FIREBLIND.COM

If you’ve regularly followed this website (and I hope, for everyone’s sake, that there’s not more than like 3 of you), you know that I don’t talk about politics much in a direct sense. I seldom use the words “Republican” or “Democrat.” I prefer to talk about politics from a more indirect, moralistic point of view. When it actually does come to voting and supporting politicians, I vote my conscience. If a Republican is the better man or woman, I vote for them. Likewise if it’s a Democrat. I usually prefer third-party candidates, but I’m pragmatic and know that I’m pretty much throwing a vote away. I voted for Bush in 2000, and had illness not kept me away, I would have voted for Kerry in 2004. I tend to lean left, but that doesn’t mean I don’t keep an open mind.

So yeah, I don’t talk about politics much here. Nevertheless, I feel that it’s time to take on the Republicans a bit. For some reason, I have this vision of Americans as being loyal to parties, but more loyal to an American ideal of honesty and integrity. A man’s words and deeds are supposed to be his handshake, and a real man sticks by his handshake. It shouldn’t matter whether he’s from one party or the next, if we elected him, he owes us. Moreover, if someone from the same party as you dicks you over, it should be a bigger insult than if the other guy does something you don’t like.

I understand that there are significant struggles and trends at play in what happens in our government, so you can’t just blame George Bush for all the failures, but it seems like the Republicans, headed by Bush, have been doing a lot of failing the last few years. The national debt is through the roof, the Iraq War was based on lies and has been a disaster, civil liberties are a freaking mess, the economy is in the toilet, our international reputation was in the toilet but has been scooped out and used as part of a disgusting Internet video, and the dollar bill is worth less than a night with Paris Hilton (which used to be the other way around).

I personally care most about the civil liberties, but the other stuff sucks pretty bad too. Alas, that’s besides the point. The point is that what I’ve stated above is public record and well known. These are facts, and they’re reflections on the jobs our elected officials are doing. It’s not about being Republican or Democrat, it’s about asking our leaders to stop screwing around with our lives and futures and to do what we goddamned elected them to do.

The fact of the matter is, George Bush has been bad for our country. I’m not asking you to vote Democrat if you’re a staunch Republican, but you should at least have the balls to write your members of congress and ask them to stand up to Bush for once, and to stop being his lap dogs for secrecy and abuse. He’s your guy, and he’s screwed you over just as bad as he’s screwed over everyone else.

By the way, did you know that articles of impeachment were brought against Bush yesterday? It was more of a stunt than an actual attempt, but you’d think something like that might get more coverage than it did. So much for our media looking out for us. I don’t care how you feel about Bush, stuff like this matters and should be front and center in the public debate.

I find myself in a somber and angry mood tonight. I’m not quite sure why, but the result is that I’m going to take a different tack with this piece.

Much has been said lately about the remarks of Jeremiah Wright, Barrack Obama’s minister. The man is certainly inflammatory, but despite all the vitriol directed his way, I honestly don’t think his assessment is too far off. At a time when mankind has reached the highest peaks of technological and scientific knowledge he has ever known, it amazes me that racism is so alive and well. Was Wright so far off in calling this the “US of KKK-A”?

Certainly, the position of black-skinned Americans is better than it probably has been at any time in the history of this country. Much of the present sorrow still visited upon that community is self-inflicted, but only an idiot would say that the majority of blame falls on blacks themselves. The civil rights movement of the 1960s laid bare the festering boil that was race relations in the United States, and through much black hardship gave white society a chance to be honest with itself. It gave whites who wanted justice to prevail an opportunity to speak out, and to help alleviate the suffering of their fellow man. This admission of guilt in itself, however, does not lift millions of people out of the burden of hundreds of years of poor education, paltry infrastructure, and genetic steamrolling. Laws were passed to better protect the physical bodies of minorities in the States, but racism persisted, and communities were ignored.

