Useless Media Words

Listen to political coverage these days and you will hear a pair of trendy words that in fact bear no meaning. "Unity" and "bipartisan" lack any substantive meaning in today's political rhetoric. At least their meaning is not revealing in an honest way. I have come to believe that bipartisan, when referenced by the media, is a call for conservatives to knuckle under and just go along with a liberal/progressive agenda. Similarly, unity is intended to convey the need for America to come together, forsaking all prior ideologies and adopt a liberal agenda. In both cases, I fail to see any true unity or bipartisan considerations. Unity is not adopted by force of will and bipartisan politics do not come at the expense of alternative views.

For more thoughts on Obama's notion of unity read here.

First Recording

Tonight our son, a lad quite fascinated with remotes, got a hold of our TV remote, rather than his remote that controls nothing, and not only turned on the TV, but also recorded 8 minutes of the NBC Nightly News. Good times!

Stonehenge Cracked

Wally Wallington (wow) a retired construction worker believes that he has cracked the mystery behind how Stonehenge was constructed. Using only technology from the time period he seems to have devised a method capable of such an engineering feat.

Moral Equivalency or Why PETA Members Cannot Think

The fallacy of moral equivalency occurs when a person or group fails to understand the existence of distinctions between types of entities. For example, PETA protested at the Westminster Dog Show in KKK attire. Their claim was that the selective breeding of dogs was morally equivalent to the "master race" theories of the Ku Klux Klan. The fallacy comes into play here as the members of PETA fail to understand, once again, the distinctions between humanity and canines. While it is noble to protest the abuse or mistreatment of dogs, if does damage to their cause, when PETA demostrates their inability to think clearly and protests at an event where the dogs in question receive better pampered treatment than most of us receive ourselves. What might have begun as a nobly intended organization, has once again demonstrated moral and intellectual bankrupcy. Just like you cannot cry "Meat is Murder" without redering our food equivalent with our children, you cannot have equal moral distain for the KKK and the Westminster Kennel Club.

Cut from the Super Bowl

The ad below was apparently set to be aired during the Super Bowl, until NBC decided not to air it due to its "political content." I am not sure why if the makers of the ad had the money to air it during the Super Bowl, they are not seeking donations to help get it aired elsewhere, but the ad itself is rather interesting.

New Skills

Recently our son has been working on waving. I say working because though he has the motion down rather good, the context for using a wave is sometimes off. Some of the time he seems to wave more at his friend the ceiling fan then his parents. When he does wave at us, like the first night that I came home to see him wave hello to me, it is heart meltingly special.

Now the interesting additional twist to his work on waving, is that while working out the motion with his left hand, he seems to have inadvertently taught himself how to snap. Yes, that's right, he will be nine months in a week and he has already figured out snapping his fingers. Now, really he just snaps while trying to wave, but I'll take it. Waving or snapping it is awful cute!

Driving It Into the Ground

Today, I was listening to Rocket to Russia by the Ramones. Track 13 is Surfin'Bird. Naturally I was then lead to recall The Family Guy driving the original song into the ground as only they can. So here you go, enjoy.