Auckland Secondary Screening Line

So, it’s been awhile since I posted because I was traveling internationally and kind of being lazy at the same time. But I was aware enough to snap this picture for a post – which is what you’re now reading.

This picture is from the secondary security line in the Auckland, New Zealand airport. Secondary security lines were only for flights bound to the USA, and from what I understand, this secondary screening applies to every passenger on every international flight to America. This was implemented sometime after the Christmas Day attempted underwear bombing. In my case, I flew from Auckland to San Francisco and had to go through screening. My prior connector was from Brisbane, Australia to Auckland and I had no secondary line. But flights out of Brisbane to LAX did have the extra line.

Let me describe the screening a bit. First, they checked every single person getting onto the plane. And they checked everything. There was an initial pat down by a security agent of the same sex as the passenger in full view of the line of people waiting. Then there was a second station where one’s carry-on luggage was checked. In my case, I just had my computer bag with a few things for flying like a book, some water, headphones, etc. The agent literally rifled through everything and asked several questions. She even flipped through the pages of my book – which made me thankful I chose not to  smuggle contraband this time Shawshank style…

Shawshank Bible

The image that sticks into my head was that of a girl in front of me who had to be around 2 years old. The secondary screener had her mom take the girl’s shoes off and then examined them ridiculously closely. Mind you, this is after everyone had already passed through the normal screening of x-ray, metal detection and random explosives trace testing. This second set of security, which none of the passengers were told was there until you literally walked up to the gate, took about an hour to get through.

It is just a shame that things have come to this. No one hates the United States and wants to terrorize and kill our citizens just because they ‘hate our freedom‘. Enemies of America wish us harm because of American policy and ‘interventionalism’. It is a difficult question to discuss – whether our foreign policy is worth its price in terms of lives and treasure – because of the price already paid by the men and women of the military (and first responders) who have given their lives since 9/11/2001. These Americans gave what President Lincoln called their Last Full Measure of Devotion, and no one intends or wants to call into question their ultimate sacrifice and dishonor the soldiers or the families left behind. But the most difficult questions for a nation are its most important to ask, and they cannot be shied away from. If whatever we’re doing results in needing to double check a 2 year old’s shoes on an airplane, it is definitely time to examine if what our country is doing is worth it.

As promised, I am going to rank all of the Oscar® nominees (that I have seen) for the major award categories. In my last post, I ranked the best picture nominees and predicted that The Hurt Locker will win Best Picture.

Best Foreign Film: I have not seen any of the nominated films but I predict that The White Ribbon (Das weisse Band) will win.

Best Documentary: 1) The Cove 2) Food, Inc. 3) The Most Dangerous Man in America: Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers – I did not see Which Way Home or Burma VJ

Best Adapted Screenplay: 1) In the Loop 2) Precious 3) An Education 4) Up in the Air 5) District 9

Best Original Screenplay: 1) Inglourious Basterds 2) The Hurt Locker 3) Up 4) The Messenger 5) A Serious Man

Best Supporting Actress: 1) Mo’Nique 2) Vera Farmiga 3) Maggie Gyllenhaal 4) Anna Kendrick – did not see Penélope Cruz in Nine

Best Supporting Actor: 1) Christoph Waltz 2) Christopher Plummer 3) Woody Harrelson 4) Matt Damon – did not see Stanley Tucci in The Lovely Bones

Best Actress: 1) Carey Mulligan 2) Helen Mirren 3) Gabourey Sibide 4) Sandra Bullock – did not see Meryl Streep in Julie & Julia

Best Actor: 1) Jeff Bridges 2) Colin Firth 3) Jeremy Renner 4) George Clooney 5) Morgan Freeman

Best Director: 1) Kathryn Bigelow 2) Quentin Tarantino 3) James Cameron 4) Jason Reitman 5) Lee Daniels

Other Predictions:

Best Animated Film: Up

Best Cinematography: Christian Berger for The White Ribbon

Best Score: Up

Enjoy!

Oscar Statuettes

The Oscars® are just around the corner so I figured I’d give everyone my 2 cents about the movies nominated for Best Picture. The Best Picture category expanded to 10 nominations this year to give more exposure to the year’s best films (i.e. sell more movie tickets and force people like me to see The Blind Side). My hope is that over the long haul it will give exposure to smaller movies that previously got screwed by the Academy (Spike Jonze’s Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind comes to mind as well as this year’s Where The Wild Things Are), and not lame cliché-filled blockbusters (I’m talking about Avatar and The Blind Side), but only time will tell.

