Misunderstood

At some point, we all have our sexuality questioned. In my case it was by two married gay men. I had expected a simple night out at the bar where a (female) friend of mine invited me to keep her company. She tended the bar while I drank the free beer she offered me. It was a good arrangement and needed no adjustment.

I had noticed earlier that there happened to be a gay couple sitting next to me. This did not concern me in the slightest bit as I don’t really care about peoples choice of sexuality. Before I know it, my friend (who I now think set me up) introduced me to the regular customers sitting next to me. I went through with the formalities, returned to my beer and vague flirting with the girl.

Since I am a smoker, I wandered outside for my 5 minutes of ‘fresh air’. It was a mistake as I was ambushed by the two queers.

“Hey, you got a smoke for me and my husband?” he asked. I obliged and even offered a light. That was the last of the niceties. “You want to come in the car with us? We have a little bit of blow.” Now, I’ve never done it and didn’t intend to with two gay guys under any circumstance. I don’t think they heard me saying no.

“You should come back to the house with us, we live around the block from here.” he went on “It will be fun, we have wine and other fun stuff. Come with us.” Again I protested and at this point, I’m making my way back to the safety of the bar. “Well, have you ever been with a boy” he prodded. I had enough and turned around and headed back to the bar.

“Atleast show us your PENIS!” they yelled. I returned expletives, explicit hand gestures and derogatory comments at the duo. Upon returning to my stool, I picked up and moved to the other end of the bar. My friend immediately saw the look on my face and exclaimed, “You poor thing, what did they do to you?”

I shook my head and ordered up a shot.

Just Say No a Failure for Elderly and Youth

Drug use among the British elder generation and the country’s youth has soared over the past few years as discussed earlier today in the BBC.

It seems that substance use among the elderly has risen to a rampant new high. Grandparents in the UK have been observed smoking, and even GROWING marijuana. Today’s article details the story of a 68-year old grandmother, named Patricia, (perhaps an alias?) from Humshaugh, England, who has been convicted of possessing and cultivating pot. These types of charges carry serious penalties in the United States, and presumably most of the rest of the free world. Patricia manages to avoid time in the slammer, probably due to the expert legal counsel of some of the top drug law experts in the UK, and instead has been sentenced to 250 hours of community service.

She comments in the article that when the probation officers come to check on her, she’ll be slipping them some “medicated” biscuits or tea- a direct threat directed at a law enforcement agent. Be warned, this is just one of the many dangerous aging drug lords that run rampant these days.

Given this situation, it might be prudent to spend your time with a youth. Unfortunately, it appears that they too have been infiltrated by the drug economy. Use of amphetamines is up sharply amongst these Brits… by some measures 12.3% over a 3-year period.

As you might imagine, for a staunch anti-drug advocate such as myself, this all this boils down to one issue for me: Nancy Reagan’s “Just Say No” campaign. It’s clear the elderly were already too involved in drugs for this to have an effect… and the youth had not been born yet. It’s obvious what we need to do to counteract this issue. A “surge” in the War on Drugs!

Cannabis Grandmother Spared Jail [BBC Online]
Use of Hyperactivity Drugs Soars [BBC Online]

Ann Coulter is the Paris Hilton of Conservative Politics

Most elementary school teachers will tell you a simple fact about the relationship between positive and negative attention and the continuation of behavior, good and bad. When you acknowledge and give attention to negative behavior as much as you do to positive behavior, you tacitly endorse negative behavior. In the end, the child becomes disinterested in the exact nature of attention, and simply pursues attention for its own sake.

Enter Paris Hilton and Ann Coulter, the quintessential attention whores. While Hilton has the predisposition to open her legs on the moments notice of being in the proximity of a flash bulb, Coulter decidedly opens her mouth when the cameras are rolling. For Hilton, doing coke, getting DUI’s, and having blowjobs night-vision video taped is the standard; for Coulter, it is insulting the widows of 9/11, referring to Muslims as rag-heads, and most recently, calling John Edwards a ‘faggot’.

