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Archive for the ‘Opinions’ Category

Okay.

Here it is. Time for me to come out and confess.

I admit it.

I’m an ailurophile.

So. There you have it.

I hope we can still be friends.

This is another riddle. And I’m going to use it to gauge if what I just experienced is part of American culture or just a bizarre experience.
I will moderate your comments so as to not give away the clue (if there is one).
This Friday I was driving a car in Cincinnati, Ohio.
With me were my wife, her daughter and the daughter’s boyfriend.
At some point we passed a fast food restaurant and everyone (except me) started to yell.
They HAD to eat there! They hadn’t had THAT in YEARS.
That was SOOOO good .. they couldn’t believe we were so fortunate to run into (actally: pass) one of ‘those’.
They made me turn around.
I parked. We went in. My wife ordered the food and returned to our table with …
(I’m not making this up!) … TWENTY hamburgers!
Did I mention there were only four of us?
I ate 5, my wife ate 4, her daughter ate 5 and the boyfriend, not a big guy at all, ate 8.
I know, that doesn’t add up to 20, but in all fairness, I only ate 3, but when we walked back to the car I burped … and two came back up.
As a further hint I can tell that for the 20 hamburgers, 4 servings of French fries and four soda’s my wife paid … $14.99
A further hint is that the next day we agreed that it hadn’t been such a great experience after all.
We were STILL tasting the stuff, that now was being described as “pure grease and salt”.
I personally agree with the “grease and salt”, but not with the “pure”. I think it was half-recycled industrial waste. Probably radio-active as well!
Sometimes you get what you pay for!
ANYWAY … was this just a fluke or could you think of the name of the hamburger joint we visited?

 

We saw Casino Royale today.

And both my wife and I liked it. A lot.

There was some blasphemy in the movie: At the poker table Bond ordered the wrong cocktail! Instead of his trademark Vodka Martini (shaken, not stirred!), he ordered a Vesper (3 measures of Gordon’s gin, 1 measure of vodka, ½ measure of Kina Lillet. Shake until ice cold and serve in a deep champagne goblet with a large thin slice of lemon peel. Easy on the fruit).

This was probably in honor of  his leading lady Vesper Lynd.

But then a little later, when he does order a Vodka Martini, the bartender actually asks him “Shaken or stirred?”, and Bond frowns and answers — oh horror –: “I don’t care”! (Correction by commenters: He actually said “Do I look like a man who gives a damn?”)

I asked my wife if she liked the ‘new’ Bond character and she fanned herself. “YeahHeah“, she said… “He’s hot hot hot … everything about him is hot!”. (Correction here too: the adjective SMOKING was used: see comments)

I must admit, fair is fair, that he, indeed, does look a bit like me: same blue eyes and he plays a mean hand of Texas Holdem too…

 

Yesterday was Friday the 13th. An unfortunate day indeed.

President Bush signed into law bill H.R. 4954: Security and Accountability For Every Port Act or the SAFE Port Act.

Official title: To improve maritime and cargo security through enhanced layered defenses, and for other purposes.

Sounds good eh? Cost: $26 per American over a four year period. Good AND cheap!

Votes: 421 Ayes, 2 Nays (9 no votes). Good, cheap and popular.

Congress hammered this through on their last day ‘at work’. Probably noone cared to actually read the damned thing. Who cares about the details .. we all want to be safe, right?

Here’s how the American people gets screwed by an increasingly sleazy and sneaky government: the catch: look at the last four words of the official title given above!

Yes. Other  purposes.

What are those other purposes?

Well … whatever some really sneaky politician decides to sneak in there. So, if, for instance, Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist and the Speaker of the house Dennis Hastert (yes, that guy from the Foley scandal), based on their righteous ideas of what is ‘moral’, decide that all those millions of Americans who play that wildly popular Texas Holdem Poker game online are engaging in immoral activities and therefore should be banned from doing so, then, yes, they can in fact sneak in some rules that practically bans this form of innocent entertainment. Even in a bill about protecting our sea ports!

Not only can they do that. They did do just that.

As of yesterday, I can no longer legally fund my accounts at online poker sites in order to engage in my beloved 5 cents poker games. All in the name of making our sea ports more secure.

We live in a free country. And we have many freedoms that other countries don’t have.

But make no mistake, those freedoms, even the ones that concern only what we do in our own houses, in our own time and affect noone else, are being eroded at an alarmingly increasing rate.

This war on terrorism is quickly becoming a war on our privacy.

Americans, once again (remember the Patriot Act?) … you’re being screwed!

You’re being conned out of your freedoms by self-righteous, deceptive, manipulative, insincere, dishonest, machiavellian, cheating, lying, powerhungry and zealously selfserving politicians. Considering the oaths they took, their actions border on treason.

“Reality is an illusion“

  — Paul Claessen, October 2006

Why is it that people in uniforms or with a badge so often think they’re above the law and that you, in dealing with them, automatically lose all your constitutionally given rights?

