More on chelation

Sometime later. I will come back to it, but this is my last entry for 2009. Tomorrow my lovely wife and I will fly away to sunny Mexico to enjoy a week in the sun. We might even get back alive unless some dolt decides to hide a bomb in a bottle of Mexican vanilla.

I'm trying to decide why I'm writing in a blog. I'm trying to decide whether it's vanity, a need to communicate, because I love to write (even though I don't do it) or some other, more twisted reason. If I figure it out, I might even write about it.

My wife and I saw the movie Avatar this week. It was a good special effects movie but I was a little confused. I wasn't sure whether I was watching Pocahontas, Dances with Wolves, or The Lion King.

Most everything is derivative, so I can't complain too much, but there were a couple of scenes that were such a ripoff of the aforementioned stories I was embarassed for James Cameron.

I read an editorial by a conservative writer who complained about the hypocrisy of the movie. On the one hand, you have the peaceful natives living in a state of harmony with nature and each other. This harmony is destroyed by the evil white, Western, acquisitive outsiders who will destroy anything that gets in their way to get what they want.

The hypocrisy, according to my understanding, is that it takes one of the evil white, Western acquisitive outsiders to fix the problem for the natives. The natives aren't smart enough to take care of it themselves. Thus the enlightened filmakers insult the very ones they attempt to admire and hold up as role models.

I'm a big fan of Western culture. Like any human enterprise it has its limitations, but I'll take it any day over some of my other choices. I found Avatar circling close to a shameless ripoff. However, let's examine the hypocrisy argument in the light of what I'll call the Headless Bomber. Headless because when you set off a fire in your lap, you're likely to lose your head. Won't help much in the next life with the 72 virgins and all. In fact, wouldn't that be cruel to send someone to Paradise with 72 nubile virgins all ready to go, and there you are. Looking down, all the Headless Bomber will see is his inability to execute. In both worlds.

Anyway, I digress. Mr Headless is to a large degree a product of Western culture. When I saw a news shot of his London apartment, it was clear he enjoyed a standard of living I'm unlikely to ever attain. Even though still a Muslim, he could easily move in the Western world. This, according to the terrorist experts I see on TV, makes Mr Headless a much more dangerous fellow than some bumpkin from the outback of Yemen or Somalia. Those types practically scream "terrorist", while Mr Headless smoothly works in and out of Western society with a cultured English accent and a London university degree. Mr Headless is what is known as an "insider", and as any security consultant will admit, the insider is the most dangerous adversary.

So how does the hypocrisy argument hold up in this light? Not well, I believe. Mr Cameron is entitled to be as liberal as he wants, and as Avatar shows, he wants to be very liberal. But I'll support his premise that the natives of Pandora could still be fun loving back to nature types, wise, intelligent and such, and still require the help of an outsider to defeat other outsiders. It would sure help us a lot more if we could acquire the help of some bumpkins from Yemen and Somalia.