The problem with the situation wasn’t Ann Coulter necessarily, but the amount of response to her absurdity. After years of hearing a neighbor’s nocturnal dog, the media and blogospheres reaction was as if being unexpectedly stirred from slumber by the barks and yelps of the canine. Much like a poorly trained dog or poorly raised child, the satisfaction of Coulter and Hilton grows as the uproar continues. They suffer from the same disease of needing to satiate their egos with the media attention they believe is deserved. In this addiction, they do not care who they hurt, what they say, or what they have to do, the end prize is the pursuit and capture of attention, no matter how negative or repugnant.

The lesson was learned apparently, later rather than sooner, by the Associated Press. Reported by CNN, the AP decidedly ‘blacked out’ Paris Hilton from media reports for a week and promptly was arrested for driving under the influence the following week:

So you may have heard: Paris Hilton was ticketed the other day for driving with a suspended license. Not huge news, even by celebrity-gossip standards. Here at The Associated Press, we put out an initial item of some 300 words. But it actually meant more to us than that. It meant the end of our experimental blackout on news about Paris Hilton.

It was only meant to be a weeklong ban — not the boldest of journalistic initiatives, and one, we realized, that might seem hypocritical once it ended. And it wasn’t based on a view of what the public should be focusing on — the war in Iraq, for example, or the upcoming election of the next leader of the free world, as opposed to the doings of a partygoing celebrity heiress/reality TV star most famous for a grainy sex video.

No, editors just wanted to see what would happen if we didn’t cover this media phenomenon, this creature of the Internet gossip age, for a full week. After that, we’d take it day by day. Would anyone care? Would anyone notice? And would that tell us something interesting?

It turned out that people noticed plenty — but not in the way that might have been expected. None of the thousands of media outlets that depend on AP called in asking for a Paris Hilton story. No one felt a newsworthy event had been ignored.

The media, after years of getting humans like Paris Hilton wrong, finally got it right. But it turned around in less than a month and got Ann Coulter wrong. The reaction to Ann Coulter’s ‘faggot’ episode was flawed not in the direction — almost everyone, left and right, denounced her words — but that the reaction was disparate, coming from all directions, and constantly replayed. Rather than having isolated Coulter, the story found itself on the headlines of CNN and FoxNews website, on Bill O’Reilly’s ‘The Factor’, on MSNBC, and any blog with a political bent. Essentially, Coulter was put on a pedestal — isolated but admired with attention that she did not deserve, aptly labeled by Slate as the press’ Ann Coulter problem.

In the end, there is but one lesson to learn: don’t feed the ego, especially of individuals who don’t deserve it. It’s the only way Ann Coulter and Paris Hilton will go away.

Double D Distractions

What a life! It’s been a few weeks since Anna Nicole Smith died, and miraculously, I’m still alive. Someone call Jesus or the mainstream media, because I am hearing far too much fuss about the ‘war’ (whatever that is) and not enough about Anna Nicole Smith. Because reporting on a blonde with a drug problem and double D’s is far, far more courageous than reporting on a corrupt, inept administration and the war they created. I mean, come on media, can we at least get a full-frontal of the corpse? I’m masturbating to my imagination here.

Which brings us to my second point, and one already made astutely by Griperblade — can’t we just buy Iraq? Can the World Bank and IMF bum America a loan for a couple of trillion bucks and employ everyone in that Allah-forsaken country to make salsa and package Nelly Furtado records? I mean, if I were a heathen destined for eternal fire, the least I could do is serve my Christian corporate overlord masters before they take the shiny Enron escalator to heaven!

I’m not saying let’s bail out of Iraq and Afghanistan — I’m not one of those pussy ass Northeast liberals who spends their time sucking Kosher Ivy league dick and crying about why I blew that i-banker in the bathroom for a bump. No, I’m a real American who lives his violence, as long as it’s on TV or YouTube. I don’t need some ugly bean-eating son of a bitch turned Presidential candidate getting all weak in the knees about torturing the bad guys or a puffhead who likes divorce almost as much as he loves homosexuality.

