But that’s not the topic here.  What strikes me as particularly two-faced about this hearing is the unstated truth of what we are seeing: a change in the complexion of the Supreme Court, and ignorant, vacuous senators who have conveniently forgotten the history of SCOTUS. They question Sotomayor’s impartiality based upon her ethnicity, only because another convenient glass ceiling has long since been broken: gender. SCOTUS was long a boys’ club, and the general perception was that a woman was incapable of performing such a serious and far-reaching task as interpreting the law for an entire country. And when at last a woman was nominated, it was in large part because she was a woman – there were undoubtedly equally- or perhaps better-qualified male judges to have taken Sandra Day O’Connor’s seat.

The bench, and the Senate, have a long history of overlooking a judge’s ‘impartiality’ and looking at his gender as a deciding factor in his ability to perform the daunting task of upholding the Constitution. Since that angle is no longer available to them, it’s clear that the conservatives have latched onto the next best thing. The sad truth of the matter is that they’re going to ‘lose,’ anyway, at least in their eyes, and they know it. This is just a play to the cameras, a hope that their constituents will see them as a strong and capable force in politics, and has absolutely nothing to do with moving this country forward. Which, I suppose, would be against the entire concept of being ‘conservative,’ anyway.

Face it, guys. You lost. Get the Fuck Over It! Come up with some ideas that don’t involve burying America’s head in the sand and denying both the truths of the last 8 years, and the truths of the next decade. America can afford neither your egos nor your petty depiction of yourselves as victims. We don’t need the Pity Party trying to screw over the greatest nation in the world with such short memories and such limited vision.

Once upon a time, the unions served a purpose – nowadays, with the government’s attention so deep in the workings of companies both public and private, they’ve become little more than PACs, collecting money for the benefit primarily of their executives and for lobbying for whichever politicians they feel will allow them to continue strong-arming both their members and the companies for whom they work. The unions’ job is to keep their employees gainfully employed and to prevent them from being exploited; the law does much of the latter, and the unions are becoming more and more incapable of the former.

Let’s hope that the ‘patriotism’ of the UAW doesn’t shutter the doors of Chrysler. Frankly, what difference does it make where the company profits go as long as the workers’ money is made, saved and spent right here?

Liking Obama, Opposing His White House

This is the sort of thinking that many of us would like to see from Republicans – the ability to conduct a civil debate, to acknowledge the difference between Obama, the man (he’s not “evil,” as some conservatives have convinced themselves) and the policies he promotes. And this from a man whose profession is clearly on Obama’s “hit list”:

“Tearing this president down is not the way for Republicans to regain a majority coalition, although some pundits and talk show hosts will be tempted to do just that. Instead, Republicans should allow themselves to like the president, just as they fight against his policies. And as they fight his policies, they should do all that they can to market their own ideas so that the American people understand that the Republicans have positive alternatives that will make our country stronger, safer and more prosperous in the future.”

Too much press time, and too many high-profile Republicans, have been devoted to hoping that the president, or more palatably, his policies, fail. Failure is not an option, folks, but it seems to be the only one that too many conservatives are rallying around. Failure can only occur if you let Obama’s policies go into effect – you’ve got to offer reasonable alternatives beforehand, not just hindsight. You’ve got to think about the country, first, not your party, especially since the Republican party is rapidly dwindling; don’t suck the entire country down for your “principles,” especially when it’s clear that those principles are really just a power play. You’d do well to read and absorb what John Feehery has to say; it sounds like he has an actual plan, one that doesn’t involve pettiness disguised as ‘patriotism.’

What really bothers me is that after apologizing their way to a subordinate position under Rush Windbag, now several Republicans are sucking up to him and feeding off the publicity he generated in his comments about wanting the President of the United States to fail. Bobby Jindal, my favorite Supermarionette, made this a key part of his speech at a fundraiser, and now Fred Thompson is talking about it live on CNN. Rush has apparently opened the floodgates for ill-considered words from his duly-elected underlings.

Aside from the equivocating on the difference between wanting the president to fail and wanting his policies to fail, these public faces of the Republican party are essentially admitting that they have no alternatives to the president’s initiatives and will have none for the foreseeable future – but, hey, they’ll come up with them once the current efforts fail and make the situation ten times worse! Yeah, that’s responsible government! We think you packed the parachutes wrong, so we’ll stay here, let you take the plane up, watch the whole team die when their chutes fail to open, and then we’ll decide what to do with what’s left. Or, I suppose, what’s far-right.

