This is where you will find my opnions on many different topics. Remember, they are based on nothing more than what everyone else has access to... experience, knowledge, inner moral sense, and simple preferences.
This is also where you will find opinions that I find interesting in one way or another. If I disagree then I will say so after the article. If I agree, then I will say nothing, and let it stand.
Note: Before you read ANY opinion of mine, you need to read the BELL CURVE RANT. If you ever want to have a conversation with me about things that are a matter of opinion, you need to understand that I come at every problem with the BELL CURVE RANT deeply implanted in my psyche. So read it HERE
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My Opnions
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My Opinions |
Other People's Opinions that are worth reading
Things I still need to write
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Most people base morality on the idea that there is a GOD who keeps track of right, wrong, and punishment. I am not of the belief that you need a strong religious conviction to have a moral system of values. I am of the belief that morality is "what works". And to me what works is a system of acting that, if generally followed, will result in a greater amount of "happiness" in the world than if people did not act that way. No.. not utilitarianism or the greatest good for the greatest number. It's not quite as simple as that. It's more like the modified golden rule: Do unto others as you would have them do unto you, but keep track of those that don't reciprocate so you can take that into account in future dealings. It doesn't make sense to be always decent to someone who treats you badly. Sure you want to be treated decently, and so you should treat everyone decently. But if you know someone else is a "bad faith" operator, then drop the rule and deal with them only if you need to, and in a manner that will further your interests while doing no harm to anothers. The golden rule is great, as far as it goes, but without some thought behind it, then it's just another knee jerk response, and knee jerk rules almost never work as a moral system.
Religion is good, and whatever form it takes is good for those it works for. I've known people who say they hate "organized religion". I don't have a problem with it. People need comfort and people need assurances, and they need it delivered to them because most of them don't have the time to spend alot of effort thinking about the alternatives. Organized religion is good at doing this. I write more on this on my religion page.
I have a problem when religion tries to interfere in the secular world in ways that assume they have the only right answer. All religions assume they have the "right" answer to all questions. But governance can't work that way. Things change over time, and governments need to adapt to change. Religions don't. And there in lies the rub. Religion should not be involved in government. Religious people can be, but religion should not. Everyone in government needs a compass... and religion can provide that. The banging together of all the various compasses is what guides government... not religion.
I believe abortion should be freely (not free) available to anyone who wants one. I also believe that it's a shame when one had to have one. It should be the last alternative. The first being birth control. We need to do better with sex education in this country. You cannot teach abstinence, and then hope that it works. When it fails, the other alternatives need to be available. And abortion is one of those alternatives. I grew up in the days when everyone knew what the wire coat hanger meant. Today's women don't know what that means. I don't want young people today to ever find out what it means.
I have no problem with it. Having a problem with homosexuality is like saying you have a problem with red hair. The person with it does not have a choice in the matter, and anyone who says they do is.. well.. not up to speed.
In general I believe that a person's sexuality is not stuck in one category, but is like a shifting target that can move from one side to the other (completely in the case of bisexuals) and can change in different circumstances.
I believe women should have all the rights of men and visa versa. I also believe that women should share all the same responsibilities of men (see notes on the draft). I believe that women should receive the same pay as men. I believe that women should also have every opportunity that a man has and that men should have every opportunity given to women.
I do not believe in quotas, nor do I believe that giving women equal rights will automatically lead to 50% representation of women in every job. That just doesn't make sense when you take the differential psychology of men and women into account. Men will always want to dominate a hierarchy. As a result you will always find more men in positions of leadership than you will women. Not because women are less qualified, but because they are less driven to get there; more willing to compromise.
I also believe that, any future draft, should apply equally to men and women. Women are fully capable of serving in the modern military and should share the burden with men if they want to be considered equal.
I am fully in favor of passing the equal right amendment.
NOTE: I'm sure some women will get their back up when I say "women should share the same responsibilities as men" - and say something like, "Well, you have the kids and raise them!!!" Saying that a man should bear children is like saying that women should have erectile dysfunction and prostate cancer. The sexes have different biological functions and there isn't much we can do about that (though we are trying). Men can't have babies. Women can't get prostate cancer.
As far as raising kids, I've known men that raised children, and they do a fine job of it, as good a job as any woman raising kids alone.
I never bought into the junk Bush, et al, was selling to try and justify the war in Iraq. I never believed that Saddam Hussein had anything to do with 9/11 (and I find it incredible that after all this time people still think he did.) I never believed that Iraq was a threat to the United States. 10 years of sanctions had pretty much ruined the ambitions of that country. I didn't much care whether they had Weapons of Mass Destruction. Whatever they had was unlikely to be used on the United States or any ally that we genuinely cared about.
Yes, he was an awful dictator, cruel to his own people, unfriendly to reform, megalomaniacal.. etc.. etc.. the basic definition of a dictator. But I wasn't about to go rescue his people unless they were already trying to rescue themselves.
But, having said all that, I was, and am, ambivalent about whether we should have gone to war. I AM of the opinion that the status quo was toxic, and SOMETHING needed to be done to shake up the situation with regard to Arab cultural hatred.
The status quo was that the governments of Arab states could deal with the frustrations of their own people by pointing to an external enemy and engendering a hatred for the United States (well, to be fair we were not always the target. Once upon a time it was the Soviet Union, and before that the British, and France in certain areas, and perennially the Israeli's). "All our problems, all the problems with the world are from the United States." they could say, and get away with it because the United States never countered these accusations with anything.
As a result, there was this large boil of hatred toward the U.S., and meanwhile the various regimes in power never had to address any social issues because the people had an outlet for their frustration... the U.S. (AND... let's be honest here. We didn't cover ourselves in glory by propping up and tearing down various governments that were no better than Hussein. I will concede anything anyone wants to say on that point.)
