Bad Seeds and Other Hilarity

I saw a heart warming advertisement for a film called, " Orphan." Suffice it to say that it looked like a pile of Bat Guano. But, a story about "bad seed" movies got me thinking, not always a good thing. It appears that preteen and junior high kids are a new horror type...This may be believable to anyone who has been out on the street when a junior high has been emptied upon a street at dismissal time. But, to call the little tykes demon seed is, perhaps, stretching it a bit. This there is a long tradition in literature and film that portrays children as perverse or possessed....I have found that to be true only with the onset of puberty....One institution in America has consistently demonized children and made money doing so...the Catholic church. See our blog entry on the Ryan Report and it's implications for the United States July 7, 2009.

Political corruption and you: perfect in New Jersey! You got to love love the theatrics around the commentary concerning the recent commotion about play to play politics in New Jersey. When ha sit been any different? And, does it make things work or is there actually a problem here? What yo ask? A very simple question. Does corruption lessen the efficiency of the political process or make it work. It is a wonderful question for poli sci classes and bar room conversations. Meanwhile, U.S. Attorney in New Jersey gets to posture about money corrupting politics....gee, josh Opie!

The best part of the corruption story is the rabbi connection. After the scandals of the Catholic Church's cover up of pedophilia, this looks like mere parking ticket violations by independent contractors...some exotic Syrian sect...how interesting.

California apologizes to the Chinese. The story of the exploitation of Chinese laborers and it correlative racism is not just a California story. The United States Government turned a blind eye to it; happily, it was just a part of the exploitation of cheap labor on a global basis: Chinese, southern European Slavic groups. The needs of industrial capitalism and robber baron greed were a symphony of misery, death and humiliation for tens of millions of contract labors in from the late 18th Century to the present....yes, my dears, we have our undocumented aliens and white slave trade still going on under our noses. Still, it was nice that Arnold acknowledged how Leland Stanford got the money to build his university.