Who the Fuck is Blocking My YouTube?!

Sometimes courts do things that make sense and sometimes courts are just completely free of the real world and logic. It is like a judge has an LSD flashback during a hearing and just loses all sense of what is pragmatic and puts on his legal blinders. Late last week, here in Brazil, YouTube was blocked by one of the biggest telecoms via a court order. The basis for this action was both controversial and legally questionable, but it was also short-sighted and useless.

The story begins with a couple having a little hanky panky on a public beach in Spain. Someone saw them in the throes of lust/ love and caught it on a camera. If this couple had been my wife and me the story would have ended there – my wife and I ending up as the butt of some stranger’s joke with his friends as he showed them pictures of his vacation at the beach. Unfortunately for me and many others, the couple in question had a certain celebrity status and the video of their exploits on the beach ended up on various Web sites including YouTube.

Now, I will not name the couple here. Not because I give a rat’s ass about their privacy (they gave that up when they chose to pursue celebrity status), but because I do not want to give them any ounce more of free press than they have already milked out of this already. (Note: However, I suffer from no delusions that even one person is reading this blog.) Be that as it may, this couple, let’s call them Ms. A and Mr. B, decided to sue YouTube in Brazilian court (they are both Brazilian citizens) to block access to the site as long as the site “allowed” its users to upload and view the racy video.

First, in this day and age, it is absolutely unimaginable that any celebrity – big or small – would be so stupid as to believe that they could have sex on a public beach and not run the risk of not only being seen, but being recorded for all time on Joe Blo’s cell phone. Second, it amazes me that any judge worth his weight in shit would grant a request to block access to a Web page that has broken no law whatsoever.

Let’s take the first point now. Any person who has sex in a public place is asking for trouble. If that person is famous, the chance that someone will notice and record your actions increases exponentially. So any celeb as stupid as that deserves no pity at all. All they deserve is our derision and ridicule for being so fucking stupid about their fucking. Period. End of story.

And now the judge… What a moron. There is no way on Earth that any entity, governmental or not, can possibly enforce the Internet for things that are almost universally illegal like child porn or murder videos. It is simply idiotic to believe that blocking the access of a few honest and blissfully ignorant Web surfers from a wonderful site like YouTube would solve anything at all. But such a judge does indeed exist in our lovely South American country.

Thankfully, this was all put to rest today as access to YouTube was again opened up by a more pragmatic and intelligent judge. But I cannot help but think that this whole episode was nothing more than a low-brow publicity ploy for a couple with waning popularity.

Piece of advice to Ms. A and Mr. B. – next time you want to get busy, do us all a favor and GET A ROOM!

You Can Judge an Idiot by His Favorite Cover

Because of the above title, this post may appear to be a part two to the last one but it actually touches a slightly different aspect of the same point – religious freedom in America. While the last post touched on the freedom to practice religion, this post will address the freedom of public officials to practice moral consistency in their religion.

This week, Keith Ellison D-Minn., the first Muslim in the U.S. House, said he will swear his oath of office on the Qur'an and not on the Bible. This has caused a small uproar among the hypocritical and radical right who spout their beliefs like so much vomit after a bender. These same religious-right yutzes who profess a profound belief in their God and often claim that they are victims of religious persecution (i.e, they cannot pray in schools, they cannot have the Ten Commandments in their courthouses, etc.) would turn around and persecute Mr. Ellison simply because he believes in a different religion than Christianity.

First of all, the oath is not even necessary to take office. Some presidents have even passed on giving an oath – Franklin Pierce and Herbert Hoover come to mind. So let's not make this into something bigger than it should be. In fact, it should not even be news.

But some people need to shout anytime their organized little world is upset. For example…

Dennis Prager:
"When all elected officials take their oaths of office with their hands on the very same book, they all affirm that some unifying value system underlies American civilization. If Keith Ellison is allowed to change that, he will be doing more damage to the unity of America and to the value system that has formed this country than the terrorists of 9-11."

Wow! What a crock of shite! Does this Prager guy really believe his own drivel? Doing damage to the value system? I fail to see your point Mr. Prager. There is simply no way that Mr. Ellison could harm the American value system by being an individual and standing up for his beliefs. In fact, I can think of nothing that is more inherently within the spirit of what America stands for than what Mr. Ellison is doing.

More snippets from Mr. Prager's tirade of tyranny…
"… imagine a racist elected to Congress. Would they allow him to choose Hitler's "Mein Kampf," the Nazis' bible, for his oath?"