Best Picture – my ranking from best to worst:

1. Inglourious Basterds – by far the most enjoyable and entertaining movie I saw all year.

2. The Hurt Locker – great movie and will most likely win Best Picture.

3. An Education – a solid performance from newcomer Carey Mulligan.

4. Up In The Air – Jason Reitman does it again.

5. Up – fun.

6. Precious – gritty.

7. A Serious Man – amusing and weird in that Coen Brothers way.

8. District 9 – Sharlto Copley is great as the bumbling Wikus.

9. Avatar – groundbreaking special effects but not Best Picture worthy.

10. The Blind Side – Best Picture? Really?

I will make my picks for the other major categories next weekend before the Oscars.

Editor’s note – this is Ragnar Danneskjöld’s first contribution and when he is not busy hijacking shipments on the high seas to Peoples’ States the world over, he enjoys reviewing films of all genres. We hope his sloop remains capable of outrunning the Navy so more contributions will follow.

I had the urge to watch Will Ferrell on the last Tonight Show with Conan O’Brien. The schtick of him dressed as Ronnie Van Zant plus that damn cow-bell doing “Free Bird” was just really memorable – not to mention Ben Harper and Beck jammed on it, too.

I decided to pop over to trusty Hulu to watch and it never occurred to me that NBC could be so vindictive as to remove all the episodes of the Tonight Show.

Hulu Devoid of All Tonight Show Episodes

My bewilderment over their actions on Hulu was short lived as NBC has apparently taken steps to erase completely all records that Conan ever existed. From Wikipedia:

Archives removal by NBC

Roughly two weeks after O’Brien’s final episode, NBC began removing all videos of The Tonight Show with Conan O’Brien from its website, as well as from the streaming video site Hulu.^[80] Gather.com has reported that NBC intends to scrub all O’Brien-related Tonight Show and Late Night clips from YouTube in the near future.^[81] Time magazine criticized the network for pulling the videos, noting that Hulu currently streams many less popular NBC series, such as Knight Rider, Kings, Crusoe, and Surface.^[82]

In February 2010, NBC took O’Brien’s official website offline, and removed all mentions of the former host from NBC.com.^[81] Around the same time, HornyManatee.com, a URL launched by O’Brien’s Late Night show as part of a sketch, began redirecting to NBC.com.^[83] In early February 2010, O’Brien’s face in the 30 Rockefeller Plaza mural was replaced by Jay Leno’s likeness.^[84]

This is not unlike Rome’s complete and utter destruction of Carthage after the Third Punic War. All they forgot to do was salt the earth. Take heed, NBC. We all know what happened to Rome. And have you guys even bothered watching Heroes lately? (This analysis doesn’t even cover the terrible recently-concluded season 4.) The writing is definitely on the wall – or in the gutter, so to speak.

Over the last few Winter Olympics, I have really started to follow Curling. I think the aspects of the game that really draw me to it are that you don’t have to be a crazy gifted athlete to compete and it’s a thinking-man’s game. I could never do this:

Shaun White in the Halfpipe

But the athletic barrier to get into curling is much lower. You don’t need years of physical training. Curling is all about subtle strategy, accuracy and precision. It’s a chess match on the ice. And being a cute Russian doesn’t hurt your chances either:

Ludmila Privivkova, Russian Curler

That’s why I also really like Bocce. I learned it at the Abruzzi Club in Ohio, watching the old Italian men drink wine and somehow manage to argue (even with the tape measure) as to who’s closer to the pallino. I will be lobbying Jacques Rogge to include Bocce in the Summer Olympics. How could this not be ratings gold?

Italian men playing Bocce in San Giorgio a Cremano, Naples, Italy

New Hubble Maps of Pluto Show Surface Changes

It was four score years ago to this day that Pluto was discovered. And I say huzzah to science and more importantly, NASA.

There is a certain segment of the population that thinks NASA is a big waste of time and taxpayer money.  So on Pluto’s birthday, I’d like to take the opportunity to point out some of the fantastic accomplishments of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. Remember, Sputnik was launched in 1957 and scared the bejesus out of the 171 million American “Joe the Plumber” types at the time. The US had to respond, not only to answer for the crisis in confidence of the nation, but to compete with the Soviets on the burgeoning technological revolution the space race entailed.  Not only did we respond by forming NASA, but we beat the hell out of Russians from that point on.

When you honestly think about it, the prospect of doing anything in space is so daunting, so complex, that only the boldest innovators and craziest risk-taking scientists, the ground-breaking physicists and wild-eyed mathematicians could come up with this stuff.

Some of the highlights – and I’m really only scratching the surface:

• Landing Americans on the Moon
• The Pioneer and Voyager Probes
• The Space Shuttle
• Space Camp
• The Hubble Space Telescope
• Avoiding Armageddon
• The Mars Rovers
• Smashing Deep Impact into a Comet for the Fun of It

And come on, these are not even all of the highlight reels one could muster for our space agency. Let’s not forget the whole inventing of the IT Industry thing NASA fostered as well. It may have indirectly spawned the job I hold today and what other government program can say that?

