For those readers who don’t diligently read every comment posted to this blog (You know who you are!) I thought I would bring this little item to your attention.

Last year I posted with amusement about the tempest in a teacup that was the Pink Taco Controversy.

James W. Sperman, the creator of the Pink Taco Restaurant & Bar posted a link to a website he created that tells the whole Pink Taco story. It’s worth a read, and as a serial entrepreneur myself, I really feel for the guy.

I’ve never been able to decide (and we’ll probably never know) if the neo-cons running America are consciously and cynically using the threat of terrorism to roll back hundreds of years of human and civil rights (and seriously, why would they want to do that? They don’t gain anything from that.) or if this pants-shitting cowardice is real, and they honestly believe that people living in caves on the other side of the world really are the “greatest threat this nation has even faced.”

Even in the current state of perpetual panic, however, every once something still makes me say “Shit! These morons are serious!”

It seems that the Department of Homeland Security and the TSA are quite excited about Lamperd’s “EMD Safety Bracelet.” There is a video on the site that really has to be seen to be believed, but I’ll explain briefly.

Under the plan, when we board a flight we would all be issued “safety bracelets” which could only be removed by security personal at the destination. If the airline crew decides we are misbehaving in flight, they will be able to remotely activate our bracelets to deliver a “debilitating electric shock that would render [us] unconscious for several minutes.”

What’s most disturbing is that these people were not laughed at or spat on, but are being actively encouraged by the US government.

… and while we’re on the subject of health. It’s kind of Amazing that Americans will ignore all kinds of real health dangers, but invent all kinds of diseases that are not real.

A friend sent me an article about the new Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders which is the psychiatrists bible. If can’t sleep after you drink too much coffee, you are not an idiot, you have
292.89: Caffeine-Induced Sleep Disorder F15.8, and of course there is a mind-altering drug available.

It also turns out that your kid is not a disobedient, ill-mannered brat, but has a combination of 313.81: Oppositional Defiant Disorder F91.3 and 312.8: Conduct Disorder F91. The recommended treatment, of course, is not grounding or a good spanking, but drugs to alter the child’s brain chemistry.

It’s as if life itself has become some kind of medical condition.

It was only a matter of time, I suppose. The pharmaceutical companies now make anti-depressants for dogs in oder to combat “Pet Separation Anxiety.”

I’m far too young to be a crusty old man complaining about the “way things are these days,” but it seems to me that messing with the brain chemistry of our pets, our kids and ourselves in all but the most extreme cases is simply asinine. We barely understand how the brain works, but we are quick to use mind-altering medications as soon as feel something is not quite right. And this in the nation with the harshest drug laws outside the Muslim world.

Oh yes, according to the article the “symptoms” of this new syndrome are

1. Destructive chewing
2. Excessive barking or whining
3. Pacing
4. Drooling
5. Yawning
6. Inappropriate urination or defecation

In other words, “Being a puppy.”

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to roll over and play dead.

One of the reasons Christianity spread through the ancient world so successfully was the flexibility with which the church adopted and re-purposed the holidays and festivals from competing religions. Today capitalism succeeds in much the same way. (Christmas being quite ironic on this point.)

Mother’s Day in America was begun by Julia Ward Howe in 1872 as an anti-war holiday. It was a time for mothers (particularly those who had lost loved ones in the Civil War) to appeal for diplomacy and peace. You probably won’t find that on a Hallmark Card.

It remained a minor holiday until a clothing company starting lobbying for wider acceptance and changed the focus away from politics. Four years later in 1914 the holiday became official.

I head from an acquaintance of mine back in the States.  It seems his teenage son has a problem with nail-biting.  The poor kid gnaws on his nails whenever he fells stressed, nervous or bored. And being a teenage boy, that means pretty much all the time.

Actually, when I was in high-school a friend of mine also bit his nails obsessively. He beat his habit in a month, by digging his fingernails into a small bar of soap he carried around with him.

It seems such simple solutions are no longer in favor today, and American parents prefer to have their children take anti-depressant and anti-psychotic drugs. Yeah, seriously! I did a bit of research and it seems that over 40% of adolescents suffer from this problem and that anti-depressant and anti-psychotic medications are the most common way of dealing with it.

Maybe I’m just old fashioned, but screwing with kids brain chemistry in these situations just doesn’t seem right.

Actually, it’s part of the ongoing and escalating drugging of American society.  Every year more and more “conditions” are invented and thresholds for things like hypertension and cholesterol are dropped. Feeling blue, insomnia, occasional muscle twitches and trouble concentrating have somehow become conditions that must be treated with chemicals.

What ever happened to “Just say No to drugs”?

The outgoing 109th congress set the record for the laziest in US history by working an average of just 1 day a week. The Democratic leadership is making a big deal of the fact that they are returning to a five-day work week starting from January 4th.

Naturally, many Congressmen consider this to be completely unreasonable. The most amusingly out-of-touch comment came from Rep. Jack Kingston (R-Ga.) who strongly opposes a work week of more than one day because

“Keeping us up here eats away at families… Marriages suffer. The Democrats could care less about families — that’s what this says.”

