Heh.
Saturday, October 22, 2005
Monday, October 17, 2005
About Damned Time
Unicef bombs the Smurfs in fund-raising campaign for ex-child soldiers.
I never liked those little blue bastards anyway.
I never liked those little blue bastards anyway.
Shiny Happy Column
Latest Newspaper Column
You know, looking back over the past few weeks’ columns, it occurs to me that some might consider me a tad gloomy, even, dare I say it, a bit negative in my outlook. As our snail-eating friends across the pond are fond of saying, “au contraire” (“Nuh-uh!”).
Oh, sure, there are plenty of things I see around that I don’t like, and quite a few that make me nuts. But there are plenty of things I do like. Herewith, a few of the things I’ve seen in the media recently that have made me smile:
Favorite recent movie: “Serenity.”
The sci-fi TV series “Firefly” came and went so fast that I never had a chance to see it in primetime. I eventually checked it out on DVD and immediately got hooked. Created by “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” director Joss Wheedon, “Firefly” chronicled the adventures of the crew of the space freighter Serenity, a scruffy bunch of misfits barely eking out a shady and often illegal living on the edges of an oppressive galactic empire called the Alliance.
Along the way, they pick up another pair of fugitives, a formerly well-to-do young doctor named Simon and his spookily pretty younger sister River. River has apparently been put through some Really Bad Stuff by the Alliance, and they want her back, because she has all sorts of freakish talents, including but not limited to psychic abilities.
The show, in typical TV fashion, revealed bits and pieces of River’s big secret, leaving tantalizing hints with each episode. When the show was canceled, all those threads were left hanging, much to the consternation of the show’s small but vocal group of hard-core fans. The feature film version answers all the questions and then some.
Every good adventure needs a good villain, and Serenity’s pursuer, known only as “The Operative,” is one of the scariest. After murdering an entire settlement, including the children, for giving refuge to Serenity, The Operative gravely explains to the crew that he does what he does because he truly believes that the end product will be a better world — a world that will have no place for him, because, he sadly admits, he’s a monster. Few things are scarier than that kind of True Believer.
What really made the show great was the interaction between the show’s characters, who fight, crack wise, and insult one another, but whose affection for each other and for their eternally harried captain comes through when the chips are down, which they are most of the time. I’m happy to say the show’s excellent ensemble cast brings that feeling to the big screen.
Favorite Recent Book(s): Barry Eisler’s John Rain series. John Rain is the James Bond for the new millennium, and Barry Eisler is its Ian Fleming.
Rain, a half-Japanese, half-American assassin living in Tokyo, is a master of killing people and making the death look like the result of natural causes. He has a few inflexible rules: No women or children. He’ll kill only a “principal,” a boss bad guy. And he works alone, with no backup teams, a rule he enforces by simply breaking the neck of anyone he thinks violates it.
Eisler, a former CIA agent himself who holds a Black Belt in Judo from Japan’s prestigious Kodokan, writes great action sequences, but he also gives the deeply conflicted John Rain a lot of soul. Add to the mix Eisler’s encyclopedic knowledge of some of the world’s exotic places and his gift for describing them, and you’ve got a great, fun read.
The books are “Rain Fall,” “Hard Rain,” “Rain Storm,” and the recently released “Killing Rain.” Eisler’s about to break out hugely with these books, and he deserves it.
Favorite TV Show: This one was a tough choice. I considered CBS’ sitcom “Two and a Half Men,” which is a sort of updated “Odd Couple,” as well as HBO’s wonderfully wicked drama series “Rome.” But I’ve still got to go with my old favorite, “The Daily Show.” It just keeps getting better and better.
Some of the best bits are when host Jon Stewart doesn’t even respond to some boneheaded videotaped quote from some politician. He just stares into the camera with this expression that says, “I cannot freaking believe this.” Neither can we, Jon, neither can we.
So there it is, folks, My shiny happy column for the year. Enjoy it while it lasts.
