Quick Roundup 136

Art as Fuel: The Pursuit of Happyness

Yes. The title really is spelled that way.

I saw Jennifer Snow's review of Will Smith's latest a few days ago and meant to link to it, but blogging has been a bit hurried for the past few days and things tend to fall through cracks when I am in a hurry.

I was already planning to watch it before I'd read this review, but if I weren't, this would have gotten my attention:

The premise is simple: Will Smith plays a hardworking father that wants to provide a better life for himself and his family. Trapped in a dead-end independent sales position, he discovers the potential of a career as a stock broker, and it seems like a dream come true. But it is a faint and distant dream, seemingly not for the likes of him. His bitter struggle to grasp hold of his dream before it escapes is both horrifying and inspirational.

My wife saw this in Chicago and really enjoyed it. She has already agreed to see it again this weekend when she's in town....

Isaac Schrodinger's Escape

One of my proudest moments as a blogger came when I learned that my efforts had helped Moslem apostate Isaac Schrodinger in his cause to seek refuge in the West from Islamic persecution. He has posted the story of his immigration hearing over at his blog. To "live as a Moslem" -- even a "secular" one -- is a contradiction in terms. Isaac had already escaped from Islam long ago. To not help him avoid confinement in the prison known as Pakistan would have been unthinkable.

Islam as Crime Syndicate, Part 8,078

When your god is -- like the one Pat Robertson worships -- nothing more than an imaginary terrorist, and your excuse for a code of morality consists in pronouncing his impulses and demands as good no matter how vile or how crushing to the human spirit, your ability to accept someone like Saddam Hussein as a hero is all but assured.

Why? Because, as Isaac Schrodinger points out, all that is required for sainthood is that one proves that one works for the right crime boss. This is why so many followers of that "Great World Religion", Islam, regard Hussein's mosque-building spree and defiance of America as sufficient grounds for calling him a martyr.

This is not despite Hussein's mass butchery. Allah is a mass butcher, too. The only problem with what Hussein was doing was that there had been some doubt as to whether it was in Allah's name.

Newport News Collision

My alarm clock woke me with news this morning of yesterday's collision of the USS Newport News with a Japanese tanker in the Straits of Hormuz.

Naturally, the folks at Ultraquiet No More and The Sub Report are all over it. Quoth Bubblehead (second link):

Believe it or not, the bigger ships are sometimes more difficult to avoid; you can hear them, but the relatively greater depths of the propellers tends to muffle the sounds, and makes them sound further away (although reports that the Newport News hit the tanker's stern make it harder to explain away). Reports indicate that the tanker was outbound from the Gulf, so she would have been fully laden, and drawing about 100 feet at the keel. So, it's possible the Newport News wasn't even at [periscope depth], and just clipped the tanker during normal submerged ops.

Ugh. I would not want to be the skipper for any collision at sea, but to be the first after the Democrats take Congress sounds especially bad.... Any collision is bad publicity, and bad publicity can make the hard sell of funding the submarine force even harder.

In other submarine news, trust funds for the children of the two sailors from the Minneapolis-St. Paul who recently died after falling overboard have been established.

Schwartzenegger Ups the Ante

Arnold Schwartzenegger, not to be outdone by Eliot Spitzer, is not just pushing for socialized medicine for children, but has decided to wave his magic wand and magically make medical care available to everyone in California.

Gosh, Arnold! Why stop there? Why not just declare that everyone in California no longer should have to pay for any of the necessities of life? I guess you just haven't been in California quite long enough....

This is very bad news for the upcoming national debate about socialized medicine. At least Republicans used to oppose the idea. Now, they're apparently too busy making Eliot Spitzer, of all people, look like a radical capitalist by comparison!

-- CAV