Two years ago there was outrage (by whom? Who is orchestrating this?) over the exposing of a nipple during the Super Bowl half time. Oh my god, there was a portion of a woman’s anatomy on television!

After that low point in the history of Western Civilization there was talk of bringing the family atmosphere back to football and the Super Bowl. (Family atmosphere?  Football?) OK let's take the premise at face value. Let’s sit down and watch this family Super Bowl.  Unfortunately, after viewing the first 7 minutes of play (about 15 to 25 minutes of actual time) we had to turn-off the game because of the violence.  Not the violence of the game, though it does have large bodies crashing into each other, it also shows teamwork, inter-team sportsmanship, and the joy of play.  No we had to turn off the game for the level of violence in the advertisements.

There were two particularly violent ads that stood out from the rest.  There was one for a movie that showed guns, shooting and very dark imagery and there was another that showed cave men kicking, and getting squashed by, dinosaurs (never mind that cave men and dinosaurs never co-existed and were separated in time by 65 million years.)   Though there was no actual dinosaurs injured in the ad the visual language and visual impact said that it was OK to kick small animals that happened to be passing by.  Couple that with the image of a man being squashed by a dinosaur and you had an extremely violent ad.

Now I know that many on the so called religious right see the human body and sex as the worst possible subjects for children (why they may even ask you a question right there and then about sex if you don’t “protect” them.)  and have no problem with violence (they hold a violent world view after all) but for me and my family, violence is evil.

It is evil because I believe that televised violence promotes fear, that it promotes violence, and that it promotes disengagement from society.  These three sins are running at an all time high and that can be traced right back to the images we allow into our heads and thus into our psyches.  

Now I do not want government regulation.  I happen to believe in and respect freedom of speech and that can mean freedom to make me turn the channel too.  Thus I will make my request not to government but to the networks who claim to want to present a “family Super Bowl”, please turn off the violence. Turn-off the violence for our families.  Turn-off the violence for our mental health.  Turn-off the violence for the future of our nation.  Then maybe we can have a family Super Bowl, one that we won’t turn-off.

We see today that a bus, loaded with the elderly being evacuated from Houston, exploded. The oxygen that many were using is suspected in the blast. Wow, billions of dollars spent on "homeland" security and you can just picture the panic of Bush administration hacks after their response to hurricane Katrina, "Get 'em out of there. Stuff them on any bus you can find, just get 'em out of there." Of course if there had been an actual plan for an evacuation maybe there would have chosen a system of transportation that wouldn't explode when transporting elderly oxygen users. But, as we all know, government is bad (that is unless it's military governemnt...)

In another indication that our pals in the White House are blithering idiots one of our "allies" in the Gulf Region, Prince Saud al-Faisal, the Saudi foreign minister (ally here means that they have lots of money and oil, not that their populous give a damn about us. In fact, they hate our guts, hell most of the 9/11 hijackers were Saudis) has warned that Iraq is on the verge of total collapse (not unlike the Bush administration itself). He warns that if this were to occur that it would most likely lead to a regional war. Oh joy! You know if we only had someone who gave a shit in office.

Speaking of collapse, there is a book out (Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed) by that name authored by Jared Diamond (he is the author of the very interesting book Guns, Germs, and Steel). I haven't read the book myself but from what I understand the general premise is that societies collapse because they choose to. What happens is that the interests of the power structure in a society come into conflict with the interests of the society itself. That is the destructive force, and one that we as TRUE Americans should be aware of. Why? Jeez, where oh where do the interests of the power class come into conflict with that of the society as a whole? Hmm. (Tax breaks for the wealthy - $200 billion on a war in a far away land (most of which has gone where exactly?). The luxury goods market is hot - Poverty has been increasing for the last four years. Crony government - Levees break in New Orleans. Creationism in the classroom - threat to our economic future from well educated foreign workers and NO plan to do anything about it.)

The city of Colorado Springs was hit by a heavy thunderstorm on Tuesday resulting in heavy flooding, lightning, water, and mud damage to homes and a foot of hail on the ground in some locations.  The question is why is god punishing Colorado Springs?

In other interesting news Joe Biden has promised that “If he has a clear chance of winning” he is planning to run for president. In a move seen as exposing his intentions, Jeb Bush immediately opened an investigation to see if Biden had been involved in Terry Schiavo’s collapse over twenty years ago and if he could account for forty some odd minutes on the morning that she did.

In the “Why the fuck there is little sympathy for you motherfuckers” department the recording industry has added another layer of “protection” on their CD recordings so that not just anyone can put the music they “bought” on just any listening medium. Of course if anyone finds out how to bypass this “protection” it is an illegal act, in this great free nation of ours, to tell anyone else how to do it.