Some kind soul generously posted Bowling for Columbine on Google Video. Watch it or download it soon before they pull it.

The movie is nearly two hours long but packed with information. I took some notes and I’ll discuss them here.

First, Michael Moore interviews some members of the Michigan Militia and James Nichols brother of Oklahoma City bombing co-conspirator Terry Nichols. What positively horrified me is how much my attitudes are like theirs. First, the Michigan Militia members all pretty much agreed, the police are useless.

He then goes on about how corporate news hounds always lead with murder or mayhem stories. Yet if you look at Canadian news, it isn’t doom and gloom. Then I stumbled on the key difference. The CBC is state owned, not corporate owned.

Then Moore touches on a subject that is near and dear to me, racism. I say that because I have seen the outright racism perpetrated by we white people. You get your eyes opened when your partner and some of your friends are black, let me tell you that. If you ever noticed, the media and even some of the programming like Cops always has a black perp to mention.

Its funny, I hear people talk about the southern end of the city of Providence like it’s a war zone. This is simply not the case. Of course the downtown area is also known as a dangerous place. It isn’t. More interesting is that the south side of the city tends to be black or Latino. But downtown is mostly full of college kids. If there is anyone to fear it’s drunk college kids.

Yet we let corporate criminals get off with a pass. Oh sure, Kenny Boy Lay died to get out of it, and Martha Stewart got her hand slapped. But there is far more corporate crime out there. How about companies that would rather pay litigation costs than to re-design or fix a defective product or service? That ought to be criminal.

Then of course Moore shows the idiocy of welfare to work. Some of us have known that for a long time. Friend of mine got caught in that web, but she worked her way out of it. But then, do I begrudge her the welfare she collected for her two kids? No I don’t because the one thing I neglected to mention is that after the second child was born, my friend had a tubal ligation. In other words, she can’t get pregnant again.

But one theme that emerges late in the movie is the fear motive. I briefly touched on it earlier when I talked about news in the U.S. versus that in Canada. Marilyn Manson appears in the video and even he gets it, fear and consumption are the driving forces in the United States and it is high time that it stopped.

Enough for now.