Whoa Nellie! Hey, Mr. Pragermeister! Let me let you in on a little secret: racism is not a recognized religion. Therefore, it is not that someone can just choose "their favorite book." The Qur'an is the "Muslim Bible." It is not some manifesto written by some fascist (which you are close to being yourself). However, to take this to the extreme, I would say this – if you want to take an oath on "Mein Kampf," go ahead. I would bet that an elected official would not last long in office if he were to do such a racist thing. And if he did stay in office, it would only be because his racist views represent his constituents. Or maybe Mr. Prager does not like our system of government.

For people like Mr. Prager to even remotely suggest that all must conform to mainstream behavior and actions is a slap in the face to all those who have died for the USA and is an affront to the visionaries who founded our country all those years ago.

Shame on you Mr. Prager and all those who would have us stoop down to kiss all YOU hold dear. I don't remember any one person being the "decider" in these matters. Indeed, no one ever should be.

Crawl back into your hole hate monger.

You Can Judge a Quran by Its Cover

History is full of examples of discrimination and over reactions. Today, being a Muslim on and airplane might just get you nowhere. Last week in my hometown of Minneapolis, a group of imams was asked to get off a flight because of “suspicious behavior” before and during boarding. I believe this was a case of paranoia and ignorance at its ugly best.

The facts are still somewhat sketchy, but here is what the passengers and some officials are saying.

1) The imams prayed before getting on the plane.
2) The imams shouted, “Allah, Allah!” before boarding.
3) The imams asked for seat belt extensions after boarding.

Wow! I am surprised they were not sent to Gitmo on the next CIA flight out!

I cannot be the only one who sees how ugly this is. Let me address these points one by one in an attempt to illustrate just how ridiculous this whole thing is.

1) The imams prayed before getting on the plane.
Muslims are required to pray 5 times per day. These prayer must be carried out in such a way that it would not be possible to hide the fact they are praying. So the contention that they “could have been more discreet” about it is crap. Americans pride themselves on their freedoms. Our nation was partially founded by people who were escaping religious persecution for Christ sake! Oh how hypocritical we have become as a people. Ben Franklin and Thomas Jefferson are surely rolling in their graves.

2) The imams shouted, “Allah, Allah!” before boarding.
Again I will hit the religious freedom chord. Also, I do not believe for one second that any real terrorist would be calling such attention to himself while preparing to commit a suicide bombing. Come one people! Get a fuckin’ grip!

3) The imams asked for seat belt extensions after boarding.
This is one thing I do not pretend to understand or have an answer to, but I can say I find it pretty harmless. Now if they had asked for extra sharp plastic knives or maybe some electric wiring…

I understand that this whole scene may have been disconcerting for the white-bread Midwesterners who were getting on the plane. And I also think that a part of the reason the imams did this was to see how far they could go. Maybe the whole thing was just a publicity stunt – that is a distinct possibility. But regardless of what they said or did they had just as much right to be on that plane as the paranoid non-Muslims did, and the imams were deprived of that right.

I guess the whole thing boils down to this…

If this had been a group of Christian missionaries singing and praying before getting on the plane… If they had shouted, “Jesus, Jesus!”… If these same Christians had asked for seat belt extensions for no apparent reason… Well, it is pretty obvious to me that we would never have even heard of this whole event.

So if Christians and Jews can do it; if Buddhists and Taoists could do it; if Pagans (well maybe not Pagans, we hate them too) – why can’t Muslims? Because some of their brethren are blowing themselves up. So we lump them all together into one group. It is as simple as that.

History repeats itself. 65 years ago, America lumped all the Japanese into one group and it meant a loss of freedom for thousands of people all over the U.S. (Side note for future topic: We did NOT put Germans into camps – only Japanese people.)

It appears that our paranoia is rearing its ugly head again and it’s focused squarely on the Muslims. No check that – people who look and act like Muslims. Come on you imams out there, tone it down! Shave those beards. Wear our clothes. Speak more English. Be less yourselves and more like us. We will like you better and let you ride on our planes.

I would bet anything that the passengers of the Mayflower heard the same rhetoric from Europeans in the early 17th century. I am glad the pilgrims of those colonial years did what was right and stood up for themselves. I am sad that their ancestors seem to be so ignorant of their own past.

And the oppressed shall become the oppressors.

Post-Election Hangover

Sorry to be so absent.

The elections in both Brazil and the U.S. captured so much of my attention over the past months that I needed a break from my brain.

Now I am back. And with a tasty treat coming up in a few minutes.

