This will be growing by about two or three links per day as I get my bookmark data gradually transcribed here.
Most Recent Edit: Moon's Day, the 23rd Day of May, 2011 C.E., 4:31 p.m., C.D.T.
Amygdala; Animation World Magazine; Apostropher; Ariel Gore; "Arts Beat Weblog", the New York Times; Australian SF Bullsheet
Bad Astronomy; Bear's Battlestar Galactica Blog; Big Head Press; Black Gate; Blag Hag; BlastR; Bob Mitchell in the 21st Century; Brendan Calling; Bullshytitis; By Ken Levine
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Generation Y; Goodbye, Microsoft; Grits for Breakfast
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J. Neil Schulman @ RationalReview.com; Johnny Dollar's Place; JustOneMinute
L. Neil Smith At Random; Lance Mannion; Larry Nemecek's Trekland; Lifeboat Foundation
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Uncle Jay Explains the News; An Unfortunate Set of Events; Universe Today
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Waiter Rant; We'll Know When We Get There; Wendy McElroy.com; The Wild Hunt; Witchvox.com; WWdN: in Exile
Zoe Paleologa
sickhttp://news.yahoo.com/blogs/ticket/obam
The story is from an interview President Obama gave to Larry Conners, anchorman at KMOV-TV, the CBS affiliate here in St. Louis. Mr. Conners has had a long career (over twenty-five years) in local television journalism; before this he worked at then-ABC affiliate KTVI, and before that he was best known as one of the reporters who busted the Chicken Ranch brothel, the story which became the movie The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas. Mr. Connors has always been a politically conservative newsman, a trait he mostly keeps quiet but which occasionally bursts out as it did this evening. He did a series of promos for his "exclusive" interview, where he asked no questions you wouldn't find on the Fox News Channel, including a gripe about Presidential vacations which ignored the vastly greater number and length of trips to Crawford Ranch by George W. Bush.
What really got me was the amazing way he channeled the late Ted Knight's character Ted Baxter from The Mary Tyler Moore Show. For a newsman as experienced as he, he simply had no idea of how he appeared on the screen as he trumpeted his two-question interview. I haven't seen so many Ted Baxterisms since the late George Putnam served as Mr. Knight's model for a pompous, loud newsman. I kept thinking of the episode in which Baxter got temporary White House credentials and practiced his revealing, hard-hitting questions such as "Mr. Secretary of State, do you sleep in the nude?"
Mr. Conners' exchange with the President was not sharp, it was a waste of the most coveted item in Washington, time with the President. (Witness the story on The West Wing in which the Domestic Policy Adviser, Toby Ziegler, had to ask for the first two minutes available in President Bartlet's schedule.)
I have never been more ashamed of a local reporter, particularly a man with enough lifetime career experience to know better.
disappointedA reality which very few want to admit exists. I know *exactly* what this article is about. I have experienced it.
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http://www.alternet.org/news/144529?pag
"Are Americans a Broken People? Why We've Stopped Fighting Back Against the Forces of Oppression"
A psychologist asks: Have consumerism, suburbanization and a malevolent corporate-government partnership so beaten us down that we no longer have the will to save ourselves?
December 11, 2009
Can people become so broken that truths of how they are being screwed do not "set them free" but instead further demoralize them? Has such a demoralization happened in the United States?
Do some totalitarians actually want us to hear how we have been screwed because they know that humiliating passivity in the face of obvious oppression will demoralize us even further?
What forces have created a demoralized, passive, discouraged U. S. population?
Can anything be done to turn this around?
Can people become so broken that truths of how they are being screwed do not "set them free" but instead further demoralize them?
Yes. It is called the "abuse syndrome." How do abusive pimps, spouses, bosses, corporations, and governments stay in control? They shove lies, emotional and physical abuses, and injustices in their victims' faces, and when victims are afraid to exit from these relationships, they get weaker. So the abuser then makes their victims eat even more lies, abuses, and injustices, resulting in victims even weaker as they remain in these relationships.
Does knowing the truth of their abuse set people free when they are deep in these abuse syndromes?