We all (well, almost all) know that it is unwise to joke about carrying a bomb when you’re anywhere near an airport, and we sort of, reluctantly (don’t we all love bomb jokes?), go along with it. Even though the automatic detainment (and heavy penalty) for using the word ‘bomb’ is a bit silly: statiscally the odds of someone cracking a joke about a bomb actually carrying a bomb, is incredibly much smaller than the guy who doesn’t announce carrying a bomb, actually having one. In fact, it is a bit scarry that in the process of searching for bombs, officials would take anything said to them by the subject-under-investigation into account. Taking someone in custody for joking to have a bomb, is logically as silly as waving him through unsearched when he claims he does not have a bomb. Why all the over-reacting drama? Why not ask the joker “Really? Show me!” and pat him down. And if the bomb-jokes get a bit old, put up a big sign saying ‘Please, no bomb jokes. Heard them all. Not funny’. That would be far more effective than not puting up a sign and sending naive innocent people to jail for five years for making a joke.

 

But again, silly as it may be, I can live with it. It gets way different when the TSA starts detaining people at the gate for calmly and passively expressing non-threatening opinions, as in the case of Ryan Bird, who wrote the political protest statement ‘Kip Hawley is an idiot’ on his toiletry bag. (Kip Hawley is head of the TSA, and I’m not referring to the Tourette Syndrome Association here, although, one has to wonder). He was first told he couldn’t write those things (huh?), then the supervisor had the audacity to inform Ryan that, basically, in dealing with TSA-uniforms and badges, Ryan in essence lost all his constitutional rights (“you can express your opinions ‘out there’, but not ‘here’“), and then proceeded to have Ryan detained. I just checked the first amendment and couldn’t find any exclusion concerning TSA officials!

This is outside of outrageous. What is next? Getting detained for not smiling at some grumpy TSA nazi?

Again, ‘security theatre’, this time by the TSA, whose slogan, ironically, is “TSA … VIGILANT, EFFECTIVE, EFFICIENT” .. they were exactly the opposite in this case.

 

Link to article

I just finished reading Sam Harris’ new book(let) “Letter to a Christian Nation”.

The book instilled in me the urge to buy a big bag full of them and go knock on people’s doors on Sunday mornings at 8am to urge them to read the ‘Better Book’.

However, I realize that in order for this crusade to have any success, the people I would be targetting would be asumed to approach religion in a rational fashion, as Sam Harris’ arguments are all very rational and logical.
Since I know from experience that even some of the smartest and best educated people I personally know have ‘decided’ to not ever let reason interfere with their religious beliefs, this expedition is doomed to fail.

So I will NOT actually go knock on people’s doors.
Which is good, because I don’t like getting up at 8am on Sunday mornings.

Instead .. I just started in Richard Dawkins’ (whom, I can proudly say, I once met. Okay, so it was during a book signing session, so what? I am actually in a picture with the Great Man himself! So! There! I bet you’re all jealous now! And so you should!) new book “The GOD Delusion”. Very promising! So far I only read the introduction, and even THAT was already delightful reading!
 

Sam Harris: Letter to a Christian Nation 

Richard Dawkins: The GOD Delusion

Do fundamentalist Muslims scare you?

Fundamentalist Christians scare me too. And you should be scared too.

How Christian (supposedly a faith based on love, compassion and tolerance) are you really, when you send death threats to a judge who ruled that today’s most popular delusion (Intelligent Design) cannot be taught in public schools?

Scary bigots!

Link to article

In Turkey there is a law that makes it a crime to ‘insult Turkishness‘.

To criticize this law is considered an ‘attempt to influence the judiciary‘. Which is also a crime.

Turkish authors who have written about the brutal slaying of over one million Armenians during WW1 by the Turkish, have been charged with the crime of ‘insulting Turkishness’.

Turkey, who is seeking membership of the European Union, has been told, by that same European Union, that European Union members have a thing against putting writers in jail for expressing opinions. Something to do with that silly thing about freedom of press and speech.

During the trials of these ‘Turkishness insulting‘ writers, there were large protests by people waving European Union flags with Nazi swastika’s on ‘m and slogans referring to ‘EU Fascism’, thereby 

• expressing their opinions about the EU’s suggestion to not put people in jail for expressing their opinions
• supporting a law which, if the EU would adopt a similar one (criminalize insulting ‘European Unioness‘), they would go to jail for.

I’d say, let’s not make Turkey a member of the European Union just yet.

(btw, when was Turkey geographically moved to Europe? Last time I was there, it was still firmly planted in the Middle East)

(link to article)

Note: I hope I didn’t insult anyone’s ‘Turkishness‘ with this post. If so: I’m profoundly sorry for your reaction! (I learned this clever way of ‘apologizing‘ from the Pope!)

This is a copy of two separately posted messages, some three weeks ago, from my previous Livejournal blog, in which I wrote under the name of ‘Dutchdoc’ (‘Dutch’ should be obvious, ‘Doc’, because Grumpy and Dopey were already taken, or so the story goes).