No, I like my America the way it is, thank you very much. I like my wars manufactured, my God vengeful and imaginary, my computers fruity and afeminite, and my countries human rights abuses neglected and ignored. Oh, and of course, my racism going around in a circle at a carnival (seriously — what the shit??).

Filling the Void: Saudi Diplomacy in a Realigned Middle East

As the Bush administration moves towards disengagement in the Middle East from those regarded as extremist — including Syria, Iran, Sunni insurgents and Shiite militias in Iraq, Hamas in Palestine, and Hezbollah in Lebanon — the result has been a vacuum of power left from the absence of traditional diplomatic channels. In the post Cold War era, this meant typically working with, and in the least, involving the United States. But in recent months as American policy becomes more rigid and inflexible, Middle Eastern diplomatic channels have rerouted outside of Washington and back into the Middle East proper. In this capacity, Saudi Arabia has emerged as the new bridge where the forces of moderation can work within the framework of Middle East reality — a reality where extremists unfortunately are popular and united — and work on successful compromises.

The Saud’s have also acted as the defacto go between for Iran and the West as issues continue to flair revolving supposed Iranian involvement in the Iraqi civil war, the pursuit of nuclear technology, and of the funding and support for Shiite proxy groups. Stated by the Washington Post:

Saudi diplomats, including former ambassador to Washington Prince Bandar bin Sultan, are also deeply engaged in talks with Iran. The contacts began with a visit to Saudi Arabia by Ali Larijani, the head of Iran’s national security council. Prince Bandar subsequently visited Tehran and, according to a report in the New York Times, King Abdullah received leaders of Hezbollah. Sunni-ruled Saudi Arabia and Shiite Iran back opposite sides in the escalating sectarian conflicts in Iraq and Lebanon, but the talks show that both governments are interested in tamping them down. Though there have been no breakthroughs, the diplomacy seems to have succeeded, at least, in cooling the situation in Lebanon, where a Hezbollah campaign against the Saudi-supported, pro-Western government led to several days of violence last month.

The continuation of this was seen in early February in talks initially balked at by Condoleezza Rice but brokered by the Saud’s between the almost-at-civil-war Hamas and Fatah Palestinian political groups. Instead of direct mediation by the Bush administration, the middle ground is reinvented by the parties involved:

America is holding back from serious involvement while it sees what else Saudi Arabia can do. King Abdullah and his energetic security adviser, Prince Bandar bin Sultan, a former long-time Washington ambassador, may try to stick another feather in their caps at next month’s Arab League summit. They want to revive and perhaps refine the Arab League’s 2002 proposal for all Arab states to normalise relations with Israel if Israel withdraws from all the territories it occupied in 1967, both Palestinian and Syrian.

…So was the Fatah-Hamas deal in vain? And why did Condoleezza Rice, the American secretary of state, fly all the way to Jerusalem to see Mr Abbas and Ehud Olmert, the Israeli prime minister, and on to Jordan to see America’s other Arab allies, to tell them something she could have fitted into an SMS text message?

While it is important that America acts against those committed to reckless ideology, it is increasingly important in the context of prolonged American involvement in Iraq and NATO involvement in Afghanistan that hostility does not boil over to conflict before it has the chance for diplomatic resolution. The ramifications of a sectarian Middle East become more visceral, the role of Saudi Arabia will grow as the leading voice as both a moderate country and the largest Sunni country.

Sources

Saudi Arabia’s Diplomacy, Washington Post.

Banking on the Saudis, Economist.

Decisions Deferred in Mideast Talks, Council on Foreign Relations.

Arab states watch Iraq with dread, BBC News.

A holy but puzzling alliance, Economist.

Posted on PubliusPundit and Ablogistan.