State of the Union on the Far Side of the Sea

Some political commentary: I believe Obama winning might have been good. Not necessarily because he is a better person with better politics than McCain. I know too little to comment on that, except that I believe his protectionist ideas suck. Since Obama is a supporter of the death penalty, I am sad to say that I still cannot see the US as a civilized country (that goes for you too, Japan!). Civilized countries do not kill their citizens. Especially not citizens like Timothy McVeigh who might well have been withholding important information that could, perhaps, have been extracted at a later date. Oh, and the innocent, you should not execute the innocent.

China having the death penalty I can understand, the country is slowly developing into an industrialized superpower, but you cannot change the mentality of the people, or the rulers, in just a few years. The US is another story, having reintroduced a death penalty once abolished, torturing prisoners, letting cults have a field day (and field decades), et cetera. However, I hope the regression into barbarism will stop soon, preferably with Obama.

What is the deal with Obama constantly being referred to as "black", by the way? If he has a white mother, how can he be black? Are blacks somehow a genetically dominant race, much like brown eyes? Either way I think it could be a very good thing that the president is not always a white male. I actually did some sort of test online at Harvard University a while ago, to see if I was a bit of a racist without knowing it. It turned out I had no preference at all between white people and black people (not sexual preference, that is, just some general sort of preferencishness). Yay for me, I guess. I also did the test with obese versus normal people. I apparently had a very strong preference for normal people as compared to obese. And I had no preference between heterosexuals and homosexuals. No surprises there. Really fat people should diet to avoid diabetes and oozing over into my seat on the bus. Gay people should be happy just like the rest of us. The test took some time to do, so I will do Indians (I guess that means native Americans) versus white people at some later date.

Speaking of gay people the proposition 8 thing in California sucked. Why should group A tell members of group B how to marry when the people in group A are generally not interested in marrying people in group B, anyway. Opposing gay marriage is just medieval, though I should point out that opposing gay people adopting kids is not necessarily so, given the various foo and bar reasons for accepting it or not. I know too little about the latter issue to have an opinion.

Speaking of gay issues, I find it so stupid that the state should subsidize people who want to "change" genders (and it happens here in Sweden - I guess having the world's second highest taxes means the government needs to find lots of stuff to do with all that money). I have had long discussions with gay (or trans or whatever the correct term is) rights people about this, but nobody has managed to convince me that a completely voluntary plastic surgery to alter your looks should be paid for by the rest of the people. Come on, there are millions of other people who do not particularly like the bodies they were born with, either, and most of them make do anyway. Use your own money.