It was inevitable that this boil of frustration would eventually result in some people taking action. Those actions included (but are not limited to)
The war in Iraq has already changed the status quo, and now various Arab governments are having to deal with internal unrest that is directed at THEM rather than us. Bombs are going off in Riad, Saudi Arabi, and the people there are pissed at their own government. It's about time.
The Arab world needs to change. This war is changing things. Don't know if it will be for better or worse, but in the long run I think I might be for the better... the very long run.
The man is an idiot. He was born to privilege, and took full advantage of it. Can't blame him for that. But he isn't presidential material in any way shape or form. He has no command of the English language, and you have to believe that his thought process is as muddled as his speech patterns. He holds simplistic views of complex issues, and is not interested in understanding anything that is complex.
I rather like Gov. Terminator. I rather like the fact that he is so much an outsider that he really can kick butt and not be beholding to anyone. It will be interesting to see what he can do.. what his agenda is, and how long it will take before he's just another mealy mouth politician trying to make everyone happy, and making no one happy as a result. (NOTE: I did not vote in the recall election. If I had I probably would have voted for Larry Flynt. Another outsider who would have stirred things up, and who HAS run a successful business.)
Taiwan should be an independent state. But I'm not willing to start a nuclear war over it. China should give up it's ambitions for a greater China, and realize that they need to govern what they already have better and not worry about getting back what they lost so long ago. I hate the saber rattling over this.
I protested the war in Vietnam. At the time it made no sense. It was a civil war we should not have been involved in.
The real problem was that we could not WIN the war. After alot of years this should have been obvious to anyone. We would not move above the 48th parallel, and we would not allow military commanders to take the actions needed to win. So over and over we lost men trying to take the same hill we abandoned just weeks earlier. At least that is how I remember it.
It made no sense. We lost that war. The protestors at the time were right. I wish we had worried less about saving face, and more about saving American lives .
I don't see a need for the draft currently. The all volunteer military seems to be working fine.
However, if the draft is re-instituted, then women should be required to sign up as well as men. It is blatant sexual discrimination that women get a pass on this and men don't.
Is a mess. We need to spend more on education because the kids in the system today will be the ones running the country when we are all gone. If we don't take care of business now, we won't be able to take card of it later.
First... double the salaries of all people who work in schools... every single one of them. They put up with alot and most people would not be able to handle what they go through on a daily basis.
Second... Spend more on better books. We need better and more available books for kids. Some of the text books I've seen are too simplistic and repetitive.
Third... Hold kids, parents, teachers, and administrators responsible for doing their part to make it work. Yes, parents have a responsibility; one they too often dodge figuring its all up the the schools. The phrase "in loco parentis" does not mean that the parents have not responsibility for their child's education. It simply means that the schools are the parents for the short time they have control over the kids... the rest is up to the real parents and the kids themselves.
WalMart, the biggest company in the world, is making enormous progress building more and more stores at the expense of everyone - even people who never go to a WalMart. They pay their employees so poorly that government funded services are needed by these employee's to make up the difference. That means that you pay for WalMart employee's health care, child care, food stamps, and retirement. (ex. SF Chronicle, 03-May-2004: "Most women workers -- 72 percent of the sales force -- earned $6.10 per hour and $12,688 per year, which made half their families eligible for the federal food stamp program and government-funded health care for their children.")
Does this sound like a responsible employer? Does this sound like the kind of business we really want in this country? A business that builds it's corporate empire on the backs of taxpayers? I certainly don't like the idea.
On "big box chains" in general... it's kind of sad to go to a different part of the country and see the same stores you see everywhere else. To go to a mall in Florida and get the same thing you get in New York, or Texas or North Dakota. It get's boring after a while. And the selection of merchandise is obviously limited to what some buyer somewhere can get by the ton.
I used to work in a K-mart, and the stated goal at the time was that when you walked into a K-mart anywhere, you could find everything in exactly the same place, with the same displays and the same prices. The goal was that, if you found yourself in a K-mart, you would not be able to tell from the inside what state of the union you were in.
I like difference. I like little businesses with quirky selections. I like big box stores for necessities and "all in one" shopping. I just wish there was more of one and fewer of the other.
People want health care. We, as a nation have the ability to make health care more available. I believe that no one should go without a minimum level of health care. I also believe that not everyone is entitled the absolute BEST level of health care, because that would make it unaffordable.
Problems that need addressing are: Malpractice Insurance - perhaps we should have a separate judicial system to handle this as the expense of this is driving good doctors out of business. This separate system would rely on special judges who know both law and medicine, and on jurors that come from a medical background.
The cost of drugs: Research is expensive. Perhaps the government should subsidized successful research in some way, and provide a means of subsidizing research that has no chance of making a profit even IF the drug is successful (this would come under the heading in the Constitution of "providing for the general welfare")
People need to be somewhat responsible for their own insurance costs... because when someone is not responsible for something they tend not to care how much it costs. Co-pays are a good idea, but there are always people who can't pay. What I don't understand is why someone who makes $30,000 a year pays the same co-pay as someone who makes $1,000,000 a year. That makes not much in the way of sense.
I think, as a nation, we have to decide what our priorities are, and I think healthcare should get more attention than it does.
[NOTE: I hate "3rd rail" issues, and if the government really stepped into healthcare it would be in danger of becoming one... these are issues that are so important or so politically dangerous that anyone who touches them is killed - hence the name 3rd rail. Social Security is one of those now, and healthcare could be one as well. These types of government programs restrict government flexibility in times of need, and we need to make some effort from the start to tell people that the future is NOT fixed and that we will always do the best we can.]
We need a welfare system in this country. And there are 2 kinds of people who will need it.
One, the person who needs some temporary help to get back on their feet. All of us are just a few mis-steps away from having nothing, and we should all be willing to help one another in that case. This kind of person doesn't really want to be on welfare in the first place and won't need too much incentive to get off it when they are able.
