Patrick Swayze, Farrah Fawcett and John Hughes died and Orly Taitz, Dick Cheney and that idiot who wrote those Twilight books didn’t.

Chez Pazienza analyzes the politics and pop culture of 2009 in a nutshell:

How can I properly categorize the various virulent strains of blatant ridiculousness we’ve been throttled by as a culture? What makes Sarah Palin more balls-out fucking stupid than Glenn Beck, or either of them more shamefully, cartoonishly insane than Michele Bachmann or the Teabagging Army?

Read here.

“I know that public scrutiny will simplify this matter and act as a check against anyone’s need to be overly vindictive, aggressive or malicious, not that Bristol would ever be that way, nor that I would. But her mother is powerful, politically ambitious and has a reputation for being extremely vindictive. So, I think a public case might go a long way in reducing Sarah Palin’s instinct to attack.”

– Levi Johnston, in his affidavit

God help me, but I do actually like this kid Levi. In a world full of people grasping for fame, he just kind of fell into it and is making the most of it. And now that the Palin family is trying to cut him off from his son, he’s fighting back. Not for sole custody, but for joint custody, a chance at being in his kid’s life, something Sarah “Family Values” Palin doesn’t seem to want.

Don’t get me wrong, he may be an ignorant racist from the backwoods, but if even he is turned off by Palin, the rest of the angry conservatives might want to be taking notes as to why.

I heard this story about Sam, a kid from Elkhart, IN the other day. He’s an aspiring musician in a town broken by the recession. Already he had few options. Being the son of undocumented immigrants, he has no way of getting into college.

I remember hearing his story on Latino USA awhile back. Here are part one and part two of his story.

There’s a lot wrong in this country, from racism to poverty to “compassionate conservatism”. How we treat those trying to make their way in this country outside the narrow confines of the bigoted rules we have is one of those things.

Best of luck Sam.

Today’s Fresh Air was a pretty good one. As part of their best-of’s they do at the end of every year, today’s episode had the zany Russell Brand, Jane Lynch, and a cool interview with Dennis Brutus, who passed away last week.

I think Hitchens overdoes it in his hatred of religion (not that he’s necessarily wrong on some points, but I digress) though he hits it on the head in this article about the collective stupidity called “airline security”.

This slideshow needs to be viewed if just for the following quote:

“Sarah Palin has always made about as much sense as opening up a rib joint next to a mosque.”

– Michael Arceneaux

Rachel interviewed Bruce Schneier yesterday to get his thoughts on security and the stupid ways we pretend to go about it.

His thoughts on it.

Then go read his blog if you haven’t already been doing so.

So, as more and more passengers get harassed in airport security lines, I once again question everyone’s priorities.

Do we want to be safe or do we want to equate being felt up by some moronic TSA drone with safety?

Because, if we are going to harass, detail, molest, and otherwise abuse a class of people, let’s at least pick the right group.

Rich kids. Particularly the idle sons of wealthy bastards. The Christmas bomber is the son of a Nigerian banker. Bin Laden is the son of wealthy Saudi/Yemeni construction clans. Bush the Lesser’s daddy was president and had a ton of connections. Between them they have wars, bombings, mass civilian killings and general fear and violence that decades of intifada can’t even come close to.

But everyone fears the angry Arab on the street. Hell, Tim McVeigh killed more children in one blast than a month’s worth of suicide vests could. Hmm, was his father anyone of means? Might be worth looking into.

Are we looking into cavity searching the children of the rich? No? Why not?

Is racial profiling, or even religion profiling, going to get to the core of the problem? No, it is going to piss people off. And those pissed off people, some of them anyway, will find homes to encourage their hatred. Some of it will be funded by rich assholes like Dick Armey and be used to elect fucking nitwits like Sarah Palin. Others will go be funded to strap on a vest and blow up a bus or try to set a plane on fire. Funded by the idle rich.

In short, calm down when it comes to worrying about terrorists and air travel.

The Bureau of Transportation Statistics provides a wealth of statistical information on air traffic. For this exercise, I will look at both domestic flights within the US, and international flights whose origin or destination was within the United States. I will not look at flights that transported cargo and crew only. I will look at flights spanning the decade from October 1999 through September 2009 inclusive (the BTS does not yet have data available for the past couple of months).

Over the past decade, according to BTS, there have been 99,320,309 commercial airline departures that either originated or landed within the United States. Dividing by six, we get one terrorist incident per 16,553,385 departures.

These departures flew a collective 69,415,786,000 miles. That means there has been one terrorist incident per 11,569,297,667 mles flown. This distance is equivalent to 1,459,664 trips around the diameter of the Earth, 24,218 round trips to the Moon, or two round trips to Neptune.

Assuming an average airborne speed of 425 miles per hour, these airplanes were aloft for a total of 163,331,261 hours. Therefore, there has been one terrorist incident per 27,221,877 hours airborne. This can also be expressed as one incident per 1,134,245 days airborne, or one incident per 3,105 years airborne.

There were a total of 674 passengers, not counting crew or the terrorists themselves, on the flights on which these incidents occurred. By contrast, there have been 7,015,630,000 passenger enplanements over the past decade. Therefore, the odds of being on given departure which is the subject of a terrorist incident have been 1 in 10,408,947 over the past decade. By contrast, the odds of being struck by lightning in a given year are about 1 in 500,000. This means that you could board 20 flights per year and still be less likely to be the subject of an attempted terrorist attack than to be struck by lightning.

Meanwhile, as you listen to Republican idiots screaming about how our nation isn’t safe with Barack Obama in charge, remember that this assholes voting AGAINST funding the TSA just a few months ago.

Somehow I always get suckered into posting these end-of-year lists. At least Time rolled a lot of them together to save, well, time. Enjoy.