September 2006 Archives

What does it take to get you detained at the airport these days? Well, other than being Ted Kennedy or being randomly placed on the no-fly list by some prankster at the TSA that is, or unfortunately having been born with a skin tone other than white? Call the director of the TSA, Kip Hawley, an idiot.

Last week, Ryan Bird, of Milwaukee, dutifully put his highly explosive personal grooming liquids into a plastic baggie (because Lord knows, when a bomb's about to go off, nothing stops it faster than Ziploc), and wrote the words "Kip Hawley is an idiot". It was his own little way of protesting the stupidity of the whole theatre of security we're being made to go through with planes right now.

Instead it got him detained for almost 30 minutes while the TSA and a sheriff's deputy and the TSA supervisor questioned him. According to the TSA supervisor, and the deputy for that matter, we don't have freedom of speech past the checkpoint at the airport. Because the phrase maybe made the supervisor feel "threatened", writing that wasn't protected speech.

Wow.

Ryan's first-hand account of the incident if available here.

In Florida, some people took time to camp in the woods next to a mosque and shoot at the Muslims who were arriving to celebrate Ramadan. (Link)

Bill O'Reilly, best known for his bloviating and blustery style and mocked for his continual accusations about a war on Christmas denounced the attacks on the mosque as a "further example of the godless attacking the godfearing in a turbulent difficult time".

...

Well, actually, he didn't. In my mind he should have though. I know he doesn't necessarily think that Muslims are godfearing, and he's clearly a devout Christian, but Christ wouldn't have advocated attacking others for their faith, and certainly not by sitting in the woods taking pot shots at the people entering a mosque. It's disgusting that this happened, though I imagine it's simply a case of just some good ole boys getting drunk and sitting in the woods giggling as they shot at the building and the people.

The last thing we need as a culture is more division and separation. We don't gain anything by splitting the Muslims apart from the rest of the world, or all the South Asians from the rest of us. Separation doesn't lead to peace or security, no matter how much Michelle Malkin really wants it to work.

I hate sounding like a broken record, because I risk sounding like an apologist for Islam, which I'm not (the religion has its issues, as do some of the practioners of the religion, but that's true for all religions just about). It just seems to me that if some shitheads had parked outside a Christian church and drunkenly started firing at the people filing in for Wednesday evening Bible Study, O'Reilly would be marching down the street in front of the church, arm in arm with Jerry Fallwell and Ralph Reed, decrying the war on Christianity and demanding the capture of these yahoos.

Which is what should happen.

Heather and I went out and got a black lab puppy this afternoon. Her name is Sophia. We weren't going to get a dog but our kids sat us down and explained to us both that we either had to make with another sibling for them or produce a puppy posthaste, so we went with the puppy.

It was some very tense negotiations with the kids, but we think they'll enjoy the dog just as much as another brother or sister, probably even more, at least until we make them start cleaning up the poop.

I was listening to NPR while I sat in traffic on the Jones Falls Expressway this morning, and they had a story about some of the prisoners that Israel refuses to hand back to the Lebanese. One of the prisoners, Samir Kuntar, was accused and convicted of murdering a father and his four-year-old daughter, among others in a cross-border raid 27 years ago.

Simar's brother was on record saying that he felt that even if he believed everything the Israelis said and that even if his brother had killed both Danny Haran and his daughter Einat, 27 years was more than enough time to spend in jail for those crimes. While I can certainly appreciate someone's desire to see his family member again, I don't see how anyone can say "Yes my brother murdered a child in cold-blood in the middle of the night but he should go free now". It just boggles my mind.

In my head, if someone were to hurt one of my kids, or the children of one of my friends or family members, hell any child in cold blood, with deliberate malice are eligible for the most heinous and horrific punishments available to man. They certainly don't go free. Ever.

More information about the whole affair is also available here.

So the Redskins lost again in an embarassing show of inept defense and worse offense. Wow. I stayed up to just get heartburn.

Being the optimist, however, I have to say, at least at this rate I can pick up some fan apparel at deep discount. Woohoo!

I thought of a new "Your Momma" joke: "Your momma's breath's so bad her teeth fell out just to get away"

To Whom It May Concern:

I am writing to let you know how very unhappy we are with the service we received during our recent visit. We went to Red Lobster to celebrate my son turning 3. He loves shrimp, and it seemed a happy coincidence that Red Lobster was running the "Endless Shrimp" promotion so close to his birthday.

When seated, we asked if we could order a single adult order of the Endless Shrimp to split between my two-year-old son and three-year-old daughter. We didn't think they would eat a lot of shrimp, but in the off chance my son might want more shrimp, we wanted to be able to get him more.

Our server looked annoyed that we would dare ask such a question and immediately denied our request. However, we asked again, so she offered to ask the manager but we could tell that she really didn't care to. She returned almost immediately and said again “No”. We were made to feel like jerks for asking. We probably should have walked out, but we promised Owen shrimp, so we stayed.

I later talked to the manager and he stated that there was no way for him to make an exception for us, but making exceptions is an everyday part of keeping customers happy in restaurants. It’s what restaurants do. It’s what your restaurant should have done.

It’s not as if my two toddlers were going to eat so much shrimp that you would have lost. We would have walked away happy, not disgruntled. We shouldn’t have been made to feel as if our request was so horrible and strange.

Looking back on this issue, it is apparent that we should have done what we intended originally and gone to the Olive Garden instead. We've never had a problem getting them let us split meals between our kids, even the Never-ending Pasta Bowls.