Two, the person who simply can't take care of themselves. These people either don't have the skills or the willingness to "make it" in the real world. Now, unless you want people dying in the street, or crime to soar, we need to take care of these people too. And no amount of "incentive" is going to get them off welfare, so once someone is recognized as a welfare addict - we put them on a strict maintenance schedule where we control where they live, and just about everything else about their life (as it relates to money.. we don't control their political or religious life, etc.).
I also know that the welfare system as it existed most of my life was bad. It was set up so it was impossible to get off welfare because the instant you started making money, your benefits went bye bye making it impossible to pay for day care and keep your job. So staying on welfare was the only alternative. If you tried to get off you were set up to fail.
We need to be able to give "levels" of welfare. Maybe someone only needs day care help. Maybe they need training and day care. Maybe they need rent until their job is settled. It's all about individual cases and we need good case workers to figure this out.
In any case. We need welfare, and I would not eliminate it.
I am against the death penalty in all cases. My knee jerk reaction to some cases is to hang them high. But as I've said in other places, your knees are not supposed to do your thinking for you. I have a simple rule that says, in the name of justice we should not take away from someone that which we can't give back if we find an error has been made. We can pay someone for their time, but we can breath life back into them once we take it away.
I don't believe it's a deterrent. There is no reality to it. Young men on the street are unaware it's even happening when it happens. Unless you are willing to broadcast it, and willing to make it agonizing, I think the deterrent effect is nil. (Except for the person executed, of course. That's pretty trite though.)
I have reached the point where I say, a pox on both their houses.
The Palestinians will not take the opportunities given for peace, but insist on hanging on to ideals that simply cannot exist in today's reality (e.g. the disappearance of the Jewish state, the right of return, etc.) The reality is that Israel exists and they need to find a way to live with that.
The Israeli's of late are a bunch of land grabbers, building settlements in areas that they know are provocative. The tactics used by Israel are reminiscent of the old Soviet order. They are doing damage to their own psyche by not disengaging from most the occupied areas and simply building a wall between themselves and the Arab world. I'm sure if you polled the Jewish people of the world they would have no problem with genocide, as long as it was Palestinians.
It doesn't matter in any case. Simple demographics is going to destroy Israel anyway. The native Arab population is growing faster than the native Jewish population and someday the Jews will find themselves the minority in their own country.
Once again, mankind has to go through the experiment of showing that states based on religion do not work.
Of the 30 countries in the Economic Union, the people of the United States are 29th on the list in terms of how much their citizens are taxed. Which means, of all the democratic countries we pay the lowest taxes except for Mexico ( and all of them are dying to get here ).
We need to quit complaining about how much we pay in taxes, and start complaining about how our tax dollars are looked after once we pay them. The budget process could be done better. Every program should be grandfathered (i.e. subject to mandatory review and vote after 5 years). Etc. There are a thousand improvements we could make.
Then we can complain about taxes.
Great Idea. About time. God made men and women. I have to assume IT didn't intend for one set of the pair to be unused.
Social Security was a great idea. It's still a great idea. Course, I'll never see any of it. By the time I need it it will be bankrupt.
And what's with the cap on taxes for social security? I only pay taxes for half the year. Bill Gates only pays for one day. Poorer schlepps pay all year long. That doesn't seem fair.. and it's got to be part of the problem when it comes to funding Social Security.
Affirmative Action was a good idea to help re-dress the wrong of discrimination. The question now is, is it still needed. I'm not sure how to answer this one. Like most things, maybe the solution needs to be modified over time as the problem is mitigated. It's possible that in some fields we still need it, but in others we don't. I would be interested in learning more on this to come to a conclusion.
I am of two minds about Illegal Immigration.
In the one mind I'm all for making the borders of America as open as possible. I like multi-cultural environments. I like the idea of new people and ideas and ways of life coming here to continue the process that made this country great to begin with. I still believe in strong borders.. don't get me wrong. But I want enough money spent on the legal immigration system so that the illegal option looks less attractive in the long run when legal immigration is efficient and easy.
Which it's not.
In the other mind, the people who are here are here illegally.. and in some cases.. quite irresponsible once they get here. Drivers with no insurance is the norm, not the exception in California. You read several times a year about over-loaded vehicles (like 15 guys in a van) having an accident and most of them getting killed - and the are invariably illegals. I can see where one can make the case that they are here illegally using more resources than they return in taxes to the society they are living in, and should be dealt with like criminals.
I could almost agree with that if a working system of immigration was in place. But it's not.
The illegal immigration "problem" in this country is a direct result of the policies of the government. If the government would do what it take to handle immigration properly, then there would be less of a "problem", and the fewer number of "illegals" that resulted COULD be dealt with as criminals, because an alternative was available to them.
I've personally had contact with several "illegal" immigrants as well as "legal" immigrants. The people I've come into contact with have been great people. Which is why, in the long run, my first mind tends to win out, and I'm inclined to think that WE should be doing more, rather than being pissed at people who are acting like human beings by coming here.
I liked Bill Clinton. So he lied about sex. Boo Hoo. Kennedy was having affairs in the White House. So what? It's not like he did a bad job as President. The whole Ken Starr investigation was an attempt to smear the president by the party that whines it's head off whenever anyone criticizes George Bush. What a bunch of two face sissys.
The best part of the whole affair was when Larry Flynt offered a ton of money for anyone to come forward and rat on a republican. Boy, were they running scared.. hypocrites. He brought down one speaker of the house with that offer, and I'm sure he got lots of information that he couldn't use because there was no proof.
And Monica... Why did you keep the stained dress? Hell of a souvenir!!!
Americans are uptight about sex. It's insane the amount of importance we give it, and the unhealthy attitudes we have toward it. Sex is not something sacred that can only be expressed properly between a married man and woman. It's a pleasurable activity open to lots of people and fine when accompanied by mutual respect. (In fact, most activities need the mutual respect.) It's fun. It's good exercise. It feels good. It's good for you.