You know, looking back over the past few weeks’ columns, it occurs to me that some might consider me a tad gloomy, even, dare I say it, a bit negative in my outlook. As our snail-eating friends across the pond are fond of saying, “au contraire” (“Nuh-uh!”).
Oh, sure, there are plenty of things I see around that I don’t like, and quite a few that make me nuts. But there are plenty of things I do like. Herewith, a few of the things I’ve seen in the media recently that have made me smile:
Favorite recent movie: “Serenity.”
The sci-fi TV series “Firefly” came and went so fast that I never had a chance to see it in primetime. I eventually checked it out on DVD and immediately got hooked. Created by “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” director Joss Wheedon, “Firefly” chronicled the adventures of the crew of the space freighter Serenity, a scruffy bunch of misfits barely eking out a shady and often illegal living on the edges of an oppressive galactic empire called the Alliance.
Along the way, they pick up another pair of fugitives, a formerly well-to-do young doctor named Simon and his spookily pretty younger sister River. River has apparently been put through some Really Bad Stuff by the Alliance, and they want her back, because she has all sorts of freakish talents, including but not limited to psychic abilities.
The show, in typical TV fashion, revealed bits and pieces of River’s big secret, leaving tantalizing hints with each episode. When the show was canceled, all those threads were left hanging, much to the consternation of the show’s small but vocal group of hard-core fans. The feature film version answers all the questions and then some.
Every good adventure needs a good villain, and Serenity’s pursuer, known only as “The Operative,” is one of the scariest. After murdering an entire settlement, including the children, for giving refuge to Serenity, The Operative gravely explains to the crew that he does what he does because he truly believes that the end product will be a better world — a world that will have no place for him, because, he sadly admits, he’s a monster. Few things are scarier than that kind of True Believer.
What really made the show great was the interaction between the show’s characters, who fight, crack wise, and insult one another, but whose affection for each other and for their eternally harried captain comes through when the chips are down, which they are most of the time. I’m happy to say the show’s excellent ensemble cast brings that feeling to the big screen.
Favorite Recent Book(s): Barry Eisler’s John Rain series. John Rain is the James Bond for the new millennium, and Barry Eisler is its Ian Fleming.
Rain, a half-Japanese, half-American assassin living in Tokyo, is a master of killing people and making the death look like the result of natural causes. He has a few inflexible rules: No women or children. He’ll kill only a “principal,” a boss bad guy. And he works alone, with no backup teams, a rule he enforces by simply breaking the neck of anyone he thinks violates it.
Eisler, a former CIA agent himself who holds a Black Belt in Judo from Japan’s prestigious Kodokan, writes great action sequences, but he also gives the deeply conflicted John Rain a lot of soul. Add to the mix Eisler’s encyclopedic knowledge of some of the world’s exotic places and his gift for describing them, and you’ve got a great, fun read.
The books are “Rain Fall,” “Hard Rain,” “Rain Storm,” and the recently released “Killing Rain.” Eisler’s about to break out hugely with these books, and he deserves it.
Favorite TV Show: This one was a tough choice. I considered CBS’ sitcom “Two and a Half Men,” which is a sort of updated “Odd Couple,” as well as HBO’s wonderfully wicked drama series “Rome.” But I’ve still got to go with my old favorite, “The Daily Show.” It just keeps getting better and better.
Some of the best bits are when host Jon Stewart doesn’t even respond to some boneheaded videotaped quote from some politician. He just stares into the camera with this expression that says, “I cannot freaking believe this.” Neither can we, Jon, neither can we.
So there it is, folks, My shiny happy column for the year. Enjoy it while it lasts.
Tuesday, October 11, 2005
James Lincoln Warren Is Right (As Usual )
The Sword & The Quill talks about the importance of the "old stuff."
Monday, October 10, 2005
Harriet Who?
Latest Newspaper Column
Remember a few weeks ago, when I wrote a column saying that the Senate should go ahead and confirm Supreme Court nominee John Roberts, because “we could do worse”?
We just did.
