chocolate, NASA, war manipulation

The new TIME magazine (Aug 1, 2005) has a tiny article about Bill Clinton increasing efforts to cut down the fast food industry's influence on chlidhood obesity. A statistic Clinton points out is that new generations are to have an actually lower life expectancy than prior ones. It's scary to imagine that our culture machine is giving us more and more evidence that it's killing us (forget fast food, what about high decibel capable music fanaticism And, has anyone ever studied the health risks of all the wireless tech we're being exposed to these days? Wi-fi for the office and the home; blue-tooth for the headsets; XM satellite radio anyone?; television signal broadcasts; and of course our mobiles we can't live without But that's another topic all together...).

Clinton forecasts necessary changes in the entire menu-creation-planning of fast fooders, saying that unfortunately his ideas are, "easy to state and hard to achieve." I like the hold-backs, unlike Bush's Jan 2004 'pre-state of the union' Mars speech, where he says, " This will be a great and unifying mission for NASA, and we know that you'll achieve it. I have directed Administrator O'Keefe to review all of NASA's current space flight and exploration activities and direct them toward the goals I have outlined." So the mars mission will be achieved then. I don't quiet understand why we must often base our future goals on tragedies of our past. The two big goals I have on my mind are fighting terrorism and going to space. In the same speech from above, the President says that we must aim to our country's space goals in order to commemorate those who lost their lives in the Columbia crash. Am I a terrible person to say that he's squeezing everything possible from their deaths? Here's an excerpt:

The loss of the Space Shuttle Columbia was less than one year ago. Since the beginning of our space program, America has lost 23 astronauts, and one astronaut from an allied nation -- men and women who believed in their mission and accepted the dangers. As one family member said, "The legacy of Columbia must carry on -- for the benefit of our children and yours." The Columbia's crew did not turn away from the challenge, and neither will we.

The legacy must carry on. After some three more sentences, that's the end of the speech, so we see that he uses one of our nation's devastations in order to bring us to action for the future. The example which overshadows the Columbia crash is of course 9-11. We are often directed to look proudly into the wind whenever we.... see someone with a 'Remember 9-11' bumper sticker or t-shirt. What better way to go through your day than by dipping our thoughts back four years every time we see a piece of manufactured mass-distributed mass-disturbing piece of memorabilia-tear-jerker-media? Are we expected to look back every time? Do you gain a little bit of strength whenever you walk past 9-11 hats on the tourist shops of 34th street? We are living in a culture that makes money at the expectation that we should submit to sorrow. It's mass manipulation.

I find it moral to pay tribute to those who have passed on, sure, but why try to, not only make money off of it, forget that for now. The bigger question is, why use it to plan out a course for our future? Over a thousand US soldiers have now lost their lives to the war in Iraq, but we can't say that, we must say that they have given their lives for the effort of the Iraq war. Moving on, ... we are to use this now to continue to accept the lack of deadline setting by the Administration. Let's even forget for now that we're in a bit of a tough situation with this war and that it is a very tough issue to resolve however way you look at it. Why, beyond all this, can't we build our future based on re-enforcing successes of say, world cooperation initiatives, though few, or even US achievements. Not accepting this is trusting that we don't need another tragedy to take us yet farther


Going back to the Clinton article though, he also says he'll start a partnership with the AHA by talking to kids, but that just talking won't do much, becaus the food industry must make the changes that will have any sort of effect. Sure, it'll be a long process.

bombs away

It is old news, but the context today has North Korea with live nuclear weapons, as North Korea's Vice Foreign Minister Kim Gye Gwan from North Korea admitted, as on a pbs.org show transcript on US- North Korean affairs. The UN had devoted the month of May of this year to try to come to an agreement on policies concerning disarmament and existing nuclear programs, as part of the "Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty Review Conference". The Secretary General, Kofi Annan must have known how hard it would be to see his vision through of a "system of collective security for the 21st century" when he started the conference off, at one point remarking that "the consequences of failure are too great to aim for anything less" (from a transcript of his speech). The US' administration would not reaffirm previous claims to disarmament, but still attacked North Korea and Iran's nuclear arms programs.