May-2004
I've stated before my ambivalence about the war in Iraq. I am not, however, ambivalent about the treatment of prisoners... be they combat prisoners or not. The abuse of prisoners is completely unjustifiable and flies in the face of what this country is supposed to stand for, and how we project ourselves to the world. The people who committed this abuse have done more damage to the reputation of America than they can ever know. This was wrong and people should be tried and punished if found guilty.
I also believe that the Bush administration is not innocent in this matter. They set the tone for the treatment of prisoners by their treatment of the people at Guantamo Bay in Cuba. The administration has said that these people have no rights, and there will be no oversight on their treatment. This simply set the tone for underlings to think that prisoners in general have no rights. And the results are inevitable.
May-2004
This is disgusting. And even more so, I don't hear a loud cry from the Muslim community in America condemning this. That's sad because the United States has the fastest growing group of Muslims in the world. Islam beats out all the other religions in this country in terms of growth of adherents. Why do we never hear from them?
Jordan, Syria and Egypt have all condemned this as well as other representatives of Islam. Why can't our own people speak up? Fear of reprisals.. Damn I hope not. That too would make me sick.
June-2004
I did not vote for Ronald Reagan, but I thought he was okay once he got into office. No, I didn't agree with everything he did, but he was a master at talking in a way that people understood, and he had a set of unshakable convictions. The fact that they were unshakable tended to give people faith in him.
He died the other day... today is the day his body is being moved to the Capitol to lie in state.
I was listening to the radio, an NPR calling show, and the moderator asked for people to call in with their remembrances or views on Ronald Reagan. What I heard made me sick. I live in San Francisco at the moment, and the callers did nothing but spew hatred and vitriol about Reagan. Apparently liberals can be as hateful as conservatives, and just as knee jerk.
For example, one caller said Reagan was a racist for creating the term "welfare queen" and for wrecking the welfare system. Well, the welfare system at the time WAS BROKEN. Instead of a system of aid to people that needed help it had become a bureaucracy that cared ONLY about it's own continued existence and increasing budget. At the time, the rules were set up so that if you wanted to try and get off welfare... you couldn't. It was not an assistance system.. it was a dependence system. As soon as you made a few dollars your welfare benefits were cut so drastically that the only way you could make ends meet was to fall back onto complete dependance on welfare. That is simply WRONG.
Granted, I don't agree with the current lifetime limits on welfare - some people simply can't cope and need lifetime assistance. But to say that Reagan was a racist because he wanted to fix a broken system, and used a term that people could identify with, regardless of how insensitive it was, misses the point.
The rest of the callers had similar sentiments - one even said "Good riddance." - and these are the people who think themselves better than the conservatives who THEY say are filled with hate. The pot is calling the kettle black in this case.
I finally had to change the channel because it was more hatred than I wanted to hear. I'd tune in to Rush Limbaugh for that kind of junk.
About Reagan himself. The man was funny. His economics were wrong, but his tax cut was okay (the top rate when he took office was 70% .. and we complain NOW over 33%). He did more to end the cold war than anyone before him. And he had style.
I mourn his passing, but am sure he is better off now than fighting Alzheimers.
June-2004
I don't have a problem with stem cell research. I don't have a problem with the use of human embryo's in stem cell research. I don't want to encourage abortion, or the creation of embryo's just for this purpose, but if they are going to be the inevitable result of human actions, then I would say use them. The potential outweighs the cost .. at least at this point in time.
Also, if the eventual fate of this material is to be simply disposed of, it is shameful not to make use of it in research.
June-2004
Holy Wedding Vows, Batman! I can't believe I left this off my list of things to have an an opinion about until now.
I just finished reading http://www.ehowa.com/mythoughts/gaymarriage.shtml and thought I should revise what I've written to be a little more explicit. Then I come here and shazaam.. I've written nothing. Okay here goes.
First lets talk about the "Sacredness of the Institution of Marriage"
The scared institution of marriage…. That's the phrase people are using to condemn gay marriage. That the institution of marriage is sacred and only between a man and a woman.
Course, a few years ago the man and woman had to be of the same race, but we dropped that requirement.
And a few years before that they had to be the same religion, but we managed to get past that conundrum.
And a few years before that you had to marry your brother's wife…. What? Oh YEAH.. it's right there in the Bible, the definitive source for these moron's and their sacred definition of marriage. Here it is…
Deuteronomy - Chapter 25 5:
"If brothers dwell together, and one of them dies and has no son, the wife of the dead shall not be married outside the family to a stranger; her husband's brother shall go in to her, and take her as his wife, and perform the duty of a husband's brother to her.
6: And the first son whom she bears shall succeed to the name of his brother who is dead, that his name may not be blotted out of Israel.
7: And if the man does not wish to take his brother's wife, then his brother's wife shall go up to the gate to the elders, and say, `My husband's brother refuses to perpetuate his brother's name in Israel; he will not perform the duty of a husband's brother to me.'
8: Then the elders of his city shall call him, and speak to him: and if he persists, saying, `I do not wish to take her,'
9: then his brother's wife shall go up to him in the presence of the elders, and pull his sandal off his foot, and spit in his face; and she shall answer and say, `So shall it be done to the man who does not build up his brother's house.'
10: And the name of his house shall be called in Israel, The house of him that had his sandal pulled off. Yep. The man HAD to marry his dead brother's wife or suffer shame in the community.
Yep.. it's part of the "sacred institution of marriage" after all.
Course, if he already HAD a wife, well, that was no problem… after all.. part of that "sacred institution" is that a man was allowed to have multiple wives!! Don't believe it? Better get it from the source again then. Here ya go….