No. For victims of the abuse syndrome, the truth of their passive submission to humiliating oppression is more than embarrassing; it can feel shameful -- and there is nothing more painful than shame. When one already feels beaten down and demoralized, the likely response to the pain of shame is not constructive action, but more attempts to shut down or divert oneself from this pain. It is not likely that the truth of one's humiliating oppression is going to energize one to constructive actions.
Has such a demoralization happened in the U. S.?
In the United States, 47,000,000 people are without health insurance, and many millions more are under-insured or a job layoff away from losing their coverage. But despite the current sellout by their elected officials to the insurance industry, there is no outpouring of millions of U. S. citizens on the streets of Washington, D. C., protesting this betrayal.
Polls show that the majority of Americans oppose U. S. wars in Afghanistan and Iraq as well as the taxpayer bailout of the financial industry, yet only a handful of U. S. citizens have protested these circumstances.
Remember the 2000 U. S. presidential election? That's the one in which Al Gore received 500,000 more votes than George W. Bush. That's also the one that the Florida Supreme Court's order for a recount of the disputed Florida vote was overruled by the U.S. Supreme Court in a politicized 5-4 decision, of which dissenting Justice John Paul Stevens remarked: "Although we may never know with complete certainty the identity of the winner of this year's presidential election, the identity of the loser is perfectly clear. It is the nation's confidence in the judge as an impartial guardian of the rule of law." Yet, even this provoked few demonstrators.
When people become broken, they cannot act on truths of injustice. Furthermore, when people have become broken, more truths about how they have been victimized can lead to shame about how they have allowed it. And shame, like fear, is one more way we become even more psychologically broken.
U. S. citizens do not actively protest obvious injustices for the same reasons that people cannot leave their abusive spouses: They feel helpless to effect change. The more we don't act, the weaker we get. And ultimately to deal with the painful humiliation over inaction in the face of an oppressor, we move to shut-down mode and use escape strategies such as depression, substance abuse, and other diversions, which further keep us from acting. This is the vicious cycle of all abuse syndromes.
Do some totalitarians actually want us to hear how we have been screwed because they know that humiliating passivity in the face of obvious oppression will demoralize us even further?
Maybe.
Shortly before the 2000 U. S. presidential election, millions of Americans saw a clip of George W. Bush joking to a wealthy group of people, "What a crowd tonight: the haves and the haves-more. Some people call you the elite; I call you my base." Yet, even with these kind of inflammatory remarks, the tens of millions of U. S. citizens who had come to despise Bush and his arrogance remained passive in the face of the 2000 non-democratic presidential elections.
Perhaps the "political genius" of the Bush-Cheney regime was in their full realization that Americans were so broken that the regime could get away with damn near anything. And the more people did nothing about the boot slamming on their faces, the weaker people became.
What forces have created a demoralized, passive, discouraged U. S. population?
The U. S. government-corporate partnership has used its share of guns and terror to break Native Americans, labor union organizers, and other dissidents and activists. But today, most U. S. citizens are broken by financial fears. There is potential legal debt if we speak out against a powerful authority, and all kinds of other debt if we do not comply on the job. Young people are broken by college-loan debts and fear of having no health insurance.
The U. S. population is increasingly broken by the social isolation created by corporate-governmental policies. A 2006 American Sociological Review study ("Social Isolation in America: Changes in Core Discussion Networks over Two Decades") reported that, in 2004, 25% of Americans did not have a single confidant. (In 1985, 10% of Americans reported not having a single confidant.) Sociologist Robert Putnam, in his 2000 book, Bowling Alone, describes how social connectedness is disappearing in virtually every aspect of U. S. life. For example, there has been a significant decrease in face-to-face contact with neighbors and friends due to suburbanization, commuting, electronic entertainment, time and money pressures and other variables created by governmental-corporate policies. And union activities and other formal or informal ways that people give each other the support necessary to resist oppression have also decreased.
We are also broken by a corporate-government partnership that has rendered most of us out of control when it comes to the basic necessities of life, including our food supply. And we, like many other people in the world, are broken by socializing institutions that alienate us from our basic humanity. A few examples:
Schools and Universities: Do most schools teach young people to be action-oriented -- or to be passive? Do most schools teach young people that they can affect their surroundings -- or not to bother? Do schools provide examples of democratic institutions -- or examples of authoritarian ones?
