Tuesday, November 2, 2010
Erection Day
Well, that was a fun week. As of yesterday, the military's archaic "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" policy was reinstated after a brief period of judicial sanity. The various judges hearing the cases on the basis of their constitutional merits evidently don't see eye to eye, so it goes back for another volley. And what luck! Just in time for politicians terrified of losing their seats to use it as another cultural wedge issue. Oh, I almost forgot: a leak from a new Pentagon study reveals that the troops really don't give a shit if someone's gay or not and top brass admits that the ban is bad for the esprit de corps. (That, and we're now behind Libya in letting gay soldiers openly serve.) I guess people running for office are too worried about taking "getting behind the troops" too literally. What a proud day to be an American.
Tuesday, July 13, 2010
Pride Of The Yank-ees
Middle Men is a new film about the guys who first made money off of boobies and snooch on the interwebs. Luke Wilson must have really wanted to get out of doing those AT&T endorsements.
Friday, July 2, 2010
Wednesday, June 16, 2010
Wednesday, June 9, 2010
Oil Of Oy Vey
It's time to stop referring to the greatest environmental disaster in history as a "spill". When I reach across the breakfast table and knock over my orange juice, that's a spill. Oops! To equate that with tens of thousands of barrels of oil gushing into the Gulf of Mexico per day is engaging in denial of the highest order. BP contends that their current solution (#459, I believe) has reduced it to a "relative trickle", but we also know they're really bad at math. However, the seductive language is far from accidental on the part of those who contend that this is a minor mishap; the cost of doing business. It creates a subliminal connotation that it's all gonna be just fine. It's not. Because, among all the sturm und drang on both sides of the political aisle, efforts to continually prop up big oil (clearly at any cost) is an effort in continued futility. There are three industries that employ most of the residents of the Gulf Coast region: tourism, oil, and fishing. After Obama's moratorium on drilling in the wake of the Deepwater Horizon debacle, jobs are being lost in all three. Plans to resume drilling in order to restore those jobs can be considered a pyrrhic victory, at best. It's also hard to recall a time in recent memory when the public reaction to corporate incompetence has been so tepid. We live in a nation where parents will pick up torches against Wendy's when their kid gets the wrong CD in their happy meal, yet the reaction to BP has strangely been along the lines of, "mistakes happen". I suppose even the dimmest among us realize that outrage over this disaster would force us to look ourselves in the mirror and willfully ignore a very basic truth: oil is simply not the future. Sadly, as long as it remains cheap, we will do nothing to face that fact. The cover of the latest issue of Newsweek says, "What The Spill Will Kill" above a picture of a sea turtle. Taken in the larger context, that turtle might as well be us.
Wednesday, May 19, 2010
Wednesday, May 12, 2010
Wednesday, May 5, 2010
Tuesday, April 27, 2010
Wednesday, April 21, 2010
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