Live Long and Prosper, NASA!

President Obama

President Obama will be hosting a Health Care Summit next week from the Blair House.  Here is a quick Yahoo! News article on the event.

A lot has been said and many crazy accusations have been leveled during the national health care debate of 2009, which saw any potential legislation stall after Republican Scott Brown won the special election to replace Ted Kennedy’s Senate seat in Massachusetts.  Not wanting to go off on that tangential diatribe at this time, let’s just say that it serves the Democrats right to be in this position since they couldn’t pass legislation with a 60 seat filibuster-proof majority in the US Senate for an entire year.

Like any famous pirate of the Golden Age, I trace my roots back to Europe and now, being only the second or third generation (depending on which side of my family) born in the United States, I have taken interest in learning a bit more about my lineage and connecting with my past. That said, some European countries which experienced mass emigration to the US over the last 150 years or so allow American citizens with ancestors originating from the old country to apply for citizenship.  In my case, Italy has a policy recognizing Jus Sanguinis, (or for you non Prep-school attending, wish-you-took-Latin flunkies, “by the right of blood”) to claim Italian citizenship without having been born in Italy or born to parents who held credentialed Italian citizenship at the time of my birth. Long story short, because my great-grandparents were born in Italy and did not renunciate their Italian citizenship, I can get citizenship recognized posthumously.  And I have engaged a great firm called ITALIAMERICA to assist me with finding the documentation.

Back to the point of the story – my ancestors came to America from Italy, Germany and Ireland to make a better life; to escape the inescapable cycle of serfdom, poverty, and destitution generations were manacled to for only having been born to the wrong family in Europe (with the vast majority of families being the wrong one). To this day, the continent they left behind remains very gentrified and it is not a stretch to understand how the governments assuage inclinations of modern uprising by the lower classes only with generous welfare programs like health insurance, unemployment, and even month long summer vacations! Welfare is the true opiate of the people. It pacifies them, makes them content. It distracts their attention away from the same lack of access to economic rise (and the security and true freedom that comes with it) that’s always existed in Europe.

"A Miracle That Changed the World"

Cut to the 5000 Year Leap – the revolutionary idea of the United States – where the content of one’s character, the drive, ambition, work and toil of an individual coalesce to form one’s position. Knowing that your lot in life doesn’t have to be your lot in life in this country – this is why generations of immigrants came to and still come to the United States. And never in the history of the world has a people been so productive, so inventive or so generous as Americans. The most recent example of the devastating earthquake in Haiti shows the compassion in this country that pre-9/11 George Bush talked about emphatically and earnestly. In your time of need, whether foreigner or next-door neighbor, Americans respond.

And we like it that way. The government cannot be the crutch for every market downturn, natural disaster or bad fortune that befalls a person. For too long, the founding tenets of this society have been chipped away – Self-Reliance, Civil Disobedience, Common Sense. They have been replaced by Bureaucratic-Reliance, Police States, and No Sense Whatsoever. It’s getting harder and harder to discern between economic opportunity that living in Europe (and increasingly the rest of the world) and living in America affords. The evolution of the United States in the twentieth and now twenty-first centuries has been away from our core principles and towards those ideas we fought a Revolutionary war, a Cold War and several very justified and very real wars against. If health care becomes yet another unfunded, monolithic welfare “right” the federal government grants to all people and borrows trillions to deliver, the massive burden that government spending thrusts onto its citizens will further erode the differences in opportunity between the United States and other countries. Investments that make us able to compete, like infrastructure, will continue to be drastically reduced. And the people will stop coming.

The people will no longer think this is the place to make a better life. And if a God-fearing politician is honest with you, that’s what the gift of Divine Providence on this land is all about. Freedom is transient and ethereal. It’s hard to grasp as an idea on its own.  Ask a person to prove they love someone and that’s just as difficult as proving one is free. What does it really mean? In practice, the tangible manifestation of freedom has always been about economic opportunity.

• Freedom from class Fatalism at birth.

• Freedom to work harder and earn more.

• Freedom of advancing through education and study.

• Freedom to keep the fruits of one’s labor.

These are the types of freedom that the promise of America guarantees. And these freedoms are more and more in jeopardy from the federal government every day. It is burying the people of this nation under crushing debt. Social Security, Prescription Drugs, Medicare. National Health Care would be only one more giant stone on the back of Atlas – and eventually, he will shrug.