Harriet Miers has never been a judge. She’s never argued a case before the Supreme Court. She’s had exactly two published articles, both of them in the trade publication “Texas Lawyer.” Her major claim to fame is that she’s worked directly for George Dubbya Bush since 1992 (except for a brief stint when then-Gov. Bush appointed her to the Texas Lottery Commission). She’s served as Bush’s staff secretary, as deputy chief of staff for policy (where her duties included promoting and defending Bush talking points on the “Ask the White House” Web site), and as White House counsel. Bush also says she’s a good friend of his. He “knows her soul,” he says. Ohhh-kay.
If some quotes are to be believed, however, Miers’ relationship with Bush the Younger goes beyond friendship into something approaching hero worship. She’s reportedly told people that Dubbya was “the most brilliant man she’d ever met.” Man, that lady really needs to get out more.
So what’s wrong with putting a friend of the president on the nation’s highest court? Shouldn’t the executive branch and the judiciary have a warm, buddy-buddy relationship?
Hell, no. There’s a little thing called “separation of powers.” It serves a greater principle called “checks and balances.” Our entire Constitution is based on this principle. At some time, any one of the three branches of government has the power to bring one or even two of the others to a screeching halt when they try to go too far. Founding Father Alexander Hamilton wrote about just this sort of thing when, in the Federalist Papers, he described the reasons for having the Senate confirm or reject presidential nominations:
“It would be an excellent check upon a spirit of favoritism in the president, and would tend greatly to prevent the appointment of unfit characters from state prejudice, from family connection, from personal attachment, or from a view to popularity. ... He would be both ashamed and afraid to bring forward, for the most distinguished or lucrative stations, candidates who had no other merit than that of coming from the same state to which he particularly belonged, or of being in some way or other personally allied to him, or of possessing the necessary insignificance and pliancy to render them the obsequious instruments of his pleasure.”
In other words, part of the reason we have the Senate do the confirmation is to avoid having the president, any president, pack the court with his home-state buddies.
Obviously, when Hamilton wrote about the president being “ashamed” to bring forth an obvious crony for the nation’s highest court, he never imagined anyone as utterly shameless in his political hackery as Dubbya. But then again, who could?
There’s also the fact that, right now, there’s a criminal investigation going on over who it was in the White House that “outed” CIA agent Valerie Plame as an act of political revenge after former Ambassador Joseph Wilson, Plame’s husband, stated publicly that the White House’s story about Saddam buying uranium from Niger was a crock.
After the story ran, someone, or possibly a couple of someones, in the White House let it out to New York Times columnist Bob Novak that Plame was a CIA WMD specialist. This is a crime if the person whose name is revealed is a “covert agent.” (Certainly the CIA thought she was, since it was they who made the referral to the U.S. attorney’s office.)
The question of “who dunnit” has reached all the way to the president’s chief of staff, Karl Rove, as well as the VP’s chief of staff, “Scooter” Libby. If a federal criminal case is filed against White House staffers, some issues, such as issues regarding executive privilege, will almost certainly end up in front of the Supremes. It is totally inappropriate for anyone who’s worked as long in the White House as Miers, including serving as the White House lawyer, to hear any part of that case.
There’s also this: House Speaker Tom DeLay was recently indicted on conspiracy and money laundering charges. DeLay also has recently faced numerous complaints in the House of ethics violations. So DeLay set himself up a legal defense fund. Unfortunately, that fund got DeLay in further trouble for accepting illegal contributions from lobbyists and law firms registered as lobbyists. Among those illegal contributions was $2,500 from Locke Liddell & Sapp, the Texas law firm formerly headed by — Harriet Miers. So what happens if DeLay’s case goes to the Supremes?
Judicial inexperience is worrisome, but it’s not an insurmountable problem. Cronyism, conflicts of interest, and ties to corrupt officials should be. Plus, we already have a Congress where so-called “legislators” on both sides of the aisle are far too ready to skip out on their role as a co-equal branch of government and rubber-stamp any madness of bumbling King George.
We don’t need another “obsequious instrument of his pleasure” on the Supreme Court.
Remember a few weeks ago, when I wrote a column saying that the Senate should go ahead and confirm Supreme Court nominee John Roberts, because “we could do worse”?