I’ll explain the reason for re-posting this later.

It was somewhere in February 2005.
A true story.
I was in line at the security checkpoint at Melbourne (Florida!) Airport. After a stopover in Atlanta, I would soon be on a transatlantic flight.
In front of me, at the security checkpoint, were four guys who were very obviously traveling together.
I estimated them to be in their mid-twenties, conservatively dressed and clearly from Middle Eastern descent. Well.. Middle East.. they could have been Afghani or Pakistani too. But you know what I mean. NOT a group of four guys you want to see board YOUR plane! I mean.. four guys with blond hair and blue eyes… sure… But this.. MAYBE not!
Understandably they were VERY closely scrutinized by the security folks. Every single one of them had their carry-on luggage hand searched, were thoroughly frisked and even had to take apart their cell phones. On top of that: they were treated RUDELY! Barked at. Two of them were visibly angered by the whole ordeal and the other two just giggled. But all four of them endured the whole thing remarkably patiently.
Was this profiling? Of COURSE it was. And I have to admit, legal or not, I don’t care! Profiling, despite being racist, in a way, simply makes sense.
Does that make me a racist? I don’t think so. Just careful. It’s all a matter of statistics.
Anyway.
As I now know, the first names of these four Pakistani-looking 25 year olds were: (8/29: names removed. No longer relevant to the story, besides I shouldn’t have used their real names, especially not in this context).
What was NOT obvious about this whole thing was that there was actually a fifth member traveling in this group.
He followed the four from a distance, watched with interest when they were being frisked, barely noticeably shook his head, smiled, joked with the security officer when he put his THREE laptops on the conveyor belt, and was waved through without any further incident.
I remember thinking: THREE laptops, isn’t that a bit suspicious?
Apparently, it wasn’t.
The five of them would fly to Paris.
And from there, according to their tickets, on to New Delhi.
As for the name of this fifth guy, let me just suffice by giving you his ‘code’ name…

(to be continued…)

And a few days later I posted the rest of the story …

Frightflight II

The (not-so)fright flight saga continues …

As mentioned in the first part of this story, the mystery fifth member of this group was waved through the security checkpoint without any incident.
One may have wondered about this, since I clearly mentioned that the security folks were heavily profiling!
There was a reason the fifth guy wasn’t bothered:
He was blond and had blue eyes.
And his code name, that I promised to reveal, was ‘Dutchdoc’.

And before you fearfully and astonished ask me ‘Are YOU a terrorist? We had NO idea!” .. no, of course I’m not a terorrist. Nor were my 4 companions terrorists.

They were just four co-workers from our software design center in Noida, India, (I have now removed their names from the first part of the story: I didn’t feel comfortable using their real names), who worked here in Palm Bay for a few weeks with some of my team’s members on various issues.
They were returning home, and I travelled with them to attend a design review meeting at said development center.
As for the reason for telling this story I have to add this: some of my Indian co-workers had purchased some electronics gadgets here like games, portable dvd-player and cell phones -yeah, I guess we pay them too much ;-)-. They were very thrilled about this and while we were seated, waiting for the plane to take off, they were showing eachother stuff, handing the gadgets back and forth, pointing, giggling and overall being very excited.

Nobody seemed to care and nobody asked them to quit doing that.
HAD someone told them to stop passing these gadgets around, chances would have been that some of them wouldn’t have immediately realized what was being asked of them: Their English is, well, while better than mine, slightly different from what’s commonly used here in the US.

Since I have SEEN this, I IMMEDIATELY knew what happened when I read the first stories of Northwest flight 42 that returned to Amsterdam after some passengers ‘displayed behavior of concern’ (passing around cell phones).

Again: security theatre!
I can understand that the onboard Air Marshall (yes, there was one) was alerted by this and payed some attention to it.
Had he DONE this calmly and without panicking, I’m almost SURE he would have recognized the innocent nature of the whole thing.
But to recommend to the captain to return IS panicking. (And I won’t even go into the absurdity of the Dutch police holding and questioning these 12(!) kids for TWO days, without realizing these guys were just passing around gadgets).

I guess this is all a matter of training.

The security theatre is becoming rampant. Last Saturday there were SIX flights being diverted here in the US, one for something silly as a woman filing her nails!

We need better training for air marshalls and cabin crew:

– If a guy tries to set his shoe on fire: sure, take him down.
– If a woman doesn’t realize you’re serious when you tell her to quit filing her nails .. diverting the flight is over-reacting.
– If a an elderly American woman goes to the bathroom ‘too often’ .. NOT a reason for TWO airmarshalls to tackle her and make the plane land.
– If you find dynamite in someone’s luggage: yes, that’s a reason for concern and requires some investigation.
– Taking someone into custody for bringing two tubes of toothpaste on a plane .. you need training! (What’s wrong with holding on to the toothpaste and returning it after the flight).