22 Chronicles - Chapter 11
21: Rehobo'am loved Ma'acah the daughter of Ab'salom above all his wives and concubines (he took eighteen wives and sixty concubines, and had twenty-eight sons and sixty daughters);
BUT, there is still a problem… see, in this particular sacred institution, if the woman you happen to fall in love with is from the wrong COUNTRY then you can't marry her. Nope. No can do. Sorry. She is from a country the Lord has said you shall not enter into marriage with… hell, that would be like GAY people getting married. Still, our Lord is a loving GOD, so what the hell. Keep her as a concubine.
First Kings - Chapter 11
1: Now King Solomon loved many foreign women: the daughter of Pharaoh, and Moabite, Ammonite, E'domite, Sido'nian, and Hittite women,
2: from the nations concerning which the LORD had said to the people of Israel, "You shall not enter into marriage with them, neither shall they with you, for surely they will turn away your heart after their gods"; Solomon clung to these in love.
3: He had seven hundred wives, princesses, and three hundred concubines;
Just, whatever you do… DON'T ALLOW GAYS TO MARRY. It would denigrate the sacred institution of incest, polygamy and concubinage as defined in the Bible.
July-2004
Okay, so the so-called sacredness of the institution of marriage is a complete crock of donkey dung. Anyone spouting that stuff needs to go back to their "sacred" texts and do a little reading.
Other objections...
Well, my opinion on gay marriage should be clear now. I believe it should be legal. Not civil unions. Marriage with all the automatic benefits and burdens that the rest of us get/carry.
Aug-2004
I'll make no bones about the fact that I am not gaga over Michael Moore's work. I like what he does, but sometimes it's a tad over the top. For example, I liked most of Bowling for Columbine, except when he did his "interview" with Charlton Heston.
There he was hectoring a man who was trying to deal with Alzheimer's about a speech he gave that he probably didn't even remember. My father had Alzheimer's. I didn't appreciate Mr. Moore's badgering a man who was obviously incapable of forming an answer. All Heston had was his old platitudes and means of coping, and the new situation obviously was something he could not deal with. Where was Mike Moore's compassion then?
But that said, the movie did not have as much impact as I thought it was going to have. The connections he tries to make are complex, and people like simple answers to questions. The best part of the whole movie was watching Bush sitting there.. doing nothing.. not having a clue WHAT to do.. after being informed of the attacks. It was obvious that he needed handling.. and that the man is not a leader in any sense of the word. Just a figure head for a bunch of rich cronies who will go down in history as a bad president.
Also.. get over Flynnt, Michigan, will ya !!! All of America has suffered.. Let's see some other places that have fallen on hard times. Why does every movie have to have Flynt in it.
I'm a big believer in tolerance. We should tolerate other cultures, other opinions, other ways of living, other points of view. Yeah, it's annoying and inconvient some times, but boo hoo.. everyone gets to live as they choose and you don't get to nay say it because it's a minor inconvience for you.
However. There are limits to my tolerance, and certain issues have pushed them lately. And I guess the biggest of them is intolerance. Cultures that do not themselves espouse any kind of tolerance do not deserve any in return. Cultures that are racist, or discriminatory also do not deserve tolerance. When someone says, "I get to treat this other person like shit because it's part of our culture and you can't understand it." - that does not deserve to be tolerated.
If a man holds down a girl and mutilates her genitals the only question we ask is how much jail time he should get. When a culture pratices femal circumsion, we are supposed to tolerate it. WRONG. Somethings are wrong, and we should stand up and say so.
Terrorists targeting children is wrong.
Opressing women is wrong.
Assuming that you are born to a station in life and you have to stay there is wrong.
Torture is wrong.
Religious fundamentalism ... in any religion.. is wrong.
I don't care how "cultural" certain things are, they should not be tolerated.
I read the following quote from another rant.. "Everyone knows Scott Peterson did it."
A couple of points:
1) If EVERYONE knew Scott Peterson did it, then there could be no trial because you could never get a jury together. We have a presumption of innocence in this country. It's so sad to see people willing to throw that out the window because they "KNOW" that so-and-so is "did it".
2) If he did it, then it's the job of the prosecution to prove that beyond a reasonable doubt. Unfortunately, due to public pressure to "do something" they had to arrest and try Scott Peterson with no evidence. There is no evidence that he did this crime. There are ALOT of people who "know" he "did it." So the cops and the lawyers had no choice but to go through with the arrest and trial. Otherwise it would have been their jobs. They probably don't like it anymore than anyone else.
3) Almost nothing he did after the fact of the crime is evidence of his having committed the crime. He sold her car. He ordered porn. He changed his hair color. These things are not crimes. They are not evidence of a crime. They have nothing to do with the case, and yet these are the things that people point to to "prove" that he did it. Proof consists of things directly related to the crime... not how sleazy someone acts afterward. The man is a sleazeball, but that does not constitute proof of a crime.
4) Lacy Peterson is not the only pregnant woman who has been fished out the bay recently. But she's white, and it was Christmas so she makes the news. I don't beleive the other case has a suspect yet.
5) Her body turned up in the exact place where Scott Peterson says he was fishing. Well, if I was the killer that's where I would put the body too.
6) Once again, as in the OJ trial, the police have tried to lie to make the case stronger, and have come off looking badly for it. I've been on juries and in jury rooms. You are instructed that if a witness is shown to have lied then you can ignore all their testimony. And I've heard people in jury rooms say, "Well, they lied, so we can ignore everything they said."... which seems a little extreme, but is the fact of the matter. The police in this case tried to cover up the fact that Lacy could have had contact with the boat before the disappearance, thus explaining the hair in the boat. I wish they would not do that.. it only makes their case weaker.
Do I think Scott Peterson did it? Yeah, he probably did.
Can it be proved in a court of law? Probably not.
Am I willing to trample on the constitution and our hard won rights to make sure he is convicted? No. I think the Bush administration is doing a fine job of pissing all over our rights as it is, and needs no help from me.
Will he lose in a civil trial. Oh.. most definately.