Poor baby.

According an article in the Washington Post, the Bush administration now claims in federal court that terrorism suspects should not be permitted to discuss the “alternative interrogation methods” used on them. According to the court documents the government’s position is that these methods are classified and essential to national security, and that a detainee talking about what was done to him (even to his own lawyer!) “could reasonably be expected to cause extremely grave damage.”

OK, I don’t need to comment on the bizarre Kafkaeske nature of this claim. But one thing strikes me as curious.

If these torture methods are truly classified, wouldn’t those employing them be guilty of revealing state secrets to the enemy?

My head is spinning like that brat from the Exorcist.

Two days ago ABC’s George Stephanopoulos asked George Bush a pretty good question about US strategy in Iraq, if there was not perhaps a middle ground between the two jingoistic extremes of “Stay to Course” and “Cut and Run”.

Bush responded with “Listen, we’ve never been ‘Stay the Course’, George.”

Ideally, Stephanopoulos would have adopted Bush’s adolescent slang and called him out on this nonsense with something like “Yo man! That’s bogus George. You dudes have been like totally ‘Stay the Course.’”

Alas, he did no such thing and went merrily on to the next question.

Since the phrase has been used extensively by everyone in the administration, including Bush, as well as a great many GOP Senators, Congressmen and supporters, I was looking forward to Tony Snow’s spin on the matter.

Yesterday he explained that the president has stopped using the term “because it left the wrong impression about what was going on.” Well OK, but that’s not quite the same thing as saying you’ve never used the term. My favorite quote from the press conference was a reporter’s follow-up to that explanation.

Q: Is the President responsible for the fact people think it’s stay the course since he’s, in fact, described it that way himself?

Snow: No.

This seemed to satisfy all reporters present who then moved on to other questions.

Great, President Bush has now authorized torture and suspended habeas corpus — but only for bad people, so it’s all OK. You know, so much has been said about this on both sides, there is not much I can add. However, something reminded me of another similar story of treason and terror so I dug up the dialog from the play. (The movie is fantastic too, if you haven’t seen it.)

All of this is far too intellectual for political debate these days, but logic behind habeas corpus has been well understood for about 600 years.

ROPER: “So, now you give the Devil the benefit of law!”

MORE: “Yes! What would you do? Cut a great road through the law to get after the Devil?”

ROPER: “Yes, I’d cut down every law in England to do that!”

MORE: “Oh? And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned ’round on you, where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat?

This country is planted thick with laws, from coast to coast, Man’s laws, not God’s! And if you cut them down — and you’re just the man to do it — do you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then?

Yes, I’d give the Devil benefit of law, for my own safety’s sake!”

It seems like the whole nation has forgotten the last 600 years of history. Terrorists and criminals will be found guilty and held accountable under the law. Due process will be of no help to them. Laws and due process exist to protect the innocent, not the guilty.

Mardin Amin faces three years in jail for “felony disorderly conduct” resulting from his attempt to carry a penis pump onto an airplane. He was traveling with his mother when a Department of Homeland Security officer noticed a strange object in his bag and asked him what it was. Not wanting his mom to know what he was packing, he leaned over and whispered “It’s a pump.” The DHS agent heard “It’s a bomb” and these days that’s enough to lock someone away.

I wonder how many years in jail I would get for reenacting my favorite scence from Spinal Tap.

When I read that someone had been prevented from boarding a plane because he was wearing a t-shirt with Arabic writing, I assumed it was a minor incident at small local airport involving a confused baggage screener.

I was wrong.

Raed Jarrar was waiting to board a plane at New York’s Kennedy Airport with a shirt that read “We will not be silent” in both English and Arabic. He was approached by both airline staff and government officials as he was having breakfast after he had cleared security. Jarrar was told that some passengers had complained about his shirt and that he would not be permitted on the flight while he was wearing it.

“We will not be silent” is apparently the slogan of an organization who opposes some of the Bush administration’s policies targeting Americans of Middle Eastern descent. I don’t know anything about this guy or his organization, but that’s not the point. This is pretty basic freedom of speech here.

Now, in a society that understands freedom of speech, those confused by the writing might have asked him what it means. Sure, there will always be nut-jobs who are freaked out by anything different, but when these people complain to the cops they should be told “It’s a free country” or perhaps the cop could ask the t-shirt wearer about the meaning and then reassure the nervous passenger who was frightened by the shirt.

Unfortunately, none of this happened. He was trying to make a statement that people did not want to hear, so was not permitted to travel.

I’ve always felt that freedom of speech, religion and association are profoundly unnatural concepts. They go against so much of human psychology. That is why such freedoms need to be not only indoctrinated into us at an early age, but encoded into clear, strictly enforced laws to prevent get-reactions like this.

An MSNBC poll showing 60% of readers consider the airline’s actions approprate is not a good sign for American freedom.

The ultimate irony is that these kinds of arbitrary restrictions and ad-hoc rules are always justified as necessary steps to “protect our freedom.”

You can read the whole exchange here if you like. Kind of interesting how the detective assumed Jarrar hated New York.

