Squirrel's Ink

At one point today, I scanned the headlines on CNN and thought, "Biden? Who's that?"

I saw an article about this a few years ago and for whatever reason I thought of it today and wanted to follow-up to see the results.

They're mixed, of course. Are they ever not when it comes to humans?

http://atlanta.creativeloafing.com/gyrobase/Content?oid=oid%3A307553

Guess who's roommate got her a ticket to see Obama speak tonight?

Oh, yeah, and has two thumbs.

I'm far more excited than my post makes me out to be.

I found a link to the original student editorial on rape, entitled "Rape Only Hurts If You Fight Back", because I wanted to see if it qualified as satire, as the author is claiming now that he has induced a national outcry. Its on page 7, if you're interested in seeing it for yourself:

http://clubs.ccsu.edu/recorder/currentissue.pdf

And behind the cut, this is the statement that the guy says he was trying to make:

( Read more... )

Tuesday, January 30, 2007 07:00 PM
Ralph Nader, will be promoting Seventeen Traditions, The
Appears on/at: BARNES & NOBLE
10th Fl 122 Fifth Ave New York, NY 10011
212-633-4067

As I was watching, I thought it was historical fiction that someone had created to make a point about the war on terror. The setting is 1980 in South Africa and follows the transformation of one man into a terrorist/freedom fighter on the one hand, but also goes into the psychology of the man in charge of preventing attacks against South Africa on the other. The themes of terrorism, torture and how far someone should go to protect his country just seemed too in the news right now for them to have been able to find a story that fit so perfectly.

At the end, though, the movie includes a note of sorts that explains that the events were based on a true story. It makes the movie all the more disturbing and left me feeling unsettled. The movie makers are clearly trying to draw parallells between then and now.

I've heard people say things like, "Well, I don't like torture, but we have to protect the country." As if torture is an abstract concept, as if it isn't happening to real people and screwing up their lives, as if it won't have very real consequences for our country. As if its all very fine and well to use agressive measures, as long as its to other people and not our people.

This movie is aimed squarely at those people. Its a true story about what happens when a country makes excuses, about what happens if we think in terms of the ends justifying the means - innocent people get tortured, held indefinately or even "disappear," and the very thing that we are trying to stop only grows in power.

No good ever comes of spreading injustice. Evil begets evil. And other ominous, vaguely preachy things one might expect from a religion teacher.

Sadly, the theater was almost empty, so I'm not sure that the point is getting across to the people who could really use it.

Tim Robbins, as always, was awesome. Derek Luke, who played the terrorist/freedom fighter (he kept getting called both), also gave a great performance. Precious was beautiful. Just beautiful. (Main character's wife, don't know her name.)

As a side point, all of the women in this movie wore their hair naturally, something you don't often see and which made me very happy.

From Countdown with Keith Olbermann:



Video is ten minutes long and reports on ten instances when the administration may have used terror alerts to distract the public from bad press. Some may be just coincidence, but others such as #10, are obviously planned.

In #10, officials receive what they describe as a credible threat against the NYC subway and increase security. They ask the media to sit on the story for three days, and when the official announcement comes, it just happens to coincide with Karl Rove being called before a grand jury.

This segment was rerun this week after the story broke that the recent airline plot was perhaps somewhat exaggerated. Why, no, politicians would never use something as serious as terrorism to get a bump in the polls or justify programs that are one by one being ruled as unconstitutional.

I would not be surprised if the terror alert gets raised a week or so before elections. Then again, it might look TOO suspicious if that happened. Maybe a month, then.

I'm more or less back in my grandfather's house, which is odd because not only is he not here, but my uncle has moved in and has his boxes everywhere. There's no place to really keep all of them, and I'm not sure that the family wants him changing the house in significant ways just yet, so there are piles of them in all the bedrooms. My mother, I think, wants to get started on going through stuff and getting rid of it. My uncle has this delusion of buying the house but that's not going to happen with this huge equity loan on it that my other uncle seems to have no intention of paying back, since no one has heard from him in several months.

Its beautiful out today. Not too hot, no humidity, sunny . . . I'm going to be spending most of it on errands, but I should really do something outdoors at some point.

Last night when I got here, I decided to watch some of the news programs my grandpa and I used to watch together last summer. I figured they would all be talking about what I saw as the biggest story of the day, the Supreme Court rulings, especially the one against Bush. I turned it on in time to catch the #1 story on Countdown, which was . . .

Britney Spears posing naked on the cover of Harpers Bazaar.

I don't know which I was more appalled at: Olberman making this his #1 story, or the actual content of the segment. (You know what they say about train wrecks . . .)