The Clamp!

Last entry's title, "We're boned", was from an episode of Futurama. Actually it's one of those catch phrases the character Bender says in about every episode. I've started to watch that show more lately since Cartoon Network now re-runs it every night. I enjoy all the various classic sci-fi references and in-jokes for the uber-geeks out there. The fry and Lela characters annoy me though. But the other characters are fun. Every time I hear the classic Star Trek tri-corder sound or see the dot matrix printer or a character using a Macintosh from 1984 I just like that show a little more. Now most people I'm sure don't even notice a lot of those things. But I do and often the first time seeing an episode. In one episode they even had the whole original cast of the original Star Trek doing a voices and themselves. It was such a clever parody of the series. For example there was one explanation from bender on whether he went to college: "Of course. I'm a bender. I went to bending college. I majored in bending." For some reason I just find that really humorous. There are also the various Professor jokes about social security. I have a feeling all the more conservative thinking writers moved over from The Simpsons to Futurama. The Simpsons is now hippie-central and Futurama while still never meeting the Simpson's golden age still manages some decent "street cred" at least in my eyes if no one else's.

I would like to talk further politics. Because, as I said in the last post, there aren't nearly enough blogs written by idiots who think they know something about politics. I can pretend to be more convincing then some though because I'm not your typical mindless automaton blankly repeating the mantra of "Bush is a Nazi", "The Iraq war was illegal", and "the United States is taking over the world". I only want to write about this because for some reason I read this blurb about the new Terminator movie and in the user commentary everybody started talking politics. Actually only a few people talked politics the rest stuck to the commentary on the movie which is what it is supposed to be about. I think it only started because there's a small chance good old Arnold will be running for governor once that son-of-a-bitch gets recalled (I hate that guy). So maybe politics was almost on subject. What does the legitimacy of the war in Iraq have to do with the governor of California or Terminator 3? I have no idea what so ever.

There was a lot of back-and-forth in the movie commentary. Most of it was about the "illegal war" in Iraq and how it was an invasion and not a liberation. I don't know all those celebrating Iraqis looked pretty happy for a populace that just got invaded. And the legitimacy? Actually the war was validated by a UN provision back in 1991 and again in November 2002. Not to mention the Democrats wholly endorsing the idea of taking out Sadam when it was there president proposing it in 1998. But all this is lost on the mantra-repeating automatons posting off-subject commentary on a message board related to the latest Terminator movie. Do they really matter? Oh yes, very much so.

Of course the counter-commentary was also there. And I thought most of those posts did a pretty good job of responding to these mindless automatons repeating their anti-American, anti-Bush, anti-anything-having-to-do-with-what-Bush-has-done posts. Now I guess an argument could be made that although I am deeply offended by a comment such as "...bombing the Iraqi children who aren't white enough in the quest to take more oil and take over the world..." (actually I'm paraphrasing) I guess some people would be just as offended by the mantra of "shut the fuck up you dope smoking hippie mother fuckers go fuck a tree and let the grown ups run the world you stupid fucks" (again a paraphrase). All I know is the anti-American rhetoric is getting really, really old. And it's about time someone stood up and argued back to these damn hippies. As you may have guessed by the waving flag I'm an American and proud of it. We (Americans) are not evil organization bent on world domination. We were bombed, we decided to respond accordingly and let the world know we are no longer lead by the dope-smoking, draft dodging hippies who happened to be elected in the 1990s. The way some talk you'd think the Americans were the assholes. Well guess what: the terrorists are the assholes. They bombed us, remember? It's in America's best interest to do what we can to try and prevent future damages to our property.

Now lets look at this logically. If you were in charge of responding to a horrible terrorist attack and trying to decide if you wanted eliminate future threats from "rogue states" like Iraq you may get out a piece of paper and a pen and start listing the advantages and disadvantages of such an operation. For example the advantages might include sending a not-so-subtle message to the rest of world about not messing with us, we're under new management and you can expect something different from us from now on, the elimination of a possible future threat, not to mention uprooting a ruthless murdering despot that even the rest of the region hates never mind his own citizens and the rest of world (outside of the French). Disadvantages? All the anti-war rhetoric, the always-present risk of it not working out the they hoped, the Iraqi citizenry not accepting the their new status and of course that degree of doubt about the legitimacy. Of course ultimately this is all academic of course since the war is over but also the fact still remains this war was absolutely necessary. Everything else is just the PR to sell it to the public. And by the way it was not about oil, as spouted by so many mindless, rhetoric-spilling automatons out there. Why would the US go all the way to Iraq just for oil? I mean there's plenty of local countries in the western hemisphere that have lots of oil, not to mention several unexplored areas in Alaska and off the various coasts. Not to mention all the troops that are already in Kuwait which also has lots of oil. So why "invade" Iraq "just for the oil"? It makes no sense to spend all that money and time preparing just to go into Iraq for the oil. Wouldn't all that money take away from the bottom line when say Mexico or Venezuela is right there in the back yard? Of course this requires some actually logical thought which is too much to ask of many people apparently.


Well what an exciting and entertaining blog entry. I think I'll stop now.

  ¶ 5:03 PM