It’s not enought that we’re putting non-violent drug users into prison to be beaten and raped. Now we’re doing it with minors. Wonderful.
On another note, the poor have more free time than the rich. Slate asks why? Um, isn’t it obvious? It’s the public choice theory. People are willing to trade income for leisure time (I myself being a prime example). If you work harder and have less free time, you’ll be less poor!
So how close was the infamous Hillary 1984 ad to reality? Pretty damned close. Remember. Hillary and Bush are like peas in a pod. There is no aspect of your life they don’t think the Feds shouldn’t be sticking there nose into.
Update: And as if things couldn’t get weirder, the owners of 1984 are bullying the poor sap who made the ad.
We really need to revist copyright law in this country. we really really need to.
When I was growing up, all my teachers and most of my professors had a reflexive hatred of the Republicans. No matter what the Republicans did, they refused to even considered supporting them. It was amazing to watch otherwise intelligent people switch off their brains. Republicans were racists (after supporting the Civil Rights Act), sexist (fair enough) evil monsters who just wanted to put us under their bootheel (apparently by shrinking government authority).
But when you dug down, you’d find one of the big reasons they really hated Republicans. Richard Nixon. He was the candidate who wouldn’t go away who eventually crushed their bright boy in 1972 and continued a war they hated. He was also a pathological liar who crippled the economy with wage and price controls and thought the President should have the authority to do whatever he wanted. It eventually got to the point where the very sight of him would infuriate people. Read the works of Hunter Thompson or even Dave Barry and you’ll find that intense deep hatred that no amount of time can really take away.
Well, Bush is now doing this all over again. Polls are showing that young people are switching to the Democrat side in droves. The President has been revealed as an incompetent, authoritarian hypocrite. He lust for power and vicious politicization of everything on Earth has made the very sight of him infurating to a generation of Americans. He hasn’t crippled the economy like Nixon did. But the string of disasters — none of which are his fault! — is long and ugly. Iraq, Katrina, the budget, prescription drugs, the justice department, ad infinitum, ad nauseum. And his embracing of a radical religious agenda has made the GOP look stupid. Boortz is right. They are on the brink of permanent minority status.
The only hope of conservatives is that a conservative Democrat emerges to lead the nation. Someone like Bill Richardson out in New Mexico. He hasn’t got a chance once Hillary’s wolves set upon him. But he’s all we’ve got now.
Sigh. You have no idea how hard it is for a Child of Reagan to say this. But I am now a man without a party.
I haven’t commented much on the US Attorney scandal because I haven’t been quite sure what to make of it. I’m rather annoyed at Boortz and his ilk dismissing this as a “non-scandal”. But the longer this goes, on, the more disturbing it gets.
First, I’m sick to death of hearing that the US Attorneys serve at the “pleasure” of the President. It’s a buzzword that’s driving up the fricking wall. He’s not a monarch, much as he has his supporters — his few remaining supporters — think that he is.
Second, I don’t think anything illegal was done here. But that doesn’t make it right. Lots of things are prefectly legal that ain’t right — American Idol, for example. I think it once again demonstrates the raw political machinations of this loathsome administration.
Third, we’ve found out that the Patriot Act gave the President the authority to appoint USA’s without congressional approval. This needs to be unpassed fast. And the fuck was that for, anyway? Is Al-Quaeda going to strike because Bush couldn’t get his partisan attorneys appointed?
Fourth, we’re getting a nasty nasty look into the Bush justice department at it ain’t pretty. Read the whole thing. One of the fired attorneys was gotten rid of despite an exemplary record because he wouldn’t prosecute pornographers, was saving his ammo in the War on Drugs for big dealers and was concerned about FBI interrogation techniques.
Some interrogation techniques “may be unsettling” for jurors in video or audio form, wrote the BATF, and therefore shouldn’t be recorded. Perfectly “acceptable” techniques may not “come across to lay persons as a proper means of obtaining information,” wrote the FBI, and recording those techniques could sway a jury—to which an unknown official added the handwritten annotation: “So we want to hide the truth? Don’t [sic] want jury to reach its own judgment?”
Apparently not. The Justice Department ultimately sided with the law enforcement agencies, noting that it’s best to hide “unsettling” interrogation techniques from juries, even when it was those techniques that extracted the confession.
As Greenwald explains, this is particularly disturbing, because interrogation techniques would only come up in those cases in which a defendant’s confession was in dispute. And in those cases, the agents would almost certainly already be asked about their techniques at trial. The very purpose of a video, then, would be to determine who’s telling the truth.
You know what? Now that I’ve typed out all my thoughts, I am angry. And I think that if the American people become familiar with this — if our lazy worthless media does their fucking job — Americans will get angry about it. (And despite Boortz’s bitching, 72% of Americans think this should be investigated, according to a poll I can’t find at the moment).
It’s just another example of the incompetence, political viciousness, authoritarianism and deception that has increasingly defined this Administration.
Via Sullivan come this surrel surreal trip into an alternate universe.
This won’t work. Various school districts are proposing to lengthen the school day in an effort to get higher test scores.
But the problem is fundamental. It’s qualitative not quantitative. Having the kids in the same shitty schools for thirty more minutes or thirty more years is not going to improve things.
It’s getting back to the fundamental problem of government. Since output can’t be measured, input is. And so we assume that if we’re spending lots of money, hiring lots of teachers and forcing the kids – who are already bored, resentful and negative toward education – to spend more time at it, that must be an improvement.