It troubles me that the worth of a man is still measured in so many ways by the color of his skin. Racism at its core is no different than superstition. It says that some magical quality is imbued within one’s skin, and that quality will always transcend whatever other abilities we have. Racism, like religion, is a virus. It infiltrates the mind through exposure to other infected individuals, and seeks to spread its ugly progeny through every inch of flesh so that each word, each dealing with someone of a different skin color is poisoned by it. It seeks every opportunity to spread, and chooses those who are most easily influenced: the young, the old, and the uneducated. Jesus knew very well what he spoke of when he said to suffer the little children unto him. A young mind is unable to withstand the attack of mental viruses, and is open to every putrid idea that its rotting parent cares to spit its way. Subject a child to 18 years of bigotry, and its mind will be so overrun by racist or religious disease that it may very well be a life long handicap.

I wonder if we’ll ever have the technology to manipulate the skin color of a child in the womb. Obviously, we can already do that to a certain extent through selective insemination. But, if we can show that skin color is nothing more than an “On-Off” switch that we can change in the OB-GYN’s office, will there still be room for racial division?

Recently, southern Congressman Geoff Davis called Barrack Obama “boy” in a discussion on Obama’s readiness to act as Commander-in-Chief. Davis is only three years older than Obama, and in effect, was calling Obama a nigger. He also said that Obama would probably be in jail if he were not miraculously lifted into the Senate. (A complete mp3 is here.) What a sad day for mankind. In the twenty-first goddamned century, a representative to the most important congress in world history can still see fit to call a black senator “boy.”

Let me offer one final thought, and I’ll be off. I rather hate the idea of “community” and fictional relationships to prominent people within one’s own race. I remember a scene in a sit-com I saw many years ago, where a black-skinned, elderly musician was talking to the two black sisters that were the main characters. The general point of his conversation was that white people stole black music and usurped it. I understand that this character was trying to tell the girls that they need not feel ashamed of themselves; that people who look just like them have achieved greatness. Even so, this bothers me.

The color of one’s skin does not imbue you with some right to take ownership of great people before you to the exclusion of others. If there was a talented black musician who’s music was stolen (I’m looking at you, Elvis Presley), that individual is no more related to the average black person than he is the average Mexican. His talent does not somehow persist through the ages to be magically inherited by every person who has a similar skin color. Similarly, I, as an half-Anglo, half-Hispanic male did not crawl into the room of a sleeping black musician 70 years ago and spirit away the essence of his musical talent in some kind of racial robbery.

The gifts that each of us have are gifts to the entire species, and our failings are burdens cast upon everyone. There is no more “black music” than there is “white space flight.” Each of us can take pride in the great men and women who came before us, we should all be ashamed at the evil that has transpired, and we all have a responsibility to those of us who come after. I am every man or woman who has struggled before me to survive, to eke out an existence on this planet. I am a single mother who does her damndest to put food on the table. I am every slave who has ever taken a whipping for daring to hold his head high, to say “I am a man.” I am every person who has ever screamed at the empty, silent heavens and said “not me, I am not going to take this without a fight.” We are all liberty, we are all evil, we are all justice. The sooner we dispense with this nonsense that we are the product of our skin, that we are members of fictitious “communities”, the sooner we can cast off one more shackle placed upon us by the darkness of ages past. Our worth is not determined by the color of our skin. Our path need not be guided by superstition.

I know you’ve all heard a phrase that goes something like “our brave soldiers fighting for our freedoms”. I can’t recall if I heard it used around the time of the 1990/1991 Gulf War, but it’s definitely made the rounds since the 2001 terrorist attacks on the US. Each of you reading this have also seen the sundry patriotic e-mails that expand on the theme.

In any event, I’ve been pondering this expression of late, primarily because it’s starting to anger me. This is not because good hearted Americans use it to describe their respect for the American military, but because for too long it’s been used as a tool to stifle legitimate debate on the policies of our government. Before you start calling me a pinko or something, hear me out.

