Hip Hip Hooray For Christmas Vacation

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It Came From New York City...

When New York City passed a ban on cooking oils with trans fats for all restaurants, I was definitely against it, but since I haven't been to the Big Apple in over four years, I didn't let myself get worked up about it. But now, like a lot of bad ideas, it appears to be spreading like wildfire, including into my sometimes-stomping-ground, the city of Philadelphia. And now I'm pissed. There's a disturbing trend at the state and local government levels these days towards nanny state policies being put in place to protect people from themselves--my home state of Delaware has already banned smoking in just about every place you can think of. It's all in the name of good health, but it's at the cost of basic civil liberties--our own right to regulate what we put into our bodies (and before anyone comments about illegal drugs, no one has ever died from an acute overdose of cigarettes or fatty foods), and entrepreneurs' rights to run their business how they see fit (so long as they don't interfere with free and fair trade). Are trans fats bad for us? Probably. Do restaurants use more of them than they should (to save a few bucks from their lower cost and longer shelf life)? Again, probably. But the way to truly effect long term change in public health is to create educated consumers, and to legislate disclosure, rather than wielding the Hammer of Bureaucracy to ban products outright.

Pettite and McGwire

Like The Blowhard, I'm happy that the Yankees signed Andy Pettite. It was a move that I was against, until he signed a short-length contract. Is he overpaid for an aging, injury-prone pitcher? Probably, but not as much as some other members of the Yankees' staff (*cough*RandyJohnson*cough*), and not as much as they might have for the likes of Barry Zito. The Blowhard has a great analogy for the quality of free agent pitchers this year--go check out his latest post.

Also, the baseball writers are currently voting on players to be inducted into Cooperstown this month, and none other than Big Mac himself is eligible for induction for the first time. McGwire, of course, has been implicated as a steroid user in Jose Canseco's book Juiced. I've read this book (it was over in my Recent Experiences bar for a week or two--did you miss it?), and while I found it entertaining in the same way I found a crack-smoking vagrant's stories about Ara Parseghian and hitchhiking across Ohio with a shiv entertaining, there's not a whole lot of evidence there to back up his wild allegations. Come to think of it, that's a lot like the vagrant's stories too. Nonetheless, one way or another, the Hall of Fame voters will be sending a message this year. If McGwire is denied, they'll be showing current players that the integrity of the game does matter. If he's brought in as a first-ballot Hall of Famer, the message will be loud and clear: home runs and offensive production matter more than keeping the playing field level for everyone, and it's OK to cheat as long as you don't get caught. That sort of attitude is fine for Bobby the Brain, but it's got no place in Major League Baseball.

Pluggage: The Online Soul Repository

I went to go visit my friends in the Washington D.C. metro area last weekend, and actually took a day off from work to go do some touristy-type sightseeing. Unfortunately, I accidentally left my camera at home, dummy that I am. Fortunately, Faxman had his with him, and you can see his pictures from the weekend on his Flickr site, The Online Soul Repository.

Video of the Day 12.06.06

The Iron Sheik has something to say about Michael Richards's use of the dreaded "N-word", in his typical incoherent fashion. Hat tip to Ron and Fez Show.

Discomfort Zones

There's been a lot of hay made in the news recently about certain ordinances recently passed in Farmers Branch, Texas, and similar laws recently put on hold by federal injunction in Hazleton, Pennsylvania. I love this new tactic in fighting illegal immigration. I liken it to the war on drugs.

See, attempts to stop the flow of drugs into the country have been fruitless at best, despite ever-increasing penalties for trafficking and unprecedented international policing efforts. But the simple fact is that as long as demand for drugs remain high, there are profits to be made for the suppliers that are worth risking the penalties, no matter how severe we make them, especially for lower-income people who can make the kind of money they have no chance to make legitimately. No, the only way to stop illegal drugs will be to make people no longer want to buy them--or at least not be willing to shell out the kind of money that keeps the trade profitable. That's pretty damned hard to do with addictive substances--almost to the point of futility.

But illegal immigration isn't an addiction, and these laws in Farmers Branch and Hazleton appear to be an effort to similarly attack an unwanted commodity from the demand side. Illegals want to come here because they can live better below the poverty line here than they can under average circumstances in their home countries. And employers enjoy having them here because they'll work for slave wages. And as long as those two conditions are true, all the fences, walls, border patrols, and armed dirigibles in the world won't stop people from coming here illegally. Instead, we need to make life more difficult for those who've broken our laws to enter this country. We need to make it more difficult for them to find places to live and work, and the only way to do this is to make it less profitable and more hazardous to business for landlords and other businesses to rent to and hire them. Once we decrease the tide of illegals, then it will become harder for the truly dangerous to hide themselves among them, and we can accomplish this through these laws for far less taxpayer cost than we can with more walls and guards.

And yet the ACLU (along with some other groups) still refuses to see the threat to national security posed by unchecked illegal immigration, saying among other things that these laws discriminate against Hispanics. Are laws increasing and establishing penalties for Americans assisting federal lawbreakers--whether they're from Central America, China, or the Middle East--more or less discriminatory than the other plans to build walls and mobilize forces exclusively along the Mexican border? The ACLU's apparently willful narrow-mindedness on this issue, and others pertaining to issues of national security, earns them a permanent link on my Enemies List.

