Webb for President?

Posted on July 16, 2007 by wellsdc

Just a thought. I haven’t actually seen the footage from Meet the Press yet, but The Anonymous Liberal has some great commentary on Senator James Webb’s handling of Lindsay Graham and on how to address the BS about Iraq:

It is not at all surprising that Iranians are assisting Shia militants in Iraq. The Saudis are doing the same thing for Sunni militants. If there’s a proxy war in Iraq, it’s not between the U.S. and Iran, it’s between Iran and Sunni Arab countries like Saudi Arabia. And we’re caught in the middle. The primary fault line in Iraq is between the Sunnis and the Shia. Naturally, the countries that border Iraq, like Shia-dominated Iran and Sunni-dominated Saudi Arabia, have an interest in who eventually controls Iraq. This was an utterly predictable consequence of invading Iraq.

We are not at war with anyone in Iraq, really. The war was against the Iraqi armed forces and the Republican Guard, and that war ended in 2003. What we have had since then is an occupation, something very, very different from a war. There are no clear fronts and no distinct enemy armies to defeat. There are homegrown militias, insurgent groups, and a handful of foreign fighters with all sorts of agendas. To speak of “winning” and “victory” is quite simply childish. Occupations either end or they don’t. Finally there is a Democrat with the cojones to stand up and speak some sense. Keep it coming, please.

Less than met the eye

Posted on July 15, 2007 by wellsdc

It’s been a week since I saw the Transformers movie, so I’ve had a chance to process my thoughts on the matter. In short, I have concluded that I have no coherent thoughts other than the following (SPOILER ALERT, sort of):

1. Glenn Morshower remains one of the most criminally-underrated actors out there–although I still haven’t seen season 6 of 24, he portrays one of the only non-Jack-Bauer characters to survive five straight seasons.
2. Megan Fox almost supplants Charlize Theron for my title of too-beautiful-to-be-human. Almost.
3. Questions regarding the consistency, coherence, or even plausibility of the central plot and various plot points are pointless. There is an item sought by everyone in the movie that has the power to turn ordinary electronic items into evil robots. For no stated reason, it cannot create good robots. Whether this is a meditation on the ubiquity of evil in the universe and the ease by which the ordinary can become the malevolent, or whether this is a complete failure of imagination on the part of the screenwriters, is of no interest to me.
4. Bumblebee is supposed to be a VW Bug, dammit! OK, I’m over it.
5. Character development. It’s important to a movie. Who the fuck are all these Decepticons that show up in the last twenty minutes? It’s as though the writers suddenly remembered, in the final moments of the movie, that they needed some sort of resolution with the bad guys they had been ignoring. Plus, I didn’t even notice that Megatron was voiced by Agent Smith.
6. Good call not making Megatron a large robot who turns into a small gun. It’s nice to see at least one shout-out to the laws of physics. Plus, he’s scarier this way.
7. It’s good to see that the guy who voices Optimus Prime can keep it on his resume for this film.
8. Summer movies and deep thought do not go together.
9. Despite several hours of inundation with the message, I still don’t want to buy a Camaro.

Hindus 1, Christianists 0

Posted on July 13, 2007 by wellsdc

The story about the Hindu offering a prayer in the Senate has probably been talked to death by now, but I feel that it is appropriate to note that Washington is not in flames one day after the prayer was offered. The prayer did not occur without incident, of course:

WASHINGTON — A Hindu clergyman made history Thursday by offering the Senate’s morning prayer, but only after police officers removed three shouting protesters from the visitors’ gallery.

Rajan Zed, director of interfaith relations at a Hindu temple in Reno, Nev., gave the brief prayer that opens each day’s Senate session. As he stood at the chamber’s podium in a bright orange and burgundy robe, two women and a man began shouting “this is an abomination” and other complaints from the gallery.

Police officers quickly arrested them and charged them disrupting Congress, a misdemeanor. The male protester told an AP reporter, “we are Christians and patriots” before police handcuffed them and led them away.