Am I glad he will probably walk. Yes. Because I'd rather let a sleaze ball like him go, knowing that no woman will ever be dumb enough to trust him again, than send other innocent people to jail (and we send plenty of innocent people to jail all the time).
Political correctness is just another word for censorship. It's a means of controlling the messanger, and not having to deal with the message. There are things that some people don't want to hear said, and by being politically correct, they can avoid having to hear them. For example:
Politically Incorrect Words: Certain words have become politically incorrect for some people to say. A white person cannot use the word "nigger". It cannot be used in classroom discourse, or in any kind of academic or work environment. It cannot even be refered to when it would be appropriate to do so... for example when discussing the works of Mark Twain. Huckleberry Finn cannot be read (in the original) in schools in the U.S. today because it contains the banned word.
And yet, it is perfectly acceptable for another group to use this "forbidden" word in common speach. Meaning by it, no disrepect or slur. It is simply a slang.
I think this is stupid. One can tell when the "N-word" is meant as a slur and when it is not. To forbid it in all cases is simply stupid.
Politcally Incorret Ideas: Certain ideas are instantly condemned when uttered and are so frowned upon that they are never given serious consideration. The founding fathers believed that the best way to come to a resolution is to allow all sides to be heard. The obviously stupid will be eliminated. Political Correctness states that some ideas should not be expressed and nothing can be gained by allowing them a hearing.
As an example if one were to say that it's not necessary for women to represent exactly 50% of top management in a company, many people would stop you right there because that is not politically correct thinking. It is however consistent with current theories of psychological evolution.. but try to get a hearing on this and you are booed down by the politically correct censors. This is censorship.
And it's the same censorship that once booed down people who spoke out against slavery or universal sufferage.
Gardasil is a vaccine that can prevent cancer. It does this by preventing human papillomavirus (HPV) Types 6, 11, 16, and 18
Wow. This is one of the best things to come around in medicine in a long time. 11,000 women a year die from cervical cancer, and this vaccine can help cut that number by cutting the number of cases of HPV - that is causally related to that cancer.
What could possibly be the down side.
Well, some parents do not want their daughters to get this vaccine because HPV is commonly transmitted by sex. So they believe that by giving their daughters this vaccine they will be encouraging sexual activity.
I find it hard to believe what these kinds of parents are willing to gamble just so their daughters don't have sex.
They are willing to gamble their daughter's lives.
Let's toss out a hypothetical. Let's say they come up with a vaccine that will stop AIDS, Syphilis and Gonorrhea, HPV and every other kind of sexually transmitted desiese. Let's say this worked 100% of the time and had no side effects.
You know that these same parents would not want to have their children getting this vaccine. They would rather risk sickness, warts, deformity, insanity and death for their children. The vaccine would take away the consequences of sex. Without the consequences, what can they use to scare their children into behaving the way they want them to behave. Apparently, the threat of GOD sending them to eternal damnation is not enough anymore. Now they have to be punished by disease in this life.
The kind of morality these people represent makes me sick. To their mind, the ONLY reason to do the right thing is because you will be punished if you don't. Forget about doing the right thing because it is RIGHT. No… you need the punishment. Either GOD, or the Church, or illness will punish you if you don't do the "right" thing - i.e. the thing I say is right.
It's sad that they would rather have dead children than healthy children. It's sad that controlling sex is more important than keeping your child safe from harm.
by Frank Rich:
WHEN they start pushing the panic button over "moral values" at the bluest of TV channels, public broadcasting's WNET, in the bluest of cities, New York, you know this country has entered a new cultural twilight zone. Just three weeks after the election, Channel 13 killed a spot for the acclaimed movie "Kinsey," in which Liam Neeson stars as the pioneering Indiana University sex researcher who first let Americans know that nonmarital sex is a national pastime, that women have orgasms too and that masturbation and homosexuality do not lead to insanity. At first WNET said it had killed the spot because it was "too commercial and too provocative" - a tough case to make about a routine pseudo-ad interchangeable with all the other pseudo-ads that run on "commercial-free" PBS. That explanation quickly became inoperative anyway. The "Kinsey" distributor, Fox Searchlight, let the press see an e-mail from a National Public Broadcasting media manager stating that the real problem was "the content of this movie" and "controversial press re: groups speaking out against the movie/subject matter" that might bring "viewer complaints." Maybe in the end Channel 13 got too many complaints about its own cowardice because by last week, in response to my inquiries, it had a new story: that e-mail was all a big mistake - an "unfortunate" miscommunication hatched by some poor unnamed flunky in marketing. This would be funny if it were not so serious - and if it were an anomaly. Yet even as the "Kinsey" spot was barred in New York, a public radio station in North Carolina, WUNC-FM, told an international women's rights organization based in Chapel Hill that it could not use the phrase "reproductive rights" in an on-air announcement. In Los Angeles, five commercial TV channels, fearing indecency penalties, refused to broadcast a public service spot created by Los Angeles county's own public health agency to counteract a rising tide of syphilis. Nationwide, the big three TV networks all banned an ad in which the United Church of Christ heralded the openness of its 6,000 congregations to gay couples. Such rapid-fire postelection events are conspiring to make "Kinsey" a bellwether cultural event of this year. When I first saw the movie last spring prior to its release, it struck me as an intelligent account of a half-forgotten and somewhat quaint chapter in American social history. It was in the distant year of 1948 that Alfred Kinsey, a Harvard-trained zoologist, published "Sexual Behavior in the Human Male," a dense, clinical 804-page accounting of the findings of his obsessive mission to record the sexual histories of as many Americans as time and willing volunteers (speaking in confidentiality) would allow. The book stormed the culture with such force that Kinsey was featured in almost every major national magazine; a Time cover story likened his book's success to "Gone With the Wind." Even pop music paid homage, with the rubber-faced comic Martha Raye selling a half-million copies of "Ooh, Dr. Kinsey!" and Cole Porter immortalizing the Kinsey report's sizzling impact in a classic stanza in "Too Darn Hot." Though a Gallup poll at the time found that three-quarters of the public approved of Kinsey's work, not everyone welcomed the idea that candor might supplant