Militaries around the world and throughout time have been used for different purposes. In many cases, soldiers have been used for the personal benefit of a ruler, whether it be Alexander the Great, or crabby ol’ Yahway of the Old Testament. If I’m a despotic ruler and I use my military to invade a defenseless neighboring country so that I can capture its queen and take her for my wife, I think you would have a hard time convincing people that my invading soldiers are fighting for anyone’s freedoms. Similarly, if I’m a Muslim ruler who invades a Hindu country simply for conquest over another religion, discussions of freedom are out the door.

Suppose that my purpose in invading another country is to take it over and rule it, and that I intend to treat the citizens harshly as I consider them to be barbarians. I want to lock everyone up in shackles and only give them a small portion of bread and water each day. Should the citizens of that country decide to fight my military, it’s pretty clear in this example that they are, in fact, fighting for their way of life, including their “freedoms”.

I suspect that during the Vietnam or Korean wars, few proponents of them argued that American soldiers were fighting for American freedoms. Rather, the motives were probably seen as something like stopping the communists, or perhaps preserving the freedom of our Vietnamese/Korean allies.

I write all this because I’m trying to show that, as far as wars go, there are a spectrum of motivations, some being more moral than others. Or, more specifically, we can understand that some wars are not fought at all over issues of freedom.

We can thus ask the question, are American soldiers in a given conflict fighting for American freedoms? Even more to the point, are Americans killing others and being killed themselves in order to protect American values?

My honest assessment of the invasion of Iraq is that no, American soldiers are not fighting for American “freedoms”. Keep in mind that I’m a political independent, and that my graduate studies centered largely around the relationship of Islamism and terrorism to the Middle East, in particular to the interests of Iraq, Iran, Israel, and the US. I’m not just some yahoo blogger this time.

It may very well be that our soldiers are being used in the interests of a larger American policy that will benefit Americans in the long run, but I find it severely disingenuous to pretend that this is the same thing as “fighting for freedom”. Fighting for freedom seems to imply that the dark-skinned barbarians are literally at the gates, ready to pounce on every small-waisted blond mother. You can just see her now, loving her freedom while she washes her dishes and cherishes the freedom of her two blond, freedom loving children playing in the front yard.

I’m joking of course, but my point is still valid. Expressions like “fighting for freedom” seem like good, safe patriotism, but in reality this is not the case. When we reduce such an enormously complex conflict like our invasion of Iraq into a cute phrase like this, in actuality this is where we’re giving away our freedom. We give up our freedom to challenge our elected officials on good policy, and in the way in which we want them to use our fighting men and women. We’ve let the spin-doctors win, because they’ve been able to hide all the difficult questions underneath a soft blanket of blue-blooded patriotism. Instead of legitimately discussing the ugly truths involved in the conflict, they’re wrapped up in a faux-patriotism that can be used as a weapon against anyone who dare challenge the “rightness” of “fighting for our freedoms”.

I’m not interested in arguing here over whether the invasion of Iraq was or was not the right thing to do (maybe another time), but if we want to truly honor our men and women in uniform, it’s time to quit with the bullshit phrases and all the fake patriotism and really talk about what’s going on in the world. If you had to sit a young soldier down and tell him that tomorrow you were going to send him into a firefight in Falluja and that he was most likely going to die, don’t you think you owe him something better than a trite, condescending phrase? At that moment, he’s fighting for himself and his family. Most importantly, he’s trying to prevent bullets from ripping through his young face. He’s got a job to do—whether right or wrong—and he wants to do it and get out alive. It’s simply insulting to tell this young man that the reason he is never going to see his daughter again is because Saddam Hussein wanted to take his freedoms away.

Support the invasion if you want, I don’t care. Just don’t do for some bullshit propaganda. Do it because you think it’s the right choice for everyone in the long run. Do it because you have a brain to decide that it’s a tough decision, but it might be the right decision. Don’t do it because you get a warm feeling forwarding along an e-mail, or because you put a goddamned bumper sticker on your car. You are quite literally telling every American soldier that you’re willing to let him or her die because this war is that important. If this is the way you feel, at least make their death count for something. Getting all warm and fuzzy over a country song doesn’t count.

I was trying to avoid it, but it’s gotten too crazy for me not to lend my worthless opinion to the situation.