A long list of school critics from Henry David Thoreau to John Dewey, John Holt, Paul Goodman, Jonathan Kozol, Alfie Kohn, Ivan Illich, and John Taylor Gatto have pointed out that a school is nothing less than a miniature society: what young people experience in schools is the chief means of creating our future society. Schools are routinely places where kids -- through fear -- learn to comply to authorities for whom they often have no respect, and to regurgitate material they often find meaningless. These are great ways of breaking someone.
Today, U. S. colleges and universities have increasingly become places where young people are merely acquiring degree credentials -- badges of compliance for corporate employers -- in exchange for learning to accept bureaucratic domination and enslaving debt.
Mental Health Institutions: Aldous Huxley predicted today's pharmaceutical society. "[I]t seems to me perfectly in the cards," he said, "that there will be within the next generation or so a pharmacological method of making people love their servitude."
Today, increasing numbers of people in the U. S. who do not comply with authority are being diagnosed with mental illnesses and medicated with psychiatric drugs that make them less pained about their boredom, resentments, and other negative emotions, thus rendering them more compliant and manageable.
Oppositional defiant disorder (ODD) is an increasingly popular diagnosis for children and teenagers. The official symptoms of ODD include, "often actively defies or refuses to comply with adult requests or rules," and "often argues with adults." An even more common reaction to oppressive authorities than the overt defiance of ODD is some type of passive defiance -- for example, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). Studies show that virtually all children diagnosed with ADHD will pay attention to activities that they actually enjoy or that they have chosen. In other words, when ADHD-labeled kids are having a good time and in control, the "disease" goes away.
When human beings feel too terrified and broken to actively protest, they may stage a "passive-aggressive revolution" by simply getting depressed, staying drunk, and not doing anything -- this is one reason why the Soviet empire crumbled. However, the diseasing/medicalizing of rebellion and drug "treatments" have weakened the power of even this passive-aggressive revolution.
Television: In his book Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television (1978), Jerry Mander (after reviewing totalitarian critics such as George Orwell, Aldous Huxley, Jacques Ellul, and Ivan Illich) compiled a list of the "Eight Ideal Conditions for the Flowering of Autocracy."
Mander claimed that television helps create all eight conditions for breaking a population. Television, he explained, (1) occupies people so that they don't know themselves -- and what a human being is; (2) separates people from one another; (3) creates sensory deprivation; (4) occupies the mind and fills the brain with prearranged experience and thought; (5) encourages drug use to dampen dissatisfaction (while TV itself produces a drug-like effect, this was compounded in 1997 the U.S. Food and Drug Administration relaxing the rules of prescription-drug advertising); (6) centralizes knowledge and information; (7) eliminates or "museumize" other cultures to eliminate comparisons; and (8) redefines happiness and the meaning of life.
Commericalism of Damn Near Everything: While spirituality, music, and cinema can be revolutionary forces, the gross commercialization of all of these has deadened their capacity to energize rebellion. So now, damn near everything – not just organized religion -- has become "opiates of the masses."
The primary societal role of U. S. citizens is no longer that of "citizen" but that of "consumer". While citizens know that buying and selling within community strengthens that community and that this strengthens democracy, consumers care only about the best deal. While citizens understand that dependency on an impersonal creditor is a kind of slavery, consumers get excited with credit cards that offer a temporarily low APR.
Consumerism breaks people by devaluing human connectedness, socializing self-absorption, obliterating self-reliance, alienating people from normal human emotional reactions, and by selling the idea that purchased products -- not themselves and their community -- are their salvation.
Can anything be done to turn this around?
When people get caught up in humiliating abuse syndromes, more truths about their oppressive humiliations don't set them free. What sets them free is morale.
What gives people morale? Encouragement. Small victories. Models of courageous behaviors. And anything that helps them break out of the vicious cycle of pain, shut down, immobilization, shame over immobilization, more pain, and more shut down.
