Email your representatives. It probably won’t stop it, but let them know you’re angry. They’re about to write a blank check for huge, unwieldy, inefficient, and bloated corporations practically held hostage by the UAW … held hostage in their private jets, that is. This is preposterous. Let your reps know what you think. I just did.

“You know you’ll see it anyway.”

Will not. Won’t even watch the trailer. The outrageous stunts of the last couple of films, including and most especially the death of Data and his oh-so-stupid replacement by an oh-so-stupid lookalike, years ago turned me off to any more Trek. The glory days of the shows with continuity and similar look and just enough recall of the old show, i.e. the TNG, DS9, and Voyager triumvirate, are gone. And frankly, even without that, I’m just not into prequels, actor changing, and most especially not into Sylar as Spock. Forget it. I’m not even going to watch the trailer. I’m just not as easy-going a person as Lileks, who seems to take the new manifestations of things in stride even as he meticulously catalogues and dreams of the old. If you can’t bring it back, and you can’t, let it die in peace. And if you try too hard, may you die violently, instead, new Trek, after one spectacularly failed flick. I know, I know: Dream on.

As a kid trying to understand the scale of human civilization, I once observed to my father that our culture seemed to act like a pendulum, swinging back and forth between the two ends of the liberal/conservative spectrum. In my limited understanding of zeitgeists some of which were before my time, I cited the supposed characters of the various decades: the fifties, staid and proper; the sixties, loose and vulgar; the seventies, trying to recover from the sixties; the eighties–well, my pattern ended there because I was living in it and I couldn’t see anything so very decadent about jellies and stirrup pants. Dad said no, that isn’t the way it works: The civilization presses towards the loose and irresponsible end of the spectrum until it collapses.

I wasn’t completely wrong, I know, but my image was wrong. Closer to correct is that various people and forces work to hold back the tide flowing to the irresponsible end and sometimes succeed in briefly damming it. Some people seem to believe the dam has now forever burst, or if it hasn’t already, it will as soon as Obama’s economic policies are enacted and turn bigger-than-ever swaths of the electorate into dependents.

As the previous post shows, I’m cautiously pessimistic. But I wonder if, even if our time has not come now, will it, irrefutably, inexorably, and inevitably? Can Western civilizations actually collapse any more? Or do they, as Peter Hitchens says, subside into the Third World?

Taylor tanks for Obama, like Billy and Bruce.

Advice for stars endorsing Obama: Say as little as possible about why your man is The Man. Please:

“And I just feel so good about seeing Obama present himself, and people getting to know who he is, and how he responds, how he works. I have a huge amount of hope.”

Come on. There’s also this gem:

“I am an Obama guy. I’m sure we don’t know the entire John McCain, we don’t know the entire Barack Obama. That’s what the campaign really needs to be about. We need to know who these guys are.”

Two things: 1) It would have been ridiculous, back in the day of “We don’t really know Obama,” to claim the same of McCain, who’s been on the national scene for decades and has run for president already. If you don’t know enough about it him it’s because you aren’t paying attention. 2) That claim is over even about Obama. We know as much as we need to: He favors socialist economic policies, tells generalistic lies about what caused the finance crisis, couldn’t see outside the bubble of his Chicago pals to know that his relationship with Ayers doesn’t play well with the rest of us, and uses race as a disingenuous club while having sat under a man who is certainly, at the very least, the most racist and flat-out craziest preacher I’ve ever seen or heard of, and I’ve seen and heard some fiery Southern Baptists in my time, people. That is “who this guy is,” James. You know I love you, and it’s certainly not going to stop me from singing “Sweet Baby James” to my son at night or keeping “Frozen Man” among my top favorite songs, but good grief. Just come out and say you’re in favor of rich people paying higher taxes and that Obama’s relationship baggage doesn’t bother you. Something wrong with that?

Allah thinks it’s refreshingly honest when they don’t bother to talk about issues, and it may be, but it also makes me think either A) they’re just not too bright or B) they absolutely think we’re not too bright. Probably some truth in both of those, but why embrace them?

H/t: J.

Reading this makes me uneasily rethink my disagreement with something like this.

Otherwise I might be upset.

…to be a Palin fan.

Not so much to be a Cubs fan.

Heart-ache. Or maybe voice-ache.

I don’t know who’s off yet; part one of my voting strategy seems to have come off, as Rocco is saved and I’m positive it was my eleven votes that did it. Positive!

Okay, now the important stuff. This is the first time I’ve ever had to a) look at moving footage of Jessica Simpson as opposed to still photos; b) listen to her sing.

She is atrocious. Yes, I realize I’m figuring out what many other people knew several years ago, but this is what comes of being a 33-year-old mom who keeps up rather languidly with pop culture. Okay, fine, I never really kept up with the pop culture that supposedly, to watch the media cover it, enthralls 80 percent of the American population. I watch/listen to what I like and know the basic peripherals about people like Britney. Or ‘N Sync. Or Jessica.