Halloween

...is over, thank God. This is a holiday without much of an upside for me. My bad food habits run more towards chips than candy, for one thing. Sure, there's always the fact that a lot of women use the holiday as an excuse to get dressed up like hookers on the stroll, but the only Halloween party I was invited to this year was at the office, so that aspect would have been ruined by middle-aged women with midsections textured like trays of freshly baked cinnamon rolls. And that was before I got caught up in the opening series of the '06-'07 flu season. There's nothing more obnoxious than trying to get from couch or bed to the bathroom in complete darkness so as to avoid little hands pounding on my door to beg for candy. Actually, in my neighborhood, the most common costume is "thug teenager", and they don't trick-or-treat so much as shank-or-treat. But fortunately, my lights-out strategy worked, due in part, that there were more larger groups of kids going around to one another's homes, rather than simply going door to door. And with good reason--my neighborhood has a higher concentration of sex offenders than the Neverland Ranch. Bring on Thanksgiving--any holiday with customs focused on gluttony and football-watching is one that I'm solidly behind!

Attack Ads

I'm not a big fan of campaign commercials. I make my voting decisions through more-or-less independent research, not propaganda spewed out by candidates, parties, and (especially) special interest groups. But I've got to admit, some of the smear campaigns are just so damned entertaining to watch for their hyperbole, if nothing else. Take a look at this one, where Republican candidate Paul R. Nelson goes after incumbent Democrat Ron Kind for voting against funding body and vehicle armor for soldiers in Iraq (which is inexcusable), but for funding all sorts of odd sex studies (which is just friggin' funny).

But they don't get any funnier...or more true...than this ad produced by David Zucker (of Airplane! and The Naked Gun fame) for the Republican party (hosted by YouTube, hat tip to The Outhouse Times-Picayune for the link.)

My Radio Debut

For all you Beast fans out there...if you've got an XM satellite radio or DirecTV, catch the replay of today's Ron and Fez show on High Voltage. About 45 minutes before the end, I'm on there for a moment discussing Frosted Mini Wheats with everyone's favorite cowbell-slingin' hosts.

Caveat Lector

I'm loving Showtime's new series Dexter, about a CSI tech who happens to be a part-time serial killer, and a sociopath with a conscience, enough so that when I spotted the credit for "Based on the novel....", I had to read it, and then the next one in the series. And suffice to say, I wasn't disappointed...the series thus far has paralleled the novel fairly well, with a few subplots thrown in for television, and the novel is as entertaining and, if anything, even funnier than the show, if dark humor is your thing. The novels are running in my "Recent Experiences" pane this week, with this word of caution: from what I can tell, season 1 of the show is going to parallel the first novel, and I can only assume that if it goes another season, they'll be using plot points from the second novel. Thus the title of the post--translated, "reader beware"--by finishing the novels, I've likely learned most of the series' plot twists for the next couple of years. That's fine with me--I always prefer to read the book before seeing it acted out--but if your tastes run the opposite way, you may want to hold off for a while.

World Series Time

Speaking as a Yankees fan, I can't tell you how happy I was to see the Cardinals finish off the dinged-up Mets last night to advance to the World Series. I'm looking forward to this one--it's not the Mets-Yankees Subway Series many were predicting, but with two Central Division teams squaring off, I think you can safely call this at least an "Amtrak Series".

Now that the season's almost over, it's time to see how I did with my predictions from the start of the season.

AL East: Yankees win, the Red Sox and Blue Jays are out of it by the time August ends. I'm 0 for 1.
AL Central: Some thought the Twins would contend for a wild card; the White Sox were in it till near the end, but I'm still 0 for 2.
AL West: Oakland's moneyball beats out Anaheim and leaves me 0 for 3.
AL Wild Card: No one saw Detroit coming this year...including me. 0 for 4.

NL East: The Mets win easily, the Phils are in it till the end, and the Braves are sub-.500; pretty much the oppositie of my prediction. 0 for 5.
NL Central: The Spirit of St. Louis takes 'em all the way to the Series. 1 for 6.
NL West: The Dodgers edge out the Padres, but Sanny Eggo takes the wild card. This one came down to tiebreakers, so I'm giving myself another hit here to go to 2 for 7.
NL Wild Card: It was the Padres and not the Mets, but I can't really give myself an extra credit for reversing the positions of a division champ and a wild card, leaving me at 2 for 8.

I'm not going to break down the actual playoffs against my predictions since I missed most of the teams that were going to be in, but I'm going to give myself a point for correctly identifying one of the World Series teams, for a final score of 3 for 9, a .333 batting average. If I was playing baseball instead of predicting finishes, I'd be in the running for a batting title, but the only title I can claim this year is that of Nostradumbass.

Go Tigers!

Worst Case Scenarios

The one thing about the extreme right and left is their insistence on attacking anything that comes from someone who doesn't share their world view. Sometimes you need to consider the worst-case scenarios coming from a course of action when the factual truth isn't clear.

Case in point: this article from Newsbusters (a site which I peruse daily, and generally agree with.) They're taking to task the coverage of Richard Branson's $3 billion dollar donation to global warming research, and by extension, the donation itself, citing doubts in the scientific community as the reason for the attack. But what's the harm here? If global warming is real, the worst-case scenario of doing nothing is fairly obvious--eventual human extinction, just like in that great rock-umentary The Day After Tomorrow. But what's the worst case scenario if manmade global warming turns out to be nothing? It's a private donation to a private foundation, so it's not costing a dime to anyone who isn't paying voluntarily. And who knows, maybe it'll help us develop some alternative fuels that can help us stop depending on paranoid dictators who hate us.

This isn't just a far-right tactic, either...check out this article from Newsweek accusing Republicans of overstating the threat of Iran developing nuclear weapons. The worst case scenario of assuming that Iran really is close to developing nuclear weapons? We gain some intelligence on an unfriendly power that's probably harboring, funding, and/or training terrorists, and maybe take some steps to slow them down. The worst case scenario? A hostile power with a nuclear weapon, followed by the end of life as we know it, just like on that reality show Jericho.