We just did.
Harriet Miers has never been a judge. She’s never argued a case before the Supreme Court. She’s had exactly two published articles, both of them in the trade publication “Texas Lawyer.” Her major claim to fame is that she’s worked directly for George Dubbya Bush since 1992 (except for a brief stint when then-Gov. Bush appointed her to the Texas Lottery Commission). She’s served as Bush’s staff secretary, as deputy chief of staff for policy (where her duties included promoting and defending Bush talking points on the “Ask the White House” Web site), and as White House counsel. Bush also says she’s a good friend of his. He “knows her soul,” he says. Ohhh-kay.
If some quotes are to be believed, however, Miers’ relationship with Bush the Younger goes beyond friendship into something approaching hero worship. She’s reportedly told people that Dubbya was “the most brilliant man she’d ever met.” Man, that lady really needs to get out more.
So what’s wrong with putting a friend of the president on the nation’s highest court? Shouldn’t the executive branch and the judiciary have a warm, buddy-buddy relationship?
Hell, no. There’s a little thing called “separation of powers.” It serves a greater principle called “checks and balances.” Our entire Constitution is based on this principle. At some time, any one of the three branches of government has the power to bring one or even two of the others to a screeching halt when they try to go too far. Founding Father Alexander Hamilton wrote about just this sort of thing when, in the Federalist Papers, he described the reasons for having the Senate confirm or reject presidential nominations:
“It would be an excellent check upon a spirit of favoritism in the president, and would tend greatly to prevent the appointment of unfit characters from state prejudice, from family connection, from personal attachment, or from a view to popularity. ... He would be both ashamed and afraid to bring forward, for the most distinguished or lucrative stations, candidates who had no other merit than that of coming from the same state to which he particularly belonged, or of being in some way or other personally allied to him, or of possessing the necessary insignificance and pliancy to render them the obsequious instruments of his pleasure.”
In other words, part of the reason we have the Senate do the confirmation is to avoid having the president, any president, pack the court with his home-state buddies.
Obviously, when Hamilton wrote about the president being “ashamed” to bring forth an obvious crony for the nation’s highest court, he never imagined anyone as utterly shameless in his political hackery as Dubbya. But then again, who could?
There’s also the fact that, right now, there’s a criminal investigation going on over who it was in the White House that “outed” CIA agent Valerie Plame as an act of political revenge after former Ambassador Joseph Wilson, Plame’s husband, stated publicly that the White House’s story about Saddam buying uranium from Niger was a crock.
After the story ran, someone, or possibly a couple of someones, in the White House let it out to New York Times columnist Bob Novak that Plame was a CIA WMD specialist. This is a crime if the person whose name is revealed is a “covert agent.” (Certainly the CIA thought she was, since it was they who made the referral to the U.S. attorney’s office.)
The question of “who dunnit” has reached all the way to the president’s chief of staff, Karl Rove, as well as the VP’s chief of staff, “Scooter” Libby. If a federal criminal case is filed against White House staffers, some issues, such as issues regarding executive privilege, will almost certainly end up in front of the Supremes. It is totally inappropriate for anyone who’s worked as long in the White House as Miers, including serving as the White House lawyer, to hear any part of that case.
There’s also this: House Speaker Tom DeLay was recently indicted on conspiracy and money laundering charges. DeLay also has recently faced numerous complaints in the House of ethics violations. So DeLay set himself up a legal defense fund. Unfortunately, that fund got DeLay in further trouble for accepting illegal contributions from lobbyists and law firms registered as lobbyists. Among those illegal contributions was $2,500 from Locke Liddell & Sapp, the Texas law firm formerly headed by — Harriet Miers. So what happens if DeLay’s case goes to the Supremes?
Judicial inexperience is worrisome, but it’s not an insurmountable problem. Cronyism, conflicts of interest, and ties to corrupt officials should be. Plus, we already have a Congress where so-called “legislators” on both sides of the aisle are far too ready to skip out on their role as a co-equal branch of government and rubber-stamp any madness of bumbling King George.