We're living in an extension of the Cold War, except now, nuclear fears live with more and more countries joining the nuke race. You have to stop and consider the world's states, from a Martian point of view, to ask why the bigger countries who have the WMDs feel they are so much better at controlling their use than those countries that are just beginning to harvest them. A mid May UN press briefing raised the issue of how the US could possibly pressure start-ups like Iran to quit their nuclear programs after what they have done in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The US has been using its non-nuclear WMDs in Iraq, making its people's lives a living hell since the very day the war officially started, March 20th 2003. The war's mission had the perfect title, ''Operation Iraqi Freedom,' telling the US people that the goal in bombing Baghdad was to free its people. The Iraqis obviously did not understand that in order to be free they must first die (or maybe we are warping another Islamic premise here? Hey aren't terrorists just Muslims who want to serve Allah by killing us so that they may quickly ascend to paradise? How could they do that? Let's bomb them). The point is that despite 9 - 11, the USS Cole bombing of 2000, the US Embassy bombings of 1998 (which didn't happen on US soil anyway), or even the anthrax scare, we still do not really know what it must be like to live in a true war zone. We can only see snapshots of people dying in Iraq, see the daily body counts of daily 'insurgency labeled' bombings, or witness the names of our own deceased soldiers as they pass down our television screens when our networks feel like making us cry.

That other world is full of terrorists who simply want to kill us and no one knows why. As our Commander in Chief has stated in his 2002 State of the Union address,

Iraq continues to flaunt its hostility toward America and to support terror. The Iraqi regime has plotted to develop anthrax, and nerve gas, and nuclear weapons for over a decade. This is a regime that has already used poison gas to murder thousands of its own citizens -- leaving the bodies of mothers huddled over their dead children. This is a regime that agreed to international inspections -- then kicked out the inspectors. This is a regime that has something to hide from the civilized world.

States like these, and their terrorist allies, constitute an axis of evil, arming to threaten the peace of the world. By seeking weapons of mass destruction, these regimes pose a grave and growing danger. They could provide these arms to terrorists, giving them the means to match their hatred. They could attack our allies or attempt to blackmail the United States. In any of these cases, the price of indifference would be catastrophic.

We must stop them because they threaten world peace. They should have listened to him then, three years ago. They should have known we had to prove ourselves in combat. I truly believe that we are the agressors and that we have allowed countries such as Iraq or Afghanistan to aggregate too much resentment towards us. It is blowing up in our faces, and we can only have speeches like the last reference to put a positive (?) front on our actions. (It doesn't end here, and it did not start with Iraq or the Persian Gulf wars. Historians will tell you the story of 19th and 20th c colonialism, of Euro-US domination of the rest of the globe, as well as the world wars that shaped our times and the political angsts that shaped the times of the world wars. There are no easy solutions. What we have today is an accumulation of way too many issues to be blamed on one president. But we must live in the now, stop ignoring continents like Africa where disease is still a killer threat, and stop creating a US public that is fed by simple speeches that represent our world as a good/evil dichotomy.)

Kinsey, the documentary

This movie answers questions that were asked in the 1920s as a documentary should, but also points to what has yet to be developed on. It shows how uninformed people were about their own biologies, about what knowing we take for granted today, but also begs questions in today's times about when homosexuality will be accepted. Only last year, after all, our president supported the outrageous Marriage Protection Amendment which attempted to mar the efforts of states like Vermont where gay marriage civil unions have been legalized. I think any amendment that limits as opposed to expands peoples rights is outrageous. But our politics were put to shame when former New Jersey governor James McGreevey resigned after he announced that he was gay. I do understand that this is similar to Clinton's adultery, since McGreevey had an affair with one of his employees, but it remains that as the only publicly gay US governor to date, by resigning he has only made gay people look bad, unfit for politics at least.

