Isn’t it amazing enough that we have communicators in our pockets like Captain Kirk? Our cell phones are even better than his, since ours take pictures and videos, send text messages and retrieve our e-mail. Do we need to also have people Twittering their most inane and banal thoughts across the world every second of every day just because they can? And can be there some sort of penalty involved if their twitters are not useful, interesting or creative? Two quick slaps across the face seems appropriate.
Do the right wing commentators who are criticizing President Obama for visiting Saudi Arabia recall their own fair haired boy, the dunce Bush The Younger, holding hands with Saudi princes like high school sweethearts? Or the fact that he spirited his business associates, the Bin Laden family of Saudi Arabia (yes, that Bin Laden family), out of the country one step ahead of FBI investigators in the days following the 9/11 attacks? Or his invasion of the Saudi’s main rival in the oil business, Iraq, on false pretenses? Doesn’t seem like all that long ago that these people would forget such things. That sort of behavior sort of sticks in the mind, no?
The Supreme Court has reminded elected judges not to rule on matters concerning the people who contributed to their election campaigns. Wouldn’t that seem like no-brainer to someone with the education, experience and presumed high moral character of a judge?
Isn’t it a bit presumptuous of the United States to chide any other nation on who they put in prison when America has more of its own citizens in jail than any other place on earth? Only Stalin’s gulags exceeded the number of ordinary civilian inmates back in the 1930’s. Do we console ourselves that we’re not as bad as Josef Stalin in this regard? And can we do something about this in The Land Of The Free?
The National Hockey League playoffs are almost finished. Does anybody give a rat’s ass who wins the Stanley Cup other than the same 20,000 people in each hockey town who fill the arenas every night and another 4 or 5 hundred who watch the games on Cable TV?
The comeback of beavers from the brink of extinction is sort of a good news/bad news deal. It’s good news for the beavers but bad news for anyone who doesn’t like them building their dams on streams near where they live. What did Native Americans do about them before John Jacob Astor and the rest of the fur trappers hunted these creatures to the brink of extinction?
The government of China just issued orders stating that all personal computers sold within their country must contain sophisticated hardware to filter out any “unhealthy information” such as pornography, references to the Dalai Lama, mention of the 1989 Tiananmen Square military crackdown on dissidents, the spiritual movement Fulan Gong or any other information the government doesn’t want their people to know about. Will western computer companies knuckle under to this censorship like Google, Microsoft and Yahoo did in order to sell their products to Chines citizens? Do Pandas shit in bamboo groves?
Will the Republican Party cease being a strange uncomfortable joke anytime soon? Between Rush Limbaugh, Michael Steele and Sarah Palin there’s not what anyone would call a brain trust of any sort to figure out what went wrong. They persist in calling themselves the “Party of Ideas.” That’s fine, except that American voters realized that all their idea were really, really stupid and voted them completely out of power; the White House, the Senate and the House of Representatives. Do they even know how ridiculous they look when they trot out Newt Gingrich as their elder statesman? The man absolutely reeks of ulterior motives and sleazy malice. How deep is that barrel? Have they scraped the bottom yet or are they going to recycle Larry Craig next?
Is the panic over the swine flu over? Can we start treating the pandemic of starvation as an emergency? It does, after all, kill 36,000 people every single day, the vast majority of them children under 5. And it’s curable, treated quite easily by food. The rest of the world inoculates itself from this disease by eating 3 meals a day, no expensive medicines required. There’s plenty of extra food on this planet to go around and the means to deliver it to the people who are dying, yet this is not done and in the time it took you to read this paragraph 7 children died. During the time it takes you to prepare and eat your dinner tonight, 750 will die. Over coffee and dessert, say goodbye forever to 300 more. Where’s the panic and the outrage over this? Bon Apetit!