ignorance and shame in the national conversation about sex. Billy Graham, predictably, said the publication of Kinsey's research would do untold damage to "the already deteriorating morals of America." Somewhat less predictably, as David Halberstam writes in "The Fifties," The New York Times at first refused to accept advertising for Kinsey's book. Such history, which seemed ancient only months ago, has gained in urgency since Election Day. As politicians and the media alike pander to that supposed 22 percent of "moral values" voters, we're back where we came in. Bill Condon, who wrote and directed "Kinsey," started working on this project in 1999 and didn't gear it to any political climate. The film is a straightforward telling of its subject's story, his thorniness and bisexuality included, conforming in broad outline to the facts as laid out by Kinsey's most recent biographers. But not unlike Philip Roth's "Plot Against America," which transports us back to an American era overlapping that of "Kinsey," this movie, however unintentionally, taps into anxieties that feel entirely contemporary. That Channel 13 would even fleetingly balk at "Kinsey" as The Times long ago did at the actual Kinsey is not a coincidence. As for the right-wing groups that have targeted the movie (with or without seeing it), they are the usual suspects, many of them determined to recycle false accusations that Kinsey was a pedophile, as if that might somehow make the actual pedophilia scandal in one church go away. But this crowd doesn't just want what's left of Kinsey's scalp. (He died in 1956.) Empowered by that Election Day "moral values" poll result, it is pressing for a whole host of second-term gifts from the Bush administration: further rollbacks of stem-cell research, gay civil rights, pulchritude sightings at N.F.L. games and, dare I say it aloud, reproductive rights for women. "If you have weaklings around you who do not share your biblical values, shed yourself of them," wrote Bob Jones III, president of the eponymous South Carolina university, to President Bush after the election. "Put your agenda on the front burner and let it boil." Such is the perceived clout of this Republican base at government agencies like the F.C.C. that it need only burp and 66 frightened ABC affiliates instantly dump their network's broadcast of that indecent movie "Saving Private Ryan" on Veterans Day. In the case of "Kinsey," the Traditional Values Coalition has called for a yearlong boycott of all movies released by Fox. (With the hypocrisy we've come to expect, it does not ask its members to boycott Fox's corporate sibling in the Murdoch empire, Fox News.) But such organizations don't really care about "Kinsey" - an art-house picture that, however well reviewed or Oscar-nominated, will be seen by a relatively small audience, mostly in blue states. The film is just this month's handy pretext for advancing the larger goal of pushing sex of all nonbiblical kinds back into the closet and undermining any scientific findings, whether circa 1948 or 2004, that might challenge fundamentalist sexual orthodoxy as successfully as Darwin challenged Genesis. (Though that success, too, is in doubt: The Washington Post reports that this year some 40 states are dealing with challenges to the teaching of evolution in public schools.) "Kinsey" is an almost uncannily helpful guide to how these old cultural fault lines have re-emerged from their tomb, virtually unchanged. Among Kinsey's on-screen antagonists is a university hygiene instructor who states with absolute certitude that abstinence is the only cure needed to stop syphilis. Sound familiar? In tune with the "moral values" crusaders, the Web site for the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has obscured and downplayed the important information that condoms are overwhelmingly effective in preventing sexually transmitted diseases. (A nonprofit organization supporting comprehensive sex education, Advocates for Youth, publicized this subterfuge and has been rewarded with three government audits of its finances in eight months.) Elsewhere in "Kinsey," we watch desperate students pepper their professor with a series of uninformed questions: "Can too much sex cause cancer? Does suppressing sex lead to stuttering? Does too much masturbation cause premature ejaculation?" Though that sequence takes place in 1939, you can turn on CNN in December 2004 and watch Genevieve Wood of the Family Research Council repeatedly refuse - five times, according to the transcript - to disown the idea that masturbation can cause pregnancy. Ms. Wood was being asked about that on "Crossfire" because a new Congressional report, spearheaded by the California Democrat Henry Waxman, shows that various fictions of junk science (AIDS is spread by tears and sweat, for instance) have turned up as dogma in abstinence-only sex education programs into which American taxpayers have sunk some $900 million in five years. Right now this is the only kind of sex education that our government supports, even though science says that abstinence-only programs don't work - or may be counterproductive. A recent Columbia University study found that teens who make "virginity pledges" to delay sex until marriage still have premarital sex at a high rate (88 percent) rivaling those that don't, but are less likely to use contraception once they do. It's California, a huge blue state that refuses to accept federal funding for abstinence-only curriculums, that has a 40 percent falloff in teenage pregnancy over the past decade, second only to Alaska. No matter what the censors may accomplish elsewhere, the pop culture revolution since Kinsey's era is in little jeopardy: in a nation of "Desperate Housewives," "Too Darn Hot" has become the national anthem. A movie like "Kinsey" will do just fine; the more protests, the more publicity and the larger the box office. But if Hollywood will always survive, off-screen Americans are being damaged by the cultural war over sex that is being played out in real life. You see that when struggling kids are denied the same information about sexuality that was kept from their antecedents in the pre-Kinsey era; you see that when pharmacists in more and more states enforce their own "moral values" by refusing to fill women's contraceptive prescriptions and do so with the tacit or official approval of local officials; you see it when basic information that might prevent the spread of lethal diseases is suppressed by the government because it favors political pandering over scientific fact. While "Sexual Behavior in the Human Male" was received with a certain amount of enthusiasm and relief by most Americans in 1948, the atmosphere had changed radically by the time Kinsey published his follow-up volume, "Sexual Behavior in the Human Female," just five years later. By 1953 Joe McCarthy was in full throttle, and, as James H. Jones writes in his judicious 1997 Kinsey biography, "ultra-conservative critics would accuse Kinsey of aiding communism by undermining sexual morality and the sanctity of the home." Kinsey was an anti-Soviet, anti-New Deal conservative, but that didn't matter in an America racked by fear. He lost the principal sponsor of his research, the Rockefeller Foundation, and soon found himself being hounded, in part for his sympathetic view of homosexuality, by the ambiguously gay homophobes J. Edgar Hoover and Clyde Tolson. Based on what we've seen in just the six weeks since Election Day, the parallels between that war over sex and our own may have only just begun.
