Congratulations, Mr. Sulu!

Actor George Takei of Star Trek got married today.

Former Star Trek actor George Takei has married his long-term partner in a Buddhist ceremony in Los Angeles.

Takei, 71, who played Mr Sulu in the sci-fi series, married business manager Brad Altman, 54, in front of a number of his Star Trek co-stars.

They included best man Walter Koenig, who played Chekhov, and matron-of-honour Nichelle Nichols - Uhura.

The wedding - at Japanese American National Museum - came after California lifted a ban on same-sex marriage.

The couple, who have been together for 21 years, wore matching white tuxedos in the ceremony.

I hope she's right

Libby Spencer, writing at AOTP. I hope she's right:

As the estrangement grew, it took on a tone of subtle mockery but in the last week or so, we’ve seen an open hostility take root. The title of this post is a quote from Lily Tomlin that I found at the Politico this morning. Ben Smith, formerly a dependable purveyor of the campaign’s talking points, links to Roger Simon who delivered some prime snark in a piece today ‘apologizing’ for practicing journalism. He asks for forgiveness saying, “It is not our job to ask questions. Or it shouldn’t be. To hear from the pols at the Republican National Convention this week, our job is to endorse and support the decisions of the pols.”

And Roger is not the only one. In the last week, we’ve witnessed Campbell Brown’s evisceration of Tucker Bounds that scared McCain out of an interview with Larry King. Joe Klein begged his colleagues to “stand strong in this case” and expose the false talking points on Palin. Even the AP, a new GOP stalwart under Ron Fournier, sent out two pieces this week, debunking the McCain campaign spin. And yesterday’s moment of unguarded candor between Mike Murphy, Peggy Noonan and Chuck Todd speaks for itself. The elite media are ready to get off the bus.

The Republicans made their intentions clear last night. They intend to resurrect the same old wedge politics and reignite the culture war. They have no platform to stand on and will try to frame the race around personality instead of issues. Up until now that has been a successful strategy only because the media was on board. But without the media’s amplification, their empty rhetoric won’t reach beyond the far right echo chamber to snare the voting blocks they need in order to have a prayer of winning.

One can only hope that the current breakup continues and ends in divorce rather than reconcilliation. The future of our country depends on it.

We're dealing with a completely ruthless and shameless foe. I've seen the speech, you know what, Palin looks great when she lies. It's absolutely critical that the media step up to the plate, and you know, actually do their jobs and expose her lies. The left blogisphere can do it's part to help focusing their attacks like a laser beam on certified falsehoods and scandals.

It's funny. I read both left-wing and right-wing blogs and the utter depth of of the belief on both sides that the MSM is completely in the pocket of the other sides is astonishing. Especially on the right-wing side. Of course, both things can't be true. The easy thing to do is to say that we're right and they're wrong and deluded. But that would be the easy and lazy thing to do. I think the truth is no matter how completely even-handed the press is, the left and the right will still hold those views.

Reporters respond to incentives just like everybody else. I believe that sometimes coverage is biased in the Republicans' favor because they are better at working the refs. However, when a reporter such as Campbell Brown ask tough questions and looks good doing it, I'm sure that will encourage other reporters to do the same. I'm hopeful.

Excuse me while I go and give some money to Obama.

The silver lining of McCain's veep pick, for feminists.

No, I'm not saying that I buy the line about "pro-life feminists." Of course not. But I would argue that the Palin nomination is significant from a feminist point of view both as a marker of how far women's rights have progressed in this country, and hopefully as a catalyst for even more change. Think about it this way. It wasn't so very long ago that we feared that not having a White Male candidate will gravely hurt the Democrat's chances. Now the Republicans seem to be shoving a woman in the veep-seat just to compete. What's more, the very most conservative base of the party love, love, love her. Of course, that's because she shares their views, views that are horrendously retrograde in my opinion, but that goes without saying. What's strikes me as noteworthy is that they are rallying to a female in a leadership position enthusiastically with no trace of belittlement, doubt or fear.

The nice things that Peggy Noonan wrote about Palin in the WSJ now seem terribly ironic after she let slip what she really thought on a hot mike. But I think she is onto something here in this paragraph from her WSJ article.

Because she jumbles up so many cultural categories, because she is a feminist not in the Yale Gender Studies sense but the How Do I Reload This Thang way, because she is a woman who in style, history, moxie and femininity is exactly like a normal American feminist and not an Abstract Theory feminist; because she wears makeup and heels and eats mooseburgers and is Alaska Tough, as Time magazine put it; because she is conservative, and pro-2nd Amendment and pro-life; and because conservatives can smell this sort of thing -- who is really one of them and who is not -- and will fight to the death for one of their beleaguered own; because of all of this she is a real and present danger to the American left, and to the Obama candidacy.

She could become a transformative political presence.