The last people I would turn to for help in remobilizing a demoralized population are mental health professionals -- at least those who have not rebelled against their professional socialization. Much of the craft of relighting the pilot light requires talents that mental health professionals simply are not selected for nor are they trained in. Specifically, the talents required are a fearlessness around image, spontaneity, and definitely anti-authoritarianism. But these are not the traits that medical schools or graduate schools select for or encourage.
Mental health professionals' focus on symptoms and feelings often create patients who take themselves and their moods far too seriously. In contrast, people talented in the craft of maintaining morale resist this kind of self-absorption. For example, in the question-and-answer session that followed a Noam Chomsky talk (reported in Understanding Power: The Indispensable Chomsky, 2002), a somewhat demoralized man in the audience asked Chomsky if he too ever went through a phase of hopelessness. Chomsky responded, "Yeah, every evening...."
If you want to feel hopeless, there are a lot of things you could feel hopeless about. If you want to sort of work out objectively what's the chance that the human species will survive for another century, probably not very high. But I mean, what's the point?...First of all, those predictions don't mean anything -- they're more just a reflection of your mood or your personality than anything else. And if you act on that assumption, then you're guaranteeing that'll happen. If you act on the assumption that things can change, well, maybe they will. Okay, the only rational choice, given those alternatives, is to forget pessimism."
A major component of the craft of maintaining morale is not taking the advertised reality too seriously. In the early 1960s, when the overwhelming majority in the U. S. supported military intervention in Vietnam, Chomsky was one of a minority of U.S. citizens actively opposing it. Looking back at this era, Chomsky reflected, "When I got involved in the anti-Vietnam War movement, it seemed to me impossible that we would ever have any effect.... So looking back, I think my evaluation of the 'hope' was much too pessimistic: it was based on a complete misunderstanding. I was sort of believing what I read."
An elitist assumption is that people don't change because they are either ignorant of their problems or ignorant of solutions. Elitist "helpers" think they have done something useful by informing overweight people that they are obese and that they must reduce their caloric intake and increase exercise. An elitist who has never been broken by his or her circumstances does not know that people who have become demoralized do not need analyses and pontifications. Rather the immobilized need a shot of morale.
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Bruce E. Levine is a clinical psychologist and his latest book is Surviving America's Depression Epidemic: How to Find Morale, Energy, and Community in a World Gone Crazy (Chelsea Green Publishing, 2007). His web site is http://www.brucelevine.net
depressedWe've had our toast here at home for 2012 to be a constructive rather than destructive year, and we wish all the same for all of you as well.
cheerful"If we are a Christian nation, either we pretend Jesus was as selfish as we are, or we acknowledge that he commanded us to love the poor and serve the needy without condition and then admit we just don't want to do it." -- Stephen Colbert
contemplativeMy father and uncle served together in the Marine Corps during the Korean War period, although in the States at El Toro Marine Air Station. My dad was a cook, my uncle was in charge of the base theater. My dad died in 1989, my uncle died the day before yesterday.
Several years ago I attended an open house at Scott Air Force Base, Illinois, and in the hangar the Air Force Band played a medley of military music. As they played "The Marine's Hymn", I noticed a man in a wheelchair behind the table of the Paralyzed Veterans of America change his position and sit at attention.
I walked over, put a fiver in his coffee can, and said that he must have been a Marine as I had seen him sit at attention during the Marine Hymn part of the medley. He said, "I still am, son. Once a Marine, always a Marine. Were you in the Corps?"
"No, sir, but my father was."
"He still is, son."
"No disrespect intended, sir, but he can't be because he's dead."
He looked at me and said very gently, "Son, your father is standing Honor Guard at the Pearly Gates right now. Once a Marine, always a Marine."
I burst into tears.