As you may or may not have heard, there was an incident in Palmdale, CA in mid-September, in which several black-skinned high school students were arrested over an incident involving spilled cake. Here’s a list of what seem to be the undisputed facts:

• Some amount of cake was dropped on the ground during a birthday party
• A security guard ordered one of the students to pick the cake up.
• A scuffle of some kind ensued, during which three students were placed into handcuffs and arrested by (white-skinned) security staff
• Pleajhai Mervin, the female student at the center of the ordeal, was expelled from school
• Mervin’s mother was later arrested for an alleged attack on various school staff members

According to most media reports, the claim has been made that Mervin suffered a broken arm/wrist, and that one of the other students arrested did as well. Moreover, the media reports claim that Mervin was “beaten” or “assaulted”, that the white-skinned security guard threw her down on a table, and while placing her in handcuffs made racist remarks, including calling her a nappy head. Her mother was later supposedly arrested basically for making a fuss.

Here’s a video of the arrest taking place. Note that this is the longest footage of the incident that I’ve seen. It’s possible that more footage is out there.

A police investigation into the case disputes the allegations of assault, and comes to the defense of the security guard. The report essentially states that the students assaulted the security guard, and that Mervin’s mother did in fact physically assault school staff (including pushing the principal, forearming a vice principal, and pushing another security guard). There are also reports that the doctor who treated Mervin’s wrist has stated that she did not break or fracture it.

It seems to me that when you compare the allegations and the police report, and after watching the video, that the allegations of assault and abuse are overinflated if not false. Then again, I wasn’t there and I don’t have any more facts than what have been reported on.

And that’s the reason I’m writing this. Very soon after the incident happened, black-skinned “civil rights” groups began to agitate against what they perceived as a(nother) grave injustice perpetrated by white-skinned security guards against defenseless and innocent teens. They did this based solely on the word of individuals in agreement with Mervin. A small rally was held at a civic building to demand justice.

Once Al Sharpton got involved, all hell broke loose. In listening to talk-radio and more “independent” media sources, the white-skinned backlash was just as animated as the protests, if not moreso. The problem was that their outrage seemed to stem more from the fact that black-skinned people were getting “uppity” rather than because of the merits of the actual case.

In both cases, I’m greatly disappointed. It’s very disappointing that in this day and age–a time of technological and scientific progress unseen in the history of mankind–that dark skinned Americans still have to put up with as much racist crap as they do. On the other hand, I think it’s unfortunate that black-skinned “activists” saw fit to cause such a stink before all the facts of the incident had come out. In both cases, each community has basically caused the other to roll their collective eyes and utter a “not this sh*t again”. What ever happened to restraint and common decency? A little of it might go a long way in patching up the terrible state of race relations in this country.

By the way, sorry if the “black-skinned” and “white-skinned” terminology is pissing you off. I’m trying to be better at using this terminology, as I think it cuts through a lot of the crap that we associate with the terms “black” or “African-American” and “white”. When one says “black students”, a lot of people will already create an impression based on some phantom black student that they “know”, who probably wears his pants really baggy, turns his hat to the side, and enjoys long walks in the park and holding up liquor stores. Similarly, some people will hear “white security” guard and conjure up notions of all the racist cops and security guards who want nothing more than to put “coloreds” in their place. Are their black-skinned people who are criminals? Of course. Are there white-skinned security guards that abuse their power? Absolutely.

I feel that in training myself to use terms like “black-skinned” or “white-skinned”, I can improve my own ability to consider people of different skin color as being only that: people who happen to be wrapped in the same shell as myself with slightly lighter or darker pigmentation. It annoys me to no end that humans make up so many stupid ways to divide themselves from one another. Black-skinned Americans don’t dial in for a conference call each morning to learn what new things their culture is going to turn out for the day, and similarly, white-skinned Americans don’t get memos about how to better oppress minorities. People are people, and it sucks that we’re so good at making stuff up about imaginary groups that don’t exist.