To Have One's Cake and Eat It Too

I like movies. There is one called, “Get Shorty” with John Travolta that is particularly good. In one scene, Travolta is set up by the local crime lord. He is given a key to an airport locker that has $500k in it and told to retrieve it. But before Travolta opens the locker he notices DEA all over the place and decides not to open the locker at all. On his way out of the airport he is accosted by the crime lord’s thug and told to give the key back since he did not open the locker. Travolta can’t believe his ears. The trick did not work and now they want him to give the key back?! “I don’t know how you guys are not all dead!” Travolta says incredulously.

Now we see a similar situation with the Bush administration regarding CIA interrogation and suspected terrorists (see link).

The story is incredible to me. Let’s say the CIA is interrogating an innocent man. After waterboarding him, using sleep deprivation, and basically leaving him a psychological mess, the Bush admin and the CIA do not want him to reveal their interrogation tactic to anyone. Imagine it! You are innocent. You are interrogated over a period of months – maybe years. After all that, instead of getting an apology, you are given an NDA to sign so that you don’t tell anyone what was done to you. Fuckin’ unbelievable!

The argument the Justice department is using is that disclosure of questioning techniques would better prepare terrorists for when they are captured and thereby cost American lives. Hah!

How the hell does the Justice Dept. plan to keep these former prisoners from talking? Are they going to follow them forever, tap their phones, infiltrate their circle of friends? I mean really!

If the Bush admin persists in violating of human rights when interrogating suspects through torture, the least they could do is accept when they made a mistake and let the guy go. By trying to make the former prisoner also stay silent about what happened to him in prison, this administration is stepping over the line of logic.

It is pragmatically impossible to make sure NONE of these people talk. It would be simply stupid to expect anything of the kind. But it is typical of this administration.

We should expect more crap before long from the endless stream of shit that flows from the production line of the Bush gang. I for one am not looking forward to two more years of this.

The Land of the Touchy

After moving to Brazil, I noticed many differences in culture and habits from what I was accustomed to in the U.S. One of the things that really pleased me about my new land was how the Brazilians did not have this nutty obsession with political correctness that has held America in its grip for over a decade now.

Don’t get me wrong. Some degree of political correctness is simply good manners. After all, I feel more comfortable using the word, “Chinese,” than, “Chink,” and I am pretty sure that most Chinese people would prefer the former to the latter. However, not being able to use the word, “Oriental,” seems a bit much to me, and I think that is a case where things get taken too far.

Another such case recently popped up on the Web (see link), and though it did not surprise me, it did disappoint me.

The story is about a police chief in Florida who, using a memo, chastised his entire 80-person staff to lose weight and get fit. Because he used the term, “Jelly Belly” in the title of his memo, it caused a furor and the chief was fired. Fired! For having the guts to call out his whole police force (Gee, d’ya think it is possible that they are overweight?) to be in good physical condition he was canned just because he used the term, “jelly belly.” Jesus H. Christ, someone needs to get a reality check.

I remember I once was in a seminar that dealt with sales and management problems back in the U.S. During the second day, we were finishing up an activity where we had broken down into sub-groups of 10 people to work out some ideas to solve a given problem. After all the groups had finished, the group leaders stood up one by one to summarize what his or her group had discussed. The group next to ours had a leader who was a man in his early 50’s. He stood and started to recount who had given certain ideas within his group. Then he said, referring to a woman in a red dress who was in her early 30’s, “This girl here had an idea to…” As the seminar leader moved on to the next group leader, he was interrupted by the, woman in the red dress, who stood up. She was crying and said that she had been offended by the word, “girl,” that the older man had used. The older man apologized, but the woman later asked to be reassigned to a different group.

What the fuck is wrong with people? Have we lost our collective sense of humor, or worse, our sense of reason?

If a boss asks his staff to shape up and asks them if they have “jelly bellies” it may not be politically correct, but he may only trying to make the subject lighter. If someone calls a woman a girl, that may not be appropriate, but that does not mean it came of bad intentions.

Maybe it is time America as a whole started to pay more attention to things that make a real difference in society instead of dwelling so much on semantics. Of course, I am not saying we should all just kick back and start letting people call us bad names and disrespect each other. I am simply suggesting that the pendulum of good manners has swung a bit too far to one side and it is time to relax and really communicate with each other.

Take a lude and enjoy the ride, people.

