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Fucking Congress. I can't post a lot with my current schedule, but once March rolls around and I have the time organize my views on the world through the peerless medium of the written word, my imaginary readers will realize that I have a bone to pick with Congress. This hardly makes me unique; Congressional Approval ratings have been in the single-digits for awhile now. But their actions lately have been indefensible. I'll put this as bluntly as I can.

CONGRESS IS STEALING FROM YOU. Not taxing you. Not just 'burdening the economy.' They are flat out stealing, giving your money to the Boards of Directors of giant financial firms so that these Boards can then bonus the money to themselves. Examples:

Merrill Lynch, the Bank of America subsidiary given $20 billion of your money two weeks ago, lost $15.3 billion in the fourth quarter of 2008, and yet bonused its senior managers $4 Billion dollars. Billion. With a B.

A.I.G. the ailing mortgage-backed security insurer that received $152 Billion in federal subsidies, bonuses it's managers $400 million.

These bonuses, mind you, come at time when these managers were so hopelessly corrupt and incompetent that they managed not only to crash their own firms, but also play key roles in collapsing the global economy. Yet they reward themselves with obscene amounts of money that were forcibly removed from your paychecks, and Congress does nothing.

Why is Congress doing nothing? Because they intentionally omitted fraud clauses from the stimulus package. At a time when they had maximum leverage over the financial industry, they gave the money without strings. Naturally, the thieves originally responsible for the crash simply stole the money.

We must all hope that President Obama has the good sense to tie fraud clauses onto his proposed $825 Billion dollar stimulus and that he instructs the U.S. Attorney to crucify anyone who dares mismanaged these gifts from the citizens' pockets.


100-0

Sports serve as fascinating microcosms for all manner of serious life events. George Orwell once wrote that sports are "bound up with hatred, jealousy, boastfulness, disregard of all rules and sadistic pleasure in witnessing violence. In other words, it is war minus the shooting." Yet sports can also reflect our fundamental human decencies and sense of honor and fair play, such as when a golfer loses a match (and several hundred thousand dollars) by calling a penalty on himself. American sports are dress rehearsal for almost anything, sports allow us to experiment with our human condition without lasting consequence. But the experiment reveals the worse angels of our nature just as often as the better. Consider the following headline:

"Covenant Christian defeats tiny Dallas Academy 100-0 in girl's basketball."

Covenant Christian is a nationally ranked high school basketball powerhouse. Dallas Academy has a student population of 20: it's a school for troubled youth. From accounts of the game, the Covenant girls were still using full-court press defense and jacking up threes in the 4th quarter. Having already defeated a hopelessly over-matched opponent, the Covenant coach ordered his charges to continue to run up the score.

I tried to imagine myself as the coach of Dallas Academy immediately after the game. These poor girls who, try as they might, couldn't manage a single basket, or even a free throw, the entire game. How powerless and weak they must have felt, not even free to surrender once defeat became inevitable, forced to play out the remainder of the game while bigger, stronger, faster kids mercilessly poured on gratuitous punishment. What words can a coach offer to console such profound humiliation?

Luckily, there is SOME humanity in this story. The principal of Covenant Christian promptly fired the coach responsible for this disgrace. In his apology to Dallas Academy, the Covenant principal admitted his school's team was guilty of "victory without honor." There is no satisfaction in obliterating the feeble. May the many, many other prep schools who beat up on cupcake opponents take heed.

Miss America Pageant Finally Sets the Right Example

So, as a guy, for the most part, I have little right to comment on female body-image issues, but plenty of self-interest. However, one thing that has always annoyed me is the idiotic polarization in the debate between fat and "skinny." On the one hand, the media quite wrongfully portrays the "ideal" image as the emaciated Hollywood dieter, thin but without appreciable muscle tone. Naturally, the Oprah Winfreys and Women Studies Professors of the world jump on their soap box and decry this artificial image. "Real woman have curves," they say. They point to Renaissance paintings of fat women and claim that's how a woman is "supposed" to look. And naturally, the overweight American populace uses this view to rationalize their couch surfing cheeto habits.
The problem here is that the debate creates a false dichotomy. Neither waifish nor chunky is the "ideal" body type, but they seem to be the only options presented by the media. Enter Miss America 2009.
Now, I've never watched a Miss America pageant. But I saw some photos from this year's contest and was immediately elated. No, not because the women were gorgeous and scantily clad. But because, for once, they were fit.
In years past, the contest has paraded out 50 super-thin starving model types and purported to crown one of them as the most "attractive." But not his year. These contestants were sculpted and muscular, appearing to spend as much time in the weight room as the fashion-model types spend puking up their breakfast. These girls looked hot and could kick your ass. Or mine.
Why is this cause for joyous social commentary? Because for once, American girls could see strong, healthy women exalted as the physical ideal, instead of the rail-thin Angelina-types. American boys could see healthy women as desirable, instead of being conditioned to chase the anorexics. Being strong and fit as a woman was finally shown as beautiful.
Presenting buff Amazonians as a positive body image also helps reverse the artificial aversion to resistance training for girls. Fearing that they'll "get buff," image conscious women resign themselves to spinning class, yoga or incomparably boring elliptical machines. But the reality is that women simply lack the testosterone to create large, bulky, masculine muscles no matter how much they lift. Lifting weights has unique and incomparable health benefits, some of which would greatly ameliorate serious women's health issues (osteoporosis springs to mind). It's also more time efficient than other forms of exercise; offering a great way for busy women to stay in top shape.
Hats off to the Miss America Pageant for finally helping to deconstruct the unhealthy 'ideal' that it helped to create.