First of all, I forgot to give props to Elliott for coming in third for being voted into the All Star. Not that what Kyle was doing wasn’t cool, it was. Very. But the charity campaign he did and the fact that all the weight of the “Junior Nation” falls behind Martin Truex Jr. whenever he is up for a vote makes coming in third a pretty fine accolade.
EDIT 2: I just read Jayski and now
NASCAR.com. Wow! A racing organization is having problems back at the shop...and they're actually addressing them! How refreshing! Here's hoping to see some great cars coming out of RYR for the second half of the season! *Yea!*
And Elliott gets his Busch ride back! **Double Yea!**
EDIT 3: I was reading through the CEO's copy of Machine Design when I stumbled across a familiar name: Roush Performance Products. Apparently they are the ultimate in aftermarket upgrades to trucks.
Check it out. I know I'm very green and want to cut our oil dependant ties with the Middle East, but still....*drool*.
Check out the sidebar about the Porche that was turned into a truck too.
The Immigration Wrangle Continues To Go On. First of all, I have to wonder if this isn’t some distracting tactic that backfired on the Bush administration. First Social Security and now this.
People tend to forget that for half of the nations history, there was no immigration law. “Give me your tired, you poor, your huddled masses yearning to be free” was taken at face value and the United States was open to all comers sorta…. The alien act of 1790 stated that “any alien, being a free white person, may be admitted to become a citizen of the United States" which for the time was pretty liberal considering nations in Europe were kicking people out for being the wrong sect of Christianity.
This is of course ignoring the simple fact the White Anglo-Saxon Protestants, the first English colonists, were themselves immigrants.
I love watching the mental gymnastics white supremacists do after you throw that one into the fray.
In 1882, the first immigration law was passed, and not to our credit. It was a law to restrict the number of Chinese people entering the nation, which they were doing in large numbers. They pretty built our railroads west of the Mississippi and much of old California.
Then in 1890, we began to “process” immigrants: inspecting, admitting or rejecting them. Ellis Island was opened two years later. From then on it’s just been more and more laws. A quota system was put in place to allow more “desirable” people in such as English and French, but keep out as many “undesirables” such as those of Jewish decent, as possible. Sadly, this is why many of them could not flee to the U.S. when the Third Reich began it’s “Final Solution”. Non-resident aliens within the U.S. were all required to register with the government and carry a, “Alien Registration Receipt Card”, the precursor of the Green card in 1940. In 1952, the immigration system we know now was put in place, but acts in 1968 and 1972 eliminated any preferential acceptance based on race, sex, religion or country of origin.
Now many people, such as myself, have wondered if we want to stop illegal immigration, why don’t we fine companies that hire illegal immigrants? Well, we already have that law in place. A law passed in 1986 went after companies that employed illegal immigrants and also cracked down on marriage fraud. In 1990, we passed a law restricting aliens again, but this time based on occupation to curtail the flood of unskilled workers entering the country.
Now here is an interesting tidbit I just learned, in 2003 the department of immigration was
suborned to the Office of Homeland Security. (You’ll have to forgive me if this is old news to you all, but this isn’t a subject I paid much attention to until
recently.)
Well, after FEMA I think we all know what happened then. Maybe instead of thousands of miles and billion of wasted dollar in fencing, we should just stop Chertoff from siphoning off Immigration and Naturalization funds and give the department it’s autonomy back.
It seems a case of having all the laws we need in place, we just need to actually enforce them. Instead of creating an entire underclass of disenfranchised people in this country, I think the answer to stopping illegal immigration is cracking down, very hard, on the companies that hire illegal immigrants. If there are no jobs for people who come into the country illegally, they won’t come into the country illegally.
The problem is this means Bush would have to go after his next to last and most important political ally: Business. Evangelicals who think Bush is working for them are blind, Bush works for Business. Everything he has done in office proves that. So rather than actually stopping the problem at the source, he throws
gobs of money we don’t have to make a useless gesture.
As for English being the official language…I really can't see a problem with that. If you move to France, you have to learn to speak French. If you move to China, you have to learn to speak Chinese. My sister in law is Japanese and she taught here. Her English is just fine, even though now dosed with a Maine accent *chuckle*. My nephew is being raised in a bi-lingual household, but it’s BI-lingual. He’s going to be able to swim in both languages which is not only proven to be a benefit to children’s learning skills and useful to him as an adult, but just darn cool. But that’s on a personal or household level. He will come home speak Japanese with his mother (and probably Dad too) and write his grandparents in Kanji, but he will be able to take full advantage of being in an American schools and work in an American workplace.
Los Angeles is a bi-lingual city and the number of people that live there for years, decades even, without learning the English is pretty appalling. I know this may piss off some of my friends back there, but the level to which non-English speaker is catered to is has made our schools and cities more cumbersome certainly, and I think those people have been denied full access to the American Dream because of their being segregated by language in the workplace. I don’t think it’s a bad thing to require people here learn to speak English. ESL programs are great, but not for a person's entire life.