I like to think of the two of them, my father Albert and my uncle Fred, young and fit again, passing in review in their dress uniforms as Lt. Robert Heinlein, Sgt. Rodger Young, and Gen. Chesty Puller salute them.
mourningThirty years ago today, I telephoned Gene Roddenberry at his home in Beverly Hills to congratulate him on the fifteenth anniversary of the premier of Star Trek on NBC-TV and thank him for it. He was stunned that I remembered the date and thought to call him as nobody else, even people who worked on the show with him, he said, had noted it to him. That a fan who had met him once before would remember and associate him with the date flabbergasted him. I owe Gene Roddenberry a great debt, which is why I called him, a debt which has continued to grow even after his death. All I can do is Pay It Forward. It was through Star Trek that I, as an eleven-year-old in 1966, became first aware that I could be part of the larger world around me than just my elementary school. Star Trek was my entry into science fiction fandom, which in turn has enabled me to meet and befriend some of the finest people I have known in my life, and taken me places I never had dreamed I could go. I have met authors, actors, politicians, libertarians, Neo-Pagans, astronauts (including a man who had literally gone where no man had gone before). I have seen a genuine spaceship land before my very eyes in the desert north of Los Angeles, heard its twin sonic booms with my own ears, and I don't mean a UFO, I mean the first landing of Shuttle Orbiter Columbia. I have made the closest friends of my life, met my wife at a Star Trek club meeting, and with her have had two children who would not have otherwise existed, all thanks to Gene Roddenberry and his compatriots' amazing creation of an entire universe, a universe so grand and wonderful that I regret I won't be alive long enough to see it come to fruition in an interstellar civilization. I confess that I had forgotten how privileged I have been:
Thank you, Dr. Buzz Aldrin, who made my mouth turn fourteen again. Thank you, David Gerrold, who has never failed to chide me when I've gone wrong or praise me when I've gone right. Thank you, Susan Sackett, who allowed me to be part of the most fateful wedding I've ever attended outside of my own. Thank you, Dr. Gerard O'Neill, who hoped that the builders of the mass drivers he advocated would never read The Moon is a Harsh Mistress. Thank you, Dr. Brian O'Leary, who gave up his chance to ride a rocket to the moon and was surprised I had read his book about it. Thank you, Dr. Timothy Leary, who told an audience of four hundred people they should talk to me as an expert on space and rocketry (Dr. Leary was always expansive in his praise). Thank you, ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif?v=92.1){kind=small}
dduane, who let me give her Girl Scout cookies. Thank you, Nichelle Nichols, as gracious a woman as I have ever met. Thank you, George Takei, as gracious a man as I have ever met. Thank you, Walter Koenig, who was polite when he didn't have to be on a public street in turn for politeness rendered to him. Thank you, Mike Glyer, David Langford, and Wendy McElroy, who indulge me in my passion for sharing information. Thank you, J. Neil Schulman, for your Gandhian experiment and your comfort in my time of loss. Thank you, Jim Davis, the best costumed Superman I ever met, for the same comfort. Thank you, L. Neil Smith. Thank you, Spider Robinson, for saving my life in a time of my weakness, and his late wife Jeanne, who wrote so eloquently of the beauty of dancing in weightlessness. Thank you, Mr. and Mrs. Robert and Virginia Heinlein, both USN (Ret.) just for being who you were. Thank you, Dr. Isaac Asimov, who was grateful to a stranger who loved his latest (at the time) book. Thank you, Harlan Ellison, who never remembers who I am at each of our encounters, but specifically requested me to attend his speech over the public loudspeaker after our first meeting, and told me I should be shot if I ever repeated a particular Biblical pun again. Thank you, Michael Fix, my oldest and wisest friend. Thank you, Richard Rosenberg, who was a boy with me, may he rest in peace he never had in his lifetime. Thank you, Linda Bushyager, whose birthday is today. Thank you, iamcompufrog, whose absence leaves a great hole in my heart. Thank you, iamcompubear, who made me feel like one of her family despite her grief. Thank you, Gary Farber, for letting me help you. Thank you, Tim Kyger, who trusted me with responsibility. Thank you, Samuel Edward Konkin, III, who indulged my son in letting him address him as "Mr. Konkin", the only time I ever heard him addressed that way. Thank you, Oberon Zell-Ravenheart, my priest, and his wife Morning Glory who said she knew we would always have a connection. Thank you, Tim Berends and Al Gross, who love me despite our differences. Thank you, Tom Baker for being "all