More demonstrably false information:
>Finally a man with more guts than brains blew the whistle and was
>fired. Kevin Ryan wrote to Frank Gayle at NIST stating that the
findings
>of the Federal Building and Fire Safety Investigation of the
WTC disaster
>, Project 3, Analysis of Structural Steel, "The buildings
should have
>easily withstood the thermal stress caused by pools of
burning jet fuel."
>I have not seen one newspaper pick up on this
issue.
Then this person didn't bother to look. Either that, or the South Bend Tribune is not a newspaper... because you can read all about his story there AMONG THE SEVERAL OTHER NEWS OUTLETS THAT HAVE PUBLISHED THE STORY. But, yeah, this stuff is never any good without the "they are suppressing the information" tag.
Kevin Ryan is a lab director with a contracting firm to Underwriter's Laboratories. Not only does Kevin Ryan not work for Underwriter's Laboratories, but he is certainly not entitled to write to the NIST "as" Underwriter's Laboratories, which is what Kevin Ryan did.
The site 911truth.org quite frankly LIES about Kevin Ryan, and calls him a "UL Executive", even though Kevin Ryan states clearly in the article that 911truth.org wrote that he is NOT. This is because someone at 911truth.org obviously doesn't care about a little thing called "truth".
You can read Ryan's letter in its entirety here: http://www.911truth.org/article.php?story=20041112144051451
Kevin Ryan is said to be a chemist, although we don't know much about his background. But he is peddling the same "melting" crap as everyone else. Do you know what his company ACTUALLY does? He tests drinking water: http://www.ehl.cc/
The WTC towers were hit by LARGE AIRPLANES - larger than any lateral transient load for which they were conceivably designed. The WTC towers had a unique and experimental structural system which was a one-of-a-kind design in outer member support for tall buildings. That steel is 40 years old. Anyone who believes themselves to be an expert when two unknowns of that magnitude meet - is kidding himself. But a bullshit theory is pretty easy to spot.
It is absolutely true, that steel won't melt until a temperature higher than the open-space burning point of jet fuel. It is also true that steel is normally forged at a temperature about half that. These two facts have NOTHING to do with why the WTC towers failed. The ASTM standard that Kevin Ryan goes on about is based on burning pools of fuel. There were no burning pools of fuel in the WTC incident. What you had was burning fuel, and other materials that were in the buildings, SURROUNDING A PERFECT VENTILATING CHIMNEY - i.e. the central shafts of the buildings. Has Kevin Ryan checked the combustion conditions when you light a fire at the top of an 87 story pipe? No. But this "burning pool" crap and ASTM E119 are pure turds of an argument.
What fuel like that does in an enclosed space with a windpipe running through the middle is act like.... waddya know... a jet.
WTC 7 had 36,000 gallons of diesel fuel was stored in diesel tanks just above and at ground level (of course "ground level" in lower Manhattan is a unique concept, given the extensive underground ventilation, uh, infrastructure). NOBODY has ever run the experiment to find out what happens when you ignite 36,000 gallons of diesel fuel inside of a 40 story building that has had random and large chunks of debris raining on it. But, yes, there is no shortage of armchair quarterbacks with CRC manuals who think that simplifying assumptions applicable to various small scale experimental situations will apply to situations that are truly unique and outside of experience. People like that are called "scientists". They are not "engineers".
You want to know another thing we've never done? We've never let high-rises just go on and burn the way that happened that day. You remember the Meridian Building in Philadelphia? My firm used to be there until they had a paper-fueled fire a few years ago.
If you read nothing else, read this:
http://www.iklimnet.com/hotelfires/meridienplaza.html
"The fire claimed the lives of three Philadelphia firefighters and gutted eight floors of a 38-story fire-resistive building causing an estimated $100 million in direct property loss and an equal or greater loss through business interruption. Litigation resulting from the fire amounts to an estimated $4 billion in civil damage claims. Twenty months after the fire this building, one of Philadelphia?s tallest, situated on Penn Square directly across from City Hall, still stood unoccupied and fire-scarred, its structural integrity in question."
Now, did anyone in the Philadelphia media market ever notice that they didn't FIX the Meridan building, but they tore it down? D'jever wonder why they tore it down?
BECAUSE THEY FOUND OUT THAT EVERYTHING THEY THOUGHT THEY KNEW ABOUT FIRE-RESISTANT STEEL BUILDINGS WAS WRONG AND THAT EVEN THE HEAT OF AN INTENSE PAPER-FUELED FIRE IN AN OFFICE BUILDING CAN DAMAGE THE STRUCTURAL STEEL TO THE POINT OF UNSAFETY.
The Meridian building, of course, DIDN'T HAVE A HUGE CHUNK OF ITS SUPPORT TAKEN OUT BY AN AIRPLANE before the fire, which would have placed EXTRA STRESS on the remaining members. And the Meridian Building WASN'T LEFT TO BURN ALL DAY LONG because there was not general mayhem and disruption in the area preventing fire-fighting efforts.
Yep, there you have it. According to water-purity chemist Kevin Ryan, the demolition of the damaged Meridian building was part of a conspiracy to make us falseley believe that high-rise fires can damage steel structural members. So, I'm supposed to believe that these buildings are going to burn hotter and longer than the Meridian Building did, but are somehow miraculously not supposed to have their structural integrity compromised - even though the Meridian Building's structure was ruined by a paper fire?
Bullshit.