We don’t need another “obsequious instrument of his pleasure” on the Supreme Court.
Sunday, October 02, 2005
Stoned Design?
Latest Newspaper Column:
The 21st-century equivalent of the famous Scopes “Monkey Trial” is going on in Pennsylvania.
A group of parents, backed by the ACLU, are taking the Dover, Pa., School District to court because the district had mandated the teaching of the theory of “Intelligent Design.” Intelligent Design, or ID as it’s known for short, basically states that life is too complex for it to be the product of either random mutation or natural selection. Something, the theory goes, has to be behind all of this.
As one ID supporter put it, “if I find something as complex as a watch in the middle of the road, logic tells me that there must be a watchmaker.”
Parents have objected that this is, at its core, a religious belief, and that mandating its teaching in state-run schools violates the separation of church and state. ID, they say, is just creationism in disguise.
ID proponents defend the school board’s decision, saying, in effect, that since ID doesn’t stipulate what the force behind creation might be, then it’s not a religion. In other words, what’s driving creation may be a super-powerful, super-intelligent invisible being, but it’s not necessarily God.
Seriously. This is their argument.
Of course this argument is weakened even further by the statements of board member Bill Buckingham, who ramrodded the ID mandate into school board policy while wearing a red, white and blue crucifix on his lapel and declaiming that “this country was founded on Christianity, and our students should be taught as such.”
Nope, no religious ideology here, not us.
I have to confess to some mixed emotions here, because ID is actually very close to what I personally believe. For some time now, I’ve felt that evolution is God’s lathe, and that all life is being constantly created (and hopefully improved) on it. The first time I finally understood how DNA replicates itself, I exclaimed out loud, “No way did that happen randomly!”
This really annoyed the guy in the desk next to me, who I apparently awakened out of a really cool dream involving a waterbed filled with Jell-O, “Wonder Woman” Lynda Carter and Catherine Bach from the original “Dukes of Hazzard.” I can’t say as I blame him. I’d have been mad, too. I mean, talk about your intelligent design. But I digress.
Anyway, here’s the thing. While ID is close to my own belief, I’ll be the first to tell you that it’s essentially a religious belief, and that for me to mandate that as the truth that has to be taught to everyone else’s children would be the height of arrogance. Not that I’m not arrogant, mind you, but even I have my limits.
But let me suggest a compromise. Proponents of creationism want, at the very least, for schools to teach a “critical analysis” of evolution theory. They want students to ask certain questions, such as “If we descended from monkeys, why are there still monkeys?” And “Why are there gaps in the fossil record?”
Actually, I know the answer to those questions: “Evolution doesn’t say we descended from monkeys, it says we and monkeys share common ancestors” and “We haven’t dug up all the fossils yet, have we?” (I often add “you doofus” to the beginning or end of these sentences, for extra spice).
All that said, there’s certainly nothing wrong with teaching our youth to think critically about any theory, whether that theory be evolution, creationism or ID. It’s only fair then, that the kids hear about some things that call the alleged intelligence of the alleged Designer into question, such as:
— The human appendix: This little dead-end side street branches off of the main drag of the large intestine, aka Colon Boulevard. It’s a useless pouch of flesh that’ s not good for anything much except getting infected and providing dramatic medical emergencies on bad TV shows.
— The human reproductive system: Ladies, can I get an “Amen” on this one? Childbirth isn’t killing nearly as many of you as it used to, but that’s because humanity has developed various workarounds for the system of baby delivery. But let’s face it: If the design of the way humans give birth had been developed by a corporation, that design would have resulted in more product liability and wrongful death lawsuits than breast implants made out of asbestos, coated with Vioxx, and implanted via Lawn Dart.
— And last but not least, I give you the duck-billed platypus. It’s a mammal! But it lays eggs! And did you know that the female platypus has two ovaries — but only the left one works? I mean, what is up with this critter?
Robin Williams once did a routine in which God was designing the platypus as a goof while stoned. Hmmm. Maybe Robin has something there. Maybe Stoned Design should be taught in schools as well.
