Far South of I-10

I'm watching the apprentice, and I think this version is a lot worse than the first two years. These people don't look like they've ever worked, much less been a group of super-successful lawyer-business Trump clones. Yeah, I know the high school graduates aren't lawyer Trump clones, but they couldn't be business Trump clones either. I thought that in the first two seasons some of the characters appeared pretty competent, sometimes they just played the game, letting the project leaders do all the work and take the blame. These two groups don't look like they could manage their way out of a paper bag. best conversation: girl1:"You can't talk to me that way! girl2:"*^&$%*(*!!!!..... How 'bout if I talk to you that way?!" Danny's web site: http://www.kastner.com/ (Leisure suit dude. Who says he's in marketing, but I bet he's a spam king based on the marketing he did in the first episode. Marketing. Righ...

I've been sick with a fairly bad cold the past few days, so I've probably watched around 50 hours of TV since Friday. Besides the obvious downsides of watching so much TV, I've also seen the commercial for the movie "Hide and Seek" around 100 times. Not only does that look a piece of crap movie (why deniro why?), it looks like a copy of an episode of Southpark. The one where Stan's Aunt Flo (who visits every month) gives Stan a goldfish that turns out to be a demonic killer from an alternate universe. (" I've got such a good boy" says stan's mother as she buries the fish's latest victim in the backyard) Hide and seek has some writing appearing on a wall behind a bathtub, which to me looks just like the south park fish blowing on the aquarium wall, then writing spooky messages to Stan. A quick google gives some secrets from the show. The spookyfish part of the show has it's roots in The Bad Seed (1956), which is one ...

I've had discussions with people about the Iraq war and the war on terror, people with opinions as diverse as: "It's all a conspiracy to steal oil, or build a pipeline, etc" to the" nuke 'em all" crowd. Usually my opinion is greeted with horror when I say thatI think it is going to end bad. Bad being several cities in the USA being nuked closely followed by most of the middle east being nuked. Maybe followed by more nuclear exchanges until we end up as the cast of a mid 80's post-apocalyptic movie. Jerry Pournelle makes a point today in a discussion of about nation building in Iraq: The American people are warlike, particularly the Scots-Irish and German populations; but we are also Christian and ashamed of being war-like; so if we go to war, it must be for a Good Cause against an Evil which Provoked Us into War, and thus the Evil must be destroyed By Any Means Necessary. Which is why we could bomb Tokyo and kill over 100,000 with one fire ...

A friend of mine asked in the comments if the war in Iraq is still justified since no WMD's were ever found. From past experience I know that I can never prove to anyone opposed to this war's satisfaction that it was the right thing to do, or the moral thing to do. It's the same as arguing religion. I can try to argue against the negative case though, and here's one attempt: Some arguments against war, and this war: - All war is wrong and immoral - This war is wrong because it is illegal - This war is wrong because it is the wrong war in the wrong place in the wrong time. All war is wrong and immoral. This is the pacifist's argument and is completely viable in a world where there are no violent people or countries. It's a beautiful thing to be a pacifist, as long as you are willing to watch someone kill your family, friends and neighbors and do nothing. Once you are willing to fight, then it is just a question of who, what and when you a...

I was just watching CNN's Tsunami coverage, they were reporting from the deck of an Indian Hospital ship, and interviewing some government officials who were preening about 11 ships of the Indian Navy helping Sri Lanka. Maybe I'm over-sensitive to media bias, and the general anti-US slant worldwide and in the news, but they sure seemed to be implying we should have more ships than India over there (we probably do). As if India is projecting it's might around the world, instead of across a narrow straight to ceylon. I'm sure the next big news story will be how the US didn't set up a Tsunami warning system to provide warnings to the people of the Indian ocean. There will be much gavel banging as people demand to know why they weren't protected, and why the US didn't do it's job as world fireman as well as world policeman. (I guess we'll soon have all the crappy world jobs, world building-code inspector, world garbageman, etc) In hindsight it wou...