One final thing before I go: in looking around for opinions on this, I was surprised to find such a large number of blogs written about this incident. Like me, they don’t actually know anything about what really happened, but man, are people jumping to conclusions all over the place. In any event, if you’re interested in reading up on some of the more interesting (to me) voices that I came across, check out these blogs.

As you may recall, back in May there were pro-illegal immigrant demonstrations in various places, but most notably in Los Angeles. They almost went off without a hitch, until the police moved in late in the day with some fierce overzealousness and shot up some peeps with rubber bullets. That, and shoved around some reporters and old people (etc). As I recall, no one was seriously injured. Given that my memory is about as good as Paris Hilton is monogamous, however, it’s possible all of LA was nuked and I wouldn’t recall it.

As you might have guessed, the lawsuit lottery apparatus is in full effect. I heard a soundbite from one of the lawyers today, in which she said something to the effect of “Despite being harassed and threatened, these people have still bravely decided to pursue justice”. I’m paraphrasing, but the gist is more or less correct. She’s saying that the police actions were an attempt to silence her clients, and despite the fact that they’re going to be under threat of continued violence by the Man, they’re still going to fight this out in court so that justice can be achieved.

I think this is the first time I’ve cussed in one of these blogs, but I think it’s warranted here: Of course they’re going to fucking pursue this in the courts. 1) The police weren’t trying to kill them or “silence” them. 2) The police aren’t going to continue to harrass them. 3) LA generally doesn’t pursue illegal immigrants, no matter what the circumstances. 4) Filing a racially based lawsuit in Los Angeles, especially if it involves the police, is a veritable gold mine for the plaintiffs. The tort system in LA has gone freaking nuts.

This has nothing to do with what happened in the park that day, but has everything to do with trying to cash in like opportunistic bastards. It would be far braver of these people NOT to pursue this in court, as that might show some real damned courage.

I don’t understand how draining the city’s coffers dry in any way helps make stuff like this better. It takes money out of badly needed programs and redistributes it into the hands of a few people.

Now, I should note that I have not seen a dollar figure yet. I would bet your left nut, however, that it’s going to be astronomical. If Brandy or bloody Tennie Pierce are any indications, LA is going to be defending itself against claims for hundreds of millions of dollars.

I have no problem with lawsuits of this nature in principle. If you are injured, you should be entitled to compensation for the injury, expenses, and income lost. I’m even ok with some punitive damages. But it makes no sense in this day and age to let plaintiffs get away with highway robbery against nervous municipalities. If any of these lawsuits ask for any significant amount of damages, I say fuck the plaintiffs. They’re brutalizing the city and its (literally) poor citizens far worse than the police did to them.

So there’s a guy in Georgia who was convicted in 1994 of a sex crime involving a child. He served his time in prison and has been released. Because of the stigma of being a sex offender, the guy has been unable to find a place to live and is presently homeless. But, a new law says that he must register as a sex offender. The funny thing is, the law says that in order to register, you must have a permanent address. If you don’t register, you go to jail for life.

In Catch-22 format:

> Make it incredibly difficult to find a home or a job
> Require people to have a home to register as a sex offender
> If they don’t have a home–because previous legislation made it too hard–put the guy in jail for life.

Now, I’m not one to defend sexual predators who harm children. But, you have to be fair to people who have obeyed the laws that you wrote in the first place. To fix this situation, either: just give life sentences to people who sexually abuse children when they’re first convicted, or let this guy register without a permanent address (put a bloody tracking microchip in him for all I care). Setting a trap for someone so that you can throw them back in jail smacks of double jeopardy and is just plain evil.

By the way, the sex offender registry is a joke. In some areas, you can be put on it for peeing in public or mooning someone. You then have to register as a sex offender for life, and can’t do all the things that really bad sex offenders can’t do, like live within so much distance of a school, day care center, etc. I don’t understand why–if I murder someone, serve my sentence, and am released–I don’t have to go door to door telling everyone that I’m a murderer, but if I so much as show my junk to a 15-year-old I have to do the same. It’s absurd. If you hate people who predate on children, put them away for good. Get rid of the stupid sex offender registry, and figure out reasonable punishment for people who did stupid things involving beer and their genitals and let people get on with their lives.