So the landlubbers across the street from my clan’s hideout in Palo Alto used to be Facebookers.  They occupied multiple locations around PA, but recently, they moved into a Facebooker-plex campus.  The 4 story building has sat empty except for a human-sized hamster ball (Yeah, I can’t figure that one out either).

Human-Sized Hamster Ball

Until now.

We have seen characteristic military-esque in-civilian-clothing types in and out of the building for a few weeks now.  An example of the kind of guys I mean (portrayed by Barry Pepper) courtesy of one of the brilliant Will Smith flicks, Enemy of the State, is just below.

"Enemy of the State" Spooks

I finally saw the company name on one of their shirts the other day: Palantir.

Palantir Technologies is a techno-spook outfit with new software that connects those damn elusive dots our intelligence agencies never appear to be capable of doing – or at least we never hear about it when they are successful. Here is a write up in the Wall Street Journal. The most sobering aspect of this company is that the innovation they achieved is apparently allowing low security-level analysts to search multiple classified databases simultaneously to look for patterns – in hopes of more readily connecting the dots. I don’t mean to discount what Palantir has developed – the point is that why the hell haven’t we spent some money on building this already!  These guys were funded for only like 30 million Doubloons and they’ve already caught patterns of Syrian suicide bombing networks in Iraq, stopped a suicide bombing in Pakistan and discovered a spy ring in an allied government!

The only pattern here is that our government is woefully unable to do the most obvious things to serve this country’s citizens. Organizing and making use of the plethora of information our government agencies obtain was a key recommendation of the 9/11 Commission:

Unity of Effort: Sharing Information
The U.S. government has access to a vast amount of information. But it has a weak system for processing and using what it has. The system of “need to know” should be replaced by a system of “need to share.”

• The President should lead a government-wide effort to bring the major national security institutions into the information revolution, turning a mainframe system into a decentralized network. The obstacles are not technological. Official after official has urged us to call attention to problems with the unglamorous “back office” side of government operations.
• But no agency can solve the problems on its own-to build the network requires an effort that transcends old divides, solving common legal and policy issues in ways that can help officials know what they can and cannot do. Again, in tackling information issues, America needs unity of effort.

Mission Accomplished.

Frank Goes Down!

This humble Pirate, pursued by the long arm of the law, had his day in court today and prevailed. Unlike my brethren of old, I chose to fight the system from within and went through the long legal process of contesting my first moving violation in 14 years.  As a bit of context, a couple of me hearties, Bronder and Julie, who usually spend their nights pillaging the Port of Chicago, weighed anchor and sailed (through what I assume could only have been) the fabled Northwest Passage to the old Spanish mission of San Francisco de Asís last May.

Picking them up from a ballgame one evening, a constable thought it good sport to accuse me of violating CVC 21453(a) – also known as running a red light.  Since I luckily was at apparently the last intersection in the city without a traffic camera, the evidence against me was solely from the constable’s eyewitness account.

I Beat Drago!

Why would a peace officer look to waste time writing a red light ticket when there are so many cameras in the city that usually do it with automaton precision? Not to mention he could be looking after all the murders, robbery and Folsom Street Fair? I asked myself that too, and found out when the notice came in the mail that the fine was 436 Spanish Doubloons.  Turns out that traffic tickets are how this City by the Bay feeds itself since there are no more Native Americans to exploit.  Parking tickets alone add 100 million Doubloons to the coffers each year.  Talk about some serious booty.

I pled not guilty and had the satisfaction knowing that if I was going to surrender $436, I was damn well going to ruin that constable’s day and drag him to court.  Today, the day of my trial, the officer did not show up. The case was immediately dismissed and I owed nothing.

To the point of this being about another Drago losing, my Commissioner was to have been Frank Drago, comrade of Ivan no doubt.

Score one for this buccaneer and American Justice. Now back to scrubbing the poop deck the lot of yas!

Gelding McCoy

Remember in the Matrix, the original one, when Cypher electro-zapped Tank and Dozer while the rest of the gang was still in the Matrix and started unplugging them all and killing them virtually and therefore physically (since we know from Morpheus that the body can not live without the mind) and Switch looks away, then up at Trinity and says “Not like this… not like this…” because she can accept an honorable death, but not a bogus one?

Last night was like that.

And I feel bad for the Longhorns and especially McCoy.  But Lou Holtz summarized that a champion needs to be able to run the football.  Alabama had that, Texas did not.  And Mark May wears sunglasses at night.

I take away another tough pill to swallow in that the SEC won their fourth BCS Championship in a row, and six of twelve.  But at least Alabama played football and not some version of real-life Madden-ball.  They have a killer defense and the Heisman Trophy-winning running back.  And while I haven’t forgotten that the South has not apologized for committing treason, I like Alabama’s style of football.