that you're one of them.
And while you're at it, try taking stock of what your constituents think of your recent principle-free tantrums. His approval ratings in the state were below 50%, and that was a month ago, before he really turned up the heat in trying to derail any substantive health care reform. After pissing off the Democrats and discovering that the Republicans don't have much of a future to offer him in Connecticut, Joe Lieberman may find himself out of work after the next election.
UPDATE: On the other hand....
Glenn Greenwald has a must-read post on his blog arguing that Lieberman has been effectively acting on the White House's behalf, and that the new toothless version of the bill is the one Obama wanted in the first place.
As for me, I'm starting to see the sense in Howard Dean's position - this has now become a fatally flawed bill and should not pass.
In essence, this reinforces all of the worst dynamics of Washington. The insurance industry gets the biggest bonanza imaginable in the form of tens of millions of coerced new customers without any competition or other price controls... Most of this was negotiated and effectuated in complete secrecy, in the sleazy sewers populated by lobbyists, industry insiders, and their wholly-owned pawns in the Congress. And highly unpopular, industry-serving legislation is passed off as "centrist," the noblest Beltway value.
There's a story in the press today about Nevada extending legalised prostitution to include male sex workers for the first time. That's an interesting story in itself, but there was one line the article that really struck me as noteworthy.
For more than 25 years, no licensed female prostitute in Nevada has contracted HIV, the virus that causes AIDS...
So what's it going to be called? The Teenies? The Tenties? Enquiring minds want to know...
With all of the 'climategate' malarky going on, I find myself despairing at the quality of the debate on climate change. It's so easy to get lost in the labrynth of statistics and arguments, but I think if you step back, the issue is much simpler than the debate suggests.
People fall into just a few categories:
The claim that [global warming] is not man-made is not only denying the reality of physics (Does CO2 trap heat or does it not? How can introducing massive amounts of this material into the atmosphere not affect the climate?), it's also the lamest of excuses of these people. Even if you deny that GW is man-made, how is this an excuse for inaction? Using the same rationale, would the commenter refuse to put out the fire in his house simply because it was hit by lighting - not a man-made fire?
The best public school system I ever attended was in Hampton Iowa. When I think back on it now, I'm still impressed with how excellent it was. I arrived at the age of 10 in 1982 and they already had computers in the classroom. Always Macintosh computers, and they even started teaching us programming in Basic, which while not terribly useful, was certainly ahead of the curve. (Anyone else remember the Oregon Trail game?) Sadly, we left Hampton three years after moving there to go to the worst school system I ever attended in Cochran, Georgia.
Thinking back, every computer I used in a school from Hampton on through my senior year of High School were all Macs. When I got to University, I discovered the PC and early versions of Windows. I wasn't overly impressed, but my interest in gaming inspired my first computer purchase to be a PC, running Windows 3.1.
That was also the version of Windows we used at my first post-university job in 1995. It was basically a clumsy user-interface running on top of MS-DOS. From there, it was soon Windows 95, then Windows 98, Windows NT, Windows ME, Windows 2000, Windows XP and then Windows Vista.
So why the hell is the new version called Windows 7? If Windows 95 followed Windows 3.1, then surely they should be on version 10 or 11 by now. But then, Microsoft has never been very good at details, have they. I've been running Vista at home for about a year and a half now, and I'm still having to download weekly patches to fix security holes and glitches they continue to discover they left in the code.
I particularly loved this old Mac - you could see a whole document at once on the screen without scrolling. Why did that never catch on? It was fab!