Any elected official who is more comfortable with allowing our country to suffer for his “principles” needs to be removed from office and replaced with someone who has the balls to stand up for what he thinks is right, to stand up to windbag “entertainers” who think they can hold our elected officials hostage with their ratings. And along with integrity and fortitude, these elected officials need to demonstrate that they have both the intellect and the common sense to comprehend the situation and offer an alternative while the situation demands it – to strike while the iron is hot – rather than to sit back, to hide behind an entertainer (who is, admittedly, a pretty large shield) and to parrot his words before the cameras. The Republicans are sowing the seeds of their own failure, and they seem to be in a Rush to do it.

Detroit’s current crisis isn’t the sole result of its bad decisions and its failure to act appropriately in response to foreign competition. Throwing billions of dollars at them isn’t going to free up the credit, ALSO paid for by the taxpayers, that is the most immediate reason why people aren’t buying cars, domestic OR foreign. Nor can Detroit – or Toyota or Honda, either, for that matter – magically begin building ‘responsible’ cars before another injection of billions of dollars would be necessary.

Detroit hasn’t been building cars that Americans don’t want – they spend millions to make sure the cars they build are EXACTLY what Americans want, up to the limit where they become too expensive, at which point they buy U.S.-built ‘foreign’ cars, built without all of the union and pension liabilities with which the U.S. automakers are saddled. Let the domestic automakers off the union hooks and maybe the money they spend will be visible in their products and not just in their retirees’ pensions.

In the meantime, however, the congressmen need to see just whose pockets THEY are in as they write stupefying regulations that prevent the Big 3 from selling, in the U.S., efficient cars they DO build, overseas. Which congressmen are beholden to the insurance lobbyists that add to the cost of developing and building cars? Or to the unions?

In addition to a loan, the automakers could use a moratorium on ridiculous ’safety’ regulations that are nothing but a way for insurance companies to reduce their payouts – they’re certainly not about ’safety.’ You can’t tell us that the EU and Japan don’t care about the safety of THEIR car buyers. Detroit simply cannot design, engineer, test and produce the cars these half-wit congressmen are trying to hold them hostage with, in time to get back to solvency. So let’s have a moratorium for, say, 5 years – they CAN create the next generation of cars in that time – during which they can not only immediately import cars they sell overseas, but can also install the tooling for them in American factories and put U.S. workers back to work building them.

And since this is a GLOBAL crisis, the global community needs to get together during that time and establish GLOBAL standards that will allow any automaker, anywhere in the world, to produce cars that can be SOLD anywhere in the world.

Congress have no place talking down to the U.S. automakers – they are equally guilty for the dire straits in which we all find ourselves. And if they complain about gas-guzzlers being built, they’d better be able to prove they don’t have one in their garage or on Capitol Hill.

==========

Technology! Since it appears that I’ll be doing the majority of this blog, moving forward, from my Treo, I guess it makes sense to acknowledge the news in the handheld arena. Obviously, the new iPhone from Apple adds many needed and significant features, and the price has to have a lot of current owners seeing red, but I wonder if even that will be enough. The competition is heating up, and Apple is partially to blame, for introducing it originally without several killer features and at an astronomical price – they gave the competition too easy a bar to clear, and now the 2.0 iPhone is almost in a position to play catch-up. Yes, Apple changed the smartphone landscape, but in a way, they gave too many others access to the seedlings, as well. My Treo is now far behind the curve, I realize, but for what I want, it’s 90% there, needing only a decent camera to remain a champeen. C’mon, Palm, why the blinders?

Sure, he may lack experience – and he wouldn’t be the last; if ‘experience’ like the current administration is a gauge, however, give me the New Guy.

What amazes me, though, is the pettiness of some very vocal supporters of Hillary Clinton. Here’s a group who, while claiming to believe the platform of their party, boil it all down to personality in the end and who would rather vote ‘against’ the person they seem to feel cheated them of their pet candidate, whom they chose to support for reasons that appear to have NOTHING to do with the safety, security and future of this country and its citizens, instead of thinking beyond their own selfishness and actually THINKING about what their votes mean. I doubt any of them give a rat’s ass for McCain, but to them, all that matters is he isn’t the one who ‘beat my poor Hillary.’ Hey, you know what? If you care so little about the integrity of this country and your own espoused beliefs, then get the hell out! If you don’t like ‘your’ candidate, show it by not voting, not by acting like 3-year-olds throwing a tantrum! Idiots! I’m more ashamed of you morons than any supporter of McCain – or Bush!