Because she's a Republican, Sarah Palin is immune from a lot of the misogynistic crap that was plastered on Hillary. There won't be any Sarah Palin novelty nutcrackers. This will seem like a terrible injustice to many liberals. But hey, that's the way the mooseburger crumbles. No more bashing her for being a hockey mom or a former beauty queen, m'kay? Certainly nothing about her kids. After the way the Daily Kos disgraced themselves, I think the left as a whole should just STFU on that particular front.

In the long run, that the Republicans are nominating a woman is a sign of progress, for us all. There are plenty of liberals out there bashing her the right way -- for her far-right positions, for her self-aggrandizing fibs. Don't let the sideshow steal the show.

Philosophy joke

An analytic philosopher and a continental philosopher walk into a bar. The bartender asks, “wadda ya havin?” The continental philosopher replies, “I will require an authentic, discursively enjoined, post-structuralist, disimmediated thing-in-itself.”

The bartender shakes his head and says, “I don’t get what you want.” The continental philosopher turns his nose up in the air and storms out of the bar. The bartender looks apologetically to the analytic philosopher and says, “I really couldn’t understand him.”

“Oh, I know!” replies the analytic philosopher. “As for me, I’ll have the same, without the adjectives.”

(Via Atoms Arranged Meaningwise.)

Pigou club slogan

Al Gore comes up with the perfect rhyming slogan for Greg Mankiw's Pigou Club:

"The answer is to end our reliance on carbon-based fuels," he said in a speech in Washington.

"When you connect the dots, it turns out that the real solutions to the climate crisis are the very same measures needed to renew our economy and escape the trap of ever-rising energy prices."

To secure this green revolution, Mr Gore said the single most important policy change would be to "tax what we burn - not what we earn".

I want that on a bumper sticker.

Ode on a Holbovian Urn

John Holbo has posted a flickr set of illustrations from a Plato book he's working on.

This one is my favorite, although I'm not sure which dialogue it's illustrating.

She blogs, she sings!

Angelica's latest hobby? Songwriting. This is the first time I've ever released a song into the YouTubes, so please, comments would make me very happy.



I got the idea for this song a couple of years ago when the Patriot act and the US-Mexico border barrier were big hot button issues, along of course with the continuing scandal of Guantanamo bay. I want a song that tied all those problems together as symptoms of the same disease -- fear -- while also remaining hopeful that America will return to her ideals in the future.

I didn't get around to actually writing the song for a while because I had to get some guitar skillz first. Unfortunately, the issues in the song are still very much with us.

Please let it be Obama 08. I don't want this song to have any relevance in four year's time.

AMERICA [Angelica Oung 2008]

Once upon a time they came from so many different shores
They left it all behind for a life that promised more
The huddled masses stayed the same America did not
There's a new fear in our hearts, our confidence is shot
We let them pick our lettuce in America
Wash the dishes in the shadows of America
While we put up a fence around America

America, land of the free, home of the brave
All eyes are on you, to see what you'll do, today

The stumbling giant shocked by pain
lashed out in righteous rage
Should our decency be shed
on the shores of Guantanamo bay
Invincible, we'll show them all
our mightiness is real
Are we the city on the hill
or will we bend the world to our will

They say freedom's not for free
so give us your liberties
To be a patriot in the name of America

CHORUS

We've still got our rights to life and the pursuit of happiness
But pardon if I ask
what's happened to the rest?
While what makes this nation great is tumbling into dust
If in God we trust, then ask the lord we must
We're fighting for the soul of America
In this dark time for America

Please give us the strength to be Americans

Banned in Memphis

This week's Memphis Flyer contained a wonderful history article on Lloyd T. Binford, who was head of the Memphis Censor Board from 1928 to 1956.

But it was Binford's attitude toward blacks that caused him — and Memphis — the most condemnation. Binford was absolutely opposed to movies showing blacks and whites together on the same social level. In 1945, he blocked the hit musical Annie Get Your Gun from Ellis Auditorium because there were blacks in the cast "who had too familiar an air about them." For the same reason, he banned the film Imitation of Life (1934) with Claudette Colbert and Brewster's Millions (1945) with Eddie "Rochester" Anderson because certain scenes "gave too much prominence to Negroes."

To show the films in Memphis, local distributors had to delete these scenes. As a result, some movies shown here were minutes shorter than the same films shown in other cities, because Binford ordered the complete removal of scenes featuring prominent black performers like Duke Ellington or Cab Calloway. Memphians probably never realized that Lena Horne's segment, for example, was snipped completely out of the 1946 picture Ziegfield Follies, as was Pearl Bailey's role in the 1947 Variety Girl.

In 1947, Binford axed Curley, a Little Rascals-type comedy distributed by United Artists, simply because it included one scene that showed black and white children in a classroom together. In his official letter to the United Artists distributors, Binford explained, "The Memphis Censor Board ... is unable to approve your picture with the little Negroes, as the South does not permit Negroes in white schools nor recognize social equality between the races, even in children."

Mario Kart Wii

Mario Kart for the Wii is very fun. And much more environmentally friendly than driving real motorized vehicles around Mushroom Gorge and Rainbow Road.