For several days, the Mississippi-based American Family Association has urged its members to object to the prayer because Zed would be “seeking the invocation of a non-monotheistic god.”

Now that these three self-styled “Christians and patriots” have utterly embarrassed themselves, their religion, and anyone claiming the title “patriot,” I have a few questions for them.

1. Is your objection to the prayer based specifically on the fact that it is Hindu in nature, or is it a more general objection to its “non-monotheistic” nature?
2. If your objection is to the “non-monotheism” of the prayer, what is/are your primary concern(s) about it? E.g., are you concerned about angering the one true God, or are you concerned that, as a result of “non-monotheistic” prayer, God will get confused?
3. Would any monotheistic prayer be acceptable? Christian? Jewish? Muslim? Sikh? Pastafarian?

I await your reply.

As if being in prison weren’t bad enough

Posted on July 13, 2007 by wellsdc

Check this out:

Red-faced officials at the scandal-racked Texas Youth Commission on Thursday canceled the release on parole of more than 150 teenage offenders after discovering that many had served little time on their sentences for serious violent crimes such as murder, aggravated sexual assault, aggravated robbery and aggravated kidnapping.

They also announced a top-to-bottom review of their parole criteria as a result.

While that must really suck on a personal level for the 150 kids who won’t be getting out of prison after all, it must really suck for TYC, who has been having a bad run of late anyway. If it weren’t so disturbing, it might be funny:

One youth on the recent list had been sentenced to 40 years in the knife slaying of a classmate, who was stabbed 15 times. He had served less than three before the agency recommended his release.

Another, serving time for molesting six children, was recommended for release even though he had numerous write-ups in youth prisons for indecent exposure and for possessing a weapon. One was a sex offender who assaulted a Youth Commission employee about a year earlier.

Two of those recommended for parole were escapees who are still at large.

That is correct–TYC recommended parole of two individuals who had escaped and are still at large. If you ask me (I know you didn’t), the Legislature (whenever they’re around again) should either eliminate the entire agency and start over, or bring in someone to boost TYC’s motivation. Just a thought.

Today in tragedies

Posted on July 12, 2007 by wellsdc

This is actually quite tragic, sad, and recent. Tragic that people were hurt. Tragic that people died. Tragic that natural gas is so dangerous. Tragic that this may have been avoidable, very, very avoidable. While my initial instinct is to do more light mockery, I’ll just quote the story and let the public decide:

CLEBURNE — A man whose wife died after their home exploded had been told not to light any more cigarettes nearly an hour before the blast, according to a city fire marshal’s report.

After calling the Cleburne Fire Department’s nonemergency number on May 29, David Pawlick told the fire inspector that “every time my wife lights a cigarette, a blue flame shoots up to the ceiling.” Fire inspector Scott Oesch said he would check the problem and told Pawlick not to light any more matches, according to a memo written by Oesch two days later.

Oesch did not tell the family to leave the home — where authorities later discovered natural gas had seeped in but went undetected.

Before the inspector arrived, Pawlick’s wife, Hazel, said she wanted to smoke. So Pawlick lit a match for his wife’s cigarette, but it went out after a blue flash. He lit another match, sparking an explosion of blue flames in the house, Fire Marshal Bill Wright reported.

Seconds later, flames went through the ceiling into the attic. Another more violent explosion then ripped a hole in the roof.

Five of the family members were injured. Hazel Pawlick, 64, died days later from her injuries.

Hazel Sanderson, the Pawlick’s daughter, and her daughter, Stephanie Sanderson, remain in critical condition at Parkland Memorial Hospital in Dallas, the family’s attorney said.

Pawlick is suing Atmos Energy and seeking unspecified damages. Family attorney Dean Jackson declined to comment on the inspector’s claim about Pawlick being told not to light any more cigarettes.

The Pawlicks’ house did not use natural gas. But fire investigators say a nearby natural gas leak traveled into a sewer line leading into the house.