Pulling this kind of crap on a homeless guy who served his time is something we should expect in a third-world country, not in the US. A legal system without integrity is something to be feared and overthrown.

Rage Against the Machine, one of my two top favorite bands of all time, played a reunion set at Coachella this past weekend. If you haven’t heard, frontman Zach De La Rocha made some pretty angry comments about the Bush administration, including this gem:

…And this current administration is no exception. They should be hung, and tried, and shot.

On the May 2, 2007 Hannity & Colmes show, the hosts and guests were falling all over themselves trying to be the biggest Bush choad licker. Basically, Rage fans are all losers, and De La Rocha should go to jail for making “terroristic” threats.

Although freedom of speech has come to mean significantly more than just speech, the original intent of the concept was to protect political speech. That you could say things like “the President is a dick” and not get beheaded was a pretty radical idea several hundred years ago (although I think “dick” was probably spelled “dicke” back then). While the whole of De La Rocha’s speech was pretty inflamatory from a political perspective, it clearly wasn’t terroristic. Had he said “I am going to murder George Bush”, or “I’ll pay 10 million dollars if someone kills George Bush”, I might be able to agree that the speech posed a threat to the health of the President. He didn’t, and I therefore feel that his speech was protected speech, and what I say goes.

His remarks were clearly appealing to political and social justice, and he was calling the Bush administration traitors. It’s no different than the dirty hippies in my area holding up signs saying that Bush is a war criminal, Bush is a Nazi, that Curious George was probably touched inappropriately by the man in the yellow hat, etc.

Listen: in my 46-year career as a Mexican yellow journalist, I’ve never seen an administration that is so positively loathed by so many people. If congress did decide to bring him up on trial or somehow voted to oust is incompetent ass, I’d be in favor of it, and so would 90% of Americans between the ages of 18-35, and 46-59, except women aged 25-34 and men aged 37-42. Hell, I voted for the guy in 2000, and I would love to see him out of office. Does that mean I’m some crazed “liberal” or anarchist? (In case you said “yes”, the answer is “no”.)

In summation, Ann Coulter is a jack ass, Rage is awesome if somewhat incendiary, and I’m probably going to get a call from the Secret Service for saying “I am going to murder George Bush” above, even though it was used as an example.

Oh, one final thought: kudos to Colmes for sticking it to Coulter over comments she made about Clinton when he was president: “The only issue is whether to impeach or assassinate….” She calls it a “serious legal point” though, which I guess makes it ok because she’s Ann Coulter, and because she’s the king of Spring Break.

Tomorrow there’s supposed to be another funtastic illegal immigrant protest. Both sides are spewing major rhetoric in the buildup. I heard one soundbite in which a young female decries being treated as “second-class”, while I’ve heard others containing white men more or less declaring that the illegals “took our jobs”.

On the one hand, not being a citizen is the very definition of being second class. The majority of rights, benefits, and privileges to to those who are citizens. The second level of the same goes to those who immigrate legally, with the least amount of privilege going to those who immigrate illegally. That’s just the way it works; I don’t make the rules, I just report them in a funky, radical kind of way.

Anyways, I’d like to make two points that I’ve probably already made elsewhere. But, since Jessica Simpson likes to hear me talk, I’ll say them again.

Point the first: the above cited female is somewhat justified in her criticism of the treament of illegals, especially in SoCal where I’m from. Sure, a LOT of illegals engage in crime and depend heavily on government programs (i.e. “taxes”) to get by. But, a significantly larger number work their bloody brown asses off to make the Californian economy go ’round. And by and large, most of our illegals are decent people. As much as we depend on many of them, it sucks that they get crapped on by so many people. If we really do need their labor and their buying habits to keep the economy churning, be fair and let more get in here legally.