After all, it fits the available data — and it’s equally unprovable.
The 21st-century equivalent of the famous Scopes “Monkey Trial” is going on in Pennsylvania.
A group of parents, backed by the ACLU, are taking the Dover, Pa., School District to court because the district had mandated the teaching of the theory of “Intelligent Design.” Intelligent Design, or ID as it’s known for short, basically states that life is too complex for it to be the product of either random mutation or natural selection. Something, the theory goes, has to be behind all of this.
As one ID supporter put it, “if I find something as complex as a watch in the middle of the road, logic tells me that there must be a watchmaker.”
Parents have objected that this is, at its core, a religious belief, and that mandating its teaching in state-run schools violates the separation of church and state. ID, they say, is just creationism in disguise.
ID proponents defend the school board’s decision, saying, in effect, that since ID doesn’t stipulate what the force behind creation might be, then it’s not a religion. In other words, what’s driving creation may be a super-powerful, super-intelligent invisible being, but it’s not necessarily God.
Seriously. This is their argument.
Of course this argument is weakened even further by the statements of board member Bill Buckingham, who ramrodded the ID mandate into school board policy while wearing a red, white and blue crucifix on his lapel and declaiming that “this country was founded on Christianity, and our students should be taught as such.”
Nope, no religious ideology here, not us.
I have to confess to some mixed emotions here, because ID is actually very close to what I personally believe. For some time now, I’ve felt that evolution is God’s lathe, and that all life is being constantly created (and hopefully improved) on it. The first time I finally understood how DNA replicates itself, I exclaimed out loud, “No way did that happen randomly!”
This really annoyed the guy in the desk next to me, who I apparently awakened out of a really cool dream involving a waterbed filled with Jell-O, “Wonder Woman” Lynda Carter and Catherine Bach from the original “Dukes of Hazzard.” I can’t say as I blame him. I’d have been mad, too. I mean, talk about your intelligent design. But I digress.
Anyway, here’s the thing. While ID is close to my own belief, I’ll be the first to tell you that it’s essentially a religious belief, and that for me to mandate that as the truth that has to be taught to everyone else’s children would be the height of arrogance. Not that I’m not arrogant, mind you, but even I have my limits.
But let me suggest a compromise. Proponents of creationism want, at the very least, for schools to teach a “critical analysis” of evolution theory. They want students to ask certain questions, such as “If we descended from monkeys, why are there still monkeys?” And “Why are there gaps in the fossil record?”
Actually, I know the answer to those questions: “Evolution doesn’t say we descended from monkeys, it says we and monkeys share common ancestors” and “We haven’t dug up all the fossils yet, have we?” (I often add “you doofus” to the beginning or end of these sentences, for extra spice).
All that said, there’s certainly nothing wrong with teaching our youth to think critically about any theory, whether that theory be evolution, creationism or ID. It’s only fair then, that the kids hear about some things that call the alleged intelligence of the alleged Designer into question, such as:
— The human appendix: This little dead-end side street branches off of the main drag of the large intestine, aka Colon Boulevard. It’s a useless pouch of flesh that’ s not good for anything much except getting infected and providing dramatic medical emergencies on bad TV shows.
— The human reproductive system: Ladies, can I get an “Amen” on this one? Childbirth isn’t killing nearly as many of you as it used to, but that’s because humanity has developed various workarounds for the system of baby delivery. But let’s face it: If the design of the way humans give birth had been developed by a corporation, that design would have resulted in more product liability and wrongful death lawsuits than breast implants made out of asbestos, coated with Vioxx, and implanted via Lawn Dart.
— And last but not least, I give you the duck-billed platypus. It’s a mammal! But it lays eggs! And did you know that the female platypus has two ovaries — but only the left one works? I mean, what is up with this critter?
Robin Williams once did a routine in which God was designing the platypus as a goof while stoned. Hmmm. Maybe Robin has something there. Maybe Stoned Design should be taught in schools as well.
After all, it fits the available data — and it’s equally unprovable.
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