Eighty years ago the movie depicts that married couples thought cunnilingus caused cancer. But it also includes the story of a man who was a sexaholic and also a pedophile, suggesting that this man who has had sex with some 600 pre-adolescent boys is pushing the understanding of the man who has been pushing everyone elses'. In this sense, (being slightly biased here), a common morality is addressed that says that because pedophilia includes actions that are against other people's wills, it just isn't acceptable behavior.

But that doesn't mean there is any definition of normal. People Kinsey's team interviews ask,
"do you find my answers typical...am I normal?" We cannot pretend to be the same, putting the ones who are different to shame. No matter how hard you may try to explain outloud that you are not biased, you will fail quickly if you had to answer the questions about your feelings immediately, such as on the IAT. That's understandable, because broadcast networks still find it necessary to enforce ratios in the races we see on tv. There are movies that explicitly mock the idea of the tocken black guy or the stupid fat guy such as Not Another Teen Movie (haven't seen it yet, but the idea is there). But the truth is we are different. Time has an article in the July 4th issue, "Suspicious Minds" by Paul Coates, that presents Centers for Disease Control's findings from Jan 2004 that blacks accounted for about half of new AIDS cases in the US while only representing 13% of the population. That may be a bit random, but it says that yes we cannot be treated for diseases the same way. We are medically different, and it's also common sense to say we are different in all other aspects such as the Kinsey movie's people's individual sexuality.

At one point Kinsey says, '...everyone is different, but people want to be the same and in trying to be part of the group, they are willing to betray their own natures.' This is like suggesting that actions are more powerful when done in groups. If you don't want to stand out, you agree with the general consensus. Even in the movie itself you see how finger votes of only a few (see Law of the few section from Gladwell's Tipping Point) of the Rockefeller Foundation board members quickly convince the remaining members to complete the unanimity. So in real life, when nobody is talking about issues of women who are frigid and can never orgasm (which Kinsey believed was a falsity) or premarital sex, you don't want to even think of suggesting a digression.

I found love to be left open ended in this movie. Kinsey says, 'the only way to study sex...is to strip away everything but its physiological functions,' but then the movie later leaves Kinsey presenting his thoughts about love, saying that though it cannot be measured, but it is very involved in the threads of our relationships, that it is an (aptly) immeasurably significant binding force between people. Make of that what you will yourself, because I saw no good suggestions in the movie. Today orgies or less inhibited multiple partner sex relations are still taboo, but I think Kinsey really was suggesting that monogomy is sexually boring and lovers can still be (note hypocritical word usage) FAITHful to their partners if they love each other. Well, in my mind we are not free chimps, but our society tends to stamp marriage or further, having children, as an action that ends the two partners' freedoms. They are unconditionally bound to their spouses. I don't have a real say in this yet, but I can guess that marriage is a tough decision to make and that's why, Henry VIII worked so hard to separate from the Roman Catholic Church to get divorces legal, I think (although for him it was a royal thing and it was a bit more problematic if you wanted an heir, but thats not the point).

I see, again, the broad aim of this movie to weed out common behaviors among people that aren't so common in the public eye. Sure this movie is about common problems in the bedroom, but when Kinsey says, "everyone's crime is no crime at all," this reaches much farther for me. You cannot be judged as wrong if say such and such number of people believe the fighting in Iraq is not a purely idealistic democratization campaign. More issues later.

I just have to point out a piece of humor in how I think the writers of the movie are mocking current trend of making documentary-style films such as the complain-a-lot variety of the McDonald's Supersize Me film or Moore's Fahrenheit, or the more tributary Ray, Cinderella Man, or the Kinsey movie itself. Kinsey said to reporters in the hallway, when they asked him if he had plans for making his first book into a movie, that it was a very stupid idea. Well I don't think this movie was a stupid idea, and if it spreads his ideas far enough, the real Kinsey probably wouldn't think so either.