Responding to calls of increased ethnic diversity, the producers of Survivor just announced, the next season of Survivor will divide people into tribes by races. The island will contain Black, White, Latino and Asian tribes whose members will struggle with each other for dominance before trying to drive the other tribes off the island.

That’s certainly reality TV in the sense that the situation applies to many LA neighborhoods. I suppose this message of tolerance and inclusion is what America is most receptive to these days.

I just got back from spending a week or so in the US. I’m perfectly comfortable in either Japan or the US, but recently political news in the US has gotten strange. I simply can’t watch TV news there. It seems like the anchors are all very upset about something and are often practically yelling at the viewers. Real people simply do not talk that way.

Another gem was catching Ann Coulter on Leno complaining that the mainstream media was somehow preventing her from explaining the inaccuracies in the statements of the 9-11 widows. What struck me odd about this is that:

1. At no time did she actually mention any of these inaccuracies, she just complained that somehow she was being prevented from talking about them.
2. This woman has a syndicated column that appears in over 100 newspapers, is a regular commentator on Fox news, has the best-selling book in the US at the moment, and is appearing on the talk-show circuit complaining her views are suppressed by the mainstream media. Ann Coulter *is* the mainstream media.

It’s theater of the bizarre.

BusRadio, a Massachusetts-based start-up, has discovered a brief interval where children and not being marketed to; the bus ride to school. BusRadio installs their radios free of charge into the buses and then “provides advertiser’s [sic] with a unique and effective way to reach the highly sought after teen and tween market.”

I’m of two minds on this. The entrepreneur in me slaps myself on the forehead and says “Damn! I wish I’d thought of that.” The human being inside me wishes we could let kids be kids for a few more years before turning them into proper, well-behaved consumers.

Ah, those irrepressible, hopelessly repressed conservatives!

When Las Vega’s Pink Taco restaurant announced they opening a branch in Scottsdale, they encountered opposition because this name is supposedly slang for vagina. That much has been in the news, but two things struck me.

1. OK. I’m a man of world. I’ve been around. (nudge nudge, wink wink). I admit that the term “pink taco” could be slang for a vagina, but neither I nor any of my worldly friends, nor some rather creative and entertaining Google searching could find a single incidence of it actually being used in that way. It’s not slang, it’s classic Freudian projection.
2. There is no controversy here! This is not news! There were a total of four emails (three of then anonymous) received by the city council. Four emails, probably from the same person, does not a controversy make.

Next year they plan on opening a seafood restaurant called “The Bearded Clam”.

Sometimes I have to simply throw up my hands and admit that I don’t understand America anymore. For the second year in a row all major television networks have refused to run an ad by the United Church of Christ

I don’t get it. I mean I really don’t I wrote about the last ad a little more than a year ago. Both ads show gays and minorities being excluded from other churches and welcomed into theirs. Their tag line is “God doesn’t reject people. Neither do we.” and they seem to be a pleasant enough group of people.

Last year CBS and UPN explained frankly that since President Bush was pushing for a Constitutional Amendment to ban gay marriage the UCC’s ad was inappropriate. This year the networks declined because other other, but unnamed, religions might find the ad offensive. The ads themselves are pretty funny and rather harmless.

It blows my mind. In this age of Jerry Springer, all of the networks are refusing to run paid ads because they consider a message of tolerance and inclusion to be too controversial for American society.

“There is no way that praying with nuns is gonna cause you asthma.” And then I prayed. And I said, “Lord, what’s wrong with her?” I just prayed silently. And the Lord said, “Ask about her sex life.”
— Pat Robertson

Really. I swear! I can’t make up stuff this good. You can read the full transcript here.

My friend (who happens to be a hot Japanese girl) told me of an unsettling experience she had when coming back from New York to Tokyo. She was clearing security when one of the TSA officers pulled her the to side to rifle through her belongings while asking her a few questions.

“So you are flying directly to Tokyo?”

“Yes, that’s right.”

“Do you live in Japan or here in New York?”

“I live in Japan.”

“So, how often do you come to New York?”

“A few times a year.”

“I see, and where do you usually stay when you are here?”

“Different hotels. It depends.”

“Well, you are very pretty. I’d like to see you next time you come to New York.”

My friend stood their speechless, until the brave defender of the homeland continued.

“Well, here’s my card. Be sure to call me next time you are in New York.”

Sheesh! It’s not just that it’s an embarrassingly lame pick-up attempt, it’s disgusting and appalling. While this TSA loser searches desperately for a woman who loves a man in uniform, Abdul Ammar Kaboom is walking past him with a bomb.

I have got to stop reading the news. Each mouse click is slowly undermining my faith in mankind.

A recent Gallup poll showed that 53% of all Americans believe that “God created man exactly how Bible describes it.” Interestingly, this is almost the same percentage of Americans that believe Saddam Husein had ties to Al Qaeda.

It would have been even more informative if Gallup has asked those 53% which version of Biblical creation they support since the Bible contains two contradictory versions. But no matter.

According to Gallup the rejection of evolution and acceptance of literal creationism was strongest among regular churchgoers, those lacking higher education and Republicans.