Freedom is as Freedom Does

Americans like to talk about their freedom as the cornerstone of democracy. Indeed, political and religious freedoms were a big part of the reason people flocked to the New World throughout the 17th and 18th centuries and beyond. However, to an ex-pat like me, the word, “freedom” is defined differently depending on where you are and what your interests are. Here are a few of the differences between freedom in the U.S. and freedom in Brazil based on my 9 years in the latter.

In the U.S., freedom of speech is a main point used by the press and by political extremists alike. The freedom of speech is guaranteed to all people in the U.S. in the Bill of Rights and has probably been invoked as much as any other part of the Constitution in history.

In Brazil, freedom of speech is limited on certain occasions but no one complains about it. For example, it is illegal to use racist speech. So if you say that black people are inferior, you can be imprisoned. Most Brazilians support this restriction on free speech, but Americans would most likely not feel the same.

In the U.S., freedom of action is more limited than in Brazil when it comes to some personal habits. For example, it is illegal to drink a beer in public in most places in the U.S. It is also not legal to sell liquor after certain hours or in certain locations in most cities around the country.

Most Brazilians would laugh at that lack of freedom and mock Americans who brag about how free the U.S. is. Here in Brazil, if you want to buy a bottle of whiskey at 4am on a Sunday morning, you need only walk to the nearest gas station to do so. If you want to drink a can of beer as you walk down the sidewalk – no problem. As long as you are not causing a disturbance, you are free to follow your adult nature.

So I would argue that, for people who are not politically marginalized or religiously abnormal, the U.S. is not an exceptionally free place to live. Your actions are quite restricted when it comes to daily activities of an adult nature.

So when someone calls America, “The Land of the Free,” I snicker a bit because I see things from a different angle. Give me the freedom to drink when and where I want, screw whomever I want, and wear only a thong while walking on the sidewalk if I so choose. I’ll take those things over calling a black man the N-word any day.

A Means for the Mean

This week, Dick Cheney, possibly the most influential Vice President in U.S. history, was quoted as saying that dunking a prisoner in water as a means to getting information was, “a no-brainer.” This represents the first time that the Bush camp has openly admitted its stance on torture – it is OK if it saves American lives. While that may fly well with the Neocons in Washington, it does not with the rest of the world.

For more than a year now, the topic of what represents torture and what does not has been in the press and the Bush administration has been in the camp pushing for a loosening of the laws defining torture. Slowly, stories of torture of Gitmo detainees and other, darker reports of those kept in secret CIA prisons came to light over the past 18 months. These reports shook many Americans out of their egocentric slumber and called opposition leaders to the floor to stand up for prisoners’ rights – not a very popular political stance, but a very correct moral stance. As more stories became public (combined with the already famous Abu Graib prison pictures), people started realizing that Americans were indeed torturing prisoners in the name of Democracy and freedom. Hypocrisy apparently knows no bounds.

So the official Bush policy has been that they are against torture, and that what has been done to prisoners thus far is simply interrogation within the law. At the same time as they have said this, the Neocons have pushed for less strict laws dictating what torture really is. So basically, we are now trying to say that what was considered torture in the past should not really be considered torture today. What a load of bullshit.

Finally, with Cheney’s comments, the real colors of the Neocons are showing. The spin squad has been out in force claiming that the VP was not referring to waterboarding when he talked about, “dunking.” For those of you who don’t know, waterboarding is considered one of the most effective means of torture. It is the act of immersing a prisoner until he believes he will actually drown and then reviving him. Then repeating the process until the subject breaks. It is said that most victims cannot hold out for more than a few seconds. (For a more complete definition see this link.)

Only an idiot would actually believe that Cheney was not referring to waterboarding. Dunking would be nothing more than a refreshing experience for a prisoner. There would be no reason for Cheney, or anyone else, to talk about dunking if they did not mean waterboarding. Furthermore, the term, “dunking” when referring to torture is even worse than waterboarding. It was used on suspected witches and meant that the suspect would either drown by not admitting their guilt or admitting their guilt and being executed. (See same link as above.)

This is just one more example to show how low this administration has sunk in moral terms. Unfortunately, what the American government does reflects on all of us, regardless of our political leanings (as any Ex-Pat can attest).

The question is a simple one. Either you are for or against torture as a national policy. If you are for it, you accept the fact that your people will also be tortured by their captors and that it will be legal to do so. I, for one, do not want to go down that road. Individuals will always torture in times of war – it is inevitable. It is quite another thing though to have that act justified by government and law. There is no other stance to take than that of total commitment to avoiding torture of prisoners. That many not be the Bush Way, but it is the American Way.