Given the way we were made to feel, and the condescending attitude of the manager, we will not be returning to the Red Lobster again. I’m not seeking special behavior or anything free. I just wanted to let you know.

Ron Jeremy would like to share with you some of his surefire advice on how to pick up ladies: http://eatliver.com/vintage-ads/4.html

Two weeks ago I highlighted the comments of former NPR correspondent Sarah Chayes, who's living now in Afghanistan and recently reported that all of the reports made by the Northern Alliance about how hard they fought the Taliban and Al-Qaeda were US fabrications. This week I finally got around to watching the CNN special "In The Footsteps of Bin Laden" by Christiane Amanpour. In it, Amanpour interviewed a former CIA operative that was in Afghanistan directing efforts in the Tora Bora mountain range against Bin Laden. He claimed that they'd captured a radio from a dead Al-Qaeda fighter and they could hear Bin Laden apologizing to his soldiers for leading them to this mountain range where they were trapped. The operative said that he kept calling Washington and asking for 500 or more US soldiers to arrive to complete the mission and capture Bin Laden but that Washington continued to rebuff him.

The maximum number of soldiers they gave him? 50.

If Bin Laden was going to be captured "dead or alive" as Bush promised in the days after 9/11, why send only a few troops and let him slip away?

Once every few months, Heather and I talk about having another kid, though usually only briefly, and kind of in the same way other people talk about the weather, or what to eat for dinner:
"You think we should have another baby?"
"I don't know. We've got our hands pretty full with these two."
"Yeah, would be nice to have another baby in the house though."
"Well we'd have to adopt."
"Yeah, that could get expensive."
etc....

Recently, however, McKenna's started asking about getting a baby sister, and we talked about it more seriously. In part, spurred on by discussions at Sepia Mutiny and this post by Scott Carney, we talked about adopting an Indian baby girl.

Last night, when we looked into the logistics, however, most of the adoption agencies in India would not adopt to a family that's not Indian in heritage. I was a little shocked and dismayed and offended.

It might be because I'm white that I'm not used to discrimination based on my heritage and bland tapioca pudding-like complexion that I was offended, but I think also because I thought that with so many kids around the world in dire situations the agencies would seek to find any loving home for the kids regardless of color.

I love being a daddy, more than anything else I've ever done, and I adore and love my two kids to distraction. But I also see kids neglected or in need of love and attention and I want to wrap my arms around them too.

There are more blasts in India today. Link: http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/articleshow/msid-1971077,curpg-1.cms

Mostly Muslims and a mosque were targeted. Will I get stoned for thinking that this might be retribution for the Mumbai bombings this summer by hardline Hindu elements in India? It would not be the first time Muslims were killed by Hindus.

Anyway, India immediately blamed Pakistan but that doesn't make sense to me on the surface. Sure I can spool out conspiracy theories, but I don't want to walk that path yet.

Right after 9/11 "The Onion" took on the task of finding humor in those terrible events, and they did a great job. I remember though that one headline they had on the page jumped out at me: "Tavis Smiley Announces 'There's a New Nigger In Town'". I'm immediately conditioned to not type that word, much less say it out loud, which is why I guess it was so funny. Part of humor is the shocking of the audience with the unexpected.

But as the saying goes "Many a truth is spoken in jest". Given the recent spat of slurs against South Asians, and people freaking out about South Asians on planes, it would seem that the Onion's joke was just another example of truth in jest. What slurs? Well, Hillary Clinton's joke about Mahatma Ghandi owning a gas station in St. Louis, or Joseph Biden's joke about needing an Indian accent to walk into a Dunkin Donuts or 7/11, George Allen's calling a staffer from his opponent's campaign a macaca (monkey) because the staffer's of South Indian descent, or now Sen. Conrad Burns of Montana stating that terrorists "drive taxis by day and kill at night".

I'm certainly not claiming that Indians in this country face the kind of endemic racism that blacks did during the Jim Crow era, but then, I'm not going to claim any amount of information about how much racism they're subjected to, since I'm whitey the blue-eyed devil son of Yacub.

But when I say there's a new nigger ( I feel creepy writing it ) in town, I mean how socially acceptable it's becoming to discriminate against South Asians, so much so that politicans who would never dream of standing up and saying "Barack Obama, didn't he run a soul food stand in Georgia?" or "Who is this fellow over here from my opponent's campaign...what's his name? Kunta Kinte? Welcome to America boy!" will routinely put their foot in their mouths about South Asians. Imagine the shitstorm that would blow up if Dennis Hastert went out and pulled at the corners of his eyes and said "You have to look like this to get around San Francisco these days".

But it isn't just the politicians who voice these sentimanets. Lots of people I know will say "All Indians are terroriststs" or "This software project's screwed up because it was done by a bunch of those Indians". Witness my friend Scott Manning who wants to fault Raed Jarrar as the guilty party because he wanted to wear a shirt with Arabic script on it onto a plane. Per Scott's reasoning, his act of merely wearing the shirt puts him in the wrong.

Even before 9/11 it was common for my friends to make fun of the Sikh guys who ran the 7/11 down the street from our house, but since 9/11, it seems like it's become culturally acceptable, almost...expected...

"The Onion" ended up being more right than they probably expected. Which is a shame. No group deserves to be mocked, derided, or singled out as has happened, be them South Asian, Chinese, Latino, etc.