A condensation line from an air-conditioning unit dropped into the sewer pipe. The result was aunit that worked as a pump, sucking natural gas from the sewer line and distributing it through the air-conditioning ducts, Wright wrote.

Two by two they went…

Posted on July 11, 2007 by wellsdc

From Bloomberg (via HuffPo), there is a story about a trend among billionaires to buy their own personal submarines:

The ocean floor is the final spending frontier for the world’s richest people. Journeying to see what’s on the bottom aboard a personal submersible is a wretched excess guaranteed to trump the average mogul’s stable of vintage Bugattis or a $38 million round-trip ticket to the International Space Station aboard a Russian rocket.

Luxury-submarine makers and salesmen from the Pacific Ocean to the Persian Gulf say fantasy and secrecy are the foundations of this nautical niche industry built on madcap multibillionaires.

“Everyone down there is a wealthy eccentric,” says Jean- Claude Carme, vice president of marketing for U.S. Submarines Inc., a Portland, Oregon-based bespoke submarine builder. “They’re all intensely secretive.”

Who owns the estimated 100 luxury subs carousing the Seven Seas mostly remains a mystery.

Paul Allen, co-founder of Microsoft Corp., warned his boat builder that loose lips sink ships.

Perhaps I am being paranoid, but there may be a trend that it quite troubling here. We have heard about the disappearing frogs and honeybees, but now our billionaires are retreating to the bottom of the ocean…

What do the billionaires know that the rest of us do not? Be afraid…

10 Minutes

Posted on July 10, 2007 by wellsdc

This is a short from Bosnian director Ahmed Imamovic. Gives you an idea of how shitty the world can be. Just a little something to bum you out if you were having a good day.

From the YouTube description:

10 minutes by Ahmed Imamovic. 1994. Sarajevo, Bosnia and Rome, Italy. How many different things can happen for only 10 Minutes. The film won the award for the best European short film in 2002.

This short film, as its title indicates lasts only 10 minutes, but it tells a much longer story which unravels only in our imagination upon seeing the end of the film. While 10 minutes in someone’s life mean nothing, they can be fatal in another: a boy and his loving family, tragedy in a war-torn city, death and destruction. All in just ten minutes. The film follows two simultaneous story lines: one set in Rome, and one in Sarajevo, in 1994, the worst time of the war in Bosnia. Although the Rome part was not filmed on the original location, that does not take away anything from the quality of the film, it was just a symbolic element anyway. Cast is great, story is very compact and well written, direction dynamic and precise. There is nothing out of place in the film: well structured, stripped of false pathos, realistic, it is very straight forward. In other words, this is a jewel of a film, and it was not by chance that it won the award for the best European short film in 2002. 10 minutes for me is definitely one of the most moving and powerful films about wartime Sarajevo. Behind the scene: I read that the director Ahmed Imamovic, in search of Japanese for the role of the tourist, had to go to the Japanese Embassy in Sarajevo and ask one of the staff to perform in the film. Luckily for the director, the Embassy allowed one of their employees to star in the film.

How far can people go to avoid their professional duties on religious grounds?

Posted on July 7, 2007 by wellsdc

From Overlawyered:

Stephen Dunne, 30, flunked the Massachusetts bar exam and now says it was because he refused on principle to answer an exam question concerning the rights of two married lesbians, their children and property. He claims the hypothetical, which concludes with the question “What are the rights of Mary and Jane?”, violated his First Amendment rights and served as a “screening device” to exclude persons like himself who disapprove on religious grounds of the state’s gay marriage law.

Let’s be clear about this: he left an answer on a bar exam completely blank. Now he is suing a group of lawyers for offending his tender sensibilities. Speaking as a lawyer (albeit one who has neither taken the Massachusetts bar exam nor practiced law there, although I have been to Amherst and thought it was nice), this guy would have made a terrible lawyer anyway. There is really no way, if you want to be any good at what you do, to avoid opining on issues that you may find repellent. The law is what it is, and if you don’t like it, a lawyer can (a) look for a sneaky way around it or (b) become a lobbyist and try to change it. The simple fact that this guy refused to even consider the question, IMHO, suggests that he does not understand the nature of being a lawyer at all.

