DEBRIS.COMgood for a laugh, or possibly an aneurysm

Given what I wrote yesterday about gay adoption, I find this photo hilarious.

Happy Valentine’s Day, indeed!

Mark Morford asks, What are you so afraid of?

This is my favorite part (well, aside from “Fear is the new black”):

Try this test. Ask your neighborhood neoconservative homophobe just what, exactly, would happen if, say, gay marriage were to be legalized nationwide.
Ask them what would change. Ask them to be very specific. How would their lives be threatened? How would society crumble, exactly? Riots? Locusts?

I actually did this once. I didn’t realize he was a neoconservative homophobe at the time. We were having dinner at a nice restaurant with two other people. Someone mentioned a California initiative regarding, I think, adoption rights for same-sex couples, and unwittingly I voiced my support. I thought it was a no-brainer… adoption is a good thing. Broken homes are a bad thing. Foster care is the band-aid on the bullet hole.

This person had a different opinion, which he proceeded to share, along with some spittle and maybe a few used bits of table bread. He launched into a fire-and-brimstone tirade about, basically, the evils of homosexuality. The other guests were embarrassed for both our sakes.

His argument was that children raised by same-sex couples couldn’t possibly end up with healthy attitudes about sex and relationships, because they’d have no male role model. (He was already apoplectic at the thought of lesbian couples — I can’t imagine how he’d have responded to the idea of male gay couples. I think I’d have had to take his fork away from him.)

I said that hetero couples are equally capable of raising kids with unhealthy attitudes. He agreed with me but countered that I hadn’t addressed the point, which was true enough. I was never on the debate team.

So, he won the argument. I could tell because he ordered a fat bowl of bread pudding for dessert. In contrast, I didn’t feel well enough to finish my dinner.

A report in the Chronicle’s Travel section last December proclaimed, “Airline passengers can lock their bags again, thanks to a private sector collaboration on design and production of new, specialized locks.”

Are the locks more secure than old, unspecialized locks? No.

Are they less expensive than old, unspecialized locks? No.

So what’s so “special” about them? In fact the new locks are flawed by design: they accept a master key, so they can be easily opened by any baggage screener in any airport in the country.

It seems ironic to me that the baggage screeners were given keys to these locks, when they’re the people that luggage locks were protecting us from.

Here’s a report of a baggage screener from Philadelphia charged with stealing from luggage. Here’s a report of screeners in Miami and New York stealing from luggage.

Most baggage screeners are honest, of course. And there are other people, besides the screeners, who have access to checked bags after the bags go down the conveyer belt into the bowels of the airport. I’m spreading the blame, because there’s plenty of it… more than enough for everyone. The Transport Security Administration, the division of the Homeland Security department that oversees baggage screening, admits it hasn’t completed background checks on all its screeners yet. We can at least be thankful they’ve fired the 85 screeners who turned out to be felons.

Instead of fancy TSA-approved padlocks, I use and recommend cable ties. Cable ties can easily be cut off by any TSA screener or determined thief — but at least I’ll know when it happens.

In my opinion, the biggest problem with TSA padlocks is that each unit sold generates a royalty to the private company founded by the guy in charge of the TSA. Isn’t that convenient? By day, the head of the TSA decreed that the only TSA-approved locks would be legal. By night, the same guy founded the company that licenses the locks. They call this “private enterprise working in cooperation to solve a problem for the government,” when in fact no such problem existed — they invented the problem, by requiring “universal” locks, and now they’re selling the solution.

Hemp is an amazing plant. As I’ve written before, it grows easily without pesticides and makes high-quality food, fiber, and pulp. Get the scoop from the Hemp Industries Association.

Just in case there’s a question of my motives: I don’t smoke pot. This isn’t about drugs; it’s about the health of the planet. Hemp grows like a weed and could revolutionize commercial agriculture, but the Bush administration wants to outlaw it because the plant contains traces of THC.

As an illustration of the wrong-headedness of the DEA’s unhealthy fixation on Cannabis, hemp advocates point out that poppy-seed bagels contain traces of opium. But nobody in the Bush administration is trying to legislate your bagels out of the market. Why? Because it would be ridiculous. About is ridiculous as classifying hemp granola bars as “controlled substances.”

Today, though, the news is good. For a change, common sense has won. As the AP reports,

Rejecting one front of the government’s drug war, a federal appeals court ruled Friday the United States cannot ban the sale of food made with natural hemp that contains only trace amounts of the psychoactive chemical in marijuana. The decision overturns the Drug Enforcement Administration’s ban on the domestic sale of hemp food products.

See more coverage in the Chronicle’s story, Bush push to expand drug wars shot down by Ninth Circuit ruling:

The court said the DEA had no authority to reclassify hemp as a dangerous drug without first showing that it has a “high potential for abuse.”

President Bush’s approval ratings have been steadily declining since the day he took office. There have been three exceptions to that trend:

• the 9/11 terrorist attacks
• the US invasion of Iraq
• the capture of Hussein

Graphically, Bush’s numbers tell a compelling story of a failing administration.

I made this graph after wondering what Bush’s chances of re-election are. I thought they were much better than this. If the election were held today, according to Gallup’s approval ratings, Bush would get about 49% of the vote — which in the opinion of the US Supreme Court is a majority. I meant that to be a joke, but it’s actually not funny.

Anyway, as I studied this graph I realized that the President’s staffmembers must be studying it too. The Bush administration is known for being media-savvy; get the full scoop on the president’s “advance team” of choreographers, lighting designers, and staging experts in this NYT article, Keepers of Bush Image Lift Stagecraft to New Heights. If Bush has a personal lighting designer, he’s certain to have someone who reads the polls every day.

Which means Bush knows the only thing that can rescue his declining approval ratings is an act of aggression. Look at the graph — war is the only thing Bush ever got respect for.

Where does that leave us, in these nine months before the election? Due for conflict, I’m afraid.

And it’s worse even than that. The capture of Hussein was a small blip on the graph. The invasion of Iraq was slightly larger. The one thing that really sent Bush’s approval ratings through the ceiling was his macho-aggressive speech after the WTC bombing.

So, in terms of approval ratings, the best thing that could happen to the Bush administration would be for the US to be attacked again. That’s a pretty ugly conflict of interest.

(The data in the graph was collected by the Gallup Organization and reported at PollingReport.com. For those of you who doubt my graph is real, feel free to download the source data I used. Dump it into Excel and see for yourselves.)