teeth and curls" (your first Doctor is always the one you love most). Thank you, Nicholas Courtney, who got my joke and answered it with the perfect response. Thank you, Chuck Lavazzi for your forgiveness (and Sherry McCowan for the same), and for all the meals you fed me along with Lynn Rathbone and the late Bryce Mouw, who I miss so much. Thank you Melissa Rathbone-Mouw Bowman, who will always be my "Supergirl" who I flew around the room. Thank you Andie and Eric Rathbone, who in the universe next door were First Lady and President of the United States, or at least the First Lady and Mayor of St. Louis. Thank you, Dr. Robert Anton Wilson, who was tolerantly amused when I accidentally spoiled his psychology lesson. Thank you, Dr. Jerry Pournelle, who printed what I had heard on the news of an education fund for the daughter of one of the heroes of Flight 93 on that horrible day a decade ago, and his son Alex who has come to accept me in a way he didn't when we knew each other in person. Thank you, Leslie Fish, folksinger of the Star Trek future and anarchist, who it was my privilege to introduce to the other anarchist previously mentioned, SEK3. Thank you, Fred Levy Haskell, with whom I share a birthday. Thank you, Steven Barnes and Tananarive Due, for their unquestioning acceptance and ever-present optimism. Thank you, Stephen Collins, for a short time Captain of the Enterprise, who offered to help me learn Transcendental Meditation. Thank you, Bjo Trimble, who saved Star Trek in its hour of need, and put on the first convention I ever attended and privileged me with being the shoulder she cried on in tears of exhaustion, and her husband John, who also saved Star Trek even though he doesn't seem to like me personally. I still owe him for what he did nonetheless. Thank you, Douglas McEwen, who I didn't know that I knew until 38 years later, who was also at that first convention, as was Jay Smith, a very cool guy. Thank you, Henry Scherr, who has kept my family from being stranded so many, many times. Thank you, Richard Webb, also known as Erik Ragnarsson, who gifted me with friendship from our first meeting, and who died of brain cancer when I wasn't looking. Thank you, Folo Watkins and Miss Julie, lovely, lovely people. Thank you, Ruth E. Bell, for your constancy in my life. Thank you, Richard Hatch, who was there working as Captain Apollo on the day I got to stand on the Bridge of the original BattleStar Galactica and pretend, just for a moment, that I was on a real starship, feeling the thrum of the engines and seeing the stars flash by in my imagination. Thank you, kittycrumpet, a woman of style and grace. Thank you,
runeshower, who knows why. Thank you, Karen Schnaubelt Turner Dick, whose father made the Enterprise a reality with his blueprints and Tech Manual of the ship, and thank you, Michael and Denise Okuda and Rick Sternbach who did the same with the Enterprise-D.
nilajean tells me I've gone on too long with the Thank Yous, so if I haven't mentioned you here, please know that you've not been forgotten. I'll just end with two more: Thank you to Bill Warren, who wrote in LASFAPA and APA-L that I was collecting donations to pay for the lawyers for arsonists who murdered a Los Angeles Firefighter, when I was collecting not for that but for the L. A. Firefighters Widows and Orphans Fund (there's a canceled check in the LASFS Treasury files to prove it as I gave the money to Treasurer Elayne Pelz so she could write a check on the Society account), teaching me that despite the fannish saying not all knowledge is contained in fanzines. And I thank the cyberbullies who have kept me isolated for the last decade, because now I know them for what they are. I gave them power, but writing the above has reminded me of how tiny and scared they really are compared to the people above, and I have learned they can't hurt me any more. And of course, my wife, nilajean, and our children, Kevin and yugioh_boy, as I had thought I would never be married or have children. Twenty-four years and two grown boys later, I am so proud of all of them that I could burst.
Thanks, Gene. For everything.
gratefulI will bet anywhere from five cents to five dollars, payment via PayPal either way, that Bart Simpson will be writing on the greenboard this Sunday "I will not hack into other peoples' cellphone messages," or something to that effect. Any takers?
amused
pleased to have found the illoI think it's clear from the episode's ending (and many others) that The Doctor's Room is the Console Room, plain and simple, even if it's an alternative console room such as the 4th Doctor used at the end of Sarah Jane's time in the TARDIS or the surprise return to the 9th/10th Doctor's console room we saw here. That they used a fan-submitted design for the home-built console was cool too, and there's even precedent for using a console without an outer shell: the 3rd Doctor tried it at least a couple of times.