But it’s not – not for everone anyway. And we could be educating these kids effectively with less money, less time and less homework. We know this, because we did it in this country for decades and see it going on all over the world. If we introduce competition between schools, we would see more effective innovation and improvement.
I have a big post on education in the queue. I’ll post it soon.
There is one bright point in the article. And it emphasizes something I’ve said — education is best run at the level closest to the students. This innovation, whether it works or not, is being driven by the states and is tailored to the schools that need the most help. The “one size fits all” model that Big Education (and our President) have been ramming down our throats is breaking down.
If only we could give them a little more freedom.
I shouldn’t jinx it. But my anti-spam measures appear to be working. The hits on this site have slowly declined this month from the 40-50k range down to the 20-30 k range. Yesterday, I had only 2483 hits — this is good since 99% of the hits are spam. Today looks like it will bounce back up to the 20k range. But I’m making progress.
So what else did KSM do? Top Five is on the case.
As the traffic increases, I should make sure that everyone coming here knows that the views expressed here are the author’s private opinion and do not reflect the views of the University of Texas, McDonald Observatory, the National Science Foundation, NASA, STScI, the University of Virginia, Cyberstrux, WordPress or anyone else I have ever been associated with in any professional capacity whatsoever.
Like the sign says, these are the random farts of an undisciplined mind.
My favorite movie critic, James Berardinelli has a fascinating post on the recent apperance of explicit sex scenes in mainstream movies. He doesn’t think this is the beginning of a trend. To wit:
Then there’s the question of how a graphic sex scene impacts a movie. People generally watch porn for stimulation. People watch legitimate films for less primal reasons. Confusing the two can lead to frustration. The conflict is evident. There’s also an issue of pacing. No movie can afford to take a several-minute “timeout” to show a sex scene, unless the movie is all about sex in the first place (in which case it’s almost certainly straight porn rather than art-porn). There’s another issue that Roger Ebert once raised. Graphic sex is documentary in nature. As he wrote in Roger Ebert’s Book of Film, speaking about Norman Mailer: “Mailer, like so many before and since, awaits the cinematic marriage of Sex and Art. I am not convinced such a thing is possible. In traditional fiction films, art involves the filmmakers in creating a fiction about characters whose lives we care about. Sex, to the degree that it involves nudity and explicit detail, brings the whole story crashing down to the level of documentary. The actors lose not only their clothes but their characters, and stand (or recline) revealed only as themselves.”
Here’s the response I e-mailed to him:
I’m afraid I have to disagree with you and with Ebert. It seems to me that you are still stuck in thinking of any explicit sex as porn and not as what we’re seeing — a more explicit extension of the sex scenes that have been in mainstream films since the fall of the Hays Code. A number of the films in your top 100 include scenes that are fairly explicit — albeit mostly in a disturbing context (War Zone or Requiem for a Dream, for example). These would have been considered pornographic — hell, they would have been banned — just a few decades ago even though they don’t “show everything”.
I think our perception of art-porn has been heavily tainted by the disastrous Showgirls foray into this. But just as there is a difference between the soft-porn that shows up on Cinemax and the erotica that shows up in, say, Secretary, I think there can be a similar difference between pure pornography and art-porn. An example that you didn’t mention and doesn’t show up in your archive is Sex and Lucia, a movie which is fairly graphic, although not pornographic, but compelling, interesting and romantic. I don’t see that the movie would have come to a screeching halt had it been slightly more explicit.
I think the word we’re both scrounging around for is “tasteful”. There is a way to make porn tasteful, but the political situation in our country has branded all explicit erotica — and most non-explicit — as evil. But films like Secretary and Lucia show that it can be done.
Of course, there’s always Sturgeon’s Law. Most movies that blur the line between art and porn will be crap, because most movies are crap anyway. And the best talent will shy away from “art-porn” because of the stigma — which is why we’re seeing the new wave emerging in countries like France and Spain, which aren’t as hysterically puritanical as we are.
Back to blog-Mike:
Sex and Lucia is a movie I have a lot of arguments about. Some people think it’s just a skin flick. I enjoyed it. Not that those two things are mutually exclusive, of course. But I do think any trend that breaks us out of “sex bad, sex evil, violence OK” mentality that has gripped his nation for the last three centuries is a good thing.
Blogged by me in January: this year feels conservative for the Final Four.
Reality in March: The lowest seed in the sweet 16 was #7 UNLV — who really shouldn’t have been rated so low. Elite eight is four #1’s, three #2’s and a #3.
Having said that, all four #1’s will now lose.
Expect a lot of saber-rattling from the Right about Iran taking 15 British sailors into custody. Neal Boortz will be calling for a bombing attack. But I suspect this will work itself out. Iran is trying to provoke an attack to shore up their government and give them an excuse to get into Iraq. Let’s not give them what they want.
Via the Agitator, i find facism is alive and well in Florida.
Seriously, seizing someone’s house over a parking ticket?! Thanks, Justice Scalia! These are the fruits of destroying Americans’ property rights!
I’ve had politics on the brain lately. The last few books I read — Somebody’s Gotta Say It and Player Piano, in particular, are political. College football is done, baseball hasn’t really started and there are very few interesting movies out.
Worse, I’m observing during the Final Four. By the time I get back home, we’ll be down to the finals and I’ll have missed a lot of great basketball. Argh! I am, however, proud that I correctly picked UVa to choke. Much as I loved being there, they never seem to go very far.