She is atrocious. She sings flat–out of tune, for you nonmusic types. And it seems she’s trying to compensate for that blatant shortcoming by affecting a style that is just as hideous. French-kissing the mike, cracking her voice like the worst possible combination of a country wailer and an alt-pop edgything, and wearing a one-armed bat-gown that, if it doesn’t get fugged, I ought to know the reason why. Try watching a flat singer who is jerking her head and torso in wretchedly unnatural movements while opening her mouth as wide as possible and all the while inwardly shrieking, “Where is your ARM?!” and you’ll have some idea of the crazy that goes on in my TV room after The Bean is asleep.

I wouldn’t have watched at all, only Cheryl and Maks were dancing rumba and Oh-My-God.

So now I’m letting the TiVo buffer accumulate so that I can fast-forward through any more garbage, like the Macy’s Stars of “Dance” performance. Dancing with the Stars amazes me sometimes with the risks it is willing to take for what one would suppose is a family-friendly show. The Macy’s thing tonight was an homage to S&M that would have been so lewd if it weren’t just so tacky. The amazing part is that nobody on the set seems to notice; they suck it in like it’s a football game until I think that I’m watching something different from what the studio audience is watching. Bread and Circuses. I love DwtS, but occasionally they seem to be trying to sanitize some very crappy stuff. Or just showcasing crappy artists. Like the Jonas Brothers. The only thing that made their flat, over-stylized stylings bearable was … it wasn’t, really. Just the dancing. This is what comes of loving a show that caters to that supposed 80 percent.

Time to find out who’s goin’ home … Hallelujah, Kim’s gone. Don’t worry, Mark, your dad won’t be the only Ballas on the floor for long. I hope. Ding-dong, Kim’s gone, we didn’t suffer through The Simpson in vain.

…by learning that P.J. O’Rourke believes in God. He also has a malignant hemorrhoid, learning of which does not brighten my day. I hope he soon recovers the structural integrity of his nethers.

H/t Anne the Lifepundit.

Woman arrested after stalking a guy who was her “boyfriend” in “Second Life” … and who broke it off after he met her in person.

They’re only about fifteen years behind the times. We were doing that stuff in college.

Getting involved online, and breaking it off when we met in person, I mean.

Not stalking outside people’s houses with stun guns and duct tape.

At least, not me.

I swear.

Via Ace’s headlines.

A post on the Beatles. I don’t know what this blog is coming to. I blame SarahK, whose ongoing saga “We Can Wiirk It Out” has got the Beatles stuck in my head today, much to my distress.

I dislike the Beatles. I like individual songs here and there (“I Will” leading that category by several lenths), but in general I find them (the group) overblown and overrated. On the “overrated” charge, I am willing to concede that, being far too young to have been around for the furor they caused when they were coming up, I probably cannot appreciate by how far they were the first of their kind. And I certainly have not missed the fact that a lot of my favorite musicians cite them as influences. So I don’t want to be ungrateful. But sometimes their sheer pompousness really gets to me. Have you ever really listened to the words of “We Can Work It Out?”

Try to see it my way,
Do I have to keep on talking till I can’t go on?
While you see it your way,
Run the risk of knowing that our love may soon be gone.
We can work it out,
We can work it out.

Think of what you’re saying.
You can get it wrong and still you think that it’s all right.
Think of what I’m saying,
We can work it out and get it straight, or say good night.
We can work it out,
We can work it out.

Life is very short, and there’s no time
For fussing and fighting, my friend.
I have always thought that it’s a crime,
So I will ask you once again.

Try to see it my way,
Only time will tell if I am right or I am wrong.
While you see it your way
There’s a chance that we may fall apart before too long.
We can work it out,
We can work it out.

Wow. We can work it out, as long as “work it out” means you immediately drop your POV and position and embrace mine. Otherwise we’re through.

“You can get it wrong and still you think that it’s all right” is undoubtedly said between many a couple during arguments. If one person didn’t think the other was unutterably wrong, there probably wouldn’t be the fight to begin with. But it’s not a basis for “working it out.” It’s the basis for the ultimatum being given here: Drop it or I’ll drop you. Seems like they’re past the point of presenting arguments with evidence and logic behind them to try to sway the other person or at least get a compromise. So what is there to work out?

The bridge is possibly the worst of all. “Fighting sucks, so stop doing it. Obviously I’m not the one fighting; it’s just you being so very, very wrong.” If you go to war, needlessly, for I did not desire it, then men will be slain. Saruman sez: I didn’t desire the war, I just decided to overrun your lands and lay waste your forests and plunder your people and you were supposed to do nothing. Because you didn’t do nothing … war! See what you did?

This song is the same thing in microcosm. It is horrible, and not worthy of McCartney, the man who wrote “I Will.” Looks like there may have been some personal overtones to it, but once you put a song out there like that it becomes a general recipe, and this is one of the worst I’ve ever heard.

And the new Padawan–sort of a Jedi intern–is a girl in hot pants and halter top and do-me boots whose dim one-liners put her right up there with Jar Jar and Ziro in the anti-pantheon.

–Kyle Smith on the new Star Wars: The Clone Wars animated movie.

I am beyond tears with this man.