Also, Amy is having Schrodinger's Baby, both there and not there at the same time until someone makes the wave/particle determination by whatever means.
Finally, Amy should stop doubting Rory's devotion. He waited two thousand years for her to come back. And he should stop doubting hers. She made the choice to die rather than live in a universe without him. Grow up, you two!
"I may not take you where you want to be, but I always take you where you need to be." -- the most astounding and yet at the same time logical quotation from the episode, making explicitly clear (as if there were any more doubt) that the TARDIS is a sapient being.
Thank you, Neil Gaiman.
pleasednilajean has just finishied watching "Grey's Anatomy". I put it in quotation marks because the program doesn't exist in my universe. For me it ended with the death (which I made sure not to watch) of George O'Malley, played T. R. Knight. I'm sure the program, such as it is, is still moderately good medical evening soap television -- but George was my hero. George was an sf or comics fan (I presume), and mentioned that he had been both Treasurer and President of his high school D&D club. I liked George. At times in my life, I was George. I was thoroughly angered. I deliberately didn't watch the season finale' in which they killed him.
Grey's Anatomy after killing George is The Man From U.N.C.L.E. after killing Napoleon Solo or Illya Kuriakin. It's Buffy after killing Willow or Xander. It's Star Trek after you've killed Kirk or Spock. It becomes a pale shell, only half a show. nilajean continues to watch it in part because she knows it annoys me.
So I prefer my occasional thought that by now George would be chief resident and whatever happened to the others is whatever happened to the others. That would be a much better show, to me. As I said, to me. I realize others will differ, and that wouldn't bother me if one weren't living with me and deliberately watching it in pattern so that I can half-hear it no matter how hard I try to avoid it.
And don't get me started on her other favorite, Law & Order: SVU, the most misogynist program on television. In order for their principles to have something to do, a woman or child has to be raped and/or murdered every single episode. 22 rapes/sexual murders per year, specifically of women and children, doesn't strike me as "entertainment".
crankyIn 1943 American Intelligence learned that the Japanese commander of the attack force against Pearl Harbor and during the Battle of Midway, Isoroku Yamamoto, was in a lone plane flying to inspect Japanese naval forces. The Army Air Force sent an entire squadron of P-38 Lightning pursuit planes (what are now called fighters in current nomenclature) to shoot down his lone aircraft and kill him. This was a military action, and I suspect, revenge for the surprise attack at Pearl. Admiral Yamamoto himself said "We have awakened a sleeping giant," referring to the United States.
Normally I am as much if not more so a believer in due process and courts of law for criminal accusation, along with rules of evidence and trials by jury as anyone on Earth. It is said this was a criminal act. It was. However, what was done to the passenger aircraft, World Trade Center, and the Pentagon was also an Act of War -- how is starting war on civilians not criminal? -- under both common and international law. The sending of a SEAL team to kill Osama bin Laden was as legal (or not) as what we did to Admiral Yamamoto's aircraft in World War II. If an American Ranger or British Commando team had killed Adolph Hitler in a precision strike during World War II nobody would have complained -- in fact, the comic books of the day were full of stories of comic heroes going after Hitler personally. The cover of the first issue of the Captain America comic book, drawn by the great Jack Kirby, showed Captain America punching Hitler in the jaw, and America wasn't even in the war yet.
indescribableMajor tornado damage at Lambert-St. Louis International Airport -- part of the roof was torn off Concourse C from which we flew to London, plate glass windows shattered, the control tower evacuated temporarily. -- The airport is now closed through at least tomorrow and first aid and hospital transportation from the airport in in effect. Power lines are down and the nearby Interstate Highways are literally parking lots as nobody can move due to damaged cars. Parts of the MetroLink commuter train system and local bus system are down in north St. Louis County. Houses have been destroyed and many surface streets are closed as well.
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