Uno aprende a amar, no cuando encuentre a la persona perfecta, sino cuando aprenda a creer en la perfección de una persona imperfecta.

(Alonso posted this to his Facebook page today. I thought it was particularly good. So often, we want a perfect “other” to come and fix us, to make us happy… and that never works, because nobody is perfect.)

Here’s Glenn Beck, talking about soccer (from an article on NPR’s web site):

“It doesn’t matter how you try to sell it to us,” yipped the Prom King of new right, Glenn Beck. “It doesn’t matter how many celebrities you get, it doesn’t matter how many bars open early, it doesn’t matter how many beer commercials they run, we don’t want the World Cup, we don’t like the World Cup, we don’t like soccer, we want nothing to do with it.”

What a moron.

The author of the opinion piece thinks that Beck gets all hysterical about soccer because it threatens Beck’s vision of a fairly monochromatic, white, suburban America. The reality is that America is far more multicultural (and brown!) than it’s ever been, and it’s only going to continue no matter what happens with the whole immigration reform debate.

(And let’s face it, Glenn Beck gets hysterical over anything and everything. It’s absolutely amazing to me that anyone takes that clown seriously about anything at all.)

Glenn Beck is, really, an avatar. He’s the representation of a group of people who aren’t open-minded enough to accept reality. The reality is (as Dave Zirin, the author of the column points out) that soccer is the most popular sport played by children in America- some estimates have as many as 15 to 20 million kids playing soccer. And it’s also a quite popular recreational sport for adults, too.

That’s reality. The reality is that soccer continues to grow in popularity (MLS attendance is up 15% from last year) and the Glenn Becks of the world are just going to have to get used to it.

Or… we can just wait ‘em out, because they’re mostly old people. The younger generations of Americans get it and are increasingly loving soccer, no matter what Beck and his fellow right-wing loonies proclaim.

So a Muslim guy tries (and fails) to blow up a car bomb in New York City, and it gets all kinds of press. The media is drawn to the story like crazy. It’s with good reason- Muslim terrorists attacked our nation on 9/11 and will probably do so again- but of course the news stories hype up all kinds of fear and hatred in people.

But did you hear anything about the right-wing Christian terrorists who set out to wage war on America, wounding two cops and killing two other cops (which is four more people than were hurt or killed by the Times Square wannabe bomber)?

Nope, you probably didn’t.

The reality, though, is that there ARE right-wing terrorists out there. They’re whipped up into a fury by the election of a black Democrat as President, and they’re waging war on the United States.

These nitwits fortunately wound up unable to harm anyone else. The Memphis cops took them down.

But remember- the media doesn’t talk about the right-wing, Christian, white guy terrorists that ARE out there and who ARE killing people and who ARE trying to harm the United States.

Brown Muslim terrorists? All kinds of media attention paid to them. White guys? Nope, not so much, because that kind of hype doesn’t sell newspapers or get people watching TV news programs.

Man, it’s too bad. OS version 4 looks pretty awesome, with lots of new functionality coming to the iPhone.

But I won’t be upgrading.

Why?

Well, first of all, I wouldn’t unless and until I know for sure that I could keep tethering my iPhone to my netbook and using it as a 3G modem. Without that, I wouldn’t upgrade.

But even if that is enabled in version 4, whether by Apple (and AT&T) or by the hackers, I don’t think I’ll be upgrading anyways because a big part of the new OS is advertising.

It’s kind of amazing to me that Apple BRAGGED about it in their big preview show. WTF? I already have to put up with ads everywhere else- I don’t want ‘em on my phone. Period, end of story.

Apple is getting greedy. They already act worse in terms of monopoly than Microsoft ever did, but now they are going to try and make money on ads on my phone.

Sorry, guys, no thanks.