Point the second: the above notwithstanding, illegal immigrants have caused a significant amount of harm to many parts of the country. Their population centers tend to be high density, high crime, high poverty, high tax infusion areas (public services). All that combines to make life worse for everyone that is here legally and who pay their fair share of taxes, including other Mexican and Central American immigrants. Heck, even the “decent’ illegals need to be able to work, and they often do that by stealing social security numbers, which screws the innocent person on the other end.

(Before DP [whom I admire more than almost anyone] can say it’s the victim’s fault for not checking their credit report often enough, let me say this: stating that identity theft is the victim’s fault is like saying a diner’s at fault for not jumping fast enough when Oldie McRetard drives through the window of a Burger King.)

In short, it pisses me off that everyone stacks up on one side of the issue and is dishonest about the totality of it all. Grow up, jerkwads.

On a different note, I didn’t realize until recently that I felt this way, but I might agree that it’s time to stop granting citizenship to any kid squeezed out of a vagina onto American soil. I’m not sure where that law came from, but it doesn’t make much sense in our modern state of 300 million people. If nothing else, it really screws up our ability to have a proper debate on immigration; after all, when was the last time you tried to sort out the legality of an illegal married couple and their eleventy legal kids?

In conclusion, build a wall, stop creating anchor babies, and stop crapping on good, hardworking immigrants simply because they’re here illegally. Have a real debate on the real issues for once. Oh, and in double conclusion: buy me a bag of pretzels. But not the peanut butter kind. Those suck.

I listen to talk radio a lot. Not as much as the old guy with the big mustache down the street who swears NASA talks to him on his ham radio, but a fair amount of my drive-time is spent listening to tinny AM stations. One of the constant themes is global warming, and on the more conservative stations, how stupid the idea of global warming is.

Granted, the incredibly good-looking jury in my head is still out on whether climate change is caused as much by us (humankind) as we think it is, but I’m very open to the idea. After all, the research for GW is being conducted by some of the most brilliant minds to ever walk the earth using the best technology ever seen. At the very least, I can say that there is incredibly strong intellectual evidence to find a correlation between the stuff we do and climate change.

You would never know this, however, by listening to conservative talk radio. The way these guys talk, you would think GW research is being conducted by blind, semi-retarded anarchist high school students who would like nothing better than to bring down the “Amerikan” economy. (See what I did there? I spelled “America” with a “k”. Take that, Big Business!)

It’s as if Global Warming has driven over to your parent’s house in it’s 1969 Corvette with its sexy hairy chest, climbed in through the second-story window using the ivy on the front porch, and is now having its way with your smokin’ hot and fully-developed, though ignorant and gullible 16-year-old sister. Hey, at least he’s assistant manager at the KFC.

In any event, all i really wanted to say is this: if the scientists are wrong, so what? We’ll have reduced pollution, decreased the pressure on natural resources, and developed much more efficient and long-term energy sources. We’ll make more jobs in the industries that develop the new technologies to replace the jobs lost in the old industries. Maybe I’ll even eventually get my stupid flying car.

On the other hand, if they’re right, and we don’t do this stuff, your sister’s not the only one who’s gonna get screwed. (Editor’s note: Zing!)

I live for arguments over illegal immigration. That, and reruns of Strawberry Shortcake. I’ve already stated elsewhere that illegal immigration is not a simple issue, but it’s worth mentioning again that the debate has been hijacked by nutjobs on both sides of the political spectrum.

In any event, I try and keep an open mind. My basic philosophy is that some immigration is good, too much is bad, and that most people migrate because they want to improve the lives of themselves and those they love. That’s admirable. But, at the same time, you can’t overwhelm the people who are already in the place with massive amounts of poor people. That’s bad for everyone.

Anyways, one of the stronger points against illegal immigration that I hadn’t heard much about until recently is the identity theft part. If employers are verifying that Juan Q. Public has a valid social security number, that means that he’s stolen it from a legal citizen. Nevermind that he’s a good guy everywhere else: he’s just screwed you and your credit history if you’re the victim.

Anyways, I mention this because it seems to get a lot more press now. Go ahead and support all immigrants if you wish, but you at least need to be fair to those who are being hurt as a part of the bigger phenomenon.