Snarky Sedition

“It’s the destructive personality that makes it really creepy,” she said. “You don’t ever want to have that to become you.”

I think the obsession with perfection, especially what might be an unobtainable perfection, and its psychological toll on the individual is what makes this film particularly creepy.  I think it’s a lesson that can be extended to other areas of life beyond ballet dancing.

Witz is the most protective book of 2010.

I really don’t have a problem with elitism when it’s a question of intelligence.  Sometimes that’s necessary and many Americans recognize this.  If you’re asking whether I’d rather have blue collars or blue blood running the country, I’ll pick the latter.  Of course, the smarter they are, the more devious.  Maybe that’s not such a good idea.  But people to gravitate towards more knowledgeable and educated people, which is a kind of elitism as far as Palin is concerned.  She’s not very knowledgeable, no matter how “smart” you want to say she is.  Elitism, on the other hand, got Obama where he is today.

Sarah Palin: “Inexplicable: I recently won in court to stop my book ‘America by Heart’ from being leaked,but US Govt can’t stop Wikileaks’ treasonous act?”

Nothing is more inexplicable than the sheer stupidity of Sarah Palin.  Someone pulling information from classified military networks and giving it to Wikileaks is like someone taking some trashy book full of gibberish written by an infantile politician and posting it all over the Internet.  Here you go, Ms. Palin.  Now try to put the genie back in the bottle.

The real danger, it seems to me, is not the revelation of assorted classified material but our tendency to overreact, either to actual security threats such as the shoe bomber and the underwear bomber or, in this case, to a massive information dump.

We’ve become so reactive to security concerns — and, at the same time, apathetic to threats to our own civil liberties — that we might, as a result of the WikiLeaks release, allow government agencies to step on the universal reach of the Internet or find ways to create exceptions to First Amendment freedoms.

This is a little short-sighted since shrewd businessmen can gain enough money as a landlord to possibly expand, further enrich themselves, and attain even more freedom than the renter.  Of course, not everyone has such inclinations or the skills.  Those people need to know who they are and stop buying into the government-led hype that everyone should own a house.  If the last few years have taught us nothing else, it’s that there are a great number of people who should not own houses.