If anyone wants to chime in here, I’m fully open to debate on this. I’ve just got my point of view. I’m sure there are other very valid points of view as well. Immigration is a very difficult, touchy and complex issue and the more open discussion we have on it the better.
Let’s Take a Breather O.K. the latest issue of the Smith came yesterday.
The first thing that caught my eyes was:
Who’s Counting: 330,000 scarab beetles from the Museum of Natural History are on loan to the University of Nebraska. The family of 35,000 species included yes, the June Bug. Did the Smith just acknowledge Jyoonyer mania?
There is a great article titled
Wyeth’s World (The site doesn't have the articles posted yet) which is a look at the uniquely American vision of Andrew Wyeth, most famous for Christina World. As the article observes everyone relates to the iconic piece in their own way. (For example until this article I never realized that she was crippled and crawling up the hill. I see it as a wild moment of despair in the inherent repression of an extremely limited existence. )
I call Wyeth’s work uniquely American because so many of them are lone figures in an overwhelming landscape or surroundings. Even the ones without human figures seem to be visions that evoke a sort of frontier remoteness, each with their own story that is generated within the observers mind. Even what are on the surface more erotic pieces like Day Dream have an gentling, “home-y” quality to them the humanizes the figures and makes them utterly comfortable yet stil remote and somewhat...off.
“People have pigeonholed Wyeth as a realist, a virtuoso draftsman, almost like a camera recording his world, and we want to demonstrate that realism is only the beginning of his method, which is so much more fantastic and artful and memory based than people may have realized. And strange.” Strangeness hidden or perhaps revealed by an exacting normally or realism, which too is a very American trait. The idea of the thin skin of normal Americana covering a sometimes dark strangeness that was so well capitalized on by David Lynch is something that goes a ways back in American culture.
Peyton Place, first published in 1956 was one of the first to peel the layer of sweet sleepy rural America back and address the things that were happening behind the closed door of quaint New England cottages. (And speaking from small town experience, yeah there a lot of stuff the goes on that doesn’t make it into Norman Rockwell paintings.)
However unlike Lynch and Metalious who consider the normalcy to be nothing more than a facade, Wyeth gives equal honor on his canvas to both the normalacy and the strangeness.
Were I much more learned in art I could probably go on, but this is about the extent of my artistic analytical abilities.
Anyway, good article and a great artist.
Gee, It’s Not All Swell Mr. President? Golly, I would have never known… While it is vaguely nice to hear him vaguely admit there were mistakes made (singling out Abu Gharib does not even begin to cover the incredible amount of mistakes made in Iraq: See
Blind Into Bagdhad) this weeks speech doesn’t even begin to address the culpability the Bush administration had directly in making Iraq the mess it is now.
A man in a chef's uniform, complete with tall white hat, went to the microphone and thanked Bush "on behalf of all the cooks and chefs in our country" for creating jobs in the restaurant industry and "running the country the way a chef would run the country." He said he hoped Bush's brother - Florida Gov. Jeb Bush - would run for the White House and continue Bush's policies. I call shenanigans. I’ve worked in a four star, they don’t wear tall white hats and if Bush ran a professional kitchen the way he has run this country, the restaurant would be closed in six months.
I mean, really, can you see it?
First he would advertise as a steakhouse, only people would show up to find a Souplantation. He wouldn’t change the menu to please the customers, following doggedly on his “singular culinary vision” even if it didn't sell. What did sell he would under charge people who wore Armani and over charge those wearing clothes from J.C. Penny. He would use cheap substitutions for the high quality items on the menu, he’d chisel his wait staff and make them buy their own uniforms. He kick out anyone of talent and experience that had a dissenting voice or independent idea, he’d run the resturaunt DEEP into the red within months (not that that is hard for a start up, but then the United States wasn’t exactly a start up country). He'd wouldn't lock up at night and he wouldn't bother with sanitation, instead accusing the Health inspectors of working for a competing resturaunt rather than addressing any issues they bring to his attention.
Months? This place would be boarded up within weeks.
What idiocy, but then I suspect this was a clumsily engineered attempt and making Bush seem popular amougn the service industry.
Will the new government stabilize Iraq?
Administration officials have said the establishment of a new government is a key step toward stabilizing Iraq and making discussion of an eventual American troop pullout possible. But they said it was unlikely to lead to a reduction of violence anytime soon. That’s sort of like a doctor saying a patient in the ICU’s prognosis is “guarded”. Not a good sign.
Is it good they have finally seated a government? Yes. But a government was seated in
Afghanistan two years ago and the violence there continues to escalate.
While the
New PM’s cabinet is more balanced than anticipated (though we await with baited breath who is named for Secretaries of the Interior and Defense), the Iranian influenced Shi’ite controls of many culturally important seats. This makes me wonder if after we leave, if the country doesn’t dissolve into Civil War (which given the
violence this week, it may) as it did after the English left in the 1950's, the country isn’t just going to become a satellite or partner of theocratic Iran. So while we have removed a dictator, we will have helped create a yet another second theocracy in the Middle East that really, REALLY, hates the U.S.