I previously discussed doctors and pharmacists who don’t want to do their jobs on religious grounds. What gets me about this case is that the guy didn’t even try to answer the question. If he had at least written something that would pass as a bar exam essay, I’m not sure there’d be grounds for a lawsuit, but at least there could be a coherent discussion:

Dunne, who describes himself as a Christian and a Democrat, is seeking $9.75 million in damages and wants a jury to prohibit the Board of Bar Examiners from considering the question in his passage of the exam and to order it removed from all future exams.
“There’s a different forum for that contemporary issue to be discussed, and it’s inappropriate to be on a professional licensing examination,” Dunne told the Herald. “You don’t see questions about partial-birth abortion or abortion on there.”

Dunne scored a 268.866 on the bar exam, just missing a passing grade of 270. The exam question at issue concerns two married lesbian attorneys and their rights regarding a house and two children when one decides to end the marriage.

This question has nothing to do with the propriety, morality, validity, etc., of the “marriage” in question–it addresses a situation that is quite likely to occur in the real world (something that rarely happens in law school, trust me.) This guy chooses to skip an entire bar exam question, barely fails, and now blames someone else for offending him. Calling it a “contemporary issue” is one of the most creative non-sequiturs I’ve heard in some time. The practice of law is pretty dang contemporary, as in it deals with current issues like marriage and divorce–which is legal for homosexuals in Massachusetts, at least at the moment. If you don’t think a lawyer should have to address that issue, you don’t deserve to be a lawyer. And you make a pretty strange case for your religious beliefs, as well.

One final quote from the article, for my own amusement:

Dunne claims the question was used as a “screening device” to identify and penalize him for “refusing to subscribe to a liberal ideology based on ‘secular humanism,’ ”according to his lawsuit.
“Homosexual conduct is inconsistent with (Dunne’s) Christian practices, beliefs and values, which are protected by the First Amendment,” the lawsuit states.

“I respect people with alternative lifestyles, and we must do that in a civil society,” Dunne said. “I just have a different opinion that millions of people share with me, and I believe that my opinion should be respected just as much as (pro-gay) opinions. I have no intent in spreading hatred or discrimination.”

My inner geek is vindicated

Posted on July 4, 2007 by wellsdc

Because cheesy internet-based quizzes do not lie!!!

You scored as Galactica (Battlestar: Galactica), You are leery of your surroundings, and with good reason. Anyone could be a cylon. But you have close friends and you know they would never hurt you. Now if only the damn XO would stop drinking.

Galactica (Battlestar: Galactica)

88%

Serenity (Firefly)

81%

Heart of Gold (Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy)

81%

Millennium Falcon (Star Wars)

81%

Deep Space Nine (Star Trek)

81%

SG-1 (Stargate)

75%

Moya (Farscape)

75%

Bebop (Cowboy Bebop)

69%

Babylon 5 (Babylon 5)

63%

Andromeda Ascendant (Andromeda)

50%

Enterprise D (Star Trek)

50%

Nebuchadnezzar (The Matrix)

44%

FBI’s X-Files Division (The X-Files)

31%

Which sci-fi crew would you best fit in with? (pics)
created with QuizFarm.com

You scored as The Doctor, You are The Doctor, the last of the Time Lords. You regenerate if you ‘die’ and always travel with a companion.

The Doctor

56%

Neo

38%

Gen. Jack O’Neill

25%

Luke Skywalker

19%

Which Sci-Fi Hero Are You?
created with QuizFarm.com

You scored as The Goa’uld, You are a Goa’uld, the evil race of symbiotic worms that take a human host and enslave them. You claim to be a god, bud aren’t

The Goa’uld

31%

The Master

31%

The Wraith

25%

Darth Vader

25%

Which Sci-Fi villain are you??
created with QuizFarm.com

Amazing time waster!