Popcorn~ Just Add Hot Air

That good ole snack food standby popcorn is amazing if you think about it.   It is a relatively cheap snack that feed many with very little effort.   I mean if you break it down it is just a little kernel of corn with a lot of hot air which turns to a puffy white buttery goodness.  I think the analogy can be made to pop music.   Although we know that "pop" music is short for popular music, I tend to think of what has become popular music today more closely related to pop corn.   It is palatable hot air with maybe a kernel of musicality.  The lyrics and chord changes are predictable and usually the "talent," behind the song is not vocally strong.

I would like to take it a step deeper and coin a new phrase known as "Pop Politics."   Pop politics is a bunch of hot air surrounding skewed little kernels of fact that can be puffed into provocative sound bytes.   It fits our current culture to a tee though.   We as a society have a bad case of short attention span, we need our politics boiled down to quick buzz words and shorter details of the fact.   This "need," of ours to have our information handed to us on a silver platter as quick as a Google search has created the perfect environment for these pop politicians to pop up and thrive.

Pop Politicians such as Sarah Palin, Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh, Ann Coulter, etc. are full of puffed up sound bytes delivered with sometimes corny theatrics rich in recycled rhetoric but short on vetted deeply researched facts.   They chose a "popular," stance and stick with it unyielding to any idea of going beyond the headline and studying all the facts on both sides.  Pop politicians worry more about their image than getting any real work or results.  They are talking heads with eyes set on their own ego led ambitions rather than protecting constitutional ethics or accomplishing any concrete good that takes into account many opinions other than their own nor embracing any fruitful debate.  They are uninformed half vetted talking heads who settle for easy popular sound bytes over any notion of going against the grain out of worry of scraping their own fragile yet glossy slick image.


Pop politicians embrace pop politico speak using loaded words to attach their character to like "maverick," or "rogue," although they never back up these claims with any real recognition of what those words mean nor offering an noticeable action to give these words any real meat.


Pop politics and their participants are just puffed up little kernels with lots of hot air to spare.

Wake Up & Smell the Holy War

Does anyone remember the Crusades from history?   Perhaps Texas has cut that from history text books as well!   Well briefly the Crusades were a military sanctioned war by Christian Europe against Middle East Muslims.   The crusades lasted from the 11^th thru the 13^th centuries.  Now in the 21^st century we have seen Jihad by Islamic radicals against non-Muslims and now I feel the tide is turning back the pages of history and we are getting ready to see another Crusade era.   The rhetoric surrounding the proposed mosque in NYC near Ground Zero, and the most recent media ploy by some two bit pastor in Florida claiming to burn the Qur’an on the anniversary of 9/11 is bringing about a hint of the Crusades to my ears.

Some may argue that we entered a holy war the minute we sat foot in Iraq.   It is true that anti-Islamic sentiments have been growing in volume since we declared war.   In return it has become easier for Americans to lump Islamic radicals in with Islam because it is a religion not understood in our largely Judeo-Christian society.  

There is no denying that everything changed on 9/11.  Americans definitely became more aware of Islam.   However aware we became the dialogue about the Middle East and Muslims since then surrounding Islam I think like most things in our society we allowed to become politicized reducing it all down to quick, easy sound bytes instead of full fledged informed conversations.

It is interesting that Christians conveniently forget about the Crusades the same way they tend to forget more recent history like The Salem Witch trials, slavery, the KKK, Fred Phelps in Kansas.   So called “witches,” were hung in Salem, Mass. By Christians out of situations we have since learned were ignorant misunderstandings.  Many Slave owners justified owning slaves thru selected text in the Bible.  More recently the KKK claims to burn crosses and terrorizes African Americans and people of Jewish faith in the name of God and even more beguiling is the pastor in Kansas that believes in hating soldiers and homosexuals.   So Christians have their radicals too.  

I won’t go into core beliefs held by both religious faiths that they both share; but it is sad that most that spread this kind of hatred are ignorant of some of the really beautiful tenets both Christians and Muslims share.   I have long maintained that ignorance is the biggest weapon of mass destruction known to man.   Ignorance begets misunderstanding, lies, and ultimately hate.

The past decade we have seen our precious American society go backwards in time.   Forgetting history and repeating it.   We have seen the all too eerie return to a war type mentality that closely resembles the horrific Vietnam War era.   In the latter years of this decade we have seen our own consumer based desires and Bush economics bring us back to a time that closely resembles the Great Depression.   

I believe that we chance a return back in our history time machine again to a time reminiscent of the Crusades if we continue to spread this anti-Islamic rhetoric.   Repeating history as we have seen in the past ten years is a costly and deadly course of direction.   Repeating history is a very harmful symptom of the disease of Ignorance.   The less we know the easier it gets to let those with their own greedy agendas to knock the foundation out from under a society and inject their own venom.   The New York City mosque debate & the nut job pastor in Florida calling for Americans to burn a Qur’an may seem like headlines that we take for granted will disappear in a few days but for me they are red flags that something more uglier is festering and boiling underneath and I’m afraid if we don’t recall our history we might just be gearing up for another holy war.

Divas of Daytime Belting Out "Its Raining Men"

All I can say is check it out..............it is a sticky sweet hunk filled video w/glorious vocals by the divas!

(Anyone feel like a rainstorm.........ummmmmmmkay!!!!   Don't forget the "umbrella" )

http://sn.soapnet.go.com/video/its-raining-men-the-divas