But then, some people here seem to like theocracies, constantly railing against that burdensome “Separation of Church and State” thing, so they should be very happy that we helped another theocracy come into being.
And what are we doing to cut our apron strings to the Middle East? Nothing. And with the oil rich countries in South America nationalizing their oil industries and much of our manufacturing overseas, it entirely possible that
U.N. Sanctions could economically hurt us.
Barring a civil war, I just really don’t know how this country could be a bigger mess.
And it is a mess. It’s not one huge thing wrong as it was back in 1860 (well, the Bush administration, but we’re talking issues here), there are ton of different things wrong: Iraq, Immigration, violations of constitutional rights, poverty, economy, national debt, torture and holding prisoners in violation of the Geneva Convention, the disappearing middle class, repairing the Gulf Coast, FEMA, loss of manufacturing jobs, the environment, quality of education, out of control Health Care costs, government and business ethics violations, the large amount of control Big Business has over the government, cutting of veterans benefits, actual honest to gawd security, terrorism which continues
worldwide (and not just in the
Middle East), the two party system which has become the Squabbling Siblings system while the public roots for their favorite team like it’s a freakin’ sport, let see, am I forgetting anything?
Aigh, it just boggles my mind thinking about it all. We think just because we have satellite dishes and running water that everything is just spiffy, but it’s not. The U.S. has a lot of problems running just under the surface, problems that threaten to drag us down in time unless we address them rather than chasing after phantoms and making useless gestures.
It’s no wonder Jeb won’t run, who the hell want to clean up that mess? I pity the multiple administrations that have to come in after this one and try and straighten it all out because it will take many, many years to rectify the mistakes that have been made.
Just In Time for the Davinci CodeAnother article in this month's Smithsonian Magazine well worth reading is
Who Was Mary Magdalene? This article breaks down the popular concept of Mary as the repentant whore to her biblical roots, which have no mention of her family or occupation (much less being married to Jesus in any canonical or noncanonical gospel) prior to accompanying Jesus and The Twelve. Around the 6th century in the early Catholic Church, Pope Gregory the Great turned her into an amalgam of several women mentioned into the Gospels. As most congregations through the Middle Ages and Renaissance were illiterate, and indeed many of the Priests in rural areas were as well, this version of Mary is what entered Western consciousness despite having no Biblcal reference.
What is interesting about the article is that it also tracks the role of women in the church from Christ’s considering women to be equals under the eyes of God (Citing St. Paul and the non-canonical Gospel of Mary) and therefore worthy of roles of leadership, to women being
“reduced to their sexual roles, even if sexuality itself was reduced to the realm of temptation, the source of human unworthiness. All of this- from the sexualizing of Mary Magdalene to the emphatic veneration of the virginity of Mary, mother of Jesus, to embrace celibacy as a clerical ideal (which was not universally embraced when the church began), to the marginalizing of female devotion, to the recasting of piety as self denial, particularly through penitential cults- came to a kind of defining climax at the end of the 16th century….it was then that the rails along which the church – and the Western imagination- would run were set...”
Thus Mary of Magdala, who began as a powerful woman at Jesus side “became” in Haskins summary” the redeemed and Christianity’s model of repentance, a manageable, controllable figure, and an effective weapon and instrument of propaganda against her own sex.” There were reasons of narrative form for which this happened. There was a harnessing of sexual restlessness to this image. There was the humane appeal of a story that emphasized the possibility of forgiveness and redemption. But what most drove the anti-sexual sexualizing of Mary Magdalene was the male need to dominate women. In the Catholic Church, as elsewhere, that need is still being met.” Philip K. Dick Only in the last 20 years or so the film world of SciFi has fallen more and more under the sway of a man practically unknown in the popular culture.
Philip K. Dick was a paranoid with multiple physical and emotional problems that often led him to question to question the nature of reality before the Wachowski Brothers were even born.
The one film most are familiar with is
Bladerunner which is based off Dick’s "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep" which questions the nature of humanity. The cheesily executed
Total Recall is based on his short story “We Can Remember It For You Wholesale" that questions the nature of memory. The underrated and nearly unknown
Dark City (tres’ cool film) is said to have drawn on one of PKD’s works and the known yet still underrated
Minority Report (often called “Spielberg’s apology for A.I.” in the SciFi world *chuckle*) is based on a “Dickinson” short story of the same name that questions the nature of free will and predestination. Now there is a film coming out called
Scanner Darkly also based on a Dickinson novel which questions the reality of self and how that self perceives reality through a drug cult.
“My major preoccupation is the question, 'What is reality?' Many of my stories and novels deal with psychotic states or drug-induced states by which I can present the concept of a multiverse rather than a universe.” ~Philip K. Dick
I find it interesting from an anthropological point of view that in the late quarter of the 20th century, we as a culture became enamored of the questions of reality and truth that were first asked thousands of years ago by the Hindus and the Greeks and have been almost the sole bailiwick of philosophers ever since. I wonder what is happening in western culture that has made these questions more mainstream?
Anyway, if you like these films and others such as
Thirteenth Floor and
EXsitenZ, you should probably give PKD's short stories a whirl.