H. Beam Piper was right …

Well, obviously, not much to report, as I await the rebooting of my equipment. Yes, it's true – "The Big Bang Theory" is hideously close to my own life, it seems. At least I can laugh with it, as well as at it.

I’m starting off 2008 in a decided funk: wholly self-aware of my own tendency not to finish many projects I start, I’m in danger of having those decisions yanked from my hands by a piece of freakin’ hardware – my main external hard drive is being a shit, and of course, it contains the sum total of my artistic creativity from the past 3 years! I’m trying to siphon off what I can. but in many cases, it copies only a couple files and then tells me the next file is either corrupt or impossible to access due to I/O errors . All of my 3D files are there, including everything I’ve done so far on my cooperative film project. So I’m not starting the year out as a happy camper.

I guess my biggest New Year Resolution will be to try to be the best person I can be, both professionally and personally – I plan to work extra hard to, if not be indispensable in my job, at least not to foolishly allow myself to be expendable through lax behaviour or inattention to detail. I don’t know what I want to do with the next 5 years of my life, but I want them to be my choice and not just losing a job because I was careless, and while I have a good reputation at work, I know I can do much better, and I plan to. It’s about time I grew up and became a responsible person.

Of course, on my next job, this very blog will probably show up attached to my résumé – I hope at the very least that they take into account that I take the time to correctly spell “résumé.”

Having had this blog for years and done nothing with it, I’ve decided to try my hand at doing something. Of course, it still goes against my basic instinct that what I have to say is probably not worth the time it takes to read it – based upon my own experience reading a few other self-centered, why-do-I-need-facts-in-order-to-state-my-opinions? Internet masturbation opuses (opii?). I’m not going to even ask what makes my words any more valuable than another’s, because I already know the answer: nothing.

And, by that measurement, my words therefore have just as much right to exist here as another’s, and by unspoken consensus, are just as valid. Right?

Hey, happy birthday, Nathan! The world just never understands how our birthdays could be only two days apart, and yet you are a year and three days older than I.

So, getting back to the ptopic (if there is one), what am I doing here? Well, I don’t really know. What do you have to expect from me? I don’t know that, either. My interests are simple and somewhat focused: I like cars, especially their design; I like girls, especially their design, as well. I like Star Trek – not to the point of wearing or even owning my own uniform, nor spending the outrageous tariffs that Paramount charges fans simply because they know they can and not because the DVDs they sell have any such intrinsic value – but I have seen, I think, every episode of every series (I may have missed a couple Voyager episodes, but I’ve seen every episode of Enterprise, and that I’m not proud of in the least; I hoped week after week that they might discover how to write in general, and for Trek specifically, and I can only say that 4 years of that series was 4 years too many, and its death was a mercy killing for the fans). I like Jethro Tull, and Mike Oldfield, and Kansas and Rush and The Alan Parsons Project. And of all the things I like, that I truly like, I’m not obsessive about any of them, even though I may be a bit of a completist about many of them – there’s very little that I really like that I could hold my own in a discussion with a deeply obsessed fan about, and I’m fine with that; I enjoy these things – I don’t intend to make them my sole reason for living.

I like to create, whether it’s writing or drawing or modeling in 3D or simply making a picture in Poser – and as much as I like all of these things, or perhaps because I like all of these things, I’ll never be great at any of them, and in fact I frequently fail to finish many of the projects I start, because I really enjoy the act of conception more than anything, and once I start realizing my ideas, I have new ideas and I get bored with the ones I’m working on – they’re just not fresh and alive any more, as they were at the moment of their conception. It’s not that I’m lazy – I’m just, as I said, not obsessive about all the details, and once I’ve conceived of something, in my head, it’s already complete, I’ve enjoyed it to its fullest, and I’m ready to move on. Which must be frustrating for the people who live outside my head, at times, because they can see how excited I am about an idea, and yet they don’t get to participate in that high because I’m too busy thinking ahead to share, tangibly, the things that excited me to begin with.

So I’m selfish, it seems. Well, join the club – we’re all selfish, even (maybe even especially!) the most altruistic of us, because even altruism is rewarding to its practitioners. Heck, even masochists get enjoyment out of their pain – no one ever chooses sacrifice because they hate it, but because the sacrifice itself fulfills them. They can deny it all they want, but that’s no less selfish than saying, “Screw you – this (fill in the blank) is mine!”

When I post, just keep in mind I’m not doing it for you, even if I claim it’s something you should know – I only think you should know it because informing you fulfills me!

Thanks for reading! Now go away until I’m ready to talk to you again! Maybe I’ll even have a ptopic.